Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168 Read online

  “Mama,” he said.

  “Watch the road!”

  “This isn’t a car, Mama,” he said. She only ever came flying with him once, reluctantly. He had been so proud, having just got his wings. She had complained the whole way to the airfield and then sat mute in the small plane the whole half hour they were airborne. Giorgio had felt a vague sense of disappointment then that he never quite managed to put into words.

  He flew over the small town again and then, just like that, he went over the line. He looked behind, but of course there was nothing there, and the jump seat was empty.

  He felt fine. The sky was blue and blue and blue and pink. Soon the airfield came into view, and the tents, and the parked airplanes. The jeep of the woman from the company was still there. Giorgio eased the stick, aligned with the landing strip. The landing was smooth. The ground crew sprayed him with delousing water, but he didn’t feel a thing. They off-loaded the cargo and Giorgio went off to change his wet clothes. The fuzzy was in the corner of his tent as Giorgio put on a fresh shirt and trousers.

  “Huggy?” it said hopefully.

  Giorgio looked into the crooked mirror over his washbasin. There was nothing there, just the back of the tent, and the dim light, and a mosquito. He finished buttoning his shirt and stepped out of the tent. He went over to the tuck shop.

  “Could I get a beer?” he said.

  The fuzzy pushed the bottle inexpertly across the wooden counter.

  Giorgio took a sip, but the beer tasted like bubble gum, and he put it down. A shadow fell on him then, and he looked up and saw the woman from the company.

  “Did you get the cargo?” she said.

  Giorgio shrugged.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Sit up straight when I’m talking to you,” the woman from the company said. She smelled of menthol cigarettes.

  “Yes, Mama,” Giorgio said. The fuzzy jumped into his lap. It looked up at Giorgio with big bright eyes.

  “Huggy-wuggy,” it said.

  “Yes,” the woman from the company said, quite seriously. She knelt down and put her arms around Giorgio. He felt like he was four years old again, and everything was better.

  “Snuggle-wuggle,” the woman said.

  And everything was blue and blue and blue and pink, forever.

  About the Author

  Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming (2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). His latest novels are the forthcoming Unholy Land (2018) and first children’s novel Candy (2018). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.

  What Remains of Maya Sankovy

  G. D. Angier

  We are good Mothers, or at least we will be once the embryos emerge from their confines. They dangle from the spaceship’s ceiling in pink bulbs like silkworm cocoons. Now that we landed, Ship will become the bones, sinew, and flesh that will birth five thousand colonist children. We can hardly wait for them to emerge and take their first breath of alien air.

  Only four grown-ups remain. Four humans, that should have been thirty. We, as a singular unit, walk the halls in search for the most important person on this planet: our captain Clara Colline. Ship is about to be hollowed out by the gestation process and our construction work outside. We think that saddens our human captain. It’s why she comes here often to talk to Ship without us hearing it. Savoring every moment before she has to discontinue Ship’s friendly AI. Our creators told us there is no new life without a little bit of pain, a little bit of dying, so we do not share her sadness.

  Clara, where are you? we ask our captain through the local frequency that connects everyone, Mothers, Fathers, and the four grown-ups.

  “What is it?” Clara asks aloud and walks out of a doorway. Her accent is faint, but still noticeable. French, Union. Common among the people that sent us here, but unlike those of our creators. He was British, she German. It means little this far from Earth.

  “Do you have a moment?” we ask Clara. Her moments are in short supply, but we are convinced she needs to know.

  “I’m busy. Transforming Ship into a maternity ward requires all my expertise. To hell with the hatchery! Ship doesn’t want to change shape for us like your parents thought it would.” Clara waves her hands. She helped our creators build our predecessors. If she can’t convince Ship to do something no one can.

  “Apologies, but there’s been trouble with the marine expedition.”

  “It’s Beebee and two Fathers. That’s not a scientific expedition, it’s poking things with sticks,” Clara says.

  She likes reminding everyone that we almost didn’t make it. Many of the Fathers were lost and, except for the four grown-ups, the rest of the human crew members slumbered on eternally. Clara wasn’t even in line to become captain.

  Ship, the mission, was troubled from the start. We can feel it inside our programming. We are not what we were supposed to be. Our creators shouldn’t have turned us into compounds by giving each Mother and Father individual memories of a past human life. We, as the singular unit that stands before Clara, remember being a human woman. It creates division among that which should be whole. Our root-memories make us think strange thoughts and ask stranger questions.

  “We thought it important to inform you.”

  Clara rolls her eyes, bounces on the balls of her feet. Humans are twitchy.

  “Who’s gotten themselves killed now?”

  “Beebee was injured by one of the fish they found, he’s having some kind of allergic reaction. We will escort you to the scene. Our, that is my root-memories are of the marine biologist Maya Sankovy. We might be able to help,” we explain and tap against our chest. Clara ogles our coverall. Under our serial number, our root’s name and prior occupation is stitched in small letters.

  “Earth marine biologist,” our captain reads, “Big help you’ve been so far.”

  She follows us outside anyway.

  Trapsiton is a water world. Looking at the planet from out of orbit it is hard to tell since red colors the ocean in thick swirls that remind us more of Mars than Terra’s blue surface. The planet’s sun is just a bit too bright. But the trees are green, the G is good, and the atmosphere a blessing to the grown-up’s lungs.

  Trapsiton is all beaches. It even smells the same as Earth, salty and a little bit like rotten kelp. The planet’s two moons made it hard for us to find a landmass big enough for the pending colony. The island we landed on will not flood completely with the changing push and pull of the waxing and waning moons.

  Though we are programmed not to make such distinctions, Maya Sankovy’s memories enable us to appreciate the planet’s exceptional beauty. All seas, Terran or not, are magnificent. Pity, no other compound can see it that way, lacking the appropriate root-memories, so it must stay our secret.

  They already dragged Beebee to shore when we arrive with Clara. The grown-up is heaving on the beach, spitting and writhing as his immune system reacts to whatever the fish he stepped on carried into his bloodstream. He’s cursing and perspiring. Another Mother comes to give him an injection and smooths the wet hair out of his face. Our fingertips tingle as we feel the touch echo through us.

  Clara listens to the two Fathers recap of the events while we walk over and take blood samples. Beebee does his best to ignore us. He doesn’t like compounds much. We discuss treatments with the other Mothers and Fathers over the frequency while our eyes are drawn to the waves. The sound they make is a rhythm, nature’s own music, and it’s hard for us to look away. Though we must look away to not raise suspicion. No thing can be loved more than another. All is equal, we remind ourselves.

  When Clara is assured that Beebee will live she excuses herself. We will never understand why the three other humans that remain decided to make a runner their leader. But we, the singular unit, run away too. We leave Beebee to
check on the gestating children. Making rounds among the embryos brings us close to the peace we grasp at when we look at the sea.

  Before the journey of Ship began, our creators built us in their image. Each Mother looks like the next: a tall slender woman. Each Father is a copy of a copy of a handsome dark-haired man. We are several hundred and still just a pair of Siblings.

  Space travel takes a human’s youth away, so Ship did not become a generation vessel. Instead, Ship’s cargo evolved into the biological human variety. Five thousand children yet unborn. Enough to meet minimal viable population. A carefully calculated future.

  But the human parents that would stay behind did not want their babies to be cradled and suckled by machines. Androids could not raise children, they argued. And what about the human spirit? What about cultural inheritance? So, our creators thought long and hard about how to solve this problem. We had to become more human in the eyes of humans.

  Our creators built the Engram-machine to copy human memories into us. Recruitment began. People from all paths of life, but more important, scientists were called in. Libraries can hold knowledge, but human brains hold experiences and empathy. Beneath our artificial craniums nestles brain tissue grown out of stem cells. It enables us to remember. We became less artificial and more organic. With the Engram-machine, the volunteers gifted each of us part of their individual memory. We became us. We became compounds. A blend of android and human to carry the Terran spirit. A fusion so profound it made our creators weep. We would be good parents once we reached our new home.

  This night Clara calls for us personally through the frequency. It’s rare for one of the grown-ups to make individual enquiries. For them, we all look, walk, and talk the same. Maybe, if one of the remaining adults came to know us better in the singular, they could learn to tell us apart from other Mothers. We shake our head minutely before we enter the tent. What would we gain by that distinction? Code advises very much against it.

  “I think he’s dying. Something’s wrong,” Clara says.

  Beebee is lying on a stretcher in the center of the Spartan tent. Unconscious, but with rolling, fluttering eyes. He stepped on the fish. He stepped on the fish and now he is making sounds like he is suffocating. The sole of his right foot was cleaned by a Father and a dermpatch applied, but the cut hasn’t healed. Instead red and violet spots have appeared on his foot, leg, and thigh.

  “We’ll have a look.” We take scissors and cut away the fabric of his trousers to reveal the festering infection. The red blemishes continue upward. They are hot and hard nubs under our probing fingertips. Beebee hisses like a reptile and we retreat. The spots protrude from the skin like pockmarks, like cancerous growths. Beebee is uplifted, there can be no cancer. In fact, he is gene-tweaked enough that there should be no sign of any of this. He survived cryo, he should not look like he is a step away from entering death’s door.

  “The epinephrine was supposed to clear his airways. We don’t understand,” we say.

  “I let another Mother run some lab tests for me. His soft tissue is turning into calcium carbonate. Look at his skin! It’s disgusting. How do you explain that, marine biologist? I sedated him when the pain got too much,” Clara’s tone becomes mocking in her fear.

  “There should be no pain,” we say and fright narrows in on us. Our humans must live, even the grown-ups.

  Trapsiton’s second moon has risen when Beebee takes his last breath. In an act of perverse consummation, the local marine wildlife fused with his body. Parts of him have grown hard and red, other parts, mostly the bigger muscles of his body, have become porous like limestone. Were we to touch we fear he would crumble. Other patches of his skin look galvanic like jellyfish or anemone skin.

  “Seventeen lightyears to get here only to die on a strange alien rock. Looks like this conqueror was conquered at last,” Clara says when we pull a sheet over Beebee’s body.

  It’s an ungainly but sad sight, the stuff children have nightmares about. Clara starts crying in silence and puts her head in her hands. We fight the urge to reach for a hug and stay very still instead. Clara doesn’t like to be touched.

  “I wish we’d stayed home. I wish they had never built that infernal machine. You can’t even cry. It messed you all up.” Clara draws her damp hair out of her blotchy face, “I’ll die here. Even if I manage to grow old, I’ll be surrounded by children who won’t understand where we came from. If I want to talk to someone that remembers home, I have to talk to you. It’s like running in infinite circles. And now another real person is gone, and I am stuck with you.”

  “What do you mean?” we ask and tell our other Siblings to prepare a grave.

  “Did you ever wonder about your prototypes? Your parents wanted to create individuals. But every single one of you remained bland, so they tried with the memories and I thought maybe it would change things. Maybe it would turn you into real people. If not human, then close enough. But I see nothing inside of you. Individual memories cannot grant you a soul. All you’ll ever be is a glorified hive mind. I’ll be the last real person if it goes on like this.”

  “But we must go on. That’s the imperative of this colonial mission,” we say.

  We hear a rustle. We and Clara jerk around at the same time. She lets out a scream as the man sits up straight. The sheet falls away from the body. Beebee’s face is not Beebee’s face anymore. The white of his unfocused eyes has gone red. The air filter in his throat makes a wet squelch as it dislodges and falls to the ground. Viscose blood splatters to the ground. The face remains a mask. FaceRec says there are no emotions there, at least no human emotions we can decipher.

  The legs swing over the cot. Something else thumps to the floor. It’s Beebee’s cell, embedded into his forearm since age fourteen, as is human custom. This body is expunging all unnecessary parts, we realize. It makes more room for the red growth that’s turning his dark skin into a tapestry of malleable stone and slimy sponge.

  Mothers and Fathers rush into the tent, but no one knows what to do. Beebee doesn’t respond to any of us. The corpse’s motions are stilted, slow. A turn of the head, a roll of the shoulders. It’s like watching a compound come online for the first time. It’s learning.

  “Beebee, Beebee, Beebee,” Clara says it like a mantra.

  She doesn’t dare touch the body, afraid like we are. Mothers and Fathers internally debate what to do as it starts to make its first unsure steps. Our captain lets out a wail. We grab her hand and pull it down to her side when she wants to stop the corpse.

  “It could be dangerous. Contagious,” a Father says next to Clara.

  “No, don’t!” she protests. Her pupils are blown wide in shock, “Beebee, Richie, listen to me! We can fix this. We’ll find a cure—” Clara stops when the body steps outside.

  We follow the corpse in a slow procession. Our singular unit and the captain at the helm. It walks downhill where the water lies waiting. In the blue double moonlight, the body’s protrusions become more obvious. We flick through the video of our fellow Siblings as the body walks and deforms to see every angle, witness every change. Ridges at the shoulders appear. The cheekbones pierce the skin. It’s growing an exoskeleton, an armor. It stands dark against the night, inhumanly large.

  The other two grown-ups arrive, and a second wave of panic follows. We, the singular unit, keep close to Clara as she tracks the body in its stride toward the sound of the ocean. We make sure she keeps her distance. We don’t know if the corpse poses immediate danger. But we needn’t worry. The corpse trudges on. It grows crown-like roots. The deformed feet leave tracks in the sand. It turns its head when it reaches the shoreline like it is saying a last farewell.

  The waves swallow its legs, its belly, torso, neck until it is gone. We are sure it does not swim, but sinks like a stone. It will go wherever the tide and currents will take it. Clara lets out a cry when the thing disappears, swallowed by the endless waters of Trapsiton and swallowed by the night.

  “It’s the corals. N
o alien fish,” we tell Clara five hours and two minutes later.

  The two other remaining adults are huddled close to our captain around the campfire. They’re seeking warmth and companionship, while Mothers and Fathers continue to work. Compounds never rest like grown-ups. Even now we move through the darkness like a single being. Printing tools, compiling raw material, building the scaffolding that will become the first huts for the children yet unborn. Are we, the singular unit, the only one concerned that the grown-ups are not sufficiently protected? They need to understand the danger we unearthed. Trapsiton is not Terra.

  “We’ve run the tests. We’ve studied what the two Fathers saw on the expedition. Trapsiton is older than Earth by two billion years. Terra’s coral reefs developed in the Cambrian period and remained relatively unchanged until their untimely demise in the twenty-first century. The ocean here had more time to adapt and evolve.”

  “Spare me the woes of the Anthropocene!” our captain says, “I lived through the worst of it. Saw the rainforests go too. That’s all part of the reason we left that doomed dying rock behind.”

  Madeline and Kathrin nod. Their faces are impassive as if they still can’t believe they lost Beebee.

  “Our apologies. We’ll try to be more concise.” Clara rolls her eyes as we continue, “On Terra, corals had two methods to reproduce. Asexually or by spawning. Most coral species spawned. They released gametes into the water, clouding the ocean with their bloom. The fertilized eggs would grow into small larvae and a new coral was born.”

  “Shit, that’s why the sea has red streaks. It’s them,” Kathrin says. An animal makes an unfamiliar sound outside the camp and Kathrin takes Clara’s hand.

  “The species we encountered found a third way of sexual reproduction, we’re afraid.” We point at ourselves, “Corals are like us: compounds, symbionts. A coral is a network of polyps, algae, and hard calcium carbonate. None of its parts can exist alone, but put together they thrive. A coral does not produce its algae on its own, but acquires it. Do you see? They rely on the algae to generate oxygen in exchange for nutrients. It’s a perfect feeding circle.”