Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 98

by Matthew Kressel

  “I rearranged the way the pots were hung up in the galley and the way the dishes were stacked in the cabinets and the way the pictures were arranged in the bedroom and the way we stored life vests and shoes and blankets. I gave everything a better flow of qi, energy, and smoother fengshui. It might seem like a cramped and shabby place to some, but the ship now feels like our palace in the skies.

  “Barry didn’t even notice it. But, because of the fengshui, we didn’t argue any more. Even during the storm, when things were so tense, we worked well together.”

  “Were you scared at all during the storm?” I asked.

  Yeling bit her bottom lip, thinking about my question.

  “When I first rode with Barry, when I didn’t yet know him, I used to wake up and say, in Chinese, who is this man with me in the sky? That was the most I’ve ever been scared.

  “But last night, when I was struggling with the ship and Barry came to help me, I wasn’t scared at all. I thought, it’s okay if we die now. I know this man. I know what I’ve done. I’m home.”

  “There was never any real danger from lightning,” Icke said. “You knew that, right? The American Dragon is a giant Faraday cage. Even if the lightning had struck us, the charge would have stayed on the outside of the metal frame. We were in the safest place over that whole sea in that storm.”

  I brought up what Yeling had said, that the ship seemed to know where to go in the storm.

  Icke shrugged. “Aerodynamics is a complex thing, and the ship moved the way physics told it to.”

  “But when you get your Aurora, you’ll let her paint eyes on it?”

  Icke nodded, as though I had asked a very stupid question.

  Las Vegas, the diadem of the desert, spread out beneath, around, and above us.

  Pleasure ships and mass-transit passenger zeppelins covered in flashing neon and gaudy giant flickering screens dotted the air over the Strip. Cargo carriers like us were constricted to a narrow lane parallel to the Strip with specific points where we were allowed to depart to land at the individual casinos.

  “That’s Laputa,” Icke pointed above us, to a giant, puffy, baroque airship that seemed as big as the Venetian, which we were passing below and to the left. Lit from within, this newest and flashiest floating casino glowed like a giant red Chinese lantern in the sky. Air taxis rose from the Strip and floated towards it like fireflies.

  We had dropped off the shipment of turbine blades with the wind farm owned by Caesars Palace outside the city, and now we were headed for Caesars itself. Comp rooms were one of the benefits of hauling cargo for a customer like that.

  I saw, coming up behind the Mirage, the tall spire and blinking lights of the mooring mast in front of the Forum Shops. It was usually where the great luxury personal yachts of the high-stakes rollers moored, but tonight it was empty, and a transpacific long-haul Dongfeng Feimaotui, a Flying Chinaman named the American Dragon, was going to take it for its own.

  “We’ll play some games, and then go to our room,” Icke said. He was talking to Yeling, who smiled back at him. This would be the first chance they had of sleeping on the same bed in a week. They had a full twenty-four hours, and then they’d take off for Kalispell, Montana, where they would pick up a shipment of buffalo bones for the long haul back to China.

  I lay in bed in my Downtown hotel room thinking about the way the furniture in my bedroom was arranged, and imagined the flow of qi around the bed, the nightstands, the dresser. I missed the faint hum of the zeppelin’s engines, so quiet that you had to listen hard to hear them.

  I turned on the light and called my wife. “I’m not home yet. Soon.”

  [This story was inspired in many ways by John McPhee’s Uncommon Carriers. Some liberty has been taken with the physical geography of our world: a great circle flight path from Lanzhou to Las Vegas would not actually cross the city of Ordos.

  The lyrics of the song that Yeling plays come from a poem by the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi (1037-1101 A.D). It has remained a popular poem to set to music through the centuries since its composition.]

  About the Author

  Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

  Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories.

  Cody

  Pat Cadigan

  “Common wisdom has it,” said LaDene from where she was stretched out on the queen-sized bed, “that anyone with a tattoo on their face goes crazy within five years.”

  Cody paused in his examination of his jawline in the mirror over the desk to give her a look. “You see any tattoos on this example of manly beauty?”

  “Can’t see the moon from here, either. Or the TV remote,” she added she sat up and looked around. Cody found it on the desk and tossed it to her. “Thanks. You know, carnies would call you a marked man.”

  “Carnies?” He gave a short laugh. “Don’t tell me you threw over the bright lights of the midway to keep a low profile in budget accommodations.”

  “Higher-end budget accommodations.” She put on the TV and began channel-surfing. “For the discerning yet financially savvy business traveler. Don’t you ever read the brochures?”

  He made a polite noise that was could have been yes or no and was neither. The hotspot that had come up over two hours ago was still there, midway between his chin and the point of his jaw, and as far as he could tell, it hadn’t faded even a little. The medic had assured him there was nothing to worry about unless it started to spread and it hadn’t. It wouldn’t have bothered him except he hadn’t had a hotspot in years. Rookies got hotspots.

  The sudden recurrence could have been down to any number of things, the medic had said, the mostly likely being the attack of hayfever he had suffered on arrival. But he’d never had hayfever in his life, he’d told the medic. He’d never been to Kansas City in late August, she’d replied, chuckling.

  Technically, he still hadn’t. The airport was thirty miles north of the city and the car they’d sent had taken him to an industrial park about as far to the west on the Kansas side of the state line, which apparently ran right through the middle of town. The most he’d seen of Kansas City proper was a distant cluster of skyscrapers, briefly glimpsed through the tinted window as the driver negotiated a complicated interchange of highway ramps. After that it was generic highway scenery all the way to a generic suburban industrial park, full of angular, antiseptic office buildings surrounded by patches of green landscaped and manicured in extremis, some with a koi pond or a fountain. The access road meandered through it so much that Cody thought there had to be an extra mile of travel. Albeit a very pretty mile; perhaps it was so people coming and going could see at least in passing the flowers they didn’t have time to stop and smell. Cody could have done without it. By the time they’d reached their destination, he had actually begun to feel carsick.

  “Yo!” A pillow hit him in the head, making him jump. “And I thought I was vain,” LaDene laughed. “Are you really that fascinating?”

  “I was woolgathering,” he said as he threw the pillow back at her. “Thinking, in case you don’t know what that means.”

  “I know what it means,” she said. “I also know you’ve got a hotspot. Unclench, honey, I’ve got one, too.” She lifted her shirt and pointed at her navel.

  “Oh, very funny.”

  “Oh, very for-real.” She was up off the bed and had his face in her hands before he could say anything. “Ah, got it, right there.” She patted his cheek and pulled up her shirt again, exposing her midriff. “Mine’s hotter. Feel.”

  Her be
llybutton was only inches away from his nose. Cody drew back and started to protest as she grabbed his hand and pressed it against her skin. His discomfort turned to surprise. “I sit corrected,” he said, extricating himself from her grip. “Yours is hotter.”

  “Told you,” she said, plumping down on the bed to stretch out again. “It’s probably the ragweed and who knows what else in the air. Man, I hate KC this time of year.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “I’m from here.” She laughed at his surprised expression. “You couldn’t tell?”

  “How could I? We just met.”

  “I knew you weren’t from around here, soon as I saw you. No antihistamines.”

  He chuckled a bit ruefully. “I thought I was dying of a head cold I caught on the plane.”

  She started to channel-surf again, then changed her mind and shut the TV off. “If you get cold symptoms a lot when you fly, it’s probably an allergy.”

  “Oh?” He gave a short skeptical laugh. “Is there a lot of ragweed on airplanes?”

  She shrugged. “Lots of other stuff—mold, dust, newsprint. Somebody’s cheap cologne. Even expensive cologne.”

  “Newsprint?”

  “Believe it or leave it. You know how if something exists, there’s porn of it? Well, there’s also someone allergic to it.”

  “Newsprint,” Cody said again, still skeptical.

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.” LaDene raised one hand solemnly, then let it fall. “Okay, that was fun. Now whaddaya wanna do?”

  Cody leaned over and scooped the remote control up so he could turn the TV back on, mainly to forestall the possibility of her wanting to compare hotspots again. The screen lit up to show a dark-haired, olive-skinned woman speaking directly to the camera with an earnest sincerity that made his own brow furrow in sympathy.

  “ . . . found flayed and burned in a midtown Kansas City, Missouri parking garage have now positively been identified as August Fiore, AKA Little Augie Flowers, fifty-one, and Coral Oh, twenty-nine, of Liberty, Missouri. Fiore went missing two weeks ago from an FBI safe house where he was being held pending the start of the trial of Carmine Nesparini on racketeering charges. The FBI has steadfastly refused to comment on allegations that Fiore was Nesparini’s personal ‘master key’ but sources close to the investigation say that Fiore’s cooperation would have given authorities an unprecedented level of access to mob records.

  “Fiore’s attorneys refused to comment, except to say that they were unaware of any escape plans and had no knowledge of Fiore’s whereabouts. Whether Fiore left the safe house voluntarily may never be known. FBI technicians are still working on the sabotaged surveillance system but experts believe there is little chance they can salvage enough data to be useful.

  “Coral Oh’s connection to Fiore still has not been established. Oh worked for the Kansas City Convention Bureau for fifteen years as an event coordinator, for the last three in a supervisory position. Co-workers described her as intelligent and well liked. She was last seen ten days ago in her office by two of her subordinates, who had been working late with her.”

  The woman was suddenly replaced by a video of a very young man who looked as if he hadn’t slept for at least that long. The slightly wobbly graphic at the bottom of the screen said he was Akule Velasquez.”She told us to go home, she’d finish up,” he said in a husky voice to someone just off-camera to the left. “We’d’ve stayed but she was all—” he made small shooing gestures with both hands. “‘No, get outa here, I’ll finish, bring me some fancy coffee tomorrow.’ She was like that. I tried to stay anyway but she kept telling me no. I wish I hadn’t listened.”

  The woman in the studio reappeared, looking more earnest and sincere than ever. “The mayor’s office issued a statement saying that this unfortunate and tragic incident should not overshadow the fact that criminal activity in the area has been steadily declining for the past twelve months thanks to new policing initiatives—”

  LaDene snatched the remote out of his hand and turned off the TV. “Well, that wasn’t fun. Now what do you wanna do?”

  “Hey, I was watching that.” Cody reached for the remote but she threw it across the room where it bounced off the wall and fell neatly into a small waste basket.

  “She shoots, she scores! A three-pointer, the crowd goes wild!” LaDene made crowd noises as he stalked over to retrieve the control. The impact had knocked the batteries out and it took him two tries to put them back in properly. “Oh, come on. What do you wanna scare the shit out of yourself for?”

  But the news had moved on; now a man was standing near the edge of an empty swimming pool, blinking in bright sunlight as he talked about levels of chlorine. “Oh, well.” Cody dropped the remote on the bed and sat down on the chair by desk again. “I wasn’t trying to scare myself.”

  “Who were you trying to scare—me?”

  “No. I just want to pay attention.”

  “Set a news alert on your phone.” She was channel-surfing again. “It’s probably all bullshit anyway. ‘Little Augie Flowers,’ for God’s sake. Who goes around calling themselves ‘Little Augie Flowers’? For a minute there, I thought they were talking about some old Grand Theft Auto module. ‘Gay Tony Meets Little Augie Flowers, bullets will fly, heads will roll!’ Oh, hey, I love this!” she added, sitting up suddenly.

  Cody barely had to look at the screen to know what it was. “I’ve seen it.” He rested an elbow on the desk and cupped his face in his hand. The hotspot was still there. “Several times.”

  “So have I but I like to watch it whenever it’s on. That guy’s so cool.”

  “He is?” If he didn’t leave the goddam hotspot alone, he told himself, it was never going to fade. He shifted so he was leaning the upper part of his cheek against his hand; as if it had a will of its own, his thumb slid down to feel his jawline. Annoyed with himself, he straightened up, grabbed the TV listings off the desk and paged through them without seeing anything.

  “Okay, he’s all wrong and he probably knew it,” LaDene was saying. She punched the pillows behind her into a more supportive position for her lower back and casually folded her legs into a half-lotus, making Cody wince. “But so what? The whole movie’s wrong.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty old movie,” he said, shrugging.

  “Not that old. Not ancient.”

  “No, but BCI didn’t even exist when this came out and people were still using floppy disks. This big.” He held his hands three feet apart. She gave him a look and he moved them so they were only a foot apart. “Okay, this big. TVs were dumb terminals and a cloud was a fluffy white thing in the sky. So the idea of people giving up memories to store data in their brains—”

  LaDene waved one hand dismissively. “I was referring to the cell phones.”

  He frowned. “What cell phones?”

  “Exactly!” She laughed. “How the hell did they miss cell phones?”

  As if on cue, there was a sound like a ray-gun in a scifi movie and the ring on her right hand lit up with tiny flashing lights. She cocked her head, listening, then bounced off the bed. “My ride’s here. See you around—” Her grin was sheepish.

  “Cody,” he said.

  “Right.” She paused, one eyebrow raised, the other down low, something Cody had never been able to manage no matter how hard he’d tried. “That’s really your name.”

  “LaDene’s really yours?” he said evenly.

  “I grew up in Tonganoxie, Kansas. Of course it’s really my name.”

  The two statements seemed unrelated to him but he nodded anyway. She pulled her suitcase out of the closet, extended the handle and then paused again, one hand on the doorknob. “Where are you from?”

  “I used to know but I rented that out for a database back-up.”

  He heard her laughing all the way down the hall.

  He ate alone in the dining room. The waitress gave him a table by a window that made the most of the hotel’s location atop a rocky promontory,
so he could enjoy his chicken Caesar salad with a scenic view of three other hotels and the six-lane highway running between them.

  While it may not have been classic postcard material, he had to admit the view was actually rather nice. Kansas wasn’t as flat as most people seemed to think, at least not in this locale. Here the landscape was gently rolling, punctuated by flat stretches usually occupied by malls or apartment complexes. In the distance, he could see the top of a mall that had to be the size of an airplane hangar and, not far from that, a crane surrounded by a framework suggesting future apartments or condos.

  But it was the highway that drew his eye more than anything. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen so many private cars. Well, the travel agent had told him this was one of the last bastions of the autonomous commuter. Cody couldn’t imagine what it was like to spend an hour or more of every weekday driving. He’d had a license himself once, but only briefly. After it had expired, he hadn’t bothered renewing it and didn’t miss it.

  Perhaps if he were driving now, he’d be too busy to keep worrying at that stupid hotspot. Annoyed with himself, he pulled the complimentary library up on the table-top and checked out the local newspaper.

  The waitress tried to talk him into dessert every time she refilled his iced tea. After his third glass, he swiped his keycard through the table-top reader, left an overly generous cash tip, and went back up to the room. It seemed a lot emptier now that LaDene was gone. Even the pillows she had piled against the headboard looked forlorn. He hadn’t been thrilled to find her there when he’d checked in. She had apologized profusely—some kind of travel-plan fiasco. Having been through a few of those himself, he was sympathetic. As it turned out, she’d been good company—better than he’d realized. His newly-recovered privacy felt lonely.

  He stretched out in the place where she had been and put the TV on again. It was only one night, and as LaDene had pointed out, this was a higher-end budget hotel. The complimentary coffee service was a drip pot with pouches of a gourmet blend rather than merely a kettle and two envelopes of instant. The minibar was well stocked with a wide variety of refreshments and if all of it cost ten times what it would in a grocery store, at least the cans of mixed nuts were a bit larger than average.