Lightspeed: Year One

Cobh had strapped her data desk to her chest; now she checked the time. “Any moment now. Lvov, you’ll be fine. Remember, you’ll feel no acceleration, no matter how fast we travel. At the centre of an Alcubierre wave, spacetime is locally flat; you’ll still be in free fall. There will be tidal forces, but they will remain small. Just keep your breathing even, and—”

“Shut up, Cobh,” Lvov said tightly. “I know all this.”

Cobh’s desk flared with light. “There,” she breathed. “The GUTdrive has fired. Just a few seconds, now.”

A spark of light arced up from Pluto’s surface and tracked, in complete silence, under the belly of the parent world. It was the flitter’s GUTdrive, salvaged and stabilised by Cobh. The flame was brighter than Sol; Lvov saw its light reflected in Pluto, as if the surface was a great, fractured mirror of ice. Where the flame passed, tongues of nitrogen gas billowed up.

The GUTdrive passed over Christy. Lvov had left her desk there, to monitor the flakes, and the image the desk transmitted, displayed in the corner of her faceplate, showed a spark, crossing the sky.

Then the GUTdrive veered sharply upwards, climbing directly towards Lvov and Cobh at the Interface.

“Cobh, are you sure this is going to work?”

Lvov could hear Cobh’s breath rasp, shallow. “Look, Lvov, I know you’re scared, but pestering me with dumb-ass questions isn’t going to help. Once the drive enters the Interface, it will take only seconds for the instability to set in. Seconds, and then we’ll be home. In the inner System, at any rate. Or . . . ”

“Or what?”

Cobh didn’t reply.

Or not, Lvov finished for her. If Cobh has designed this new instability right, the Alcubierre wave will carry us home. If not—

The GUTdrive flame approached, becoming dazzling. Lvov tried to regulate her breathing, to keep her limbs hanging loose—

“Lethe,” Cobh whispered.

“What?” Lvov demanded, alarmed.

“Take a look at Pluto. At Christy.”

Lvov looked into her faceplate.

Where the warmth and light of the GUTdrive had passed, Christy was a ferment. Nitrogen billowed. And, amid the pale fountains, burrows were opening. Lids folded back. Eggs cracked. Infant flakes soared and sailed, with webs and nets of their silk-analogue hauling at the rising air.

Lvov caught glimpses of threads, long, sparkling, trailing down to Pluto—and up towards Charon. Already, Lvov saw, some of the baby flakes had hurtled more than a planetary diameter from the surface, towards the moon.

“It’s goose summer,” she said.

“What?”

“When I was a kid . . . The young spiders spin bits of webs, and climb to the top of grass stalks, and float off on the breeze. Goose summer—‘gossamer.’ ”

“Right,” Cobh said sceptically. “Well, it looks as if they are making for Charon. They use the evaporation of the atmosphere for lift . . . Perhaps they follow last year’s threads, to the moon. They must fly off every perihelion, rebuilding their web bridge every time. They think the perihelion is here now. The warmth of the drive—it’s remarkable. But why go to Charon?”

Lvov couldn’t take her eyes off the flakes. “Because of the water,” she said. It all seemed to make sense, now that she saw the flakes in action. “There must be water glass, on Chiron’s surface. The baby flakes use it to build their bodies. They take other nutrients from Pluto’s interior, and the glass from Charon . . . They need the resources of both worlds to survive—”

“Lvov!”

The GUTdrive flared past them, sudden, dazzling, and plunged into the damaged Interface.

Electric-blue light exploded from the Interface, washing over her.

There was a ball of light, unearthly, behind her, and an irregular patch of darkness ahead, like a rip in space. Tidal forces plucked gently at her belly and limbs.

Pluto, Charon and goose summer disappeared. But the stars, the eternal stars, shone down on her, just as they had during her childhood on Earth. She stared at the stars, trusting, and felt no fear.

Remotely, she heard Cobh whoop, exhilarated.

The tides faded. The darkness before her healed, to reveal the brilliance and warmth of Sol.

SPIDER THE ARTIST Nnedi Okorafor

Zombie no go go, unless you tell am to go

Zombie!

Zombie!

Zombie no go stop, unless you tell am to stop

Zombie no go turn, unless you tell am to turn

Zombie!

Zombie no go think, unless you tell am to think

—from Zombie by Fela Kuti,

Nigerian musician

and self-proclaimed voice of the voiceless

My husband used to beat me. That was how I ended up out there that evening behind our house, just past the bushes, through the tall grass, in front of the pipelines. Our small house was the last in the village, practically in the forest itself. So nobody ever saw or heard him beating me.