Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (57 page)

Galactics. Couldn’t he recognise an immerser junkie when he saw one? But then Galactics, as Tam said, seldom had the problem—they didn’t put on the immersers for more than a few days on low settings, if they ever went that far. Most were flat-out convinced Galactic would get them anywhere.

Second Uncle and Galen were haggling, arguing prices and features; Second Uncle sounding more and more like a Galactic tourist as the conversation went on, more and more aggressive for lower and lower gains. Quy didn’t care anymore: she watched Agnes. Watched the impenetrable avatar—a red-headed woman in the latest style from Prime, with freckles on her skin and a hint of a star-tan on her face. But that wasn’t what she was, inside; what the immerser had dug deep into.

Wasn’t who she was at all. Tam was right; all immersers should be taken apart, and did it matter if they exploded? They’d done enough harm as it was.

Quy wanted to get up, to tear away her own immerser, but she couldn’t, not in the middle of the negotiation. Instead, she rose, and walked closer to Agnes; the two men barely glanced at her, too busy agreeing on a price. “You’re not alone,” she said, in Rong, low enough that it didn’t carry.

Again, that odd, disjointed flash. “You have to take it off.” Quy said, but got no further response. As an impulse, she grabbed the other woman’s arm; felt her hands go right through the immerser’s avatar, connect with warm, solid flesh.

You hear them negotiating, in the background—it’s tough going, because the Rong man sticks to his guns stubbornly, refusing to give ground to Galen’s onslaught. It’s all very distant, a subject of intellectual study; the immerser reminds you from time to time, interpreting this and this body cue, nudging you this way and that—you must sit straight and silent, and support your husband—and so you smile through a mouth that feels gummed together.

You feel, all the while, the Rong girl’s gaze on you, burning like ice water, like the gaze of a dragon. She won’t move away from you; and her hand rests on you, gripping your arm with a strength you didn’t think she had in her body. Her avatar is but a thin layer, and you can see her beneath it: a round, moon-shaped face with skin the colour of cinammon—no, not spices, not chocolate, but simply a colour you’ve seen all your life.

“You have to take it off,” she says. You don’t move; but you wonder what she’s talking about.

Take it off. Take it off. Take what off?

The immerser.

Abruptly, you remember—a dinner with Galen’s friends, when they laughed at jokes that had gone by too fast for you to understand. You came home battling tears; and found yourself reaching for the immerser on your bedside table, feeling its cool weight in your hands. You thought it would please Galen if you spoke his language; that he would be less ashamed of how uncultured you sounded to his friends. And then you found out that everything was fine, as long as you kept the settings on maximum and didn’t remove it. And then . . . and then you walked with it and slept with it, and showed the world nothing but the avatar it had designed—saw nothing it hadn’t tagged and labelled for you. Then . . .

Then it all slid down, didn’t it? You couldn’t program the network anymore, couldn’t look at the guts of machines; you lost your job with the tech company, and came to Galen’s compartment, wandering in the room like a hollow shell, a ghost of yourself—as if you’d already died, far away from home and all that it means to you. Then—then the immerser wouldn’t come off, anymore.

“What do you think you’re doing, young woman?”

Second Uncle had risen, turning towards Quy—his avatar flushed with anger, the pale skin mottled with an unsightly red. “We adults are in the middle of negotiating something very important, if you don’t mind.” It might have made Quy quail in other circumstances, but his voice and his body language were wholly Galactic; and he sounded like a stranger to her—an angry foreigner whose food order she’d misunderstood—whom she’d mock later, sitting in Tam’s room with a cup of tea in her lap, and the familiar patter of her sister’s musings.

“I apologise,” Quy said, meaning none of it.

“That’s all right,” Galen said. “I didn’t mean to—” he paused, looked at his wife. “I shouldn’t have brought her here.”

“You should take her to see a physician,” Quy said, surprised at her own boldness.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” His voice was bitter. “I’ve even taken her to the best hospitals on Prime. They look at her, and say they can’t take it off. That the shock of it would kill her. And even if it didn’t . . .” He spread his hands, letting air fall between them like specks of dust. “Who knows if she’d come back?”

Quy felt herself blush. “I’m sorry.” And she meant it this time.

Galen waved her away, negligently, airily, but she could see the pain he was struggling to hide. Galactics didn’t think tears were manly, she remembered. “So we’re agreed?” Galen asked Second Uncle. “For a million credits?”

Quy thought of the banquet; of the food on the tables, of Galen thinking it would remind Agnes of home. Of how, in the end, it was doomed to fail, because everything would be filtered through the immerser, leaving Agnes with nothing but an exotic feast of unfamiliar flavours. “I’m sorry,” she said, again, but no one was listening; and she turned away from Agnes with rage in her heart—with the growing feeling that it had all been for nothing in the end.

“I’m sorry,” the girl says—she stands, removing her hand from your arm, and you feel like a tearing inside, as if something within you was struggling to claw free from your body. Don’t go, you want to say. Please don’t go. Please don’t leave me here.

But they’re all shaking hands; smiling, pleased at a deal they’ve struck—like sharks, you think, like tigers. Even the Rong girl has turned away from you; giving you up as hopeless. She and her uncle are walking away, taking separate paths back to the inner areas of the restaurant, back to their home.

Please don’t go.

It’s as if something else were taking control of your body; a strength that you didn’t know you possessed. As Galen walks back into the restaurant’s main room, back into the hubbub and the tantalising smells of food—of lemongrass chicken and steamed rice, just as your mother used to make—you turn away from your husband, and follow the girl. Slowly, and from a distance; and then running, so that no one will stop you. She’s walking fast—you see her tear her immerser away from her face, and slam it down onto a side table with disgust. You see her enter a room; and you follow her inside.

They’re watching you, both girls, the one you followed in; and another, younger one, rising from the table she was sitting at—both terribly alien and terribly familiar at once. Their mouths are open, but no sound comes out.

In that one moment—staring at each other, suspended in time—you see the guts of Galactic machines spread on the table. You see the mass of tools; the dismantled machines; and the immerser, half spread-out before them, its two halves open like a cracked egg. And you understand that they’ve been trying to open them and reverse-engineer them; and you know that they’ll never, ever succeed. Not because of the safeguards, of the Galactic encryptions to preserve their fabled intellectual property; but rather, because of something far more fundamental.

This is a Galactic toy, conceived by a Galactic mind—every layer of it, every logical connection within it exudes a mindset that might as well be alien to these girls. It takes a Galactic to believe that you can take a whole culture and reduce it to algorithms; that language and customs can be boiled to just a simple set of rules. For these girls, things are so much more complex than this; and they will never understand how an immerser works, because they can’t think like a Galactic, they’ll never ever think like that. You can’t think like a Galactic unless you’ve been born in the culture.

Or drugged yourself, senseless, into it, year after year.

You raise a hand—it feels like moving through honey. You speak—struggling to shape words through layer after layer of immerser thoughts.

“I know about this,” you say, and your voice comes out hoarse, and the words fall into place one by one like a laser stroke, and they feel right, in a way that nothing else has for five years. “Let me help you, younger sisters.”

To Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, for the conversations that inspired this.

About the Author

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a Computer Engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fictionshe is the author of the Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, and her writing has been nominated for a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award and the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

If The Mountain Comes

An Owomoyela

François and Papa were outside, discussing what to do if the water rose. I was in, scrubbing blood from the walls with a palmful of sand.

That was the summer Enah came to our village. He’d led a donkey, and the donkey pulled a cart with tools, a flowering lilac, and a barrel of fresh water. The barrel made Enah richer than the doctor, richer than the preacher. Richer than anyone but us, and he meant to change that.

I heard footsteps crunching the cracked earth outside, but I assumed it was a pumpyard guard until Papa went silent and his dogs went barking mad and I looked to see why. There they were, in the dry riverbed: Papa and François and the Rottweilers all glaring at Enah, who approached as though he feared nothing. He had skin as dark as François; he walked barefoot, and smiled. People weren’t in the habit of smiling at my father.

Enah and Papa exchanged a few words, then turned and came into the house with the dogs keeping pace. “Make us tea,” Papa said, and I was banished to the kitchen. I boiled the water and measured the leaves, and brought out the teapot and the cups, several of them chipped. I poured for my father first, then Enah. Enah didn’t say anything. Not even to acknowledge such luxury.

“In the next months, I’m going to sink my pumps another ten meters into the ground,” Papa was saying. “I can bring more water up and provide it even more cheaply to the people of this village.”

“The people of this village do not want to pay for something the world provides freely,” Enah said. Papa snorted, boar-like.

“Not so freely. My grandfather would have called this a drought; I call it the state of things. It rains perhaps thirty days a year. Your program might work where you’re from, but here, it’s foolishness.”

Enah shrugged. “There was a river here once,” he said, and sipped the steaming tea.

“That mountain to the east was a volcano
once
,” Papa said. “The world changes.”

“And we are often the ones who change it.” Enah shrugged again. “That’s what I’ve promised them, Mr. Wolfe: there was a river here once and there will be again.”

They sat watching each other for a moment, these two men, Enah small and strange with laughter lines around his mouth and forehead, Papa solid and strong with anger carved into his brow.

“There is a house here now,” Papa said. “A family. A dozen workers. Water pumps. You’d have us all vanish?”

“No, no,” Enah said. “I’d have you go up the bank, join the rest of your town. It must be lonely down here.”

It was lonely down there.

Ever since Mama died, Papa and I went around with a higher awareness of mortality. His mortality, mostly. Papa wasn’t a young man, and death was something we expected with half a head. Death was like rain — uncommon, but it would come.

So ever since Mama died, I had a bag packed, and I was ready to run away. I knew I couldn’t survive on the riverbed without Papa, though I didn’t know where I could go. Up to the village, if they’d take me, but what would I do? Set bones, or forage in the brush, or whore myself?

Or I could set off. See what lay beyond the horizon, and beyond the horizon beyond that. Water would be the problem — so heavy, so necessary, and something that unlike the people of the village I had never learned to go without.

The riverbed had been parched for as long as I could remember, its dirt cracked and peeling like thick and brittle plates. You could throw them toward the bank, and watch them burst into plumes of dust. Our family drilled deep and sucked water from the earth, and it was enough to keep us wealthy, by our own, dusty standards of wealth.

Papa sent Enah away. Then he went out to the pumpyard, and I ran out after our visitor. “Wait!”

Enah turned and looked at me. “We weren’t introduced,” he said.

“I’m Lena,” I said. “Lena Wolfe. You say you can bring the river back?”

He looked up and down the riverbed. The town was clustered on the bank, and my grandfather’s home and his father’s home connected the town and our farm like the dots of an ellipsis. My family had always followed the water.

“Let me ask you something,” Enah said. “Why is it you think these people don’t seek their fortunes elsewhere?”

I shrugged. “This is home,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s their home, and it’s still possible to live here. If it is possible to live, many will stay where they’ve buried their parents, and where they’ve dug the wells with their hands, and laid the cobblestones. And besides, the sun is hot everywhere. Water is precious everywhere.” He tapped the ground with one foot. “What is the name of this river?”