Sunspot Jungle: Volume Two Read online

  Other Anthologies from Rosarium Publishing

  APB: Artists against Police Brutality

  Edited by Bill Campbell, Jason Rodriguez, and John Jennings

  Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction

  Edited by Bill Campbell and Francesco Verso

  Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond

  Edited by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall

  The SEA Is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia

  Edited by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng

  Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany

  Edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell

  Cover art and design by John Jennings

  Copyright © 2018 Rosarium Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below:

  Published by Rosarium Publishing

  P.O. Box 544

  Greenbelt, MD 20768-0544

  www.rosariumpublishing.com

  Table of Contents

  INTRODUCTION • Daniel José Older

  ATTENUATION • Nick Harkaway

  SLIPPERNET • Nisi Shawl

  TERPSICHORE • Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría

  STRAIGHT LINES • Naru Dames Sundar

  THE DRAGON STAR • Pavel Renčín

  THE MOUSER OF PETER THE GREAT • P. Djèlí Clark

  THE LITTLE BEGUM • Indrapramit Das

  THE BEARER OF THE BONE HARP • Emmi Itäranta

  MADAME FÉLIDÉ ELOPES • K.A. Teryna

  WAITING FOR THE FLOOD OR THE BATHERS • Natalia Theodoridou

  SIN EMBARGO • Sabrina Vourvoulias

  COPY AND PASTE • Yoav Rosen

  ONEN AND HIS DAUGHTER • Dilman Dila

  THE LOVE DECAY HAS FOR THE LIVING • Berit Ellingsen

  PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG ZOMBIE IN CRISIS • Walidah Imarisha

  TYPICAL • Raquel Castro

  MANA LANGKAH PELANGI TERAKHIR? (WHERE IS THE RAINBOW’S LAST STEP?) • Jaymee Goh

  WELCOME TO YOUR AUTHENTIC INDIAN EXPERIENCE™ • Rebecca Roanhorse

  WHICH TREATS OF LÁZARO’S ACCOUNT OF THE FRIENDSHIP HE SHARED WITH A BLIND TRAFFICKER IN STORIES AND THE MISFORTUNES THAT BEFELL THEM • Carlos Yushimito

  TOMORROW’S DICTATOR • Rahul Kanakia

  GEPPETTO • Carlos Hernandez

  OTHER METAMORPHOSES • Fábio Fernandes

  LETTERS AS SWEET AS HONEY • Foz Meadows

  CONSCIOUSNESS • Zig Zag Claybourne

  YOUNIS IN THE BELLY OF THE WHALE • Yasser Abdel-Latif

  THE CHURILE OF SUGARCANE VALLEY • Vashti Bowlah

  COME TOMORROW • Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

  THE SOULLESS • Walter Dinjos

  SIMULACRUM • Ken Liu

  THE HUMAN I NO LONGER WAS • Jeremy Szal

  THE SONG OF THE SKY • Sanem Ozdural

  TREE OF THE FOREST SEVEN BELLS TURNS THE WORLD ROUND MIDNIGHT • Sheree Renée Thomas

  ROOTING • Isha Karki

  THESE CONSTELLATIONS WILL BE YOURS • Elaine Cuyegkeng

  READ BEFORE USE • Chinelo Onwualu

  SOUL CASE • Nalo Hopkinson

  BIG THRULL AND THE ASKIN’ MAN • Max Gladstone

  THE LANGUAGE OF KNIVES • Haralambi Markov

  THE GOOD MATTER • Nene Ormes

  NO OTHER CITY • Ng Yi-Shen

  SEÑORA SUERTE • Tananarive Due

  THE BOIS • R.S.A. Garcia

  THE SPOOK SCHOOL • Nick Mamatas

  THE LITTLE DOG OHORI • Anatoly Belilovsky

  SUNSET • Hiroko Minagawa

  GHOSTALKER • T.L. Huchu

  I TELL THEE ALL I CAN NO MORE • Sunny Moraine

  INCREASING POLICE VISIBILITY • Bogi Takács

  THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD • Carmen Maria Machado

  THE UNVANISHED • Subodhana Wijeyeratne

  OUR TALONS CAN CRUSH GALAXIES • Brooke Bolander

  THE MEMCORDIST • Lavie Tidhar

  THE MIGHTY SLINGER • Karen Lord and Tobias S. Buckell

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  for the Kid

  and

  Diaper Scientific

  Introduction

  History teems with monsters. I started writing historical fantasy recently and was only slightly surprised when it turned out an actual once living person was more villainous and horrifying than any bad guy I could’ve dreamt up. Treacherous skullduggery of all flavors creeps from the pages of our archives, and of course, the past is alive and well, walks with us, and more than that: we keep it alive, consecrate it with statues enshrined in sacred pillared halls and weathered plaques. We honor our monsters, those authors of devastation, as Baldwin dubbed them, and then pretend we’ve only noticed their noble attributes and hope everything else just fades away.

  But history holds monsters much bigger than those individuals. They are harder to see—we’re so trained to focus on the one and only. But their wingspan crosses oceans, and the destruction they’ve caused reaches through the passage of time, curses generations and generations; they leave widening ripples of war and havoc in their wake. Because they don’t have single faces, they are even harder to pin down than the singular men and women who rose to the height of power and remained in our memories. These larger monsters become imprinted on our DNA, insidious, and seem to be a part of the very fabric of life, a natural occurrence. And we build great monuments to them, too: huge walls demarcating imaginary lines in the earth, topped with machine guns and patrolled by vast armies of killing technology that are themselves a tribute to the great monsters of history. But more than all those physical tributes, we have honored those monsters with story.

  Story, the mechanism of so much of our madness, can be a guiding light or the deepest of shadows. For so long, the gatekeepers of narrative have kept a tight rein on which stories we lift up and which we never hear about. Historical memory, it turns out, is a finite resource, and so a flashpoint of conflict. Story is the hinterlands where mythmakers crash into each other, feed armies wholesale into the mire that then stumble out, changed forever, and change our perception of the world in the process. Story, and the vast industries that package and distribute stories across the world, has lifted us up and shut us down. It has given life and taken it away, time and time again.

  And here we stand, once again at the crossroads. This the age of children detention camps and mass deportations, of ongoing state violence and fascism on the march. This is the age of counternarratives, of protest, of fighting back. We’ve long needed collections like Sunspot Jungle, anthologies that bring together voices from across the world to sing about impossible, difficult truths through the lens of the imagination. We’ve long needed stories about giant robot mausoleums on anticolonial tears across the Indian countryside and sentient, anxiety-ridden spaceships, and Russian house spirits who help a boy from far away discover his own power through storytelling. I am so glad Sunspot Jungle Book 2 is in the world, because the world has been hungry for it for a very long time.

  Daniel José Older

  Attenuation

  Nick Harkaway

  Sonny Hall, the space traveller, in the darkness of the recovery room, blinks and comes to himself. He can still see the tumbler falling from his hand, the cocktail party lit in a warm yellow haze and the girl from He
idelberg grinning at him like a cat. He can feel the slick surface of the glass slipping between thumb and finger, can pinpoint the moment when the remaining friction is too slight to prevent it surrendering to gravity. The paper umbrella drops end over end, ice cubes skitter across the polished concrete of the apartment’s floor.

  He opens his mouth to say “What?”

  “Hush,” the technician says, high and strained, “it’s okay. You’re fine.”

  Until this moment it had not occurred to Sonny that he might not be fine, but the transparency of the lie causes him to reexamine. He feels ghastly: as if he has grit in the joints and skin and yet is somehow made of jelly. He imagines that his whole body has been transformed, is now made of whatever goes into eyeballs, and all that eyeball stuff is dry and hung over.

  “You’re not fine,” another voice says firmly. “Tell me exactly what happened in London.”

  He suspects there may have been Swedish whisky and—he licks dry teeth—potatoes roasted in goose fat. He can taste colours.

  “Synaesthesia is a temporary companion effect,” the second voice says. “Ignore it. Did you do this to yourself? Are you making money on it? We get that. People are stupid enough to do that. Are you that stupid? Because it will kill you.”

  He must have spoken aloud. That’s excellent. But this is clearly not Nieuwsterdam, not even close. On the wall, block letters read simply “Halfway.” So this is the Halfway Station. They must have pulled his signal when they saw something was wrong. Is something wrong?

  “He’s dissociated,” the technician says primly. The sheriff—the uniform has a star on it, and Sonny can actually hear the theme from High Chaparral glinting off it—doesn’t care about that either. He sings along a bit, then stops.

  “Did I do wha’ to m’self?” a new voice says. It’s a good voice. It’s catching somewhat as if the speaker has a mouthful of peanut butter, but in the flow it’s deep and buttery. A voice for the seduction of valkyries. It resonates in Sonny’s chest, plucks at his gut. Oh. That’s me.

  “Your old corpse,” the sheriff says. “It wasn’t burned. It’s active. You’re in two places at once. You have attenuation sickness.”

  The umbrella flies upwards, dragging the glass and the ice cubes with it. The smiling girl slips her arms around his chest and buries her face in the crook of his neck. He returns the favour, and all the lights come on at once.

  Transit is last decade’s new new thing. What once was wondrous is now banal, and instead of taking time to be amazed at what it implies, people complain at the paperwork, at the limited options, at the frequent flier rewards being insufficient. Transit has come of age, become ubiquitous, and now no one cares. But even a few years ago, it was miraculous. A simple enough idea, fiendishly hard to implement—until it was done. Information can be transmitted instantly across distances to boggle the human mind. The human mind itself is a clever thing made of information, a self-animating bundle of entangled strands which in the proper medium will unfold and catch the mundane physical ground and function but which can, with certain reservations, be plucked out of that soil, folded up, and sent. In this manner, with some preparation, a person might travel across galactic space. And indeed one can.

  The logistical preparation is not trivial. It includes the creation of a conduit (vastly complicated) and the presence of a suitable host platform at the far end (relatively simple). Probes filled with durable storage technologies and microconstruction engines must be fired out to far away planets, accelerated and decelerated more violently than any human frame could withstand. Many of them are lost, of course, but some arrive and far away and alone create landing pads and accommodation for incoming minds. The first through are pioneers and scientists, but the second wave are homesteaders and tourists.

  The greatest difficulty is in completing the transfer. The silly string nests of information which are people are recalcitrant about leaving one home for another. They are reluctant travellers at best. Thus, two possibilities: for short trips, the original body can be made dormant, chilled, and stored. Longer stays away necessitate the absolute destruction of the beautiful corpse. Age-based mortality is no longer inevitable and population less of a concern with worlds spreading out before each wave of probes.

  As transit becomes commonplace, so too it becomes a little less sterile and reputable. There are transit crooks, transit loopholes, a transit demimonde. But the wise traveller knows one thing above all: the service provider must be of absolute probity. Absolute. Because even slight residue of the corpse left behind will, after more than a week or so, induce a jet lag of the soul, a distant echo dragging the mind back and forth between worlds, both corpses eventually dying for lack of constant anima.

  The phenomenon is called attenuation sickness. It occupies a place in the culture somewhere between the tuberculosis of poets and cancer from smoking; romantic yet fractionally self-inflicted, tragic yet educational. There’s a moral sense that you had to have done it to yourself although occasionally it can happen by chance.

  Sonny Hall can’t remember doing it to himself. But then he can’t remember much of the last few days. Sitting in the grey holding room—not a cell, not a hospital suite, just how people live in the Halfway station, in rooms made of varnished composite bricks and extruded steel fittings—he stares up at the stand holding his saline and tries to put it together. He closes his eyes meditatively and waits for flashes of his recent past, but it doesn’t happen. He opens them again.

  “You can use the long link relay,” the sheriff says. “Call people. That might spark something.” Sonny’s convenient amnesia annoys him. It annoys Sonny, too—and he doesn’t find it even slightly convenient—but he wants memory to come spontaneously. It is a challenge, a reassertion of control. His attenuation will begin to betray him in hours, will kill him in days, and he needs to demonstrate that he still belongs to himself, that his new body—broad where the old one was narrow and brooding and physical where once he was effete—really is his and not some stranger’s. He remade himself for this journey, despite all that talk of embodied cognition—or because of it.

  The sheriff wrinkles his nose. It’s a big nose with long, lean nostrils. Too long, in Sonny Hall’s perception. Creepy long. Weird fingernails, too, which wrap around the finger so that, as the sheriff taps his hands on the steel desk, there’s a sharp click like a dog walking. Chack chack chack chack. The sheriff is Caucasian, Sonny figures, in the sense of coming from the Caucasus Mountains. He catches himself: no. The body comes from a Caucasus stemline, imported here on a probe, built from scratch. If the sheriff has a belly button, it is a skeuomorph, the conceptual legacy of an old technology.

  Sonny resists the urge to examine his own stomach. Instead, he looks around properly at where he is. Everything in Halfway is made from local materials, everything has a different feel from how it is at home. 3D printed replicas of Earth objects. Frank Lloyd Wright designs rendered in stone dust and resin, injection moulded steel. Plastics are easy. There’s no wildlife here, not really, so no furs or leathers. No cottons either. Jars line the walls with green stuff in them: transit station’s version of potted plants. There aren’t even insects—nothing for them to eat. No roaches. For the first time in his life, Sonny Hall is billions of light years from a cockroach.

  He steeples his fingers and hopes the sheriff will do the same. Kinesics. Sonny knows a few things about human behaviour, that is his métier. Human stress analysis and behavioural dynamics, individual and group, Class II. Never bothered to finish the Class I section. Class II is good enough for most practical purposes, and Class I involves a lot of dry academic background. Boring as hell.

  Class II is good enough here, too. The sheriff stops tapping and leans forward to match Sonny’s posture, to make him feel at ease. Impending death’s good for something: gravitas comes with it, free of charge.

  When the sheriff has gone—he clearly wants to sit in, but there’s no way that’s happening—Sonny phones home. He starts
with friends or rather with friendly acquaintances. He’s going to circle inwards, hoping that the outer limits will trigger his memory without anyone revealing things he ought to have first person. Also, this way he doesn’t have to discuss his attenuation with anyone who will tell him he’s being brave or he’s going to be fine.

  From talking to the sheriff, he already knows that his old corpse is AWOL. The brief flutter of hope that his sickness was caused by a few stray entangled bits of brain and bone was thus disposed of; this situation results from deliberate action on someone’s part. The sheriff seems to think Sonny is personally involved, which he devoutly hopes is true. If he is, then presumably he had a plan for not dying from it, for receiving lots of money. Maybe even his amnesia is part of the plan although, if it isn’t, he has to consider the possibility that the amnesia is the problem that will cause him to die rather than survive, cause him to miss some window of action to which he is committed in order to redeem the situation. This is partly why he is so keen to regain his memory indirectly—he doesn’t want to have to admit to any putative partner in crime that he has no idea what he’s doing. That sort of thing makes people nervous. Nor does he want the sheriff listening in on these discussions though he suspects that is inevitable. That appalling nose is everywhere.

  He calls the girl who brought the girl from Heidelberg—Renate! The smiling German’s name was Renate. Excellent. Early success, though he’s not sure if that’s recovery from amnesia or just something he never forgot.

  “Hey, Justine. It’s me, Sonny. This is my new look.”

  “Oh, wow, hey, Sonny! You look totally different.”

  “New body. You think it suits me?”

  “Wow. I don’t know. Yes, I think so. You look like a gangster.”

  In fact, he picked this corpse to resemble an Anglo-Kenyan actor who once played Hamlet at the Olivier, but to someone like Justine anybody not entirely white was automatically a little dangerous and edgy. He wonders when he stopped noticing that a lot of his friends—a lot of people he knew, anyway—were basically objectionable. Probably about the time he broke up with Liz (or rather, about the time she caught him with … he couldn’t remember who it actually was) and she went to off on a trip around the world in a fury. Auburn Liz, hiding from the sun and doing election monitoring in Haiti or Salvador or … he doesn’t remember. Probably never knew. Angry Liz, fire in everything she did, whose chiefest attraction, he suspects, was her ability to make him care about something even if only by shouting. And who, he had realised as her letters had drifted in and he had forced himself to read about her work with the indigenous population and how they were basically treated like shit by big oil and big pharma and big agri, was a better person than he was by a mile. Which was fine, just fine, his post-breakup self had snarled into the shaving mirror. Screw better people, anyway. But he had ended up here, so maybe she’d had a point. His life had been empty and selfish, after all.