The Apex Book of World SF 2 (28 page)
Read The Apex Book of World SF 2 Online
Authors: Lavie Tidhar
Of course, not
everyone was happy. Lucy and Peter still had to put up with the odd comment in
the playground, and there were still some who edged away whenever one of the
Thompsons came into a room. Number 54 Utley Terrace squatted behind its high
fence and its locked gate and would have no part of the bright future on offer.
But now the mood was all for change.
And change duly
came. Myrtle and George don't live at number 56 any more—they've gone back to
the home world. Lucy and Peter went with them, but Susan stayed on in the
house. She met a nice human boy from Palmerston North, and they've got a family
of their own now, two girls and a boy on the way. The children look human
enough, and beyond that, I'm too much the gentleman to ask.
Myrtle wasn't lying
about the rest of the galaxy. Energy is as cheap as dust up there, and
galactics—those who can breathe our air—come in such numbers the Government's
had to put restrictions on the back country. Lots of Chinese and Indian
restaurants are closing down and being replaced by New Zealand ones, and you
can walk past any bistro and see aliens of all shapes and sizes dining out on
puha, kumara and lamb.
There's just Alison
and me now. Josh studied engineering in Christchurch, then, a couple of years
ago, he left on a longer journey. We drove him up to Shannon, then stood
watching from behind the safety of 80 centimetres of reinforced glass as the
spear of light rose straight up into the night sky. Neither of us had much to
say on the drive home.
Tonight we're out on
the deck, using the telescope that Myrtle and George gave us as a parting gift.
Golden lights move serenely through the field of view, far above Earth's atmosphere.
We swing our telescope towards the patch of sky, dark and almost empty, where
we know our son now lives, studying, learning. Sometimes we get a message, Josh
smiling and telling us he's fine against a background of lights, or bodies with
too many legs, or places we cannot recognise or even comprehend.
I'm retired, and
Alison's not far off. One day soon, we'll sell our house—the worst house on the
best street—and after a few weeks of touring round and saying goodbye to
friends, we'll take that road to Shannon. Before they left, George and Myrtle
said to look them up one day. I think we will.
From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7
Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor was born in the
United States to Nigerian Igbo parents. Her first novel,
Zahrah the
Windseeker,
won the Wole Soyinka Prize and her second,
The Shadow
Speaker
(set in Niger and Nigeria) won the Carl Brandon Society Parallax
award. She has also won the Macmillan Writer's Prize for Africa, for the children's book
Long Juju Man.
Field Guide
.
This
series of audio files was created by TreeFrog7
.
It has been
automatically translated into text
Some clumsy beast
has been stalking us. It only comes out at night and it moves with no regard
for the bushes, plants and detritus on the jungle floor. It sounds big and is
probably dangerous. And…I think it brings the smell of flowers with it. I can
smell it now, like sweet lilacs. Does Morituri36 even notice? I wonder.
Regardless of the creature's presence, he continues to compile information and
I put it together and upload the finished entries into the Greeny Jungle Field
Guide. That's our mission and our system.
ignorance! Upload information!" We are true Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure.
Joukoujou willing, we'll survive this day as we have the hundreds of others
since choosing to dedicate our lives to informing the ignorant masses about
this great jungle.
us, we'll deal with it when the time comes.
The God Bug is an insect of the
taxonomic order
Ahuhu-ebe
, which includes all beetles. It is common in
the Greeny Jungle. Usually blue, sometimes green. When it feels the urge, it
spontaneously multiplies, becoming two independent god bugs. As it multiplies
it may make a soft popping or giggling sound. There have been rare cases where
one has multiplied into four or five. They are docile, almost playful insects.
Diurnal.
—written and entered by: TreeFrog7/ Morituri36
*note:
For some reason,
this common insect has not previously been listed in the Greeny Jungle Field
Guide. This may be because the god bug is also found in the city. Or maybe this
is another example of the field guide's incompleteness.
disgusting. It rains constantly. The ground is always ankle-deep red-brown mud.
There are a thousand types of biting and stinging insects. We have to sleep in
the trees but the trees, bushes, and plants are noisy with buzzes, growls,
snorts, screeches, clicks, whistles, too. Especially at night. The air
reeks
of moss, the syrupy scent of flowers, ripe palm nuts and rotting mangoes. And
the jungle traps heat like a sealed glass tube held over a fire. The Greeny
Jungle is a tough place to be while pregnant.
light-headed. I vomit at least three times a day because of the strong smells.
Yes, still, even in my eighth month. But though my sensitive nose makes for
great discomfort, it makes for even greater documentation. You'd be amazed at
how many floral and faunal specimens show themselves first and foremost with
scent.
led me to a tree full of those hairy pink spiders with striped orange legs. A
year and half ago, Morituri36 and I uploaded a field guide entry on these
creatures. We named them
treebeards
. They were our hundredth entry.
Their bites paralyse your fingers and cause an intense headache. If these
spiders ever became common back home they'd cause society to break down within
a week. Imagine people unable to type on their computers!
yesterday, I forgot that
treebeards
give off a strong smell that is very
similar to figs. I thought I'd found a fig tree. I love figs, especially since
becoming pregnant. The sky was cloudy. Any other day, I'd have seen all those
webs. Instead, I walked right into them and the spiders descended on me like
rain. Understandably, they thought I was attacking their home. Not good.
to be in the middle of one of his bouts when it happened. I had to save myself
by running from the tree, throwing myself in the mud and dead leaves and
rolling like crazy, the roots of some tree grinding into my back. Then I just
lay there looking up…into the leaves and ripe fruit of a giant fig tree. The
smell of real figs was all around me.
Treebeards
and
figs, can
you believe it!
was stung. I have to type with my right. I'm left-handed so this has been very,
very annoying. I'll be better in a few days.
have. He cannot even save his wife from bush spiders. What has this place made
us into? But can I blame him for having dulled senses due to his
junglemyelitis? Maybe.
I
have been exploring this jungle right beside
him all these years. He has been the only human face
I've
had to look
at, too. Yet the trees do not "close in" on
me
.
I
do not need to
have the sun and moonlight wash over my face for at least four hours a day.
My
brain isn't muddled with an irrational fear of shadows that makes me rant and
rave once in a while. And
I'd
have yelled
stop
before
he
walked under a tree full of treebeards. Idiot.
and I can hear and smell it again—the creature following us. It's definitely
nocturnal.
The Treebeard is a spider of
the taxonic order Udide, which includes all joint-legged anti-spine creatures
with eight legs. The treebeard is bright pink with orange stripes on its legs
and about the size of a flashdisk. It is called a "treebeard" because it is
covered with think pink hairs that grow longest around the belly, about the
length of an adult's index finger. When sitting in a tree, it looks like the
tree has a small pink beard. Treebeards are highly social creatures and known
to create "cities" in large leafy trees. These treebeard cities give off the
strong smell of figs that can drift as far as a half mile radius.
Warning:
Treebeard poison causes near paralysis of the fingers and toes. One must
tolerate this aggravation for only a few days. Diurnal.
—writen and entered by: TreeFrog7/Morituri36
decided to break science-speak and enter this journal appendix in the field
guide. My name is Treefrog7 and my husband is Morituri36. We are from a village
in southwest, Ọnaghị agba nahịa, the people of the impossible
beads. Of course, out here in the Greeny Jungle, we cannot wear our traditional
beaded attire. Far too heavy. Instead we wear plain light clothing (northern
attire). But we never take off our beaded bracelets and marriage earrings. And
there is always the bead of the soul. So that is us and that is all I will say
on the subject.
this audio series because, after three months of exploration, we are closing in
on something big. Very big. The very process of finding it should be documented
along with the scientific information.
uploaded two hundred and eighty-eight new entries to the field guide. Our
fellow explorers are proud. What we explorers do is dangerous work. Many of us
die for the information we gather. Many of us return to civilisation with only
half our bodies, or half our minds, or ill in a thousand ways. Many of us are
lost. Morituri36 and I are not lost. We know exactly where we are and we know
exactly what we seek. We will find it. And human civilisation will be changed
forever.
need all my faculties for the time being. I wish Morituri36 would stop singing
that song.
World of Our Own
. It reminds me of home. He has such a
beautiful voice. I wish he'd shut up. I wish my body would stop aching. I'm
sick of being pregnant.
clack beetle
today. Their venom is itchy and the white spot it left on my skin is
about the size of my fingernail. It shows up on me a lot more than it showed up
on Morituri36 when he was bitten last year. I'm a much darker shade of brown
than he is. Which means, yes, I get to complain about it. I don't mind cuts,
scratches, bites, etcetera. But something about a mark on my skin of
temporarily-neutralised melanin really bothers me. No matter. It should be gone
in a few days.
looked for a tree to sleep in, we heard the creature. How long is it going to
follow us? What does it
want
?
The Clack Beetle is a
flightless insect of the taxonic order Ahuhu-ebe, which includes all beetles.
It is shiny black and the size of an adult's fingernail. Instead of wings, it
has two short stalks with shiny poisonous black balls on the end.
Warning:
Clack Beetle poison causes intense itching and neutralizes the melanin at the
site of the bite. When it bites, the pleasure of sucking the victim's blood
causes these two balls to loudly "clack" together. Try to crush a clack beetle
and you will receive another dose of its poison, this time from the two balls.
It's best to shake a clack beetle from your person and quickly walk away. The
symptoms will last for a few days if you are lucky. In rare cases where an
explorer has repeatedly tried to kill the highly durable insect, the symptoms
have lasted forever. Nocturnal.
—written and entered by: Nkoririko89
whisper quietly. Morituri36 is beside me, too. Something just screeched very,
very loudly. An
elgort
? As soon as we can climb down, I need to find a
certain seed…just in case. Morituri36 is too clumsy to handle them. He's
looking at me, annoyed, but he knows I'm right.
trail of what we seek and I believe that whatever has been following us is
still on our trail, too. Maybe the
elgort
will scare it away, or better
yet, eat it.
The Elgort is of an unknown
taxonic order, possibly Enyi Mba. It is a nasty destructive stupidly irrational
beast that physically bears a similarity to a pig or elephant spliced with the
genes of a demon. It is generally the size of a small house and has smooth
black skin and a powerful trunk lined with many large sharp teeth. It is an
egg-layer and, despite its size, capable of moving very very fast, fast as at
least the speed of sound. Six explorers I work with have been eaten by these
cursed beasts. More on the elgort soon. They are not easy to study.
—written and entered by: MadHatter72