Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 132 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: chinese, magazine, novelette, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2017-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

5: THE BEAM COMES ON, ILLUMINATING US ALL

Amir arrives in France just after dawn on a foggy fall day. His out-breaths add frills of fog to Nantes’ thick cloak of it. He keeps his Impulse off after landing. Sounds muffled, skin damp, his first impression of his new home is of being underwater.

He explores the city on foot, stopping for croissants then brioches then tartines. At sunset, he sits on the lawn of the Château des Ducs de Bretagne and tosses a bag of soy chips to two mallards and their ducklings paddling in the castle’s moat. Impulse would help him form a mental map, but he knows if he turns it on he’s going to look for a message from Mani, and if there’s none he’s going to be heartsick. And if there is one he’s going to be heartsick.

Three things cycle through Amir’s mind: first, how to make the most of this opportunity; second, how desperately he needs to recenter himself in personal growth practice; third, the problem he’s had for most of his life, which is that he can’t stop thinking about Mani.

Amir wakes up with the sun on his first morning in his Nantes apartment and he takes creaking steps that raise dust motes along the woodgrain floorboards. At the window he turns Impulse on and his heart rattles the split-second before his unreads appear.

Nothing from Mani.

Amir starts to compose a message. “Hi! Nantes is beautiful. There’s a duckling in the castle moat who has learned to swim alongside—” then he closes his eyes, hard, and deletes. When he opens them the weathervane across from his window has flipped 180 degrees and the sun is a blur of honey.

The Crowdgrow pilot takes place along two residential streets in Nantes-2, just north of the Gare de Nantes. Amir hand-delivers cuttings of ecoboosted crawler vine to each of the experiment’s participants.

“Je vous attends toute la matinée,” says one girl when Amir puts the little red planter pot in her hands. Her tight cornrows have been braided into an orchid-shaped bun on top of her head. She takes him round to the back garden, shows him the sheltered hole in the soil she’s dug. There is so much care in her actions that Amir’s belief in—dedication to—Crowdgrow redoubles just like that.

“Mes mamans disent que le ciel sera plein d’oiseaux,” she says.

“Yes,” Amir replies through Impulse. “As many birds as the sky can handle.”

Nantes is on a clean air travel vector with Beirut, so Joud comes to visit the week before Amir presents the results of the pilot to a delegation from Nantes’ municipality. They go to Nantes’ shipyard island, go on mech-AI safari. They feed the giant hydraulic elephants from a tray of silicon peanuts, and the elephants regurgitate silicon caricatures of Amir and Joud. Joud’s is great: an impossibly vertical cone of hair, small ears rendered as notches. Amir’s own caricature makes him feel every year as old as his thirty-two, and older.

He wraps their portraits up and tucks them in his bag, presses Joud close.

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