Brave New Worlds

'I was never any good with gifts, either,' she replies, watching as the glass vial from the manila envelope slips from his fingers and begins the long descent towards her kitchen floor. It might fall for a hundred years, for a hundred Thousand years, but she'll never be quick enough to catch it.

The child reaches deep into the painting again, deeper than before, and now the water has gone as cold as ice and burns her hand. She grits her teeth against the pain, and feels the shark brush past her frozen skin.

'If it's not already within you, no one can put it there,' the droid says to her as it begins to unbutton the pink, ketchup-stained blouse she doesn't remember putting on. 'We have no wombs but those which open for us. '

'I told you, I'm not any good with riddles. '

Farasha is standing naked in her kitchen, bathed in the light of falling stars and burning rivers and the fluorescent tubes set into the low ceiling. There's a girl in a rumpled school uniform standing nearby, her back turned to Farasha, watching the vial from the envelope as it tumbles end over end towards the floor. The child's hands and forearms are smeared with greasy shades of cobalt and jade and hyacinth.

'You have neither love nor the hope of love,' the girl says. 'You have neither purpose nor a dream of purpose. You have neither pain nor freedom from pain. ' then she turns her head, looking over her right shoulder at Farasha. 'You don't even have a job. '

'Did you do that? You did, didn't you?'

'You opened the envelope,' the child says and smiles knowingly, then turns back to the falling vial. 'You're the one who read the message. '

The shark is coming for her, an engine of blood and cartilage, dentine and bone, an engine forged and perfected without love or the hope of love, without purpose or freedom from pain. The air in her lungs expands as she rises, and her exhausted, unperfect primate muscles have begun to ache and cramp. This is not your world, The shark growls, and she's not surprised that it has her mother's voice. You gave all this shit up aeons ago. You crawled out into the slime and the sun looking for God, remember?

'It was an invitation, that's all,' the girl says and shrugs. The vial is only a few inches from the floor now. 'You're free to turn us away. There will always be others. '

'I don't understand what you're saying,' Farasha tells the girl and then takes a step back, anticipating the moment when the vial finally strikes the hard tile floor.

'Then stop trying. '

'Sonepur—'

'That wasn't our doing,' the girl says and shakes her head. 'A man did that. Men would make a weapon of the entire cosmos, given enough time. '

'I don't know what you're offering me. '

The girl turns to face Farasha, holding out one paint-stained hand. There are three pearls resting in her palm.

The jungle echoes with rifle and machine gun fire and the dull violence of faraway explosions. The muddy, crooked path that Farasha has taken from the river bank ends at the steps of a great temple, and the air here is choked with the sugary scent of night-blooming flowers, bright and corpulent blooms which almost manage to hide the riper stink of dead things.

'But from out your own flesh,' the girl says, her eyes throwing sparks now, like the shark rushing towards her. 'the fruit of your suffering, Farasha Kim, not these inconsequential baubles—'

'I'm afraid,' Farasha whispers, not wanting to cry, and she begins to climb the temple steps, taking them cautiously, one at a time. The vial from the envelope shatters, scattering the sooty black powder across her kitchen floor.

'That's why I'm here,' the child says and smiles again. She makes a fist, closing her hand tightly around the three pearls as a vertical slit appears in the space between Farasha's bare breasts, its edges red and puckered like a slowly healing wound. The slit opens wide to accept the child's seeds.

The pain Farasha feels is not so very different from the pain she's felt her entire life.

Farasha opens her eyes, in the not-quite-empty moments left after the dream, and she squints at the silver disk from the manila envelope. It's hovering a couple of inches above the countertop, spinning clockwise and emitting a low, mechanical whine. A pencil-thin beam of light leaks from the dimple on the side facing upwards, light the lonely color of a winter sky before heavy snow. The beam is slightly wider where it meets the ceiling than where it exits the disk, and the air smells like ozone. She rubs her eyes and sits up. Her back pops, and her neck is stiff from falling asleep at the kitchen counter. Her mouth is dry and tastes vaguely of the things she ate for her supper.

She glances from the spinning disk to the glass vial, still stoppered and sealed with a strip of orange tape, and her left hand goes slowly to the space between her breasts. Farasha presses three fingers against the thin barrier of cloth and muscle and skin covering her sternum, half-expecting something on the other side to press back. But there's nothing, nothing at all except the faint rhythm of her heart, and she reaches for the vial. Her hand is shaking, and it rolls away from her and disappears over the far edge of the counter. A second or two later, there's the sound of breaking glass.

The disk is spinning faster now, and the light shining from the dimple turns a bruised violet.

She looks down at the scatter of paper, and her eyes settle on the three handwritten lines from The Waste Land. She reads them aloud, and they feel wild and irrevocable on her tongue, poetry become the components of an alchemical rite or the constituent symbols in some algebraic equation. And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising up to meet you. Nine, seven, ten, dividing into thirty-eight syllables, one hundred and nineteen characters.

But what if I won't listen? she thinks. What if I won't see? And she's answered

at once by the voice of a child, the voice of a brown woman who dives for gems in a painted ocean, the wordless voice of the sooty particles from the broken vial as they fill the air Farasha's breathing and find their way deep inside her.

That's why I'm here, remember? The voices reply, almost speaking in unison now, a secret choir struggling for harmony, and the disk on the counter stops suddenly and then begins to spin in the opposite direction. The beam of light has turned a garish scarlet, and it pulsates in time to her racing heart. The contagion is faster than she ever could have imagined, and this is not the pain from her dream. This is pain doubled and redoubled, pain become something infinitely greater than mere electrical impulses passed between neurons and the folds of her simple, mammalian brain. But Farasha understands, finally, and she doesn't struggle as the soot begins its work of taking her apart and putting her back together another way, dividing polypeptide chains and inserting its own particular amino acids before it zips them shut again.

And her stolen body, like the fractured, ephemeral landscape of her nightmares, becomes something infinitely mutable, altered from second to second to second, living tissue as malleable as paint on a bare canvas. There is not death here, and there is no longer loneliness or fear, boredom or the dread of whatever's coming next. With eyes that have never truly seen before this moment, Farasha watches at her soul fills up with pearls.

Dead Space For The Unexpected by GEOFF RYMAN

Geoff Ryman is the author of the novels The Warrior Who Carried Life, The Unconquered Country, The Child Garden, Was, 253, Lust, Air, and The King's Last Song. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Tor.com, New Worlds, and has frequently been reprinted in Gardner Dozois's Year's Best Science Fiction series. Most of his short work can be found in the collections Unconquered Countries and the recent Paradise Tales and Other Stories. He is a winner of