Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

For them it had been a long rocket trip, and before that, a long and extremely bad month. A month ago, a young woman in a boxy neoprene business suit had visited their house. On their doorstep she squeezed rain out of her hair and asked if she could have a moment of Margot’s mother’s time. She said her name was Hilda. She was immaculately composed, her makeup like a bulletproof vest.

Hilda had told them that their father had put the whole Venus Project in jeopardy. But this meant nothing to Margot’s mom; she couldn’t care less about the Venus Project. Her husband had disappeared, and that’s what mattered to her. Margot’s dad had disappeared, and her mom absolutely did not give a shit about the Venus Project.

It wouldn’t be that hard to kill yourself on Venus. Margot has thought about it. You just walk out of your door and keep walking, don’t change a thing. Sure, you could do that on any planet, but on Venus death would be fast, and it would be predictable: drowning or sea monster.

Her mom questioned all their friends, searched his files, demanded that the authorities scour the oceans, and then paid contractors to continue searching—until she ran out of money. Because that was the thing, there wasn’t much money left. When it came to money, Margot’s dad had lied in every way possible, about the getting of it and most certainly about the spending of it.

Margot and her mother left Venus after that.

When I am thirty, my mother will viddy me, looking great. She’ll have just gotten the hand rejuvenation surgery that she’d been saving up for. “Check it out,” she’ll say, waving springy teenage hands that look like they could repel water. She’ll tell me that things have been great since she moved out. She likes her job at the archive. She likes that her younger coworkers will tell her all the work gossip because they think she’s old and harmless but still fun enough to confide in. Sometimes she’s the subject of the work gossip, like the time she went out on four dates with a researcher who had frequented the archive more and more since she started working there, haunting the checkout desk with increasingly unnecessary requests. My mother will have even gotten back into painting, where she was on a hotter track decades ago, when she was younger than I will be now. She’d studied at Martian Yale and won a big prize and everything.

I’ll remind her that I haven’t heard from her in a long time.

My mother, who usually apologizes so sweetly, whose apologies are heartfelt and devastating but ultimately goldfish apologies, that kind that are forgotten six seconds later, this time will not even say sorry. “There’s been so much going on,” she’ll say. “The most wonderful thing has happened. Your father is alive.” She’ll tell me that she rehired a private investigator on Venus, who has found a man who looks like my father working on a research submersible. There is a photo. Seeing it, I won’t be able to tell whether it’s him, one way or another. I will have so many things to say that they will get stuck—too many people trying to crowd through a narrow door. My mom will just look at my face, which she can tell I’ve changed, I can tell.

“I’m going to Venus to find him,” she’ll say. “I’ve given notice at the archive.”

“You can’t,” I say. “You just moved out.” My new face will not move around as much as my old face, for which I will be grateful.

“Please, darling. I’m going. We’re not going to be able to talk again for a while, so let’s make this nice.”

In my opinion, all my mother has to do is get better and stronger and never call me and, even if she acts like a high school best friend who thinks you’re a dork but puts up with you because they love being worshipped and always hangs up first, that is still all I want and all that is required of her, and the words crowd together and all that will come out is another strangled,

“You can’t.”

My mother will shake her head. She will laugh, looking everywhere but at the screen, at me. “You think that I like everything, that I’m having such a fabulous time and this is the best that can be expected,” she’ll say. Then she’ll look at me. “All of it’s nothing.”

When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus and a woman bursts into the classroom and starts punching the kids. She is not very good at it and the children quickly overpower her. To Margot, this is the height of unfairness: that an adult would bend from her looming height to attack children, so Margot shouts and fights back, too. The others look at her with a new respect. The woman coughs, dabs her bloody nose with the back of her hand, and disappears. By the end of that day the children will have witnessed two miraculous events, and they will never forget either one. Over beers, they will meet at least once a year when they’re in their twenties, once every two years in their early thirties, and so on, the connection degrading but never really disappearing.

When I am thirty, I will give up trying to be pretty. I will give up on trying to have fun. I will decide, instead, that what I need to do is erase myself and then proceed on a new, normal path. Late one night—so late that no one is hanging around, playing Jenga, drinking from beakers, what fun—I will open the door to the lab. Time machines are so beautiful in the moonlight. They look like what they are, like pearls, like eggs you can crawl into and sleep inside until it’s time to be born.

I will initiate a program that I cooked up myself. It will take many attempts, but I have so much time after giving up on having a smiling boyfriend, even skin, rosy lips, a mother who calls, friendly eye contact with just about anyone. Those things, I will come to realize, are cosmetic. What I need to fix is far, far back, before I got twisted and grew wrong, my little gnarled life, the lives of everyone around me warped around it.

Eventually I will do it: I will find my own timeline. After three days without sleep and only one change of underwear and a tender pink groove worn into my left middle finger by my pen, I will type a new code into the time machine. I will fold myself inside, close my eyes gratefully, and when the eggs shudders me into a new universe, I will already know something is different. Something is right.

When Margot is nine, the sun comes out on Venus and her classmates let her out of the closet only after they’ve come back from playing outside. She tries to make her face ready for them, to steel herself, but when they open the door, it all comes undone.

When I am thirty, when Margot is nine, I open the door and she opens the door, I open the door and I remember opening the door. I will be nine, thirty staring right at nine. It is almost more than any human being can endure. I am nine and I am seeing the woman in front of me who I know to be myself and it is changing my life: I grow fuller and happier and even stranger as I stare at my nine-year-old self. I remember that, when I was nine, a woman appeared out of nowhere to stop the children from shutting me in the closet on the day that the sun came out. Because at the moment I am telling the children to go, because the sun will be coming up soon, and I take myself by the hand and I lead myself out of the classroom, through the tunnel, and it is exactly as I remember: I look up at the woman leading me by the hand and her eyes are closed. My eyes are closed. I feel wonderful, and I just want to rest for a moment; I’m dizzy; I’m skating around a shrinking loop and things are moving very quickly now.

I search for what I know, and one thing I know is this: my father is still lost or dead somewhere on Venus. My mother still searches for him. I know I can help them, maybe with the right word to one of them, or myself, at the right time. The right action taken. This life is a good one, but all is not well. Now that I’m here, there is so much left to do.