The Rules Of Utopia

James Bloomer

While James Bloomer is a staunch supporter for optimistic science fiction, he also does not shy away from telling when a DayBreak story didn’t work for him, sometimes remarking that the ‘feel-good’ factor was tuned too low for his liking (or even missing). Make no mistake: I welcome comments and critiques, both positive and negative.

Nevertheless, I think every magazine needs variety: also one dedicated to upbeat SF. So sometimes progress will be a small step, incredibly hardfought. Sometimes progress in one area comes together with decline in another. Sometimes the road ahead is harder than we expected, but sometimes it’s easier than we feared. And sometimes, yes, there will be unmitigated Utopia.

To paraphrase a world famous poem:

Idyllic Utopia, shining bright
In SF’s dystopian night
What immoral hand or eye
Dare propose thy fearless lullaby?

Kidding aside, even James Bloomer’s “The Rules of Utopia” does not come without its price. But yeah, does it shine bright, eventually…

1. No One Is Lonely

The evening sun was still high and golden, yet the light had a thicker consistency than earlier on in the day. The pub had a large front garden, dotted with wooden picnic tables, some with umbrellas, some without. People were everywhere: old, young, parents, single, kids, dogs. Local. Meaning from within the area. It wasn’t a special holiday or a weekend, it was just a sunny evening with blue sky and warm air, and like every other day you could always find someone to talk to. No one was lonely.

And on other nights there was not just people to meet but things to do: make, do, learn, volunteer. Providing people joy and purpose. There was a church for those who believed, a shop to post notices in the window and a cricket pitch around which to gather on match days.

Lucas stood on the edge of the social fray, alone and intimidated, feeling lonely and a little scared. He had moved into one of the old terraced cottages on main street a week ago, after returning from three years working in Switzerland. After his life had collapsed around him.

His stomach swirled and a great wash of hopelessness crashed over him. He turned.

“Hello.”

A voice, clear and direct, at him.

He turned back to see a man, his age, smiling, a touch of concern in his eyes.

“New to the village?”

“Yes,” said Lucas.

And that was how the conversation started. Throughout the evening Lucas met more people. Not all of them became his friends. He didn’t feel better immediately. But slowly, eventually, and seemingly from out of nowhere, a social life grew, and Lucas was no longer lonely.

2. No One Has To Work

When capitalism finally died, not in a catastrophic collapse, but in a slow diseased death, coughing and spluttering, Lucas wondered for a moment how he would survive. No job. No money.

There was surprisingly little panic, from both Lucas and the country at large. Instead there was relief, that finally they could move on and find something better.

The village held a meeting in the cricket pavilion, the adults sat on plastic chairs set in concentric circles, the kids played outside in the sunshine. The village came up with a plan: it started with meagre eco transformations of houses, moved through shared food production including the farms that lay around the village, attacked the water problem by resurrecting the old well and searching for new water tables, and ended up with a new recycling centre.

No one was really sure whether it would work, or where they would get some of the materials from, but the confederation of small ex-companies that lived on the trading estate within the village were confident that they could manufacture anything. Someone even owned a three dimensional printer. Fabrication was targeted as an area which could prove useful for time investment.

Lucas volunteered to join the electricity team whose remit was to make the village self-sufficient and sustainable. They began to manufacture solar panels and wind tape turbines. It was hard work, often with seemingly insurmountable problems. But Lucas enjoyed it and worked hard.

After five years the plan came to fruition, the village infrastructure became self-sufficient and the work teams moved to a low key maintenance schedule. Which meant that everyone could once again spend their copious free time doing whatever they fancied.

3. No One Is Hungry

In the first blushes of independence the village’s food production seemed the least of their problems. Everyone grew vegetables and fruit in their own gardens, the village wiki being used to organise who grew what, when, and how to share it. The surrounding farms grew wheat and raised cattle. Some villagers kept goats and pigs in their gardens too.

Lucas specialised in fruit trees; successfully cultivating cherry trees, pear trees and apple trees, although the cherry trees were somewhat erratic in their production of fruit. In fact all of the village food production was somewhat erratic, and for the first few years it didn’t matter.

When the stockpiles of food available from outside the village ran out, suddenly the villages self-sufficiency with regards to food was starkly highlighted. No more bartering, no more scavenging, just the food they grew themselves. The population of the village was upbeat about the situation, but Lucas felt a small kernel of dread roll around inside him.

The dread was an awful foreshadowing of the disaster: crop failure in a massive way. Wheat wiped out by rain. Fruit diseased. Vegetables eaten by bugs. They all knew, come the autumn harvest, that winter was going to be hard, but Lucas never imagined it could be so terrible. No bread. No fruit. No vegetables. The meat went so far, but eventually there was nothing for the animals to eat. Through the bleak winter and spring months, Lucas had never been so hungry. The ache of slow starvation became a terrible constant companion.

A rescue package arrived in early spring, tins from the open communities factory project; factories built by volunteers, automated, constructed to open source specifications. But even the factories needed raw materials and everywhere was struggling. Lucas enjoyed a week of tomato soup and processed ham, but knew that it wouldn’t last.

Instead of hoping that someone else would solve the problems, he joined the gene modification programmes which were trying to tweak the food to be more resilient. In particular Lucas joined the super-wheat programme, intent on producing a multiple-harvest, super durable wheat crop.

It only took two months to solve the super-wheat problem once the project had been fully committed to; the result an easy to cultivate, fast growing, incredibly hardy wheat. Whilst others moved on to bolster other crops, Lucas instead joined a small team within the village working on micro-mill bread ovens. Within six months everyone grew their own wheat and made their own bread, none of the modified crops ever failed, and no one was ever hungry again.
Lucas even learned to enjoy tending his crops, turning off the automated harvest robots to pluck fruit by hand, falling into a comfy synchronisation with the rhythms of their augmented nature.

 

4. No One Gets Ill

The village thought it had avoided the flu pandemic, but somehow through some spurious contact with the outside world it sneaked in. As soon as it was realised that the population was infected, the village implemented a strict quarantine system.

Lucas joined the drug micro-factory team, which fabricated a machine within a couple of long days from open source specifications gathered from the net. There was no panic, but quietly he realised that they may be fighting for their survival. Another few days and they had succeeded in manufacturing enough anti-viral drugs for everybody.

Too late for Helen Smith though, who’s other health complications teamed up with the virus to end her life. She was only thirty-six. The village wanted a funeral, but resisted the urge, lest they spread the virus even more. Lucas cried the night she died, cried for the first time in years.

With the anti-viral drugs apparantly not working, every spare person in the village threw themselves into the global research programme to combat the virus. The programme had been opened up and segmented such that everyone could contribute; be it adding another node to their distributed computing grid, visually verifying data, solving complex biological conundrums, or driving robots in a far away sequencing lab.

Three more people died in the village before they found a vaccine. Lucas had begun to think that it was the apocalypse, the hard work and social isolation taking its toll. But the vaccine was an easily manufactured gene therapy, one that they produced within a day of finding the solution.

The result was much more than a simple flu anti-viral drug, it cranked up the human immune system to its full potential. After taking it, and the booster each year, Lucas never felt ill again. And neither did anyone else in the village. They remembered the dead with a memorial, then quickly returned to life as it was before: socialising, learning, growing. 

5. There Is Space For Everyone

To begin with the population in the village grew organically and Lucas hardly noticed the difference, just a few more kids here and there, a slightly larger crowd at the pub, more chairs needed at the village meetings. But after a few years the immigration increased and the trouble began.

A family from Russia claimed a dormant field and began to build a crude old fashioned home. Lucas watched in dismay as they toiled by hand to slap in old bricks and tiles. The village met to discuss the issue, unused to violations of the communal will. The debate was heated. Lucas felt sick and scared. His beloved village, ruined by foreigners, by immigrants. Anger surged through him and the others. They let the anger burn, said horrible things, until they were spent and dull with fear.

Someone, with a clearer head, asked how many people had lived in the village all of their life. Only the youngsters put their hands up, everyone else had moved in, sometime. Like Lucas. And was welcomed. The realisation boldened him to speak.

“Could we build more houses?” said Lucas.

Heads turned, eyes glared.

“If we build them then we can ensure that they are self sufficient and sustainable.”

“Where exactly would you build them?” said John, a young man, born in the village, athletic and intelligent, expression open and questioning.

“One of the fields?”

“And the crops?”

“Build flat or gently sloping roofs, and grow the crops on top. The super-wheat will grow anywhere and the harvest bots can work anywhere. In fact if we slope the roofs we gain more growing surface area.”

A moment of silence was overtaken by an outburst of simultaneous conversations.

They built the houses and it worked, temporarily. For a while everyone was welcome if they were willing to build a house to the required specification. If not they were asked to leave, and they did. Until there was nowhere else to go. Until the world was so full that living in a tent became the norm. One of the village fields turned into a refugee camp, a sub-village. The infrastructure struggled to provide food and water.

There seemed only one solution. Find somewhere else.

So backed into a corner the world finally did. Global space programmes commenced: new scram jet to orbital planes, a proper space station, terraforming Mars. All the arguments and objections dropped away when the realisation hit: there was no other choice.

Lucas worked on the new orbital craft programme and designed a plane that could be fabricated easily. Then a team from the village built one and offered it to anyone who wanted it. Unsurprisingly the tent population grabbed it with eager hands. They towed it to the old air-force base, shot into space and headed for Mars. Looking for land and a new life.

For a year the orbital planes tore over the village, bright metallic streaks, ripping through the atmosphere. Lucas would stand still and raise his head, watch them. Wonder at the lives they were heading for. Proud of his work. Sad that it came down to shipping people away. But no one was forced. Everyone left with hope and enthusiasm.

Until finally there were no tents in the village. No over-crowding. Space like there had been before. The shiny new life on other worlds had called out to many. And life in the village settled back to the happy equilibrium.

6. Life Is Perfect
 

Lucas owned a dog, a black and white Cocker Spaniel. The dog had come from a litter of two, born in the village. When Lucas saw him he couldn’t resist; small, cute, cheeky. Lucas named him Ben. They went everywhere together. Ben and Lucas. Lucas and Ben. Throughout the village they were known as a pair.

Not that it prevented Lucas from looking for a romantic pairing. He dated a few women from the village, and also for one scandalous month, a woman from outside the village. But there were no sparks, no love beyond initial lust, and all of the relationships faded away amicably.

Lucas never felt lonely, because the village was such a social place, always with someone to talk to, work with, play with. He never really felt alone either, because Ben was always with him. He did however feel like a part of him was missing.

Ben lived until he was fifteen, only slowing down and losing his puppy-like enthusiasm in the last year. In the end he died of nothing more than old age; the gene therapy shots fighting off cancer twice. A full and happy dog’s life.

Ben’s death hit Lucas hard. He spent a lot of time alone and crying. The world looked grey and black. He got up early, climbed onto the peak of his roof astride the solar panels and watched the sun come up over his village, wondering what life was all about.

He tried to throw himself into some work, a project to distract him. He spent time on biological projects: life extension, illness cures, mental enhancers. Edging the human lifespan out slowly whilst maintaining quality of life. But closeness to the building blocks of life made him question life even more.

He searched elsewhere: religion, physics, sport. And found no answers.

One day he walked to the village green and lay prone in the middle of the cricket pitch, staring at the clouds which were pink in the rays of the setting sun. And he cried. Cried like it was the end of his world.

A black Labrador found him, licked his tears away. Lucas tried to ignore it.

“I’m sorry! Monty!” The voice was female.

The dog was pulled away and the woman knelt down beside him.

“Are you okay, Lucas?”

Her name was Maria, recently returned to the village after two decades of wanderlust. Lucas didn’t know her too well, he had talked to her a few times, years ago, when she was restless and eager to see the world.

“No,” said Lucas, “I’m not okay.”

“Oh, Lucas.” She pulled him up, forced him into her arms, then held him tight whilst he cried.

Lucas tried anti-depressant drugs for a week, then swapped them for a diet rich in Omega-3, a daily run and time with Maria. They worked together on the weather coercion project, spent evenings in the company of the village at the pub, played tennis and cricket and cards. Laughed and cried and finally fell in love.

A complete and consuming love that made Lucas feel whole. A love that no one else was the slightest bit surprised at.

When Lucas and Maria’s first child was born, Lucas didn’t immediately feel the wonder that had been promised. But it gave him a focus, to make the world even better for his child.

The second child completed his family: a boy and a girl, a wife and a dog, a village to live in.

Life did not always make sense to Lucas, but more often than not he was happy.

Picture Credits:

• Pub: via The Old World;
• Cricket Pavillion: via Panoramio;
• Wheat: via Digital Journal;
• Immunity Booster: via Pharmalogical Reviews;
• Liftoff: via Chamorro Bible;
• Black Labrador: via Sodahead;
• Idyllic Village 2: via Lansdowne Villa;

James Bloomer has a PhD in particle physics (he worked at CERN) and has probably forgotten more physics than most people ever learn. He has been running the SF blog Big Dumb Object for 242 internet years and writing Science Fiction for more than a decade in the real world. You can find him on Twitter @bigdumbobject.

An interactive Google map with locations of the story:

The Rules Of Utopia

James Bloomer

While James Bloomer is a staunch supporter for optimistic science fiction, he also does not shy away from telling when a DayBreak story didn’t work for him, sometimes remarking that the ‘feel-good’ factor was tuned too low for his liking (or even missing). Make no mistake: I welcome comments and critiques, both positive and negative.

Nevertheless, I think every magazine needs variety: also one dedicated to upbeat SF. So sometimes progress will be a small step, incredibly hardfought. Sometimes progress in one area comes together with decline in another. Sometimes the road ahead is harder than we expected, but sometimes it’s easier than we feared. And sometimes, yes, there will be unmitigated Utopia.

To paraphrase a world famous poem:

Idyllic Utopia, shining bright
In SF’s dystopian night
What immoral hand or eye
Dare propose thy fearless lullaby?

Kidding aside, even James Bloomer’s “The Rules of Utopia” does not come without its price. But yeah, does it shine bright, eventually…

1. No One Is Lonely

The evening sun was still high and golden, yet the light had a thicker consistency than earlier on in the day. The pub had a large front garden, dotted with wooden picnic tables, some with umbrellas, some without. People were everywhere: old, young, parents, single, kids, dogs. Local. Meaning from within the area. It wasn’t a special holiday or a weekend, it was just a sunny evening with blue sky and warm air, and like every other day you could always find someone to talk to. No one was lonely.

And on other nights there was not just people to meet but things to do: make, do, learn, volunteer. Providing people joy and purpose. There was a church for those who believed, a shop to post notices in the window and a cricket pitch around which to gather on match days.

Lucas stood on the edge of the social fray, alone and intimidated, feeling lonely and a little scared. He had moved into one of the old terraced cottages on main street a week ago, after returning from three years working in Switzerland. After his life had collapsed around him.

His stomach swirled and a great wash of hopelessness crashed over him. He turned.

“Hello.”

A voice, clear and direct, at him.

He turned back to see a man, his age, smiling, a touch of concern in his eyes.

“New to the village?”

“Yes,” said Lucas.

And that was how the conversation started. Throughout the evening Lucas met more people. Not all of them became his friends. He didn’t feel better immediately. But slowly, eventually, and seemingly from out of nowhere, a social life grew, and Lucas was no longer lonely.

2. No One Has To Work

When capitalism finally died, not in a catastrophic collapse, but in a slow diseased death, coughing and spluttering, Lucas wondered for a moment how he would survive. No job. No money.

There was surprisingly little panic, from both Lucas and the country at large. Instead there was relief, that finally they could move on and find something better.

The village held a meeting in the cricket pavilion, the adults sat on plastic chairs set in concentric circles, the kids played outside in the sunshine. The village came up with a plan: it started with meagre eco transformations of houses, moved through shared food production including the farms that lay around the village, attacked the water problem by resurrecting the old well and searching for new water tables, and ended up with a new recycling centre.

No one was really sure whether it would work, or where they would get some of the materials from, but the confederation of small ex-companies that lived on the trading estate within the village were confident that they could manufacture anything. Someone even owned a three dimensional printer. Fabrication was targeted as an area which could prove useful for time investment.

Lucas volunteered to join the electricity team whose remit was to make the village self-sufficient and sustainable. They began to manufacture solar panels and wind tape turbines. It was hard work, often with seemingly insurmountable problems. But Lucas enjoyed it and worked hard.

After five years the plan came to fruition, the village infrastructure became self-sufficient and the work teams moved to a low key maintenance schedule. Which meant that everyone could once again spend their copious free time doing whatever they fancied.

3. No One Is Hungry

In the first blushes of independence the village’s food production seemed the least of their problems. Everyone grew vegetables and fruit in their own gardens, the village wiki being used to organise who grew what, when, and how to share it. The surrounding farms grew wheat and raised cattle. Some villagers kept goats and pigs in their gardens too.

Lucas specialised in fruit trees; successfully cultivating cherry trees, pear trees and apple trees, although the cherry trees were somewhat erratic in their production of fruit. In fact all of the village food production was somewhat erratic, and for the first few years it didn’t matter.

When the stockpiles of food available from outside the village ran out, suddenly the villages self-sufficiency with regards to food was starkly highlighted. No more bartering, no more scavenging, just the food they grew themselves. The population of the village was upbeat about the situation, but Lucas felt a small kernel of dread roll around inside him.

The dread was an awful foreshadowing of the disaster: crop failure in a massive way. Wheat wiped out by rain. Fruit diseased. Vegetables eaten by bugs. They all knew, come the autumn harvest, that winter was going to be hard, but Lucas never imagined it could be so terrible. No bread. No fruit. No vegetables. The meat went so far, but eventually there was nothing for the animals to eat. Through the bleak winter and spring months, Lucas had never been so hungry. The ache of slow starvation became a terrible constant companion.

A rescue package arrived in early spring, tins from the open communities factory project; factories built by volunteers, automated, constructed to open source specifications. But even the factories needed raw materials and everywhere was struggling. Lucas enjoyed a week of tomato soup and processed ham, but knew that it wouldn’t last.

Instead of hoping that someone else would solve the problems, he joined the gene modification programmes which were trying to tweak the food to be more resilient. In particular Lucas joined the super-wheat programme, intent on producing a multiple-harvest, super durable wheat crop.

It only took two months to solve the super-wheat problem once the project had been fully committed to; the result an easy to cultivate, fast growing, incredibly hardy wheat. Whilst others moved on to bolster other crops, Lucas instead joined a small team within the village working on micro-mill bread ovens. Within six months everyone grew their own wheat and made their own bread, none of the modified crops ever failed, and no one was ever hungry again.

Lucas even learned to enjoy tending his crops, turning off the automated harvest robots to pluck fruit by hand, falling into a comfy synchronisation with the rhythms of their augmented nature.

 

The village thought it had avoided the flu pandemic, but somehow through some spurious contact with the outside world it sneaked in. As soon as it was realised that the population was infected, the village implemented a strict quarantine system.

Lucas joined the drug micro-factory team, which fabricated a machine within a couple of long days from open source specifications gathered from the net. There was no panic, but quietly he realised that they may be fighting for their survival. Another few days and they had succeeded in manufacturing enough anti-viral drugs for everybody.

Too late for Helen Smith though, who’s other health complications teamed up with the virus to end her life. She was only thirty-six. The village wanted a funeral, but resisted the urge, lest they spread the virus even more. Lucas cried the night she died, cried for the first time in years.

With the anti-viral drugs apparantly not working, every spare person in the village threw themselves into the global research programme to combat the virus. The programme had been opened up and segmented such that everyone could contribute; be it adding another node to their distributed computing grid, visually verifying data, solving complex biological conundrums, or driving robots in a far away sequencing lab.

Three more people died in the village before they found a vaccine. Lucas had begun to think that it was the apocalypse, the hard work and social isolation taking its toll. But the vaccine was an easily manufactured gene therapy, one that they produced within a day of finding the solution.

The result was much more than a simple flu anti-viral drug, it cranked up the human immune system to its full potential. After taking it, and the booster each year, Lucas never felt ill again. And neither did anyone else in the village. They remembered the dead with a memorial, then quickly returned to life as it was before: socialising, learning, growing.

To begin with the population in the village grew organically and Lucas hardly noticed the difference, just a few more kids here and there, a slightly larger crowd at the pub, more chairs needed at the village meetings. But after a few years the immigration increased and the trouble began.

A family from Russia claimed a dormant field and began to build a crude old fashioned home. Lucas watched in dismay as they toiled by hand to slap in old bricks and tiles. The village met to discuss the issue, unused to violations of the communal will. The debate was heated. Lucas felt sick and scared. His beloved village, ruined by foreigners, by immigrants. Anger surged through him and the others. They let the anger burn, said horrible things, until they were spent and dull with fear.

Someone, with a clearer head, asked how many people had lived in the village all of their life. Only the youngsters put their hands up, everyone else had moved in, sometime. Like Lucas. And was welcomed. The realisation boldened him to speak.

“Could we build more houses?” said Lucas.

Heads turned, eyes glared.

“If we build them then we can ensure that they are self sufficient and sustainable.”

“Where exactly would you build them?” said John, a young man, born in the village, athletic and intelligent, expression open and questioning.

“One of the fields?”

“And the crops?”

“Build flat or gently sloping roofs, and grow the crops on top. The super-wheat will grow anywhere and the harvest bots can work anywhere. In fact if we slope the roofs we gain more growing surface area.”

A moment of silence was overtaken by an outburst of simultaneous conversations.

They built the houses and it worked, temporarily. For a while everyone was welcome if they were willing to build a house to the required specification. If not they were asked to leave, and they did. Until there was nowhere else to go. Until the world was so full that living in a tent became the norm. One of the village fields turned into a refugee camp, a sub-village. The infrastructure struggled to provide food and water.

There seemed only one solution. Find somewhere else.

So backed into a corner the world finally did. Global space programmes commenced: new scram jet to orbital planes, a proper space station, terraforming Mars. All the arguments and objections dropped away when the realisation hit: there was no other choice.

Lucas worked on the new orbital craft programme and designed a plane that could be fabricated easily. Then a team from the village built one and offered it to anyone who wanted it. Unsurprisingly the tent population grabbed it with eager hands. They towed it to the old air-force base, shot into space and headed for Mars. Looking for land and a new life.

For a year the orbital planes tore over the village, bright metallic streaks, ripping through the atmosphere. Lucas would stand still and raise his head, watch them. Wonder at the lives they were heading for. Proud of his work. Sad that it came down to shipping people away. But no one was forced. Everyone left with hope and enthusiasm.

Until finally there were no tents in the village. No over-crowding. Space like there had been before. The shiny new life on other worlds had called out to many. And life in the village settled back to the happy equilibrium.

Lucas owned a dog, a black and white Cocker Spaniel. The dog had come from a litter of two, born in the village. When Lucas saw him he couldn’t resist; small, cute, cheeky. Lucas named him Ben. They went everywhere together. Ben and Lucas. Lucas and Ben. Throughout the village they were known as a pair.

Not that it prevented Lucas from looking for a romantic pairing. He dated a few women from the village, and also for one scandalous month, a woman from outside the village. But there were no sparks, no love beyond initial lust, and all of the relationships faded away amicably.

Lucas never felt lonely, because the village was such a social place, always with someone to talk to, work with, play with. He never really felt alone either, because Ben was always with him. He did however feel like a part of him was missing.

Ben lived until he was fifteen, only slowing down and losing his puppy-like enthusiasm in the last year. In the end he died of nothing more than old age; the gene therapy shots fighting off cancer twice. A full and happy dog’s life.

Ben’s death hit Lucas hard. He spent a lot of time alone and crying. The world looked grey and black. He got up early, climbed onto the peak of his roof astride the solar panels and watched the sun come up over his village, wondering what life was all about.

He tried to throw himself into some work, a project to distract him. He spent time on biological projects: life extension, illness cures, mental enhancers. Edging the human lifespan out slowly whilst maintaining quality of life. But closeness to the building blocks of life made him question life even more.

He searched elsewhere: religion, physics, sport. And found no answers.

One day he walked to the village green and lay prone in the middle of the cricket pitch, staring at the clouds which were pink in the rays of the setting sun. And he cried. Cried like it was the end of his world.

A black Labrador found him, licked his tears away. Lucas tried to ignore it.

“I’m sorry! Monty!” The voice was female.

The dog was pulled away and the woman knelt down beside him.

“Are you okay, Lucas?”

Her name was Maria, recently returned to the village after two decades of wanderlust. Lucas didn’t know her too well, he had talked to her a few times, years ago, when she was restless and eager to see the world.

“No,” said Lucas, “I’m not okay.”

“Oh, Lucas.” She pulled him up, forced him into her arms, then held him tight whilst he cried.

Lucas tried anti-depressant drugs for a week, then swapped them for a diet rich in Omega-3, a daily run and time with Maria. They worked together on the weather coercion project, spent evenings in the company of the village at the pub, played tennis and cricket and cards. Laughed and cried and finally fell in love.

A complete and consuming love that made Lucas feel whole. A love that no one else was the slightest bit surprised at.

When Lucas and Maria’s first child was born, Lucas didn’t immediately feel the wonder that had been promised. But it gave him a focus, to make the world even better for his child.

The second child completed his family: a boy and a girl, a wife and a dog, a village to live in.

Life did not always make sense to Lucas, but more often than not he was happy.

Picture Credits:

• Pub: via The Old World;
• Cricket Pavillion: via Panoramio;
• Wheat: via Digital Journal;
• Immunity Booster: via Pharmalogical Reviews;
• Liftoff: via Chamorro Bible;
• Black Labrador: via Sodahead;
• Idyllic Village 2: via Lansdowne Villa;

James Bloomer has a PhD in particle physics (he worked at CERN) and has probably forgotten more physics than most people ever learn. He has been running the SF blog Big Dumb Object for 242 internet years and writing Science Fiction for more than a decade in the real world. You can find him on Twitter @bigdumbobject.

An interactive Google map with locations of the story:

Every first and third Friday of the month there will be two story excerpts from the Shine anthology. This is the twelfth one: “Sheherazade Cast in Starlight” by Jason Andrew:

The Qur’an says that all people are a single nation. Though we failed that day, we were shown the way by the will of Allah. Globalization has been a dirty word for oppressive governments. They want to keep their borders clearly defined with walls of stone and barbed wire and land mines. They want their citizens to think only of what happens in their lands, to their familes. They want us to forget that we all are one family.

Technology blurs those borders. It allows information to flow freely. It is the bane of any oppressive government. There were no more barriers to hide us away from the rest of the world. No firewalls that could keep out our stories. The world hungered for reality entertainment. When I was ready, I stepped into the starlight.

My v-casts are circulated around the world. Every action recorded and captured in amber for the world to study. Anyone in the world can watch me. I am Scheherazade cast in starlight, telling a story each night to keep my head. I competed against drunken bears roaming free in Butte, Montana. I told the world of the food shortages, the war, tragedies, and love against the tale of seven strangers trapped in a house forced to live together. I battled against Big Brother by showing stories about all of our brothers and sisters. We showed the world that the greatest stories come not from forced drama, but from life and living despite the darkness.

Each night before I slept, I checked my ranking. I was safe as long I had eyes upon me. Or so I believed. I am shamed to admit that I was drunk with my new celebrity. I had messages from foreign leaders, proud mothers, and little girls seeking a role-model. I thought that I had made a difference.

Picture Credits:

• Freedom for Iran: via Ray Mosteller;
• Scheherazade: via Ragged Claws;

Jason Andrew lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife Lisa. By day, he works as a mild-mannered technical writer. By night, he writes stories of the fantastic and occasionally fights crime. As a child, Jason spent his Saturdays watching the Creature Feature classics and furiously scribbling down stories; his first short story, written at age six, titled ‘The Wolfman Eats Perry Mason,’ was rejected and caused his Grandmother to watch him very closely for a few years.

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Finally, also an interactive Google Map of story locations from the SHINE anthology:

Every first and third Friday of the month there will be two story excerpts from the Shine anthology. This is the tenth one: “Sarging Rasmussen: A Report by Organic” by Gord Sellar:

We started out as far from idealists, of course. As my teacher, Praxis, said when he met me: “Environmentalist? Ha, you know who gets laid less than a green radical?”

“Nobody?” I said, wishing I’d mentioned my day job as a lab tech instead of how I spent my weekends.

It was true, though. Women had seen fit to chain themselves to trees beside me, and join me in hijacking oil tankers on highways, and march arm in arm with me in the streets of a dozen countries by my side. But I’d gotten precisely one girl out of a bra in my life, and that had lasted just five weeks. 37 days, to be precise. And that had been four years before.

“‘xactly,” Praxis said with a sneer. “Nobody. But we’re gonna change all that. You’re gonna,” he said, on day one.

That was back in the days when fellas like Praxis were called mPUAs. Guys like him made a living running “boot camps” for AFCs, the Average Frustrated Chumps. Guys who didn’t know how to talk to women and were willing to spend a thousand bucks for a weekend of being coached on how talk to women.

Guys like me.

Mostly, they learned by being forced to go sarging—approaching thousands of women in a row, until they stopped pissing themselves with fear and grew a backbone. And Praxis was right: during that weekend, he changed my life… or, well, really, I did. He’d taken me and the other AFCs—a hardware engineer who called himself Axiomatic, a lonely high school teacher we dubbed Homework, a recently-divorced cop called Slammer, and some Japanese poet or something—and baptized us by fire. We went out sarging all weekend—chatting up hot women in bars and bookstores and coffeeshops, coming onto them and hassling them, teasing and rubbing shoulders and even scoring some phone numbers.

That weekend was the first time I ever wore leather. Tight leather. Peacocky leather. Praxis taught us routines, taught us cocky-funny, taught us rules of thumb and dozens of techniques, and by the end of it, every one of us had learned the secret: there wasn’t one. Getting a woman’s phone number—or anything else, for that matter—didn’t require magic, or an eleven-inch cock, or perfect white teeth. All it took was asking for it in the right way, once she was ready to give it… once you’d helped her become ready. Pretty soon, we were having the time of our lives with the kind of babes who’d terrified us just months before. I was no longer Andrew Dalton: I had become Organic, and now I was swimming in women. Tall women, short women, dark and pale, funny and serious, wild and schoolmarmish alike. I tasted every flavour there was. I’d learned techniques for getting them to come home with me in less than thirty minutes of first contact. For engineering a threesome. For getting them to give me a sponge bath dressed in nurse uniforms, while speaking in fake Polish. (Look, everyone has his kinks, and whoever claims otherwise is lying.) For the first time in my life, I was getting laid like a truckload of linoleum. And it was the part of me that was really, really enjoying all that sex that spoke first when Katana had laid out his plan.

That was the part of me that had stopped caring about how many trees got cut down at Clayoquot sound, and didn’t give a shit about the coral reefs and strip mining in the Northwest Territories. They say that a sense of impending death makes people have more sex—it’s a mammalian instinct. Well, the first year the icecaps melted completely in summer? I made that work for me, and worked out my own mammalian panic all at once. From there, I hadn’t looked back, not once, at the dying Earth.

Not till that day. And it hurt to look again at what I’d once cared about—which I think is why I yelped, “That’s fucking crazy, Katana! The tools we have… they’re for pickup. For getting laid. Not for… saving the world.”

“Yeah, man,” Biosfear said, nodding his head. “What d’ya wanna do, seduce the sun into shining less brightly? Sarge lumberjacks? Toss a few negs at metacorporations and hope that they go sweet on us?”

Biosfear laughed at the absurdity of it. We all did.

“You’re not listening, bros,” Katana said, his hands parallel in front of him like some kind of loony Japanese evangelical minister. His eyes shone with some kind of insane, holy-fire light. “You can’t seduce the sun, but you don’t need to. The environment? The ecology? It’s people. I’ve been rereading Dawkins and Page…”

We all groaned.

“…and there’s something to this extended phenotype thing,” Katana went on. “The world is what we make it. What governments decide. How giant companies decide to behave. But governments and companies, what are they?”

“People,” Biosfear said. “They’re just people, and so they can be seduced…”

“Wrong,” said Katana, flicking at the wall with his keychain remote. The smartwall flickered, and images from satellites flooded it at high speed, corporate logos and national flags flashing superimposed onto creeping desertification, megastorms, and black-smoke flashes of brief, vicious water wars. “They’re persons, legally and functionally. They’re the ultimate amogs. And they can be amogged too.”

Someone who hadn’t known us would have taken one look around the room at us in our freaky peacocky clothing—Homeboyostasis’ purple fur vest, my depilated scalp, Biosfear’s animated Magic Eight Ball T-shirt cycling through its advice—No Way!… Yes Way!… Maybe!… Go Fuck Yourself!—and declared Katana’s attempt to sway us a complete, hopeless failure.

Goes to show you what total strangers know about anything.

Picture credits:

• Environmentalists: via Armor Games;
• Average Frustrated Chump: via Zazzle;
• Earth Day: via Hub Pages;
• (Master)Mind: via Masterlife;

Gord Sellar was born in Malawi, grew up in Saskatchewan, and currently lives and works as a professor of English Language & Culture in South Korea. Since attending Clarion West in 2006, his work has appeared in Asimov’s SF, Interzone, Clarkesworld, Subterranean, and The Year’s Best SF Vol. 26, among other venues, and in 2009 he was a nominee for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. This story is dedicated to his buddies named Mike—in Jeonju, Utah, and Toronto alike, for being very different kinds of men, each excellent in his own way.

US:

UK:

Independents:

Finally, also an interactive Google Map of story locations from the SHINE anthology:

The Notebook of my Favourite Skin-Trees

Alex Dally MacFarlane

Alex Dally MacFarlane is — as far as I can see — on a rather extended wanderjahr. My sister did something similar more than a decade ago, and eventually she wound up (via East Asia and Japan) in Australia, where she basically hasn’t returned from (apart from several family visits): she’s an Australian citizen now. I don’t know if Alex will return to her native England, but she sure seems to have fun travelling, and if that leads to stories like “The Notebook of My Favourite Skin-Trees”, then we all are all the richer for it.

Also, while my original intent with my Twitterzine @outshine was mainly to promote the SHINE anthology, I was (and am) happily surprised by the way it attracted talented writers and interesting pieces that were — as I found out later — hypercondensed forms of a short story. One of these was a tweet from Eric Gregory that was directly related to “The Earth of Yunhe” — his SHINE story — and another was a tweet from Alex Dally MacFarlane (published on Wednesday July 15, last year, which I’ll display below) that was directly related to “The Notebook of My Favourite Skin-Trees”.

A woman grafts a miniature, nano-engineered breed of fruit to people’s skin. Orchards travel the world and seed onto garbage heaps.

The actual story, as you can read below, goes quite a bit further, though…

BANANA

The best part of these are the fruits, growing on their fat stem, dangling down the person’s back or from their arm. I always bow and smile, asking, “Can I taste one of your fruits? Bananas from a skin-tree are so sweet.”

So sweet and so small, a single mouthful.

I also enjoy the place where banana tree meets flesh, roots curving over and into the person’s limb — pressing my lips there, my tongue — and the small shade cast by the leaves.

Kim Cuc saw advertisements everywhere she looked in the walking street market, but only on the leaves of the skin-trees: names of shops and cafés and restaurants spelled out, Thai or English or other languages, in the bright white veins. Aside from the occasional cry from stall owners or vendors — “I have the finest grilled bananas in Chiang Mai! Come and taste!” — no other form of promotion cluttered the senses.

That had always been the intent of the skin-trees’ engineers and earliest supporters. Kim Cuc smiled often, seeing the remains of once-garishly lit billboards, or walls that several years earlier would have been covered in paper.

No smiles on this night.

She stopped every person with a skin-tree in the walking street market, to ask if they’d noticed strange discolourations on their leaves. “There is a sickness,” she said, putting urgency into the phrase she now knew in many languages, not just her native Vietnamese and second tongue English, “and it’s important to collect samples and data.” Into one of the notebooks carried under her arm, she noted the age and ethnicity of the person, the age and species of their tree, the company its leaves advertised — this for those whose trees remained healthy. In a second notebook, with frowning lizards on the spine, she noted the same information for those whose trees were not. There she added information about the duration of the discolourations, their colour and spread. Samples went into a third notebook, with little clips to fasten two pages together, and special paper to protect and preserve the leaves.

The lizard-spined notebook was not as full as the first, yet.

Late in the night, when vendors began packing away their wares, Kim Cuc followed the shoppers returning to their homes. She drank from the large bottle of nutrient-full water she always carried around. The durian tree growing on her left shoulder needed it.

She passed a stall selling Buddha-shaped lanterns, a popular tourist item. Some still glowed, yellowly and redly, and in their light she glanced at her durian. A brown circle, no greater in circumference than a joss stick, lay on the edge of one leaf.

“No!” she cried out.

The bright screen of her wrist-computer did not contradict the Buddha lights.

BANYAN

The banyan’s thick roots suggest a secret fluidity, like wax, uncommon to plants: frozen over Pitsamai’s shoulder, beginning where bone used to jut from her thin flesh, sliding down her shoulder blades, curling around her upper arm (carefully trained not to restrict movement), stretching across her collarbone and down her breastbone, down the neat lines of her ribs. They frame her right breast. I always think they will flow when Pitsamai is alone, even though she tells me this isn’t the case.

The thick leaves advertise Chiang Mai University. Veins curl in the letters in Thai and English, artificially white against dark green. Pitsamai loves her university.

The tangled trunks rise from her shoulder, as tall as her forehead. Aerial roots dangle from its branches, always reminding me of hair (sometimes tangling with Pitsamai’s hair), and they are my favourite part. I always tilt my head when I kiss Pitsamai’s lips, so the aerial roots brush my cheek. When I kiss the base of the tree, that special place where root is fixed to flesh, the aerial roots tangle in my hair.

I considered, years ago when no skin-tree grew on me, acquiring a banyan. Perhaps it’s retained its allure because I have to be with Pitsamai or another of my girlfriends to enjoy it: a double pleasure, like spicy meat inside a rice ball.

“I am worried,” Pitsamai, biological engineer at Chiang Mai University, said in English.

“Oh, don’t say that!”

The previous night, Kim Cuc had torn off the infected leaf and fastened it in her third notebook. She’d written in the lizard-spined one, summarising this latest infection. By the light of glowing Buddhas, she’d wiped the tears from her cheeks and pretended the sickness was only a small thing, a two-hour stomach upset among the skin-trees.

The look on Pitsamai’s face when she took the leaf from Kim Cuc’s notebook ended that flimsy lie.

They stood on the edge of Pitsamai’s lab, where the Asian skin-trees had been created. Behind them were rows of tables, glass equipment, remote-controlled machines that tended to the cultures and plants in secure and biohazard cabinets. One of Pitsamai’s colleagues sat at a table, inputting data to a computer. Graphs arced across its screen.

Several specimens in the cabinets — skin-trees grafted to synthetic limbs — bore the dark marks of the disease.

“It’s beginning to spread very quickly,” Pitsamai said, “and in many parts of the world. Örn is seeing them in Iceland now. Neroly in Venice has begun a clinic, and noticed a dramatic rise two days ago — partly due to people only just hearing about the clinic, only just getting concerned, but many were new. This afternoon I v-chatted with one of the first cases in Australia. Half the leaves on his tree are brown and shrivelling. I think the skin-trees will die from this.”

Skin-trees were not meant to do that before the person’s death.

Kim Cuc played with the amulet at her throat, hating the nausea that wriggled in her belly like a troublesome naga. “What more can I do to help?”

“Keep collecting samples for me. Talk to some of the older cases in your notebook.” Pitsamai tangled her fingers into Kim Cuc’s. “I know it will be hard, seeing their trees so ill, but I need to know if any of them have managed to slow down the illness’ progression. Or if any of them have got healthier. I’m still trying various treatments.”

Inside the synthetic limbs flowed blood from infected people. Pitsamai and the others had already learned that they battled a virus that passed fluidly from person to person, by sweat and other excretions, flowing into the tree through its thin, nutrient-drinking roots. It was not like a fungus, where removing the affected areas might save the rest of the plant. So far it hadn’t reacted to general or specific antivirals. Containment didn’t work on something so eager to transfer in such a small quantity of liquid.

“Do you want to take some of my blood?” Kim Cuc asked, looking away from the ailing specimens. “Maybe you’ll find a cure with it.”

Such outright selfishness made her guilty, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her durian withering. Maybe, just maybe, Pitsamai would find a cure from one of the injections into her blood. And another sample always helped.

Pitsamai smiled. “Of course I’ll take some.”

After Kim Cuc’s blood filled a small container and Pitsamai found some sugary biscuits, they kissed. Banyan aerial roots brushed Kim Cuc’s ear, drawing a small sigh from her mouth. The banyan’s leaves, speckled brown, rustled against her hair.

“Work hard and well, as always,” Kim Cuc murmured.

“I hope you find something useful, love.”

DRAGON FRUIT

You have to be careful when kissing a dragon fruit skin-tree. There are spiky parts and they scratch, like a lover’s nails. The fruits are small and bright and, because of Pitsamai’s engineering, don’t need their shells removed. My brief lover, Busarakham, let me run my fingers along the smooth part of the leaves, let me kiss them, before tugging my attention to her flesh. I never told her that I preferred the tree to her breasts.

Five names from Kim Cuc’s lizard-spined notebook. Five conversations, by virtual-chat or in the city. None of them offered optimism like a red-enveloped birthday gift.

And, in a neat row along the side of a tourist-full songtaew on Ratchamanka Street, she saw stickers for one of the newest skin-whitening products. That, even more than the consistent reports of worsening, browning skin-trees, made her want to cry.

DURIAN

Ho Chi Minh City, six years ago:

The miniature durian tree grew from my left shoulder, its trunk straight and many-branched, roots curling over and, thinly, into me. The fruits, blunted so they didn’t cause injury, fell into my bra. Its leaves, dark green, long and wide as one finger joint of a child, advertised Thanh Clothes, a growing chain of eco-friendly outfits.

I walked back and forth in front of the billboards, the posters pinned on the sides of the road, on the sides of motorbikes, the little stickers that piled onto the posts as thickly as the electricity cables above. I bared my shoulder, wearing clothes Thanh made to fasten easily. I bared my tree. I made a tally: who stared at bright posters with cheerful smiling faces and big letters, Vietnamese and English, and who stared at my durian.

I presented my figures to many companies.

I said, “Your flashing electronic billboards soak up energy and no one wants them there, no one likes them, but over a hundred people an hour — busy shoppers, vendors, schoolchildren, businessmen and -women — stop to ask ‘What is Thanh Clothes?’ Thanh asks his customers why they come to his shop, and most say ‘Because that girl wears a strange tree on her shoulder.’ I don’t have to be reprinted, lit up. I don’t obstruct the beautiful parts of this city. All I must do is drink a lot of water, eat more food than usual, with the right nutrients, but really the plant is cleverer than a real one and can survive more difficulties. I can distribute seeds, if more people want to advertise Thanh Clothes.”

Not many companies liked the thought of advertising spread by the consumer’s wants. Advertising beyond their control, after the original tree or two.

Later, I bared my tree in vast protests across Southeast Asia. In Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, in Angkor Wat, in Vientiane, in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, in Shanghai and Hong Kong and Singapore and Manila. How did I afford all this, a fisherman’s daughter with half an education? Thanh made a lot of money because of me, because of the other women and men who took a tree onto their flesh and walked around my city with his name on their leaves. He believed in our advertising. The original investment in the technology — our nearest source: Chiang Mai, Pitsamai’s experimental work, who I later came to love in more ways that appreciating her vision — paid off more times than I can count. Our protests accused advertising of spreading too widely and wastefully.

Soon after my twenty-fifth birthday, the skin-trees replaced light and paper in many countries around the world — if not through a government’s law, then through public opinion and voting with their wallets.

And then the sickness, two years later, rippling across skin-trees of all types.

And advertisements returning. The stickers on the songtaew would be the first of many, vanguard to what Kim Cuc and many others had campaigned against.

“I hate it,” she told Pitsamai, over a quick dinner of seafood tom yam. “The stickers were so ugly.”

“I know. But smile, a little, because Neroly has made a compound that slows the progression of the illness. I’m going to replicate it on the Asian trees, just in case it doesn’t work on them, and see if I can make it work even better.”

Kim Cuc clapped her hands and, while Pitsamai pretended to bow for an audience, stole a big piece of squid from her bowl.

It seemed likely that a big corporation had developed the sickness, wanting a return to advertising that it controlled. Pitsamai and her colleagues agreed on this, after examining the virus and finding it so very distinct. But no one had determined which one. Probably not the skin-whitening company with the songtaew stickers. Who used those kinds of products in Canada, where one of the first cases appeared? From what Pitsamai had said, the virus appeared simultaneously in several locations around the world. A company with global interests, then. There were too many of those to bother tracking them down, when the skin-trees needed a cure quicker than an explanation. Unless several companies were behind it, which widened the list of suspects because then they could be more local. “Some businesses are suffering because they won’t change their ways,” Neroly had said in v-chat. “I can imagine someone thinking ‘Oh, let’s just kill the skin-trees’, as if this is the kind of backward step we need and want.” Governments were beginning to acknowledge the illness and, in certain countries, direct funding to the various universities.

At the end of the meal, Kim Cuc noticed three new brown spots on her durian’s leaves. She left the leaves in place, not wanting to deprive the tree of the rest of those leaves’ functionality, though she winced at glimpses of them.

She knew that living with Pitsamai and talking to many infected people had made catching the disease inevitable. Part of her had hoped for luck. Part of her considered it worth the risk. Still, it hurt.

A week passed.

Leaves darkened, Pitsamai’s work left her stressed and tired, Kim Cuc’s questions in the streets left her unhappy and the lizard-spined book full of notes. Six days after the first brown spot on Kim Cuc’s durian, skin-trees were announced dead in Canada and Bangkok: all the leaves shrivelled and fallen off. Regardless of species, skin-trees were evergreen. And these dead trees no longer took in nutrients. That same day, Kim Cuc saw ten more songtaew with stickers on their sides. She almost cried in the street, among vendors setting up their stalls for the night market — lanterns, wooden carvings, amulets, t-shirts, fresh fruit in bright piles — and tuk-tuk drivers who called out for custom. “It will not fall apart,” she whispered in Vietnamese, strange sounds to all the passersby. “Pitsamai and the others will find a cure. It will not fall apart.”

How could she, only an assistant and lover to Pitsamai, a Vietnamese girl in a foreign country, keep that promise?

She tried to spread optimism: telling other skin-tree wearers that the biological engineers worked hard across the world, that progress was already being made, berating songtaew drivers for giving in to greedy opportunistic companies, though she understood why they let the companies give them money to bear ads, and pulling down the posters appearing on poles and walls.

To cheer herself, to refill her strength, she spent a lot of time at her favourite temple in Thailand — Wat Doi Suthep, with its golden chedi, golden roof, golden bells dangling from the roof’s edge, and the smell of joss sticks, of lotus petals beneath her nose, and the calm golden gaze of Buddha — and she visited one of her other girlfriends.

JASMINE

Oh, the smell! It curls around Mekhalaa’s legs, rooted in her right foot, tendrils brushing her hips. She works with wood, she built a wooden frame for her chair, so when she rolls along the street with jasmine against exquisitely carved teak — kinnara, garuda, ghilen, kochasri and myriad other creatures — she looks like the flowering Himmapan forest.

She paints her nails gold, like an offering, and she wears no perfume except the scent of her flowers. When I kiss her, lips to the immobile arch of her foot, her ankles, her calves and thighs and the place in-between where she retains sensation, I am full of jasmine. It crowds my nose. Forgetting myself, kissing with my eyes closed, I swallow petals. I lick her foot, that special place where the plant passes through flesh, that thin line of scar tissue like an inlaid pearl border on a shutter, I open my eyes and look up through jasmine to her smiling face. “Kim Cuc, Kim Cuc, you are the only person I know who loves the skin-trees so much,” she often says, either in her faulty English or, slowly for me, in Thai.

“I got a skin-tree because I believe in them,” I tell her, “but their sexiness was a good side-bonus.” I laugh too, with joy. Even touching my durian is fun, sometimes, though another woman is better. Especially someone as beautiful as Mekhalaa (or Pitsamai, who is opposite in every way to Mekhalaa, small and slim with a face as delicately shaped as my statues of the Trung sisters, where Mekhalaa is large and soft with short hair that tickles her ears), especially someone patient and attentive and skilled.

Lying together on her bed, on yellow sheets with the carved headboard of a fish-tailed woman, we indulge in one another. I move where she asks me. I press my lips to her jasmine’s base, tracing the line of roots under her skin, under her sole — no inconvenience for a woman who never walks — while she flicks her fingers inside me. One hand following the stem of the jasmine up her thighs, I return the touch, affection for affection.

I close my eyes against the brown stains on the leaves, inhaling jasmine and getting lost in Mekhalaa’s touch, the jasmine’s bark under my lips, the smell, oh that wonderful sweet smell of petals crushed between our skin.

More trees died. More leaves developed brown spots on Kim Cuc’s durian, and on a hot, cloudy morning she woke to find one fallen, utterly brown and lifeless, on her pillow. Her tears splashed on it. Outside the window, two men pasted a big poster — billboard-big — to a bare wall. Already many people thought the skin-trees a failed experiment in alternative advertising. Enforcers of the new law in Thailand cared less about old forms. Real billboards, illuminated and animated, would follow.

“Go away,” Kim Cuc shouted through the mosquito netting. Over the honk of tuk-tuk horns — not replaceable, like the engines, with a silent electric version — and the voice of an exuberant banana and pineapple seller, the men had no chance of hearing her. At least she’d used their language.

She mailed some of her friends in Chiang Mai, the ones who’d introduced her to Pitsamai a couple of years earlier, and arranged a meeting: seven of them, mixed in age and gender, planning over spring rolls and chilli rice and bamboo prawn soup. First after the ordering of food, Kim Cuc updated them on Pitsamai’s progress. Still no cure. The compound that slowed the virus’ work helped them all, but couldn’t be developed further, couldn’t stop the skin-trees’ deaths.

“But we need to tell people that there’ll be a cure, sometime soon, and they shouldn’t give up,” she told the group.

Nods like obedient elephants in a tourist show.

“Not many people want to get a skin-tree now,” one said. “They see us with these dying things, so they settle for an animated tattoo or those glow-in-the-dark temporary ridges.”

“In the shape of temples on their white farang skin!” one said, giggling.

“Well, we need to point out that the virus isn’t harming people,” Kim Cuc said. The word ‘yet’ remained on her tongue, un-used. No one knew if the virus would mutate. But the people whose skin-trees died were completely healthy, except for useless dead wood on a limb or shoulder. “Maybe we can try to convince some friends. Or students! Some of them must be interested by death.”

Laughter. Remarks that not everyone owned a strange preference like Kim Cuc. She shrugged and said that no one would hurt from trying to persuade people.

They talked of removing posters, refusing to ride in a songtaew or tuk-tuk with those adverts — though some of them hesitated at depriving such low-income people of custom. The grandfather in the group suggested that, if people didn’t want a skin-tree right now, they could ink a tree and a favourite company’s name onto their arms. Only temporary. Henna, or pen by those who still used that implement. The katoey Sunatda, man-tall in glittery sandals and a pretty dress, offered to decorate the leaves in her plant shop with various good business’ names.

Kim Cuc left the meeting with a smile, with ideas filling her like Mekhalaa’s jasmine.

Collecting more information from people in the city lowered her mood. Skin-trees creeping closer to death, angry regrets at getting such a difficult-to-remove piece of body art, distress, fear. Too many falling leaves. Spreading hope felt fake and impossible, but Kim Cuc tried. “Don’t give up quite yet,” she told a young man, who waited for coffee in a new, locally run branch. “The biological engineers were clever enough to develop the skin-trees. They can fix them.” To a woman she suggested patience, as the skin-tree on her upper arm only bore several discolourations.

Later, she waited for Pitsamai at a little metal table in the night market, morose, thinking of the durian’s darkening leaves, imagining it dead and bare. “Still no breakthrough,” Pitsamai said, collapsing into the chair with a sigh. “Immune systems still don’t recognise the virus as an enemy, our anti-viral compounds aren’t doing enough.”

In unison, they sipped from cups of ice drink, kiwi and watermelon.

“Can you make the virus different?” Kim Cuc said. “So the immune system goes, ‘Hey there, I kill you now!’”

Pitsamai stared at her through the translucent base of her cup.

“We haven’t tried that,” she said, putting it down. “It’s a pretty complicated virus, but… well, we haven’t tried, so we don’t know.” She grabbed Kim Cuc’s hands, kissed them fiercely. “Fisherman’s daughter saves the world. Or, well, the skin-trees. Maybe. I want to go back to work!”

“You can go, if you want.” Emotions tangled in Kim Cuc: excitement, hope, desire for a cure, desire for Pitsamai at her side, strolling by stalls, in bed.

“No, no, I’ve had a long day. I won’t be able to work.” She laughed. “I’m not a student anymore!”

“You’ll be thinking of it all evening,” Kim Cuc fake-whined, “instead of me.”

“I can think of both, you know.”

When they leaned upright against the cushions on their specially designed bed, legs locked and a two-way dildo inside them both, gasping into each other’s trees, Kim Cuc’s thoughts were equally shared between pleasure and possibility.

RAMBUTAN

This tree’s trunk grows clear of branches, at least when carefully groomed like Sunatda’s, and then for its upper half is a great bush of leaves, thin branches, and the hairy little fruits, red when ripe. I love those fruits. So funny-looking in a market. So funny when the little skin-tree ones, as small as the ‘O’ on the Dong coins I still have from home, tangle in my hair after sex with Sunatda. I kiss the bare trunk and she flicks the branches, laughing as the fruits fall.

Kim Cuc lay on the floor of the apartment, watching a protest in London on her wrist computer’s projected screen. Many of the men and women in the small crowd bore skin-trees, and none of them were healthy. Their signs and shouts demanded more funding for Imperial College and Edinburgh University’s biological engineering departments. “We have this fantastic way of advertising, that’s utterly driven by consumer choice, and the government says they support us!” said the leader into his microphone. A row of tiny holly trees, only two centimetres high, grew on his left cheekbone, obscuring a useless eye. The other, bright blue, flitted constantly as he made eye contact across the crowd. “We need that support now!” Cheers and more shouts. The waving of banners.

Chiang Mai University had good funding from a series of Asian companies, so Pitsamai needed no one in the streets of Chiang Mai or Bangkok to help her. Assistance came from a colleague who specialised in virology, her pair of doctoral students and other graduates, eager to contribute, and from Kim Cuc who collected samples and information in Chiang Mai and several people in Bangkok doing the same.

“We think we can re-engineer the virus to be recognised,” Pitsamai said one evening, when Kim Cuc waited by the square canal with two dead durian leaves in her hands. “It’s slow work, though.”

Pitsamai’s banyan looked even worse.

“How slow?” Kim Cuc said quietly. “Are you going to do it before our trees die?”

“Yours? Probably. I’ll give you a cure as soon as it’s ready, before we mass-produce. Mine?” Pitsamai shrugged. The gesture made four leaves fall and the aerial roots wave. “I will not be as sad as you, but removing one as established as this will be difficult.” Then she sighed. “You remember how Örn and I were developing ways to make them much more easy to remove, so people aren’t put off by their permanence like old tattoos? I wish we were doing that again. It was fun.”

Kim Cuc held her hand, tugging her along the canal-side. Once, a wall had stood there around the old Chiang Mai. “You must be enjoying the challenge of this.”

“Yes, of course, but it’s stressful too.”

“Mmm.”

They reached the south-east corner, where a bit of re-constructed wall stood: a reminder of the past in dark brick. Further along, they passed a spirit house nestled in a full-size banyan. The little house, bright as a temple, was covered in garlands and offerings. Pitsamai laughed, pointing to bright pink carved animals on the spirit house’s verandah. “I like this spirit’s taste!”

At a roadside vendor they bought grilled meatballs and ambled away from the canal.

“It also makes me angry,” Pitsamai said, “that someone decided they hated the skin-trees so much, they had to kill them all. But I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that plenty of people still don’t care about killing plants.”

“You should be upset, though. Caring is good.” Kim Cuc looked up at the nearby buildings: a lot of ugly concrete, but covered in balcony-gardens, green roofs, vines on recycled metal trellises. Along the street, bins were clearly labelled for glass bottles, fibre-bag juice containers, paper waste, food waste. Vendors had recently started selling some of their meals in banana leaf instead of less natural packaging. Tourists liked the novelty and locals appreciated the reduction in waste. “People are protesting in London,” she said. “About skin-trees. Not a vast urban greening project, not re-forestation or renewable energy, but our skin-trees that provide better advertising. Be angry, but also be happy.” She tugged a garish massage-salon poster from a wall and dumped it in the paper bin. “So hurry up and cure the virus. Show people they can’t just get rid of good things.”

“I’m working on it!”

Arms linked, smiling, they walked on.

PHOENIX TAIL

The only man I ever wanted to take back to my apartment had a phoenix tail tree growing from his forearm, its flowers as vibrantly red as the ones growing near my school. I never got to ask why he put it in such an inconvenient place. In a temple in Ho Chi Minh City I saw him, holding up his arm as if the tree was a lit candle, and when he walked past I realised that the curving roots and trunk formed a tiny basin, full of rainwater. I wanted to drink from it.

<Posters covered the city like the disease on the skin-trees’ leaves, multiplying and ruining. Kim Cuc woke several mornings with dead leaves on her arm. On another afternoon with her friends, ice drinks along the side of the Ping river, she realised that the lychee on Sunatda’s brother was dead. She tried not to stare. She tried not to cry, especially later when she and Sunatda embraced and their leaves fluttered brown and dry around them. Sometimes she saw new skin-trees on students’ bodies and barely restrained herself from dancing across the street to them, sometimes she saw people removing advertisements from walls; then she turned, glimpsed her own dying durian or another person’s brown, wilting leaves, and the joy left her like a balloon floating into the sky.

Afraid of skin-trees disappearing from the city, from her memory, she had bought a notebook with bright yellow flowers on its cover and for several weeks had been writing lists and descriptions of her favourite skin-trees.

So when Pitsamai finally mailed her with the precious words ‘I think I’ve got something, come to the lab’, Kim Cuc almost ran out of a meeting with a Thanh Clothes manager, who finally had some hours to give her in the Chiang Mai branch. She hailed a tuk-tuk, not caring that it had stickers for Google’s new wrist computer on its front, and willed it to go faster, faster through the traffic to the university. She ran through the building to the biological engineering department, waving her pass at the scanners, until she more calmly entered Pitsamai’s lab.

Three students worked at the cabinets, manipulating injections into synthetic limbs or Petri dishes, and another worked at the computer. Coffee cans were piled in a chedi-shape. Pitsamai greeted Kim Cuc with a weary hug, and more leaves fell around them. “Look, follow me,” she said, taking Kim Cuc’s hand and leading her to one of the cabinets, where a man with purple hair sat. “These synthetic limbs are free of infection, totally free, and look at the trees, they hasn’t got worse in three days. That’s long enough to convince me. We need to do more tests, I’ve got this lot putting my re-engineered virus into samples, soon we’ll know for sure. But you can have it now, if you want.”

Kim Cuc stared at the little mango with brown-speckled leaves, knowing that gradually the tree would replace them with new, healthy ones.

“Yes, now.”

The needle barely hurt. As she held a small tissue over her arm, she imagined the chemicals running through her body, changing the virus, making her immune system notice an intruder, attack, kill.

“You’ve taken it too, haven’t you?”

“Yes, of course.” Pitsamai’s tree looked nearly dead. “But, you have to remember that the trees are hurt by all the leaves getting sick, some of them might not recover. Yours should. There’s a lot of green left. Mine… I don’t know.”

“I hope yours is strong enough,” Kim Cuc said, hugging her again. “And thank you, thank you.”

After leaving the university, she started a new notebook: fish-spined and bright blue. She wrote her name, the day of her injection, the duration of the illness beforehand. Pitsamai messaged other friends, asking if they wanted to surreptitiously take the drug, before its proper approval, and Kim Cuc wrote their names and information too. Several days later, official test subjects were brought in. Pitsamai recorded their data. When the first batches of the formal drug were circulated in Chiang Mai and other parts of northern Thailand, Kim Cuc wrote in the notebook: A hundred more doses shipped out today. Another hundred to Chiang Rai. Fifty to surrounding towns.

Skin-trees continued to die, if the drug didn’t reach the person in time, but many survived. Slowly, demand for new skin-trees grew. Paper advertisements peeled from walls in the rain or from determined fingers. No billboards marred Chiang Mai again. Sometimes Kim Cuc thought: How much of this is because I didn’t let people dismiss the skin-trees too quickly? No answer could be taken from the following months, but she was pleased by her determination, by her contribution however small.

Kim Cuc burned all her notebooks except the fish-spined one in an offering of thanks, after Pitsamai copied the data.

VANDA COERULEA ORCHID

This is the new skin-tree (skin-plant, really) on Pitsamai’s shoulder. Its roots curl around the stump of her banyan. Its broad, smooth, curving leaves cast a shade on the old banyan roots, that still lie on Pitsamai’s skin like frozen wax. I miss the aerial roots. I miss a whole tree to press my lips against. But I adore the curly roots, I adore the thin stem that I must be gentle with, I adore the famous blue flowers. Wrapping my tongue around the roots and feeling the gentle brush of petals against my hair, I learn new ways to love Pitsamai’s shoulder.

“The Notebook of My Favourite Skin-Trees” by Alex Dally MacFarlane. Copyright © 2010 by Alex Dally MacFarlane.

Picture credits:

• Skin tree tattoos: via The Kedge;
• Banana bonsai: via Paddle with Hoz;
• Tree with roots symbol: via Shaman UK;
• Banyan: via the Art of Bonsai;
• Acacia Tree symbol: via the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas;
• Dragon Fruit via Bid or Buy;
• Tree of Life symbol: via Gaia Community;
• Durian: via National GeoGraphic;
• Tree Tattoo Symbol: via Canada Top;
• Water jasmine bonsai: via wikimedia;
• Tree of Life: via Listphile;
• Rambutan: via CVI Jet Forum;
• Tree of Life symbol + with profile: via Briargrove;
• Phoenix Tail Bamboo: via Picasa;
• Vanda coerulea orchid: via Thai Local Craft;
• Tree and Skin: via treatment of your skin;

Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer and traveller, often found in markets. Since leaving her job in July 2009, she’s visited North America, Greece, Turkey and Singapore, and called Australia home for half a year. Next she intends to travel through various countries of East Asia. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Jabberwocky 4, Electric Velocipede, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Goblin Fruit, Sybil’s Garage and several other magazines. To find out more, visit her website: http://www.alexdallymacfarlane.com .

As a bonus, an interactive Google map with locations of the story:

The Notebook of my Favourite Skin-Trees

Alex Dally MacFarlane

Alex Dally MacFarlane is — as far as I can see — on a rather extended wanderjahr. My sister did something similar more than a decade ago, and eventually she wound up (via East Asia and Japan) in Australia, where she basically hasn’t returned from (apart from several family visits): she’s an Australian citizen now. I don’t know if Alex will return to her native England, but she sure seems to have fun travelling, and if that leads to stories like “The Notebook of My Favourite Skin-Trees”, then we all are all the richer for it.

Also, while my original intent with my Twitterzine @outshine was mainly to promote the SHINE anthology, I was (and am) happily surprised by the way it attracted talented writers and interesting pieces that were — as I found out later — hypercondensed forms of a short story. One of these was a tweet from Eric Gregory that was directly related to “The Earth of Yunhe” — his SHINE story — and another was a tweet from Alex Dally MacFarlane (published on Wednesday July 15, last year, which I’ll display below) that was directly related to “The Notebook of My Favourite Skin-Trees”.

A woman grafts a miniature, nano-engineered breed of fruit to people’s skin. Orchards travel the world and seed onto garbage heaps.

The actual story, as you can read below, goes quite a bit further, though…

BANANA

The best part of these are the fruits, growing on their fat stem, dangling down the person’s back or from their arm. I always bow and smile, asking, “Can I taste one of your fruits? Bananas from a skin-tree are so sweet.”

So sweet and so small, a single mouthful.

I also enjoy the place where banana tree meets flesh, roots curving over and into the person’s limb — pressing my lips there, my tongue — and the small shade cast by the leaves.

Kim Cuc saw advertisements everywhere she looked in the walking street market, but only on the leaves of the skin-trees: names of shops and cafés and restaurants spelled out, Thai or English or other languages, in the bright white veins. Aside from the occasional cry from stall owners or vendors — “I have the finest grilled bananas in Chiang Mai! Come and taste!” — no other form of promotion cluttered the senses.

That had always been the intent of the skin-trees’ engineers and earliest supporters. Kim Cuc smiled often, seeing the remains of once-garishly lit billboards, or walls that several years earlier would have been covered in paper.

No smiles on this night.

She stopped every person with a skin-tree in the walking street market, to ask if they’d noticed strange discolourations on their leaves. “There is a sickness,” she said, putting urgency into the phrase she now knew in many languages, not just her native Vietnamese and second tongue English, “and it’s important to collect samples and data.” Into one of the notebooks carried under her arm, she noted the age and ethnicity of the person, the age and species of their tree, the company its leaves advertised — this for those whose trees remained healthy. In a second notebook, with frowning lizards on the spine, she noted the same information for those whose trees were not. There she added information about the duration of the discolourations, their colour and spread. Samples went into a third notebook, with little clips to fasten two pages together, and special paper to protect and preserve the leaves.

The lizard-spined notebook was not as full as the first, yet.

Late in the night, when vendors began packing away their wares, Kim Cuc followed the shoppers returning to their homes. She drank from the large bottle of nutrient-full water she always carried around. The durian tree growing on her left shoulder needed it.

She passed a stall selling Buddha-shaped lanterns, a popular tourist item. Some still glowed, yellowly and redly, and in their light she glanced at her durian. A brown circle, no greater in circumference than a joss stick, lay on the edge of one leaf.

“No!” she cried out.

The bright screen of her wrist-computer did not contradict the Buddha lights.

BANYAN

The banyan’s thick roots suggest a secret fluidity, like wax, uncommon to plants: frozen over Pitsamai’s shoulder, beginning where bone used to jut from her thin flesh, sliding down her shoulder blades, curling around her upper arm (carefully trained not to restrict movement), stretching across her collarbone and down her breastbone, down the neat lines of her ribs. They frame her right breast. I always think they will flow when Pitsamai is alone, even though she tells me this isn’t the case.

The thick leaves advertise Chiang Mai University. Veins curl in the letters in Thai and English, artificially white against dark green. Pitsamai loves her university.

The tangled trunks rise from her shoulder, as tall as her forehead. Aerial roots dangle from its branches, always reminding me of hair (sometimes tangling with Pitsamai’s hair), and they are my favourite part. I always tilt my head when I kiss Pitsamai’s lips, so the aerial roots brush my cheek. When I kiss the base of the tree, that special place where root is fixed to flesh, the aerial roots tangle in my hair.

I considered, years ago when no skin-tree grew on me, acquiring a banyan. Perhaps it’s retained its allure because I have to be with Pitsamai or another of my girlfriends to enjoy it: a double pleasure, like spicy meat inside a rice ball.

“I am worried,” Pitsamai, biological engineer at Chiang Mai University, said in English.

“Oh, don’t say that!”

The previous night, Kim Cuc had torn off the infected leaf and fastened it in her third notebook. She’d written in the lizard-spined one, summarising this latest infection. By the light of glowing Buddhas, she’d wiped the tears from her cheeks and pretended the sickness was only a small thing, a two-hour stomach upset among the skin-trees.

The look on Pitsamai’s face when she took the leaf from Kim Cuc’s notebook ended that flimsy lie.

They stood on the edge of Pitsamai’s lab, where the Asian skin-trees had been created. Behind them were rows of tables, glass equipment, remote-controlled machines that tended to the cultures and plants in secure and biohazard cabinets. One of Pitsamai’s colleagues sat at a table, inputting data to a computer. Graphs arced across its screen.

Several specimens in the cabinets — skin-trees grafted to synthetic limbs — bore the dark marks of the disease.

“It’s beginning to spread very quickly,” Pitsamai said, “and in many parts of the world. Örn is seeing them in Iceland now. Neroly in Venice has begun a clinic, and noticed a dramatic rise two days ago — partly due to people only just hearing about the clinic, only just getting concerned, but many were new. This afternoon I v-chatted with one of the first cases in Australia. Half the leaves on his tree are brown and shrivelling. I think the skin-trees will die from this.”

Skin-trees were not meant to do that before the person’s death.

Kim Cuc played with the amulet at her throat, hating the nausea that wriggled in her belly like a troublesome naga. “What more can I do to help?”

“Keep collecting samples for me. Talk to some of the older cases in your notebook.” Pitsamai tangled her fingers into Kim Cuc’s. “I know it will be hard, seeing their trees so ill, but I need to know if any of them have managed to slow down the illness’ progression. Or if any of them have got healthier. I’m still trying various treatments.”

Inside the synthetic limbs flowed blood from infected people. Pitsamai and the others had already learned that they battled a virus that passed fluidly from person to person, by sweat and other excretions, flowing into the tree through its thin, nutrient-drinking roots. It was not like a fungus, where removing the affected areas might save the rest of the plant. So far it hadn’t reacted to general or specific antivirals. Containment didn’t work on something so eager to transfer in such a small quantity of liquid.

“Do you want to take some of my blood?” Kim Cuc asked, looking away from the ailing specimens. “Maybe you’ll find a cure with it.”

Such outright selfishness made her guilty, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her durian withering. Maybe, just maybe, Pitsamai would find a cure from one of the injections into her blood. And another sample always helped.

Pitsamai smiled. “Of course I’ll take some.”

After Kim Cuc’s blood filled a small container and Pitsamai found some sugary biscuits, they kissed. Banyan aerial roots brushed Kim Cuc’s ear, drawing a small sigh from her mouth. The banyan’s leaves, speckled brown, rustled against her hair.

“Work hard and well, as always,” Kim Cuc murmured.

“I hope you find something useful, love.”

DRAGON FRUIT

You have to be careful when kissing a dragon fruit skin-tree. There are spiky parts and they scratch, like a lover’s nails. The fruits are small and bright and, because of Pitsamai’s engineering, don’t need their shells removed. My brief lover, Busarakham, let me run my fingers along the smooth part of the leaves, let me kiss them, before tugging my attention to her flesh. I never told her that I preferred the tree to her breasts.

Five names from Kim Cuc’s lizard-spined notebook. Five conversations, by virtual-chat or in the city. None of them offered optimism like a red-enveloped birthday gift.

And, in a neat row along the side of a tourist-full songtaew on Ratchamanka Street, she saw stickers for one of the newest skin-whitening products. That, even more than the consistent reports of worsening, browning skin-trees, made her want to cry.

DURIAN

Ho Chi Minh City, six years ago:

The miniature durian tree grew from my left shoulder, its trunk straight and many-branched, roots curling over and, thinly, into me. The fruits, blunted so they didn’t cause injury, fell into my bra. Its leaves, dark green, long and wide as one finger joint of a child, advertised Thanh Clothes, a growing chain of eco-friendly outfits.

I walked back and forth in front of the billboards, the posters pinned on the sides of the road, on the sides of motorbikes, the little stickers that piled onto the posts as thickly as the electricity cables above. I bared my shoulder, wearing clothes Thanh made to fasten easily. I bared my tree. I made a tally: who stared at bright posters with cheerful smiling faces and big letters, Vietnamese and English, and who stared at my durian.

I presented my figures to many companies.

I said, “Your flashing electronic billboards soak up energy and no one wants them there, no one likes them, but over a hundred people an hour — busy shoppers, vendors, schoolchildren, businessmen and -women — stop to ask ‘What is Thanh Clothes?’ Thanh asks his customers why they come to his shop, and most say ‘Because that girl wears a strange tree on her shoulder.’ I don’t have to be reprinted, lit up. I don’t obstruct the beautiful parts of this city. All I must do is drink a lot of water, eat more food than usual, with the right nutrients, but really the plant is cleverer than a real one and can survive more difficulties. I can distribute seeds, if more people want to advertise Thanh Clothes.”

Not many companies liked the thought of advertising spread by the consumer’s wants. Advertising beyond their control, after the original tree or two.

Later, I bared my tree in vast protests across Southeast Asia. In Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, in Angkor Wat, in Vientiane, in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, in Shanghai and Hong Kong and Singapore and Manila. How did I afford all this, a fisherman’s daughter with half an education? Thanh made a lot of money because of me, because of the other women and men who took a tree onto their flesh and walked around my city with his name on their leaves. He believed in our advertising. The original investment in the technology — our nearest source: Chiang Mai, Pitsamai’s experimental work, who I later came to love in more ways that appreciating her vision — paid off more times than I can count. Our protests accused advertising of spreading too widely and wastefully.

Soon after my twenty-fifth birthday, the skin-trees replaced light and paper in many countries around the world — if not through a government’s law, then through public opinion and voting with their wallets.

And then the sickness, two years later, rippling across skin-trees of all types.

And advertisements returning. The stickers on the songtaew would be the first of many, vanguard to what Kim Cuc and many others had campaigned against.

“I hate it,” she told Pitsamai, over a quick dinner of seafood tom yam. “The stickers were so ugly.”

“I know. But smile, a little, because Neroly has made a compound that slows the progression of the illness. I’m going to replicate it on the Asian trees, just in case it doesn’t work on them, and see if I can make it work even better.”

Kim Cuc clapped her hands and, while Pitsamai pretended to bow for an audience, stole a big piece of squid from her bowl.

It seemed likely that a big corporation had developed the sickness, wanting a return to advertising that it controlled. Pitsamai and her colleagues agreed on this, after examining the virus and finding it so very distinct. But no one had determined which one. Probably not the skin-whitening company with the songtaew stickers. Who used those kinds of products in Canada, where one of the first cases appeared? From what Pitsamai had said, the virus appeared simultaneously in several locations around the world. A company with global interests, then. There were too many of those to bother tracking them down, when the skin-trees needed a cure quicker than an explanation. Unless several companies were behind it, which widened the list of suspects because then they could be more local. “Some businesses are suffering because they won’t change their ways,” Neroly had said in v-chat. “I can imagine someone thinking ‘Oh, let’s just kill the skin-trees’, as if this is the kind of backward step we need and want.” Governments were beginning to acknowledge the illness and, in certain countries, direct funding to the various universities.

At the end of the meal, Kim Cuc noticed three new brown spots on her durian’s leaves. She left the leaves in place, not wanting to deprive the tree of the rest of those leaves’ functionality, though she winced at glimpses of them.

She knew that living with Pitsamai and talking to many infected people had made catching the disease inevitable. Part of her had hoped for luck. Part of her considered it worth the risk. Still, it hurt.

A week passed.

Leaves darkened, Pitsamai’s work left her stressed and tired, Kim Cuc’s questions in the streets left her unhappy and the lizard-spined book full of notes. Six days after the first brown spot on Kim Cuc’s durian, skin-trees were announced dead in Canada and Bangkok: all the leaves shrivelled and fallen off. Regardless of species, skin-trees were evergreen. And these dead trees no longer took in nutrients. That same day, Kim Cuc saw ten more songtaew with stickers on their sides. She almost cried in the street, among vendors setting up their stalls for the night market — lanterns, wooden carvings, amulets, t-shirts, fresh fruit in bright piles — and tuk-tuk drivers who called out for custom. “It will not fall apart,” she whispered in Vietnamese, strange sounds to all the passersby. “Pitsamai and the others will find a cure. It will not fall apart.”

How could she, only an assistant and lover to Pitsamai, a Vietnamese girl in a foreign country, keep that promise?

She tried to spread optimism: telling other skin-tree wearers that the biological engineers worked hard across the world, that progress was already being made, berating songtaew drivers for giving in to greedy opportunistic companies, though she understood why they let the companies give them money to bear ads, and pulling down the posters appearing on poles and walls.

To cheer herself, to refill her strength, she spent a lot of time at her favourite temple in Thailand — Wat Doi Suthep, with its golden chedi, golden roof, golden bells dangling from the roof’s edge, and the smell of joss sticks, of lotus petals beneath her nose, and the calm golden gaze of Buddha — and she visited one of her other girlfriends.

JASMINE

Oh, the smell! It curls around Mekhalaa’s legs, rooted in her right foot, tendrils brushing her hips. She works with wood, she built a wooden frame for her chair, so when she rolls along the street with jasmine against exquisitely carved teak — kinnara, garuda, ghilen, kochasri and myriad other creatures — she looks like the flowering Himmapan forest.

She paints her nails gold, like an offering, and she wears no perfume except the scent of her flowers. When I kiss her, lips to the immobile arch of her foot, her ankles, her calves and thighs and the place in-between where she retains sensation, I am full of jasmine. It crowds my nose. Forgetting myself, kissing with my eyes closed, I swallow petals. I lick her foot, that special place where the plant passes through flesh, that thin line of scar tissue like an inlaid pearl border on a shutter, I open my eyes and look up through jasmine to her smiling face. “Kim Cuc, Kim Cuc, you are the only person I know who loves the skin-trees so much,” she often says, either in her faulty English or, slowly for me, in Thai.

“I got a skin-tree because I believe in them,” I tell her, “but their sexiness was a good side-bonus.” I laugh too, with joy. Even touching my durian is fun, sometimes, though another woman is better. Especially someone as beautiful as Mekhalaa (or Pitsamai, who is opposite in every way to Mekhalaa, small and slim with a face as delicately shaped as my statues of the Trung sisters, where Mekhalaa is large and soft with short hair that tickles her ears), especially someone patient and attentive and skilled.

Lying together on her bed, on yellow sheets with the carved headboard of a fish-tailed woman, we indulge in one another. I move where she asks me. I press my lips to her jasmine’s base, tracing the line of roots under her skin, under her sole — no inconvenience for a woman who never walks — while she flicks her fingers inside me. One hand following the stem of the jasmine up her thighs, I return the touch, affection for affection.

I close my eyes against the brown stains on the leaves, inhaling jasmine and getting lost in Mekhalaa’s touch, the jasmine’s bark under my lips, the smell, oh that wonderful sweet smell of petals crushed between our skin.

More trees died. More leaves developed brown spots on Kim Cuc’s durian, and on a hot, cloudy morning she woke to find one fallen, utterly brown and lifeless, on her pillow. Her tears splashed on it. Outside the window, two men pasted a big poster — billboard-big — to a bare wall. Already many people thought the skin-trees a failed experiment in alternative advertising. Enforcers of the new law in Thailand cared less about old forms. Real billboards, illuminated and animated, would follow.

“Go away,” Kim Cuc shouted through the mosquito netting. Over the honk of tuk-tuk horns — not replaceable, like the engines, with a silent electric version — and the voice of an exuberant banana and pineapple seller, the men had no chance of hearing her. At least she’d used their language.

She mailed some of her friends in Chiang Mai, the ones who’d introduced her to Pitsamai a couple of years earlier, and arranged a meeting: seven of them, mixed in age and gender, planning over spring rolls and chilli rice and bamboo prawn soup. First after the ordering of food, Kim Cuc updated them on Pitsamai’s progress. Still no cure. The compound that slowed the virus’ work helped them all, but couldn’t be developed further, couldn’t stop the skin-trees’ deaths.

“But we need to tell people that there’ll be a cure, sometime soon, and they shouldn’t give up,” she told the group.

Nods like obedient elephants in a tourist show.

“Not many people want to get a skin-tree now,” one said. “They see us with these dying things, so they settle for an animated tattoo or those glow-in-the-dark temporary ridges.”

“In the shape of temples on their white farang skin!” one said, giggling.

“Well, we need to point out that the virus isn’t harming people,” Kim Cuc said. The word ‘yet’ remained on her tongue, un-used. No one knew if the virus would mutate. But the people whose skin-trees died were completely healthy, except for useless dead wood on a limb or shoulder. “Maybe we can try to convince some friends. Or students! Some of them must be interested by death.”

Laughter. Remarks that not everyone owned a strange preference like Kim Cuc. She shrugged and said that no one would hurt from trying to persuade people.

They talked of removing posters, refusing to ride in a songtaew or tuk-tuk with those adverts — though some of them hesitated at depriving such low-income people of custom. The grandfather in the group suggested that, if people didn’t want a skin-tree right now, they could ink a tree and a favourite company’s name onto their arms. Only temporary. Henna, or pen by those who still used that implement. The katoey Sunatda, man-tall in glittery sandals and a pretty dress, offered to decorate the leaves in her plant shop with various good business’ names.

Kim Cuc left the meeting with a smile, with ideas filling her like Mekhalaa’s jasmine.

Collecting more information from people in the city lowered her mood. Skin-trees creeping closer to death, angry regrets at getting such a difficult-to-remove piece of body art, distress, fear. Too many falling leaves. Spreading hope felt fake and impossible, but Kim Cuc tried. “Don’t give up quite yet,” she told a young man, who waited for coffee in a new, locally run branch. “The biological engineers were clever enough to develop the skin-trees. They can fix them.” To a woman she suggested patience, as the skin-tree on her upper arm only bore several discolourations.

Later, she waited for Pitsamai at a little metal table in the night market, morose, thinking of the durian’s darkening leaves, imagining it dead and bare. “Still no breakthrough,” Pitsamai said, collapsing into the chair with a sigh. “Immune systems still don’t recognise the virus as an enemy, our anti-viral compounds aren’t doing enough.”

In unison, they sipped from cups of ice drink, kiwi and watermelon.

“Can you make the virus different?” Kim Cuc said. “So the immune system goes, ‘Hey there, I kill you now!’”

Pitsamai stared at her through the translucent base of her cup.

“We haven’t tried that,” she said, putting it down. “It’s a pretty complicated virus, but… well, we haven’t tried, so we don’t know.” She grabbed Kim Cuc’s hands, kissed them fiercely. “Fisherman’s daughter saves the world. Or, well, the skin-trees. Maybe. I want to go back to work!”

“You can go, if you want.” Emotions tangled in Kim Cuc: excitement, hope, desire for a cure, desire for Pitsamai at her side, strolling by stalls, in bed.

“No, no, I’ve had a long day. I won’t be able to work.” She laughed. “I’m not a student anymore!”

“You’ll be thinking of it all evening,” Kim Cuc fake-whined, “instead of me.”

“I can think of both, you know.”

When they leaned upright against the cushions on their specially designed bed, legs locked and a two-way dildo inside them both, gasping into each other’s trees, Kim Cuc’s thoughts were equally shared between pleasure and possibility.

RAMBUTAN

This tree’s trunk grows clear of branches, at least when carefully groomed like Sunatda’s, and then for its upper half is a great bush of leaves, thin branches, and the hairy little fruits, red when ripe. I love those fruits. So funny-looking in a market. So funny when the little skin-tree ones, as small as the ‘O’ on the Dong coins I still have from home, tangle in my hair after sex with Sunatda. I kiss the bare trunk and she flicks the branches, laughing as the fruits fall.

Kim Cuc lay on the floor of the apartment, watching a protest in London on her wrist computer’s projected screen. Many of the men and women in the small crowd bore skin-trees, and none of them were healthy. Their signs and shouts demanded more funding for Imperial College and Edinburgh University’s biological engineering departments. “We have this fantastic way of advertising, that’s utterly driven by consumer choice, and the government says they support us!” said the leader into his microphone. A row of tiny holly trees, only two centimetres high, grew on his left cheekbone, obscuring a useless eye. The other, bright blue, flitted constantly as he made eye contact across the crowd. “We need that support now!” Cheers and more shouts. The waving of banners.

Chiang Mai University had good funding from a series of Asian companies, so Pitsamai needed no one in the streets of Chiang Mai or Bangkok to help her. Assistance came from a colleague who specialised in virology, her pair of doctoral students and other graduates, eager to contribute, and from Kim Cuc who collected samples and information in Chiang Mai and several people in Bangkok doing the same.

“We think we can re-engineer the virus to be recognised,” Pitsamai said one evening, when Kim Cuc waited by the square canal with two dead durian leaves in her hands. “It’s slow work, though.”

Pitsamai’s banyan looked even worse.

“How slow?” Kim Cuc said quietly. “Are you going to do it before our trees die?”

“Yours? Probably. I’ll give you a cure as soon as it’s ready, before we mass-produce. Mine?” Pitsamai shrugged. The gesture made four leaves fall and the aerial roots wave. “I will not be as sad as you, but removing one as established as this will be difficult.” Then she sighed. “You remember how Örn and I were developing ways to make them much more easy to remove, so people aren’t put off by their permanence like old tattoos? I wish we were doing that again. It was fun.”

Kim Cuc held her hand, tugging her along the canal-side. Once, a wall had stood there around the old Chiang Mai. “You must be enjoying the challenge of this.”

“Yes, of course, but it’s stressful too.”

“Mmm.”

They reached the south-east corner, where a bit of re-constructed wall stood: a reminder of the past in dark brick. Further along, they passed a spirit house nestled in a full-size banyan. The little house, bright as a temple, was covered in garlands and offerings. Pitsamai laughed, pointing to bright pink carved animals on the spirit house’s verandah. “I like this spirit’s taste!”

At a roadside vendor they bought grilled meatballs and ambled away from the canal.

“It also makes me angry,” Pitsamai said, “that someone decided they hated the skin-trees so much, they had to kill them all. But I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that plenty of people still don’t care about killing plants.”

“You should be upset, though. Caring is good.” Kim Cuc looked up at the nearby buildings: a lot of ugly concrete, but covered in balcony-gardens, green roofs, vines on recycled metal trellises. Along the street, bins were clearly labelled for glass bottles, fibre-bag juice containers, paper waste, food waste. Vendors had recently started selling some of their meals in banana leaf instead of less natural packaging. Tourists liked the novelty and locals appreciated the reduction in waste. “People are protesting in London,” she said. “About skin-trees. Not a vast urban greening project, not re-forestation or renewable energy, but our skin-trees that provide better advertising. Be angry, but also be happy.” She tugged a garish massage-salon poster from a wall and dumped it in the paper bin. “So hurry up and cure the virus. Show people they can’t just get rid of good things.”

“I’m working on it!”

Arms linked, smiling, they walked on.

PHOENIX TAIL

The only man I ever wanted to take back to my apartment had a phoenix tail tree growing from his forearm, its flowers as vibrantly red as the ones growing near my school. I never got to ask why he put it in such an inconvenient place. In a temple in Ho Chi Minh City I saw him, holding up his arm as if the tree was a lit candle, and when he walked past I realised that the curving roots and trunk formed a tiny basin, full of rainwater. I wanted to drink from it.

Posters covered the city like the disease on the skin-trees’ leaves, multiplying and ruining. Kim Cuc woke several mornings with dead leaves on her arm. On another afternoon with her friends, ice drinks along the side of the Ping river, she realised that the lychee on Sunatda’s brother was dead. She tried not to stare. She tried not to cry, especially later when she and Sunatda embraced and their leaves fluttered brown and dry around them. Sometimes she saw new skin-trees on students’ bodies and barely restrained herself from dancing across the street to them, sometimes she saw people removing advertisements from walls; then she turned, glimpsed her own dying durian or another person’s brown, wilting leaves, and the joy left her like a balloon floating into the sky.

Afraid of skin-trees disappearing from the city, from her memory, she had bought a notebook with bright yellow flowers on its cover and for several weeks had been writing lists and descriptions of her favourite skin-trees.

So when Pitsamai finally mailed her with the precious words ‘I think I’ve got something, come to the lab’, Kim Cuc almost ran out of a meeting with a Thanh Clothes manager, who finally had some hours to give her in the Chiang Mai branch. She hailed a tuk-tuk, not caring that it had stickers for Google’s new wrist computer on its front, and willed it to go faster, faster through the traffic to the university. She ran through the building to the biological engineering department, waving her pass at the scanners, until she more calmly entered Pitsamai’s lab.

Three students worked at the cabinets, manipulating injections into synthetic limbs or Petri dishes, and another worked at the computer. Coffee cans were piled in a chedi-shape. Pitsamai greeted Kim Cuc with a weary hug, and more leaves fell around them. “Look, follow me,” she said, taking Kim Cuc’s hand and leading her to one of the cabinets, where a man with purple hair sat. “These synthetic limbs are free of infection, totally free, and look at the trees, they hasn’t got worse in three days. That’s long enough to convince me. We need to do more tests, I’ve got this lot putting my re-engineered virus into samples, soon we’ll know for sure. But you can have it now, if you want.”

Kim Cuc stared at the little mango with brown-speckled leaves, knowing that gradually the tree would replace them with new, healthy ones.

“Yes, now.”

The needle barely hurt. As she held a small tissue over her arm, she imagined the chemicals running through her body, changing the virus, making her immune system notice an intruder, attack, kill.

“You’ve taken it too, haven’t you?”

“Yes, of course.” Pitsamai’s tree looked nearly dead. “But, you have to remember that the trees are hurt by all the leaves getting sick, some of them might not recover. Yours should. There’s a lot of green left. Mine… I don’t know.”

“I hope yours is strong enough,” Kim Cuc said, hugging her again. “And thank you, thank you.”

After leaving the university, she started a new notebook: fish-spined and bright blue. She wrote her name, the day of her injection, the duration of the illness beforehand. Pitsamai messaged other friends, asking if they wanted to surreptitiously take the drug, before its proper approval, and Kim Cuc wrote their names and information too. Several days later, official test subjects were brought in. Pitsamai recorded their data. When the first batches of the formal drug were circulated in Chiang Mai and other parts of northern Thailand, Kim Cuc wrote in the notebook: A hundred more doses shipped out today. Another hundred to Chiang Rai. Fifty to surrounding towns.

Skin-trees continued to die, if the drug didn’t reach the person in time, but many survived. Slowly, demand for new skin-trees grew. Paper advertisements peeled from walls in the rain or from determined fingers. No billboards marred Chiang Mai again. Sometimes Kim Cuc thought: How much of this is because I didn’t let people dismiss the skin-trees too quickly? No answer could be taken from the following months, but she was pleased by her determination, by her contribution however small.

Kim Cuc burned all her notebooks except the fish-spined one in an offering of thanks, after Pitsamai copied the data.

VANDA COERULEA ORCHID

This is the new skin-tree (skin-plant, really) on Pitsamai’s shoulder. Its roots curl around the stump of her banyan. Its broad, smooth, curving leaves cast a shade on the old banyan roots, that still lie on Pitsamai’s skin like frozen wax. I miss the aerial roots. I miss a whole tree to press my lips against. But I adore the curly roots, I adore the thin stem that I must be gentle with, I adore the famous blue flowers. Wrapping my tongue around the roots and feeling the gentle brush of petals against my hair, I learn new ways to love Pitsamai’s shoulder.

“The Notebook of My Favourite Skin-Trees” by Alex Dally MacFarlane. Copyright © 2010 by Alex Dally MacFarlane.

Picture credits:

• Skin tree tattoos: via The Kedge;
• Banana bonsai: via Paddle with Hoz;
• Tree with roots symbol: via Shaman UK;
• Banyan: via the Art of Bonsai;
• Acacia Tree symbol: via the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dallas;
• Dragon Fruit via Bid or Buy;
• Tree of Life symbol: via Gaia Community;
• Durian: via National GeoGraphic;
• Tree Tattoo Symbol: via Canada Top;
• Water jasmine bonsai: via wikimedia;
• Tree of Life: via Listphile;
• Rambutan: via CVI Jet Forum;
• Tree of Life symbol + with profile: via Briargrove;
• Phoenix Tail Bamboo: via Picasa;
• Vanda coerulea orchid: via Thai Local Craft;
• Tree and Skin: via treatment of your skin;

Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer and traveller, often found in markets. Since leaving her job in July 2009, she’s visited North America, Greece, Turkey and Singapore, and called Australia home for half a year. Next she intends to travel through various countries of East Asia. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Jabberwocky 4, Electric Velocipede, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Goblin Fruit, Sybil’s Garage and several other magazines. To find out more, visit her website: http://www.alexdallymacfarlane.com .

As a bonus, an interactive Google map with locations of the story:

Sick of my ZiPod bleating
with all its texts and tweeting
I spin wild and free
On the windmills by the sea.

[Bio] Eva Chapman loves to have fun. www.is.gd.fTIP .

December 12:

When AI was incorporated into the surveillance cameras, they became more interested in watching each other. They left the rest of us alone.

[Bio] Jonathan Pinnock ( @jonpinnock, http://www.jonathanpinnock.com/ ) is. For the time being, at any rate.

December 19:

Alas! Mine heart doth beateth no more.
Yea, I liveth on, thy grateful cyborg.

[Bio] Beth Katte @bethblackbird fancies futuristic antiquities. http://www.bethkatte.com/ .

December 26:

While Owen’s back was turned, Zoe clicked the ArouzalCard into the port behind her left ear. Why wouldn’t I be in the mood tonight, my love?

[Bio] Bobbie Laughman lives, writes and feigns normalcy in Gettysburg, PA http://tinyurl.com/ydztbnd .

Every first and third Friday of the month there will be two story excerpts from the Shine anthology. This is the tenth one: “At Budokan” by Alastair Reynolds:

I’m somewhere over the Sea of Okhotsk when the nightmare hits again. It’s five years ago and I’m on the run after the machines went beserk. Only this time they’re not just enacting wanton, random mayhem, following the scrambled choreography of a corrupted performance program. This time they’re coming after me, all four of them, stomping their way down an ever-narrowing back alley as I try to get away, the machines too big to fit in that alley, but in the malleable logic of dreams somehow not too big, swinging axes and sticks rather than demolition balls, massive, indestructible guitars and drumsticks. I reach the end of the alley and start climbing up a metal ladder, a ladder that morphs into a steep metal staircase, but my limbs feel like they’re moving through sludge. Then one of them has me, plucking me off the staircase with steel fingers big enough to bend girders, and I’m lifted through the air and turned around, crushed but somehow not crushed, until I’m face to face with James Hetfield out of Metallica.

“You let us down, Fox,” James says, his voice a vast seismic rumble, animatronic face wide enough to headbutt a skyscraper into rubble. “You let us down, you let the fans down, and most of all you let yourself down. Hope you feel ashamed of yourself, buddy.”

“I didn’t mean…” I plead, pityingly, because I don’t want to be crushed to death by a massive robot version of James Hetfield.

“Buddy.” He starts shaking me, holding me in his metal fist like a limp rag doll.

“I’m sorry man. This wasn’t how it was meant…”

“Buddy.”

But it’s not James Hetfield shaking me to death. It’s Jake, my partner in Morbid Management. He’s standing over my seat, JD bottle in one hand, shaking me awake with the other. Looking down at the pathetic, whimpering spectacle before him.

“Having it again, right?”

“You figured.”

“Buddy, it’s time to let go. You fucked up big time. But no one died and no one wants to kill you about it now. Here.” And he passes me the bottle, letting me take a swig of JD to settle my nerves. Doesn’t help that I don’t like flying much. The flashbacks usually happen in the Antonov, when there’s nowhere else to run.

“Where are we?” I ask groggily.

“About three hours out.”

I perk up. “From landing?”

“From departure. Got another eight, nine in the air, depending on head-winds.”

I hand him back the bottle. “And you woke me up for that?”

“Couldn’t stand to see you suffering like that. Who was it this time? Lars?”

“James.”

Jake gives this a moment’s consideration. “Figures. James is probably not the one you want to piss off. Even now.”

“Thanks.”

“You need to chill. I was talking to them last week.” Jake gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder. “They’re cool with you, buddy. Bygones be bygones. They were even talking about getting some comp seats for the next stateside show, provided we can arrange wheelchair access. Guys are keen to meet Derek. But then who isn’t?”

I think back to the previous evening’s show. The last night of a month-long residency at Tokyo’s Budokan. Rock history. And we pulled it off. Derek and the band packed every seat in the venue, for four straight weeks. We could have stayed on another month if we didn’t have bookings lined up in Europe and America.

“I guess it’s working out after all,” I say.

“You sound surprised.”

“I had my doubts. From a musical standpoint? You had me convinced from the moment I met Derek. But turning this into a show? The logistics, the sponsorship, the legal angles? Keeping the rights activists off our back? Actually making this thing turn a profit? That I wasn’t so certain about.”

“Reason I had to have you onboard again, buddy. You’re the numbers man, the guy with the eye for detail. And you came through.”

“I guess.” I stir in my seat, feeling the need to stretch my legs. “You—um—checked on Derek since the show?”

Jake shoots me a too-quick nod. “Derek’s fine. Hit all his marks tonight.”

Something’s off, and I’m not sure what. It’s been like this since we boarded the Antonov. As if something’s bugging Jake and he won’t come out with whatever it was.

“Killer show, by all accounts,” I say.

“Best of all the whole residency. Everything went like clockwork. The lights, the back projection…”

“Not just the technical side. One of the roadies reckoned Extinction Event was amazing.”

Jake nods enthusiastically. “As amazing as it ever is.”

“No, he meant exceptionally amazing. As in, above and beyond the performance at any previous show.”

Jake’s face tightens at the corners. “I heard it too, buddy. It was fine. On the nail. The way we like it.”

“I got the impression it was something more than…” But I trail off, and I’m not sure why. “You sure there’s nothing we need to talk about?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Fine.” I give an easy smile, but there’s still something unresolved, something in the air between us. “Then I guess I’ll go see how the big guy’s doing.”

“You do that, buddy.”

• Antonov 225: via Aerospaceweb;
• Angry Hetfield: via Last FM;
• Spider Robot Lars: via bonnaroo boards;
• Extinction Event: via Time to Eat the Dogs;
• Budokan: via de academic;

Alastair Reynolds was born in 1966. His first short fiction sale appeared in 1990, and he began publishing novels ten years later. Chasm City, his second novel, won the British Science Fiction award in 2002. His ninth novel, Terminal World, is due imminently. He is about to embark on an ambitious and broadly optimistic trilogy documenting the expansion of the human species into solar and then galactic space over the next 11,000 years. A former scientist, Reynolds worked for the European Space Agency until 2004, when he turned full-time writer. He is married and lives in Wales, not too far from his place of birth.

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Finally, also an interactive Google Map of story locations from the SHINE anthology:

Every first and third Friday of the month there will be two story excerpts from the Shine anthology. This is the ninth one: “Seeds” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia:

Two teenagers bolted past him, running so fast James almost lost his balance and dropped his multi-text device, which would have been a major problem because he had no idea how to get back to the main road. The paths had twisted and turned a dozen times before he had finally parked his car close to the town square with its double arcades.

James glared at the teenagers but they kept running. He was sure they had bumped into him on purpose. They probably recognize the logo on his suitcase.

He didn’t get it. Just on Sunday he watched a group of UNAM students parading around the Angel of Independence, wearing black and white Zapata t-shirts and yelling “maiz y libertad.” Like a perfect seed and a perfect crop was somehow wrong and Germingen was the devil. It all sounded suspiciously anarchistic to him.

Fine, it was copyrighted technology and the seeds were sterile unless they were treated with Germingen’s very own Germingrow. If the user agreement was not followed exactly as intended, Germingen would trigger the Trojan Horse built into the genetic map of the seed, but so what? You got large, perfect crops in return. In the end, they were doing these people a favor.

James shook his head, straightened his clothes and kept on walking until he reached the fountain in the middle of the plaza. Without people wearing a geo-location unit, all he could do was squint and wait under the harsh sun for his contact to arrive, guessing, rather than knowing, if any of the townsfolk headed his way were Mr. Totol.

The wind blew a cloud of dust in James face and he sputtered and swore. His suit was nano-treated, but the dirt was probably pullulating with dog faeces and some nasty germs.

When the cloud dissipated a man wearing white linen pants, a matching shirt and hat approached him and extended his hand.

“I’m Alejandro Totol,” he said. “You’ve got to be from Germingen.”

James had all of his data on the multi-text but it was going to do no good if Mr. Totol did not carry his own multi-text. By the looks of it, all the farmer had with him was a crude knapsack. He would have to introduce himself the old-fashioned way.

“James Clark, Customer Satisfaction and Services Representative, Germingen, Mexico and Caribbean division. At Germingen we develop the most resistant, innovative crops to supply the farms of tomorrow—”

“That’s nice,” said Mr. Totol, interrupting James before he could finish his speech.

“Bigger, better, stronger crops make a bigger, better, stronger world,” James ran his thumb across his multi-text device. “It says here, Mr. Totol, that you are one of our silver maize seed users. Ten-year contract, eight percent copyright and user fee and insured GM seeds, right?”

“It’s not my contract.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s not my contract. The governor got the contract for the whole state and we have to use the seeds. Everyone in Oaxaca has to do it. They have this state levy on us for the stuff.”

• Teotitlan Maiz: via Globe Trotters;
• Mais en Oaxaca: via Menédez y Menéndez Opus;
• Question mark: via UITA;
• Maiz y Libertad: via YouTube;

Silvia Moreno-Garcia was born in the north of Mexico and moved to Canada several years ago. She lives in beautiful, rainy British Columbia with her husband, children and two cats. She writes fantasy, magic realism and Science Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Futurismic, Shimmer and Tesseracts Thirteen. With the help of editor Paula R. Stiles and a band of eldritch writers she publishes the online zine Innsmouth Free Press. Silvia is also working on her first novel and be found online at http://www.silviamoreno-garcia.com/.

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UK:

Independents:

A Thousand Trains Out of Here

Paul Evanby

Hey: I’m both happy and proud to present a Dutch writer — a compatriot — on this (supposedly) international stage. I think it’s healthy that English-language SF is increasingly (even if still somewhat slowly) opening up to non-Anglophone writers. In general, I think greater diversity is a good thing.

Atypically, Paul is not among the modern creed of speculative fiction writers who keep the day job for financial security and write for pleasure or for the soul (or both) in their spare time: no, he quit his job to get more writing done. Then — as he told me at the last semi-irregular meet-ups we have with Jurgen Snoeren and Floris Kleijne — his previous employer(s) kept bothering him with requests to work on several IT projects (obviously, his expertise is in demand, and I’m trying to use it for make an iPhone app. of his own story).

No rest for the wicked, as the saying goes.

A saying that is perfectly applicable to “A Thousand Trains Out of Here”, where Jaouad — the main character — tries, very hard, to get at least one certain aspect of his overworked (yet fairly exciting) life in order. To use another saying: should you ‘be careful what you wish for’, or not?

A saying that is perfectly applicable to “A Thousand Trains Out of Here”, where Jaouad — the main character — tries, very hard, to get at least one certain aspect of his overworked (yet fairly exciting) life in order. To use another saying: should you ‘be careful what you wish for’, or not?

There was always the sudden brightness in their eyes: the lighting up of their faces which was actually, Jaouad thought, a kind of hidden, inverted form of racism. Racism, and thus self-hatred. But they were never aware. How could they be? Moroccan-targeted xenophobia was simply not done. Not in the Netherlands: one does not, after all, bite the hand that feeds.

The blonde girl behind the counter smiled at him as he waved his hand in front of the credit reader. No careful positioning of his fingers over the sensor for him: his implants were always first-class, and registered immediately.

The girl noticed it too, of course, and her starry-eyed “Enjoy your lunch” sounded that much more breathless for it.

Jaouad grinned. “Thanks!”

He took his coffee and his bun to a small table on the edge of the canal. Alex had not arrived yet, so he sat watching the boats on the water. The Amsterdam morning was slowly warming up. Tourists and real people (Alex liked to call the tourists ‘fake people’) were already milling around on the more obvious spots, but this small corner café was run by a pair of ex-geohackers who had managed to keep it off the geogrid for years now, so that it could only be found by those who already knew where it was, and those who were not afraid to walk into a blind spot on their tag maps.

Which meant that Jaouad could enjoy his coffee in relative quiet: a scarce commodity in the heart of one of the Old Immunities, Amsterdam still being favourite among the districts of Edge.

He checked the time. Alex should have been here by now, but there was no sign of him. No message, no com.

Instead, Jaouad’s assistant had left a Call Me note, the way she did when she knew he would not be in the mood for bad news. He sighed, then commed. “Okay, tell me.”

“Jaouad, glad you called,” Meryam, sounding professionally hurried. “It’s about Orbital’s last-minute change in plans, of course.”

“Of course. What do they want now?”

“They want you to be present. As in, physically?”

Jaouad sucked in his cheek. “Present, where?” he asked, to buy time.

“LP.”

Laâyoune Principal. The head office. They had to be joking. “I’m in Edge. Far from the madding crowd. Virtually unreachable, was the idea, remember?”

“I told them that.”

Jaouad waited. She wouldn’t have called just to inform him about the unrealistic expectations of a client. No matter how big the client, he would not be in Morocco this afternoon.

Meryam cleared her throat. “They’re proposing a reschedule.”

He blinked. “For me?”

“For the shareholders. But, yes, you’re the excuse.”

She would have explained to them how delaying the moment their new power transmitter went online would have wide-ranging consequences. The date and time had been set months ago. Commitments had been made, business plans had been laid — a single hour of delay would mean no end of difficulties. She would have showed them calculations to that effect, conveniently framed in mega-euros of damages and lost revenue, both direct and indirect.

Apparently none of this had changed their minds.

“God!” He muttered. “What’s the new target date?”

“Thursday, twelve noon.”

“Two whole days. Ridiculous.”

“The official line is that they want the main Terrestrial architect present in the same room with Orbital’s head of mission control. Some sort of political statement. Zidoune seems to have convinced the board that a display of unqualified unity is the only way to make the public and the shareholders believe it was necessary to spend all that money. A few millions extra won’t matter, apparently.”

He sighed again. He and Cham Zidoune, the CEO of Laâyoune Solaire, did not see eye-to-eye on a great many things. This was exactly the kind of manoeuvering he had wanted to flee, by taking a vacation just before the big day. It should all have rolled on without him. It was out of his hands anyway, and there was nothing he could do to make it run better.

This, plus the fact that he had not seen Alex for more than a month.

“When do you expect a decision?”

“The board meeting should continue in about, oh … fifteen minutes,” said Meryam. “Won’t be long after that.”

“Call me when you know more.”

He stared at the empty chair opposite from him. Up here, in the quaint streets and plazas of old Europe, it was hard to imagine the hectic goings-on of real life. But real life had a way of catching up with you, wherever you went.

And where was Alex?

Of course he knew better than to expect his friend to be on time. Alex tended to become … distracted. For a food programmer, his attitude towards lunch was remarkably cavalier. Jaouad had known him to miss dinner dates entirely, just because he had to wait for a particularly interesting strain of mealworm to roll out of the protoprinter.

But half past noon was pushing it.

He called Alex and got no reply. Then he looked up his geotrace, but Alex’s last update showed him to be at Dam Square, just ten minutes ago.

What was he doing at Dam Square?

Jaouad stood up.

By the time he set foot on the tourist-and-pigeon-covered steps surrounding the greyish stone pillar at the centre of Dam Square, Alex’s geotrace had updated to a location more than seven kilometres to the south. Jaouad swore softly. He must have taken the old underground train from Rokin Station.

Jaouad hurried down the escalator and boarded the first southbound train. In the rickety old carriage he sat down amidst a gaggle of tourists. Alex’s geotrace was stationary; the image showed a corner of some anonymous skyscraper against a blue, sunny sky.

What was going on? Was it deliberate? Had Alex taken the train when he saw Jaouad’s trace leaving the café?

That was unlike him. Alex’s sense of humour could verge on the bizarre, like his own, but it did not usually extend to drawn-out practical jokes. He was to the point. If there was something he wanted to tell Jaouad, he would do so outright.

On the other hand, even after years of living together he was still able to surprise Jaouad with an unexpected turn of phrase, a wild plan, a unique point of view. It was one of the many reasons Jaouad had missed him, during the long weeks he’d had to spend in El Aaiún and Casablanca, overseeing the final phase of the project. Had it been up to him, he would have managed the whole thing from his home office on the Keizersgracht, the old Amsterdam canal, as he did all of his projects.

That would also have allowed him to check on the final touches being put on the ecotecture. His assistants were perfectly capable of finishing the job here in Edge, but they did not have the complete overview. And even though he knew that centralised ecotecture was supposed to be a thing of the past, he still saw himself as an artist: an artist who should be able to step back from his canvas to regard the whole painting.

But not, of course, from outside his studio.

Cham Zidoune, whose executive bio was liberally sprinkled with terms such as ‘visionary’, ‘multi-talented’ and ‘can-do leadership’, had insisted on Jaouad being personally available to the Orbital branch of the joint-venture for the duration of the deployment phase, even though he’d had nothing to do with the design and construction of the geosynchronous power station itself. His work was all ground-based.

Antennas were needed to receive the microwave energy beamed down from the phased arrays of the orbiting solar power plant. Large antennas, covering square kilometres. Square kilometres of area which quaint, densely populated Edge City could not provide. Moreover, existing lines of communication were not to be disturbed. Jaouad Amrani was the architect whose modular ecostructivism enabled the roofs of his specially designed housing units to configure themselves into conducting elements that could autonomously join their neighbours into a single rectenna large enough for converting microwaves into electricity, while acting as relays for voice traffic and netcom. If architecture by itself was not sufficient to disguise the rectenna elements, optical cloaking technology took care of aesthetic concerns.

None of this was reason for Jaouad to be Saharaside for weeks on end, but Zidoune’s ‘vision’ was essentially nationalistic, centred on the États-Unis du Maroc et le Sahara Occidental. As far as he was concerned, El Aaiún was the navel of the world, and everything that was worth doing had to be done in El Aaiún. Jaouad Amrani was just one part of that.

Even if it meant that Jaouad would not see his family. He had thought about inviting Alex over for the duration of the project, but attaining a visa for an unmarried partner was still difficult in Morocco: Rabat had had a persistent problem with juvenile delinquents from the Netherlands, mostly second generation immigrants, which it was only slowly beginning to solve. Moreover, Alex was reluctant to leave his own work unattended for too long.

Two days ago he had finally managed to return to Amsterdam, looking forward to a well-earned holiday, only to find that Alex was even more preoccupied than usual. He had blamed himself, of course, giving in to Zidoune’s demands and staying away too long. And now there was a surliness between them which he had hoped to resolve by having lunch together at their favourite café.

As the train drew into South Boulevard Station, Meryam commed again. “That was quick,” Jaouad said. He got off the train, walked along the platform and stopped in front of a billboard.

“Well, they pride themselves on being decision makers. I just heard the verdict.”

The billboard showed a stretch of unsullied beach with an impossibly blue surf rolling in. The surf looped while the board tried to determine Jaouad’s identity. When it came up against his firewall, it started running a generic ad tailored to a Dutch male of his appearance and age bracket: a small, light, lusciously designed and clearly very energy-efficient car sweeping noiselessly through an uninhabited landscape of rough natural beauty. He turned his back to it. “Which is?”

“As expected. The budget allows for three days delay, so they’re on the safe side, even.” Meryam paused. “I’m sorry.”

Jaouad checked Alex’s geotrace. He was not surprised to see it had moved even further south, and this time slightly westwards, as well. Narrowing his eyes, he tried to imagine where his friend might be headed, and failed.

He watched the tail lights of the train disappear into the tunnel, accompanied by a frightful screeching of metal against metal. When he could hear himself again, he said: “I’m not going.”

He had to assume that Alex was doing all of this by train. If he’d hired a taxi or talked a friend into taking him by car, there was no telling where he might end up.

So Jaouad was following him across Edge’s tightly spun web of railway lines. That web was a superposition of historic urban needs and modern ideas about fast and efficient transportation. It meant that there was a roughly horseshoe-shaped bundle of trunk lines running through Edge’s Old Immunities, with its closed segment abutting the coast, while the inside of the U-shape was filled with a net of lines criss-crossing between population centres. Had he been able to guess Alex’s destination, he might have told EdgeRail to program him a shortcut. The initial stages of the project had involved lots of touring around the city, scouting for locations, and by now he knew his way around the AIs running the transport system.

As it was, he sat staring out the window at the painfully well-organised Dutch ‘countryside’, cursing Alex for his continued com silence, and himself for letting it get to him. If this was his friend’s intention, he was succeeding admirably. Once this was over, they would have a serious talk.

Someone commed him. He saw who it was, groaned softly, and answered. “Cham.”

“Jaouad. Dear boy. What’s this I hear about—”

“That’s no use, Cham. I’m on holiday, remember? You should try it sometime.”

Cham Zidoune’s sighs were expressions of world-weariness that would have put a Romantic poet to shame. “Jaouad. Is there anything, anything I can do to impress upon you further the importance of this occasion? Let’s, let’s for the moment forget about Laâyoune Solaire, shall we? This is not about short-term business interests. This is about history. I swear. History.” His French drew out the word into something which could only have been written with an elegant, elongated Arabic ligature.

“I see,” said Jaouad.

“The magnitude of this deal, it’s staggering. You are … we both are … too young to remember the days when we were dependent on development aid from the North. But make no mistake: they were the alms for the poor, and designed to keep us that way. Did you know I was born in the same year as the States of Morocco, the year we finally unlocked our own oil wealth? Our parents used that wealth wisely, because they’d seen enough examples of African corruption, greed and mismanagement. The North wanted our oil … oh, how they needed it! But we didn’t need to sell it cheaply. We used our new wealth to develop solar. Then we closed the tap, because we, unlike the North, were aware of our responsibility toward the planet.” He paused. “And now, it’s payback time. Where would Europe be, where would your beloved Edge be without our investments and our technology?”

It was Zidoune’s version of the Maghreb Renaissance. In his mind a set of wildly separate events and contingencies was fused into a single stream of inevitability, resulting in the emergence of Morocco as a leading energy supplier. He preferred to overlook the Persian Struggle, which set off a domino effect of popular revolutions throughout the Middle-East, leading the countries of North Africa, which saw the writing on the wall, to scramble for political reform. He never mentioned dissident elements within the Alaouite dynasty itself, foreign-educated princes who were able to modernise the monarchy from within, while keeping radical islamism at bay. Instead, he loved to go on about the spirit of unity which had led the new governments of Morocco and Algeria and the leaders of the Polisario Front to agree to a peace deal: the deal that eventually led to the formation of the dual-state system in which Morocco and Western Sahara were joined in a single national entity, finally allowing their off-shore oil and gas reserves to be exploited. And he had a way of trivialising the role of foreign investors, although he admitted that Applied Indian Rocket Systems and Tianlong Aerospace had both been instrumental in the development of the low-cost commercial space flight without which Laâyoune Solaire’s orbiting power stations would never have been cost-effective.

Jaouad had heard it all before. “I see,” he said again. “But Cham, I’m just a humble architect. I really don’t think I’m the one to stand next to you, looking important and symbolising history and all that. Also, you’re taller than me.”

“No worries, Jaouad. We only want you to nod to, shake hands with, and answer a few questions from the Danish environmental attaché.”

“Danish?”

“If the Netherlands project is a success, Denmark may want to employ our technology as well. They’ve already contacted us. This in all confidentiality, you understand.”

“But I still don’t see—”

“There’s a rival bid. From Egypt. Shawqi Something-or-other. Terrestrial solar collectors and heat storage in the desert sand. All proven technology, and all as sexy as last year’s com pod. No vision. No synergy.” He chuckled. “I swear, dear boy, when those Eurotypes see your designs, they’ll beg us to take their money.”

“They can talk to me whenever they want,” Jaouad persisted. “My office is mapped and tagged. And my designs are published. I still don’t see why I need to be there in person.”

Another of Zidoune’s sepulchral sighs. “Alright. I didn’t want to tell you this until you were safely down here.” He paused. “We think you’re in danger.”

At Leiden Station he got off the train and sat down on a bench at one end of the platform. The afternoon was beginning to get quite warm and the sun was burning mercilessly. After a while he made his way down to the adjoining park. As he descended the stairway he couldn’t help but look over his shoulder to check if someone was coming after him.

Letting them know you’re aware of them. How smooth, he thought. How sophisticated.

Zoudine had told him of what he thought the Egyptians were up to. They were quite desperate to win the Danish contract, and they would not hesitate to remove some key players from the competition if they thought it would improve their chances. He had also hinted quite clearly that any future cooperation between Jaouad and Laâyoune Solaire might hinge on Jaouad’s presence at the meeting with the Danes.

As he wandered aimlessly under the trees of the small strip of parkland, he found that he wasn’t even very worried about himself. Zoudine wanted him in El Aaiún as quickly as possible, but Jaouad kept checking up on Alex’s geotrace, which was creeping steadily further south. It wouldn’t take long for him to reach the Old Immunity of Rotterdam, the European transport hub for all of Edge.

Alex had vanished without leaving a message, and it was clear now that he was unable to tell anyone where he was going, although as long as his trace updated he could be followed.

But once in Rotterdam, they could take him anywhere.

He had first met Alex van Heesteren while working as an assistant at an architectural firm in Tangier. Alex was in town for a friend’s wedding, a wedding which Jaouad happened to attend as well. Halfway during the afternoon he was already thoroughly annoyed by the tall, fair-skinned European who kept turning up at the food table to deliver short and pointed analyses of the items on it; remarks apparently tailored to get under his skin, since no one else seemed to take notice.

When the tall guy finally complimented the bride on her exquisite caftan and the intricate, swirling pixelations of the animated beberiska designs on her hands — the latest fad to sweep the Tangier marriage industry — Jaouad turned away just a bit too soon, to avoid showing his irritation.

Only to run into him again on his way to the garden. But this time there was a shy, boyish smile on Alex’s face as he half blocked Jaouad’s path, a cup of mint-scented tea held out to him as an offering. “Still haven’t noticed me?”

Jaouad stared at him, dumbfounded, captivated by his shocking blue eyes for so long that the shy smile changed into uncertainty and the beginnings of a “Sorry, my mistake.” But then the groom brushed past, sized up the situation with surgical accuracy, and sweetly pointed out that the garden had enough dark corners for everyone: no need to block the doorway.

In later years, Tangier became a special place for both of them. Soon after they met, Jaouad relocated to Edge and started his own business, Amrani Ecotecture. But even though they both visited Tangier separately on several occasions, they never went back together. Always for perfectly valid reasons, but never willing to admit that they were both afraid to spoil the memory — which in turn allowed the place to take on even more of a mystical gloss.

Alex’s trace remained stationary in the neighbourhood of Edge Grand Central.

Where were they taking him, and what were they waiting for? They must know that his geotrace was still active.

On impulse, Jaouad boarded the next train for Rotterdam. He did not know what he was going to do, but he could not just sit waiting for events to catch up with him.

As the train pulled out of the station, Meryam called. “What did you tell Zidoune?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, distracted. Then he shook his head. “Sorry. I mean, I don’t know yet. I told him I’d get back to him.”

“Get back to me too, okay? I’ll need to have someone arrange your ticket.” She paused. “Are you alright?”

“I guess.” He forced himself to sound upbeat. “No worse than anyone who finds his vacation cancelled at a day’s notice, I imagine.”

“Tell me about it, boss. Zidoune … sometimes you get the feeling he actually lives on one of his damned satellites.”

Jaouad mumbled something and signed off. He was immediately commed again, by someone whose sig he didn’t recognise. “Amrani speaking.”

“Good afternoon, mister Amrani,” a businesslike female voice said. “My name is Salihah-Nabirye Hassan. I represent Shawqi Sunflower Limited. We are a Cairo-based research firm specialising in creative solutions for energy supply, storage and delivery. I hope I’m not inconveniencing you, but I was wondering if it would be possible for us to meet on short notice.” She waited.

Jaouad unclenched his jaw. “To meet? As in, physically?”

“If it suits you, of course. I am currently in Edge. We would like to discuss a … a business proposal.”

The rendezvous was at the outskirts of the Zoetermeer district. The Egyptians had chosen one of his own developments for their meeting: a residential area consisting mainly of houses with superstructures customised for microwave reception. The usual haphazard arrays of rusty solar collectors and photovoltaic panelling had been replaced by a variety of straight and curved elements in carefully selected shades, often cantilevered and sometimes crossing the street to connect with neighbouring houses. Some of the elements had small servo units built in, which imperceptibly rotated them or moved them back and forth. In a way it looked like a forest.

The place was fitting, he supposed, for what they had in mind, although he could not guess what that might be. Perhaps he was walking into a trap; but if so, Alex might already be in it. He had to find out.

A smallish woman and two men in crisp North African business suits were waiting for him. His as-salaam’alaykum was answered with formal courtesy, but then they got immediately to the point. One of the men opened a large suitcase and produced a contraption which looked like a tilted cylinder with three wheels at the bottom. Two smaller cylinders protruded at right angles from the top edge, and several other wiry attachments made the knee-high mechanism resemble something from a 20th-century children’s book on robots.

He put the thing down on the street and positioned it so that it straddled the edge of the shadow of one of the slowly moving roof elements. Then he swiped his finger along the bottom edge, and stepped back.

The cylinder began to move. It rolled slowly along the sharp, curved edge of the shadowed area on the pavement, carefully keeping one half in the sun and the other in shadow.

“You see?” Ms. Hassan said. “Your kinetic roof sculptures. A stroke of genius to have them follow the sun.” She pointed. “That piece of pavement has been baking in the heat all day, while the shadowed area hasn’t warmed up very much since this morning. The temperature differential is enough to drive a small Stirling engine. Gamal?”

The other man tapped his com pod rapidly. The mechanism trundled to a standstill.

And the wall behind it disappeared.

Jaouad was looking at a wide green meadow, with a ditch and a group of cows in the distance. Off to the right he could see the edge of a tulip field. There was even an old, wooden windmill. “What?”

Then he noticed irregularities in his vision. He blinked, and suddenly it became obvious that the scene was projected onto the wall.

“Meet ShadeBoy. Enough energy to power a laser projection in broad daylight,” said Hassan. “Incidentally, this forms part of our RealityPlus network. The GeoHistory channel, if I’m not mistaken, Gamal?”

“Correct,” the man nodded. “Put ShadeBoy down anywhere you like, and it will turn any flat surface into a window on the past.”

The woman looked at Jaouad. “What do you think?”

He swallowed. “It’s ah … an interesting use of the circumstances arising from the presence of kinetic ecotecture in the landscape…” he said weakly. Salihah-Nabirye Hassan blinked at him. He closed his mouth, and asked simply: “Why?”

She flashed a quick grin. “You really shouldn’t be asking that question, mister Amrani. Questions like that tend to be answered with ‘why not?’” She gestured up at the customised roofs. “Energy technologies are a dime a dozen, these days. Kites, mills, waves, satellites: the number of new schemes invented to exploit direct or indirect solar or geothermal grows every year, and the growth accelerates as old technologies generate new ones. Few of them ever get realised, of course, but that’s beside the point. Unlike the turn of the century, when people were clutching at straws for a single way out of the mess, we’re now on the fast track. We can take our pick from a multitude of possibilities, a thousand trains out of here. But Shawqi Sunflower is interested in more than the technology. We wish to give meaning to the artifacts which humanity uses to convert that energy. Your work interests us because of the effort put into the contextualisation of something as abstract, yet mundane, as a microwave antenna.”

“I see,” Jaouad said, looking at the cylindrical robot standing a few metres away, itself presumably a ‘contextualisation’ of something or other. “But I gathered you were mostly into solar collectors?”

She nodded. “Our activities need funding, of course. Nothing like a decent, trusted old technology as a source of revenue.”

“And your … business proposal?”

“Yes. We are currently in negotiations with the city authorities of Copenhagen, Denmark, who have expressed an interest in our program. We expect Laâyoune Solaire to be contracted for an orbital solution; in cooperation, naturally, with Amrani Ecotecture as part of their Terrestrial division. Our role in this will consist of a conceptual advancement in how the general population relates to the technology. In short, we will bring the technology down to a human level. Cute ShadeBoy will be there, but we already have several other concepts in development.”

Jaouad opened his mouth, but then decided it was best to remain quiet.

“You provide the canvas,” Hassan concluded. “We’ll create the painting.”

On his way back to the station he commed Meryam, who immediately started talking at him. “I can’t imagine what you said to Zidoune, boss, but he’s reconvened the board again. He is currently advising them to go back to the original plan and throw the switch early this evening. Apparently something to do with a new potential business partner and the importance of showing flexibility in the face of new conditions. Sort of thing. I’m sorry. What’s your news?” she finished, embarrassed.

“I guessed as much. It will be impressive, though. We pulled the street lighting off the grid earlier, for several districts, remember? Imagine all of these coming back online at the same time, in the twilight?” He grinned. “By the way, I hope you haven’t been so forward-thinking as to book a train for El Aaiún?”

“Should I have been?”

“Nope. We’re going to Copenhagen next month.”

He signed off, leaving Meryam flabbergasted.

When he finally arrived in Rotterdam, Alex’s trace had moved only a little, showing an image of a rocket-like ATGV waiting patiently next to a crowded platform in Edge Grand Central, its lightning-blue sides streaked to give an impression of speed even while standing still.

And then there was a message. Main hall entrance platform 35. Red/black. Hurry!

Quickly Jaouad made his way out of Domestic to the International terminal of Grand Central. Of course, that entrance was adjacent to platform 1, so he ran.

When he passed 30 he started looking out for a tall figure in black trousers and red shirt on the busy concourse. He found two. Neither of them were Alex.

Instead, Alex stood between the two, with a pair of suitcases behind him. Only then did Jaouad realise that his escorts were two of their friends. The left one waved at him.

He came to a halt, looking accusingly at Alex, bridging twenty metres and a day of worrying with a silent glare. People passed them on all sides.

Until Alex came walking towards him, looking him in the eye. They stood facing each other. Finally Alex asked: “Well … how was lunch?”

“Lunch was … interesting. If somewhat solitary. Could you perhaps find it in yourself to come up with an explanation?” Then: “You idiot.” He punched Alex’s shoulder hard.

Alex screwed up his face in pain. He grabbed his shoulder. “Yah. But we’ll have to get on the train first.” Suddenly he smiled, shyly. “And I have an important question for you. But we really need to get on that train. Let’s go.” He turned around and started walking.

Jaouad did not move. Their friends were still watching from a distance. “Alex,” he said. “There are a thousand trains out of this place. Go where? And what are they doing here?”

Alex turned around. “They’re witnesses. I’ve asked them to come with us. We’ll need them.” He pulled something out of his pocket and waved it at Jaouad, who realised it was an actual piece of paper. “Just heard back from the Qadi’s Office in Tangier. They can squeeze us in tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning? We have to be in Tangier in the morning? For what, if I may ask?”

Alex walked back to him and gently took hold of his shoulders, pulling him close. Jaouad caught the faint tang of mint on his breath, mixed with — surprise! — aftershave. Alex hardly ever wore aftershave.

His friend looked him in the eye. “Remember Tangier?”

And Jaouad knew the form the important question was going to take. He knew Alex’s thoughts well enough to translate them before Alex himself was able to condense them into words. It would be concise, the way everything about Alex was. Jaouad started to smile.

Of course Alex noticed. But he asked the question anyway. “Marry me?”

“A Thousand Trains Out of Here” by Paul Evanby. Copyright © 2010 by Paul Evanby.

Picture Credits:

• Siempre Amsterdam: via Spotted by Locals;
• Ecotecture Logo (used as scene break #): via Ecotectureus;
• De Dam: via Panoguide;
• Microwave Rectenna Plant: via SimCity 4;
• Aptera: via Inhabitat;
• Dutch Countryside 1: via Tom Berger (ARR);
• TGV train station: via Okino Computer Graphics;
• Solar Sunflower: via Clean Break;
• Solar Panel Forests: via Ecoshopper;
• Kinetic Sculpture: via Walking Melbourne;
• Blue TGV: via Skyscraper City;
• Tangier: via The Lost Girls;

Paul Evanby is a writer by day and a programmer by night. Most of his work has been published in the Netherlands only, in a wide range of Dutch magazines and anthologies. His stories have won the Paul Harland Prize for best Dutch SF on several occasions. In 1995 an English-language collection Systems of Romance was published to critical acclaim. In the UK and the US his work has further appeared in, for instance, Nemonymous, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly and the themed anthology The Elastic Book of Numbers, which won the 2006 British Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. In 2009 his first novel De Scrypturist appeared from Mynx (the Netherlands’ largest publisher of fantasy and science fiction); his second is scheduled for late 2010.

And as a bonus: a map of DayBreak story locations: