Report from Planet Midnight
Read Report from Planet Midnight Online
Authors: Nalo Hopkinson
NALO HOPKINSON
Winner of the World Fantasy Award
Campbell Award
Locus Award
Ontario Arts Council Award
Sunburst Award
Gaylactic Spectrum Award
Aurora Award
… and Honourable Mention in Cuba’s Casa de las Américas
Prize for literature.
“Her work stretches imagination and memory.”
—The New Yorker
“Out-of-the-ordinary science fiction!”
—Kirkus Reviews
“The plot and style get an early grip on you … and you don’t
let go till story’s end. Hopkinson is a genuine find!”
—Locus
magazine
“Hopkinson has had a remarkable impact on popular fiction.
Her work continues to question the very genres she adopts,
transforming them from within through her fierce intelligence
and her commitment to a radical vision.”
—The Globe and Mail
(Canada)
PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES
1.
The Left Left Behind
Terry Bisson
2.
The Lucky Strike
Kim Stanley Robinson
3.
The Underbelly
Gary Phillips
4.
Mammoths of the Great Plains
Eleanor Arnason
5.
Modem Times 2.0
Michael Moorcock
6.
The Wild Girls
Ursula Le Guin
7.
Surfing the Gnarl
Rudy Rucker
8.
The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow
Cory Doctorow
9.
Report from Planet Midnight
Nalo Hopkinson
10.
The Human Front
Ken MacLeod
Nalo Hopkinson © 2012
This edition © 2012 PM Press
An earlier version of “Message in a Bottle” appeared in
Futureways,
a special exhibit “faux science fiction novel” published by New York’s Whitney Museum and Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004. “Shift” was published in the journal
Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists,
Bard College, 2002. Ed. Peter Straub.
Series Editor: Terry Bisson
ISBN: 978-1-60486-497-7
LCCN: 2011939667
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
PMPress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan
www.thomsonshore.com
Outsides: John Yates/
Stealworks.com
Insides: Josh MacPhee/
Justseeds.org
“Correcting the Balance” Outspoken Interview with Nalo Hopkinson
“W
HATCHA DOING, KAMIA?”
I peer down at the chubby-fingered kid who has dug her brown toes into the sand of the beach. I try to look relaxed, indulgent. She’s only a child, about four years old, though that outsize head she’s got looks strangely adult. It bobs around on her neck as her muscles fight for control. The adoption centre told Babette and Sunil that their new daughter had checked out perfectly healthy otherwise.
Kamla squints back up at me. She gravely considers my question, then holds her hand out, palm up, and opens it like an origami puzzle box. “I’m finding shells,” she says. The shell she proffers has a tiny hermit crab sticking out of it. Its delicate body has been crushed like a ball of paper in her tight fist. The crab is most unequivocally dead.
I’ve managed to live a good many decades as an adult without having children in my life. I don’t hate them, though I know that every childless person is supposed to say that so as not to be pecked to death by the righteous breeders of the flock. But I truly don’t hate children. I just
don’t understand them. They seem like another species. I’ll help a lost child find a parent, or give a boost to a little body struggling to get a drink from a water fountain—same as I’d do for a puppy or a kitten—but I’ve never had the urge to be a father. My home is also my studio, and it’s a warren of tangled cables, jury-rigged networked computers, and piles of books about as stable as playing-card houses. Plus bins full of old newspaper clippings, bones of dead animals, rusted metal I picked up on the street, whatever. I don’t throw anything away if it looks the least bit interesting. You never know when it might come in handy as part of an installation piece. The chaos has a certain nestlike comfort to it.
Gently, I take the dead hermit crab in its shell from Kamla’s hand. She doesn’t seem disturbed by my claiming her toy. “It’s wrong,” she tells me in her lisping child’s voice. “Want to find more.”
She begins to look around again, searching the sand. This is the other reason children creep me out. They don’t yet grok that delicate, all-important boundary between the animate and inanimate. It’s all one to them. Takes them a while to figure out that travelling from the land of the living to the land of the dead is a one-way trip. I drop the deceased crab from a shaking hand. “No, Kamla,” I say. “It’s time to go in for lunch now.”
I reach for her little brown fist. She pulls it away from me and curls it tightly towards her chest. She frowns up at me with that enfranchised hauteur that is the province of kings and four-year-olds. She shakes her head. “No, don’t want lunch yet. Have to look for shells.”
They say that play is the work of children. Kamla
starts scurrying across the sand, intent on her task. But I’m responsible to Kamla’s mother, not to Kamla. I promised to watch the child for an hour while Babette prepared lunch. Babs and Sunil have looked tired, desperate and drawn for a while now. Since they adopted Kamla.
There’s still about twenty minutes left in my tenure as Kamla’s sitter. I’m counting every minute. I run after her. She’s already a good hundred yards away, stuffing shells down the front of her bright green bathing suit as quickly as she can. When I catch up with her, she won’t come. Fifteen minutes left with her. Finally, I have to pick her up. Fish-slippery in my arms, she struggles, her black hair whipping across her face as she shakes her head, “No! No!” I haul her bodily back to the cottage, to Babette. By then, Kamla is loudly shrieking her distress, and the neighbours are watching from their quaint summer cottages. I dump Kamla into her mother’s arms. Babette’s expression as she takes the child blends frustration with concern. Kamla is prone to painful whiplash injuries.
Lunch consists of store-bought cornmeal muffins served with sausages cut into fingerjoint-sized pieces, and bright orange carrot sticks. The muffins have a sticky-fake sweetness. Rage forgotten, Kamla devours her meal with a contented, tuneless singing. She has slopped grape juice down the front of her bathing suit. She looks at me over the top of her cup. It’s a calm, ancient gaze, and it unnerves me utterly.
Babette has slushed her grape juice and mine with vodka and lots of ice. “Remember Purple Cows?” she asks. “How sick we got on them at Frosh Week in first year?”
“What’s Frosh Week?” asks Kamla.
“It’s the first week of university, love. University is
big people’s school.”
“Yes, I do know what a university is,” pipes the child. Sometimes Kamla speaks in oddly complete sentences. “But what’s a frosh?”
“It’s short for freshman,” I tell her. “Those are people going to university for the first time.”
“Oh.” She returns to trying to stab her sausage chunks with a sharp spear of carrot. Over the top of her head, I smile vaguely at Babette. I sip at the awful drink, gulp down my carrot sticks and sausages. As soon as my plate is empty, I make my excuses. Babette’s eyes look sad as she waves me goodbye from the kitchen table. Sunil is only able to come up to their summer cottage on weekends. When he does so, Babs tells me that he sleeps most of the weekend away, too exhausted from his job to talk much to her, or to play with Kamla on the beach.
On my way out the door, I stop to look back. Kamla is sitting in Babette’s lap. There’s a purple Kamla-sized handprint on Babette’s stained yellow T-shirt. Kamla is slurping down more grape juice. She doesn’t look up as I leave.
When I reached the age where my friends were starting to spawn like frogs in springtime—or whenever the hell frogs spawn—my unwillingness to do the same became more of a problem. Out on a date once with Sula, a lissom giraffe of a woman with a tongue just as supple, I mentioned that I didn’t intend to have kids.
She frowned. Had I ever seen her do that before? “Really?” she said. “Don’t you care about passing on your legacy?”
“You mean my surname?”
She laughed uncomfortably. “You know what I mean.”
“I really don’t. I’m not a king and I’m never going to be rich. I’m not going to leave behind much wealth for someone to inherit. It’s not like I’m building an empire.”
She made a face as though someone had dropped a mouse in her butter churn. “What are you going to do with your life, then?”
“Well,” I chuckled, trying to make a joke of it, “I guess I’m going to go home and put a gun to my head, since I’m clearly no use to myself or anyone else.”
Now she looked like she was smelling something rotten. “Oh, don’t be morbid,” she snapped.
“Huh? It’s morbid to not want kids?”
“No, it’s morbid to think your life has so little value that you might as well kill yourself.”
“Oh, come on, Sula!”
I’d raised my voice above the low-level chatter in the restaurant. The couple at the table closest to us glanced our way. I sighed and continued: “My life has tons of value. I just happen to think it consists of more than my genetic material. Don’t you?”
“I guess.” But she pulled her hand away from mine. She fidgeted with her napkin in her lap. For the rest of dinner, she seemed distracted. She didn’t meet my eye often, though we chatted pleasantly enough. I told her about this bunch of Sioux activists, how they’d been protesting against a university whose archaeology department had dug up one of their ancestral burial sites. I’m Rosebud Sioux on my mum’s side. When the director of the department refused to reconsider, these guys had gone one night to the graveyard where his great-grandmother was buried.
They’d dug up her remains, laid out all the bones, labelled them with little tags. They did jail time, but the university returned their ancestors’ remains to the band council.
All Sula said was, “Don’t you think the living are more important?”
That night’s sex was great. Sula rode me hard and put me away wet. But she wouldn’t stay the night. I curled into the damp spot when she’d left, warming it with my heat. We saw each other two or three times after that, but the zing had gone out of it.
Babette and Sunil began talking about moving away from St. John’s, perhaps to Toronto. Kamla was about to move up a grade in school. Her parents hoped she’d make new friends in a new school. Well, any friends, really. Kids tended to tease Kamla, call her names.
Babette found a job before Sunil did. She was offered a post teaching digital design at the Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver. Construction was booming there, so Sunil found work pretty easily afterwards. When she heard they were moving, Kamla threw many kinds of fits. She didn’t want to leave the ocean. Sunil pointed out that there would be ocean in Vancouver. But Kamla stamped her foot. “I want
this
ocean right here. Don’t you understand?”