The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  I can destroy the canvas, he said, voice flat and scraped clean of emotion. It was the first real painting he’d done since he left the crèche. But he couldn’t look at it. When he did, his flesh crawled.

  No. Don’t do that. Hide it.

  He nodded. It’s a decent painting.

  Yeah. Not bad. You worked out the kinks.

  He knocked his head against the wall behind him. Wood was harder than it looked. He swung his head harder.

  Stop that.

  There’s no point, Marta. Those brawlers are going to find me.

  No, they won’t. And chances are good the tribunal will rule in your favor. We have to be patient.

  Even if I get to live in Beijing, people will still find out what I did.

  They’ll assume you had no choice. Everyone knows Luna is the most dangerous place in the solar system.

  I did have a choice—

  Marta interrupted. It was a mistake. An accident. It could happen to any hockey player.

  I aimed for Dorgon’s neck.

  You did what you were taught, and so did Dorgon. Playing hockey isn’t the only way to die on Luna. If you live in a place where getting killed is accepted as a possible outcome, then you also accept that you might become a killer.

  But we don’t understand what it means.

  No. Marta looked sad. No, we don’t.

  • • • •

  The day after he’d killed Dorgon, Zhang Lei’s team hauled him to a surgeon. Twenty minutes was all it took to install the noose around his carotid artery, then two minutes to connect the disable button and process the change to his ID. His teammates were as gentle as they could be. When it was all done, the team’s enforcer clasped Zhang Lei’s shoulder in a meaty hand.

  “We test it now,” Korchenko said, and Zhang Lei had gone down like a slab of meat.

  When he woke, his friends looked concerned, sympathetic, even a little regretful.

  That attitude didn’t last long. After the surgery, the team traveled to a game in Surgut. Zhang Lei’s disable button was line-of-sight. Anyone who could see it could trigger it. He passed out five times along the way, and spent most of the game slumped on the bench, head lolling, his biom working hard to keep him from brain damage. His teammates had to carry him home.

  For a few weeks, they treated him like a mascot, hauling him from residence to practice rink to arena and back again. They soon tired of it and began leaving him behind. The first time he went out alone he came back on a cargo float, with a shattered jaw and boot-print-shaped bruises on his gut. That was okay. He figured he deserved it.

  Then one night after an embarrassing loss, the team began hitting the button for fun. First Korchenko, as a joke. Then the others. Didn’t take long for Zhang Lei to become their new punching bag. So he ran. Hid out in Sklad’s lower levels, pulling temporary privacy veils over his ID every fifteen minutes to keep the team from tracking him. When they were busy at the arena warming up for a game, he bolted for Harbin.

  He passed out once on the way to the nearest intra-hab connector, but the brawler who hit his disable button was old and drunk. Zhang Lei collected a few kicks to the ribs and one to the balls before the drunk staggered off. Nobody else took the opportunity to get their licks in, but nobody helped him, either.

  Boarding the connector, he got lucky. A crèche manager was transferring four squalling newborns, and the crib’s noise-dampening tech was broken. The pod emptied out—just him and the crèche manager. She ignored him all the way to Harbin. He kept his distance, but when they got to their destination, he followed her into the bowels of the hab. She was busy with the babies and didn’t notice at first. But when he joined her in an elevator, she got scared.

  “What do you want?” she demanded, her voice high with tension.

  He tried to explain, but she was terrified. That big red label on his button—KILLER—FAIR GAME—didn’t fill people with confidence in his character. She hit the button hard, several times. He spent an hour on the floor of the elevator, riding from level to level, and came to with internal bleeding, a cracked ocular orbit, three broken ribs, and a vicious bite mark on his left buttock.

  He limped down to the lowest level, where they put the crèches, and found his old crèche manager. She was gray, stooped, and much more frail than he remembered.

  “Zhang Lei.” She put a gentle palm on his head—the only place that didn’t hurt. “I was your first cuddler. I decanted you myself. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

  If he cried then, he never admitted it.

  • • • •

  Zhang Lei watched Jen Dla carry a pot of soup into the dining room. She moved awkwardly, shifting her balance around that bulbous gut. He couldn’t understand it. Why hadn’t she had an operation to remove the tumor? Her mother was even a surgeon.

  Terminal, he guessed, and then realized he’d been staring.

  Jen Dla nestled the pot on the stove in the middle of the table, and lit the flame. He caught the chef’s eye as she adjusted the temperature of the burner.

  “Your father must be an important man here in Paizuo,” he said.

  Jen Dla laughed.

  “He certainly thinks so.” She laid her hand on the embroidered blouse draped over her bulging abdomen. “Fathers get more self-important with every new grandchild.”

  She tapped her finger on her stomach. Zhang Lei sat back in his chair, abruptly. She wasn’t sick, but pregnant—actually bearing a child.

  “Are all Miao children body-birthed?” he blurted.

  She looked a little offended. “Miao who choose to live in Paizuo generally like to follow tradition.”

  Abrupt questions leapt behind his teeth—does it hurt, are you frightened—but her expression was forbidding.

  “Congratulations,” he said. She smiled and returned to her kitchen.

  After talking to Marta, he’d taken the painting down to his room and hidden it under the bed, then collapsed into dream-clouded sleep. The arena at Sklad, deserted, the vast spread of ice all his own. The blades of his skates cut the surface as he built speed, gathered himself, and launched into a quad, spinning through the air so fast the flesh of his face pulled away and snapped back into place on landing. He jumped, spun, jumped again.

  Dreams of power and joy, ruined on waking. He’d pulled the painting from under his bed and hid it behind the sofa in the guest house lounge.

  Jen Dla’s soup began to bubble. Tomatoes bobbed in the sour rice broth. Zhang Lei watched the fish turn opaque as it cooked, then pinged one word at the three artists upstairs—lunch. They clattered down.

  “Looked like you were having a productive session yesterday,” Prajapati said. “Good to see.”

  “Don’t stop the flow,” Han Song added.

  Paul grinned. “Nothing artists love more than giving unwanted advice.”

  “It’s called encouragement,” said Prajapati. “And it’s especially important for young artists.”

  “Young competitors, you mean.”

  “I don’t see it that way.” She turned to Zhang Lei. “Do you?”

  All three artists watched him expectantly. Zhang Lei stared at his hands resting on the wooden tabletop. He’d forgotten to roll down his sleeves. His forearms were exposed, the scarred skin dotted with pigment. He put his hands in his lap.

  “I think the fish is ready,” he said.

  After lunch, while exploring for new compositions, he found Jen Dang behind the guest house. The water buffalo—one of the first creatures he’d looked up on his seer—was tethered to a post by a loop of rope through its nose. It was huge, lavishly muscled, and heavy, with ridged, back-curving horns, but it stood placidly as Jen Dang examined its hooves.

  “Stay back,” Jen Dang said. “Water buffalo aren’t as friendly as they look. He’s not a pet.”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Zhang Lei. When he’d sketched the water buffalo, a stern warning had popped into his eye: Do not approach. Will trample, gouge, and kick.

 
He lifted his viewcatcher and captured a composition: Jen Dang stooping with his back turned to the water buffalo, drawing its massive hindquarter between his own legs and trapping the hoof between his knees.

  “All he has to do is back up, and you’ll get squashed,” said Zhang Lei.

  “He knows me.” Jen Dang dropped the hoof and patted the animal’s rump. “And he knows the best part of his day is about to begin.”

  The farmer untied the rope from the post and led the animal up the narrow trail behind the houses. Zhang Lei followed. A bird stalked from between the trees, its red, gold, and blue body trailing long, spotted brown tail feathers. His seer tagged it: Golden Pheasant, followed by a symbol that meant major symbolic and cultural importance to the indigenous people at this geographical location. Which was no different from most of the plants and animals the seer had identified.

  “So, I’ve been using a seer,” he said, as if his rice paddy conversation with Jen Dang had happened that morning instead of days ago. “It doesn’t explain anything. Why is every butterfly important to Miao but not the flies? Why one species of bee but not the other?”

  “The butterfly is our mother,” Jen Dang said.

  “No, it’s not. That’s ridiculous.”

  “I might ask you who your mother is, if I were young and rude, and didn’t know better.”

  “I don’t have a mother. I was detanked.”

  “That means you’re the product of genetic advection, from a tightly edited stream of genetic material subscribed to by your crèche. How is that less strange than having a butterfly mother?”

  “Is the butterfly thing a metaphor?”

  Jen Dang glanced over his shoulder, his gaze cold. “If you like.”

  The water buffalo lipped the tail of Jen Dang’s shirt. He tapped its nose with the palm of his hand to warn it off. The trail widened as it began to climb a high ridge. The water buffalo was heavy but strong. It heaved itself up the slope, like a boulder rolling uphill. Jen Dang ran alongside to keep pace, so Zhang Lei ran after. The exertion felt good, scrambling uphill against the full one-point-zero, with two workout partners. So what if one of them was an animal? Zhang Lei would take what he could get.

  When the trail widened, he took the chance to sprint ahead. He made it to the top of the ridge a full ten seconds before the water buffalo. Jen Dang looked him up and down.

  “Not bad. Most guests are slow.”

  Zhang Lei grinned. “I train in the dubs.”

  “Dubs?”

  “Double Earth-normal gravity. You know. For strength.”

  “I never would have guessed.”

  “I know,” Zhang Lei said eagerly. “I look bottom-heavy, right? Narrow above a wide butt and thick legs. That’s what makes me a good skater.”

  Shut up, Marta hissed in his ear. But he couldn’t stop. Finally a real conversation.

  “I train for optimal upper body flexibility, like all center forward play—”

  One twinge in his throat, that’s all it took to send Zhang Lei plummeting to the ground. He twisted and rolled when he hit the dirt—away from the edge of the hill, and then the world faded to mist.

  • • • •

  Zhang Lei clawed his way to consciousness.

  You’re fine, you’re fine, nobody’s touched you.

  Okay, he mumbled.

  You’ve only been down five minutes, Marta added. Tell him you have a seizure disorder and your neurologist is fine-tuning your treatment protocol. Say it.

  Zhang Lei struggled to focus. His eyelids fluttered as he tried to form the words.

  “I get seizures.” He licked his lips. “Doc’s working on it.”

  Jen Dang said something. Zhang Lei forced his eyes to stay open. He was collapsed on his side, cheek pressed to the dirt. Three ants crawled not ten centimeters from his eye. He flopped onto his back to read the farmer’s word balloon.

  “Your medical advisory said it wasn’t an emergency, and I shouldn’t touch you.” Behind Jen Dang, the water buffalo cast a lazy brown eye over him and shook its head.

  Tell him you’ll be fine, Marta demanded. Ask him not to mention it to anyone.

  “I’m fine.” Zhang Lei pushed himself onto his elbows, then to his knees. “Don’t talk about this, okay?”

  The farmer looked dubious. He gathered the water buffalo’s lead rope.

  “I’ll walk you back to the studio.”

  “No.” Zhang Lei jumped to his feet. “There’s nothing wrong with me. It won’t happen again.”

  Better not, Marta grumbled.

  Zhang Lei led the way up the trail. Jen Dang followed. The water buffalo wasn’t dawdling anymore, it was moving fast, nearly trotting. The track converged on a single-lane paved road, which snaked up the valley in a series of switchbacks. They were higher now, the guest houses far below, and everywhere, rice terraces brimmed with ripening grain yellow as the sun. He could paint those terraces with slabs of cadmium yellow. Maybe he would.

  “Which way?”

  Zhang Lei needn’t have asked. The water buffalo turned onto the road and trundled uphill. Before long, the slope gentled. Houses lined the road, with gardens and rice paddies behind. The road ended at a circular courtyard patterned with dark and light stones and half-bounded by a stream. At the far end, a footbridge arched over the water, leading to more houses beyond.

  The animal’s tail switched back and forth. It trotted toward the water, splayed hooves clopping on the courtyard’s patterned surface. A hygiene sweeper darted out of its path. At the stream’s edge, where the courtyard’s stone patterns gave way to large, dark slabs, the water buffalo paused, lowered its head, and stepped into the water.

  A man called out from one of the houses across the bridge. Jen Dang shouted a reply. No word balloon appeared.

  Jen Dang offered the lead rope to Zhang Lei.

  “He’ll stay in the water. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  Zhang Lei leaned on the bridge railings, flipping the rope to keep it from tangling in the animal’s horns as it luxuriated in the water below. The stream wasn’t deep, only a meter or so, but the beast lay on its side and rolled, keeping its white beard, eyes, and horns above water.

  When Jen Dang returned, the water buffalo was scratching its long, drooping ear on a half-submerged rock. Zhang Lei kept the rope.

  “It’s fun,” he said. “Best part of my day, too.”

  The farmer sauntered across the courtyard and joined a pair of friends working in the shade of a mulberry tree.

  Zhang Lei composed a series of canvases. The water buffalo with its eyelids lowered in pleasure, lips parted to reveal a gleaming row of bottom teeth. Three women in bright blue blouses weaving in an open workshop, their silver torques flashing. A man in deep indigo embroidered with pink and silver diamonds, sorting through a table piled with feathers. Jen Dang leaning on a low stone wall, deep in conversation with two friends using gleaming axes to chop lengths of bamboo. A white-haired woman in an apron stirring a barrel of viscous liquid with a wooden paddle. A battery of pink-cheeked, scrubbed children racing across the courtyard as a golden pheasant stalked in the opposite direction. A row of cabbages beside the road. Herbs clinging to a slate outcropping. A dragonfly skipping over the water. The tallest peak puncturing the western horizon like a fang on the underjaw of a huge beast.

  Aesthetically pleasing, peaceful, picturesque. But all communities had tensions and contradictions. Only a Miao could identify the deeper meaning in these scenes. Only a great artist could paint the picturesque and make it important. He wasn’t Miao and he was no great artist. Could he capture the water buffalo’s expression of ecstasy as it pawed the water? Not likely. But he could paint the mountain. Nothing more banal than another mountain view. But he loved that unnamed peak. He’d loved Mons Hadley, too.

  Jen Dang waved. A word balloon blossomed over his head: Let’s go.

  He jiggled the rope. The water buffalo ignored him. He flapped it, then gave the gentlest of tugs. The buffalo snort
ed and heaved itself out of the water. It stood there dripping for a moment, then its skin shivered. It lowered its head, shaking its great bulk and coating Zhang Lei in a local rainstorm.

  Zhang Lei wiped his face on his sleeve. The men were still laughing when he joined them. Nothing more fun than watching a rookie fall on his ass.

  Jen Dang was still chatting. Zhang Lei waited nearby, in the shade of a house. Along the wall was a metal cage much like the one behind the guest house. A rooster stalked back and forth, its face, comb, and wattle bright red, its bare breast and scraggly back caked with clean, healing sores. It stared at Zhang Lei with a malevolent orange eye, lifted one fiercely-taloned yellow leg, and flipped its water dish.

  “Stupid bird,” Zhang Lei muttered.

  Around the corner was another cage, another rooster in similar condition, its comb sliced in dangling pieces. When it screamed—raucous, belligerent—the other bird answered. Zhang Lei knew an exchange of challenges when he heard it.

  “Are these fighting cocks?” he asked when Jen Dang joined him.

  “You don’t have them on Luna?” he answered.

  Shit, whispered Marta. Tell him you’re from the Sol Belt. You’ve never been to Luna.

  Why don’t you hit my disable button again? Load me on a cargo float and stick me in a hole somewhere? Or better yet—a cage. Evict one of the birds and get me my own dish of water.

  I might have to do that. Listen kid, it’s never been more important for you to be discreet.

  Why? Are they coming for me?

  Silence.

  They are, aren’t they? Answer me.

  A Lunite team tracked you to the Danzhai roadhouse, but don’t worry. We’ve got people on the ground, planting rumors to lure them to Guiyang. Even if they don’t take the bait, Danzhai County has lots of towns and villages. You’re still safe.

  “I’m from the Sol Belt,” he told Jen Dang. “I’ve never been to Luna.”

  The farmer didn’t look convinced.

  Zhang Lei’s hand stole up to his throat. Under his jaw, where his pulse pounded, the hard mass of the noose waited to choke off his life.

  • • • •