The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (81 page)

I have to go and find a monk. I give him a huge sum of money to earn merit, and I ask him to chant for us. I ask him to bless our luggage and at a distance bless the boat that we will sail in. I swallow fear like thin sour spit. I order ahead, food for Pchum Ben, so that he can eat it, and act as mediary so that I can feed my dead. I look at him. He smiles. He is a man without guns without modernity without family to help him. For just a moment I envy him.

I await disaster, sure that the loss of our neak ta bodes great ill; I fear that the boat will be swamped at sea.

But I’m wrong.

Dolphins swim ahead of our prow leaping out of the water. We trawl behind us for fish and haul up tuna, turbot, sea snakes and turtles. I can assure you that flying fish really do fly – they soar over our heads at night, right across the boat like giant mosquitoes.

No one gets seasick; there are no storms; we navigate directly. It is as though the sea has made peace with us. Let them be, we have lost them, they are going.

We are Cambodians. We are good at sleeping in hammocks and just talking. We trade jokes and insults and innuendo sometimes in verse, and we play music, cards, and bah angkunh, a game of nuts. Gerda joins in the game and I can see the other kids let her win. She squeals with delight, and reaches down between the slats to find a nut that has fallen through.

All the passengers hug and help take care of the children. We cook on little stoves, frying in woks. Albatrosses rest on our rigging. Gerda still won’t speak, so I cuddle her all night long, murmuring. Kynom ch’mooah Channarith. Oun ch’mooah ay?

I am your new father.

Once in the night, something huge in the water vents, just beside us. The stars themselves seem to have come back like the fish, so distant and high, cold and pure. No wonder we are greedy for them, just as we are greedy for diamonds. If we could, we would strip-mine the universe, but instead we strip-mine ourselves.

We land at Sentosa. Its resort beaches are now swallowed by the sea, but its slopes sprout temporary, cantilevered accomodation. The sides of the buildings spread downwards like sheltering batwings behind the plastic quays that walk us directly to the hillside.

Singapore’s latest growth industry.

The living dead about to be entombed, we march from the boats along the top of pontoons. Bobbing and smooth-surfaced, the quays are treacherous. We slip and catch each other before we fall. There are no old people among us, but we all walk as if aged, stiff-kneed, and unbalanced.

But I am relieved; the island still burgeons with trees. We take a jungle path, through humid stillness, to the north shore, where we face the Lion City.

Singapore towers over the harbour. Its giant versions of Angkor Wat blaze with sunlight like daggers; its zigzag shoreline is ringed round with four hundred clippers amid a white forest of wind turbines. Up the sides of Mt Fraser cluster the houses of rustics, made of wood and propped against the slope on stilts.

It had been raining during the day. I’d feared a storm, but now the sky is clear, gold and purple with even a touch of green. All along the line where trees give way to salt grasses, like stars going for a swim, fireflies shine.

Gerda’s eyes widen. She smiles and holds out a hand. I whisper the Khmer words for firefly: ampil ampayk.

We’re booked into one of the batwings. Only wild riches can buy a hotel room in Sentosa. A bottle of water is expensive enough.

Once inside, Agnete’s spirits improve, even sitting on folding metal beds with a hanging blanket for a partition. Her eyes glisten. She sits Gerda and Sampul on the knees of her crossed legs. “They have beautiful shopping malls Down There,” she says. “And Rith, technik, all the latest. Big screens. Billion billion pixels.”

“They don’t call them pixels anymore, Mom.”

That night, Gerda starts to cry. Nothing can stop her. She wails and wails. Our friends from the boat turn over on their beds and groan. Two of the women sit with Agnete and offer sympathy. “Oh poor thing, she is ill.”

No, I think, she is broken-hearted. She writhes and twists in Agnete’s lap. Without words for it, I know why she is crying.

Agnete looks like she’s been punched in the face; she didn’t sleep well on the boat.

I say, “Darling, let me take her outside. You sleep.”

I coax Gerda up into my arms, but she fights me like a cat. Sssh sssh, Angel, sssh. But she’s not to be fooled. Somehow she senses what this is. I walk out of the refugee shelter and onto the dock that sighs underfoot. I’m standing there, holding her, looking up at the ghost of Singapore, listening to the whoop of the turbines overhead, hearing the slopping sound of water against the quay. I know that Gerda cannot be consoled.

Agnete thinks our people are kind because we smile. But we can also be cruel. It was cruel of Gerda’s father to leave her, knowing what might happen after he was gone. It was cruel to want to be missed that badly.

On the north shore, I can still see the towers defined only by their bioluminescence, in leopard-spot growths of blue, or gold-green, otherwise lost in a mist of human manufacture, smoke and steam.

The skyscrapers are deserted now, unusable, for who can climb seventy stories? How strange they look; what drove us to make them? Why all across the world did we reach up so high? As if to escape the Earth, distance ourselves from the ground, and make a shiny new artifice of the world.

And there are the stars. They have always shone; they shine now just like they would shine on the deck of a starship, no nearer. There is the warm sea that gave us birth. There are the trees that turn sunlight into sugar for all of us to feed on.

Then overhead, giant starfish in the sky. I am at loss, choy mae! What on earth is that? They glow in layers, orange red green. Trailing after them in order, come giant butterflies glowing blue and purple. Gerda coughs into silence and stares upwards.

Cable cars. Cable cars strung from Mt Fraser, to the shore and on to Sentosa, glowing with decorative bioluminescence.

Ampil ampayk, I say again and for just moment, Gerda is still.

I don’t want to go. I want to stay here.

Then Gerda roars again, sounding like my heart.

The sound threatens to shred her throat. The sound is inconsolable. I rock her, shush her, kiss her, but nothing brings her peace.

You too, Gerda, I think. You want to stay too, don’t you? We are two of a kind.

For a moment, I want to run away together, Gerda and me, get across the straits to Johor Bahu, hide in the untended wilds of old palm-oil plantations.

But now we have no money to buy food or water.

I go still as the night whispers its suggestion.

I will not be cruel like her father. I can go into that warm sea and spread myself among the fishes to swim for ever. And I can take you with me, Gerda.

We can be still, and disappear into the Earth.

I hold her out as if offering her to the warm birthsea. And finally, Gerda sleeps, and I ask myself, will I do it? Can I take us back? Both of us?

Agnete touches my arm. “Oh, you got her to sleep! Thank you so much.” Her hand first on my shoulder, then around Gerda, taking her from me, and I can’t stop myself tugging back, and there is something alarmed, confused around her eyes. Then she gives her head a quick little shake, dismissing it.

I would rather be loved for my manliness than for my goodness. But I suppose it’s better than nothing and I know I will not escape. I know we will all Go Down.

The next day we march, numb and driven by something we do not understand.

For breakfast, we have Chinese porridge with roasted soya, nuts, spices and egg. Our last day is brilliantly sunny. There are too many of us to all take the cable car. Economy class, we are given an intelligent trolley to guide us, carrying our luggage or our children. It whines along the bridge from Sentosa, giving us relentless tourist information about Raffles, independence in 1965, the Singapore miracle, the coolies who came as slaves but stayed to contribute so much to Singapore’s success.

The bridge takes us past an artificial island full of cargo, cranes and wagons, and on the main shore by the quays is a squash of a market with noodle stalls, fish stalls, and stalls full of knives or dried lizards. Our route takes us up Mt Fraser, through the trees. The monkeys pursue us, plucking bags of bananas from our hands, clambering up on our carts, trying to open our parcels. Rith throws rocks at them.

The dawn light falls in rays through the trees as if the Buddha himself was overhead, shedding radiance. Gerda toddles next to me, her hand in mine. Suddenly she stoops over and holds something up. It is a scarab beetle, its shell a shimmering turquoise green, but ants are crawling out of it. I blow them away. “Oh, that is a treasure, Gerda. You hold onto it, OK?”

There will be nothing like it where we are going.

Then looking something like a railway station, there is the Singapore terminal dug into the rock of the outcropping. It yawns wide open, to funnel us inside. The concrete is softened by a screen of branches sweeping along its face – very tasteful and traditional I think until I touch them and find that they are made of mouldform.

This is Singapore, so everything is perfectly done. Pamper yourself a sign says in ten different languages. Breathe in an Air of Luxury.

Beautiful concierges in blue-grey uniforms greet us. One of them asks, “Is this the Sonn family?” Her face is so pretty, like Gerda’s will be one day, a face of all nations, smiling and full of hope that something good can be done.

“I’m here to help you with check in, and make sure you are comfortable and happy.” She bends down and looks into Gerda’s eyes but something in them makes her falter; the concierge’s smile seems to trip and stumble.

Nightmarishly, her lipgloss suddenly smears up and across her face, like a wound. It feels as though Gerda has somehow cut her.

The concierge’s eyes are sad now. She gives Gerda a package printed with a clown’s face and coloured balloons. Gerda holds the gift out from her upside down and scowls at it.

The concierge has packages for all the children, to keep them quiet in line. The giftpacks match age and gender. Rith always says his gender is Geek, as a joke, but he does somehow get a Geek pack. They can analyze his clothes and brand names. I muse on how strange it is that Rith’s dad gave him the same name as mine, so that he is Rith and I am Channarith. He never calls me father. Agnete calls me Channa, infrequently.

The beautiful concierge takes our papers, and says that she will do all the needful. Our trolley says goodbye and whizzes after her, to check in our bags. I’m glad it’s gone. I hate its hushed and cheerful voice. I hate its Bugs-Bunny baby face.

We wait.

Other concierges move up and down the velvet-roped queues with little trolleys offering water, green tea, dragon fruit or chardonnay. However much we paid, when all is said and done, we are fodder to be processed. I know in my sinking heart that getting here is why Agnete married me. She needed the fare.

No one lied to us, not even ourselves. This is bigger than a lie; this is like an animal migration, this is all of us caught up in something about ourselves we do not understand, never knew.

Suddenly my heart says, firmly. There are no aliens.

Aliens are just the excuse. This is something we want to do, like building those skyscrapers. This is all a new kind of dream, a new kind of grief turned inwards, but it’s not my dream, nor do I think that it’s Gerda’s. She is squeezing my hand too hard and I know she knows this thing that is beyond words.

“Agnete,” I say. “You and the boys go. I cannot. I don’t want this.”

Her face is sudden fury. “I knew you’d do this. Men always do this.”

“I didn’t use to be a man.”

“That makes no difference!” She snatches Gerda away from me, who starts to cry again. Gerda has been taken too many places, too suddenly, too firmly. “I knew there was something weird going on.” She glares at me as if she doesn’t know me, or is only seeing me for the first time. Gently she coaxes Gerda towards her, away from me. “The children are coming with me. All of the children. If you want to be be blown up by aliens. . . .”

“There are no aliens.”

Maybe she doesn’t hear me. “I have all the papers.” She means the papers that identify us, let us in our own front door, give us access to our bank accounts. All she holds is the hologrammed, eye-printed ticket. She makes a jagged, flinty correction: “They have all the papers. Gerda is my daughter, and they will favour me.” She’s already thinking custody battle, and she’s right, of course.

“There are no aliens.” I say it a third time. “There is no reason to do this.”

This time I get heard. There is a sound of breathing-out from all the people around me. A fat Tamil, sated maybe with blowing up other people, says, “What, you think all those governments lie? You’re just getting cold feet.”

Agnete focuses on me. “Go on. Get going if that’s what you want.” Her face has no love or tolerance in it.

“People need there to be aliens and so they all believe there are. But I don’t.”

Gerda is weeping in complete silence, though her face looks calm. I have never seen so much water come out of someone’s eyes; it pours out as thick as bird’s nest soup. Agnete keeps her hands folded across Gerda’s chest and kisses the top of her head. What, does she think I’m going to steal Gerda?

Suddenly our concierge is kneeling down, cooing. She has a pink metal teddy bear in one hand, and it hisses as she uses it to inject Gerda.

“There! All happy now!” The concierge looks up at me with hatred. She gives Agnete our check-in notification, now perfumed and glowing. But not our ID papers. Those they keep, to keep us there, safe.

“Thank you,” says Agnete. Her jaw thrusts out at me.

The Tamil is smiling with rage. “You see that idiot? He got the little girl all afraid.”

“Fool can’t face the truth,” says a Cluster of networked Malay, all in unison.

I want to go back to the trees, like Tarzan, but that is a different drive, a different dream.

“Why are you stopping the rest of us trying to go, just because you don’t want to?” says a multigen, with a wide glassy grin. How on earth does s/he think I could stop them doing anything? I can see s/he is making up for a lifetime of being disrespected. Shis intervention, though late and cowardly and stupid, gets the murmur of approval for which s/he yearns.