Children of Ruin

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Hard to believe,” Fred said.

  Ta Shu smiled. “Hard to believe.”

  It was easy to tell when they stopped decelerating: the pressure ended. Then they were sitting there, feeling lunar g properly for the first time. Sixteen point five percent of Earth’s gravity, to be exact. That meant Fred now weighed about twenty-four pounds. He had calculated this in advance, wondering what it would feel like. Now, shifting around in his seat, he found that it felt almost like the weightlessness they had experienced during the three days of their transfer from Earth. But not quite.

  Their attendant released them from their restraints and they struggled to their feet. Fred discovered it felt somewhat like walking in a swimming pool, but without the resistance of water, nor any tendency to float to the surface. No—it was like nothing else.

  He staggered through the spaceship’s passenger compartment, as did several other passengers, most of them Chinese. Their flight attendant was better at getting around than they were, very fluid and bouncy. Movies from the moon always showed this bounciness, all the way back to the Apollo missions: people hopping around like kangaroos, falling down. Now here too they fell, as if badly drunk, apologizing as they collided—laughing—trying to help others, or just pull themselves up. Fred barely flexed his toes and yet was worse than anybody; he lofted into the air, managed to grab an overhead railing to stop himself from crashing into the ceiling. Then he dropped back to the floor as if parachuting. Others were not so lucky and hit the ceiling hard; the thumps indicated it was padded. The cabin was loud with shouts and laughter, and their attendant announced in Chinese and then English, “Slow down, take it easy!” Then, after more Chinese: “The gravity will stay like this except when you are in centrifuges, so go slow and get used to it. Pretend you are a sloth.”

  The passengers staggered up a tunnel. It had windows in its sidewalls that gave them a partial view of the moon, also of one wall of the spaceport, looking like a concrete bunker inset in a white hill, black windows banding it. Concrete on the moon was not actually concrete, Fred had read during the flight, in that the cement involved was made of aluminum oxide, which was very common in moon rock, and made a lunarcrete stronger than ordinary concrete. The landscape around the spaceport looked as it had during their landing, but hillier. Nearby hills were white on their tops and black below. Sunrise or sunset, Fred didn’t know. Although wait; they were near the south pole, so this could be any time of day, as the sun would always stay this low in the polar sky.

  Fred and Ta Shu and the rest of the passengers shuffled carefully along, either holding on to the tube’s handrails or hopping up the middle of the tube. Almost everyone was tentative and clumsy. There were many apologies, much nervous laughter.

  The sun spilled its jar of light over the hills. The rubble-strewn land outside was so brilliant it was hard to believe that the tunnel windows were heavily tinted and polarized. It might have been easier to move if the tunnel walls were windowless, but it did look wonderful, and the visual fix might also help people adjust to the gravity, affirming as it did that they stood on an alien world. Not that this was keeping people from going down. Fred held a side rail and tried little skips forward. Crazy footwork, ad hoc hopping—it was hard to move! No one had mentioned how strange it would feel, maybe that passed after a while and people forgot. He felt hollow, and without a plumb line to judge if he was upright or not.

  Ta Shu moved just behind Fred, smiling hugely as he clutched the rail and pulled along as if on a climbers’ fixed rope. “Peculiar!” he said when he saw Fred look back at him.

  “Yes,” Fred said. It was like weightlessness with a downward tropism, some kind of arc in spacetime—which of course was what it was. Frequent course corrections had to be made, but with very slight muscular efforts. Toes could do it, but shoes amplified what one’s toes tried for. Quite awkward, actually. A feat of coordination. Tiptoeing in slow motion. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”

  Ta Shu nodded. “Not in Kansas anymore! Where are you staying?”

  “The Hotel Star.”

  “Me too! Shall we have breakfast together to start our day?”

  “Yes, that sounds good.”

  “Okay, see you there.”

  Fred followed signs to the foreigners’ line for visa control, noticeably shorter than the line for Chinese nationals. Quickly he was facing a pair of immigration officers, and he handed over his passport. The officials gave him a quick look, put his passport under a scanner, and gestured him on. Beyond the controlled area two Chinese men saw him and waved. They greeted him and led him to the next room, which looked like any other airport baggage claim area. Signage was in Chinese characters, with small English script below them.

  Welcome to the peaks of eternal light

  Baggage carousels spit out luggage as at home: many black cubes with inset handles, all similar. His had a green handle. When he saw it he hauled it off the carousel, almost tossing it into the air behind him; he spun around like a discus thrower, staggered, caught his balance. He was getting yanked around by a weight of a pound or so! But he wasn’t much heavier, and mass was not the same as weight, as he would have to learn. No doubt the unicaster in his luggage made it heavier or more massive than it looked.

  His minders watched him impassively as he spun. When he calmed down one of them carried his luggage for him, so he could hold a handrail with both hands. Gingerly he tiptoed toward the exit, feeling conspicuous, but all the other newcomers were just as maladroit; there were still many low-impact falls, with people embarrassed rather than hurt. The halls were filled with laughter. The moon was funny!

  if you enjoyed

  CHILDREN OF RUIN

  look out for

  ROSEWATER

  The Wormwood Trilogy: Book One

  by

  Tade Thompson

  Rosewater is a town on the edge. A community formed around the edges of a mysterious alien biodome, its residents comprise the hopeful, the hungry and the helpless—people eager for a glimpse inside the dome or a taste of its rumored healing powers.

  Kaaro is a government agent with a criminal past. He has seen inside the biodome and doesn’t care to again—but when something begins killing off others like himself, Kaaro must defy his masters to search for an answer, facing his dark history and coming to a realization about a horrifying future.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ROSEWATER: OPENING DAY 2066

  Now

  I’m at the Integrity Bank job for forty minutes before the anxieties kick in. It’s how I usually start my day. This time it’s because of a wedding and a final exam, though not my wedding and not my exam. In my seat by the window I can see, but not hear, the city. This high above Rosewater everything seems orderly. Blocks, roads, streets, traffic curving sluggishly around the dome. I can even see the cathedral from here. The window is to my left, and I’m at one end of an oval table with four other contractors. We are on the fifteenth floor, the top. A skylight is open above us, three foot square, a security grid being the only thing between us and the morning sky. Blue, with flecks of white cloud. No blazing sun yet, but that will come later. The climate in the room is controlled despite the open skylight, a waste of energy for which Integrity Bank is fined weekly. They are willing to take the expense.

  Next to me on the right, Bola yawns. She is pregnant and gets very tired these days. She also eats a lot, but I suppose that’s to be expected. I’ve known her two years and she has been pregnant in each of them. I do not fully understand pregnancy. I am an only child and I never grew up around pets or livestock. My education was peripatetic; biology was never a strong interest, except for microbiology, which I had to master later.

  I try to relax and concentrate on the bank customers. The wedding anxiety comes again.

  Rising from the centre of the table is a holographic teleprompter. It consists of random swirls of light right now, but within a few minutes it will come alive with text. There is a room adjacent to ours in
which the night shift is winding down.

  “I hear they read Dumas last night,” says Bola.

  She’s just making conversation. It is irrelevant what the other shift reads. I smile and say nothing.

  The wedding I sense is due in three months. The bride has put on a few pounds and does not know if she should alter the dress or get liposuction. Bola is prettier when she is pregnant.

  “Sixty seconds,” says a voice on the tannoy.

  I take a sip of water from the tumbler on the table. The other contractors are new. They don’t dress formally like Bola and me. They wear tank tops and T-shirts and metal in their hair. They have phone implants.

  I hate implants of all kinds. I have one. Standard locator with no add-ons. Boring, really, but my employer demands it.

  The exam anxiety dies down before I can isolate and explore the source. Fine by me.

  The bits of metal these young ones have in their hair come from plane crashes. Lagos, Abuja, Jos, Kano and all points in between, there have been downed aircraft on every domestic route in Nigeria since the early 2000s. They wear bits of fuselage as protective charms.

  Bola catches me staring at her and winks. Now she opens her snack, a few wraps of cold moin-moin, the orange bean curds nested in leaves, the old style. I look away.

  “Go,” says the tannoy.

  The text of Plato’s Republic scrolls slowly and steadily in ghostly holographic figures on the cylindrical display. I start to read, as do the others, some silently, others out loud. We enter the xenosphere and set up the bank’s firewall. I feel the familiar brief dizziness; the text eddies and becomes transparent.

  Every day about five hundred customers carry out financial transactions at these premises, and every night staffers make deals around the world, making this a twenty-four-hour job. Wild sensitives probe and push, criminals trying to pick personal data out of the air. I’m talking about dates-of-birth, PINs, mothers’ maiden names, past transactions, all of them lying docile in each customer’s forebrain, in the working memory, waiting to be plucked out by the hungry, untrained and freebooting sensitives.

  Contractors like myself, Bola Martinez and the metalheads are trained to repel these. And we do. We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. A professor did a study of it once. He found a correlation between the material used for firewalling and the activities of the customer for the rest of the year. A person who had never read Shakespeare would suddenly find snatches of King Lear coming to mind for no apparent reason.

  We can trace the intrusions if we want, but Integrity isn’t interested. It’s difficult and expensive to prosecute crimes perpetuated in the xenosphere. If no life is lost, the courts aren’t interested.

  The queues for cash machines, so many people, so many cares and wants and passions. I am tired of filtering the lives of others through my mind.

  I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston, that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess; and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally, if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city…

  On entering the xenosphere, there is a projected self-image. The untrained wild sensitives project their true selves, but professionals like me are trained to create a controlled, chosen self-image. Mine is a gryphon.

  My first attack of the day comes from a middle-aged man from a town house in Yola. He looks reedy and very dark-skinned. I warn him and he backs off. A teenager takes his place quickly enough that I think they are in the same physical location as part of a hack farm. Criminal cabals sometimes round up sensitives and yoke them together in a “Mumbai combo”—a call-centre model with serial black hats.

  I’ve seen it all before. There aren’t as many such attacks now as there were when I started in this business, and a part of me wonders if they are discouraged by how effective we are. Either way, I am already bored.

  During the lunch break, one of the metalheads comes in and sits by me. He starts to talk shop, telling me of a near-miss intrusion. He looks to be in his twenties, still excited about being a sensitive, finding everything new and fresh and interesting, the opposite of cynical, the opposite of me.

  He must be in love. His self-image shows propinquity. He is good enough to mask the other person, but not good enough to mask the fact of his closeness. I see the shadow, the ghost beside him. Out of respect I don’t mention this.

  The metal he carries is twisted into crucifixes and attached to a single braid on otherwise short hair, which leaves his head on the left temple and coils around his neck, disappearing into the collar of his shirt.

  “I’m Clement,” he says. “I notice you don’t use my name.”

  This is true. I was introduced to him by an executive two weeks back, but I forgot his name instantly and have been using pronouns ever since.

  “My name—”

  “You’re Kaaro. I know. Everybody knows you. Excuse me for this, but I have to ask. Is it true that you’ve been inside the dome?”

  “That’s a rumour,” I say.

  “Yes, but is the rumour true?” asks Clement.

  Outside the window, the sun is far too slow in its journey across the sky. Why am I here? What am I doing?

  “I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “Are you going tonight?” he asks.

  I know what night it is. I have no interest in going.

  “Perhaps,” I say. “I might be busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  This boy is rather nosy. I had hoped for a brief, polite exchange, but now I find myself having to concentrate on him, on my answers. He is smiling, being friendly, sociable. I should reciprocate.

  “I’m going with my family,” says Clement. “Why don’t you come with us? I’m sending my number to your phone. All of Rosewater will be there.”

  That is the part that bothers me, but I say nothing to Clement. I accept his number, and text mine to his phone implant out of politeness, but I do not commit.

  Before the end of the working day, I get four other invitations to the Opening. I decline most of them, but Bola is not a person I can refuse.

  “My husband has rented a flat for the evening, with a view,” she says, handing me a slip of paper with the address. Her look of disdain tells me that if I had the proper implant we would not need to kill trees. “Don’t eat. I’ll cook.”

  By eighteen hundred hours the last customer has left and we’re all typing at terminals, logging the intrusion attempts, cross-referencing to see if there are any hits, and too tired to joke. We never get feedback on the incident reports. There’s no pattern analysis or trend graph. The data is sucked into a bureaucratic black hole. It’s just getting dark, and we’re all in our own heads now, but passively connected to the xenosphere. There’s light background music—“Blue Alien” by Jos. It’s not unpleasant, but my tastes run to much older fare. I’m vaguely aware that a chess game is going on, but I don’t care between whom. I don’t play so I don’t understand the progress.

  “Hello, Gryphon,” someone says.

  I focus, but it’s gone. She’s gone. Definitely female. I get a wispy impression of a flower in bloom, something blue, but that’s it. I’m too tired or lazy to follow it up, so I punch in my documentation and fill out the electronic time sheet.

  I ride the elevator to street level. I have never seen much of the bank. The contractors have access to the express elevator. It’s unmarked and operated by a security guard, who sees us even though we do not see him or his camera. This may as well be magic. The elevator seems like a rather elegant wooden box. There are no buttons and it is unwise to have confidential conversations in there. This time as I leave, the operator says, “Happy Opening.” I nod, unsure o
f which direction to respond in.

  The lobby is empty, dark. Columns stand inert like Victorian dead posed for pictures. The place is usually staffed when I go home, but I expect the staff have been allowed to leave early for the Opening.

  It’s full night now. The blue glow from the dome is omnipresent, though not bright enough to read by. The skyline around me blocks direct view, but the light frames every high-rise to my left like a rising sun, and is reflected off the ones to my right. This is the reason there are no street lights in Rosewater. I make for Alaba Station, the clockwise platform, to travel around the edge of the dome. The streets are empty save the constable who walks past swinging her baton. I am wearing a suit so she does not care to harass me. A mosquito whines past my ear but does not appear to be interested in tasting my blood. By the time I reach the concourse, there is a patch of light sweat in each of my armpits. It’s a warm night. I text my flat to reduce internal temperature one degree lower than external.