Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus and she is on the verge of getting pushed into the closet when a woman appears out of nowhere and starts screaming at the kids. They scatter and run. Margot is trapped, backing into the closet that she had been fighting to stay out of. The woman approaches. She is tidy, flawless even, but her face droops and contorts like a rubber mask without a wearer. “Recognize me,” says the woman.

When I am thirty, Sana, the new researcher at the lab, will tell me what she’s been writing in that notebook of hers. After her first day of work, Sana will have written down her observations about everybody: summaries of the kind of people we all are, predications about what we might do. After working at lab after lab and traveling the worlds, Sana will be confident about her ability to nail people down precisely. She is nice, though. When I ask her what she wrote about me, she’ll reply, “I’m not sure about you yet. You are a tricky one. It will take some time to see.” I’ll know that that means I have the most boring entry with the fewest words.

Sana will be one of those who believe that you cannot find your own timeline. You will not be able to access it, to travel back in time to change one’s life. You can go into other universes and mess the place up and leave, but not your own. We will both know of the many who have tried to find their own timestreams; all have failed. Sana will say, “The universe does not allow it to happen because we cannot be the gods of ourselves,” and this is about as mystical as Sana will ever get.

When Margot is nine, her parents refuse to take her out of school. She asks and she asks and they don’t hear. Margot’s father is high up in the Terraforming division, which has both an image problem and a not-being-good-at-its-job problem. Her parents tell her that it helps them that she attends regular school with the kids of their employees’ employees’ employees’ employees’ employees. It doesn’t matter that Margot hasn’t exactly been the best PR rep.

A while back, the students had studied the Venus Situation in Current Events. The teacher played a video, which showed the disaster as it was happening, everyone in the control room yelling, “Fuck!” The fucks were bleeped out incompletely. You could still hear “fuh.” 1,123 people had died moments after the Terraformers pressed the button. The Terraformers had been trying to transform Venus from a hot gassy mess into an inhabitable, Earth-like place. What actually happened was that everything exploded, the blast even sucking in ships from the safe zone. After the space dust had cleared, they did not find a normal assortment of continents and oceans and sunlight and foliage: what they found was one gross, sopping slop-bucket of a world. A Venus that was constantly, horribly wet. A Venus that, to this day, rains in sheets and buckets, a thousand firehoses spraying from the sky. Iron-gray and beetle-black and blind-eye white: these are the colors of Venus. Forests grow and die and grow and die, their trunks and limbs composting on a wet forest floor, which squeaks like cartilage.

The teacher had stopped the video. “Margot’s father is part of the new Terraforming division,” she said. “He is helping us make Venus a better place to live.” The teacher was too tired to smile, so she made her mouth wider. She had been drafted, had come from New Mexico on Earth. She despaired of her frizzing hair and her achy knees, and she missed her girlfriend a lot, even though it was sad to miss someone who didn’t love you quite enough to follow you somewhere shitty. But, not a ton of lesbians on Venus. The teacher was tired of going out on lackluster dates where she and the other woman would briskly concur, Yes, we are both interested in women, that is why we are on this date , maybe not in those words exactly, but you get the drift, and then sometimes they would go home alone and sometimes not.

One kid had turned around and given Margot the finger. Behind her, a girl leaned forward and whispered something like “maggot.” The children in the classroom whispered in their slithering voices, things about Margot, things about her father, who was so bad at his job, things about Venus. Then someone said, “Who said penis?” and laughter rose and exploded outward like a mushroom cloud. “You know who likes penis?” a boy said, in a high, clear, happy voice, as if he had just gotten a good idea. “Your dad.”

When I am thirty, I will visit other timestreams. It will almost feel like traveling into my own past, but not quite. Sometimes there will be big differences: shirts, the configurations in which the children stand, the smell of lunch on their breaths. But there will also be the differences I can’t see. I could stay in one event cluster until I died and I still wouldn’t have seen it all. In one timeline, a single hair on a girl’s head might be blown left. In another, blown right. A whole new universe, created just for that hair. The hair was the star of the whole goddamn show but the hair was not egotistical about it at all. It would simply, humbly change directions when the time came. But always: children will come in; children will run out.

When Margot is nine, her parents are carefully, jazzily, ostentatiously in love. Enraptured by each other and enwrapped in money, their love cushioned against the world and Margot. Native Martians for two generations, Margot’s parents’ families had come from China and Denmark and Nigeria and South Korea. The people do sigh to watch Margot’s parents walk hand in hand—they are lovely alone and sublime together, a gorgeous advertisement for the future, except to see them is to know that the future is the present, it is here, and isn’t that a happy thing?

This pressure is beneficial to their relationship; they perform a little for the world and Margot, and most of all, for themselves; they grin at each other competitively; their real feelings are burnished until they blaze. She has never seen them in sweatpants, whereas Margot herself often changes into pajamas the moment she gets home, which makes Margot’s mother laugh and pat her face and tell her how extremely Korean she’s being. At the dinner table, her parents feed each other the first bite. Sometimes this is yet another competition, a race to construct the perfect tiny arrangement of food, and sometimes it is a simple moment of closeness that doesn’t make Margot want to barf yet (she’s not old enough) but induces in her narrow chest a weird, jealous, proud feeling. She is certain that, someday soon, she will be able to create a role for herself and join them in their performance.

When I am thirty, I will be too tall for my parents to make jokes over my head. They’ll have to look me in the eye when they do it. Or the back of my head.

I will call my mother and she won’t pick up, over and over again. Catching myself in the viddy reflection, I’ll be scared by my face. How perfectly slack and non-sentient it is when nothing prompts it into action. It will remind me of my father’s face, when I watched him alone in the dining room a few weeks before his disappearance. I had woken up in the middle of the night and crept out of my room to get a glass of water. I needed to be quiet, because at night the house stopped being mine. Sometimes it belonged only to my parents. Sometimes the grayscale walls of our aggressively normal house looked alien, as too-smooth as an eggshell, and then the house seemed to belong to no one.

I peered around the corner into the dining room and saw my father sitting at the table alone. He sat still, staring at his computer. Nothing moved. I was frightened but fascinated to see my father this way, all flat surface. Suddenly he reached up and pinched his upper arm hard, on the inner part where it really hurts. He pinched hard, and then he twisted hard, and the tiny violence of his fingers was so at odds with the nothing expression on his face that I wanted to laugh. I pressed my hands to my mouth and tiptoed quickly back to bed.