Johanna is not there; beside her, Jason sleeps, snoring softly; and she’s suddenly seized by nausea, remembering what he said to her–how casually he spoke of blocking her memories, of giving a home to her after stealing her original one from her. She waits for it to pass; waits to settle into her old life as usual. But it doesn’t.
Instead, she rises, walks towards the window, and stands watching Prime–the clean wide streets, the perfect trees, the ballet of floaters at night–the myriad dances that make up the society that constrains her from dawn to dusk and beyond–she wonders what Johanna would say, but of course Johanna won’t ever say anything anymore. Johanna has gone ahead, into the dark.
The feeling of nausea in her belly will not go away: instead it spreads, until her body feels like a cage–at first, she thinks the sensation is in her belly, but it moves upwards, until her limbs, too, feel too heavy and too small–until it’s an effort to move any part of her. She raises her hands, struggling against a feeling of moving appendages that don’t belong to her–and traces the contours of her face, looking for familiar shapes, for anything that will anchor her to reality. The heaviness spreads, compresses her chest until she can hardly breathe–cracks her ribs and pins her legs to the ground. Her head spins, as if she were about to faint; but the mercy of blackness does not come to her.
“Catherine,” she whispers. “My name is Catherine.”
Another name, unbidden, rises to her lips. Mi Chau. A name she gave to herself in the Viet language–in the split instant before the lasers took her apart, before she sank into darkness: Mi Chau, the princess who unwittingly betrayed her father and her people, and whose blood became the pearls at the bottom of the sea. She tastes it on her tongue, and it’s the only thing that seems to belong to her anymore.
She remembers that first time–waking up on Prime in a strange body, struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of being so small, so far away from the stars that had guided her through space–remembers walking like a ghost through the corridors of the Institution, until the knowledge of what the Galactics had done broke her, and she cut her veins in a bathroom, watching blood lazily pool at her feet and thinking only of escape. She remembers the second time she woke up; the second, oblivious life as Catherine.
Johanna. Johanna didn’t survive her second life; and even now is starting her third, somewhere in the bowels of the Institution–a dark-skinned child indistinguishable from other dark-skinned children, with no memories of anything beyond a confused jumble…
Outside, the lights haven’t dimmed, but there are stars–brash and alien, hovering above Prime, in configurations that look wrong; and she remembers, suddenly, how they lay around her, how they showed her the way from planet to planet–how the cold of the deep spaces seized her just as she entered them to travel faster, just like it’s holding her now, seizing her bones–remembers how much larger, how much wider she ought to be…
There are stars everywhere; and superimposed on them, the faces of two Dai Viet women, calling her over and over. Calling her back, into the body that belonged to her all along; into the arms of her family.
“Come on, come on,” the women whisper, and their voices are stronger than any other noise; than Jason’s breath in the bedroom; than the motors of the floaters or the vague smell of garlic from the kitchen. “Come on, great-aunt!”
She is more than this body; more than this constrained life–her thoughts spread out, encompassing hangars and living quarters; and the liquid weight of pods held in their cradles–she remembers family reunions, entire generations of children putting their hands on her corridors, remembers the touch of their skin on her metal walls; the sound of their laughter as they raced each other; the quiet chatter of their mothers in the heartroom, keeping her company as the New Year began; and the touch of a brush on her outer hull, drawing the shape of an apricot flower, for good luck…
“Catherine?” Jason calls behind her.
She turns, through sheer effort of will; finding, somehow, the strength to maintain her consciousness in a small and crammed body alongside her other, vaster one. He’s standing with one hand on the doorjamb, staring at her–his face pale, leeched of colours in the starlight.
“I remember,” she whispers.
His hands stretch, beseeching. “Catherine, please. Don’t leave.”
He means well, she knows. All the things that he hid from her, he hid out of love; to keep her alive and happy, to hold her close in spite of all that should have separated them; and even now, the thought of his love is a barb in her heart, a last lingering regret, slight and pitiful against the flood of her memories–but not wholly insignificant.
Where she goes, she’ll never be alone–not in the way she was with Jason, feeling that nothing else but her mattered in the entire world. She’ll have a family; a gaggle of children and aunts and uncles waiting on her, but nothing like the sweet, unspoiled privacy where Jason and she could share anything and everything. She won’t have another lover like him–naive and frank and so terribly sure of what he wants and what he’s ready to do to get it. Dai Viet society has no place for people like Jason–who do not know their place, who do not know how to be humble, how to accept failure or how to bow down to expediency.
Where she goes, she’ll never be alone; and yet she’ll be so terribly lonely.
“Please,” Jason says.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll come back–” a promise made to him; to Johanna, who cannot hear or recognise her anymore. Her entire being spreads out, thins like water thrown on the fire–and, in that last moment, she finds herself reaching out for him, trying to touch him one last time, to catch one last glimpse of his face, even as a heart she didn’t know she had breaks.
“Catherine.”
He whispers her name, weeping, over and over; and it’s that name, that lie that still clings to her with its bittersweet memories, that she takes with her as her entire being unfolds–as she flies away, towards the waiting stars.
HANNU RAJANIEMI
Hannu Rajaniemi (born 9 March 1978) is a Finnish author of science fiction and fantasy, who writes in both English and Finnish. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, and was a founding director of a commercial research organisation, ThinkTank Maths.
Rajaniemi was born in Ylivieska, Finland. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Oulu, a Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics from the University of Edinburgh. Prior to starting his Ph.D. candidature, he completed his national service as a research scientist for the Finnish Defence Forces.
While pursuing his Ph.D. in Edinburgh, Rajaniemi joined Writers' Bloc, a writers' group in Edinburgh that organizes semi-regular spoken word performances and counts Charlie Stross amongst its members. Early works included his first published short story "Shibuya no Love" in 2003 and his short story "Deus Ex Homine" in Nova Scotia, a 2005 anthology of Scottish science fiction and fantasy, which caught the attention of his current literary agent, John Jarrold.
Rajaniemi gained attention in October 2008 when John Jarrold secured a three-book deal for him with Gollancz, on the basis of only twenty-four double-spaced pages. His debut novel, The Quantum Thief, was published in September 2010 by Gollancz in Britain and was published in May 2011 by Tor Books in the U.S. The novel has been nominated for the 2011 Locus Award for Best First Novel. A sequel, The Fractal Prince, was published in September 2012 by Gollancz in Britain, and in October 2012 by Tor in the US. Third book in the series will be called The Causal Angel, and will be published in April 2014 by Gollancz in Britain and in May 2014 by Tor in US.
Elegy for a Young Elk, by Hannu Rajaniemi
The night after Kosonen shot the young elk, he tried to write a poem by the campfire.
It was late April and there was still snow on the ground. He had already taken to sitting outside in the evening, on a log by the fire, in the small clearing where his cabin stood. Otso was more comfortable outside,
and he preferred the bear’s company to being alone. It snored loudly atop its pile of fir branches.
A wet smell that had traces of elk shit drifted from its drying fur.
He dug a soft-cover notebook and a pencil stub from his pocket. He leafed through it: most of the pages were empty. Words had become slippery, harder to catch than elk. Although not this one: careless and young. An old elk would never had let a man and a bear so close.
He scattered words on the first empty page, gripping the pencil hard.
Antlers. Sapphire antlers. No good. Frozen flames. Tree roots. Forked destinies. There had to be words that captured the moment when the crossbow kicked against his shoulder, the meaty sound of the arrow’s impact. But it was like trying to catch snowflakes in his palm. He could barely glimpse the crystal structure, and then they melted.
He closed the notebook and almost threw it into the fire, but thought better of it and put it back into his pocket. No point in wasting good paper. Besides, his last toilet roll in the outhouse would run out soon.
“Kosonen is thinking about words again,” Otso growled. “Kosonen should drink more booze. Don’t need words then. Just sleep.”
Kosonen looked at the bear. “You think you are smart, huh?” He tapped his crossbow. “Maybe it’s you who should be shooting elk.”
“Otso good at smelling. Kosonen at shooting. Both good at drinking.” Otso yawned luxuriously, revealing rows of yellow teeth. Then it rolled to its side and let out a satisfied heavy sigh. “Otso will have more booze soon.”
Maybe the bear was right. Maybe a drink was all he needed. No point in being a poet: They had already written all the poems in the world, up there, in the sky. They probably had poetry gardens. Or places where you could become words.
But that was not the point. The words needed to come from him, a dirty bearded man in the woods whose toilet was a hole in the ground. Bright words from dark matter, that’s what poetry was about.
When it worked.
There were things to do. The squirrels had almost picked the lock the previous night, bloody things. The cellar door needed reinforcing. But that could wait until tomorrow.
He was about to open a vodka bottle from Otso’s secret stash in the snow when Marja came down from the sky as rain.
#
The rain was sudden and cold like a bucket of water poured over your head in the sauna. But the droplets did not touch the ground, they floated around Kosonen. As he watched, they changed shape, joined together and made a woman, spindle-thin bones, mist-flesh and muscle. She looked like a glass sculpture. The small breasts were perfect hemispheres, her sex an equilateral silver triangle. But the face was familiar—small nose and high cheekbones, a sharp-tongued mouth.
Marja.
Otso was up in an instant, by Kosonen’s side. “Bad smell, god-smell,” it growled. “Otso bites.” The rain-woman looked at it curiously.
“Otso,” Kosonen said sternly. He gripped the fur in the bear’s rough neck tightly, feeling its huge muscles tense. “Otso is Kosonen’s friend. Listen to Kosonen. Not time for biting. Time for sleeping. Kosonen will speak to god.” Then he set the vodka bottle in the snow right under its nose.
Otso sniffed the bottle and scraped the half-melted snow with its forepaw.
“Otso goes,” it finally said. “Kosonen shouts if the god bites. Then Otso comes.” It picked up the bottle in its mouth deftly and loped into the woods with a bear’s loose, shuffling gait.
“Hi,” the rain-woman said.
“Hello,” Kosonen said carefully. He wondered if she was real. The plague gods were crafty. One of them could have taken Marja’s image from his mind. He looked at the unstrung crossbow and tried to judge the odds: a diamond goddess versus an out-of-shape woodland poet. Not good.
“Your dog does not like me very much,” the Marja-thing said. She sat down on Kosonen’s log and swung her shimmering legs in the air, back and forth, just like Marja always did in the sauna. It had to be her, Kosonen decided, feeling something jagged in his throat.
He coughed. “Bear, not a dog. A dog would have barked. Otso just bites. Nothing personal, that’s just its nature. Paranoid and grumpy.”
“Sounds like someone I used to know.”
“I’m not paranoid.” Kosonen hunched down and tried to get the fire going again. “You learn to be careful, in the woods.”
Marja looked around. “I thought we gave you stayers more equipment. It looks a little … primitive here.”
“Yeah. We had plenty of gadgets,” Kosonen said. “But they weren’t plague-proof. I had a smartgun before I had this”—he tapped his crossbow—“but it got infected. I killed it with a big rock and threw it into the swamp. I’ve got my skis and some tools, and these.” Kosonen tapped his temple. “Has been enough so far. So cheers.”
He piled up some kindling under a triangle of small logs, and in a moment the flames sprung up again. Three years had been enough to learn about woodcraft at least. Marja’s skin looked almost human in the soft light of the fire, and he sat back on Otso’s fir branches, watching her. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
“So how are you, these days?” he asked. “Keeping busy?”
Marja smiled. “Your wife grew up. She’s a big girl now. You don’t want to know how big.”
“So… you are not her, then? Who am I talking to?”
“I am her, and I am not her. I’m a partial, but a faithful one. A translation. You wouldn’t understand.”
Kosonen put some snow in the coffee pot to melt. “All right, so I’m a caveman. Fair enough. But I understand you are here because you want something. So let’s get down to business, perkele,” he swore.
Marja took a deep breath. “We lost something. Something important. Something new. The spark, we called it. It fell into the city.”
“I thought you lot kept copies of everything.”
“Quantum information. That was a part of the new bit. You can’t copy it.”
“Tough shit.”
A wrinkle appeared between Marja’s eyebrows. Kosonen remembered it from a thousand fights they had had, and swallowed.
“If that’s the tone you want to take, fine,” she said. “I thought you’d be glad to see me. I didn’t have to come: They could have sent Mickey Mouse. But I wanted to see you. The big Marja wanted to see you. So you have decided to live your life like this, as the tragic figure haunting the woods. That’s fine. But you could at least listen. You owe me that much.”
Kosonen said nothing.
“I see,” Marja said. “You still blame me for Esa.”
She was right. It had been her who got the first Santa Claus machine. The boy needs the best we can offer, she said. The world is changing. Can’t have him being left behind. Let’s make him into a little god, like the neighbor’s kid.
“I guess I shouldn’t be blaming you, “ Kosonen said. “You’re just a … partial. You weren’t there.”
“I was there,” Marja said quietly. “I remember. Better than you, now. I also forget better, and forgive. You never could. You just … wrote poems. The rest of us moved on, and saved the world.”
“Great job,” Kosonen said. He poked the fire with a stick, and a cloud of sparks flew up into the air with the smoke.
Marja got up. “That’s it,” she said. “I’m leaving. See you in a hundred years.” The air grew cold. A halo appeared around her, shimmering in the firelight.
Kosonen closed his eyes and squeezed his jaw shut tight. He waited for ten seconds. Then he opened his eyes. Marja was still there, staring at him, helpless. He could not help smiling. She could never leave without having the last word.
“I’m sorry,” Kosonen said. “It’s been a long time. I’ve been living in the woods with a bear. Doesn’t improve one’s temper much.”
“I didn’t really notice any difference.”
“All right,” Kosonen said. He tapped the fir branches next to him. “Sit down. Let’s start over. I’ll make some coffee.”
Marja sat down, bare shoulder touching his. She felt strangely warm, warmer than the fire almost.
“The firewall won’t let us into the city,” she said. “We don’t have anyone … human enough, not anymore. There was some talk about making one, but … the argument would last a century.” She sighed. “We like to argue, in the sky.”
Kosonen grinned. “I bet you fit right in.” He checked for the wrinkle before continuing. “So you need an errand boy.”
“We need help.”
Kosonen looked at the fire. The flames were dying now, licking at the blackened wood. There were always new colours in the embers. Or maybe he just always forgot.
He touched Marja’s hand. It felt like a soap bubble, barely solid. But she did not pull it away.
“All right,” he said. “But just so you know, it’s not just for old times’ sake.”
“Anything we can give you.”
“I’m cheap,” Kosonen said. “I just want words.”
#
The sun sparkled on the kantohanki: snow with a frozen surface, strong enough to carry a man on skis and a bear. Kosonen breathed hard. Even going downhill, keeping pace with Otso was not easy. But in weather like this, there was something glorious about skiing, sliding over blue shadows of trees almost without friction, the snow hissing underneath.
I’ve sat still too long, he thought. Should have gone somewhere just to go, not because someone asks.
In the afternoon, when the sun was already going down, they reached the railroad, a bare gash through the forest, two metal tracks on a bed of gravel. Kosonen removed his skis and stuck them in the snow.
“I’m sorry you can’t come along,” he told Otso. “But the city won’t let you in.”
“Otso not a city bear,” the bear said. “Otso waits for Kosonen. Kosonen gets sky-bug, comes back. Then we drink booze.”
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 436
