Mom, don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!
Or is it more likely that once the man has left the room, he will slit Carrie’s throat and cut out her implant? He knows there’s a recording of him inside, and he can’t afford to leave that behind.
Ruth’s hands are shaking too much. She wants to curse at herself. She cannot get a clear shot at the man with Carrie in front of him. She cannot.
Ruth wants to evaluate the chances rationally, to make a decision, but regret and grief and rage, hidden and held down by the Regulator until they could be endured, rise now all the sharper, kept fresh by the effort at forgetting. The universe has shrunken down to the wavering spot at the end of the barrel of the gun: a young woman, a killer, and time slipping irrevocably away.
She has nothing to turn to, to trust, to lean on, but herself, her angry, frightened, trembling self. She is naked and alone, as she has always known she is, as we all are.
The man is almost at the door. Carrie’s cries are now incoherent sobs.
It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.
Ruth’s first shot slams into Carrie’s thigh. The bullet plunges through skin, muscle, and fat, and exits out the back, shattering the man’s knee.
The man screams and drops the scalpel. Carrie falls, a spray of blood blossoming from her wounded leg.
Ruth’s second shot catches the man in the chest. He collapses to the floor.
Mom, mom!
She drops the gun and crawls over to Carrie, cradling her and tending to her wound. She’s crying, but she’ll be fine.
A deep pain floods through her like forgiveness, like hard rain after a long drought. She does not know if she will be granted relief, but she experiences this moment fully, and she’s thankful.
“It’s okay,” she says, stroking Carrie as she lies in her lap. “It’s okay.”
* * *
Author’s Note: the EchoSense technology described in this story is a loose and liberal extrapolation of the principles behind the technology described in Qifan Pu et al., “Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals,” The 19th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom’13) (available at http://wisee.cs.washington.edu/wisee_paper.pdf). There is no intent to suggest that the technology described in the paper resembles the fictional one portrayed here.
The Woman from the Ocean
KARL BUNKER
Here’s a melancholy tale about a woman who crash-lands back on Earth after a long voyage out to the stars and finds that the human race has changed in subtle but profound ways while she was gone.
Currently a software engineer, Karl Bunker has been a jeweler, a musical instrument maker, a sculptor, and a mechanical technician. Karl Bunker’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Cosmos, Abyss & Apex, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, and elsewhere. His story “Under the Shouting Sky,” won him the first Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story Contest. He lives in a small town north of Boston with his wife, various pets, and sundry wildlife. He maintains a Web site at www.karlbunker.com.
It was a morning in early winter when she came to the village. She came on foot, along the shore road from the north. Michael’s cabin was the first one on this road, and he was stoking the morning fire when he was startled by a banging at his door. He got up and was just reaching for the latch when the door opened and she came in.
She was hunched over with her arms tight across her chest. She walked past him without speaking, barely glancing at him, and sat down cross-legged in front of the fire. Michael closed the door and stood looking at her for a moment, frozen by surprise. Then he saw she was shivering, so he got a blanket from his bed and put it over her shoulders. Her clothes were strange, bright with colors that he’d never seen in any fabric. They were also too thin to be any protection against the cold.
He squatted beside her. “My name is Michael,” he said quietly, and after a moment she turned her head to look at him.
She had a strong face, with high cheekbones and a wide jaw, and her skin was brown. When she looked at him, her eyes darted over his face as if she was searching for something. “You speak English,” she said. “Or something like it.” She made a short, unhappy smile. “What place is this?”
She had a strange accent, and it took Michael a moment to understand what she had said.
“This is our village, on the inner coast of the cape. My name is Michael, I’m a carpenter, and you’re in my home.”
“What cape?” she asked.
“The—the big cape…” he stammered. “The one on the ocean.”
“The big cape. The one on the ocean,” the woman repeated. Then she turned back to the fire and pulled the blanket closer around herself. “Fuck,” she said.
Michael waited a little while, then asked, “Are you from far away?” He realized then that he could smell the ocean in her hair and on her clothes. “Were you on a boat?” he asked. “Did it sink?”
“Yes. Something like that. We crashed into the ocean. Only a few of us got out of the lander before it sank, and no one else could make the swim. I spent all day going up and down the shore calling, looking for them, but there was no one … Then it got dark, and I started walking … All of them … only seventy-eight of us were left, and now they’re all dead. Philip, Zhang, Gabriela, Mary, Lester … All dead, all dead … all … dead…”
Her head dropped as she said these last words, and soon Michael saw she was asleep. He moved close to her, then picked her up with one arm at her back and one behind her knees. She made a soft grunting sound when he lifted her, but didn’t wake up. He laid her in his bed, putting two heavy blankets over her and pulling them up to her neck. Then he left the cabin, closing the door quietly behind him. He was back a few minutes later with Susan, who was the old woman of the village.
“She’s not like anyone I’ve ever seen,” Susan whispered as they stood over the sleeping stranger. “I’ve seen brown skin before, but not on a person with such straight black hair. What color are her eyes?”
“Brown,” Michael said. “Light brown. Almost exactly the color of her skin, and large, like a child’s eyes.”
“Are they now?” Susan said, drawing out the words and smiling at Michael. “She looks about your age, Michael, and very healthy. Perhaps the sea has sent her to you, in return for your poor Emma.”
Michael looked at Susan, one eyebrow arched.
“I know,” she said. “You don’t believe in that sort of thing. And neither do I, come to think of it. But it sounds nice. As I get older I’m learning to find comfort in things I don’t believe.”
The woman slept until past midday; then she appeared at the doorway to the half of the cabin that was Michael’s workshop. “Could I have some water?” she asked. “And maybe something to eat?”
“Of course!” Michael said. He came quickly out of his shop and poured water from a pitcher into a mug, handing it to her. He asked her to sit at his small table and began assembling a meal.
“My name is Kali,” the woman said as she sat down. Michael brought her bread, cheese, a bowl of thick soup. As Kali ate she gestured at her surroundings. “It looks like two people live here.”
Michael sat down across from Kali. “I … had a wife. She died last year.”
Kali picked up the clay mug of water in front of her and looked into it. “From what? Do you know? Typhoid? Dysentery? Consumption? Evil spirits?”
“She had a pain in her chest. In the end she couldn’t breathe. Susan, our medicine woman, couldn’t help her.”
“Must not have been evil spirits, then,” Kali said. Then she glanced up, meeting Michael’s eyes briefly. “I’m sorry.”
She drank from the mug, then looked at it, turning it in her hand. “Where was this made? Your clothes, the fabric they’re made from, the
tools you work with—where do all these things come from?”
“My cups and dishes were made by a potter named Jim. A woman named Ann is a weaver and seamstress; she made most of my clothes. My tools—“
“The fiber for the cloth—the cotton, or whatever it is,” Kali interrupted, “is it grown nearby or does it come from somewhere else?”
“Traders … it’s brought by traders.”
“Itinerant traders? People from outside your village?”
“Yes.”
“And where do the traders get it? Where is it grown?”
Michael lifted his hands with the palms up. “It comes from … far away, outside the village. Sometimes the traders come on the road from the south, other times they have boats that go up and down the coast. Was your boat a trader boat?”
“How do you pay for the cloth? By barter? Do you do everything by barter?”
“We … give different things in exchange for what they bring. It depends on what we have, and what the traders want.” Michael smiled uncertainly, his eyes on Kali’s face.
“Can you read?” Kali’s voice was sharp and she was holding the heavy mug in both hands, squeezing down on it so that her fingertips whitened. “Can anyone read? Have you ever heard of anyone who can read?”
“I’m sorry … That has something to do with markings, doesn’t it? A trader showed me something once—marks on a piece of plastic—I couldn’t see what they meant.”
Kali took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it,” she said. Then she stood up suddenly. “I need to go out—to look at this village of yours.” She bent and reached across the table until the tips of her fingers touched Michael’s hand. “Thank you Michael,” she said. “Thank you for your hospitality, and I’m sorry for being rude with you.”
As she was walking to the door, Michael called after her. “It’s cold. Take this.” He held a deerskin jacket out to her, his eyes on the jacket rather than Kali.
“Your wife’s,” Kali said. “Thanks. I’ll bring it back.”
“No need,” Michael said, but Kali was already out the door, pulling it closed behind her.
* * *
It was late afternoon when she came back. She knocked on Michael’s door, waiting for him to open it this time. “I met the woman—Susan—in the next house down the road,” she said. “She took me around, introduced me to lots of people. Everyone was very pleasant, very kind. Susan said I could stay with her until … until I can support myself, I guess.” She walked through the main room of Michael’s cabin, to the doorway that led to his workshop. “Susan told me that you had an apprentice until recently.”
“Yes, Alan. He decided to go back to fishing.”
“A long time ago,” Kali said, “a long, long time ago, I used to do some woodworking. Many of the tools were different then, but I was good at it, and I can learn, if you would be willing to teach me.”
* * *
That night Kali was in Susan’s cabin, sitting at her table. “Michael is a good man,” Susan said as she put a plate of stew in front of Kali. “You will like working for him. He is very kind, very gentle, and good-looking too, don’t you think?” There were gaps in her teeth when she smiled.
Some time through the night Susan woke to the sound of Kali quietly crying. She got up and knelt on the floor beside the straw-padded pallet that was Kali’s bed, stroking the younger woman’s hair. “Poor child, poor child,” she whispered.
Kali sat up, wiping under her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said.
Susan made a loose gesture with her hand, sitting down on her heels.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Susan,” Kali said. “I mean live here, in this village, in this world. I just don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I even want to try.”
“This … world?”
Kali brought her knees up underneath the long nightgown that Michael had given her and folded her arms across them. “This isn’t my world, Susan. It’s changed so much … The world I came from, like all the people I knew, is dead. It died hundreds of years ago.”
“Michael’s wife’s name was Emma,” Susan said. “She came from another village, far away, a place where the crops had failed. Many people died and others, like Emma, left to find a better place. She was very sad at first; she felt that she had lost everything. But Michael made her happy. He made her laugh.”
“You have a one-track mind, Susan,” Kali said.
Susan smiled, her old face looking impish. “You say hundreds of years ago. You don’t look like someone who has lived hundreds of years. Do people not grow old where you come from?”
“We were on a long journey. The only way to make the journey was to use machines that caused us to sleep for many years without getting older. We were like Michael’s wife; we were looking for a far-away place where we could live. But we never found it. We only found dead, unlivable places. So finally we gave up and started back. Our ship was deteriorating, and couldn’t last forever. But while we were away, things here changed. Things became very different.” She tilted her head and rested it sideways on her folded arms. “Things became very different.”
“So where you come from—the time you are from—it was during the machine times?”
“The machine times?” Kali asked. “Yes, I suppose that must be what you call it. Tell me what you know about the machine times.”
“Only that it was long ago, and people then had giant machines that could do anything. Now the machines no longer work, and all we know of them is what we are told by traders who go to the old places and bring back metal and plastics.”
“Hm,” Kali grunted. “And do you know about wars?”
“Wars…” Susan repeated, mouthing the word in a way that suggested it was a sound with no meaning.
“People killing people, in large numbers.”
Furrows deepened in Susan’s face. “People? Which people? Killing … which people? And why?”
“That’s a very good question, Susan.” Kali lay back down on her side, pulling her blankets up and closing her eyes.
* * *
The next morning Kali went to Michael’s cabin. He took her to his workshop, and they talked about his work, his tools, different kinds of wood, the various items he made and what he hoped to get for them in trade. They worked together all day until it began to get dark. As Michael was lighting a candle, Kali looked around the cabin. “Is that a musical instrument?” she asked, pointing at an object hanging on a wall. “Do you play it, or did it belong to your…”
“Yes, I play it sometimes,” Michael said.
Kali took the instrument off the wall and brought it to Michael. “Would you play something for me?”
Michael sat on a chair near the fire and laid the instrument across his legs like a zither. He plucked at its strings, his right hand moving up and down the fretboard. After a few bars he began to sing in a soft, dry voice. When he finished the song Kali asked him to sing another, and another after that.
“How did you learn these songs?” Kali asked.
“The first one is old. People in the village taught it to me. The other two are mine. I made the last one as a gift for my wife.”
“That one was my favorite,” Kali said. She stared into the fire for a time, and then turned her face to Michael. “I want to talk about some ideas with you, Michael. As sort of an experiment, okay?” When Michael nodded she went on. “First, do you know that there are—there used to be—ways of marking down music on paper—or on animal skins, let’s say.”
“You mean like writing?”
“Yes, like that. But with different marks for musical notes as well as words. If I wrote down your songs, you could share your music with everyone.”
“I do share my music with everyone,” Michael said. “I teach my songs to anyone who asks.”
“But what about other people? What about people you might never meet, people far away, peopl
e in the future, after you’re gone? If you wrote your music down, it could last forever. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”
Michael frowned, as if struggling to understand. “But … who are these people? Why would they want to know my songs?”
An edge came to Kali’s voice. “Some people would want to. Not everyone, but some people would see them and love them. Can you see the beauty of that idea?”
Michael started to speak, stopped, started again. “It seems … strange. Why would I give something to someone I don’t know, someone I’ve never even met? Someone who has never asked me for the thing I’m giving? If I could see this person, if he told me he wanted to learn my songs, then I would understand…” His voice faded.
Kali turned back to the fire. “Oh brave new world,” she said quietly.
Michael let her sit in silence for a time. He put some dried leaves into a pot of water hanging over the fire and then poured out two mugs of tea. “Can you tell me something about … where you came from?” he asked.
Kali said nothing for a long time. She continued to look into the fire, blew onto her tea, sipped it a few times. “We thought the world was ending,” she said finally. “There were too many weapons; too many terrible, horrific weapons. It was becoming too easy to destroy too much of the world, too quickly. Everything was going to hell when we left. We kept listening to news transmissions as we went out and out. Things only got worse. It looked like the world, the whole world, was going to die. We thought we might be the only survivors.”
Again she paused for a long time. “And then someone, or something, decided to save the world, and they came up with the virus. The favorite theory on the ship was that it must have been an AI. Some machine was given, or gave itself, the problem of how to save humanity, and the virus was its solution.”
“Vi-rus?”
“A kind of disease, Michael. A sickness. A sickness that was created, and one that didn’t make people sick. Instead it affected their chromosomes in a way that changed the brains of every new baby that was born. Just a small, small change…”
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 21
