The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  After one of the patrols near the shipyards, asura Aditi turned to me and said, “We’ll be on one of those ships one day, sailing to other parts of the galaxy. They’ll need us to defend Mother India when she sets her dainty feet on new worlds. Maybe we’ll be able to see Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune zoom by like cricket balls, the Milky Way spinning far behind us like a chakra.”

  “I don’t think that’s quite how FTL works,” I told her, but obviously she knew that. She looked at me, low dawn sunlight on her visor so I couldn’t see her face. Even though this patrol was during a temporary ceasefire, she had painted her face like she so loved to, so all you could see anyway were the whites of her eyes and her teeth. Kali Ma through and through, just like you said. “Just imagine, maybe we’ll end up on a world where we can breathe everywhere. Where there are forests and running water and deserts like Earth. Like in the old Bollywood movies, where the heroes and the heroines run around trees and splash in water like foolish children with those huge mountains behind them covered in ice.”

  “Arre, you can get all that on Earth. It’s where those movies come from! Why would you want to go further away from Earth? You don’t want to return home?”

  “That’s a nice idea, Gita,” she said. “But the longer we’re here, and the more news and movies and feeds I see of Earth, I get the idea it’s not really waiting for us.”

  That made me angry, though I didn’t show it. “We’ve waited all our lives to go back, and now you want to toss off to another world?” I asked, as if we had a choice in the matter. The two of us, since we were children in the juvenile barracks, had talked about moving to a little house in the Himalayas once we went back, somewhere in Sikkim or northern Bengal (we learned all the states as children, and saw their flags along New Delhi Avenue) where it’s not as crowded as the rest of Earth still, and we could see those famously huge mountains that dwarfed the Moon’s arid hills.

  She said, “Hai Ram, I’m just dreaming like we always have. My dear, what you’re not getting is that we have seen Earth on the feeds since we came to the Moon. From expectation, there is only disappointment.”

  So I told her, “When you talk about other worlds out there, you realize those are expectations too. You’re forgetting we’re soldiers. We go to Earth, it means our battle is over. We go to another world, you think they’d let us frolic like Bollywood stars in alien streams? Just you and me, Gita and Aditi, with the rest of our division doing backup dancing?” I couldn’t stay angry when I thought of this, though I still felt a bit hurt that she was suggesting she didn’t want to go back to Earth with me, like the sisters in arms we were.

  “True enough,” she said. “Such a literalist. If our mission is ever to play Bollywood on an exoplanet, you can play the man hero with your lovely rat-tail beard. Anyway, for now all we have is this grey rock where all the ice is underneath us instead of prettily on the mountains. Not Earth or any other tarty rival to it. This is home, Gita beta, don’t forget it.”

  How right she was.

  THEN CAME PEACETIME.

  We saw the protests on Earth feeds. People marching through the vast cities, more people than we’d ever see in a lifetime in Chandnipur, with signs and chants. No more military presence on the Moon. The Moon is not an army base. Bring back our soldiers. The Moon is not a battlefield.

  But it was, that’s the thing. We had seen our fellow asuras die on it.

  With the creation of the Terran Union of Spacefaring Nations (T.U.S.N.) in anticipation of human expansion to extrasolar space, India finally gave up its sovereignty over Chandnipur, which became just one settlement in amalgamated T.U.S.N. Lunar territory. There were walled-off Nuclear Seclusion Zones up there on Earth still hot from the last World War, and somehow they’d figured out how to stop war on the Moon. With the signing of the International Lunar Peace Treaty, every nation that had held its own patch of the Moon for a century of settlement on the satellite agreed to lay down their arms under Earth, Sol, the gods, the goddesses, and the God. The Moon was going to be free of military presence for the first time in decades.

  When us asuras were first told officially of the decommissioning of Lunar Command in Chandnipur, we celebrated. We’d made it—we were going to Earth, earlier than we’d ever thought, long before retirement age. Even our COs got shitfaced in the mess halls. There were huge tubs of biryani, with hot chunks of printed lamb and gobs of synthi dalda. We ate so much, I thought we’d explode. Even Aditi, who’d been dreaming about other worlds, couldn’t hold back her happiness. She asked me, “What’s the first thing you’re going to do on Earth?” her face covered in grease, making me think of her as a child with another name, grubby cheeks covered in syrup from stolen jalebis. “I’m going to catch a train to a riverside beach or a sea-wall, and watch the movement of water on a planet. Water, flowing and thrashing for kilometers and kilometers, stretching all the way to the horizon. I’m going to fall asleep to it. Then I’m going to go to all the restaurants, and eat all the real foods that the fake food in the Underground Markets is based on.”

  “Don’t spend all your money in one day, okay? We need to save up for that house in the Himalayas.”

  “You’re going to go straight to the mountains, aren’t you,” I said with a smile.

  “Nah. I’ll wait for you, first, beta. What do you think.”

  “Good girl.”

  After that meal, a handful of us went out with our suits for an unscheduled patrol for the first time—I guess you’d call it a moonwalk, at that point. We saluted the Earth together, on a lunar surface where we had no threat of being silently attacked from all sides. The century-long Lunar Cold War was over—it had cooled, frozen, bubbled, boiled at times, but now it had evaporated. We were all to go to our paradise in the black sky, as we’d wished every day on our dreary chota duniya.

  We didn’t stop to think what it all really meant for us asuras, of course. Because as Aditi had told me—the Moon was our home, the only one we’d ever known, really. It is a strange thing to live your life in a place that was never meant for human habitation. You grow to loathe such a life—the gritty dust in everything from your food to your teeth to your weapons, despite extensive air filters, the bitter aerosol meds to get rid of infections and nosebleeds from it. Spending half of your days exercising and drinking carefully rationed water so your body doesn’t shrivel up in sub-Earth grav or dry out to a husk in the dry, scrubbed air of controlled atmospheres. The deadening beauty of grey horizons with not a hint of water or life or vegetation in sight except for the sharp lines and lights of human settlement, which we compared so unfavorably to the dazzling technicolour of images and video feeds from Earth, the richness of its life and variety. The constant, relentless company of the same people you grow to love with such ferocity that you hate them as well, because there is no one else for company but the occasional civilian who has the courage to talk to a soldier in Chandnipur’s streets, tunnels and canteens.

  NOW THE MOON is truly a gateway to the stars. It is pregnant with the vessels that will take humanity to them, with shipyards and ports rising up under the limbs of robots. I look up at our chota duniya, and its face is crusted in lights, a crown given to her by her lover. Like a goddess it’ll birth humanity’s new children. We were born in the sky, for war, but we weren’t in truth. We were asuras. Now they will be devas, devis. They will truly be like gods, with FTL. In Chandnipur, they told us that we must put our faith in Bhagavan, in all the gods and goddesses of the pantheon. We were given a visiting room, where we sat in the veeyar pods and talked directly to their avatars, animated by the machines. That was the only veeyar we were allowed—no sims of Earth or anything like that, maybe because they didn’t want us to get too distracted from our lives on the Moon. So we talked to the avatars, dutifully, in those pods with their smell of incense. Every week we asked them to keep us alive on chota duniya, this place where humanity should not be and yet is.

  And now, we might take other worlds, large and small.


  Does that frighten you?

  I... don’t know. You told us all those years ago, and you tell me now, that we asuras looked like gods and superheroes when you saw us. In our suits, which would nearly crush a human with their weight if anyone wore them on Earth, let alone walked or fought in them. And now, imagine the humans who will go out there into the star-lit darkness. The big ships won’t be ready for a long time. But the small ones—they already want volunteers to take one-way test trips to exoplanets. I don’t doubt some of those volunteers will come from the streets, like us asuras. They need people who don’t have anything on Earth, so they can leave it behind and spend their lives in the sky. They will travel faster than light itself. Impossible made possible. Even the asuras of the Lunar Command were impossible once.

  The Moon was a lifeless place. Nothing but rock and mineral and water. And we still found a way to bring war to it. We still found a way to fight there. Now, when the new humans set foot on other worlds, what if there is life there? What if there is god-given life that has learned to tell stories, make art, fight and love? Will we bring an Earth Army to that life, whatever form it takes? Will we send out this new humanity to discover and share, or will we take people like me and Aditi, born in the streets with nothing, and give them a suit of armour and a ship that sails across the cosmos faster than the light of stars, and send them out to conquer? In the myths, asuras can be both benevolent or evil. Like gods or demons. If we have the chariots of the gods at our disposal, what use is there for gods? What if the next soldiers who go forth into space become demons with the power of gods? What if envy strikes their hearts, and they take fertile worlds from other life forms by force? What if we bring war to a peaceful cosmos? At least we asuras only killed other humans.

  One could argue that you didn’t just fight on the Moon. You brought life there, for the first time. You, we, humans—we loved there, as well. We still do. There are still humans there.

  Love.

  I’ve never heard anyone tell me they love me, nor told anyone I love them. People on Earth, if you trust the stories, say it all the time. We asuras didn’t really know what the word meant, in the end.

  But. I did love, didn’t I? I loved my fellow soldiers. I would have given my life for them. That must be what it means.

  I loved Aditi.

  That is the first time I’ve ever said that. I loved Aditi, my sister in arms. I wonder what she would have been, if she had stayed on Earth, never been adopted by the Indian government and given to the Army. A dancer? A Bollywood star? They don’t like women with muscles like her, do they? She was bloody graceful with a jet-pack, I’ll tell you that much. And then, when I actually stop to think, I realize, that she would have been a beggar, or a sweeper, or a sewer-scraper if the Army hadn’t given us to the sky. Like me. Now I live among beggars, garbage-pickers, and sweepers, and sewer-scrapers, in this slum clinging to what they call the pillar to heaven. To heaven, can you believe that? Just like we called Earth heaven up there. These people here, they take care of me. In them I see a shared destiny.

  What is that?

  To remind us that we are not the gods. This is why I pray still to the gods, or the one God, whatever is out there beyond the heliosphere. I pray that the humans who will sail past light and into the rest of the universe find grace out there, find a way to bring us closer to godliness. To worlds where we might start anew, and have no need for soldiers to fight, only warriors to defend against dangers that they themselves are not the harbingers of. To worlds where our cities have no slums filled with people whose backs are bent with the bravery required to hold up the rest of humanity.

  Can I ask something? How... how did asura Aditi die?

  Hm. Asura Aditi of the 8th Lunar Division—Chandnipur, Indian Armed Forces, survived thirty-four years of life and active combat duty as a soldier on the Moon, to be decommissioned and allowed to return to planet Earth. And then she died right here in New Delhi Megapolis walking to the market. We asuras aren’t used to this gravity, to these crowds. One shove from a passing impatient pedestrian is all it takes. She fell down on the street, shattered her Moon-brittled hip because, when we came here to paradise, we found that treatment and physio for our weakened bodies takes money that our government does not provide. We get a pension, but it’s not much—we have to choose food and rent, or treatment. There is no cure. We might have been bred for war in the sky, but we were not bred for life on Earth. Why do you think there are so few volunteers for the asura program? They must depend on the children of those who have nothing.

  Aditi fell to Earth from the Moon, and broke. She didn’t have money for a fancy private hospital. She died of an infection in a government hospital.

  She never did see the Himalayas. Nor have I.

  I’m sorry.

  I live here, in the slums around Akash Mahal Space Elevator-Shaft, because of Aditi. It’s dangerous, living along the spindle. But it’s cheaper than the subsidized rent of the Veterans Arcologies. And I like the danger. I was a soldier, after all. I like living by the stairway to the sky, where I once lived. I like being high up here, where the wind blows like it never did on the Moon’s grey deserts, where the birds I never saw now fly past me every morning and warm my heart with their cries. I like the sound of the nanotube ecosystem all around us, digesting all our shit and piss and garbage, turning it into the light in my one bulb, the heat in my one stove coil, the water from my pipes, piggybacking on the charge from the solar panels that power my little feed-terminal. The way the walls pulse, absorbing sound and kinetic energy, when the elevator passes back and forth, the rumble of Space Elevator Garuda-3 through the spindle all the way to the top of the atmosphere. I don’t like the constant smell of human waste. I don’t like wondering when the police will decide to cast off the blinders and destroy this entire slum because it’s illegal. I don’t like going with a half-empty stomach all the time, living off the kindness of the little ones here who go up and down all the time and get my flour and rice. But I’m used to such things—Chandnipur was not a place of plenty either. I like the way everyone takes care of each other here. We have to, or the entire slum will collapse like a rotten vine slipping off a tree-trunk. We depend on each other for survival. It reminds me of my past life.

  And I save the money from my pension, little by little, by living frugally. To one day buy a basic black market exoskeleton to assist me, and get basic treatment, physio, to learn how to walk and move like a human on Earth.

  Can... I help, in any way?

  You have helped, by listening. Maybe you can help others listen as well, as you’ve said.

  Maybe they’ll heed the words of a veteran forced to live in a slum. If they send soldiers to the edge of the galaxy, I can only hope that they will give those soldiers a choice this time.

  I beg the ones who prepare our great chariots: if you must take our soldiers with you, take them—their courage, their resilience, their loyalty will serve you well on a new frontier. But do not to take war to new worlds.

  War belongs here on Earth. I should know. I’ve fought it on the Moon, and it didn’t make her happy. In her cold anger, she turned our bodies to glass. Our chota duniya was not meant to carry life, but we thrust it into her anyway. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not violate the more welcoming worlds we may find, seeing their beauty as acquiescence.

  With FTL, there will be no end to humanity’s journey. If we keep going far enough, perhaps we will find the gods themselves waiting behind the veil of the universe. And if we do not come in peace by then, I fear we will not survive the encounter.

  I CLAMBER DOWN the side of the column of the space elevator, winding down through the biohomes of the slum towards one of the tunnels where I can reach the internal shaft and wait for the elevator on the way down. Once it’s close to the surface of the planet, it slows down a lot—that’s when people jump on to hitch a ride up or down. We’re only about 1,000 feet up, so it’s not too long a ride down, but the wait for it cou
ld be much longer. The insides of the shaft are always lined with slum-dwellers and elevator station hawkers, rigged with gas masks and cling clothes, hanging on to the nanocable chords and sinews of the great spindle. I might just catch a ride on the back of one of the gliders who offer their solar wings to travelers looking for a quick trip back to the ground. Bit more terrifying, but technically less dangerous, if their back harness and propulsion works.

  The eight-year-old boy guiding me down through the steep slum, along the pipes and vines of the NGO-funded nano-ecosystem, occasionally looks up at me with a gap-toothed smile. “I want to be an asura like Gita,” he says. “I want to go to the stars.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of not being able to walk properly when you come back to Earth?”

  “Who said I want to come back to Earth?”

  I smile, and look up, past the fluttering prayer flags of drying clothes, the pulsing wall of the slum, at the dizzying stairway to heaven, an infinite line receding into the blue. At the edge of the spindle, I see asura Gita poised between the air and her home, leaning precariously out to wave goodbye to me. Her hair ripples out against the sky, a smudge of black. A late evening moon hovers full and pale above her head, twinkling with lights.

  I wave back, overcome with vertigo. She seems about to fall, but she doesn’t. She is caught between the Earth and the sky in that moment, forever.