Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  Antonio nodded again.

  “Which wasn’t on Mi Suerte when he got tagged.”

  “So probably he dumped it,” Antonio said. “And it’s still sittin’ there, somewhere out there, just waitin’ for someone to come bag it. You ain’t the first to think it.”

  “And your friend here, if you ain’t lyin’ and he was Corazón’s Fibs, he knows where it is.”

  “Knew where it is,” Antonio said.

  Lázaro looked from one to the other. “Knew what, Antonio?”

  “Go on,” Antonio said to the captain, ignoring Lázaro.

  “They got the cleanin’-up memories stuff. So why not just get some for your buddy and clean up his memory, and we go out after the schatz.” She leaned back. “Fifty-fifty, you an’ me. I cut my crew into my half, you cut your buddy into yours. Win win.”

  Antonio shook his head. “You can’t do it. MemMax’s red-list Hub only, and even if you find it, it’s hella expensive and you ain’t got that much scratch, not for enough to do some good. Little dose, all it’ll do is get him unfuzzed for maybe a day. You want my help, you get enough so he’s never goin’ back to this. Got me?”

  The captain looked at him, then away, then back, then pushed her chair away from the table and stood up. “I’ll find a way,” she said. “Don’t you go sellin’ him to anyone else, hear?”

  Antonio just laughed. “You the only bitch crazy enough to think that’ll work,” he said. “Don’t worry. Me an’ Laz, we ain’t got nowhere to go.”

  Floating like a yuck parade

  After that there was a long time when nothing much happened. The weather that leaked in beside Papa Carlisle’s got hot, then it got damp, then it got cool, then it rained like hell and the street flooded so all the mud and garbage and boosters and prophs and dead cats came floating through like a yuck parade. Days like that, Lázaro stayed home. Lately he’d been spending a lot of time back when he was a kid right out of school, before he hooked up with—with—well, never mind. Being right out of school was like swank, lots of money to send home and money in his pocket and good friends and once they all climbed a mountain together, got the gear and hired a guide and went on up the sucker to the very top where there was hardly any air and it was cold as sin, and he and Jane made love in the snow at the top of the world. It was great, like it all happened yesterday, and Lázaro had a good time telling his furniture all about it, telling the jokes and laughing at them, and sharing around the hike food, and saying what his dad said when he called him up from the top of the world and that made him cry a little, but it was a good cry even if he couldn’t remember why he did it.

  When Antonio showed up, Lázaro thought he was the guide and told him they were running low on food and when was it going to stop raining at the top of the world, anyway? Antonio went away and came back with food and made Lázaro eat some hot stuff and go to bed. When he woke up, Antonio was gone and so was the top of the world and he didn’t remember what it was that he missed, only that he missed something. Maybe it was the rain, because there wasn’t any now and the mud was drying up with crap sticking up out of it so he had to walk around it real careful ’cause some of that stuff, it got on your foot it could hurt you. He kept walking anyway, trying to find a place that would take him back to the place that he remembered that he couldn’t remember. He walked all the way to where the Curve got skinny and dark and stopped in a pile of garbage against the port dome, then he came back on one of the side streets, but nothing made him remember anything. He slept out a couple of times. Maybe more. There was maybe someplace else he was supposed to sleep, but maybe not. It made his eyes hurt to try to think about it.

  One morning he thought he found the remembering place, so he came through the shimmer into Papa’s. Papa scowled with only half her face on and then a woman came down and took his hand and led him away.

  “We’ve been looking for you for days,” she said. “Are you all right? Stop, turn around, let me see you, damn, Laz, you scared the shit out of Antonio an’ me, we thought you’d gone off and died somewhere, where you been?”

  Lázaro wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t. The words were there, he just couldn’t make them work, couldn’t remember how to make his mouth make them. Jane started crying and took him upstairs to her room and called Antonio. Lázaro just sat with his hands folded in his lap and the only thing he could remember was that everything he had to remember was gone. It was all dark and cold and hollow and he didn’t like it, but when he stood to go the woman grabbed his arm and told him he couldn’t leave, and that made him angry so he hit her and she fell away so he went out the door and someone he almost knew came and pushed him back into the room and locked the door.

  “You okay?” the man said to the woman. The woman nodded and stood and put her hand alongside her face where she was bleeding a little. Lázaro didn’t know who had hit her, but if he found out he’d make them real sorry.

  Then a voice with no body started shouting and the man in the room cursed and he and the woman took Lázaro away to another place and a second woman came and they all stood around looking at Lázaro and jabbering, but nothing they said made any sense to him. Something about swag and something about skunking a deal and other stuff. The woman had a box with shiny things in it and the man talked about what was real and the woman said it was real and did he want it or not and he said he didn’t trust her, and the other woman—the pretty woman with the black eye—kept crying and Lázaro kept trying to talk, but the words were gone, solid gone, and the harder he tried the more gone they were. First he wept, then he got mad again and stood up and made fists, and the man pulled Lázaro’s sleeve up and slapped a skinsting against his arm and then he went to sleep.

  He woke up two days later. His brain hurt. Before he could be all the way awake, they fed him and skinned him and he passed out again.

  How she got it

  It’s only available in the Hub, and even there you need a full croesus and permission from the Govs carved in platinum and set with gems just to get within a klick of it. Made from some kind of venom, from some kind of bug, that can only live on a planet that got crudded to death years ago—so you can see that it’s pretty rare. But that’s not what the story’s about, how she found it and got it and brought it back, and we’re not stopping the story to say. She found it. She got it. She brought it back. That’s enough.

  Clarity

  The fourth time he woke up, he opened his eyes and saw Antonio sitting there, holding a bowl of hot soup. Behind him a woman in spacer’s clothes sat with her butt on the edge of a table, arms crossed, staring at him.

  “Toño,” Lázaro said. “Híjole, me duele la cabeza como un verdadero diablo.”

  “Yeah, well, that ain’t too surprising,” Antonio said, but he was grinning like a maniac. “Have some soup.”

  “Corazón,” the woman said, like she’d said it a lot before. She had captain’s bars on her sleeves. Lázaro decided he didn’t like her.

  “Mi Fregado Suerte,” she continued.

  Lázaro scooted himself up to sit against the wall and took the bowl. “I been drunk?”

  “Kinda,” Antonio said. He passed a hunk of bread.

  “Corazón’s last run.”

  Lázaro frowned at her. “Corazón’s last run, some chingadero ratted him to the Freddies and they dumped him on some fregado asteroid somewhere and trashed the rest of us too.”

  “But he had a cargo, he dumped it before the Freddies caught him,” she insisted. “Where’d he dump it?”

  Lázaro took a bite of the bread. It was fresh and tasted great. “Toño?” he said, his mouth full. “What’s goin’ on?”

  Antonio shrugged, leaning back in the chair. It creaked and wobbled, but it held him.

  “She got an offer for us,” Antonio said. “She’s got MemMax, enough to fix what the Freddies did to you. What she wants is the zero point to get to where Corazón dropped his loot, and she’ll share it out fifty-fifty, you an’ me on one side, her and h
er crew on the other.”

  “You don’t even have to come with,” she said. “Maybe better if you didn’t. You just tell me where and—”

  “And you take off with the whole thing,” Antonio said, like he’d said it a lot already. “What, you think we’re stupid or something? Laz can’t go ’cause the Freddies got him chipped and he can’t leave the Curve, but I’m goin’ with. You got a problem with that, you say it and we can stop the whole thing right here.”

  “Skitte,” she said. “Your ponyboy ain’t got enough MemMax in him to be permanent, just enough to buy him maybe a couple weeks then bang, right back to Stupidville. You ain’t about to stop it right here.”

  “And I ain’t about to give you the numbers and watch you fly off and hope someday you’ll be back, neither,” Antonio retorted. “And he ain’t my ponyboy, he’s my brother, got it?”

  They kept bickering. Antonio’s foxleather jacket hung from the back of the rickety chair, frayed along the seams so that Lázaro could see the plastic of it. Antonio’s slick black hair showed some grey at the roots. He had always cared a lot about his looks, even back when they were kids. Lázaro sat up and swung his legs over the side of the cot. Now that the soup was gone the room smelled stale and close and there was nothing in it that said it was his place, no glyphs or books or anything, but he knew it was his anyway. He recognized the stains on the wall.

  He recognized his memories, too. Being a kid, school, the Academy, climbing mountains, the first commission, the years with Emiliano Corazón, the last run, the bust, and what the Freddies did to him afterwards. He remembered the years roaming the Curve, while more and more of himself sloughed away, and he remembered Jane, the Jane that had been and the Jane that was.

  “How’m I chipped?” he said, interrupting their conversation. Both heads swung toward him. “How’m I chipped?” he repeated. “Where’d they put it?”

  “It’s like, it’s a blastoma nano.” Antonio hesitated. “It’s in your brain, Laz. They shoot it into your artery, right about here, and it heads up to your brain and latches on.” He took his fingers off his neck. “They know it’s there, they check for it, ’slong as they get a signal back they know where you are and that you ain’t dead, and it sleeps. But you try to leave, we even try to find it, it goes malignant.”

  He pulled his mouth down and shrugged and went back to the argument, while Lázaro thought about that and about his memories. The argument kept intruding, making noise inside his head as well as outside. Finally he put his hand out to stop them.

  “Enough,” he said. “Here’s how we’ll do it. I’ll give Toño the zero points, there and back, and your Fibs can run the numbers. I’ll stay here with the rest of the MemMax, you two go get the cargo. Is Trafalgar still outside Freddie control?”

  “Oh yeah,” the captain said. “Outside and wide open.”

  “You go there, look for a company name of Chisler Chang-Himmel. They commissioned the smuggle, they’ll still pay for it. Chang’s got a long memory. You divide up the loot, Antonio brings our half back here, you go wherever you want with your own cut. Agreed?”

  “Hold on,” the captain said. “Why unload it on Chang-Himmel? If it’s that damned valuable, we could bid it up …”

  “It’s kids,” Lázaro said. “Chang’s kids, embryos. Stem-cells, some of them, others already growin’ parts. Everything in ten-year stasis. Chang commissioned them, then welshed on the debt. Hemetica wouldn’t release them and blackballed Chang from the other clone houses, too. Chang’s pretty desperate for spare parts. I been out for what, four years?”

  “Five,” Antonio said.

  “Five. Chang still wants them and nobody else does ’cause they’re tailored. You want to unload them, you got only one market, but that market’ll pay big. You take the stuff to Trafalgar. Chang’ll want a recognition code—Toño’s gonna carry that. And part of the price is Chang gives Toño a ride back. You get the money, you split the money, you split. Nobody gets a chance to screw nobody.”

  “Stem cells,” the woman said. “About how big a payload?”

  Lázaro showed her with his hands; maybe the size of a spacer’s duffle, maybe a bit smaller. “That’s why it’s tricky,” he said. “It’s a small box and it’s just floating out there on some bitty asteroid, probably no bigger than the one they left Emiliano on.” He rocked back; the cot creaked. “So, you gonna do it?”

  Antonio and the woman looked at each other, then she shrugged and he stuck his hand out and they shook on it. She went outside while the men huddled over the table and Lázaro made Antonio memorize the zero point coordinates and the recognition code. When Lázaro was satisfied, he put out his hand to keep Antonio from rising.

  “Hey, that stuff about the chip. True?”

  “Yeah, bro. All of it.” Lázaro looked at him and Antonio said, “But listen, man, it’s not a bad life. And when this comes down we’ll have so much scratch we won’t never have to even think about it again, we can walk on money and drink credits and piss gold, we’ll be kings of the Curve. You remember all that scratch you used to send home, kept us all goin’? It’ll look like mouse dicky next to what we’re gonna have. We ain’t gonna be livin’ in no squats, either. Hell, you could buy Papa Carlisle’s if you want, kick that skanky noface bastard outta there and have it all for yourself.” He hit Lázaro’s shoulder. “What you say, bro? Pretty sweet, yeah?”

  “And the stuff, the MemMax—”

  “Relax, there’s plenty. You got about half in you right now. You get Jane to come in an’ babysit you while you finish it off. Another week, maybe 10 days, and bammo! The gunk’s outta your brain and the Freddies won’t know nothing.”

  “And if I stop now—”

  “But that won’t happen, cause the bitch’s gonna give us the rest of the drug just as soon as we let her in again. You take it while we’re gone, and when I come back, I tell you bro, kings of the Curve.” He hit Lázaro’s shoulder again and opened the door for the woman.

  And that’s almost the way it went down

  Antonio and the numbers and the codes and the captain lifted off for the Continuum as soon as she could gather her crew and sober them up. Lázaro stood at the edge of the Curve dome and stared up through the gap until a ship rose into the sunlight, then walked back to his apartment, avoiding Papa Carlisle’s. He didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want to see any more of the Curve than he had to.

  Back in his squat, Lázaro sat with his hands in his lap and remembered, although some of the older memories were getting fuzzy and others were already gone. But the Curve memories were clear and strong: laughing with Antonio at Celia’s, Papa Carlisle’s mirror face, the taste of beer and the way it made him feel as if he was flying, and Jane who wasn’t Jane but who was, somehow. He remembered how the Curve curved inside its arc of dome and how small it all was, and how the only sky was the little bit of it that leaked in beside Papa Carlisle’s. When Antonio came back with all that scratch they’d still be in the Curve and none of the memories would matter because what the hell use was it if you remembered mountains if you couldn’t touch them?

  There was another memory waiting, an older one. He turned away from it and the very act of turning brought it over him like a falling of light.

  How it works

  I don’t know exactly, I’m no Fibs and neither are you. But it starts where you are, that’s the zero and grows square to square, from (zero) where you are to (one) to (zero+one) to (one+one) to (two+one) to (three+two) to (five+three) to (eight+five) and on out forever, in growing strides to the reaches of the universe, and every right-angle step is a dimension from zero (here) where you start to (here + up+down) to (here+up+down + backwards+forwards) to (here+up+down+backwards+forwards + time), dancing through the dimensions and the Fibs dances each step, hands and mind and body moving to the rhythm of phi and the Fibs makes a turn and the boxes follow and the dimensions follow into the other there that is the Continuum, like launching the ship out through the pit of your gut
s, like sex, only better because you’re it and you’re you and you’re the ship and the boxes and the dance and the Continuum and when you’re not the dance, you’re waiting for the dance like you wait for a breath or a heartbeat or anything else that keeps you alive because you’re a Fibonacci Dancer. You’re a Fibs.

  The King of the Curve

  He couldn’t dance, not without a ship, not without the Continuum, not sitting at the table in his squat, not anywhere in the Curve, just not.

  He wondered how long the blastoma nano would take to work. He wondered if it would hurt. He wondered if it would eat memories too. He wondered what it would be like, living in the Curve, knowing the dance was out there but unable to reach it, ever. He wondered what it would be like to die in the Curve knowing you were dying in the Curve.

  He couldn’t change the Curve and he couldn’t escape it, but he could change who he was within the Curve. When he understood that, he opened the box of MemMax ampules. There were four left, each one ready to slip into the skinsting and apply, and when they were all gone he would be a king of the Curve. His brother had said so.

  He took them into the reeking bathroom and broke each ampule into the commode, and flushed them away. Then he went back to the table and sat, hands folded, waiting to be Lázaro again.

  © 2007 Marta Randall.

  Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Two-time Nebula nominee Marta Randall is the author of seven novels: Islands, A City in the North, Journey, Dangerous Games, The Sword of Winter, Those Who Favor Fire, and Growing Light. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Omni, Twilight Zone Magazine, and in many anthologies. In the past, she served for two years as the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and she currently teaches science fiction writing at WritingClasses.com. Learn more at MartaRandall.com.

  An Accounting