by Ken MacLeod
“But if he doesn’t want to serve the emperor, why does he?” Mehra asked.
“To refuse would be to dishonor his family,” Sophene said. “Do you enjoy killing on behalf of your government?”
“I’m defending my home,” Mehra said.
Sophene replied, “Earth, Roeir and Tung would all benefit from following the path of peace, as we do on my planet.”
Mehra frowned. “Are you from Tung?”
“My people are from elsewhere,” Sophene said. “Many worlds suffer because of the Roeir-Tung disharmony. We serve them both in hopes we can someday guide them into communication and peace.”
“Doesn’t seem to be working,” Mehra said.
The faux cheese sandwiches ran out, replaced by cardboard-like crackers that tasted even worse. They still had tea with their meals, but Mehra suspected Jiun was watering it down.
“Which are we going to lose first?” Mehra asked. “The food or the water or the oxygen?”
Jiun took his time answering. “The power cells.”
“You’re a bucket of sunshine,” she said, and then had to look away. That had been one of her father’s favorite sayings. Before he was murdered by the Tung.
Mehra tried not to think about that.
They cut back on their exercising and dimmed more of the lights. Jiun turned down the ship’s temperature as well, and gave Mehra all the blankets he could dig up. By week five her cabin was too cold for her to sleep very well and so she moved to the hub, where the furniture was large enough for two.
“We could share body heat,” she said. “Basic survival training for combat pilots.”
“I don’t think . . . ” Jiun blinked a few times. “That may not be wise.”
“It’ll take my chance being dumb,” she replied.
They slept together that night, bodies and blankets entwined. In the morning Jiun was gone. He didn’t bring breakfast. Mehra didn’t have anywhere to go or anywhere to go and so she stayed huddled in the blankets, half-dozing, dreaming of pancakes and coffee and biscuits. She was lifting a dream spoon of dream maple syrup when Sophene poked her in the middle of her brain.
“Flight bay!” Sophene snapped, lighting up a mental map for Mehra to follow. “Hurry!”
Mehra stumbled out to the passage and bounced her way forward, propelled by the urgency in Sophene’s tone and the dreadful feeling that something was wrong. That Jiun’s ship even had a flight bay was surprising, but not half as startling as the sight of him crumpled and insensate next to Mehra’s flight suit and some kind of ground vehicle.
“Don’t you die on me now,” Mehra threatened, slapping his face lightly. “What have you been doing here?”
He blinked up at her, shivered, and tried to close his eyes again. Mehra rubbed her knuckle on his breastbone and annoyed him into consciousness.
“What is this?” she demanded. “Your secret lab project, all this time?”
Sophene flickered onto the nearest display, all greenorangeredyellowpink against the brown bulkheads. “I told him to tell you before he killed himself of exhaustion and starvation.”
“Both of you are very irritating,” Jiun said wearily.
Mehra retrieved blankets for him, and tea, too, after Sophene told her where the last stash was. Once Jiun was on his feet again, Mehra turned her attention to the vehicle. It looked amateurish and home-made. Jury-rigged from other parts. The motor was fueled by a battery and the steering and braking were rudimentary.
She couldn’t help but notice that it only had one seat.
“What’s this for?” she asked.
Jiun touched the vehicle and didn’t look at Mehra. “There’s an abandoned rover about six hours from here, if you take this and travel at max speed.”
“A rover from Earth?” she asked. Her knowledge of the early space program was hazy—Apollo this, Columbia that—but there’d been robot rovers, yes, first on Mars and then later on Jupiter’s moons.
Jiun found his tablet and showed her a map. “If you reach it and recharge its solar panels, you should be able to send an emergency signal. There’s an Earth carrier nearby that can pick you up within twenty-four hours.”
Mehra wasn’t able to speak for a moment. Finally she managed, “You want me to travel in this go-cart for six hours at minus two hundred degrees Celsius, so that I can maybe recharge an ancient piece of junk, which might be able to signal a carrier, which might or might not decide to pick me up before I freeze to death?”
Jiun met her gaze. “Yes.”
“And you’re going to stay here and slowly die?”
His eyes darkened at her tone. “I’m going to let Sophene put me into medical stasis. With the ship in deep sleep mode, the fuel cells will keep me there for several years. One day my people might find me.”
Mehra studied the rover. Studied Jiun. It was the craziest, stupidest, most dangerous plan he could have possibly thought of. She almost admired its sheer insanity.
“And what happens when they ask me where I’ve been all this time?” she asked. “No matter how much I don’t want to tell them, they’re not going to take ‘I don’t remember’ for an answer.”
Sophene spoke up. “I can make that true.”
Mehra whirled to the panel. “You can what?”
“Clear out your memories of us,” Sophene said serenely. Her colors swirled together. “Your superiors can’t find information that is not there.”
Mehra turned back to Jiun. “Tell me why.”
He was silent for a moment. Finding the right words, she thought, was never easy for a man who’d frozen himself.
“Because there’s no point to a war if no one wins,” he finally said.
Mehra eased herself into the go-cart’s seat. Imagined herself careening down Europa’s frozen ice cracks. The odds of getting the rover recharged and able to send out a signal were remote, and the carrier might very well decide to ignore her signal (a trap, of course they’d think it was a trap), but what kind of combat pilot was she if she didn’t risk everything for a very small chance at success?
But even if she convinced them she knew nothing (even if she let Sophene drain her brain), they’d never trust her again. Not in a combat role, not with a ship, not in any kind of leadership position. And here Jiun would sleep, locked in a forgotten ship parked against a forgotten mountain on a remote moon, until the ice crept past the hull and consumed him.
Mehra climbed out.
“In the Battle of Sarkit, during the Third War of the Sea People of Doria, the warriors Evliunor and Markiun made a pact to see the war end together,” she said. “You taught that lesson in your history classes. I’m frankly kind of insulted that you think I’m any less than Markiun.”
Stricken, he said, “Mehra, this is no time to joke.”
“Also, Markiun was the male,” Sophene added.
Mehra took Jiun’s hand. It was a nice strong hand, with long fingers and calluses from all his hard labor.
“The way to win a war is to survive it,” she said.
On an icy moon orbiting a giant gas planet, near an unnamed ridge straddling the equator, there sits a six-wheeled robot long abandoned to the frigid temperatures. Its batteries and sensors are long dead. It knows nothing of the war that has consumed the distant skies. It knows nothing of death or grief or survival. It certainly knows nothing of the snake coiled beneath it, redyellowgreenbluepurple, patiently working to fix the robot’s connections and panels. Someday the war will end and the snake will send a message onward: Here sleeps Mehra, here sleeps Jiun. Come wake them. With luck, some survivor will hear it.
Her Husband’s Hands
Adam-Troy Castro
Her husband’s hands came home on a Friday. Rebecca had received word of the attack, which had claimed the lives of seven other soldiers in his unit and reduced three others to similar, minimal fractions of themselves: One man missing above the waist, another missing below, a third neatly halved, like a bisected man on display in an anatomy lab.
The Veteran’s Administration had told her it could have been worse. The notification officer had reminded her of Tatum, the neighbor’s daughter so completely expunged by her own moment under fire that only a strip of skin and muscle remained: A section of her thigh, about the size and shape of a cigarette pack, returned to her parents in a box and now living in their upstairs room, where it made a living proofreading articles on the internet. That’s no life, the notification officer said. But Bob, he pointed out, was a pair of perfect hands, amputated from the body at the wrists but still capable of accomplishing many great things. And there was always the cloning lottery. The chances were a couple of million to one, but it was something to hope for, and stranger things had happened.
Rebecca had asked her parents, and his, and the friends so anxious to see him, to stay away. It was a personal moment and she could not be sure that she would be able to take their solicitous platitudes. She waited at home wanting a cigarette as much as she’d ever wanted anything in her entire life and stared at the door until the knock came and the two smartly uniformed escorts brought what was left of her husband inside in a box with an American flag on it.
They opened the box and showed her Bob’s hands, resting side by side on a white pillow. The left one lay palm-down, the right one palm-up. The one that was palm-up twitched and waggled fingers at Rebecca when it saw her. The new light-sensitive apertures at the fingertips blinked many times in what she could only assume was excitement. The fingernails had been manicured and buffed to a high sheen. Rebecca’s eyes inevitably wandered to the wrists, which ended in thick silver bands, a lot like bracelets except for the flat bottoms where arms should have emerged. They, Rebecca knew, contained not just the life support—without which her husband’s hands would just be graying meat—but also his most recent memory backup, without which everything he had ever been, and everything he had ever done, would now be gone.
She had not supposed that a pair of hands could be personal enough to be recognized, but she did recognize them. There was a crooked angle to one of the pinkies where he had once broken it catching a baseball and it had not healed back precisely right. And there was a scar on one of the knuckles where he had once cut himself, almost to the bone, on broken glass. She knew those hands as the same ones that once could make her shiver, when they were at the end of strong and comforting arms.
The fingers wagged some more, and the escort told her that her husband wanted to talk to her. She said that she did not know what to do. The younger of the two escorts presented her with a flat black pad with slots for fingers, turned it on, and placed it in the box where Bob’s hands could get at it. As the text display came up, Bob’s hands turned around, inserted fingertips into the pad’s control slots and did . . . something, not exactly typing as she knew it from the familiar QWERTY keyboard but something very much like it, with subtle and practiced movements that over the next few seconds forced words and sentences onto the screen.
rebecca please don’t be afraid, her husband’s hands typed. i know this is strange & frightening but it’s still me. i can see you & i’m glad to be home. i love you. please i want you to kiss me
There were few things Rebecca wanted to do less right now, but she knew her husband’s hands would sense any further hesitation, and so she reached down and touched them. They disengaged from the black pad and let her pick them up, one hand in each of her own. They were as warm as she remembered, and heavier than she expected. A sick feeling rose in her throat as, driven by obligation, she gave each one a sweet kiss on the knuckles. Each one turned around in the hand that held it and twined its fingers through hers, a grip as tight and as complete as a hug would have been had fate decided to let him come home as a whole man.
One of the escorts said, “We’ll leave you two alone now.”
Rebecca couldn’t help thinking: What do you mean, you two? His hands are now two separate objects; don’t you mean, you three? Or, since they don’t add up to anything even close to the whole man, shouldn’t you be using fractions? Telling me, we’ll leave you one and a tenth alone now? Or whatever? She thought all this but did not say it, as they donned their caps and told her to call if she needed anything, and left her alone grasping what had once been part, but not all, of the husband who only four years before had struck her eighteen-year-old self, sitting across from him in a college seminar, as the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
For a long time she sat with him—with them—in silence. Sometimes, as she closed her eyes and waited for the reassuring squeezes that were as close as he could come to conversation without the typepad, she could almost fool herself into thinking those hands were connected to wrists that were connected to arms that joined at shoulders with a chest and a beating heart and lips and eyes and a man who could lie beside her and arouse her passions as well as her pity.
After a while, his left hand gently disengaged from her right and climbed up to her shoulder, squeezing that as well before crab-crawling to her face and finding the tear-tracks on the side of her cheek. It froze at the discovery, and she could not help feeling that she’d failed him, that she’d proven herself shallow, that she’d hurt him or what was left of him at the moment he needed to know that she was still capable of loving him.
Some time later his hands withdrew to the table so they could talk to her about the problems they now faced. The left one turned over on its back so the light-apertures on the fingertips could see her face, and the right one went to the typepad and told her that he knew how she felt, that this wasn’t how he had envisioned their future either, and that if she gave him a chance he would still be the best husband to her that he possibly could. Her hesitation, her struggle to come up with words that would not be a mockery or a lie, spoke volumes, and may have broken whatever he now had for a heart. But after a long time she nodded, and it was a start.
He could not tell her anything about what had happened to him. The last backup before the attack that had destroyed the rest of him was only a week old, sparing him the memories of a hellish ordeal under fire, watching the rest of the unit fall away, one or two at a time, in pieces. He typed that he had at best an academic knowledge of what had been in that backup, as he said there were things even then that he chose not to remember, and had preferred to live the rest of his life arrested at an even earlier set of memories, recorded two months before that, and blessedly free of some experiences that would have crippled him even more than his current condition.
He typed that the war had been so terrible that he would have gotten rid of even more, had that been possible; there were certainly vets who backed up just as they were shipped out and came back as parts or wholes refusing to remember any of what they’d done, or had done to them, over there. Rather than recall a single day in-country they preferred to live a life where being strong and fit and whole and on a troop carrier getting their past coded into a database was followed, without so much as a single moment of transition, by being older and finished with their time and back, reduced to a sentient body part on a plate. But there’d been buddies, people in his unit, who had done things for him in that time during his hitch that he would never allow himself to forget, not even if he also had to remember visions out of hell. He typed that the little he could remember, he would never talk to her about.
After that, there was little to say; she made some lunch for herself and his hands sat on the table watching her eat, the palms held upward so the fingertips could see, giving the accidental but undeniable impression that they were being held upward in supplication.
Later, as the silence of the afternoon grew thick, the hands typed, i still enjoy watching you eat. It was something he had said before, as they’d circled each other performing the rituals that connect early attraction to couplehood; he had appreciated her meticulousness, the way she addressed a plate of food as much like a puzzle to be disassembled as a meal to savored. She did not respond that once upon a time she’d loved watching him eat as well, the sheer joy he’d taken in
the foods he loved, the unabashed and unapologetic gusto with which he’d torn into meals that were not good for him. It was, she knew, a gusto he could never show anymore, and that she’d never witness, again: Another of life’s pleasures robbed from them, left on a bloody patch of dirt beneath a foreign sky. She could not help thinking of the all the meals to come, the breakfasts and lunches and dinners that for years unwritten would always be reminders of what had been and would never be again.
Conversation lagged. They watched television, the hands sitting on her lap or beside her on the couch showing pleasure or displeasure in the set’s offerings with mimed commentary that at one point, an angry response to an anchorman’s report on the war, included a silent, but vehement, middle finger. Rebecca answered some concerned phone calls from family and friends who wanted to know how the reunion was going, and told them that no, she and Bob were not ready to receive any visitors just yet. More hours of silence broken by intervals of halting conversation rendered necessarily brief by his limited skill at typing inevitably and to some extent horrifically led to dinner, where the discomfort of lunch was not only repeated but doubled by the awareness that all this was still only starting, that the silence of their meals would soon be a familiar ritual, for as long as the future still stretched.
There was only one sign of real trouble before bedtime. Bob’s wandering right hand encountered a framed photograph of himself in uniform, on an end table next to the sofa. Rebecca happened to be watching as his hand hesitated, tapping the glass with a fingertip as if somehow hoping to be allowed back into the image’s frozen moment of time. It looked like he knocked the photo over deliberately. She was almost a hundred percent sure.
That night she lay on her habitual side of the bed, the ceiling an empty white space offering no counsel. His right hand burrowed under the covers and settled at about waist level, while his left sat on his fresh pillow, preferring the sight of her to any warmth the blanket might have provided. When she turned off the lamp, the pinprick red lights of his left fingertips cast a scarlet glow over everything around them, making that pillowcase look a little like the aftermath of a hemorrhage. The fingers caught Rebecca looking at them and waggled; either a perversely jaunty hello, or a reminder from Bob that he could see her. She forced herself to lean over and kiss his palm, somehow fighting back an instinctive shudder when the fingers curled up to caress her cheeks.