“mama.”
we stop. mama hugs me again. now I hug mama too, not just hug my chest. lean cheek on top of mama’s head.
“Just breathe,” says. “Can’t do nothing with ugly, but breathe it out. Breathe.”
take big deep breaths. lungs hurt. let pain out with screechy animal sounds. deep breaths. hurt wants to take me back to that room. i don’t want to go back. grip mama. i want to stay with mama. look around. look over mama’s shoulder. people. people rushing. people walking. people staring. people pretending not to see. get nervous. I slip quiet. one second, quiet. two seconds, quiet. three seconds, quiet. mama grabs my arm.
“We got to get you away from here,” says.
rushes me past people. doesn’t look around. looks straight. drags me past huge buildings. drags me past hard buildings, brown buildings, gray buildings. finally looks around. turns.
“there?” i ask.
mama’s face breaks into a smile.
“You’re talking, Equi! You’re coming back.”
words coming back to me. memories too. memories of how it felt to see mama, hug mama, touch mama. laughter. one night of hugs and laughter. want nothing but hugs and laughter.
mama points to a narrow space between two gray buildings.
“There,” says.
mama walks to the space. i follow. she turns sideways and squeezes in between the two buildings.
look at the people. so much gray. people in gray clothes. no color. more color Under than here. Surface doesn’t make sense.
“Equi!”
mama tugs on my hand, then squeezes deeper into the space. waits for me to follow. i step between the buildings behind mama. space is tight and dark. litter crackles underfoot. reminds me of a tunnel leading to a sub-station: narrow and dark with no clue of what lies on the other side.
on the other side, i hear voices. can’t see what’s in front of mama, but i hear voices. when we step out from between the buildings, the first thing i see are trees. first trees i’ve seen since i been back. i go over to touch one. mama doesn’t stop me. then i look around.
tied to the tree branches are ropes, ropes stringing dirty stretches of plastic overhead. down on the ground, i see as many tents as trees. more. more tents than trees. plastic, fabric, boards—ragtag shelters. noise. the air is full of noise. snaking noise. spiky noise. laughing noise. music noise.
“where are we?”
near the tents, smoke hovers over silver pots. i smell food.
“Last park in this quarter of the country.” mama sounds like just thinking about it makes her tired. “Hungry?” squeezes my hand.
my body feels many things. exhaustion. fear. anger. worry. pain. confusion. no hunger. i turn away from mama, lean my cheek on the tree. run my fingers along the bumpy bark. feel gashes and grooves in the bark. look closer. see words acid-etched on the bark. run my fingers over the words: names, dates, shapes. biggest words say: Squat Park.
“Squat Park.” a sad laugh dies in mama’s throat. “That’s what they call it now. We lived here. After you left. Land loss. Relocations. That seems like so long ago.” mama turns me to face her and takes my other hand. “I saved every bit you sent, Equi. That’s the only way we were able to get out. People like us … people like us ….” mama’s head droops as if her thoughts are breaking her, snapping her spine so she can’t hold her head up anymore. “People like us are supposed to squat, we’re not supposed to have a home.”
purse my lips, fix them to ask how long was she here and was it anything like it is now, was she safe. my eyes wander over the people. i freeze, squint my eyes. two huge men walking shoulder to shoulder. two huge men wearing loose black clothes. they push past people. i grab mama’s shoulders, squeeze, spin her so she can see them, point. they walk toward me. fingers shake, arm trembles, but i keep pointing. mama nods, then she turns to look at me. she is smiling. her smile drops when she sees me: shaking my head, trembling. backing away. looking around for an escape.
mama glances back at the two men. they are moving slowly now, confusion covers their faces. grab mama’s shoulders, turn her to face me. try my voice. try to speak to mama. but no words. i have no words. all i can bring out of my mouth is one long squeak.
mama sees fear in my eyes. clasps my hands. “Equi, you’re safe here. No one’s going to hurt you. Don’t you know who they are?”
point again. shake my head, no words. back away. hold on to the tree. men step closer, then stop. one of them eases a sack off his shoulder, rests it on the dirt at his feet. light hits the globe sticking out of his sack, my legs go slack.
“my … my … headg-g-g-ear,” i stammer. slide down the tree with trembling knees.
mama squats down, looks me in the eye.
it’s as if the metal spiders have stolen my tongue again. i croak out strange, broken sounds. my hands fly around my face, fluttering over the wounds, trying to show mama what my mouth can’t say. i see them over mama’s shoulder. they don’t move. they don’t move.
mama shakes me softly, begs, “Equi, please, these are your children. They have been waiting for you all their lives.”
hurt shadows their faces. my children? the question pokes at my chest, tries to pierce my panic. my children? have my boys grown up to be so like my attackers? my skinny, scabby sons whose hunger drove me Under? mine? could these big, frightening men be mine?
mama speaks again, all the softness gone. “Equi, don’t do this!”
mama knows, has always known, what i’m going to do before i do it. she knew i was pregnant before the pain in my breasts sent me to the doctor. knew i was going Under before i told her i’d signed up for training. knows what my face looks like when i’m ready to run.
“Equi!” mama’s voice reaches me, but i can’t focus on her now. grip her without seeing her. my heart beats wild against her bony chest. she doesn’t ask me to go near them, she just says my name over and over and over again.
only for mama, i look at them again. only for mama, i try to find myself in their faces. but these are strange creatures, not children. i can’t bear to look in their eyes. i look instead at their hands. try to judge the size of their fists. wonder if their hands know the weight of metal spiders, if their cheeks know the bulge of the pasty white drug. i chance a glance at their faces—what do they know that mama doesn’t?
fear pants just behind my ear. she doesn’t know what they do at night. she trusts them but she doesn’t know. my eyes fall on the shiny globe of my headgear. my headgear. other than mama, it is the only thing that makes sense on the Surface.
i can feel it already, the water. i can feel its pull, its weight, its silence. i look at mama. in that half second, my eyes tell her what my mouth cannot. my eyes beg forgiveness, they weep for my wounds after flashing my guilt. then i squeeze mama tight. i don’t look at her when i push her away. i don’t stop to see if she fell or if she’s panic-stricken. i am in flight. i let the urge to flee have me. scramble across the dirt, crab-like. grab my headgear from the sack without another look at the man-children. no more spiders and needles, no more metal disks and memories. no more NewsNet and mumblers. no more home.
run. reach the space where the buildings meet. don’t look back. block out those hurt, angry faces. block out mama’s pain. scratch my skin on the stone buildings. run wildly. listen to the echo of my breath. listen to my feet pounding. run. feel the tightening in my chest. push people away. startle them. don’t stop. run. turn corners blindly. don’t ask questions. no more words. run.
sweat.
sweat stinging eyes. sweat dripping down neck. calves burning. gray sky. hear a squawk, loud and rough. up. look up. see the great white wings. see the orange feet. see the beak. run harder. follow bird to water. don’t stop. shove on my headgear. let it lock into the groove in my skin. no suit, no tank. i can make it. need the hush of Under. need to hear the echo of my own breath. need the wet weight of the ocean to erase any trace of home.
The Runner of n-Vamana
Mira lets the wired nanoswarm saturate every muscle, every neuron in her body. She has been running for four days. With sunrise in her eyes she stops, only to remind herself what not running feels like. Her augmented heart is no longer beating—it’s too fast to call it that. It floats like a hummingbird in her chest. The nanoswarm works overtime as she pauses, mending the damage to her muscles and bones, using her skin to synthesize water and energy from the atmosphere and sunlight. Cryofoils embedded in her muscular planes keep her from overheating, sucking at her scorching core temperature. She is alarmed by how inhuman she feels.
Four more days and Mira will be back where she started, back at the huddled settlement of the terraforming station. Looking at the white-hot orb on the horizon, she remembers the adulation of her fellow humans. The settlers, touching her feet and hands, raising their palms to fluorescing clouds pregnant with constant change. Bright array of absorbent prayer flags perched on the settlement’s crete houses, snapping in the charged nanite breeze. Voices lifting in song to the old god in the sky, planted by probes centuries ago and still in the flux of maturation: n-Vamana, nanogod that shares its name with the planetoid it shelters and grows.
Alone, n-Vamana above and below her, Mira feels artificial, built, a magnificent sculpture created by nanotechnists and surgeons out of an obsolete body. Artificial like the sun in the sky, no sun at all; a hole punctured into spacetime to flood this dim little world with the light of a distant white giant and pull the planetoid gently into a new orbit. Artificial like the atmosphere, churned into fertility by the work of n-Vamana and the zoati, the seven icy comets driven into the planetoid before it was settled. All artifice worthy of gods. Inhuman, magic, impossible. Her heart, trying to fly out of her chest. Her lungs, breathing air that would asphyxiate an Earthling.
She reminds herself of her brother. The small, human creature that emerged from the same womb she did. Whose augments are still in infancy, growing with him. Her brother, who is an orphan like her. Their mother—dead during the voyage, unable to weather the crushing pressures placed on the human body by the warp-points through which it slipped, by the radiation leaking past shields, by extended microgravity, by the very augments that protect younger bodies from such rigors. Their father—dead on their homeworld while his son was still gestating—crushed by an errant car on the streets of Mumbai’s megapolis, cremated, ashes drifting in that atmosphere. Her brother—alive. Nine-year-old Ela, who smeared her ankles and cheekbones with terastil clay—soil from this world mixed with water from Earth, a planet he has never seen. His eyes vacant with wonder at the expanses of even this small planetoid, dizzying after a life spent on a starship. Ela had carried out the ritual as he’d been told, knowing how precious the old-water was, his small hands carefully daubing the cool mud across his sister’s Earth-born bones. Mira looked at him kneeling in front of her, with his dirty palms and fingers, as if he were just playing out the impulses of childhood instead of the symbolic narrative of an entire posthuman diaspora, and she saw a little boy losing his big sister.
New worlds need new stories. New legends. She saw Ela witness her ritual transformation into a cybadevi, a breathing mythmeme for this new world. There was no escaping what the whole settlement felt at that moment, as Ela painted Mira’s carbon-reinforced ankles in front of the chanting settlers, the flaring sky. All augmented to some degree, all in the process of cyba-meld to help them stay alive here. But none like her, none trained and modified over nine years to become this new being that might just survive its test. Of all of them, she was the least human.
She was now the Runner of n-Vamana. She was more than just Mira.
Knowing this, Mira had run her hand through Ela’s short, damp hair. She had gathered it in her fist and given it a tug.
“Aoh,” he whispered. A single quick syllable, universal. Pain. The pain woke him. It reminded him, perhaps, of his sister. His sister Mira. Mira, the girl who’d once teased him for being afraid of the void outside the chilly starship windows, who told him there were monsters who ate little boys out there in the dark between the stars. Mira, who had long hair then, before she cut it off, whose braids he’d watched float in the starlight of viewing ports, coiling away from her head as she read on her tablet novels written millennia ago. Mira, who held him close when he longed for a parent, helped with his lessons, taught him to grow and prepare gcel rations; who’d tethered and tucked him into his sleeping pod and told him her distant memories of a crowded Earth.
His hair in her fist. The pain made him look up, look into her eyes so she could smile at him. He smiled back. A weak smile, but a smile all the same. She could ask for no more than that, on the eve of her run.
“Don’t run away forever. Come back,” Ela said.
Even with her muscles burning with energy beyond what an unaugmented human being could produce, she pressed her lips to Ela’s sweaty forehead, to let him know that his sister was still there under the glow of this devi’s tattoos, the flicker of glyphs across this devi’s photosynthetic skin.
“Yashin ti terra, Ela,” she said in the star-tongue of their vessel, now a language of n-Vamana. [I] Swear on Earth, Ela. Blue gem in the sky, fragile, waiting, birthplace, memory. Swear on Earth. Ela had nodded, convinced.
And then she ran.
She is not dead, yet. It is working. All of it. She is halfway through the test, halfway across the planetoid. She has run faster than any man or woman since humans walked, faster than machines, faster than Mercury, Hermes, Flash, Maya. This is impossible, it is madness, but she has done it. Four more days. Mira will test the limits of their augmentations, prove how far they can take humans on this little planetoid, just as the warp hole and the atmospheric nanogod sheathing the world have taken n-Vamana beyond its own provenance as a lifeless speck in the universe. In her electric limbs, she holds change itself. She is the messenger, and the message. She will prove how little food or water they will need here, how effectively they can process the changing atmosphere outside the settlement, even while pushing at the limits of the human system.
Every time she thinks: This is impossible, she also thinks of Ela. The child she has raised alone, in a vessel that carried them through the howling emptiness of the universe. Who can speak and write, and love, despite not having seen a world to live on till now, despite having only his sister as a guardian. She, grief-struck orphan, has somehow become a mother to her little Ela.
Impossibilities that bring her back to the ground, even as she shears the very air with her speed, slashing the crust of n-Vamana.
There is a strange vertigo that accompanies her, running on the back of this celestial dwarf, its gravity low despite a superdense core that keeps her from soaring into flight. It was, after all, chosen by her people because of its small size—easier to terraform. It is the first of its kind, to be wreathed and gifted with life-nurturing power by humans—an experimental home for the first of the cyba.
At night, running by the crests of n-Vamana’s low hills, she has seen past the nanogod’s aurora to glimpse the stars, the moon-blue glow of the system’s actual sun, too far away to give this place its own life. To the Jovian giant Shesha, its gaseous curve burning the star-studded dark, distance turning it deceptively small, a delicate red sickle suspended in the black.
And she has felt more alone than ever before, dizzy from the sensation that she is running across a tiny rock in space, her legs barely tethered to the ground. At other times, with the galaxy crowning the night, that same loneliness has nurtured a euphoria so strong that Mira has had to slow down and linger on it, to take in a horizon empty of human life, glimmering with the luminescence of burgeoning algal fields, tunnelled sunlight of the warp hole sparking off embryonic microbial oceans pooling out of the sky, to bask in the illusory sensation that she is n-Vamana, that she is beyond humanity, that she is this world incarnate, a deity carving its path through spacetime, aeons from the flocked and boiling Earth and its anxious worshippe
rs who wait for distant strains of information filtering out of the cosmos. The datastreams of humanity’s trembling colonization of deep space, its evolution into space-faring cyba, bolstered against an unfathomable infinity.
After nearly a decade of running and training her augmentations in the confines of a starship’s centrifuges, always surrounded by walls to keep out the void, running across n-Vamana feels like no freedom Mira has ever imagined. In these moments, she has become the cybadevi she is meant to be, a legend in the nascent history of this world, embodiment of n-Vamana like the dim, remote gods that gave their ancient names to the solar worlds near Earth. It has taken four sunrises, four times washed by the borrowed light of a star centuries in the past, blinding her tear-shot eyes, to wake her from these trances of divinity.
E-la. Two syllables, named on Earth, spoken by a mother and father long gone. Ela. Ela. Ela. She whispers, veils of steam rising off her superheated body.
Mira is cyba, but human still.
She sees into the future, when her likeness will grace the domed ceiling of the port, immortalized in a mosaic of stone chips, their colors unlike anything Earthlings ever saw, mined from the crust her feet cling to right now. New arrivals will look up at her for generations to come, glittering above them, a new myth born on this place. Earthlings will look at their textbooks and read about her, centuries from this moment, and light incense in front of shrines in her honor, smoke lilting through glowing 3D portraits of her carried in the pulsing hot dataservs of starships; they will look through their telescopes to the constellation where her memory dwells, the runner in the night sky, herald of the long-awaited galactic age. The pioneer of the cyba, the runner of n-Vamana.
She doesn’t care that these things will happen. Rather, she actually does care about these things but is just too wired to realize it. Right now, all Mira can see is forward motion. She wants to run, to live, to survive. She can feel the union between her body and the nanoswarm, between her colony and n-Vamana, its atmosphere seeded and transforming even as she breathes and sweats. At this moment, what she cares about is the finish, a hemisphere away, drawing a human line across the planetoid to her little brother Ela, her fallible flesh and blood, waiting, waiting for his sister to run around the world and return to him.
Mothership Page 22
