Lightspeed: Year One

Xin and Christopher fell, tangled together. Before they hit the dirt, the rescue workers’ heads shattered in a spray of bone and blood. I spun around, followed the sound of silenced shots. The preacher stood at the base of his tower with a pistol in each hand, his guns raised toward me and the dead, his face empty as an abandoned city.

We burned the bodies in silence. Joseph stood too close to Christopher’s pyre, head bowed and lips moving wordlessly. The sun was almost down. I held one of his pistols and watched the woods. Far as I could tell, the preacher didn’t know what his son had planned to do. I wasn’t going to tell him. I didn’t have anything more to say to Xin, and I felt guilty for it. Still, I stood by her pyre, clinging quietly to my only friend at a lonely party.

When the preacher finished his prayers, we climbed the tower and watched the fires burn down. He made bitter coffee, and we drank it slowly as the stars came out, denser and brighter than I’d seen in years. When Joseph spoke, his voice was hoarse and flat.

“You still want to try to take me back to your city?”

I reckoned I could do it. Carry him to Coroner. My debt might not be paid, but the boss would be off my back for another day. He’d have something priceless, something that no thuglord or company—not even the few who could fly over oceans—could buy: Words that could hold the dead at bay. Joseph might not cooperate, but Coroner knew how to make a man talk. He’d learn the loops and rhythms, put poets on his payroll, try to vivisect the tongue of Heaven. He’d try to figure out what other things those words could make the dead do.

I swallowed my coffee. “No, sir.”

The old man nodded, then unsheathed his knife.

“You were blessing her,” he said.

I watched the knife’s tip, tried to work out the right answer. He took my silence for confusion.

“The woman. You were blessing her.”

The pyrecoals glowed below, a constellation of deaths.

“Her name was Xin Sun,” I said. “She was the nearest thing to family that I had.” I looked up from the knife and met his eyes, willing him to believe me. “I don’t know how to save a soul, but I would have liked to have saved hers.”

There was nothing about Xin’s soul that needed saving. I hoped she would have forgiven the lie. Joseph leaned on the rail and toyed with his knife, moonlight glinting on the blade. My palms were sweaty, my throat tight with unasked questions. I wasn’t used to wanting something like this. Wanting to walk in the wilderness, outside of walls. Wanting to ride the roads and forests, far from companies and criminals, free from Coroner and the machinery of obligation. I’d never believed that kind of life was possible, and now I was drunk on the fantasy.

“If you want me to teach you,” Joseph said at last, “I’m gonna have to cut out your feed.”

I touched the warm nub on my neck and bit back a smile.

Mark of the Devil.

Already, I could feel it. The sting of alcohol. Metal on skin, the knife’s edge like nightbreeze. Blood. One drop, and then a trickle. The cut, the last hum of the feed running my numbers.

And then a release, when it tells the world that I’m a dead man.

BIBI FROM JUPITER Tessa Mellas

When I marked on my roommate survey sheet that I’d be interested in living with an international student, I was thinking she’d take me to Switzerland for Christmas break or to Puerto Rico for a month in the summer. I wasn’t thinking about a romp around the red eye of Jupiter, which is exactly what I’d have gotten had I followed my roommate home. Apparently, American school systems have gotten popular all over. Universities shepherd the foreigners in. Anything to be able to write on the brochures, “Our student body hails from thirty-three countries and the far reaches of the solar system.”

You’d think there’d have been an uproar over the matter. I mean, here we have student-funding going down the toilet and everyone staging protests to show they’re pissed. And she gets a full ride, all the amenities paid for. She comes in like a Cuban refugee, minus the boat, sweeps up all the scholarships. And why shouldn’t she? She probably qualifies as fifteen different types of minority. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against her. We were friends. I just didn’t expect her to be so popular. I figured I’d have to protect her from riots and reporters. But as it turns out, she was really well liked.

The first time I met her I nearly peed my pants. It’s the end of August and I’ve got all my stuff shoved in the family van, a bit too unorganized for my father’s taste, but we only live an hour away. I’m hoping to get there first to pick the best side of the room, the one with the most sunlight and the least damaged furniture. I get up early— just to beat her there. But I don’t.

She’s sitting at her desk already, reading the student handbook. I double-check the room number. 317. I’ve got the right place. This is my roommate.

At first, I think she’s an inmate. She’s wearing this light-blue jumpsuit. And she’s got pale-green skin that looks sickly. Gangrene, I think, not quite knowing what that is. It just sounds like a disease that would turn you green. She’s not an all-out green. Tinted rather, like she got a sunless tanner that didn’t work out. Her ears are inset like a whale’s, and she doesn’t have eyelids. She’s this tiny creature, not even five feet tall, completely flat, no breasts. It doesn’t even look like she has nipples.

My parents are right behind me. My mother’s carrying my lava lamp like some offering. My father’s got my futon extended over his head, trying to be all macho in case my roommate’s a babe. They drop my stuff on the side of the room with a broken closet door and turn to this green, earless girl. They’re all excited, want to make friends with the new roommate. So they start asking questions: “How was your drive? Do you like the campus? Have your parents left?”

Not even acknowledging the obvious. That she’s green. Maybe they didn’t notice. Like I said, it was a pale green, a tint really, but it was pretty obvious to me, and she had weird eyes too, beady black pinhead eyes like a hamster’s.

So finally I ask, “Where are you from?”

And she says, “Jupiter.”

“Jupiter, New York?” my parents ask.

Not that they know there is a Jupiter, New York. It just makes more sense than the other possibility.

“No,” she says. “Jupiter, Jupiter. The planet.”

“Oh,” they say. “I didn’t realize we’d found life on other planets yet. How interesting.”

She says, “You didn’t. We found you,” and goes back to her reading.

That shuts my parents up fast. They have no response. They do an about-face and head back to the car.

“Jupiter,” my father’s saying. “You believe that, Cath?”

My mother’s shaking her head, saying “Jupiter” over and over. First, like it’s a word she’s never heard, a word she’s trying to get used to. Then like a question. “Jupiter?” Not quite sure whether or not to believe it. She says it several more times, looks at my father, then me.

“I was worried about Angela living with city kids,” she says. “This is a bit different.” She unlocks the car, grabs a handful of pillows, and adds, “Is Jupiter the one with the rings?”

“I thought Jupiter was made of gas,” my father says. “How can she live on a gaseous planet?”

“Let’s just drop it,” I say. “She could be from the moon, for all I care.”

As it turned out, she was from the moon. Well, one of them. Apparently Jupiter’s got a few dozen. The one she’s from is called Europa—by Americans at least. But she tells everyone she’s from Jupiter, says it’s easier to explain. Her name is Bibi. No last name. Just Bibi. I looked it up. It means “lady” in Arabic. Ironic, as her kind doesn’t have genders, just one type, like flowers, self-germinating and everything. But she looks more like a girl than a guy, so that’s how we treat her while she’s here, even though her body parts serve both functions.

She tells me most of this the first night in the dorm. I’m unpacking my toiletries and makeup, and she’s still