For two hard heartbeats, Sedgewick fronted the pack, flying across the ice like something unslung. The second impact nearly took his legs out from under him. He staggered, skidded, regained his balance, but in that split second Petro was past him. And Anton, and Oxo, and Oxo, Brume, Fletcher last.
Sedgewick dug deep for every shred of speed. The ice was nowhere near smooth, scarred with pocks and ridges and frozen ripples in the methane, but the others slid over it like human quicksilver, finding the perfect place for every footfall. Modded, modded, modded. The word danced in Sedgewick’s head as he gulped cold glass.
The green light swelled again, and he braced before the third frostwhale hit. The jolt shook him but he kept his footing, maybe even gained half a step on Oxo. Ahead, the race was thrown into relief: Brume’s broad shoulders, Anton’s thrown-back head, and there, sliding past gangly Petro for the lead, was Fletcher. Sedgewick felt hot despair churn up his throat.
His eyes rose to the pylon and he realized they were over halfway across. Fletcher pulled away now, not laughing, with that crisp bounding stride that said, I can run forever. Then he glanced back over his shoulder, for what, Sedgewick didn’t know, and in that instant his boot caught a trench and slammed him hard to the ice.
Sedgewick watched the others vault past, Anton pausing to half-drag Fletcher back upright on the way by. “Benga, benga, extro!”
The fourth frostwhale hit, this time with a bone-deep groaning crack . Everyone else had overtaken Fletcher; Sedgewick would in a few more strides. Fletcher was just now hobbling upright and Sedgewick knew instantly he’d done his ankle in. His modded eyes were wide.
“Sedge.”
All the things Sedgewick had wished so savagely in the night—that the doctor had never pulled Fletcher out of his vat, that Fletcher’s pod would fail in transit to New Greenland—all of those things shattered at once. He swung Fletcher up onto his back, how they’d done as kids, and stumped on with lungs ragged.
The fifth impact. Sedgewick’s teeth slammed together and fissures skittered through the ice. He spared only a moment to balance himself, then stumbled forward again, Fletcher clinging fiercely to his back. At the far pylon, the others hurtled to the finish, whooping and howling from a dozen meters away now, no more.
They all seemed to turn at once as the sixth impact split the world apart and the frostwhale breached. Sedgewick felt himself thrown airborne in a blizzard of shattered ice, felt himself screaming in his chest but unable to hear it, deafened by the shearing boom and crack. Some part of Fletcher smacked against him in midair.
Landing slammed the wind out of him. His vision pinwheeled from the unending black sky to the maelstrom of moving ice. And then, too big to be real, rising up out of the cold methane sea in a geyser of rime and steam, the frostwhale. Its bony head was gun-metal gray, the size of a bus, bigger, swatched with pale green lanterns of pustule that glowed like radiation.
Cracks webbed through the ice and something gave way; Sedgewick felt himself slanting, slipping. He tore his gaze from the towering bulk of the frostwhale and saw Fletcher spread-eagled beside him, a black shadow in the burning lime. His lips were moving but Sedgewick couldn’t read them, and then gloved hands gripped the both of them, hauling them flat along the breaking ice.
Oxo and Oxo made sure they were all pulled past the pylon before anyone got up off their bellies. Sedgewick, for his part, didn’t even try. He was waiting on his heart to start beating again.
“Sometime six,” Anton said sheepishly, crouching over him.
“Go to hell,” Fletcher croaked from nearby, and in a moment of weakness Sedgewick choked up a wavery laugh.
They washed home on a wave of adrenaline, caught up in the rapid-fire conversation of the New Greenlanders who still seemed to be rehashing how close Sedgewick and Fletcher had come to getting dumped under. Every single one of them needed a send-off handshake at the living quarters, then they slunk off in one chattering mass.
Sedgewick couldn’t keep the chemical grin off his face, and as he and Fletcher snuck through the vestibule and then ghosted back to their temporary shared room, they talked in a tumble of whispers about the frostwhale, about the size of it, and about the ones that had surfaced afterward to suck cold air into massive vein-webbed bladders.
Sedgewick didn’t want to stop talking, but even when they did, climbing into their beds, the quiet felt different. Softer.
It wasn’t until he was staring up at the biocrete ceiling that he realized Fletcher’s limp had swapped sides on the way back. He swung upright, unbelieving.
“You faked it.”
“What?” Fletcher was rolled away, tracing the wall with his long fingers.
“You faked it,” Sedgewick repeated. “Your ankle.”
Fletcher took his hand off the wall, and the long quiet was enough confirmation.
Sedgewick’s cheeks burned. He’d thought he had finally done something big enough, big enough to keep him on the greater side of whatever fucked-up equation they were balancing. But it was Fletcher feeling sorry for him. No, worse. Fletcher making a move. Fletcher manipulating him for whatever kind of schemes floated through his modded head.
“We could have both died,” Sedgewick said.
Still turned away, Fletcher gave his perfect shrug, and Sedgewick felt all the old fury fluming up through his skin.
“You think that was a hologame?” he snarled. “That was real. You could have deaded us both. You think you can just do anything, right? You think you can just do anything, and it’ll fucking work out perfect for you, because you’re modded.”
Fletcher’s shoulders stiffened. “Good job,” he said, toneless.
“What?” Sedgewick demanded. “Good job what?”
“Good job on saying it,” Fletcher told the wall. “You’re ashamed to have a modded brother. You wanted one like you.”
Sedgewick faltered, then made himself laugh. “Yeah, maybe I did.” His throat ached. “You know what it’s like seeing you? Seeing you always be better than me?”
“Not my fault.”
“I was six when they told me you were going to be better,” Sedgewick said, too far gone to stop now, saying the things he’d only ever said alone to the dark. “They said different, but they meant better. Mom couldn’t do another one freestyle and to go off-planet you’re supposed to have them modded anyway. So they grew you in a tube. Like hamburger. You’re not even real.” His breath came lacerated. “Why wasn’t I enough for them, huh? Why wasn’t I fucking enough?”
“Fuck you,” Fletcher said, with his voice like gravel, and Sedgewick had never heard him say it or mean it until now.
He flopped back onto his bed, grasping for the slip-sliding anger as it trickled away in the dark. Shame came instead and sat at the bottom of him like cement. Minutes ticked by in silence. Sedgewick thought Fletcher was probably drifting to sleep already, probably not caring at all.
Then there was a bit-off sob, a sound smothered by an arm or a pillow, something Sedgewick hadn’t heard from his brother in years. The noise wedged in his ribcage. He tried to unhear it, tried to excuse it. Maybe Fletcher had peeled off his thermal and found frostbite. Maybe Fletcher was making a move, always another move, putting a lure into the dark between them and sharpening his tongue for the retort.
Maybe all Sedgewick needed to do was go and put his hand on some part of his brother, and everything would be okay. His heart hammered up his throat. Maybe. Sedgewick pushed his face into the cold fabric of his pillow and decided to wait for a second sob, but none came. The silence thickened into hard black ice.
Sedgewick clamped his eyes shut and it stung badly, badly.
ONE HOUR, EVERY SEVEN YEARS
ALICE SOLA KIM
Alice Sola Kim has been published in Tin House, The Village Voice, McSweeney’s, Lenny, BuzzFeed Books, and Fantasy & Science Fiction. She received the prestigious Whiting Award in 2016 and has received grants and scholarships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference, and the Elizabeth George Foundation.
“One Hour, Every Seven Years” takes us through the life and times of a time-travel researcher trying to save her childhood self.
WHEN MARGOT IS NINE, she and her parents live on Venus. The surface of Venus, at that time, is one enormous sea with a single continent on its northern pole, perched there like a tiny, ridiculous top hat. There is sea below, and sea above, rain continually plummeting from the sky, endlessly self-renewing.
When I am thirty, I won’t have turned out so hot. No one will know; from a few feet away, I’ll seem fine. They won’t notice the dandruff, the opalescent flaking of my chin. They won’t know that I walk hard and deliberate, like a ’40s starlet in trousers, in order to compensate for the wobbly heels of my crummy shoes. They won’t see past my really great job. And it will be a great job, really. I will be working with time machines.
When Margot is nine, it has been five years since she has seen the sun. On Venus, the sun comes out but once every seven years. Margot’s family moved to Venus from Earth when she was four. This is the main thing that makes her different from her classmates, who are just a bunch of trashy Venus kids. Draftees and immigrants. Their parents work at the desalination plants, the dormitory facilities; they plumb and bail, they traverse Venus’s vast seas in ships and submersibles, and sometimes they do not come back.
To her classmates, Margot will never be Venusian, even though she’s her palest clammiest self like a Venusian, and walks and talks like a Venusian—with that lazy, slithering drawl. Why? First finger: she’s a freak, quiet and standoffish, but given to horrible bursts of loud friendliness that are so awkward, they make everyone hate her more for trying. Second finger: her dad is rich and powerful, but she still isn’t cool. The Venus kids don’t know it, but it isn’t her wealth they hate. It is the waste of it. The way her boring hair hangs against her fresh sweatshirts. The way she shuffles along in her blinding new sneakers. Third finger, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth fingers, and all the toes too: in her lifetime, Margot has seen the sun and they haven’t. Venus kids are strong and mean and easily offended. They know there’s a thing they should be getting that they’re not getting. And that the next best thing to getting something is no one in the whole world getting it.
When I am thirty, I will have gotten my first boyfriend. He’ll be a co-worker at the lab and I won’t have noticed him for the longest time. Big laugh, right? You would think that, as some nobody who nobody ever notices, I’d at least be the observant one by default, the one who notices everyone else and forms complex opinions about them, but, no, I will be a creature spiraled in upon myself, a shrimp with a tail curled into its mouth.
Late night at work, a group of people will be playing Jenga in the lounge. The researchers love Jenga because it has the destructive meathead glamour of sports but only a fraction of the physical peril. Anders will ask me if I want to play and I’ll shake my head, hoping it looks like I’m too cool for Jenga but also bemused and tolerant, all of this hiding the truth, which is that I am terrified of Jenga. I’m afraid of being the player who causes all of the blocks to fall. Because that player is both appreciated and despised: on the one hand they absorb the burden of causing the Fall, thus relieving everyone else of said burden, but on the other hand, they are responsible for ending the game prematurely, killing all the fun and potential, not to mention the Jenga tower itself—the spindly edifice that everyone worked so hard together to create and protect.
The guy who will be my first boyfriend will push a block out without any hesitation. He won’t poke at it first, he will go straight for the block, and I will watch as the tower wobbles. It won’t fall. As he takes the dislodged block and stacks it on his pile, he will make eye contact with me, a carefully constructed look of surprise on his face—mouth the shape of an O, eyebrows pushing his forehead into pleats.
When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus. Her classmates lock her inside a closet and run away. They are gone for precisely one hour. When her classmates finally come back to let Margot out, it will be too late.
When I am thirty, I will have been at my great job, the job of working with time machines, long enough to learn their codes and security measures (I’ve even come up with a few myself), so I will do the thing that I didn’t even know I was planning to do all along. I will enter the time machine, emerging behind a desk in the school I attended when I was nine. Water droplets will condense on the walls. There is no way to keep out the damp on Venus. The air in the classroom will taste like the air in a bedroom where someone has just had a sweaty nightmare. I will hide during all of the ruckus, but don’t worry: I will work up the courage. I will stand and open the closet door and do what needs to be done. And I will return!
When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus. Her classmates lock her inside a closet and run away. She hears someone moving outside. Margot’s throat is raw, but she readies another scream when the door opens. A golden woman stands in the doorway, her face dark, her hair edged with gilt. Behind her the sun shines through the windows like a fire, like a bombing the moment before everybody is dead. “Wouldn’t you like to play outside?” the woman says.
When I am thirty, I will live on Mars, the way I’ve always dreamed I would. I will live in the old condo alone, after my mother has moved out, and I will become a smoker the moment I find a pack my mother has left behind. It will feel wonderful to smoke on warm and dusty Martian nights. It will feel so good to blow smoke through the screen netting on the balcony and watch it swirl with the carmine dust. Many floors down, people will splash in the pool of the condo complex, all healthy and orange like they are sweating purified Beta Carotene and Vitamin C.
It is the sight of these party people that will spur me to spend a month attempting to loosen up and to get pretty. I will have a lot of time on my hands and a lot more money after my mother moves out. I will learn that there are lots of things you can do to fix yourself up, and that I hadn’t tried any of them. Makeup, as I learn it, is confusing and self-defeating. I’ll never understand why I have to make my face one flat uniform shade, only to add back color selectively until my old face is muffled and almost entirely muted: a quiet little cheep of itself. I will learn all of this from younger women at the department store, younger women who are better than me at covering up far nicer faces. I will also get some plastic surgery, because I will be extremely busy; I don’t have time to be painting this and patting that! I will have lost so much of my time already.
When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus and she is on the verge of getting pushed into the closet when a woman appears out of nowhere and starts screaming at the kids. They scatter and run. Margot is trapped, backing into the closet that she had been fighting to stay out of. The woman approaches. She is tidy, flawless even, but her face droops and contorts like a rubber mask without a wearer. “Recognize me,” says the woman.
When I am thirty, Sana, the new researcher at the lab, will tell me what she’s been writing in that notebook of hers. After her first day of work, Sana will have written down her observations about everybody: summaries of the kind of people we all are, predications about what we might do. After working at lab after lab and traveling the worlds, Sana will be confident about her ability to nail people down precisely. She is nice, though. When I ask her what she wrote about me, she’ll reply, “I’m not sure about you yet. You are a tricky one. It will take some time to see.” I’ll know that that means I have the most boring entry with the fewest words.
Sana will be one of those who believe that you cannot find your own timeline. You will not be able to access it, to travel back in time to change one’s life. You can go into other universes and mess the place up and leave, but not your own. We will both know of the many who have tried to find their own timestreams; all have failed. Sana will say, “The universe does not allow it to happen because we cannot be the gods of ourselves,” and this is about as mystical as Sana will ever get.
When Margot is nine, her parents refuse to take her out of school. She asks and she asks and they don’t hear. Margot’s father is high up in the Terraforming division, which has both an image problem and a not-being-good-at-its-job problem. Her parents tell her that it helps them that she attends regular school with the kids of their employees’ employees’ employees’ employees’ employees. It doesn’t matter that Margot hasn’t exactly been the best PR rep.
A while back, the students had studied the Venus Situation in Current Events. The teacher played a video, which showed the disaster as it was happening, everyone in the control room yelling, “Fuck!” The fucks were bleeped out incompletely. You could still hear “fuh.” 1,123 people had died moments after the Terraformers pressed the button. The Terraformers had been trying to transform Venus from a hot gassy mess into an inhabitable, Earth-like place. What actually happened was that everything exploded, the blast even sucking in ships from the safe zone. After the space dust had cleared, they did not find a normal assortment of continents and oceans and sunlight and foliage: what they found was one gross, sopping slop-bucket of a world. A Venus that was constantly, horribly wet. A Venus that, to this day, rains in sheets and buckets, a thousand firehoses spraying from the sky. Iron-gray and beetle-black and blind-eye white: these are the colors of Venus. Forests grow and die and grow and die, their trunks and limbs composting on a wet forest floor, which squeaks like cartilage.
The teacher had stopped the video. “Margot’s father is part of the new Terraforming division,” she said. “He is helping us make Venus a better place to live.” The teacher was too tired to smile, so she made her mouth wider. She had been drafted, had come from New Mexico on Earth. She despaired of her frizzing hair and her achy knees, and she missed her girlfriend a lot, even though it was sad to miss someone who didn’t love you quite enough to follow you somewhere shitty. But, not a ton of lesbians on Venus. The teacher was tired of going out on lackluster dates where she and the other woman would briskly concur, Yes, we are both interested in women, that is why we are on this date, maybe not in those words exactly, but you get the drift, and then sometimes they would go home alone and sometimes not.
The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 16