New Suns

by Nisi Shawl

  Land around La Guardia’s remains was cheap, and Tavi lived in an apartment complex roofed by the charred chunk of the once-space elevator’s outer shell.

  “Home sweet home,” he said, coming in for a landing.

  There was a burning smell somewhere in the back of the cab. Smoke started filling the cabin and the impellers failed.

  He remained in the air, the kinine misters doing their job and preventing him from losing neutral buoyancy, and coasted.

  Tavi wanted to get upset, hit the wheel, punch the dash. But he just bit his lip as the car finally stopped just short of the roof’s parking spot. He had the misters spray some cancellation foam, and the car dropped a bit too hard to a stop.

  “At least you got home,” Sienna said, laughing as he opened the doors to the cab and stumbled out. “You know what I think of this Galactic piece of shit.”

  “It gets the job done.”

  Sienna poked her head into the cab, holding her breath. Her puffy hair bobbed against the side of the hatch.

  “Can you fix it?” he asked her.

  “It was one of the dog things, with the cinnamon breath? That gas they breathe catalyzes the o-rings. You need to spend some money to isolate the shaft back here.”

  “Next big tip,” Tavi told her.

  She crawled back out and let out the breath she’d been holding.

  “Okay. Next big tip. I can work on it if you split dinner with me.” She nodded at the bag Geoff had given him.

  “Sure.”

  “There’s also a man waiting by your door. Looks like Tourist Bureau.”

  “Shit.” He didn’t want anyone from the bureau out here. Not in an illegal squat in the ruins of the space elevator now draped across this side of the world.

  THERE WAS NO air conditioning; the solar panels lashed to the scrap hull roof top didn’t pump out enough juice to make that a reality. But the motion sensitive fans kicked on and the LED track lights all leapt to attention as Tavi led the beet-faced Tourist Bureau agent through the mosquito netting.

  “Your cab is having trouble?”

  The agent, David Khan, had a tight haircut and glossy brown skin, the kind that meant he didn’t spend much time outside loading aliens into the back of cabs. He had an office job.

  “Sienna will fix it. She grew up a scrapper. Her father was one of the original decommissioners paid to work on picking La Guardia up. Before the contract was canceled and they all decided to stay put. Beer?”

  Tavi passed him a sweaty Red Stripe from the fridge, which Kahn held nervously in one hand as if he wanted to refuse it. Instead, he placed it against his forehead. The man had been waiting a while in the heat. And he was wearing a heavy suit.

  “So, I am here to offer you a grant from the Greater New York Bureau of Tourism,” Kahn started, sounding a little unsure of himself.

  “A grant?”

  “The Bureau is starting a modernization campaign to make sure our cabs are the safest on Earth. That means we’d like to take your cab in and have it retrofitted with better security, improved impellers, better airlocks. For the driver’s safety.”

  “The driver?”

  “Of course.”

  Tavi thought it was a line of bullshit. Human lives were cheap; there were billions teeming away on the planet. If Tavi ever stepped out, someone else would bid on his license to Manhattan and he’d be forgotten in days.

  Maybe even hours.

  “Take it,” Sienna said, pushing through the netting. “That piece of shit needs any help it can get.”

  Tavi didn’t have to be told twice. He put his thumb to the documents, verbally repeated assent into a tiny red dot of a light, and then Kahn said a tow truck was on its way.

  They watched the cab get lifted onto its back, the patchwork of a vehicle that Tavi had come to know every smelly inch of.

  “What about the dead alien?” Tavi asked.

  “Well, according to the documents you just signed, you can never talk about the… err… incident again.”

  “I get it.” Tavi waved a salute at the disappearing cab and tow truck. “I figured as much when you said you had a ‘grant.’ But what happens to the alien? Did you ever find the body?”

  Kahn let out a deep breath. “We found it, downstream of where it jumped.”

  “Why the hell did it do that? Why jump out?”

  “It was out of its mind on vacation drugs. Cameras show the party started in orbit with a few friends, continued down the JFK elevator all the way to the ground.”

  “When do you send the body back to its people?”

  “We don’t,” Kahn looked around, surprised. “No one wants to know a high profile cephaloid of any kind has died on Earth. So they didn’t. The video of the fall no longer exists in any system.”

  “But they can track the body—”

  “—already fired off via an old school rocket aimed at our sun. That leaves no evidence here. Nothing happened on Earth. Nothing happened to you.”

  Kahn shook hands with Sienna and Tavi and left.

  The next morning a brand new cab was parked on the roof.

  “Easier than scrubbing it all down for DNA,” Sienna said. “The old one’s probably on a rocket as well, just like the body, being shot toward the sun as we speak.”

  He scrambled up some eggs for his ever-hungry roomie, and some extra for the Oraji brothers next door. There were thirty other random clumps of real and found families living in welded together scrap here. Several of them watched the sun creep over the rusted wreckage scattered from horizon to horizon as they ate breakfast. Tavi would head back into the drudgery of flying tourists around, Sienna would work at trying to pry something valuable out of the ruins.

  Just as they finished eating, a second cab descended from the clouds. It kicked up some dust as it settled in on the ground.

  “Hey asshole,” Sienna shouted. “If we all land on metal we don’t kick dust into everyone’s faces.”

  Grumbling assent rose into the morning air.

  The doors slid open, and Tavi felt his stomach drop.

  Another octopus-like alien stood on the ground looking up at them.

  “I’m looking for the human named Tavi,” the speaker box on the exoskeleton buzzed. “Is he here?”

  “Don’t say a thing,” Sienna hissed. Sienna, who had all the smarts built up from a lifetime of eat or be eaten while scavenging in the wreckage.

  “I am Tavi,” Tavi said, stepping down toward the alien.

  “You’re an idiot,” Sienna said. She walked off toward the shadows under a pile of scrap and disappeared.

  THE ALIEN CROUCHED in a spot of shade, trying to stay out of the sun, occasionally rubbing sunscreen over its photo-sensitive skin.

  “I’m the co-sponsor of the unit last seen in your vehicle when it came down to your planet for sightseeing.”

  Tavi felt his stomach fall out from under him. “Oh,” he said numbly. He wasn’t sure what a co-sponsor was, or why the alien’s language had been translated that way. He had the feeling this alien was a close friend, or maybe even family member of the one he’d witnessed jump to its death.

  “No one will tell me anything, your representatives have done nothing but flail around and throw bureaucratic ink my way,” the alien tourist said.

  “I’m really sorry for your loss,” Tavi said.

  “So, you are my last try before offencers get involved,” the alien concluded.

  “Offencers?”

  The alien used one of its mechanized limbs to point up. A shadow passed over the land. Something vast skimmed over the clouds and blocked the sun. It hummed. And the entire land hummed back with it. Somehow, Tavi knew that whatever was up there could destroy a planet.

  Tavi’s wristband vibrated. Incoming call. Kahn.

  The world was crashing into him. Tavi felt it all waver for a moment, and then he took a deep breath.

  “All I wanted to do was the right thing,” he muttered, and took the call.

  “Ver
y big, alien destroyers,” David Kahn said, in a level, but clearly terrified voice. “We at the Greater New York Bureau of Tourism highly recommend you do whatever the being or beings currently in contact with you are asking, while also, uh, acknowledging that we have no idea where the missing being they are referring to is. Please hold for the President—”

  Tavi flicked the bracelet off.

  “What do you want?” Tavi asked the alien.

  “I want to know the truth,” it said.

  “I see you have an advanced exotic worlds encounter suit. Would you like a real human beer with me?”

  “If that helps,” it said.

  “YOU HAVE SUCH a beautiful planet. So unspoiled, paradisiacal. I was swimming with whales in your Pacific Ocean yesterday.”

  Tavi sat down and gave the alien a Red Stripe. It curled a tentacle around it, pulled it back towards its beak. They watched the trees curling around the La Guardia debris shiver in the wind, the fluffy clouds ease through the pale blue sky.

  They deliberately sat with their backs to the section of sky filled with the destroyer.

  “I’ve never been to the Pacific,” Tavi admitted. “Just the Caribbean, where my people come from, and the Atlantic.”

  “I’m a connoisseur of good oceans,” the alien said. “These are just some of the best.”

  “We used to fish on them. My grandfather owned a boat.”

  “Oh, does he still do that? I love fishing.”

  “He started chartering it out,” Tavi said. “The Galactics bought out the restaurants, so he couldn’t sell to his best markets anymore. They own anything near the best spots, and all around the eastern seaboard now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “About your friend,” Tavi took a big swig. “They jumped out of my cab. When it was in the air. They were in an altered state.”

  There was a long silence.

  Tavi waited for the world to end, but it didn’t. So he continued, and the alien listened as he told his story.

  “And, there were no security systems to stop them from jumping?” it asked when he finished.

  “There were not, on that cab.”

  “Wow,” it said. “How authentically human. How dangerous. I’ll have to audit your account against the confessions of your bureau, but I have to say, I am very relieved. I suspected foul play, and it turns out it was just an utterly authentic primitive world experience. No door security.”

  Overhead, long fiery contrails burned through the sky.

  “What is that?” Tavi asked, nervous.

  “Independent verification,” the alien said. It stood up and jumped down to its cab. It looked closely at the rear doors. “I could really just jump out of these, couldn’t I?”

  It opened the door, and Tavi, who had hopped over the roof and down the stairs, caught a glimpse of a pale-faced driver inside. Sorry, friend, he thought.

  There were more shadows descending down out of space. Larger and larger vessels moving through the atmosphere far above.

  “What is happening?” Tavi asked, mouth dry.

  “News of your world has spread,” it said. “You are no longer an undiscovered little secret. Finding out that we can die just in a cab ride—where else can you get that danger?”

  The cab lifted off and flew away.

  Sienna came back out of the shadows. “They’re over every city now. They’re offering ludicrous money for real estate.”

  Tavi looked at the skies. “Did you think it would ever stop?”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Beats them blowing us up, right? They do that, sometimes, to other worlds that fight it.”

  He shook his head. “There’s not going to be anything left for us down here, is there?”

  “Oh, they’ll never want this,” she spread her arms and pointed at the miles of space elevator junk.

  “And I still have a new cab,” he said.

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe these new Galactics coming down over the cities tip better.”

  And for the first time in days Tavi laughed. “That’s always the hope, isn’t it?”

  Deer Dancer

  Kathleen Alcalá

  “HA!” SHE SAID, jiggling the wrench. “I’ve got you!”

  The pipe came loose with a grating sound, and she reached in and unscrewed it the rest of the way. Rusty water dribbled out the end as she scuttled from under the house, waving the pipe section in the air. Brownish water spattered her shirt. It felt good.

  “Found it! It will be easy to fix!” she said, wondering if they could find pipe the same diameter, and long enough to repair the plumbing.

  This was the fifth house she had helped rehab, and Tater was beginning to think of herself as an expert in the undersides of houses.

  Shonda took the pipe from her and fingered the rusty hole. “How you going to find the right size?”

  “We’ve got a whole pile from the other houses around here. One of them must have used the same size, maybe even the same plumber in the first place. All these houses were built about the same time.”

  The sun, mother sun, blazed down, and Tater pulled her hat forward from where it hung down her back on a string.

  “We’d better get home.”

  It was five bells since first light, and unless they planned to spend the rest of the day under the house, they needed to get back. Walking single file, Shonda took the lead, poking any suspicious-looking soil with her walking stick before proceeding. Tater carefully set her feet in Shonda’s prints until they came to a place where the houses were lively with people preparing for midday siesta.

  Chia was just pulling protective burlap sacking back over a patch of taters after digging up a few. The grey nubs did not look like much as they sat steaming on the ground, but washed and sliced into brilliant purple disks, they would glow. Tater’s mom had named her after the naturalized Ozettes. Brought from Peru by long ago voyagers, the potatoes had taken to the northwest like, well, no other plant or animal. Tater was proud of her unusual name, and secretly hoped she was like them, ordinary at first look, but gem-like on the inside. Rooted.

  Tater was still carrying the pipe. “What you going to do with that?” asked Chia.

  “Match it, then recycle. The rest of the pipes held up good. This one is far enough gone Re-use might be able to smash it into dust for the iron.”

  Tater splashed some water on her neck and hung up her hat. Out of the sun now, she rolled up her sleeves and served herself soup she found cooling on the stove. Chia would stay up cooking so that the Day crew would have something to eat when they woke from their midday slumbers around sundown.

  Nights worked second shift. It used to be called graveyard shift, but that made too many people sad.

  What to think when the sun goes down and every light takes on a spectral aspect?

  My eyes, my eyes—ever deceitful, ever necessary for one who relies on visual cues, who only trusts the stimuli she takes in through the range of light

  and motion.

  The angular bounce of light at the solstice,

  of sun streaming directly into our eyes as though to make up for all the days when we see no sun at all. How our limbs loosen and we tilt back our heads

  with a slight smile, drinking it in.

  Who can deny the intoxication of sunlight, the touch of gold as it runs down our arms from our fingertips.

  Our thighs grow slack as our lips part to drink

  in the pearly heat.

  Our pens rest on their tables as our minds glide

  away from the task at hand.

  TATER READ A page in her aunt’s diary, then set it aside. She had been given it years before, but had not tried to read it until being assigned to housing rehab. She found it hard to sleep out here on the Edges. Reading the old diary helped. She loved imagining what it was like Before, when the sun was scarce. Tater liked stroking the soft edges. It was the only book she owned herself, and she found herself fingering the pages like worry
beads. Tater lay back carefully in her hammock so as not to flip over, afraid of and grateful for the distance from the floor. Not that rats wouldn’t jump or climb up onto the hammock if they felt like it. But Tater still felt better this way.

  Now she tried to imagine Aunt Ceci’s life when water stayed in its place and the sun was a welcome embrace against the damp cold. She could barely remember being cold.

  “Not sleeping?” asked Shonda as she came in.

  “Not yet.”

  Shonda unhooked her own hammock from where it hung coiled on the wall and took it outside. She preferred to sleep under the giant Doug fir that sheltered their house, a tree they had defended with guns and clubs early on. Tater could smell the taters cooking. There was an herb with them, something she could not quite place as she drifted off to sleep.

  LATE AFTERNOONS WERE for domestic chores. That included upkeep on the house where they homesteaded. If they could defend it for seven years, the house was theirs.

  Most people stayed on waitlists until a house opened up in the Center. But that could take forever. Homesteading on the Edges offered larger properties, enough to grow food. And also, dangers. But even for the Edges, there were waitlists of people stacked sky high in mass housing. Tater barely remembered Before, and there were some things in between that she could not think about at all.

  Shonda gently shook Tater awake. It felt as though she had just dozed off, a dream of deer picking their way across a clearing fading gently from her mind.

  “Your turn to wash.”

  Tater dragged herself back to the waking world. She might have been having a True Dream, but if that’s what it was, it would come back. She would need to let the others know if it did.

  When she was a child of eight, it became clear that Tater got the Dreaming. When she was fourteen, she was given her aunt’s journal. Ceci was an original Dreamer, born in Mexico, raised in the US in secrecy by her family. Given every advantage to learn the language, the ways of these people so that she could rescue the rest of her family from the label THEM. Everyone in Ceci’s family, including Tater’s mom, worked every waking moment to keep Ceci, the youngest, in school and living long enough to pull her family through the tortuous knots of the legal system. She succeeded, and her nieces and nephews became US as well. But that was all Before.