Five hours later I got onto the lighter. They couldn’t hold me because there wasn’t anything illegal in my possession. I’d soaked the package Liam gave me in the hotel room sink overnight and then gotten up early and booted it down a storm drain when no one was looking. It was a quick trip to orbit where there waited a ship larger than a skyscraper and rarer than almost anything you could name, for it wouldn’t return to this planet for centuries. I floated on board knowing that for me there’d be no turning back. Earth would be a story I told my children, and a pack of sentimental lies they would tell theirs.
My homeworld shrank behind me and disappeared. I looked out the great black glass walls into a universe thronged with stars and galaxies and had no idea where I was or where I thought I was going. It seemed to me then that we were each and every one of us ships without a harbor, sailors lost on land.
I used to say that only Ireland and my family could make me cry. I cried when my mother died and I cried when Dad had his heart attack the very next year. My baby sister failed to survive the same birth that killed my mother, so some of my tears were for her as well. Then my brother Bill was hit by a drunk driver and I cried and that was the end of my family. Now there’s only Ireland.
But that’s enough.
<p>The Ki-anna</p><p>GWYNETH JONES</p>Gwyneth Jones (homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann) lives in Brighton, in the UK. She writes both intellectually ambitious SF novels under her real name, as well as books for young adults under the name Anne Halam. She writes aesthetically ambitious, feminist intellectual science fiction and fantasy, for which she has won lots of awards. In a recent interview, she said, “I’m frequently identified as a feminist writer, but just as frequently rejected by feminists.” “My most recent book is called Spirit,” she says, “a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo. In the world of Spirit it’s against the law for an AI to be embodied in human form, with the exception of sex workers and street-level police officers. These two jobs are thought to be too psychologically and physically dangerous for human beings, and yet best conducted in human-shaped form. So there are bots … fully sentient software agents, temporarily inhabiting human-shaped machines.” Make that humanoid aliens and you have something like the setup for “The Ki-anna.”
“The Ki-anna” is a murder mystery that appeared in Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Engineering Infinity. It takes place in the established Buonarotti SF future of many other Jones stories and novels. It is about dualized predator-prey relationships among aliens: the protagonist’s twin sister has died. How did it happen?
If he’d been at home, he’d have thought Dump Plant Injuries. In the socially unbalanced, pioneer cities of the Equatorial Ring, little scavengers tangled with the recycling machinery. They needed premium, Earth-atmosphere-and-pressure nursing or the flesh would not regenerate—which they didn’t get. The gouges and dents would be permanent: skinned over, like the scars on her forearms. Visible through thin clothing, like the depressions in her thighs. But this wasn’t Mars, and she wasn’t human, she was a Ki. He guessed, uneasily, at a more horrifying childhood poverty.
