The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 30

  “Because of a dame? You think a dame could do that to me? What’s eating you?”

  “Mercy’s home,” Jacob said, letting his lion-face curl into a snarl.

  “Ee. I see. I’m sorry—”

  “No. Not today,” Jacob said, and logged off. He tore the gauntlets from his hands. Then he saved the game logs to his phone, to remind himself of what a rat Rob was, and stormed out of the Black Nile. It was ten long and dusty blocks home. Jacob stomped and swore his way up the concrete stairs.

  At the top, Mercy was waiting for him.

  “Look,” she said, matching him step for step as he backpedaled down the stairs, “I don’t like it either, Jacob, kweli, all the church ladies up in my face with ‘When are you going to get married, I have a nephew just your age.’ Once I got away I took a taxi here—”

  “Go back to Cambridge and all that stupid grass you can’t touch, and all that colonial-in-the-metropolis crap you like so much.”

  “You do read my emails.” She beamed. “I had wondered.”

  “Get lost.”

  “You have potential up to here, Jacob. You are crackling with the stuff. The problem is, you don’t see it yourself.”

  “Mathe put you up to this.”

  “Nobody put me up to this. What I wanted to say was—Jacob, wait. As soon as I have a job, which will be soon, I’m interviewing all over Europe right now—as soon as I’m settled, I want to pay for your university. All you have to do is pick a course.”

  “I hate to break it to you, sis dear, but these days university is free. So take your money and—”

  “I don’t mean university in Kenya. Maybe China. Tsinghua University? Shanghai Tech? Maybe the U.S. Wherever you like. Dream big. Some travel would be good for you.”

  “Mercy,” Jacob said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs. Four steps above him, she wobbled on her acrylic heels, clinging to the balustrade. “This is all I want. I’m happy. Leave me alone.”

  “If you think I’m going to just—”

  “Yes. You are.”

  “Well,” Mercy said, “you have my number. When you change your mind—”

  “I won’t.”

  “Ee, twenty-two years and you’re still as fussy as an infant.”

  “Kwaheri, Mercy.”

  He stepped sideways and waved her down the stairs. Mercy descended. Before she passed him, she put a hand on his shoulder.

  “I care about you,” she said. “Would I be this obnoxious if I didn’t?”

  “Please, find a nice wazungu or wahindi at Cambridge to torture instead of me. Try the maths department. I hear they’re just as odd as you are.”

  A hawkeyed taxi driver slowed and hovered at the curb.

  “Bye, Jacob.”

  “Piss off, Mercy.”

  And Jacob went up to his tiny room and flung himself down, wondering why it felt like an elephant had stepped on his chest.

  Something important that he’d overlooked tickled the back of his eyelids until he awoke.

  Ah. Jacob rolled over in bed and grabbed his penphone. There, in the previous day’s logs, was the anomaly: the moment when Consolata went from starter gear to a hodgepodge of expert-level bits. The game logs showed a line of code injected at the exact time she twisted her left hand into a complicated shape like a mudra.

  Jacob searched online for the snippet of code and found lengthy discussions of a developer-mode trigger in three unpatched, two-year-old, Conifer-based games. After an hour or two of reading he thought he had the gist of it.

  As Jacob, clearly the first customer of the day, came in, the man at Black Nile yawned and waved his hand over the array of keycards.

  “Any of them. Be my guest.”

  Jacob loaded Ogrefall first. Pasting in the code snippet from his phone, he contorted his left hand—here a silver paw—into the shape he remembered and had practiced that morning.

  Blip.

  His rare and beautiful endgame armor was gone. It had been replaced by an eye-smarting farrago of gear. Only now each item showed a purple variable name floating over its center. He could have kicked himself for his carelessness—the Nebula Paladin set had taken sixty-four hours to complete—but wonder and fascination won out over regret. Holding the same awkward mudra as before, Jacob tapped his lotus-stamped breastplate and toggled the number at the end of the variable.

  The lotus transformed into a winged lion rampant, the metal from silver to burnished gold.

  When Jacob raised his eyes, he noticed that the ice demons hissing and swooping nearby had variables too. Soon he was sending them jitterbugging this way and that and spiraling helplessly off the edge of a cliff.

  Was this what the world looked like from the other side?

  The other two games that the tweaker forums mentioned, a historical shooter and a haunted-house platformer, permitted similar manipulations. Jacob stood in the middle of floating words and numbers, changing the world around him with hardly more than a thought. He had become a god in these three small worlds. Ann and Chao would explode from envy. He suppressed a grin.

  Then the screens went dark, and the harsh after-hours lights in the cube flashed on. Jacob struggled out of the VR rig, perplexed. He prodded buttons and lasered the empty wall. Nothing happened.

  The door clicked, and the manager came in.

  “Sorry sir,” he said. “Your account has been banned for cheating. Same thing happened over at the Monsoon Club yesterday. We got the automated warnings just now, straight from Japan. One-month ban from all Japanese games. Very sorry about that.”

  The room spun. Perhaps Oakley’s graphics had been subpar.

  A month? Ann and Chao wouldn’t wait a month. They’d find some new Don’t, fresh out of secondary school or the military or a ruined thirty-year marriage, to replace him. To replace both him and Rob, now.

  “I can see this is not easy news, sir. Not easy for me, either. You are a loyal customer.”

  “All Japanese games.”

  “Correct.”

  “What about other regions?”

  “Cross-platform automatic two-week bans in Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Australia.”

  “But not Africa?”

  “Not Africa. We’re not advanced enough to be asked to sign those agreements yet.”

  “I think—” Jacob swallowed. “I think I’d like to try Duka Stories, if you have it.”

  The manager smiled. “Of course. Supporting the local economy, local artists, local products, that is one of my business goals.”

  Consolata’s game turned out to be a simple duka simulator. Jacob had to clear the ground, hammer the corrugated iron sides of the shop together, and stock its shelves with what he blindly guessed might appeal to the neighborhood. The art was hand-painted, probably by one of Consolata’s friends, the music easy and old-fashioned. The grandmothers who stopped by for spices pinched his cheeks and told him in quavering voices how glad they were to have him there, only couldn’t he make an exception for them on the prices, everything being so expensive these days?

  By the end of his first day in business, an hour into the game, Jacob was bankrupt and rapt.

  Six hours later his business had been flattened twice, once by a student protest, once by askaris demanding protection money. Each time he built it up again, making brightly lettered promises to his worried customers. In the meantime he sent his painted children to school in uniforms with books and pens and crayons, an accomplishment that turned his heart to sugar. The game lacked the gloss that he was used to, but he had met the person who had created it. All of this, from three women!

  An impossible thought arose in him. He refused to look at it directly. No, never. Maybe for money. Enough money. And only for a while.

  “Boss,” he said, emerging from the cube, “you said your brother runs a game studio?”

  “He does,” the manager said.

  “Would he give me a job, do you think?”

  “You should ask him yourself.” The manager closed
the game of bao he had been playing on his ancient iPhone, a bashed-up brick of third-hand tech, and pulled up a number.

  “Yes, I have a young man here, regular customer, plays all the new games, wants to know if you have a job for him.” He turned to Jacob. “He says go ahead, send him your portfolio.”

  “My portfolio?”

  “Yes, art, music, design, whatever it is you want to work in. He says he doesn’t have a portfolio. Hm? Okay. My brother says you should take courses in those things, whatever interests you, and come back when you can do something.” He set the iPhone down.

  “Thanks,” Jacob said, because there was nothing else he could say. He slouched out of the Black Nile, brow furrowed with thought.

  Since there was nowhere else to meet, he invited Ann and Chao to visit his spruced-up duka, where they stood around sipping virtual sodas and blocking customers from their programmed paths.

  Chao said, suspicion dripping from every syllable of his Southern drawl, “Run that by me again.”

  “I’m going to take some university courses so I can get a job, and then when I have enough saved up for a VR rig of my own, I’ll quit and game full-time, twenty-four-seven.”

  Ann said, “I think the only person you’re fooling is yourself.”

  “Don’t be like that. You have no idea how much a rig costs in Nairobi. It’s not like the U.S., where, what, one-third of your monthly stipend buys one? More like two years’ stipend for us. I want to game, but I also need to eat.”

  “If you say so,” Ann said.

  “Plus they’ve banned me from all Japanese-owned servers for a month, and other major regions for the next two weeks. This way I can do something.” Hearing his own words, he stopped.

  “So these courses,” Chao said. “They’re in . . . management? Administration?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Okay. That’s almost as good as not doing anything. I wish you’d said something earlier, though. We could have crowdfunded you a console, as a guild.”

  “My parents would never let me live that down.”

  “We’re going to miss you,” Ann said abruptly. “I mean, Robbie, and now you . . .”

  “Hey,” Jacob said. “I’ll still be online. And I’ll still game with you, once this ban is done.”

  Her character hugged his. “Don’t let the Doers get you.”

  “I won’t.”

  “If you see Rob—” Chao said.

  “Yes?”

  “Never mind.”

  It was, in fact, on a gleaming skybridge of the Chiromo campus of the University of Nairobi that Jacob next saw Robert, two thick textbooks wedged under his arm. Rob walked quickly, with purpose, in the flood between classes; then, with a start, his eyes met Jacob’s, and his face broke into a pleased and embarrassed smile.

  “You caught me,” Rob said.

  “What are you studying?”

  “Astronomy. I wanted to discover a planet, as a kid. Somehow I forgot. Then somebody reminded me.”

  “You and Consolata—”

  “Still together.”

  “Good for you.”

  They stood there awkwardly, toe to toe, as students streamed past.

  “So what brings you here?” Rob said eventually.

  “Intro to Programming.”

  “What? Here? You?”

  “And some art classes.”

  “Art!” Rob laughed, his teeth flashing.

  “I’m going to design games. Please don’t tell Mercy.”

  “I’m not a monster.” Rob paused. “You’ll have to, though. Eventually. And if you’re serious, Ann and Chao—”

  “That will bite.”

  “It will. Also, so you know, I would never say—”

  “I know.”

  “We should play together sometime,” Rob said, punching his shoulder. “Consolata’s releasing her new game next month. It’s called Love and War: The Story of a Doer and a Don’t. There’ll be a party. You should come.”

  “If the beer’s good, maybe. Maybe I will.”

  The two of them knocked knuckles with half-embarrassed, half-conspiratorial smiles. The sun beat down hot and golden on the campus as they passed and went their separate ways, each chasing, in his own heart, down a twisting road, the dim and indeterminate beginnings of a dream.

  MADELEINE

  AMAL EL-MOHTAR

  Amal El-Mohtar’s short fiction has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, and her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories, and The New Voices of Fantasy; in magazines such as Tor.com, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside; and in her own collection of poems and very short stories, The Honey Month. She’s also the author, with Max Gladstone, of an epistolary spy vs. spy novella titled This Is How You Lose the Time War. Amal is the New York Times Book Review’s science fiction and fantasy columnist, and lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats.

  “Madeleine” pairs the emotional discombobulation of mourning and falling in love with the physical unease of starting experimental medication and time travel. It was a 2015 Nebula Award finalist.

  MADELEINE REMEMBERS being a different person. It strikes her when she’s driving, threading her way through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future.

  She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.

  “Tell me about your mother,” says Clarice, the clinical psychologist assigned to her.

  Madeleine is stymied. She stammers. This is only her third meeting with Clarice. She looks at her hands and the tissue she is twisting between them. “I thought we were going to talk about the episodes.”

  “We will,” and Clarice is all gentleness, all calm, “but—”

  “I would really rather talk about the episodes.”

  Clarice relents, nods in her gracious, patient way, and makes a note. “When was your last one?”

  “Last night.” Madeleine swallows, hard, remembering.

  “And what was the trigger?”

  “The soup,” she says, and she means to laugh, but it comes out wet and strangled like a sob. “I was making chicken soup, and I put a stick of cinnamon in. I’d never done that before but I remembered how it looked, sometimes, when my mother would make it—she would boil the thighs whole with bay leaves, black pepper, and sticks of cinnamon, and the way it looked in the pot stuck with me—so I thought I would try it. It was exactly right—it smelled exactly, exactly the way she used to make it—and then I was there, I was small and looking up at her in our old house, and she was stirring the soup and smiling down at me, and the smell was like a cloud all around, and I could smell her, too, the hand cream she used, and see the edge of the stove and the oven door handle with the cat-print dish towel on it—”

  “Did your mother like to cook?”

  Madeleine stares.

  “Madeleine,” says Clarice, with the inevitably Anglo pronunciation that Madeleine has resigned herself to, “if we’re going to work together to help you, I need to know more about her.”

  “The episodes aren’t about her,” says Madeleine, stiffly. “They’re because of the drug.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “They’re because of the drug, and I don’t need you to tell me I took part in the trial because of her—obviously I did—and I don’t want to tell you about her. This isn’t about my mourning, and I thought we established these aren’t traumatic flashbacks. It’s about the drug.”

  “Madeleine,” and Madeleine is fascinated by Clarice’s capacity to both disgust a
nd soothe her with sheer unflappability, “Drugs do not operate—or misfire—in a vacuum. You were one of sixty people participating in that trial. Of those sixty, you’re the only one who has come forward experiencing these episodes.” Clarice leans forward, slightly. “We’ve also spoken about your tendency to see our relationship as adversarial. Please remember that it isn’t. You,” and Clarice doesn’t smile, exactly, so much as that the lines around her mouth become suffused with sympathy, “haven’t even ever volunteered her name to me.”

  Madeleine begins to feel like a recalcitrant child instead of an adult standing her ground. This only adds to her resentment.

  “Her name was Sylvie,” she offers, finally. “She loved being in the kitchen. She loved making big fancy meals. But she hated having people over. My dad used to tease her about that.”

  Clarice nods, smiles her almost-smile encouragingly, makes further notes. “And did you do the technique we discussed to dismiss the memory?”

  Madeleine looks away. “Yes.”

  “What did you choose this time?”

  “Althusser.” She feels ridiculous. “‘In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.’”

  Clarice frowns as she writes, and Madeleine can’t tell if it’s because talk of war is adversarial or because she dislikes Althusser.

  After she buried her mother, Madeleine looked for ways to bury herself.

  She read non-fiction, as dense and theoretical as she could find, on any subject she felt she had a chance of understanding: economics, postmodernism, settler-colonialism. While reading Patrick Wolfe she found the phrase invasion is a structure, not an event, and wondered if one could say the same of grief. Grief is an invasion and a structure and an event, she wrote, then struck it out, because it seemed meaningless.