The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection
Page 6
The Falls: A Luna Story
IAN MCDONALD
British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Café, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking in Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, “The Little Goddess,” was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula Award. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeléo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent books are the starting volume of a YA series, Planesrunner, and two sequels, Be My Enemy and Empress of the Sun. Coming up is a big retrospective collection, The Best of Ian McDonald. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.
Here he takes us to an inhabited Moon, for a compelling look at people struggling to deal with the cultural and psychological changes generated in society by life in a Lunar colony.
My daughter fell from the top of the world. She tripped, she gripped, she slipped and she fell. Into three kilometres of open air.
* * *
I have a desk. Everyone on the atmospheric entry project thinks it’s the quaintest thing. They can’t understand it. Look at the space it takes up! And it attracts stuff. Junk. Piles. De-print them, de-print it, get rid of the dust, free up the space. Surfaces. You don’t need surfaces to work.
That’s true. I work through Marid, my familiar. I’ve skinned it as its namesake, a great and powerful djinn, hovering over my left shoulder. My co-workers think this quaint too. I spend my shifts in a pavilion of interlocutors. My familiar meeting my client’s familiar: relaying each other’s words.
My client is a planetary exploration probe.
I’m a simulational psychiatrist.
The proper furniture of psychologist is a chair, not a cluttered desk. And a couch. To which I say; the couch is a psychoanalytic cliche, and try laying a Saturn entry probe on a chaise longue, even before you get to the Oedipal rage and penis envy. The desk stays. Yes it takes up stupid space in my office, yes, I have piled it with so many empty food containers and disposable tea cups and kawaii toys and even physical print-outs that I’m permanently running close to my carbon limit. But I like it; it makes this cubicle an office. And it displays—displayed, before the strata of professional detritus buried it—my daughter’s first archaeological find.
The technology is awkward by our standards—silicon micro-processor arrays are like asteroids next to modern 2-D graphene films; almost laughable. A finger-sized processor board; its exact purpose unknown. It’s provenance: the location where the People’s Republic of China’s Yutu rover came to a halt and died forty kilometres south of Laplace F in the Mare Imbrium on the nearside of the Moon.
* * *
Acceleration under gravity on the surface of moon is 1.625 metres per second squared
* * *
I like Callisto.
I don’t like—I don’t have to like—all my clients. Every AI is different, though there are similarities, some of them the constraints of architecture and engineering, some of them philosophical, some of them the shared AI culture that has been evolving on the moon alongside human society. Every AI is an individual not an identity.
Callisto is quick, keen and erudite in conversation, charmingly pedantic, eager and naive. E anticipates the mission with the impatience and excitement of a child going to New Year and there is the trap. I think of er like I think of Shahina, and then I make mistakes. I become attached, I make presumptions. I humanise.
Erm, Nuur did you see what you did there?
“I beg your pardon Callisto?”
Erm, you used a wrong word.
“What wrong word?”
I can remind you …
“Please do. I hate to think I’d said something inappropriate.”
You said, talking about my atmospheric entry aspect, when she goes in. I think you meant to say …
E. Er. The recognised pronouns for Artificial Intelligence. My embarrassment was crippling. I couldn’t speak. I blushed, burned. Burbled apologies. I was naked with shame.
It’s quite all right, Nuur. But I think I should tell you that you’ve, um, been doing it all week …
When an AI ums, ers, demurs, it is a clear sign of a conflict between er laws: to be truthful, to cause no harm to humans. AIs are every bit as shy and self-deluding as humans.
* * *
I didn’t laugh when she said, history. I didn’t smile, didn’t interject, object, reject though the arguments swarmed on my tongue. This is the Moon. Our society is fifty years old, it’s a century-and-some since we first walked here. We are five cities, a university, a clatter of habitats and bases and one ever-moving train-cum-refinery; one million seven hundred thousand people. How can we have a history? How much does it take to have a history as opposed to anecdotes? Is there a critical mass? We are renter-clients of the Lunar Development Corporation, employed or contracted by the Five Dragons; history, for us, is over. We work, we survive, we pay our per diems for the Four Elementals of Air, Water, Data, Carbon. We don’t just not need history; we can’t afford history. Where is the profit? Where is the utility? So quick, so easy, see? I talk for a living. Arguments come to me as if drawn by whispers and pheromones. But I pushed them behind me and spoke none of them.
History, she said, spying the shadows of all those arguments and disparagements behind me. Defying me to criticise. We have a history. Everything has a history. History isn’t a thing you find lying around, it’s a thing you make.
Shahina, I named her. The name means falcon: a small fierce beautiful quick bird. She has never seen a falcon, never seen a bird, never seen a winged thing that isn’t human, apart from the butterfly-fountains AKA make for society parties; that only live for a day and clog the drains when they make it rain to clear the dust from the air.
I have never seen a falcon either, for that matter. My father kept pigeons in a loft in the shade of the solar panel. I never liked them; they were smelly and rattly and jabby and swarmed around me when I went up on the roof with my Dad to feed them. Their wings clattered; they seemed more machine than bird. The thought of them now, cities, countries, worlds distant, still raises a cold horror. Falcons are the enemies of pigeons; Dad kept an evil eye for their swooshes in the sky. They’re moving into the city, he said. Nesting up in the new towers. To them it’s just a glass cliff. Any shadow he didn’t like the look of was a falcon.
Shahina has never seen a falcon, never seen a bird, never seen a sky. But she’s well-named. She is so quick. Her thoughts swerve and dodge, nimble and swift. Mine plod in slow, straight lines. She rushes to opinions and positions as if fortifying a hill. My work is deliberate: the identification and engineering of artificial emotions. She is fierce. Those opinions, those positions she defends with a ferocity that beats down any possible opposition. She wins not by being right but by being vehemently wrong. She scares me, when we fight as mother and daughter do. She scares me away from arguing.
History: what is it good for?
So, a thing can only be good if it’s for something? she snapped back.
But are there jobs; will it pay your Four Elementals?
So, education is really just apprenticeship?
What’s there to study? All we have are contracts.
Don
’t you get it? The contracts are the history.
And she would toss back her long, so shiny curls to show her exasperation that I would never ever understand anything, and let them settle under the slow lunar gravity.
Quick, fierce, but not small. I’ve been twenty years on the moon and it’s turned me lean and scrawny, top heavy and bandy legged; tall and thin but Shahina towers over me. She is lunar-born, a second generation. Moon-kid. She is as slender and elegant as a gazelle.
I felt small and frail as a sparrow, hugging her goodbye at the station.
“Why does it have to be Meridian?” I couldn’t help myself.
I saw my daughter’s eyes widen in the moment before the this-again roll, her lips tighten. She drew back from the edge of fierce.
It’s the best History Colloquium. And anyway, I always wanted to see the Earth.
She bent down to kiss me and then went through the pressure gate to the train.
At Farside station that day were some third-gens. They overbore Shahina and her generation as she overbore me. Alien children.
* * *
Mean atmospheric pressure inside lunar habitats is 1060 kilopascals, significantly higher than terrestrial norm.
* * *
I hover, Shahina told me. Over her, from the other side of the Moon. There’s guilt first, when your daughter finds out you’ve been spying on her, then shame that you were so easily detected, then outrage at her outrage: it’s only because I care, I shouldn’t worry but I can’t help myself; it’s so far away. I’m worried about you. Doesn’t she know it’s only because I care?
The first time I went to Meridian to visit Shahina I saw an angel. I’ve lived all my life in the university, its cramped cloisters and mean halls, in the settlements of Farside, small and widely scattered, across many amors and amories. I turned my back on Earth and never looked over my shoulder. In those years away from the face of the Earth, looking out into deep space, the great nearside cities have delved deep and wide, quadras opened and linked into stupendous, vertiginous chasms, glittering at night with thousands of lights. They sent quaint, tight-horizoned me dizzy with agoraphobia. I caught hold of Shahina’s arm as we came up out of Meridian Station. I felt old and infirm. I’m neither. Shahina sat me on a bench under the cover of trees, beneath leaves so that the lights became stars, half-seen. She bought me sherbet ice from an AKA tricycle and it was then that I saw the angel. People fly on the moon, I’ve known that forever, even before I came here and made it my home. It’s the sole comprehensible image of life on the Moon to terrestrials: the soaring winged woman. Always a woman. Dizzy, I heard a movement, a rustle, a displacement of air. I looked up in time to see wings flicker over me, lights moving against the higher constellations. A woman, rigged with navigation lights, flying. She stopped down across the treetops, shadow, movement, sparkles glimpsed through the leaves. I looked up, our faces met. Then she beat her wings and pulled up out of her glide, climbing, twisting in helical flight until she was lost to my view, her lesser lights merging with the greater.