The Apex Book of World SF 2 (23 page)

Accusations of
Anglocentric attitudes ensued. (An argument much discussed was that Earth is a
really big planet, and they recognised that many things happened outside the
Anglo-American sphere of influence—most of the things that happened in the
world, actually. Earth had come a long way in globalisation and, after all,
time travel was discovered by a team of French, Indian, and Brazilian
scientists in Accra, Ghana, so that was expected.)

The second phase of
research and development was most focused in the matter of geopolitics. Using
systems of co-ordinates and geolocation tools, they managed to make the
time-travelling environment travel around the world as well as in time, so
people could visit other cities in different historical periods instead of
their own. It would seem to be most practical and convenient—until the second
prototype was lost just outside Earth's orbit. (You must be painstakingly
accurate in order to compensate for the travelling of Earth itself around the
Sun and across the galaxy, eventually. Not something to be taken lightly.)

Then it was pointed
out that this apparent flaw could be used as an advantage. It would take a lot
of effort and calculation, but nothing a quantum computer couldn't handle.

Again, 1999 was a
crucial year, much to the dismay of critics and nay-sayers, but for reason
other than the historicity criterion: it was pointed out that the time travel
mechanism would need a slingshot-effect to dislocate the prototype adequately
through the space-time grid and do it safely enough with the maximum degree of
precision and minimum risk.

1999 just happened
to have the Y2K bug. Of course, it could have been any other thing, but why
bother to try and invent it when the bug was already in place, just waiting for
a chance to be useful? The "rollover" from 99 to 00 hadn't played havoc with
data processing as had been feared, but the transition to 2000 in the digital
systems would jumpstart the mechanism and power the slingshot through this
now-called Zero Year and enable the time-travelling environment to go anywhere
in the space-time continuum. And they were not thinking only of Earth.

Humankind discovered
interstellar travel in the mid-22nd Century.

To Wu Yan, for his help and enthusiasm

 

Shadow
Tade Thompson
 
Tade Thompson grew up in
Nigeria (he is Yoruba, which, he says, influences most of his writing) and
currently lives in the United Kingdom. His stories have appeared in Expanded
Horizons, Ideomancer and in the Nigerian writers collective project
In My
Dreams it was Different
.

 

I met a man with no shadow
today.

 

He crossed into the
village limits near dusk, furtive but resolute. He wanted to find the
Mamman
.
He did not understand my description of the route, partly because he spoke
gutter Yoruba learnt from leather traders, and partly because I have a stutter.

I decided to take
him there because I thought it would be a very sad thing losing one's shadow.
He was grateful, but fell silent after our initial conversation. I told him to
wait while I checked my traps, for I am a hunter.

I had caught one
bush rat and the leg of an antelope who had chewed his limb off in order to
escape my pot. I reset the traps under the studious gaze of the man with no
shadow.

The sun hid beneath
the horizon, and even my shadow did not survive. We crossed the brook of tears
without getting our feet wet and waved greeting to the three drinkers at the
palm-wine bar, men with whom I had been circumcised, but whose features had
been blunted by
ogogoro
, their bodies the harvest of a misspent youth.

We walked past my
house and I handed my puzzled wife the bag with the bush rat and my belt of
charms. I kept the rifle slung over my shoulder. The Mamman had magic, but
gunpowder and lead would work on anything that had a heart, shadowed or not.

 

"Your shadow is born
when you are," said the Mamman, "but it outlives you. You should cast a shadow
until your body rots."

 

She was fat, with
massive swinging breasts that held intricate tattoos, and she had a sensual
carelessness about her near-nakedness.

"You may go," she
said to me.

I shook my head. "I
want to hear what he has to say."

"Very well." To the
man, she said: "What have you brought for me?"

The man unwrapped a
small package and lay a dried, blackened object at the Mamman's side. "This is
the trigger finger of the greatest warrior my village has ever known."

"Did you kill him?"
she asked.

"No, but it is mine
to give away." He offered no further explanation.

The Mamman put it
away and, licking her lips, sat back down. "I've known two others who lost
their shadows in my time."

"I did not lose it,"
said the man. "I drove it away."

"Explain, outlander.
I get bored easily and when I'm bored I amuse myself by sucking the brains out
of the eyeballs of mouthy customers."

 

It was a story of war.

 

The man's village
had been outnumbered by invaders from the north. Fair-skinned, heavily-clothed
warriors with curved swords and strange customs. They outnumbered the
indigenous people two to one and had mounted cavalry and bows and arrows.

"The witch doctor
had a solution. He would bring alive our shadows, in the process, doubling the
army strength, but we had to win the battle before sundown because he could
only hold the spell from dawn till dusk of one day. We also had to fight
alongside our counterparts so that they could find their way back to merge just
before sundown. As it turned out, the invaders were so afraid of the dark
warriors that they fled, but the shadow-selves were more…dishonourable."

There was a
massacre, with the slaughter and sodomisation of unarmed men in the process of
surrendering.

"Most of my
villagers allowed this, encouraged it even, but I objected. My shadow wished to
continue, but I tried to prevent it. It tried to turn on me, but I fought it
off. It hissed and sputtered and slinked away, and I did not see it again
before sundown. I have not cast a shadow since. It made my wife and family
uncomfortable and I had heard of the Mamman here. I loaded provisions, left my
kinsmen, and here I am."

 

The Mamman was
silent for a long time. Then she scratched herself absently. Our shadows
flickered in the candlelight, with an eerie gap where the stranger's should
have been.

 

"It's not such a bad
thing to lack a shadow-self," she said.

"Then give me yours,"
said the man.

The Mamman laughed.
It sounded like many jackals at once, and her spittle sprayed around. I dared not
wipe it off my chin. The woman stood and crumbs of something dropped to the
floor. "There are two ways of solving this problem. We can find your errant
shadow or take one from a recently-deceased person. The latter will not look
like you and may not move at exactly the same moment as you, but nobody will
notice who doesn't observe closely. Choose wisely."

 

This is how I came
to be a resurrectionist, digging into the grave of one Saliu Ogunrombi, who had
died in the last wave of Yellow Fever.

 

There was no moon.
There was the rhythmic digging of myself and the man with no shadow. The Mamman
sat on a stool, waiting, smoking.

The ritual itself
was undramatic, and consisted of holding Saliu upright and lighting torches
behind him. The Mamman said something to the resultant shadow and it detached
from Saliu and bobbed over to the stranger.

 

At dawn, I settled
at my wife's side, freshly showered and with no intention of doing the day's
hunting. Her hand drifted between my legs, but grave digging is tiring work and
there was no oak tree for her to climb, just a willow.

 

Before I fell asleep
I remembered the last words the Mamman had said to me, as the man walked away
with his new shadow.

"In a year he will
return to us. To me. He will tell me to release him from this shadow."

"Why?" I asked.

"He will say his
wife has left him and the people of his village shun him. He will say the new
shadow-self has changed his behaviour and he cannot control himself."

I said nothing.

"And he will be
right."

"What is a shadow,
Ma?" I asked. I did not stutter when with her.

She did not answer,
but walked into the twilight. Presently, I had gone home.

I looked at the
walls of my bedroom, at the shadows receding with the rising sun, and the rise
and fall of my wife's chest.

I slept.

 

Shibuya no Love
Hannu Rajaniemi
 
Hannu Rajaniemi's first novel,
The
Quantum Thief
, has been hailed as "brilliant" by John Clute and he has been
called the best new hard SF writer to emerge in recent years. Two more novels
are forthcoming. A Finn, Rajaniemi currently lives in Edinburgh. He holds a PhD
in string theory, and is the director and co-founder of ThinkTank Maths.

 

They were eating takoyaki by
the statue of Hachiko the dog when Norie told her to buy a quantum lovegety.

 

Riina's Japanese was
not very good in spite of two years of Oriental Studies and three months in
Tokyo, and the translation software on her phone did not immediately recognise
the term, so she just stared at the small caramel-skinned girl blankly for a
few seconds, mouth full of fried dough and octopus. "A what?" she managed
finally, wiping crumbs from her lips.

Norie, who sat on
the edge of the fountain and dangled her impossibly tanned legs in the air,
giggled.

"You don't have them
in Finland? How do you meet boys there? Oh, I forgot, you have the sauna!"

"It's not a—" Riina
stopped. The concept of non-erotic unisex nudity in a steamy room was something
only her Canadian friends had grasped so far. "Never mind. Tell me about the
lovegety."

"It's the most
kawaii
thing! I keep mine on all the time. Look!" Norie held up her wrist. Her
phone was embedded in a Cartier platinum bracelet with a jewel-studded Hello
Kitty engraving that her boyfriend Shinichi had given her for her birthday.
Riina had admired it several times, but had not paid attention to the little
teardrop-shaped plastic thing dangling from it until now. It was hardly bigger
than the tip of her index finger, and its pink surface had the characteristic
Teflon sheen of a nanovat-grown product. There was a silvery heart-shaped logo
on one side.

"They had these
already when my mother was a schoolgirl—that's how she met my father! Then they
went out of fashion for several years, but now there is this crazy
otak
in Akihabara making new and better ones. Quantum versions. Everybody has one!"

"So, what does it
do?"

"I can't tell
you—you have to try it! C'mon, let's go-find you one!" Norie leaped up, took
Riina's hand in her own and tugged her towards the techno beat of Shibuya and
District 109 that was its heart. A forest of orange hairdos, brown legs and
spidery eyelashes swallowed the girls. There was a crowd around the statue: it
was one of the few clear landmarks in the district, and tourists loved the
story of the dog who waited for its master for years after his death.

Riina hesitated.
Norie tended to assume that she was equally good at assimilating the new memes
that boiled up from the teenage paradise of Shibuya as her Japanese friends,
who seemed to be able to turn the latest otaku toy into a subculture or a
fashion statement in a matter of minutes. She was starting to become
desensitised to future shock, but the labyrinths of the new and the old in this
country still confused her. She wondered how her father managed: good
protocol/etiquette software, probably. It was simply impossible to figure out
the right kind of bow, the correct form of address towards a senior or a
superior.

Let alone get a
date.

She sighed and
allowed Norie to tow her deeper into the crowd. The Japanese girl's neon-rimmed
eyes were bright, and her small white teeth were flashing, her canary-yellow
backpack bopping up and down.

"Seriously—lovegetys
are sooo kawaii!"

 

The boy looked like
a painted little satyr: silver lips and eyelids, orange ash-streaked hair and a
heavy gold chain around his neck. He couldn't have been older than twelve, but
then, in Shibuya, a fifteen-year-old was ancient and venerable. The drone of
the base beat that seemed to permeate everything in 109 obscured the rapid-fire
exchange between Norie and the boy, but it wasn't long before he smiled
hungrily and held his palm out towards Riina, the little pink thing bright
against his dark skin like a tiny flower. She took it, and it was still warm
from the boy's hand, a living thing almost. Her MasterCard thumbnail sang an
inaudible song to the boy's account, and suddenly she was the proud owner of a
quantum lovegety.

 

Norie gave her a
nymph-like smirk as the satyr-boy vanished into the seething mass of Japan's
young around them.

"Now comes the best
part. We go to Starbucks, and you get to try it out!"

Most of Shibuya was
like a graffiti: clashing, bright, screaming colours over a drab concrete
surface, the clothes shops and holograms and neon signs and rainbow crowds, a
stark contrast to the utilitarian 90s architecture. Starbucks was an exception—an
intricate, cylindrical two-storey glass monstrosity, a ten-metre hologram of
the white-green all-seeing mermaid hovering above it.

The girls sat at a
small table on the second floor, sipping cardboard-flavoured cappuccinos. Norie
helped Riina to calibrate the lovegety: it talked to her old Nokia toothphone
eagerly, a little light blinking in the centre of the silver heart. Menus with
swirling Japanese characters danced on her retina, barely comprehensible. "Get2
setting? What is that?"