Tides From the New Worlds

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Rebecca grabbed my forearm.

  “But would they take us up with them?”

  “Yes.” One of the reasons they kept the spaceport cleared, and a regular schedule, was for reasons like this. A small percentage of the inhabitants changed their mind and took the subtle offer.

  Rebecca leaned against me.

  “My parents will not approve.”

  “They can’t stop you,” I said. “This is your life we’re talking about.” I kissed her hair. It smelled of fresh bread and pumpkin pie. “Come with me.”

  She stood up, letting go of my hand.

  “The hospital,” she said. “Can they...really...?”

  “Yes. Don’t pack anything,” I told her. “Just be ready.”

  “Tonight?”

  I looked back down the road we would have to take to get to DY-99.

  “Later tonight.”

  Rebecca walked back into the house. I saw her falter for a second, and she held onto the edge of a table for support. I winced.

  • • •

  I approached David. I felt wrong for deceiving him slightly, as I asked him about a good deal for one of his horses.

  He smiled and stroked his beard.

  “We wondered how many more days it would take before you got tired of asking for rides,” he said. He named a price and I agreed on the spot. I could have dickered a little, but I wanted to go home as soon as I could.

  We walked to the stables, and David led my new horse out. He was a sturdy young fellow. I chose not to pay too much attention, though, as I would be leaving him behind soon enough.

  “Herr Doctor,” David said. “You still feel badly about young Suderman?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I could have saved him.”

  “All the good health in the world would be useless with an empty life, or in a community that had rotted away.”

  “If there is no one alive to appreciate the community,” I said, “then it is all pointless.”

  “You believe this is all pointless, then.”

  “No.” I leaned my head against the horse, smelling its musky sweat. It shifted. “No. But it is wasteful.” I broke into the words of the Hippocratic oath: “Into whatsoever house I shall enter, it shall be for the good of the sick to the utmost of my power...and then to also believe in the community and follow our practices.”

  “Did you anticipate being torn like this? Before you came to New Pennsylvania?”

  “No,” I said. “I was wrong. I thought on a world with total freedom that a doctor would be free to cure the sick.”

  “But you do tend to the sick.”

  “With methods and cures that haven’t changed in five hundred years,” I said bitterly. “Out there”—I waved my hand at the stars—“they replace hearts and lungs as easily as you replace a torn shirt. Yet here...”

  “You should have looked deeper into your heart before making the decision to come here.”

  “Then who would have tried to save Mark Suderman?” I said. “I lose far too many patients, patients I could save anywhere else—but I do save some.”

  “He was saved the day he made the decision to join the church,” David Yoder said with a certainty that I wished I possessed. About anything.

  “It’s getting near dark,” I said. “I will be going now.”

  “Guten Nacht.”

  I pushed the horse to a run after I was out of sight.

  • • •

  I threw two suitcases of clothes together. In my desk I pulled out something I never thought I would need, but had kept anyway. It was a wallet, and inside were plastic cards that on any other world would link me to lines of credit and old friends. I hitched the new horse to my spare buggy and tossed the suitcases in the back.

  A horse and buggy turned onto the gravel of my drive.

  I was sure it was David Yoder, but I was wrong. Two Elders, Zebediah Walshman and his brother, Paul, pulled aside the storm curtains.

  “William Hostetler?”

  I walked up to the buggy.

  “Yes.”

  “We talked to Brother Yoder. He feels you are going through a crisis,” Paul said.

  Zebediah looked over at my buggy. “Are you leaving for a while, William?”

  “Possibly,” I said.

  “You are going to the Englanders?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “We can’t deny you that choice,” Paul said. “But you will not take Rebecca with you.”

  They turned the buggy back around and rattled off down the road. My heart pounded, my throat dried with nervousness. I walked back to my buggy and kicked at a wheel with my boot. The pain was briefly satisfying.

  The air was chilly, and as I turned up the road towards the house I extinguished the buggy’s road lamp. I stopped the horse a bit down from the usual post, tying him to a tree. I patted his neck and jumped the ditch onto David Yoder’s farm.

  It took me a few long minutes in the pitch black to find a ladder. The notion of it—a clandestine meeting with a ladder in the 23th Century—struck me as ludicrous. But there was nothing ludicrous about the purpose of it. I walked it over to the point under Rebecca’s window and leaned the ladder against the side of the house as gently as I could.

  She was waiting. She opened the window, bunched up her skirts, and got onto the ladder. It creaked as she came down step by agonizing step.

  I led her around the house towards the waiting buggy.

  We didn’t get far before David Yoder’s gentle but firm voice came from the porch.

  “Rebecca, come back inside the house,” he said.

  She froze.

  “Come on,” I said. “Keep walking. You’re free to leave. He can’t stop you.”

  “I can’t stop you,” David agreed. “But think about what you are leaving. Rebecca, you are already saved, no matter what you do here. But when you leave, you will no longer be able to come back. You will be healthy, but unable to ever see us or speak to us again. Do you think there will be a family out there, with the Englanders, for you? What sort of lives do they lead? Good lives, or will they be confused, and spiritually cluttered, caught up with worldly goods.” He paused. “Remember,” he concluded, “if you leave, you can never come back. Your children can never come back.”

  Rebecca’s tears trickled down her cheeks and collected along her jaw.

  “I can’t do this!” she told me. “I can’t!”

  “Then you’ll die,” I said. “Probably within a couple of months. And in terrible pain that I am not permitted to alleviate on this world.” I took off my hat, trying to do something useful with my hands.

  “I know,” she said. She brushed the side of my face with her hand and kissed me lightly on the lips. “I’m sorry, but I cannot be other than what I am.”

  I watched her go back up into the house.

  David and I stood there watching each other.

  “She’s free to go,” I said.

  “She was never free to go,” said David. “There are certain laws that are unwritten, and these are the most powerful laws of all.”

  “You’ve signed her death warrant,” I said bitterly.

  “Do you think I want her to die?” he demanded, and the light of the four moons reflected off the tears running down his cheeks. “This is God’s will, not mine. Never mine!”

  And I suddenly realized that he was caught in the same web that had ensnared Rebecca and me. I had thought, just a moment ago, that I hated David Yoder. Now I knew that I could never hate him; I could only pity him, as I pitied us all.

  “What will you do now, Dr. Hostetler?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  I turned and began walking across his yard.

  • • •

  I rode the horse hard. My hat blew away, and the cold wind played with my hair. The horse started to lather by the time I saw my house, and I slowed us down, struck by remorse. There was no reason to take my anger out on the poor beast.

  I hadn’t cried in a long
time, but I cried that night.

  And along with crying, I examined my life and my options. DY-99 was only a few miles away. It would be so easy to get on it, to go out into the galaxy where I could use all my skills.

  And if I did, who would take care of Rebecca? Who would deliver Esther’s child, and help make sure it grew into a healthy adult? Who would even try to save all the Mark Sudermans after I left?

  I turned the buggy around. With a snap of the reins I sent us both trotting back towards the Yoders. In the coming days and weeks I was going to preside at two more miracles, the miracle of death and the miracle of birth. I was going to do it under adverse conditions, like a racehorse carrying extra weight, but Rebecca had not asked to die and Esther’s child has not asked to be born, so in a way we were all running handicapped.

  In a moment of clarity, I realized that it just meant that we had to try harder. If we were already saved, then it was only right that God wanted a little extra effort in return, whether it was dying with grace or struggling to save people who placed so very many restrictions on their savior.

  Somewhere along the drive back, I took the wallet from my pocket and threw it into the dark forest along the road.

  Her

  So deep into my senior year of college I was working on an independent study that featured a number of short stories all linked to each other with a setting. But halfway through I became slightly obsessed with this idea of writing a story that combined science fiction and magical realism. So instead of what I was supposed to be writing for a grade, I tried to imagine it as a magical tale, but one written by someone in the future. So many futures don’t seem to contain anything of the sorts, and so this crossover was my answer to that perceived lack.

  Cultural anthropologist Jo Anderson was not an exotic woman, but as she talked about her work a sort of fire built up in her pale green eyes. The tiny hint of a smile tugged the corners of her mouth, transforming her into something almost radiant and certainly a little bit more than just attractive.

  But it was hard as hell to try and pay much attention to an animated Jo Anderson when a three hundred mile long… well… there were ogling blue-collar men sitting around the window who you could tell had just been shipped in. The main feature of the bay windows on this side of the Toe Lounge was the view of giant soft sloping legs stretching far up into the horizon.

  I was being manipulated, and I knew it. The chin had better selections of restaurants, but Jo pretty much figured that if she sat me next to a window looking up the thighs of the 6,500 mile long woman we walked the surface of I would let her say yes to whatever it is her department wanted.

  So of course I murmured “yes.”

  “It’s fascinating,” Jo said, now that she had what she wanted out of me, “that the inhabitants here are the only race we know of that has their mythology dead on.”

  “Huh?” I looked down at the table. I needed more beer. I usually tried not to come face to face with the reality of existence on… Her.

  “They believe they live on the corpse of a giant.”

  “Maybe it’s because they do,” I said, sneaking another look back down the inner thigh that dominated the western hemisphere.

  • • •

  A month later I sat in a bar with Director Thomas. Thomas was a short chubby man with a goatee and a shrewd sort of ruddy intelligence that comes from being administration. It ran in his family, he’d told me once: “My great-grandfather Barry was an administrator of a star-plex, grandma Stella ran an inter-galactic courier service. Dad ran things here when we first landed, and uncle Brad ran things after Dad died in the cheek-wars…” the nuclear exchange responsible for that blemish on the left cheek, “…and my brother runs shipping and trade out by the Toe. As far as we can trace it back, we’ve run things.” Thomas showed me a piece of paper with my signature on it. We were on the tip of the chin; on the edge of the dimple that overlooked the sharp roller coaster drop of her neck that flowed into the deep valley between her ample but firm breasts.

  For a coin you could use one of the telescopes and zoom in on the spaceport on the left areola, or see the developments of skyscrapers being built into the hill-like curves. Zoom in again and one could even see the lattices of tracks being laid down for trains, like veins, only raised and ridged across the acres and acres of skin.

  “Is there any particular reason you allowed Anderson to head off for the pubic region?”

  “She took me to the Toe Lounge,” I said.

  Thomas rolled his eyes, but folded the paper and put it away. “I’ve been trying to keep out of the region for the past year.”

  The indigenes lived among the thick pubic hair, declared a protected reserve. They logged the massive hairs and used them for building houses, pulped them into clothing and paper, and built roads with them. In fact, several hundred years of logging had resulted in bare patches. Eventually, maybe, the pubic area would become smooth.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” Thomas said. “Come on, if one group gets to go into the pubic area, everyone else will want to.”

  I sipped a beer. A large starship, easily ten miles long, winked into existence and spiraled in towards the left breast, plasma streaming out its tail end as it jetted towards the spaceport.

  “Thomas, how long do you really think any indigenous group will be left alone, or unassimilated?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” He replied. “But we have to try and respect that this is their land.”

  The universe is not only stranger… I thought.

  • • •

  On Thursday I met with representatives of several of the major local churches. I didn’t enjoy meeting with those of the religious persuasion, as they still were a bit hot/cold about the idea of a giant human floating in space at the edge of the known universe. Some said She was God. Other more patriarchal religions strongly protested, though the possibility really ate at them.

  So I sarcastically suggested that we meet at the Toe Lounge but they politely declined and instead settled for a location on the dome of her head, near one of the major logging and mining operations.

  When men first landed they’d cleared most of the locals out, taking the prime logging areas; the long locks of space-dark, carefully braided hair that stretched down to the shoulders. Sections of the scalp near the top of the head were already showing, thanks to years of zealous logging. The hair could be used for orbital tethers; it was incredibly strong. Other uses abounded, although it involved smelting the hair to reform it.

  Mining operations found bone to be the most troublesome substance, but ground back up could be used as the most remarkable concrete. The skin, tanned and dried, could be found in stores sewed as canopies, or if combined with muscle, composted to provide an excellent loam.

  So it was here I met the church members. Some of them dressed in formal robes, others in jeans and loose shirts. Catholics and Protestants, Buddhists, Muslim, Methodist, Taoist, Moonies, Hare Krishna, and so on. I wondered what miraculous act had bought most of humanity’s religions all together on accord.

  “We want you to cover up the genitalia,” they said. And handed me a long printout on pale fleshy parchment, with hundreds of names cut into it. “It is an affront to decency, and encourages moral decrepitude.”

  “How is that?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “Men should not see such things,” Gene Grady muttered. “It is pornographic that the thousands of people living on the legs see her daily, and lust for her.”

  My head hurt. “How exactly do you suggest I do this?” I said. “Do you happen to have some hundred odd square miles of fabric?”

  “Leather can be made out of skin,” Father O’Toole declared. “Just between the ribs is easily mineable.”

  “And expensive,” I said. “Unless you’re going to do it yourself, we’ll do no such thing.”

  “Then we would like to pass an edict stating that no man should past the waistline.”

  “If you wou
ld pass such a thing on to your congregations,” I said, “that would be fine. But I’m not going to pass any such edict. The taxes on toenail mining are generous, and fund most of our civic projects.”

  And that was that. They all left in a dark mood, and I continued to sit there, ordering lunch.

  • • •

  Thomas showed me his latest headache on his desk. Requests from various distant mining companies to come in and compete. Particularly, Mining Under-Firth Inc. was putting up a large bid to come in and mine the outer and inner labia.

  “They say they can do this with minimal impact on the inhabitants.”

  I nodded. Thomas sighed.

  “Some religious leaders have expressed an interest in letting them come in, they’re hoping they can get the entire area mined out, or at least rendered unrecognizable.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said.

  • • •

  Three months, and Jo’s group was sending us back enthusiastic reports by satellite on the local culture and habits, the first such real records in almost fifty years. The inhabitants believed that since they lived on the body of a woman, the broad stream of the Milky Way in the sky was actually a fertilizing stream of sperm. It was apparently from a male deity in the act of ejaculation. They called it the big bang.

  Thomas called me up to meet with a starship-guild captain. His name was Evergror, and he had thick vacuum-proof reddish skin. His large all black eyes bubbled out as ridiculously, and he didn’t wear any clothes. His genitalia slid back up into a radiation proof slit, which made all the starship-guild people look like they had vaginas whether male or female.

  He said he was the keeper of records, a sort of historian, and started to tell a hell of a story about a group of old Earth fellows who’d set out in a slower than light ship. I looked at Thomas, Thomas looked at me, and we both shrugged.

  Evergror’s story beat going into the industrial zoning debate raging in our office over the armpit regions.

  “The name of the ship was ‘Seed of Hope’ and they wanted to settle a star system according to their own religious beliefs,” he said. “But every time they showed up, someone would be there already. Then they would re-equip their ship with the latest technology found at the latest stop and try again. This went on for almost two thousand years, until finally, they aimed their ship off into the abyss, aiming at no star, no reasonable destination.”