by Susan Juby
Bright took a deep, nauseated breath and hit all the buttons at once. That was the cue for the jetpack to propel her in two or three large circles. Instead, it whipped her end-over-end so fast that her legs and arms got whiplash trying to keep up. To make matters worse, she wasn’t held aloft as she rotated like an old-fashioned meat substitute on a rotisserie, but instead kept falling and flailing. Falling and flailing.
People in the crowd screamed as she spun out of control and dropped closer above their heads.
They ran away. Bright used every bit of her strength to find and press another button. Any other button. As her trajectory slowed, she gritted her teeth and tried to straighten her head. But the jetpack held her in a twisted, off-kilter hover before failing entirely. She plowed into the corner like a cheap skiddle and lay in a heap on the floor, trying to catch her breath. She moved her head and limbs to make sure nothing was broken. Then she glanced up to gauge the crowd’s response. They had thirty seconds after a landing to officially register their order.
All over the room lights winked off, until it was dark but for the dance lights.
A moment later, the Mistress’s powerful voice pierced the throbbing music from above.
“And now, FON!” she cried. “Put your wands in the air for FON!”
Every order wand in the place lit up before Fon even cleared the dressing room.
Bright crawled to her knees and convinced her wrenched neck to hold up her head. She saw Fon poised on the platform, wearing a jetpack Bright had never seen before. Fon held a microphone to her lips.
“Let’s do the jetpack and do it right!” Fon shouted.
The crowd roared like a single eager being. Fon leapt off the railing. She flew so fast that her halo left a light trail behind her, as though her head were on fire with pink lights. She slowed, executed three lazy, perfect somersaults followed by a precise pair of aerial figure eights, then drifted to the floor, glorious in Kevlar, her perfectly tinted legs set ablaze by the insistent illumination from the floor, where every wand was lit and bobbing frantically as the clients put in their orders, hoping they had enough credits to spend the night dancing and having a blast with Fon.
Bright sank back down, unstrapped her jetpack, and sighed heavily. That was the last time she would ever buy a jetpack on sale.
02.00
Grassly pushed himself away from his worktable. He felt like sweeping his tools onto the floor as a grand gesture, but he didn’t want to make a mess that he’d later have to clean up.
Instead, he checked the surveillance feed and stared at the images of favours and clients doing the slip slide with a triple twist. He was instantly entranced and jumped up to follow along with their steps. As hard as he worked on the light, he worked even harder at his dancing, but he still couldn’t figure out how to do the triple twist. The ancestors, while perverse in countless ways, had incredible dance skill.
He was tucked away in his workshop, hidden deep in the recesses of the House of Gear, working on the latest version of the light. Undercover among the last remnants of the ancestors, he was finding his Sending far more challenging than he’d imagined. The ancestors truly were the most annoying creatures in the Charted Territories. Trying to copy the relentless innovation and athleticism of their dancing was the only thing keeping him sane. The dancing also helped him, at least for brief periods, to forget the many complications of his two-year odyssey to save the ancestors.
For starters, the substance he’d used to seal his ship to the skin of the Store—the seal that prevented the lingering biotoxins from the war-ravaged environment from slipping inside and killing everyone—was being eaten away by the poisons. He’d miscalculated just how polluted Earth was and how long the seal would have to last. In addition, the ancestors’ behaviours and mores were nearly impossible for a rational being to understand, even though their main communication and data system, known as the feed, was not difficult to hack. Worst of all, the light was giving him trouble.
The idea for the light came from the ancestors’ own historical documents. When Grassly had reached low Earth orbit, he’d discovered a small group of abandoned ships endlessly circling the devastated planet. Inside one of those ships were the corpses of several ancestors and the partial remains of a single book. All that was left of Enlightenment Made Easy: Follow Your Inner Angel! by Sally Lancaster was the front cover and the first few pages, most of which were taken up with compelling testimonials like “This book literally saved my life!” and “I was blind before I read this book and now I see the light!” According to the embossed words on the cover, Enlightenment Made Easy had sold over forty million copies.
The remaining pages of text spoke of the need for all of humanity to become “enlightened and seek a new beginning in new lands.” That sounded exactly like what Grassly had in mind for them. Sally Lancaster claimed humans had only to “see the light to become ready to move to the place where all good things are possible.” Only when everyone had “migrated to the light” would humanity be healed and ready to begin anew, “bathed in the healing of angelic illumination.” There his understanding faltered. He didn’t know what “angelic” meant, but he felt he got the gist of her argument.
The book’s cover showed a man falling to his knees in front of a brilliant beam of light and a woman in a pair of high-waisted blue slacks walking directly into it.
Grassly felt his discovery of the book was a sign as to how he should proceed. After all, Sally Lancaster was a distant relation, of sorts. She was a human. He was a 51. His people, fifty-one of them, had been rescued from Earth in the mid-1970s. They were taken from the fourth floor of a nightclub in New Jersey in an incident that came to be called the Great Nightclub Disappearance. In fact, they were rescued from their sad, limited existence by a powerfully philanthropic, advanced alien species called the Xnxnga (pronounced Ex-in-Ga).
The Xnxnga, who looked like anteaters, only friendlier and larger, transported the fifty-one to an idyllic (at least from a 1970s human perspective) planet called H51, where they developed a technologically and sociologically utopian society and received the gift of accelerated evolution. Only a few decades after they left the faltering Earth, the 51s and their descendants underwent the sort of profound transformation experienced by many advanced species: they became One.
When they turned fifty-one years of age, the 51s merged physically and psychologically into their familial group, joining the group mind known as the Mother. The fifty-one Mother consciousnesses were housed in towering black pyramids located in the majestic red rock desert in the northwestern lands of H51. As you might expect if you’ve ever met a mother, the Mothers were a powerful presence in the lives of their offspring, except during a single life phase: the coming-of-age ritual known as the Sending, which took place when 51s were on the cusp of adulthood, somewhere between their seventeenth and twenty-first years, depending on their maturity level.
The Sending was another legacy from the Xnxnga. Young 51s on a Sending left their planet, and sometimes their galaxy, with the goal of discovering, rescuing, and, if necessary, rehoming endangered species from other planets. The experience was meant to solidify their self-esteem, which was considered the critical prerequisite for a successful life.
In order for a 51 to complete a successful Sending, the species being saved had to actively participate in its rescue. For instance, the original fifty-one had willingly gone with the Xnxnga when they mistook the ship parked on the roof of the nightclub for another dance floor.
The ancestors were notorious throughout the Charted Territories for having destroyed their planet and every other living thing on it. Every young 51 knew that the ancestor population was on the verge of extinction and lived inside a single dwelling called the Store, into which they had withdrawn at the time of the Great Corporate Retreat. But they were considered beyond hope—beyond Sending, if you will.
Had Grassly fully understood what he was getting himself into, he might have chosen his Sending more wi
sely. As it was, a lesser-known trait of the ancestors had greatly influenced his decision. They were reputed to be superb dancers, and Grassly yearned to be a great dancer. Of course, he also wanted to have one of the most impressive Sendings ever. What better way than to rescue a species considered doomed and, if possible, learn their dances? What a boost to his self-esteem and that of his entire family!
So it was that Grassly came to find Sally Lancaster’s book in the abandoned orbital colony. He knew that some creatures on H51 and other planets migrated to new habitats in response to biological urges and environmental pressures. That sounded much like what Sally Lancaster was talking about. And he remembered a teacher saying something about how all creatures carried within them the “cellular memory” of their species’ entire history. If he could activate the migratory instinct in the ancestors, perhaps they would board his ship willingly. Once they were on his ship, the Sankalpa, he would transport them to a rehabbed planet that was ready and able to accommodate their special biological needs.
All he needed to do was to design a special light that would make the ancestors want to travel to a new environment. He needed to invent an enlightener.
Thus fortified with original research and a fail-proof plan, Grassly had left the remains of the extinct colony of earth orbiters, whose ships floated like ghostly hulks far above the last remaining human settlement. Determined to shine a light on the last remnants of humanity, he was going to go undercover in the Store to help the ancestors help themselves.
Everything went smoothly until he started testing his lights.
The first one had killed the subject instantly. The subject was a young male favour from the House of Splash with signs of a degenerative neurological disorder, not uncommon in the ancestors, who practised an unsustainable form of cloning. It was clear the boy would have been released soon for lack of productivity. Still, Grassly felt bad about the way he had died, with blood spouting from his nose and mouth as he collapsed into a heap, shouting, “I see the light! I see the light!”
Stating the obvious, really, as Grassly had been shining the thing right in his eyes.
Grassly began tinkering with the intensity and frequency of the light, as well as its spectrum. There had been six lights since that first, each designed to activate a different part of the ancestors’ brains. His hypothesis was that the right light, targeting the correct area of the brain, would make the ancestors stop earning and spending credits long enough to migrate to the only part of their environment that featured semi-natural sunlight, which happened to be the least populated, least popular part of the Store and, thanks to Grassly’s strategic planning, the place where he’d parked his ship, the Sankalpa.
The last favour, the one who’d bitten through the electrical cord, had displayed the most promising reaction to date. She was obviously trying to create fire and light, both ancient human instincts. The prototype was definitely in the right neighbourhood now, ancient-instinct-wise. Grassly was sure he’d spec’d the frequency correctly this time. That was the hard part to get right, and Sally Lancaster’s book was no help, technically speaking.
As bumpy as the experimental process had been, he remained convinced that an enlightener was the way to go. The ancestors lived in an environment illuminated almost exclusively by artificial means. The Store was covered in a special skin, or membrane, that was porous enough to allow oxygen exchange and carbon dioxide filtration systems to function, but not so porous that the many chemicals and toxins the last humans had unleashed on each other during the final war could get inside and poison the inhabitants. The faint light from outside that made it through the semi-translucent skin was considered a serious distraction by the Board of Deciders, who ran the Store, so the skin around the inhabited areas was coated in a specially formulated breathable black paint, and extremely small but powerful lights were installed across the upper infrastructure to imitate stars.
The situation inside the House of Gear, Grassly’s base of operations, was particularly optimal from a lightdevelopment perspective. The ancestors inside the House of Gear were voracious light users and wearers, illuminated from the time they awoke until they were drugged into unconsciousness in their pods. They carried lights, wore lights—some of them even had small lights implanted in odd places on their bodies, which made Grassly’s stomach feel upset. The House of Gear residents, who belonged to a class of ancestors known as party favours, had created work and living spaces that were a mass of flashing, strobing, twinkling, and stuttering lights.
If there was any place Grassly could experiment with his enlighteners, it was inside the House of Gear. He had chosen to go undercover as a personal support, or PS, officer because he fit the height and weight requirements and had a standard sort of face. Also, PS staff wore special mirrored dataglasses that wrapped around their faces and allowed them to access the data feed. Through the feed, Grassly could view any part of the Store at any time, and he could use the glasses to hack into the deeper functions of the feed at will. Plus, he thought the dataglasses looked good with his black turtleneck, black slacks, heavy black boots, and black vest. Back on H51, everyone wore clothes with flattering colours and an attractive and customized fit. It was oddly liberating to be anonymous among the other PS officers. And thankfully, the uniform didn’t interfere with his dancing.
His hips sore from trying to do the triple twist, he returned to preparing for the next test. He slid the bulb into the power source and clicked the button. The filaments flickered like dazzling fingers fluttering inside a globe.
He clicked it off and removed the bulb to inspect it. Strange.
Once more he fit it into the wand and clicked it on. Again the light flickered wildly.
None of the other bulbs had done this. Grassly passed his hand through the pulsing stream of light. He clicked it off and on for a third time. Finally, light poured in a solid stream.
To test the light’s reach, he set it on the counter and walked across the dark room. The beam lit up a spot on his clothing at a distance of six feet. That was acceptable.
As he went to turn the light off, he once again passed a hand in front of the beam. A sensation like a thousand skudrins biting him made him jerk his hand, which struck the handle, knocking the light to the floor and smashing the glass bulb.
The area of skin touched by the light was a brilliant red and covered with tiny white bumps. He’d had allergic reactions before: to particular foods and cleaning products and to certain environments, such as the time his family went on vacation to Belroos 6 to look at the craters and something about the light of the six moons made him so sick he had to spend the afternoon on the ship. The symptoms now were unmistakable. A throbbing headache filled his skull, his breathing became laboured, and he had broken out in a flaming rash. Could he be allergic to this new version of the light? Grassly took to his bed to think and to wait for the pain to subside.
It was a typical ancestor bed: remarkably comfortable. He planned to take a selection of beds home when he left. In his opinion, ancestor beds and dancing were the greatest contributions the ancestors had made to the universe, perhaps the only useful contributions they’d made to the universe.
He knew he had to be extremely careful from now on. Once he became allergic to something, his reaction increased exponentially each time he was exposed to it. His sensitivity was a constant concern for his Mother, who’d been as vigilant in protecting him as only a familial group mind could be. He wondered why he hadn’t reacted to the flickering light, but wasn’t about to experiment on himself to find out. It was no longer safe for him to handle the lights. That much was clear.
As his pain receded, an idea slid into his brain like both suns dawning over H51 on a perfect day. Once he’d built a new light to the specs of the one he’d just smashed, he would have one of the ancestors wield it during the testing phase. After all, the ancestors had to play an active role in their own rescue. Who better to wield a light than a party favour from the House of Gear? If th
e chosen favour was accidentally enlightened, Grassly would slip the light to another favour until his tests were complete.
All he had to do was pick the right favour. He began to scroll through the feed, moving his finger at the side of his dataglasses and poking it in the direction of his temple to expand certain screens.
Within seconds he found what he was looking for: the favour with the highest credit score in the House of Gear. Her name was Fon.
03.00
Bright caught a ride on one of the privators and reached the dressing room for her designated nutrition update two minutes early. Clients loved to see favours appearing for a shift, but they were less keen to see them during breaks or after work, and with good reason. A good party could really take it out of a person.
After three point five hours on the party floor, so many extensions had been torn off Bright’s eyelashes that she was nearly blinded by the dangling remainders. The low-credit client who put up his wand for Bright long after the highest bidder had claimed Fon had been so shocked to find himself partying with an elite favour, even one whose entrance had failed spectacularly, that he could barely stay upright. The client had loosened one of her teeth when he bowed his introduction. Loose teeth were nothing new. Most favours got their veneers replaced on a monthly basis as a result of client impacts and changing tastes in looks. Still, Bright wasn’t pleased that Fon was partying for the big credits and she was scraping along the bottom with a client who’d clearly never been in the House of Gear before, much less partied with a favour who was practically top forty like her. And now Fon was late for her nutrition break, which was practically a violation, but it wouldn’t matter! Bright got no recognition for her diligence about taking breaks on time and sometimes even early.
The dressing room was empty. Pinkie and Peaches had probably gone to get the drinks. Bright coughed as she headed for her station, and the loose tooth flew out of her mouth. It clinked quietly as it hit the counter near Fon’s ready station. Bright reached for the tooth, but when she saw the pink construction helmet with the cool beacon light on top, her hand froze in mid-air.