We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (9 page)

Then, suddenly, they all snapped into a giant megacube which started to slide down along an axis, and this axis was a shiny metal cable with no discernible end in sight. Raitek couldn’t see the interior of the cube. He did know, however, that the cable ran inside it as well, and
anyone who touched it would be hurt by its speedy passage through the cube
. The faster the cable ran, the bigger the chances someone would be badly cut or burned by the friction.

Acceleration mattered
.

It was then that Raitek called Patel and Jonathan for an emergency meeting.

“Are you kidding?” Patel said.

“Is this what you called gambiarra?” Jonathan asked, amazed.

“This is one of its many possible variations, yes,” Raitek said. “Are you willing to try?”

“What are the risks?” Patel asked him.

Raitek spread his hands in the air.

“Honestly? No idea. All I know is that acceleration seems to be the key, here. I may be wrong; in which case, nothing out of the ordinary will occur. Hell, the fact the we will be using a different elevator means it probably won’t result in anything at all, so why not?”

Patel stopped a bit to consider. Indeed, why not? Wasn’t it to get out of the sameness of Old Europe that he had come to Ghana? Deep inside, didn’t he want to take chances, to take risks? Indeed,
why the fuck not
?

“Okay, but on one condition.”

“Name it.”

“
I
will go.”

The next day, a teary-eyed Jonathan was beside Raitek in the control room, following the preparation for the third experiment.

They had spent the previous night transferring the whole immersion machinery array to the elevator shaft at the center of the floor. It was a good thing that Raitek had the necessary clearance to bypass the proper channels.

“Too convenient, if you ask me,” Patel grumbled as they mounted the wafer-thin screens of the array inside the carriage.

“Hey, it’s all in the name of filthy lucre,” Raitek said half-jokingly. “They don’t want to jeopardize their investment. We live in the Golden Age of Science, blah blah blah.”

“You don’t believe that?”

“I believe in everything, Hiran,” he said. “The world is a big place, and everything you can possibly imagine exists. I’ve seen many strange things with these eyes.”

“Such as…?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I do. Really.”

Raitek just shrugged. “Nothing that you haven’t seen in India.”

“I grew up in England.”

Raitek went mute for a while.
Wow, that’s a first
, Patel thought.

“Sorry,” he said after a minute. “I meant no prejudice.”

“It’s all right.”

“No. My grandfather hated it when some guy from the US called us
chicanos
or tried to talk to us in
Spanish
. Same thing, no excuse. Do you drink?”

“Not much. But a beer, occasionally, yes.”

“When this is all over, will you let me buy you a pint?”

Patel wobbled his head in a slight amusement. “Yes, sure. Thanks.”

“Thank
you
, Hiran. Thank you.”

That was then. This was now: a sweaty Patel checking his harness, his wraparound recording glasses and the impromptu emergency kit Raitek had given him at the last minute, checking them two, three, four times. He looked like a man with OCD. He didn’t give a fuck. He just wanted to know he was safe.

“All systems go, Hiran,” Raitek’s voice came over the elevator’s intercom. “Ready when you are.”

“Okay,” he replied. “Wish me luck.”

“
Boa sorte, meu camarada
,” Raitek said.

Patel breathed deeply and remembered what they had discussed in the last meeting: in the previous experiments, they had been very cautious, pressing buttons for no more than fifty floors, even though the feeling of acceleration wasn’t exactly corresponding.

This time, though, what should they do? More of the same could only bring the same results. More floors down could provoke an accident if they jumped to a past when the elevators hadn’t been invented yet. More floors up, on the other hand, could mean an incredible future—but what if they ended up in an ecologically improved Earth, one with no arcologies? What then? More importantly, would any of these scenarios affect the bubble and anyone inside it?

They just didn’t know.

In the end, they had reached a decision.

Patel pushed the button for one hundred floors up.

It was no big deal. The communication with Raitek was cut up immediately, but that was to be expected. The acceleration was smooth, but noticeable.

Then, full stop. The doors started to open. Patel felt immediately a freezing cold.

And the dark of space.

He was sucked to the void instantly, but felt the tug of the rope just before he could fall into the blackness. The only reason his eyes didn’t explode in their orbits was that the glasses were watertight, but he knew they wouldn’t resist for long. He gasped; not only he couldn’t breathe but he felt his trachea burning cold.

This is it
, he thought.
I’m going to die here
.

His hands were already fumbling in the emergency bag.

And found the small oxygen unit there.

He quickly secured it over his mouth, but he couldn’t adjust the rubber strap: he started to feel numb, his fingers losing their grip. He should close the doors before he could inhale safely. He closed his eyes for just a second.
Focus, Hiran, Focus
. Then he opened his eyes and caught the rope, starting to pull himself painfully with one hand while still holding the oxygen mask with the other.

Then the mask slipped off; it started to drift away slowly, but by then he had already turned to the inside panel of the car, lifted a hand and pushed the emergency button. The doors closed. The car was a vacuum: would he survive when he got back?

He did.

“We were worried about you, mate,” Raitek said to him, sitting by his bed in the building’s small medical ward.

“I wonder why.” Patel managed a shadow of a smile.

Jonathan looked at him from a distance.

“He won’t admit it, but he was scared shitless,” Raitek said.

“I know,” Patel said. “I was too.”

“We all were.”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t. It was an educated guess.”

“Too educated.”

“Here’s the thing: it turns out that acceleration wasn’t really the issue after all. You have think in systems of
coordinates and geolocation tools
. Later that night, I started wondering, what about the Earth’s orbit? Shouldn’t we be calculating to compensate the transit of Earth around the Sun? You’d be traveling in space as well as in time, after all, so your bubble would be slingshot towards Mercury, probably.”

“Probably.”

“I had too much on my mind to do all the math.”

“That makes sense.”

“Then I figured, hell, it’s too late for that, but not too late to take some precautions, just in case.”

“In case.”

“Exactly.”

“Thanks.”

“No. Thank
you
. You were the hero.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? You conned me into doing it. I won’t forget this!”

“We’ll discuss it over a beer as soon as you get better, all right? I’m going now,” and he started to get out of the room.

“One more thing,” Patel said.

“Yes?”

“Is Raitek a common name in Brazil? I must confess I don’t know much about your country aside from football, but I’ve never even heard of such a name before anywhere.”

Raitek smiled.

“Say it out loud again. This time slowly, separating the syllables. And don’t forget to exaggerate the initial R.”

“Like a roar.”

“Exactly.”

Patel did it.

“Fuck. Fuck.” He couldn’t help it.

The other man shrugged. “My mother was a sucker for puns. And for hi-tech too, of course. How’s that for a geek, huh?”

“One more thing,” Raitek said, coming back to the bedside. “I took the liberty of filing the whole project under a FAIL tag. I already had a talk with the rest of the team. They were pretty shaken up after what happened to you, and they all agreed with it.”

“Wait, why? After all we did?”

“Because a FAIL tag is better than a DANGEROUS one. A DANGEROUS tag means it’s a good project, ready to be revived at a later date with the right team and the right equipment. That is…”

“Not us.”

“Exactly.”

“But then what? Did I work in vain?”

“Not at all,” Raitek said. “I have clearance with failed projects. What would you say if I got you a transfer to Brazil? We have an arcology in São Paulo that’s a bit higher than this, and you’d have everything you needed to start working right away—including a better paycheck.”

Patel squinted. He could feel a massive headache coming.

“What’s the point? What can we do there we can’t do here?” he tried to keep his voice down.

“We have a good aerospace agency in Brazil,” Raitek said.

“I still don’t understand.”

Then Raitek smiled again that devious smile of his.

“Why, Hiran, you wanted to open a travel agency, and so does the company. But, after what happened to you, I was thinking of aiming a little higher. Why not the stars, Hiran?
Why not space travel
?”

Hiran Patel and Raitek da Silva arrived in São Paulo three weeks later—time enough to move the necessary equipment and transfer everyone in the team who wanted to go with them (a condition Patel imposed to close the deal). Jonathan was among the group.

In Brazil, the team doubled in size, as did their workload. They had better working conditions, better equipment, an almost stress-free environment and lots of money.

“We can do better, Hiran,” Raitek told him when the lab was finally ready to work. “We can change the game for good.”

“The company will back us in this?” Hiran asked him.

“Never mind the company,” he said. “I’m applying the gambiarra method here too.” Suddenly he stopped smiling and said, “Want to know why?”

Hiran stared at him.

“Why the gambiarra? Of course I do.”

“No. The gambiarra goes without saying. I meant why Brazil.”

“Oh. Okay, carry on.”

“In Ghana, as well as in Europe, Hiram, space exploration is still the domain of the military. Not in Brazil.

“We also had a military space program here in the 20th century, did you know that? No, you didn’t. Almost nobody didn’t. It was no big secret. It just happened people wasn’t that much interested in anything coming from a banana republic then. Until 2003, when a rocket intended to get two satellites in orbit exploded on its launch pad. It killed twenty-one civilian techs.

“After what was considered a thorough military enquiry—to which no civilian had access—the official investigation report said that the explosion was caused by dangerous buildups of volatile gases, deterioration of sensors and electromagnetic interference at the launch site. Nobody could prove if it was true, but after that our space program pretty much stopped. The military one, that is.”

“You mean that there are civilian companies working on space exploration now?”

Then Raitek’s broad face broke into a smile again. He produced a laminated card from the inner pocket of his jacket. It was a dull grey ultrathin plastic job, featuring his name, an old redundancy QR-code and, most important, the acronym of the company: AIM.

“There is one now,” he said.

A Bridge of Words

Dinesh Rao

Once in a while, you’d suddenly see someone, out of the corner of your eye, with the tattooed dots on the forehead and the side, but of course, you’d blink and before you got a better look, the person would disappear into the crowd. It is a hopeless task, thought Riya, as she trudged along the main thoroughfare in the market, unable to keep her eyes from constantly scanning the crowd and yet weary of the necessity to be constantly alert. It didn’t help that she drew attention to herself; no matter how much she tried to blend in, something gave her away. It wasn’t her face—she could pass for a local any day—nor her clothes, but maybe her stance? The way she walked? Some subtle trait advertised her strangeness to the people around her. Bahsa, the research assistant, was amused by their failure, but even his cheerful explanations of their situation were beginning to grate on her.

“I hate field work,” she announced. “Let’s just scan through the police database. I can write a script in ten minutes…”

“If we can get hold of it… personally, I don’t think they will just give it to us, here, take the camera files, have fun,” replied Bahsa.

“But Dr Gudi promised…”

“I know, I know, but in my experience”—Bahsa looked around conspiratorially—“Dr Gudi is a nice man, but sometimes he says things you want to hear. We all do, it’s a national failing. Scholars have long lamented this problem. There is no way the police will let us have access to anything.”

Riya sighed, and longed once again for the cool of the old library. “Maybe that’s how they can tell that there’s something off about me—maybe they can sense the sweat rolling off me,” she thought.

Bahsa said, “Look let’s give this half an hour more. If we don’t find anyone by then, let’s go back and have a drink.” Riya muttered okay, and cheered up grudgingly.

They wandered through the market, dodging shoppers and sellers and pickpockets and beggars, through the byways of the marketplace, constantly scanning people’s faces for the telltale dots on the head. Riya’s feet were aching and the need for sustained alertness tired her. They stopped to buy some weirdly shaped fruits—even Bahsa had never seen them before. He asked the old lady selling it what they were called, and she said its name in that sing-song accent that Riya remembered so well from her childhood. Bahsa handed one to Riya, and they peeled the flakes off the
Khumba
fruit and munched into it. Riya pretended not to listen as the woman interrogated Bahsa about her. She could understand most of it but it was the accents that troubled her. She heard the familiar patter that Bahsa used every time it came up—