The Apex Book of World SF Page 3

  “Even if,” she whispered as his being engulfed hers and the thermonuclear reaction of matter and antimatter fusion sparked and began to eradicate them both, “our puny existence, the conclusion of an agitated, conscious universe, is insignificant, remember...remember, brother, that mercy will go on. Kindness will go on.”

  Let there be gentleness, she thought. Let there be equilibrium, if all we are and will be can survive in some form. Let there be grace and goodness and a hint of something to come, no matter how uncertain.

  Let there be possibility, she thought, as they flickered annihilatively and were immolated in some fool’s idea of love.

  ***

  For the 145 innocents of the 12/16 Peshawar terrorist attack and

  countless known & unknown before.

  Setting Up Home

  Sabrina Huang

  Translated by Jeremy Tiang

  Taiwanese author Sabrina Huang has published several short story collections under the pseudonym Jiu Jiu. Her work has won many Taiwanese short story competitions, including the China Times Literary Award and the United Daily Literary Award.

  THE ANTIQUE ROSEWOOD day-bed, sturdy in the Ming Dynasty style, sat casually at his front door as if it belonged there, as if waiting for some monk to reveal an oracle or incantation that would allow it to move. Its carved legs were slender, its filigreed back elegant, and on the couch surface was a piece of scarlet paper, his name black-inked on it.

  He’d heard that during the heady boom years of the eighties, Taipei residents regularly threw out sofas and dining room sets after just a few months of use. University students and impoverished office workers could furnish their squalid apartments entirely by scavenging from rubbish dumps. But in this day and age, who’d be willing to be the kind of fool who sends a gift with no expectation of a return? He almost didn’t dare to smile, frightened his joy would send away the windfall. Instead, he hastily pulled it inside the flat.

  This was wonderful. The empty living room had previously looked as gloomy and neglected as he himself. With this new item, the place seemed to develop a personality, acquire some kind of background. Now it looked more like somewhere a proper person might live. He looked at it from several angles, and his belly filled with happiness.

  Coming home the next day, he opened the door to find the new sofa still present. He sat down delightedly, setting his takeaway dinner down on the wide armrest while flicking on the television. Hmm, had this little table been there the day before? But at that moment the commercials ended and the theme tune to his show began, whisking away his apprehension.

  On the third day, the ceiling spouted two red glass lanterns, one to either side of the day-bed, like twin drops of bloodshot tears from eyes too brimful of emotion to blink. Was this strange? Of course something felt wrong, but then it wasn’t like the originally empty space had seemed right. As he reclined, red light pouring down on him, he allowed himself shyly to think about women.

  Day four brought a trunk of tiger-striped camphorwood, which he used as a coffee table. On day five a long table with turned-in legs arrived—a television stand. The next day, the partition between living and dining rooms was transformed into an openwork screen carved with arabesques, and all this began to seem normal to him. On the seventh day—when, it is worth noting, even the Lord felt the need to rest—he woke first thing to find the entire apartment had been fitted with wooden floorboards. He didn’t notice during daylight hours, but as night fell, elegantly languorous words appeared on these boards, written in gilt: the heart sutra. “…no eyes no ears no nose no tongue no body, no sensing colour or sound or scent…”

  In the days after that, more things appeared: a four-poster bed here, a green silk canopy there, as well as all kinds of ornaments he didn’t even know the names of. Led by that day-bed, they arrived in a constant stream. He sat amongst them, straining to keep track of his new possessions, beginning to wonder if these gifts from nowhere might eventually crush him to death.

  But he needn’t have worried. On the forty-ninth day, it came to a halt. He searched through the whole apartment three times, inside and out, and found nothing new except a thin sheet of notepaper on his pillow.

  “Dear son, I’ve calculated that you’d be about the right age to set up home. I’ve burnt everything I thought you’d need. And there’s a girl, too. She used to be your mother’s home nurse, she’s gentle and meticulous, she’ll take good care of you. Please apologise to her on my behalf, tell her uncle that was too anxious at the time. I should have chloroformed her before setting her on fire—it must have hurt, being burnt alive. Tell her Uncle Chen couldn’t stand the thought of her becoming someone else’s daughter-in-law. You must be good to her. Love, Dad.”

  He understood now. The pile of ashes now appearing by the sofa was slowly assembling itself into a pair of legs, a delicate pair of clasped hands resting on them. And what was forming above them, right in front of his eyes, was probably a waist, curved and shapely.

  Very, very carefully, afraid of startling her, he sat down beside her half-body, and gently, gently stroked her thigh. The initial sensation was gritty, like his voice, “What’s your name? …Oh, right, your head hasn’t formed yet. But anyway, let me welcome you. Welcome to our home.”

  The Gift of Touch

  Chinelo Onwualu

  Chinelo Onwualu is a writer, editor, and journalist living in Abuja, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship. Her writing has appeared in the Kalahari Review, Saraba Magazine, Mothership: Tales of Afrofuturism and Beyond, and elsewhere.

  BRUNO STRODE ACROSS the causeway, scanning the three land skimmers hanging from their docking harnesses with a critical eye. His footsteps echoed through the cavernous space of the docking bay. The diagnostic reader he held showed the surface vehicles were fuelled and in perfect mechanical condition. They were decades out of date, lacking the smooth, sleek designs of newer models, but they worked—and that was all that mattered.

  Bringing passengers on board always set him on edge; they had a tendency to poke about in places they didn’t belong. But running a haulage freighter doesn’t pay much when there isn’t much to haul. Now that the technology for instant matter transportation had improved movement between the five planets of the star system, work was becoming rarer. Bruno needed the money and he had to know that his ship, The Lady’s Gift, was in perfect shape.

  He keyed an all-clear code for the docking bay into his reader and sent the message to the main computer. Slipping the flat pad into his tool harness, he headed for engineering. Ronk, the ship’s mechanic, met him at the entrance to the engine room. At almost seven feet of solid muscle, with skin a glossy brown so dark that it seemed to drink in light, Ronk was an intimidating presence. Bruno had no doubt the engineer could snap him in half. Luckily, Ronk was a pacifist.

  “How’s she looking?” Bruno asked, though he needn’t have bothered. The burly engineer was scowling, which made Bruno smile. Ronk had grown up on a religious colony whose people believed that life was a burden and death was its only release. They frowned on anything meant to keep one comfortable.

  “We’ll live,” Ronk snapped. Bruno watched him lumber back into the dark recesses of the engine room, wondering, as usual, how a man so big could move so delicately.

  Bruno continued toward the bridge. Passing through the mess hall, he saw his twin sister, Marley, sitting at the dining table. Her chestnut brown skin was a shade lighter than his and she liked to dye her black hair a vibrant orange, otherwise everyone said she was a female version of him. Which was unfortunate, because the square jaw and broad physique that gave him his rugged good looks made her look homely.

  Marley had taken up half of the dining table with an assortment of metal parts. Knowing her, it was some machine she was reassembling. He watched her work for a time.

  “What’s this?” Bruno picked up an unidentifiable bit of metal.

&n
bsp; “This, fearless leader,”—he hated when she called him that— “is a V-26 Skyhammer with 10-volt action, 15-meg rounds and a zoom scope that could see Neptune—if it still existed.”

  “Try that again, this time in a language I can understand.”

  “It’s a very big gun.”

  Bruno nodded and dropped the piece he’d picked up. He should have known. She had an intuitive grasp of machinery that she focused exclusively on armoury, making her the ship’s default security officer.

  “I’m trying to fix the balance, though. Thing’s so top-heavy, you’d need to prop it over a barrel to shoot it straight.”

  “And what’s wrong with the collection of very big guns you already have?”

  “Nothing, but you never know when you might need a back-up. This baby could pop a hole in a military freighter—with the right modifications.”

  “Marley, we’re a trawler not the Sixteenth Battalion. Why would we possibly need this?”

  “You never know.”

  Bruno sighed. Sometimes it was like talking to a very small child.

  “Just put that thing back together and stow it. I don’t want any sign of it when the passengers board, got it?

  “Aye, aye, fearless leader.” Marley grinned and snapped him a salute.

  “And stop calling me that!”

  He continued toward the bridge. There, he found Horns, his navigator, frowning over a display console. She was small-boned, at full height she barely cleared his chest, with a round child-like face that dimpled when she smiled. It was rumoured that she was part Scion, the ancient race that had developed most of the technology that underpinned their world, but Bruno doubted it. The Scions had disappeared centuries ago. Still, given her porcelain pale skin, silver blonde hair, and almond-shaped grey eyes, it was clear that someone somewhere in her genealogy had fooled around.

  “Did you look at this clearance ticket before you filled the passenger register?” asked Horns. Before a ship could take on passengers clearance tickets were required from the Imperial Command certifying that none of the guests had outstanding warrants or, worse, unpaid bills.

  “Yeah, they checked out. Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it exactly,” she said. “But take a look at the seal.” Bruno leaned over her shoulder to stare at the screen. Her hair smelled like lemons. “Notice the extra cross over there? That’s a top-level Imperial symbol. Only government brass use those.”

  “All we’ve got on the register are a widow and her kids.”

  “I know. Why would anyone that high up in the Imperial Command sign off for a farmer travelling on a broken-down freighter?”

  Bruno didn’t like this. He and Marley had grown up on a smuggling scow in the rough waters of Moonlight Bay on Old Antegon, and it had been a long time since he had been on the wrong side of the law. They had worked hard to get off-planet and he wasn’t eager to go back.

  “Scrub them through the system again. If anything looks even remotely funny, flag ’em.”

  “Should I drop their booking, too?”

  “Heck no! We need the money too badly for that. No, I’ll have Marley keep her big gun handy. Anyone tries to start something on my ship, it won’t be pleasant.”

  As soon as they walked onto the ship, Bruno knew they were trouble. They were dressed as farmers, but he knew none of them had ever seen a farm. The older woman was too straight. She moved like someone who was used to giving orders—shoulders thrown back and a steady, penetrating gaze. The young man was a soldier. Barefoot, dressed in a threadbare shirt and trousers two sizes too small, he carried nothing more dangerous than a cloth bag, but Bruno had seen too much of war to be fooled. The girl was something else entirely.

  She could not have been older than fifteen. Her coal-black skin was so smooth it was luminous. She was bald as an egg with delicate features and a grace that made her seem as if she was gliding. She kept her gaze down for the most part, but for a moment, when she glanced up, Bruno saw that her eyes were as golden as the heart of a flame.

  The woman called herself Ana. She introduced the young man and the girl as her children, Drake and Bella. She handed over their identification cards and Bruno checked them one last time. They were clean. Just like her clearance papers. But they had the same high-level seal he had seen on the manifest. Bruno hesitated over the cards, debating whether he needed this kind of trouble. There would be other passengers, surely. Then his eye fell on her payment receipt. The amount she’d paid was more than double what he had charged.

  “Is there a problem, captain?” Ana asked softly.

  “Not at all, ma’am,” Bruno said. “Welcome aboard.”

  Usually, all the crew—except Ronk—would come out to the entrance of the docking bay to welcome new guests, but by the time they reached the loading bay only Marley had arrived. Bruno let out a relieved breath to see that strapped to her back was her big gun. He caught the young man’s face when he saw Marley. His eyes had narrowed at the sight of the gun, but he had quickly smoothed his features into a careful blankness. Bruno resolved to watch him carefully.

  “My, that is a big gun,” Ana said after Bruno had made the introductions. She spoke as if she was talking to a slow-witted child. Luckily, Bruno’s twin had no ear for sarcasm.

  “Yeah, I call her Jane.”

  “That’s a lovely name.”

  “Thanks! Hey, follow me, I’ll show you where you’ll be staying.” Marley looked over at Bruno and mouthed: I like her. Bruno sighed inwardly. His sister was such a poor judge of character sometimes. As they headed into the heart of the ship, the intercom in his ear cackled to life.

  “I need to talk to you.” Horns’ voice sounded strained.

  “Can it wait?” Bruno wanted to keep an eye on his guests and he was in no mood to deal with any more strangeness.

  “No, Bruno. It really can’t.” Horns only ever called him by his name when she was being serious. Otherwise it was ‘Boss’.

  When he got to the bridge he found Horns pacing. Her pale hands were fluttering like live things. He had never seen his hard-as-nails navigator so agitated.

  “I didn’t know, Bruno. I mean, I suspected something was shady, but I had no idea,” she said.

  “Horns, calm down. What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve got to get them off the ship.”

  “Our passengers? Are you crazy? They’ve already paid—and you should see how much. We can finally fix our hyperdrive, maybe even get one that was made in the last decade.”

  “Bruno, you don’t understand.” She took a deep breath to calm herself before she continued. “They’re Mehen.”

  Bruno’s smile froze on his face. The Mehen di Gaya were the highest class of priests in the Amethyst Order, the religious institution that controlled the Empire. There were rumours that the Mehen even operated a shadow arm of elite warrior monks who could make whole families disappear overnight.

  “How can you be sure?” Bruno asked.

  “Because I used to be one of them.”

  “You’re Mehen? You never told me that.”

  “It’s who I was, not who I am now,” she said, waving her hand dismissively. “Besides, you never asked.” She gave him a sad look.

  “That’s not fair, you could have said something if you wanted to. It’s not like you talk about your past all the time. I mean, I don’t even know your real name.”

  “Well, there never seemed a good enough time. It was always one crisis or another with you.” She turned toward the control banks and stared out the giant windows. “It still is.”

  Bruno thought he heard a hint of tears in her voice. “What do you want me to say, Horns? I run haulage; if it’s not someone trying to ship stolen goods off-planet, it’s not having the right papers, or stowaways, or…there’ll always be something.”

  “I know, but sometimes it’s like you don’t have space in your life for anything beyond this ship.”

  They had had this conversati
on a thousand times. He fought the urge to touch her, to wrap her in his arms and feel the way her body curved into his. He longed for the familiarity of her smell and her skin. He had never been good with words, but his touch could make her promises. Yet they had been down that path before. Only heartbreak lay that way.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, cutting into his thoughts. “We have bigger problems. I think the girl is in danger.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most people don’t know this, but the Order started out as the tenders of the fire pits in the old temples, back when people would burn sacrifices in the sacred flames. In those days, the priests would pick a child—a special child who no one was allowed to touch—and when this child reached a certain age, it was sacrificed, burned in the Holy Fires. When I was a novice, they told me the Order stopped the practice hundreds of years ago.” She turned. “But I don’t think they have. I think they just took it off-planet.”

  “So you think they’re going to kill that girl?”

  “It’s worse than that. I ran that symbol through the system and I found records going back nearly fifty years. Every fourteen years or so, this symbol would show up in the passenger manifests of a small M-class vessel—like ours—going to the moon of Osiris. The thing is, all the ships would go in…but none of them ever came back out.”

  A cold feeling settled at the base of Bruno’s spine. “Are you sure?”