By Eric Choi
First published in Brave New Worlds edited by S.C. Butler and Joshua Palmatier, Zombies Need Brains, ISBN 978–1‑940709–44‑4, 2022, pp. 188–205. Finalist for the 2023 Prix Aurora Award in the category of Best Short Story. Selected for Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction: Volume One.
Approaching Planet Huxley 1163c (Pala)
In the Year of Our Ford AF 826
The dull grey exterior of the starship was pitted and scarred from its one hundred and fifteen years of flight across the interstellar void. But if anyone had been there to see it, the shield insignia of the World State on its hull would still have been visible, along with the motto: COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.
For much of its journey, the ship had coasted at twelve percent the speed of light. It was now turned about, the torch of its Sakharov rocket burning forward as it entered a star system of four planets orbiting a red dwarf. The long deceleration that had begun seventeen years ago was finally nearing an end.
Powered by the energy of merging nuclei, the Sakharov rocket and the other technological marvels that had made the starship possible were fruits of the brief flowering of science and liberty under the regime of Her Fordship Seema Bhutto. Following her assassination, her successor controllers of the World State dispatched starships not as vessels of exploration, but as transports for exiles. Iceland, Marquesas, Samoa, the Falklands, Australia, Luna, and Ares were full.
There had been nine Navigators aboard the ship when it departed Earth, one conscious and the others in soma suspension. All were Alpha-Ultra-Pluses from the same Bokanovsky group, all decanted and conditioned for the sole and lonely purpose of piloting a vessel across the stars. The ninth and final Navigator had been woken from soma suspension eleven years after the start of deceleration following the death of his predecessor.
The gravity of the red dwarf captured the ship into an elongated orbit and the flame of the Sakharov rocket was finally extinguished. Over the course of a half dozen years, the Navigator repeatedly swung the ship inside the orbit of the third planet, using the gravity of the gas giant to pump and crank the starship’s orbit into phase with the second planet, a rocky world one-and-a-half times the size of Earth, on which the exile settlement had been established.
A chemical rocket with three hundred souls in soma suspension was released from the hold of the starship and began a fiery descent through the atmosphere. But one was not among them. His long and lonely task completed, and his only reason for existence gone, the ninth and final Navigator allowed himself to die, never to see a new brave world.
#
She heard a murmuring voice, too soft to understand. Slowly, the words became louder.
“Ada Pascal? Can you hear me?”
She opened her eyes. A person was standing beside the bed.
“I’m Dr. Anthony Banting,” the person said. “How do you feel?”
Every breath was an effort. It felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. She had chills, and her heart was racing. “Bad.”
“I’m sorry to say this is normal,” said Dr. Banting, “but you’ll feel better soon enough. Do you know where you are?”
Ada willed herself to speak. “Settlement…exile…”
The figure came onto focus, a tall middle-aged man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck. “Yes, you have arrived.”
“Hurts…”
“I’m afraid you’re suffering the symptoms of emergence from long-duration soma suspension,” said Dr. Banting. “A kind of withdrawal.”
“C‑can’t…breathe.”
Dr. Banting pressed an oxygen mask against her face. She inhaled deeply.
“The gravity here is sixty percent higher than on Earth,” he continued. “But you will acclimatize. We will help you.”
Unable to say more, she blinked her eyes.
“Welcome to Pala, Ada Pascal.”
#
Of the three hundred people who had accompanied Ada Pascal on the one-way journey to Pala, two hundred and fifty-seven were successfully revived from soma suspension. For the others, exile had become execution.
In the World State of Earth from which they had been banished, people were subjected to chemical and radiological manipulation while still embryos in order to be conditioned according to their social caste—depriving Epsilon embryos of oxygen, for example, to inhibit their brains in preparation for a lifetime of docile servitude.
The exiles were all adults, but the new environment of Pala required them to be conditioned again.
Ada and the other newcomers were given haemoglobin substitute to raise their blood oxygen and synthetic calcium to strengthen their bones, and they were fitted with leg braces to help them walk. Despite her exhaustion following the physical therapy sessions, Ada found it hard to sleep. Tidally locked to its red dwarf star, the sun never set on Pala. The window curtains in her quarters never seemed to completely block out the diffuse crimson light. When sleep came it was often fitful, interrupted by the sweats and tremors of soma withdrawal.
In many ways, however, the physical conditioning was the easier part.
#
The newcomers were divided into groups of about a dozen for the counselling sessions. Most of the participants were still fitted with leg braces, as was Ada herself. The knowledge that she was trapped on an alien world more than four parsecs from everything and everyone she had ever known was absolutely terrifying. She had never felt more frightened and alone.
“Hello,” said the man at the front of the room. A simple hello was the standard greeting. It was once said that the sun never set on the British Empire, the precursor of the World State. On Pala, this was literally true. The old pleasantries of wishing people a good morning or good evening no longer made sense.
“My name is Sigmund Maslow.” His hair was white and his face was wrinkled like an elephant’s hide, manifestations of age unfamiliar to the newcomers. Back on Earth, hormone therapies and magnesium salts kept people youthful until the day they died. “And this is Martha Heines. She is my wife.”
Ada glanced about the room, gauging the reaction of her companions to the obscene word. The World State had promoted heterosexual promiscuity while any sort of monogamy was considered deviant. Dr. Banting had told Ada that marriage was common on Pala, with unions allowed between any adult male, female, or freemartin.
“My husband and I welcome you to this first counselling session,” said Martha. She was also white-haired. “We know this must all be terribly confusing and even frightening. Many of the customs on Pala, and even our appearance, will seem strange to you. It will take time, but you will adjust, and we will help you. It was the same for me and Sigmund when we first arrived.”
“And it has been a great joy of our lives to have the privilege of welcoming newcomers like you every couple of years,” Sigmund continued. “So, let’s start with introductions, shall we?” He turned to a woman. “Would you like to start?”
“My name is Rosalind Miescher,” she said. “I am an Alpha, a researcher of the natural sciences by profession.”
“Thank you Rosalind, but please, it would be more correct to say you were an Alpha,” Martha said gently. “There are no castes on Pala.”
A stocky younger man turned to Rosalind. “What in the name of Ford did you do to get sent here?”
“I had submitted a paper on a new theory of biology,” said Rosalind. “It was deemed dangerous and potentially subversive to the social order.”
Sigmund turned to the stocky man. “Would you like to go next?”
“My name is Vladimir Chopra,” he said. “I am—was, a Beta-Plus, a lecturer at the College of Emotional Engineering. They raided my flat and found some poems I had written, rhymes about being alone. So…heretical, subversive—all those things.”
“Here on Pala,” said Sigmund, “you will be free to write whatever you want.”
“What I want is to go home!” Vladimir shouted angrily. “I had everything in London. A wonderful job, my Riemann-surface tennis club, all-you-can-eat buffets at the Aphroditaeum, any—and I mean any—woman I wanted, any time…” He covered his face in his hands and began to sob.
“Uh, maybe I can go next,” Ada said quickly. “My name is Ada Pascal. I was an Alpha, and I was an engineer at the Electrical Equipment Corporation. I’m actually not sure what I did to deserve being sent here, but I was arrested shortly after demonstrating a new machine I had invented. It was a sort of mechanical automaton, a device that could have taken over some of the dangerous factory tasks performed by Deltas and Gammas.”
“Oh Ford, isn’t it obvious?” Rosalind said. “Full employment is a cornerstone of social stability. It’s a fundamental principle of Baibakov’s inefficient market hypothesis.”
“Let’s hear one more before we take a break,” said Martha. She smiled at a man in a green shirt. “Would you like to say something?”
The man was staring at the floor. When he finally spoke, it was in a voice so soft that Ada strained to hear.
“My name is Xuésen Goddard,” he said. “I worked at a Vitamin D factory in Singapore. I was a Gamma.”
Ada was surprised. It was unusual for lower castes like Gammas to be exiled because free thought had been most severely extinguished from them by embryonic manipulation and neo-Pavlovian conditioning in infancy.
“Welcome to Pala,” said Martha. “What do you think you would like to do here?”
Xuésen looked down again. Finally, he said in a quiet voice, “I want to learn to read.”
Ada’s jaw dropped. As a schoolgirl, her class had gone on a field trip to a neo-Pavlovian conditioning centre for Gamma infants. She watched as nurses put books in front of the babies, who started crawling towards them. But just as they got near, the head nurse pulled a lever and suddenly the babies were assaulted by alarm bells and electric shocks. Ada would never forget their screams of terror and pain, and how the infants recoiled and cried again when presented with the books.
“What a wonderful dream,” was all Ada could think of to say.
“Yeah, I’m sure he’ll be reading my poetry someday,” Vladimir miffed with open condescension. He put away a damp handkerchief. “By the way, what was your transgression?”
An embarrassed grin crossed Xuésen Goddard’s lips. “I spat out my chewing gum from the platform of the Charing‑T Tower.”
#
Two weeks after the removal of Ada’s leg braces, Sigmund Maslow and Martha Heines organized a hiking tour of the area outside the settlement for any newcomer who was interested and physically comfortable doing so. Vladimir Chopra chose to sulk in his quarters, but Ada, Rosalind Miescher, Xuésen Goddard, and a few others took up the offer.
Walking sticks in hand, they went single file along a path up a shallow hill. Martha was in the lead, with Sigmund taking up the rear. Wispy white clouds, carried along by strong winds, streamed across the salmon pink sky. Hovering permanently near the horizon, an angry red sun cast a dim crimson glow over the landscape.
“One hemisphere of Pala always faces the sun and the other never sees it,” Martha explained. “Life can only exist on the terminator between the night and day sides, a thin strip that is only—” she extended her arms “—a few hundred kilometres wide.”
The trees along the trail had thick trunks and enormous blackish-purple leaves whose shape and texture resembled those of rhubarb plants. Branches arched downwards in the higher gravity, putting the giant leaves almost vertical to the ground. A winged lizard-like creature leapt from a branch and took to the sky.
“I would love to see this under a microscope.” Rosalind rubbed her fingers on a leaf and put it up to her nose. She smiled. “Smells a bit like lilac.”
Ada pulled herself along the path, clutching her walking stick in a death grip for fear of falling. Her arms and legs felt heavy, and her lungs heaved. She spotted a bubbling ribbon of water cascading down a rock face. A dragonfly-like insect buzzed above a pool.
“Go ahead,” said Sigmund. “It’s safe to drink.” He cupped his hands under the little waterfall, then brought them to his face.
Ada did the same. The water was cool and crisp and absolutely delicious, and she started to feel a little better.
The group reached the summit of the shallow hill. Sprawled before them was the settlement, referred to by its 25,241 inhabitants (perhaps with excessive grandiosity) as the City. At its centre were squat metallic cans and elongated cylinders scavenged from the landing rockets. Around them were wooden buildings made from indigenous trees, and beyond those were a handful of newer buildings made of ferro-concrete and vita-glass—evidence of the slow progression of the City’s industrial capabilities. In the further distance, stretched along a ridge, were the turbines of the wind farm which harnessed the latitudinal air currents that blew constantly from the day to the night side of the planet.
Suddenly, the air above them lit up. A shimmering curtain of greenish-blue light rippled across the pink sky, like a river of iridescent energy across the heavens.
“Aurora palalis,” explained Sigmund. “Our red sun flares often, but the planet’s magnetosphere protects us. This is the result.”
#
“Xuésen Goddard slid up his eye goggles before carefully removing the newly machined geared wheel from the hopper and handing it to Ada.
“You do such amazing work, Xuésen.” She ran a finger along the teeth. “Thank you.”
Xuésen took off his gloves. “What is this for?”
“I’m trying to build a machine,” said Ada. “I’m calling it an analytical engine until I come up with a better name. It will be a machine that can do mathematical calculations.”
“Like Mr. Heisuke Ramanujan?” asked Xuésen, referring to the former Alpha Plus who was the City’s resident Calculator.
“Yes, just like Mr. Ramanujan, or maybe even better,” Ada said. “A machine might be able to do more calculations faster and more precisely than a person, maybe even solve problems that a person cannot.”
Xuésen looked at her with frank admiration. “Where do you get these amazing ideas?”
“Well, back on Earth I thought my ideas were unique, but it turns out there was a Palan engineer named Nicole- Reine Hopper who had very similar concepts, so now I’m building on her work.” Ada smiled and put down the gear. “Would you like to get some dinner?”
“Dinner” no longer meant an evening meal, just the third meal of any given twenty-four hour period. The inhabitants of Pala simply carried on with the old Fordian clock and calendar despite having no cycles of day and night and little seasonal variation due to the planet’s nearly circular orbit and lack of obliquity.
Ada certainly agreed with Vladimir Chopra on missing the cuisine of London. The restaurant’s vitaminized chicken surrogate was actually not bad, but she wasn’t sure if she would ever get used to Palan vegetables. She had never liked aubergine back on Earth and now almost all the plants were that dark purple colour.
She put down her knife and fork. “Is there anything you’d like to do?”
Xuésen thought for a moment. “Would you like to go to the Library? Mr. Maslow is teaching me how to read. Maybe we could get…a book.”
The City Public Library was a small nondescript wooden building, yet the citizens of Pala could still take pride in it being superior to the libraries of London—because the World State had shut them all down. Its collection had begun with a small number of books that had been stashed aboard the first exile rocket by a dissident engineer at the Malindi Spaceport, who herself would later be exiled and die somewhere in the darkness between worlds.
It had been Xuésen’s idea to come, but Ada saw he was now sweating and breathing rapidly. The sight of a group of children reading together gave her an idea. “I wonder if they have a book from when I was small. Why don’t you wait here and I’ll see if I can find it.”
The librarian was a kindly woman named Helen Clinton. It didn’t take her long to search the modest card catalogue, and against all the laws of probability, she found Ada’s book and retrieved it from the stacks.
Ada brought the little book to Xuésen and sat beside him. “Would you like to have this?”
Xuésen wiped his damp hands on his trousers, then took the book into his hands and slowly opened it. Ada put an arm around him. “Let’s read together, shall well?”
“A, B, C, Vitamin D. The fat’s in the liver, the cod’s in the sea.”
#
“Thank you for coming to the first public demonstration of the analytical engine,” said Ada, surveying the audience nervously. Among them were her patron Mayor William Tiberius, the City Calculator Heisuke Ramanujan, and Vladimir Chopra in his role as the new editor of the Palan Telegram.
Xuésen cranked a handle and the analytical engine whirred and clicked to life. The turning of the handle drove gears, cams, rods, levers, and springs, periodically turning and stopping the number wheels. Rosalind seemed to be mesmerized, watching a helical pattern sweep up the vertical rods as the steel fingers extended and withdrew. Ada fed a sequence of punched paper cards into a slot at the base of the engine. After a moment a clacking sound could be heard and a strip of paper emerged from the opposite side of the machine.
Ada tore off the piece of paper. She looked at the columns of numbers, then nervously handed it to Mayor Tiberius.
The Mayor stared at the paper for a moment. “Well, this is…interesting.” He passed the paper to Vladimir, who shrugged and gave it to Heisuke. The Calculator took one look, chortled, and threw it on the floor. “It’s a multiplication table!”
“Multiplication table?” repeated the Mayor.
“Eight years of effort, an untold expenditure of City resources, all for…this?” Heisuke laughed without humour. “Your contraption is no better than a Gamma child. No offence.”
Xuésen glared at him.
Vladimir sighed theatrically and made a show of closing his notebook. “Nothing newsworthy here!”
Ada’s eyes were downcast as people filed out of the laboratory. Xuésen took her hand in his and gently squeezed it.
#
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Xuésen put down the book. “That is a strange sentence.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ada.
“Well, is it really true and universally believed? And what does universal mean anyway?”
“Across the universe,” said Ada. “Maybe it’s supposed to be true on Pala as it was on Earth, at least when that book was written.”
“But it’s not true on Earth. There were no wives or husbands in the World State. So it’s not universal. And what is a good fortune? Does it mean to be lucky?”
“Maybe it means possessions. It actually says possession, right?” Ada chuckled. “Maybe it’s like all the Palan scrip we’ve got in the Bank.”
“I think I am in possession of good fortune.” He turned to Ada. “Am I in want of a wife?”
“Are you?” Ada asked coyly.
Xuésen thought some more. “Yes, I am in want of a wife. Will you be my wife?”
Ada was taken aback, but only a little. “Are you suggesting that we should…” she carefully enunciated the unfamiliar word, “…get married, the way they do here on Pala?”
“Married. Yes. To belong only to each other. Forever.”
Ada took his calloused hands into hers. “Yes, Xuésen Goddard. Let’s get married.”
Five months later, Ada and Xuésen stood before Mayor Tiberius in a simple outdoor ceremony at Henry Ford Square in front of the Legislature Building. The wedding party was small, consisting only of Anthony Banting, Sigmund Maslow, Martha Heines, the Mayor’s husband Ahmed Mfume, and Rosalind Miescher as the person-of-honour. Vladimir Chopra was covering the event for the Palan Telegram.
“Since the days of the first permanent human settlements on Earth, all civic officials have had one happy privilege: that of uniting two people in the bonds of matrimony. And so we are gathered here today with you, Ada Pascal, and you, Xuésen Goddard, in the sight of your fellows, in accordance with our laws and our many beliefs, so that you may pledge your—”
“Excuse me please, your Fordship Mayor, sir,” Xuésen interrupted. “But is it really necessary to say so many things?”
Mayor Tiberius looked stunned, then burst out laughing.
“My wonderful straightforward Xuésen,” Ada whispered as they exchanged rings.
“I, Mayor William Tiberius, by virtue of the powers granted by the people of Pala, pronounce you wife and husband. Congratulations! You may kiss.”
And kiss they did.
#
“Come take a look at this.” Rosalind gestured at the microscope, then stood aside.
Ada peered into the eyepiece. Dozens of light purple globs seemed to stare back at her, each with a cluster of darker material at its centre. Some of the dark material appeared almost solid, but many looked like clumps of string, and in others the threads were pulled apart to opposite sides of the globs.
“What am I looking at?”
“These are cells from the leaves of the Palan maples just outside the City,” Rosalind explained. “I believe those dark structures are somehow related to hereditary factors.”
“Hereditary factors?” Ada repeated.
Rosalind nodded. “A Palan scientist named Chanchao Türeci originally came up with the idea. She thought these hereditary factors govern the characteristics of every living thing. If we study these hereditary factors, I believe we can get a fundamental understanding of the very nature of life itself. Perhaps…perhaps even change it.”
Ada was suddenly chilled by a sobering thought. On Earth, the World State had used chemical techniques and neo-Pavlovian manipulation to condition embryos and later infants into the five castes of Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon. But the conditioning had to be done with every new generation because all embryos started out the same, and the process was often imperfect. If the World State had developed the ability to manipulate gametes at the hereditary level, her beloved Xuésen might never have learned to read.
#
There had been no more exile ships from Earth since the arrival of Ada and Xuésen’s cohort more than fifteen years ago, but the City’s population continued to grow and there were many children. Ada and Xuésen, however, had agreed early in their marriage never to have their own. The very thought of giving birth revolted Ada, an ingrained hypnopaedic phobia that no amount of Palan deconditioning could erase. So, the analytical engine became their offspring.
When it was completed, the operational engine occupied an entire building to which the people of Pala brought their numerical problems for solution. An early use supported the Palan census, but the application that finally impressed even Heisuke Ramanujan was the daily calculation for the pitch of the wind turbine blades to optimize power production based on the meteorological forecast (which was also produced by the engine). Heisuke became a regular at the Calculation Centre, bringing stacks of punched cards at all hours and frequently falling asleep on a cot while the engine clattered away at some esoteric problem.
With the patronage of the Mayor, Heisuke led an ambitious project that deployed a network of ground and balloon-based meteorological instruments that stretched for hundreds of kilometres along the planet’s terminator. Telegraph wires transmitted the readings back to the Calculation Centre for processing. So great was the need for calculation that Ada and Xuésen began to build a new analytical engine, one that would use electricity and aether tubes instead of mechanical switches for logic. Ada would have said it was the dawn of a new scientific age—except, of course, there were no dawns on Pala.
And then the murder happened.