Tales of the Civil War by eds. Philip Purser-Hallard

Author:eds. Philip Purser-Hallard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Obverse Books
Published: 2017-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

JUST PASSING THROUGH

Juliet Kemp

‘So,’ Brianna said. ‘How do we manage this?’

She held the pint glass of vodka up in front of Sirithgow’s camera. Sirithgow’s fish (or rather, the fish that were Sirithgow) swam patterns around the aquarium, and words scrolled across the glass.

Just tip it in.

‘Straight into the water? Right then. Do I need to open the tank?’

No! There’s an ingress port at the top. I’ll unlock it.

Brianna peered at the top of the tank, noticing the thickness of the glass and the robust heavy-duty locking latches to add detail to her article. Her editor liked her ‘weird travel encounter’ snippets. Human, or, as the case may be, posthuman interest was consistently popular with the readers. And given the current state of her bank account, she needed to submit something soon.

A flap popped open at the rear of the tank, and Brianna tipped the vodka in. She watched the fish. There wasn’t any obvious immediate effect, but then – she sipped her own beer – you wouldn’t notice any immediate difference in her either.

‘How are you enjoying your travels, then?’ she asked, and surreptitiously flipped on the recorder of her handheld. Obvious note-taking always put people off talking to you.

In her nearly-three-hundred years of wandering around the City, this was the first time she’d encountered a shoal-person. They were, as the name suggested, a hive mind in the form of a shoal of fish, and represented yet another of the efforts of the human diaspora to find bodies that could deal with unusual planetary situations, out in the Universe. They almost invariably stayed in nice watery places – ocean planets in the Last Universe, and places like the underwater Araminta District in the City, whose main entrance was just around the corner from this bar.

Haven’t travelled much so far. We only left Araminta District this afternoon.

‘So this is your first time out of the water?’ Brianna asked.

Oh no. We lived Out in the Universe most of our life. Here, we like Araminta, but we travelled to Vesuvius every year. Have done since the start.

Of course, in any human subspecies, however reclusive, there was always someone with a little wanderlust. Someone who was prepared to make the effort to see the world. The shoal-person adaptation to the non-aquatic parts of the Universe had been a form of very robust aquarium on wheels, which was precisely Sirithgow’s current habitation. Of course, being in the City must make this experience rather less precarious, and thus less stressful, than it had presumably been in the Universe.

The aquarium was tall and thin, its top just below the top of Brianna’s head, so the words that scrolled across it, translated from the activity of the fish, were at roughly her eye height; as was the fish-eye camera embedded in the top right corner of the aquarium. A secondary camera was mounted to the rear. A couple of shelves under the aquarium housed a solid-looking black box (this, Brianna assumed, must contain the doubtless very complicated innards

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