And I save the money from my pension, little by little, by living frugally. To one day buy a basic black market exoskeleton to assist me, and get basic treatment, physio, to learn how to walk and move like a human on Earth.
Can… I help, in any way?
You have helped, by listening. Maybe you can help others listen as well, as you’ve said.
Maybe they’ll heed the words of a veteran forced to live in a slum. If they send soldiers to the edge of the galaxy, I can only hope that they will give those soldiers a choice this time.
I beg the ones who prepare our great chariots: if you must take our soldiers with you, take them—their courage, their resilience, their loyalty will serve you well on a new frontier. But do not to take war to new worlds.
War belongs here on Earth. I should know. I’ve fought it on the Moon, and it didn’t make her happy. In her cold anger, she turned our bodies to glass. Our chota duniya was not meant to carry life, but we thrust it into her anyway. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us not violate the more welcoming worlds we may find, seeing their beauty as acquiescence.
With FTL, there will be no end to humanity’s journey. If we keep going far enough, perhaps we will find the gods themselves waiting behind the veil of the universe. And if we do not come in peace by then, I fear we will not survive the encounter.
I clamber down the side of the column of the space elevator, winding down through the biohomes of the slum towards one of the tunnels where I can reach the internal shaft and wait for the elevator on the way down. Once it’s close to the surface of the planet, it slows down a lot—that’s when people jump on to hitch a ride up or down. We’re only about one thousand feet up, so it’s not too long a ride down, but the wait for it could be much longer. The insides of the shaft are always lined with slum-dwellers and elevator station hawkers, rigged with gas masks and cling clothes, hanging on to the nanocable chords and sinews of the great spindle. I might just catch a ride on the back of one of the gliders who offer their solar wings to travelers looking for a quick trip back to the ground. Bit more terrifying, but technically less dangerous, if their back harness and propulsion works.
The eight-year-old boy guiding me down through the steep slum, along the pipes and vines of the NGO-funded nano-ecosystem, occasionally looks up at me with a gap-toothed smile. “I want to be an asura like Gita,” he says. “I want to go to the stars.”
“Aren’t you afraid of not being able to walk properly when you come back to Earth?”
“Who said I want to come back to Earth?”
I smile, and look up, past the fluttering prayer flags of drying clothes, the pulsing wall of the slum, at the dizzying stairway to heaven, an infinite line receding into the blue. At the edge of the spindle, I see asura Gita poised between the air and her home, leaning precariously out to wave goodbye to me. Her hair ripples out against the sky, a smudge of black. A pale, late evening moon hovers full and pale above her head, twinkling with lights.
I wave back, overcome with vertigo. She seems about to fall, but she doesn’t. She is caught between the Earth and the sky in that moment, forever.
My English Name
R. S. BENEDICT
Here’s a creepy yet ultimately quite moving story about a man with a secret so deeply buried that even he no longer knows what it is….
R. S. Benedict spent three years teaching English to rich kids in China, before returning to her native New York to become a bureaucrat. Her work can be found in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Upper Rubber Boot’s upcoming anthology Broad Knowledge: 35 Women Up To No Good.
I want you to know that you are not crazy.
What you saw in the back of the ambulance was real.
What wasn’t real was Thomas Majors.
You have probably figured out by now that I wasn’t born in London like I told you I was, and that I did not graduate from Oxford, and that I wasn’t baptized in the Church of England, as far as I know.
Here is the truth: Thomas Majors was born in room 414 of the Huayuan Binguan, a cheap hotel which in defiance of its name contained neither flowers nor any sort of garden.
If the black domes in the ceiling of the fourth-floor corridor had actually contained working cameras the way they were supposed to, a security guard might have noticed Tingting, a dowdy maid from a coal village in Hunan, enter room 414 without her cleaning cart. The guard would have seen Thomas Majors emerge a few days later dressed in a blue suit and a yellow scarf.
A search of the room would have returned no remnant of Tingting.
Hunan Province has no springtime, just alternating winter and summer days. When Tingting enters room 414 it’s winter, gray and rainy. The guest room has a heater, at least, unlike the sleeping quarters Tingting shares with three other maids.
Tingting puts a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and locks it. She shuts the curtains. She covers the mirrors. She takes off her maid uniform. Her skin is still new. She was supposed to be invisible: she has small eyes and the sort of dumpy figure you find in a peasant who had too little to eat as a child and too much to eat as an adult. But prying hands found their way to her anyway, simply because she was there. Still, I know it won’t be hard for a girl like her to disappear. No one will look for her.
I pull Tingting off, wriggling out of her like a snake. I consider keeping her in case of emergency, but once she’s empty I feel myself shift and stretch. She won’t fit anymore. She has to go.
I will spare you the details of how that task is accomplished.
It takes a while to make my limbs the right length. I’ve narrowed considerably. I check the proportions with a measuring tape; all the ratios are appropriate.
But Thomas Majors is not ready. The room’s illumination, fluorescent from the lamps, haze-strangled from the sky, isn’t strong enough to tan this new flesh the way it is meant to be.
You thought I was handsome when you met me. I wish you could have seen what I was supposed to be. In my plans, Thomas was perfect. He had golden hair and a complexion like toast. But the light is too weak, and instead I end up with flesh that’s not quite finished.
I can’t wait anymore. I only have room 414 for one week. It’s all Tingting can afford.
So I put on Thomas as carefully as I can, and only when I’m certain that not a single centimeter of what lies beneath him can be seen, I uncover the mirrors.
He’s tight. Unfinished skin usually is. I smooth him down and let him soften. I’m impatient, nervous, so I turn around to check for lumps on Thomas’s back. When I do, the flesh at his neck rips. I practice a look of pain in the mirror.