21st Century Science Fiction (25 page)

“Know what, Pop?”

“That we had enough.”

“Enough what?”

“Oh, everything. We had enough everything. Is that a plane?” he looks at me with watery blue eyes.

“Here, let me help you put your helmet on.”

He slaps at it, bruising his fragile hands.

“Quit it, Dad. Stop!”

He fumbles with arthritic fingers to unbuckle the strap but finds he cannot. He weeps into his spotted hands. It drones past.

Now that I look back on how we were that summer, before the tragedy, I get a glimmer of what my father’s been trying to say all along. It isn’t really about the cakes, and the mail order catalogs, or the air travel they used to take. Even though he uses stuff to describe it that’s not what he means. Once there was a different emotion. People used to have a way of feeling and being in the world that is gone, destroyed so thoroughly we inherited only its absence.

“Sometimes,” I tell my husband, “I wonder if my happiness is really happiness.”

“Of course it’s really happiness,” he says, “what else would it be?”

• • • •

We were under attack is how it felt. The Manmensvitzenders with their tears and fear of bread, their strange clothes and stinky goats were children like us and we could not get the town meeting out of our heads, what the adults had considered doing. We climbed trees, chased balls, came home when called, brushed our teeth when told, finished our milk, but we had lost that feeling we’d had before. It is true we didn’t understand what had been taken from us, but we knew what we had been given and who had done the giving.

We didn’t call a meeting the way they did. Ours just happened on a day so hot we sat in Trina Needles’s playhouse fanning ourselves with our hands and complaining about the weather like the grownups. We mentioned house arrest but that seemed impossible to enforce. We discussed things like water balloons, T.P.ing. Someone mentioned dog shit in brown paper bags set on fire. I think that’s when the discussion turned the way it did.

You may ask, who locked the door? Who made the stick piles? Who lit the matches? We all did. And if I am to find solace, twenty-five years after I destroyed all ability to feel that my happiness, or anyone’s, really exists, I find it in this. It was all of us.

• • • •

Maybe there will be no more town meetings. Maybe this plan is like the ones we’ve made before. But a town meeting is called. The grownups assemble to discuss how we will not be ruled by evil and also, the possibility of widening Main Street. Nobody notices when we children sneak out. We had to leave behind the babies, sucking thumbs or blanket corners and not really part of our plan for redemption. We were children. It wasn’t well thought out.

When the police came we were not “careening in some wild imitation of barbaric dance” or having seizures as has been reported. I can still see Bobby, his hair damp against his forehead, the bright red of his cheeks as he danced beneath the white flakes that fell from a sky we never trusted; Trina spinning in circles, her arms stretched wide, and the Manmensvitzender girls with their goats and cart piled high with rocking chairs, riding away from us, the jingle bells ringing, just like in the old song. Once again the world was safe and beautiful. Except by the town hall where the large white flakes rose like ghosts and the flames ate the sky like a hungry monster who could never get enough.

T
ONY
B
ALLANTYNE
Born and raised in the northeast of England, Tony Ballantyne made his first sale in 1999, and is best known for his Recursion trilogy of hard SF novels published between 2004 and 2007. Very little of his fiction has been published outside of the United Kingdom thus far, and readers unfamiliar with his work will find many surprises both in science and in fiction.

“The Waters of Meribah,” published in 2003, is a work of what some have called “radical hard SF.” It builds a universe in which not only is it true that “everything we know is wrong,” but
everything SF readers passionately believe
is wrong. For instance, the universe, far from being a vast cosmos remote from human concern, is actually only three hundred miles across, and extraordinarily responsive to the presence and feelings of living things. And curiosity, far from being the driver of our greatest achievements, is in fact our fatal flaw. All of this is gradually revealed from the point of view of a convict who is being used as the subject in a series of increasingly dire experiments. It is one of the most creepily memorable stories in modern SF.

A
pair of feet stood on the table, just waiting to be put on. Grayish-green feet, webbed like ducks; they looked a little like a pair of diver’s flippers, only alive. Very, very alive.

“We thought we’d start with the feet as you can wear them underneath your clothes while you get used to them. It’s probably best that no one suspects what you are—to begin with, anyway.”

“Good idea,” said Buddy Joe, looking over the head of the rotund Doctor Flynn at the feet. Alien feet. A faint mist hung around them, alien sweat exuding from alien pores.

Doctor Flynn held out an arm to stop Buddy Joe from reaching for the feet and putting them on right away.

“Slow down, Buddy Joe. I have to ask, for the record. Are you sure that you want to put the feet on? You know there will be no taking them off once you have done so.”

“Yes, I want to put them on,” said Buddy Joe, eyeing the feet.

“You know that once they are attached they will be part of you? If your body rejects them, it will be rejecting its own feet? Or worse, they may stay attached but the interface may malfunction, leaving you in constant pain?”

“I know that.”

“And yet you still want to go ahead?”

“Of course. I’ve been pumped full of Compliance as a part of my sentence. I have no choice but to do what you tell me.”

“Oh, I know that. I just need to hear you say it for the record.”

Doctor Flynn moved out of the way. Buddy Joe was free to pick up the feet and carry them across the room to a chair. There he sat down, kicked off his shoes and socks and pulled them on.

It was like pushing his naked human feet into a pair of rubber gloves. He struggled, twisted and wriggled them into position. The alien feet did not want him; they were fighting back, trying to spit him out. Somewhere deep inside his brain he could feel himself screaming. His hands were burning, soaked in the acidic sweat that oozed from the pores of the alien feet. His own feet were being amputated, dissolved by the first stage of the alien body that Doctor Flynn and his team were making him put on. Buddy Joe was feeling excruciating pain, but the little crystal of Compliance that was slowly dissolving into his bloodstream kept him smiling all the while.

And then, all of a sudden, the feet slipped into place and they became part of him.

“That’s it!” called one of Doctor Flynn’s team. She looked up from her console and nodded at a nurse. “You can remove the sensors now.”

She peeled the sticky strips away from his skin and dropped them in the disposal chute.

“A perfect take. We’ve done it, team.”

Doctor Flynn was shaking hands with the other people in the room. People were looking at consoles, at the feet, at each other, in every direction but at Buddy Joe. Buddy Joe just stood there, smiling down at his strange new feet, wondering at the strange new sensations he was feeling. The floor felt different through them. Too dry and brittle.

Doctor Flynn came over, a grin spreading over his round, shiny face. “Okay, we’d like you to walk across the room. Can you do that?”

He could do that. Dip your feet into a pool of water and see how refraction bends them out of shape. That’s how the feet felt to Buddy Joe. At an angle to the rest of his body; but part of him. Still part of him.

He took a step forward with his left leg, and the left foot narrowed as he raised it. As it descended it flared out to its full webbed glory, flattened itself out and felt for the texture of the plasticized floor. It recoiled. The floor was too dry, too brittle. A good gush of acid would melt it to nothing. He moved his right foot, and then he flapped and squelched his way across the floor.

“No problems walking?” said Doctor Flynn.

“No,” he replied, but the doctor hadn’t been talking to him.

There was a final checking of consoles. One by one the assembled doctors and nurses and technicians gave a thumbs up.

“Okay,” said Doctor Flynn. “Well, thank you Buddy Joe. You can put your shoes on now. They should still fit if you roll the joints of the feet over each other, and in that way you can conceal them. We’ll see you again the same time next week.”

“Hey, just a minute,” said Buddy Joe. “You can’t send me out there with the Compliance still active.”

Doctor Flynn gave a shrug. “We can’t keep you in here. Laboratory space costs money. We’re out of here ourselves in five minutes time to make way for yet another group of Historical Astronomers. Goodbye.”

And that was it. He had no choice but to slip on his shoes and to walk out of the laboratory onto the fifth-level deck.

• • • •

Buddy Joe made his way to a lift that would take him down to the Second Deck. The Fifth Deck was quite empty at this time of night. With any luck, he would make it home without being recognized as someone under the spell of Compliance.

His feet were rolled up in his plastic shoes and socks, it took all his self-control to hold in the exhalation of acid that would melt them away and allow his feet to flap free. Don’t let go, Buddy Joe. The metal grid of the deck will feel horrible against your poor feet.

The laboratory lay a long way out from the Pillar Towers. He could see through the mesh of the floor, all the way down to the waves crashing on the garbage-strewn shoreline far below. Looking up, he could see the flattened-out stars that pressed close, smearing themselves just above the tops of the highest buildings. He would have liked to stop for a while, it was a rare treat to look at the remnants of the universe, but he didn’t dare. Not with Compliance still inside him.

The few Fifth Deckers who were out walking ignored him as usual. Scientists or lawyers, who could tell the difference? All wrapped up against the winter cold, trousers tucked into their socks against the cold gusts of wind that blew up through the metal decking. Buddy Joe kept to the shadows, dodging between the cats’ cradles of struts that braced the buildings to the decks. Approaching the Pillar Towers he saw the yellow light that bathed the polished wooden doors of the main lift and he relaxed, but too soon. The woman who had been following him called out from the shadows behind.

“Stop there.”

He did so.

“You’re on Compliance, right?”

“Yes.”

Buddy Joe felt a pathetic cry building inside. First they had taken his feet, now they would take his wallet, or worse.

“What did you do?”

“Rape,” he said. “But . . .”

“I don’t want to hear the details.”

Buddy Joe dutifully closed his mouth, panic rising inside. His shoes were melting.

“Some bastard raped my partner only two months ago. Caught him alone in a lift coming up from the Second Deck. Are you a Second Decker?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“I’m not interested. How about if I told you to throw yourself off the edge?”

“Please don’t do that.”

“Funny, that. John said ‘Please’ too. Bastard didn’t listen to him.”

Buddy Joe clenched his fists together. His new feet were flapping open and closed by themselves, trying to creep away from the woman. There was a gentle intake of breath. This was it. This was the end. She would tell him to go and jump off the deck and he would have no choice but to obey. She was going to say it. She was going to . . .

And then nothing. A lengthening pause.

He turned around: the woman had gone. In her place was the stuff of nightmares. Buddy Joe began to make a noise. A thin scream of pure terror.

He was looking at another alien. He was looking at himself. It had his feet. It was his height, its hands stretched out . . . No. Don’t look at the hands, Buddy Joe. But worse than that.

It had no head.

No head, but it was watching him. It was trying to say something to him, but he wasn’t ready to understand.

—
Forget it, then
, said the alien.—
For now
.

It rose up into the air and vanished.

Two minutes later, Buddy Joe walked, shaking, into the lift.

He had Compliantly forgotten all about the alien.

• • • •

Buddy Joe’s flat was at the top of a block built on the Second Deck, home of those just bright enough not to believe in anything, but not bright enough to believe in something. His window looked out into the gloom cast by the underside of the Third Deck. He had a bed, a food spigot and a view-screen. Down the corridor were a bathroom and a row of toilet cubicles. Buddy Joe’s father lived two flats down, his sister in the next flat again. Buddy Joe’s grandfather had lived in the flat just next to the lift shaft. That flat had echoed and boomed every time the lift had moved. It echoed and boomed all day long, and most of the night. Buddy Joe’s Granddad was dead now, though, and a new family had moved in. Granddad would have called them an Indian family, but he was old-fashioned in that respect. He had been old enough to remember when flowers had first bloomed on the moon.

“What do you know, Buddy Joe?” asked the woman on the viewscreen.

“I don’t know nothing,” said Buddy Joe.

“Next dose of Compliance at 40 P tomorrow. Next part of the alien suit at 60 P.”

Buddy Joe rolled over on his bed. He was seriously thinking of throwing himself off the edge of the deck.

The viewscreen flickered and his sister appeared. She was sitting on a bed in a gray metal room just the same as his, just three doors away.

“Forty P tomorrow, eh, Buddy Joe?”

“That’s right.”

“And the next part of the alien suit at 60 P.”