Shine (15 page)

The trolley drops them at the northeast corner of the park. Manon leads her sister through the half-wild tangle of chaparral and jungle gyms.

"I can't believe you made this whole park!" Elise says.

"There's still a lot of poison oak," Manon says absently.

Elise breathes in dry spicy air. "It smells so good. Ooh, what is that, it's like cough drops only delicious?"

Manon laughs. "Eucalyptus trees."

Elise's belly slows her down and her nap is still mellow in her, or maybe that's pregnancy too. She is happy to stroll, to stop and sniff the air, to peer after the jay she hears chattering in the bush. Manon keeps starting ahead, she can hear people talking and laughing on the rose terrace, but then she has to wait, to pause, to stroll, until she is ready to burst like a seed pod with anticipation. But finally the path takes one final curve and it is Elise who looks ahead and says, "Oh look, I wonder what's happening."

Manon takes her sister's hand to urge her on.

Amongst the determined roses a crowd of people mills. There are people from the park crews, people from the art school, people from the ice cream store, people from the city who have come to see the new/old park, people who were passing by. At the heart of the crowd, on the center space of the rose garden where a fountain once had played, surrounded by a lively ring of children, stands Manon's sculpture. Free from its wood and plastic form, it gleams in the late morning sun, an arc of ice, a winter stream's limb, an unbound book written on sheets of time. The sunlight fingers through the pages, illuminating the suspended branches of red and green madrone, the butterfly bouquets of poppies, the stirred-up stream-pebble floor: layers and depths all captured by the water poured and frozen one day after another and already melting.

"Did you make this?" Elise says, her eyes unaccountably bright with tears.

"Yes," says Manon, suddenly shy.

"Oh," says Elise. "Oh." And carrying her belly she pushes gently among the children to drink.

The enzymes dissolve the bark of my memories. I marvel at the clean, pale wood of my mind. I am born again.

--Deborah Walker--

Sustainable Development

Paula R. Stiles

E
arly in 2009, there was an open day of the Triodos Bank where I deposit my savings (yes, at the height--or depth, if you like--of the credit crisis; Triodos invests in ethical and sustainable projects, and the credit crisis affected them only minimally, if at all). I learned a lot about ethical investments, one of these being about micro-credits in developing countries.

'
Who receive more than 90% of all the micro-credits offered in developing countries?' was a question during a presentation. The answer--unsurprisingly and somewhat saddeningly--was women. Unsurprising because in most developing countries women invest it in a local project, and work hard to pay the money back. Somewhat saddening because most men in those countries tend to accept the money and then splurge it on booze, wild parties and whatnot.

While I have been in Africa, I never was there long enough to witness that particular dynamic (or I wasn't aware of it enough at the time). Paula obviously has (see her bio in the back), as "Sustainable Development" all-too-aptly demonstrates...

I
nside the empty bar, the concrete walls and cement floor echo with the tinkling guitars and drumbeats of a popular
Makossa
song. I'm not dancing, though. Too hot in the afternoon for anything but getting drunk. The only other sound is women beating manioc into meal in a compound on the other side of the village
marché
.
Villageoises
in West Africa never stop working for the twelve hours between dawn and dusk.

Something skitters across the
marché
, its etiolated silver legs glittering against the red packed earth--the biggest, ugliest spider I've ever seen, two feet across and a foot high. It bears a tray with several
tas
of boiled peanuts.

Normally, selling peanuts in Boubara is a job mothers send their children to do in the
marché
. As the spider heads up the steps into the bar, I try the usual way of calling a child-crooking my fingers at the robot. "Tsst!
Petit! Viens ici!
"

The robot approaches me. Someone has left a carefully scrawled sign on the tray, "
10 CFA par tas--
10 Francs per pile." Village prices. I pull out a 50 CFA coin for all five
tas
and toss it onto the tray.

The robot tilts the tray forward until the
tas
begin to slip. It probably has a weight measurement control inside that calculates the coin.

"
Prenez tous, grand merci--
Take everything, thank you," it says in a flat, metallic voice. I scoop up the
tas
and dump them on the dusty cement of the bar. After I empty the tray, the robot hurries off through the empty
marché
.

Talk about tech dumping. Who got the bright idea to dump intelligent robots in a small African village? My predecessor, that's who. He got them to help the men grow cash crops. Scooping up my peanuts, I stand and follow it.

Even after six months, I am shocked by the poverty and how hard the women work. I often sit and chat in the compounds while the women pound manioc under a hard blue sky.

"What about the robots?" I asked once in French. "They could pound this manioc for you."

One of the women, Aisatu, stopped pounding to bat away a fly. "Those are for the men."

Her neighbor Fadi laughed. "The men never use them anymore. They couldn't get
le machine droit
to make it do men's work." By 'machine,' she meant 'thingamabob.' Nobody in this conversation spoke French as a native tongue. "Without
le machine
the robots are useless to them."

"
Machine--
you mean '
l'attaché'--
the attachment?"

Fadi nodded.

"Why can't they give the robots to you if they can't use them?"

Both women laughed. I understood--the men would never give up their toys--but it made me angry. The women did most of the real work in the village. Why should they have to suffer because the men didn't want to share?

"Maybe if you got the right attachment..." I said.

Fadi shrugged. "Yes, maybe. Come learn how to pound manioc."

They got me off my stool and positioned me over the huge, double-sided wooden mortar. It looked like a drum without the skin. Maybe that was how African drums had gotten started. They handed me the thick, wooden pole. I raised it and brought it down--THUMP--into the already sodden white mass of manioc. They would have to pound this to pulp before scraping it out and drying it in the sun. Then, they would have to pound it into powder and store it. And after that, they would have to pound palm nuts for oil. After that...

Puffing and hot in the face, I handed the pole back to Aisatu ten minutes later. "Don't worry," she said. "You will get it eventually. It is woman's work, so all women can do it. Not the men." She and Fadi began to pound again, singing along in Fulfulde, the local
patois
.

"I don't know how you do it," I said.

"We are women," Fadi said. "Who else would do it?" I couldn't see how they kept their sense of humor. It seemed unfair when there were robots available to help them do it.

The rainy season came and we stopped talking about robots. Sluggish streams flooded; roads turned to mud. Everything else turned green.

The women didn't have to carry water up anymore. They could stick the great
paniers
under the roof, instead, to catch the water now. Maybe that was why they no longer trudged, but stepped high down the dirt lanes and across the
marché
, muscular arms swinging, bags of cloth-wrapped goods piled high on their heads. They'd always smiled and laughed, but now the lines in their faces seemed less tight, less dry. And all the time, the thumping of poles in mortars continued behind compound walls.

I started to wonder again about robots and their uses.

Now, the robot leads me straight across the
marché
. I follow it into the
quartier
, down the narrow, rutted lanes. It leads me straight to a familiar compound. The thumping of poles and a
makossa
song carry over the woven-palm walls. As the robot scutters inside, I pause in the entryway, unsure, for once, of my welcome.

"
Viens ici, mon amie!"
It's Aisatu.

Inside, five women sit around the compound, none of them working. Three argue over a board game while Aisatu and Fadi sashay to the music.

Fadi beckons. "Come in!"

I spot the source of the thumping--two robots hold thick poles in their spider limbs over a mortar. White paste stains the lower ends of the poles.

I guess the women found the right attachments, after all.

Footfalls, sunlight, waves, wind, and heat--we used it all. But it wasn't until we used life itself that balance returned to the planet.

--Ben White--

The Church of Accelerated Redemption

Gareth L. Powell & Aliette de Bodard

C
an an editor be proud of his 'discoveries' (even if, almost always, someone else 'discovered' them first)? I hope he can. I am.

Back in 2005, Gareth Lyn Powell sent me a story called "The Last Reef" and after some fairly intense rewrites it was published in
Interzone
#202. And while his "Ack-Ack Macaque" won the Interzone reader's poll in 2007, "The Last Reef" is still my favourite IZ story of his, and I was more than honoured to write the introduction to his collection
The Last Reef and Other Stories
for Elastic Press.

Back in 2006, Aliette de Bodard sent me a story called "Deer Flight," published in
Interzone
#211. However, while "Butterfly, Falling at Dawn" was reprinted in the Dozois
Year's Best SF
, I'd say that "The Lost Xuyan Bride" is my favourite IZ story by
her
hand, so far.

I was surprised to hear that they were collaborating on a story. I was happy when they sent it my way. True to form, though, it went through a re-write (in case you didn't know: editors are evil. Pure evil).

Both are, I think, examples of the modern SF/fantasy writer: they both have demanding day jobs, both have a partner who understands and tolerates their crazy 'hobby,' and both spend most of their spare time writing. SF & fantasy writing, even if you're writing novels (exceptions acknowledged, obviously, but these are a small minority) doesn't pay as much as a well-established day job. One only quits the day job when one is fairly sure that one's established carreer in SF/fantasy will be enough to pay the bills (or one has married a wealthy spouse...).

"
The Church of Accelerated Redemption" tells about a woman caught up in a day job that, while not dreary, does seem quite a dead end. Until she meets this stranger who shows her that some things are not quite what they seem...

I
t had been an atrocious day and now all Lisa wanted to do was get home and forget about it. But as she tried to leave the headquarters of the Church of Accelerated Redemption, she found the glass doors blocked from the outside by a row of CRS policemen, arms linked against the placard-wielding mob of protesters on the building's wet front steps. With a sinking heart, she put her toolkit down and used her mobile phone to call her boss.

"What are you still doing at the Church?" Pierre said, exasperated. "You were supposed to have finished up there two hours ago. I had another job for you."

Lisa massaged the bridge of her nose with the finger and thumb of her free hand. Her sinuses were dry from the conditioned air of the server room. "I had some trouble installing the new boards. They wouldn't give me full access to their network, so I had to format all the new drives from scratch."

Pierre huffed. "Well, the extra time's coming out of your wages," he said, and hung up.

Lisa sighed and pocketed the phone. Things had never been easy for her. Not only was she a woman in a male-dominated field, but computer engineering itself had been steadily going downhill for a while now, with the slow but irresistible rise of applied artificial intelligence taking many of the traditional programmer jobs and leaving her with the manual work. And even the manual work seemed to be slipping out of her hands these days. She'd had a run of bad luck with overrunning projects and failed implementations and her status at the temp agency was at an all-time low. She had nothing left to bargain with, no option but to accept the lousy assignments the other engineers turned down, and no other choice but to do so if she wanted to keep earning enough to put food on the table.

It's a simple thing
, Pierre had said when booking her onto this job.
Just wire in a couple of extra processors, the way they want, a few connections here and there, implement a secure protocol for their private network, and you'll be done in a few hours
.

That was, until the secure server's motherboard started smoking, every alarm in the building went haywire, and a posse of beefy Redemptionists marched into the server room demanding to know what the
hell
she was doing.

And now, to top it all off, there was this demonstration blocking her way, preventing her from leaving. She massaged the bridge of her nose. Her dry sinuses were threatening to turn into a migraine. Outside, despite the rain, the protesters were chanting. Some wore scarves across their mouths; others wore dark glasses or cartoon masks. Lisa glared at them. Although born and raised in a quiet town in Wyoming, she'd lived and worked in Paris long enough to become used to the glee with which the French threw themselves into their frequent demonstrations. There were always groups protesting about something or other, but this was the first time one of the mobs had actually inconvenienced her, blocking her way and standing not ten paces from her, shouting through the glass as if protesting against her personally.

As she scanned their ranks, her eyes were drawn to the end of the front row, just to the right of the CRS barrier, where a man in blue robes with a Bedouin scarf wrapped around his face brandished a placard that read: 'We Stand for the Rights of All Thinking Beings.'