by Nisi Shawl
Carol and I were leaning over a railing. Long minutes passed, and I was about to whisper to Carol about Jacob stealing glances at us when the far shore suddenly bloomed with color.
It took a moment before any of us realized what we were seeing, then cheers erupted up and down the esplanade, rising with such a fervor that it frightened me, if only for a few moments. People were hugging and clapping each other on the back while others simply stared, too awed by the relit Seattle skyline to make a sound.
I ran to my father and threw myself into his arms.
“Daddy!” I screamed. “You did it, you did it!”
Mother stood apart from the two of us, watching our celebration. She wore a bright smile, but I could tell she wasn’t happy. Even surrounded by so many people, she seemed alone and afraid. Her attitude frustrated me—how power was restored to Seattle is now a matter of outrage, but at the time it was the most wondrous thing any of us had seen, especially the children. Even today, knowing what I know, I still look back on that moment with exhilaration.
Sadly, the night ended on a sour note for me. After hugging my father, I went looking for Carol. I found her at the edge of the esplanade. She was holding hands with Jacob, the two of them grinning shyly at one another. It shames me to say it, but even after so many decades, I can still recall the shock I felt—like a kick in the belly, a sharp pain and a rising nausea. Although she was my closest friend on the island, in that moment I would have been quite pleased to see Carol dead. (It would be easy to dismiss this as childish and fleeting, Prof. Kim, but I have always believed that children feel betrayal more deeply than adults.)
Despite this last incident, I will always remember that final Christmas as a remarkably optimistic time on Bainbridge Island. Our bellies were full and the island was celebrating and the war, so we believed, would soon be won. When the Colonel’s yacht left Eagle Bay the next morning, the lights were still on in Seattle. We all thought they’d never go out again.
The rest you know, Prof. Kim. In the days that followed, events began to accelerate. The siege of Portland, the State House massacre, the mass unchipping of the Korean labor battalions—I am no historian and have little to add to what is already known.
After Colonel Herrick was assassinated by Jeong Sin-Jo, Bainbridge Island became a prison, our lives constrained by rumor and fear. Carol’s family was one of several that were purged by my father after evidence was found that they were planning to flee the island for Nuevo California.
The rest of us hung on as well as we could, but by the end of March we all knew the war was lost, the dream of a reborn Cascadia finished. When we finally abandoned the island, we did not need flashlights to light our way—across the water Seattle was burning, the flames far brighter than the electric lights that had once illuminated the city.
I thought I’d never see Carol again, but I was wrong. During my father’s trial, I glimpsed her sitting in the audience. The camera did not linger on her face, but in the brief moment she appeared onscreen, I saw her smiling. I was moved that she could still feel so warmly towards my father after all that her family had suffered. I saw her again when my father was hanged, but Carol’s back was to me and I could not see her face. I later learned that she had been allowed to remain in Cascadia, eventually marrying a factory worker and having several children. It is good to know that she has endured.
As for me, life in my adopted nation has been as much as I could hope for. Anonymity has been my balm these last six decades, and I have always zealously guarded my privacy, at least until your email arrived.
You have asked for my thoughts about Bainbridge Island, Prof. Kim. Although I obviously regret the things that were done there, I am not ashamed to admit that I have nothing but the deepest affection for my childhood home. I’ve spent many hours watching the promotional vids that the new Cascadian government has published online. These tell me that the majority of the island has been turned over to the agricultural cadres, but that the waterfront and its immediate surrounds have been restored as a kind of historical site. (The processing center at the far end of the island has also been restored, but I have no desire to view vids that would cause me to revisit the horrors that occurred there.)
It’s difficult to describe the pleasure I’ve felt seeing those places where I spent so many happy years. Blue House has been returned to its former charm, its colonnades and balconies and leaded-glass windows just as I remember.
Perhaps it will not surprise you that I have decided to buy a ticket for the train to New Tacoma. It is a long journey from San Diego, but the northern border is open and such a trip is quite feasible, even for an old woman like me. From New Tacoma it is only a short bus trip to Seattle and then a ferry crossing to my newly restored home.
I look forward to that crossing more than you can imagine, Prof. Kim. I can see myself at the railing of the ferry, watching my island grow nearer and more distinct as the distance between us diminishes. And after I have revisited all those places that I have missed so dearly—the ferry terminal, the esplanade and the marina, my childhood home—perhaps I will seek out my old friend Carol. It would be so good to see her again. I imagine us sitting together in some shady spot, telling each other of the things of our lives, the joys we have been gifted with and the sorrows we have endured in the years since our last encounter. There are so many things to be said, so many memories to share. Mostly, though, I hope to hold her hand again as we did on Bainbridge Island so many years ago, two little girls still innocent of the world beyond its shores.
The Runner of n-Vamana
Indrapramit Das
Mira lets the wired nanoswarm saturate every muscle, every neuron in her body. She has been running for four days. With sunrise in her eyes she stops, only to remind herself what not running feels like. Her augmented heart is no longer beating—it’s too fast to call it that. It floats like a hummingbird in her chest. The nanoswarm works overtime as she pauses, mending the damage to her muscles and bones, using her skin to synthesize water and energy from the atmosphere and sunlight. Cryofoils embedded in her muscular planes keep her from overheating, sucking at her scorching core temperature. She is alarmed by how inhuman she feels. Four more days, and Mira will be back where she started, back at the huddled settlement of the terraforming station. Looking at the white-hot orb on the horizon, she remembers the adulation of her fellow humans. The settlers, touching her feet and hands, raising their palms to fluorescing clouds pregnant with constant change. Bright array of absorbent prayer flags perched on the settlement’s crete houses, snapping in the charged nanite breeze. Voices lifting in song to the old god in the sky, planted by probes centuries ago and still in the flux of maturation: n-Vamana, nanogod that shares its name with the planetoid it shelters and grows.
Alone, n-Vamana above and below her, Mira feels artificial, built, a magnificent sculpture created by nanotechnists and surgeons out of an obsolete body. Artificial like the sun in the sky, no sun at all; a hole punctured into spacetime to flood this dim little world with the light of a distant white giant, and pull it gently into a new orbit. Artificial like the atmosphere, churned into fertility by the work of n-Vamana and the zoati, the seven icy comets driven into the planetoid before it was settled. All artifice worthy of gods. Inhuman, magic, impossible. Her heart, trying to fly out of her chest. Her lungs, breathing air that would asphyxiate an Earthling.
She reminds herself of her brother. The small, human creature that emerged from the same womb she did. Whose augments are still in infancy, growing with him. Her brother, who is an orphan like her. Their mother—dead during the voyage, unable to weather the crushing pressures placed on the human body by the warp-points through which it slipped, by the radiation leaking past shields, by extended zero-g, by the very augments that protect younger bodies from such rigors. Their father—dead on their homeworld while his son was still gestating; crushed by an errant car on the streets of Mumbai’s megapolis, cremated, ashes drifting in that atmosphere. Her brother�
�alive. Nine-year-old Ela, who smeared her ankles and cheekbones with terastil clay—soil from this world mixed with water from Earth, a planet he has never seen. His eyes vacant with wonder at the expanses of even this small planetoid, dizzying after a life spent on a starship. Ela had carried out the ritual as he’d been told, knowing how precious the old-water was, his small hands carefully daubing the cool mud across his sister’s Earth-born bones. As Mira looked at him kneeling in front of her with his dirty palms and fingers, as if he were just playing out the impulses of childhood instead of the symbolic narrative of an entire posthuman diaspora, she saw a little boy losing his big sister. New worlds need new stories. New legends. She saw Ela witness her ritual transformation into a cybadevi, a breathing mythmeme for this new world. There was no escaping what the whole settlement felt at that moment, as Ela painted Mira’s carbon-reinforced ankles in front of the chanting settlers, the flaring sky. All augmented to some degree, all in the process of cyba-meld to help them stay alive here. But none like her, none trained and modified over nine years to become this new being that might just survive its test. Of all of them, she was the least human.
She was now the Runner of n-Vamana. She was more than just Mira.
Knowing this, Mira had run her hand through Ela’s short, damp hair. She had gathered it in her fist and given it a tug.
“Aoh,” he whispered. A single quick syllable, universal. Pain. The pain woke him. It reminded him, perhaps, of his sister. His sister Mira. Mira, the girl who’d once teased him for being afraid of the void outside the chilly starship windows, who told him there were monsters who ate little boys out there in the dark between the stars. Mira, who had long hair then, before she cut it off, whose braids he’d watched float in the starlight of viewing ports, coiling away from her head as she read on her tablet novels written millennia ago. Mira, who held him close when he longed for a parent, helped with his lessons, taught him to grow and prepare gcel rations; who’d tethered and tucked him into his sleeping pod and told him her distant memories of a crowded Earth.
His hair in her fist. The pain made him look up, look into her eyes so she could smile at him. He smiled back. A weak smile, but a smile all the same. She could ask for no more than that, on the eve of her run.
“Don’t run away forever. Come back,” Ela said.
Even with her muscles burning with energy beyond what an unaugmented human being could produce, she pressed her lips to Ela’s sweaty forehead, to let him know that his sister was still there under the glow of this devi’s tattoos, the flicker of glyphs across this devi’s photosynthetic skin.
“Yashin ti terra, Ela,” she said in the star-tongue of their vessel, now a language of n-Vamana. [I] Swear on Earth, Ela. Blue gem in the sky, fragile, waiting, birthplace, memory. Swear on Earth. Ela had nodded, convinced.
And then she ran.
She is not dead, yet. It is working. All of it. She is halfway through the test, halfway across the planetoid. She has run faster than any man or woman since humans walked, faster than machines, faster than Mercury, Hermes, Flash, Maya. This is impossible, it is madness, but she has done it. Four more days. Mira will test the limits of their augmentations, prove how far they can take humans on this little planetoid, just as the warp hole and the atmospheric nanogod sheathing the world has taken n-Vamana beyond its own provenance as a lifeless speck in the universe. In her electric limbs, she holds change itself. She is the messenger, and the message. She will prove how little food or water they will need here, how effectively they can process the changing atmosphere outside the settlement, even while pushing at the limits of the human system.
Every time she thinks: this is impossible, she thinks of Ela. Child she has raised alone in a vessel that carried them through the howling emptiness of the universe. Who can speak and write, and love, despite not having seen a world to live on till now, despite having only his sister as a guardian. She, grief-struck orphan, has somehow become a mother to her little Ela.
Impossibilities that bring her back to the ground, even as she shears the very air with her speed, slashing the crust of n-Vamana.
There is a strange vertigo that accompanies her, running on the back of this celestial dwarf, its gravity low despite a superdense core that keeps her from soaring into flight. It was, after all, chosen by her people because of its small size—easier to terraform. It is the first of its kind, to be wreathed and gifted with life-nurturing power by humans—an experimental home for the first of the cybas. At night, running by the crests of n-Vamana’s low hills, she has seen past the nanogod’s aurora and to the stars, the moon-blue glow of the system’s actual sun, too far away to give this place its own life. To the Jovian giant Shesha, its gaseous curve burning the star-studded dark, distance turning it deceptively small, a delicate red sickle suspended in the black. And she has felt more alone than ever before, dizzy from the sensation that she is running across a tiny rock in space, her legs barely tethered to the ground. At other times, with the galaxy crowning the night, that same loneliness has nurtured a euphoria so strong that Mira has had to slow down and linger on it, to take in a horizon empty of human life, glimmering with luminescence of burgeoning algal fields, tunnelled sunlight of the warp hole sparking off embryonic microbial oceans pooling out of the sky, to bask in the illusory sensation that she is n-Vamana, that she is beyond humanity, that she is this world incarnate, a deity carving its path through spacetime, aeons from the flocked and boiling Earth and its anxious worshippers who wait for distant strains of information filtering out of the cosmos. The datastreams of humanity’s trembling colonization of deep space, its evolution into space-faring cyba, bolstered against an unfathomable infinity. After nearly a decade of running and training her augmentations in the confines of a starship’s centrifuges, always surrounded by walls to keep the void out, running across n-Vamana feels like no freedom Mira has ever imagined. In these moments, she has become the cybadevi she is meant to be, a legend in the nascent history of this world, embodiment of n-Vamana like the dim, remote gods that gave their ancient names to the solar worlds near Earth. It has taken four sunrises, four times washed by the borrowed light of a star centuries in the past blinding her tear-shot eyes, to wake her from these trances of divinity.
E-la. Two syllables, named on Earth, spoken by a mother and father long gone. Ela. Ela. Ela. She whispers, veils of steam rising off her superheated body.
Mira is cyba, but human still.
She sees into the future, when her likeness will grace the domed ceiling of the port, immortalized in a mosaic of stone chips, their colors unlike anything Earthlings ever saw, mined from the crust her feet cling to right now. New arrivals will look up at her for generations to come, glittering above them, a new myth born on this place. Earthlings will look at their textbooks and read about her centuries from this moment, and light incense in front of shrines in her honor, smoke lilting through glowing 3D portraits of her carried in the pulsing hot dataservs of starships; they will look through their telescopes to the constellation where her memory dwells, the runner in the night sky, herald of the long awaited galactic age. The pioneer of the cybas, the runner of n-Vamana. She doesn’t care that these things will happen. Rather, she actually does care about these things, but is just too wired to realize this. Right now, all Mira can see is forward motion. She wants to run, to live, to survive. She can feel the union between her body and the nanoswarm, between her colony and n-Vamana, its atmosphere seeded and transforming even as she breathes and sweats. At this moment, what she cares about is the finish, a hemisphere away, drawing a human line across the planetoid to her little brother Ela, her fallible flesh and blood, waiting, waiting for his sister to run around the world and return to him.
The Saltwater African
Lisa Bolekaja
Bola Ogun.
Tchula Walker rolled the name on her tongue. It was a thick name. Had weight. Texture. She hadn’t heard a pureblood African name in years. Purebloods fresh off the boat were a risk for slave
owners, because they remembered what it was like to be free. The sweetness of it was still fresh as black strap molasses for them, and that sweetness could infect others. There were legendary stories about Africans along the Georgia coast who had escaped their bondage. Stretched out their arms and flew away. But this was Mississippi, and homegrown niggers had clipped wings.
The washerwomen were whispering about the arrival of the Saltwater African, Bola Ogun, that morning when Tchula was rubbing a poultice made of burdock root and comfrey onto her twin sister Celestine’s right hand. Celestine had a boil above her left knuckle that pussed over and stunk to high heaven, seeping yellow, orange, and pinkish-red fluid. Tchula chewed up more pieces of burdock root, fished the moist pieces off her tongue and pressed them onto the infected area before wrapping it with a clean strip of cotton.
Sitting on Tchula’s uneven oak table, Celestine blocked off her nose with a lavender handkerchief that was embroidered with her initials. She made a great show of it to Tchula, fluttering her hand so that the silken cloth was always within eyesight. It was a gift from their owner, Master Lyle Stewart.
The two solidly built washerwomen with sun-scorched indigo skin were heaving large baskets of laundry on top of their heads when they passed by Tchula’s cabin door, clucking their tongues, giddy with excitement.