New Suns

  First published 2018 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN 978-1-78618-203-6

  “Foreword” © 2019 LeVar Burton

  “The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex” © 2019 Tobias S Buckell

  “Deer Dancer” © 2019 Kathleen Alcalá

  “The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations” © 2019 Minsoo Kang

  “Come Home to Atropos” © 2019 Steven Barnes

  “The Fine Print” © 2019 Chinelo Onwualu

  “unkind of mercy” © 2019 Alex Jennings

  “Burn the Ships” © 2019 Alberto Yáñez

  “The Freedom of the Shifting Sea” © 2019 by Jaymee Goh

  “Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire” © 2019 by E. Lily Yu

  “Blood and Bells” © 2019 Karin Lowachee

  “Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister” © 2019 Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “The Shadow We Cast Through Time” © 2019 Indrapramit Das

  “The Robots of Eden” © 2019 Anil Menon

  “Dumb House” © 2019 Andrea Hairston

  “One Easy Trick” © 2019 Hiromi Goto

  “Harvest” © 2019 Rebecca Roanhorse

  “Kelsey and the Burdened Breath” © 2019 Darcie Little Badger

  “Afterword” © 2019 Nisi Shawl.

  The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

  Octavia E. Butler

  This book is dedicated to Sheree Renée Thomas, writer and editor extraordinaire, whose groundbreaking Dark Matter anthology series inspired and empowered the careers of many authors of color, including my own.

  Contents

  Foreword, LeVar Burton

  The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex, Tobias S Buckell

  Deer Dancer, Kathleen Alcalá

  The Virtue of Unfaithful Translations, Minsoo Kang

  Come Home to Atropos, Steven Barnes

  The Fine Print, Chinelo Onwualu

  unkind of mercy, Alex Jennings

  Burn the Ships, Alberto Yáñez

  The Freedom of the Shifting Sea, Jaymee Goh

  Three Variations on a Theme of Imperial Attire, E. Lily Yu

  Blood and Bells, Karin Lowachee

  Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  The Shadow We Cast Through Time, Indrapramit Das

  The Robots of Eden, Anil Menon

  Dumb House, Andrea Hairston

  One Easy Trick, Hiromi Goto

  Harvest, Rebecca Roanhorse

  Kelsey and the Burdened Breath, Darcie Little Badger

  Afterword, Nisi Shawl

  Contributor Biographies

  Foreword

  LeVar Burton

  I AM A huge fan of science fiction! Throughout my life I have marveled at the powerful, even transformative nature of speculative storytelling. The influence science fiction storytelling is having in popular culture right now is amazing to behold, and as a genuine fan of the medium, I truly believe we are in a New Age of speculative fiction. There is a pleasing phenomenon developing in the genre recently: the worthy inclusion of voices of color, which are being paid much overdue attention. Why this is important should be self-evident. However, for those sitting way in the back, consider this: we continually create the world we occupy—in our imaginations first, and only afterwards do we make those visions manifest in this world. So it stands to reason that a healthy society is one that respects and honors the voices of ALL of its components. For too long, the voices and visions for our future have been provided, for the most part, by and from a culturally European (if not Eurocentric) perspective. However, there is change afoot. The works of Octavia E. Butler are becoming mainstream, and names like Nnedi Okorafor and Lesley Nneka Arimah are bringing much needed flavor to the narratives that help shape our future.

  I’m also a sucker for a good short story. In fact, reading short fiction is one of my favorite pastimes. I read a lot in this genre, and producing a podcast that celebrates the short story, LeVar Burton Reads, has not only deepened my love for the form, it has also provided me a platform to help audiences discover visionary voices.

  Nothing less than mastery is required from the storyteller who must grab an audience, create compelling characters, build the requisite conflict/resolution, deliver a satisfying conclusion (often with a twist), and do it all in five to fifty pages. Whenever I am reading for the purest of pleasure, I am likely to have an anthology of science fiction short stories in my hand. Such as this one.

  From the haunting, lyrical, “Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister,” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, to Anil Menon’s “Robots of Eden,” about a man’s struggle to reconcile his feelings in an age where enhanced sensorial modification is commonplace, these stories are delivered by vibrant, authentic voices bursting to weigh in on the human condition and our journey of human evolution.

  There are familiar voices, like that of Steven Barnes, an OG in the game, who delivers a wickedly satiric look at an advert targeted to a special demographic, interspersed with those with whom you may not be familiar: Jaymee Goh, Darcie Little Badger, Indrapramit Das. These are voices that are sorely needed if we are to chart a course for humanity that does not result in the destructive practices of our past.

  The exploration of space and our eventual close encounters with other intelligent species will require us to leave our “colonizer” mentality behind and embrace an attitude of openness and humility we have yet to cultivate, let alone master. When a world leader advocates for the creation of a militaristic Space Force to exercise “dominance” in the heavens, we are moving further than ever from Gene Roddenberry’s United Federation of Planets.

  Instead, our exploration into the unknown should cause us to examine who we are as sentient beings, and science fiction as a tool for social change makes for a most welcome companion on our journey. You are about to read one of the finest collections of short stories from the world of speculative fiction I have ever encountered. The stories contained within will delight your sensibilities, inspire your wonderings, and connect you to your humanity, which is the point of good storytelling—but, you don’t have to take MY word for it!

  The Galactic Tourist Industrial Complex

  Tobias S. Buckell

  WHEN GALACTICS ARRIVED at JFK they often reeked of ammonia, sulfur, and something else that Tavi could never quite put a finger on. He was used to it all after several years of shuttling them through the outer tanks and waiting for their gear to spit ozone and adapt to Earth’s air. He would load luggage, specialized environmental adaptation equipment, and crosscheck the being’s needs, itinerary, and sightseeing goals.

  What he wasn’t expecting this time was for a four hundred pound, octopus-like creature to open the door of his cab a thousand feet over the new Brooklyn Bridge, filling the cab with an explosion of cold, screaming air, and lighting the dash up with alarms.

  He also definitely wasn’t expecting the alien to scream “Look at those spires!” through a speaker that translated for it.

  So, for a long moment after the alien jumped out of the cab, Tavi just kept flying straight ahead, frozen in shock at the controls.

  This couldn’t be happening. Not to him. Not in his broken down old cab he’d been barely keeping going, and with a re-up on the Manhattan license due soon.
>
  TO FLY INTO Manhattan you needed a permit. That was the first thing he panicked about, because he’d recently let it lapse for a bit. The New York Tourism Bureau hadn’t just fined him, but suspended him for three months. Tavi had limped along on some odd jobs; tank cleaning at the airport, scrubbing out the backs of the cabs when they came back after a run to the island, and other muck work.

  But no, all his licenses were up to date. And he knew that it was a horrible thing to worry about as he circled the water near the bridge; he should be worrying about his passenger. Maybe this alien was able to withstand long falls, Tavi thought.

  Maybe.

  But it wasn’t coming up.

  He had a contact card somewhere in the dash screen’s memory. He tapped, calling the alien.

  “Please answer. Please.”

  But it did not pick up.

  What did he know about the alien? It looked like some octopus-type thing. What did that mean? They shouldn’t have even been walking around, so it had to have been wearing an exoskeleton of some kind.

  Could that have protected it?

  Tavi circled the water once more. He had to call this in. But then the police would start hassling him about past mistakes. Somehow this would be his fault. He would lose his permit to fly into Manhattan. And it was Manhattan that the aliens loved above all else. This was the “real” American experience, even though most of it was heavily built up with zones for varying kinds of aliens. Methane breathers in the Garment District, the buildings capped with translucent covers and an alien atmosphere. Hydrogen types were all north of Central Park.

  He found the sheer number of shops fun to browse, but few of them sold anything of use to humans. In the beginning, a lot of researchers and scientists had rushed there to buy what the Galactics were selling, sure they could reverse engineer what they found.

  Turned out it was a lot of cheap alien stuff that purported to be made in Earth but wasn’t. Last year some government agency purchased a “real” human sports car that could be shipped back to the home planet of your choice. It had an engine inside that seemed to be some kind of antigravity device that got everyone really excited. It exploded when they cracked the casing, taking out several city blocks.

  When confronted about it, the tall, furry, sauropod-like aliens that had several other models in their windows on Broadway shrugged and said it wasn’t made by them, they just shipped them to Earth to sell.

  But Galactics packed the city buying that shit when they weren’t slouching beside the lakes in Central Park. If Tavi couldn’t get to Manhattan, he didn’t have a job.

  With a groan, Tavi tapped 9-1-1. There were going to be a lot of questions. He was going to be in it up to his neck.

  But if he took off, they’d have his transponder on file. Then he’d look guilty.

  With a faint clenching in his stomach, Tavi prepared for his day to go wrong.

  TAVI STOOD ON a pier, wearing a gas mask to filter out the streams of what seemed like mustard gas that would seep out from a nearby building in DUMBO. The cops, also wearing masks, took a brief statement. Tavi gave his fingerprint, and then they told him to leave.

  “Just leave?”

  There were several harbor patrol boats hovering near where the alien had struck the water. But there was a lack of urgency to it all. Mostly everyone seemed to be waiting around for something to happen.

  The cop taking Tavi’s statement wore a yellow jumpsuit with logos advertising a Financial District casino (Risk your money here, just like they used to in the old stock market! Win big, ring the old bell!). He nodded through his gas mask as he took notes.

  “We have your contact info on file. We’re pulling footage now.”

  “But aren’t you going to drag the river?”

  “Go.”

  There was something in the cop’s tone that made it through the muffled gas mask and told Tavi it was an order. He’d done the right thing in an impossible moment.

  He’d done the right thing.

  Right?

  He wanted to go home and take a nap. Draw the shades and huddle in the dark and make all this go away for a day. But there were bills to pay. The cab required insurance, and the kinine fuel it used, shipped down from orbit, wasn’t cheap. Every time the sprinklers under the cab misted up and put down a new layer, Tavi could hear his bank account dropping.

  But you couldn’t drive on the actual ground into Manhattan, not if you wanted to get a good review. Plus, the ground traffic flow licenses were even more whack than flying licenses because the interstellar tourists didn’t want to put up with constant traffic snarls.

  Trying to tell anyone that traffic was authentic old Manhattan just got you glared at.

  So: four more fares. More yellowed gas mixing into the main cabin of the cab, making Tavi cough and his eyes water. The last batch, a pack of wolflike creatures that poured into the cab, chittering and yapping like squirrels, requested he take them somewhere serving human food.

  “Real human food, not that shit engineered to look like it, but doctored so that our systems can process it.”

  Tavi’s dash had lit up with places the tourist bureau authorized for this pack of aliens that kept grooming each other as he watched them in his mirror.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  He took them to his cousin Geoff’s place up in Harlem, which didn’t have as many skyscrapers bubble-wrapped with alien atmospheres. The pack creatures were oxygen breathers, but they supplemented that with something extra running to their noses in tubes that occasionally wheezed and puffed a dust of cinnamon-smelling air.

  Tavi wanted some comfort food pretty badly by this point. While the aliens tried to make sense of the really authentic human menus out front, he slipped into the hot gleaming stainless steel of the kitchens in the back.

  “Ricky!” Geoff shouted. “You bring those dogs in?”

  “Yes,” Tavi confessed, and Geoff gave him a half hug, his dreadlocks slapping against Tavi. “Maybe they’ll tip you a million.”

  “Shiiiit. Maybe they’ll tip you a trillion.”

  It was an old service job joke. How much did it cost to cross a galaxy to put your own eyes, or light receptors, on a world just for the sake of seeing it yourself? Some of the aliens who had come to Earth had crossed distances so great, traveled in ships so complicated, that they spent more than a whole country’s GDP.

  A tip from one of themcould be millions. There were rumors of such extravagances. A dish boy turned rich suddenly. A tour guide with a place built on the moon.

  But the tourism bureau and the Galactic-owned companies bringing the tourists here warned them not to overpay for services. The Earth was a fragile economy, they said. You didn’t want to just run around handing out tips worth a year of some individual’s salary. You could create accidental inflation, or unbalance power in a neighborhood.

  So the apps on the tourist’s systems, whatever types of systems they used, knew what the local exchange rates were and paid folk down here on the ground proportionally.

  Didn’t stop anyone from wishing, though.

  Geoff slid him over a plate of macaroni pie, some peas and rice, and chicken. Tavi told him about his morning.

  “You shouldn’t have called the police,” Geoff said.

  “And what, just keep flying?”

  “The bureau will blacklist you. They have to save face. And no one is going to want hear about a tourist dying on the surface. It’s bad publicity. You’re going to lose your license into Manhattan. NYC bureau’s the worst, man.”

  Tavi cleaned his fingers on a towel, then coughed. The taste of cinnamon came up strong through his throat.

  “You okay?”

  Tavi nodded, eyes watering. Whatever the pack out there was sniffing, it was ripping through his lungs.

  “You need to be careful,” Geoff said. “Get a better filter in that cab. Nichelle’s father got lung cancer off a bunch of shit coming off the suits of some sundivers last year, doctors couldn’t do nothing fo
r him.”

  “I know, I know,” Tavi said between coughs.

  Geoff handed him a bag with something rolled up in aluminum foil inside. “Roti for the road. Chicken, no bone. I have doubles if you want?”

  “No.” Geoff was being too nice. He knew how Tavi was climbing out from a financial hole and had been bringing by “extras” after he closed up each night.

  Most of the food here was for non-human tourists, variations on foods that wouldn’t upset their unique systems. Tavi had lied in taking the tourist pack here; the food out front was for the dog-like aliens. But the stuff in the bag was real, something Geoff made for folk who knew to come in through the back.

  Tavi did one more run back to JFK, and this time he flew a few loops around the megastructure. JFK Interspacial was the foot of a leg that stretched up into the sky, piercing the clouds and rising beyond until it reached space. It was a pier that led to the deep water where the vast alien ships that moved tourists from star to star docked. It was the pride of the US. Congress had financed it by pledging the entire country’s GDP for a century to a Galactic building consortium, so no one really knew how to build another after it was done, but the promise was that increased Manhattan tourism would bring in jobs. Because with the Galactics shipping in things to sell here in exchange for things they wanted, there wasn’t much in the way of industrial capacity. Over half the US economy was tourism, the rest service jobs.

  Down at the bottom of JFK, the eager vacationers and sightseers disgorged into terminals designed for their varying biologies and then were kitted out for time on Earth. Or, like Tavi’s latest customer, just bundled into a can that slid into the back of a cab, and that was then dropped off at one of the hotels dwarfing Manhattan’s old buildings.

  When the drop-off of the tourist in a can that Tavi couldn’t see or interact with was done, he headed home. That took careful flying over the remains of La Guardia, which pointed off from Brooklyn toward the horizon, the way it had ever since it collapsed and fell out stable orbit.