by Neil Clarke
“But Farsiders are in command,” said Pony, fists lifted as if in victory. “All the big old families are pooling their resources, but since this project is so vast and complicated—”
“Too vast and too complicated,” Bosson interrupted.
Sitta looked at Icenice. “How about you, darling? How many shares have you purchased?”
The pretty face dropped, eyes fixed on the table’s edge.
“Let’s just say,” her husband replied, “that their most generous offer has been rejected by this household. Isn’t that what happened, love?”
Icenice gave a tiny, almost invisible nod.
Pony glared at both of them, then asked Sitta, “Are you interested?”
“Give her time,” Varner snapped. Then he turned to Sitta, making certain that she noticed his smile. “Think it through, darling. Please just do that much for us, will you?”
What sane world would allow another world to build it a sun? And after the long war, who could trust anyone with such enormous powers? Maybe there were safeguards and political guarantees, the full proposal rich with logic and vision. But those questions stood behind one great question. Clearing her throat, Sitta looked at the hopeful faces, then asked, “Just why do you need my money?”
No one spoke; the room was silent.
And everything was made transparent. Simple. They wanted her money because they had none, and they were desperate enough to risk whatever shred of pride they had kept from the old days. How had they become poor? What happened to the old estates and the bottomless bank accounts? Curious, Sitta saw how she could torture them with her questions; yet suddenly, without warning, she had no taste for that kind of vengeance. The joy was gone, lost before one weak excuse could be made, by Varner or anyone. So with a slow, almost gentle voice, Sitta said, “I can’t. Because my money has been spent, you see.”
A chill gripped her audience.
“I used everything to help my hospital. Some equipment was illegal, and that meant bribes to have it delivered and bribes to keep it secret.” A pause. “I couldn’t buy ten shares for just me, and I’m afraid that you’ve wasted your time, friends.”
The faces were past misery. Every careful hope and earnest plan had evaporated, no salvation waiting, and the audience was too exhausted to move, too unsure of itself to speak or even look at one another.
Finally, with rage and agony, one of the strangers climbed to her feet, saying, “Thank you for the miserable dinner, Icenice.”
She and the other strangers escaped from the room and house.
Then the Twins spun a lie about a party, leaving and taking Vechel with them. Had Vechel spoken a single word today? Sitta couldn’t remember. She looked at Pony, and Pony asked, “Why did you come home?”
For an instant, Sitta forgot why.
“You hate us,” the girl observed. “It’s obvious how much you hate this place. Don’t deny it!”
Why would she deny anything?
“Fucking bitch.”
And Pony was gone. There was no other guest but Varner, and he sat with his eyes fixed on his unfinished meal, his face pale and indifferent. It was as if he still didn’t understand what had happened. Finally, Icenice rose and went to Varner, taking him in her arms and whispering, the words or her touch giving him reason to stand. From where she sat, Sitta could watch the two of them walk out on the stone porch. She kept hugging him, always whispering, then she wished him good-bye, waiting for him to move out of her sight. Bosson watched his wife, his face remote. Unreadable. Then Icenice returned, sitting in that most distant chair, staring at some concoction of mints and cultured meat that had never been touched.
And Bosson, with the shrillest voice yet, said, “I warned you. I told you and your friends she’d never be interested.” A pause, a grin. “What did I tell you? Repeat it for me.”
Icenice stood and took the platter of meat in both hands, flinging it at her husband.
Bosson was nothing but calm, confidently measuring the arc and knowing it would fall short. But the sculpted meat shattered, a greasy white sauce in its center, still hot and splattering like shrapnel. It struck Bosson’s clothes and arms and face. He gave a flinch. Nothing more. Then not bothering to wipe himself clean, he turned to Sitta, and with a voice that made robots sound emotional, said:
“Be the good guest. Run off to your room. Now. Please.”
12
Thomas’ death was tragic, yet perfect. No else knew what Sitta was carrying. The original mother thought her baby had come early and died. The hospital’s AI functions had been taken off-line, leaving them innocent. No one but Thomas could have betrayed her, and it was his horrible luck to inhale a killing mote of dust. By accident? Sometimes Sitta asked herself if it was that simple. Toward the end of the process, the boy began to wonder aloud if this was what Sitta truly wanted, and if it was right. Maybe he became careless by distraction, or maybe carelessness was to ensure that he couldn’t act on his doubts. Or maybe it was just what it had seemed to be at first glance. An accident. A brutal little residue of the endless war, and why couldn’t she just accept it?
What was living inside Plowsharer was a particularly wicked ensemble. Designed to be invisible to Terran jurists and their instruments, it carried its true self within just one in a million cells. But in the time between her first labor pains and the delivery, each of those cells would explode, invading their neighbors, implanting genetics in a transformation that would leave no outward sign of change, much less danger. The monster would be born pale and irresistible. Perhaps the finest baby ever seen, people would think, wrapping it in a blanket and holding it close to their breasts.
That appearance was a fiction. Beneath the baby fat was a biosynthetic factory that would absorb and transmute every microbial strain. Mother and jurists would sicken in a few hours, their own native flora turned against them. No immune system could cope with such a thorough, coordinated assault. A village or city would be annihilated in a day, and with ample stocks of rotting, liquified meat, the monster would nurse, growing at an impossible pace, becoming for all intents and purposes a three year-old girl, mobile enough to wander, mute and big-eyed and lovely.
It was a weapon made inside many labs, including her parents’. That was no huge coincidence; Sitta had seen many examples of their work. But it helped her resolve. If justice was a simple matter of balance, then both were being achieved.
In a war full of famous weapons, this creation had never been discussed publicly. As far as Sitta could determine, the parasite was sent down for field tests and then lost. Probably waiting somewhere as a hibernating cyst, the cyst finally found the young woman, and that’s what Sitta took for herself. No medical authority had seen it in action. What would Farside do with such a monster? Its people had little experience with real disease, and if anything, the moon was a richer target for this kind of horror. Where the earth had few species and tiny populations, Farside had diversity and multitudes. Each beetle and orchid and monkey had its own family of microbes. A thousand parallel plagues would cause an ecological collapse, the domed air left poisoned, the Central Sea struck dead. Here was an ultimate, apocalyptic revenge, and sometimes Sitta was astonished by her hatreds, by the depth of her feelings and the cold calculating passion she brought to this work.
Doubt found her. Doubts made her awaken in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. Then her habit was to walk under the seamless black sky, taking the wide road to the cemetery, reading the simple tombstones with her lamp, noting the dates and trying to recall who was below her feet. The earth itself was entombed in a grave, alone, and the overheated air made Sitta think of the many billions of bodies rotting in the useless ground. How could she feel weakness? By what right?
Given such a mandate, she had no choice, and turning back with resolve, she felt her way down to the city and along its narrow streets. That’s what she did on her last night in the city, the shuttle for Athens scheduled for the morning. Her leather bag was packed. She was wearing her trav
el clothes. Approaching her bunker home, full of distractions, Sitta didn’t notice the children at work. She was almost past them when some sound, some little voice, caught her attention, making her turn and lift her lamp’s beam, dozens of faces caught in mid-smile. What were these girls and boys doing? “You should be sleeping,” she said. Then she hesitated, lifting the beam higher, every bunker festooned with long dirty ribbons and colored ropes and stiff old flags. “What is this?” she whispered, speaking to herself. “Why . . . ?”
And she knew. An instant before her audience broke into song and a ragged cheer, she realized this was for her, all of it, and they hadn’t expected her so soon. These were people unaccustomed to celebrations, people who had few holidays, if any; and those long legs trembled, then gave way, knees into the foot-packed earth and Sitta’s eyes blind with tears. Hundreds of children poured into the street, parents at their heels. Everyone was singing, no one competent and everyone loud, and what surprised Sitta more than anything was the final proof that these were genuinely happy people.
Inside the hospital, she saw them wounded or ill, or dead. Those were the people she understood best.
Yet here were souls more healthy than hurt, and more grateful than she could believe, everyone touching her, every hand on her swollen belly, every joyous shout giving her another dose of luck, the burden of all this luck and gratitude making it impossible for her to stand, much less turn and run for home.
13
Obeying Bosson, not caring what happened, Sitta climbed halfway up the staircase before she paused, standing beside sunlight, turning when she heard a whimper or moan. Was it Icenice? No, it was one of begging monkeys. She looked past the animal, waiting for a long moment, telling herself that regardless of what she heard, she would do nothing. This wasn’t her home, nor her world—she was here to destroy all of this—and then she was walking, watching her shoes on the long lunar steps, aware in a distant, dreamy way that she was moving downhill, reentering the dining room just as Bosson finished binding his wife’s hands to one of the table’s legs.
The Mercurian didn’t notice his audience. With smooth, practiced deliberation, he lifted Icenice’s gown over her hips and head, the girl motionless as stone, her naked back and rump shining in the reflected light. Then Bosson stood over the table, selecting tools, deciding on a spoon and a blunt knife. Then he moved behind the thin rump, wiping his face clean with a sleeve, coughing once, and placing the blade against the pucker of her rectum.
The man was twenty years Sitta’s senior and accustomed to the moon’s gentle tug, and he was taken by surprise. She struck him on the side of the head, turning him, then struck his belly and kicked him twice, aiming for his testicles, earth-trained muscles making Bosson grunt, then collapse onto an elegant floor of colored tiles and pink mortar.
“Get up,” she advised.
He tried to find his balance, halfway standing, and proving that he was still dangerous, Sitta drove her foot into his chin.
Again, she said, “Get up.”
“Sitta?” whispered Icenice.
Bosson grunted, rose. She had drawn blood this time. Next a cheekbone shattered beneath her heel, and the man lay still, hands limp around his bloody head, and Sitta asked, “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you even stand up, you fuck?”
With the weakest of voices, Icenice asked, “What is happening?”
Sitta pulled the gown back where it belonged, then untied the napkins used to bind her hands. Her one-time friend looked at Bosson, and horrified, she said, “Oh this is so terrible.”
Knotting the many napkins together, Sitta made crude ropes, then knelt and tied the groggy man’s hands behind him and wrapped his ankles together and filled his mouth so that he couldn’t shout orders to the robots. When she stood again, she felt weak. Almost faint. When Icenice tried to clean Bosson’s wounds, Sitta grabbed her and pulled her toward the stairs, panting as she asked, “Why? Why did you marry it?”
“I was in such debt. You don’t know.” Icenice swallowed, moaned. “He promised to help me.”
“How could you lose all that money? Where did it go?”
“Oh,” she whimpered. “It seemed to go everywhere, really.”
Reasons didn’t matter. What mattered was bringing Icenice upstairs, the two of them moving through the shafts of sunlight.
“Everyone had debts,” the girl was explaining. “I mean, we didn’t know enough about modern business, and the Martians . . . they seemed very good at taking what we had . . .”
Sitta said, “Hurry up.”
“Where are we going?”
“Hurry!”
Her bag was where the robot had set it, on the bed, still unopened, She unfastened the latches and threw its contents on the floor, then used a tiny cosmetic blade to cut into the thick bottom layers. What wouldn’t appear in any scan were half a dozen lozenges of leather, their flesh filled with hormones and odd chemicals that nobody would consider illegal. Sitta had synthesized them in her hospital. Hesitating for an instant, she looked at Icenice and tried to decide the best way to do this thing.
“Varner wanted your money,” said the girl.
“Come on. Into the bath.”
“Why?”
“Now! Hurry!” Someone might be watching them. Sitta thought about the Belter with the dogs, wondering if she had shadowed them all this way. Stripping as she walked, she ended up naked, wading into the clear warm water, down to her chest before looking up at Icenice. “You have to climb in with me. Do it.”
Again, the girl asked, “Why?”
The lozenges were made to answer a fear. What if she found herself giving birth in the wrong place? The possibility had awakened her with a shudder. What if she found herself trapped on the earth, and this monster of hers was threatening the people whom she loved most? How could she protect the innocent ones?
“I don’t understand.” The girl was weeping, quietly devastated by the day’s events. “Why are you taking a bath now?”
One by one, Sitta swallowed those pieces of flesh, gulping bathwater to help get each of them down.
“Sitta?”
The process would take half an hour, maybe less. In minutes, the first of the drugs would cross into the fetus, crippling its genetic machinery—she hoped—giving her long enough to let the miscarriage run its course. The danger was that she would lose consciousness. The horror of horrors was that the monster would live long enough to outlast the anti-genetics, then somehow climb to the air and out of the bath, premature but coping, its transformation happening despite her desperate best wishes. That would be the ironic, horrible end.
“Sitta?”
And Sitta looked up at Icenice, then said, “In. Climb in.”
The girl obeyed, still wearing her gown, the black fabrics blacker when soaked, billowing up around her waist, then covering her breasts, “You’re my jurist,” said Sitta, looking straight into Icenice’s eyes, “When it comes, drown it. Don’t let it take a breath.”
“What do you mean?”
“Promise me!”
“Oh, my.” Icenice straightened, as if stabbed by a needle.
“Promise.”
“I can try,” she squeaked.
“You have to do it, darling. Or the world dies.”
The words were believed. Sitta saw their impact and their slow digestion, the girl becoming thoughtful, alert. A minute passed. Several minutes passed. Then Icenice attempted a weak little smile, telling her friend, “I’ve never wanted your money.”
A single red pain began in Sitta’s pelvis, crawling up her spine.
“And I’ve always wanted to tell you,” the girl went on. “When you were sentenced, and only you would be going to the earth, I knew that was best for everyone.”
Wincing, Sitta asked, “Why?”
“None of us could have survived. Not for three years.”
“And I was safe?”
“You did live,” Icenice responded, then again tried her smile. “But you
always had a toughness, a strength. That’s the thing that I’ve always wanted to borrow from you. Even back when we were little girls.”
Pain came twice, boom and boom.
“I’m not strong,” Icenice said with conviction.
When was I strong? What did the girl see in me?
Then more pain. BOOM.
And when it passed, Sitta grabbed the ruined gown, pulling her friend in close to her, wrapping arms around her, and whispering with her most certain voice, “When the time comes, I’ll kill it myself.”
“Because I don’t think I could,” Icenice whimpered.
“But can you stay?”
“Here? With you?”
Sitta tried to breathe and the body froze with pain. Then a second time, she tried to inhale, which worked, and that’s when she pleaded, “Don’t leave me!”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Which was only the beginning. Because now the miseries began in earnest, and every pain before them, reaching back through Sitta’s entire life, was just the careful preparation for the scorching white miseries inside her, trying to escape.
1999
Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novel, set in post-climate change Antarctica, is Austral.
HOW WE LOST THE MOON, A TRUE STORY BY FRANK W. ALLEN
Paul J. McAuley
you probably think that you know everything about it. After all, here we are, barely into the second quarter of the first century of the Third Millennium, and it’s being touted as the biggest event in the history of humanity. Yeah, right. But tossing aside such impossibly grandiose claims, it was and still is a hell of a story. It’s generated millions of bytes of Web journalism (two years after, there are still more than two hundred official Web sites, not to mention the tens of thousands of unofficial newsgroups devoted to proving that it was really caused by God, or aliens, or St. Elvis), tens of thousands of hours of TV and a hundred schlocky movies (and I do include James Cameron’s seven-hour blockbuster), thousands of scientific papers and dozens of thick technical reports, including the ten-million-page congressional report, and the ghostwritten biographies of scientists Who Should Have Known Better.
