Shine

by Jetse de Vries

  “Yes?”

  “You have an incoming call from Elena Ivanova.”

  “Oh, wonderful! Put her through.”

  Elena’s beautiful face, with its smiling eyes, appeared on the notebook screen. “Elena! So wonderful to see you.”

  “Guess where I am?”

  I couldn’t tell. The sky behind her was blue; that was all I could see. No clouds. It looked as sunny where she was as my heart was feeling at that same moment.

  “Does this help?” She swung her phone around.

  “That’s my house!”

  “Can I come in?”

  “It’s unlocked. Wow! You’re really here?”

  Her voice echoed through the house and from my notebook as she said, “Right here, Paul, my friend!”

  I headed to the front door. We embraced.

  “What—what are you doing here?”

  “It’s Joe the Martian Day. Where else would I want to be?” She smiled.

  “Come in, come in—let me show you my back patio. I have a wonderful view of the lake,” I shut the front door and led her through the kitchen and to the back door.

  “Can I get you anything? Tea? Water? Wine?”

  As we went out through the back door, she said, “Wine? It’s only nine in the morning. You trying to get me drunk?” She winked.

  “Wine it is.” I went back into the house and I heard her exclaim, “Oh, Paul, it is beautiful here! What a wonderful view you have!”

  I returned to the patio with two glasses and an opened bottle of a South African cabernet.

  “Sit, sit,” I suggested as I poured wine into each glass.

  She sat at my little outdoor table. I moved the other chair next to and closer to her so that our knees touched under the table. We toasted, “To old friends!”

  “And Joe the Martian!” she exclaimed. Our glasses clinked and we each took a sip.

  Then she said, “Paul, no ash tray? No cigarettes?”

  “I quit!” I said proudly, “The doctor said ‘you smoke too much, and you work too hard.’ Well, so I quit smoking.”

  “And did you cut back on work?”

  “No, not really. I love what I am doing,” I smiled. Then I asked, “So, really, why are you here?”

  She sipped her wine. Swallowed. And said, “I’ve been transferred to Nairobi.”

  “That’s wonderful!” She’d been working in Mumbai, reporting on developments in south Asian science and technology for the BBC and journals like Nature. “When do you move there?”

  “I just arrived. Last week. And I couldn’t wait to come down here and see how you are doing.” She smiled again.

  It had been a few years. She’d been married for part of that time. It hadn’t gone well. We kept in touch, but we’d not seen each other while she was in India.

  “But, Paul, here is the thing—”

  Maybe it was the early morning wine, maybe it was the way the sun glinted off the lake. Or her smiling eyes. It was her. Here. At my home. In Mwanza. I suddenly felt alive.

  “—I don’t have to stay in Nairobi. I think the real action in east African science and technology development is here.”

  I took a deep drink from my wineglass.

  She continued, “What you have done—what Joe the Martian and Beauty the Leopard have done—for science and education here—it is just astounding. Children all across east Africa are growing up with those lessons they learned from Joe and Beauty in mind. They’re choosing technological careers. And their parents and grandparents are embracing this, as well. Do you realize that Tanzania leads the world in off-the-grid production of electricity? That its new products for water purification are selling better—because of their quality workmanship—than anything China or India is producing?”

  “But Joe the Martian didn’t do all of that—we’ve only been on the air for six years—wait a minute—what are you saying, Elena?”

  “I’m coming to Mwanza. And I’d like—”

  “Paul?” It was my notebook. I could hear it through the window. It was still on the kitchen table. “Paul, this is a reminder. You have thirty minutes before you must be downtown for the parade.”

  ONE DAY JOE was trying to make a new machine to get through the electric fence. Then Joe tested his machine. “It works!” said Joe. When Joe landed back on Pluto he told the people. They were overjoyed with excitement. So they built more. They collected rocks and things. Soon there was a big party and everyone took off.

  7 June 2047

  THE LATE AUTUMN air was cool and dry. The sky was overcast but there was no threat of rain. Precision Air’s 17:30 dirigible to Bukoba was passing overhead and toward the lake. Carolnine, Elena, and I were walking home from the market. Carolnine carried a basket of fresh vegetables and bread on her head, just as the women of Mwanza used to do. She also carried some fresh tilapia and a liter of nonfat milk inside her refrigerated torso. There was a festive mood in the marketplace we’d just left. Street musicians were playing, and children—fresh out of school for the day—were buying treats from Kisukuma-speaking robovendors.

  When we arrived at our hillside home overlooking the lake, there was a woman of perhaps forty or forty-five years sitting on the bench on our front porch.

  As we approached, she looked uncertain as to whether to get up. Whether we were who she was looking for.

  “Carolnine?” I said.

  “The house is reporting that the woman is Sandra Nakabuye.”

  Elena said, “Sandra Nakabuye. That sounds familiar. Why does it sound familiar?”

  Carolnine responded quickly, “She was one of the crew members of the Second International Mars Expedition. They returned to Earth four months ago.”

  As we reached the porch, Nakabuye stood up and offered her hand, saying, “Doctor Kishosha?”

  I received and shook her hand and said, “That’s me.”

  “Oh, it is so wonderful to meet you!” she gushed, “And you must be Elena Ivanova!” She hugged my wife.

  “And you are Sandra Nakabuye. Of Second International Mars Expedition,” Elena said.

  “Second International, yes. Third crew on Mars.”

  I opened the door. “Come, come inside! Welcome to Mwanza!”

  “Thank you!” She entered and we followed her in. Carolnine closed the door and headed toward the kitchen. Before leaving the front room, she turned and asked, “Can I fix you three something to drink?”

  I looked at Nakabuye and asked, “Water? Juice? Tea? Iced tea?”

  “Oh, no thank you. I actually can’t stay long.” She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a gift-wrapped cube of about eight centimeters on a side. “I came to give you this.”

  She handed the small package to me. It was heavier than I expected, and cool to the touch. I said, “What is it?”

  “Open it.”

  Elena’s eyes met those of Nakabuye. Then they met mine. She nodded.

  I tore off the gift-wrapping. It was a glass cube. Embedded at its center was a rounded, reddish-gray granule of about 3 millimeters in diameter.

  Elena beamed. She asked, “Is it?”

  “Yes, it is,” Nakabuye began, “I was given permission by the U.N. to give this to you. I brought it all the way from Mars, just for you, Doctor Kishosha.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked at Elena, and she was wiping a tear from her cheek.

  “I don’t know if you realize what an impact Joe the Martian and Beauty the Leopard have had on Africa. The world, for that matter! I grew up with those characters. I had all the dolls: Joe, Beauty, Mandy the Elephant... all of them.”

  I’d sold Joe the Martian’s Adventures in 2026. The videos, the lesson plans, e-books, toys, t-shirts, everything. The buyers formed JoeCorp, still headquartered here in Mwanza. Really, the children of my nephew, Enos, mostly ran it.

  JoeCorps did well. They are still doing well, with plans for a theme park in the works. Children today more readily recognize Joe the Martian than they do Mickey Mouse, B
ig Bird, and Samuel Snapturtle. Well, maybe not Samuel Snapturtle.

  “Anyway, Doctor Kishosha, I just wanted to thank you for what you’d created. For the inspiration. When my mother was a little girl—four years old—she was living on the streets of Kampala. A church group found her, took care of her, and plopped her in front of a television every Saturday morning for Joe the Martian’s Adventures. She became a lab technician at a hospital. It paid well. She met my father, an engineer. They had my brother and me. They raised us on a steady diet of Joe the Martian. I really think the characters and the exposure to African scientists and engineers helped my mother—and, later, me—to dream big. Bigger than our circumstances and ourselves. Honestly, I am humbled to be here.”

  Elena and I both hugged her, simultaneously.

  She thanked us again, and then she had to go. She had to be out at the airfield to catch a flight to Mogadishu. She said she had to participate in a peer review inspection of the still-to-be-named Space Elevator—the world’s first—under construction there.

  Elena put the cube—with its little piece of wind-rounded basalt from a dune field in Melas Chasma—on a shelf amid photos and holos of my mother, siblings, nephews, nieces, and their children. She put it next to the photo of Uncle Azi.

  Feeling amazed and satisfied, we headed out to the back patio. The sky was clearing toward the west. Several sailboats were out on the lake, and a beautiful sunset was beginning to take shape.

  Carolnine brought us each a cool glass of chardonnay as an AfriquExpress dirigible was passing by. Elena and I watched in silence as the sun went down over the lake.

  Mother asked me to stay in Tanzania. I stayed. She asked me to marry. I did—a little later, perhaps, than she had in mind—but I did. Mother also asked me to have children. Although I never fathered any, I gave birth to Joe the Martian and Beauty the Leopard. And they had children. First, all over Tanzania and the EAC, then eventually, the world.

  And now, two worlds.

  A HUNDRED YEARS later Joe came back to Mars. The Martians had a big party to welcome them back. All of a sudden a big meteor came crashing down to Mars. Then the BIG BALL OF FIRE blew up! Then it was silent. Two days later everyone burst into laughter. Joe started to tell this story about Pluto. Joe started to grow some growing rocks he found on Pluto.

  THE END.

  —The Martians’ Adventures: Book 3, Trip to Pluto, by Paul Kishosha, age 9, April 1980.

  Surgeon airships, new angels, visit lonely clearings and conjure health from chaos, creating smiles from pain—the alchemy of medicine.

  —Ben White—

  Ishin

  Madeline Ashby

  WHEN RUDY RUCKER published one of my stories in FLURB#6, I reckoned my claim-to-fame for that one would be that I shared a table of contents with Bruce Sterling. Now, I’m not so sure. Appearing in the same issue was a young woman whose story “Fitting a New Suit” made a hell of an impression, and whose Shine submission “Ishin” completely swept me off my feet.

  A woman who is a regular contributor to Frames Per Second Magazine and WorldChanging Canada. Who had stories published in Nature and Tesseracts. Whose piece about optimism in manga she sent me for ‘Optimism in Literature around the World, and SF in Particular’ still averages over a hundred hits a day, six months after it’s been published.

  Seeing how quickly she’s developing into a major writer, I suspect that my future claim-to-fame might be that I shared a ToC with (and later published) Madeline Ashby. Just check this very finely-wrought story of two men—one hardened and one idealistic, or is it the other way around?—who try to turn a total political, social and cultural quagmire into fertile land, who fight the good fight in a situation that makes ‘hopeless’ look like a tea time distraction, who face the most harrowing and complex of odds. And still.

  Eppur si muove...

  “HEISER,” THE OLD man says in Brandon’s ear. “Wake up.”

  “Sir, yes sir,” Brandon mutters, but doesn’t leave the bed.

  “I know you haven’t moved, Heiser.” From across Jalalabad, the old man punches Brandon in the ribs. He feels it reverberating through his clothes, hears the soft shudder of it like a mobile phone buzzing in an independent film theatre.

  “Don’t go hurting yourself, old man,” Brandon says. Now his eyes are opening. His room is bare, blank, tinged blue by dawn through broken shutters.

  “Come on. First prayer’s already finished.”

  The old man, Singer, wakes approximately five minutes prior to the dawn call to prayer. Sometimes Brandon feels this through his clothes, which have been defaulted to the mirror relay setting for longer than he can remember, when Singer rises and a slight pressure vanishes from Brandon’s back or side. Most of the time, though, Singer remains perfectly still until the prayer has finished. This is one of the silent, unacknowledged realities of their partnership that Brandon is grateful for.

  “There’s a present outside your window,” Singer says.

  Now Brandon does get up. He pads to the window and opens it. The shutters squeak dryly. Outside, hovering, is their drone: four wings, all black, her hindparts heavy with twelve hours of surveillance.

  “Hello, Tink,” Brandon says, extending his hand. The UAS does a brief identity check and flits over to his open palm. He carries her gently into his room, opens his laptop, watches her crawl delicately to an open USB port and insert herself there. Data streams from her body: shipment logs for aid packages, border sentry comments regarding volunteers and their orgs, patterns of food voucher distribution, search-and-record audio keyed to specific phrases associated with the black market. The afterglow of a war long waged, codified and made sensible through transfer from one machine to the next, ultimately destined for some years-from-now report doubtless coloured by self-congratulation on the part of those least responsible for its success.

  “Put your shoes on,” Singer says. “It’s time to go.”

  HE FIRST MET Singer in a Kabul hotel conference room, while they listened to a presentation on the Ishin program. He looked like the kind of man who watched films whose titles Brandon could never pronounce. He was half-human, half-owl: gold spectacles over colourless eyes hidden in a craggy face under close-cropped hair. He seemed to not be paying very much attention to the presentation. He wore no uniform. Private contractor, Brandon guessed.

  “If you’re here,” the presenter up front said, his face made ghostly by the light of a humming projector, “it’s because you’re uniquely qualified for this project.”

  Oh God, Brandon thought. Here we go.

  Ishin, they learned, was a surveillance co-op involving tiny unmanned aerial systems. It was also the Edo Period word for renewal and restoration. Ishin-enabled systems could communicate with other systems, from swooping, missile-equipped predators in the air to lumbering camel-bots on the ground. This would further cut out human interference, they were told, by reducing the semantic drift between orders from up top and orders to machines. Once all the bots used Ishin, you could speak to a drone or a packbot and soon all the available systems would know the orders and start cooperating.

  “It’ll be like a counter-insurgency,” the presenter said, his eyebrows wiggling with obvious delight. “A robot counter-insurgency.”

  “Doesn’t that mean they’ll just ask us to leave?” someone asked.

  Everyone but Brandon and Singer laughed. But Brandon immediately saw the problem. Ishin-eqipped bots did not need to ask anyone for anything—unlike their colonized counterparts, they had no need to perform politeness. They reacted, behaved, and made decisions utterly unburdened by the crushing constraints of self-awareness.

  When Brandon looked at the silent man sitting across from him, and saw the blank glare of projected light reflected in his spectacles and the flat, disinterested line of his cracked lips, he knew this man saw the same problem.

  OUTSIDE THE HOTEL lobby, in the haze of afternoon sunlight, Brandon found the owlish man wiping off his spectacles and examining t
hem. He peered up into the sky. Something up there was circling.

  “Falcon,” he said, pointing. “They’re coming into vogue, again. Good hunters.”

  “Falconry?” Brandon asked. “What’s next, jousting?”

  The other man continued squinting up into the sky. “I know you.” He put on the spectacles. “You figured out that schoolbus deception. How that town fooled the satellites into relaying false bombing recommendations.”

  Brandon shrugged. Lately he’d gotten a lot of attention for having figured out this particular puzzle. It was part of why he’d wound up in the hotel listening to the Ishin presentation in the first place. “Anybody could have figured it out, eventually,” he said. “No town that size has that many schools.”

  “Especially after prolonged exposure to depleted uranium.”

  Brandon winced. “I guess.”

  “Bill Singer,” the man said, in the same vaguely apologetic tone other men sometimes used to explain their diabetes or their flat feet. “What do you think of Ishin?”

  Again, Brandon shrugged. “It’s a good idea, if it works. I think if you expand the applications, it could be more interesting.”

  “Such as?”

  “Like, if you included more bots in the network. Farm-bots, for example. You could get moisture readings from a few acres and forecast the need for new fertilizer and seed shipments a year from now, then relay the data to re-purposed predators. Teach them to act like crop-dusters.”

  A new dimple formed on one side of Singer’s wrinkled face. He nodded to himself slightly, as though making a decision. “If you were offered the project, you’d take it?”

  “Sure,” Brandon said. “The bombing stuff—it’s mostly over, now. And it’s already ruined gaming for me.”