by Neil Clarke
“Jump,” said her brother. “You can do it.”
The plank felt like carpet fibres under her feet, but all around her and beneath were just glinting buildings, and space, and sky. Xanthe swayed a little.
“I can’t,” she said.
“You can, just jump,” came the voice again. “You know it’s not real.”
“I know,” Xanthe said, her toes gripping carpet, “but it feels real. It’s much scarier than I thought it would be.”
“It’s the war of your conscious mind over your animal brain, your amygdala,” said her brother, “you know that, you know what you have to do.”
But it’s not only things that are real that you have to be scared of, thought Xanthe, and who is to say that it is your conscious brain that is always right? Maybe there is a truth to this feeling. She inched an almost imperceptible amount forwards anyway.
A light flickered in the upper-top left of her vision and a low bell-tone sounded. Xanthe slow-blinked twice to exit and retracted the side-screens of her glasses and the scene became the small box that was her living room, and, once she folded her bed out from the wall, bedroom as well. Her brother’s form reclined on the sofa, his feet crossed at the ankles, his hand under his chin, a smile ghosting over his face.
“Package!” Xanthe said to him, opening the door to her very small, squat gray balcony—just wide enough for her to stand out there but hardly even sit down, where there was a drone-delivered parcel from her Singles’ Day shopping. The low cloud cover had the pollution levels spiking and on her tongue was the acrid, slightly burnt taste to the air, so she retrieved her soft and lumpy package and shut the door hurriedly.
“It’s my dress!” she exclaimed. She never usually wore dresses, preferring the sleek utilitarianism of her jumpsuits with built-in sensor-gloves, but this had popped up in her AR catalogue when she was looking at cupboard storage—there it had been, hanging in her built-in wardrobe with a few other items as if to illustrate how perfectly they fit. She had lingered, fingering the fabric and holding it up against her, then had moved on, only to return later and add it to her shopping cart queue.
The dress came to below her knees, and looked like it was made of the ocean; deeper blues, brightening into waves of cerulean and green, tipped with white. Her family had lived by the coast until Xanthe was almost twelve, and Xanthe missed it with a deep and fundamental ache. If she swam out far enough, she could be alone, or as good as alone. Alone, and yet not boxed in, caged, limited. Alone and expansive, alone and infinite. Floating, not touching the ground, she was no longer connected to the exhausted heaving of the planet, jam-packed past capacity with swarming, teeming humanity.
“But,” said her brother, with that wry tone in his voice, “where are you going to wear it?”
Xanthe had not been outside her apartment in nearly two years.
“I’m going to wear it right here,” she said, and threw a fringed cushion—another of her Singles’ Day purchases—at his head, which of course failed to connect.
Xanthe moved away from him dismissively to the small tiled area that demarked her kitchen and picked up her spray bottle to mist her mushrooms with water. The cardboard boxes lined her wall, using agricultural waste for cultivation. The latest crop were blooming out of their box, the caps just starting to invert. Oyster mushrooms, these ones, with a velvety texture and a mild, delicate flavor, and they’d be ready to stir-fry tonight. Xanthe realized she was hungry.
Another bell-tone, this one deeper and richer somehow than before. Xanthe blinked to the right and the unfolding message floated in front of her, unfurling in shimmering, shining gold.
“Congratulations,” it said.
Three of the four Greatships had already left the Earth. Coming Events Cast Their Shadows Before Them was the first, but also the slowest, with a less direct course. The second, The East Wind, had left Earth eighteen months later but had arrived only weeks afterwards. The third, It Sings Because It Has A Song, was mere days away from approaching the Rift now. Peace Begins With A Smile was currently in lower Earth orbit, awaiting her final launch status checks, and of course, her cargo.
CARREN
Utrecht, The Netherlands
The message was govt.-id encrypted and verified, and burnished brightly. “Congratulations,” it began. Carren had squeezed onto the train, the station attendants with their pristine white gloves gently applying pressure to push the last passengers on board. Bodies pressed against her, swaying with the movement of the train, warmth and breath mingling together, eyes averted. Brightly colored moving verts on the walls of the station; more faces, smiling, teeth perfectly white and straight, endorsing everything from breath freshener to neural implants to sleep inhibitors to facial mods. All flashing by while she traveled in a curved container full of people and empty of anything else.
Peace Begins With A Smile was to be the fourth Greatship to leave the Earth. The Earth, where all of them had found life, where everything had started, even though the planet was suffering under the reign of people who had not treated her well. It felt disloyal somehow, these great beautiful ships that headed away and did not come back. Carren knew about it, of course, it was impossible not to have heard, but it was her sister Vikk who was obsessed by it. It was Vikk who had told her, it must have been five years ago, that Peace Begins With A Smile had its long central grav-walkway called the Corridor of Joy; that the carbon nanotubes were sprung to release sounds akin to laughter in different tones and volumes depending on where you trod and how fast you moved. Vikk had been entranced by this idea, but Carren had always wondered whether you would feel that the floor and walls were laughing at you, whether you would tire of the incessant amusement and long for peace and quiet, gentle steps where no-one could hear you coming.
Carren leaned with all her slight weight and pushed and maneuvered her way off the train as the doors opened at Utrecht Centraal. She leaned against a steel column and let people teem around her.
If she had this right, through her use of Smile to Pay for her purchases made on Singles’ Day 11/11 she had been in the draw and had won, had won, subject to some conditions and caveats, passage on the Greatship Peace Begins With A Smile, bound for Zorya, beautiful green and blue sister planet, so far, so very far away.
Leaving in less than three months’ time.
Leaving. Leaving . . . the Earth.
Carren slid down the column a little.
It was incredible, and absurd. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, the opportunity of nearly eleven billion lifetimes, all of them happening around her, right now.
Carren’s breath hitched in her throat. She read the message over and over. She did not smile.
Carren had been a solemn child. She’d heard “You’d be much prettier if you smiled” more times than she could count. And “Try Smiling,” “Your face won’t crack if you smile,” “Let me see you smile,” “I’ll give you a dollar if you smile.” She had been offered many things in exchange for her smiles at various times; a dollar, a sweet, a kiss. She usually declined.
It wasn’t that she never smiled, it was that a smile seemed to come up from deep inside her, from far away, it had to be earned, it meant something. Smiles were not for strangers, for casual acquaintances, for people on the street and in the shops. She gave her smiles to the people she loved, a rare gift. Tears also were rare, Carren had to be devastated before they would surface from the well deep inside her.
“You can tell you apart from your sister—she’s the one who smiles.” School friends had told her some variant of this since she was very young. It was true, Vikk was two minutes younger than her, and she wore her emotions on the outside of her skin, laughing, crying, dancing or raging. She shimmered like a raindrop, whereas Carren was, what? A deep, slow-moving river, maybe.
YU YAN
“Congratulations,” the message had said, and Yu Yan had felt a sudden internal thud, because ‘congratulations’ was a word people said at other times, for other reasons.
And it was a word she didn’t know if she would hear, from anyone, when she told her news.
But this was something very different. The hand she rested on her stomach was shaking.
Zorya was a dream, a beautiful far-away dream. She could remember its discovery, when she’d been a small child. The world had fallen in love with Zorya, so like the Earth, but so new and clean and empty. Odd, strange life moving deep in her oceans, which covered even more of her surface than Earth’s, but only vegetative masses on land.
“When I live on Zorya . . .” was a game they used to play, all the little girls, pig-tailed with bright bare faces, in their little, narrow outer-city school, a dream they all shared.
The first two Greatships had arrived planetside already, although it took a long time to receive messages back through the Rift. There were people who’d been born here on Earth living their lives on Zorya right now; breathing her oxygen, having children who had room to play and the whole vast planet to explore. Having children with room to play.
And she, against astronomical and insane odds, had smiled, smiled to pay for her kitchen appliances and her new work skirts and her skincare products, and now she was offered passage on Peace Begins With A Smile, which everyone said was the most sleek and darkly beautiful Greatship yet.
Passage, for one.
There were things Yu Yan had not bought in the Singles’ Day sales. A crib, a pram, bottles or diapers or comforters. Singles’ Day was on the eleventh of November because the 1 was meant to represent a person who was alone. She was not a one. She was a two. Or a three?
Secret Child. Impossible Child. Forbidden Child.
JEA
Jea’s face contorted, the golden message still shining forefront in her vision. How could you want something so long and so deeply but never even acknowledge it to yourself, and then have it given to you, out of the blue, out of the blue of a sky you might see one day on a planet far away?
If anyone had been with Jea they would have thought her broken and devastated, bent over and wracked as if with pain, tears that she never usually cried streaming down her face.
When Jeanne was a baby she never cried.
“She’s so contented, she’s so peaceful, you’re so lucky,” other people told her mother. Jeanne’s mother had tried to feel lucky. She didn’t mention how when she played peek-a-boo with her baby, or blew raspberries on her fat little stomach, Jeanne just looked at her and blinked. How when Jeanne was older and beginning to walk, she had tripped over her feet and banged into the base of the bed, blackening her small eye and bruising the side of her face in awful purple and yellow, and she had giggled merrily for twenty minutes. It was the first time her mother had heard her laugh.
When Jeanne’s sister had been born her mother funneled all of her emotional energy into the child who would smile when she saw her coming. The child she understood.
Jea wiped her face and instructed her phone to call her sister. “Hi,” Jeanne’s sister Davinia’s voice said brightly. “I can’t answer your call right now, but please leave a message.”
She’s got a new job. She’s busy. She’s just always in the middle of something, thought Jea. She knew her sister bore her no resentment, at least rationally. She knew Davinia understood. She also knew that way down at the beating heart of things that made no difference at all.
XANTHE
“It says it’s confidential,” she said, her voice trembling, although she didn’t know what emotion was making it shake so. Shock probably.
“Who would you tell anyway, kitten?” her brother said. Her dad used to call her kitten.
“I’ve got friends,” she said, resenting the defensive note in her voice. “Online,” she added, wishing she had another cushion to throw, although she knew he needled her on purpose.
“But it doesn’t matter. It’s ludicrous anyway. I can’t go. There is no way. I couldn’t.”
“You don’t want to go?” her brother asked innocently. She didn’t look at him but she already knew the expression he would be wearing.
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m not going to go. I can’t.”
Her brother said something else then, but she wasn’t listening to him, because when she’d said she wasn’t going to go it had felt like something was dropping away from her, plummeting down, down to the center of the Earth, like her heart, or her future. She’d felt like this the day of the accident. The day she’d lost her family.
“I can’t,” she said again, softly. She knew now that there was nothing she had ever wanted more than to fly into a sea of stars, and arrive, finally, at Zorya, shining in space. Nothing she had ever wanted more, and it was completely impossible.
CARREN
The HSL train up to her sister’s unit was full and Carren had to stand, squashed up against two men in suits and a teenage girl who had her head absently to one side, and AVR glasses on, obviously VRgaming. It was only a forty-five minute trip but Carren realized she couldn’t remember the last time she had made it. A year ago? More?
Vikk lived in a densely packed apartment precinct, over-high scrapers shading the narrow streets from the glare of the midday sun but not relieving the rising humidity. Drones moved busily overhead, providing the occasional flash in the periphery as they caught the light of the sun.
Her sister opened the door. “Hi, clone,” she said.
Carren thought her sister looked tired. “Hi, transporter accident,” she said in response.
“Reflection,” her sister said.
“Afterbirth,” she countered.
A faint smile drifted over Vikk’s face. “Come in,” she said.
It had been more than a year, probably. The apartment felt different somehow, more sparse. There had used to be a large print in the entry way, hadn’t there? Mountains or something? The off-white wall was bare now.
“I thought you both might be busy on a Saturday,” Carren said, as she turned into the small lounge, before the silence of the apartment crept up on her. And there was something about her sister’s face that matched the apartment somehow; more silent, more sparse.
“Lusa left me,” Vikk said, the words blunt-edged and taking up too much space in the small room.
“Oh. I’m sorry,” Carren offered. “You didn’t say.”
Her sister shrugged, and Carren could read the words behind the gesture. We don’t say a lot these days.
Carren had liked Lusa. Or maybe liked wasn’t the right word. She had envied Vikk the subtle affection and warmth that the two showed in public, the way they pooled their money to buy real coffee for weekends, the way Lusa had looked at Vikk with laughter in her eyes.
Vikk had always been easy with relationships, falling in and out of them with casual grace. Crying tempestuous tears and then being all excited over a new fling only weeks later. It had always been harder for Carren. I’m just as pretty as you are, why doesn’t anyone look at me that way, she had thought watching the way Lusa had looked at her sister. It had been around five years ago that her sister had started seeing Lusa, and she had not disappeared quickly, like the others. Lusa had been different. Lusa had stuck.
Carren suddenly realized that she would never see Lusa again either. Not that that was a thing that mattered. Or it shouldn’t be a thing that mattered.
“Your hair got long,” she said to her sister. It had been cropped close to Vikk’s head the last time she’d seen her. Definitely more than a year ago then.
“Yours got short,” Vikk said.
Carren ran her hand across the back of her short, shaved under-cut. “Just last week,” she said, writhing a little inwardly at how trivial their words were. Lusa was gone. Not a thing that mattered, not to her. Not a thing that was allowed to matter. She hadn’t seen her sister in a long time.
“You’re looking good,” her sister added.
“Thanks,” said Carren, a little surprised. “It’s all in the DNA.” Carren sat on the little sofa and Vikk brought her coffee. Not real coffee, Carren saw.
“When did Lusa go?” Carren said. She had not meant to ask that.
Her sister shrugged again, which wasn’t a gesture Carren had associated with her sister in the past. “Two months ago, almost,” she said. Her sister’s face was quiet, unruffled, still. Not like the Vikk Carren was used to, her face mobile with one emotion or another. It was like looking into a mirror.
“I’m sorry,” Carren said again, and she was this time, truly.
Again, that shrug. “What’s been going on in your life then, DNA?”
Carren dropped her gaze and played with the hem of her top. Confidential.
Then she looked up into her sister’s eyes. Light clear brown, flecking into green. Exactly like her own. Except they weren’t really, were they.
The striations of the iris were different, solely individual, and an image with enough resolution could tell them apart. It was Vikk who had told her that, a long time ago. Vikk had always been very interested, when she was younger, in all the things that made twins different. She had arced her path away from Carren’s at every opportunity. If Carren liked a thing it seemed like Vikk had always been determined not to like it, to choose something, anything, else. Carren had not wanted to be different. She would not have minded company for the ride.
For the ride. Confidential, it had said. But maybe, after all, this was why she had come.
“Well,” she said to her sister, younger than she was by two minutes, “something big.”
YU YAN
Robert got the apartment. He was elated with his purchase, and with all his Singles’ Day items, and talked nonstop about them, not noticing that Yu Yan was silent by his side, with the occasional flash of a smile when it seemed to be required.
Passage, for one.
But she wasn’t really single. And she had her own passenger.
“It will be so good to have our own space. To be alone together,” she ventured. It was true. She had been waiting a long time, like Lady White Snake, waiting for their chance.
For the first time all afternoon Robert was quiet.
“It will be lovely, sweetling,” he said, eventually. “But I think we should be careful not to ruin our opportunities here. Of course I want you there, often. But if we hold off on declaring ourselves a couple, just another year, or maybe two, we can really build our financial future. We still have to get a VR hub, and a dishwasher, and so many things for the new apartment. Just a couple more Singles’ Days and we should be all set up.”
