The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (27 page)

A-what that? Him come? No, only one baby raincloud scudding by. “Dumpling done! I frying the banana!”

“What a way you taking long today,” grumbled Dry Bone.

Yes! Coasting in quiet-quiet on wings the span of a big man,
Master Johncrow the corbeau-bird float through the sky. From her window
Tan-Tan see him land on the banister rail right beside Dry Bone, so soft that the duppy man ain’t even self hear he. She heart start dancing in she chest, light and airy like a masque band flag. Tan-Tan tiptoe out to the front door to watch the drama.

Dry Bone still have he eyes closed. Master Johncrow stretch he long, picky-picky wattle neck and look right into Dry Bone face, tender as a lover.
He black tongue snake out to lick one side of he pointy beak, to clean out the corner of one eye. “Ah, Dry Bone,” he say, and he voice was the wind in dry season, “so long I been waiting for this day.”

Dry Bone open up he eye. Him two eyes make four with Master Johncrow own. He scream and try to scramble out the chair, but he belly get too heavy for he skin-and-bone limbs. “Don’t touch me!” he
shout. “When you pick me up, you pick up trouble! Tan-Tan, come and chase this buzzard away!” But Tan-Tan ain’t move.

Striking like a serpent, Master Johncrow trap one of Dry Bone arm in he beak. Tan-Tan hear the arm snap like twig, and Dry Bone scream again. “You can’t pick me up! You picking up trouble!” But Master Johncrow haul Dry Bone out into the yard by he break arm, then he fasten onto
the nape of Dry Bone neck with he claws. He leap into the air, dragging Dry Bone up with him. The skin-and-bone man fall into the sky in truth.

As Master Johncrow flap away over the trees with he prize, Tan-Tan hear he chuckle. “Ah, Dry Bone, you dead thing, you! Trouble sweet to me like the yolk that did sustain me. Is trouble you swallow to make that belly so fat? Ripe like a watermelon. I
want you to try to give me plenty, plenty trouble. I want you to make it last a long time.”

Tan-Tan sit down in the wicker chair on the verandah and watch them flying away till she couldn’t hear Dry Bone screaming no more and Master Johncrow was only a black speck in the sky. She whisper to sheself:

Corbeau say so, it must be so,
Please, Johncrow, take Dry Bone and go,
Tan-Tan say so,
Tan-Tan
beg so.

Tan-Tan went inside and look at she little home. It wouldn’t be plenty trouble to make another window to let in more light. Nothing would be trouble after living with the trouble of Dry Bone. She go make the window tomorrow, and the day after that, she go re-cane the break-seat chair.

Tan-Tan pick up she kerosene lamp and went outside to look in the bush for some scraper grass to polish
the rust off it. That would give she something to do while she think about what Master John-crow had tell she. Maybe she would even go find this Papa Bois, oui?

Wire bend,
Story end.

THE FOUR GENERATIONS OF CHANG E

Zen Cho

The First Generation

In the final days of Earth as we knew it, Chang E won the moon lottery.

For Earthlings who were neither rich nor well-connected, the lottery was the only way to get on the Lunar Habitation Programme. (This was the Earthlings’ name for it. The moon people said: “those fucking immigrants”.)

Chang E sold everything she had: the car,
the family heirloom enamel hairpin collection, her external brain. Humans were so much less intelligent than Moonites anyway. The extra brain would have made little difference.

She was entitled to the hairpins. Her grandmother had pressed them into Chang E’s hands herself, her soft old hands folding over Chang E’s.

“In the future it will be dangerous to be a woman,” her grandmother had said.
“Maybe even more dangerous than when my grandmother was a girl. You look after yourself, OK?”

It was not as if anyone else would. There was a row over the hairpins. Her parents had been saving them to pay for Elder Brother’s education.

Hah! Education! Who had time for education in days like these? In these times you mated young before you died young; you plucked your roses before you came down
with some hideous mutation or discovered one in your child, or else you did something crazy – like go to the moon. Like survive.

Chang E could see the signs. Her parents’ eyes had started following her around hungrily, for all the world as if they were
Bugs Bunny and she was a giant carrot. One night Chang E would wake up to find herself trussed up on the altar they had erected to Elder Brother.

Since the change Elder Brother had spent most of his time in his room, slumbering Kraken-like in the gloomful depths of his bed. But by the pricking of their thumbs, by the lengthening of his teeth, Mother and Father trusted that he was their way out of the last war, their guard against assault and cannibalism.

Offerings of oranges, watermelons and pink steamed rice cakes piled up around his
bed. One day Chang E would join them. Everyone knew the new gods liked best the taste of the flesh of women.

So Chang E sold her last keepsake of her grandmother and pulled on her moon boots without regret.

On the moon Chang E floated free, untrammelled by the Earth’s ponderous gravity, untroubled by that sticky thing called family. In the curious glances of the moon people, in their condescension
(“your Lunarish is very good!”) she was reinvented.

Away from home, you could be anything. Nobody knew who you’d been. Nobody cared.

She lived in one of the human ghettos, learnt to walk without needing the boots to tether her to the ground, married a human who chopped wood unceasingly to displace his intolerable homesickness.

One night she woke up and saw the light lying at the foot of her
bed like snow on the grass. Lifting her head, she saw the weeping blue eye of home. The thought, exultant, thrilled through her:
I’m free! I’m free!

The Second Generation

Her mother had had a pet moon rabbit. This was before we found out they were sentient. She’d always treated it well, said Chang E. That was the irony: how well we had treated the rabbits! How little some of them deserved it!

Though if any rabbit had ever deserved good treatment, it was her mother’s pet rabbit. When Chang E was little, it had made herbal tea for her when she was ill, and sung her nursery rhymes in its native moon rabbit tongue – little songs, simple and savage,
but rather sweet. Of course Chang E wouldn’t have been able to sing them to you now. She’d forgotten.

But she was grateful to that rabbit.
It had been like a second mother to her, said Chang E.

What Chang E didn’t like was the rabbits claiming to be intelligent. It’s one thing to cradle babies to your breast and sing them songs, stroking your silken paw across their foreheads. It’s another to want the vote, demand entrance to schools, move in to the best part of town and start building warrens.

When Chang E went to university there
was a rabbit living in her student hall. Imagine that. A rabbit sharing their kitchen, using their plates, filling the pantry with its food.

Chang E kept her chopsticks and bowls in her bedroom, bringing them back from the kitchen every time she finished a meal. She was polite, in memory of her nanny, but it wasn’t pleasant. The entire hall smelled of rabbit food. You worried other people would
smell it on you.

Chang E was tired of smelling funny. She was tired of being ugly. She was tired of not fitting in. She’d learnt Lunarish from her immigrant mother, who’d made it sound like a song in a foreign language.

Her first day at school Chang E had sat on the floor, one of three humans among twenty children learning to add and subtract. When her teacher had asked what one and two made,
her hand shot up.

“Tree!” she said.

Her teacher had smiled. She’d called up a tree on the holographic display.

“This is a tree.” She called up the image of the number three. “Now, this is three.”

She made the high-pitched clicking sound in the throat which is so difficult for humans to reproduce.

“Which is it, Changey?”

“Tree,” Chang E had said stupidly. “Tree. Tree.” Like a broken down
robot.

In a month her Lunarish was perfect, accentless, and she rolled her eyes at her mother’s singsong, “Chang E, you got listen or not?”

Chang E would have liked to be motherless, pastless, selfless.
Why was her skin so yellow, her eyes so small, when she felt so green inside?

After she turned sixteen, Chang E begged the money off her dad, who was conveniently indulgent since the divorce,
and went in secret for the surgery.

When she saw herself in the mirror for the first time after the operation she gasped.

Long ovoid eyes, the last word in Lunar beauty, all iris, no ugly inconvenient whites or dark browns to spoil that perfect reflective surface. The eyes took up half her face. They were like black eggs, like jewels.

Her mother screamed when she saw Chang E. Then she cried.

It was strange. Chang E had wanted this surgery with every fibre of her being – her nose hairs swooning with longing, her liver contracting with want.

Yet she would have cried too, seeing her mother so upset, if her new eyes had let her. But Moonite eyes didn’t have tear ducts. No eyelids to cradle tears, no eyelashes to sweep them away. She stared unblinking and felt sorry for her mother, who
was still alive, but locked in an inaccessible past.

The Third Generation

Chang E met H’yi in the lab, on her first day at work. He was the only rabbit there and he had the wary, closed-off look so many rabbits had.

At Chang E’s school the rabbit students had kept themselves to themselves. They had their own associations – the Rabbit Moon-ball Club, the Lapin Lacemaking Society – and sat in
quiet groups at their own tables in the cafeteria.

Chang E had sat with her Moonite friends.

“There’s only so much you can do,” they’d said. “If they’re not making any effort to integrate …”

But Chang E had wondered secretly if the rabbits had the right idea. When she met other Earthlings, each one alone in a group of Moonites, they’d exchange brief embarrassed glances before subsiding back
into invisibility. The basic wrongness of being an Earthling was intensified in the presence of other Earthlings. When you were with normal people you could almost forget.

Around humans Chang E could feel her face become used to smiling and frowning, every emotion transmitted to her face with that flexibility of expression that was so distasteful to Moonites. As a child this had pained her, and
she’d avoided it as much as possible – better the smoothness of surface that came to her when she was hidden among Moonites.

At twenty-four, Chang E was coming to understand that this was no way to live. But it was a difficult business, this easing into being. She and H’yi did not speak to each other at first, though they were the only non-Moonites in the lab.

The first time she brought human
food to work, filling the place with strange warm smells, she kept her head down over her lunch, shrinking from the Moonites’ glances. H’yi looked over at her.

“Smells good,” he said. “I love noodles.”

“Have you had this before?” said Chang E. H’yi’s ears twitched. His face didn’t change, but somehow Chang E knew he was laughing.

“I haven’t spent my entire life in a warren,” he said. “We do
get out once in a while.”

The first time Chang E slept over at his, she felt like she was coming home. The close dark warren was just big enough for her. It smelt of moon dust.

In H’yi’s arms, her face buried in his fur, she felt as if the planet itself had caught her up in its embrace. She felt the wall vibrate: next door H’yi’s mother was humming to her new litter. It was the moon’s own lullaby.

Chang E’s mother stopped speaking to her when she got married. It was rebellion, Ma said, but did she have to take it so far?

“I should have known when you changed your name,” Ma wept. “After all the effort I went to, giving you a Moonite name. Having the throat operation so I could pronounce it. Sending you to all the best schools and making sure we lived in the right neighbourhoods. When will
you grow up?”

Growing up meant wanting to be Moonite. Ma had always been disappointed by how bad Chang E was at this.

They only reconciled after Chang E had the baby. Her mother came to visit, sitting stiffly on the sofa. H’yi made himself invisible in the kitchen.

The carpet on the floor between Chang E and her mother may as well have been a mare. But the baby stirred and yawned in Chang E’s
arms – and stolen glance by jealous, stolen glance, her mother fell in love.

One day Chang E came home from the lab and heard her mother singing to the baby. She stopped outside the nursery and listened, her heart still.

Her mother was singing a rabbit song.

Creaky and true, the voice of an old peasant rabbit unwound from her mouth. The accent was flawless. Her face was innocent, wiped clean
of murky passions, as if she’d gone back in time to a self that had not yet discovered its capacity for cruelty.

The Fourth Generation

When Chang E was sixteen, her mother died. The next year Chang E left school and went to Earth, taking her mother’s ashes with her in a brown ceramic urn.

The place her mother had chosen was on an island just above the equator, where, Ma had said, their Earthling
ancestors had been buried. When Chang E came out of the environmentcontrolled port building, the air wrapped around her, sticky and close. It was like stepping into a god’s mouth and being enclosed by his warm humid breath.

Even on Earth most people travelled by hovercraft, but on this remote outpost wheeled vehicles were still in use. The journey was bumpy – the wheels rendered them victim to
every stray imperfection in the road. Chang E hugged the urn to her and stared out the window, trying to ignore her nausea.

It was strange to see so many humans around, and only humans. In the capital city you’d see plenty of Moonites, expats and tourists, but not in a small town like this.

Here, thought Chang E, was what her mother had dreamt of. Earthlings would not be like moon humans, always
looking anxiously over their shoulder for the next way in which they would be found wanting.