The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (66 page)

11. The Sea of the Known (Mare Cognitum)

If one
were to sit on the shore of this sea and peer deep into its transparent waters, one would see that the bottom is covered with a multitude of marbles – red, yellow, green, powder-blue, and clear with a blue spiral inside, the best of all. The marbles shift constantly in the current, and arrange themselves in elaborate patterns. If one were to assign them a numerical or alphabetic value, one would
soon realize that the patterns only speak of the things that are true.

One would spend day after day, enraptured over all the facts in the universe revealed in no particular order. One would learn that the diameter of Phobos is 22.2 kilometers, that the ducks have a special gland at the base of their tails to keep their feathers waterproof, that cobalt melts at 1495ºC, and that in 1495 Russia
invaded Sweden.

Then inevitably one would grow impatient and stare at the
marbles, frowning. None of the facts the sea tells have anything to do with the Moon itself. One could spend eternity staring into the Sea of the Known, yet learn nothing about it.

12. The Eastern Sea (Mare Orientale)

The Yellow Emperor washes all of his animals in this sea. They stare with their liquid eyes of every
shade of jade, amber, and topaz, and their crested and maned heads bob obediently as the calm, warm waters lap at their sides. The salt stings a bit, but the Emperor likes his animals clean. They squint their eyes and dream of the days when they will be able to walk into the sea all by themselves, without whips and demanding clicks of human tongues.

13. The Southern Sea (Mare Australe)

The Southern
Sea is warm and shallow, and the beach is soft sand. Starfish wander through the lapping waves, and suck the mussels dry. Old people like this sea. They chase advancing and retreating waves and toss oversized striped beach balls, and then they sit on the sand and drink Pepsi from warm glass bottles. They listen to the radio and aggregate in small groups, talking and whispering, and casting
sideways glances at each other. They laugh, throwing back their heads, their hands covering the grinning lips.

It is always the summer of your thirteenth year by the Southern Sea.

14. The Sea of Waves (Mare Undarum)

A weighty galleon would seem a toy atop these waves. The endless moonquakes shake its bottom, and gigantic waves, unconstrained by gravity, pound the shores.

Those who have perished
in earthquakes and tsunamis make settlements here. Nobody forces them to, but many of the ghosts are unable to conceive of anything other than their own death. They stand and stare as the waves roll over the ground,
swallowing their houses and oxen whole, poisoning their fields, ripping their lives from them again and again.

Some move elsewhere, but there are always the new ones arriving.

15.
The Sea of Nectar (Mare Nectaris)

The legends of this sea had long existed among the native folks, transmitted in fleeting whispers and shy glances from under lowered eyelashes. A few men, fed up with the stories, longed for sweetness on their lips – and sweetness was the concept only, for nothing on the Moon was ever sweet. Driven by the imaginary taste they could not fathom, they crossed vast
empty plains and bristling mountain ranges. Many of them wandered into deep snow, a few more were crushed by falling boulders, one was sucked in by the mud, two released their grasp on their souls, three drowned, and one contracted diphtheria. All of them died, but continued on their way, unable to let go of what they could not even dream about. They reached the sea and cried, because the dead
are unable to taste it.

16. The Sea of the Edge (Mare Marginis)

Here, the horizon is a razorblade, cutting the sky in two, and it bleeds at sundown. The cliffs are sharp, and the bottom of the sea is filled with jagged shards of broken mirrors.

Suicides come here, and wait in the piercing wind, looking at the precipitous drop in front of them. They imagine their slow fall and their flesh rent
by the teeth of the universe all around them.

And then they jump. It takes a long time to fall on the Moon, and they see themselves reflected in the broken mirrors below.

17. The Sea of Cold (Mare Frigoris)

A long time ago, Emissary Togril sat by the shore of the sea and watched out of his slanted eyes as the sky lit up in streaks of blue and white, and the ribbons of color crackled and danced
across
the night. The light undulated and grew brighter, then faded and dispersed, like a drop of milk in a water bucket.

When only a faint glow remained of the former splendor, a weak phosphorescent shadow stretched downward. The air grew colder, and Togril smelled the spicy, sun-heated wormwood and tamarisk. The tentacles of light grew thicker, until white roads stretched between heaven and
the lunar steppe.

Eleven columns of somber riders descended, their horses’ hooves clanking, just above the edge of hearing, on the solid milky surface. Their breath did not cloud the air, and their armor – intricately decorated over the breastplate – was made of green translucent ice.

The procession of the warriors showed no sign of stemming, and streamed onto the ground. Cheetahs sat behind
each warrior, their eyes glowing frozen gold, their pink tongues hanging out, as if they had just vaulted into their masters’ saddles after a chase. The leashes chaining the cats to the back bows of the saddles were spun out of thin links of the same green ice as the rest of the tack and armor.

The first rider approached Togril, and he flinched as a hoof caught him square in the chest. With a
sharp stab of cold, the horse’s leg pierced his chest and exited through his back. His scream froze in his throat as one after another spirit passed through him. The passage of the spirits inflicted no bodily harm, except the cold that settled deeper into his bones, so deep that it never left. The Sea too had retained the cold of the passage of dead Persian warriors forever.

18. The Sea of Serpents
(Mare Anguis)

It is well known that the serpents with female breasts are the deadliest of all. They raise their narrow poisonous heads above the water, and their breasts bob in the waves.

The travelers know to avoid these monsters when the snakes haul themselves onto the beach and sunbathe under the grey lunar sky. The blue sand of the beach bears scars in the shape of the snakes.

When the
snakes lay their eggs on the beach, they coil around
them in a protective spiral, and wait for the sound of faint cracking. Free of their shells, the newborn snakes drink once of their mothers’ venomous milk, and swim into the sea. And woe is to the swimmer who comes across a mother snake who has just watched her brood disappear under the waves.

19. The Sea of Islands (Mare Insularum)

The islands
that stud the calm surface of the sea, smooth as green glass, have long beckoned lovers and mariners. People looked at the round and oblong shapes rising from the sea, and dreamed of fragrant woods and glacial lakes, of the buzzing of bees suckling heavy roses, and metallic dragonflies perched atop nodding stems of lilies.

But the islands are really the humps of ancient monsters with leaden dead
eyes and slow, rumbling thoughts. Occasionally, they whisper to each other in softest voices, but they never move or come up for a gulp of air or a taste of fish. They exhale cautiously, and the gentle waves raised by their breath lap at the shores of the islands. They die slowly, too shy to reveal themselves, their embarrassment the foundation of an exquisite illusion.

No matter how horrifying
these monsters are, they know the value of appearing beautiful.

20. The Sea of Foam (Mare Spumans)

Everyone knows that when mermaids die they turn into foam, because they have no soul. On the Moon, however, every creature shares the fate of the mermaids.

The sea brims with multicolored bubbles, each of them reflecting all others for a short moment before bursting.

They do not visit graves
on the Moon. Indeed, there are no graves at all. Those who tire of being dead blink out and reappear in the Sea of Foam. Everything that has ever existed finds its way here, and the Sea of Foam contains, or will contain in a near future, all of the Moon.

VECTOR

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

You. Are.

(A weapon. A virus. A commandment from God.)

The stage is your skull, the script someone else’s, and they are about to win.

Here’s a wall. You are the battering ram against an amassed weight of a million shrines nestled in the crook of ancient trees, in the corners between skyscrapers, the solidity of Chaomae Guanim and Phramae Thoranee: for this is
your land and yours is a land of many faiths.

The viral chorus is vicious and through you it is a tidal wave breaking upon the shore of your history, of a country shaped like an axe. Flash-narratives howl through your lips, biblical verses and names, stories of killing and fire. You understand none of it, but the virus needs a host – a mind that touches and is touched by Krungthep’s subconscious
grid – and so you’ve been chosen, with a bit of chloroform to your face and a counterfeit ambulance where you lay, able to see but not to think. Neon glare in your eyes and men wearing surgical masks. Farang men with their cadaver skin and their eyes blue-gray-green.

Fear, panic. You try to remember them, but they’ve frayed into abstractions under the shadows of anesthetics.

The chips urge you
forward and you heave against a network with mantras and prayers for bone, dreams and desires for muscle. These are what protect Krungthep and these are what they want you to destroy, with their falsity of Yesu, with visions of stained glass and cathedrals, and alien insertion of tasteless wafers into pale thin mouths. Find the cracks. Fill them up with false data, false dreams. Yours is a land
that does not open its arms to
churches; yours is a land that once escaped Farangset and Angrit flags through the cleverness of its kings. About time they fix that.

This is how to rewrite a country’s past, and when a past is gone it is easy to replace the present with convenience. Belief moves will, and will moves nations. No screens needed, no competition with other channels. Poured straight
into the intent grid this stabs the subconscious, direct as a syringe to the vein.

Holes in your skin oozing pus. Blood in your mouth lining teeth and bruised gums. No pain anywhere, because your nervous system has been deliberately broken and put back together wrong. You try to think of something other than this, other than the ports they’ve made in your arms and between your vertebrae, other
than the cold metal jacked into you to dictate your heart and measure your synapses.

You dream of ghost dances and processions to pray for rain, a black cat yowling in a wicker cage slung between villagers’ shoulders. You dream of leaving offerings, fruits and sweets and glasses of cream soda to divinities you can understand.

There was a war between China and America, and it left the world a
series of deserts, the sky a pane of broken glass.

Krungthep has clawed out survival from the aftermath’s bedrock under the engines, which process intent into power, and power into a shelter that makes Krungthep possible. It is expanded and strengthened year by year; it can be turned, with the right adjustment, into a weapon. From shield to sword. From sword to gun. The woman who created this
system died young to a sniper. She’s celebrated now, her name a byword for martyrdom and progress. No daughter of Prathet Thai, and few sons either, have done more.

Second phase of infection. It returns you to a time where you wear a body in place of plastic, in place of the coffin in which you’ve been interred. In this present there are no temples or mosques in the city, by the rivers or punctuating
the soil. Only churches with their naked Yesu, their clothed altars that mean nothing to you, their abjection before a fancy whose appeal you cannot understand.

In the streets billboards and signs shine neon Angrit, foreign brands, foreign elegance. No Thai anywhere, for why should a
language exist that’s spoken by less than a hundred million, next to one spoken worldwide? Where’s the efficiency
in so many letters in the alphabet, and vowels and consonants? Twenty-six is all anyone needs. The chips bombard you with linguistic algorithms and statistics. In a world of Angrit, Thai is unnecessary.

Listen. Your sister’s speaking faultless Angrit in the style of foreign news anchors. The cousin from overseas won’t have to pinch his face and look away and sigh at everyone’s pronunciations,
everyone’s misspellings. No more shame. Everyone will be perfectly equal, rid of that embarrassing accent. Forget the tongue you’ve spoken since birth. Childish toys are to be put away; sick things are to be put down. (Observe those phrasal verbs, the ambiguities. The qualities of
away
and
down
can both mean death.)

The logic of this does not slot quite right but soon enough the thinking part
of you is thrust back to a corner, smaller than you, than half a raindrop. You try to hold onto it but it slips and drips. It is gone, it is vapor, it was never there.

You stagger out of a classroom taught by a woman with ashy hair and painted pebbles for eyes. That school’s all air-conditioned rooms and corridors polished to a shine, populated tidily by children of the rich and powerful. Yellow-headed
classmates with their loudness and their big bodies close in on you. (This is not the sort of school your parents could afford.) You look for, and cannot find, dark hair. Reflections of you dwindle, so small you can thread yourself through a needle’s eye.

Was the city of your birth ever so crowded with people who looked like that?

Yes, it was. This is how things have always been, and it follows
that this is how things will be. This is logical, this is sensible. This is peace and progress.

Out through the school gate, part of a crowd pouring out, you hope for familiar smells of roast pork and sticky rice, for colors you recognize: an old tree with a pink sash around it to mark the spirit residing within. Tiny plates of food at the base of a utility pole, to curry favor with any small
god that might live in the wires or the concrete. It does no harm to put such things out. But they are superstitions and the farangs passing by smirk. A tourist more freckles than skin pauses to blink at it; her spectacles give off a
flicker. Photo snapped and uploading, to be laughed at and rendered into a joke. Who believes in divinities so diminutive? Yesu-Lord is large and he lives everywhere,
not just in a pole or a tree. Or his ghost does. Or his father. One of them or possibly all. Nano-missionaries have been drilling you with parables and sermons but they don’t take. It is not a strength of will or integrity of self that protects you but sheer confusion.