by Tim Pratt
They say water is blue, but water is really nothing at all but light trapped before the eyes. It’s like glass, taking the color of whatever it is laced with, whatever stands behind it, whatever shade is bent through its substance. Most people out in the Deep Dark have a mystical relationship with water. The very idea of oceans seems a divine improbability to them. As for me, my parents came from Samoa. I was born in Tacoma, and grew up on Puget Sound before finding my way Up. To me, it’s just water.
Still, this little pond choked with the wrong kind of life seems to say so much about everything that is wrong with Earth, with the Deep Dark, with the little damp sparks of colonies on Ceres and Mars and elsewhere. I wondered what would happen to the pond if I poured my blue paint out of its lead-lined bottles into the water.
“Your work holds fair,” says Huang. I did not hear him approach. Glancing down, I see his crepe-soled boat shoes, that could have come straight off some streetcorner vendor’s rack to cover his million dollar feet.
I meet his water-blue eyes. Pale, so pale, reflecting the color of his golf shirt. “Thank you, sir.”
He looks at me a while. It is precisely the look an amah gives a slab of fish in the market. Finally he speaks again: “There have been inquiries.”
I reply without thinking. “About the radioactives?”
One eyebrow inches up. “Mmm?”
I am quiet now. I have abandoned our shared fiction for a moment, that pretense that I do not know he is poisoning thousands of homes worldwide through his artifact trade. Mistakes such as that can be fatal. That the entire present course of my life is fatal is not sufficient excuse for thoughtless stupidity.
Huang takes my silence as an answer. “Certain persons have come to me seeking a man of your description.”
With a shrug, I tell him, “I was famous once, for a little while.” One of history’s villains, in fact, in my moment of media glory.
“What you paid me to keep you . . . they have made an offer far more generous.”
I’d sold him my life, that strange, cold morning in a reeking teahouse in Sendai the previous year. Paid him in a substantial amount cash, labor and the last bare threads of my reputation in exchange for a quiet, peaceful penance and the release of obligation. Unfortunately, I could imagine why someone else would trouble to buy Huang out.
He was waiting for me to ask. I would not do that. What I would do was give him a reason not to send me away. “My handiwork meets your requirements, yes?” Reminding him of the hot paint, and the trail of liability which could eventually follow that blue glow back to its source.
Even gangsters who’d left any fear of law enforcement far behind could be sued in civil court.
“You might wish me to take this offer,” he says slowly.
“When has the dog ever had its choice of chains?”
A smile flits across Huang’s face before losing itself in the nest of wrinkles. “You have no desires in the matter?”
“Only to remain quietly in this house until our bargain is complete.”
Huang is silent a long, thoughtful moment. Then: “Money completes everything, spaceman.” He nods once before walking away,
It is difficult to threaten a man such as myself with no family, no friends, and no future. That must be a strange lesson for Huang.
I drift back to the latticed window. He is in the alley speaking to the empty air—an otic cell bead. A man like Huang wouldn’t have an implant. The dogs are quiet until he steps back into the blue Mercedes. They begin barking and wailing as the car slides away silent as dustfall.
It is then that I realize that the dog pack are holograms, an extension of the car itself.
Until humans went into the Deep Dark, we never knew how kindly Earth truly was. A man standing on earthquake-raddled ground in the midst of the most violent hurricane is as safe as babe-in-arms compared to any moment of life in hard vacuum. The smallest five-jiǎo pressure seal, procured low bid and installed by a bored maintech with a hangover, could fail and bring with it rapid, painful death.
The risk changes people, in ways most of them never realize. Friendships and hatreds are held equally close. Total strangers will share their last half-liter of air to keep one another alive just a little longer, in case rescue should show. Premeditated murder is almost unknown in the Deep Dark, though manslaughter is sadly common. Any fight can kill, even if just by diverting someone’s attention away from the environmentals at a critical moment.
So people find value in one another that was never been foreseen back on Earth. Only the managers and executives who work in the rock ports and colonies have kept the old, human habits of us-and-them, scheming, assassination of both character and body.
The question on my mind was whether it was an old enemy come for me, or someone from the Ceres Minerals Resources corporate hierarchy. Even setting aside the incalculable damage to our understanding of history, in ensuring the loss of the first verifiable nonhuman artifact, I’d also been the proximate cause of what many people chose to view as the loss of a billion tai kong yuan. Certain managers who would have preferred to exchange their white collars for bank accounts deeper than generations had taken my actions very badly.
Another Belt miner might have yanked my oxygen valve out of sheer, maddened frustration, but it took an angry salaryman to truly plot my ruin in a spreadsheet while smiling slowly. Here in Huang’s steel embrace I thought I’d managed my own ruin quite nicely. Yet someone was offering good money for me.
Oddly, Huang had made it all but my choice. Or seemed to, at any rate. Which implied he saw this inquiry as a matter of honor. Huang, like all his kind, was quite elastic in his reasoning about money, at least so long as it kept flowing, but implacable when it came to his notions of honor.
Even my honor, it would seem.
All of this was a very thin thread of logic from which to dangle. I could just keep painting shards until any one of several things killed me—radiation sickness, cancer, the old cook. Or I could tell Huang to break the deal he and I had made, and pass me back out of this house alive.
Given how much trouble I’d taken in order to surrender all control, there was something strangely alluring about being offered back the chitty on my life.
That night when the cook brought me the tea, I poured some into the tiny cup with no handles. He gave me a long, slow stare. “You go out?”
“With Mr. Huang, yes,” I told him.
The cook grunted, then withdrew to the kitchen.
The tea was so bitter that for a moment I wondered if he’d brewed it with rat poison. Even as this thought faded, the cook came back with a second cup and poured it out for himself. He sat down opposite me, something else he’d never done. Then he drew a small mesh bag on a chain out from inside his grubby white t-shirt.
“See this, ah.” He tugged open the top of the bag. Out tumbled one of my little blue caltrop fragments. I could almost see it spark in his hand.
“You shouldn’t be holding that.”
The cook hefted the mesh bag. “Lead. No sick.”
I reached out and took the caltrop arm. It was just that, a single arm broken off below the body. I fancied it was warm to my touch. It was certainly very, very blue.
“Why?” I asked him.
He looked up at the ceiling and spread one hand in a slow wave, as if to indicate the limitless stars in the Deep Dark far above our heads. “We too small. World too big. This—” He shook his bag “—this time price.”
I tried to unravel the fractured English. “Time price?”
The cook nodded vigorously. “You buy time for everyone, everything.”
I sipped my tea and thought about what he’d told me. I’d been out in the Deep Dark. I’d touched the sky that wraps the world round, past the blue and into the black.
“Blue,” he said, interrupting my chain of thought. “We come from sea, we go to sky. Blue to blue, ah?”
Blue to blue. Life had crawled from the ocean’s blue waters to even
tually climb past the wide blue sky. With luck, we’d carry forward to the dying blue at the end of time.
“Time,” I said, trying the word in my mouth. “Do you mean the future?”
The cook nodded vigorously. “Future, ah.”
Once I’d finished eating the magnificent duck he’d prepared, I trudged back to my workroom. I’d already bargained away almost all of my time, but I could create time for others, in glowing blue fragments. It didn’t matter who was looking for me. Huang would do as he pleased. My sins were so great they could never be washed away, not even in a radioactive rain.
I could spend what time was left to me bringing people like the old cook a little closer to heaven, one shard after another.
Jay Lake lives and works in Portland, Oregon, within sight of an 11,000 foot volcano. He is the author of over two hundred short stories, four collections, and a chapbook, along with novels from Tor Books, Night Shade Books and Fairwood Press. Jay is also the co-editor with Deborah Layne of the critically-acclaimed Polyphony anthology series from Wheatland Press. His next few projects for 2010 include Pinion, Reign of Flowers, The Sky That Wraps, and two novellas, The Baby Killers, and The Specific Gravity of Grief. In 2004, Jay won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has also been a Hugo nominee for his short fiction and a three-time World Fantasy Award nominee for his editing.
THE CLARKESWORLD CENSUS
Clarkesworld welcomes and thanks the following citizens:
Z.S. Adani *, Kathryn Baker, Jenny Barber, Johanne Barron, Jennifer Bartolowits *, Heidi Berthiaume ***, Michael Blackmore ***,Samuel Blinn *, Adam Blomquist, Nathan Blumenfeld **, Jennifer Brissett, Michelle Broadribb **, Jennifer Brozek ***, Patricia Buehler *, Karen Burnham ***, Evan Cassity *, Catherine Cheek, Elizabeth Coleman, Brenda Cooper *, Carolyn E. Cooper **, Lisa Costello, Danieldeskbrain—Watercress Munster, Maria-Isabel Deira, Daniel DeLano, Paul DesCombaz, John Devenny *, Brian Dolton **, Aidan Doyle, Jesse Eisenhower, Fabio Fernandes, Eric Francis, Fran Friel, Michael Frighetto, Eleanor Gausden, Mark Gerrits *, Inga Gorslar *, Jaq Greenspon *, Eric Gregory *, Geoffrey Guthrie, Jordan Hanie *, James Hartley **, Andrew Hatchell ***, Dave Hendrickson, John Higham, Andrea Horbinski, Clarence Horne III, Richard Horton, Justin Howe *, Chris Hurst *, Marc Jacobs *, Toni Jerrman *, Audra Johnson *, Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon, Robert Keller, Joshua Kidd *, Krista Hoeppner Leahy *, Darren Ledgerwood, Susan H Loyal *, Thomas Loyal, Dominique Martel, Peter McClean *, Tony McFee *, Mark McGarry *, Brent Mendelsohn, Seth Merlo, Terry Miller, Sharon Mock *, Cheryl Morgan ***, Anne Murphy **, Patricia Murphy, Charles Norton **, Vincent O’Connor **, Lydia Ondrusek, Thomas H Pace Jr., Richard Parks *, Beth Plutchak, Adam Rakunas, Robert Redick, Jo Rhett ***, Tansy Roberts, Abigail Rustad, Steven Saus, Espana Sheriff, Chugwangle Sparklepants III **, Sally Squire, Kevin Standlee **, Jerome Stueart *, Robert Stutts *, Terhi Tormanen **, Damien Walter *, Diane Walton, Tom Waters *, Tehani Wessely *, Peter Wetherall, Jeff Williamson, Neil Williamson, Eric Witchey, Chalmer Wren III, Tero Ykspetäjä *, Anonymous
* Bürgermeister
** Royalty
*** Overlord
To become a citizen, visit:
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION: Tomorrow Can Wait
Summer in Paris, Light from the Sky
Tetris Dooms Itself
Blue Ink
Curse
Clockwork Chickadee
Flight
Captain’s Lament
Birdwatcher
The Buried Years
The Glory of the World
Teeth
A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antartica
After Moreau
Debris Ensuing from a Vortex
When the Gentlemen Go By
The Human Moments
The Secret in the House of Smiles
A Dance Across Embers
Threads of Red and White
Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang
The River Boy
Acid and Stoned Reindeer
Worm Within
Can You See Me Now?
The Sky that Wraps the World Round, Past the Blue and into the Black
The Clarkesworld Census