Click on title for excerpts. |
A Slice At A Time
It was stress, the psychiatric report said, that had driven the
mother to eat her two youngest children. There was nothing to be
achieved by prosecuting her.
"But these were healthy youngsters," Nick said. "There
was nothing wrong with them at all."
He closed the report on screen. It wasn’t the first time
the resident aliens on Maran V had eaten their offspring, but it
was unusual for them to eat healthy ones. It was the first time
in his stint as senior social worker at the Taranto colony that
he’d actually dealt with a cannibalism case.
"What do you think, Ian?"
The trainee social worker he had acquired for the year was crammed
in the corner of the twenty-five square meter office. He shrank
behind a desk that had seemed a good idea in the catalogue but had
been a little too large on arrival, and nobody in the department
was prepared to pay the exorbitant freight charges to ship it back
to base. The kid had a fixed wide-eyed expression, as if he’d
been freeze-dried in the middle of seeing something terrible.
"Ian? In a case like this, would we recommend prosecution
or would be ask the court for a supervision order?" It was
a policy thing, a matter of judgement, and if Ian was going to make
it in this job he would have to take those decisions on his own
one day. "Well?"
"Culturally sensitive area," Ian said in a mechanical
tone. "Minimum intervention, seek regular client meetings to
ensure the safety of offspring still living in the family home."
"Spot on."
Nick had forgotten what it was like to be new to the job: he’d
made sure he had. "They take some getting used to, the ussissi,2
he said. "But give it a year and they’ll look just like
human clients."
"I’ll take your word for it," said Ian.
Excerpt from Asimov's July 2002
Copyright Karen Traviss 2002
Back to top |
Suitable for the Orient
In a place where there are no humans, one must strive to be
human. (Rabbi Hillel)
I lost another patient this morning.
The family took the body away, and I spent an hour trying to clean
the surgery. Now I had a fiber cup of vodka and cold black coffee
in my hand; and every time I raised it I could smell the sulfur
and strawberry odor of aliens on my fingers, even though I’d
worn gloves and scrubbed my nails clean with a stiff brush until
my cuticles bled. The minkies’ body fluids were amazingly
persistent.
I was drunk with Bob the maintenance man, as I often was on Friday
nights, both of us crammed in his four square meter office so close
to the generators that the vibration made the surface of my drink
shiver if I put the cup on his desk. And I mean that I was drunk,
not just that I was drinking, although that was obviously true as
well.
Bob said he saved his doctor jokes for me because I needed to see
the lighter side of my calling. Fresh jokes were in short supply
in an isolated colony ten light years from home: we didn’t
meet many new people.
"So the guy asks who he is, and St Peter says, 'That's God
playing doctor'. "Bob tapped my knee with a length of foam
insulation tube. I was sitting on his locked tool cabinet. "Good
one, eh, doc?"
"Heard it. And it was a white coat, not green."
"You shouldn’t let it get you down, Frank."
I must have been staring into mid-distance. "And what if this
is the pinnacle of my career?"
"I meant the minkies. They just die, y'know."
"Not the first time I've had an alien die on me," I said,
and wished I had been caught feeling compassion instead of self-pity.
I drank with Bob because I wanted to. We were both mid-thirties
and going nowhere. Stagnation was made more comfortable because
someone on-base had worked out how to bypass the beer rations and
acquire illicit alcohol. But they never thought of making a good
mixer to go with it, so we settled for coffee and a touch of sweetener
to pretend we were downing Black Russians.
"You could go back to Earth for a hospital job," Bob
said.
"My training's already twenty-five years out of date before
I step on the shuttle."
"Can't you retrain?"
"What’s the point?"
I found out that I was good only for minor medicine when I pulled
my file as a final year medical student. Someone had coded "SFTO"
on the header. Medics were notorious for cryptic codes on files.
It was a long time before I found out what SFTO meant, but I did,
and it meant SUITABLE FOR THE ORIENT. It was an old, old saying
from the days of the British Empire, when the colonial civil service
sent barely competent doctors to Asia and India – the orient
- because it didn’t matter if they killed the natives. The
really good doctors attended white men.
So I was suitable for an orient which was a colony and support
base on Hera, a month's subjective-time flight from earth but actually
ten years distant. No one cared if I couldn’t save aliens
and it wasn’t my job to try too hard.
Excerpt from Asimov's February 2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
Return Stores
Today, I'm just a madman blowing a dented brass bugle while the
street where my grandfather lived in is razed to the ground.
It's amazing how fast they can knock down a terrace of houses.
First the crane swings the ball at the end house. You see the walls
peel away, and the floors collapse, leaving the party wall. It's
like a sheet from a cardboard doll's house, the sort you fold and
slot together: there's pink emulsion paint marking where the bathroom
was, and blue Georgian stripe wallpaper in the bedroom, but no walls
separating them, just a torn line where the stud partitions were.
Maybe you can slot it all back together again somehow.
I give the bugle another strangled blast. It's much harder than
you'd think to get a brass instrument to make a noise. The demolition
team glance at me from time to time, but they probably can't hear
it.
The sound isn't for them, anyway. It's for the house, the last
one left in the row.
Ten years ago, when my grandfather died, he left me his home.
When I opened the cupboard, the smell of a lifetime ago hit me;
oily, musty and faintly bitter at the back of my throat. I reached
out to touch the workman’s coat that I knew had to be hanging
there. I knew it would feel slightly damp under my fingers, and
that it would carry the dark patina of graphite grease.
I clutched at air. The cupboard was empty, except for the heritage
of its dockyard smell.
"Your grandfather didn't do much to this house, Mr Hollis,"
said the solicitor. He kept looking at his watch: he obviously had
better-paying clients than students like me to attend to. "But
property prices round here are going up, and you can probably get
an improvement grant from the council. So, all in all, not a bad
inheritance."
A shabby two-up, two-down flat fronted terraced house with an outside
toilet and no central heating. It was a scene from one of those
time-warp programmes where they made people live in the 1940s for
a month without fridges and unlimited hot water. But to a student
like me it was a potential palace, somewhere I could be independent
and have parties without worrying about rent, or my mother complaining
about the spilled beer and the noise.
Granddad's furniture was still there, war-time utility style, polished
so many times the varnish was worn through on the edges. A time-speckled
mirror with green faceted glass edges still hung above the tiny
gas fire, and there were a couple of amateur paintings of warships
hanging on the wall. Granddad had been a welder in the dockyard
and the navy had been his life right up to the time he lost his
job.
Mum said he was sacked for pilfering and that he'd never got over
the shame of it. I knew that: when he'd had a glass of beer or whisky
at Christmas, he'd go quiet and miserable and then talk about the
dockyard and how he would clear his name. That seemed terribly important,
because his name was also my name, Arthur, although I never told
kids at school what the A after Mark was for. My mother would say:
"Come on, Dad, it's all history now." But it wasn't over
for him, not at all. Once, just once, he took me up a ladder to
the attic where he showed me a battered brass bugle that he said
would prove he was innocent. When I asked Mum about it she said
that grown-ups often said stupid things when they'd had a drink.
But today I was that kid again, hiding in the coats and waiting
for Granddad to find me. His shirt, his coat, everything he wore
at work was speckled with tiny weld burns.
At Christmas dinner when I was six, I remembered him crying and
making Mum embarrassed when he rambled on about the injustice of
being sacked and how they had stabbed him in the back. I thought
he had to be brave, because he was just like the heroes in films
who got stabbed but went on fighting. And I decided there and then
that bosses had to be very bad people to stab my Granddad and that
I'd never, ever work for one.
Excerpt from Realms of Fantasy February 2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
Does He Take Blood?
The lounge was too warm and too bright. It smelled of human pee,
disinfectant and beeswax polish, and the plush-covered armchairs
set round the edges of the room all had white crackling coverings
on the seats. Ba'al Teekan Makak could hear each rustle of the plastic
as the elderly occupants shifted position.
He couldn't hear so well these days, but his ears were still sharper
than a human's.
"There’s nothing for your father to worry about,"
said the social worker, talking past the demon's leathery black
shoulder and folded wings as she wheeled his chair across the lounge.
He gripped the armrests with his claws, fearful of being tipped
out. "I know we had a little problem adjusting to the needs
of the ... the differently sentient, but we've done lots
of work with client focus groups and we're confident we can provide
care that's much more sensitive to your father's cultural needs.
We've even got a scratching post for his claws."
His offspring were behind him, following the chair as it ploughed
the thick sage green carpet. He could see them with his wrap-around
vision, his night-hunter’s eyes. Both youngsters looked uncomfortable.
"We can visit our sire any time?"asked his daughter.
"'Course you can, dear," said the social worker. "But
if you come at night, give us a call first, won't you? It might
disturb the other residents." She paused, all care and cultural
sensitivity, overwhelming his nostrils with a floral scent. "Now,
about his special diet. Does he take blood?"
Excerpt from Realms of Fantasy June 2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
The Man Who Did Nothing
Hursley Rise, May 2
There was a boy - five, maybe six - sitting on half a discarded
mattress by the kerb as Jeff drove down the road. At first he thought
the child was trying to open a bottle of pop, but the closer he
got, the better he could see that the boy was making a petrol bomb.
Jeff slowed to a crawl and then stopped. He didn't dare switch
the engine off, not here. A daffodil nodded in the grass at the
side of the road and the whine of a power-drill competed intermittently
with music throbbing from an open window. The normality didn't reassure
him; he opened the car window about six inches.
The child was trying to thread some rags into the neck of a beer
bottle, pausing every so often to hold the bottle up to the light,
sigh, and resume his task of working the rag into the neck of the
bottle with his index finger.
For a moment Jeff thought about getting out and taking the thing
from him. Then an older boy in the latest Manchester United tracksuit
walked up to the kid and crouched over him, like a protective elder
brother, and took the bottle gently from him. He examined the wick,
pushed it further into the bottle and handed it back to the kid.
That was how you did it. Then both boys looked up at Jeff,
as if moving as one.
"Antichrist! Fuckin' antichrist!" they shouted. And the
bottle - unlit, mercifully - arced and crashed onto the road just
short of the driver's door. Both boys ran back up the road, not
looking back.
He could have - should have - got out of the car and taken the
lethal little toy from the kid. He should have marched him back
to his own front door and berated his mother for letting such a
tiny child handle potential destruction. He should have done something.
But he didn't. It was Hursley Rise, and these were dangerous times,
and the shabby little housing estate was going mad. He accelerated
away towards the city center.
Excerpt from Asimov's February 2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
Strings
Let me tell you this: I never even liked Orpheus.
You should never believe what you read in mythology. The stories
are true, of course, at least in part. But they're written down
by the fallible, translated by the inept, perpetuated by people
with axes to grind.
And told by men.
So if you teach classics, or if you care about the truth in any
way at all, tell your children this - Eurydice didn't love Orpheus
for all eternity.
In fact, I hated him.
Picture this: I'm fourteen. The whole village, the whole nation,
is enthralled by the musical skills of Orpheus. Whatever I feel
for him now, I have to concede that his talent was every bit as
magical as the myth said. And I was the prettiest girl in the region,
food for heroes, or so I thought.
You might have heard I was a dryad or a nymph. I think something
was lost in the translation, because I was - am - a mortal. But
it probably seemed less glamorous to have the fabulously talented
son of Apollo and Calliope drooling after a merchant's daughter,
pretty or not, so in retelling I have been part-deified. Or perhaps
it was the olive trees. Yes, I did spend a lot of time with those
trees, because my family's livelihood depended on them.
Orpheus, luring humans and animals and even rocks with his lyre,
glanced briefly at me in the agora and I did indeed feel like a
goddess for a few moments. Then he glanced away again.
He went on playing a slow cascade of pure notes that trickled like
water down the scale. I felt the sounds deep in my body like a missed
heartbeat, as if it would never beat again: and yet it did, and
it seemed to beat to the slow rhythm of his music. It left a yearning
void in my chest but it was not unpleasant or frightening, merely
a longing like recalling a happy time long gone. I could have held
it in me forever.
Everyone in the agora had stopped what they were doing. A woman
in a grubby yellow gown paused while tying bunches of green chick-pea
pods: two men haggling loudly over a bolt of dalmatic cloth fell
silent at exactly the same time as the grasshoppers and bees did.
The notes hung in the still, hot air.
The world stopped for Orpheus. It always did.
Excerpt from Realms of Fantasy October 2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
Death, Taxes and Mackeral
Death wasn’t all it was cracked up to be for Julia.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was an unimaginative
bouquet on the table at her hospital bedside. Yellow chrysanthemums:
God, she really hated chrysanthemums and their musty wet scent.
She made a grab for the small card propped against the vase, and
missed. A nurse rushed in to her field of vision.
"The card," Julia said, still hoarse from revival. Chrysanthemums
had been banned from the house when she was a girl: her mother claimed
they were bad luck, funeral flowers. "Who sent that?"
"The International Revenue, ma’am," said the nurse.
"Shall I read the card? It says, 'Nice try, welcome back, love
from all at District 6A, Appeal Court ruled you were temporarily
non-resident, not dead'."
"Bastards," said Julia.
#
Julia Sinstadt had proved death was avoidable but she was still
struggling a little with the taxes.
Her fight with taxation was the last frontier in a long life built
on winning battles. She won at business and she won in the divorce
courts and she won on property deals, and she went on winning until
the winning was all that she had left. She was 120. She wanted to
win the last game of all.
"You have to view it like joy-riding," said the taxation
lawyer. He was Gascoyne, or Hatton or King: she had trouble caring
which of the firm's partners he was. She settled on Hatton. "For
example, taking a car isn't the same as stealing it. In law, the
prosecution has to prove you intended to permanently deprive the
owner of their vehicle, or you're just a joy-rider. So if you want
to take advantage of the tax benefits in death, you can't intend
to resurrect yourself. You have to mean to be really, really dead. That's the legal argument they used on appeal."
"Then," said Julia Sinstadt, "find another way to
get round the International Revenue." She smoothed her well-kept
hands down her well-cut suit. Age didn't excuse a sloppy appearance:
she was sharp and chic. "I will not have my money go to the
government. I'll decide where it's spent – every last
penny."
Cryo-suspension had been her accountant's idea. Die intestate by
your own hand, chill down for four months, then come back to life
before the deadline and claim the estate before it went to the government.
Only beneficiaries had to pay inheritance tax. You couldn't inherit
from yourself, so you didn't pay a penny. It was a test case.
And, medically, Julia really had been dead: no cardiac, respiratory
or higher brain activity had been detectable. But she hadn't been
dead enough for the taxman.
"They did allow you a small rebate, though," said Hatton.
They were getting sharp, the International Revenue. But she would
be sharper.
Excerpt from On Spec Spring 2002
Copyright Karen Traviss 2002
Back to top |
Chocolate Kings
Some people – well, some people just deserved to be child
sacrifices, and Superintendent Nuataxtl was one of them. He had
the timing of a sadist. There we were, filing away our last crime
reports for the day and just waiting for the sun to dip below the
horizon, and in he came. There was no getting out that door now.
"The mescal bar’s going to miss you tonight, Ahuatl,"
he said. "In fact, it might be missing you tomorrow night too.
All of you. You've just got to see what Customs turned over at the
airport."
Now, the appeal of the Commercial Branch – a.k.a. Fraud Squad
- to half-hearted detectives like me was that you usually worked
business hours: no night surveillance, no armed blags and no resisting
arrest. (Although I did nick a very stroppy accountant last season,
and those little bean-counters can put up a hell of a fight.) And
faster promotion, too, because most coppers didn't consider fraud-busting
to be real men's work. It was a good way to get a desk job at HQ
- if you fancied working in the Big Temple, that is.
This wasn't a desk job night. "Sergeant, we have forensics
squad on its way and you'll take the mobile assay team with you,"
said Nuataxtl. "We’re talking big haul here, my son.
Headline stuff."
"Tobacco?" I asked. They got excited about illegal tobacco,
although I couldn't work out why people drank the stuff. "How
much?"
"No, counterfeit xocolatl. Five tons of it. And guess where
it’s come in from?"
"No idea, Super."
"Some freeze-arse state called Helvetica."
It was what we had all dreaded. The Europeans had found a way to
fake chocolate. It wasn't just our economy that was at stake.
It was our whole way of life.
Excerpt from On Spec Fall 2002
Copyright Karen Traviss 2002
Back to top |
An Open Prison
As a mobility aid for patients with paralysis, the Suit has
a significant market. But the most lucrative application may prove
to be as a replacement for the electronic tagging and incarceration
of offenders. The one-off cost of a Suit is half the annual cost
of keeping a criminal in a medium-security prison in most Western
countries. Given the crisis in prison funding and increasingly anti-liberal
mood of politics today, we recommend that this is an area of development
to pursue.
(Marketing analysis, Carmody Life Engineering.)
It's pewter gray and slightly reflective and I have no idea why
I've agreed to have this damn thing in my office. When I look at
its skin, I expect it to be pneumatic and yielding like a vinyl
beach-ball. It even smells like one. I don't want to touch it to
find out.
There's a man inside it. What violence he's committed to end up
encased in this all-encompassing correctional Suit, I mustn't ask:
he has his privacy, which is why the Suit obscures his face - to
protect him, not me.
All I know for sure is that this is not the man who strangled my
daughter. The prison service says it's very careful about that sort
of thing.
Excerpt from An Open Prison, On Spec Winter2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
View Of A Remote Country
The audio tape had been the hardest thing to get, but he'd found
it in one of those freak magazines you saw people with green hair
and pierced lips buying in Smith's. He'd had to ask one of the weirdoes
to point it out the magazine to him, though. The table tennis ball
and the red light bulb had been much easier to buy.
It seemed a pretty simple kit for reaching out into the paranormal.
Evan cut the ball into two halves with some difficulty. The eggshell
plastic was tougher than he'd thought, and he didn't want jagged
edges sticking into his eyelids. So he filed down the rim of each
hemisphere with one of Annie's emery boards and checked it with
his fingertip. Then he put his chair into a reclining position,
plumped up the cushions, and made sure the door was locked.
He didn't want Annie walking in on him. It would have meant a lot
of explanations. He switched off the room light, flicked on the
lamp with the red bulb, and lay down to let the Walkman feed shapeless
noise into his ears.
He hesitated before covering his eyes: he must have looked a complete
dickhead. But the halves of the ball fitted over his eyes without
too much discomfort and he forgot how daft it was.
The non-noise washed over him and his closed eyes couldn't detect
even the usual wash of coloured flashes. It was emptiness, total
and complete nothing.
He could see better now. Much, much better.
Excerpt from On Spec, Spring 2004
Copyright Karen Traviss 2004
Back to top |
The Final Demand Of The Sun
"Hello? Is that the Office for Sunlight Regulation? I want
to make a complaint about my current supplier ... I'm a devotee
of Helios the Sun God and he's cut me off .. what do you mean, how
do I know at this time of night? There's a bloody great black cloud
parked over my roof with the words Jupiter Pluvius Debt Recovery
on it, that's how I know ... why?"
Excerpt from Scheherazade Summer 2003
Copyright Karen Traviss 2003
Back to top |
The Last Penny
They said co-ordination was one of the first things to go with
age, but she could still lob a coin into a crumpled coat from a
fair distance. She could, of course, have walked closer to the down-and-out,
but his dog – a surprisingly well-fed thing given its station
in life – looked capable of lunging in a split second.
"Thanks love," said the recipient of her charity. A young
man: obligatory stringy hair and a grimy once-yellow sweater. "Don't
you want a copy of the magazine, then?"
She paused, a reflex at being addressed. So he wasn't begging.
He was selling. He held up a copy from his cross-legged position,
and she could easily pick out Still The Big Issue on the masthead.
"No thanks," she said. "But you will get yourself
something to eat, won't you?"
The young man, the sort that made her feel uncomfortable, gave
her a half-hearted salute and ruffled his dog's coat.
Christine always had coins and banknotes on her. She liked old
money. In a month's time, real currency would cease to be legal
tender: there would be no more ecus and pounds and eurodollars,
neither in coinage nor note. There would be nothing to drop in a
charity tin, or leave under the plate in a restaurant, or save in
a jar. Nothing to wish with, or toss to win. Everything, absolutely
everything would finally be charged to the barc, the barcode embedded
for eternity into the heel of your hand.
The public information jingles were now interrupting pretty well
everything she watched on TV, urging her to make sure she’d
banked all her currency by the end of the year.
She stood in the queue at the seitan bar with her daughter –
the married one – waiting for a table. Infobites flashed across
the screen at head height, suggesting where they might want to shop
next, and there was the obligatory countdown to the withdrawal of
currency. "Thirty days to spend it!" a voice trilled.
Christine made an irritated sucking noise between her teeth.
"I don't understand why you're so awkward about using the
damn thing," said her daughter. "We’ve had charge
cards for nearly a century. You do your grocery shopping on line.
What’s so wrong with a damn barc?"
"Choice," said Christine. "There’s enough
data stored on me to fill a library. I want to be able to buy a
bar of chocolate without anyone knowing about it, except me and
the chocolate."
"Yes, and I want to know that you're not in danger of being
mugged for cash and cards when you go out, and that if you have
an accident the paramedics will know who you are and what medication
you're on. I think that's a small price to pay for some marketing
firm finding out that you eat Ritter marzipan bars."
Christine raised her hand slowly. It looked for all the world like
a slow-motion martial arts movement, preparing for a downward chop:
faint grey lines and dots showed through the translucent skin from
the base of her little finger to the wrist.
"There, I'm branded," she said. "My whole life encoded.
Maybe they’ll chop my hand off when they rob me."
Excerpt from Spaceways Weekly 2002
Copyright Karen Traviss 2000
Back to top |
Orchids
An expensive, embossed card, cattleya orchids picked out in the
palest pink.
"To my special girl, with love from your Dad. Happy Birthday.
We are what we’re meant to be."
"Oh, Dad, I miss you so much."
Simon scrambled up the attic ladder. "Who’re you talking
to. Mum?"
"Just remembering my Dad, love," Vicky said. She put
the card back in a manila envelope that was sueded with age and
frequent handling. Her life was in those carefully-kept cards. "I
like to remember sometimes."
#
"Congratulations. It’s going to be a boy."
Bob looked up at the doctor and wanted to tell him that he bloody
well expected it to be for the money he’d paid. Instead, he
smiled his best paternal smile and squeezed Gina’s hand.
It was clenched tight. He squeezed it anyway.
"It might be premature to tell everyone just yet," the
doctor said.
"Implantation’s been successful, and there’s no
reason to suppose Gina won’t carry to term. But let’s
be cautious."
"I feel like I did the last time." Gina looked determined
rather than elated. "It’s going to be okay."
"Of course it will." The doctor ushered them towards the
receptionist.
"Let’s make some appointments for you, shall we?"
Bob had no intention of announcing their pregnancy to the world.
It was something he was hoping to avoid for as long as possible.
He didn't want to lie. But he didn’t want to admit to anyone,
especially Gina's mother, that they had paid for IVF treatment and
genetic manipulation.
"We'll have to tell her it’s a boy sooner or later,"
Gina said. "Or we'll slip up and call it 'he' sooner or later.
Yes, when we do tell her we'll have to say she's going to have another
grandson."
#
Ten weeks.
"Yes, mum. . .yes, that's right, I’m pregnant. . . no,
I didn't tell you. . .no, I didn’t want to get everyone's
hopes up. . .it's private. . .I'm sorry, really I am, but it's okay
now, you can tell everyone. . ."
Bob heard Gina put the phone down and sigh theatrically.
"Can I say interfering old cow?" he called.
"You can," she called back.
"Interfering old cow."
Gina flopped down onto the sofa and took an apple from the fruit
bowl beside her. "She thinks I should have told her we were
trying."
"Hello mum, just calling to let you know Bob's spent us up
to the hilt getting a private clinic to give me IVF and mess with
the embryo to make sure we have a boy like Jack, by way of recompense."
"You know she didn’t really blame you for that. Let's
not re-open - "
"If I had filled in the pond, like she said, Jack would still
be here."
"She never meant that. It was grief talking."
"She meant it."
"I'm not going to encourage you. I’m not even going
to start that argument
again."
"Thank Christ she's at the other end of the country."
"Yes, but her mouth's on the other end of the phone, and the
news'll be halfway round the world by now."
"Did you know you’re thirty-six and you don't have to
ask your mum's permission any more?"
"Really?" She snorted a laugh and lobbed the neatly chewed
core into the waste bin. "Tell her, will you?"
Gina's family were funny about children. They didn't produce many.
Maiden aunts and female cousins who had failed in the past to procreate
were still spoken of with pity at Hickson family gatherings. When
he and Gina had tried for six years to conceive, it seemed they
were due to be the next holders of the Hickson Award for Failing
in Reproductive Duty.
The obsession had given Jack's arrival an almost religious significance.
It also made his death even more tragic, if such a thing were possible.
"I'll make some tea," Bob said. As he passed the dresser
in the hall, the repeating video picture caught his eye and he tried
not to look at it.
It was Jack on his green tricycle, gleeful at discovering he could
turn the handlebars and actually move in another direction. He'd
been three. A year later, he'd drowned in the garden pond. Bob was
finding it increasingly hard lately to meet Jack's unseeing gaze,
reproduced over and over again by the video portrait. We're not
replacing you, I promise, Jack-Jack. There’ll never be anyone
to replace you. We just wanted another boy like you.
He turned the frame slightly so Jack's gaze wasn’t directly
aimed at him, but stopped short of turning it completely to the
wall.
"What're you doing?" she called. "I thought you
were supposed to be waiting on me now I'm pregnant."
"Sorry, love. Tea coming up."
Excerpt from Neverworlds 1999
Copyright Karen Traviss 1999
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Nanny
"I can grow you a housing estate," said the architect.
"Grow?" asked the Director of Planning. "Is that
the the latest buzz-word?"
"I do mean grow, Mrs. James," he repeated. "Just
take a look at this."
He placed the plans on her neatly-arranged desk and swivelled them
so she could read them the right way up. But there were no straight
lines and elevations for her to recognise: the images were all snap-together
molecular models, like simple construction toys. He watched for
a flicker of interest on her face.
"It's a smart house," he prompted. "And I mean smart.
Not just automated. More like autonomic."
"We don't need more houses," she said. "And we haven't
got any green-field sites to build on. What we could do with is
someone prepared to refurbish some of the run-down housing stock
we're stuck with. Not as profitable, maybe, but that's what we need."
It was a cue from heaven. "I know," he said." That's
why I'm here. Regenerating brown-field sites and contaminated land
- it's my special interest."
He laid an old-fashioned business card on the desk: Hedley Barton,
Consulting Nano-architect, Sustainable Technologies, Novel Constructs.
"Just suppose that I could rebuild your most run-down area,
fill it with environmentally-neutral housing, and remove the soil
contaminants at the same time."
"Is this before or after you transmute base metal into gold?"
She was studying the card. "You're not a qualified architect.
Not according to this, anyway."
"I'm a scientist who can build things."
"So why should we take a risk on you?"
"Your old defence establishment land is riddled with heavy
metals and asbestos
and you can’t sell it. How long has it been sitting derelict?
Twenty years?"
Barton knew it was the sort of site you couldn't give away free
with breakfast cereal. He also knew the prospect of releasing capital
for the city coffers was a temptation on a Faustian scale. Like
most city councils, this one had sold off the civic silver and was
close to auctioning sports fields to make ends meet.
"So how do you intend to do this?" she asked.
"Nano-tech," said Barton. "A project I've been working
on with the university. You don't need huge teams to deliver it.
I can give you estates that not only build themselves, but also
cleanse the site of contaminants. It's not just smart housing -
it could be the whole future of construction. Just give me a chance
to show you."
"I've seen nanotech on the TV, I think, but it's pretty radical
stuff for us."
Barton knew the seductive nature of professional vanity. "Wouldn't
you like to be the first to demonstrate its potential?"
She hesitated. "I'm all for innovation."
He'd hooked her. "Just trust me," he said. "This
will change the architectural world."
Excerpt from Neverworlds 1998
Copyright Karen Traviss 1998
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