Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year. Volume 10

Yes all the entertainment and all the products that can touch us are Chinese. Business is Chinese, culture is Chinese. Yes at times it feels like the Chinese blanket us like a thick tropical sky. But only because there is no market to participate in. Not for humans, anyway.

The AI know through correlations, data mining, and total knowledge of each of us exactly what we will need, want, love, buy, or vote for. There is no demand now to choose one thing and drive out another. There is only supply, to what is a sure bet, whether it’s whores or bouncy shoes. The only things that will get you the sure bet are force or plenty of money. That consolidates. The biggest gets the market, and pays the AI for it.

So, I never really wanted to get away from the Chinese. I was scared of them, but then someone raised in isolation by nuns is likely to be scared, intimidated.

I think I just wanted to get away from Papa, or rather what he did to us, all that money – and the memory of those nuns.

A TAXI DROVE us from the docks. You and Emilda sat communing with each other in silence, so in the end I had to turn on, just to be part of the conversation. She was showing us her home, the Mambila plateau, rolling fields scraped by clouds; tea plantations; roads lined with children selling radishes or honeycombs; Nigerians in Fabric coats lighter than lace, matching the clouds. But it was Fabric, so all kinds of images played around it. Light could beam out of it; wind could not get in; warm air was sealed. Emilda’s mother was Christian, her father Muslim like her sister; nobody minded. There were no roads to Mambila to bring in people who would mind.

Every channel of entertainment tried to bellow its way into my head, as data about food production in Mambila fed through me as if it was something I knew. Too much, I had to switch off again. I am a classic introvert. I cannot handle too much information. Emilda smiled at me – she had a kind face – and wiggled her fingernails at me in lieu of conversation. Each fingernail was playing a different old movie.

Baje’s robe stayed the same blue. I think it was real. I think he was real too. Shy.

Lagos train station looked like an artist’s impression in silver of a birch forest, trunks and slender branches. I couldn’t see the train; it was so swathed in abstract patterns, moving signs, voices, pictures of our destinations, and classical Tiv dancers imitating cats. You, dead-eyed, had no trouble navigating the crowds and the holograms, and we slid into our seats that cost a month’s wages. The train accelerated to 300 kph, and we slipped through Nigeria like neutrinos.

Traditional mud brick houses clustered like old folks in straw hats, each hut a room in a rich person’s home. The swept earth was red brown, brushed perfect like suede. Alongside the track, shards of melon were drying in the sun. The melon was the basis of the egussi soup we had for lunch. It was as if someone were stealing it all from me at high speed.

You were gone, looking inward, lost in AIr.

I saw two Chinese persons traveling together, immobile behind sunglasses. One of them stood up and went to the restroom, pausing just slightly as zie walked in both directions. Taking eyeshots? Sampling profile information? Zie looked straight at me. Ghosts of pockmarks on zir cheeks. I only saw them because I had turned off.

I caught the eye of an Arab gentleman in a silk robe with his two niqabbed wives. He was sweating and afraid, and suddenly I was. He nodded once to me, slowly. He was a Voyager as well.

I whispered your name, but you didn’t respond. I didn’t want to latch you; I didn’t know how much might be given away. I began to feel alone.

At Abuja station, everything was sun panels. You bought some chocolate gold coins and said we were rich. You had not noticed the Chinese men but I told you, and you took my hand and said in Portuguese, “Soon we will have no need to fear them any longer.”

The Arab family and others I recognized from the first trip crowded a bit too quickly into the Makurdi train. All with tiny Fabric bags. Voyagers all. We had all been summoned at the last minute.

Then the Chinese couple got on, still in sunglasses, still unsmiling, and my heart stumbled. What were they doing? If they knew we were going and they didn’t like it, they could stop it again. Like they’d stopped the Belize launch. At a cost to the Cooperative of trillions. Would they do the same thing again? All of us looked away from each other and said nothing. I could hear the hiss of the train on its magnets, as if something were coiling. We slithered all the way into the heart of Makurdi.

You woke up as we slowed to a stop. “Back in the real world?” I asked you, which was a bitchy thing to say.

The Chinese man stood up and latched us all, in all languages. “You are all idiots!”

Something to mull over: they, too, knew what we were doing.

THE MAKURDI TAXI had a man in front who seemed to steer the thing. He was a Tiv gentleman. He liked to talk, which I think annoyed you a bit. Sociable, outgoing you. What a waste, when the AI can drive.

Why have humans on the Voyage either?

“You’re the eighth passengers I’ve have to take to the Base in two days. One a week is good business for me. Three makes me very happy.”

He kept asking questions and got out of us what country we were from. We stuck to our cover story – we were here to teach Lusobras to the Nigerian Air Force. He wanted to know why they couldn’t use the babblefish. You chuckled and said, “You know how silly babblefish can make people sound.” You told the story of Uncle Kaué proposing to the woman from Amalfi. He’d said in Italian, “I want to eat your hand in marriage.” She turned him down.

Then the driver asked, “So why no Chinese people?”

We froze. He had a friendly face, but his eyes were hooded. We listened to the whisper of his engine. “Well,” he said, relenting. “They can’t be everywhere all the time.”

The Co-op in all its propaganda talks about how international we all are: Brasil, Turkiye, Tivland, Lagos, Benin, Hindi, Yemen. All previous efforts in space have been fuelled by national narcissism . So we exclude the Chinese? Let them fund their own trip. And isn’t it wonderful that it’s all private financing? I wonder if space travel isn’t inherently racist.

You asked him if he owned the taxi and he laughed. “Ay-yah! Zie owns me.” His father had signed the family over for protection. The taxi keeps him, and buys zirself a new body every few years. The taxi is immortal. So is the contract.

What’s in it for the taxi, you asked. Company?

“Little little.” He held up his hands and waved his fingers. “If something breaks, I can fix.”

AIs do not ultimately live in a physical world.

I thought of all those animals I’d seen on the trip: their webbed feet, their fins, their wings, their eyes. The problems of sight, sound and movement solved over and over again. Without any kind of intelligence at all.

We are wonderful at movement because we are animals, but you can talk to us and you don’t have to build us. We build ourselves. And we want things. There is always somewhere we want to go even if it is 27 light years away.

OUTSIDE MAKURDI AIR Force Base, aircraft stand on their tails like raised sabres. The taxi bleeped as it was scanned, and we went up and over some kind of hump.

Ahead of us blunt as a grain silo was the rocket. Folded over its tip, something that looked like a Labrador-colored bat. Folds of Fabric, skin colored, with subcutaneous lumps like acne. A sleeve of padded silver foil was being pulled down over it.

A spaceship made of Fabric. Things can only get through it in one direction. If two-ply, then Fabric won’t let air out, or light and radiation in.