Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “He was wearing a spacesuit,” I said calmly.

  But I could see Oslo didn’t believe me. His eyes creased and his fingers tightened. A bright explosion of pain ripped into me.

  My vision cleared.

  I was on my hands and feet, shaking with pain from the electrical discharge. A whirlwind of debris whipped around me. I looked up to see the lander lifting into the sky.

  So that was it. I’d made my choice: to try and not be a monster.

  And it had been in vain. The Vesians would be lobotomized by Kepler’s virus. Beck would die. I would die.

  I watched the lander beginning a wide spiral upward away from me. In a few seconds it would fire its rockets and climb for orbit.

  In a couple hours, I would run out of air.

  Four large gourds arced high over the black forest and slapped into the side of the lander. I frowned. At first, it looked like they had no effect. The lander kept spiraling up.

  But then, it faltered.

  The lander shook, and smoke spilled out of a crack in the side somewhere.

  It exploded, the fireball hanging in the sky.

  “Get away from the antenna,” Beck suddenly said. “It’s next.”

  I ran without a second thought, and even as I got free of the clearing, gourds of acid hit the structure. The metal sizzled, foamed, and then began to melt.

  A few seconds later, I broke out onto a dirt path where the catapults firing the gourds of acid had been towed into place.

  Beck waited for me, surrounded by a crowd of Vesians. He wore only his helmet, he’d ripped his suit off. His skin bubbled from bad chemical burn blisters.

  “The Vesians destroyed all the remote-operating vehicles with the virus in it,” he said. “The queens have quarantined any Vesians near any area that had an ROV. The species will survive.”

  “You’ve been talking to them,” I said. And then I thought back to the comforting smell in my room the first night Beck spent with me. “You’re communicating with them. You warned them.”

  Beck held up his suit. “Yes. The Compact altered me to be an ambassador to them.”

  “Beck, how long can you survive in this environment?” I stared at his blistered skin.

  “A year. Maybe. There will be another ready by then. Maybe a structure to live in. The Gheda will be here soon to bring air. The Compact has reached an agreement with them. The Vesian queens are agreeing to join the Compact. The Compact gets to extend out of the mother system, but only to Ve. In exchange, the Gheda get rights to all patentable discoveries made in the new ecosystem. They’re particularly interested in plastic-based organic photosynthesis.”

  I collapsed to the ground, realizing that I would live. Beck sat next to me. A small Vesian, approached, a gourd in its mandibles. It set the organic, plastic bottle at my legs. “What’s that?”

  “A jar of goodwill,” Beck said. “The Vesian queen of this area is thanking you.”

  I was still just staring at it two hours later as my air faded out, my vision blurred, and the Gheda lander finally reached us.

  The harbormaster cocked his head. “You’re back.”

  “I’m back,” I said. Someone was unpacking my two bags. one of them carefully holding the Vesian ‘gift.’

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” the harbormaster said. “Not with a contract like that.”

  “It didn’t work out.” I looked out into the vacuum of space beyond us. “Certainly not for the people who hired me. Or me.”

  “You have a peripheral contract with the Compact. An all-you-can-breath line of credit on the station. You’re not a citizen, but on perpetual retainer as the Compact’s primary professional Friend for all dealings in this system. You did well enough.”

  I grinned. “Points on a package like what they offered me was a fairy tale. A fairy tale you’d have to be soulless to want to have come true.”

  “I’m surprised that you did not choose to join the Compact,” the harbormaster said, looking closely at me. “It is a safe place for humans in this universe. Even as a peripheral for them, you could still be in danger during patent negotiations with Gheda.”

  “I know. But this is home. My home. I’m not a drone, I don’t want to be one.”

  The harbormaster sighed. “You understand the station is my only love. I don’t have a social circle. There is only the ebb and flow of this structure’s health for me.”

  I smiled. “That’s why I like you, harbormaster. You have few emotions. You are a fair dealer. You’re the closest thing I have to family. You may even be the closest thing I have to a friend, friend with a lowercase ‘f.’”

  “You follow your contracts to the letter. I like that about you,” the harbormaster said. “I’m glad you will continue on here.”

  Together we watched the needle-like ship that had brought me back home silently fall away from the station.

  “The Compact purchased me a ten-by-ten room with a porthole,” I said. “I don’t have to come up here to sneak a look at the stars anymore.”

  The harbormaster sighed happily. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? I think, we’ve always loved them, haven’t we? Even before we were forced to leave the mother world.”

  “That’s what the history books say,” I said quietly over the sound of ducts and creaking station. “We dreamed of getting out here, to live among them. Dreamed of the wonders we’d see.”

  “The Gheda don’t see the stars,” the harbormaster said. “They have few portholes. Before I let the Gheda turn me into a harbormaster, I demanded the contract include this room.”

  “They don’t see them the way we do,” I agreed.

  “They’re not human,” the harbormaster said.

  “No, they’re not.” I looked out at the distant stars. “But then, few things are anymore.”

  The Gheda ship disappeared in a blinding flash of light, whipping through space toward its next destination

  About the Author

  Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born writer and NYT Bestseller who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel is Arctic Rising.

  Futures in the Memories Market

  Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  You can’t do anything else when you emp one of Geeta Tilrassen’s memory modules. Her senses seize you; you see through her eyes, taste with her tongue, hear with her ears. And touch? You’ve never felt air against your skin until you’ve felt it breathe across hers. In a desert environment, there’s a sense of cinnamon in the air. When Geeta’s on a water world, you feel the humidity as embrace instead of torture, as though you are constantly being kissed. Every module Geeta makes is fresh and innocent, and every time you use one, you feel as though it’s the first time.

  I’ve got one legitimate copy of a Geeta memod; I’m only allowed one at a time, and I’ve kept this one for a while. It’s her visit to the Hallen people. Nothing very exciting happens. She walks into their village. (The red sand gets into your sandals, but instead of grinding against your feet or raising blisters, it’s a pleasant friction.) The air smells of woodsmoke, charred flesh, and sage.

  Hallen burrows are mostly underground, but they have built delicate aboveground structures of woven withies, beautiful as spider webs, with small crystals at the intersections that flare in the red sunlight.

  The Hallen greet Geeta, draw her into one of the withy shelters, and give her the only thing it’s safe for her to ingest from their cuisine, some kind of berry drink with bits of leaf in it. She drinks. The liquid is cool on your tongue, a nice contrast to the desert heat. You taste the essence of that drink a long time after she’s swallowed the last sip, a sour-sweet merging of bright and dark flavors. She presses palms with the head lizard, smells his individual scent that shares species straw-tones with the others in the shelter but smells a shade more like sulfur and ginger. She listens to their drum-intensive music and sits in a woven-leaf chair with a Hallen egg in her lap. The music gets inside you l
ike a second heartbeat, chasing your blood until you want to rise and dance. You can feel how warm the egg is, how there’s something moving inside that leather shell. You sense Geeta’s delight, the way it feathers her insides.

  It only lasts about a minute real-time, maybe twenty minutes mod time. It’s my favorite possession. I save it for the most difficult days, when I hate being Itzal Bidarte, the man who lost his home as a child and has never found another. I long for roots, and all I do is wander.

  If I had Geeta’s power, perhaps my memories of my homeland would be stronger. They are fragments, mostly visual, a plane of light on my mother’s cheek as she leans to kiss me, my father settling in a deep chair beside the hearth and lighting his pipe with a coal on a wire he’s fished from the fire.

  I acquired a memod made by a cousin of mine, dead now. When I play it, I see again the stream beside our village, smoke rising from the chimneys of the white-plastered, red-shuttered houses on a cool morning, pots of red geraniums beside the doors, and even, I think, I catch a glimpse of my father leading a donkey down to drink. My dead cousin’s memory is too flat, too simple. There are only muted sounds, distant scents, no touch. I don’t feel as though I’m there. It is more like seeing something in a smoked mirror.

  I’ve emped Geeta’s memory module of the Hallen about twenty times. I notice different things each time. She is so alert to every sensation that a normal person can’t take it all in at once.

  What I don’t see in the memod are Geeta’s bodyguards. GreaTimes, the memory merchants who have the sole license to distribute Geeta’s mods, edits us out. Even though I’ve gone on memory missions with Geeta, you will never sense me in one of her mods.

  As the ship approached our next destination, I pressed the alert beside Geeta’s cabin door. The door slid up and let me in.

  Geeta stood in the middle of the cabin, with colored outfits draped over the omnishapes of furniture whose functions she hadn’t set. The scentser laid down a faint, unobtrusive smell that covered any other odors in the cabin, and the audio was playing very low, something melodic without any percussion. Aside from the colors, this was Geeta neutral, as close as she could get to shutting down her senses and living on a par with the rest of us.

  “Itzal,” Geeta said, “you know more about this than I do. What should I wear on Tice?”

  She had been to Tice before, but she didn’t remember.

  I looked over all her outfits and pointed to the scarlet one with the gilt, point-edged hem. “We’re going to a big city on Tice, lots of energy and interaction. That dress will attract attention and intensify your experience.”

  She looked at me sideways, her broad mouth quirked at one corner. She was not beautiful in any of the regular ways, but her face was full of character, elastic enough to reflect her moods and thoughts. Only lately had I learned that she might be a different person behind her face, that there were parts of herself she had been hiding. “What if I want to have a quiet time?”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  She spun around, stopped, hugged herself. “You know me better than I know myself.” She took the red dress and hung it from a ceiling ring. I helped her pick up the other clothes and store them behind the wall. She controlled the furniture into two chairs and a table, and we sat facing each other.

  She tapped her wrist. I lifted my own wrist and swept the room with the spystopper. No glow: Geeta’s corporate masters weren’t watching us.

  “Did you get me one?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Sentients all through the interlinked worlds could buy Geeta’s memods, but access to them was strictly limited aboard The Collector. Each crewmember could own one at a time, and Geeta was not allowed to use any of them. She didn’t have an implanted emp receptor like the rest of us. She had to use an external one to get the cultural gloss and language of the places we visited before we arrived. Her corporate masters allowed her some forms of entertainment so she would be stimulated during our tween-worlds journeys through the skip nodes and in and out of systems. Nobody wanted Geeta to get bored.

  “Maybe I can pick up something on Tice,” I said. “I’m not sure how to get it aboard, though.”

  “Could you disguise it as something else?” she asked.

  I thought about that. “Maybe. If I have enough money. I’d need to find an underground tech there who could make it look like your normal entertainment emps, so you could put it into the emper without them knowing what you’re doing.” I tapped my lips with my index fingers. Before I landed this job as Geeta’s bodyguard, I had done some less-than-legal things—most of my guard training had come from people operating at the fringes of the linked worlds, in shadowy spaces often called Underground. I knew a few signs of the Starlight Fraternity that might lead me to someone on Tice who could successfully disguise an emp. Or the signs might have expired, and using them could get me into trouble.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I can pay enough.”

  “I’ll give you money.”

  “But Geet, you don’t have any.”

  Geeta made the best memods in the business, according to her fans, who were legion across many worlds. GreaTimes bought her contract when she was very young, recognizing her memory potential even then; they had automated observers on most worlds, watching for talented children like Geeta. Geeta was kept in luxury, given everything she needed and wanted so long as it wouldn’t interfere with her memories, but she had no salary, and no real freedom.

  “I’ll trade something.” She looked around her cabin, went to the wall and opened a drawer full of jewelry. She had a robber bird’s delight in sparkling things, so she often asked for and received jewel gifts when she had completed a memory job. She got out the Kudic rubies, a necklace with raw chunks of pink stone. It was one of her most expensive pieces.

  I felt a prickle of excitement. We usually visited backwater planets, because people who bought memods seldom went there, and they were hungry for Geeta’s fresh experiences. Tice was bigger than our usual stop; I might successfully fence jewels like these. They’d have a wider choice of memods for sale there, too. “Which memory do you want most?” I asked, tucking the jewels in an inner pocket.

  “The horse people,” she said. Though she wasn’t allowed to emp her own memods, she could check the infostream and see the GreaTimes catalog, read the blurbs.

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Geeta had a second guard, Ibo; we alternated shifts when we were in relatively safe environments. I had some leave due, and Tice had some quiet places Geeta was scheduled to visit.

  “Thanks, Itzal.” She pressed her cheek to the back of my hand. I wondered what that was like for her. Did she like my smell? The feel of my skin? These were small random memories no one would ever buy. GreaTimes let Geeta keep all her memories between missions, the dull details of shipboard life; it was only the planet visits they siphoned off, leaving her with amnesia of all her adventures, unknowing of any lessons she might have learned. They kept her in a state of confused innocence. She wanted to change that. She wanted me to help her recover the memories she had lost.

  Ibo and I flanked Geeta as she stepped out of the shuttle, through the docking tunnel, and into Tice’s “Welcome Outworld Travelers” Terminal. She looked everywhere, smiling wide. Hanging baskets of local plants with long, colored fronds filtered the light coming through the hazed sky-ceiling, scattering spots of green and lavender on the floor. People attended by companion animals moved through the distance, intent on their own business. A mother with triplet daughters dangled a star on a string in front of her babies. They laughed and reached for it, and Geeta laughed, too.

  I hungered for her response to this situation even as I surveyed the area for potential threats. Like Geeta and Ibo, I’d emped the culture and language memod for Tice last night. I still wasn’t sure about the companion animals; they’d be easy to mimic. Some looked like large dogs, some like pack animals, and some walked upright like the humans they accompanied, and looked like nothing
I’d seen before. What if one of them was the kind of fan who wanted Geeta to experience death or pain so they could share her intense response to that? She’d encountered threats before.

  Because of the nature of her memories, most people had no idea what Geeta looked like. She rarely looked at herself in mirrors. If her reflection happened to show up in a memory, GreaTimes fuzzed it. She had been captured in some tourist vids GreaTimes could do nothing about, though; a tricky outsider might have some idea of what she looked like. Plus there was always the general threat anyone might fall under in any place.

  Ibo took the lead. We went through customs scan. They determined that Ibo and I were licensed to carry the stun weapons we had. We had no luggage. Geeta never stayed anywhere overnight. It only took her a few hours to collect several salable memory sets. She had already started. She had a long conversation with the customs official about what kind of people he met, what their stories were, what people tried to smuggle in. Ibo and I stood patiently while the customs official called over his superior and had her tell more stories. All part of Geeta.

  I had the rubies in a shielded belt. I wasn’t sure the belt would fool sophisticated scanners on Tice, or even the ship’s scanner, though I hoped the stones would show up as just rocks and metal. (Emps triggered the ship scanner—it was looking for them.) Then again, rubies weren’t illegal or dangerous. I didn’t want Captain Ark to know about them, though, or Ibo.

  We left the terminal through close-pressed crowds of various kinds of people and animals. Geeta smiled at them, and they found themselves smiling back, maybe without thinking about it. The usual ripple of pleasant spread around us as we moved. Even the pickpocket whose hand I caught in Geeta’s purse smiled after I retrieved Geeta’s pay-ID, because Geeta said, “Better luck next time,” with a short warble of laughter, and kissed his cheek before I released him back into the wild.

  On the curb of Hollow Street, Geeta engaged a cab. She sat in the back sandwiched between me and Ibo and told the driver we wanted to go to the Queen’s Sculpture Garden, the first of four planned stops here.