Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

The chef had tagged the food with detailed nutritional notes, and it said millet was good for digestive upset. After vomiting his Danzhai lunch yesterday, he couldn’t face more peppers. But the millet cake was good—honey-sweet and crunchy. The egg dumplings were delicious, too. He could eat the whole plate.

Marta pinged him.

I thought you’d never wake up. Listen, don’t worry about the other guests, okay? We’ve had them investigated. They’re all nice, quiet, trustworthy people. They agreed not ask too many questions.

He shoved another dumpling in his mouth. Zhang Lei knew he ought to be grateful but he wasn’t. The three oldsters were getting something out of the deal, too. They would be able to tell stories about him for the rest of their lives. I once shared accommodations with a murderer. Well, not a murderer, I suppose, not exactly, my dear, but a killer. No, I never asked him what happened but you should have seen the disable button on his ID. It said KILLER right under it. I couldn’t help but stare.

Zhang Lei finished the dumplings and claimed the rest of the millet cake. He left the table, still chewing, and slammed the front door behind him.

What did you tell them about me? he asked Marta.

Not much. I said you weren’t responsible for what happened and we’re working to have the disable button removed.

I was responsible, though.

Zhang Lei, we’ve discussed this. Do you want to ping a peer counselor? Talk therapy is effective.

No. I hate talking.

The guest house was part of a trio of houses, fronted by a cabbage patch. Large birds—domestic poultry he guessed—pecked at the gravel walkway that led to the guest house’s kitchen door. Nearby, a huge horned mammal was tethered in the shade, along with a large caged bird that stalked back and forth and shrieked.

Zhang Lei trudged toward a peak-roofed pavilion. The midday sun stood high over the valley, veiled by humid haze. Not at all hot, but in the unfamiliar atmosphere, sweat beaded on his scarred forearms.

The pavilion overlooked the terraced fields descending the valley and the hazy fleet of mountains on the horizon. No blue sky today. He might as well be in a near-Sun-orbit greenhouse hab, deep in the eye of its dome, every sprout, bud, and bloom indexed and graphed. The locals probably used the same agricultural tech here. Each of the green-and-yellow plants in the terraces below was probably monitored by an agronomist up the mountain, watching microsensors buried in the soil and deploying mineral nutrition with pinpoint accuracy.

Zhang Lei pinged one of the plants. Nothing came back, not even an access denial. He tried pinging one of the farmers working far below, then a nearby tree. Still nothing. Frantic, he flung pings across the valley.

All of the Paizuo guest houses answered immediately. A map highlighted various routes up and down the valley. The guideway landing stage sent him the past two days of traffic history and offered average travel times to various down-slope destinations. A lazy stream of ID information flowed from the guest artists, thirty in total.

Several hazard warnings floated over their targets: Watch for snakes. Beware of dog. Dangerous cliff. But no pings from the locals, or any of the crops, equipment, or businesses. Not even from the wooden hand truck upended over a pile of dirt at the side of the path. But no way this village ran everything data-free.

His pings summoned the hospitality fake. It hovered at his elbow, head inclined with a gently inquiring look.

“Why can’t I get a pingback from anything here?” he demanded.

It gave Zhang Lei a generic smile. “Paizuo data streams are restricted to members of the Miao indigenous community.”

“So I can’t find out anything?” His face grew hot with anger. Stuck here for weeks or more, totally ignorant, unable to learn anything or find out how the village worked.

The fake nodded. “I’ll be pleased to answer your questions if I’m able.”

Zhang Lei wasn’t in the mood for crèche-level games. He slapped it down, hard. The fake misted away, immediately replaced by Marta in full length. She had her fists on her hips and didn’t look pleased.

Feeling a little aggressive, Zhang Lei? You didn’t say two words to your fellow guests, and now you’re getting testy with a fake.

I’m sorry, okay? Embarrassing. He should have controlled himself. I hate this place.

No, you don’t. You’re out of your element. Nothing here is any threat to you. She grinned. Not unless you have a phobia of domestic animals.

Hah , he grumbled.

Go for a walk. Do a little sketching. Get familiar with the village. There’s lots to see, and it’s all gorgeous. There’s a reason why artists love Paizuo.

Okay. He booted up his viewcatcher. Marta gave him an approving nod and dissolved.

True, Paizuo was beautiful. From the pavilion, mountains thick with trees stretched sharp and steep over the valley, where green and yellow terraced fields stepped up and down the lower slopes, punctuated by small groups of wooden houses under tall trees. He framed the composition in his viewcatcher. It was perfect, prechewed—the whole reason the pavilion had been built there in the first place. The fang-like form of the tallest mountain clutched in the spiral fist of the golden mean. Nice.

Even though the view was pre-packaged, framing it in his viewcatcher was satisfying. And what a relief to be able to do it openly. Back on Luna, he had to be careful not to get caught using the viewcatcher, or he’d get smacked by one of his teammates or screamed at by his coach. Zhang Lei was allowed to draw cartoons and caricatures, but everything else was a distraction from training and a waste of time and focus.

Total commitment to the game, that’s what all coaches demanded.

“What do you love better, hockey or scribbling on little bits of paper?” Coach had demanded, and then smacked him on the back of the head when he hesitated.

“Hockey,” he answered.

“Right. Don’t forget it.”

So he drew cartoons of his teammates, their rival teams, and stars from the premier leagues they all wanted to get drafted into. He got good. Fast. Accurate. In thirty seconds, he could toss off a sketch that got the whole team hooting. Coach liked it, said it was good for morale. But quick, sketchy work didn’t satisfy. Neither did the digital-canvas painting he snuck past Coach on occasion, but both were better than nothing.

He padded down a trail to the first terrace, flipping his viewcatcher through its modes—thirds to notan to golden mean to phi grid—as he strode along the edge. The earthen berm bounding the terrace was less than a meter wide, and seemed to be made entirely of dirt. The next terrace was ten meters below on his left.

He blacked out edges of the view, widened the margins until nothing was visible outside his constantly expanding and contracting search for a composition. He swept back and forth across the landscape. Then he slipped and fell. The viewcatcher framed a close-up of green plants in brown water.

Zhang Lei lurched sideways, regaining his footing, the right leg of his pants wet to the knee and slimy with mud. He dismissed the viewcatcher and stared incredulously around him.

The matrix of the terraces was liquid, not soil. Water and mud. He’d seen it glinting between the greenery, but he hadn’t realized it was water. And now he was covered in it.

A fleeting thought— I’m going to die here —easily dismissed. All he had to do was watch where he put his feet as he explored.

Paizuo wasn’t what Zhang Lei expected. The village wasn’t all one piece like ancient towns in crèche storybooks. It was spread thin, covering the whole valley, the houses clustered in groups under the trees and separated by fields and paddies. The Miao didn’t build on flat or even sloping land—those areas seemed dedicated to crops. Instead, they chose the precipitous and rocky landscape for their multi-level wooden homes. Each house stood on stilts over the canted landscape, the weight of the structures leaning back on the mountainside. Livestock sheltered in the shade beneath, some tethered or penned, some roaming free.