The Apex Book of World SF

by Mahvesh Murad

  When she saw herself in the mirror for the first time after the operation she gasped.

  Long ovoid eyes, the last word in Lunar beauty, all iris, no ugly inconvenient whites or dark browns to spoil that perfect reflective surface. The eyes took up half her face. They were like black eggs, like jewels.

  Her mother screamed when she saw Chang E. Then she cried.

  It was strange. Chang E had wanted this surgery with every fiber of her being—her nose hairs swooning with longing, her liver contracting with want.

  Yet she would have cried, too, seeing her mother so upset if her new eyes had let her. But Moonite eyes didn’t have tear ducts. No eyelids to cradle tears, no eyelashes to sweep them away. She stared unblinking and felt sorry for her mother, who was still alive, but locked in an inaccessible past.

  The Third Generation

  Chang E met H’yi in the lab, on her first day at work. He was the only rabbit there and he had the wary, closed-off look so many rabbits had.

  At Chang E’s school the rabbit students had kept themselves to themselves. They had their own associations—Rabbit Moonball Club, the Lapin Lacemaking Society—and sat in quiet groups at their own tables in the cafeteria.

  Chang E had sat with her Moonite friends.

  “There’s only so much you can do,” they’d said. “If they’re not making any effort to integrate…”

  But Chang E had wondered secretly if the rabbits had the right idea. When she met other Earthlings, each one alone in a group of Moonites, they’d exchange brief embarrassed glances before subsiding back into invisibility. The basic wrongness of being an Earthling was intensified in the presence of other Earthlings. When you were with normal people you could almost forget.

  Around humans Chang E could feel her face become used to smiling and frowning, every emotion transmitted to her face with that flexibility of expression that was so distasteful to Moonites. As a child this had pained her, and she’d avoided it as much as possible—better the smoothness of the surface that came to her when she was hidden among Moonites.

  At 24, Chang E was coming to understand that this was no way to live. But it was a difficult business, this easing into being. She and H’yi did not speak to each other at first, though they were the only non-Moonites in the lab.

  The first time she brought human food to work, filling the place with strange warm smells, she kept her head down over her lunch, shrinking from the Moonites’ glances. H’yi looked over at her.

  “Smells good,” he said. “I love noodles.”

  “Have you had this before?” said Chang E. H’yi’s ears twitched. His face didn’t change, but somehow Chang E knew he was laughing.

  “I haven’t spent my entire life in a warren,” he said. “We do get out once in a while.”

  The first time Chang E slept over at his, she felt like she was coming home. The close dark warren was just big enough for her. It smelt of moon dust.

  In H’yi’s arms, her face buried in his fur, she felt as if the planet itself had caught her up in its embrace. She felt the wall vibrate: next door H’yi’s mother was humming to her new litter. It was the moon’s own lullaby.

  Chang E’s mother stopped speaking to her when she got married. It was rebellion, Ma said, but did she have to take it so far?

  “I should have known when you changed your name,” Ma wept. “After all the effort I went to, giving you a Moonite name. Having the throat operation so I could pronounce it. Sending you to all the best schools and making sure we lived in the right neighbourhoods. When will you grow up?”

  Growing up meant wanting to be Moonite. Ma had always been disappointed by how bad Chang E was at this.

  They only reconciled after Chang E had the baby. Her mother came to visit, sitting stiffly on the sofa. H’yi made himself invisible in the kitchen.

  The carpet on the floor between Chang E and her mother may as well have been a maria. But the baby stirred and yawned in Chang E’s arms—and stolen glance by jealous, stolen glance, her mother fell in love.

  One day Chang E came home from the lab and heard her mother singing to the baby. She stopped outside the nursery and listened, her heart still.

  Her mother was singing a rabbit song.

  Creaky and true, the voice of an old peasant rabbit unwound from her mouth. The accent was flawless. Her face was innocent, wiped clean of murky passions, as if she’d gone back in time to a self that had not yet discovered its capacity for cruelty.

  The Fourth Generation

  When Chang E was 16, her mother died. The next year Chang E left school and went to Earth, taking her mother’s ashes with her in a brown ceramic urn.

  The place her mother had chosen was on an island just above the equator, where, Ma had said, their Earthling ancestors had been buried. When Chang E came out of the environment-controlled port building, the air wrapped around her, sticky and close. It was like stepping into a god’s mouth and being enclosed by his warm humid breath.

  Even on Earth most people travelled by hovercraft, but on this remote outpost wheeled vehicles were still in use. The journey was bumpy—the wheels rendered them victim to every stray imperfection in the road. Chang E hugged the urn to her and stared out the window, trying to ignore her nausea.

  It was strange to see so many humans around, and only humans. In the capital city you’d see plenty of Moonites, expats, and tourists, but not in a small town like this.

  Here, thought Chang E, was what her mother had dreamt of. Earthlings would not be like moon humans, always looking anxiously over their shoulder for the next way in which they would be found wanting.

  And yet her mother had not chosen to come here in life. Only in death. Where would Chang E find the answer to that riddle?

  Not in the graveyard. This was on an orange hill, studded with white and grey tombstones, the vermillion earth furred in places with scrubby grass.

  The sun bore close to the Earth here. The sunshine was almost a tangible thing, the heat a repeated hammer’s blow against the temple. The only shade was from the trees, starred with yellow-hearted white flowers. They smelled sweet when Chang E picked them. She put one in her pocket.

  The illness had been sudden, but they’d expected the death. Chang E’s mother had arranged everything in advance, so that once Chang E arrived she did not have to do or understand anything. The nuns took over.

  Following them, listening with only half her attention on their droning chant in a language she did not know to a god she did not recognise, she looked down on the town below. The air was thick with light over the stubby low buildings, crowded close together the way human habitations tended to be.

  How godlike the Moonites must have felt when they entered these skies and saw such towns from above. To love a new world, you had to get close to the ground and listen.

  You were not allowed to watch them lower the urn into the ground and cover it with soil. Chang E looked up obediently.

  In the blue sky there was a dragon.

  She blinked. It was a flock of birds, forming a long line against the sky. A cluster of birds at one end made it look like the dragon had turned its head. The sunlight glinting off their white bodies made it seem that the dragon looked straight at her with luminous eyes.

  She stood and watched the sky, her hand shading her eyes, long after the dragon had left, until the urn was buried and her mother was back in the Earth.

  What was the point of this funeral so far from home, a sky’s worth of stars lying between Chang E’s mother and everyone she had ever known? Had her mother wanted Chang E to stay? Had she hoped Chang E would fall in love with the home of her ancestors, find a human to marry, and by so doing somehow return them all to a place where they were known?

  Chang E put her hand in her pocket and found the flower. The petals were waxen, the texture oddly plastic between her fingertips. They had none of the fragility she’d been taught to associate with flowers.

  Here is a secret Chang E knew, though her mother didn’t
.

  Past a certain point, you stop being able to go home. At this point, when you have gotten this far from where you were from, the thread snaps. The narrative breaks. And you are forced, pastless, motherless, selfless, to invent yourself anew.

  At a certain point, this stops being sad—but who knows if any human has ever reached that point?

  Chang E wiped her eyes and her streaming forehead, followed the nuns back to the temple, and knelt to pray to her nameless forebears.

  She was at the exit when she remembered the flower. The Lunar Border Agency got funny if you tried to bring Earth vegetation in. She left the flower on the steps to the temple.

  Then Chang E flew back to the moon.

  Pockets Full of Stones

  Vajra Chandrasekera

  Vajra Chandrasekera lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and his short stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Black Static, among others.

  THE GHOST OF my grandfather Rais flickered when he talked about first contact. He was a decade younger than me now, unwrinkled and black-haired, far from grandfatherly.

  Beside me, Hadil gestured for a pause. My grandfather’s ghost stopped talking, his features losing expression. The rich brown of his skin faded, became ghostlier, as the imago switched over to standby mode.

  “Dike,” Hadil said, nudging me unnecessarily. “You notice the flicker?”

  “Probably lost some frames in the cooker,” I said. Error-correction was tricky with neutrino-based communications over the light-years. The original Rais, very much alive, was extremely far away and travelling fast. “Did he say first contact?”

  “He did,” Hadil said. He took off his augmented-reality glasses to rub his temples. Without them, his eyes looked too big, the red veins standing out. Too much time behind the glasses. “But I think that’s all the time he’s going to spend on it, no matter how important it might be. He just wants to talk to you.”

  I would have argued, except it was true.

  Picked up a neutrino transmission, the ghost of Rais had said tiredly. Could be pulsar activity. Some talk of first contact. See attached update for details. As if that closed the matter. Then he had changed the subject to his obsession: the petition to open up a bandwidth allocation for family members of his twenty thousand fellow colonists on the Cây Cúc. The right to talk to the Earth they’d left behind.

  “Let me take a look at the attachment before Da Nang comes up,” Hadil said. On Makemake Station, we lived in epicycles. The station’s magnetic transmission horns tracked Earth in her orbit, waiting every day for the planet to spin Da Nang Mission Control into our line of sight so we could report home. There were a few hours left to go today.

  “Do you mind if—” I nodded at the silent ghost. Without his glasses on Hadil couldn’t see the imago, but it hadn’t moved since he paused it.

  “Go ahead,” Hadil said, getting up. “It’s your Grandpa. He probably spends the next twenty minutes crying about bandwidth and your Grandma, anyway.”

  I scowled at his back as he walked to the other side of the workroom, walking through all the phantom displays he couldn’t see without his glasses on: bright screens and blinking glyphs, the scale model of Makemake Station in the corner, the wall of clocks hovering in mid-air, my silent flickering grandfather, and my favorite Gauguin, D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Hadil had once complained it gave him nightmares, but I found it both soothing and ironically appropriate.

  I had pulled rank and kept it at full size, four meters wide in our shared virtual space. Hadil always sat facing away from it.

  As the relay station, the only link between Earth and her first colony ship, we could read the Updates from the Cây Cúc but they weren’t meant for us. Once we transmitted it back to Earth, it would be unpacked and pored over by analysts at Da Nang. This Update would have details about the mystery transmission, phrased carefully so that Da Nang wouldn’t think that the crew of the Cây Cúc was having a collective psychotic break. But there wouldn’t be much in the way of analysis from the Cây Cúc, just raw data. The time dilation meant they had no time to sit on information.

  And neither did I. Hadil could satisfy his curiosity, but I had laws to break and no time for hypothetical aliens.

  It couldn’t possibly be real aliens. They’ve probably discovered a new kind of pulsar.

  “You want coffee?” Hadil said.

  “No, thanks.”

  The slightly acrid smell of instant coffee filled the room. You couldn’t virtualize a kettle, Hadil always said. “Do we have any fresh fruit left?” I asked, not turning around.

  The fridge door opened and closed behind me. “Nope. Three days to the next supply drop.”

  When he first got here, Hadil had been a little shocked to discover what I was doing. Makemake Station was a two-person miniature civilization at the outer edge of the solar system. There could be no secrets here, so I had just told him: I was dipping into that precious bandwidth to talk to my grandfather on the Cây Cúc. A strange crime, I’d admitted, but a crime nevertheless. He could have reported me, had me shipped off back home, banned from space.

  But Da Nang was very political, even so many years after the troubles. He would be tainted by association, I had told him. I didn’t say that I would make sure of it. He wasn’t stupid. After a few months, he had relaxed. After his first year, we had become friends.

  Given enough time, all problems are solvable.

  “Oh, crap. Look at this,” Hadil said. He pushed an array of screens across the room in my direction, displacing my own virtual workspace. Process listings and system status monitors, bars in the green flickering up to angry reds.

  I rubbed my hands over my close-shaven scalp. “What did you do now?”

  “There was an executable binary in the Update,” Hadil moaned. “It was part of the signal they said they picked up.”

  “You opened an attachment…from space?”

  “No! I swear,” Hadil said. He sounded guilty. “Only in a sandbox. I was curious. I’m rebooting.”

  I waved at the illegal ghost of my grandfather to continue. Color bled back into the imago’s skin and light into his eyes.

  Dear Dikeledi, Rais said. Granddaughter. He kept looking down at the photo in his hands. I’d walked over and looked at it once, but it cycled through so many pictures of my grandmother and Mom as a baby that it came across blurry and indistinct in the imago. Please let me know about the petition. Has Da Nang given an answer? His voice was warm, a little too loud. Little puffs of air from the tiny speakers in my glasses, as if my too-young grandfather had his lips pressed to the soft skin behind my ear.

  If things had been different, I would have been one of the twenty thousand colonists. No, that wasn’t right—I wouldn’t even be born yet. If Rais had been allowed to take his wife, Abena, and their infant daughter along with him, my grandmother would be a young woman, my mother still a baby. I wouldn’t be born for another four hundred years.

  But he hadn’t been allowed to take them with him. Something happened, eighty years ago, while the family was preparing for departure. My grandmother wouldn’t speak of it except elliptically, to say that Rais made an enemy of someone powerful, someone in the junta, someone with control over the colonization project’s approvals board. I didn’t know exactly what it was that Rais had done to deserve this—Grandma Abena wouldn’t speak of it, and Mom didn’t know. It had been serious enough that after Rais left, Grandma Abena had changed her name and gone into hiding for a while. But by the time Mom was grown up, the urgency and the terror had faded. By the time I was born, it was only history.

  I could even appreciate the clever cruelty of it: to give him the choice of being part of the colony, but only if he went alone.

  A forced decision, made in haste. I distrusted haste. Decisions needed planning, strategy, not a wild leap into a dilemma constructed by somebody else. And it was still so recent for him, just a year and a half at relativistic speeds. A year and a half
of recent memories and regrets, against eighty years of half-forgotten family history for me.

  There had been no contact for all of that time, until he got that first message from me. An older woman who called him “grandfather” and told him that his wife and daughter had grown old and died, that I was his only family.

  I look forward very much to your next message, Rais said. Your last before you leave Makemake. Perhaps the petition will move faster when you are back in Da Nang.

  Rais kept pausing, as if expecting an answer. He wasn’t used to one-way messages yet, having only been doing them for a few weeks. His messages were full of awkward pauses and non sequiturs. Or perhaps the error correction at this range was poorer than I’d accounted for and parts were being lost. There was no way to tell.

  Family, under time dilation: he’d append a personal message to the Cây Cúc’s daily update; I’d get it every two months. I’d add a small personal message to the annual update from Makemake; he’d get one of those every week.

  When it ended, he would have spent a month talking to me. I would have spent five years, the full term of my contract on Makemake Station. It was almost done.

  I nudged Hadil. “Your spikes are on the host network now.” I’d just noticed the angry red spikes indicating increased activity on Makemake Station’s computers both physical and virtual.

  “Everything’s showing spikes,” Hadil said. “Except ops and life support.”

  “Those are physically separate networks,” I said, absently. The CPU temperature graph was climbing steadily. I’d missed something Rais said. I’d have to rewind him later.

  “Will you please switch off your Grandpa and check the logs?” I could hear the glare in Hadil’s voice. He was right, but I was reluctant to stop listening.