Ian snatched the bottle out of the air and froze.
"I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to say it like that. But, I just…people said, when you died, that it was a blessing, because you were suffering but now you’re here, and I don’t understand—”
Ian’s face had changed when Brigid said the word “died,” but she couldn’t stop herself from talking, even as he looked at her with angry confusion, like Brigid had just told him a lie out of spite.
"Don’t you know?” Brigid said. “Ian, you’re—”
The scary anger returned to Ian’s face, and his hands began to twitch. They flew up to his head and grasped the tufty blond hair that grew there. He pulled on it, and a chunk came away in his fist. He opened his hand and watched it float to the ground. Then he pulled out another chunk. And another. The chunks of hair floated down all around him, like the leaves of a dying plant.
"Stop!” Brigid said. His eyes darted between his head and Brigid’s, then to the bottle of Nair. He snatched up the bottle and poured it all over Brigid’s head. The thick liquid gushed down in a white stream, covering Brigid’s messy brown hair, her forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth. Her eyes burned and she choked for breath. She watched her reflection in horror as Ian pulled her long brown hair from her head in sickly, dripping strands.
Brigid bolted out of the bathroom and down the stairs. She nearly knocked her mother over when she burst into the kitchen.
"Brigid!” her mother said, grabbing her daughter by the shoulders. “What are you doing?”
Brigid tried, and failed, to hide the terror in her eyes as her mother scrutinized her. She wasn’t sure what her mother saw, but she seemed to think it required no more than a comforting hug. She held her daughter for a brief, sweet moment. Then she turned her attention back to the kitchen.
"Daddy will be home for dinner,” she said. Her mother’s hand on her shoulder tightened at the mention of Daddy. Brigid felt trapped. “Could you set the dining room table?”
The last thing Brigid wanted to do was touch the good china with her shaking hands. No, that wasn’t the last thing she wanted to do. The last thing she wanted to do was sit in her room, alone, and wait for Ian’s ghost to find her. She didn’t think they should be trying to help him anymore. She wondered if she and Sinead were actually keeping him here.
The dishes in the china closet trembled when she approached it, and Brigid caught sight of herself in its mirrored back wall. Between the mirrored backs of the dishes, her reflection had all its hair. Brigid searched the corners of the mirror for Ian, but he was nowhere to be seen.
After Brigid finished setting the table, her mother discovered her newly short chunk of hair and yelled at her for ruining her haircut. Brigid didn’t rat Sinead out this time, not because she was cowed by the stupid gum prank, but because she was afraid Sinead’s revenge would provoke more terrifying Ian episodes.
Sinead was hiding in the basement in an attempt to put off her interview with her father, but she also had important work to attend to. Sinead had decided after the events of the previous night that Ian was lost, and being lost made him angry, so he needed to be guided to heaven, or wherever he was supposed to go—Sinead was pretty sure heaven was a part of the whole God-lie. Sinead had not made the prank connection, since she didn’t know about all of Brigid’s pranks; in fact, she was convinced that Ian was seeking them out, unable to let go. She had spent the afternoon acquiring the necessary tools: salt, an important memento, a tiny bell. The next time she saw him, she intended to send him off to eternal peace, whether she believed in it or not.
Sinead refused to come up from the basement to cut the potatoes, or polish the silver, or put out the glasses. She didn’t even respond to their mother’s calls for assistance, which made her sound as if she was shouting down the stairs at no one. By the time Daddy came home, their mother was crackling with irritation, and it fell to Brigid to make the appeasing niceties required whenever her father joined the family for dinner. When he asked her how she had spent her day, she told him she had watched cartoons.
The rest of the family was already seated by the time Sinead emerged, the little bell tinkling in the pocket of her hoodie. Her parents’ half-empty bottle of wine sat on the kitchen counter and reminded Sinead that she wanted juice. She dug into the refrigerator for her orange-mango concoction, which she had secretly started to get sick of. But it inexplicably annoyed her father, so it would serve well as a final act of defiance before her punishment.
When Daddy came home for dinner, the family always ate in the dining room, with the gold-edged china and the freshly polished silver. The candles were always lit, and the girls’ mother made food that was cooked in the oven, not the microwave. Tonight there were small, bloody steaks freshly seared in the broiler, roasted fingerling potatoes, and garlicky greens. Each of the women handed a plate to Daddy, and he dropped on greens and potatoes and a single, wobbly steak. Brigid got half a filet, both because she was the youngest and because she was considered by the whole family to be fat. Then Daddy served himself a filet and Brigid’s leftover half, and the women listened to him talk about his day, and everyone enjoyed a nice family meal.
When Sinead sat down at the table with the mango juice, Brigid banged her knife on the table to get her attention, but Sinead refused to look up from her plate. She took a bite of her potatoes, then took a sip of her juice. She didn’t even register the taste; all she knew was that it had to be out of her mouth, now. Sinead spat orange liquid all over the white tablecloth, splattering the green beans and extinguishing one of the candles. The silence afterward was so complete that when Brigid took a breath, it sounded like the rush of the ocean.
"What,” their mother began with a sharp, clipped tone, “was that.” She clearly hoped to derail their father by taking on the scolding herself, but he spoke over her before she could get out her next word.
"Is there something wrong with your drink, Sinead?” he said. He said it so gently that all three women at the table tensed.
Sinead said nothing as she stared at Brigid, who looked at her with wide, helpless eyes. Brigid had never felt regret like this before, not even when she told Ian that he was dead. That had been an accident. This was something she had done on purpose, and it had worked exactly as she had planned. As terrifying as Ian’s reaction had been, he had stayed trapped in the mirror. Sinead and her father were here in the room.
Sinead kept staring at Brigid as she said, “Just went down the wrong tube.”
Their father considered this answer, folding his hands like the girls imagined he did in complex negotiations. “Take another sip,” he said—then added, as if it had just occurred to him, “so we know you’re all right.”
As she brought the glass to her lips, Sinead thought of the people who ate bugs on television. The horrid hot-salty flavor of the juice burned her throat, and her stomach turned and gurgled when it hit bottom. She put down the juice in a way she hoped was ladylike, then covered her mouth for one tiny cough.
Sinead could not tell if her performance had any effect, because now their father was looking between them, as if trying to spot an invisible thread. “Brigid, why don’t you take a sip?” he said.
Brigid should just take it. Just take the glass, choke the whole thing down, and spare Sinead. But she would spew juice everywhere or, worse, throw it up. “I hate that weird mango stuff,” she said. She pathetically hoped this would win his sympathy, since he, too, hated the weird mango stuff.
"Give it another try,” their father said. “Go get the bottle.”
Brigid rose from her seat as slowly as she possibly could, and shuffled into the kitchen. She pulled out the orange-mango juice and a glass and shuffled back into the dining room like a prisoner headed to the gallows. The three members of her family stared at her with anger as she approached, though their anger was confused, and directed at different people. Her sister was angry with Brigid for pranking her and furious with their father for toying with them. Her mother was ang
ry with the girls for provoking her husband, though her constant, simmering anger at their father boiled up from beneath the other, safer emotion. And her father—her father was angry at his children, and at his wife, but his ideas of who they were and what they represented were so distorted that the anger might as well have been at different people entirely. He’d been furious at Ian when he got sick again. Brigid had seen him slap him. Their father’s anger made no sense.
All these competing angers made Brigid angry, too. Hers was not mixed with denial, however, or directed at someone who didn’t exist. She was angry at everyone, and she was going to make this stop. When she crossed the threshold, she slid her foot underneath the rug and elaborately, comically, tripped. The glass went flying out of her hands, and the juice bottle crashed to the floor. Their parents stared at Brigid, frozen, but Sinead leapt to her aid, making sure to knock over her juice glass in the process. Sinead slid her hands beneath her sister’s arms and drew her to her feet.
Then their parents started screaming about the rug and broken glass and carelessness and disrespect. Sinead and Brigid couldn’t make the words out, exactly. They were too distracted by Ian’s reappearance. Sinead saw him standing next to their father, arms crossed. Brigid saw him staring out from the china-cabinet mirror, hovering.
“—disrespect that should have died with your son!” their father shouted, just at the moment when their mother fell silent. Then everything was silent, taut with the ugly truth that had just been unleashed. Ian was dead. And each member of the family had wished for that death in the hope that life would be better without him.
The first dish in the cabinet broke like a gunshot. The one closest to it went off next, then another, and another, the dishes exploding like targets in a carnival game. Sinead saw Ian pick them up and hurl them. Brigid saw his face in the mirror behind each dish. Their parents were screaming again, and the sisters watched the carnage unfold before them like spectators, rather than two people intimately involved in the situation. Then Sinead remembered the bell in her pocket, and Brigid remembered the look on Ian’s face when she told him he was dead, and they both began to shout, too.
"You can leave!” Sinead shouted. She rang her little bell at the dish cabinet, then pulled out her salt and shook it around the floor. “You don’t have to stay here! You can leave!”
"Ian, I’m sorry!” Brigid said. “I’m sorry you died! I’m sorry!”
The dishes kept exploding, and every member of the family kept shouting, and the sisters weren’t sure if they had unleashed something cathartic or something terrible. Sinead believed Ian just needed to release this anger to move on. Brigid wondered if their family had poisoned him with their selfishness, and now they were paying the price. Either way, all they could do was cower under the table, holding hands, until it had run its course.
Nahiku West
Linda Nagata
Linda Nagata [www.mythicisland.com] is the author of multiple novels and short stories including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. Though best known for science fiction, she writes fantasy too, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Her newest science fiction novel is The Red: First Light, published under her own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.
A railcar was ferrying Key Lu across the tether linking Nahiku East and West when a micrometeor popped through the car’s canopy, leaving two neat holes that vented the cabin to hard vacuum within seconds. The car continued on the track, but it took over a minute for it to reach the gel lock at Nahiku West and pass through into atmosphere. No one expected to find Key Lu alive, but as soon as the car repressurized, he woke up.
Sometimes, it’s a crime not to die.
I stepped into the interrogation chamber. Key had been sitting on one of two padded couches, but when he saw me he bolted to his feet. I stood very still, hearing the door lock behind me. Nothing in Key’s background indicated he was a violent man, but prisoners sometimes panic. I raised my hand slightly, as a gel ribbon armed with a paralytic spray slid from my forearm to my palm, ready for use if it came to that.
"Please,” I said, keeping the ribbon carefully concealed. “Sit down.”
Key slowly subsided onto the couch, never taking his frightened eyes off me.
Most of the celestial cities restrict the height and weight of residents to minimize the consumption of volatiles, but Commonwealth police officers are required to be taller and more muscular than the average citizen. I used to be a smaller man, but during my time at the academy adjustments were made. I faced Key Lu with a physical presence optimized to trigger a sense of intimidation in the back brain of a nervous suspect, an effect enhanced by the black fabric of my uniform. Its design was simple—shorts cuffed at the knees and a lightweight pullover with long sleeves that covered the small arsenal of chemical ribbons I carried on my forearms—but its light-swallowing color set me apart from the bright fashions of the celestial cities.
I sat down on the couch opposite Key Lu. He was a well-designed man, nothing eccentric about him, just another good-looking citizen. His hair was presently blond, his eyebrows darker. His balanced face lacked strong features. The only thing notable about him was his injuries. Dark bruises surrounded his eyes and their whites had turned red from burst blood vessels. More bruises discolored swollen tissue beneath his coppery skin.
We studied each other for several seconds, both knowing what was at stake. I was first to speak. “I’m Officer Zeke Choy—”
"I know who you are.”
“—of the Commonwealth Police, the watch officer here at Nahiku.”
The oldest celestial cities orbited Earth, but Nahiku was newer. It was one in a cluster of three orbital habitats that circled the Sun together, just inside the procession of Venus.
Key Lu addressed me again, with the polite insistence of a desperate man. “I didn’t know about the quirk, Officer Choy. I thought I was legal.”
The machine voice of a Dull Intelligence whispered into my auditory nerve that he was lying. I already knew that, but I nodded anyway, pretending to believe him.
The DI was housed within my atrium, a neural organ that served as an interface between mind and machine. Atriums are a legal enhancement—they don’t change human biology—but Key Lu’s quirked physiology that had allowed him to survive short-term exposure to hard vacuum was definitely not.
I was sure his quirk had been done before the age of consent. He’d been born in the Far Reaches among the fragile holdings of the asteroid prospectors, where it must have looked like a reasonable gamble to bioengineer some insurance into his system. Years had passed since then; enforcement had grown stricter. Though Key Lu looked perfectly ordinary, by the law of the Commonwealth, he wasn’t even human.
I met his gaze, hoping he was no fool. “Don’t tell me anything I don’t want to know,” I warned him.
I let him consider this for several seconds before I went on. “Your enhancement is illegal under the statutes of the Commonwealth—”
"I understand that, but I didn’t know about it.”
I nodded my approval of this lie. I needed to maintain the fiction that he hadn’t known. It was the only way I could help him. “I’ll need your consent to remove it.”
A spark of hope ignited in his blooded eyes. “Yes! Yes, of course.”
"So recorded.” I stood, determined to get the quirk out of his system as soon as possible, before awkward questions could be asked. “Treatment can begin right—”
The door to the interrogation room opened.
I was so startled, I turned with my hand half raised, ready to trigger the ribbon of paralytic still hidden in my palm—only to see Magistrate Glory Mina walk in, flanked by two uniformed cops I’d never seen before.
My DI sent the ribbon retreating back up my forearm while I greeted Glory wit
h a scowl. Nahiku was my territory. I was the only cop assigned to the little city and I was used to having my own way—but with the magistrate’s arrival I’d just been overridden.
Goods travel on robotic ships between the celestial cities, but people rarely do. We ghost instead. A ghost—an electronic persona—moves between the data gates at the speed of light. Most ghosts are received on a machine grid or within the virtual reality of a host’s atrium, but every city keeps a cold-storage mausoleum. If you have the money—or if you’re a cop—you can grow a duplicate body in another city, fully replicated hard copy, ready to roll.
Glory Mina presided over the circuit court based out of Red Star, the primary city in our little cluster. She would have had to put her Red Star body into cold storage before waking up the copy here at Nahiku, but that was hardly more than half an hour’s effort. From the eight cops who had husks stashed in the mausoleum, she’d probably pulled two at random to make up the officers for her court.
I was supposed to get a notification anytime a husk in the mausoleum woke up, but obviously she’d overridden that too.
Glory Mina was a small woman with skin the color of cinnamon, and thick, shiny black hair that she kept in a stubble cut. She looked at me curiously, her eyebrows arched. “Officer Choy, I saw the incident report, but I missed your request for a court.”
The two cops had positioned themselves on either side of the door.
"I didn’t file a request, Magistrate.”
"And why not?”
"This is not a criminal case.”
No doubt her DI dutifully informed her I was lying—not that she couldn’t figure that out for herself. “I don’t think that’s been determined, Officer Choy. There are records that still need to be considered, which have not made their way into the case file.”
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7 Page 70