Dark Currents

by Sulivan, Tricia; Nevill, Adam; Tchaikovsky, Adrian; McDougall, Sophia; Tidhar, Lavie

  We noticed that his comrade carried him.

  We moved back behind the perimeter and waited for them to arrive.

  When the waiting was over, we opened the gate and came out to meet them. We greeted them in their language, which we had all used once upon a time but which was now not ours. When we spoke, they did not believe what they were hearing. They did not hear what we were saying.

  We said: welcome. We said: you are safe here. We said: you may come inside.

  We did not say, indefinitely.

  The one who was carrying his comrade said, “Who are you? Whose side are you on?”

  We laughed.

  The other (by various signs marked as ‘superior’) stepped forwards. He put his arms around the nearest of us. Selene did not prevent him and he wept into her breast. We heard his whispered supplications. He said: “Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven, Star of the Sea, Mother of Patriarchs, hear your son your servant in this his hour of need…”

  He said this again and again.

  We took them inside. We were not at any point afraid of them.

  We put the shocked one to bed. We gave the other food. He told us their names, which we heard grudgingly. He told us their story, which we have heard many times before.

  He said: “We were amongst the last onto the arks. Half-a-day out, we looked back and saw the last of the bombs fall on the city. Mother of Heaven…”

  His words failed him. Abigail filled his cup. We noticed that before he drank he thanked her in an automatic fashion.

  He said: “Sailed three days. Made good speed. Tried to think of what was ahead, not behind us. Then the ark was targeted. Went down. Lost the lot – good people! Devout! They were our charge and we lost the lot. Michael,” (this, he said, was the other’s name), “this is what’s eating him. ‘Our charge, Paul,’ he said to me, ‘and we lost them’.”

  He stopped. We did not ask him to continue but we waited and we gave him our attention.

  “Four of us on a raft. Still huge waves from what happened. Hector dead before we reached the shore. Buried him at sea. Michael said the words. A week at sea, maybe more. When we landed, we went north. We knew the eighth and twelfth chapters were to rendezvous in the north, so we went north. Simon died. Two of us left. We walked a while. Saw settlements. Got food. The locals pointed us this way, so we came this way. And here you are. Here you are.”

  Here we are.

  He looked round slowly, as if noticing our number for the first time. “Wonder where you came from. How you got here.”

  The view beyond the window showed him long-standing houses, well-established fields and gardens and orchards. In twos and threes we rose from our chairs. We guided him to bed. Ofure said later that before he slept he knelt and said his prayers. Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven. Mother of Patriarchs. Star of the Sea.

  We put the pistols away.

  When they woke, Michael sat looking at his hands. We offered him small tasks to keep his mind busy. Paul devoted himself to fixing their talker. Some time passed this way, both profitably and unprofitably. Some of us noticed how they exerted a fascination upon others of us, mostly the children and several of the younger adults. One of these, anxious to stand out, produced a screwdriver and offered this to Paul. Michael took it. Some of us noticed that, after this, he noticed us more.

  Then matters came to a head. In the night, we were woken by a great disturbance. Rising, we discovered Michael searching the house, the cabinets, drawers, common spaces, chests, and other containers. When he found tools, devices, and machines, he added them to the pile. He noticed that we were there. He said: “What else is there? What else do you have?”

  We did not respond.

  He said: “Do you have materials? Do you have the ability to make any of this?”

  We did not respond.

  He said, in a clear voice: “Do you understand what has been happening away from here? Do you understand? All of this,” and he swept his hand across the pile, “could prevent a great deal of suffering.”

  We did not reply. Ingrid reached for one of the pistols.

  He was there first.

  Even then we would have let them go. But he said: “You do not need to be afraid. Not any longer. You are under our protection now.”

  We were a confusion. Many single voices struggled to be heard and hold sway.

  For example:

  Amina said that we should have expected this.

  Athene said that we had a duty to help those in need.

  Ekaterina said that we must not make any rash decisions.

  Chloi said that we should not have allowed them to stay in the first place.

  Bridget said that we had a duty to protect ourselves.

  In the midst of this, they left. Some of us remarked that they took tools with them to mend their talker.

  Athene went with them.

  We continued to dispute. Later in the day, we came to our conclusion.

  We drew lots. One of the younger adults, Iphigene, was selected. Because of her youth, I went with her, although in any technical matters she no longer needed my guidance.

  We packed only what we needed for the task. We ran swiftly and silently along high ground and made good time. We came to their camp late and watched through the night, under a thin moon. In the uncertain dawn, as they rose, she got them in her sights. After, she wept a while.

  She is young and she is strong.

  We returned to our settlement. We returned to our work. We returned home.

  We are here. We have always been here. We have not gone away. We shall never go away.

  We listen. We measure every word. We measure even the ones you think are uttered in private, amongst yourselves, in your own language. We hear and we translate. This makes us aware of our contingency. This makes us aware of the conditionality of our existence. This makes us aware that we have only been granted permission. It is not enough. It will never be enough. We will be ready, when permission is withdrawn.

  We are still here. We have never gone away. We have tools that we teach others to use. We will seize the means, tear down the master’s house, smash the world machine. We are Fury. We are Kali. We are the new moon. We are the dark inexorable undertow and the great obliterating wave. Our rage is rational and righteous. We will not fall silent. We will not fall, silent.

  Follow this link to read the author notes

  Lost Sheep

  Neil Williamson

  Hope To Die fizzed into coherence. The cabin-bubble, frantic with the ghostlight of tactical displays, reverberated with noise: the scream of a klaxon, the imperative twitter of warning systems, the groan of superstructure under stress and the laughter of the man who occupied the gimballed chair suspended in the centre of the sphere. Daniel Gibbs, youngest child and official black sheep of the Gibbs Galactic Cultures dynasty was scarlet, shaking and sweat-soaked with excitement.

  The scrawling displays slowed and, one by one, the warning noises diminished until only the blaring klaxon remained. “We’ll be havin’ the siren off now, Danny, yeah?” Hope sounded a little annoyed. “You complete cock.”

  Gibbs relaxed, spun lazily in the chair. His laughter dwindled to a sigh.

  The klaxon cut out. “All that noise, mate.” Hope’s vocal pattern was still the abrasive baritone she’d picked up from her most recent scrap of Earthwave. It made everything she said sound peeved, but in this instance there was even more than the usual amount of – what had she called it? – nark. “It is really not fucking necessary.”

  “All right.” Danny pouted. What wasn’t necessary was his ship, however human it might pretend to be, complaining about noise. He’d been warned about her attitude when he bought her. For the price he’d paid for her, though, he could put up with it most of the time. If nothing else, her abrasiveness kept things from getting boring. “You have to admit it adds to the drama, though,” he said.

  The ship approximated the sound of breath drawn in through teeth. “Don’t you start
with me about fucking drama, you nonce. I fried my quantum racks to a crisp there finding a safe spot of space for us to pop into. You just had to sit back and enjoy the ride.”

  Now she was really killing the buzz. “Aw, come on, Hope. We’re safe, aren’t we?”

  “Of course we’re safe. No thanks to you. They’re getting closer, you know. Your family the Hegemony, the representatives of who knows how many law enforcement and security agencies… and let’s not even mention the bounty hunters? Bunch of fuckers. Do you know how many fucking spins that took us?”

  Danny shrugged. As far as he was concerned the occasional need for a speedy exit was an occupational hazard. It went hand in hand with the notoriety and the rewards; at least, when there were rewards. Their riotous escape had been a distraction from the plunging disappointment experienced on arriving at the planet whose cultural rights he’d been planning to claim-jump. A newly discovered planetary system was rare, and a virgin culture an order of magnitude more so. He’d had the rights deals secured and the money spent long before Hope slipped them into the system, but as soon as they arrived he knew they were too late. The cultural claim notice broadcast across the system’s media spectra had made it all too clear that the Hegemony had got there first by some margin. The euonymists had already begun their naming work on the inhabited planet, and the Hegemony-wide broadcast and trade rights too were neatly parcelled up among various divisions of the Gibbs Corporation.

  Disappointment, in fact, was barely sufficient to describe how he had felt. He had been raging. The whisper from the Grüber Brothers was supposed to have been exclusive. In the tantrum that followed the realization that it was anything but, Danny had vowed expressively and in several languages to make sure that they were repaid for their mistake. It might still have been possible to sneak close enough to the new world to grab some footage that he could flog quickly before the sanctioned cultural tsunami rolled across the Hegemony worlds, but in his prolonged incandescence he’d lost the opportunity for even that consolation.

  When the sudden swarm of antagonistic ships bore down on them, Hope took over and their escape became a rush of coherence and decoherence that Danny had no chance of following. The displays had swum with snapshot ghosts, lingering images of threats that were already a subspace spin away: everything from Hegemony hulks to diamond-glitter drone arrays, all of them hunting for him with the same cut-throat avidity with which he sought unsanctioned cultural novelty to titillate the jaded palates of the populated galaxy. All attempting to outmanoeuvre Hope’s tactical strategies. Pieces moved, bets spread; a game of risk and reaction. Even as they cohered, Hope had sent them spinning off again to some other point in space, the ship juddering with imposed seizure imperatives, jerking under weapons fire, but every time they’d managed to slip away, try again. It had been a wild ride.

  “Over seventeen fousand spins” Hope said. “This malarky is getting too risky by half. Remind me why I do this again?”

  “Because we’re a team?” Hope usually went along with that shtick, but on this occasion her only response was a snort of derision, so he followed it up with: “And because I own you.”

  After a beat, Hope said: “Well, you’ll be hearing from my brief on that score, wontcha?”

  Danny didn’t know what a brief was. Hope picked up the most unlikely phrases from the old Earth broadcasts, the strung-out signals that had leaked across the light years during that short period of the planet’s history when high-powered, modulated EM had been the primary method of media broadcast. Commercially speaking, Earthwave material never went out of fashion, and dedicated collectors could make a modest living. Danny’s sister, Imelda, headed Gibbs Old World. It was a minor division but it provided a steady contribution to the family fortunes. That was Mel all over, though. No ambition. She’d always been perfectly content with her allotted role, seeking out those vanishingly faint signals, collating humanity’s old stories.

  Old stories, though. Who cared? Next to the corporate soaps and the melo-historicals, where the ratings were really at was discovering how weird other people – on other planets, in other systems – could be.

  The galaxy was immense, and in a couple of thousand years of human colonization still only a fraction of its treasures had been uncovered. The thought of what else might be out there waiting to be found, and exploited, constantly thrilled him. Planets, civilizations, hilarious sexual practices: when it came to entertaining the masses, novelty was everything.

  He’d never understood how or why his ship had become a stodgy old Earthwave nut.

  “Where are we, anyway?” Danny said.

  “Don’t know, do I?” He heard the sulk in her sigh.

  “Yes you do.”

  “All right, keep them on,” she muttered. One, two, three displays blossomed on the curve of the bubble. A galactic limb. The details of the nearest star clusters. Proximity estimates to the nearest Hegemony worlds, to the nearest habitable world, to anything. All, literally, astronomical.

  Hope didn’t need to say it, but she did anyway. “We’re way out there, mister.”

  “Take us somewhere else then.”

  “No can do, buster. Seventeen thousand jumps takes it out of a girl. I’m going to put my feet up and take it easy.”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t ya hear me? Ya got cloth in your ears? We need to recharge, and there ain’t a whole amount of energy out here. It’s gonna take a while.”

  Danny groaned. “How long?”

  “One hundred and sixty three hours. Give or take a smidgen.”

  “A smidgen…?” It was then that he cottoned on that Hope’s voice had changed. The blunt baritone had been replaced by a brassy, rapid-fire patter. At least this time it was female. “So let me get this straight,” he said. “There’s no energy out here, but you’ve managed to find Earthwave?”

  “Give the boy a doughnut!” The cheerfulness was already grating. “But that’s just about all there is. So for the forseeable, you’ll find me tucked up with a new, old movie. Want to watch?”

  “No.” Movie was one of her favourite Earthwave words. A movie was like a melo-historical, but not as good.

  “Your funeral, mac. See ya in the funny papers.”

  Privately, Hope agreed that the escape had been exhilarating. She relished the excitement of her role in Danny’s story. Just like in a movie: she was the loyal companion, the wisecracking sidekick, the grumpy getaway driver. She even put on voices so she could play the parts properly.

  Dramatic thrills like this were why she had agreed to Danny’s ownership. She loved her Earthwave movies but there just weren’t enough of them, so she’d sought out her own adventure. It had been a proper rollercoaster right from the start, full of intrigue and escapes and brushes with the law. Lately, though, the excitement had worn thin. If this had been an Earthwave drama it would have come to its conclusion by now, but Danny was never quite clever enough or daring enough to pull off the great coup that he dreamed of and Hope always managed to extract them from the inevitable pursuit. All in all, it was becoming tiresome. On balance, she was coming to the conclusion that she preferred her movies after all.

  To be truthful, she was only sticking around with Danny now to see what happened at the end.

  It took only a fraction of the estimated downtime for Danny to go crazy with boredom. While Hope drifted in space, scooping up atoms, he ate, slept, played his interactives. When he grew tired of those, he scoured the most recent feeds for leads, recatalogued his finds, even attempted to reconcile his financial affairs.

  “All right,” he shouted. “Show me a movie.”

  Without comment, Hope displayed the moving image on the bubble: a grainy office scene with a man and a woman talking over each other so rapidly as to be incomprehensible. From what little he could follow he gleaned that they worked for a media organization, but they were using methods of securing their stories that seemed, bizarrely, to be considered illegal at the time and their endless argument
s on the subject formed the bulk of the story. They might have been in love too, but that seemed coincidental. Beyond that, the experience was a mystery. He kept watching in hope that something might explode; it often did when things got tedious in Earthwave dramas. On this occasion, however, he was disappointed.

  “Why did the police arrest that man?” Danny moaned, more to have something to say than because he cared.

  “Just follow the story, bozo. It ain’t War And Peace.”

  “It’d help if there was a story. Although I still fail to see why that’s always so important to you.”

  “Buster, if you can’t watch a movie without complaining, so help me I’ll…” She broke off.

  “You’ll?”

  Shh.

  The imperative was not uttered aloud, but directly via his C-link. Danny’s blood cooled. If they had been tracked down already, they’d be unable to spin their way out of trouble.

  What is it? he replied.

  There’s another ship out here.

  There was a pause while she assembled whatever data she was receiving from the grey market multiband sensor arrays that he’d installed specifically for the purposes of knowing what was out there before anyone else did. In the business of cultural claims you needed every advantage you could get.

  “What kind of ship?” Danny said aloud.

  “An old one. I think it’s an original Sol system generation rock.”

  “Don’t be stupid. It can’t be.”

  “If you’re calling me a liar, Mac, you can take it up with my sweet old grey-haired mother.”

  “All right, all right.” Anything to keep the peace. She was still wrong though. It really couldn’t be an original gen-ship from the time of the first diaspora. Not all the way out here. Although, now he thought about it… it wasn’t inconceivable for a ship to drift this far out into the darkness. If the guidance systems had been damaged or if its crew had succumbed to attack or contagion, transforming their vessel into a drifting tomb, awaiting discovery. It wasn’t impossible.