A brief smile flashed across Beatrix’s face. Then it went blank again.
“Yes, those are strong memories, Cara,” Ambus said. “She’ll remember them right up to the point of encorporation. After that, it’s even possible I may still retain a stray experience, a random memory, but I can’t guarantee any particular one will survive.”
Cara placed her hands over Beatrix’s. “Hey, Bea. Are you in there?”
“She’s in there,” Ambus answered. “Fully cognizant of everything you say.”
“Can’t she answer me?”
“I speak for her now.”
Cara paused.
“So will there be nothing left of her?”
“Of course!” Ambus said. “Her knowledge of nanotech, her facility with plants, a few random experiences. Her most useful skills will survive encorporation, creating a new me.”
“What about her dreams, Ambus?” Cara’s voice trembled. “What about her dreams of exploring the universe?”
He paused. “I’ve come to like it here on Titan, Cara. I can’t say …”
Juan Carlos shot her a look and glanced dramatically at his watch.
“Bea, honey,” Cara said, patting her hand. “I have to go, I’m sorry. Juan Carlos needs to be somewhere right now and I promised I’d accompany him.”
“That’s fine,” Ambus answered. “But Cara, you have to promise you’ll come visit again soon. Beatrix would love to see you again before encorporation is complete.”
Beatrix’s eyes remained rolled back in her head and a bit of clear drool oozed out of the corner of her mouth. Cara couldn’t bear to see her like this. But she would never abandon her friend in the final moments of her life.
“Of course I’ll be back, Bea.” She leaned in close and whispered in her ear. “We’ll go to the lake again and you can sit on the shore and watch while I dive for perpuffers for us, okay?” She felt the tears well up and fought them back.
“Cara,” Juan Carlos said softly. “We should get going.”
She took a deep breath and waved goodbye to her friend, wondering how much of her would remain when next they met.
ENCRYPTED Med. Journal Entry No. 228 by Dr Juan Carlos Barbarón: Cutting the tether of mated Wergens results in an instantaneous loss of identity, followed by a rapid and painful death.
The smog that blanketed Titan was thinner than usual on this day. So much so that Cara could almost make out the outline of ringed Saturn filling half the sky. In all of her years of living on Titan this was the first time she’d ever seen the planet with her naked eye. Its proximity caused the tidal winds that drove down from the poles towards the equator.
She felt awkward visiting Beatrix’s hearth. So much time had passed that her friend was certainly long gone by now. Damn Juan Carlos. She would never forgive herself for allowing him to keep her away all this time. She had made a promise and she would keep it. If nothing else, she owed it to Beatrix’s memory.
As she followed the winding trail down a steep hill toward the familiar hearth, she slowed down. What if encorporation wasn’t complete? What if pieces of Bea were still visible? She imagined the segments of an arm jutting out of Ambus’s chest, two half-heads merged together into a disfigured monstrosity. She wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of it.
No, more than a year had passed. She began walking again.
When she got within twenty feet of the hearth, four Wergen children raced out through the archway in her direction. They ran in circles around her, saying “Good morning” and “Can we help you?” over and over.
She stooped down. “Are you Beatrix’s children?”
One of the thicker, squatter females said, “My name is Antillia. Ambus is our father.”
“Is he inside?”
The children nodded excitedly and followed close behind her.
When she entered the hearth’s archway, Ambus stood there as if expecting her, even after all this time.
“I knew you would come,” Ambus said. There was no longer any sign of the Ambus she remembered, the Wergen who spurned all contact with humanity. He threw his arms around her and she hugged him back. He looked different. Thinner. And his scales had familiar flicks of silver.
He guided her into the fireroom, where a transparent tube that ran from floor to ceiling blazed with flames. “Your children are beautiful, Ambus,” she said.
The Wergen children tittered and whispered to each other.
“I need to speak alone with Cara for a moment,” he said to them and they slowly, reluctantly left the fireroom staring over their shoulders at her, trying to sneak one final glance.
Housebots skittered at Cara’s feet, taking away her boots while others brought in a tray with a cup of steaming spicy sap.
“How is Juan Carlos?” he asked as they took their seats in front of the roaring fire column at the center of the room.
“I broke off our engagement.”
Ambus gasped.
“He was so possessive. So secretive about his work at Biotech. I thought I could change him. But it didn’t happen.” She set down her cup of cider-sap. “He didn’t like it when I visited with friends, when I did anything without him. And I went along with what he wanted. I started to feel … suffocated. I couldn’t continue living that way, under someone else’s thumb. I didn’t like the person I was becoming.”
Ambus stared incredulously. After a long pause, he said, “Sometimes I forget how truly alien you are.”
She smiled. “No, of course you wouldn’t understand.”
They drank their sap and all the while Ambus leaned forward on his elbows and fixated on her every word; he offered her food; he asked whether she wanted him to feed the flames so she could luxuriate in the warmth of the fire column.
“Are you sure I can’t get you something else?” Ambus said.
The initial joy Cara felt at being back in Beatrix’s hearth began to drain away as she listened to Ambus’s steady stream of fatuous remarks. She had to face the bittersweet truth: her best friend was gone forever. It could never be the same with just any other Wergen. She couldn’t imagine herself without Beatrix. Before she even realized it, she started to cry.
“Cara, what is it?”
“I was thinking about something you told me once. That it was unfair of me to have remained friends with Beatrix for so many years.” She wiped away the tears and regained her composure. “I think you may have been right. I should have … freed her of her biochemical shackles.”
“Again, I wasn’t myself at the time. I had taken the suppressant, which skewed my perception of reality. Please forget about what I said to you. It was unkind of me.”
“Unkind, but true.”
“Cara … did Beatrix explain what happened to my suppressants?”
Cara recalled their conversation on the lakeshore, when Beatrix had explained how she’d found where Ambus hid the drugs and destroyed them. “Yes, she kept them from you.”
“On the day that we met you at the shore …” Ambus paused as if considering the consequences of his words. “Beatrix had taken the suppressants herself.”
“What?”
“She said she wanted to have … a better understanding of her relationship with you, Cara. Its effects were temporary—only a matter of minutes—but in those minutes she experienced a clear understanding of her true feelings.”
Cara dreaded asking, but she did. “And how did she really feel about me in that moment of clarity?”
“She never told me. And the memory didn’t survive encorporation. I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
After an extended, awkward silence, they talked about other subjects: politics, the terrorist attacks on the Martian settlement, the rumored abandonment of the Langalanan outpost, the future of human-Wergen colonization efforts. And so on. And when it came time for her to leave, Cara knew that she would never return here again.
As she stood and the bots re-laced her boots, Ambus said, “Before you go, there’s something I need to give you.
” A few seconds later a bot entered the room carrying a small metal box. “Beatrix wanted you to have this.”
“It’s a stasis box,” Cara said. She carefully lifted the lid and looked inside.
A purple perpuffer sat at its center.
“Beatrix preserved it for so many months,” Ambus said. “I don’t understand its significance.”
Cara slipped it onto her wrist. Removing it from the stasis box meant that the perpuffer wouldn’t last for more than a day or two before decaying. But it didn’t matter.
“Thank you, Ambus,” she said softly.
Ambus tilted his head to the left in a familiar manner, and nodded.
As Cara made her way out the exit archway, she told herself she’d never see this hearth again. But after only a few seconds she couldn’t resist looking back over her shoulder. She saw Ambus out in front, surrounded by the four Wergen children, all of them staring raptly at her as she trudged through the methane snowdrifts.
Wahala
NNEDI OKORAFOR
Nnedi Okorafor (www.nnedi.com) is a novelist of Nigerian descent who lives in the Chicago suburbs with her daughter; she is a professor of Creative Writing at Chicago State University. She is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled, “Weapons of Mass Creation,” The New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning.” Her novels include Who Fears Death (winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), Akata Witch Witch (a 2011 Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award). She’s also written one children’s book titled Long Juju Man (winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa). Her chapter book, Iridessa and the Secret of the Never Mine (Disney Press), is scheduled for release in 2012.
“Wahala” was published in the original anthology Living on Mars, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Set in the Sahara desert in a post-apocalyptic future, local people, colonists, are returning in a ship from Mars, as if from the past. Several mutant humans await their arrival. The protagonist is a plucky telepathic teenage Nigerian girl reminiscent of characters in Zenna Henderson’s stories of The People.
I wasn’t lost. I wanted to cross “The Frying Pan of the World, Where Hell Meets Earth.” I was fighting my way through this part of the Sahara on purpose. I needed to prove to my parents that I could do it. That I, their sixteen-year-old abomination of a daughter, could survive in a place where many people died. My parents believed I was meant to die easily because I shouldn’t have been born in the first place. If I survived, it would prove to them wrong.
The sun was going down and the “frying pan” was thankfully cooling. Plantain, my camel, was walking at her usual steady pace. We’d left Jos three days ago and we were still days from our destination, Agadez. I’d traveled the desert many times … well, with my parents, though, and not here. I was okay, for now.
I was staring at the small screen of my e-legba, trying to forget the fact that I might have made a terrible mistake in running away and coming out here. It was picking up the only netcast available in the region, Naija News.
“Breaking News! Breaking News, o!” a sweating newscaster said in English. He stared into the camera with bulging eyes. He was wearing an ill-fitting Western-style suit. It was obviously the reason for his profuse sweating.
I chuckled. Everything on Naija News was “breaking news”. Drama was the bread and butter of Nigerians. Even our news was suspenseful and theatrical. It was why our movies were the best and our government was the worst. I laughed. I missed home.
“Make sure you listen to what I am about to say, o! Then turn to those beside you and tell them! Tell everybody,” the man stressed. Spit flew from his mouth, hitting the camera lens as he spoke. He wiped his brow with a white handkerchief. I could see individual beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “This is no laughing matter, o!”
“Let me guess,” I muttered. “Another farmer! has lost his flock of goats in a spontaneous forest. Someone’s house! is infested with a sparkling lizard. Another boy! turned into a giant yam.” I smiled, ignoring my chapped lips. This kind of “breaking news” happened all the time.
“It’s heading this way right now!” the anchorman said. He clumsily held the microphone and wiped his brow again. He switched to Igbo. “This is utterly unbelievable!”
I laughed loudly. So unprofessional! How many of his viewers would understand that?
He coughed, smiled sheepishly, and switched back to English. “A space shuttle carrying people from the Mars Colony is going to land in the Sahara, o! These people had been on a spacecraft for months! Cooped up like chicken! It landed on the moon. From there they got on to the space shuttle to return to Earth. Communication with the shuttle has been spotty but we know where it will land.” He moved closer to the camera, turned his head to the side, and opened his eyes wider. “If you encounter it, do not approach. Biko nu, stay away! Help will arrive. Officials will be there in two or three days! Don’t—”
The picture distorted and the sound cut off. From far off came a deep boom! I felt the vibration in my chest, like a huge talking drum. Plantain growled. “Shh.” I patted her hump. “Relax.”
She stopped and I jumped off, looking to the south. I saw nothing but sky and sand for miles. A startled desert fox family was running across the sand about two miles away. I looked into the sky with my sharp eyes. There. About fifteen miles away.
“Oh,” I whispered.
Within seconds, it zoomed overhead like a giant white eagle. Plantain groaned loudly as she dropped to the sand. I knelt beside her, craning my head and shielding my eyes from the dust it whipped up. It was flying so low that I could have hit it with a stone. This was the first flying aircraft I’d ever seen. I watched it land a few miles away, sliding to a stop in the sand.
It was a snap judgment, though it came from deep within me. “Let’s go see!” I said to my camel, climbing on. “Before all the ambulances, government officials, technicians, and journalists show up!” I was in the middle of nowhere. It really would be days before anyone got here. I couldn’t believe my luck. People from Mars!
As we headed there, I felt a pinch of embarrassment. I wondered if those onboard knew what we had done to ourselves here on Earth while they were away. People had been living on Mars for decades before the Great Change. We should have been super advanced like the people in those old science fiction books, jumping from planet to planet, that sort of thing. Instead we had destroyed the Earth because of stupid politics and misunderstandings.
I wanted to go inside the shuttle and breathe its trapped air. After so many years, that air wouldn’t be Earth air. I am a shadow speaker. My large catlike eyes, my “reading” abilities, they’re extraordinary, but they are all because of the Great Change, aka stupid human error. I’m as tainted by nuclear and peace bombs as one can get. I was born this way. But those on that ship hadn’t been here when it happened. They were untouched. I wanted to see and touch them. And I wanted to read them.
Some of them were probably born on Mars. What had it been, over forty years since anyone last heard from the colonies?
“Faster, Plantain!” I shouted, laughing.
“I don’t believe this,” I muttered, my heart sinking.
Already, a small spontaneous forest had sprung up around the shuttle, enshrouding it with palm trees, bushes, and a small pond to its left. Vines had even begun to creep up the sides of the shuttle. I guess this was the Earth’s way of welcoming it home. The sun was now completely down and there were several sunflowers opening up near the bottom of the ship.
Plantain slowed her stride when we reached the trees. An owl hooted and crickets and katydids sang. An instant oasis in the middle of the Sahara. Yet another result of human idiocy. I’d known spontaneous forests all my life, but their spontaneity and inappropriateness always bothered me. It wasn’t
hard to imagine a time when this was not normal.
I looked around cautiously, ready for anything. I couldn’t tell if this was the type of forest that was full of stuff like stinging insects and rotten fruit or stuff like succulent strange vegetables and colorful butterflies. We passed a tree heavy with rather normal looking green mangos. That was a good sign.
The shuttle was about the size of an American football field. It took us a while to amble all the way around it. Not one opening. It was night, but I could see perfectly in the dark, another shadow speaker privilege. I knocked on the ship’s white metal skin. No response. Minutes passed. Nothing happened.
I was exhausted. We’d been traveling for hours before seeing the ship. I’d been so excited that I hadn’t eaten or been hydrating myself properly. Stupid. Suddenly, all at once, my neglect disarmed me. I fell to my knees, weak. Plantain trotted to the small pond and started drinking. Eventually, Plantain returned to me, gently clasped the collar of my dress with her teeth, dragged me to the water, and dumped me in the shallow part.
I laughed weakly. The water was cold. “Okay, okay,” I said, pushing myself up. Cupping some of the water in my hands, I looked closely at it, searching for bacteria or strange microorganisms that might make me sick. The water was wonderfully fresh and clean, so much better than the water my capture station pulled from the clouds. I drank like crazy.
After having my fill, I laid my mat under a tree, sat down, and ate some bread and dried goat meat as I gazed at the ship. Don’t they want to come out? I wondered. They had to have been on that shuttle for weeks. I brushed my teeth and lay down. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought, Tomorrow.
I woke an hour later to Plantain’s soft warning grunt. I opened my eyes to a star-filled sky. Something was humming and splashing in the pond. I listened harder. It sounded like a person. Finally. Someone’s come out, I thought, sitting up. But the shuttle looked as it had an hour ago, no openings anywhere. Maybe the door’s on the other side? I crept to the pond for a better look.
Year's Best SF 17 Page 8
