“My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my trees, my trees!” Eye stalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. “Destroyer of saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!”
“Back off,” said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter and fumbling for his airgun.
The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across angry blue irises. “How dare you?”demanded the farm. “My treasured seedlings!”
“Shut the fuck up,” Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. “Think I’d let you burn my holding when tha’ rocket launched? Stay the fuck away,” he added as a tentacle began to extend from the farm’s back.
“My crop,” it moaned quietly: “my exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for Baby Jesus! Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn’t fucked up! Who set you up to this, Rat Lady?” It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery mantle atop its leg cluster.
So Joe shot it.
Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyses skeletal muscles, the kind over which human nervous systems typically exert conscious control. Etorphine is an insanely strong opiate—twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense against the etorphine—but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a blue whale, and he had no intention of giving the farm enough time. It shuddered and went down on one knee as he closed in on it, a syrette raised: “why?” it asked plaintively in a voice that almost made him wish he hadn’t pulled the trigger. “We could have gone together!”
“Together?” he asked. Already the eye stalks were drooping; the great lungs wheezed effortfully as it struggled to frame a reply.
“I was going to ask you,” said the farm, and half its legs collapsed under it, with a thud like a baby earthquake. “Oh Joe, if only…”
“Joe? Maddie?” he demanded, nerveless fingers dropping the tranquiliser gun.
A mouth appeared in the farm’s front, slurred words at him from familiar seeming lips, words about Jupiter and promises. Appalled, Joe backed away from the farm. Passing the first dead tree he dropped the nitrogen tank: then an impulse he couldn’t articulate made him turn and run, back to the house, eyes almost blinded by sweat or tears. But he was too slow, and when he dropped to his knees next to the farm, pharmacopoeia clicking and whirring to itself in his arms, he found it was already dead.
“Bugger,” said Joe, and he stood up, shaking his head. “Bugger.” He keyed his walkie-talkie: “Bob, come in, Bob!”
“Rrrrowl?”
“Momma’s had another break-down. Is the tank clean, like I asked?”
“Yap!”
“Okay. I got ’er backup tapes in t’office safe. Let’s get’t’ank warmed up for ’er an’ then shift t’tractor down ’ere to muck out this mess.”
THAT AUTUMN, THE weeds grew unnaturally rich and green down in the north paddock of Armitage End.
The Little Goddess
IAN MCDONALD
British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Brasyl, and The Dervish House, as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking in Tongues, and Cyberabad Days. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it, The Little Goddess, was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette The Djinn’s Wife, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeleo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. Among his most recent novels are the starting volume of a YA series, Planesrunner, and its two sequels, Be My Enemy and Empress of the Sun, along with a big retrospective collection, The Best of Ian McDonald. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.
In the brilliant story that follows, he plunges us into a future India of dazzling complexity and cultural diversity, where the highest of high-tech exists side-by-side with the most ancient of ancient ways, and unbelievable wealth cheek-by-jowl with utter poverty, for the compelling and fascinating story of what it feels like to become a god… and then have to find your way in an indifferent world on the other side of divinity.
I remember the night I became a goddess.
The men collected me from the hotel at sunset. I was light-headed with hunger, for the child-assessors said I must not eat on the day of the test. I had been up since dawn, the washing and dressing and making up was a long and tiring business. My parents bathed my feet in the bidet. We had never seen such a thing before and that seemed the natural use for it. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel. We thought it most grand, though I see now that it was budget tourist chain. I remember the smell of onions cooking in ghee as I came down in the elevator. It smelled like the best food in the world.
I know the men must have been priests but I cannot remember if they wore formal dress. My mother cried in the lobby; my father’s mouth was pulled in and he held his eyes wide, in that way that grown-ups do when they want to cry but cannot let tears be seen. There were two other girls for the test staying in the same hotel. I did not know them; they were from other villages where the devi could live. Their parents wept unashamedly. I could not understand it; their daughters might be goddesses.
On the street rickshaw drivers and pedestrians hooted and waved at us with our red robes and third eyes on our foreheads. The devi, the devi look! Best of all fortune! The other girls held on tight to the men’s hands. I lifted my skirts and stepped into the car with the darkened windows.