Under the Moons of Venus

Under the Moons of Venus

Damien Broderick

Tall cumulonimbus clouds moved in like a battlefleet of thy sky, but the air remained hot a sticky. Lightning cracked in the distance, marching closer during the afternoon. When rain fell, it came suddenly, drenching the parched soil, sluicing the roadway, with a wind that blew discarded plastic bottles and bags about before dumping them at the edge of the read or piled against the fences and barred, spear-topped front gates. Blackett watched from the porch, the spray of rain blowing against his face in gusts. In the distance a stray dog howled and scurried.

On Venus, he recalled, under its doubled moons, the storms had been abrupt and hard, and the ocean tides surged in great rushes of blue green water, spume like the head on a giant’s overflowing draught of beer. Ignoring the shrill warning of displaced astronomers, the first settlers along the shoreline, he had been told, perished as they viewed the glory of Ganymedean-Lunar eclipse of the sun, twice as hot a third again as wide. The proxivenerean spring tide, tugged by both moons and the sun as well, heaped up the sea and hurled it at the land.

Here on Earth, at least the Moon’s current absence somewhat calmed the weather. And without the endless barrage of particulate soot, inadequately scrubbed, exhaled into the air by a million factory chimneys and a billion fuel fires in the Third World, rain came more infrequently now. Perhaps, he wondered, it was time to move to a more salubrious climatic region. But what if that blocked his return to Venus? The very thought made the muscles at his jaw tighten painfully.

Fast Texture. Illustration by Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

For an hour he watched the lowering sky for the glow pasted beneath distant clouds by a flash of electricity, then the tearing violence of lightning strikes as they came closer, passing by within miles. In an earlier dispensation, he would have pulled the plugs on his computers and other delicate equipment, unprepared to accept the dubious security of surge protectors. During one storm, years earlier, when the Moon still hung in the sky, his satellite dish and decoder burned out in a single nearby frightful clap of noise and light. On Venus, he reflected, the human race was yet to advance to the recovery of electronics. How many had died with the instant loss of infrastructure – sewerage, industrial food production, antibiotics, air conditioning? Deprived of television and music and books, how many had taken their own lives, unable to find footing in a world where they must fetch for themselves, work with neighbors they had found themselves flung amongst willy-nilly? Yes, many had been returned just long enough to ransack most of the medical supplies and haul away clothing, food, contraceptives, packs of toilet paper… Standing at the edge of the storm, on the elegant porch of his appropriated mansion, Blackett smiled thinking of the piles of useless stereos, laptops and plasma TV screens he had seen dumped beside the immense Venusian trees. People were so stereotypical, unadaptive. No doubt driven to such stupidities, he reflected, by their lavish affect.

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The Night Train

The Night Train

By Lavie Tidhar

(To read full story, read The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, 2011 Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois).

An assassin can take many shapes. It could be the sweet old lady carrying two perfectly balanced baskets of woven bamboo over her shoulders, each basket filled with sweet addictive fried Vietnamese bananas. It could be the dapper K-pop starlet with her entourage, ostensibly here to rough it up a bit for the hovering cameras. It could be the couple of French backpackers – he with long thinning silver hair and a compressed-data cigarette between his lips, she with a new face courtesy of Soi Cowboy’s front-and-back street cosmetic surgeries – baby-doll face, but the hands never lie and the hands showed her true age, in the lines etched there, the drying of the skin, the quick-bitten nails polished a cheap red –.

An assassin could be anyone. A Yankee rich-kid on a retro-trip across Asia, reading Air America or Neuromancer inn a genuine reproduction 1984 POD-paperback; it could be the courteous policeman helping a pretty young Lao girl with her luggage; it could be the girl herself – an Issan farmers-daughter exported to Bangkok in a century-long tradition, body augmented with vibratory vaginal inserts, perfect audio/visual-to-expert, always-on record, a carefully tended Louis Wu habit and an as-carefully tended retirement plan – make enough money, get back home to Issan was bigfalla mama, open up a bar/hotel/bookshop and spend your days on the Mekong, waxing lyrical about the good old days, listening to Thai pop and K-pop and Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa, growing misty-eyed nostalgic…

Could be anyone. She waited for the Old Man to arrive. The trains in Hua Lampong never left on time.

Her name before, or after, doesn’t matter. They used to call her Mulan Rouge, which was a silly name, but the farangs loved it. Mulan Rouge, when she was still working Soi Cowboy, on the stage, on her knees or hands-and-knees, but seldom on her back – earning the money for the operation that would rescue her from that boy’s body and make her what she truly was, which was katoi.

Woman looking sideways. They call it the third sex, in Thailand. But she always considered herself, simply, a woman (Lavie Tidhor). Illustration © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Shipmaker

The Shipmaker

Aliette de Bodard (Excerpt. You can read the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction, twenty-eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2011)

Ships were living, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat – even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced together. They had to flow into a seamless whole – to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

An abstract dolphin. “Beautiful as a poem declaimed in drunken games, as a flower bud ringed by frost – beautiful and fragile as a newborn child struggling to breathe” (Aliette de Bodard). Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The Easterners of the Mexica didn’t understand. They spoke or recycling, of design efficiency: they saw only the parts taken from previous ships, and assumed it was done to save money and time. They didn’t understand why Dac Kien’s work as Grand Master of Design Harmony was the most important on the habitat: the ship, once made, would be one entity, and not a patchwork of ten thousand others. To Dac Kien – and to the one who would come after her, the Mind-bearer – fell the honour of helping the ship into being, of transforming metal and cables and solar cells into an entity that would sail the void between the stars.

The door slid open. Dac Kien barely looked up. The light tread of the feet told her this was one of the lead designers, either Miahua or Feng. Neither would have disturbed her without cause. With a sigh, she disconnected from the system with a flick of her hands, and waited for the design’s overlay on her vision to disappear.

“Your Excellency.” Miahua’s voice was quite, the Xuyan held herself upright, her skin as pale as yellowed wax. “The shuttle has come back. There’s someone on board you should see.”

The Starship Mechanic

The Starship Mechanic

By Kay Lake and Ken Scholes

(You can find the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).

I awoke in a dark place choking for air, my chest weighted with fluid. Penauch’s hand settled upon my shoulder. The heaviness leapt from me.

“Where am I?”.

I heard a sound not unlike something heavy rolling in mud. It was a thick, wet noise and words formed alongside it in my mind. You are in – crackle hiss warble – medical containment pod of the Starship – but the name of the vessel was incomprehensible to me.

Exposure to our malfunctioning – hiss crackle warble – mechanic has infected you with trace elements of – here another word I could not understand – viruses.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

The cat Pusha. A cat ran in front of me, feet scampering over floors that were badly in need of a polish. “Goodbye”, I told it, but didn’t know why (Jay Lake and Ken Scholes). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Penauch’s voice was low. “You’re not meant to. But once I’ve fixed you, you will be returned to the store”.

I looked at him. “What about you?”

He shook his head, the rigatoni of his face slapping itself gently. “My services are required here. I am now operating within my design parameters”.

I opened my mouth to ask another question but then the light returned and I was falling. Beside me, Penauch fell, too, and he held my hand tightly. “Do not let go,” he said as we impacted.

This time we made no crater as we landed. We stood and I brushed myself off. “I have no idea what any of this means.”

“It won’t matter,” Penauch told me. “But say goodbye to the cats for me”.

“I will,” I promised.

“I liked your planet. Now that the” – again, the incomprehensible ship’s name slid entirely over my brain – “is operational once more,

I suppose we’ll find others.” He sighed. “I hope I malfunction again soon”. He stretched out a hand and fixed me a final time.

I blinked at him and somehow, mid-blink, I stood in the center of Valencia Street.

The Taste of Night

The Taste of Night

Pat Cadigan

The taste of night rather than the falling temperature woke her. Nell curled up a little more and continued to doze. It would be a while before the damp chill coming up from the ground could get through the layers of heavy cardboard to penetrate the sleeping bag and blanket cocooning her. She was fully dressed and her spare clothes were in the sleeping bag, too – not much but enough to make good insulation. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, though, she would have to visit a Laundromat because phew.

Phew was one of those things that didn’t change; well, not so far, anyway. She hoped it would stay that way. By contrast, the taste of night was one of her secret great pleasures although she still had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Now and then something almost came to her, almost. But when she reached for it either in her mind or by actually touching something, there was nothing to all.

Taste of the Night. Illustration by Elena

Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ______

Memory sprang up in her mind, the feel of pale blue stretched long and tight between her hands.

The blind discover that their other senses, particularly hearing, intensify to compensate for the lack. The deaf can be sharp-eyed but also extra sensitive to vibration, which is what sound is to the rest of us.

However, those who lose their sense of smell find they have lost their sense of taste as well because the two are so close. To lose feeling is usually a symptom of a greater problem. A small number of people feel no pain but this puts them at risk for serious injury and life-threatening illnesses.

That doctor had been such a patient woman. Better yet, she had had no deep well of stored-up suspicion like every other doctor Marcus had taken her to. Nell had been able to examine what the doctor was telling her, touching it all over,, feeling the texture. Even with Marcus’s impatience splashing her like an incoming tide, she had been able to ask a question.

A sixth sense? Like telepathy or clairvoyance?

The doctor’s question had been as honest as her own and Nell did her best to make herself clear.

If there were some kind of extra sense, even a person who had it would have a hard time explaining it. Like you or me trying to explain sight to someone born blind.

Nell had agreed and asked the doctor to consider how the other five senses might try to compensate for the lack.

That was where the memory ended, leaving an aftertaste similar to night, only colder and with a bit of sour.

Nurse. “She had tried medication in the beginning because Marcus had begged her to. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety capsules, and finally anti-psychotics – they had all tasted the same because she hadn’t been depressed, anxious, or psychotic”. 

(To read the full story: The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).