ITSF Project -Science Fiction Contest Terms and Conditions

The Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition

Form and Function

Wunji Lau

The tattoos are hungry. I can feel them burning on my skin, see their phosphorescence fade ever so slightly. Their appetite is different from mine; I get hungry when my body needs food, but the Mosaic is hungry when its nutrient level runs low, and it seldom is so when I myself am hungry.

Rolling over in my tiny sleep-tube, I can feel the hum of Whimsy’s engines, the ship decelerating from its long trip. I reach into a morph-bag hanging from the wall, withdraw a half-used nutrient tube, and begin to rub the sweet-smelling ointment into my skin. Instantly, I can feel the burning sensation subside as the Mosiac absorbs the sustenance in the lotion.

The Mosaic can feed from protein in my blood, but its cells have to shift metabolism to do so, creating waste materials that stimulate my nerves, alerting me to the change in the tattoos’ dietary preferences. The nutrients in the ointment will keep the Mosaic satiated for a few days, less if they have to expend energy to keep me warm or provide extra light.

That’s they way the Mosaic was engineered, to be as much a part of me as I’m willing to let it. If I decided to fast, voluntarily or otherwise (“otherwise” being the more common circumstance in my lifestyle), the countless cells of the Mosaic would just keep feeding, mindlessly stealing from my blood as my body starved. When I die, the tattoos will live on, consuming leftover nutrients in the blood and carrying on in post-mortem activity along with my hair and fingernails. If the tiny microprocessor in my skull remains intact, the networked cells of the tattoos will continue to run preset programs of light and color; I may look more alive when I’m dead than I do now.

Half a billion kilometers from the sun, Whimsy slows, nearing her destination. We have been traveling for months from the Belt to get here, the edge of human civilization, beyond which only the Seekers have gone and none can follow.

First, centuries ago, there was a simple probe. Then came the first tentative explorers, followed years later by the Seekers in their colony ships; it was they who began the first permanent construction. Now there is a city, a glittering ten-kilometer long cylinder lit from within by a manmade sun, built and maintained by the robots and computers so painstakingly assembled and programmed by those early pioneers, and populated by fifty thousand simple peasants who left a motherworld that had grown too crowded for its own children.

The city is called Gap, named not for itself, but for its view; but a few thousand kilometers distant are a pair of two-hundred-kilometer-wide spheres of rock, each orbiting the other at a distance of only a few kilometers. The two asteroids are both named Hektor; early astronomers thought the two bodies to be one, and named it accordingly. To stand on one and gaze up at the expanse of the other hanging a few thousand meters above is to feel, for a moment, true animal fear, bereft of any human intellect.

I smile at a sudden thought, and I feel my cheeks flush as the Mosaic reacts to the endorphin release and puts on a random show of color. It would have been wiser to build the colony farther from the asteroid, where the tidal forces from the two great masses would not push and pull the structure, requiring constant repairs and stationkeeping burns from the colony’s thrusters. But had that been done, the view would not be nearly so good; the awe and wonder of the famous Hektor Gap would be lost. Pure function is vital to sustain life, but pure form is vital too, to sustain the soul, even if it means building one’s home next to a pair of floating, spinning mountains.

Perhaps, though, I’m just making excuses for my own existence.

One hundred kilometers out, Whimsy comes to a stop relative to the colony station. The ship is too big to dock, and I know well the kind of damage Whimsy’s drive plume could do to the colony’s exposed docking areas or the free-floating workshacks that cluster about the main cylinder like bees about a hive. All thirty of us clamber into Whimsy’s skiff along with our drones and props for the trip to the colony.

On the way in, we pass a few unmanned cargo barges. Gap doesn’t get many visitors due to its isolation. It’s almost self-sufficient; the automated facilities the Seekers left behind on their outward journey continue to work flawlessly, recycling water and air using the abundant power from the huge fusion plant tethered to one end of the colony cylinder.

Even so, life for these folk is hard and dangerous, all the more so for the fact that many of them were born on Earth and are unused to the rigors of outsystem life. Waste is a high crime; every drop of water, every breath of air is precious. In the hard vacuum of space, even small mistakes or accidents can be fatal. Punishments are necessarily harsh; there are no extra resources to waste on prisons, and the registered Arbiters from Earth come only twice a year, hardly enough to hear and judge all the cases that crop up. All the outer colonies are like this, as cold and unrelenting as the void that surrounds them.

After docking, we see no one until we reach the reception area, a low-ceilinged hall at the edge of the colony cylinder. Beyond is the colony proper, the broad, curving interior surface of the hollow cylinder festooned with buildings and parks, with the blindingly bright fusion-powered sun-line running straight down the middle of the vast open space.

We can hear them before we see them. As always, the children are at the front. I smile to my companions, and as one, we activate our costumes. The drones go before us, setting the atmosphere, each tiny, flitting robot emitting steam, smoke, or holograms to darken the room, light our way, emphasize our arrival; Skindancers have come to visit Gap.

Olin, the first to enter, has chosen to be Fire today. His Mosaic displays images of flickering flame, his eyeprinting paints twin orbs of lightning in his sockets, and his morphwear flutters and whips about while cycling through patterns of red, orange and yellow. A drone hovers just behind him, hidden in the cloud of holographic smoke it projects, in which Olin is wreathed; for the rapt colonists, it is as if a being of living flame has drifted into their midst. Olin is young; he can be forgiven for choosing an easy costume.

The others have chosen their own costumes for our entrance. Each one is greeted with cheers, laughter, clapping, perhaps the most such activity this colony has seen in months. Some of my companions embody concepts, like Nature or Eros, while others have chosen to imitate more tangible subjects, like butterflies or clouds.

Verena has created something hauntingly lifelike; clever real-time programming of her Mosiac makes her almost invisible from the waist down, but from the waist up, she is a sleek dolphin, her morph-wear emulating the shape and projecting the texture while her drone projects shimmering holographic water around her to mask any imperfections in the illusion. For a few moments, the ocean of Earth is alive in the hall, and silence falls as an extinct creature floats through imaginary waters. In this instant, there are no outside concerns, no strain from the harsh life outside these walls; there is only Verena, and the colonists will remember her for a long time.

I am last, as befits the leader of the troupe. I have chosen Void today, in remembrance of the last time I was here in Gap. Void appears simple, but belies the artistry required. A set of cameras on the drones nearby is radio-linked to a computer on my back, which is in turn linked to the microprocessor in my skull. The computer uses the camera images to calculate light angles and intensity, allowing the Mosaic on my body to appear transparent in one instant, and opaque the next. The program responds to my thoughts and gestures, correcting itself and changing configuration according to my whims.

Verena’s costume does something similar, but I need no holographic water to disguise errors, for there are none; I am nothing more than a flickering, folding, twisting sheet of starlit blackness, with no human shape at all.

The wonder is evident on their faces, mirrored in their eyes. I know what they see; my eyes were once as theirs are. To them, we are barely human. How can we be? We are drifting visions of elements and anima, each with a thousand faces and then none at all. They know on an intellectual level that it’s all illusion, but the costumes and performances strike a deeper resonance than high intellect. Just as no amount of rational thought can mask the awe evoked by Hektor’s mighty breach, so does our artifice draw out the deepest emotion despite all the efforts of the mind.

We stay for a week, performing dances, plays, histories, and erotica for the colonists. We perform in the weightlessness of the colony’s axis, in the windswept gardens, and in a vertiginous amphitheatre suspended between Hektor’s twin orbs.

There is other business, too. We each find a few colonists to visit alone, supposedly by lottery. Their names, however, are all in files the Arbiters have sent us; whenever the Arbiters visit a colony, they make note of certain individuals who bear observation or questioning.

It is a talent of Skindancers that we compliment, comfort, listen, or provide each one what they most need in order to lower their guard and let us in. They tell us things they are too frightened or guilty to tell an Arbiter; things one whispers only to the wind, or to stone, or a pet. The data all comes together, and we learn of the colony’s gossip, conflicts, and crimes. We see all the tiny cracks that might shatter this fragile society, and we make note of them. When next an Arbiter from Earth visits Gap, she will, with seemingly supernatural accuracy, know whom to question, whom to arrest, and whom to execute, and thus the colony will survive.

In the early days, when Gap was but an unformed dream and the first waves of explorers and builders streamed forth from Earth to conquer the solar system, humans tried for a time to change themselves to fit their new environment. Polarizing contact lenses protected their eyes, and skintight membranes kept them warm, shed light, and changed color to reflect medical and physiological conditions. They wore clothes of memory metal, phase-shifting polymers, genetically-modified plant musculature, and other materials never spun on a loom; in an instant, their sleepwear or day uniforms could become vacuum-tight or hard as steel or padded for impact, so that one would always be wearing the correct clothes for any eventuality.

When they fought amongst themselves, as humans always do, they used color- and light-generating membranes to make themselves invisible to their enemies, and killed each other using remote-controlled drones that floated on puffs of air.

With each generation, born and raised in the vault of space, the changes grew more advanced, less removable. Eventually, some simply had their armor grafted to their bodies, permanent protection against the nothingness of space. Such tools kept them alive, and by stages less human.

Those folk are gone now. They could not go home, for in the end, home was as alien to them as they had become to the rest of humanity. Outward they looked, and outward they went, passing beyond the bounds of the solar system on hyperluminal wings, ever searching, ever finding, still human in their eternal urge to be seekers. They leave markers for us to follow, messages to inspire us, and half-built colonies for us to use when, someday, we step on the paths of their wingbeats to claim a place among the stars.

They have been gone for a century, and still we are not ready to follow, still we fumble and trip as we slowly, painfully build a human society out where humans never evolved. That we Skindancers, mere imitators, are necessary to keep the frontier colonies from self-destructing is the most damning testimony of all. We are not ready. Some say that humanity moved too far, too fast, but when have we done anything but?

It has been twenty years since I left Gap, city of my birth. The navigation error that brought my shuttle too close to a workshack was my fault, but it was also an accident of youthful rashness. The law of the colony was absolute; execution would consume the least resources, would be the most immediate resolution, and hardly noticed next to the lives already lost to my clumsiness.
Perhaps there is a God. The Skindancers visited, led by Verena’s mother. They offered to take me, to bring me into exile and save the colony the cost of a noose. There are times, in the years after, I have wondered if perhaps I chose the harder path.

I have returned, but one has recognized me, not under the Mosaic the Skindancers meticulously injected beneath my skin to make me one of the troupe. My name is gone from the records, and there is no grave marker for me, only for those I killed. Gap is not my home, and making this visit has only confirmed what I have feared for twenty years.

I have seen Earth, Venus, Mars, and the vast, glittering chain of colonies between, but I cannot stay in those places; even if the Skindancers allowed their initiates to retire, there is no room in the inner colonies for immigrants. We are welcome to visit and entertain, and even more welcome to leave. Only the Arbiters know of the service we provide, and their thanks is sparing.

I am a Skindancer, one of the few who preserve humanity’s frontier, a society that doesn’t even know it needs help. I have no home. I cannot follow the Seekers, for I am too human, but I cannot return to my birthplace, for I am not human enough. It is my fate, and it may, I think, be the fate of humanity – locked forever between staying and leaving, lacking the ability or instinct to do either.

When Whimsy is under full burn and Gap is lost amid the stars, I am still crying. I huddle alone in the ship’s habitat ring, sobbing like a child where no one can see. There are security cameras, of course, but they can only see the Mosaic and the laughter painted atop my tears. It’s how I will always be seen, always remembered.

Long after I am dead, the tattoos will live on, and I will forever be smiling on the outside.

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