The Apex Book of World SF 2 (9 page)

Katulo stood
looking, not at the spirits around him, but at the broken body of Eyo. The
corpse lay in front of him, eyes and mouth still open. His neck bone was
exposed. Somewhere in Bujumbura, a group of terrified people watched an echo of
Katulo's father murder fifteen schoolchildren. Katulo did not care about that
memory any more. What he had done was the only thing in his mind. His body
quaked and his voice cracked. He howled like an infant, hating every person in
Bujumbura, but none as much as he loathed himself. The rampage of the spirits
continued for an hour. Katulo was blind to them. When they finally disappeared,
he, too, was gone.

10

The murderers of
Chama were never punished. There was no trial, but there was also no slaughter.
The Azamé villagers returned home.

 

Katulo was never
seen again. Some said he had died but no body was found. At marriages, harvests
and initiations there was no longer a Waking ceremony. Waking was now a part of
legend like rainmaking and giants.

If Katulo had lived
on, it cannot have been for long. There were occasional rumours that he had
been seen walking alone in the streets or by a river in ragged clothes. One of
his ex-apprentices said that he had seen Katulo one morning, bent over the place
where Eyo had died. He could not be sure. The old man he had seen rushed off.
Where the old man had been, between gravel and weeds, a slender white sapling
had been planted.

 

The First Peruvian in Space
Daniel Salvo
Translated by Jose B. Adolph
 
Peruvian Daniel Salvo is the
creator of
Ciencia Ficción Perú
, a web site devoted to science fiction.
He is a writer and researcher in the field of fantasy and science fiction and
has written the first survey of Peruvian SF. The following story appears in
English for the first time.

 

Anatolio Pomahuanca had reason
enough to hate whites. Hundreds of years ago they had invaded and conquered his
world and reduced his forebears to the sad condition of serfs or second-class
citizens. There were historic changes like independence wars, rebellions and
revolutions. But, be it as it may, whites were still those who ruled and
decided everything in Peru and throughout the rest of the world. "Now we live
in a democracy, we have made great progress in human rights and integration,"
they proclaimed. Anatolio smiled crookedly every time he heard such used-up and
false sayings. Weren't the president, the military and the priests white? Had
anyone ever seen a native holding a decisive post? If he could, he would have
spat on the floor. All whites were shit.

 

He couldn't spit
because of where he was: a metallic, softly illuminated cubicle full of
controls and screens. It was the command post of an orbiting spaceship. Like
all spaceships, it belonged to the United Nations. Its mission was routine—to
measure solar winds—but this time it had an additional element: Anatolio
Pomahuanca, the first Peruvian in space.

Everybody considered
his appointment to the ship's crew an honour; although he had no illusions. His
tasks as maintenance engineer were like those of an attendant at a gas station.
The ship, built with the best of the white's technology, was an enormous
automatic mechanism destined to follow a precisely sequenced program of
instructions. In truth, he and the rest of the crew were mere passengers. The
navigation and registry instruments would do it all.

He yawned. His brief
turn at the command bridge would soon be over. He had completed his assigned
tasks. To check a screen, to verify a measurement, report some co-ordinates…all
activities that led nowhere.
They have to keep me busy somehow,
he thought bitterly.

The captain of the
ship and chief of the mission entered the cabin. He smiled winningly at
Anatolio, who nodded. An indifferent expression on his face, he rose.

"Everything okay,
Pomahuanca?" asked the captain in perfect Spanish.

Anatolio hated
whites in general, but more so those who tried to win his confidence or his
friendship. It was always easy to notice their intentions, the false mask of
respect hiding the contempt whites felt or, even worse, their pity for Anatolio's
race.

"Everything in
order, captain."

"Up to now, you've
done very well. It's a great opportunity for a young engineer to be a part of
this mission. A lot of Peruvians would like to be in your place."

"Oh, yeah?" Anatolio
knew the whites were incapable of catching the contempt in his words. He knew
the whites really considered them an inferior race, a sort of animal that, in
the past, was exploited without pity but now had to be better treated. But they
would never accept them as equals.

"Of course,
Pomahuanca. You have shown the ability of the true Peruvian man to take part in
the exploration of space, to go upwards and always upwards, as Jorge Chávez,
your aviation pioneer, said."

"What ability are
you talking about, captain? Of the ability to work in a mine? Of the ability to
push a plough? Of the ability to be a servant in the home of a white?"
Anatolio, without meaning to, had ended up screaming the last few words.

The captain kept
smiling. Anatolio sighed. In the past, when Anatolio had asked the same
questions of other whites, there had been different reactions. Some left
silently, others insulted him. Anatolio preferred the insults because they at
least expressed what they felt. The captain belonged to the worst: those who
believed there was already a harmonic conviviality between whites and natives
as a result of centuries of history that had erased past wounds. In books and
official speeches there was no more talk of invasion or conquest; now it was all
about the meeting of two worlds or two cultures. He thought it incredible that
the whites also believed their lies.

"There are—whites,
as you call them—who also do jobs like those you described. Anyway, work
dignifies us all."

"But we always get
those jobs! Do you let us be presidents, ministers or ambassadors?"

"Everything in its
own time, Pomahuanca. I am sorry that things were different in our common past,
and that we now have to carry that burden…"

"What burden do the
whites carry? Is being entrepreneurs, big landowners or generals a burden? To
drive luxurious vehicles is a burden? To appear in the media? There are no
changes, captain; we are still the conquered and you the conquerors."

"Then how do you
explain your presence here, Pomahuanca? How do you explain your education,
completely free, with the highest quality standards and in the best
universities? Your healthcare? According to your logic, only the whites, as you
call us, should be on this mission."

Anatolio Pomahuanca
shook with anger and hatred. He closed his fists while, out of his mouth came
the thoughts that had been growing in his mind ever since the mission had
begun. They could do what they wanted afterwards, they could sanction him,
degrade him; at least he'd had the pleasure of telling this captain what he
really thought of the mission.

"Because I am an
ornament! A symbol! Because you needed me in order to say you sent a Peruvian
into space! So that everybody could believe that "harmonic conviviality" thing!"

The smile on the
captain's face disappeared. His eyes became small decoloured slits, parallel to
the lipless long hole that was his mouth. He furled his hearing appendages as
he stepped to the command dashboard. Except for the blue crest his species
displayed on the head, his scaled skin lacked any pigmentation. The few
earthlings who had survived the wars of conquest of the invaders from space had
been right in calling them whites.

"You can leave,
Pomahuanca, Be ready for your second shift," said the captain, waving him off
with his membranous hands.

 

Eyes in the Vastness of Forever
Gustavo Bondoni
 
Argentinean writer Gustavo
Bondoni grew up in Buenos Aires and spent some of his formative years in the
United States. His stories have appeared in
Jupiter SF
, the
StarShipSofa
podcast,
Expanded Horizons
and elsewhere.

 

Every few moments, one of the
lights would blink. It was for only an instant and almost unnoticeable because
of their sheer number, but Joao De Menes was watching intently, defying the
devil-eyes to come closer. If they did, he would show them the power of a
Portuguese right arm.

 

Magalhaes had
laughed at him, simply saying, "If you fear the Indians' camp-fires on the
coast so much, perhaps you should take all the watches tonight," and had then
ordered the anchor dropped.

The captain might be
an arrogant fool, but Joao knew the truth: those eyes were watching and
weighing, the eyes of hundreds upon hundreds of hungry demons, waiting for the
foolish Europeans to sail their ship beyond the edge of the world.

He didn't know what
lay beyond the end of the world. Some men told of a magic mist that you
wandered around in forever, with no exit and no heaven, while demons feasted on
your spirit. Others simply said you dropped off the edge of the planet,
straight into the fires of hell. Still others spoke of eternal blackness,
impossible torment.

Whichever was true,
there were demons, and those demons possessed eyes that stared down at the ship
malevolently from the cliffs that marked the edge of the world.

And every once in a
while, one of them would blink.

 

Dawn broke lightless
and drizzling, but Magalhaes was adamant: a boat was lowered and a fearful crew
selected. It was impossible to fault the captain's courage—he was the first to
nominate himself—but easy enough to resent his cruelty. Of the ten men
selected, five were the strongest on the
Trinidad
, while the other five
were the most superstitious. Magalhaes was convinced that they could be cured
of their foolishness by force, and exposure to the fact that what they believed
to be demons were, in fact, just natural phenomena.

 

Predictably, De
Menes was amongst them. He hadn't even bothered to go to sleep following his
watch because it was obvious that he would be on the boat. He boarded sullenly,
ignoring the wind-driven spray. That wasn't what was bothering him; his concern
lay in the fact that he had no inkling as to what devils might await them on
the barren patch of rocky land ahead.

The place looked
innocuous enough: an empty brown and grey shore with low cliffs broken by periodic
inlets. But De Menes knew that daytime often found malignant forces dormant,
waiting. They were still there, of course, but they wouldn't show themselves,
just feel out the sailors and take them in the night when their power went
unchallenged.

They landed without
incident and Magalhaes led them a short distance inland and halted in front of
a fire pit surrounded by the bones of a small animal. He pointed at it, looked
straight into De Menes' eyes, and laughed. "Here are your demons Joao. Hungry
savages, from the look of it." Turning to the rest of the men, he said, "Be
wary, they can't have gone far. This fire was burning an hour before dawn—I
marked it especially."

The men shifted
uncomfortably. All were well aware that being harpooned by seal-hunters who'd
never seen a European before would only destroy the body, as opposed to the
eternal ravages that falling into the clutches of a demon supposed, but it made
no difference to them. Death was what they feared, and they would worry about
their immortal eternities at a later time. They stood straighter, attentive to
the approach of any savages.

The natives they'd
encountered along the interminable coast they'd sailed down to get that far
hadn't been particularly aggressive, but it was never advisable to let down the
guard. Everyone who'd ever boarded a ship bound for spice or glory had heard
the tales of fearsome ceremonies, strange rituals in pitch-coloured jungles and
unholy banquets in which Europeans had been served as the main course.

They need not have
worried, however. An hour after sunrise, a small group of natives approached
them from behind an outcropping of rock. They walked slowly, their skin just
slightly darker than the pale brown grass that their passage seemingly did
nothing to disturb.

As they came nearer,
the sailors could discern that every member of the group, composed of three
women and two men, was as bare as the day they'd been born, their skin covered
with some kind of thick grease or paste, a bright red colour. Presumably, this
must have kept out the winds that, this far south, were cruel even in the
spring—and would be deadly in winter.

The three women
walked boldly to the group of Spanish and Portuguese mariners and spoke in
their own language, a tongue that sounded harsh and hollow to De Menes, as
desolate as the moaning of the ever-present wind. There was no threat in their
gestures. The men were unarmed, and the spokeswomen seemed unsurprised to see
them.

Magalhaes turned to
Herrero, a Spaniard who could understand any tongue, no matter how uncivilised.
Rumours, given strength by his dusky skin and quick temper, told that the
interpreter's affinity for the tongues of the savages was due to him being
half-savage himself. Others said it was a gift from the devil. However he'd
come about it, though, the ability had proven both useful and profitable on the
journey so far. "Stay ashore and learn their tongue. I will have the ship send
you a boatload of supplies. De Menes and Carrizo will stay with you." Herrero
nodded.

De Menes said nothing.
He should have felt fury at the captain for belittling his beliefs once again,
but there was no anger within his soul. He'd known what was coming, felt as
though he was walking a predetermined path with an already decided ending,
albeit one he could not see. All he saw when he thought about it was the
greyness of impenetrable fog, an indeterminate future.