by Neil Clarke
She finds her wife kneeling before the server, already plugged in. She follows.
The church is carved from solid rock, a copper-roofed globe drenched in bronze evening. The floor murmurs quartz canticles underfoot. Kerttu is enclosed in a pebble-rounded pew, a carpet of white furs and ice crystals mounded at her bare feet. “I was never religious,” she says without turning, “but I liked Temppeliaukio. It is—was—a good hideout when I wanted to think. When I wanted peace, but usually it was too crowded. In a way, you’ve created the perfect version of my country for me.”
“Kerttu—” Heilui draws a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”
Her wife turns around. Rime cracks at her movement, sloughing off her shoulders in flecks and teardrops. “There’s no need, Doctor. I always knew I was released from the Institute for a purpose and he was a priority target. Of all his surviving associates, I made the best bait. I’m only curious why you did it. Is it simply patriotism? Frightening as his reputation was, I don’t think he would have resumed his work. He meant to lie low, disappear. Change his face again and become just an ordinary man.”
“Five years ago occidental terrorists infiltrated my university and I got close to one of them, a woman I thought I could marry. She . . . made use of me to access our archives, I don’t remember anymore what data she got. I was arrested as a potential accessory and though found innocent, it scarred my records. This—I was offered amnesty. My name cleared.” Within the virtuality she is not subjected to involuntary reactions, the tyranny of cortisol and serotonin, but she’s accustomed to configuring her avatar to reflect her real body as much as possible. Her throat is sore and thick. “Why didn’t you? Go with him.”
Kerttu folds her hands. Snow blooms, unmelting, on her knuckles like wedding rings. “Ultimately it is a question of whose property I am. What did he offer? A life on the run, dogged each step by terror. The past is past. There’s no use resurrecting a hill of ashes. The dead do not come back. The arrow of time doesn’t reverse.”
Heilui purses her mouth, opens it. Exhales. “My contract with the Institute isn’t permanent. There’s been no further . . . instructions. After what’s happened, you should have this choice. You can go back to the Institute and they’ll find you another client.”
“Is that what you want, Heilui?”
A painful-sweet wrench in her chest: like love, like cardiac arrest. It is strategically placed and cannot be inadvertent, but even so. “You’ve never called me by name before, like that, ever.”
“The Institute appears to be done with me. I’m of no further use to them and therefore I’m now granted freedom, after a fashion, as long as they can track me and I’m tethered to a client.” Kerttu looks, unblinking, at Heilui with her aquatic eyes. “A future can be had and a new life can be built. That is what you offer me and I’d like to take you up on it.”
Logical. Transactional, as this has been from the beginning. And yet Heilui finds herself smiling. “No, you’re right. And if you were gone, I’d miss you. I’ll have to talk my family around, but my mothers at least I think I can convince.”
“I will do my best to be the daughter-in-law they can tolerate. They will be my family, my mothers.”
Heilui laughs, surprising herself, the sound of a scale tipping in her heart. “So they would. I never asked you properly before, did I, so—Kerttu, will you be my wife?”
Kerttu gathers Heilui in her arms and kisses her brow, soft and warm. “Yes. Let’s try to make this work together.”
At their feet, the frost of Kerttu’s country thaws: a pool clear as the first water of spring, blue-green and sharp with salt.
Out in the world of mortal flesh and unbearable history, on the island surrounded by storm and sea, the occidental bride never dons black again.
About the Author
Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Phantasm Japan, The Dark, and year’s bests. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.
Canary Land
Tom Purdom
Back home in Delaware County, in the area that was generally known as the “Philadelphia region,” the three guys talking to George Sparr would probably have been descended from long dead ancestors who had immigrated from Sicily. Here on the Moon they were probably the sons of parents who had been born in Taiwan or Thailand. They had good contacts, the big one explained, with the union that “represented” the musicians who played in eateries like the Twelve Sages Cafe. If George wanted to continue sawing on his viola twelve hours a day, thirteen days out of fourteen, it would be to his advantage to accept their offer. If he declined, someone else would take his place in the string quintet that the diners and lunchers ignored while they chatted.
On Earth, George had played the viola because he wanted to. The performance system he had planted in his nervous system was top of the line, state-of-the-art. There had been weeks, back when he had been a normal take-it-as-it-comes American, when he had played with a different trio or quartet every night, including Saturday, and squeezed in two sessions on Sunday. Now his performance system was the only thing standing between him and the euphoric psychological states induced by malnutrition. Live music, performed by real live musicians, was one of the lowest forms of unskilled labor. Anybody could do it, provided they had attached the right information molecules to the right motor nerves. It was, in short, the one form of employment you could count on, if you were an American immigrant who was, when all was said and done, only a commonplace, cookbook kind of biodesigner.
George’s grasp of Techno-Mandarin was still developing. He had been scraping for money when he had left Earth. He had sold almost everything he owned—including his best viola—to buy his way off the planet. The language program he had purchased had been a cheap, quick-and-dirty item that gave him the equivalent of a useful pidgin. The three guys were talking very slowly.
They wanted to slip George into one of the big artificial ecosystems that were one of the Moon’s leading economic resources. They had a contact who could stow him in one of the carts that delivered supplies to the canaries—the “long term research and maintenance team” who lived in the ecosystem. The contact would think she was merely transferring a container that had been loaded with a little harmless recreational material.
George was only five-eight, which was one reason he’d been selected for the “opportunity.” He would be wearing a guaranteed, airtight isolation unit. Once inside, he would hunt down a few specimens, analyze their genetic makeup with the equipment he would be given, and come out with the information a member of a certain Board of Directors was interested in. Robots could have done the job, but robots had to be controlled from outside, with detectable radio sources. The Director (George could hear the capital, even with his limited knowledge of the language), the Director wanted to run some tests on the specimens without engaging in a direct confrontation with his colleagues.
There was, of course, a very real possibility the isolation suit might be damaged in some way. In that case, George would become a permanent resident of the ecosystem—a destiny he had been trying to avoid ever since he had arrived on the Moon.
The ride to the ecosystem blindsided George with an unexpected rush of emotion. There was a moment when he wasn’t certain he could control the sob that was pressing against the walls of his throat.
He was sitting in a private vehicle. He was racing along a strip of pavement, with a line of vehicles ahead of him. There was sky over his head and a landscape around him.
George had spent his whole life in the car-dominated metropolitan sprawls that had replaced cities in the United States. Now he lived in a tiny one room apartment, in a corridor crammed with tiny one room apartments rented by other immigrants. His primary form of transportation was his own legs. When he did actually ride in a vehicle,
he hopped aboard an automated cart and shared a seat with someone he had never seen before. He could understand why most of the people on the Moon came from Asiatic countries. They had crossed two hundred and fifty thousand miles so they could build a new generation of Hong Kongs under the lunar surface.
The sky was black, of course. The landscape was a rolling desert composed of craters pockmarked by craters that were pockmarked by craters. The cars on the black strip were creeping along at fifty kilometers per hour—or less—and most of the energy released by their batteries was powering a life support system, not a motor. Still, he looked around him with some of the tingling pleasure of a man who had just been released from prison.
The trio had to explain the job to him and some of the less technical data slipped out in the telling. They were also anxious, obviously, to let him know their “client” had connections. One of the corporation’s biggest products was the organic interface that connected the brains of animals to electronic control devices. The company’s major resource was a woman named Ms. Chao who was a big expert at developing such interfaces. Her company had become one of the three competitors everybody in the field wanted to beat.
In this case the corporation was upgrading a package that connected the brains of surveillance hawks to the electronics that controlled them. The package included genes that modified the neurotransmitters in the hawk’s brain and it actually altered the hawk’s intelligence and temperament. The package created, in effect, a whole new organ in the brain. You infected the brain with the package and the DNA in the package built a new organ—an organ which responded to activity within the brain by releasing extra transmitters, dampening certain responses, etc. Some of the standard, medically approved personality modifications worked exactly the same way. The package would increase the efficiency of the hawk’s brain and multiply the number of functions its owners could build into the control interface.
Their Director, the trio claimed, was worried about the ethics of the other directors. The reports from the research and development team indicated the project was months behind schedule.
“Our man afraid he victim big cheat,” the big one said, in slow Techno-Mandarin pidgin. With lots of emphatic, insistent hand gestures.
It had been the big one, oddly enough, who had done most of the talking. In his case, apparently, you couldn’t assume there was an inverse relationship between muscle power and brain power. He was one of those guys who was so massive he made you feel nervous every time he got within three steps of the zone you thought of as your personal space.
The artificial ecosystems had become one of the foundations of the lunar economy. One of the Moon’s greatest resources, it had turned out, was its lifelessness. Nothing could live on the surface of the Moon—not a bacteria, not a fungus, not the tiniest dot of a nematode, nothing.
Temperatures that were fifty percent higher than the temperature of boiling water sterilized the surface during the lunar day. Cold that was grimmer than anything found at the Antarctic sterilized it during the night. Radiation and vacuum killed anything that might have survived the temperature changes.
And what happened if some organism somehow managed to survive all of the Moon’s hazards and cross the terrain that separated an ecosystem from one of the lunar cities? It still had to cross four hundred thousand kilometers of vacuum and radiation before it reached the real ecosystems that flowered on the blue sphere that had once been George’s home.
The Moon, obviously, was the place to develop new life forms. The designers themselves could sit in Shanghai and Bangkok and ponder the three-dimensional models of DNA molecules that twisted across their screens. The hands-on work took place on the Moon. The organisms that sprouted from the molecules were inserted in artificial ecosystems on the Moon and given their chance to do their worst.
Every new organism was treated with suspicion. Anything—even the most trivial modification of a minor insect—could produce unexpected side effects when it was inserted into a terrestrial ecosystem. Once a new organism had been designed, it had to be maintained in a sealed Lunar ecosystem for at least three years. Viruses and certain kinds of plants and insects had to be kept imprisoned for periods that were even longer.
According to the big guy, Ms. Chao claimed she was still developing the new hawk control interface. The Director, for some reason, was afraid she had already finished working on it. She could have turned it over to another company, the big guy claimed. And the new company could lock it in another ecosystem. And get it ready for market while the Director thought it was still under development inside the old company’s ecosystem.
“Other directors transfer research other company,” the big guy said. “Show him false data. Other company make money. Other directors make money. His stock—down.”
“Stock no worth chips stock recorded on,” the guy with the white scar on the back of his fingers said.
“You not commit crime,” the big one said, with his hands pushing at the air as if he was trying to shove his complicated ideas into George’s dumb immigrant’s brain. “You not burglar. You work for Director. Stockholder. Director have right to know.”
Like everything else on the Moon, the ecosystem was buried under the surface. George crawled into the back of the truck knowing he had seen all of the real Topside landscape he was going to see from now until he left the system. The guy with the scarred hand kept a camera on while he stood in the sterilizing unit and they talked him through the “donning procedure.” The suit had already been sterilized. The donning procedure was supposed to reduce the contamination it picked up as he put it on. The sterilizing unit flooded him with UV light and other, less obvious forms of radiation while he wiggled and contorted. The big guy got some bobs and smiles from the third member of the trio when he made a couple of “jokes” about the future of George’s chromosomes. Then the big guy tapped a button on the side of the unit and George stood there for five minutes, completely cased in the suit, while the unit supposedly killed off anything the suit had attracted while he had been amusing them with his reverse striptease. The recording they were making was for his benefit, the big guy assured him. If he ran into any legal problems, they had proof they had administered all the standard safety precautions before he entered the ecosystem.
The thing that really made George sweat was the struggle to emerge from the container. It was a cylinder with a big external pressure seal and they had deliberately picked one of the smaller sizes. We make so small, nobody see think person, the big guy had explained.
The trick release on the inside of the cylinder worked fine but after that he had to maneuver his way through the neck without ripping his suit. Any tear—any puncture, any pinhole—would activate the laws that governed the quarantine.
The best you could hope for, under the rules, was fourteen months of isolation. You could only hope for that, of course, if you had entered the ecosystem legitimately, for a very good reason. If you had entered it illegally, for a reason that would make you the instant enemy of most of the people who owned the place, you would be lucky if they let you stay inside it, in one piece, for the rest of whatever life you might be willing to endure before you decided you were better off dead.
The people on the “long term research and maintenance team” did some useful work. An American with his training would be a valuable asset—a high level assistant to the people on the other side of the wall who really directed the research. But everybody knew why they were really there. There wasn’t a person on the Moon who didn’t know that coal miners had once taken canaries into their tunnels, so they would know they were breathing poisoned air as soon as the canaries keeled over. The humans locked in the ecosystem were the living proof the microorganisms in the system hadn’t evolved into something dangerous.
The contact had placed the container, as promised, in the tall grasses that grew along a small stream. The ecosystem was supposed to mimic a “natural” day-night cycle on Earth and it was darker than any place Ge
orge had ever visited on the real planet. He had put on a set of night vision goggles before he had closed the hood of the suit but he still had to stand still for a moment and let his eyes adjust.
His equipment pack contained two cases. The large flat case looked like it had been designed for displaying jewelry. The two moths fitted into its recesses would have drawn approving nods from people who were connoisseurs of bioelectronic craftsmanship.
The hawks he was interested in were living creatures with modified brains. The cameras and computers plugged into their bodies were powered by the energy generated by their own metabolism. The two moths occupied a different part of the great borderland between the world of the living and the world of the machine. Their bodies had been formed in cocoons but their organic brains had been replaced by electronic control systems. They drew all their energy from the batteries he fitted into the slots just behind each control system. Their wings were a little wider than his hand but the big guy had assured him they wouldn’t trigger any alarms when a surveillance camera picked them up.
Insect like this in system. Not many. But enough.
The first moth flitted away from George’s hand as soon as he pressed on the battery with his thumb. It fluttered aimlessly, just above the tops of the river grasses, then turned to the right and headed toward a group of trees about a hundred meters from its launch site.
At night the hawks were roosters, not flyers. They perched in trees, dozing and digesting, while the cameras mounted in their skulls continued to relay data to the security system.
George had never paid much attention when his parents had discussed their family histories. He knew he had ancestors who came from Romania, Italy, Austria, and the less prominent regions of the British Isles. Most of them had emigrated in the 19th Century, as far as he could tell. One of his grandmothers had left some country in Europe when it fell apart near the end of the 20th Century.