io9 is proud to current fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we function a narrative from LIGHTSPEED’s present subject. This month’s choice is “Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu” by Grace Chan. You can learn the story under or listen to the podcast on our web site. Enjoy!
Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu
I’d at all times identified Calam would run.
He had all of the indicators. A taut restlessness, physique brittle as an overstretched lute string, once we stayed too lengthy in a single place. A gloom in his eyes, as we drifted by means of stretches of useless house. A sullen crease between the brows, each time I attempted to ask how he’d landed in that dead-end Martian workshop at seventeen.
But after ten years, why now?
Drumming my fingers on the battered dashboard, I gazed by means of the viewport on the planet under. My retina flooded with data from the Records. Zhenzhu. Once the pearl of the Feng System: terrestrial, principally ocean, strung round with island chains like jewelled necklaces. Now, centuries after colonisation, tainted puce-coloured whorls obscured its aquamarine floor.
It’s not troublesome to trace an individual. As a Beaconer, I do it for a residing. I may’ve dug into Calam’s previous at any level in our travels collectively. But we’d maintained an unstated code—till, in sneaking off with out a lot as a jotted message, he’d damaged it.
My preliminary sweep of each Assembly-run and personal surveillance databanks had uncovered a torrent of brainwave, kinetic, and metabolic signatures matching Calam’s to numerous levels. Even with out the biodata, the clumsiest Beaconer may’ve used the serial numbers of his cybernetic enhancements to pinpoint his whereabouts in inhabited house. After discarding the outliers, I nonetheless had a transparent file of his actions, courting again not simply days, however years.
It was my first time to Zhenzhu, however not Calam’s.
I moved the Left-Handed Bandit out of orbit, right into a stealthy descent.
Calam’s path unspooled in shimmering blue on my retina—by means of damp-slicked alleys, thick with cinder-smoke and burnt oil, to Mur Angh’s canal district. On the other financial institution, mushroom-shaped skyscrapers loomed in opposition to an ochre sky, air site visitors zipping round their stalks like glittering fireflies.
The waterside market was a loud sea of aluminium-roofed stalls, meals carts with illustrated curtains, merchandising droids on versatile legs, and tricycle-hauled trailers piled with mass-produced trinkets. The residents of Mur Angh, in tattered artificial clothes and home made goggles, seemed battered, weather-worn, just like the crumbling fee flats that dominated the town’s slums. Fragments of dialog, a mixture of Common and native dialect, floated by means of the air.
Zhenzhu’s entry on the Common Records had been no completely different from the opposite first-wave colonisation planets. An inflow of diasporic teams. A number of a long time later, the Human Nations Assembly’s coordinated terraforming effort. Now, issues had been cleaving alongside the standard traces: the expansionist elitists of their gleaming towers, birthed into new money and new sources, and the leftovers seething within the slums, wrestling for the scraps.
The path took me to a roadside stall, the place I gestured on the first merchandise on the menu and lit a cigarette.
I scanned the middle-aged vendor for enhancements. Ah, good. An lively reminiscence chip. I pinched the final couple of hours of recording and scrubbed till I noticed Calam’s face. He’d been sitting within the seat I used to be in, hunched over a bowl of porridge. I activated my deciphering networks.
“—not as good as it used to be, Kang,” Calam was saying, in an area dialect.
“Shut up, boy,” mentioned the seller. “You try making good food with stale ingredients. Zhenzhu’s in decay. Imports, agriculture, all dying. The elitists don’t give a shit about the dogs under the table. And you and me, we’re the bottom of the bottom-feeders.”
“What’s changed?”
“Eh, Yen, look at you. You look well. Healthy. Ten years gone—you’re crazy to come back.”
“Not staying.” Calam seized a deep-fried doughstick and crunched into it. “Just here to see my mother.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah. She sent me a message. She’s dying.”
Kang stared flatly at Calam. “Boy, you know what your mother did, to survive, right? Who she is now?”
“I know.”
“You still want to see her?”
“She sent me a message,” mentioned Calam once more.
Kang sighed and dragged a hand over his fleshy face. “Let an old friend give you some advice, Yen. Even though you won’t listen to me. Finish your juk, go to the shipyard, and buy yourself a one-way ticket. Forget your mother. You did the right thing ten years ago. You’re not wanted on this rock.”
I snapped out of the playback when Kang slammed a bowl onto the bench: steaming rice gruel, topped with a gooey black sphere. The fermented aromas made my mouth water. I hadn’t had a recent meal in weeks. Kang watched, with a happy expression, as I stubbed out my cigarette and dug in.
“First time on Zhenzhu, eh?” He spoke in Common.
“How’d you know?”
“No jacket, no goggles.” Kang gestured at his personal gear. “After first time, you remember acid rain.”
Ah. That defined the eroded buildings, the stalls decked in aluminium sheets, the tense expressions as individuals flitted from door to door with hoods pulled low. Acid rain was a foul signal—an indication that, after mere centuries, as soon as once more, we’d extorted an excessive amount of from a planet.
“Forecast says rain coming in an hour,” Kang mentioned, pointing on the heavy sky. “I suggest, go somewhere safe.”
Silly Calam.
Did he actually consider I’d let him go? He’d contrived an elaborate routine: sending his baggage forward to a public locker; slipping away after the Thurnos Bidding, muttering a couple of pleasure den; unleashing an actually-decent pirate program to cover his escape through a stem-cell colony ship.
Sure, I may’ve snagged one other mechanic. Thurnos was full of unhappy souls vying to underbid each other for a heat meal and a heat mattress. But after ten years, you get used to somebody. You determine whether or not you possibly can dwell with their worst habits.
Kang known as him Yen. I wasn’t stunned to find he had a unique title. I remembered the half-starved squirrel-boy—twitchy, shaggy-haired, lined in engine grease—who’d stepped out of that rundown Martian workshop. Mine had been a reluctant stopover. I’d been itching to shoot away from the Sol System, however the Left-Handed Bandit had wanted a brand new portside cannon cradle.
The provide of a job had left my lips on impulse. Maybe, subconsciously, I’d wished somebody with secrets and techniques, who didn’t need to speak about them. Maybe, in his brittle gloom, in his unwavering silence, I felt an unstated kinship.
Well, this was in all probability one of many most secure locations in Mur Angh. I’d tracked Calam to the tallest tower within the fancy district, watched as a statuesque receptionist led him to the elevators, and hacked the service elevator to comply with him as much as the penthouse suite.
Sliding doorways opened onto a hallway draped in Cultural Appropriation Lite. Whoever had embellished the penthouse was evidently a passionate however undiscerning fan of the Jovian-satellite diaspora aesthetic. Embroidered silks in an imitation of the Ganymedean artisans softened the chrome partitions; conventional Callistoan music thrummed from the ceiling. There was even a hologram of the Europa sky: a fire-striped orb with a stormy pink eye, evident above a rim of icy spikes.
I activated my jacket’s bio-cloaking tech earlier than stepping out of the elevator, plunging straight by means of Jupiter’s equatorial belts. The warmth signatures of six or seven individuals radiated from a big room on the north facet of the penthouse.
Bloody Calam. Why hadn’t he simply informed me about his mom? We may’ve come to Zhenzhu collectively. We may’ve put a plan in place. Now he was in all probability going to die—and I needed to determine how a lot to danger my life attempting to rescue the idiot.
I skulked my strategy to a service room. Wedged between a metal trolley and the wall, peeking between doorframe and door-curtain, I had a partial view of a richly furnished lounge.
Calam was standing in entrance of a luxurious sofa, shoulders hunched, eyes darting. Kneeling at a low desk of burnished wooden, the receptionist poured tea from a gilt teapot. She gestured for Calam to take a seat. He lowered himself onto the sofa, one hand clenched at his bag.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
“She’s coming.” The receptionist supplied an enamelled teacup in a swish circle of fingertips. Her sleeves slipped down, revealing pale wrists. “Please.”
Calam blew on the tea, however didn’t drink.
A curtained doorway on the opposite facet of the room parted. A girl stepped in. A silk gown hugged pyramidal breasts, cinched a wasp waist, and swished round elongated legs. Scarlet lips bloomed in a pearly, luminescent face. Beneath puffy eyelids, inhumanly violet irises glittered. She was somebody’s embodied fetish.
She was not sick, and by no means dying.
“Ma . . .?” Calam rose, dropping the cup onto the desk. Hot tea splattered. His expression stretched midway between a pant and a grimace.
The lady’s head drooped in direction of her chest, like a stalk of wheat snapped in a harsh wind.
Four extra individuals got here by means of the curtained doorway: a brown-haired, clean-shaven man in a high-collared grey swimsuit, and three troopers in fight gear. One of the troopers yanked Calam’s mom apart. In the identical second, Calam scrambled backwards over the sofa and whipped his hand out of his bag. He was holding a gun, however it seemed like a toy subsequent to the troopers’ weapons.
“You lied,” mentioned Calam, his eyes exhausting and glued on his mom’s face.
The scarlet mouth trembled. “I’m sorry, Yen.”
“I’m not surprised,” Calam hissed. “You sold us out before. You sold yourself. Why wouldn’t you sell out your last child, too?”
The man within the swimsuit stepped ahead. From my hiding spot, I couldn’t get a transparent view of his face. But he reeked of elitist: oozing vitality, management, wealth. I wrapped my hand round my holster’s reassuring coolness.
“Now, boy. There’s no need to scold your poor Ma. We didn’t really give her a choice. Come. We don’t want this to be messy. Let’s put that gun down, hey? Let’s be civilised.”
“Evan,” spat Calam. “You’ve modded yourself so much I wouldn’t have recognised you—if not for that slimy voice.”
Evan unfold his arms large. I had a detailed view of his left hand, extending from his cuff, which bore a coat of honest downy hair. On his index finger, he wore a gold signet ring imprinted with an eagle.
“I told you we’d see each other again.”
“What do you want? It wasn’t enough for you to kill my father, my brother, my sisters? To take my mother as your bed toy? To murder the Luying because we were an inconvenience?”
“Good grief, boy. You make it sound personal.”
Calam was backed in opposition to the wall, each palms wrapped round his pistol. Sweat poured down his flushed face. He had one shot. At most. The troopers’ enhancements had been a number of years forward of Calam’s—they might in all probability kill him on the first twitch of his set off finger.
I dipped rapidly into the Common Records, trying to find any entries concerning the Luying individuals on Zhenzhu, or a bloodbath ten years in the past. Nothing.
“Why go to such lengths?” Calam hissed. “I’m a nobody. Why bother luring me back here, just to kill me?”
Evan took two steps ahead. “You know I work clean. Loose threads are an . . . irritation. Sometimes, the Assembly likes to stick their nose into the past. They don’t understand that cleaning up the lowlife is a necessary part of building a great planet. Call it . . . tidying.”
Pursing his lips, Evan turned to his troopers.
A neural blast bludgeoned into my mind. I reeled.
Are you ready for me to fucking invite you in?!
It was Calam.
He knew. He knew I used to be right here.
Bloody—
I went for the receptionist first. I’d seen the faint scars of implanted pistols in her wrists. She was unquestionably essentially the most harmful one within the room.
I crossed the room in 4 strides. A neuro-linked command to my weapons belt dispatched a chemical blast at Evan and his three henchmen. A small vary grenade. Probably go away one or two of them alive—however I didn’t need to damage Calam or his mom. Pistol in hand, I fired on the receptionist. The bullet took her within the jugular. Blood sprayed in a crimson fan over the sofa as she crumpled.
I dove behind a grand pianoforte, simply because the pictures got here. Darn—two nonetheless standing. Something hit my foot, however I felt no ache. I went low and ducked out, firing.
Silence.
The troopers had been sprawled on the carpet. Two had been melted by the chemical grenade. The third had taken my pictures in his chest, and was gurgling his final breaths. Somehow, I’d missed Evan completely—however Calam had bought him, first with a bullet, after which with a knife to his face.
I needed to pull my mechanic away.
“Hey,” I mentioned. “Hey. Calam. Come back.”
He collapsed onto his heels, gasping and shuddering, knife clattering from slack fingers. He gazed up at me, blank-eyed.
“You—cursed—shagua,” I snarled, prodding my finger into his brow. “What the fuck would you have done if I weren’t here?”
A delirious smile unfold over Calam’s blood-splattered face. “But you are here.” Then he shivered, and appeared to return to himself. His gaze dropped to my ft. “Orin—you’re bleeding.”
I glanced down. A puncture in my boot was leaking blood onto the carpet. The ache got here to me distantly. I activated a neural web to scoop it up, for later.
“You didn’t have to smash into my head, by the way,” I snapped, as a result of snapping would preserve the wooziness away. “You took down three layers of delicate security work. I was about to waltz in and rescue you.”
“Just had to make sure you didn’t change your mind, enyi.”
“Starting to wish I had.”
We each jerked our heads up at a delicate noise. Calam’s mom was clawing on the velvety wallpaper, her physique spasming. I limped as much as her.
“Wei. You OK?”
She moved her lips, however no sound got here out. She didn’t look injured. Tentatively, I touched her shoulder. She crumpled right into a heap, her chin coming to relaxation on her knees like a decommissioned android. Her synthetic eyes seemed by means of me, previous me, in direction of the tall home windows, which had been squealing beneath an onslaught of poisonous rain.
“Forget her,” Calam mentioned. His tone was indifferent, however not merciless. “She’s been rewritten too many times.”
I got here again to Calam. We gazed down at Evan’s corpse. Bits of jellied eyeball and stringy muscle had been seen within the pulpy stew of what had been his face. I puzzled if Calam had ever killed anybody earlier than.
“After I escaped,” he mentioned in a low voice, “I tried to find others. Relatives, friends, anyone. Didn’t have much luck. I’ve accepted that I’m the only one left. The only one who knows everything he did. He wanted my memory chips—probably would’ve ripped them right out of my head. Can’t have an annoying Luying kid popping up and making Zhenzhu’s history look . . . unpalatable.”
I scanned the physique for ID and enhancements. Evan Enders. Date of start: 12/08/2571. Age: 56 Earth-years. Chief Minister for Sustainable Development, third time period of service. I drew in a pointy breath. “He’s Assembly. Big shot. He’s got a Scribe Implant.”
“Of course.” Calam glanced at me. “How do you think he wrote the Luying out of existence? You think Assembly don’t mod their own Records? Wah, Orin. You’re more of an optimist than I thought. Hey—what are you doing?”
The tip of my serrated knife was the place Evan’s nostril had not too long ago been. “I’m taking it. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I know we’re into murdering Ministers now, but tampering with Records—that’s a crime against humanity, no?”
“I’ve already done it once.” I assumed again to undulating swathes of grey, the pink followers of salt basins, smoky breath fanning my face—and a virus I’d crafted to cover, to guard. I couldn’t consider how guileless I’d been, just some brief months in the past, about the best way the galaxy labored. “We’ll write the Luying back into it. Take that memory loop out of your head and upload it. A crime for humanity.”
“No.”
“No?”
“Then we’d be just like him.” Calam wiped his palms on his pants, leaving grisly trails of the Minister. “Using stolen power for our own purposes. We should do more. We should tear down the walls. Make it so anyone can amend it.”
The acid rain gave the impression to be hammering proper into my cranium, corroding the bony arches, shaking the flooring and roots. For most of my life, I’d prevented occupied with the Assembly if I may—there was a motive a sure sort of individuals grew to become Beaconers. I felt instantly silly. For years, I’d thought that in fleeing the Sol System, in chopping all ties, I’d defied them. But whilst a Beaconer, I used to be completely of their thrall. I labored for money. I delivered these with much less, to these with extra.
The Records had been one more instrument for the privileged few to hide, to manage.
Calam’s mom lifted her face from her knees with a small, unhappy smile. Her whisper was barely audible beneath the rattling home windows. “Good chaos.”
An imprint of my very own mom rose unbidden in my thoughts—stolen, rewritten, forgotten. I squashed the reminiscence away. That was one other ache to take care of later.
“Can you do it, Orin?”
Can is a shitty phrase in Common. It’s a mash-up of meanings, conflating levels of potential with levels of willingness till a complete spectrum of nuance is condensed into one clumsy time period. In my mom’s Callistoan dialect of the Jovian language, there are 13 other ways to say can, every with their refined hints of inclination, capability, significance, and immediacy.
I puzzled how Calam would’ve requested, within the Luying tongue—and what he was actually asking of me. He’d by no means requested something of me earlier than. Not immediately, not like this.
Taking a deep breath, I plunged the knife by means of Evan’s crushed nasal bones. I assumed I heard a whimper, a gurgle. The Implant was nestled between his frontal lobes. Pinching it between two fingers, I pulled it freed from its gory cage and held it as much as the wan mild streaming by means of the home windows. Beneath a silver-scarlet sheen of viscous fluid, the Scribe Implant seemed like a bronze slug, coiled right into a spiral.
I wiped it roughly and tucked it into my glove, the place it nestled warmly within the crease of my palm.
“Let’s get back to the Bandit, Calam.”
Once we had been freed from Zhenzhu’s orbit, I scrambled the Left-Handed Bandit’s outgoing positional information—an energy-draining program, however obligatory to hide our subsequent steps. The Scribe Implant sat on the dashboard, cracked open and linked to the mainframe.
Calam dropped into the seat subsequent to me. His poncho was melted in spots the place it had caught some rain; a tuft of hair poked out of a gap in his hat. From his left cheek to his proper temple, a sprig of dried blood—the receptionist’s? Evan’s?—fashioned an offended crimson arc.
“How’d she go?”
“Freaked out when I tried to buckle her down,” mentioned Calam, wearily. “Had to give the sedative. She’s strapped into the bunk now.”
We hadn’t talked about the place we’d take his mom, however that was an issue for later—together with my injured foot, which I’d rapidly patched with a globule of Soothe’em, the puncture gap in my favorite boots, which nonetheless carried some Ranzan soil, and the dual pains I’d netted away at the back of my thoughts.
Calam leaned ahead to gaze by means of the viewport. The angle of the Feng Star revealed solely a slender crescent of Zhenzhu—the air pollution clouds creamy, like frothed milk, in opposition to an inky backdrop.
I glanced at him. “Will you miss it?”
He shook his head. “It was never really home, you know. Even though I was born there. From the beginning, they chased us out.”
The Common Records unfolded in shimmering hologram earlier than us. A shiver thrilled by means of my physique. I’d solely ever seen the floor, the lacquered exterior of a puzzle-box. But instantly we had been within the coronary heart of the labyrinth, with a birds-eye map of deeply tangled layers of archives, and the data of the place issues had been knotted and unknotted. And at our fingertips, a harmful energy: to extract, rewrite, change.
It wouldn’t be troublesome to interrupt it open. Unlock the puzzle-box, crack open its compartments, and switch it inside out, for anybody and everybody to play with. The Common Records can be really widespread.
“Huh,” Calam mentioned. Touching a dirt-streaked hand to his temple, he neuro-linked to the mainframe. A rigorously compiled database unfurled from his reminiscence chip: holographs and names of the Luying individuals, dates and locations of start, dates and locations of demise. There was plenty of data, nearly a thousand identities, however I may additionally see plenty of gaps. Trails, gone chilly. Missing, whereabouts unconfirmed, presumed useless.
I turned to him. Tears glimmered on his cheeks, carving paths by means of the blood.
He reached over me to provoke the hack.
The ghost-blue faces of his grandparents, father, siblings, cousins, drifted into their digital shrine. Page by web page, the Records opened to the galaxy. Good chaos, his mom had whispered. As the primary wave flowed again to us, a deluge of grief and shock and fury, I shifted the Left-Handed Bandit out of impartial, balancing on a knife’s fringe of stars, and waited for Calam’s path.
About the Author
Grace Chan is an Aurealis and Norma Ok Hemming Award-nominated author and physician. She can’t appear to cease writing about brains, minds, house, know-how, and identification. Her brief fiction could be present in Clarkesworld, Fireside, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, and lots of different locations. Her debut novel, Every Version of You, shall be printed in September 2022. You can discover her at gracechanwrites.com and on Twitter as @gracechanwrites.
Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the May 2021 subject, which additionally options work by Jonathan Maberry, Lauren Ring, Tobias S. Buckell, Andi C. Buchanan, Aigner Loren Wilson, Lina Rather, Peter Watts, and extra. You can anticipate this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should purchase the entire subject proper now in handy book format for simply $3.99, or subscribe to the book version right here.
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