Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  The casualties wore only respirators and shoulder mecha, which hadn’t been enough to protect them. Joanna’s emotions were too deep to catalogue when the Michaud brought up two torn, bloody corpses, even though these women were lighter in coloring and slimmer than the black-haired Löw. Death had become uncommon in the line culture as they mastered their genetic codes, and violence was unknown, and Joanna could not have been less prepared for gore and bone.

  In some odd way she felt honored, even calm.

  Hel trembled beside her. Hel was gripped by a more primal reaction, and yet the Michaud and the Suhoza seemed to share Joanna’s mood, carrying the bodies with slow grace.

  Standing in the shadows was no protection, of course. Louise and Katarine found Joanna by homing in on the signal generated by her implant.

  As the two seniors approached, Hel left Joanna’s side before anyone spoke, desperate for whatever physical contact could be had despite their armor. “Line,” Hel murmured. Louise and Katarine both repeated the greeting, embracing her.

  Joanna joined them a moment too late and worried again at this visible mistake.

  “Walk with us to your find,” Louise said.

  “I—” Hel was still shaking. When she moved her head from side to side, no, it looked like a larger spasm.

  The slightest of glances passed between Louise and Katarine. Then Katarine brought Hel closer to herself, both calming her and turning her away from Joanna.

  “I’ll show you,” Joanna said quietly. She didn’t want to leave the group, but judgment was inevitable.

  Their foursome split. Hel and Katarine stayed near the Michaud as Louise and Joanna walked away. Underbellies split open with lights, two spiders paced ahead of them, slaved to their movements. One dazzling array of floodlights loped forward smoothly but the other jerked and then swayed as Joanna looked back at the human silhouettes gathered in bent, heavy postures of mourning.

  More spiders hunched above Hel’s find, mapping the chaotic sediment layers but not digging. The lines did not, could not, trust machines so completely.

  A culture that had survived only by tinkering with its very biology was also one intensely sensitive to change. They could be as hostile towards it as their own hyper-immune systems were towards infection. With a total population of six thousand, her line allowed no room for difference—or freedom.

  Joanna walked after Louise cautiously, not trying to protect her strained hip but so steeped in thought that each step was a great process. She recounted each of her failings today, her head swarming with memory and regret.

  Their line-mother had celebrated Joanna’s childhood skills as a gardener, encouraging her to experiment with otherwise useless blossoms because doing so increased her knowledge of selection and breeding. That had been the start of Joanna’s ambition, but always the lesson was one of care and control.

  Always the line sought to preempt risk to itself.

  Joanna’s reverie broke as Louise led her into the midst of the spiders. The robots’ long, multi-jointed shapes had never seemed menacing before. Joanna shivered and glanced away but still there were no stars, only the cloud cover. Her apprehension quieted again into something more rueful.

  Violence was unknown to the line, yet nonviable members were recycled, whether in fetal screenings or much later, because breeder-like traits persisted among them and must be pruned away.

  If earning this job had also been a winnowing of those with anti-social tendencies—if leaving the crèche was a test that Joanna had failed by succeeding—she didn’t want anything other than her fate. Yes, it would be cruel to kill her now. It was also right. And yet she’d cost the line so much training! Couldn’t she still be useful somehow?

  Louise stopped beside the nexus spider and said, “I’m going to allocate your find to the Michaud.”

  Joanna hesitated, caught between hope and terror.

  “It’s the proper action,” Louise said. “It’s because of them that we found this batch.” Louise watched her closely, aware of her tension. “You haven’t patched in.”

  The deeper link would be her truth. Joanna took the hand that Louise extended, a symbolic joining only, metal glove in glove. Then she tapped her implant—

  The nexus spider collated information from all the others much like a line-senior directing her mates. Compilation imaging showed three thousand, three hundred and eighteen Sealies in the main body of this vein, balled up and bagged together by the dozens. Another ninety-one had been scattered as far as ten meters by the tidal grinding of the earth.

  It was a superior find, no doubt from a hospital or nursery, and easily worth Joanna’s life. On an average day they were glad to recover just five or six diapers from household garbage, most of which were badly degraded and worthless.

  Fortunately, Sealies had been a dominant brand throughout the twenty-first century. The synthetics used were almost ideal. Old media advertised Sealies as ultra leak-proof, fluid and odor absorbent, each one stamped with the distinctive logo of a blue, grinning seal.

  The breeder civilization had discarded the feces and urine of their infants in such packets by the trillions. The population had been impossibly bloated until the pandemics—and here was their pre-contagion genetic treasure, sheathed in white plastic and polycotton filaments grayed with age and mold. Only one in thousands had been mummified by the heat of the rotting landfill, fused with the plastic or otherwise preserved in ways that the line could extract viable DNA, but the poor yield had never deterred them from their hunt. Pre-plague samples were necessary both to reestablish diversity and to further develop superior immunities, intelligence, and life-spans.

  There were safer places to dig than alongside the California sea, but before the pandemics, this region had been host to an unusual blend of ethnic groups from across the globe. The landfills here were richer because of it.

  Joanna’s pride was what Louise singled out among her tangle of emotions. “You were excellent today,” Louise said, continuing to hold her hand.

  Surprised, Joanna flexed, muscle memory betraying the secret of her Diamond. “But the things I’ve felt . . .”

  “You were better than Hel, tougher and more alert.”

  “The hallmarks of breeder thinking . . .” Joanna insisted, giddy with relief and love and, still, a razor of guilt.

  Louise smiled. “You’ve been telling yourself too many ghost stories,” she said. “It’s okay. You’re okay. It happens to all of us here, especially because of the implants. Most of what you were feeling was ours.”

  “Line-senior, no. This wasn’t conveyance. I know when I’m—”

  “You don’t. When were you ever in a situation like this? The biggest crisis you’ve dealt with before today was leaving home. Believe me. The feedback can become its own problem.”

  Joanna nodded slowly. Why am I arguing?

  It was Louise who answered the thought. “Your actions prove your heart, cub. Above all you’re loyal. And you endured as well as any of us.”

  “I was selfish.”

  “Good,” Louise said, and when Joanna’s gaze lifted suddenly Louise had a new, fierce grin for her. “Yes. Good. We’re not just out here to dig up Sealies.”

  Joanna began to smile back. “I . . . sometimes I thought . . .”

  “You’re quicker than most, cub.”

  “Sometimes I thought the matriarch must have planned for the ways I’d feel, even wanted it.”

  “Our line-mother was one of us, a digger, before you and I were born. It’s been that way now for three of the past four generations.”

  Joanna stared. Then she laughed at the idea of herself ever becoming eligible for a senior position. “But they teach us leadership is internal,” she said.

  “In the crèche they have to. Ninety-five percent of the line never leaves home, cub.” Louise grew quiet again. “We’re weaker because of it.”

  This notion seemed even stranger, and yet Joanna understood. In the colony, life had been well-ordered
and predictable. The line itself was equally tame, at least in comparison to the veterans of this site crew.

  “We’re starting to change,” Louise said. Her voice was more forceful now, like a promise, and Joanna felt a bright, rising fire of self-worth.

  The hostile lands stretching endlessly from the pole held too many resources to be ignored, too much sheer room, but to recolonize Earth would also demand new skills and capacities, new strength, new destinies.

  “Thank you,” Joanna said.

  Copyright © 2010 Jeff Carlson

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  SHORT STORIES

  SHIPBIRTH

  Aliette de Bodard

  Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a job as a Computer Engineer. In the nighttime she writes speculative fiction, with a special interest in Mesoamerican culture. Her first novel, the Aztec fantasy Servant of the Underworld, was published by Angry Robot, and the sequel Harbinger of the Storm is forthcoming later this year. A recent story for Asimov’s, “The Jaguar House, in Shadow” (July 2010), was part of the Xuya continuity—a universe where China discovered America a century before the Europeans. Her new tale deals with a very particular attitude of the Aztecs toward childbirth and pregnant women, taken several centuries into the future.

  The Hungry Coyote had been in deep planes for ten days, the whole journey between the planet of Quetzalcoatl and this lonely rendezvous place; and for ten days Acoimi had felt himself going subtly, irremediably mad.

  In deep planes, everything was wrong on the ship: the doors shimmering as if in a heat wave, the control panels blinking on a frequency that hurt the eyes, the metal of the corridors twisting and changing appearance from an oily sheen to the brittle transparency of crystal. There were sounds, on the edge of hearing: whispers and voices, snatches of songs that seemed familiar but receded farther and farther the more he attempted to listen to them . . . But worse than everything else was the vast presence of the Hungry Coyote’s Mind, its processes dwarfing Acoimi’s thoughts—like a black hole pushing against a vessel, compacting everything inside.

  At least now they were back in real-space, in real-time, and everything seemed . . . almost normal, with just the spongy, elastic touch of quickened steel to the walls. And the presence, though it was muted away from the deep planes.

  Acoimi shivered. Black One take me, I shouldn’t be here, he told himself, not for the first time. Not that he had been given much choice: he was ticitl, physician, and he served where the Lord of Men sent him. But still . . .

  Still, his other title, the one whispered behind his back, was huecatl ahuiyal : “the sweet one, the deep one,” an inescapable reminder of what he had once been. Still, ahead of him was everything he had been running away from: the fears of his sweat-soaked nights, of his confused awakenings when he would find himself trapped in an unfamiliar body—before he realized it was no dream, that he had truly made the change . . .

  The voice of the Hungry Coyote’s Mind tore him from his thoughts. “Linking complete. Disembark.”

  Ahead of him, the tube had finished extending itself in the vacuum between the Hungry Coyote and the unborn ship—the one where he was needed. Acoimi crossed over, breathing a sign of relief in spite of everything else. Here, onboard the unborn ship, the walls were cool and hard, and nothing beat under his fingers, nothing twisted or yielded more than it should have.

  “Transfer complete. Severing connection.” The Mind’s voice came from very far away, muted and almost harmless. Behind him, the walls sealed shut again, and the tube retracted back into the Hungry Coyote, even as the ship shifted further away. A small consolation, that: Acoimi wouldn’t have to endure the Mind’s presence longer than he had to. Minds were solitary by nature, and ships only approached each other in extreme need—and not for long.

  The unborn ship followed the classic layout of a Jaguar class: four arms radiating out from the heart-room; five corridors linking the arms, and so on, a mirror of the mortal World’s order—no, a reassertion, a reassurance that between the hungry stars, the order forged out of fire and blood remained, unassailable. The corridors were curved metal, intricately worked into a mass of warding symbols, from stylized knots to jade beads, their monotony broken here and there by frescoes: warriors extracting prisoners out of captured ships; women ascending into the Heavens, their hands pressed against their bloodied wombs; a procession of gods accompanying the Sun on His journey amongst the planets.

  Acoimi found the midwife, Xoco, in one of the rooms on the circumference: the north one, that of Grandmother Earth, of death and decay. Her face was still thin and sharp, though the rest of her looked more like a matron, with her waist overflowing her jade-colored trousers. Her eyes were an uncanny gray, the same color as the hollows of her face. “There you are,” Xoco said. “She’s all yours.”

  All his. Acoimi stifled a bitter laugh. He’d avoided, carefully, looking at the third person in the room: the woman sitting cross-legged on the colored mat bearing the design of a green and yellow jaguar. Her face was slack, her eyes as vacant as those of a corpse.

  “Huexotl, of the Atempan clan,” Xoco said. She shook her head, and there was a hint of—sadness, disgust?—in the tight arc of her lips. Atempan was one of the sixteen clans, one of the greatest and oldest, going back all the way to Old Earth. To find a member of the Old Nobility reduced to this, waiting in this impersonal room for the ignominious coda to her life . . .

  “How long—?” Acoimi asked, carefully. The room was clean, smelling faintly of bleach, with not even a few bloodstains to bear witness to what had happened. What had he expected? Some writhing, pulsing mass of optics and flesh, flopping like a fish on dry land? As if they would leave such traces, days after the failure . . .

  “The contractions started thirteen days ago.” Xoco shook her head. She’d have been there since the start, of course—since Huexotl had come to the ship, her belly distended by the mid-stages of the pregnancy, her face no doubt shining with the anticipation of her glory. Xoco would have cooked for Huexotl; combed her hair every morning; massaged the mound of flesh in which the Mind rested, snug and tidy—readying her for the last and most dangerous part of the quickening: the moment when the womb was breached, and the Mind punched its way out, seeking to tether itself to the core in the heart-room—breathing life into the ship, bending the rooms, passageways, and corridors to its will.

  Unbidden, the words they’d sung at his sister’s funeral came back to him:

  Spread your wings upward, O Mother

  O Giver of Life, O Yielder of Life

  Spread your wings upward, O Mother

  Let Death be your passage into the House of the Sun, the House of your father and mother . . .

  “I see,” Acoimi said. He looked again at Huexotl, and put his satchel on the ground with a sigh. “You’re free to leave.”

  Xoco watched him for a while, her gaze uncannily piercing, as if she were trying to assess his worth. “You volunteered for this?” she asked.

  Acoimi laughed. Once, it would have been crystalline, enough to turn men’s heads. Now it came out as rough and threatening. They’d rebuilt his throat and his vocal chords, but some things ran too deep to be disguised. Laughter ran too close to what he’d been, inside. “For determining whether she’s dead? Who would volunteer for anything like that?” he said. “I’m no executioner. I’m merely here as you are, sent where I am needed.”

  Xoco didn’t move. Perhaps she’d missed it when he entered, but now her face was pinched, in the peculiar way of people hunting for something they’d missed.

  “You—”

  “I wasn’t always thus.” Acoimi inclined his head and, even now, it was absurdly easy to fall back into old patterns, to cock his face slightly sideways with fluid grace, to display a seemingly careless simper—but no, he wasn’t that anymore, not the flighty girl who’d watched her sister’s body for the four days of the vigil. That was d
one and accounted for and the Duality had given him a new chance, a new life, one that wouldn’t involve Minds or deep spaces or quickenings, not ever.

  Or so he’d thought, until now.

  “I see,” Xoco said, in turn. “It’s not always easy.”

  “No.” He said nothing more and she must have sensed she’d gone too far. She bowed to him, as one equal to another. “Acoimi-tzin,” she said. “I shall look forward to the results of your examination.”

  He nodded, though the only thing he was looking forward to was the end of this whole sordid affair.

  Alone now, he withdrew a small mirror from his satchel, resisting the temptation to stare into it. He had been a beautiful girl—fine-boned, with round, full cheeks and wide hips that promised strength and endurance, all that was necessary to succeed at bearing Minds. As a man, he was too . . . fluted, too fragile, with proportions that seemed always out of kilter no matter how much weight he put on or lost.

  “Huexotl, of the Atempan clan,” he said, formally. “I am Acoimi of the Chimilco clan, ticitl to the Master of Darts, the Lord of Men, Southern Hummingbird’s Chosen. Will you submit to an examination?”

  Huexotl didn’t answer or move. Her eyes slid sideways, seemingly staring at the wall behind him. Dead, he thought, and clamped down on the thought. That was what he was here to determine: if there was still a chance she could be saved—fixed, in order to bear other Minds, to waste her blood and water birthing those monstrosities that moved in the planes between the stars . . .

  And, if not . . . There was the rest of his kit: the injector at the bottom, with enough toxins to clog the lungs, to freeze the heart in the chest.

  For an unarmed woman. What an honorable, soldierly thing to do. Acoimi’s regiment commander would have stripped him of rank, had he known, but he, too, was far away in the past, beyond recovery.

  I’m no executioner.

  How good a liar he’d become, over time.

  He took a deep breath—feeling a quiver, a fear that shouldn’t have been there—and took out more of his equipment: the basin filled with water, which he set on Huexotl’s lap. She raised one hand—for a heart-stopping moment, he thought she was reacting, but it fell back, as listless as the rest of her.