Tides From the New Worlds

by Tobias S. Buckell

  There was food in berries and roots. Other animals sometimes came towards me, but I ran from them. They were dangerous and rough. They were not like the docile animals in the land we were taken from to bond with the aerokratois.

  My fur soon became shaggy, matted, and long. My skin ached for anakoinosis.

  • • •

  A gang was working on the edge of a new road. They jumped when I came out from behind a tree. I had visions in my mind of being a master to other whiffets. I thought about being alone, and that maybe I could spread the memory to other whiffets. If they were like me, alone and their own masters, but with me, maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely.

  Was this what it was like to be an aerokrat? I wondered.

  A cool wind blew over us and rustled the falling leaves on the ground.

  I held my hands out.

  “Do not be alarmed.”

  “Who are you?” they wished to know. I showed them my tatoo and told them I had lived near the Hopper.

  “Such thick fur!” they said. They gathered around me. “We have not had time for anakoinosis for a while. We have worked so long and hard.”

  I stroked their arms.

  “Then let us,” I said. “All of our fur is thick.”

  They found me strange, but relaxed enough to let me into the group. Our egg was thick when it formed on the ground by our feet.

  “We’ll give it to our aerokratois,” they insisted afterwards.

  The road was getting hotter as the sun rose higher into the sky.

  “No,” I told them. “I will take this one.”

  They were shocked.

  “You are too similar.”

  “I know.”

  They watched, quiet, as I took our egg with me deep into the forest.

  • • •

  When my child hatched several weeks later he stood up, full with pieces of my own knowledge and the knowledge of the road crews and the knowledge of all their foreparents.

  He didn’t bond with me. Just like I had been free since Bob killed himself, my own child was somewhat free. I could see that he was a bit confused, and that he had much on his mind. Just as I did.

  We stood with each other for a long while.

  “We should go find other road crews,” my child finally said. “If we both have anakoinosis with others, then others can be their own masters with us.”

  I was happy he felt the same way I did, and did not feel so alone.

  My child told me where the nearest work camps where, and we split company to spread our new revelation.

  • • •

  It was a rainy day when I found the work camp.

  The sun remained almost invisible behind the clouds, but it occasionally broke out to illuminate the rows of tents behind the barbwire. Several aerokratois walked around the edges of the camp, giving orders to the multitudes of whiffets bonded to them.

  I stopped. I was about to return to being ruled by the aerokratois in there. Maybe it was better to stay in the wilderness, taking eggs from work gangs. It would be better to remain free, and spread my memories, than return to a work camp.

  The memories of my foreparents bonded to aerokratois overwhelmed me, telling me to return to the camp. The memories of foreparents who where their own masters remained distant.

  It was comforting to think about returning to a workgang, and being told what to do, and when to do it.

  Would I ever be my own master again?

  The desire for anakoinosis tugged at me, and with a strange feeling in my stomach I walked to the edge of the camp. At the gates I stood in the mud and the aerokratois let me in.

  My fur was thick with dirt.

  The aerokratois were such exciting creatures. They brought these new concepts, new behaviors, and many other things we never could have come up with. I had so many things to learn from them yet. It was good that I was returning, I reassured myself.

  There were many whiffets in the camp behind the sharp wires.

  I hugged the first one to reach his arms out to me behind one of the tents. I touched his cheeks to mine and shared my memories of my foreparents, my life, and Bob’s strange gift to me.

  I wondered if there would ever be stasis again, now that I was trapped inside the camp, working for the aerokratois again. I hoped my child spread some of the very new thoughts Bob gave me.

  Those memories would never die, but live on. My fur fell to the muddy ground as I gave new memories to another.

  • • •

  The next morning I was woken by an aerokrat with red hair. He handed me a pick.

  “We’ll be breaking rock, today, whiffet,” he grinned. I was slow to stand up, so he yanked me to my feet with a shout, hurting my arms.

  As I walked out into the sun, blinking, I knew, deep within me, that the longer we worked for the aerokratois, the sooner we will become just like them.

  Then both would have true anakoinosis.

  Aerophilia

  These first few sentences of Aerophilia are the closest you’ll come in my fiction to words that would come right out of my mouth. Letting a narrator intrude this much is self-indulgent, I feel, but this entire story’s setting is complete, heaped on piles of self-indulgence. I love airships, and any excuse to feature them in a unique setting is a great deal of fun.

  It is the greatest shame to me that the world’s first air disaster captured on tape, was of one of the more majestic and amazing methods of flight. A horrible PR disaster, it snatched lighter than air travel away from the rest of us.

  But who knows, maybe on another world, in another time…

  “You know, the thing about zeppelins is that they got a bad rap,” Vince says. He’s actually twirling a virtual mustache. Nutjob. “I mean, in the famous ‘Oh, the humanity’ accident only thirty-five passengers died. Out of ninety seven!”

  He steps forward and looks at me critically.

  “Ever heard of a sixty-four percent survival rate in any crash? Space or air?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, but turns around. “No!” I can’t answer him anyway. My mouth is gagged with a rubber ball and strap, and my hands are cuffed. My lips are starting to dry out and stick to the black rubber ball.

  The key to the handcuffs has been flushed out of the airship through the toilet. It’s probably still falling, and will fall for a few hours more until crushed into liquid metal by the deadly atmosphere far below us. It would continue falling, being crushed even smaller, until it joined the great diamond core of the gas giant that was Riley.

  Or so some physicists I once saw quoted in a touristy introduction to Riley had said.

  Four passengers sitting on the side of the gondola stare at me with wide eyes. They’re local colonists. Three guys in tuxedos on their way to a party and a lady in a hoop skirt and purple plastic corset. Probably lived all of their lives in any one of the aerostat cities on Riley’s upper atmospheres. They’ve certainly never seen a down on his luck spacer like me, likely because there has never been such a thing as a down on his luck spacer. It’s almost oxymoronic.

  “On a planet like this,” Vince continues, “Zeppelins are too useful to ignore. But I think the colonists are missing something.”

  The colonists: they look at me as if I am crazy. And from their perspective it can’t be too far off, right? What they’ve seen with their normal, unaugmented, fleshy eyeballs has been me, and only me, boarding their dirigible for a regular flight from one city to another. Routine for them, until I knocked out their pilot, took over the airship, and reprogrammed the ship’s destination to somewhere deep into the atmosphere of Riley.

  “Nobody try to fly this ship, or call for help, or you’ll all regret it,” I’d announced. Then I’d stuffed a ball gag in my mouth, handcuffed myself, and slumped into the corner of the gondola.

  The problem being, from my side, is that my Id is a total asshole. He hates my guts. We split up yesterday and he hijacks my skull today in retaliation.

  So I’m not really me right now. And no one els
e can see Vince. He’s just a computer-induced hallucination inside my own skull. I work up some spit to try and moisten the ball gag a bit. Drool runs down my lips, and one of the men across from me shakes his head in disgust.

  • • •

  Even though Vince is using my own body-wide neural network against me to induce hallucinations and control my motor movement, I can still access some basic functions. I dial out of the airship and make a call. As a spacer I’m totally cyborged, constantly seeing and interacting with information laid over every thing I see.

  I manage to contact my ex-girlfriend’s secretary persona. A virtual image pastes itself in the left corner of the inside of my artificial eyes.

  The persona looks just like Suzie as I remember her sixty years ago: blond, brown eyes, but more digitized. It laughs when it sees me.

  “You look exactly as we remember you,” it says.

  My hopes lift.

  “I need help,” I subvocalize. “Can I talk to Suzie?” The secretary mimics sitting back and folding her arms. Lifts an eyebrow.

  “Why in hell would we want to talk to you?”

  “I’m in trouble.” My subvocal throat grunts get another disgusted look from the colonists in the actual gondola. In the picture in my head the secretary leans forward.

  Somewhere between the two I can see Vince flickering as he paces around the edge of the gondola, muttering to himself. He passes through one of the colonists, like a ghost.

  “You’re always in trouble, Vincent,” the secretary says.

  “Yeah, but now I’m in really deep. I need Suzie’s help.”

  A click.

  Then it’s Suzie. The real Suzie.

  “Hello?”

  The secretary fades away. I try to clear my throat, gag, and close my eyes. The insides of the gondola disappear, but Suzie remains, still staring at me.

  “Suzie,” I subvocalize. “My god, you look . . . great.” She doesn’t. She looks really old. Even with aging treatments, she’s been sitting in real time for sixty or so years while I skipped out a relativistic few months near the speed of light and tried and build up my financial empire.

  Compound interest is every light hugger’s friend. You leave a bank account behind for a couple months in your time reference and come back to your original departure planet rich.

  I’m hoping those decades softened the memory of my departure.

  “Son of a bitch,” Suzie says, realizing who I am.

  “I need help Suzie. Please. Do you still work for the Air Guard?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Sixty freaking years, Vincent. Sixty.”

  “I’m so sorry, I can explain, but right now I’m handcuffed in the gondola of an airship and I need your help.”

  “Do you realize I’ve had a whole life since then? A marriage? Kids? Grandkids?”

  I pause.

  “We could talk about this over coffee, or something. After you help me?”

  “If you can call me you should have called the Guard yourself,” Suzie says, and hangs up.

  I mouth the ballgag for several seconds, then redial.

  It’s the secretary.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” the younger image of Suzie says. “She’s really pretty ticked that you even dredged all those old memories back up for her. You left her after taking all her money, and even worse, you didn’t even tell her you were leaving. You know she would have given you the money if you would have asked.”

  “I’m so sorry to be doing this.” I sigh around the edges of the rubber ball. “I don’t know what else to do. My Id became a persona inside of my own neural network, and now it’s taken me over.”

  “Well you really messed her up. She lied, you know, she never actually had a husband or grandkids, she just threw herself into work. For a while she became part of an anti-Spacer activist group,” the secretary leans forward. “Look, you could just turn off all your neural devices and go totally normal, just regular wetware.”

  “That’s a bit drastic, isn’t it?” I’ve been wired since, well, as long as I can remember. I wouldn’t be able to make calls, check up on info, see floating data tips around me, if I shut it all down. I’d be just like the colonists staring at me.

  “People on Riley manage it all that time. Not everyone is a high rolling spacer.”

  The secretary smiles. Funny tickly feelings are running up and down my chip-packed spine. I ignore them.

  “And if you buy yourself some time, I imagine I could work the old lady over, if you know what I mean.” She winks. “There are, after all, some very good memories we’re dredging up as well.”

  She’s gone.

  It’s a bit of a flimsy plan, but it beats calling the Air Guard directly and guaranteeing arrest. Susie might still fly out and rescue us.

  Vince sits next to me.

  “I think that’s a bad idea,” he says. “I’ve been trying to keep you occupied and distracted. Which is easy by the way, I didn’t want you to think of doing that.”

  Hah.

  I start getting the codes ready.

  “Just ponder this,” Vince says, leaning closer to me. “I’m always the one that comes up with the good plans. I always get us out of the bad scrapes on instinct. I always get the girl when you stop over thinking things. You have to trust me.”

  Good plans my ass. I’d been unaware of my Id until he’d started giving me anonymous messages, leaving links to stories about a lost aerostat city that had kept actual gold bars in its bank, now abandoned and waiting for someone to plunder it. My Id has gone insane. He splintered off into his own personality when I’d started resisting his plan to go down searching the lower atmosphere for this mythical lost city.

  “I’m taking good care of us right now. This is all part of a plan.”

  I initiate a shut down.

  Vince finally flickers away.

  • • •

  It’s different going a hundred percent wetware. When I look out the observation windows I can’t see little weather tags telling me where the thermals around us are. People’s public ID info sheets don’t hover over their heads.

  But I can wiggle my fingers and move my hands.

  I rip off the ball gag and take a deep breath, then stand up. The colonists flinch.

  “It’s okay,” I reassure them. “I’m okay now.”

  They don’t believe it.

  “I had a software problem,” I explain, wiping my cracked lips with the sleeve of my dress shirt. “My personality kinda got messed up and split, then the splinter tried to take me over. Bit of a glitch in the programming allows that.”

  One of them raises his hand.

  “So which one is in charge now?”

  “I am,” I say brightly. “I’m Vincent.”

  They all chorus: “Hi Vincent.”

  I nod.

  “Vince is gone now, so we’re all okay. He was the one that knocked out the pilot and reprogrammed the airship. I’m more normal.”

  One of the colonists leans over to the purple corseted lady and stage whispers, “Does this happen to off-worlders often?”

  She shakes her head.

  “So . . .” I say. “Can we wake the pilot up now?”

  They enthusiastically approve of this course of action.

  We trudge over to the front of the gondola where the bank of displays and switches gleam. The pilot is an elderly man with brown hair, slumped in the well-padded pilot’s seat. A heads up display flickers green figures over the roiling red clouds of Riley on the windowscreen in front of him. This is how the colonists access the layers of information around them.

  I shake his shoulders, but his head lolls. Other than that, he looks okay. I don’t have the ability anymore to ping his health icon, but the lady colonist leans over and pulls her hoop skirt off. She’s wearing an elaborate set of lacy knee-length pants underneath. She squeezes in between me and the captain to check his pulse.

  “He’s dead,” she says.

  E
veryone is looking at me.

  I’ve become a murderer, though I doubt even my Id was crazy enough to kill the pilot.

  “Heart attack, probably,” the lady says, pushing past me and pulling her hoop skirt back on.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I’m a doctor.” She sits back down, smoothes the skirt out over her legs.

  It’s a small relief.

  “Does anyone here know how to fly this thing?” I ask. They all shake their heads.

  I slump to the floor.

  I could fly it. But I’d have to reboot my neural network to get that kind of information. And then Vince would return.

  The airship shakes, and several motors whirr.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  The doctor looks out the observation windows.

  “The bag is venting,” she says. “We’re dropping.”

  “Do you know how to use these manual controls to call the Air Guard?” I ask, pointing at the scary rows of controls in front of the dead pilot. If the alternative is plummeting down into the depths of a gas giant, arrest is starting to look good.

  The doctor looks at me as if I’m stupid. “Yes.”

  “Then do it!”

  • • •

  The doctor sits up front speaking into the arm of the seat near the dead pilot. She’s talking to the Air Guard.

  “How far do you think this ship can fall?” I ask the men around me, trying to keep myself from focusing on the sinking feeling in my stomach that tells me we are still descending.

  “This particular ship,” says the doctor from up front, “comes from a line of what used to be tourist ships. They would follow the generator cables of the cities way down into the clouds.” She throws a paper brochure at us. It lands on the floor. “Didn’t any of you read the booklets on each of your seats?”

  I feel around in my pockets to find a crumpled up ball of paper.

  “Spacers.” She stares at me with menace. “They loved riding these things down into the clouds. Until the depression hit. Now they’re used for more practical things. We don’t get many spacers on vacation here on Riley anymore.”

  “How long before the Air Guard gets to us?” I ask, trying to deflect the cloud of animosity in the air. My stomach begins to settle.