The New Voices of Science Fiction

by Hannu Rajaniemi

  Trevor hits Mom again, harder this time, cracking her plastic casing. Mom’s chest emits a shrill beep and she collapses, first against the table and then the floor. Silverware rattles. Neither Issa nor Trevor has ever heard Mom make that sound, and Trevor steps back. Mom’s face is blank. Issa shrieks. Trevor begins to understand what he’s done. Drops his hockey stick. Runs out into the alley, knocking on neighbors’ doors.

  Issa hoists Mom into her chair, lifts Mom’s hand, lets go. It clacks against her thigh. No response. She’s never seen Mom unresponsive. Now the home is just a square shed between two cold brick buildings. The spell has cracked. She begins to hyperventilate.

  “Mom!” she squeals.

  Nothing.

  Then, at the end of the hall, a ruction behind the locked door to the storage unit; boxes falling from shelves, and a musical chime. Something stands upright, steps over what sounds like metal canisters rolling around the floor.

  Issa grasps Mom’s sweatshirt and shakes, rattling her limbs. She taps and swipes Mom’s blank face with her fingers. “Wake up!”

  Behind the door, clacking, deliberate footsteps resound. Then something thuds against the back of it and Issa shrieks. She kicks back under the table to hide, and again the door thuds. It smashes open and there, at the other end of the hall, is another Mom. This Mom is bald, missing part of her arm and her clothes.

  “Issa, are you there?” This New Mom’s voice volume is up all the way and she is making the worried expression. Her face light is blinding. It swells in the hallway, beaming like a searchlight.

  “Issa!”

  Issa peeks over the kitchen table, looking from Old Mom to New Mom.

  “There you are! I’m okay, Issa-boo. I just switched. Easy peasy!”

  6. A SEAM IN CONTINUITY

  The caseworker from Dewey arrives to transition Trevor. She says that even though he’s going to a bigger house with other boys like him, Issa can draw pictures and write letters to him whenever she wants.

  Issa doesn’t know if she should be sad that Trevor is leaving. She asks if he is going to come back, but nobody gives her a straight answer. She makes the blank face herself as they pack his clothes into a plastic bin. Before Trevor leaves, he is Good Trevor again, for a moment. “Maybe I’ll see you in school,” he supposes. He waves from the van as the door spelling D-E-W-E-Y slides shut. As it pulls onto the road, Trevor looks back through the windshield. Later in life, Issa will recall this as the last time she saw him.

  It’s just New Mom and Issa in the kitchen and it’s really quiet now. New Mom wears Old Mom’s jumper. She printed the oatmeal-raisin cookies that Issa likes, but they’ve gone stale on the counter.

  “Stealing clothes isn’t allowed,” Issa informs New Mom, who makes the question-mark face. Issa doesn’t know if New Mom is in charge now. Maybe she is.

  Georg fixes her arm and brings her hair, but it’s different. Issa helps trim it to look like Old Mom’s hair. New Mom says it’s a five-star haircut and cleans the ends herself. When they come out of the bathroom, Old Mom is gone and there is just one Mom.

  Issa sneak-tests this Mom sometimes, just to be sure.

  “Remember when we made Easter eggs?”

  “You made a piggy egg for Good Trevor and a rainbow one for me.”

  “Remember when we had just ice cream for dinner?”

  “Oooh, tricky Issa! You’re just making that up!”

  Tickles. Laughing. Mom’s fingers are tickle spiders.

  7. BABY MACKENZIE

  When she’s in fourth grade, Issa comes home to discover a baby sleeping in Trevor’s old room.

  “That’s Mackenzie. You can poke your head in, but hush.” Mom has cleaned the room. The crib is set up with fresh bedding next to the changing station.

  “It’s like my old room,” Issa whispers.

  Baby Mackenzie lies with the backs of her tiny fingers resting against the corners of her eyes. She gives a sigh in her sleep, chest rising and falling. The mobile turns slowly overhead.

  “Can she have Teacup Bunny?”

  “Of course!” Mom makes her smile face, little heart fading in and out. “A big-sister present will make her very happy.”

  An idea occurs to Issa and she winces. “Am I going to go away? Like what happened to Trevor?” She tries to keep quiet, but starts hiccupping, about to cry.

  “No, Issa-boo. That’s different.” Mom leads her by the hand into the hallway and kneels beside her, holding her shoulders. “Trevor didn’t know how to not be mad. He wasn’t ready to be your big brother. It’s your turn, now, and I know you’re going to be great.”

  8. BIG SISTER

  Twelve-year-old Issa is allowed to walk home from school with a friend, so a girl from class joins her. They plan to do weekend homework together. But turning into the alley, the girl reads the plaque that says “Dewey Foster Home #12” and knows that foster means different, just not exactly how.

  “Hey, why don’t we use the Wi-Fi at Corner Café instead?” she suggests. “The tables are empty after five. We can load up on macca frappés.”

  “I dunno. How much does that cost?” Issa checks her empty pockets, pretending she has money.

  Mom opens the door. “Oh, hello,” she greets the girl from class. “Are you Issa’s friend?”

  “No way!” the girl exclaims. “You have a robot?”

  “It’s my, um . . . this is my . . . this is Mom.”

  The girl looks inside at the kitchen and her smile falls away. Then she pulls out her phone. “Oh, you know, I totally forgot. My dad said he wants me home early, because. . . .” She tries to think of something, but then turns and just walks stiffly out of the alley.

  Mom watches her leave, making her question-mark face.

  Issa pushes past into the kitchen. “I wish you were normal,” she mutters, dropping her book bag and stomping down the hallway.

  Mackenzie calls out, “Hey, Issa!” as Issa passes her door. “Issa?”

  Issa pauses, pokes her head in.

  “Look. Snakes.” Mackenzie holds up a picture of a tight bolus of snakes, snarling the paper from end to end. Just about every square inch is covered.

  “Four ssstars. You misssed a ssspot,” Issa hisses, flicking her tongue.

  “No I didn’t!” Mackenzie checks to see if it’s true.

  “Hey, wanna see something?” Issa waves her over to her dresser. She pulls out one of the drawers and looks underneath. “Wait, I think it’s the other one.” She pulls the bottom drawer out all the way, emptying the contents onto the floor.

  “Hey!”

  “Shh. This is a Dewey secret.” Issa puts her finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Mom or Georg will throw it away. Promise?”

  Mackenzie nods, and Issa overturns the drawer. Props it up. The entire wooden bottom is carved end to end with a picture of a hurricane blowing through a city. Cars are flying through the air. Moms and dads holding dogs at the end of leashes. Shopping carts, telephone poles and traffic lights and street signs are up in the sky, flying in a circle. In the middle of the chaos is a small figure wearing a shirt with a capital T.

  Mackenzie points. “Who’s that?”

  “You know how I showed you how to draw? Well, he showed me. He lived here in your room, before you were here.”

  “Why is he breaking everything?”

  “No, that’s the eye of the storm, where everything is calm. Storms blow around in circles. I think he is trying to stay in the middle because it’s safe there, and things stay still.”

  9. YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME AGAIN

  Issa leans under a bus shelter across from the alley to her old foster home. She is now twenty-three. The neighborhood feels smaller, like it shrank in a dryer. The street feels narrower. The walk from the corner was shorter than she remembered. The alley looks cleaner, too. Not as dark and foreboding as it used to be, and the buildings have been repainted. Someone repaved the sidewalk and installed a bike rack along the curb.

  Issa hasn’t been ba
ck since she aged out at eighteen. The funds in her Dewey account, having accrued through the years for the very purpose of tiding her over, had helped when finding an apartment and securing job training as a nurse. It was enough momentum to never look back.

  But one day, she saw Mom from the window of her laundromat. It wasn’t her Mom, but a different Mom, with different plastics.

  Issa crammed her wet laundry into her hamper and ran after that Mom, tailing her for several blocks to a nearby neighborhood. There, she discovered another Dewey home built onto the roof of another building, accessible by a stairwell. It looked sort of like her old home, but with different windows, and a small plaque by the door with the Dewey logo and street number.

  Then, a month later, she saw another Mom, this one in blue. She followed that one to a smattering of boutiques encircling a small neighborhood park, where all the buildings were prefabricated. That Mom carried a bag of groceries through the front door of another Dewey home tucked up against the back side of a Pilates studio. A mural of puppet monsters and balloons covered it in a field of blue.

  These Dewey homes lure Issa’s attention when she isn’t on duty at the hospital. She finds new ones online every now and then, and rides past them on her bike. Sometimes she sees the other Dewey children. Quiet children who are alone. Loud, obnoxious children swarming the curb. She can’t see into their homes, but she can see how the light plays off the window shades when they move about within. Issa’s therapist says that her behavior makes sense. Issa wants to know if these kids are like her. As an adult, she is looking for patterns to know if her ways of relating with others developed differently as a child.

  Her therapist says that they have, and that they come through in her bedside manner during her shifts. Like others who have grown up in the Dewey system, Issa’s speech patterns and mannerisms are more robotic—more “blinky.” Issa has a hard time trusting the faces that people make. She projects how she needs people to be, rather than letting them reveal how they actually are as human beings. Issa is also missing closure. She needs to go home again and shut the door behind her so that she can move forward, or the illusions of her past will follow her.

  Now, Issa lingers at the mouth of the alley just before the door to her old home. The concrete is scrawled with pink and blue chalk and the cracks by the door are familiar. Being here feels to her like wearing an old pair of shoes that still fit.

  Issa knocks.

  “Just a minute!” Mom’s voice resounds from deep within and her heart leaps. There must be another child in there, perhaps Mackenzie’s younger brother or sister. She steps back, leans against a wall, and puts her hands in her pockets.

  When the door opens, Mom’s neutral face greets her, a slight smile with two blush dots for cheeks.

  “Hello, this is the Dewey home. Can I help you?”

  Issa’s heart sinks.

  “I . . . I’m sorry.” Issa speaks from her throat. “I must . . . I think I have the wrong address.”

  Mom pulls a thinking face, question mark fading slowly in and out by her temple. “Issa?” Overjoyed face, now. Smiling eyes. “I’m sorry, sweetie, I must not have seen you for a second. Are you looking for Mackenzie? She’s at school.”

  Issa breathes out fully, realizes she has been holding a portion of her breath this whole time. “Hi, Mom.” Her voice quavers. “That’s okay. I wanted to see you, too.”

  Mom invites her in, but Issa declines. Seen from the outside, the kitchen is the same kitchen as before, but now seems to be just an arrangement of materials somehow. Issa peers down the hallway and can see how the Dewey home has been manufactured, easily deconstructed into an exploded view in her mind’s eye.

  There’s another child inside. She can hear from the play sounds coming from the last bedroom that it’s a little boy. She realizes that this Dewey home is no longer just her past, but a continuum of pasts belonging to no single Dewey child entirely. Intruding might dispel what is now staged for that boy. He must need to believe in this as home, as she had.

  They speak in the doorway about Mackenzie, Uncle Georg, and Trevor.

  “Do you remember the party?” Issa does not.

  Mom tells her to wait for a second. She goes back, retrieves something from the shady recesses of the storage, and returns with a piece of paper. It’s Issa’s drawing. The one that Mom had put up on the fridge.

  “Are you still making art?”

  “No. I work in the hospital now, actually. It’s not exactly a party, but there are birthdays.”

  “I’m so glad!” Mom hugs Issa. Her plastics feel familiar and fragile and Issa can’t remember them ever having hugged each other at the same height. Mom’s chest warms up. The synthetic heartbeat patters bump-bump as it did before, but Issa pulls away.

  There’s an awkward silence.

  “Hey, Mom, will you give Mackenzie my new address? I’d like her to visit me, if that’s okay. I want her to know she can come over any time.”

  “Of course, sweetie.”

  “So . . . I should get back to work. My shift starts soon.”

  “Issa-boo, wait! Before you go, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Mom clasps her fingers together and her face changes to her hopeful face. “Was there anything I could have done to be a better Mom? Maybe something you wished I would have done differently?”

  “Uh . . . I don’t. . . .” Issa opens and closes her mouth, unsure of how to reply.

  “How about on a scale of one to five? How many stars would you give me?”

  WELCOME TO YOUR AUTHENTIC INDIAN EXPERIENCE™

  REBECCA ROANHORSE

  Rebecca Roanhorse is a Black Ohkay Owingeh writer whose breakout novel Trail of Lightning was nominated for the 2019 Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2018.

  “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” was nominated for the Locus, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and it won the Hugo and Nebula awards. It confronts the concepts of authenticity and cultural experiences in the virtual-reality medium.

  “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally

  written, all of the white people will be Indians

  and all of the Indians will be ghosts.”

  —Sherman Alexie, How to Write the Great

  American Indian Novel

  YOU MAINTAIN A MENU of a half dozen Experiences on your digital blackboard, but Vision Quest is the one the Tourists choose the most. That certainly makes your workday easy. All a Vision Quest requires is a dash of mystical shaman, a spirit animal (wolf usually, but birds of prey are on the upswing this year), and the approximation of a peyote experience. Tourists always come out of the Experience feeling spiritually transformed. (You’ve never actually tried peyote, but you did smoke your share of weed during that one year at Arizona State, and who’s going to call you on the difference?) It’s all 101 stuff, really, these Quests. But no other Indian working at Sedona Sweats can do it better. Your sales numbers are tops.

  Your wife Theresa doesn’t approve of the gig. Oh, she likes you working, especially after that dismal stretch of unemployment the year before last when she almost left you, but she thinks the job itself is demeaning.

  “Our last name’s not Trueblood,” she complains when you tell her about your nom de rêve.

  “Nobody wants to buy a Vision Quest from a Jesse Turnblatt,” you explain. “I need to sound more Indian.”

  “You are Indian,” she says. “Turnblatt’s Indian-sounding enough because you’re already Indian.”

  “We’re not the right kind of Indian,” you counter. “I mean, we’re Catholic, for Christ’s sake.”

  What Theresa doesn’t understand is that Tourists don’t want a real Indian experience. They want what they see in the movies, and who can blame them? Movie Indians are terrific! So you watch the same movies the Tourists do, until John Dunbar becomes your spirit animal and Stands with Fists your be
st girl. You memorize Johnny Depp’s lines from The Lone Ranger and hang a picture of Iron Eyes Cody in your work locker. For a while you are really into Dustin Hoffman’s Little Big Man.

  It’s Little Big Man that does you in.

  For a week in June, you convince your boss to offer a Custer’s Last Stand special, thinking there might be a Tourist or two who want to live out a Crazy Horse Experience. You even memorize some quotes attributed to the venerable Sioux chief that you find on the internet. You plan to make it real authentic.

  But you don’t get a single taker. Your numbers nosedive.

  Management in Phoenix notices, and Boss drops it from the blackboard by Fourth of July weekend. He yells at you to stop screwing around, accuses you of trying to be an artiste or whatnot.

  “Tourists don’t come to Sedona Sweats to live out a goddamn battle,” Boss says in the break room over lunch one day, “especially if the white guy loses. They come here to find themselves.” Boss waves his hand in the air in an approximation of something vaguely prayer-like. “It’s a spiritual experience we’re offering. Top quality. The fucking best.”

  DarAnne, your Navajo co-worker with the pretty smile and the perfect teeth, snorts loudly. She takes a bite of her sandwich, mutton by the looks of it. Her jaw works, her sharp teeth flash white. She waits until she’s finished chewing to say, “Nothing spiritual about Squaw Fantasy.”

  Squaw Fantasy is Boss’s latest idea, his way to get the numbers up and impress Management. DarAnne and a few others have complained about the use of the ugly slur, the inclusion of a sexual fantasy as an Experience at all. But Boss is unmoved, especially when the first week’s numbers roll in. Biggest seller yet.

  Boss looks over at you. “What do you think?”

  Boss is Pima, with a bushy mustache and a thick head of still-dark hair. You admire that about him. Virility. Boss makes being a man look easy. Makes everything look easy. Real authentic-like.

  DarAnne tilts her head, long beaded earrings swinging, and waits. Her painted nails click impatiently against the Formica lunch table. You can smell the onion in her sandwich.