by Neil Clarke
And I save the money from my pension, little by little, by living frugally. To one day buy a basic black market exoskeleton to assist me, and get basic treatment, physio, to learn how to walk and move like a human on Earth.
Can . . . I help, in any way?
You have helped, by listening. Maybe you can help others listen as well, as you’ve said.
Maybe they’ll heed the words of a veteran forced to live in a slum. If they send soldiers to the edge of the galaxy, I can only hope that they will give those soldiers a choice this time.
I beg the ones who prepare our great chariots: if you must take our soldiers with you, take them—their courage, their resilience, their loyalty will serve you well on a new frontier. But do not to take war to new worlds.
War belongs here on Earth. I should know. I’ve fought it on the Moon, and it didn’t make her happy. In her cold anger, she turned our bodies to glass. Our chota duniya was not meant to carry life, but we thrust it into her anyway. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not violate the more welcoming worlds we may find, seeing their beauty as acquiescence.
With FTL, there will be no end to humanity’s journey. If we keep going far enough, perhaps we will find the gods themselves waiting behind the veil of the universe. And if we do not come in peace by then, I fear we will not survive the encounter.
I clamber down the side of the column of the space elevator, winding down through the biohomes of the slum towards one of the tunnels where I can reach the internal shaft and wait for the elevator on the way down. Once it’s close to the surface of the planet, it slows down a lot—that’s when people jump on to hitch a ride up or down. We’re only about 1,000feet up, so it’s not too long a ride down, but the wait for it could be much longer. The insides of the shaft are always lined with slum-dwellers and elevator station hawkers, rigged with gas masks and cling clothes, hanging on to the nanocable chords and sinews of the great spindle. I might just catch a ride on the back of one of the gliders who offer their solar wings to travelers looking for a quick trip back to the ground. Bit more terrifying, but technically less dangerous, if their back harness and propulsion works.
The eight-year-old boy guiding me down through the steep slum, along the pipes and vines of the NGO-funded nano-ecosystem, occasionally looks up at me with a gap-toothed smile. “I want to be an asura like Gita, “ he says. “I want to go to the stars. “
“Aren’t you afraid of not being able to walk properly when you come back to Earth?”
“Who said I want to come back to Earth?”
I smile, and look up, past the flutteringprayer flags of drying clothes, the pulsing wall of the slum, at the dizzying stairway to heaven, an infinite line receding into the blue. At the edge of the spindle, I see asura Gita poised between the air and her home, leaning precariously out to wave goodbye to me. Her hair ripples out against the sky, a smudge of black. A pale, late evening moon hovers full and pale above her head, twinkling with lights.
I wave back, overcome with vertigo. She seems about to fall, but she doesn’t. She is caught between the Earth and the sky in that moment, forever.
2017
Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-four books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her most recent work is Terran Tomorrow (Tor), the final book in her Yesterday’s Kin trilogy. Kress’s fiction has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Tao Toolbox. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
EVERY HOUR OF LIGHT AND DARK
Nancy Kress
1668
Delft, shrouded in rain, was uniformly gray. Hunched against the cold and wet, the artist walked from Oude Langendijk along the canal to his patron’s house. Much as he hated this sort of occasion, inside the house would be warmth, food, wine. And quiet. His own house, crowded with children, was never quiet.
“You are welcome,” said his patron’s wife shyly as a servant took his cloak. “Pieter will be glad to see you.”
Johannes doubted that. This celebration was not about him, nor one of his paintings, nor even the newly acquired Maes painting being shown for the first time. This celebration was about the patron: his wealth, his taste, his power. Johannes smiled at his pretty wife, another acquisition, and passed into the first of many lavishly furnished rooms, all warm from good fires.
In this room hung one of his own paintings. Johannes glanced at it in passing, then stopped abruptly. His eyes widened. He took a candle from a table and held it close to the picture. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet—he had painted it four years ago. Catharina had been the model. She sat, heavily pregnant, on a wooden chair, the light from an unseen window illuminating the top of her fair hair as she bent over her work. A broken toy lay at her feet, and what could be seen of her expression was somber. On the table beside her were her work basket, a glass of wine, and a pearl necklace, tossed carelessly as if she had thrown it off in discomfort, or despair. On the wall behind her was a painting-within-a-painting, van Honthorst’s Lute Player.The painstaking detail in the smaller picture, the hint of underpainted blue in Catharina’s burgundy-colored dress, the warm light on the whitewashed walls—how long it took to get that right!—all shone in the glow from Johannes’s candle.
But he had not made this painting.
Inch by inch, he examined it, ignoring guests who passed him, spoke to him. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet was the most skillful forgery he had ever seen, but forgery it was. Did Pieter know? Presumably not, or the picture would not still be on the patron’s walls. How had it come there? Who had painted it? And—
What should Johannes do about this?
The decision came swiftly—he should do nothing. He owed money all over the city. He had hopes of Pieter’s commissioning another painting from him soon, perhaps tonight. The original could not have been switched with the forgery without Pieter’s consent, not in this well-guarded house, and Pieter would not welcome attention drawn to whatever scheme he was participating in. Say nothing.
“Ah, Johannes!” said a booming voice behind him. “Admiring your own work, you vain man?”
Johannes turned to face the guest of honor, Nicolaes Maes. “No,” he said. Maes waited, but Johannes said nothing more.
Not now, not ever.
2270
Cran is working on clearances at his console when Tulia bounces into the Project room. “Cran! They chose it! They really chose it!” She grabs his hands and twirls him in circles.
“CarefUl! You’ll hit the Squares!”
She stops moving and drops Cran’s hands. He hears his own tone: sour, disapproving, a cranky old man. He sees that Tulia understands immediately, but understanding isn’t enough to erase the hurt. Torn between them, she chooses hurt.
“Aren’t you happy for me?”
“Of course I am,” he says, and forces a smile. And he is happy, in a way. How could he not be—Tulia is him, or at least 32 percent of her genes are. It’s the other 68 percent that prompts this terrible, inexcusable jealousy.
She says softly, “Maybe next cycle the Gallery will choose one of your pictures.”
It is the wrong thing to say; they both know that will never happen. Cran does not have Tulia’s talent, has perhaps no talent at all. How does she do it, produce art that is somehow fresh and arresting, after working all day at the Project’s forgeries? How? Sometimes he hates her for it. Does she know this?
Sometimes he loves her for it. She knows this.
Cran says, “I am happy for you.
But I need to work.”
Her eyes sharpen. She, after all, is also part of the Project. “Do you have something?”
“An ancient Egyptian vase, on Square Three. Go look.”
She looks, frowning. “We cannot reproduce that.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s inside a tomb. We can Transfer a lump of rock and no one would ever know.”
We could Transfer one ofmy sculptures, which are just as dreadful as my paintings.
“The tomb was never opened before—”
“No.” No one ever names the Madness, if naming can be avoided. Even in a deliberately rational society—legally rational, culturally rational, genetically rational to whatever extent the geneticists can manage—superstitions seep in like moondust in airlocks. No one says the word aloud.
“Well, that’s wonderful!” Tulia says. “Has the Director vetted it? Have you done the clearances?”
“Yes, he did, and I’m completing them now. When . . . when is your Gallery presentation?”
“Tuesday. I’ll go now. I just wanted to tell you about . . . about my painting.”
“I’m glad you did,” Cran says, lying, hoping she doesn’t realize that. Sixty-eight percent foreign genes.
Tulia leaves. Cran de-opaques the window wall and stares out. The Project is housed in its own dome, and sometimes the bleak lunar landscape calms him when he feels equally bleak. Not, however, this time.
On the horizon, the lights of Alpha Dome are just visible below stars in the black sky. Alpha was the first, the only dome to exist when the Madness happened on Earth. Six thousand lunar colonists, half of them scientists. They had the best equipment, the best scientific minds, the best planners. Earth had those who could not qualify; Earth had too many people and too many wars; Earth had the ability to create genetically boosted bioweapons so powerful that when the Madness began as just another war, it quickly escalated. In three months everyone on Earth was dead. How could they do that, those Terrans of two centuries ago? Those on Alpha watched in horror. There was nothing they could do except what they did: shoot down both incoming missiles and incoming, infected escapees.
He was not there, of course. He’s old, but not that old. How long does it take for guilt to evaporate? Longer than two hundred years. Alpha Dome grew to sixteen more domes. If he squints hard, he might be able to see the robots constructing Sigma Dome on the western horizon, or the sprays of dirt thrown up from the borers digging the connecting tunnels. But through all the construction, all the genetic tinkering, all the amazing scientific progress, the guilt has not gone away. We humans murdered our own species. Thus, the Project.
Or perhaps, Cran thinks, that’s wrong. There is, after all, a strong but polite political faction—all Luna’s political factions are polite, or else they don’t exist—that says the Project should be discontinued and its resources committed to the present and the future, not to rescuing the past. So far, this has not happened.
It takes Cran nearly an hour to finish the complicated clearance procedures for the Egyptian vase. He finds it hard to concentrate.
The clearances are approved almost immediately. They are, after all, only a formality; the Director, who is the Project’s expert on art of the ancient world, has already inspected the image glowing in Square Three. Cran has worked a long day and it’s late; he should go home. But he likes working alone at night, and he has the seniority to do so. He gazes at the vase, this exquisite thing that exists in dark beneath tons of rock in a buried tomb a quarter-million miles and three millennia away. A core-formed glass vessel, three inches high, its graceful, elaborately decorated curves once held perfumed ointment or scented oils. Perhaps it still does.
The Project room is lined with Squares, each a six-foot cube. Some of the Squares are solid real-time alloys; some are virtual simulations; some are not actually there at all—not in time or space. The Project is built on chaos theory, which says that the patterns of spacetime contain something called “strange attractors,” a mathematical concept that Cran doesn’t understand at all. He is, after all, a Project technician, not a physicist. A senior, trusted technician who will never be an artist.
Why Tulia? Why not me?
One of those questions that, like the Madness, has no answer.
2018
The guard at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., made his early morning rounds. He unlocked each room, peered in, and moved on. He had worked there a long while and prided himself on knowing exactly what each exhibit held at any given time.
He unlocked a gallery, glanced in, and stopped cold.
Not possible.
This room held the Gallery’s five Vermeers. At present, two were on loan. The other three should be on the off-white walls in their protected frames. They were.
But—
“Oh my God,” the guard said under his breath, and then very loudly. His hands shook as he pressed the alarm on his pager.
2270
The Transfer happens, as always, blindingly fast. One moment Square Three holds a small stone. The next it holds a delicate purple vase trimmed in gold.
Cran doesn’t touch it. He follows protocol and calls two members of the Handler Staff. Despite the hour, they both rush to the Project room. Marbet Hammerling’s eyes water, an extravagance that Cran deplores even as he understands it.
Salvaging anything from the past is a slow, difficult, emotional triumph. Humanity’s artistic heritage lay decaying on a deserted and contaminated Earth; nothing can be brought from the present without bringing contamination with it. But thanks to the genius of the Rahvoli Equations and the engineers who translated them to reality, some things can be saved from the past. Only things less than six cubic feet; only things deemed worthy of the huge expenditure of energy; only things non-living; only things replaced in Transfer by a rough equivalent in weight and size; only replacements that will not change the course of the timestream that has already unfolded. Otherwise, the Transfer simply did not happen. The past could only be disturbed so much.
Marbet whispers, “It is so beautiful.” Reverently she lifts it from the faint shimmer of the Square.
Cran is permitted to touch it with one finger, briefly. Only that. The vase will go into the Gallery and thousands will come to view and glory in this rightful human inheritance.
The Handlers bear away the vase. Cran paces the Project room. It’s well into the artificial lunar night; the lights of Alpha Dome have dimmed on the horizon. Cran can’t sleep; it’s been several nights since he slept. He’s old, but it isn’t that. Desire consumes him, the desire of a young man: not for sex, but for glory. Once, he thought he would be a great artist. Long ago reality killed the dream but not the gnawing disappointment, eating at his innards, his brain, his heart.
Tulia has a painting chosen for the Gallery.
His own work is shit, has always been shit, will always be shit.
Tulia, people are beginning to say, is the real thing. A genuine artist, the kind that comes along once in a generation.
Cran can’t sit still, can’t sleep, can’t lift himself, yet again, from the black pit into which he falls so often. Only one thing helps, and he has long since gotten past any qualms about its legality.
He takes the pill and waits. Ten minutes later nothing matters so much, not even his inadequacy. His brain has been temporarily rewired. Nothing works optimally, either, including his hands and his brain, both of which tremble. Small price to pay. The gnawing grows less, the pit retreats.
A flash of color catches his eye. Square Two lights up. The endlessly scanning Project has found something.
2018
“How?” James Glenwood said. And then, “Is anything missing?”
Of the National’s five Vermeers, Girl with a Flute and Girl with the Red Hat were on loan to the Frick in New York. Woman Holding a Balance and Lady Writing both hung on the walls. So did Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet.Below that, propped against the wall in a room locked all night, sat its duplicate.
A fake, of course—but how the hell did it get there?
The guard looked guilty. But Henry had worked for the museum for twenty-five years. And naturally he looked upset—suspicion was bound to fall on him as the person who locked this room last night and opened it this morning. Glenwood, a curator for thirty years, remembered well the 1990 brazen theft of Vermeer’s The Concert from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The picture had never been recovered.
Except this was not a theft. A prank? A warning of thefts to come—Look how easily I can break into this place?
