Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Nuri grew restless, but not distressed. Aisha was not in pain yet, but it felt like the times she’d lain too close to an electric radiator on a cold night, and the initially comforting warmth edged toward something damaging.

The force eased off; the glow faded. Aisha checked the data on the buggy’s accelerometer. The whole spike had lasted four minutes: not as long as her calculations had predicted.

She fed the numbers into her model. The buggy had shed enough velocity for the Earth to capture it, but it would swing out to an apogee some hundred thousand kilometers away. And though it would come in close again, it would be moving more slowly than at the first encounter, so the drag would be less. The model showed an excruciating succession of incremental changes, taking sixty-three orbits in almost fifty days before they were low enough to parachute down.

To remain in Medii, hoping for rescue, had been untenable. Any gamble had seemed worthwhile—even if the narrow path home would be flanked by fiery death and slow starvation. But now she understood why Jingyi had made her own choice: what she’d feared most was watching her friend, and the child she’d delivered, perish beside her as the food ran out, the water dried up, the air went stale.

Aisha gingerly opened the tent to give the suit a chance to radiate some heat away. Maybe there were errors in the model still to unfold, in her favor. She felt Nuri shift and nuzzle against her, the broken skin of a rash on her daughter’s cheek warm against her own skin.

Chance wouldn’t save them. If she left this to chance, they would die.

She watched the planet slowly recede. Their speed and altitude the next time they entered the atmosphere were immutable now. Which left… what? The drag would depend on their shape, and the area they presented to the airflow. The sheet was much bigger than the buggy’s frame, in preparation for its later role as parachute, but if she tried to trail it behind her at this point, the unprotected buggy would fry. If she’d brought half the struts from the tower, she might have stretched the sheet out into a larger shield, but they were all sitting uselessly back on the farside.

Nuri slept and woke, fed and shat, oblivious. Aisha could not have faced her dying as a three-year-old in a medical emergency, as a teenager in Medii’s slide into disrepair, or, if the machines all proved resilient, as the loneliest centenarian in history.

But she could not face this either.

She closed her eyes and pictured the beautiful fabric she and Jingyi had toiled so long to weave, billowing out above her as the buggy drifted gently toward some green field or calm sea. Spread out by the force of the air alone. But when they grazed the unbreathably thin mesosphere… how much pressure would it take, from within , to puff the tent out like a balloon?

Not a lot.

Aisha opened her eyes and did some calculations. It was possible. She believed she could spare it and survive.

She forced herself to wait until the perigee was just an hour away, to keep the batteries charging as long as possible. Then she spread the sheet around the buggy and knotted the cords as tightly as she could around the hole at the back. It would not be a hermetic seal, but it only had to retain its contents for a few minutes.

She checked the time, then told the suit to start venting.

The tent remained limp and crumpled.

“Vent more,” she commanded.

“That would put reserves below safe levels,” the suit replied.

Aisha placed her gloves against the sides of her helmet and turned it. The suit tried to dissuade her, but Jingyi had proved that it could be done. As the seal was breached the air hissed out and the tent inflated, the fabric taut against the vacuum.

Aisha reversed the twist. She took a breath. It felt inadequate. She took a deeper one; she was dizzy, but she was not suffocating.

The silica balloon began to shudder, buffeted by the thin, fast air outside. Aisha felt the growing heat on her face, breaking through her light-headedness.

The drag pushed her forward: a little weaker than before, but much more than her dire calculations had predicted for the status quo. She watched the time pass, until she was weightless again. Three minutes.

She crunched the accelerometer data. Six more orbits, and they would be spiraling down to Earth.

Nuri started babbling happily, making sounds Aisha had never heard before. Aisha let herself weep, for Gianni, for Jingyi, for whatever havoc she was yet to find below.

Then she composed herself and started singing softly to her daughter, waiting for the time they could look into each other’s eyes again.

Chinelo Onwualu (chineloonwualu.wixsite.com/author) is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto, Canada. She is co-founder of Omenana , a magazine of African speculative fiction, and former chief spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. She is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion West Writers Workshop, which she attended as the recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. Her short stories have been featured in Slate, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, The Kalahari Review , and Brittle Paper as well as in the anthologies New Suns and Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond .

I suppose you could say that it started with the storm.

I hadn’t seen one like it in thirty years. Not since I moved to Tkaronto, in the Northern Indigenous Zone of Turtle Island—what settler-colonialists still insisted on calling North America. I’d forgotten its raw power: angry thunderclouds that blot out the sun, taking you from noon to evening in an instant, then the water that comes down like fury—like the sky itself wants to hurt you.

As I sat in the empty passenger terminal of the Niger River Harbourfront waiting for the bus, I watched as rain streaked the cobbled walkways in silver, sluicing through the narrow depressions between the solar roadway and the gutter. The ferry was long gone, moving up the river into the heart of Igboland, leaving me stranded in an alien world.

A holographic advertisement for some sort of fertility treatment played out on a viewscreen across the street. It was distorted by the haze of rain, but I made out a plump, impossibly happy woman in a crisp red gele—her skin glowing in the golden light of a computer-generated sun—clutching a newborn baby and dancing toward a household shrine. She was surrounded by celebrating family members, but she stopped before a regal older couple to whom she presented the child. The old man took the child with a benevolent smile, while the woman stretched her hand toward the young mother, who was now kneeling before them, in a benediction. The ad ended with a close-up of the beaming mother and the logo of the fertility treatment company in the corner. I turned away before my ocular implants could sync with the ad’s soundtrack, but I’d already caught the tagline: “Keep New Biafra Alive.”

My AI announced that the bus had arrived. Its interface had switched to Igbo as soon as I passed from Nigeria™ into New Biafra, as neither English nor Anishinaabe were recognized languages here. I hadn’t spoken Igbo in decades, but its musicality returned to me with smooth familiarity—as if it had simply been waiting for its turn in the spotlight. I ignored the ping; I wanted to watch the rain a little longer. Perhaps it would somehow wash this reality away and I could return to the quiet life I’d built for myself on the other side of the Atlantic.

You can’t put it off forever.

I frowned, then sighed. The dead man was right. This was like getting a body mod. You’d be a brand-new person when it was over, but in the meantime it was going to hurt like hell. I put up the hood of my hi-dri, shouldered my backpack, and stepped out into the storm.