Book Excerpt: ‘The Best of World SF: Volume 1’

On June 1, Head of Zeus publishing will release The Best of World SF: Volume 1.  It’s a collection of 26 new short stories representing the state of the art in international science fiction, selected by Lavie Tidhar. Contributors come from 21 countries including France, China, Singapore, Botswana, Nigeria, India, Japan, Italy, Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad, Spain, Mexico, Finland, Israel, Iceland, Russia, Ghana, South Africa, Sweden and Malaysia.

To celebrate the book’s release, we’re sharing an excerpt from “Debtless” by Chen Qiufan and translated by Blake Stone-Banks.

Freckles got deleted.

I don’t mean her meatbody, rather our memory data of her existence. In the hour since I had woken up, Freckles had become an insignificant name. Even her face was blurred. All the feelings I had once attached to the flesh-and-blood human — desire, annoyance, sadness, and let’s shamelessly admit a little love — were blown away like sand. And it wasn’t just me. It was all of us.

The company had been moving things around in our minds, for safety and efficiency.

So the girl became just another entry in the system, a coded lesson reminding future generations not to make the same mistake.

“… For carbonaceous bodies to be classified as C-type asteroids, we require high-sensitivity spectra covering optical to mid-infrared wavelengths 0.5 to 3.5 micrometers in length, in order to detect absorption bands at 0.7 and 3 micrometers. This is how we determine if asteroids contain water. Absorption bands of approximately 0.7 micrometers do not directly indicate water itself rather charge transfers in iron-bearing material, such as water, existing in C-type asteroid. Even then, presence of an 0.7 micrometer absorption band doesn’t allow us to accurately estimate water content in an asteroid or its spectral color …”

This entry kept popping from the mouth of the beautiful new girl, like a string of tongue twisters. In my mind, I gave her the nickname Magpie.

Suddenly she stopped, raised her head and looked at me confused. Her face, slightly red and sweaty, spewed out her question. “I don’t get why it’s not more direct to detect the presence of the 3-micrometer absorption band?”

I shot a friendly smile. “The high background radiation in the mid-infrared spectra makes the presence of the 3-micrometer band weak and difficult to detect.”

“Oh.” She looked as though she’d lost all interest in the question. For a hunter, that was a dangerous sign.

Water was the fundamental element for survival in our vast universe, so asteroids with water were always a primary collection targets for miners, but in some cases this proved fatal.

Magpie was speaking form a cylindrical metal cage just wide enough for a human body. Her waist and hands were strapped to swiveling branches. Her feet were spinning on the “hamster wheel”, which was what we crew called this piece of equipment. It was the safest and most effective way to combat osteoporosis and muscle atrophy in our one-third-gee environment.

As her mentor, I had to correct her movements from time to time. Even a slight errors accumulating over time could lead to fractures or fasciitis.

#

Bathing on a mining vessel was like mixing vegetables and salad dressing in a sealed bag. Magpie climbed out from her bathbag naked, wiped her firm calves in front of me as though no one was there. For some reason I turned my face to the side, perhaps because she was new and I wanted to show respect. It didn’t matter. Her bathwater would be recycled for our food, drinking water and air. It would eventually be part of my own body. From this point of view, our intimacy was assured.

“Why’d you come here?” I asked, trying to shift my attention.

“That a question?” She asked.

“I know, of course, the Treatise of Our Divine Debts. I mean, did you ever think about where that debt came from in the first place?”

“Is that important? We are all born into wearying debt, right? We’re just a bit more fortunate than others …”

“Fortunate?”

“It’s not fortunate to catch a fat fish worth more than one-hundred-billion credits? That’s a platinum mine alone, not counting nickel and cobalt. Enough to pay off all debts and make me a billionaire.”

“That’s a fairytale!”

“No, it’s a probability.”

“The probability is you get hung out to dry in space …”

“This isn’t much more dangerous than commercial crabbing in Peru or the Bering Sea. Of course, if you insist, the probability of getting hit by asteroid debris is higher than on Earth. Problem is …”

“Another hopeless optimist …” I glimpsed something familiar in her expression.

“Problem is …” She shook her head showing no intention of slowing down. “You got a hundred trillion in gold deposits on Earth, but nobody can get at it. Why? Because it’s in the sea. Cost of extracting gold dissolved in seawater far exceeds the value of the gold itself. So the value of that huge deposit is zip. We’re here. Yes, it’s dangerous. But the desserts are real. They’re out here …”

When she talked about dessert, it was like I almost remembered something, something on the tip of my tongue. I didn’t bother trying to remember though. I didn’t want to argue any more.

“Magpie, I hope you react on mission as quickly as when you’re speaking.”

“Mag— what?” You wimp. Go cower in the cabin and do your arithmetic. I hope your debt gets paid as soon as possible.”

She looked like she was actually getting angry.

In theory, Magpie wasn’t wrong. An M-type asteroid was the absolute best dessert. A 16 Psyche M-type could carry enough iron and nickel to meet Earth’s demand for the next million years. A platinum-rich asteroid might carry as much as one hundred grams per ton, twenty times more than the highest-grade South African open-pit platinum mine. This meant a five-hundred-meter M-type could produce one-hundred-seventy-five times the annual output of the planet.

That was our ultimate mission. C-type asteroids were for sustained replenishment. Mother Whale could not be overexploited. She wasn’t some giant rock. Rather, she was like loose rocks and gravel gathered by together by their own gravity, utterly without structural integrity. Any rotation, impact or deep excavation could trigger her disintegration. Then everything we had built would be destroyed, including ourselves.

#

Magpie slowly came to accept her new name. She even came to accept my style.

I tried not to get too close. I feared gravity’s power of attraction, which caused things to haphazardly smack into each other. I always had this ominous feeling around her, like the superstition of a sailor on the sea too many years who believes doom follows a red tide with white waves.

I feared it was Magpie’s fate to someday be deleted.

She knew what I thought and mocked it. Holding her pickaxe or drill, she’d say, “We got just one road, and we gotta follow it to the end.”

To Magpie, life was an adventure with few real choices.

She was ordered to recycle an abandoned sheepdog. The order said the sheepdog’s memory module might contain data from previous contact with an M-type asteroid and could provide valuable tracking clues.

We never knew where the orders came from, from Earth 380,000 kilometers away or from some space station? From other humans or from AI? Still, in most cases, the orders were correct. In a few cases, human interpretation led to bad consequences, like misinterpreting the oracle in a Greek tragedy.

Magpie never doubted the orders, though I tried to undermine her blind belief any way I could.

For example, I told her, using a mathematical formula, that even if we identified and tracked an M-type asteroid, trying to change its orbit and capture it would be like a monkey typing out the collected works of Shakespeare. It was harder than winning any lottery. Mining an M-type would be like catching a whale with a fishing rod. The costs could swallow up any potential profit while sacrificing dozens of lives. Even if we succeeded, shipping the ore back to Earth might cause a full market collapse.

For example, I made her doubt her abilities. I told her, what a robot can’t do, a miner made of protein and water certainly can’t do.

“Maintaining complex mining facilities, dealing with unpredictable equipment failures, analyzing anomalous events, assessing their impacts on Mother Whale? If the AI can’t succeed, Magpie doesn’t stand a chance. So it’s not clear what value you really have, at least while you’re alive.”

“So, what do you want me to do?” she shot back. “Cower in the cabin like you, waiting for my muscles to atrophy? Overdose on cosmic radiation causing tumors to take over my body and kill me?” She flashed the whites of her eyes.

“That’s not what I mean … I just hope you get these dumb ideas out of your head so you stay alive a bit longer …”

“But what does it mean to live when you live like that? We owe our lives to the God who made us …”

“Tell that to all the people who’ve died doing our work …”

“Then what are you here for? Didn’t like Earth?

“This wasn’t my choice! Just like it isn’t your choice! You woke up in this hell, unable to remember anything of the past other than what’s in your damn skill tree. We can never free ourselves of our debt, except in death. There’s no other way out!”

I turned my back, not wanting to let Magpie see how weak I was. A hand rested on my shoulder.

“I remember how I came here.”

I spun my head in astonishment and looked at her unsmiling face. Nobody knew, not even for the newest arrivals. I heard the company created a break in crew consciousness to avoid unnecessary risk. I had always imagined the risk was a mentally broken crewmember who might try to hijack the spaceship to get back home.

“Is that a joke?” I asked.

“No, I remember a strange place. It was like I was waking from a dream. There I was in this long, narrow passage. There were these flashing green lights guiding me forward, urging me forward …”

“And then?”

“And then I’ll tell you when I get back.” Magpie winked. Only then did I realize I’d been fooled.

BIO: A fiction writer, screenwriter, and columnist, Chen Qiufan (a.k.a. Stanley Chan) has published fiction in venues such as People’s Literature, Youth Literature, Science Fiction World, Esquire, and Chutzpah!. His futurism writing may be found at places like Slate and XPRIZE.

He has garnered numerous literary awards, including Taiwan’s Dragon Fantasy Award and China’s Galaxy and Xingyun (Nebula) Awards. In English translation, he has been featured in markets such as Clarkesworld, Pathlight, Lightspeed, Interzone, and F&SF. “The Fish of Lijiang” won a Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Award in 2012, and “The Year of the Rat” was selected by The Year’s Best Weird Fiction: Volume One.