“We should leave the two of you alone,” said Ursula.
“Or however many of them there are,” said Tomas. “Let’s go, dear.”
“You’ll let us know how it goes, Karl, won’t you?” said Ursula.
Selene eventually stopped trembling, and was able to realize that she and her husband were by themselves. As she let Karl help her to her feet, the flitter dissolved around them and was reabsorbed into the planet’s surface. As she stared into the shadows spilling off the dry, red rocks, she realized exactly how much time had passed them by while they’d traveled through the void and explored Earth the old-fashioned way.
An entire cycle had passed. It was that time again, if she still wanted it to be that time.
They entered their dome, and she studied the view out of the bedroom’s picture window. She almost thought she could see Ursula, curving through the sky like a shooting star off in the distance. Selene replayed her friend’s last words in her mind, until . . .
“None of today was real, was it?” Selene whispered. “Not a moment of it.”
She waited for him to reach for her, hoping that he would, hoping that he wouldn’t.
“Tomas and Ursula, they were both in on it, weren’t they?”
“We just wanted you to have an old-fashioned experience,” said Karl. “We just wanted you to be happy, that’s all. I thought you would like it.”
“And I appreciate the gesture, Karl,” she said. “I really do. But could you leave me alone for just a moment?”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine,” she said.
Once Karl exited through a biolock, Selene sat on her side of the bed. On a small table nearby, perfectly centered, was exactly what she knew would be there: a small, blue pill just like the one that had been waiting for her the morning before, and the morning before that, and all the mornings she could still remember.
She snatched at, and choked it down quickly. Then, while thinking with terror of the old-fashioned ways, she held out a palm in wonder and supplication until a second pill appeared, and then she swallowed that one even more quickly than the first.
Kyle Meets the River
Ian McDonald
K
yle was the first to see the exploding cat. He was coming back from the compound HFBR-Mart with the slush cone—his reward for scoring a goal in the under elevens—squinted up at the sound of a construction helicopter (they were still big and marvelous and exciting) and saw the cat leap the narrow gap between the med center and Tinneman’s coffee bar. He pointed to it one fraction of a second before the security men picked it up on their visors and started yelling. In an instant the compound was full of fleeing people; men and women running, parents sweeping up kids, guards sweeping their weapons this way and that as the cat, sensing it had been spotted, leaped from the roof in two bounds onto the roof of an armored Landcruiser, then dived to ground and hunted for targets. A security guard raised his gun. He must be new. Even Kyle knew not to do that. They were not really cats at all, but smart missiles that behaved like them, and if you tried to catch them or threatened them with a weapon, they would attack and blow themselves up. From the shade of the arcade he could see the look on the guard’s face as he tried to get a fix on the dashing, dodging robot. Machine gun rattle. Kyle had never heard it so close. It was very exciting. Bullets cracked all over the place, flying wild. Kyle thought that perhaps he should hide himself behind something solid. But he wanted to see. He had heard it so many times before, and now here it was, on the main streets in front of him. That cat-missile was getting really really close. Then the guard let loose a lucky burst; the steel cat went spinning up into the air and blew itself up. Kyle reeled back. He had never heard anything so loud. Shrapnel cracked the case of the Coke machine beside him into red and white stars. The security man was down but moving, scrabbling away on his back from the blast site, and real soldiers were arriving, and a med Hummer, and RAV air drones. Kyle stood and stared. It was wonderful wonderful wonderful and all for him, and there was Mom, running toward him in her flappy-hands, flappy-feet run, coming to take it all away, snatching him up in front of everyone and crying “Oh, what were you doing what were you thinking are you all right all right all right?”
“Mom,” he said. “I saw the cat explode.”
His name is Kyle Rubin, and he’s here to build a nation. Well, his father is. Kyle doesn’t have much of an idea of nations and nationhood, just that he’s not where he used to live, but it’s okay because it’s not really all that different from the gated community, there are a lot of folks like him, though he’s not allowed to leave the compound. In here is Cantonment. Out there is the nation that’s being built. That’s where his dad goes in the armored cars, where he directs the construction helicopters and commands the cranes that Kyle can just see from the balcony around the top floor of the International School. You’re not allowed to go there because there are still some snipers working, but everyone does, and Kyle can watch the booms of the tower cranes swing across the growing towers of the new capital.
It all fell apart, and it takes us to put it back together again,
his father explained. Once there was a big country called India, with a billion and a half people in it, but they just couldn’t live together, so they fell to squabbling and fighting.
Like you and Kelis’s mom,
Kyle said, which made his father raise his eyebrows and look embarrassed and Mom—his mom, not Kelis’s—laugh to herself. Whatever, it all fell apart, and these poor people, they need us and our know-how to put it all back together for them. And that’s why we’re all here, because it’s families that make us strong and hopeful. And that’s how you, Kyle Rubin, are building a nation. But some people don’t think we should be doing that. They think it’s their nation so they should build it. Some people think we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution. And some people are just plain ungrateful.
Or, as Clinton in class said, the Rana’s control is still weak, and there are a lot of underrepresented parties out there with big grievances and arsenals of leftover weaponry from the Sundering. Western interests are always first in the firing line. But Clinton was a smart-mouth who just repeated what he heard from his dad who had been in Military Intelligence since before there was even a Cantonment, let alone an International Reconstruction Coalition.
The nation Kyle Rubin is building is Bharat, formerly the states of Bihar, Jharkand, and half of Utter Pradesh on the Indo-Gangetic plain, and the cranes swing and the helicopters fly over the rising towers of its new capital, Ranapur.
When there weren’t cats exploding, after practice Kyle would visit Salim’s planet.
Before Kyle, Striker Salim had been the best forward on Team Cantonment U-11. Really he shouldn’t have been playing at all because he didn’t actually live within the compound. But his father was the Bharati Government’s man in Cantonment, so he could pretty much do whatever he liked.
At first they had been enemies. In his second game Kyle had headed home a sweet cross from Ryan from Australia, and after that every cross floated his way. In the dressing room Striker Salim had complained to Coach Joe that the
new boy
had got all the best balls because he was a westerner and not Bharati. The wraths of dads were invoked. Coach Joe said nothing and put them on together for the game against the army kids, who imagined that being army kids was like an extra man for them. Salim on wing, Kyle in center: three three four. Cantonment beat US Army two one, one goal by Salim, the decider from a run by Salim and a rebound from the goalkeeper by Kyle, in the forty-third minute. Now, six weeks in another country later, they were inseparable.
Salim’s planet was very close and easy to visit. It lived in the palmer-glove on his brown hand and could manifest itself in all manner of convenient locations: the school system, Tinneman’s coffee house, Kyle’s e-paper workscreen, but the best was the full proprioception so-new-it’s-scary lighthoek (trademark) that you could put behind your ear so, fiddle it so, and it would get inside your head and open up a whole new world of sights and sounds and smells and sensations. They were so new not even the Americans had them, but Varanasi civil servants engaged on the grand task of nation building needed to use and show off the latest Bharati technology. And their sons too. The safety instructions said you weren’t supposed to use it in full sensory outside because of the risk of accidents, crime, or terror, but it was safe enough in the Guy’s Place up on the roof under the solar farm that was out of shot of any sniper, no matter how good or young she was.
Kyle plugged the buddy-lead into Salim’s lighthoek and slipped the curl of plastic behind his ear. It had taken a while to work out the sweet spot, but now he got it first time every time. He was not supposed to use lighthoek tech. Mom’s line was that it hadn’t been proved safe yet but Kyle suspected it was his father—it was opening yourself up to evil influences to let things inside your head like that. That was before you even got to what he thought of the artificial evolution game itself. Maybe if he could experience the lift out of the Cantonment, up through the solar arrays, past the cranes and helicopters, and see Salim’s world there in front of him—Alterre, as it was properly called, and feel himself falling toward it through the clouds faster than anything could possibly go to stop light as a feather with his feet brushing the wave—tops; maybe he would change his mind. He could smell the salt. He could feel the wind. He could see the lifted jelly sails of a kronkaeur fleet above the white-edged swell.
“Aw not these jellyfish guys again,” said Kyle.
“No no no, this is different.” Salim stood beside him above the waves. “Look, this is really cool.” He folded his hands and leaned forward and flew across the ocean, Kyle a heartbeat behind him. He always thought of those Hindu gods you saw on the prayer cards that blew into the compound from the street shrines. His dad didn’t like those either. They arrived over the kronkaeur armada, beating through a rising ocean on a steady breeze, topsails inflated. When the huge, sail-powered jellyfish had appeared, Kyle had been so excited at his first experience of a newly evolved species that the vast, inflatable monsters had sailed like translucent galleons through his dreams. But all they did was raise their triangular sails and weave their tentacles together into a huge raft-fleet and bud off little jellies that looked like see-through paper boats. Once the initial thrill of being part of the global game-experiment to start life on Earth all over again and see how it evolved differently had worn off, Kyle found himself wishing that Salim had been given somewhere a bit more exciting than a huge square of ocean. An island would have been good. A bit of continent would have been better. Somewhere things could attack each other.
“Every bit of water on Alterre was land, and every bit of land was water,” Salim had said. “And they will be again. And anyway, everything eats everything out on the open ocean.”
But not in a cool way,
Kyle thought.
Apart from his high tech and his skill at soccer, nothing about Salim was cool. At home he would never have been Kyle’s friend. Kyle would probably have beat him about a bit, he was geeky, had a big nose, couldn’t get clothes right—all the wrong labels—and had no idea how to wear a beanie. He went to a weird religious school for an hour every afternoon and Fridays to the mosque down by the river steps where they burned the dead people. Really, they should not be friends at all. Ozzie Ryan, who’d been the team big one before Kyle, said it was unnatural and disloyal, and you couldn’t trust them; one moment they’d be giving you presents, and the next they’d be setting you up to people out there to shoot you. Kyle knew Ozzie Ryan was just jealous.
“Now, isn’t this so cool?” Salim said, his toes brushing the wave-tops. The sculpted upper surfaces of the great ocean-going jellies between the inflatable booms that held out the sails were bloated with bubbles, visibly swelling and bulging as Kyle floated around to a closer angle. Bigger, bigger, now the size of soccer balls, now the size of beach balls, stretching the skin until it split with a gush of acid-smelling liquid, and a host of balloons dashed into the air. They rose in a mass, tethered to their parents by woven strands of tentacles, rubbing and bouncing and rebounding from each other in the wind. They were higher than the sail tops now and Kyle could make out detail; each balloon carried a cluster of stingers and translucent claspers beneath its domed canopy. Blue eyes were grouped in threes and fours. One by one their tethers parted and the balloon-jellies sprang up into the air and were whisked away on the sea breeze. All around him the flotilla was bubbling and bursting into spasms of balloons; they soared up around him, some still tangled together by the tentacles. Kyle found himself laughing as he watched them stream up into the sky until they vanished against the fast-moving clouds. It was definitely undeniably way way way cool.
“It’s a completely new way of reproducing,” Salim said. “It’s a new species!” Kyle knew what that meant. By the rules of Alterre, played out on eleven million computers around the globe, whoever found a new species gave it his or her name. “They’re not kronkaeurs any more. I went and registered them; they’re Mansooris!”