New Scientist Book Club: Read an extract from Slow Gods by Claire North

This is the story of the supernova event known as Lhonoja. By the end of it, several planets will have burned, a couple of civilisations will have fallen, and I will have spoken to an entity some consider a god, and whose theological status will remain in question throughout.

Before then, I must explain how I came to be, and for that, I must take you back several centuries, to Glastya Row.

Glastya Row started as a landing strip on the planet Tu-mdo.

Most urban establishments on most colonised worlds begin this way. Tu-mdo had been a prime terraforming candidate – comfortable gravity, good magnetic shield, not too hot, not too cold, not tidally locked and already possessed of a moon which, once water was thawed out in sufficient volume, would serve to stir the great big mixing bowl of Tu-mdo’s freshly churning oceans. The first colonists didn’t even need to spend five centuries in arcologies waiting for atmospheric conditions to settle, but were out and breathing without aid within a couple of pioneering generations. Two millennia later, Glastya Row had been transformed from pioneer’s outpost to merely another borough of some few million in the great city of Heom, a middling hub of profit and endeavour within the interplanetary-spanning United Social Venture.

They say you can tell a lot about a Venture based on how its employees name their children.

In Antekeda, the Venture that ran my city, these were the most common middle names given to children at birth:

Chairman – 15 per cent

Entrepreneur – 10 per cent

Director – 9 per cent

Abundant – 5 per cent

Diligent – 4 per cent

In Theymann, a Venture specialising in deep space habitation, the distribution skewed towards Pioneers and Engineers, while in Halsect there was an almost sentimental emphasis on children called “Aspiring”.

My parents had all the ambition you might expect of residents of Glastya Row, combined with a grim realism. Thus when I was born, my name was registered as Mawukana “Respected” na-Vdnaze. I might never achieve dazzling heights or have great Shine, but dammit, my neighbours would at least know that I was respectable.

It would be fair to say that things went downhill from there.

I am told that I cried an unhallowed amount when I was born, though no one seems able to clarify what “unhallowed” means. I imagine my scream rose a little in volume as they implanted my Chint in the top of my plump left bicep, already embedded with the debts I had accrued to the Venture that ran the hospital that sheltered me – 400 Glint for a standard birth, plus another 1,873 Glint for basic costs such as bedding, vaccinations, postnatal checkups, vitamin shots, etc. . . .

Thus, before I was placed upon my mother’s breast, I was marked with the overriding feature of life on Glastya Row – the debt I owed.

As befits two individuals who named their child “Respected”, my parents were not irresponsible. They had carefully saved for this moment, and were between them able to bring my initial debt down to a mere 700 Glint, and keep on top of the 1.5 per cent child-rate interest payments my existence accrued. Moreover, to welcome me into the world, Antekeda gifted me with fifty shares, my ownership marking me as a citizen of the Venture. By the time I turned fifteen and sat my assignment exams, those shares were worth nearly 600 Glint – though my educational and civic debts were well in excess of 92,000.

This system, we were taught, was about fairness. We were pioneers and our world was a place of scarcity, hardship and struggle. Everything the Venture gave us – the air we breathed, the roads we walked down, the schools we learned in – had been sweated for, bled for, and our debts were a marker of the needful labour we would give back in return.

All are born equal, and by their labours shall they rise.

This philosophy was the underlying constitution of the United Social Venture. Both it and the more anthropologically engaging qualities of social and economic status that arose from it were known as Shine.

We were not a high-Shine family. My parents ran a small restaurant that served cold-broth dumplings to hot middle Managers too tired and busy to cook. They did their best to improve their Shine, constantly cooing over difficult, well-dressed customers and putting themselves forward to run catering events in Shiny houses or at Shiny events, but nothing could really wipe the smell of Glastya Row off their grease-stained aprons and soap-scoured fingers. Every six months, an Antekeda representative would come by and offer them another course or long-distance learning diploma in business growth and radical enterprise, and sometimes my mother, always the more energetic of the two, would sign up and do her coursework and pay her fees, and talk at the table about how this was it. This was the change we needed to get out, move up. It never came to anything.

During my “cute” years, which I was told were seven to eleven years old, I worked as a waiter in the shop in the hope someone would give me that most wondrous of miracles, a “tip” for my services. By the time I was twelve, you could see the shape of the adult I was going to be. My father’s thick, straight black hair was overgrown around my mother’s sunset-through-smog face. I was always a little short, with green-grey eyes that narrowed to almost impossible lines when I squinted in confusion (as I did a lot) and pale lips that didn’t smile enough, or smiled wrong, or just didn’t quite get the smiling business right, whenever I tried to move them.

“Smile with your eyes,” my mother commanded, during one of her we-shall-advance phases. So I stood in front of the mirror in the grubby upstairs bathroom and squeezed my eyelids tight and waggled my eyebrows and tried to inventory every tiny muscle about my growing grubby dishcloth of a face, until I could at least achieve something that didn’t seem to upset people too badly.

Despite, or perhaps owing to, these efforts, I was relegated to the back of the kitchen so that my mother could stay out front, charming and occasionally bamboozling the customers. By the time I was fourteen and my schooling was getting unfeasibly expensive, it was already apparent that I would not have a Shiny life. Most of my classmates were starting to drop out into the menial labour that was the heart of every Venture, and those who remained were preparing for adulthood with an endless dance of alliances, enmities, petty acts of cruelty and theft, out-daring each other in who could game the system. Bullies thrived – so long as they were not caught. Being caught was far worse a sin than being a thief, a liar or simply cruel.

Many economists, observing the Shine, have marvelled at the low levels of educational obtainment common across its population. The circular economies of most other worlds, powered by the sunlight or atomic reactors and fed by agricultural systems whose architects can sit in their pantries dispatching drones to the harvest, consider education not merely of primary importance to the success of their systems, but as frankly the most interesting thing the population can do with their expansive time.

However, education breeds curiosity. And curiosity is one of the very first qualities that the leaders of the Shine seek to eliminate from the population.

This is an extract from Slow Gods by Claire North (Orbit), the New Scientist Book Club’s pick for July. Sign up for the Book Club here, and join the discussion on Discord here.

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