Shades Within Us by Seanan McGuire & Susan Forest

Author:Seanan McGuire & Susan Forest [McGuire, Seanan & Forest, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FMM - Magical realism, FXS - Narrative theme: Social issues, aliens and colonization, FM - Fantasy, FLP - Science fiction: near-future, FD - Speculative fiction, FIC003000 Fiction: Anthologies, FXP - Narrative theme: Politics, coming of age, speculative fiction anthology, immigrants and migrants, foreign cultures, adventures and explorations, FXE - Narrative theme: Environmental issues, FXR - Narrative theme: Sense of place, FL - Science fiction, FIC009040 Fiction: Fantasy – Short Stories, FYB - Short stories, FIC028040 Fiction: Science Fiction – Short Stories, FIC009010 Fiction: Fantasy – Contemporary, racial diversity, FIC061000 Fiction/Magical Realism
ISBN: 9781988140056
Publisher: Laksa Media Groups Inc.
Published: 2018-06-28T06:00:00+00:00

Below the pod, Kyo stroked for the darkness beyond the hab’s lights, not quickly, but purposefully. Alon opened his gills and the sea flooded his throat. He smelled thick salt, and fainter, the sake burn that was the water’s acid content filtered through his gills’ layer of oxalg. The malachite water tasted of metals and minerals, of clean-fleshed fish, and of the slipperier, denser hint of shellfish from the beds. Alon kicked after Kyo, spreading his toes for better speed.

Past the first fronds of kelp, he saw Kyo ahead. Alon caught up easily, and slipped alongside Kyo’s moon-brown body. He tangled Kyo’s stroke, spiralling around him. Kyo gave a stablizing kick and nudged closer. Alon locked his arms around his chest from behind, keeping his chin well clear of Kyo’s gills, until the current cradled them both.

They drifted. Kelp strands tickled along Alon’s back and sides; his kicking feet, now and then, brushed Kyo’s. The water was dark, dense on Alon’s skin. Heat sank from Kyo’s body into his. Alon let his eyelids slip to half-mast, his nictating membranes protecting his eyes.

The membranes had been his second surgery, after he came home weeping to his mother with reddened eyelids and blurry vision. Gills could have been a fad, an experimental procedure popularized by manips of large-breasted women writhing coyly among the waves. Instead, as the habs began expanding in earnest, gills became an asset, a ticket into employment. If Alon had idolized those internet sirens, or if he’d claimed a purely economic motive, Danilo would have dragged him to the clinic himself. But Alon wanted more: the membranes, the suede-soft webbing between lengthened fingers and toes, the subcutaneous adipose transplants. When Danilo refused, a science scholarship and a promise of hands-on training filled the gap. Alon shipped out to Earlehab the day he could legally sign the consents.

They’d trained him as a kelp farmer at first, and later he took over the oyster bed management. Not a day passed that Alon didn’t feel the water flowing around him, through him. He swam with a fierce, bittersweet pleasure, a harmony cobbled together from discarded dissonance. He couldn’t imagine a greater union of self and body. Then Kyo arrived in Earlehab, an ichthyologist with smiling eyes and a lower lip that dented when he laughed. They could spend hours together, skin to slippery skin, swaying in the current.

Kyo flicked a foot, spinning in Alon’s arms to face him. “I’m sorry,” he said, in Japanese sign language.

Alon trailed out his arm in a rippling shrug. Not your fault—he didn’t have the signs to say what he needed to. “Let’s go to the thalassade.”

Earlehab’s great central pod, five hundred metres long, was built and pressurized underwater long after the individual living pods were completed. Half that span held offices, laboratories, med bays, and equipment repair shops. The rest encircled a long oval moonpool, where people could walk beside the glimmering water, or doze on chaises. Alon breached softly and blew his gills clear. Kyo surfaced beside him, and they climbed out onto the deck, twining hands.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.