He could be wrong. Maybe they weren’t working on bombs. Maybe they wouldn’t succeed. Maybe it would take a long time. Maybe he should forget the whole thing.
Kiyoshi and Sheila’s alcove was near his. Sergei could hear the thumps and moans of their tangled bodies through the thin walls. He allowed himself to think of Izumi, of tracing his finger slowly along the arch of her foot, hearing the intake of her breath, taking her big toe in his mouth and hearing her gasp.
His heart and soul didn’t buy his maybes.
Two days later he was on the way back to Earth. They would touch down in Kazakhstan. Kiyoshi and Sheila were also ending their shifts, while Boyle stayed on. Sergei looked away from the couple, strapped in across from him, their hands intertwined.
It would make sense to take Pace’s offer. It had come wrapped in a veiled threat. Pace even had a point. Sergei had no sentiment for the nation-state. During World War II, Petersburg had been under siege for nine hundred days. Shostakovich had been there. The population went from 3.5 million to 600,000. In his lifetime, the endless Chechen wars. Was any of that right?
Out the small window, sun slanted across a long wall of cumulonimbus over the coast of Venezuela. Somewhere below the clouds, American troops were liberating oil fields.
“The right thing.” Who could know what that was? Imagine all the damned souls who believed they had done the right thing. Who may in fact have done the right thing, and found themselves damned anyway.
And Sergei was ready, maybe, to finally stay below the clouds. To keep his feet on the ground, to have a normal life.
But that was mere survival. There was a Russian saying, vsyo normal’no, “everything is normal.” No matter how screwed up: “everything is normal.” Also that American saying: “the new normal.” Universal surveillance was the new normal. Resource wars were the new normal. Climate refugees by the millions were the new normal. And if Pace got his way, his executive monopoly of “legitimate” violence would be the new normal.
Sergei shut his eyes as the faint whistle of reentry grew to a thunder and the capsule juddered. Soon they’d be at four Gs. Pure falling, again, but now into the burning force of the still-living planet’s atmosphere. Still living for how much longer?
Izumi had said to him once: You think a lot, but you follow your heart. He wasn’t sure he did, but he was glad she thought so, or at least that she said she did. He let the memory of that gladness echo in him. Maybe it was time to be sure.
Who will take care of your heart and soul?
The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.
Outside, the heatshield roared and burned. A firedrake of plasma, the capsule passed over Helsinki, Petersburg, Moscow, specks in a crowded emptiness. He opened his eyes.
He saw that both his fists were clenched tight. Very slowly he allowed his hands to open.
Starlight Express
MICHAEL SWANWICK
Here’s a melancholy and evocative story about a man in a far-future Rome who encounters a mysterious woman from very, very far away….
Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980 and, in the thirty-eight years that have followed, has established himself as one of science fiction’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006, for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions in Time.” His other books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, The Dragons of Babel, Dancing with Bears, and Chasing the Phoenix. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, The Periodic Table of Science Fiction, and the massive retrospective collection The Best of Michael Swanwick. Coming up is a new novel, The Iron Dragon’s Mother. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a website at www.michaelswanwick.com and maintains a blog at floggingbabel.blogspot.com.
Flaminio the water carrier lived in the oldest part of the ancient city of Roma among the popolo minuto, the clerks and artisans and laborers and such who could afford no better. His apartment overlooked the piazza dell’Astrovia, which daytimes was choked with tourists from four planets who came to admire the ruins and revenants of empire. They coursed through the ancient transmission station, its stone floor thrumming gently underfoot, the magma tap still powering the energy road, even though the stars had shifted in their positions centuries ago and anyone stepping into the projector would be translated into a complex wave front of neutrinos and shot away from the Earth to fall between the stars forever.
Human beings had built such things once. Now they didn’t even know how to turn it off.
On hot nights, Flaminio slept on a pallet on the roof. Sometimes, staring up at the sparkling line of ionization that the energy road sketched through the atmosphere, he followed it in his imagination past Earth’s three moons and out to the stars. He could feel its pull at such times, the sweet yearning tug that led suicides to converge upon it in darkness, furtive shadows slipping silently up the faintly glowing steps like lovers to a tryst.
Flaminio wished then that he had been born long ago when it was possible to ride the starlight express away from the weary old Republic to impossibly distant worlds nestled deep in the galaxy. But in the millennia since civilization had fallen, countless people had ridden the Astrovia off the planet, and not one had ever returned.
Except, maybe, the woman in white.
Flaminio was coming home from the baths when he saw her emerge from the Astrovia. It was election week and a ward heeler had treated him to a sauna and a blood scrub in exchange for his vote. When he stepped out into the night, every glint of light was bright and every surface slick and shiny, as if his flesh had been turned to glass and offered not the least resistance to the world’s sensations. He felt genuinely happy.
Then there was a pause in the constant throb underfoot, as if the great heart of the world had skipped a beat. Something made Flaminio look up, and he thought he saw the woman step down from the constant light of the landing stage.
An instant only, and then he realized he had to be wrong.
The woman wore a white gown of a cloth unlike any Flaminio had ever seen before. It was luminously cool, and with every move she made it slid across her body with simple grace. Transfixed, he watched her step hesitantly out of the Astrovia and seize the railing with both hands.