“That’s a good question,” Ha-eun said. “For your sake, I hope they’re not.”
“It’s not the fine itself, of course,” the woman said, tugging at the collar of her fur, “but it shows up on your profiles, you know. The fine for smoking. The station would tell my son’s school. And the school would tell the other mothers.”
Ha-eun couldn’t really see how it was anyone’s business if someone smoked or not, but the rich lived in a different layer of reality than she did, one where they were always connected and never truly alone. She said none of this, of course, merely smiled and excused herself and moved on. She had an overwhelming urge to find Jun-seo. Not just to ping him, but to actually see him.
As though the crowd had read her mind, the people on the platform seemed to knit together even more tightly. She squinted. A fresh outpouring of people had stepped onto the platform from the escalators. Why wasn’t the station doing anything? It was supposed to know where all the passengers were, at all times. It scraped the data from all the watches and glasses and lockets and other devices. Surely the station knew how many people were waiting on the platform, and how frustrated everyone they were, by now. It knew things like pulses and heartbeats and temperatures. She had seen people taken aside when their fevers were too high, because they might be spreading one of the flus. Why wasn’t the station sending attendants? She lifted her watch to lodge a complaint.
Her watch.
When had her watch last worked?
Granted, some functions still behaved. Time, email. The water usage in the apartment. The location of all her food in the communal fridge. But all the locative data pertaining to her location … when had that last worked? She hadn’t been able to access her locker with the thing. Nor had she been able to call for help when the cars crashed. It had not alerted her to any tests when the power went out in the building across from her stall.
Did it even know she was alive? Did it know she was her?
Blood spattered across her shoes.
She looked up, and two young men in front of her were hitting each other. Decades had passed since she’d last heard the sound of fists on flesh. She had forgotten how soft and small a sound it was. “I told you not to touch me!” one of the men—boys, really—shouted. His knuckles were bloody. The other boy’s face was worse; blood streamed from his mouth. They drove at each other again. The crowd widened around them.
Now she knew for certain that the watches were broken. Not just hers. All the watches. Because they should have picked up what was happening on the platform: the raised pulses, the shouting, the arc of fists in the air. The station should have learned about the fight from the watches, and sent attendants to break it up. She looked at her fellow bystanders. They were all checking their watches. They looked at each other, not the fight. They looked around at the platform. They waited for sirens. For attention. None came.
“No one knows we’re here,” she whispered. “No one’s coming to help.”
Was it really that easy to bring a station of this size to a screeching halt? She had always thought it would take something like a bomb, or a toxin, like the sarin gas attack in Tokyo. But maybe not. Maybe all it took was a sudden deafening silence from everyone’s devices.
The young men were grappling each other, now. They twisted on the frosty platform, and the crowd shoved back and forth as their bodies rolled across the concrete and advertisements. Ha-eun gripped her rolling bag tightly and positioned it in front of her, like the cattle-catcher on an old locomotive train. As the crowd ebbed away from her, she made a break for it. She ducked into the crowd on the other side of the fight, muttering apologies and keeping her head down. People squawked and screeched as she pushed through. Why had she never thought to use her rolling bag this way? It was just the thing for parting the crowd.
She leaned hard on the rolling bag and steered its stubborn, whining bulk to the escalators. More people poured out. A look of horror crossed their faces as they comprehended the sheer size of the crowd waiting on the platform. They lifted their watches. Shook them. Cursed. Tried to go back up the escalators in the wrong direction. Began trampling each other. She heard a child crying. Then another.
A thin scream rose. She turned. Someone from the edge of the crowd had fallen onto the tracks. An old man. Not much older than Jun-seo, anyway. Her heart met her throat.
“What do we do?” she heard someone shout. “Why isn’t anyone coming?”
A teenaged boy in a school uniform jumped down. Then another.
And right on cue, she heard a distant whistle and saw a cold glow pierce the winter fog. A train. Its shriek joined with the collective scream rising on the platform. She turned away. There was nothing else to do. She could only stare at the labels and logos on her groceries. They had seemed so important, just a minute ago. The shouting and the noise built and built and built, echoing on the old spray-foam ceiling, making a structure within the structure. The train howled as it tried to slow itself. It moaned over the bodies in its path. She had heard that sound only once before, just after a suicide attempt on one of the other platforms at this very station. Now it was three times worse.
Beside her someone was abruptly sick into her rolling bag, and she didn’t even care. She stood, wiped a spatter of bile off her sleeve, and began pushing herself the length of the platform.
“Wait, Jun-seo,” she murmured. “Please wait.”
* * *
Snow fell softly on the chaos.
Ha-eun had never crossed the city entirely on foot, before. She had always used the trains to travel under the exclusive, members-only zones: the plazas and parks meant only for elite families. They lived in pockets of airy space shrouded in trees. Here there were no towers, only houses. And not the kitbashed container houses like in Ha-eun’s neighbourhood, but real ones, the old-fashioned kind, with gables and tile roofs and high stone fences crawling with ivy. Ha-eun made the mistake of staring, pausing long enough to be noticed by someone in a uniform.
“You can’t be here,” he said.
He was young. His face was completely unlined, poreless, perfect. For just a moment, she wondered just how good the corporate robot technology had gotten. Then she dismissed the thought. All the prettiest robots were supposed to look like women.
“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he added. “You aren’t authorized to be here.”
Ha-eun thought quickly. “What is your name?”
He blinked rapidly. “Excuse me?”
“Your name. What is it?” Ha-eun put on the voice she used to talk to kids who shortchanged her. “How dare you stop me in the middle of an emergency like this? It’s snowing! I have arthritis!”
The young man looked suitably chastened. “It’s just we have a bunch of diplomats and security experts who live in this area,” he said in a low voice. “And, well, they’re all being called in, because of what’s happening. Their rides will be going very fast. Pedestrians have to be especially careful.”
“I’ll stay on the sidewalk,” Ha-eun said, and pushed past him.
Black SUVs rumbled past her as she shuffled through the snow. She had never seen trucks so big. Government types, surely. She found herself not caring. What did it matter who they were, so long as the power came back on eventually? She peered at the homes surrounding her. Most of them had power: she heard the hum of external generators. But the towers that overshadowed them had gone dark. As she crossed under a beautiful wrought iron pergola that announced the neighbourhood’s exit, she saw people roving about in the streets. Thicker and thicker crowds of them, all of them waving compacts and watches and wads of cash, trying to find purchase of one kind or another. They must have poured out of the buildings, once the power and the networks died. Ha-eun couldn’t remember the last time the streets had been this lively.
Poor Jun-seo would have such a lineup to deal with, she realized. The thought quickened her steps. Under her feet, she heard the definitive crunch of snow. For the first time in months, t
he pain in her back had vanished.
After another half hour, Ha-eun rounded the corner where Jun-seo would be waiting. The stalls were dark. Curtains drawn. No lineup. Her feet carried her across the street as the pit in her stomach deepened. She was a fool for coming this far on foot. He wasn’t worried about her. He wasn’t waiting. He’d probably never made it in—his own route must have been equally compromised. Why hadn’t she just turned around and gone home? She could be warm, at least. Warm and dry. Warm and dry and dignity intact.
“Ha-eun?”
She turned. Jun-seo stood carrying a recycling bin full of paper packaging. Poster tubes, old boxes, pulp cartons. “I was going to burn all this,” he said. “It’s a good thing you got here first!”
Ha-eun could barely find her voice. “You were waiting?”
“Of course I was waiting! All the customers told me what happened at your station. I had to wait.”
“… The customers?”
“Oh, well.” He gestured at the stalls. “I sort of sold out early. This sort of thing is good for business, I guess. They’re saying it was some sort of hack, like a cyber-attack on the infra-”
“But you were still waiting?”
“Yeah. Sort of stupid, huh?” He smiled sheepishly. “I guess you’ll tell me I should have gone home to get warm.”
Ha-eun scrubbed furiously at one eye. “Put that bin down!”
He dropped it. Ha-eun launched herself at him. Her arms came around him, tight. He was too thin, she thought. Strong, but too small. She wanted to fatten him up. Spoil him. And never stop.
“Hey, Ha-eun…” he said, “it’s okay. Everything will be fine. There are smart people working on this. I talked to one of the city people about the trains—”
“I don’t care about the trains!” She hugged him harder.
“Okay.” He patted her shoulders awkwardly. Then his arms settled over her shoulders. “Hey, if you’re all right walking, I don’t live very far from here. We could go there. I don’t think there will be power, but I do have a little propane stove, and some soju—”
“Yes,” Ha-eun said. “Yes. I want to go with you.”
He chuckled. She felt it through her whole body. “You’ll have to let me go, first, if you want to walk anywhere,” Jun-seo said.
“One more minute,” she said. “Just one more minute.”
* * *
Four days later, Ha-eun knew what it felt like to stand in line at her own food stall. At least, what it would be like if she herself, Ha-eun, were terrible at her job. “They should have hired us to do this,” she said, for the third time that day. “Or people like us. The city’s full of people who can do this same job faster than some dumb trainees.”
“We have to eat,” Jun-seo said. “And that means we have to wait.”
It wasn’t the food that was the problem, though. It was the fuel. Jun-seo had plenty of food in his apartment: sacks of seven-grain rice, a nice little bundle of sweet potatoes, anchovy stock, dry seaweed (they’d gotten into that early), kimchi, eggs, black bean sauce for noodles. And of course, the rice cakes and fish cakes he made every day. It should have sustained them. And it could have.
If they’d only had enough fuel to cook with.
“I thought you said you had more propane,” Ha-eun had said.
“I thought I did,” Jun-seo had said. And that was that.
Naturally, all the convenience stores and other shops were out of the stuff by the time they ran out. Bizarrely, the shops were still open. They’d gone back to cash. Some places used barter—hot coffee was the new money. Wait times were murderously slow; no one knew how to total up a bill, any more, not to mention do percentages. Sales tax quickly became a distant memory.
“It’s like when the currency was failing,” Jun-seo said. “Remember that? When everyone turned in their gold?”
Ha-eun did remember. And Jun-seo was right: this was much the same. At least, the same in spirit. She had turned over her wedding band, back then. The damn thing had never done her much good, anyway, even when she still wore it. This time she had turned over all her food—what rice and eggs and kimchi she still had in the stall became the army’s property, turned over the morning after she found Jun-seo in the snow. At least, she had turned them over in theory. What really happened was that she found a notice from the army on her stall, with an itemized list of what they’d “requisitioned,” and a site she could access when the networks came back in order to obtain her reimbursement. She was to give them an estimate of monetary value. She wondered how much she could fudge it. Maybe if she claimed it was fancy organic stuff they’d taken. The list they left behind didn’t include brand names.
“Come on,” Jun-seo said, and they shuffled forward to close the gap ahead of them in line.
She had expected chaos, but it was all very … orderly. The army kept on talking about the pluck and industriousness of the Korean national spirit. They pasted broadsheets reminding people how to use weather radios, and the radio stations talked about how the worst was behind them and there was nothing to worry about, how systems would come back online as soon as possible, how people were at work ’round the clock. Trucks with loudspeakers trundled down the newly quiet roads, blaring messages about pulling together in the struggle, sharing hand sanitizers, wearing flu masks, and where the city warming stations were.
“We’re lucky we’re old,” Ha-eun said. “They wouldn’t let us in here, otherwise.”
The warming stations were only for the very young or the very old. Ha-eun didn’t like to think of herself as very old, but for the moment she was willing to let the army think of her that way. And it was still better than being one of the exhausted parents in line, trying to corral kids in snow pants who wouldn’t quit demanding their old devices. No, you can’t play with those right now, they kept saying. No, I don’t know when the network is coming back.
Inside the warming station, they had ninety minutes. There was hot tea and instant noodles and tinned fish and whatever the army had managed to put together. The first day, all the restaurants gave up their supply. The second day, there was less to work with. The army had extra propane, and they could make do, but getting the supplies in without trains was a challenge. The Japanese had promised to send supplies. And the Americans, of course. The Red Cross. The Red Cross was supposed to be good at handling things without any computers or data streams. They’d done the same in worse places, where no one had handhelds or chips. With all the smart stickers and wearables dead, nobody had any sense of inventory or location any longer, of who needed what and where. The warming station did regular headcounts. Ha-eun had heard they were doing the same things at hospitals.
“It’s like going back in time,” Ha-eun said.
Jun-seo sipped at a cup of instant noodles. “I like it,” he admitted. “It makes me feel younger.”
“What were you like, back then?”
He shrugged. “Not so different.”
“You liked castles?”
“I wanted to be an architect.”
This fact fell under the “Things I Do Not Know About Jun-seo” category in Ha-eun’s mind. It was odd, to work alongside someone for so long, and not know the simplest things about them. “What happened?” she asked.
“I got someone pregnant.”
Ha-eun hissed in sympathy. Jun-seo snorted. They stared out at the children—babies, really—in the warming station. There were yoga mats and cots set up, and someone had thought to bring in old-fashioned toys and books, the kind that didn’t need charging.
“Did you have kids?” Jun-seo asked.
Ha-eun shook her head. “I wouldn’t be any good at it. It was the one thing my husband and I agreed on.”
“You were married?”
“For about five minutes, once.”
“We should get married,” Jun-seo said.
Ha-eun coughed on her tea. It almost went out her nose. “What?”
“It would be easier,” he said. “Legally. Wha
t if we get separated, in this situation? The government would have no idea who to contact. Or what if one of us is injured, or becomes ill? The other could be an advocate, in the hospital. Also I think that, when the business starts up again, we would get a better deal on cart space as a family. They prioritize family business licenses. We could move to a different corner, where there’s more foot traffic. Maybe even one of the stations.”
Ha-eun stared at him. “How long have you been thinking about this?”
He shrugged. “Oh, the last ten years. Give or take.”
“And now you tell me?!”
The others in the warming station gave her a sharp look. In the absence of trains, train etiquette had taken over the shared spaces: one had to maintain an equal volume with one’s neighbours, or risk deep disapproval. “Now?” she repeated.
“Why not now? I waited for you, in the snow. My head was telling me to leave, but my feet wouldn’t let me move. And you came to me. You came right to me.” He peered at her over the rising steam from his noodles. “So, Ha-eun, why not now?”
“Because…” She blinked. She stared out at all the families crowding around the space heaters, rubbing their arms. What if this didn’t end? What if the systems never came back? Until this moment, she had not allowed herself to consider the possibility. But here in this room bathed in orange emergency light, she had to face it. They were all running scared, like pheasants flushed from the undergrowth. What attack might come next? Was this just the first phase of something much worse?
“Nothing,” she said. “Forget I said anything. I can’t think of a reason, aside from maybe the fact that there isn’t an office to grant us a licence. At least, not in the city.”
“Then we’ll have to go to the country,” Jun-seo said. He slurped the last of his broth. “Some of the other families are leaving. I’ll ask who has room for a couple of cooks.”
The Citadel of Weeping Pearls
ALIETTE DE BODARD
Here’s another “Xuya” story by Aliette De Bodard, whose “Three Cups of Grief, By Starlight” appears elsewhere in this anthology. This one deals with an empire on the verge of being invaded by another empire, and the search for a fabled lost space station, where superweapons that might tip the balance were said to have been developed—but most of the Xuya stories are at their core about family, and “The Citadel of Weeping Pearls” is no exception, centering around an intricate web of dysfunctional family relationships that stretches across generations and includes family members who have been transformed into immensely powerful living spaceships, and the “ghosts” of long-dead family members who still interact (and squabble) with the living through memory implants that preserved their personalities and experience as past rulers (an experience that they’re willing to share with present-day rulers, whether the present-day rulers want it or not). Add time travel, a skein of plots, counterplots, and betrayals, and spooky interaction with weird dimensions beyond the space we know, and you end up with the hugely entertaining novella that follows.…
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 102
