Of course, Guillem had not been born when The Ladies of The Factories came to Barcelona, in boats that were so large that they seemed to be islands docking. He did not remember that the workers tried to boycott them in the beginning, that lots of people disappeared during the protests. For the first years, people saw The Ladies and remembered the pale sunken faces of those who had come back from the expedition into Russian waters.
When The Ladies came, Father was still alive. I remember this because it was a Saturday afternoon, when mother was working in the sweetshop. We went to the port to greet the brave adventurers, back from the Antarctic after months of work. We saw The Ladies approaching as if they themselves were floating, gigantic bodies that became even more impressive when they reached the land, bearing with them their terrible dignity. The tubes that came from their bellies fell heavily onto the decks of the boats, with nothing to connect them to. The sailors got them unloaded and then headed for home or the nearest tavern, but they argued first with the owner of the boats who spat on the ground and then disappeared into the dazzled crowd. People were scared and surprised, like a little child who hears a creaking door in the dark, at Christmastime.
I know that Guillem always thought that it was Señor Soler’s fault, when he decided to build a huge waterwheel that, he assured us, would double the colony’s productivity. They had to cut down the little wood that grew up round the main factory building and divert the course of the Velet River. No one was really happy with the plans because who knew if they could adapt themselves to the new rhythm? No one ever mentioned hiring new people, just effort and enthusiasm.
As a mechanic, I was there throughout the whole installation process. I remember the hours of frustration when the plans did not fit with the result we had hoped, the nights of sitting up worried because the parts that we needed to fulfil Señor Soler’s deadline had not arrived. We mechanics had spent days drinking milk of magnesia to calm our stomachs. And I remember the day before the inauguration when our tests made The Lady sing. A thick steam came out of her eyes and you could hear rhythmic thumps coming from her chest, getting ever faster.
At the inauguration, on a fine morning, Señor Soler gave a speech accompanied by a few of his investors and the mayor of Olistany. The children were in their Sunday best and the adults all looked serious. When the speeches were over, they all went home to change and then go to work, more rapidly than usual. The teacher and the Mossèn stood on either side of Señor Soler, who made grandiloquent gestures with his arms and hands. The river flowed over new ground and the magpies settled on the factory roof. My brother closed his eyes, insisting that he would not participate in this. I remember this as a scene from a mural, static and brightly lit. Ephemeral.
The survivors insist that it was the moment when the holy water hit the river that it started. When the Mossèn blessed the waterwheel the air started to taste of salt and a scream that would have bloodied any human throat came from the factory. It was not the singing voice we remembered, but a complaint, the denunciation of an abuse. The heavy sound of falling machinery accompanied the groaning noise. We were all still and a girl at my side vomited the castor oil they had made her take that morning.
As soon as he was able to react, Guillem ran toward the factory with my mother behind him. I followed them, covering my face, with my back soaked in a cold sweat, while the glass fell and the people screamed. I got there just in time to see The Lady’s coffin opening slowly, surrounded by warm salt steam.
I still do not know what it was that kept us still, while a huge creature, the size of Our Lady, squirmed elastically amid the wreckage of the building where we had worked for seven years and which now collapsed as she passed over it as if it were a sandcastle. Perhaps it was the kind of fear that takes charge of a nocturnal beast when the lights are suddenly turned on, the white terror that paralyses all your limbs. Perhaps it was the sight of that oily mass, like the sea during a storm, a bluish black with green and purplish tints that took up the space that The Lady had previously occupied. The creature was howling, deafeningly so, with a mouth that at times was as tiny as the eye of a needle and sometimes so large that its deformed head seemed to lack both nose and eyes. The creature stood like The Lady had stood, but the hand on its hip had fused with its waist and its shirt. It seemed to be forgetting, moment by moment, the shape of its sarcophagus, and it rapidly transformed itself. The seaweed and tentacles in her belly seemed to have taken on a life of their own and set off from the body, touching the walls, touching the ceiling and the floor quickly, as if palpating them, leaving a blackish sticky residue behind them.
‘Lady, go back!’ Guillem shouted as he ran after her, a child once again under her imposing form, trying to catch hold of her skirt with his metal hand, but unable to find anything to hold on to. The monster to whom we had prayed so much, our kind and bountiful Lady, turned her head at an unnatural angle and looked at him with an intensity that was almost curious. After a few terrifying seconds, she turned her head back and carried on walking. As she moved, the metal slowly fell away. Some debris reached my face, and though I remember that the blow hurt less than it should have, we still had no option other than to run.
Standing by the river, the people saw a kind of thick liquid building up in the back wall of the factory, crossing through the porous material of the façade. When The Lady came through the wall, Señor Soler had his back broken by a falling column. As the creature crossed through it, the river rose up and swept away the people who were closest to the shore. The creature walked straight across and then started to head downhill.
The Mossèn was the first to react, coolly and with common sense enough to save many lives. The sad-faced man whose boring sermons had made all of us youngsters laugh in secret got the survivors to the train station with short and direct orders. We followed him, trying not to look back, not to see where the creature was headed. Nothing we did seemed to matter in the slightest to The Lady, who carried on straight toward Barcelona.
Among all the confusion, no one realised that my brother’s metal fingers had stayed on the floor of the factory, in a shining pool that looked like mercury. The old reddened stump with its dry skin was now a young hand once again, well-shaped and complete. Luckily enough no one noticed, because the change had taken place when he had sunk his fingers into the gelatinous skirts of the creature, the same creature that had drowned our master and crumbled our home to the ground. My brother looked at The Lady without blinking, with his eyes open and with the same expression of adoration as always. Looking at him, as hot blood slipped from my hurt lip down my chin, I stopped feeling scared for us, and started to feel scared for him.
In Olistany station, our muscles aching from the tension, we took one last look at the hill where the remains of the colony stood. Inside the skeleton of the factory, with the machines half melted like ice under the sun, The Lady’s sarcophagus stood wide open. There was no kind of mechanism inside; all we could see was an empty carcass.
We shivered in a heap on the train when the sky suddenly filled with the shouts and songs of the other Ladies, like the calls of exotic birds, or the wind blowing through a badly-closed window. Apparently they were responding to Our Lady’s calls, and they moved with the same trembling step, their bodies, made of the same strange material losing their original shape with each step. Those of us who were by the windows saw them leave. Like eroded walking mountains, they walked down into the sea and carried on walking until they were lost from sight.
There was no damage caused to the city, they left no remains as they had done in the various colonies. The people who saw them said that they slipped between the buildings, barely touching them, like benign tornadoes, like the smoke from a fire, flexible and discreet, but dark and fearful as well. When the seven Ladies went into the water, the sea-level rose so much that boats ended up being lifted onto the pier.
No one could return to the colonies, which had been filled with this highly toxic material that was inflamma
ble and destroyed any metal with which it came into contact. Soon woods grew up where our streets had been and life prospered without us.
The Russians, fast and clever, christened these remnants that covered our colonies Лед слизь, which we turned into lludllitz. There were some people who thought of it as a kind of Luddite action, flesh against machinery, as if the whole atrocity had been planned as some kind of social protest. It was a feeble attempt to try to get back a degree of the control we had lost when these beings looked at us and decided to turn their backs on us forever.
For my mother, lludllitz was something absolute, a moment from which there was now no return, a sign of the need to abandon physical objects, to move forward or to drown.
We knew that the metal that made the bodies of The Ladies had been drawn from Lake Vostok. The sarcophagi had been based on a popular actress, something that was painfully obvious once we were told. What we never knew was whether they returned to their distant lake, perhaps because that is what the international investors had decided, who left Barcelona along with their money and their promises, to see if the Italians had better transport systems or a better workforce. No one blamed them; they did not have the strength left to do so.
Mother went back to work at the pastry-stall on the market and a few months later married her boss, a well-mannered but shy man, a widower, who treated us with a respect to which we were not accustomed. We went to live in a little house with draughty walls, cold in the winter and warm in summer, but much better than the charity wards where a lot of the former workers at the Soler colony were living.
I found work in the fisherman’s guild, working from the Barceloneta, and I am still there, soldering, repairing. I lost my colony girl accent and now speak like one of the workers, many of whom are from Andalucia. Although the pay is not very good, it is enough to live on. When I could save up a bit of money, I built one of those metal warehouse boys to help in the pastry stall. Although it looks a little rudimentary, it can use its hooks to pick up and unload packages and save my mother’s bent back. We take it once a week to the public charging point in the middle of the market. Guillem never comes to the steam generator, neither does he use the warehouse boy. He has become sensitive now, surrounded by technology, as if he had forgotten his mechanical hand. Or as if he still remembered it.
For me, the lludllitz is the chance to come back to the surface after having touched rock-bottom, having lost a great deal. I don’t know if I’m happier in the city than in the colony, but this life is enough for me. My brother no longer wakes me up, and he looks at my tools with mistrust.
Guillem is the only one who has not mentally overcome the collapse of the Colony. He walks through the world like a visionary: slowly, touching everything gently, his eyebrows bent in an eternal question. His hand never hurts, not even in bad weather. When he says he wants to go to Antarctica to study lludllitz and the sarcophagi that are still there, my mother argues with him for hours. He pronounces the word like the Russian scientists do and has scratched it in Cyrillic all over the house.
What he finds in lludllitz are truths that are whispered to him in the dark, like prayers, about regimes that fall, about ethics, charity, pain. For Guillem, lludllitz is more to do with Señora Soler and her little metal horse than with our family.
Occasionally, but less and less often, my brother brings a girl home with him when he comes for Sunday lunch. Sometimes, more and more often, the girl has wavy hair and a twisted smile. We are all quiet, and if we are lucky, the noise of rain on the pipes fills the silence.
The Four Generations of Chang E
Zen Cho
Zen Cho was born and raised in Malaysia and currently lives in London. She is the author of the Crawford Award-winning short story collection Spirits Abroad, and is the editor of the anthology Cyberpunk: Malaysia. Her debut novel, Sorcerer to the Crown, was published in 2015.
IN THE FINAL days of Earth as we knew it, Chang E won the moon lottery.
For Earthlings who were neither rich nor well-connected, the lottery was the only way to get on the Lunar Habitation Programme. (This was the Earthlings’ name for it. The moon people said: “those fucking immigrants”.)
Chang E sold everything she had: the car, the family heirloom enamel hairpin collection, her external brain. Humans were so much less intelligent than Moonites anyway. The extra brain would have made little difference.
She was entitled to the hairpins. Her grandmother had pressed them into Chang E’s hands herself, her soft old hands folding over Chang E’s.
“In the future it will be dangerous to be a woman,” her grandmother had said. “Maybe even more dangerous than when my grandmother was a girl. You look after yourself, OK?”
It was not as if anyone else would. There was a row over the hairpins. Her parents had been saving them to pay for Elder Brother’s education.
Hah! Education! Who had time for education in days like these? In these times you mated young before you died young, you plucked your roses before you came down with some hideous mutation or discovered one in your child, or else you did something crazy—like go to the moon. Like survive.
Chang E could see the signs. Her parents’ eyes had started following her around hungrily, as if they were Bugs Bunny and she was a giant carrot. One night Chang E would wake up to find herself trussed up on the altar they had erected to Elder Brother.
Since the change, Elder Brother had spent most of his time in his room, slumbering Kraken-like in the gloomful depths of his bed. But by the pricking of their thumbs, by the lengthening of his teeth, Mother and Father trusted that he was their way out of the last war, their guard against assault and cannibalism.
Offerings of oranges, watermelons, and pink steamed rice cakes piled up around his bed. One day Chang E would join them. Everyone knew the new gods liked the taste of the flesh of women best.
So Chang E sold her last keepsake of her grandmother and pulled on her moon boots without regret.
On the moon Chang E floated free, untrammelled by the Earth’s ponderous gravity, untroubled by that sticky thing called family. In the curious glances of the moon people, in their condescension (“your Lunarish is very good!”) she was reinvented.
Away from home, you could be anything. Nobody knew who you’d been. Nobody cared.
She lived in one of the human ghettos, learnt to walk without needing the boots to tether her to the ground, married a human who chopped wood unceasingly to displace his intolerable homesickness.
One night she woke up and saw the light lying at the foot of her bed like snow on the grass. Lifting her head, she saw the weeping blue eye of home. The thought, exultant, thrilled through her: I’m free! I’m free!
The Second Generation
Her mother had had a pet moon rabbit. This was before we found out they were sentient. She’d always treated it well, said Chang E. That was the irony: how well we had treated the rabbits! How little some of them deserved it!
Though if any rabbit had ever deserved good treatment, it was her mother’s pet rabbit. When Chang E was little, it had made herbal tea for her when she was ill and sung her nursery rhymes in its native moon rabbit tongue—little songs, simple and savage, but rather sweet. Of course Chang E wouldn’t have been able to sing them to you now. She’d forgotten.
But she was grateful to that rabbit. It had been like a second mother to her, said Chang E.
What Chang E didn’t like was the rabbit claiming to be intelligent. It’s one thing to cradle babies to your breast and sing them songs, stroking your silken paw across their foreheads. It’s another to want the vote, demand entrance to schools, move in to the best part of town and start building warrens.
When Chang E went to university there was a rabbit living in her student hall. Imagine that. A rabbit sharing their kitchen, using their plates, filling the pantry with its food.
Chang E kept her chopsticks and bowls in her bedroom, bringing them back from the kitchen every time she finished a meal. She w
as polite, in memory of her nanny, but it wasn’t pleasant. The entire hall smelled of rabbit food. You worried other people would smell it on you.
Chang E was tired of smelling funny. She was tired of being ugly. She was tired of not fitting in. She’d learnt Lunarish from her immigrant mother, who’d made it sound like a song in a foreign language.
Her first day at school Chang E had sat on the floor, one of three humans among twenty children learning to add and subtract. When her teacher had asked what one and two made, her hand shot up.
“Tree!” she said.
Her teacher had smiled. She’d called up a tree on the holographic display.
“This is a tree.” She called up the image of the number three. “Now, this is three.”
She made the high-pitched clicking sound in the throat which is so difficult for humans to reproduce.
“Which is it, Changey?”
“Tree,” Chang E had said stupidly. “Tree. Tree.” Like a broken down robot.
In a month her Lunarish was perfect, accentless, and she rolled her eyes at her mother’s singsong, “Chang E, you got listen or not?”
Chang E would have liked to be motherless, pastless, selfless. Why was her skin so yellow, her eyes so small, when she felt so green inside?
After she turned 16, Chang E begged the money off her dad, who was conveniently indulgent since the divorce, and went in secret for the surgery.
The Apex Book of World SF Page 30
