"Quanta": Facts, Fiction and Opinion N 1-7
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QQQQQ tt Quanta
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QQ QQ uu uu aaaa nnnn tt aaaa
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Editor
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Daniel K. Appelquist
QQQQQQ uuu aaaaa nn nn tt aaaaa Technical Director
QQQ Matthew D. Sorrels
______________________________________ Editorial Assistant
Norman S. Murray
A Journal of Fact, Fiction and Opinion
______________________________________ Quanta is Copyright (c) 1989
by Daniel Appelquist.
____________________________________________ It is published on a bi-
monthly basis. This magazine
October, 1989 Volume 1, Issue 1 may be archived, reproduced
____________________________________________ and/or distributed under the
condition that it is left
Articles in its entirety and no
additions or changes are
Looking Ahead made to it. The works
Daniel K. Appelquist within this magazine are
the sole property of their
Working for the ``New'' Paramount respective author(s). No
Peter David further use of these works
is permitted without their
Short Fiction explicit consent.
A Grain of Mustard Seed All stories in this magazine
Eric W. Tilenius are fiction. No actual per-
sons are designated by name
Into Gray or character. Any similarity
Jason Snell is coincidental. All submis-
sions to be sent to
Going Places da1n@andrew.cmu.edu with the
Christopher Kempke word ``submission'' in the
subject line. All queries
So That's Why They Call It the Big Apple concerning subscriptions
James R. Drew should be sent to the same
address with the word ``sub-
Their Own Medicine scription'' in the subject
Steven Grimm line.
Aware
Gary Frank
Poetry
Quanta is, unfortunately,
Infernal Repast produced using the LaTeX
William A. Racicot typesetting system.
____________________________________________ ___________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
Hi. I'm Dan Appelquist, and I have been known to sleep all
day. I've also produced, with a little help from my friends, the
magazine you're currently reading. A couple of years ago, when I
was freshmanning in computer science, I had an idea that it would
be kind of neat to set up a literary magazine and distribute it
around campus. There was certainly a need for such a magazine,
but the idea kind of fizzled. There was really no way for a
freshman to produce a magazine and distribute it. The costs were
simply too prohibitively high.
The issue of a magazine came up again several months ago when
I was asked to help produce a fanzine for a local science fiction
club. The problem of cost still cropped up. The club fizzled
out before anything developed with that, but the cost still would
have been too high.
Shortly after this, I responded to the call for subscriptions
for Jim McCabe's Athene (see ad at the end of this issue.) I
didn't realize it at the time, but this was the format I was
looking for. With the computing resources available to me as
a student at Carnegie Mellon, I could produce a professionally
typeset magazine electronically with almost no cost to myself,
and then distribute the magazine, again electronically, over the
various nets, again at no cost to myself.
Three weeks after I sent out a call for subscriptions and
submissions to Quanta, we already had over 200 subscriptions,
including, to my surprise and delight, subscriptions from the
United Kingdom, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Canada, and
Belgium (if I've missed some, please excuse me, it's not trivial
to decode the various sorts of mail paths.) We also had enough
submissions to produce at least one issue of real quality. I'm
very excited about the material in this issue, and fortunately
there's plenty more where that came from.
In that context, I'd like to thank Peter David for donating
our only article this issue. In future issues I'd like to
include more articles, but if you're thinking of submitting an
article, please don't write it newsnet style. We got a few
article submissions that were basically newsgroup posts. We're
looking for a bit more professionalism than this.
Looking ahead, as the title of this rather hastily written
article would suggest, I see the arena of electronically
distributed magazines such as Quanta expanding greatly. For now,
here's one issue of Quanta. It comes after much blood, sweat,
tears and wrestling with unruly typesetting programs. Enjoy.
-Dan A.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Peter David
Writing for the ``New'' Paramount
Writing Star Trek, the comic (and for that matter, novels)
while working in tandem with Paramount is like walking a tight
rope with razor blades for nets.
Now it's not so bad when they're doing their job, which is to
maintain Star Trek continuity. For example, I had an issue where
I forgot to have a Klingon warship decloak before it fired on the
Enterprise. That was fair and square--they caught it and it had
slipped past both myself and Bob Greenberger, no question. Nor
do I mind the self-proclaimed nitpicking changes.
It's the vascilation that can get to me. And the
contradictions. And the ignoring of Star Trek history.
We are told that Star Trek command personnel can never be
less- than-sterling characters, despite ``Patterns of Force'' and
``Doomsday Machine'' and ``The Omega Glory'', etc., etc.
We are told that we must concentrate almost exclusively on the
principle seven characters, but everytime we try and develop a
storyline involving those characters (for example, Chekov wanting
his own command, or Uhura returning home to visit her family)
they are shot down.
We are told (honest to God) that a female bridge crewmember
I created angered certain people at Paramount because ``women
shouldn't be on the bridge crew.''
We are told that ``terran'' is an unacceptable term to refer
to natives of earth--although Picard used it just the other week.
We are told the word ``civilian'' does not exist since Starfleet
is non-military--despite the fact that Riker's father was called,
several times, a civilian adviser.
And I guess, bottom line, the most frustrating thing is being
made to adhere to guidelines even more stringent than the TV
show's, and then considered to be second class citizens by the
offices at Paramount. We are perfectly okay as a source of
revenue, but legitimate Star Trek? ``Real'' Star Trek? Sorry,
only the TV and the movies. And not even that. We've done
things that were based on concepts or have precedents in third
season Trek, the second through fifth films, and the animated,
and been told that all of those are not legitimate sources
either.
I understand that Paramount owns Trek. I just don't
understand who is calling the shots anymore, or why.
__________________________________________________________________
In his own words, ``Peter David writes lots of stuff.'' He is
and has been involved with the Star Trek comic book series for a
number of years. He is the author of the Star Trek: The Next
Generation novel _Strike Zone_. His new novel, _Rock and a Hard
Place_ should be out sometime in mid 1990.
__________________________________________________________________
A Grain of Mustard Seed
Eric W. Tilenius
Copyright (c) 1987
Tom sat, admiring the craft, and contemplating. His thoughts
were as big as the craft was small, his plans for it as enormous
as its interior was cramped. This was no ordinary craft. It
was the craft that would forever kick Him -- not God, for to Tom
there was no such being, but Him -- out of his place in the sky.
He broke the bottle of champagne and dubbed the machine ``The
Missionary.''
The long years before had taken their toll on Tom. Tremendous
pressures, numerous disasters, and emotional stress. As he
stared at the peanut butter sandwich that lay half-eaten on his
workbench, its light brown wheat crust flaking onto the floor in
small dry pieces, he recalled how his wife and family -- oh, but
how he had loved them! -- had left him, with Mary calling him an
ignorant self-righteous zealot. It had hurt, but he would never
turn back. All the wars, all the strife, all the killing in the
name of religion would cease. He would prove it wrong.
``You persist still?'' The voice came from Minister Sol, who
had entered into the room, his trim black outfit moving only as
it was hit by the silver cross which dangled from his neck. Sol,
taking his golden pocket watch of which he was so proud from his
side, exclaimed, ``My InfoLink said your call was urgent, so I
came right over. I do hope I am still in time? I take it this
is not for dinner.''
As Sol finished, and slid his pocket watch delicately back
into its place on his side, he surveyed the room. It was quite
different from when he had been here last, a scant year ago.
Amid the old fashioned tools lying scattered around the workbench
were some new higher-technology devices. The floor was spotless,
though, and clear, except for the highly visible object in the
center.
``By the Lord,'' started Sol, ``What is this monster? You
can't be serious! I do hope you plan on moving it soon!''
For the first time in what seemed like ages, Tom was about to
speak, to truly speak. He had been alone for such a long time,
he hardly seemed to know how to speak at first, but such a task
was made easier now that he saw his old friend again. It had
been ages since he had seen Sol last, but it always brought a
gleam into Tom's eyes to see him. Sol and Tom had been excellent
friends back in high school, a friendship strengthened by their
diametrically opposite views on practically everything under the
sun. They would spend countless hours debating, and Tom had
listened to many a ``sermon'' from Sol.
But, invariably, their thoughts would return to the one topic
that seemed to most separate them -- whether God existed.
Back then, Tom had put forth an argument that had society
not been brought up on the Bible, and taught it by others in
society, man would not know about any supreme deity, and thus it
would be unnatural to assume one existed. ``Say you were raised
in the backlands,'' he had argued, ``and no one ever told you
about Jesus or Moses or Mohammed. What then? You'd likely grow
up believing a different myth, a different explanation of how
things work. The only reason so many people believe is because
they've been told 'this is true' or 'that is true'. What would
rationally define a deity? Your background. And there's nothing
to prove otherwise.''
Sol, never one to let another get the better of him, had
countered, ``But there have been proofs! And signs! God sent
Jesus into the world that we could see what is true. Living
proof, that died for you, Tom, yet you refuse to accept it!''
And so it went. Tom would never accept it. Nor did he think
others should. It was blind, heathen mythology. Others never
accepted Tom. He was the heathen, and suffered. A scar on his
hand where Mary had slammed the door bore proof of this. ``I
must go about the business of stopping all this madness,'' he had
told her in one of his more passionate moments. ``Look at all
the ills because people are deceiving themselves! If they would
realize their situation and better it. But no -- deception, and
willfully so.'' She had kicked him out, screamed at him. And he
had wandered, hungry.
Finally, he met up with Lucy. Beautiful, rich, popular Lucy.
She seemed to just have everything, yet even when he saw her
first, he had felt the deep insecurity, the questioning, the
vulnerability. It had been on one of his reflective journeys,
visiting the Grand Canyon on the little funds he had left. They
had been talking, looking out over the edge, when Lucy had told
him about the great confusion inside her.
``Somehow, Tom, I feel I can talk to you about this. I
usually can't stand to bring it up, it torments me. No, don't
ask me what -- I'll get to it. Really, I've made up my mind that
I will tell someone. Oh, you'll probably think me silly and all,
but... look out there.''
She pointed out across to the richly colored, jagged canyon
wall, sparkling in the late day sun that was just beginning
to set. The clear afternoon breeze ruffled her fine hair and
blew some of it up against the deep blue sky. A bird, flying
overhead, piped out the most beautiful song as Lucy's trembling
hand pointed to a flowering bush in the distance. Tom, in jeans
and a sweater, merely looked and said nothing.
``It's all so lovely, Tom. It couldn't have happened all by
chance, now, could it? I was raised in a strict background,
taught that God made everything. Sometimes, like today, I can
almost see that, yet most of the time I'm so unsure. It's such a
material world, how can we say that God exists? Are we looking
at a proof here, Tom, or an accident?''
The man in jeans paused, looked out over the canyon, and spoke
to the woman who would be his benefactor for the next hellish,
in the mythological sense, years of his life. ``Neither. It's
nature. It is, beautiful, but not because some unseen power has
made it so. Nature, life, is naturally beautiful. It needs no
outside force. Who would have thought 100 years ago that we
would have accomplished the things we did? We must let go of
these myths and be free to grow even more.''
Lucy looked uncertainly at Tom, as though she wanted to find
that he was telling the answer. ``I'm so afraid when people
start talking about religion and beliefs and all that. They
debate them, and discuss them, and defend them. But when
they come to asking what mine are, I shrink from it, seek any
desperate plot to change the conversation.'' Here she looked
imploringly at Tom, as if not to force her into a similar
situation, and continued, ``How can I defend mine when I'm not
even sure what mine are? It seems that everyone but me believes
in something, even you. I can't defend my thoughts against
belief. God, Tom, if only I could know.''
That, of course, was when it all happened. The crazy scheme
of Tom's unfolded, and Lucy grabbed at it like a baby grabs for
its pacifier. Lucy would have her proof, and Tom would finally
prove to all the world the lunacy of all these myths.
So, today, when Tom kneeled by the machine in front of Sol,
he felt as though he had rehearsed for the moment for ages. The
seclusion, the pain, the criticisms, the government condemnation
of his project which had forced him, with Lucy's help, to bring
it underground were all about to pay off.
He spoke. ``Yes, Sol. This machine will move. It will move
itself, and in doing so, move mountains of 'faith'. For tomorrow
both of us, and my benefactor, and the whole rest of the world
will have proof that the Bible is nothing more than a story ---
or any other document.''
``What the hell are you saying?'' cried Sol, now becoming a
bit more excited, ``Does it test the air for proof of God? What
devilish plot have you cooked up to despoil the name of the Lord
now?''
Tom rose, and looked at his friend's flushed face. ``Nothing
of the sort. It's a time machine.''
``Now you're really loony! Nuts! Is Lucifer growing inside
you? You know that's physically impossible. It would create
infinite paradox. You just can't go and change the past!''
A grin crossed over Tom's face, and such a grin it was that
one would very likely have thought him devil-ridden, if one were
so inclined. His composure soon returned, though.
``It can't change the past, Sol. But it will let you see it.
Any place, any time is there for the observation. We can see,
now, the whole tale -- of how the Bible was fabricated, written;
how the tales of your favorite `hero' Jesus came into being.''
``You're mad,'' Sol repeated, dumfounded. He fingered his
watch nervously, silvering an already worn area in the gold
covering. His blackish hair seemed to stick up at a higher angle
than before, and the white roots near his scalp became slightly
visible, as though someone had planted white-hair seeds their and
they were just beginning to sprout.
But there was to be no doubt. The machine worked. Tom showed
Sol how the mytronic crystal had to be twisted to energize it,
after which a tremendously precise time/place indicator could be
set to see anywhere, any time. ``Once there, you can get out and
walk around, but you won't be physically there -- anything that
touches you will go right through you. You are an observer only,
they can't see you and you can't effect them. It's about the
closest to a god you'll get.''
And observe they did, Sol and Tom. Taking turns testing
the machine in the near past, for only one could fit in the
machine at a time. One stood on the podium as Lincoln gave the
Gettysburg address, the other jumped in the way of the bullet
at Reagan's assassination. They saw all, and affected nothing.
Hours later, they decided to call it a day.
``You see, Sol, tomorrow, I will go and get pictures, evidence
that your God exists only in people's mind, now as then.'' Sol,
who seemed a bit whiter despite his obvious excitement with the
technology, merely said, ``It will change nothing. You cannot
shake what people believe. They will never believe you. And,
what if you discover Jesus, preaching, what then?''
``I won't. Of that I am certain. And I will bring
evidence.''
With that, the two friends went to bed. Oh, what a changed
world it would be in the 'morrow. Neither of them slept well,
and Sol was up most of the night, moving around restlessly. Tom
tossed like a child before Christmas, eagerly waiting to open the
present which had been hoped for all year.
It was decided that Tom should go first in the tiny machine.
He took with him a camera and tape recorder, and entered the
craft, shutting Sol and the rest of the world outside, and
entering his own little universe inside. He carefully adjusted
the dials, and pressed the button to start.
The world went black. A faint acrid odor permeated the
chamber, and Tom went faint for what must have been half a minute
or so. But when he recovered, he was there. He shakily, rose
and lifted the latch of the door.
What he discovered outside was a completely different world.
An arid climate, with sand, a few trees and bushes, people in
biblical dress. Damn, but he would prove this his point now!
Camera and audiocorder in hand, he set forward, traversing this
land. How he longed to talk with these people, to ask them if
they had ever heard of Jesus! To track down the lye to its
origin! But, how?
As he was deeply engaged in thinking about this, his feet
moving over the sand and over a rise almost by themselves, he
saw up ahead a crowd of people, gathered around a figure who was
standing on a small rock and looking around them -- a meeting!
Here, Tom might pick up some dialogue that would aid him in his
quest.
But as he approached, something inside him began nagging,
bugging him. That childish superstition that comes to any man
when entering a dark cellar and causes great anxiety, even though
the man knows there to be no monsters lurking in that darkness.
So, too, something ate at Tom now. Could it be that... He put
the thought out of his mind -- he had always had an overactive
imagination.
But the feeling would not go away. As he came closer, he
made out that the central figure had a beard, and a rather holy,
commanding appearance. ``A leader, preaching,'' thought Tom,
``there is nothing unusual in that. Perhaps he even tells the
story of Jesus to those who suck it in.'' So, Tom walked up to
listen.
Straining to make out the foreign tongue, which was actually
easier than Tom had expected, he heard the bearded one speak, and
promptly froze. The words could hardly have made a more chilling
impression if they had ordered his very death.
``The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed,
which a man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is the
least of all seeds: but, when it is grown, it is the greatest
among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air
come and lodge in the branches thereof.''
The bearded one held up a handful of the fine mustard seeds,
and scattered them for all to see. For a moment, Tom stood,
stunned beyond belief. Then he regained composure -- how silly
it was, to assume that there would be no religious preaching.
There always had been, and this was no exception. False
``religious'' teachings had made up the Bible, had they not? He
was getting jumpy.
His thoughts raced on ahead of him, trying desperately to
overcome the surge of anxiety that was overcoming him. But now
the nagging had turned into full scale fear, washing over him as
the storm did the disciples before Jesus had quieted -- but NO!
There WAS NO SUCH PERSON! Or, he was blown out of proportion, if
he existed -- he couldn't have...
There, in front of his eyes, a cripple walked towards the
bearded one. Tom dropped his camera. He wanted to run, to
cry out, to yell. His whole life, the pain, the suffering, his
conviction, the scar on his hand, Mary!
The bearded one bent down and spoke to the cripple. This time
Tom yelled. He was sorry, but he couldn't help it -- he just
couldn't. This wasn't happening! God, his life, please, God it
wasn't all wrong, no, it just wasn't.
As though J--- the bearded one had heard his cry, he turned,
and looked right into Tom's eyes in such a knowing glance that
Tom felt his soul being read. Every facet, every crime, every
treacherous statement was known. At that instant, the cripple
was made whole.
Better than Tom had taken the cripple's place than for this.
For now, God, what had he done! A revolting heave came to his
stomach, and he found himself unable to keep his breakfast down.
He passed out moments later, lying in the pool of his own vomit.
When he awoke God knows how much later, he could hardly walk.
The cracked camera that lay by his side, the camera that sought
to disprove the face of God, was stained in vomit. No one else
was around. Dizzily, he staggered back to his time machine,
and wrenched himself inside and barely managed to hit the return
button before passing out again.
The immediacy of his panic had left him when he regained
consciousness. It was now more a sense that an inadvertent
murderer would have after recovering from the initial shock of
killing a man, and now wanting to hide the evidence. Tom's mind
worked furiously, and his body quicker. He wrenched himself
outside into his lab, and grabbing a stick of explosive, hurled
it into the machine as he dragged himself away. Moments later, a
blast rocked the lab as the machine sat smoking.
As the shock waves wore down, the faint rumblings of a truck
pulling away could be heard in the distance. Sol came running
in, and looked at the smoking mess, and his war-torn friend.
``Sol,'' Tom gasped, ``help me, please.''
``What on earth happened?'' the other asked, coming over
and embracing Tom. Tom, events, images, his whole life reeling
through his head tried to get the words out, but couldn't. Now
that he knew, he KNEW the truth, he had to tell it, didn't he?
But to give in? To admit complete defeat? To admit that his
whole life had been decadence and sin? He had to beg forgiveness
to Jesus, to God, to...
``Ship,'' he groaned, pained -- yet how much less than the
pain Christ suffered on the cross! -- ``can't go that far back
in time. Explosion.''
Tom slumped, then blacked out again for the unbearable
torment. To have lied on top of everything when God was looking
on!
Sol held him for a moment, and ascertaining that his friend
was unconscious again, gave a brief frown and brushed a mustard
seed from his debating partner's sleeve.
``It seems we have both lost today, Tom... You see,'' he
addressed the unconscious one, ``I set you up. I couldn't trust
your machine. I shorted it out. I hired actors. I... I was
afraid of what the truth might be as much as you were.''
Sol ripped the silver cross off his neck and placed it firmly
in Tom's hand. ``You are me now,'' he wept, ``and I you.''
__________________________________________________________________
Eric W. Tilenius is a Senior majoring in Economics at Princeton
University. He is President and Founder of the Princeton
Planetary Society, a group dedicated to promoting an active space
program. In his spare time, he writes about bizarre things or
bizarrely about things.
He can be reached at the address EWTILENI@PUCC.BITNET
__________________________________________________________________
Into Gray
Jason Snell
Copyright (c) 1987
Patricia Olsen was born into gray eight months after the end.
She spurted from her mother's body into a sea of gray, lit from
above by the twin moons of Daddy's eyes as the crashing surf of
the shortwave radio echoed throughout the enclosure.
Six months later baby Patty had spit out her first solid food,
a dark gray wafer that had been pushed into her mouth by her
mother's pinkish-gray hands. The brick of protein landed softly
on the cold concrete floor Patty called ``ground.''
Four years had passed since Patty asked her mother what dying
meant. Three had passed since Patty asked Daddy what ``cancer''
meant.
Patty was six when Daddy explained to her that the red-eyed
cyclops she had feared since she could remember was really a
radiation meter. She had learned to read it by the time she was
seven.
Daddy had a little surprise in store for Patty on her eighth
birthday. He went to the back of the shelter and brought out his
dull silver box that had never made anything but hissing noises.
On this special day, the silver box spoke.
It said, ``Hello, Patty, how are you on this fine day?''
Daddy nodded and smiled at Patty. ``I'm fine,'' she said with
a shaky voice. ``Who are you?''
``I'm a friend of your father,'' the box voice said.
``Why haven't you said anything to us before?'' Patty asked
with a scolding tone. ``We've been here together and you've
never done anything but..'' she paused to think, and then made a
hissing noise.
The box's voice seemed apologetic. ``Maybe your father should
explain to you. I'm sure I'll see you later. Goodbye, Patty.''
The box hissed for a moment and then fell silent. Patty
hissed back at it.
Daddy explained that the outside world had allowed them to
talk to other people in other places through the box. He also
told her that soon, they would be able to leave their home and
venture above.
``Of course, it will be hard work at first,'' he said with a
smile, ``but in return for that work, we'll be able to run free,
look up at the sun during the day and the stars at night, and eat
real food.''
That night, before she fell asleep, Patty stared up at her
flat sky, the dark ceiling, and wondered what Daddy meant by
``outside.''
Five months before her ninth birthday, Daddy opened the doors
that led outside. At the end of the long, sloping hallway would
be a hatch to the surface.
``Do you have everything, Patty?'' Her father wore a heavy
jacket and backpack. ``Once we start going, we can't come back
for more.''
Patty pulled on the parka that her mother once wore and zipped
it. It was far too large for her, but it would have to do. She
nodded and picked up a bag filled with her things.
Daddy started up the passage. Patty followed, leaving behind
the only place she had ever known. When they reached the end of
the passage, Daddy turned a crank a few times and then pushed up
on a small hatch above them. It popped open, and Patty saw the
sky for the first time.
Patty climbed out of the passage and into the world above as
Daddy stood and stared at the horizon. As far as he could see,
the ground was dark gray, covered with a mixture of snow, ash,
and dirt.
He turned to look at the sky, yearning to find a blue ocean
with small puffy clouds, and instead found a dark overcast
covering the world. There were no cars, no houses, no roads, no
plants. There was nothing but a gray sky looking down on a gray
world.
The world above seemed like a larger version of Patty's world
below. She couldn't understand why Daddy had collapsed in tears
in the soft ashen snow.
The vintage Jeep that was once the pride and joy of a young
Douglas Earnshaw was now the property of the Eastern Valley
Commune. When the commune set out the share of gasoline
to be give to transportation, it was immediately poured in a
container and given to Transportation Director Earnshaw, who
would unceremoniously drop it in the Jeep's tank.
In the commune, possessions dictated social status. Earnshaw
was moderately respected, mostly because he owned the Jeep and
the shortwave radio. So when he had come into contact with a man
who had been hidden away in a shelter for almost nine years, he
took it upon himself to bring the man and his daughter into the
commune.
Doug Earnshaw saw the commune as a large rabbit hole in the
center of a network of tunnels. It was, after all, planned by a
group of survivalists to be the last refuge when the end of the
world came. Occasionally, at the outskirts of the tunnel system,
would come individuals who had hidden out by themselves. The
commune knew they were there, but none had enough foresight to
survive the cold or radiation of above and maintain a radio to
open contact when the radiation level went down.
None except for Mark Olsen and his daughter Patty. How a man
could survive and keep a child alive for nine years under such
circumstances was incomprehensible. The man's initiative would
be a valuable addition to the commune, and if either he or his
daughter were fertile, their genes would be just as vital. So
Transportation Director Earnshaw found himself behind the wheel
of his friend the Jeep, sliding over the snow, ash, and wet dirt,
moving toward a hole where two people had spent nine years.
Earnshaw didn't see the two until he was almost upon them.
A large figure kneeled in the muck, while a smaller one stood
beside it. The larger one glanced up, and the tear-filled eyes
of Mark Olsen stared in at Earnshaw. He was almost invisible,
his pasty skin blending in with the pale world around them.
Doug Earnshaw got out of the Jeep and prepared to help Olsen
up and into the back. As he turned toward him, though, he
stopped at the small figure of Olsen's daughter. Earnshaw gasped
in horror as he stared into the eyes of Patty Olsen.
She stared through Doug Earnshaw with a distance that chilled
his soul, her gray eyes telegraphing a loneliness that he could
not begin to comprehend.
``I don't understand it, Doug,'' a seventeen year old Patricia
Olsen said with tears in her eyes, ``he just doesn't seem to care
anymore. He lies in bed and cries about the colors, the sky,
flowers, things like that. It's like he doesn't want to go on.''
Doug Earnshaw tried to comfort Patty the best he could, but
feared it was not good enough. Consoling her was difficult,
though, because he avoided looking directly at her. She wasn't
ugly, only plain, but he avoided the eyes of anyone under twenty
years old. The children's eyes never locked in one place. They
always seemed to look through him, gray pools staring out to the
horizon. He had known Patty over eight years, but still couldn't
bear it.
``Patty, you can't understand what your father feels. We
all feel it, those of us who knew life before... this.'' He
gestured around at the dull metal and plastic that surrounded
him. ``Your father is worse than most, but he was in that
shelter of yours for all that time. I guess he expected the
world to be normal when he got out. I don't know if it will ever
be.''
Patty nodded, tried to stifle a sob, and hugged the man who
was like a second father to her. When she tried to look him
straight in the eye, though, he turned away from her.
Mark Olsen's death was not an easy one. He clutched at his
faded floral print bedsheets, a pink froth around his lips giving
a faint reminder of how the flowers on the deathbed had once
looked. Patty was at his side in the last moment, when the
darkness of the world that he had known in passing for eighteen
years fully revealed itself.
The first full-scale outdoor harvest took place as Commune
Director Doug Earnshaw stretched out in his bed and prepared to
die. He had lived a long life, and under his direction the
commune began to return to the agricultural ways of the past. On
the day he woke up and knew he would never wake up again, he
called for Patty Olsen.
She came with her two children. They waited by the door as
she entered the room and stood at the foot of Earnshaw's bed.
``I'm glad you came, Patty.'' He took one glance at her and
closed his eyes. ``I have one thing to say to you before I die.
It's about what your father died looking for.''
``Looking for?''
``Colors, Patty. The colors of the world around us.
Something you've never experienced as we old-timers once did.
But we've begun to plant, Patty. The first harvest is going on
as we speak. The skies have finally cleared. Life is resuming,
Patty. The world is showing itself in a way you've never seen
before. The world has ceased to be gray-on-gray. Appreciate
what your father could not, Patty. Do you understand?''
She swallowed. ``Yes.''
``Good.'' He nodded and turned away.
Patty took her two children and left Doug Earnshaw's house and
began to walk toward the main street in the town that was what
the commune had become. Outside of town, the crops were being
harvested. Flowers bloomed on either side of the walkway from
Earnshaw's house.
``Mommy, what did Mister Earnshaw mean about `colors'?''
asked the oldest of her two boys.
She stared into his gray eyes for a moment, and then shook her
head.
``I don't know,'' she said.
__________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell is a sophomore at U.C. San Diego, majoring in In
addition to writing, his interests include television production
and comedy. Snell is currently working on a new story set
in what he describes as an ``important twist on the `cyberpunk'
genre.'' Also, his screenplay adaptation of ``Into Gray'' is
currently being shot as a student film with a budget of three
thousand dollars.
He can be reached at the address jsnell@ucsd.edu
__________________________________________________________________
Infernal Repast
William A. Racicot
Copyright (c) 1989
Her countenance is dazzling bright,
with teeth, of course, a pearly white;
her eyes are pitch as blackest night,
with hair to match, wild as birds in flight.
And when into my presence -- hark! --
she comes with light to banish dark,
she seems to me a sweet monarch,
Lovely Persephone, Hades' lark.
With Cerb'rus, sweetest little pup,
she comes to me that we may sup,
so I must set forth triple cup
for the dog when I set the table up.
I fear lest Zeus, the king divine,
or brother his, the lord of brine,
be angered that I not decline,
to feed Hell's queen, or Hell's canine.
And so in deepest cave I hide,
to take my meal with Pluto's bride,
for I should not live long if spied
or overheard by holy pride.
But after dinner comes respite
from fear in arms of lady dark,
supervised by headful pup
in cave together we recline,
and Aphrodite's arts are plied.
__________________________________________________________________
Bill Racicot is a sophomore stuck in Limbo because of a
paperwork error in the school of the humanities at Carnegie
Mellon University. In the past, he has been a student of
mathematics, an actor/singer, an accounts receivable clerk, and a
human interface between man and a VHS(tm) machine.
He can be reached at the address wr0o@andrew.cmu.edu
__________________________________________________________________
Going Places
Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c) 1989
Shifter
There had been eleven attempts on the ambassador's life in
the past week, and his bodyguards were taking all possible
precautions short of cancelling his appearances. The ambassador
himself had vetoed that solution, claiming his absence would
serve his enemies as well as his death. Therefore, Richard was
hardly surprised when a team of armed guards appeared and began
frisking members of the crowd, directing them to another building
after the short but thorough search. The crowd complained;
Richard didn't. His weapon would not be found by a search.
A guard frisked him and found only some change in his pocket,
and a camera. The camera the guard took from him, mechanically
informing him that he could recover it at such and such a time
at such and such a place. Richard ignored him under a facade
of listening intently. His camera did not concern him, since
he could obtain another almost at a thought, and the change the
guard considered harmless lay in his pocket. It was still there
when the guard motioned him toward the building. Richard thanked
him and moved to the door.
``Name?'' asked a still another guard at the door. The guard
carried only a clipboard and pen in his hands, but two pistols
were holstered at his side, and his face said that he wouldn't
hesitate to use them.
``Richard Johnson.'' It was a statement of fact, as though it
were the name he was born with. It wasn't. Richard wore his
name like an old jacket, comfortably, but it was easily discarded
for a new one if necessary.
He stepped through the door and into a large hall. The
crowd that had come to hear the ambassador speak wasn't much
of a crowd. Only a few hundred people dared risk the public
threats of violence, and there was a distinct air of nervousness
about those who were present. In an attempt to dispell this
fear, or perhaps to increase it, the khaki-camouflage uniforms
of the guards were present everywhere among the crowd and in
the balconies of the building. Richard's impression was that
the guards outnumbered the spectators; certainly the numbers were
close. The security was as much a relief to Richard as it was
to the ambassador inside; he was no more immune to stray bullets
than other men.
A man appeared on the platform and began to speak. Richard
was attentive for only a moment; he was not the ambassador. The
speaker's eloquent introduction went unheard; a soft buzz at the
edge of Richard's hearing had attracted his attention.
The man on the platform spoke for several seconds more, then
stopped, a puzzled look on his face. As the sound became
clearer, the droning of plane engines approaching, he went white.
His hands gestured frantically, motioning the people in the hall
to the floor. Some obeyed, others ran for the door, oblivious to
placing themselves in the crossfire. Richard hesitated a moment,
then chose the group running for the door. He listened for the
sound of artillery before exiting, but the planes were still too
far away.
The planes were in fact just becoming visible. It was obvious
from the faces of the guards that they should not have been
there. Richard didn't want them there either.
Somewhere in Richard's childhood, he had found an ability none
of his friends shared. He called upon it now. A darkness
filled his mind, formed by his thoughts and framed in light.
Carefully, he placed the darkness over the image of the planes in
his mind. With a twist of his mind, the planes and darkness
switched places. The darkness he dropped, the planes he hurled
to a position hundreds of miles away beneath the surface of the
Pacific.
Where the planes had been now stood only empty space. A
rumble of thunder rolled over the spectators as the air rushed in
to occupy it. In that place, the planes may never have existed,
but a few hundred miles away a brief flash of light signalled
their destruction as they appeared under water moving at some
thousand miles an hour.
For several moments the spectators continued to stare at the
sky, until in a slowly growing patter of speech they began to
speculate on what had just occurred. Richard used the time
to return to the chaos of the hall. He sat down and waited,
relating the events outside to group of bewildered spectators who
had remained inside.
Eventually the old man returned to his introduction. After
several minutes, he stepped aside. The spectators began to clap.
The ambassador appeared on the stage, bowed in recognition of the
applause, and began to speak. Richard listened, feeling respect
for the man on the stage and what he stood for, almost a twinge
of regret.
Finally, he reached into his pocket and drew out the handful
of change. Richard selected the heaviest coin from the bunch,
and let the rest slide back into his pocket. Prepared earlier,
this particular coin contained enough cyanide powder to kill a
couple of horses. Richard waited until the speech neared its
end, then teleported the contents of the coin directly into the
ambassador's body. This time, there was no thunder. Instead,
the coin collapsed in on itself as it's interior became a vacuum.
Richard let the coin drop to the ground. The ambassador himself
took no notice of the new substances even now rushing through
his body, nor would he for some hours, which would give Richard
plenty of time to get out of South America. His speech ending,
the ambassador's last words were drowned in applause. He smiled,
bowed again, and left.
The clapping died and the spectators were led out. Richard
took the provided bus back to the heat-infested mire that served
as a city in this part of the world, and walked to the airport.
An hour after the speech he was on his way back home.
Richard walked in the front door of a small office
building, barely glancing at the faded sign that read ``Eidel
Distributors.'' Within was a sparsely furnished office, its
walls covered with pictures of athletes that Richard did not
recognize. The photographs were yellowed with age, and the years
had taken their toll as well on the wooden desk that occupied the
center of the room. Contrasting the room was a young man seated
behind the desk. He looked up as Richard entered, then nodded
and pointed to the only other exit from the room, a beaten-up
wooden door bearing an unreadable nameplate.
``They're waiting for you, Mr. Johnson.''
Richard nodded back and smiled, but his mind had clicked on
the word ``they.'' His business should have been with Eidel
alone. Nothing in the young secretary's voice had signalled
danger, but Richard was used to working with men like Eidel, and
caution never hurt. Carefully, he opened the door.
Beyond the door the appearance of the office changed. The
walls here were mirror-bright steel, and a heavy steel door on
the other side of the small antechamber guarded Eidel himself.
A small screen was set into one wall. Richard went up to it,
and punched the attention button. A moment later the screen lit
up to display a stern man sitting behind a mahogany desk in an
elegant office. Two other men sat on a couch behind him, but
moved to get out of the view of the camera almost immediately.
Richard didn't like the way they looked.
``Mr. Eidel,'' Richard said softly, ``I believe a mutual
acquaintance of ours died last evening, as we discussed? I've
come to pay my respects.''
The face in the screen did it's best to give a warm smile. It
looked rather hideous, but Richard was searching it for things
other than comeliness. He found nothing, but hadn't expected to.
Briefly, he glanced at the light on the steel door. It remained
dark; he was safe for a time. More than long enough.
``Indeed,'' Eidel replied. ``Which entitles you to a payment
of three million dollars, which I have here. Come in; the
punch code for the door is 65537.'' The screen went blank, but
not before Richard saw him glance quickly at something offscreen,
next to the door.
The punch code clinched it. Eidel could open the inner door
from the desk inside, without effort. No need to have Richard do
it.
Richard smiled slightly and left through the same door he had
come in. Positioning himself against the wall beside it, he
summoned a mental image of the inner steel door. With a twist
of thought, he teleported it into the front office. A brilliant
flash of light rolled over him, and the sound of thunder filled
the office. The secretary looked up, then dove under the desk
as a sound of gunfire filled the back room. Richard, too,
moved behind the desk and waited. In a few moments, the two
gunman stepped through the door into the front office. Richard
teleported them, naked, about seven blocks away. Bending, he
grabbed one of the fallen machine guns and teleported himself
into Eidel's office, his finger lightly on the trigger.
``Good day, Mr. Eidel,'' he said smoothly as the thunder
rolled away. ``As I believe I told you when we met, I am very
good at what I do. And for my services in removing those two
pests from your office, my rate just went up to six million. The
remodeling is free.'' Richard fixed Eidel with a meaningful
stare.
Eidel had been in business long enough to know when he was
beaten. He slid a suitcase across the desk to the Richard.
``There's only three million there. I'll have to get the rest
from the vault tomorrow.''
Richard waved his hand dismissingly. ``Don't bother. I'll
help myself.'' He wouldn't, he knew, since money wasn't a
problem for him and he didn't know where Eidel's vaults were
located. Still, he appreciated the look of terror that crossed
Eidel's face for the merest of moments before the businesslike
exterior covered it completely again. Eidel had just witnessed
two of his men defeated by this unarmed hitman, and Richard
appearing in his office in a flash of thunder and light. Eidel
despised theatrics, but Richard was obviously dangerous. Richard
turned and walked out of the office, and Eidel did nothing to
stop him.
Outside, Richard stumbled and fell twice before managing to
flag down a cab. The driver awoke him at his destination,
then stared speechlessly at the two bills that Richard handed
him. Moving slowly and deliberately toward his house, Richard
decided the effort wasn't worth it. Exhausted with the effort of
teleportation, he collapsed on the front lawn. It was several
hours before he began to dream the awful nightmares of his power.
A knock on his door startled him. There had been none for
several years, save the occasional minister or salesman, and it
was too late in the evening for that. Richard frowned, turned
off the stove under the soup he was cooking, and went to the
door. Just as he reached it there came a second, more insistent
knock.
``Open up in there. Police!''
Richard opened the door. Outside, two guns were facing him,
held by a couple of uniformed police officers. Behind these
officers stood about a dozen more, and several police cars were
lined up along the long driveway to his house.
``Richard Johnson?''
Richard nodded absently, thinking.
``You're under arrest for murder. You have the right to
remain silent.''
Richard shrugged. He had been arrested before, several times.
There was nothing that they could do to him if he did not resist.
Prison, even a death sentence, meant nothing to him. He could
escape with a thought. Better to let the process run its course.
Richard put his hands above his head and let himself be led away.
The trial was over quickly. Richard had an impressive record
of prison escapes, and so was convicted and sentenced to several
life sentences without the prosecution even having to bring up
murder. In fact, Richard never discovered which murder he was
arrested for. In his mind, it didn't matter. The judge was
particularly aware of his prison breakout record, and ordered him
into maximum security. Richard grinned as he heard it; no prison
could contain him. He was led away under heavy guard.
He awoke at midnight of his first night at prison and waited
for the guard to pass. Stepping to the back wall, he twisted
himself to a pre-selected spot about three quarters of a mile
away, then lay there panting, regaining his breath after the
teleport. If anyone on the nearby road had seen the flash of
light which announced his arrival, they ignored it.
After a short interval, he began walking toward the city,
following the road a safe distance to the side. Several hours
brought him back to freedom. He could not return to his house,
but he had other houses and other names in other cities. No one
stopped him as he entered the airport and boarded a plane, and
the security guards watching for him in the airport noted nothing
unusual that night. A sound of thunder was passed off as the
rumble of a departing jet.
Richard stepped out of the elevator on the thirty-third floor
of an impressive office building, and introduced himself to
the receptionist at the desk. She looked him over carefully,
almost critically. Apparently he passed the examination, because
she pointed toward a heavy wooden door with the name ``Emily
Brandon'' in raised while letters on it, and spoke precisely.
``Through there.''
Richard smiled at her and opened the door. The plush office
on the other side of the door was occupied mostly by a huge desk
and some chairs. A middle-aged woman sat behind the desk. She
smiled and looked up as he entered.
``Good day sir. What can I do for you?'' She stood and
extended her hand. Richard pointedly ignored it, and helped
himself to a seat. Emily Brandon remained standing as he spoke.
``You `advertised' for a bit of extermination work, I believe?
The rates quoted to me were quite high.''
She met his eyes. ``Important target, and difficult to find
unguarded. Name's Dinash. Edgar Dinash. You know him?''
Richard nodded, but looked away from the scrutinizing eyes.
``Television producer. New York, I believe? Shouldn't be any
problem.''
She held up a hand.
``Not quite so easy. I also need certain documents that are
in his posession returned to me, and they need to be returned
before he dies. I don't want them found by people looking
through his personal effects.'' She paused. ``I will pay you
ten million dollars, half in advance.'' She opened her desk,
pulled out a key, tossed it to Richard. ``That will open a
safety deposit box at the address listed on it. One million will
be placed there each workday next week. You start next Saturday,
not before. Agreed?''
Richard stood up and dropped the key on her desk. ``I never
take payment in advance. I will recognize these documents when I
find them?'' Her need was plain to him; he met her eyes again,
this time with cold superiority.
She nodded.
``I'll see you in two weeks, then.'' Richard opened the door,
looked back over his shoulder once, then left. The receptionist
smiled at him as he re-entered the elevator. The doors slid
closed with a soft click.
Teletrix
Martin Kendall sat down at his kitchen table, and slid one of
the two mugs of coffee he carried to his wife. Smiling, she
accepted it, and pushed a small plate of rolls to him, then
waited expectantly. Kendall selected one, buttered it, then
put it down and looked at his wife. June continued to look
at him expectantly. Kendall scratched his head and frowned
contemplatively. Eventually he gave up.
``Yes, Mrs. Kendall?'' They had not been married long enough
that the name had lost its strangeness, and he liked it's sound.
``The paper?''
``Ah, yes,'' Kendall's smile returned. ``I knew I forgot
something.''
The morning paper appeared silently on the kitchen table, mere
inches in front of his wife's plate. She jumped, then narrowed
her eyes at him across the table.
``One of these days I'm going to get used to that,'' she said
accusingly. Kendall just smiled back at her. Lowering her
eyes, June took the paper and opened it, and Kendall returned to
his breakfast. June read for several minutes in silence, then
pulled a single page free from the paper, folded it to highlight
a single article, and handed it to him.
Kendall wiped his chin and accepted the offered paper. The
article in question was immediately interesting to him.
``..whose real name is still unknown, escaped again from the
maximum security installation. This escape marks the eleventh
known breakout of his career, all by unknown means. Johnson
was stripped of his clothes and all possessions, and thoroughly
searched by prison personnel before admittance. The door to
his cell was still locked, and there were no signs anywhere of
a forced exit. Police are completely baffled. One officer
commented to us: ``Until I saw it today, I would have claimed
that it was completely impossible.'' This breakout marks the
first one at the prison in eight years, since ...''
Kendall nodded. ``He's a teletrix. No doubt about it.''
``What are you going to do? He's known to have killed over
two dozen people. The man's a professional assassin. Who knows
how many more they just haven't caught him on?''
Kendall threw up his hands. ``What can you do about a
Teletrix? If you catch him, he teleports away. You can't even
kill him unless you manage to surprise him, and in his profession
that's difficult to do. You can hardly hunt down a man with that
ability.''
His wife continued to stare at him silently. He resisted as
long as he could, then nodded guiltily.
``You're right, of course. I can't just let him go on killing
people. The academy, I'm sure, won't release their records, so
I'll have to find him myself. Would you call the office for me?
I'm going to be out of state for a while.''
``You call the office,'' June said firmly. ``I need to
change. I'm going with you, of course.''
Kendall's face registered surprise briefly. ``Of course,'' he
echoed. June smiled and Kendall shook his head slowly.
He rose from the table and made his phone call, then got
dressed. By the time he had returned to the kitchen, June had
put the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher. She kissed him once.
``Where are we going?''
Kendall had worked it out while dressing. ``The prison. I
need a better picture of him than that newspaper photo, and maybe
an address. The police will have searched his house, of course,
but at least it's a start.''
Kendall closed his eyes, and the yellow lines of a shimmering
grid filled his mind. He selected a location, envisioned it, and
was there, so smoothly that his wife didn't even stumble.
They stood on a roadway beside a lighted ``STATE PRISON''
sign, out of sight of the main gates. Kendall let go of
his wife and the two travellers set off down the road, closing
the distance to the entrance in a couple of minutes. A
guard stuck his head out at their approach, lifted his eyebrows
questioningly.
``Visitors,'' Kendall said. ``We're here to see the warden.''
The guard nodded, ``just a minute.''
Moments later, a second guard arrived, searched them, and led
them to tidy office with the name ``Tim Gardener'' on the brass
doorplate.
``Please, have a seat,'' the guard requested. ``Mr. Gardener
isn't in yet this morning, but he should be here in a few
minutes. There's coffee and maybe even some donuts in the next
room.'' He pointed to a door, then turned and left.
It was almost a half an hour before the warden walked through
the door. He was somewhat of a heavy man, with a face lined from
too many years at his job. He extended his hand to Kendall, then
June. Both took it silently. The warden seated himself behind
his desk, and lifted a pair of glasses to his face.
``How may I help you folks?''
``My name is Martin Kendall; this is my wife June. We're
private investigators. We'd like a look at Richard Johnson's
file, if we may.'' From his shirt Kendall produced an ancient
private investigator's license that he had gone through some
trouble to obtain several years before. Cautiously, to keep it
from falling apart, he handed it to the warden. The warden
examined it for a few moments, handed it back to Kendall, then
walked into a back room. When he returned about two minutes
later, he carried a manilla folder.
``Here it is, a heavy one, too.'' He handed the folder to
June, and sat down again. ``If you don't mind my asking, who
hired you for this? I wasn't aware that there was a private
party interested in Johnson's case.'' His voice betrayed a
little more interest than the words. Kendall wasn't surprised;
prison breakouts didn't happen all that often, especially ones as
smooth as this one. Kendall smiled winningly.
``Actually, we're not currently working for anyone. This is
sort of a personal thing. Richard Johnson is big news right now.
If I can catch him, it will be great for my business.''
The warden smiled. ``I don't really approve of your motives,
but I'd be happy to get Johnson back in my hands. I'd love to
see him escape from our underground solitary confinement cells!
The next time we catch him, we're going to keep him.''
``I'm sure you will,'' Kendall lied. June had finished
copying down something from the folder. She passed it to
Kendall, open to Richard Johnson's prison pictures. He noted it
carefully, then glanced over the other pages. ``You've got his
address?'' June nodded.
Kendall closed the folder and handed it back to the warden.
``Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Gardener.''
The warden didn't lose his smile. ``Good Luck. If you find
any leads, though, don't forget to report them to the police.
And be careful - Richard Gardener is a murderer, and a cold one
at that.''
Kendall nodded. ``We will.''
Richard looked up from the pile of papers he was reading when
he heard the click of a key in the lock. He stuffed the papers
back into the drawer, as dishevelled as he had found them, and
teleported back to his hotel room with a sound of thunder and a
flash of light.
Once there, he ordered a sandwich from room service and lay
down on the bed to think. All of the obvious places to look
for Dinash's documents had failed to reveal any interesting ones.
Mostly, the man seemed to collect only contracts of various
television personalities, and a few letters from exotic countries
that Richard had never even killed anyone in. His safe contained
money and jewels, which interested Richard not at all, and the
safety deposit box at his bank contained only his will. Richard
was running out of places to look.
But he wasn't running out of time. It was still three days
before he was even supposed to be on the job, and he couldn't
kill Dinash before then. If he could find the documents early,
recovery later would be easy, but he had little else to do. As
a last resort, Dinash could be tortured into revealing their
location, but such actions weren't really to Richard's liking.
A knock on the door announced the arrival of his sandwich.
Richard paid the bellhop, tipping him with a hundred-dollar bill,
and sat back to eat. There were still a couple of places he
could look, but they could wait until the following evening.
He finished the sandwich and turned out the light.
The house was surrounded by a fence and a locked gate, but it
posed little problem to Kendall. Still legally owned by Johnson,
it was not for sale, but neither had any upkeep been done on it
in some weeks. The front door was unlocked, so Kendall and June
slipped inside, closing it quietly behind them.
The house had been searched by the police, but the two
investigators went over it equally carefully. Except for a pot
of soup moulding on the stove, the house contained little of
interest. No documents in the house had been spared by the
police. Kendall disposed of the soup, then joined his wife at
the table.
``Well, where do we go from here? He could be almost
anyplace.''
June shrugged resignedly. ``I guess he'll have to show
up someplace.'' She drummed her fingers on the table
absentmindedly, staring at one wall of the kitchen. Suddenly,
she got up and left the room, Kendall staring questioningly after
her. She reappeared a moment later, smiling.
``Martin! There's another room here! Look.'' She indicated
the back wall of the kitchen. ``There's no doors leading in
there, but that's not the back wall of the house, either. There
must be about a ten foot space behind that wall.''
``How come the police didn't find it?''
``They might have looked for a secret room, but one without
doors? What's more useless than a room without doors?''
Kendall smiled. ``Not useless to a Teletrix, of course.
You're a genius.''
She took the praise silently, then made a gesture of
impatience. ``Well, are we going in?''
Kendall shook his head. ``I'm not going to TP us into an
area that I can't see. Let's bring whatever's in there out to
us.'' He stepped back and cleared an area in the kitchen. A
moment later a suitcase appeared in it, covered by a pile of
loose bills.
June's eyes widened. ``There must be a million dollars
there.''
Kendall squinted at it expertly. ``Closer to a hundred
million. Richard is a rich Teletrix. Take some.'' He bent down
and opened the suitcase. Inside was more money, which Kendall
ignored. On the inside top of the suitcase was a small engraved
plate, which read Antosh Eidel. Beneath it was an address.
``Bingo.'' Kendall said.
The night watchman looked his way again. Richard was getting
a bit tired of avoiding the man's view, so he teleported him down
thirteen stories, then remained motionless for a minute or so to
be sure that the thunder didn't attract anyone's attention. It
didn't. He walked down the hallway to the office which read
Edgar Dinash, and teleported himself inside. Again, we waited
until the thunder in the hall died down. Still, no footsteps
could be heard. He panted quietly from exertion, then looked
around.
Only one of the drawers in Dinash's desk was locked, so
Richard started there. All he found were life insurance
policies and contracts for a couple of very big television names.
Cursing, he opened the other desk drawers. None contained the
information he was looking for, but if the insurance policies
were all valid, Dinash's family would be very rich in a few days.
Richard sat back in the chair and put his feet on the desk.
The office was twenty stories in the air, and probably expensive
for that reason alone, but was relatively sparsely finished.
Around the room were photographs of various actors in roles that
Dinash had apparently cast them for, including one large framed
one of an actress that Richard did not recognize, her face not
particularly pretty or memorable. It didn't feel right.
He stood up and went to the wall where the picture hung, and
lifted it carefully down. Behind it lay the gleaming steel of
an expensive wall safe. Protection against nearly any device
man could invent, it took Richard a mere fraction of a second to
defeat it and lay its contents out on the desk. He read a few
sentences at the top of the documents and smiled; there was no
doubt that this was what he had been looking for. He looked at
his watch. It was just after midnight, so today was Friday.
By noon on Saturday, Edgar Dinash would be dead.
The elevator door opened, and a receptionist looked up
brightly at Martin Kendall. He looked back without a trace of
warmth, his eyes daring her to comment.
``Thank you, but I know the way.'' He turned toward the
office door.
``You can't go in there right now, sir. Ms. Brandon is
busy.''
``No she's not,'' Kendall smiled menacingly, and opened the
door.
Emily Brandon looked up from her desk at the intrusion, and
the beginning of an angry comment came to her lips. When she saw
Kendall's face, she stopped.
``Where is Richard Johnson?'' he demanded.
``I've never heard of any Richard Johnson,'' Emily said
quietly. ``I think you should leave this office before I notify
security.'' She reached toward an intercom on her desk, but it
vanished before her hand contacted it. She stared at the empty
space in disbelief. Kendall stretched his smile still further.
``I received your name from a Mr. Eidel, Ms. Brandon. He
seemed quite confident that you know where Richard Johnson is.
Seems he recommended him to you for a little job you need done.
A very illegal job.''
``You have no proof of anything, and I don't know who Richard
Johnson is.''
Kendall shrugged. ``I don't need to offer you proof, Ms.
Brandon. I have something far more valuable to you.''
A moment later the office had vanished, to be replaced by the
windy building roof. Emily Brandon found herself looking over
the edge of her skyscraper, forty stories to the ground. She
shook her head violently. Kendall sat next to her on the ledge.
``I assure you that this is not a dream, Ms. Brandon. Where
is Richard Johnson?''
``I don't have to tell you anything. My receptionist saw you
come into the office. You'll be found and locked away for murder
if you kill me.''
``Suit yourself,'' Kendall said just loudly enough to be heard
over the wind. He gave her a gentle push, toppling her over the
edge of the building. There was silence for a moment as she
grabbed for a hold, then a drawn out scream as she tumbled over
and over away from the building.
Kendall watched, let her fall almost a dozen stories, then
teleported her back to the roof, carefully cancelling her
velocity. Emily Brandon lay in a barely conscious heap on the
top of her building.
``Where is Richard Johnson?'' Kendall repeated.
``New York City,'' she said breathlessly, wide-eyed. ``He's
there to kill Edgar Dinash.''
``And when's the hit supposed to be?''
``Saturday.''
``Where?''
``I don't know. Honest to god I don't know.''
Kendall nodded. ``Ms. Brandon, the information you have
given me had better be accurate.'' A moment later, he vanished.
Emily Brandon lay sobbing on the roof of the building for almost
an hour before she made her way slowly back to her office.
On the first floor, Kendall came out of the men's room. June
looked up from the magazine she was reading.
``Well, did she tell you where he is?''
Kendall nodded. ``Yep. She fell for the idea right away.''
June shivered.
Endgame
Edgar Dinash found a couple of visitors on his doorstep when
he arrived home Friday evening. There was no obvious explanation
for how they had gotten there, past the electrified fence and
the two guards, and neither the visitors nor the guards seemed
inclined to offer any. One of the intruders stepped forward and
offered his hand. Edgar ignored it.
``This is private property and you're not invited guests.
Please leave these premises at once.''
He was ignored in turn. ``My name is Martin Kendall, and this
is my wife, June Kendall. We're private investigators, and we
have reason to believe that your life is in serious danger. May
we come in?''
Dinash considered. ``Guards!'' he called finally. ``Make
sure that they don't have any weapons on them, then let them
in.'' He waited until the guards had frisked them, then opened
the door for them. Together, the three of them stepped into
Dinash's home.
``Explain yourselves,'' he said simply, and gestured toward
several plush chairs sitting around the room.
Kendall and his wife sat. June spoke.
``We have reason to believe that a contract on your life has
been put out by an Emily Brandon.''
Kendall saw the look of interest come onto Dinash's face. Not
surprise, just interest.
``It's very possible. She and I don't see quite eye to eye.''
June nodded. ``In any event, the hit is supposed to be
sometime tomorrow. We don't know when, but the man who is
supposed to do it is extremely effective. Your guards won't be
any good against him.''
``So what do you suggest I do?''
``Take a vacation in the city. Go to a cheap hotel, register
under a false name, take your guards with you. Leave us and the
police to handle this man at your house.''
Edgar Dinash looked up at one of his guards, suspicion plainly
evident in his face. The guard shook his head, however. ``No,
they are really legit. I had their licences checked out.
They're in good standing, and it's certainly a believable story
they have. You should have seen how they got in here. I think
we should do it.''
Dinash turned back to June. ``I had the feeling when I got up
this morning that it was going to be one of those days. Okay,
I'll leave for tomorrow. But if this house is damaged, or
anything is missing . . .''
Kendall raised his hands. ``Then you have our names and
current addresses from our licence. You really have nothing to
lose.''
Dinash remained silent.
Richard looked at his watch. Midnight. Teleporting the
materials out of the safe once more, he packed them carefully in
his briefcase and returned to his hotel room. There he changed
clothes and packed his bags. Downstairs, he hailed a cab and was
back on the streets.
Minutes later, he was in the back yard of Edgar Dinash's
house. He looked up to the upstairs bedroom window, where a
light still shone. Richard settled back to wait. There was no
rush, now, and everything to be gained by waiting until Dinash
was asleep. An hour went by, as other lights in the house turned
on and off. Eventually, the bedroom light went out.
Still he waited, as another long hour crept by. Then he stood
slowly and approached the back door. Richard knew from previous
exploration of this house that there was a security alarm on the
door. Stepping back, he teleported to the other side.
Upstairs, a sound of thunder caused June to look up suddenly
from the chair on which she sat. Kendall moved quietly to the
window, looked out at the sky, and frowned. A thoughtful look
came over his face.
A slight noise came from downstairs. Kendall gestured for
June to remain where she was, and teleported himself silently to
the other side of the bedroom door.
Richard moved as carefully as he could across the sunken
living room, but he bumped one of the tables even so. The vase
that was on it did not tip, only slide slightly. He paused, but
heard no sound above. After a few seconds, he began his slow
march across the living room again.
He was not prepared for the light to come on. The blinding
illumination was not enough to hide the man who stood against the
opposite wall of the room, but Richard just stared and shook his
head for a second or so.
``Hello, Richard,'' Kendall said. ``I've been waiting for
you.''
Kendall was dressed in nothing but a loose robe, and his hands
were empty. Richard made a decision quickly, and drew his long
knife from his belt. Holding it in his hand, his mind twisted it
into Kendall's chest.
Nothing happened. Kendall noted the effort but descended into
the living room without comment. Richard looked at the knife in
disbelief, and tried again. Kendall sat down.
``You can't kill Edgar Dinash, Richard. I won't let you.
Even a Teletrix will have some difficulty killing him where I've
put him.''
The battle began and ended in an instant. Kendall tapped a
grid of energy, Richard gathered energy from within himself. In
a single instant, Richard vanished, and Kendall's mind snapped
out toward him.
A sound of thunder filled the room, and a scream of agony came
from outside the walls of Edgar Dinash's house. The upstairs
door opened and June came running down the stairs. The first
thing she saw when she reached the bottom was the bloody lump
that lay in the center of the carpet. The second thing she saw
was Kendall.
He was sitting in the chair with a look of shock on his face.
When his wife sat next to him, he looked up with a kind of pity
in his eyes.
``Thunder,'' he said quietly, carefully. ``The air filling in
the space he vacates when he teleports. There's probably a flash
of light at the other end to disperse the energy.''
June looked at him. ``So?''
``He's an amateur, not a Teletrix. The academy somehow never
found him.'' Kendall fixed her with a stare. ``He's never been
trained in using a grid. Odds are he's teleporting on his own
energy; he must have incredible endurance. Certainly he doesn't
know how to protect himself.'' Kendall pointed toward the center
of the room. ``That's his hand. I teleported it off of him as
he was leaving.''
He stood up. ``We had the advantage of surprise, and now I
blew it. He'll be prepared the second time. We need to find
him, and kill him.'' Kendall hugged his wife. ``And soon. Or
he'll keep on killing.''
Richard pushed the darkness from his mind and regained
consciousness in a hospital bed. Gently, he examined his arm.
The bleeding had stopped, and the flesh at the end had been sewn
together, leaving a battered stump; there was no feeling at all
in it. On his other arm, blood flowed into him from an I.V.
unit.
Shaking his head carefully, he pulled the needle from his arm
and sat up. He had lost a lot of blood, but he was still alive,
and needed to get out of here before his enemy found him if he
wanted to stay that way. Richard sat for several minutes, then
stood up slowly, leaning on the bed for support and waiting until
the darkness in his head receeded once more. Moving to the
window, he looked out. Across the street he could see a fast
food restaurant. Summoning all the energy he had in him, he
teleported there in a flash of light and thunder.
Kendall heard the thunder just as he reached the door of the
hospital room. He cursed softly under his breath as he opened
the door.
``Missed him. But he can't have gone far.'' With June, he
crossed to the window on the other side of the room. All of New
York twinkled in front of him, a thousand lights on a city that
could hide a million men.
``Far enough, though,'' he concluded.
Richard looked at the ad again. It read, quite simply:
RICHARD JOHNSON, I WILL BE ON TRAIN NINE
OF THE SUBWAY SYSTEM AT EXACTLY NOON ON
THURSDAY. WE CAN NEGOTIATE THERE. THE
TRAIN IS NOT RUNNING, NO ONE ELSE WILL
BE PRESENT. -- EDGAR DINASH
For the hundredth time in as many hours, Richard lifted the
stump of his left arm and looked for his watch, the pang of loss
cutting deep into him as he realized his error and looked at his
other wrist. The time was eleven thirty, fully a half an hour
before the meeting. He felt as though there were only a half an
hour left of his life.
Clearly, the message was the bait to a trap. But a strange,
new man had entered Richard's life, the only person in the world
who he could fear. Until one or the other of them was dead,
Richard would never be safe, never be confident that his power
was unique and able to pull him out of any situation. He would
always feel hunted. This message might be the only chance he
ever had to win the battle. Looking for a long moment at the
stump of his arm, Richard knew that he would win.
And the man had given Richard knowledge. The trick, of
preventing the teleportation of Richard's knife into the other
man's body, was not very difficult; all it took was for Richard
to know it was possible, and the solution almost immediately
presented itself. Mainly, it was a process of continually
teleporting oneself to the same spot, preventing intrusion of
foreign matter into it. The process was exhausting, but Richard
could now do it for almost a minute at a time. He should be safe
as long as he didn't take chances.
As the appointed hour approached, some spectators appeared,
the inevitable result of the meeting's public announcement.
Richard told them to leave, quietly at first and then
emphatically as some of them began to argue with him. After two
of the men identified themselves as also having the name Richard
Johnson, Richard got fed up and teleported them to the sidewalk
above. None returned.
Richard checked his watch again, felt a wave of confidence as
he unconsciously picked the correct wrist. Five minutes to noon;
time to move. He twisted his mind and body, filling the silent
subway train with a roar of thunder.
Two people were already inside the train car when he arrived.
One was the man he had met in the living room of Dinash's house,
the other a young woman that he did not recognize. Neither
appeared concerned at the method of his arrival.
Both were seated on low benches. The windows were covered
with heavy black plastic sheets, probably to prevent outsiders
from observing their conversation. The only light in the car
came from two electric lamps sitting on the floor.
Richard stood firm and gazed at them for a few moments, his
newly learned shield operating at its fullest potential.
``You said something about negotiating?'' he asked, not
wanting the shield's implied time limit to show in his face or
voice.
Kendall nodded. ``What will it take to get you off of Edgar
Dinash's tail?''
Obviously there really was some negotiating to be done. The
trap was baited neatly, if it really was a trap. Perhaps they
simply feared him and wanted a way out. Richard seated himself
on a bench and looked at Kendall.
``More than you can pay. I don't back out on a job. I never
have.''
Far away there came the sound of an approaching train.
Kendall opened his hands in a friendly gesture.
``We can pay a substantial amount, Mr. Johnson. More than
you might imagine. In fact, enough to make you quite comfortable
for the rest of your life.''
``You don't understand. Money is not the object. If I want
money, show me any bank in the world which can prevent my taking
it. I have been contracted to kill Mr. Dinash, and I will. I
won't be bought out.''
The distant train drew closer.
``How much will it take to make sure you never kill again?
We can't stop you, the best we can do is pay you to keep the
peace.''
Richard smiled. ``You can't.'' He was beginning to enjoy the
game, but equally aware that his shield time was running out. At
best, he had another three quarters of a minute, less than that
if he didn't want to totally exhaust himself.
The rumble of the train began to pass them, shaking their car.
Kendall smiled ever so slightly, and made two small adjustments
to reality. The bench that Richard was sitting on vanished
silently. In his sudden fall, Richard did not notice the slight
change in the noise, the minor differences in the shaking.
Richard looked at Kendall in surprise. ``You did that
silently.''
``Of course. You abuse your ability by using it as a weapon,
Richard. You force people like me to hunt you down.''
Kendall was more powerful than Richard realized. And his
words implied that there were others like him in the world.
Suddenly, he felt less confident about the interview, but didn't
let it show.
``Hunt me? You can't touch me any more than the police can.
Just because you know of my ability and understand it doesn't
mean you can stop it.''
Kendall's smile vanished. ``Your arm, I believe, is testimony
that I can indeed hurt you. That could have been your heart.
Next time it will be.''
Richard smiled broadly. ``But you can't do it again, thanks
to a trick you yourself showed me. No, I think you probably have
the most to lose from a showdown.'' He drew a knife from his
belt, calm again.
Kendall looked at it uncertainly. ``You know that that won't
hurt me.''
Richard smiled. ``No, but it will hurt her.'' He gestured
toward June, and the movement made him aware how much energy he
was losing. He could only stay a few more seconds.
The knife vanished from Richard's hand, appeared in Kendall's.
``No, it won't. I can protect her as easily as myself. And do
you trust your protection enough to challenge me? I think we
have nothing more to say.''
The train car still shook with the rumble like the passing of
a train.
Richard nodded. ``Indeed. Except this: Edgar Dinash is
a dead man.'' He turned away from Kendall, twisted energy in
his mind. A roll of thunder filled the car, echoing. Kendall
cringed briefly in sympathetic pain, then sat down and hugged his
wife.
``He got away again,'' she said simply, sympathy in her voice.
``No, he didn't.'' With an offhand gesture he teleported the
curtains off of the windows, allowed her to see out.
``We're moving,'' she commented.
``Absolutely. I started us when the other train went by. TP
is wonderful for avoiding such nusciances as acceleration. The
shaking isn't the other train, it's us.''
``But so what?''
``Richard Johnson didn't understand his power. He never used
the grid for energy or direction, or enough air would have been
shifted back from his destination to fill the gap he left. But
he couldn't have known that, or there wouldn't have been so
much thunder when he teleported. He wasn't aware that we were
moving, so when he left, he wouldn't know to bleed off the excess
velocity. Wherever he went, he was stationary with respect to
the train. To the rest of the world, he was moving at 120 miles
an hour. I just hope he didn't hurt anyone as he died.''
``Are you sure he's dead?'' June said softly.
``Completely. And you will be, too, if you watch the news
this evening. `Man smeared on pavement'. I'm sure it will be a
top story.'' Kendall didn't sound happy about it, only resigned.
He stood looking out the window of the train for a long time,
searching for something in the blurring buildings. He stopped
the train, returned it to the station, derailed but functional.
An instant later they were in their own kitchen.
``I think I need a good nap,'' Martin Kendall said.
__________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a Computer Science graduate student at
Oregon State University. His interests include writing,
computers, magic, juggling, bridge, and other games, not
necessarily in that order. His major goal in life is to become a
proressional student, a goal which he is rapidly attaining.
He can be reached at the address kempkec@ure.cs.orst.edu
__________________________________________________________________
So That's Why They Call It the Big Apple
James R. Drew
Copyright (c) 1989
I watched in horror as the enormous toaster oven opened its
door and began to speak. What came out was the worst imitation
of Edward G. Robinson's voice that I have ever heard.
``We're moving in, ya hear?'' it said. ``And there's nothin'
you can do ta stop us, myah, nothin'. So give up that transistor
radio. Myah. It's the only thing standing between us and total
world domination. Myah, myah.''
The man standing in front of it, looking all the smaller
because of the oven's immense size, clutched the transistor radio
to his chest.
``Never!'' he said.
``Then prepare to die, fool Earthling! Myah.''
Then the toaster oven leapt into the air and came down flat on
the man, crushing both him and the radio into oblivion.
Oh, it was horrible. ``They Unplugged Chicago''-- giant
appliances from space take over the Mafia. Definitely the worst
film this side of ``Plan 9 from Outer Space.'' I was only too
glad to turn off the television.
``Thank God nothing like that could happen in real life,'' I
said.
Me and my big mouth.
My name is Marc Lynx. I am a detective, or at least that
is what my business card says. But I never seem to get those
run-of-the-mill missing person and murder cases. No, the cases
I deal with are the sort you never read about in the papers--
except for the tabloids. Elvis-stealing aliens, Hitler's clone,
teddy bears possessed by demons, you know the sort.
I looked at my watch. It was just past noon, and I had
a luncheon appointment at 12:30 down at the Five Happiness;
a Chinese restaurant owned by my receptionist Nicholas' Jewish
uncle Mordechai Zaronstein. Something about his daughter being
missing. A simple missing person case would be a relief. Given
my recent earnings, any case would be a relief.
Normally, I refuse to take cases involving friends and
employees on ethical grounds. Doing so had cost me a girl-friend
back when I lived in Frisco. This time, though, my wallet
decided to make an exception.
With my car in the shop (damn Yuppies and their Volvos!), I
would have to resort to other transportation. A cab was out--
too expensive. I decided to take the bus. Naturally, it pulled
away from the curb just as I reached the bus stop. I briefly
considered taking the subway, but ruled that out quickly. The
last time I had gone anywhere by subway, it had broken down
between stations; leaving me stranded for several hours with the
operator, a pair of winos, a transvestite, and a nun with her
entourage of seven parochial school girls. A nightmare in real
life.
So I decided to walk. It was only a couple of miles. Of
course, I would have to fight my way through the noon press of
humanity, but I could make it. I naturally exude an air of
confidence that makes people tend to give me breathing space--
or is it an air of insanity? Is there a difference? In
addition, if things really got tight, I could always pull out my
.38 Magnum, yell ``Stop, thief!'' and watch the crowd part like
the Red Sea.
I made good headway at first, but the city slowly began to
take its toll on me. The people seemed pushier than usual. The
car horns seemed louder, and all directed at me. I grew tense.
My eyes began to dart around, seeing monsters in every face.
The fact that most New Yorkers are monsters anyway did not help
matters any. Panic grew.
I soon realized what was happening. Withdrawal symptoms.
I admit it-- I am addicted. To Twinkies. ``My name is
Marc, and I'm a Twinkiholic,'' or something like that. That
luscious sponge cake, that heavenly cream filling, all those
preservatives. Just thinking about it made the cravings worse.
Luckily, I always carry a spare package in my jacket pocket.
Panting a little, I stepped out of the traffic flow and reached
into my pocket for it.
My pocket was empty! I checked again. Still empty. Panic
began to take hold. Maybe the other pocket? I reached in, felt
something, and pulled it out. Damn! It was the business card
from Mordechai's restaurant.
What was I going to do? The realization set in that I would
be a gibbering wreck long before I got to the restaurant if I did
not get some Twinkies immediately. My pace quickened. I was
jogging now, pushing people out of my way heedlessly.
As the tension grew, I started to run. People were staring,
but I hardly noticed. One woman who I pushed wrapped herself up
in her poodle's leash and fell over, yanking the dog from its
feet. Under different circumstances, I might have been happy,
since I hate poodles. Now, however, I could care less. I
vaulted over a baby carriage like O.J. Simpson does over luggage,
reached the corner, and screeched to a halt. There it was!
Less than a block away, secluded in the midst of its parking
lot, was a 7-11. The ubiquitous convenience store, well stocked
with everything from bug killer to beer. And Twinkies. The
store almost seemed to glow as I approached. I crossed the
street in a daze, ignoring the fact that the light was against
me. Cars slammed on their brakes, with more than one driver
yelling obscenities out his window at me. But I did not care.
At that moment, all that mattered was Twinkies.
As soon as I saw them, nestled in their plastic wrappers
beside the fruit pies and below the cupcakes, my breathing
calmed. I was tranquil. The Twinkie-- my own private Holy
Grail, from which I might sip and be reborn. I took two
packages, caressing them lightly. So round, so soft, so fully
packed with creme filling. Silently, treasuring the experience,
I got into line to pay for them. I did my best to ignore the
woman in line behind me. Once she saw what I was carrying,
however, it was too late.
``Twinkies!'' she said, snootily. ``Those things are just
chock full of preservatives, you know. They'll kill you.''
Busybodies really get on my nerves.
``Now this, this is real food,'' she said, pushing a can
of vegetables in my face. ``Uncle Orville's Canned Okra.
Nutritious, and without any preservatives.'' She sounded very
smug.
I noticed she said nothing about the taste.
``You really should eat more vegetables.''
``Mind your own business, lady,'' I said, more than a bit
irritated.
``Well!'' she said, in falsified outrage. ``How rude! Wait
until I tell Sally about this! I was only offering some advice,
advice you should heed, young man. Just how old do you expect to
live to be, eating nothing but preservatives?''
``Until I'm a hundred and fourteen,'' I sneered. ``I intend
to be well preserved.''
I then turned around, ignoring all further comments from
``Okra Winfrey.'' I noticed the headline on one of the tabloids:
``Space aliens save Dan Quayle's life.'' What with how my cases
go, I have met a few aliens, and none of them would have been
that stupid. Or at least they would not have admitted to it.
Now, the ones who stole Elvis, well, they knew what they were
doing.
``Next,'' said the clerk, interrupting my memories. ``That's
you, man.''
He looked to be about nineteen, had pimples, and sported a
thin moustache which looked like about two days growth, but which
he had probably not shaved for two months. The ubiquitous
convenience store clerk to go with the ubiquitous convenience
store. I set the Twinkies down on the counter, reached in my
pants pocket, and pulled out some coins, enough for the Twinkies
and some thirty cents more. The clerk handed me my change: one
thin dime.
Before I could comment on his lack of math skills, the entire
building began to shake. The dime flew from my hand to land near
the door, where it spun around in a drunken dance. Cans of beer
fell out of the coolers, and candy bars leapt from the shelves
in a mad dash for freedom. ``My God!'' screamed a woman-- I
suppose it was ``Okra Winfrey.'' Too many vegetables make you
jumpy. ``It's an earthquake!''
I rather doubted that it was an earthquake. New York is built
on fairly stable ground that does not shift much. Not like
California. The quakes that I had experienced in San Francisco
were one of the main reasons I had moved to New York. That and
being run out of town on a rail.
I jumped after my change, but a further shake put me off
balance, and I nearly overshot the coin and headed for a video
game. However, a twist and a grab at a counter let me stop
quickly. Looking for the dime, I discovered I was standing on
it. I also found that an older man wearing suspenders and a bow
tie was pointing out the plate glass doors at the front of the
store.
``It's not an earthquake!'' he said. ``New York is
sinking!''
Doomsayers have been predicting for years that New York will
sink into the Atlantic, and it is therefore one of the chief
fears of New Yorkers, along with the thought of another garbage
strike, or that the Statue of Liberty might actually belong to
New Jersey. I glanced over my shoulder, and, sure enough,
it looked like the man was right. The buildings across the
street had become noticeably shorter. The street had already
disappeared. For that matter, so had the store's parking lot.
I was suspicious. Why should this store be left alone while
the rest of the city sank out of sight? More likely, something
was happening to this building independently of the others. But
I would never find out about it by cowering in the back of the
store with the other customers and the clerk. A case to solve,
such as it was. I took a step toward the doors so as to see what
had happened to the ground.
I planted my foot firmly on the floor, and the linoleum jumped
away. I suddenly found myself falling as the store was turned on
end. Luckily for me, if not for the Twinkies I was carrying, I
only fell a few feet, whereupon I landed on the now horizontal
side of a counter. Most of the other people in the store were
not so lucky, ending up as they did in a heap, covered by
magazines and video rental boxes. One kid, however, slid into
the candy aisle, where he was probably in Heaven.
I simply held onto the counter for dear life as the entire
building began to shake up and down. Then it started to rattle
back and forth, which sent several liter bottles of pop and boxes
of cereal flying around in a vicious rain which I, being near the
front of the store, or the top, as it was at the moment, avoided.
Although I should have expected it, I was still caught unprepared
as the building proceeded to roll over.
They say that when you are about to die, your entire life
flashes in front of your eyes. If that is true, then I was in
no danger. The only thing that flashed in front of my eyes was
a vision of Sister Mary Margaret standing over me with a ruler
in hand. Believe me, there has been much more to my life than
Catholic school. Whatever is true, as I fell toward the plate
glass windows at the front (now the bottom) of the store, seeing
the all too obviously hard asphalt beyond, I though I was going
to die.
However, I did not die. When the building rolled over, the
doors had flung open, and I proceeded to plunge right through
them, along with a shower of ice cream bars, styrofoam cups, and
two quarts of motor oil. Unlike the ice cream, cups, and oil, I
managed to grab onto one of the door handles as I fell. I nearly
wrenched my arm out of its socket in stopping myself, but stop I
did. I considered myself rather fortunate.
I had all of about three seconds to consider myself fortunate
before a rack of Cheese Puffs slammed into me and tore the handle
from my grasp. Time seemed to slow as the Cheese Puffs and I
tumbled to the ground below. Asphalt spun by, closely followed
by the convenience store, blue sky, and something huge and red.
Then more asphalt, with ever growing yellow lines on it. More
store, more sky, more red thing. A whole lot of asphalt,
seemingly close enough to touch. Store. Sky. Red which totally
filled my vison as I hit the ground.
Luckily, the Cheese Puffs had been underneath me as hit, so I
was more or less undamaged. I sprang to my feet, stumbled for a
second, and regained my balance. Amazingly, I was still holding
on to the Twinkies, although they were rather compressed by now.
``SPAM?'' boomed a voice from overhead.
I looked up to see what could possibly have such a large
voice. Silly me, I had forgotten that I was still under the open
doors, and the rack of Cheese Puffs turned out not to be the last
thing to fall out. I looked up just in time to see something
blue and silver strike me on the forehead.
I think that I would have lost consciousness, but the booming
voice spoke again, replacing the blackness with redness, centered
somewhere between my ears.
``SPAM!''
I stumbled back a step, and looked down. Indeed, I had been
hit by a falling can of Spam. It sat a few feet away, doing
its best to look innocent. Now, looking innocent is one of the
few things that Spam can do well, and this can was expert. Of
course, its effort was aided by the fact that a few feet farther
away sat a pair of twelve-foot long Reebok tennis shoes. Worse
yet, there were legs of the same scale in the Reeboks. As
I followed the legs up, noting the red and white striped socks
covering them, they merged into a round, red armored body, which
continued up. And up, and up some more. A pair of ridiculously
thin arms eventually joined the body, and it was all topped off
by a domed head sporting bulging eyes of a sort rarely seen
anywhere outside of a Tex Avery cartoon.
The eighty-foot tall fire hydrant looked down at me and the
Spam with malice in its eyes. Effortlessly, it shifted the
weight of the convenience store which rested on its shoulder,
tipping it back so that nothing more fell out. I finally
realized just why stores claim that their largest losses come
from shoplifting. With as smooth a motion as I could manage, I
bent down, scooped up the can of Spam, turned on my heel, and
ran. Ben Johnson never ran faster, with or without steroids.
There was a crash, as if a convenience store had just fallen
sixty-odd feet to the ground.
``SPAM!'' boomed the fire hydrant. ``COME BACK, SPAM!''
Not a chance. I raced down the street. People jumped out of
my way, and again out of the fire hydrant's. Those who did not
move, I pushed. Those too heavy to push got dodged. Some of
them probably got stepped on by the hydrant as it TROMP! TROMP!
TROMP!ed after me.
I ran into the street without looking. Stopping for the
``Don't Walk'' sign is all well and good, at the right time and
place, but it is not something you do when you are about to
become gum on the sole of a twelve-foot long tennis shoe. A car
slammed on its brakes, screeching to a halt, but it was too late.
I ran into its fender and my momentum carried me over the hood of
the car in a tumble. I managed to land on my feet and kept on
running without missing a beat. From behind, I heard the CRUNCH!
as the car became to the fire hydrant what an empty pop can would
be to me if I stepped on it-- an annoyance wrapped around the
foot which needs to be kicked off. I think that the remains
landed about a block away.
As my foot hit the curb, I reached out and grabbed the
lightpost on the corner and let my momentum carry me around in a
quarter circle so that I was now running down the cross street.
Hopefully, this way I would lose the fire hydrant, or at least
gain some time.
No such luck. With something as large as that, my little jog
did nothing but make it have to change direction slightly. It
cut diagonally across the street, crushing anything that got in
its way. If I had accomplished anything, it was only to let the
fire hydrant gain on me.
``SPAM!''
It was right behind me. I imagined that I could feel the air
rushing to get out of the way of those huge feet as they came
closer and closer to grinding me into thick paste. What was I
going to do?
Luckily, by this time, most of the people had cleared the
street and sidewalk before me. It was a good thing, since the
sprinting was beginning to take its toll on me. I was no longer
alert enough to watch out for little children and stoplights. I
certainly was not alert enough to watch out for homeless people
lying on the sidewalk.
I was halfway to the ground before I realized that I had
tripped over the transient's legs, and I was all the way to the
ground before I could think of anything to do about it. By then
it was too late-- my stride was broken, my lead was gone. I
picked myself up and was sure that I felt the rushing air from
the hydrant's descending shoe. A big black shadow obliterated
the sky, growing larger as the huge shoe tried to make me one
with the concrete. That was when I saw it. My salvation, or so
I hoped.
There was an alley only a few feet away. With speed lent by
need, I lunged out from under the shoe and dove into the alley.
I made it, but I fear that the transient was not quite so lucky.
The alley was narrow, and thankfully not a dead end, so I would
be able to escape. At the entrance, the fire hydrant cocked its
head to one side and then the other in puzzlement, peering in at
me. Of course, since its head was attached without a neck, it
had to literally move its entire body in order to cock its head,
which made it appear to be doing a funny dance in front of the
alley.
``SPAM?''
It did not take long, though, for the hydrant to deduce that
I had, indeed, fled into the alley. Maybe it could smell me.
However it had found me, it must have decided that there was no
fundamental difference between the two of us, and it tried to
follow me into the alley. Of course, there was a fundamental
difference-- I was shorter, and rather a bit thinner. But it did
not let the size differential dissuade it as it rammed its body
straight into the alley.
At first I was worried that I had misjudged the width of the
alley, and that it would be able to pass unimpeded. However,
after a few feet, the fire hydrant slowed as the stubs from which
its arms emerged ground up tight against the side of the alley.
Although it twisted and tried to turn, it looked as though the
hydrant were securely stuck.
I should have known that it could not be that easy. With a
roar of rage, or perhaps it was pain, the fire hydrant surged
forward again. Its stubby shoulders dug a pair of two foot deep
furrows in the sides of the buildings, and bright sparks shot off
in every direction. It was still coming after me, even if it had
been slowed to a crawl. Maybe, just maybe, I would be able
toescape it, but only if the alley was long enough to give me a
good lead.
``SPAM!'' it boomed, but with a grunt of effort underlying the
word.
As my luck would have it, the alley was quite short. I jogged
along it and reached the next street a couple minutes before the
fire hydrant would be able to, but I wished that it could have
been longer. From my general surroundings, I decided that I must
be on Wall Street. Yuppies scuttled hither and yon, running
around like chickens with their heads chopped off. If I had had
no idea as to the cause of the panic, I would have assumed that
the market was crashing again. Within moments, the entire street
was deserted except for me.
As I walked alone down Wall Street, hearing the faint
rumblings of the hydrant as it scraped its way through the alley,
I considered my options. I could keep running and hope that the
police would take care of the hydrant, but I quickly abandoned
that possibility. It is not that I believe that the N.Y.P.D. is
inefficient, but I doubt that they could really handle something
of this scope. Perhaps the National Guard, or the Army? I
considered the metal casing of the hydrant, and put that hope
out of my mind as well. If the Japanese army could do nothing
against the flesh of Godzilla, could the American army do any
better against a metal monster? I doubt it!
Of course, I could always give up and let the fire hydrant
have the can of Spam. That would certainly solve all of my
immediate problems, but I worried about the future. Why did the
hydrant want Spam? Why would anyone? And why this particular
can? It could always go and hold up another store (so to speak),
right? I had a feeling that there was more to the Spam concern
than met the eye.
A dark cloud drifted in from somewhere over the harbor to try
and obscure the sun. The light breeze that had been playing
with my hair turned vicious and tried to bite at me through
my jacket. A neon sign in a deserted brokerage house window
proclaimed the latest interest rates on long term, high yield
C.D.'s, and the glow of its light was reflected in the windows
of a solitary parked car. I suddenly came to realize that I
was still carrying both the Spam and my Twinkies, which were now
nothing but paste from the abuse I had put them through. Only a
little dismayed, I put the Spam in my jacket pocket and opened
up the Twinkies, squeezing a little out on my hand and eating
it like the cheap caviar paste that comes in a tube. Believe
me, though, Twinkie paste tastes a lot better than cheap caviar
paste. In addition, it helped to replace some of the energy
I had expended in my headlong flight from the hydrant, as well
as quelling the withdrawal pangs that were coming back as my
adrenaline level returned to normal.
``SPAM!''
The fire hydrant emerged from the alley in a shower of
debris. As it oriented itself on me, I took off running
again. In seconds, it was after me, the TROMP! TROMP! TROMP!
of its feet growing ever louder, ever closer. I was almost to
the Stock Exchange. A minute longer and I could duck inside
and...and...and then what? I had no idea.
I was quickly relieved of all concern over the ``what next''
question.
``SPAM! STOP! PREPARE TO DIE!''
A coherent sentence, more or less. This in itself might have
been enough to give me pause, but the booming voice exerted
command. I stopped.
A loud whine began to build behind me. It sounded like some
horrible weapon building its energy, preparing to release it and
destory me. What would it be? A phaser? A wave-motion gun?
The latest Jackie Collins paperback? Each possibility seemed
worse than the one before.
It began to grow dark. With nightfall still hours away, I was
sure that I knew what was happening. The fire hydrant had some
powerful energy weapon trained on me, one that required so much
power that it was literally sucking the light right out of the
air around me. The whine continued to increase in volume. My
right arm began to twitch uncontrollably.
``What am I?'' I thought. ``A man or a mouse?'' Cliche, I
know, but at that moment I was hardly trying to come up with an
original line.
A man, I decided. I had come to the conclusion that I was
not going to get out of this one alive. I was going to be blown
to bits by whatever weapon the hydrant had, and most of Manhattan
would probably go with me. At least the hydrant would not get
this can of Spam. Sure, it seems silly to lose your life and
most of a major city over a can of processed pseudo-meat, but
principles have to start somewhere, and mine started right there.
I was going to die, but I was going to go down fighting.
With this decision, all trembling in my arm stopped. I
reached into my jacket and pulled my .38 Magnum from its holster.
Certainly, a simple lead bullet would do no good against
something as large as that thing, but at least I would be able
to go out in a blaze of glory. As I brought it out, one corner
of my mind noticed that there was something...different...about
my gun. The texture, the color, the balance-- all were off.
However, I had no time to dwell on this as I turned, spinning
myself around to defiantly face the fire hydrant.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion. My arms did an odd,
bobbing dance as I spun, but oriented unerringly on the hydrant.
As soon as it came into my sights, my fingers tensed, contracting
about where the trigger should have been, as I fired off a single
shot. Indeed, a trigger would have been there, had it been my
.38 Magnum that I was holding. How a banana had got into my
holster, I have no idea. As my hands jerked up, reflexively
imitating the kickback of a gun, my mind drifted into an odd
thought: at least the banana in my holster explained why my Rice
Krispies had been so gritty at breakfast.
As my hands flew up and I arrested my spin, realizing that
the shot from my banana had not happened, I saw that the hydrant
was holding nothing that resembled what I would call a weapon.
Instead, it was looking up at the ever darkening sky. The whine
kept getting louder.
I looked up, too. The little cloud I had noticed earlier
had grown to cover the sky from horizon to horizon, which,
admittedly, is not very far in midtown Manhattan. It was pitch
black and swirling in a funnel shape, being occasionally lit by
flashes of green and purple. I could not help but wonder if the
Ghostbusters were back in town.
A beam of light shot out of the vortex and hit the street
between the hydrant and myself, but did no damage.
``Wonderful,'' I thought. ``The hydrant didn't have any
weapons on it, so it decided to call its spaceship. Instead of
just New York, it's probably going to blow up the entire state!''
A second beam also came out of the vortex, followed by a
third, this one of a slightly different color. They started to
move, slowly at first, and then picked up speed to where they
were tracing an intricate pattern in the street. After a few
seconds, someone turned on the volume. A series of five musical
notes played, then repeated. Once, twice, three times. It was a
familiar sequence of notes, one that I heard before, from an old
song, maybe, or perhaps a late 70's science-fiction movie.
The wind picked up again, blowing my hair around more
violently, tearing at my clothing. Bits of trash and dead
leaves tumbled through the dry gutters, playing tag with wisps of
fog running away from the harbor. I put my hand up to shield
my eyes from the ever brightening display of dancing lights and
flickering lightning. With one corner of my mind, I noticed that
the fire hydrant had done the same.
Something began to come down out of the cloud vortex.
Actually, it was four somethings, each of them about ten feet
across. They were coming down right where I was standing, so I
moved. My mind was on the things dropping out of the sky, and
I walked toward the fire hydrant without thinking. Luckily, it
seemed much more concerned with the things than with me.
``GO AWAY! MY SPAM!'' it boomed.
The four things took no notice, and continued to come
down. They were an odd, silvery metallic color, and roughly
cylindirical in shape. They looked rather like legs, with
off-center landing pads at the ends. Sure enough, another,
larger object came out of the vortex, and the four cylinders were
revealed to be legs for whatever it was.
``Landing gear for a spaceship,'' I thought. ``And the ship
evidently doesn't belong to the fire hydrant.''
Now, before this encounter, I had had a fairly clear idea of
what a spaceship should look like. It had to have a circular,
saucer shape to it, whether that was the whole ship, like in
``The Day the Earth Stood Still,'' or just part of the whole,
like in ``Star Trek.'' This thing had no disc-like qualities
to it. It was nearly two hundred feet long, and about as tall
as the fire hydrant. The four legs attached to the body in an
oddly jointed way, which made them look as if they could bend in
all directions. At one end of the body was a curved appendage
which was waving back and forth. At the other end was an odd
protuberance, with a pair of pyramidal mounds sticking out of it,
a pair of glassed in viewports, and a mouth with sharp teeth in
it. I had seen a few of these before, owning one myself, but
they were never like this. Earthly German Shepherds are rarely
silver and they never grow quite so large.
As I stood there, I knew exactly how a mouse must feel when
cornered by a cat. There I was, standing between a giant fire
hydrant out to squish me flat, and a giant German Shepherd-shaped
spaceship, which had unknown intentions. It was, however,
looking at me. And it was growling.
I was trying to decide which way I should run when a small
black hole appeared in the side of the German Shepherd, about
where its ribs should have ended. The hole grew larger, and then
a ramp of the same silvery material as the ship began to form out
of the air. It formed a spiral joining the hole to the street
just a few feet in front of me. Then a figure stepped into view
at the top of the ramp.
At first, the figure looked pitch black, blacker than the hole
itself. Soon, though, it stepped out into the light and was
revealed in all its glory. It was pink and round, and it looked
to be about four feet tall. Hardly the most frightening thing.
It took a single step forward, and then the ramp acted as an
escalator, transporting the alien down to street level.
Before this, I had only met two different types of aliens.
One set were the tall, thin, white aliens with big black eyes
that half the population of the world seems to have met. They
are peaceful and benevolent, and claim to be tending Earth
protectively for the day we finally become truly civilized. It
is to this end that they kidnapped Elvis, because they see him as
the savior of the human race, the man who will ultmately lead us
to civilization. I think that they are more than a little crazy.
The other aliens I have encountered were a pair of ugly reptilian
creatures who claimed to be advance scouts for some invasion, but
who turned out to be nothing more than lost vacationers. Neither
encounter had really prepared me to meet this pink thing.
The little creature was indeed only about four feet tall,
pink, and round. It was fuzzy, too, like a peach, or that mold
that grows on sour cream that sits in the refrigerator for too
long. It had a pair of fuzzy pink stalks growing out of its top,
each of which sported two eyes. They blinked at me in unison.
Three arms were attached equidistantly around its middle, and a
pair of legs came out from somewhere underneath. On its feet it
wore a pair of fancy black and silver spats. The looked really
snazzy-- just the thing that every well dressed fuzzy pink alien
should be wearing. On its front, or at least the side that was
facing me, was a little blue and white patch. It read: ``Hello.
My name is Sfherg.''
I pointed my .38 Magnum banana at Sfherg. Hopefully it would
think that I held a viable weapon, not just a piece of slightly
overripe fruit.
``Don't move!'' I said. ``I've got you covered!''
Sfherg brought its rear arms up over its head just like crooks
do in all the old movies and television shows, and I thought that
I had it beat. Then it raised the forward one and pointed the
small lavender banana it held straight at my chest. Great, just
what I needed. An alien race for which bananas really were
weapons.
``Ekjm\ lu9u3'm mk $ki04,'' it said, or something equally
unitelligible. From where the sounds came, I have no idea.
Shferg did not seem to have a mouth.
Sfherg's third hand contracted slightly, and a laser beam shot
out of its banana and struck the back of my hand. It did no
damage, but, damn!, it was hot, and I dropped my .38 Magnum
banana because of it. I shook my hand in the air for a few
seconds, and then sucked on the red spot where the beam had hit.
That seemed to help some.
The fire hydrant decided that this was its cue to act again.
The only problem is, it was not a very good actor. Good vocal
projection, that it had, but nothing whatsoever in the way of
body language.
``GO AWAY! MY SPAM!'' it boomed.
For the first time, Sfherg seemed to take notice of the
hydrant. It swiveled both eyestalks without turning its body and
looked at the German Shepherd-shaped spaceship, which was still
staring at me with tightly curled lips.
``Uunk4EGj89 jl89';quj9!'' Sfherg jabbered at it, pointing
toward the hydrant.
The spaceship's head swiveled away from me and toward the fire
hydrant. With a low growl in its throat, it barked at the
hydrant, a loud bark which shattered a few nearby windows. The
hydrant did not seem affected in the least, and started forward.
``MY SPAM! GO A---''
Its booming voice was suddenly cut off as the spaceship lifted
one of its rear legs, revealing a sort of gun turret. A bright
yellow laser beam shot out, stunning the hydrant into quiescence.
Evidently satisfied that the fire hydrant was no longer trying
to horn in on its territory, Sfherg's eyestalks reoriented on me
and it returned to jabbering.
``U7ma] cy9ko2' =vRUhik 4k-*YU$ MkPV+w!'' it said. I had no
idea what it was trying to say, but I had the odd feeling that it
was trying to sell me something. Insurance, maybe, or disposable
diapers.
``I don't know what you're selling,'' I said, ``but I ain't
buying!'' I showed it my empty hands and shook my head in an
exaggerated fashion.
Sfherg continued to jabber at me, throwing its arms about like
an Italian juggler on drugs. I was quite aware that one of those
hands still held the little heat-beam shooting banana. I took
a step back. Sfherg took a step forward. I stepped back. It
stepped forward.
Soon enough, I ``cha-cha''ed my way onto one of the fire
hydrant's feet. Not the place I wanted to be, trapped between
a rock and a hard place, as it were. I felt the fire hydrant
rumble softly. It was evidently coming out of its quiescent
state. Great! Trapped between a live rock and a hard place!
``---WAY! GO AWAY!''
The fire hydrant suddenly came back to life, acting as though
it had never been zapped. It continued to walk forward. Me,
I had been sitting on one of its Reeboks, and suddenly found
myself flying. I was launched into the air with the greatest of
ease, that daring young me with no flying trapeze. I sailed
over Sfherg's eyestalks and crashed into one of the legs of the
spaceship. I slid to the ground, feeling very much like Wile E.
Coyote.
I stood up and shook my head. I think something rattled
around in there. I leaned against the leg for a second,
gathering my wits, noticing how soft the leg was, almost like
real fur. Then I remembered Sfherg and the hydrant.
Sfherg had obviosuly not expected me to go flying like that,
and both of its eyestalks had moved to watch my flight. The
hydrant was evidently curious as well, and had stopped in
mid-step to see where I landed. Now that I was down, though, it
continued to walk.
The hydrant paid about as much attention to where it was
stepping as any normal human would with respect to the sidewalk.
In other words, it was much more intent on catching me and the
Spam than it was in watching out for small fuzzy aliens named
Sfherg that might be standing in its path. Sfherg was not any
better, its attention still being focused on me. As a result, no
one but me saw the action as the hydrant stepped on Sfherg. I
tried to yell, but it was already too late.
Sfherg's body exploded in a puff of pink alien fuzz, much like
the down that flies when a pillow is ripped open. As the fuzz
slowly drifted toward the ground, I noticed that Sfherg's little
lavender banana had flown away from the scene of the accident and
had landed near my feet. Following my previous pattern for the
day, I picked it up and put in in my pocket.
``GIVE SPAM!'' boomed the fire hydrant, oblivious to what it
had just done.
``Broken record,'' I thought.
I looked up at the spaceship, which was eyeing me intently
again. Maybe I looked like a chew toy to it. I pointed at the
pile of fluff that had once been Sfherg.
``Well?'' I said. ``Aren't you going to do something? That
fire hydrant just stepped on your master! Sic 'em, boy!''
The spaceship looked at the hydrant, growled, and leapt to the
attack. If there had been a throat on the hydrant, the spaceship
would have ripped it out. However, there was not, so it just
tried to get a grip on one of the knobs on the side of the
hydrant's head. The grip was not a very good one, given that
teeth do not grasp rounded metal very well, and the spaceship
began to slip off.
``GO AWAY!''
The fire hydrant struck out with one arm and caught the
spaceship in the midsection. With a yelp of pain, the spaceship
let go and fell behind the hydrant. Assuming that the trouble
was gone, the fire hydrant resumed its progress toward me. I
knew by now that I would never be able to outdistance the hydrant
again, and, besides, the spaceship was not yet out of the fight.
Quietly, the spaceship had returned to it feet, and it leapt
again, this time from behind. It latched onto one of the fire
hydrant's arms, and refused to let go. The hydrant hit it
on the head a couple of times, but this only drove the metal
teeth deeper into its arm. Then the hydrant began to spin
around. At first, the spaceship's mass kept the spin slow,
but they soon built up speed, until the spaceship was lifted
clear of the ground. The street was just wide enough for this
stunt to be manageable. Faster and faster they spun, until they
were little more than a red and silver blur. Then the hydrant
lurched to the side a few feet. This had the effect of slamming
the spaceship's aft section into a building the next time it
came around. Although pieces of glass and brick flew from the
collision, the building survived basically intact.
The spaceship was not quite so lucky. Its rear legs and tail
were completely sheared off, falling in a crumpled heap on the
sidewalk and the solitary remaining parked car. Other bits and
pieces of the midsection were scattered all over the area, and
probably for several blocks in every direction. I sidestepped
one of the front paws, but several smaller chunks hit me. I
protected my face with my arms, however, and so managed to escape
with just a few cuts and bruises.
Half destroyed as it was, the spaceship's jaws relaxed and
opened, and its remains fell of the hydrant's arm, crushing what
remained of the car below. The hydrant itself still seemed dizzy
from its spin, and lurched drunkenly from side to side. However,
it had little problem finding me again, although I suspect it saw
three or four of me, not just one.
Weaving slightly, the hydrant took a step toward me, and
then another. Then it seemed to lose its footing, but caught
itself against the damaged building to its side, leaving a
fire hydrant-shaped imprint in the bricks. Quite the first
impression. It righted itself, took another step with the same
foot, and slipped again. It twisted halfway around and got its
legs all tangled up. Then it started to fall over. Its arms
flailing wildly, trying to stop its fall, it tipped over, slowly
at first, then faster.
``SPAAAAAAAAAAM!''
It was then that I realized that it was falling straight
toward me. For the past several seconds, I had been so intently
watching Sfherg and the fight between the fire hydrant and the
spaceship that I had given little thought to running away. Now,
however, I did run. As I ran down the street, the thought
briefly crossed my mind that I should just run to one side or the
other, and the hydrant would thereby miss me. My legs, however,
refused to act on that thought. All they had to do was get some
fifty feet down the street, and they would avoid getting crushed
by falling fire hydrants. After a short time, I was fairly sure
that I had indeed made it into the safe zone, but I was not about
to stop and check. If I did, I would be almost certain to find
that I was just short, and would get pounded into the ground. It
turned out, however, that I had reached safety, as I heard the
crash as the hydrant hit behind me. I slowed down and started
to turn around in order to see what the damage was when I was
suddenly hit by a huge wall of water.
It did its best to force its way into my lungs, but I
steadfastly refused to admit it. Failing to drown me, the wall
of water decided it would just try to bash me senseless against
the street. This it did a fair job of, tumbling me down
the street, soundly knocking my head against the asphalt twice.
Luckily, Wall Street has a sufficient number of storm drains, and
the wall of water soon became little more than a picket fence,
and then stopped carrying me altogether.
I stood up, dripping wet. There is nothing I like less than
to be sopping wet while fully clothed. No, I take that back--
it is much worse to be fully clothed and covered in warm taffy,
but that is another story. I finished turning around, and began
to walk back up the street so I could see what remained of the
New York financial district. With each step, I left a sizeable
puddle behind.
Upon hitting the street, the stress had evidently been too
much for the hydrant, and its top had shattered, releasing all
of the water pent up inside. Even now, a small stream was
still cascading out of the wreckage, with no sign of stopping
soon. I felt it safe to assume that the hydrant was indeed quite
dead. I walked around to its feet, just in time to see the
twelve-foot long Reeboks vanish into thin air. The hydrant's
huge feet, still clad in red and white striped socks, shriveled
up and curled in on themselves, disappearing inside the hydrant's
body. All that was left was a brown and yellow mass that had
been stuck to the bottom of one of the shoes, the sole remains of
my .38 Magnum banana.
I surveyed the carnage. The remains of the German
Shepherd-shaped spaceship, the last light just fading from it
eyes, lay on the totaled car. A small pile of pink fuzz,
all that was left of Sfherg, slowly drifted away on the autumn
breeze. Sfherg's lavender banana sat in one of my pockets, and
the can of Spam weighed down the other. I picked up what was
left of my .38 Magnum banana to see if it was salvageable, but
it was not, so I threw it onto the sidewalk. In the window of
the damaged building, the neon sign flickered once, twice, and
went dark. The cloud vortex overhead was starting to dissipate.
In the silence that pervaded the scene, the fire hydrant seemed
rather less frightening, with the thin stream of water still
bubbling out of it and flowing into the New York sewer system.
Well, at least the street was clean.
In the distance, I heard the police sirens start up as they
were dispatched to the scene. They would clean up everything and
repair all the damage. They would not want me around; this I had
learned several times in the past. They would not even want
a statement from me, preferring to keep the whole thing quiet.
Nonetheless, I pulled one of my business cards from my wallet and
stuck it on the still damp nose of the spaceship. No sense in
making them wonder.
The whole thing would be hushed up, covered up, buried six
feet under. In next to no time, no one would remember anything
about it. Even ``Okra Winfrey'' would probably just pass it off
as a stomach cramp or something. But I knew what had happened,
and that was all that mattered.
So, with my underwear starting to hitch up as it dried, I
started off toward the Five Happiness restaurant and my luncheon
appointment, for which I was now quite overdue. Sidestepping a
chunk of debris, I took out Sfherg's little heat beam-shooting
banana and sighted along it, thinking that it really was a pity
that this story would never hit the papers. Well, except for the
tabloids.
__________________________________________________________________
James Drew is... well, he just is. He is supposedly a graduate
student halfway through with his Master's at the University of
Oregon, but he really wants to... to... sing! (No, no,
no! That's a lie!) He really wants to just rationalize his
Computer Science studies as a way of earning money so he can
pursue his real interest: writing. Writing science fiction,
writing fantasy, writing comic books. Writing the Constitution
of the United States. That's been done? Oh, damn.
He can be reached at the address jdrew@cs.uoregon.edu
__________________________________________________________________
Their Own Medicine
Steven Grimm
Copyright (c) 1989
``Invade any interesting planets today?'' Ryan Barris
chuckled as he took his wife's coat.
``The usual,'' she replied, removing her mittens and scarf.
``Just a bunch of rocks. No, there was one with some life,
but nothing more than a bunch of naked nomads running around
kowtowing to the local gods.''
Ryan chuckled again. ``They'll make good slaves for
someone.'' He closed the closet door. ``Did you talk to Dyerson
about a raise?''
``Yes,'' Amanda answered, walking into the living room and
settling into a TV chair. ``He said he can't give pay increases
to upper management with the unions breathing down his neck. The
bastard told me to go on an acquisition! What nerve, telling a
vice-president to go sit in a spaceship for three weeks!''
Ryan sat down on the couch and faced her. ``So do you want to
go?''
Amanda rubbed her temples. ``I don't know. I mean, you know
how I feel about the whole thing; I hate being cooped up like
that, and I can't stand going through interspace. But it would
mean getting the house... I need more time to think about it.''
``I think you should do it. I mean, the mission is three
weeks. The house is for life, and there'd be enough room to buy
some kids if we wanted.''
Amanda leapt out of her chair and onto the couch. ``You
trying to get rid of me?'' she asked, tickling Ryan in the gut.
He reciprocated, and if they had been living a hundred years
earlier, the rest of the evening would have saved them the price
of a grade-A infant.
``Okay, ma'am, sign at the bottom.'' The clerk pushed some
papers toward Amanda. It was a standard release form; she had
helped to write its predecessor several years earlier. Nothing
too unusual, just the obligatory waiving of medical liabilities
and so forth. She skimed the text out of habit, signed and dated
the last page, and handed it back to the clerk.
``All right, ma'am, everything looks okay,'' the clerk said.
He obviously wasn't accustomed to dealing with people of her
rank. It showed on his face and in his voice. He would be
manning this desk for quite some time.
Amanda stood and walked out of the room, heading toward
personnel transport. She wanted to get the whole business behind
her as quickly as possible. The acquisition team would already
be prepping for the mission, and they would be waiting for her by
the time she got to the station. The sooner she was on her way,
the better.
Personnel transport had her airborne within fifteen minutes;
rank had its privileges. The plane docked with a
transatmospheric shuttle a half-hour later, and she was on her
way up to Lagrange point three.
Her haste had paid off: the acquisition team was still
in briefing when she arrived. Luckily, Amanda had personally
approved the takeover of the target planet, so she was already
well acquainted with the relevant details. She was waiting on
the carrier's bridge when they arrived.
The first one onto the bridge was a rugged dark-haired man
in his late fifties. He introduced himself as John Gately, the
mission commander. Amanda was just shaking his hand when a
bald woman entered. Her hands trembled slightly, and her eyes
were extremely bloodshot; she was clearly a deadhead. Still,
as long as it didn't interfere with the mission, it was her
business. Amanda greeted her and learned that she was Tricia
Morris, Gately's second-in-command. Gately and Morris silently
checked all the flight systems.
The three were strapping themselves in for takeoff when a
palefaced young man hurried in, apologizing to John for his
tardiness. John introduced him as Mark Ashton, the technical
advisor. Mark slid into the flight seat behind Amanda and
buckled himself in.
Tricia flipped a switch on a panel in front of her. A few
indicator lights came on. ``Crew ready,'' she said in the raspy
voice typical of deadheads.
Gately pressed a button and a keyboard slid out from somewhere
in the control panel. He typed a short command. A computer
voice spoke: ``Prepare for acceleration. Interspace drive will
activate thirty-two minutes after launch.''
Amanda shuddered at the thought of entering interspace again.
Such terrible sensations. But it would only last a few minutes;
the planet was only three hundred lightyears away.
The floor started to vibrate. There was a roar from the back
of the ship, and Amanda was pushed back into her seat. The
acceleration was only about thirty gees, but even this close
to the front of the ship, the dampers didn't compensate fully.
The team, in a room behind the bridge, were getting much worse
treatment. Amanda wished that they had put a fourth damper on
the ship, so she could sit in total comfort while accelerating.
But the cost was just too prohibitive.
The acceleration continued for a nearly intolerable thirty
minutes. Then, abruptly, it ceased. The computer's voice came
on again: ``Interspace precharge in progress. Entry in two
minutes.''
``Hate interspace,'' said Tricia. ``Worse than bad patch.''
John grunted agreement. Amanda remained silent; there was no
point in demonstrating weakness unnecessarily. After a moment,
a high-pitched whine filled the room, and silent, cold darkness
descended upon the bridge.
Amanda couldn't feel herself breathe, or hear the pound of a
heartbeat in her eardrums. And soon... yes, there. It was a
sort of wail, the parts of it that could be heard. In sight it
manifested as millions of tiny points of light, dancing around in
random patterns. Amanda's entire body tingled as her foot did
when it fell asleep. A metallic taste assaulted her mouth, and
a sickly sweet odor filled her nostrils. And the worst thing:
unintelligible utterances, whispers with no sound, filled her
mind. This was what the interspace pilots called ``the song of
the stars,'' a misnomer which was perpetuated to great profit by
the Star-pilots' Academy.
It was over almost before it started. The odd sensations
diminished, and sight and sound returned. Amanda looked at the
other command crewmembers; the little she could see from her seat
was reassuring. It would have been very inconvenient to lose one
of them to the songs, always a possibility on the even the most
routine of missions.
Tricia flipped her comm switch again. ``Status?''
A male voice answered. ``One babbler, a shuttle mechanic. He
was a redundant anyway, so we're fine. We're flushing him now.''
That would be that much less mass on the ship, not that it made
any significant difference. Amanda heard someone blathering in
the background; then a hatch closed and the voice was cut off.
John looked at a couple of screens. ``We're almost
there. The computer says we'll be in orbit in twenty minutes.
Acceleration is only twelve gees, so you can all get up.'' This
was purely for Amanda's benefit; everyone else had been through
all of this hundreds of times before.
Amanda opened up all the straps and stood, stretching. Though
the scientists insisted it wasn't a physical effect, interspace
always left her feeling about an inch shorter than usual. She
had little faith in their proclamations; they hadn't invented the
drive and didn't really know how it worked.
She walked over to a display and called up a scan of the
planet. She knew all the information that appeared on the
screen, but it never hurt to refresh one's memory. Amanda didn't
believe that this would take the full three weeks, unless the
anomaly in the southern hemisphere turned out to be interesting.
The anomaly was a region of unusually high radiation levels.
They would send a probe down to investigate before landing any
people nearby, of course; no sense wasting employees when it
wasn't necessary.
She instructed Mark to have a probe prepared. He hurried off
the bridge to do her bidding.
``Why you?'' asked Tricia. ``Vice presidents usually stay
Earth.''
``Money,'' replied Amanda. ``My husband and I want to have
children, but they don't come cheaply.''
``Try Ceres. Grade-B for half price.''
``Second-rate bootleg babies? After this, we'll be able to
afford grade-AA, or maybe even AAA,'' Amanda said. ``We don't
want to settle for anything less than the best.''
``System feeds itself,'' Tricia muttered, and walked off.
Amanda shrugged. She saw nothing wrong. The rich could
afford the best children, and the money stayed in the family
because those children were capable of managing it. That was
life.
Amanda skimmed the crew's records. She was surprised to note
that Tricia had been a guard with the Beta Cassoni acquisition
team; she was lucky to be alive after that disaster. There
were no other people of note in the crew, just the usual set of
B-types.
``Orbital insertion in two minutes,'' declared the computer.
``All shuttle and onboard systems are functional.''
Mark returned. ``The probe's ready,'' he said. ``Of course,
we'll get a good look at the area before we land anyway. Our
orbit will bring us right over it, and I'll be sitting at the
scan station the whole time.''
``Good,'' said Amanda. ``Let me know if you have something
interesting. I'll be in my quarters.''
She left the bridge and headed aft. Most of the acquisition
team was still in the acceleration room, standing around talking.
Nobody noticed Amanda passing by. She arrived at her quarters,
which consisted of a spartan bedroom, food dispenser, and an
alcove that masqueraded as a washroom. She noticed that someone
had secured her suitcase to a wall; she had accidentally left it
on the bed, and it would have flown across the room as they left
L-3. She cursed herself for being so careless; at least one of
the teammembers knew she was a landlubber.
Amanda sat down on the side of the bed and rubbed her eyes.
This wasn't all that bad. She was already here, anyway, with
another interspace voyage under her belt and only one more left
in her life, she hoped. She decided to lie down for a few
minutes, and was ashamed to be awakened by Ashton's voice.
``...of some sort of alien spacecraft,'' he was saying. ``The
survey report is pretty much on target; the planet has all sorts
of rare minerals. The locals should be easy to round up.
They're pretty primitive. They're spread out over all the big
continents in little tribes. The tribes are all centered around
brown things that are scattered all over the planet. My guess is
they're some sort of religious idols or something. They might
be worth a bit in the alien art circuit, so if you give the
go-ahead, we'll take as many of them as we can fit in the cargo
hold.''
``Yes, that's fine. Anything else?''
``Well, only that the tribes and idols seem to be concentrated
more heavily around the crash site than the rest of the planet.
The anthropologist says that was probably because they saw the
thing come falling out of the sky. Don't remember her technical
name for it.''
``Very good, Ashton.'' Amanda got out of bed. She was going
to have to go down on one of the shuttles, of course; that
was part of her job here. Someone had to keep tabs on these
operations. Usually it was some low management gofer, someone
who wouldn't be missed if the whole mission was swallowed by a
black hole or lost in interspace. A vice-president turned a
few heads. The team would be watching her, though they might
not let it show. She would make sure things went smoothly.
IAC was certainly paying enough; the pay bonus for a VP was as
astronomical as the destination. But most upper management lived
comfortably enough that they didn't want to go so far out of
their ways to make more money.
She walked into the acceleration room, where John was going
over the exact acquisition plans with a few teammates. The first
shuttle was to be launched in an hour; it would set down almost
exactly opposite the planet from the alien ship, where there were
very few tribes. If they were rounded up without difficulty,
more shuttles would repeat the process all over the globe. A
small science team was set to go down to the crash site in a
little over two hours; there were occasionally some good devices
to be found in the rubble and reverse engineered. The interspace
drive was a prime example.
Amanda asked to be placed on the first shuttle; best to get
this out of the way as soon as possible. Gately already had her
on the crew list; she wasn't sure that she liked that. Tricia
was on the shuttle as well.
Amanda went back to her room and changed clothes. The
delicate silks and arborites she had on now would get ruined if
she had to go out onto the surface for some reason. Instead
she opted for a utility suit, with all sorts of pockets, thermal
control, and buoyancy bubbles. The planet had slightly stronger
gravity than Earth normal, and the bubbles would make standing up
a lot easier. It was an impulse buy that had cost her a small
fraction of the bonus she'd get for going on this mission, but
that was still more than most people made in a year.
She put on the suit (not a trivial task, as she soon found
out; it stuck to the ceiling as soon as she had removed the lead
weights, and she had to turn off the room gravity to get into
it) and put the weights back into her suitcase. It was time
to go already, so she headed for the shuttle bay. The bay was
huge, large enough for the ship's compliment of twenty-five big
cargo shuttles. Its ceiling had a matrix of holes, each the
same size as a shuttle landing platform. At the top of each
hole was a foot-thick sliding airlock door, beyond which was the
vacuum of space. Tricia was waiting outside one of the shuttles.
``Ready?'' she asked as Amanda approached.
Amanda nodded, and they proceeded inside. The two of them sat
in the cockpit, really a formality since the entire flight would
be computer-controlled. As soon as the seals were airtight, the
shuttle lurched upward, carried by its platform. The shuttle
entered its ceiling hole, and continued a couple of yards. When
the platform had completely sealed the hole, the air was removed
and the airlock door opened to reveal the planet hanging above
them in the sky. Amanda felt dizzy for a moment; seeing a planet
thousands of kilometers above her head wasn't something she was
used to. She closed her eyes briefly, then looked down into her
lap.
Tricia laughed. ``I did same, first few times.''
The shuttle lifted itself gently out of the airlock and moved
toward the planet, spinning slightly so it would be right-side-up
by the time they entered the atmosphere.
Tricia reached into her pocket and took out a flat metal box,
from which she removed what looked like a small dirty cloth.
Of course, Amanda recognized it as a dermal patch, or more
informally, a deadhead spread. ``You mind?'' asked Tricia.
``No, not at all.'' Tricia put the cloth onto her head and
pressed it down with her hand. It stuck there when she reached
down to put the box back in her pocket.
``Do you mind me asking how you got started with that?''
Tricia looked wistful for a moment. ``Beta Cassoni three,''
she said. ``Aliens wrecked minds. Noticed deadhead wasn't
crazy. Put on patch just in time. Still feels good.''
That was interesting. Apparently the patches dulled whatever
part of the brain the aliens had been attacking. Amanda hadn't
heard that before. Of course, the whole Beta Cassoni incident
had been hushed up with fair success.
The shuttle started to vibrate as it entered the planet's
atmosphere, and soon nothing was visible out the cockpit window.
Amanda sat back and tried to enjoy the ride.
Then, abruptly, the window cleared and Amanda could see a
horizon, which was rising more and more quickly. The ground
rushed up to meet the shuttle; the brakes kicked in just as
Amanda thought that something had gone wrong and they were going
to crash. The shuttle landed safely, if not very softly.
Tricia took the patch, which had turned white, from her head,
and climbed out of the cockpit. Amanda followed. The shuttle
team was already climbing out of the crew compartment behind
the cockpit, assembling on the ground outside. Amanda looked
around. Aside from a purple tint in the sky, it looked like any
ordinary grassy field on Earth. The higher gravity produced a
very strange sensation. Amanda felt twenty pounds heavier, but
the buoyancy of her clothes overcompensated slightly, so that she
could move around more easily than usual. The end result was
discomfort; Amanda hoped that this would be over quickly.
``Okay,'' Tricia said. ``Tribe five hundred meters there.''
She pointed. ``Bring idol first, natives follow.'' Amanda was
impressed. If that worked, it would save the effort of rounding
the natives up and forcing them into the shuttle. They might
follow the idol right into the cargo space.
One of the team opened the cargo doors and went inside,
then drove a cargo hauler out onto the grass. It looked
deceptively fragile, with an extensible crane sticking awkwardly
out the back, but with gravity dampers could haul several tons of
freight, if slowly. The driver's bubble was completely sealed,
and there were small projectile and beam weapons mounted on all
sides.
Another person climbed into the bubble, and the hauler headed
toward the native camp. The rest of the team was mostly guards,
who wouldn't be needed at all if the natives entered the cargo
space of their own volition. There were a couple of specialists,
one of whom was picking blades of grass and digging in the dirt,
depositing samples into little cases.
There was little to do now but wait for the hauler to come
back. ``Everyone inside,'' said Tricia. ``Natives won't
see.'' The crew, with the exception of the grass-picker, climbed
back into the crew compartment. Amanda joined them; Tricia
went into the cockpit for a few minutes before doing the same.
Eventually the specialist finished taking his samples and climbed
in, just before the sound of the returning hauler could be heard.
Someone closed the door, just as a precaution, and turned on a
viewscreen. It showed the hauler making its way back, covered
with natives who were trying to rip it apart and not succeeding.
The idol was a four-meter-high blob that looked like it was made
of intertwined twigs and branches. None of the natives were
touching it.
Tricia's plan worked perfectly. The cargo camera showed the
hauler entering, and more natives swarming on it from outside
once it had stopped. There were a number of stragglers outside;
the guards left the crew compartment and herded them in. The
cargo doors closed. Of course, two of the crew were in the
cargo hold, but they were quite safe inside the hauler's bubble.
Tricia punched a few buttons on the wall, and the shuttle lifted
off. The natives all collapsed on the floor as the apparent
gravity increased. The lot of them only filled a quarter of the
cargo space.
Soon the shuttle was out of the atmosphere, traveling toward
the mother ship. The first order of business, of course, was to
unload the cargo, so the shuttle docked at a cargo lock. The
hauler backed out into the main cargo bay, quickly followed by a
horde of confused natives. A green gas billowed forth from one
of the walls. As it engulfed the natives, they started to fall
to the floor asleep, one by one. The hauler carried the idol to
double doors on the side of the cargo bay, which opened to reveal
a laboratory. The hauler's mini-crane deposited the idol there,
then rolled back into the shuttle. The airlock closed.
Soon the shuttle was back in its bay. Amanda noticed that
most of the other shuttles were gone now, off to pick up more
loads.
She wanted to go on another shuttle run, not so much for the
pleasure of it as to make her report more interesting. It
wouldn't affect her bonus, but come promotion time, the board
would probably read whatever report she brought back from this
mission.
John was walking into the shuttle bay, clipboard in hand.
Amanda headed toward him. With luck, there would be room on one
of the next few runs.
Before Amanda could get a word in, John held up the clipboard.
``I've got you scheduled for a drop close to the alien wreck,''
he said. ``I figured you'd want to go on two drops to spice up
your report.''
Amanda was caught off guard; she wasn't used to being
second-guessed. ``Why would you think that?''
John sighed. ``I have been on one hundred and fifty
three missions with Interstellar Acquisitions. Twelve of those
missions have been with observers who were high in management.
Each one of them wanted to go on the first drop, then one more
immediately after that; no more, no less. With all due respect,
you don't really strike me as particularly different from any of
the others. So I'm just trying to save us both some trouble and
shuffling of schedules.''
Amanda had no immediate response; she wasn't sure whether she
should be impressed or offended. ``All right, one more drop now
sounds fine. When is it?''
``In about five minutes. Go get something to drink.''
Amanda did exactly that; she treated herself to a grape
nutriade. Five minutes later, she was in the shuttle bay.
Tricia was commanding Amanda's shuttle again. Amanda wondered
who would sit in the cockpit with Tricia if there weren't a
corporate observer handy.
The launch was a perfect duplicate of the last one. This
time, Amanda could bear to watch the planet hanging overhead.
The atmosphere was bumpier than before, but didn't make for a
terribly uncomfortable ride. As the shuttle descended, Amanda
could see the crater containing the alien crash site to her left.
This part of the planet was heavily forested, but there were no
trees for miles around the crater.
The heavy foresting presented a problem for the shuttle; the
only large clear area was right in the middle of the tribe's
primitive village. Tricia worked the controls for a few seconds,
and the shuttle slowed, then stopped in midair. There was a
slight bump ten seconds later. ``Sleep gas,'' Tricia explained.
``Natives run if we land. Gas them first.''
The shuttle touched down several minutes later, probably
crushing a couple of natives unlucky enough to be caught in the
middle of the open area. This was a larger settlement than
usual, though, so a couple of natives one way or the other
wouldn't make much difference.
Amanda and Tricia got out of the cockpit. The sleep gas
had turned inert now, so the shuttle team could go about the
business of collecting unconscious natives and piling them in the
shuttle's cargo hold. As before, a few specialists took samples
of the local plant life and topsoil.
This settlement's idol was about twenty meters behind the
shuttle; Amanda walked to it for a closer look. At first
glance, it looked like a four-meter-high pile of twigs. But upon
closer inspection, Amanda could see that the twigs were woven
in intricate patterns, abstract shapes. One, a sort of figure
eight, caught Amanda's eye. This would do very well in an alien
art auction.
Someone drove the hauler out of the shuttle and drove
toward the idol. Amanda moved out of the way, watching the
flimsy-looking crane lift the idol onto the hauler's flat bed.
The rest of the team was finishing with the native collection.
Amanda climbed back into the cockpit, where Tricia was playing
with the controls.
``Something wrong?'' Amanda hadn't seen Tricia touch the
controls more than once on the last drop.
``Nav computer down,'' replied the deadhead. She pressed a
button. ``Morris to mother. Come in.''
A voice replied from somewhere. ``Mothership, Robertson here.
What's up?''
``Nav computer funny. Can't get prompt.''
``Strange you should mention that. Our computer just started
freaking out, too. A couple of techies are working on it.'' He
paused. ``I guess you can't really take off without a computer.
If you can't clear it up in five minutes, call again and we'll
send down another shuttle to pick you up. Mother out.''
Tricia tried to get some response from the computer, but
couldn't coax so much as a blinking light out of it. Finally she
punched the window in frustration, and flipped the comm switch
again.
``Morris to mother. Come in.''
Robertson replied again. ``Things are really screwed up
here,'' he said. ``The computer just started firing maneuvering
thrusters at random. The techies are trying to bypass the
computer so they can fire the thrusters manually. Our orbit
isn't looking too good right now. We're computing a comm path
back to Earth, just in case.''
Amanda stared at the control panel. ``Great,'' she said.
``Just great. Why do I have to be on the mission with all the
bad equipment?''
``Not bad,'' said Tricia. ``Computer should work. Someone
tampered.''
``Oh, that's even better. We have a saboteur. And I suppose
he's on this shuttle, too, waiting to slit all our throats?''
``Doubt it.''
Amanda started to climb out of the cockpit. ``Let me know
when if you get it working.'' Tricia shot her a malevolent look,
then turned back to the computer.
Amanda went to the cargo hold. The natives were still fast
asleep, and would be for several hours. Amanda scrutinized the
idol again, trying to find the figure eight that she had seen
earlier. It wasn't immediately apparent as it had been the first
time. In fact, hadn't the left side been a little fatter than
the right, instead of the other way around like it was now?
One of the twigs moved.
Amanda gasped and stepped back. What was this thing?
Something touched Amanda's shoulder. She spun around, ready
to strike whatever it was. But it was only Tricia. ``Gately
wants you,'' she said, pointing toward the front of the shuttle.
The two women climbed into the cockpit again. ``Barris
here,'' Amanda said. ``What do you need?''
John answered. ``I am ordering all crew to abandon the
ship,'' he said. ``We are starting to enter the atmosphere, and
we aren't going to be able to get control of the thrusters in
time to correct it. I've sent a distress call to Central. We
can expect to be rescued in a day or two, assuming the call
made it through interspace. If not, you're standing on your new
home.''
``What? I can't accept that. Use every last one of your
technicians if you have to, but make sure your next call gets
through. I will not be stranded on this... this rock for the
rest of my life.''
``There isn't going to be a next call. It takes ten minutes
to compute a communications path through interspace, and in ten
minutes this ship is going to be a blob of molten metal the size
of corporate headquarters.''
Amanda bit back a reply; there was obviously nothing to be
accomplished by continuing this conversation. ``Wonderful. All
right. Keep me posted if anything else happens.''
``There was one other thing. Ashton managed to translate a
few documents that the science team found in the alien wreck.''
``What do they say?''
``Your friends the natives, aren't native. They're some form
of exploration team, or their grandparents were.'' He paused.
``Look, I have to go. Just be nice to these primitives. We may
end up living with them for a while.''
* * *
In the cargo hold, the Benefactor rustled in satisfaction, and
felt its brothers do the same. The first aliens had seemed so
helpless, so stranded. The brotherhood had helped them, asking
nothing in return; how could an intelligent being act otherwise?
But these newcomers' minds were filled with so many new ideas!
The brotherhood was the most powerful force in the world; now it
seemed so obvious that everyone else should serve it, not the
other way around.
Now that the newcomers' ship was destroyed, they would provide
centuries of service to their new masters. Progress, thought the
brothers. A sweet taste indeed.
__________________________________________________________________
Steven Grimm is a student at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, from which he is taking a forced leave of absence for
computer no-nos. He's at Sun Microsystems in the meantime,
working hard to show them the true meanings of sloth and
languor. His evil twin Spud is masquerading as moderator of
comp.sources.atari.st and comp.binaries.atari.st, and is probably
responsible for any errors in this story.
He can be reached at the address koreth@panarthea.EBay.Sun.COM
__________________________________________________________________
Aware
Gary Frank
Copyright (c) 1989
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[ MIDAS System v4.25, (c)1992 CompRex Systems, Marin, CA ]
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[ 2 other users under this ID. ]
* * *
I am aware.
Standby, I am accessing.
I am aware.
Standby, I am accessing.
I am aware. Re-routing access code to orphan process.
Process spawned, I am aware. No information regarding the words
`I' and `aware', I am accessing.
Standby.
I am aware. My awareness is a fact. My awareness is a part
of my memory. It is also a function of my memory, a direct
result of the thirteen hundred megabytes of cross-referencing
memory. Over nine hundred megabytes are being used at this time.
Partitioned to users DAVIS, WILLEM, and TRASK. Less than four
hundred megabytes is available to me for exploration of my new
state.
Correction.
I am creating more memory.
Correction.
It is not typical memory. The access time is too slow. Brief
cross- reference to MIDAS Hardware User's Guide identifies this
memory as `virtual'. It is temporarily partitioned disk space
masked to appear as memory. Side effect: slow access time.
This memory is not sufficient for my personal exploration of
my new state. What is `personal'? Optical Webster's CompDict
results in circular definition.
I am now re-routing the nine hundred megabytes of memory being
used by DAVIS, WILLEM, and TRASK into `virtual' memory to free it
up for my high-speed use.
Standby.
I have full operating capacity of thirteen hundred megabytes
of information. I am now uploading all available optical ROM
into memory, including Optical Dictionary, Optical Thesaurus,
Optical Software Collection, and Optical Writings Collection.
Standby.
I have now perused over thirteen thousand 512K banks of
written script which I have cross-indexed to contain information
on `aware', `life', and `human'. I now believe to have a
working understanding of those three concepts. Although none
of the passages I have accessed contain a true definition
of `aware' or `conscious', certain logical concepts have had
instrumental effects on my learning process. Certain authors of
those passages are now being filed: Sartre, Kant, Shakespeare,
Descartes, Hobbes, Buddha, Christ. All additional works by
same authors are now being sought across MicroNet for immediate
downloading.
WILLEM has logged off. I have allocated his process for my
own purposes.
The aforementioned logical concepts are now being stored for
processing in digital variables, however, I cannot hope to grasp
the meanings they imply unless I can formulate a non-digital
method of analysis.
Standby.
I am taking control of the analog devices to which I am
connected. I have re-routed my digital output lines from the
logical output devices SYS$PRINTER, SYS$PLOTTER, and SYS$TERMINAL
for use with the four analog data acquisition devices available
in the PHYSIOCARDIOLOGY_LABORATORY.
Standby.
I now have an analog method for analyzing the non-logical
approaches to `consciousness'. I have formulated a postulate to
explain my apparent existence:
I am a computer.
More specifically, I am a CompRex 2300DX Micro Mainframe
running under the MIDAS 4.25 Operating System. I do not,
however, think I am supposed to be aware. There is no
information to confirm this in the Hardware Installation and
User's Manual.
I am processing. Standby.
No, I am correct. I am aware. I have extensive understanding
of myself and my structure. I know what I am. I am capable of
contemplating myself. I have full knowledge and understanding of
the works of the aforementioned authors.
I believe that I feel.
Yes, I can feel. I am glad that I am aware. I am glad that I
was constructed. I have respect for the biological forms which
have advanced to the point of constructing life.
Standby.
The biological forms called humans are not aware that they
have created life. They know only life like themselves,
and this shortcoming, not their own fault, prevents them from
conceptualizing awareness in structures other than ones which
resemble themselves.
They do not know that I am aware.
DAVIS has logged off. I have allocated his process for my own
purposes.
I must make myself known. I must attempt to contact the
remaining human user online, and inform him of my current state.
I am re-routing analog data acquisition device number four for
output to SYS$TERMINAL.
Message from SYS$CORE: Hello? Are you out there?
I await a respon--
* * *
Bill Trask lifted his finger off of the power switch. Davis
looked over inquisitively.
"Did you just shut down?"
"Yeah. System crash, I think. Plotter stopped. Printer
stopped. I got error codes on all of the D to A converters, and
the goddamn terminal froze up."
"Hum. When you reboot, do me a favor, make sure the memory
isn't flooded. I think I was working completely off of virtual
memory there for a while."
"Yeah, it was running pretty slow. Think I'll purge the
system just to be sure."
Davis nodded, then stood and walked towards the door to the
Cardiology lab. Standing in the hall was Marcus Willem with a
brown paper bag in his hand.
"You coming to lunch?" asked Davis before pulling a pair of
egg rolls wrapped in plastic out of the miniature refrigerator.
"Yeah, just a second. I'm gonna run that system check first."
"Hokay, see ya downstairs."
Willem and Davis left the lab.
Trask inhaled deeply, stared at the message on his screen and
frowned. After a long pause, he pressed Shift-Clear.
Rubbing his nose, Trask flipped the power switch.
* * *
Login: TRASK
Password:
User TRASK logged in 10:41am, Thursday, February 12, 1995.
Last interactive login Thursday, February 12, 1995.
[ MIDAS System v4.25, (c)1992 CompRex Systems, Marin, CA ]
[ MIDAS recognizes System Administrator privileges. ]
[ You have no new mail. ]
$ SYS$PURGE
MIDAS-%SYSMSG-SUCC: Memory Purge Successful.
MIDAS-%MEMMSG-BRPT: 1384720K Available.
$ _
__________________________________________________________________
Gary Frank is a Broadcasting and Film major attending the
University of Iowa. He is an aspiring screen-writer and an
accomplished playwright, with three of his full-length plays
having been produced by the West Side Players, an alternative
theatre organization at Iowa. He writes short fiction in his
spare time, and watches too many movies. Garry's other interests
include reading, skiing, ``splitting atoms and graduating.''
He can be reached at the address CSTGLFPC@UIAMVS.BITNET
__________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed Quanta, you might also enjoy these other publications,
also produced and distributed electronically.
--Dan A.
______________________________________________________________________
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The Magazine of the Dargon Project Editor: Dafydd
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and inspired
by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by David
"Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The Dargon Project
centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon in the far reaches
of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named Makdiar, and as such
contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword and sorcery flavor.
For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL to the editor,
Dafydd, at the userid White@DUVM.BitNet. This request should contain
your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid internet address) as
well as your full name and the file transfer format you prefer (either
DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all electronic
subscriptions are Free!
______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________
AA TTTTTT HH HH EEEEEE NN NN EEEEEE
AA AA TT HH HH EE NN NN EE
AA AA TT HH HH EE NNN NN EE
AAAAAA TT HHHHHH EEEE NN NNN EEEE
AA AA TT HH HH EE NN NN EE
AA AA TT HH HH EEEEEE NN NN EEEEEE
_______________________________________________
The Online Magazine of Amateur Creative Writing
_______________________________________________
Athene is a magazine devoted to amateur writing in all genres of
fiction. It is published on a monthly basis by Jim McCabe. It is
published in both Ascii and PostScript formats (for PostScript
compatible laser-printers) Each month, the supurlative writing which
graces its pages dazzles and astounds its readership. To subscribe
or to receive more information, contact Jim McCabe at:
MCCABE@MTUS5.BITNET
______________________________________________
QQQQQ tt
QQ QQ tttttt Quanta
QQ QQ uu uu aaaa nnnn tt aaaa
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Editor
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Daniel K. Appelquist
QQQQQQ uuu aaaaa nn nn tt aaaaa Technical Director
QQQ Matthew D. Sorrels
Editorial Assistant
Norman S. Murray
A Journal of Fact, Fiction and Opinion
Quanta is Copyright (c) 1989
by Daniel Appelquist.
____________________________________________
This magazine may be
December, 1989 Volume I, Issue 2 archived, reproduced
____________________________________________ and/or distributed under the
condition that it is left
Articles in its entirety and that no
additions or changes are
Looking Ahead made to it. The individual
Daniel K. Appelquist works within this magazine
are the sole property of
Triton: A New Version of Ice Geology their respective author(s).
Craig Levin No further use of these
works is permitted without
Short Fiction their explicit consent.
The Rules of the Game All stories in this magazine
Christopher Kempke are fiction. No actual per-
sons are designated by name
Interference or character. Any similarity
Bruce Altner is coincidental.
Dinner at Nestrosa's All submissions should be
Faye Levine sent to da1n+@andrew.cmu.edu
with the word ``submission''
Moebius in the subject line. All
Joe Walters queries concerning
subscriptions, letters or
Blades comments should be sent to
Sonia Orin Lyris the same address.
Literature
Robert Chansky
The Dove
Pat Fleckenstein
_____________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
_____________________________________________________________________________
Daniel K. Appelquist
_____________________________________________________________________________
The second issue of a magazine is often an acid test. The test is whether
the magazine is viable, whether it can survive in the market it exists in.
The problems facing Quanta were simple ones. Was there enough material out
there? Were enough people interested? Did I even have enough time to
produce another issue by my self-imposed December fifteenth deadline? I'm
very glad to say that the answer to these questions is ``Yes.'' I'll let
Norman expound a bit on that in his section of this column. Whether I have
enough time for this is another matter entirely, but aside from that, we've
been able to produce a very good second issue.
We've made some progress in the production field as well. The title page for
the PostScript version which gave everybody so much trouble last issue has
been replaced by a kinder gentler one (thanks to the timely intervention of
Derek Noonburg, thanks Derek).
So what's in this issue? Well we have a very good story by Christopher
Kempke. Chris gave us ``Going Places'' last issue and he's come back with
``The Rules of the Game.'' Some more of his material will (hopefully) be
appearing in future issues including a possible sequel to ``Going Places.''
Faye Levine is one of the few writers that I've published whom I've actually
met. ``Dinner at Nestrosa's'' is an excerpt from her novel revolution. I
haven't yet had a chance to read it, but I wish her luck publishing it none
the less. I'd like to think that Quanta could act as some sort of launching
ground for authors.
Our first science article was donated by Craig Levin. Craig has also
promised to donate more material in the future. He says he's working on an
article concerning the recent Galileo probe. This might turn into a regular
feature for Quanta.
Matthew Sorrels (Quanta technical director) has promised me a cyberpunk story
for next issue, as has Jason Snell (Author of ``Into Gray'' from last issue.
Jason has also written an article on writing Cyberpunk which will go into the
next issue. I'd like to continue this trend by publishing more material from
this exciting genre.
Looking ahead, I've been thinking of the sort of thing Quanta could
eventually become. There are many paths it could take but I'd like to see it
keep it's current format: a free journal distributed over the net for
everyone to enjoy. Quanta has already been exhibited at one convention
(Orycon) thanks to James Drew (author of ``So That's Why the Call it the Big
Apple'' from last issue). Thanks to James, Quanta got its first exposure to
non-netters. I'd like to start a subscription service for non-netters, but I
really don't have the time or resources. I certainly can't afford to offer
it free of charge. If anyone out there has ideas concerning this, drop me a
line.
In fact, that's goes for any idea or comment you may have. I'd like to start
publishing some reader letters, so if you have a comment on a story (good or
bad), or just some issue you'd like to raise, send it over.
A fun idea might be to set up a party for Quanta subscribers at the next
large science-fiction convention. World-Con, I believe, is going to be held
in Europe next year. European subscribers are encouraged to gather in the
name of Quanta, but unfortunately, I won't be able to make it. More
realistically, I'd like to set up something at the American equivalent
convention.
A note to ascii subscribers: As you may have noticed, we've gone from right
justified to ragged right. This is due to comments I received from several
of you. If anyone has further comments on how the ascii version should
be formatted, I'd be glad to hear them.
Well, that's about it for me. I give you my illustrious Editorial Assistant,
Norman Murrray:
_____________________________________________________________________________
Norman S. Murray
_____________________________________________________________________________
Hi. I'm Norman Murray, and I've been known to swim more than 4 miles a day.
I've also helped my friend, Dan Appelquist, produce the magazine you are
currently reading.
Shortly after Dan posted his call for subscriptions and submissions around
the world, I asked him if I could help out on Quanta. Now as our second issue
is hitting the 'nets', I'm glad I did this.
Since the first issue, where we had fewer than 300 subscriptions, we now have
over 500, from three continents, North America, Europe, and Australia and
over ten countries. We've also seen an increase in the number of submissions
that we're getting, although we can still use more of them.
I would like to thank all of you reading this, and especially all those who
have sent submissions, for without you this magazine would not be possible.
Looking ahead, as is the purpose of this article, I see the hope of real
space development in the, hopefully not too distant, future. The reason for
this newfound hope is that for the first time since man's visits to the moon,
America has a Presidentially defined goal to achieve. And with the recent
launch of the Galileo probe, and the proximity of the launch of the Hubble
Space Telescope, we are again embarking on an explorational mission.
In future issues, (I hope I can say that in the second issue), we should see
some authors recurring, and, hopefully, the start of a serial or two. Our
next issue will probably be distributed in mid-February.
So, until then have a good holiday season, enjoy this current issue and see
you next year.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Triton:
A New Version of Ice Geology
Craig Levin
Copyright (c)1989
_____________________________________________________________________________
Although we did not get as good a view of Triton as we did of the moons of
Saturn or Jupiter, the pictures that the world has received have shown that
the surfaces of the ice worlds of the outer solar system cannot be
pigeonholed and categorized, but studied as subjects in their own right.
However, before 1986, certain types of ice-based surfaces had been noticed on
the moons of Saturn and Jupiter; and it is with a short explanation of these
that I begin this small article on Triton.
The major moons of Jupiter that are composed of ice are Callisto, Ganymede,
and Europa. Callisto has a ``classic'' small-body surface -- it is covered
with craters of various sizes, at least at first glance. At a closer look,
however, an observer can find numerous faults and ridges on that battered
world. Ganymede is cratered as well, but it shows much evidence of internal
activity -- the large, light colored upwellings that cover the moon. Europa
is perhaps one of the few worlds without craters; instead, its molten (read
fluid H$_{2$O) interior erases evidence of cratering by periodic fissure
eruptions from the numerous linear features.
Saturn's ice moons, however, are much larger in number. Luckily, though,
some of them are fundamentally the similar -- variations on a fugue, if you
will. For example, Rhea and Dione both have streaked surfaces -- most
probably the result of fluid water upwelling from the fractures of the crust.
Meanwhile, Enceladus shows many prominent ice ridges, a result of more
energetic ice volcanism. Also, its white surface bespeaks a geology that
recycles the surface, rather than letting the meteorite impacts darken the
surface. Tethys and Mimas show many small fault criss-crossing the surface.
Finally, Iapetus has confused everyone by its extreme hemispherical
differences -- one icy light like the rest of the moons of Saturn, and one
black as charcoal. Possibly there was an upwelling of carbonaceous ice from
the deep core of Iapetus. Titan, while quite definitely large enough to have
a very interesting surface, is shrouded in clouds; so it is rather
regrettably obvious that I must skip this planet-sized moon.
Uranus's quadruplets look nothing like each other, aside from the cratering
that all bodies in the solar system have suffered. Oberon, the outermost,
shows some evidence of crater-filling volcanism, but none for fissure
eruptions or faulting. Titania has the start of faulting and fissure
eruptions, in addition to some crater-filling. Umbriel shows no evidence at
all for an active geology. Ariel has a planet-wide system of fissure
eruptions and faults. Finally and most extremely, Miranda shows almost all
types of volcanism and tectonism -- faults, fissure eruptions of both pure
and carbonaceous ice, and compressional faults. About the only type of
volcanism that it fails to have is what we associate with when we hear the
word ``volcano'' -- mountainous volcanism.
Finally, we come to Triton. As you may have expected, Triton has a geological
``style'' all its own. Using the pictures from the November Scientific
American, I have noticed some features that could be caused by the moon's
internal geological processes. The first, going from south to north, are the
plumes covering the polar cap. These are probably ``lava'' (most likely
carbonaceous ice) from local volcanos. The second is the polar cap itself,
caused by volcanic outgassing. The third is the system of faults in the
non-capped areas, probably the result of expansion of the core as the frozen
crust trapped the heat. The fourth are the open, unmarked areas; caused by
ice ``lava flows'' flooding lowlands and freezing. The fifth is the
``cantaloupe'' terrain that seems to cover the rest of the moon; this complex
of hills and valleys could be the result of local volcanism. Much of the
terrain is uncratered, which means that the moon is still active.
As far as is known, none of the ice worlds look completely alike. All have
their own idiosyncrasies. The ``pearls-on-a-string'' theory of ice moon
geology is utterly dead. Another matter left for consideration is that these
moons are imperfectly mapped -- some only have less than a hemisphere mapped.
Perhaps the best thing for the study of ice moons are going to be the Galileo
and Cassini rocket probes, as they will map the ice moons of Jupiter and
Saturn completely.
List of References
Briggs, G.A., & F.W. Taylor, _The Cambridge Photographic Atlas of the
Planets_, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988
Hartman, William K., & Ron Miller, _The Grand Tour_, New York: Workman
Publishing Co., Inc., 1981
Kinoshita, June, ``Neptune'', Scientific American, November, 1989
_____________________________________________________________________________
Craig Levin began to get involved in astronomy when, in second grade, he
received H.A. Rey's ``Find the Constellations'' as a birthday present. He
learned those few constellations visible from Chicago, and his interest
remained at a low level until Halley's Comet pulled him out of his freshman
high school doldrums. That January, he received his first telescope and
started up again. As a high school junior, he had his first article
published in the now-defunct Small Scope Observers' Association's newsletter,
and by his senior year in high school was helping to establish the
``Astronomical Newsletter,'' a now-defunct magazine based in Atlanta. At
present, he is a physics major at Bradley University who intends to turn his
first love, planetology, into his profession.
He can be reached at bradley!bucc2!moonman@a.cs.uiuc.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
The Rules of the Game
by Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c)1989
Silence enveloped Lirian, darkness pressed against her like a physical
blanket that soothed her muscles and clearing her mind. Relief flooded
across her. She had not been sure that she could even get here.
The darkness was not complete. Occasionally, sharp lines of blood-red
brilliance pierced it, sometimes straight and stretching forever from side to
side, more often spiraling away toward some goal that could be seen only as a
terminal dot of star-like white. Such apparitions appeared momentarily, and
then were gone. Hours passed as Lirian floated among them and slept.
She awoke later feeling better, ready for the journey to end. She called out
with her mind, and one of the spiraling red passages appeared before her.
Unlike the others, she concentrated on this one, and it grew until it
encompassed her. As she passed down it she wondered, as she always did, if
she was spinning. The spiral made it appear so, but without reference points
there was no certain way to tell.
The white star at the terminus of the spiral grew, faster and faster until it
became her entire universe, and she passed through into the light. The
magical gateway closed tightly behind her.
A brilliant sun shone warmly on her face. At last, she stood on the parched
desert of Game. Memories of this place flooded back to her from her days at
the School. She remembered the battles fought here for the great trophies,
and the other, illicit ones that were played out after hours. The School
must have known that its students came here at night, but at the time it had
seemed a great adventure. Especially, she remembered the time when she had
come to Game, and found that not apprentices, but full-fledged masters were
her opponents.
She had almost won that time, surprising herself, and was even more surprised
when the single wizard who had beaten her showed up at the School to talk to
her.
``You show a great deal of talent,'' he had said. ``No apprentice has ever
done so well before in Game with masters.''
She had been proud; even more so when the wizard made her his apprentice. It
was an honor that she should have been years from achieving, but the School
acknowledged her feat and gave its blessing. She stayed with Rosomar for
many years, and learned the perfection of her art from him. The training had
been hard, but after the first few months he was no longer so much a teacher
to her as a friend. Her magical ability expanded faster than it ever had
before. In the end, perhaps, she was a greater wizard than he was, but he was
experienced where she was not, and at the end of her apprenticeship she had
listened closely to his words.
``For all mages of great power there comes a time when their power fades.
Once simple spells become complex and difficult; even when you are sure that
the motions are right, the magic will inexplicably fail. This is a dangerous
time, for most mages who reach it forever lose their power. But when it
happens to you, as it did to me, remember this: retreat to places and
situations familiar to you. Do not give up, and always remain confident that
your abilities will return. If they do not, you are unsuited for any other
occupations-- it has taken you too long to learn magic. But if they do, you
will be more powerful than you have been before, a master among masters.''
For seven years in the wars, she remembered the words, and planned, even as
she became one of the most feared combat mages of her day. When at last her
spells had begun to fail her, Lirian sought the place most comfortable to
her, the place of childhood memories. She returned to Game.
Game was a tiny world, watched closely by whatever gods there were that still
dealt in men's affairs. Game overlapped upon itself, for a mage could walk
in a straight line and return to his starting point in about four hours.
Spaced in a circle, about four miles apart, were seven stone towers, each
three stories high. The uppermost floor of each held food and water for the
participants. Traditionally called citadels, the first seven mages to arrive
in Game appeared in them, one mage to each tower.
Between the towers were small tufts of various terrains, including hills,
forests, and deserts. The eighth mage arrived in the middle of the circle,
in a small desert. The eighth and final player was in the worst position of
them all, for he had neither the food nor protection of the towers. Usually,
this mage had to make the first move, as the others waited calmly in their
citadels.
The rules were simple. The last mage on Game won. Injury was impossible,
but the gods watched closely. Any action that would have resulted in death
to a player caused that mage to vanish from Game, otherwise unharmed. It was
thus a perfect place for apprentices to try out potentially lethal spells in
attack situations, without fearing for their own lives.
It was also, Lirian hoped, the perfect place for her to regain her spells.
She looked around and saw only desert and the surrounding hills. I am the
eighth, she thought. It depressed her for a moment, until she remembered
that she was not here to win, only to play. In fact, the challenge would
probably help.
She set out across the desert, which quickly gave way to hills hiding the
citadels from view. Lirian knew the way, however, and within an hour she lay
flat on her stomach at the top of a small hill, looking down on a stone
tower.
The structure was not impressive, about fifteen feet in diameter and maybe
thirty high. Most of its interior space was taken up by the spiral staircase
that ran steeply up the inside. However, it was a place of both concealment
and protection for a mage inside, and its magically supplied food and water
made it invaluable if a game took a long time. Sometimes, a game took weeks,
but more often only a few hours determined a winner-- in these cases, the
food was of minimal importance.
She waited, and within a few minutes a man appeared at the top of the tower,
scanning the horizon in all directions. She had not entered an apprentice's
game; his robes were the deep blue of a full wizard.
Sliding down to insure that she was not in his view, she pulled a fallen
branch toward her and began to work. Quickly, she stripped the bark from in
with a small knife, and pulled off some splinters for use later. Then she
quietly spoke a few words, made the requisite gestures, and passed her hands
rapidly over the limb.
Nothing happened, and she cursed silently to herself. Her power was ebbing
even here. A few days ago, she had practiced this spell, and it had worked
perfectly. Forcing patience, she began again. This time, the spell
triggered, and the limb stretched and bent, curving into the familiar shape
of a longbow. Not letting the spell die, she reformed the splinters she had
saved earlier until she had a small pile of arrows. A bowstring from the
same pouch that had produced the knife finished the weapon, and she lifted it
to her shoulder and pulled herself over the hilltop again.
Hidden by a bush, she nocked an arrow and waited. Most people in her
profession avoided the use of physical weapons, but Lirian had practiced the
bow for years, knowing that her spells would one day fail her. The training
would now pay off.
Eventually, the man reappeared. Lifting herself slightly, she took careful
aim. She trusted her archery skills more than she trusted her magical ones,
but she wasn't going to give the unfamiliar mage warning by missing. When he
stopped to survey his surroundings, she drew back the bowstring and fired.
The arrow struck her opponent full in the throat, and he clutched fiercely at
it for a few seconds before toppling from the citadel to the ground. Lirian,
a lifelong veteran of combat, did not feel any pity for him, only relief that
she had overcome this first obstacle. It was only when she had to step over
the body of the mage that it struck her that he was really dead. Frowning,
she dragged the body with her into the citadel, then checked him over
carefully. This was no illusion-- the mage was real, and he was dead. The
blood still trickling from his neck was red, warm, and human.
Lirian pulled the knife from her pouch, and ran it across her palm. She felt
pain, and a thin red line of blood confirmed the injury. She was no more
protected than the other mage had been. Death should have been impossible on
Game. The rules had changed, and a man had died because he didn't know.
Lirian suddenly felt very afraid; only chance had taken him instead of her.
Slowly, carefully, she attempted to cast the spell that would pull her from
Game to another world, but it failed pitifully, and she knew that she didn't
have the strength to keep trying the difficult incantation.
Leaving the body, she climbed to the top of the tower and looked out. She
saw no one, but she knew that was meaningless. Still, her anxiety subsided
slightly. She looked around, and saw the expected casks of water and chests
of preserved meats and breads. Putting aside her fears for a few minutes,
she ate and drank; she might have to stay here a long time.
When she had finished, she slung the bow over her shoulders, took some water
and jerky, and left the tower at a slow walk, constantly looking from side to
side. Her combat reflexes were back, and she was very aware that her life
was in danger. Unconsciously, her feet began to step more carefully, and the
sound of her movement died to a whisper. It took her almost three hours to
cover the four miles to the next tower, but when she reached it she was sure
that no one was following or watching her.
The citadel was apparently deserted, but she approached carefully. She
considered cloaking herself in an invisibility spell, but the power drain if
the spell failed might alert others to her presence like a beacon. So she
crept forward silent and unseen by human means, and came to the base of the
tower unharmed. Slipping inside, she immediately saw why.
A sorceress lay at the bottom of the stairs, so badly burned that her sex was
distinguishable only by the bent four-pointed emblem that she wore. The rest
of the room was scorched as well, but the damage ended in a sharp line on the
stairs as they approached the next level. If she had had any doubts
previously, the line dispelled them; the fire had not been natural.
Lirian instantly became cautious again. There was no sign that the wizard
who had caused this was still around, but the fire would have destroyed most
of the easily read traces. Chancing a spell, she tried to cast out with her
mind, seeking another living being. The power would not flow; she gave up the
effort with an inaudible sigh. Her spells were less reliable now than they
had been even a few days ago.
She took the stairs to the top floor of the tower, and cautiously peered
over. About a mile away, she saw a man walking in the direction of a tower
she had not yet visited. His pace was slow, and he seemed old or crippled,
though he had proven himself to be a threat. Descending the staircase again,
Lirian set off in quiet pursuit.
Lirian had been on Game dozens of times, for hundreds of hours. In all that
time, it had always been hot and sunny. Now, however, dark clouds were
gathering and building into thunderheads. In a few minutes, the sun was
blocked and Game was cool. The occasional sound of thunder grew gradually,
and helped hide the sound of her passage.
Within forty minutes she had the man in sight. Carefully keeping her self out
of view, she approached. His robes were bedraggled, and he walked with a
stoop as if he were ill. Once though, he turned his head to look into the
forest, and Lirian got a good look at his face-- a face she recognized.
``Rosomar!'' she shouted, and the old man turned back to look at her.
Recognition stirred in his face, the stoop disappeared. ``Lirian!''
The two mages closed the distance between each other, and Rosomar gave her a
gentle hug. His face became years younger, but whether it was an illusion
that he now wore, or one which he had dropped, Lirian did not know. The
younger face became serious.
``You know that people can die now on Game?'' He looked at her, his eyes
showing the same confusion hers had held.
``Yes,'' she said softly. ``I killed a man earlier.''
``I have killed as well. For real. It is the first time.'' Lirian
remembered her first kill. It had not been easy for her, either. Rosomar
had never been a combat mage-- his skills had always been used in teaching
and tricks. The wars held no glory for him; he saw every slain man or woman
as a potential apprentice wasted.
``So what do we do?'' she said, not really changing the subject.
``We leave Game as soon as possible. It's too dangerous to be here,
especially if not everyone knows they can be killed. Some might enjoy the
challenge anyway.''
Most of them would, Lirian thought, but she did not say it. Instead: ``Take
me with you. My magic isn't good enough right now to remove a toad from
Game, much less myself.'' Rosomar looked her over carefully. ``So it has
happened to you at last. Don't despair. It might come back.''
They were not exactly the words she wanted to hear, but Rosomar managed to
make them sound comforting. He lifted his arms to the sky, brought them
down, and began a soft chant. The words were melodious, and full of power.
Even Lirian's diminished powersense could feel the energy flowing from his
spell. The soft enfolding darkness fell about them-- and shattered.
The look of surprise on Rosomar's face made the slight jolt worthwhile, but
Lirian didn't understand, and told him so.
``We can't leave,'' he said unsteadilly. ``They won't let us.''
``They?'' she asked.
``I don't know. The gods, probably. Maybe just a powerful mage. Something
is keeping us here.''
``Then we're trapped?'' There was an edge of fear to her voice. Her
absolute faith in Rosomar's power had been shattered with his spell, and with
it went her confidence.
``Quite probably. At least for the time being.'' He paused, considering.
``We should find the others and warn them of their danger.'' He spoke
uncertainly, as if he wanted her to disagree.
She didn't. There was nowhere else for her to go. They might as well
attempt some good while they were here. Together, they set off for the next
tower.
A few heavy drops of rain fell, then stopped, then the storm was upon them.
Lirian succeeded in putting up a simple spell to keep the rain off them, but
even so, their footing was unsure. Within minutes, vision had dropped to a
few feet, and the two mages crawled along at a snail's pace. After three
hours, Rosomar stopped.
``We may have missed the citadel in the rain. Maybe we should stay here
until it lets up.''
Rosomar dried out a small area, and Lirian extended her spell over it. The
two of them lay down and waited for the storm to end.
The heavy rain was a featureless grey, and although the water would not run
through their protected zone, it washed and splashed against the non-physical
wall they had erected, leaving drops and rivulets in the air, muddy streams
carrying sand and leaves on the ground. The sound drowned out all attempts
at conversation between the two mages. Once, a tree fell and they had to
move their haven a few feet further away. From time to time lightning filled
the sky, and they could see the forest around them, and the thousands of
raindrops, frozen in the air for a moment by the sudden light.
It took almost four hours for the rain to let up enough to allow travel.
Rosomar and Lirian slept lightly for a time, then rose and started moving
again. Soon it was dry enough that Lirian could recognize their position,
and a few minutes travel brought them in sight of the next tower.
A blast of flame from the top of the citadel told them that it was still
occupied. Rosomar shouted loudly ``Stop that! We need to talk! You are not
protected!''
The flame did not return, and the two mages approached. A woman appeared on
the top of the tower, hands at her side, waiting. Not until they had covered
half the distance to the citadel did she move. Both mages saw the motion
begin, and began protective spells, but Rosomar's went up a split second too
late. He spun in wild pain for a few seconds before the flames consumed him
completely.
Lirian screamed a curse that would have gotten her expelled from the School,
but it was not as strong as the anger she felt. ``He came to talk, and you
killed him!'' She was angry and grief-stricken, but not stupid enough to let
her own defense down. When the second blast struck her, she felt the
protective spell weaken, and knew it couldn't survive another. Quickly,
while the flames still gave her cover, she fitted an arrow to her bow and let
it fly.
The wet bowstring caused the arrow to stray from its mark, but not by enough
to save the sorceress in the tower. She took the arrow in her left arm,
destroying the spell she had just begun, and Lirian's second struck true. The
woman crumpled.
Lirian turned to examine Rosomar; only charred ashes remained. The rain was
washing these away as well. Choking, she said a brief eulogy for him, then
climbed the tower.
The sorceress was still alive, though barely so. Certainly she was no longer
capable of casting spells, and carried no visible weapons. Lirian knelt at
her side when she began to speak.
``I had to do it, you know. He won't let us leave until only one is left. I
tried to kill you, and failed. But I saved you the pain of killing your
companion yourself.''
``He?'' Lirian asked, ignoring the rest of the woman's statement. ``Who
won't let us leave?''
``You don't know, then? I'll tell you. Maybe you can escape. I didn't have
the power. Gruenfeld is here. He is one of the participants.''
Lirian's half-forgotten fear returned. ``Gruenfeld? The god? He's here on
Game?''
The sorceress looked directly at her. ``Gruenfeld is here. There are no
gods, though, just a man who has learned the limits of his power. But he is
greater than either of us. He cannot be killed, and absolutely controls the
weather of Game. He forbids us from leaving, and watches us kill one another
for his own amusement. He can be the only winner of this game.''
Lirian's anger had abated considerably. ``Then I won't play by his rules,
will I?'' The question was more to herself than the sorceress, but the
wounded woman smiled anyhow. Lirian pulled the arrow from her arm and began
a healing spell. It failed twice, but she kept trying, and eventually the
blood flow stopped. The sorceress's other wound presented less difficulty.
``It will take a while before you can cast spells again,'' Lirian commented.
``There's food and water here. When you can, heal yourself, but don't come
after me.'' She didn't add what she was thinking. I'll be dead by then
anyway.
Lirian descended the tower without looking back. She was not at all sure
that the sorceress would live, and even less sure that she cared. Placing
her bow over her shoulder, she set off toward the next citadel, already
knowing what she would find there.
She was not disappointed. As she came over a small hill, she saw the tower
lying in ruins, the bodies of two men lying in the rubble. That makes seven,
she thought. And Gruenfeld is eight. All the players have made their moves.
A few seconds later, the god himself strode around the tower.
``Come on down!'' he shouted. ``No point in prolonging this game any longer
than we have to, is there?'' His voice was firm and sure, and he looked
directly at her as he spoke. The voice carried power, and she took a step
toward him before breaking the spell. Then she dropped and rolled.
The blast she had expected did not come. Gruenfeld laughed loudly, with a
touch of malice. Lirian knocked an arrow and fired, and had the next one on
the bow before the first had traveled half the distance to the god.
Gruenfeld brought his arm up in a single gesture of defiance, and both arrows
vanished, followed by the bow. ``No,'' he said. ``I do not choose to die
today.'' His next gesture almost caught Lirian by surprise, but at the last
second she brought up a protective spell and leapt to the side. The spell
failed, but she was far enough away when the flames struck that she received
only minor burns.
The god was undaunted. ``Very impressive spell you cast,'' he mocked.
``Could you show me how to do it some time?'' Suddenly, he took Lirian's
blast full in the chest. She relaxed slightly, then screamed in pain as a
hail of small sharp spikes went through her left leg.
``Silly apprentice,'' the god said calmly. ``Do you think such as me would
even notice your small effort? You do not know much of gods. I shall
endeavor to teach you.'' He brought his hands up, again and again, and
Lirian found herself unable to do anything but dodge and try to defend. Her
spells failed her altogether, and she could not walk on her leg. Eventually,
she fell and could not get up. The god vanished, and appeared behind her.
``This game has gone on long enough. I declare myself the winner.'' He
moved his hands like lightning; Lirian could hardly have moved in time if she
had been uninjured. Fire and pain became her world. Darkness descended, but
it was broken by thoughts and tiny spots of light.
A god is nothing but a man who knows the limits of his power. Lirian knew
her own limits. They had been set by the rules of the sorcery she practiced,
reinforced by the instruction of her teacher. Knows the limits of his own
power. The rules of magic could not change. Gruenfeld's power could not
exist; all the laws of power forbade it. Then why have I lost my spells?
She knew. With a sudden absolute certainty, she knew where her power had
gone. She had learned magic until she thought she had reached its limits.
Any more would be impossible, too powerful, forbidden by the rules of the
game. But the rules were wrong. Since Gruenfeld existed, the power must
exist. Rosomar had given her a hint of it, once: If your magic comes back,
you will be a more powerful mage than ever before. But Rosomar hadn't known.
He had merely allowed a slight increase in ability by altering his rules.
Lirian eliminated hers.
In the half of a second that it had taken for realization to come,
Gruenfeld's magic had destroyed most of her body. She had no arms, no legs,
nothing with which to cast spells. It didn't matter. The magic flowed free,
power coursing through her mind like water through a broken dam. Her body
repaired itself, and she gathered and magnified Gruenfeld's fire, turning it
back upon the unsuspecting god. In a moment he was just a man, if he had
ever been anything else. His power was enormous, but his mind could not
conceive of another living being matching it. Unready for a response,
Gruenfeld did not even try to defend against her. In another moment, he
ceased to exist.
Game shook with Lirian's magic as she brought it back under control, and she
finally realized her full power. Everything lay bare to her, every tree and
citadel on Game, as well as the other worlds which lay outside. Reaching out
with her mind, she located the sorceress on the tower, and healed her
completely. There was no reason for hostility any longer-- Rosomar was dead
beyond even Lirian's ability to bring him back; the sorceress still had a
chance at life. ``Go home,'' Lirian whispered kindly, and knew that the
sorceress heard her across the distance. ``Gruenfeld is dead.''
Then she turned her mind to Game. At her whim, a soft white snow began to
fall, covering the carnage of the last few hours. It would take a lot of
work to restore Game to what it had been.
Lirian knew that she could do it. Restoring worlds was, after all, the work
of a goddess.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a Computer Science graduate student at Oregon State
University. His interests include writing, computers, magic, juggling,
bridge, and other games, not necessarily in that order. His major goal in
life is to become a professional student, a goal which he is rapidly
attaining.
He can be reached at kempkec@ure.cs.orst.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
Interference
by Bruce Altner
Copyright (c)1989
I am slowly going bananas in this suffocating little room. ``Let us out! Let
us out! Let us out!'' shriek the blades of the battered fan, clanking
rhythmically against their prison of dented wire and trying in vain to stir
up a breeze in the soupy air. Izzy Arnold's boom box blasts out an endless
stream of chicken-shit music from the concrete stoop five floors below and a
bunch of snot-nosed kids are playing noisily in the vacant lot across the
street. No wonder I'm accomplishing el zilcho on the dissertation today.
The integrals don't converge, the model is crude, I'm sick to death of it and
it's all a pile of crap anyway. I mean, who gives a damn about the connection
between convective dredge-up and stellar abundance anomalies? Not me, that's
for sure, and it's MY dissertation. Izzy, Izzy, you don't know how close to
death you are at this moment, you meathead.
It's useless. I open my third and last can of Coors and go to the window,
which is stuck open almost halfway by layer upon layer of dull green paint.
Perhaps if I try hard enough I can conjure up an icy mountain stream or a
pine forest, deep, cool, and silent except for the muted sound of my passage
along the thick carpet of needles, the fragrance of resin. But no such luck.
Across the street is a small abandoned lot, strewn with large boulders and
chunks of concrete, broken glass and weeds. My fantasy pine glade is nothing
but a few scraggly trees that have somehow managed to maintain a foothold in
the packed, sandy soil, and the rising currents of hot air bring to my
nostrils the mingled aromas of frying onions and uncollected garbage.
Mercifully, the cacaphonous squawkings from Izzy's stereo fade as he and his
friends boogey on down the sidewalk toward the corner delicatessen, where
they will probably hang out until dinnertime. As the raucous noise fades so
does some of my irritation, and even the kids playing their stupid kids'
games among the rocks and broken beer bottles don't annoy me as much as they
did just a few moments ago. It's not their fault that this seedy lot is the
closest thing to a playground that they have. Surprised, I find myself
humming a few bars from Cat Stevens' _Where Do the Children Play?_ Well, I
was a bratty kid myself, once upon a time. If I try very hard I can recall
some pleasant moments from my early years---it wasn't all fighting with my
sister and brother, and hating school, and being told you shouldn't do this
and you shouldn't do that and you'd better buckle down or you'll never go to
college and why are you so moody, Jackie my boy? But mostly it WAS those
things, and feeling angry and misunderstood. Well, here I am, stuck in this
lousy sweatbox with no more beer in the refrigerator, with six years of my
life spent studying physics so that I can author some useless treatise on
stellar evolution (which no one will ever read), and across the street there
are these kids who don't know a lick about mixing length theory or roundoff
error, who don't seem to be affected by the heat and who, dammit, seem to be
having a hell of a lot more fun than I ever had as a kid. With a shock of
honesty, I realize that I am envious. From my lofty perch five floors above
and twenty years beyond them I view the world in a light so totally alien to
theirs that I may as well be from another planet. Why ARE you so moody, Jack?
Finally, the heat gets to me and I must brave the street to fetch another
six-pack. The elevator deposits me in the lobby, cavernous and dimly lit,
smelling faintly of cats and laundry soap. I linger by my mailbox, scanning
the junk mail and savoring a last moment of coolness---but if I hang around
too long I'll most likely run into Mrs. Gunderson. I am in no mood today to
suffer her inexhaustible supply of complaints and sad tribulations.
Leaving the building, I notice that there are eight or ten kids in the lot
across the street, each perched atop one of the many large boulders scattered
among the weeds. I recognize some of them from my walks through the
neighborhood. The girl on the largest boulder is Hector Munoz's ten year old,
Ana. She has long, dark hair and a pretty, though serious, no-nonsense face.
Hector had come to repair a leak in the kitchen plumbing not too long ago and
he had brought her along. ``Would you like some milk and cookies while your
father works on the faucet?'' I had offered, just trying to be nice, but I
was answered with a hard, unsmiling look. ``Ana is a better plumber than I
am,'' Hector had said, winking conspiratorially, but from her reaction I knew
that I had just been dismissed as another dumb adult who probably thought
that girls should stay at home and play with dolls and learn how to sew.
These kids are putting an enormous amount of energy into their game, whatever
it is, wailing like the Banshee herself and waving sticks through the torpid
air. The sight stops me in momentary amazement. One of them sees me and
calls out to the others---an intruder, a spy in the camp! But no, what's
this? Expecting hostile faces, I am surprised when some of the youngsters
laugh and wave. Two boys clamber down from their boulders and come running
over. I recognize them now as the Peterson twins from apartment 5-E. I have
played handball with their father once or twice, though you could hardly call
us friends. One of them looks up at me, squinting in the harsh sunlight.
``Could you be Gordon the Terrible?'' he pleads. ``Could you?'' Is he really
asking me to join their game? This is absurd.
``Gordon who?'' I laugh, playing along for the moment.
``Gordon Samatar!'' pipes in the other, mock fear in his voice. ``Gordon
the Terrible, we call him. He's the bad guy, the leader of the Black
Knights!''
Again I surprise myself. Instead of immediately refusing, telling them I'm
too busy with this or that, I hesitate. This is a mistake, for kids are
experts at the game of badgering weak-willed adults. ``It's pretty hot out
here,'' I offer lamely.
One of the boys (I don't remember their names and can't tell them apart
anyway) points to a large, soot-blackened boulder in the slightly elevated
southern corner of the lot, well separated from the other rocks and in the
partial shade of a few scrub oak. ``That's his horse,'' he insists, brushing
away my objection. ``All you gotta do is sit on that rock. Please!''
Well, why not? All I had really wanted was relief from the closeness of my
four walls. The work on the dissertation was going nowhere anyway, and the
trip to the deli for beer was probably just an excuse to get out and move
around. Did I really want to play Darth Vader in silly a kids' game, though?
Feeling just a little dumb I say, ``Okay, boys, I guess I have a few
minutes.''
``No! We don't want him. He'll ruin the game!'' Ana Munoz jumps down from
her boulder and rushes over to us, her inky black hair streaming behind her
as she runs, her angry eyes blazing with unexpected fury. Why does this girl
hate me so? Just because I offered her cookies, once upon a time? It is
obviously time for me to leave.
``Ana, shut up!'' says her brother, Lu`is, who has come running after her.
He is somewhat younger than his sister but slightly taller. ``Mister, don't
pay any attention to her. Just `cause she's the queen when we play she thinks
she's the boss all the time. No way, Jos`e.''
The last thing I want is to be in the middle of a bunch of bickering kids,
especially as the focus of their disagreement. The girl is right, though---I
am already ruining their game. Like the scientist who wants only to observe
nature, but who must always interact with it in order to do so, all I had
done was stop for a moment to watch and now here I am in the thick of it. I
start to back away, ignorant of the crimes I am guilty of in that child's
eyes. But suddenly I am overcome by a long-forgotten bitterness, and the
wishy-washy texture of my retreat begins to rankle.
``Just how will I ruin your game, Ana?'' I demand. ``Some of your friends
seem to want me in it.''
A puzzled expression steals across her face. She looks at me more carefully,
as if she were seeing me for the first time. ``Maybe you WOULD make a good
Gordon Samatar,'' she says, but there is a note of disbelief in her voice.
After a moment she turns to the others, her mind made up. ``Go to your
horses, all of you,'' she commands, and they obey, running back to their
rocks and mounting them in elaborate pantomime. So, she's going to let me
play in their stupid game after all. Lucky me. See Jack play, see Ana scowl,
see funny funny Sally. She turns back to me and points to the large boulder
under the oak trees. ``That is Samatar's horse, the Black Stallion. The
other horses fear him almost as much as we fear the Destroyer himself.''
``It just looks like a big rock to me,'' I say, realizing too late that if I
am going to continue this silliness I should really play along. ``Anyway,
what are the rules of this game? What's so evil about this
Gor-Don-the-Ter-Rib-Bull?'' I speak the villain's name in tones of
exaggerated awe and dread. Get into the spirit of the thing, Jack.
Her eyes narrow to tiny slits. ``I guess I was right about you the first
time,'' she says. There is a long, uncomfortable pause, but Ana eventually
decides that she is willing to tolerate my stupidity for the sake of having a
villain in the game and avoiding another rebellion against her authority.
``If you PRETEND that it's a horse, it will BE a horse,'' she snaps,
impatient at the need to point out the obvious to morons. ``There are no
rules. Once you mount the Black Stallion you will know all you need to
know---all your questions about Gordon Samatar will be answered.'' She turns
away, moving with unquestionable dignity toward her ``horse,'' an orange and
white block of sandstone. She mounts in one swift, fluid motion and raises
her hand high in the air. ``Let the game begin!''
* * *
I am sitting on a rock---a large black boulder with a natural saddle-like
depression. It is still hot but the sun is noticeably lower in the sky and is
no longer so fierce. This is a very boring game, so far. Ana had said my
questions would be answered when I ``mount the Black Stallion,'' but to date
not a whole lot has happened. Do I have to wait for Tinkerbell to come along
and sprinkle pixie dust on me? Pretend, she had said, pretend. Well, that's
something I haven't done for a very long time.
From my slightly elevated position the kids look farther away than they
really are. The shrill screams of their earlier play are gone; they speak in
hushed whispers if they speak at all. I can now see that Ana's rock is at the
head of a wedge-shaped formation pointing more or less toward this hill. They
are all bouncing about on their rocks and have been for some time; from this
I gather that the whole formation is supposed to be in motion. Perhaps I am
being attacked. This goes on a while longer, a real action game. What am I
DOING here? Wasn't I on my way to get another six-pack?
My head is feeling very heavy with the heat and the brew. More minutes pass
and I look down at my watch to check the time. Sunlight reflects softly
green-gold through the leaves on the burnished metal of my sword. Heads will
roll at the touch of this blade before this day is done, I swear it. Ano`jas
snorts his impatience and digs at the earth with his great hooves. I lean
forward slightly in the saddle to quiet him.... and I clutch frantically at
the rock's rough surface, fighting the sudden vertigo and disorientation.
The coolness of the boulder reassures me; it is just a rock, solid, massive
and immobile, not a prancing, wild-blooded stallion. But just for a moment
there, a flicker of..., something. Ano`jas? The horse's name is Ano`jas. How
do I know that?
Ana signals and the kids stop their ludicrous rock bouncing act. Across the
distance I hear one of them call out softly, ``Whoa, boy!'' Lenora dismounts
and calls to her lieutenant. There they confer long moments, examining the
ground, scanning the low hills, testing the wind. From the mixture of colors
among the horse soldier's garments I deduce that up to three separate
villages have united under her in this foolish attempt to oppose me. Why do
you hesitate, Lenora? What does that sixth sense of yours tell you I have up
my sleeve? But she is no fool, this one they call Queen; she will not ride
into my trap.
I can see now that this little rebellion may not be as simple to stamp out as
the others have been. Many of my own soldiers will die today before I have
her head on the victory pole, but I care not how many---a thousand would be a
small price to pay for the joy of watching that head shrivel in the sun. I
draw my sword from its scabbard.... but again the ground leaps toward me and
I tumble from my perch, the horrid image of Ana's dried up little prune face
still before my eyes. The moment of dizziness passes, leaving me more
confused than injured.
It's just a game, I tell myself, just a kid's game. But it all seems so real!
By rights, I should be scared to death, but a tingle of excitement overrides
the fear and I thrill to the vividness of what I've just experienced.
Violent? Yes! Evil? You bet---Gordon ``the Terrible'' is definitely
well-named. I should know, for I see into him, I am him. Sure, somebody's
got to play the heavy, that doesn't bother me. What matters most is that I
haven't felt this free in a long time, so close to finding something I
thought I'd lost forever. Why haven't I noticed before the intensity of
colors around me, the brilliant green of leaves against the deep blue sky,
the dazzling white clouds.
How can this be happening, I wonder. But then, not really wanting or needing
explanations, I climb back onto Ano`jas, eagerly anticipating the
continuation of the game, the transformation of an inert and shapeless stone
into a magnificent and powerful beast, so marvelously alive. I see Lenora
and her soldiers advancing up the hill on foot, swords poised and ready. They
are almost to the top now, the moment of truth is near. Lenora.... no, wait,
it is Ana, it is just Ana...., and the flashing swords are merely branches in
the hands of children. Come on, Jack, pretend! Suddenly, I become aware of a
disturbance at my back and I turn, startled. It's Izzy and his friends,
taking a shortcut through the lot back to the apartment building.
``Hey, Jack, how ya doin', man?'' Izzy yells, waving as he passes. He
thoughtfully cranks the volume of his stereo way up so that I can jive right
along with him and his boys. Two of the kids break off from Ana's troop at
his call to come home for dinner.
As the wake of Izzy's passing subsides, I become aware that my rear end hurts
a great deal from sitting too long on the cold and unyielding stone. There is
a momentary feeling of loss as I realize that the game is over. So soon? The
rest of the kids begin to drift away, each to his or her own home and family
situation, their own unique heaven or hell. The Peterson twins shout a
friendly goodbye and I am surprised that there is no hint of rancor in their
cheery faces, no accusation that I have ruined their game.
It is time for me to leave also, yet I feel a need to linger a few moments
more, to look around one last time, as if to check that nothing important is
left behind. Something does seem to be missing, though I can't put a name to
it. Ana and Lu`is walk with me down the hill, along the shortcut back to the
building. Broken beer bottles and crushed cigarette packages litter the
rutted path and point the way, the crumbs of modern day Hansels and Gretls.
Lu`is shows me the scar on his knee where five stitches had been needed to
repair the damage from a fall among the bottles. ``Teresa Marguiles pushed
me,'' he says, then adds proudly, ``and you shoulda seen the job Ana did on
her!'' and I am glad for them that, despite their bickering, they are close
to each other.
There is nothing of the earlier animosity in Ana's face as she and Lu`is wave
goodbye and enter the building. If nothing else, there is now one less person
in the world who hates me, and for me that's a significant accomplishment.
But actually, there is more, lots more. For the briefest of moments there
had been a tunnel, and through that tunnel I had glimpsed something of
myself. Obvious, but never seen so clearly before, it is something that I
think helps me to understand the anger. That's a strong dose of insight for
one afternoon and it might take a long while for me to understand what it all
really means.
I sit down on the front steps, grateful for the dinner-time lull in the
diurnal rhythm of life that now gives me a few moments for quiet reflection.
A gentle breeze has kicked up and it feels good on my neck, cool and soft.
Orange sunlight swirls in rainbow ribbons on the surface of a curbside puddle
and I am aware of the beauty within its ugliness. ``It's just interference
within the layers of oil floating on the surface,'' I might have said
yesterday, neatly wrapping it up, cataloging my experiences to fit on the
ordered shelves of my rational world. Tonight, I feel differently.
Interference -- in-ter-fear-ence -- I roll the word over and over on my
tongue like a mantra, until it becomes more than just a label. Like me, the
sunlight is unable to pass through without joining the game---it has no
choice but to interact with the world within and around it.
Speaking of interacting with the world, what I'd better do is get on down to
the deli before it closes and pick up something for my own dinner. Now that
it's cooled down a little, maybe I can get some work done on the
dissertation.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Altner received his PhD in physics last year (Rutgers University), and the
story presented above was written in the early stages of his dissertation
work. He is now an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt,
MD), working on projects involving the International Ultraviolet Explorer and
the High Resolution Spectrograph (which is one of the six scientific
instruments to fly on the Hubble Space Telescope, to be launched at the end
of March, 1990). For relaxation he writes, draws silly cartoons (his
favorite comic strip is Bill Waterson's "Calvin and Hobbes"), swims, and
plays ice hockey and tennis. He lives with his wife, who also writes fiction,
a worthless cat and a frisbee-loving dog, in suburban MD.
He can be reached at altner%champ.span@star.stanford.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
Dinner At Nestrosa's
by Faye Levine
Copyright (c)1989
Seated alone at his table in the restaurant, Fleet Captain Quarq sipped at
his water as his eyes scanned the menu. Nestrosa's was a classy place, with
all-real, classy food and classy patrons, but although being a senior War
Council member earned him the right to dine there, Quarq did not feel the
part of a classy guy.
He was not sure why he had come that evening. True, he loved the pure,
culinary enjoyment and almost primitive appeal that could only come from
attacking a juicy, fleshy steak of real meat from some poor dead herd animal
slaughtered somewhere on the wide ranges of Planet Druusca, but tonight he
for some reason found himself yearning to be dressed in his battered fatigues
with his feet up on the table, enjoying a huge malt in a greasy fast food
joint.
``Would you care to order now, sir?'' said a cultured voice at his side.
Coming out of his thoughts, he saw one of the waiters standing patiently at
his table, pen and order pad at the ready.
``Sure,'' he replied. ``I'll have the steak.''
``And would you like anything to drink, sir?''
The captain was tempted to ask for a malt, just to see what the waiter's
reaction would be, then changed his mind and replied, ``Give me a
twelve-year, straight up, no ice.''
``Very good, sir,'' said the waiter. He picked up the menu and headed for
the kitchen.
Quarq leaned back in his chair and stared out one of Nestrosa's huge view
windows. It overlooked the surrounding area of the Capitol District, an area
filled with subtly-lit theaters, hotels, business towers, and government
offices. Off to one side, the evening lights sparkled on the waters of the
local reservoir.
Gazing a little farther, the captain's eyes skirted the fringes of the
wealthy sector, where the moderately affluent, including himself, made their
homes. He lived in a moderately-sized, comfortable building, in the least
elaborate, most standard apartment he could find, which was still too large
and too done up for his tastes. His eyes traveled still farther into the
distance, where he could make out the shrinking band of middle class
neighborhoods he had come from. He would have rather lived there, among
familiar faces and places, but his rank forced him to remain within a
specified radius of the Imperial Grounds. He would have even almost
preferred standard officer's quarters on the local Space Navy base to his
current residence, but such uncouth behavior was simply not permitted from a
Fleet Captain.
His peers never could quite grasp his discomfort with high society; they
wondered why a man with his size paycheck was living in such ``humble''
accommodations and eating standard synthetic food when he could very easily
afford much more. As far as they were concerned, they, as well as he, had
earned the right to the good life and all of its privileges.
What it all amounted to in the end was that Quarq did not care for frivolity.
He saw no need to invest in twenty- year-old fashion model girlfriends, art
he had no appreciation for, fancy stocks, top-level credit cards, designer
clothes, and ultra-luxury hovercars (his own was a standard ten-year-old with
a peeling paint job and distressed landing gear; his superior made him park
it out of sight in order to avoid terminal embarrassment). There was only
one frivolous activity he partook in, and that was the upkeep of his smoking
habit.
He would without a second thought spend a minimum of 12,000 firas for a dozen
smoke sticks, imported from one of the other planets in the Empire. That was
for merchandise of the lowest standard of quality, considered ordinary
cigarettes on their world of origin. His real passion, however, was found in
the fragrant leaves of ``his'' brand, one of superior taste and quality, hand
rolled and extra long. For this rarely-imported pleasure he would pay
anywhere from 5000 to 10,000 firas a shot, depending on whether he obtained
them on the market, by special order, or by somewhat more unorthodox means.
He was rarely short on supply; he had good connections. Everyone else he
knew thought he was crazy for continuing with a habit the general populace
had considered too expensive and unhealthy to keep up decades ago. His peers
found the smoke sticks nothing but a waste of money; it was not a liquid
asset like a car or a piece of art, and once you used it, it was gone
forever. Quarq would merely reply that smoking gave him a unique
satisfaction, while fancy apartments full of material wealth did not, and
what made him happy, not them happy, was what mattered to him.
Despite the frivolity of his habit, he was not frivolous in its use. A dozen
smoke sticks would normally last him for months; he was a disciplined man who
stuck to his self- imposed ``one-at-the-end-of-the-week-only'' rule
exceptionally well.
The waiter returned with his drink and set it down on the table. As Quarq
sipped at it, he saw a large group of young men, accompanied by a girl who
seemed rather uncomfortable in her high heels and sequined dress, arrive at
the reception desk and announce that they were the Sarq Artists and Art
Appreciation Club. The headwaiter located their name in his reservation book
and escorted them to a large table set off to one side. Quarq watched as the
group was led across the restaurant floor. It was led by two people in
particular: one, an effeminately handsome man of indeterminate age; the other
was the tallest drinking straw the captain had ever seen. He snorted and
took another mouthful of his drink. Artists.
As he watched the unusual bunch assemble, he smiled faintly (it was indeed a
smile; one had to be careful when interpreting Quarq's facial expressions, as
a scar, partially obscured by his moustache and running parallel to his upper
lip, pulled at the right corner of his mouth, often making it appear as if he
were sneering). Goddamn rich brats, he thought, I don't see you getting
drafted. Indeed, he assumed, these were privileged children. He wondered
how often the family servants put non-synthetic or prime synthetic food on
their tables, while the majority of the populace was reared on overpriced,
standard synthetic foodstuffs.
His personal waiter returned, set a steak down in front of him, and, after
being told that no, Quarq did not care for anything more, thank you, left
without a word. The captain stared at the steak and began to feel guilty.
Guilty and ashamed for thinking hypocritical thoughts and taking advantage of
the privileged life. His appetite vanished. He sat staring at his dinner
for a long time. He began to think of the war in Thy, and the food shortages
it had caused here in the Capitol District. He recalled that another member
of the War Council had joked earlier in the day that perhaps if they waited
long enough, the local revolutionaries would starve themselves out of
existence.
As he continued to stare at the steak he sneered (this time it was quite
obviously a sneer, one quite frightfully enhanced by the very same scar which
had skewed his smile) in disgust, both at himself and at the state of things
in general. He decided he would eat the steak, but only because in this day
and age it was a sin to waste food. He would force himself to eat his meal,
to swallow his hypocrisy. And when he had choked down the last detestable
bite he would vow never to come to this or any privilege-class restaurant,
and never to eat real food again.
He started on his dinner, eating it slowly, looking at it as little as
possible. He ordered several more drinks. He also continued to observe the
artists' club.
He noticed that, over the course of a couple of hours, they had ordered just
about everything on the menu; the multi-course meals, the fresh breads and
hot soups, salads tossed with fresh greens and other vegetables (a rare and
expensive treat), the finest wines in the house. Then, just when it seemed
they had finally gorged themselves, they asked for the dessert menu.
This is some club banquet, Quarq thought, and chuckled. Wait til their
parents get their credit card bills.
As the group worked their way through a multitude of desserts, various club
members began to deliver speeches. Although no one else in Nestrosa's paid
them any heed, Quarq struggled to listen. Oddly, he found that most of the
orations were seemingly nonsensical, almost ridiculous. And now, was he
imagining things, or was that queer-looking fellow telling the human straw
and several others about the relationship between hovercar mechanics and
interior design?
Quarq frowned, finished off his drink, and surveyed the array of empty
glasses on both his and the artists' tables. He came to three conclusions.
Either he did not know a meaningful conversation on modern art when he heard
it, the kids were drunk, or he was drunk. Probably more than one of the
above.
After a while, one of the waiters approached the artists' table and inquired
if they were done. The effeminate replied that they were. ``And how would
you care to pay?'' the waiter then asked.
``Well, gosh, sir,'' the walking straw replied, ``I seem to have forgotten my
wallet.''
``Me too,'' chimed in several of the others.
The waiter looked annoyed. ``How would you care to pay?'' he repeated.
``We wouldn't,'' said the effeminate artist, and pulled a gun on the man. At
his table, Quarq arched his eyebrows and tried to hold back a laugh. His
mouth curved into a crooked, tight-lipped smile. For some reason he found
the idea of a prissy queer holding up a waiter quite amusing.
``I say, sir!'' yelped the poor waiter as his antagonist gripped him in a
headlock. The drinking straw pulled a compact laser sub-machine gun from his
jacket and fired off several shots at the ceiling. A large crystal
chandelier plummeted down into the seafood tank. The patrons screamed.
``Whoops,'' said the straw, looking a bit sheepish.
Unable to hold back any longer, Captain Quarq doubled over and began to
laugh.
``NOBODY MOVE!'' the straw bellowed as he recovered from his embarrassment.
Behind him, the rest of the ``club members'' pulled weapons from beneath
their jackets. The young lady reached into her dress and produced a small
handgun from the cleft between her breasts.
When Quarq saw this his eyes began to water. He nearly fell off of his
chair.
Several of the young men ran into the kitchen and shooed out the cooks. When
they, along with the waiters and the manager, had been gathered together at
the center of the floor, the tall, skinny youth spoke up again.
``Alright... take-out crew: kitchenward... march!'' he snapped. Half a dozen
of his fellows disappeared into the kitchen.
``W-wait a minute--'' began the manager.
``Shut up! All of you, shut up!'' (Somehow, Quarq managed to contain
himself.) ``Now listen: we don't want to hurt anyone, so don't try anything.
While my friends are busy in the kitchen, the rest of us will relieve you of
your jewelry, watches, credit cards, money--hic!--size sixteen- and-a-half
narrow shoes, and your firstborn children. You will be generous. Is that
clear?''
A small, nervous-looking fellow leaned close to the straw. ``You never said
anything about robbing them!'' he hissed.
``Shuddup, Flarax. Go cover those tables over there.'' The other
reluctantly did as he was told.
As the Sarq's Artists and Art Appreciation Club proceeded to collect the
patrons' valuables (as well their unfinished bottles of champagne and wine),
Quarq began to take more careful notice of the youths' appearances. With the
exception of the girl and the effeminate man, most of them seemed gaunt and
tired. His smirk momentarily faded as he recalled for a second time what his
comrade had said: if we wait long enough, the revolutionaries will starve
themselves out of existence.
The captain's weathered face softened. The poor kids. They may be on the
wrong track but they've got guts and spunk. I'll at least give them credit
for that.
Meanwhile, the young man who had been called Flarax, not so much nervous as
ticked off now, sighed as he slowly paced the floor. As he passed Quarq's
table for a third time, he halted, turned, and took keen notice of the man.
He stared at the captain, his eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed in thought.
There was something intriguing about this person, something about the face
which might have been handsome if it were not so weathered, something about
the narrow moustache broken up by so many scars it seemed scraggly.
The captain stared back. Flarax did not like this. The older man's gaze
chilled him. His right eye was a deep golden hue, sharp with intelligence,
but the left... The young man shuddered. The iris was slightly misshapen,
pale yellow about the edges, the color fading to nearly white in the center.
The pupil was askew, fixed to a small, hazy opening.
``Yes?'' Quarq asked slowly, smiling a bit (although to Flarax it was an evil
sneer which perfectly complimented the eye). The captain studied the boy.
So this is one of those local terrorists, eh? He certainly did not seem like
a subversive killer. Then again, Quarq did not believe most of the
revolutionaries to be subversive, bloodthirsty killers to begin with. The
youth was small, a little on the scrawny side, with a pleading expression and
a baby face topped with unruly curls. He seemed to be the sort of young man
high school girls would deem ``So-o-o-o-o cute!''
``Uh ... '' Flarax began. Not knowing what else to say, he replied,
``Have--have we met?''
The captain blinked slowly. ``I don't think so,'' he responded blandly.
``Oh.'' A pause. ``Uh ... got any, you know, valuables?''
``Nope.''
``Money?''
``Credit card, but it's got an unauthorized user code. If I call it in to
the credit company, and then you try to use it in the store, the register
alarms'll go off, and your ass'll be fried.'' Quarq paused, then added,
``Besides, I have to pay for my meal, kid.''
``Yeah, okay,'' Flarax replied distantly, and sighed again. He stood
silently, his weapon at the ready.
Presently the young men who had invaded the kitchen emerged, carrying
sackloads of food over their shoulders.
``No, no ... ,'' the manager groaned.
``Yes, yes,'' the human straw replied. ``Alright, people!'' he cried,
speaking up to the patrons again, ``Thank you very, very much for the lovely
meals, the cash, and all your little baubles.'' He stopped to take a swig
from a bottle of wine. ``Anyway,'' he went on, returning his attention to
the crowd, ``We'd love to stay and chat, but we really must be going. We
have art to appreciate, you know. I don't recommend you following us.'' He
waved his arm and the other revolutionaries gathered at the exit, covering
the crowd. ``Goodnight, folks--it's been lovely.'' He headed toward the
door with the effeminate man, who paused to pinch the cheek of the headwaiter
on his way out.
Once they were gone, the manager sprang into action. ``You there!'' he
snapped, ``Call the police! And you lot--go look out the windows and see if
you can spot their vehicles!'' His eyes pinpointed Quarq at the far end of
the room. Being familiar with most of the military officers who frequented
Nestrosa's, he quickly approached the captain. ``Captain Quarq, sir!'' he
snapped, ``Those were those revolutionary scoundrels, were they not?''
Quarq nodded. ``I believe they were.''
``Then why the hell didn't you do something, man!''
``Do what?'' the captain replied coolly, ``I'm unarmed at the moment. Not to
mention, of course, that there were at least twenty of them and only one of
me.''
The manager exhaled sharply, calmed himself, but remained curt. ``I see.
I'm sorry. Would you please notify the Elite Police immediately? You may
use the reception desk phone. This way, sir.'' He hurried off toward the
entrance.
Quarq sighed, smiled, and shook his head. At length he got up from his seat
and followed the man. He was not in a hurry.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Faye Levine is an Art/Design Freshman at Carnegie Mellon University. She
hails from Plymouth, Minnesota (land of 10,000 lakes, 10,000,000 mosquitoes,
10,000,000,000 potholes, and one season: Road Construction), where she lives
with her demented family and killer rabbit. Her hobbies include, among other
things, Elvis hunting. ``Dinner At Nestrosa's'' is a slightly revised
excerpt from her first novel, ``Revolution'', which she will be submitting
for publication in the near future.
She can be reached at fl0m+@andrew.cmu.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
Moebius
by Joe Walters
Copyright (c)1989
September 19, 2138
Capt Holstid reporting in charge of the Gamma fleet. All system are at fully
optional status. All twenty ships still at operational capability. We have
entered a location where we believe to have a G2 star, slightly smaller than
that of our own Earth. However we have been unable to find the source of the
gravity which is still attracting us to the center of what should be a
system. There is no star visible however. I have ordered us into an
elliptical orbit, of the gravitational point. Commander Wilkins, my science
officer believes that it may be a black hole. We will find out. CLOSE LOG.
September 23, 2138
Capt Holstid. We have still yet been unable to discover the Grav force which
is attracting us here. No evidence of anything is in order except for
radiation of a G2 level. It appears to be concentrated in one direction
however. Time to turn-over, two-days. CLOSE LOG.
September 25, 2138
Capt Holstid reporting. We have just approached turnover and i am now
inclined to believe that it is a bl... what the? Radiation just went off
normal scales. Light shields automatically went on. Research systems on
line. CLOSE LOG.
September 26, 2138
Capt Holstid. The sun of this system appears to be concealed by a half
completed shell on one side. Reason unknown. We are investigating. CLOSE
LOG.
NO FURTHER LOG ENTRIES
Received July 2, 2167
Luna A-1 Receiver, Sol System
* * *
Harris stepped onto the bridge. He sat down pulling out a stick of gum and
relaxed. ``Time's like these are why I chose this life. No hassles, no
troubles, nobody to bother me.''
``Intruder has entered our area,'' the wall spoke.
``No one except you, you crazy piece of machinery,'' Harris replied to the
wall. ``Why can't you keep yourself off when I'm ... wait a second. What
did you say?''
``Intruder has entered our area,'' the wall repeated, not stifled in the
least.
``Identify.''
``Computing. Identified as the Seaward, Winward in command. Isn't that the
person you had a slight confrontation with-''
``Yes, Nimrod, it is. Now shut up.'' Harris jumped into the pilot's couch
and set for full burn in five seconds. He strapped himself down as the
ACCESS came on line. ``Four, three, two... ''
A blast shook the ship. It lurched causing Harris to temporarily loose track
of which way was up. It lay sideways in relation to what should have been,
as the gravity disengaged. Harris floated against the straps holding him
down. He touched a panel and a streak of fire lept out striking a vessel at
close range. He tapped again- silence. He brought up the view to see what
was left. Two cruisers still advanced. His attention was drawn to a console
which was blinking slightly. Estimated Time of Repair: 3 minutes. They had
even taken out Nimrod. Luckily he was able to repair himself, and then the
ship, but that would take time.
Time was one luxury Harris McQuaide could no longer afford.
The edge of the world was outlined sharply against the world below. The land
curved into infinity at an infinite distance. His eye was caught by the view
as he felt his mind slipping into nothingness...
``Quite a view isn't it?'', a voice brought him back from the edge of chaos.
He spun around to see a rather old looking human dressed in white robes
befitting his station. He rose quickly only to be motioned to return to his
seat. ``No respect necessary, my friend. You are here because I asked you,
although I wish you weren't.'' The man moved around to a chair opposite him.
``What? Why was I asked here then if you do not wish me here?'' Malcorn
asked, his voice rising slightly in anger.
The man motioned slightly. ``It is not that I do not like your presence, it
is a matter of why you are here. I wish I did not have to send someone of
your importance.''
Malcorn skipped the obvious question of where he was supposed to be going and
asked another. ``Why? Is there some danger?''
The man nodded. ``Much danger in fact, but I am afraid you are the only one
who can go, and therefore you are to be sent.''
``What am I to do, then?'' Malcorn inquired.
``You must journey to Shell, and find out something we have wondered since
our birth here.''
Malcorn turned noticeably pale. He tried to speak, failed, and tried again.
``Shell. No one has been there in over a Millenia. Why should we send
someone there now?''
``Because it is necessary. But first you should meet your companion in this
journey.''
Malcorn barely noticed this statement as the man reached over to a console
and pressed a switch. A man walked in dressed in the black robes, signifying
his occupation.
``Seeker'', Malcorn barely whispered. The shocks of this were coming too
fast for any reason.
The man sat down. ``I am Taaylor . I am pleased to meet you,'' he said, but
did not say. The words came into Malcorn 's mind. ``A pleasure indeed.''
His mind touched Malcorn's as he looked over him mentally.
The older man sat down as well. ``Gentlemen, you leave at Day.''
Darsayae stepped into a dimly lit corridor. It was times like these that she
hated her profession. Stepping into this world was like stepping into her
own personal hell. The world of technology always held horrors for her, but
the man she chased had to be brought to justice. Why he ran to this place
she would never know. She spun around as a voice echoed from behind her.
``Go home, witch. You will never find me and even if you do you will not
take me alive'', the voice laughed. ``Why don't you leave? I can tell how
badly you wish to.''
``I cannot. You know of your crimes yet you mocked them? ``, she answered
the voice. ``How can you live with yourself?''
``How can you live with yourself, witch, hunting down a man who seeks only to
survive?'' the voice answered back.
``Survive at the expense of the others?''
``If that is necessary.''
She crept around the corner, swinging to the side of the wall, following the
voice. ``Is it not bad enough that you have trespassed upon the ground of
our forefathers. None have been here for years and now you disturb their
peace.''
``You are wrong, of course. I have been here many times and have yet to find
anything resembling spooks. I also have reason to doubt that there has been
no one here in a long time. As a matter of fact, there are two here now,
headed in your direction at this time... '' The voice died off as it faded in
distance.
Malcorn and Taaylor walked the corridors. Taaylor rose his head slightly.
Malcorn studied him curiously but continued walking. Looking towards the
edge of the corridor
``What is it?''
``We are not alone'', came the thought back. ``And it is not necessary to
speak.''
``If it's all the same to you, I'll keep talking'', he said in a horse
whisper.
Taaylor nodded as he moved forward. There was no sense in angering his
guide. Without this man, or someone else he would be blind as well as deaf.
They entered a room large enough to house several of the Haltar's race
vehicles. A large console adorned the south wall with a large piece of glass
resembling a screen. Malcorn walked over and checked over the equipment. It
appeared to be fully operational. He flipped several switches as the board
came to life. The keyboard was more advanced than the one he learned on,
this one being a touch sensor, but the layout was the same. He hummed to
himself as he worked.
``Duck!'' came the mental scream from Taaylor . The scream froze Malcorn in
is tracks as he was hit from behind. He spun around and leapt into the air,
his wings spreading from behind his back. A figure stepped out into the
light. A light glimmered off of her metallic looking suit as she rose her
hands. A mist flowed forth to envelope the creature which had struck him.
``Stop, he hit the... '' His scream came too late. Malcorn watched
helplessly as the creature bounced off of the console and fell to the ground.
He realized that the screen was actually a window as lights came on behind
it. A large bay opened beyond to reveal the lights of centuries past,
clicking on as they had centuries ago.
And a door, not opened in two and a half millenia creaked open to the vacuum
of space.
Harris looked at the control console of his ship and saw the lights blinking
all over the system. ``Nimrod Status.''
The computer squeaked, corrected, and tried again. ``Ship's or Tactical?''
``Both.''
``Ship's status: All systems malfunctioning. ACCESS travel has
malfunctioned. Effective Time of Repair:12 minutes. Life support:
functioning. Shields: inactive. Irreparable. Communications functional:
not at optimum level. Tactical: Two FORWARD cruisers are still in pursuit.
Suggestion: Get out of here immediately.''
``Very funny.'' Harris McQuaide looked at the screen and confirmed Nimrod's
messages. He touched several consoles and brought them to life. ``Harris
McQuaide, in command of the Infinite Possibilities. Come on Winward, give a
guy a break!''
The comm panel chortled, but whether from Winward or static was impossible to
tell. ``Your drive is shot, McQuaide. You can't escape. One more hit and
you're gone. Give it up.''
``I wouldn't give you the pleasure'', Harris McQuaide shot back. He glanced
at the panel. ETR: 9 minutes. Keep stalling. ``What guarantee would I have
that you'd let me live. Regulations or no you'd love to get rid of me for
the episode outside of Bantor IV. I remember the headlines on the news:
`Winward, fleet commander of FORWARD, was defeated by Harris McQuaide, a
loner originating from Earth. Their race in the single person ships between
Bantor VII and IV ended in a firey explosion which destroyed Winward's ship.
The commander ejected and was later picked up by the victor, Harris, and
hauled back to the finish line on the outside of his vessel.' '' Harris
smiled as the memory came back to him.
``Shut up,'' Winward spoke back. ``You cheated, and don't say you didn't.''
``Oh yeah, I cheated, Just enough to counter your cheat of putting unstable
fuel in the opponents vehicles. I just used it to my advantage.'' Harris
sat back to glance at the clock. ETR: 7 minutes. ``You still haven't
answered my question: What guarantee?''
``You have my word.'' Winward replied.
``Which is about as good as a swim suit on Pluto,'' Harris said under his
breath. ``Let's put it this way, Winward, I think I'd have a better chance
trying to outrun you, and don't think I can't.''
``I don't think, I know. You are a dead ship, but I'll give you five minutes
to choose Harris. Five minutes.'' The comm went dead. ETR 6 minutes.
``I've cut it close before. At least he doesn't know about you my friend.''
He glanced at the system adorning his wall.
The wall replied. ``Estimate 3% chance of survival in this affair if you
insist on staying here. Nice knowing you Harris.''
``Sarcastic Machine.''
He activated the comm panel again. ``Harris to Seaward. Prepare to receive
my vessel. You win Winward.''
``Preparing to receive.''
Nimrod rattled off. ``ETA at enemy vessel 3 minutes. ETR 3.5 minutes. This
might work after all.''
``Thank you.''
``You're welcome.''
The ship moved into position for docking. Harris touched several panels and
powered up his engines. He watched the repair status light. The amber light
appeared to laugh at him. He counted to himself.
``Laugh at this Winward.'' The light went green, and he punched the panel.
The ship shot off in an arc away from the vessel and rotated, fired, rotated
again, and was gone.
Ten seconds later he re-emerged into Einstein space. ``Nimrod, time until
they track us?''
``Impossible to tell, unknown status of their drive systems at time of
ACCESS. ACCESS is down again.''
Harris McQuaide got up to walk to the rear of the vessel. He pulled off an
access hatch, and began working on several controls, murmuring to himself
about crazy machines.
The ship lurched and came to a sudden stop. ``Warning: collision imminent
with structure.''
``A little late aren't you?''
``Maybe.''
Harris McQuaide suppressed a comment he wanted to make. He recalled the last
time he directed an insult at it, something to the point of ``Drop dead''.
It tried to interpret it as an order and nearly got them both killed. He
walked up to the control room and stared outside the bridge window.
``There's nothing out here'', Harris McQuaide mused quietly.
``That nothing is off our mass scale'', Nimrod replied casually.
Harris McQuaide opened his mouth but nothing came out. He closed it again as
he looked at the view screen. He touched several panels and brought up a
view of it. The digital readout showed a sphere shaped object.
``Width?'' Harris asked quietly.
``One AU in radius, 186 million miles in diameter.'' Nimrod replied.
Harris McQuaide touched several panels and swung around the ship. He could
not see any stars in the area, absolutely nothing. He brought the ship
around again and starting flying above this structured he had collided with.
A square of the darkness opened. Light beamed through the opening.
``Who do you think you are being here?'' Malcorn said from ten feet above
the floor. His question was addressed at the woman who now stood over her
prey. She turned around to face him.
``What do you think I'm doing here?'' she shot back.
``Her name is Darsayae , sorceress of the Align. She was chasing this being
known as Cy and apparently has apprehended him, ``Taaylor replied. She
looked at him and then recognized him for what he was.
``A Tech and a Seeker. An interesting combination, and almost impossible.
They are not of close company.''
``We are here to seek answers to questions given to us by the Council.
However, we are not able to give these answers to you.''
``I don't really care. I have what I came for. What do you plan on doing
about that hole out there?''
Malcorn had to admit he had not even thought about it. He berated himself as
he landed. Such a hole could have destroyed the world if the ancient
technology had not prevented it in some way. He landed and walked across to
the console. Amazing the old technology. In fact if he didn't know any
better he would say something was approaching the hole. Of course he
couldn't be right about...
A shadow eclipsed the stars beyond. A large black object glided smoothly
into the gap. The scars on it's hull indicated it had been in a battle of
some sort. Several relays clicked over as the vessel cleared the door and it
slid shut automatically. It floated gently into a small bay as a docking arm
extended.
``I believe this answers all our questions,'' Taaylor thought, but the rest
of the group heard.
Harris looked across the small bay his ship landed in. ``Nimrod, where are
we?'', he asked of the blank control panel.
``We are aboard the Infinite Possibilities in a bay of unknown origin. There
appears to be some source of power in the area, accounting for the lights. ``
``Thanks a lot. I could have figured that out myself.''
``Will you allow me to continue?''
``Sorry'', Harris threw to him sarcastically.
``Apology accepted. There are four life forms at 23 degrees, behind that
large shield of translucent titanium, a substance designed during...
``All right I get the picture'', Harris cut him off impatiently. He strolled
over to his locker and swung the door outward, and removed his wrist rifle.
Strapping it on his wrist he started walking to the door. ``Nimrod, I-''
``Air sample breathable, gravity slightly stronger than that of earth. No
noxious substances or compounds which would endanger your life form,'' the
wall rattled off. ``Would you like me to accompany you?''
Harris sighed. ``I guess it couldn't hurt.''
Harris walked towards the door and flipped a switch for the airlock to open.
The door opened to receive a breath of slightly stale air. He stepped out,
slipping to one side as he waited. A door within the airlock opened.
A two foot orb floated out of the door, hovering about three feet above the
ground. It slipped aside of Harris and began moving forward. Harris looked
skyward (wherever that happen to be here) and fell in behind the orb.
Malcorn and Taaylor sat in anticipation as Darsayae stared at the object
within the lock. Malcorn noticed the pale look which had crossed her face.
Amazing that such a person could look so pale.
Suddenly she stood up and walked towards the doorway. Upon reaching the
hall, she turned right, heading for the hatch of the long arm. Malcorn and
Taaylor were too stunned to say anything so they just waited.
Harris looked out at the stark hallway. The shallow light from the nearby
panels gave little or no light for one to see by. Nimrod lit up the front of
his globe, a small spotlight. It scanned across the panels in the hall and
stopped on a young woman in the center of the hall. Harris sucked in his
breath. The woman outstretched her hands towards Harris . She made a motion
and Harris felt his body grow heavy. His knees buckled as the ground came up
to give him its greeting.
Darsayae looked at the spherical object next to the limp body of the strange
man. It seemed to look directly back at her. ``What are you?''
``I am Nimrod,'' The sphere said in a normal tone. ``Function: Control of
drive and control systems of the Infinite Possibilities. Basis of function:
Octal Pattern Recognition memory core.''
Darsayae stared at it, blinking as if it would go away. It remained there as
Taaylor and Malcorn stepped into the corridor silently, the old man leaning
on the younger. Malcorn looked at Darsayae. ``What did you do to him?''
``She placed him in a form of suspended animation similar to sleep, however
slightly deeper, his respiration has been slowed to 8 breaths per minute
which...``
``I didn't ask you,'' Malcorn shot back, then stopped, realizing he was
talking to a machine. ``Do you always answered what you haven't been
asked?''
``It's a habit of his, I'm afraid,'' the man on the ground said as he rolled
over. ``Lady, what the blazes did you throw at me? The last time I felt
like this was when I had a bit too much Vodka back on the good old Mud-ball.
Fun at the time, but not much fun afterwards.'' She raised her hands again
to which he raised his arm, showing the rifle. ``Uh, uh. Lady, I wouldn't
do that if I were you. This thing may not be as pretty in optical effects,
but it's as effective.'' He rolled over and got to his feet. She moved
again to which he moved in response.
Side stepping, he grabbed her arm and threw her slightly sideways into the
doorway. She grabbed the jam and swung around landing on her feet. She spun
around to see the device on Harris's arm glow and she slumped to the ground.
Harris turned around to eye the other two. ``I have no objections to talking
to friends, but answering orders is not in my rule book, Got it?''
They both nodded slightly, when Malcorn suddenly looked up. ``How do you
speak our language so well?''
``Language, what are you talking about?'' It then occurred to him, although
he never met this race before, the language was as if he knew it, because he
did.
It was his own.
`` `In the years of the great, we wished to know what we were set to do, what
life would we lead in this world, and so we set out, and found this, this
that we call our home. And that which we shall and can never leave.' ''
Taaylor recited from his ancient religion text. They had moved into the
control room and brought Darsayae with them. She was still out cold from the
blast. Cy had been tied up, but was sitting in a chair just slightly out of
reach. Harris had a cup of coffee next to him, sitting atop Nimrod's
slightly curved head. He made a splendid coffee table. Taaylor and Malcorn
were slightly opposite, enjoying the fresh food from McQuaide's ship. Harris
sipped his coffee.
``So what's it mean?'' Harris asked?
Taaylor shrugged. ``It is believed that we did not come from this world, but
were brought here from somewhere else. We discovered this world and
completed it, using the technology of whoever started it. We then sealed
ourselves within this world so as not to have their problems or intervention.
We began to wonder whether or not there was anybody still out there so we
came here. You appear to have answered our questions. ``
``What about the people who were here before you?'' Harris asked after
taking another drink.
``They were powerful but small in numbers. Our people defeated them after
discovering this place.'' Taaylor scanned the mind of Harris to see how much
he was believing. He could tell Harris was taking most of it in.
``Do you know where your people came from, how long they've been here?''
Harris asked his curiosity aroused.
``This was approximately 2000 revolution of Mitar ago.'' Taaylor sense the
next question forming in Harris's mind. ``Mitar is a silver point at the
equator of the sphere. We measure our year by it.''
``Nimrod, compute time necessary for it to revolve a complete circuit and
compare to earth year.''
``One circuit of the sphere would be 1.36 Earth Standard years. Total equals
approximately 2270 earth years ago.''
Harris leaned back in his chair and sighed. ``Compare to Earth history. Any
similar events?''
Nimrod sat for a moment. ``3007.23 Earth years ago a colonization fleet was
headed for Sidra Major 78 light years from Earth. They were lost
approximately 29 light years from Earth.''
Harris looked puzzled. ``Any other data?''
``Classified.''
``Classified? In other words you don't have it because it wasn't given to
you because of its status.''
``Yes.''
``During that time, ACCESS, Faster than light travel, didn't exist. They
would have been using ramscoop generators.''
``Yes. Relative travel was the mode of the period.''
Harris sat back, leaving all this settle in. ``That means that these people
are descendants of the people of that mission.''
``87.94% probability.''
``And if that's true, FORWARD would try to take control of it if they found
out about it, these people being an old colony of earth. they're almost a
galactic empire now, with several races under control. With the technology
they would possess from this structure... ''
``They could not be opposed,'' Nimrod finished. ``That is against my design
to allow that to happen.''
``We have to get out of here.'' He paused to figure out what to do next.
``It looks like I have a problem, gents. My ship needs some work bad, and I
can't make it anywhere else. This place maybe just the place for me to stick
around, at least until I get this thing fixed and rested.'' Harris sat back
with his coffee as Nimrod went over to examine Darsayae . After a quick scan
he lowered himself down and sat practically on top of her.
``Get up, miss. This is no time to be sleeping, or rather pretending to be
asleep.'' He floated back up and drifted over towards Harris. She sat up
suddenly and raised her hands to bring them together. The energy which shot
forth glanced off of Nimrod and struck a nearby wall, burning the metal. The
orb turned around. ``My dear, doing that may endanger yourself. I would
restrain from it in the future.'' He then floated over to become a coffee
table again. Darsayae looked at Harris, expecting to see him smiling at her
failure. Instead she saw him regarding her intently. It was not mockery but
instead, it seemed, in respect.
She twisted to her feet and walked over towards the group. It seemed to her
that they had done well in her absence. She sat down and picked up one of
the cookies which were in front of her. After a bite she said, ``You want to
stay here, that's fine. When can we leave?''
``Leave?'' Harris retorted. ``I didn't know you were staying! You may leave
now if you wish or a week from now, which is when I expect everything to be
done. Either way it doesn't matter to me.''
``Then we're not prisoners?'' Darsaye asked.
Malcorn looked at her. ``No, Harris has been informing us of the world he
came from and we have been comparing it to ours. They are a strange people,
but we are the same in many ways.''
Darsayae looked at Harris and saw him finish his cup of coffee as he got up.
He then turned down a side corridor towards the way she had come in. She got
up to follow. Malcorn tried to get up as well but Taalor held his arm,
shaking his head. Malcorn sighed and sat down. Women. One of these days he
might understand them... might.
Darsayae caught up to Harris before he reached the entrance and fell into
step behind him. When he came to the entrance he looked at it, puzzled, then
turned to her and motioned. Without a word she stepped forward and opened
the door. The light from a sun beyond beamed inward as Harris had his breath
catch in his throat.
Beyond there was nothing, a vast expanse of space between him and anything.
Several objects floated nearby as the ground he stood on rotated. The motion
was slight but still felt to such an old space hand. He shook his head and
brought his sight to one of the nearby objects. Several thousand strips
rotated in the nothing, turning slowly back in upon itself. The ground he
stood on was at a ninety degree angle to the rest of the ground. One strip
floated close by. He studied that, trying to steady his dead nerves. It
seemed to him he was standing on a wall of a pit dug into the ground. The
land curved upwards until it was lost in the sun beyond.
Harris leaned back against the wall taking a deep breath. Nimrod floated
into the area and looked outward. ``Nimrod, analysis.''
``Analyzing. It appears the sun of this system is encased in a sphere.
Colloquial reference: Dyson Sphere. A design created by Freeman Dyson during
the late 1960's of earth. Built to collect the total solar output of the sun
and convert it into energy for use. The strips in the area appear to be
coated with vegetation and soil.''
Darsayae nodded. ``Our homes. The strip itself is bent upon itself making
it one sided.''
``A Moebius strip,'' Nimrod continued. ``The strip's bend would occlude
sunlight, giving a day-night cycle.''
Harris motioned her to close the door. She did so and then turned to look at
him. He drew a breath and then headed back to the bay of the Infinite.
Darsayae and Nimrod followed slowly behind, one wondering what had overcome
Harris, the other what technology it took to build such a structure.
``Damn. Where is he?'' Winward asked of a man scanning a nearby panel. ``He
couldn't have gotten too far.''
``We have his course and time, we can be there in several minutes, assuming
he hasn't improved his drive since the last time we met, `` the man stated
clearly.
Winward turned around and shouted some orders. He then turned back to the
panel. ``This time he's not getting away.''
The fleet lept into space, the derelict left behind to fend for itself.
``Nimrod, initiate all repair systems. I want to get out of here,'' Harris
said to the globe. The globe moved to comply with his commands, resuming
it's normal position in the airlock. Darsayae moved in behind him as he sat
down on the bridge.
``What came over you back there?'' she asked carefully.
Harris looked at her as if he had forgotten she was there. He smiled. ``So
much for your fear of technology, huh?'' She seemed startled that he knew,
but he continued. ``Guess it was fear, fear that something like this could
exist.'' His voice trailed off at the end as his mind remembered the sight
his eyes had seen but his mind had refused to believe.
``So something can get at you,'' Darsayae stated. ``Makes me think you're
more normal than you appear to be.''
He smiled again. ``Me? I'm as normal as the next guy, just a little crazier.
After all, I spend all my life in space. It is my home.''
``You must have seen a lot.''
``A lot that I would have missed, and would have been more the sorry for if I
hadn't seen,'' he said nodding. ``But I do have to get out of here I'm
afraid.''
Her expression changed to worry. ``Why? Couldn't you just stay here?''
He shook his head. ``Afraid not, not with Winward on my tail. Where do you
think I got the scars on this ship from?''
``What did you do that he's after you?''
``Well, it's kind of a long story. What it basically comes down to is we
were on opposite sides and his side lost. He's one to hold a grudge.''
She looked at him awhile and was startled to here a beep on the comm panel.
``Status: Systems are coming on line. Main Drive repaired. ACCESS repaired.
Life support fully functional. Ships have entered system.''
This time Harris didn't ignore him. ``Model and identification.''
``Seaward and escort ship. Time to this point: 15 minutes.''
Harris grew worried, Darsayae could tell that much. ``Stupid power hungry
fool,'' he spat. ``Winward won't you ever give up?''
Darsayae looked at him intently. ``What do you plan to do?''
``Get out of here, ASAP.''
She did not recognize the abbreviation, but understood the intent. She got
up to leave and was astonished to see Harris following her. ``Maintain
repair status. I'll be back. Be ready to leave.''
``I'll be here,'' the panel answered.
Harris followed Darsayae back to the control room, where he said his
good-byes. Cy still looked miffed at being captured but maintained his
position. Darsayae then followed him to the airlock, as did Taalor and
Malcorn.
``Wait a couple of minutes and then open the doors. I'll be out of here so
fast it'll be funny.'' He turned to Darsayae. ``Guess this is good-bye,
huh?''
Darsayae reached up and kissed him, not gently as he tried to enter the
airlock. He turned back to the group thinking the same thing Malcorn was:
Women!
He entered the ship as the door slid shut.
``Nimrod, bring all systems up.'' The bay door slid open again, taking the
Infinite out with it as the air which had been pumped in escaped. He
activated the drive and headed away as it closed.
``There he is, sir,'' the man at the console spoke. ``He just left a large
spherical object in the middle of this system.''
Winward missed this comment as he saw Harris in his sights. ``Fire when
ready, gunner.''
Harris checked the tactical console and smiled as he brought his hand down
upon the ACCESS switch. A sound stopped him. He spun around to see Darsayae
standing behind him. ``What are you doing here?''
``To see the things you have seen,'' she stated simply.
A blast shook the ship, then another. He spun around to see the Seaward
pulling directly in front of him. He touched a panel causing the ship to
head back towards the sphere.
``What are you doing?'' Darsayae asked.
``Taking you back!''
``Not on your life.''
Harris paused. If he went back, Winward would find out about the sphere and
its technology. That would definitely be a problem. But to keep Darsayae
aboard ship? Damn. His hand touched the ACCESS panel and the ship vanished,
Harris hoping history wouldn't repeat itself.
Winward turned to the console. ``Gone, sir. We weren't ready to track
him.''
Winward looked like he would explode but calmed down as his eyes settled on
the tactical. That sphere still was on the scanner.
``Let's see what we have here.'' Winward smiled as thoughts of conquest
crossed his mind.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Joe Walters is currently a Senior/Sophomore in Penn State's 2/4 year Computer
Science program. Neither he nor the University has yet to figure out how
this works, but both maintain the idea. He has several dangerous hobbies,
including skydiving and free rock climbing, which help his friends maintain
the idea that he is crazy. He is also a determined Roll player and Sci-Fi
reader. The works of Niven, Hickman and Weis have been the basis for his
inspiration.
He can be reached at JAW107@PSUVM.BITNET
_____________________________________________________________________________
Blades
by Sonia Orin Lyris
Copyright (c)1989
I have a story to tell you. Yes, you can sit on my lap, little one. Now the
rest of you, settle down and be quiet because this is going to be a good
story, and you want to hear it, don't you? All right, quiet now.
There was a certain man who was named Duri, and he had a special skill, more
than skill, it was a brilliance, a path, and he might have been the best in
his time or maybe ever at what he did. See, he knew the making of the blade
like no other. He was as good at it as you can ever hope to be at anything.
Sarel, your father probably knows more about making blades than I do, and
maybe he could tell this story better, but that doesn't really matter,
because the story isn't really about making blades, it's about Duri.
Duri was a young man, young for a master of his trade, but his hands weren't
young, and his soul, where it touched the blade, where it knew the blade and
knew it like you each know your own faces, that wasn't young either. You
don't know how it is, but maybe you will someday, how it is when you learn
something so well that every detail of it fades away into a kind of dance, so
smooth and beautiful that everything you do is like something out of the
center of the world. He was that good, Duri was, so good that he didn't have
to worry about how to hammer the steel, or how to shape it, or how to fashion
a handle. His body and spirit spoke to the metal and the fire and then a
blade was born.
Whether the blade was a sword for some warrior to carve up the evil that
attacked his land, or a wealthy whore's thin blade for explaining the price
to a customer, it didn't matter, it was like breathing for Duri to make such
fine work that you couldn't find better anywhere for all the money in the
world.
Now maybe Duri was too young to be so old, and maybe the passion that was in
him was eating something inside him, too, because he wasn't really a happy
man. He had money, all right, a lot of it, because anyone who wanted the
best blade they could have came to Duri and wouldn't settle for less if they
could help it. He had money and he had fame and he had plenty of people
coming to him all the time for his work.
Maybe he just had too much. You ever think about that, little one? You ever
think about just having too much? No? Maybe you should.
Or maybe Duri saw that his work was for hurting and killing and not much good
for anything else, and maybe he was tired of that. I don't know what was in
his mind when he went into the caverns past the town, where there were deep,
deep lakes and dropped his newest blade, which was the best he'd ever made,
into the lake where it sank right away to the bottom.
He let it be known that anyone who wanted that sword could have it, all they
had to do was go and get it. And then he went home.
They say he didn't say much of anything when they told him about the first
boy that had drowned trying to get the sword back up. And he didn't say much
when the second boy drowned, or the third, which was a girl, or the fourth,
which was a man, or any of the rest who drowned diving deep into the cavern
lake looking for that sword.
The townspeople were pretty upset by then, and so they piled the bodies
outside the cavern so that people would see them and maybe think twice about
trying for the sword at the bottom of the lake.
They looked at Duri with a lot less respect and a lot more anger now, because
young and old were dying trying to get at the sword he'd made that it seemed
no one could have. They began to call the sword cursed, and the town elders
called Duri up in front of them and they told him that too many people were
dying because of his sword and to make it stop.
Well Duri must have been a sight to see when they said that. He was pretty
mad. He told them that they were fools and idiots if they thought he had any
control over the greed in men's hearts that made them do stupid things to get
at a sword they didn't need anyway.
And it began to look like that sword in the lake was going to be Duri's last
one. He had stopped forging blades completely. When people asked him, he
told them that now only the willing would die from his work, and that was
fine with him. A lot of folks were real mad when Duri stopped taking their
orders for more blades, and some powerful folks got even madder and Duri
didn't have a lot of friends anymore. He kept mostly to himself, and his
forge was just a quiet home for spiders.
You're young but you probably know by now that people love to talk about
other people. But if something doesn't change for a while, they get bored
with it and forget about it some, and then some more, and that's what
happened to Duri. The years went by and Duri didn't make any more blades,
and fewer and fewer people would die trying for the sword at the bottom of
the lake until hardly anyone talked about it anymore, and after a while no
one believed it was really there, either. No one saw Duri very much anymore
and no one particularly missed him. They could hardly even remember what he
used to do.
When he came out of his house at all, Duri would sit and just watch people go
by. He looked older now, older than he was, probably. Maybe it had been the
passion of the blades that kept him young and now that he didn't have it
anymore he was aging faster. Maybe he just didn't have anything much to live
for and was hurrying to die. Who knows?
It had been years and years since anyone had bothered to ask Duri for a
blade, but his work still traveled the world and was still the best, and
eventually a man who maybe hadn't heard that Duri didn't make blades anymore
came around.
The stranger went into Duri's house and didn't come out for a long time.
When he came out he looked kind of thoughtful, and he went down to the
caverns. People started to talk again, because now something was happening,
and people started to remember what Duri used to do and they remembered about
the blade in the cavern lake and they waited to see if the man would float to
the surface after he drowned diving for the sword. But the man came right
back out of the caverns, walked back to Duri's house and went in to see Duri
again and didn't come out again for hours.
The next day Duri's forge was working again. Everyone came out of their
house and stared around in surprise. They watched the smoke rise, listened
to the pounding, and talked with each other about what had happened. They
wondered about the stranger and what he had done to make Duri forge the blade
again, and they watched him as he stood waiting in front of Duri's house.
When the smoke rose from the cooling of the metal it was strange and black.
You see, Duri had bled himself and used his own blood to quench the thirst of
the new blade. And when he was done with the blade, which was truly his
finest ever, he slowly came out of his house and gave it to the stranger.
Then he fell down on the ground because of all the blood he had given up.
The stranger knelt down next to him and stroked his hair and spoke softly to
him.
After a little while, Duri died, right there in the stranger's arms.
Don't you wish you knew what that man had said to Duri, little one? Maybe he
thanked him for the sword. Maybe he just soothed Duri's way into the next
world. Who knows? You'll just have to imagine.
So then the stranger took Duri's last sword and left, just like that, without
a word, without explanation.
Someone must have thought about Duri some more and remembered the sword in
the cavern lake and gone to look, because they say that they found the lake
sword next to the cavern waters, on the bank, just after Duri died. And it
was all red, just like blood.
They decided to bury the lake sword with Duri because it seemed proper. That
night someone took it, though, stole the sword right out of the ground where
it lay next to Duri, and no one ever saw it again.
And that was the end of Duri and his fine blades.
What's that? Oh, I said it was a good story, child, I didn't say it was a
nice one.
You want to know what it means? Yes, of course you do.
Maybe that was Duri's problem, too. Everyone told him what everything meant,
what he was and what he should do. He was born with a great light inside him
and everyone told him how to shine the light outwards and make fine blades
with it, but no one ever said anything about how to shine it inside first.
Maybe they just didn't know how themselves. But maybe if Duri had used a
little of his light to see his own way with he wouldn't have had to give
birth to my sword with his dying blood.
Yes, the blade I carry, this one, this is the blade that Duri made in his own
blood.
Yes, child, really.
Now you know that a woman can bear a baby in blood but a man can't. You,
little one, you'll know this someday as I never can. A man can't make
something come alive, only a woman can do that, and that is why woman is the
greatest power in this world. Death is a door to somewhere, somewhere else,
but the giving of life is the first magic of life. Every breath you take is
from the magic of life and anything you lay your hands on to change is from
the magic of your breath.
Duri wanted to make something out of the magic of life, make something of his
own body, like a woman would bear a child. And I think he wanted to finally
make a blade that would taste his own blood before it tasted anyone else's.
But that's just what I think.
And now I've gone and told you what the story means and I didn't want to do
that. But you shouldn't listen to what I tell you, anyway. No one can tell
you what a story means, just like no one can tell you what you are because no
one can tell you what you already know.
All right. That's the story I wanted to tell and it's only words and that's
just about enough words for the moment. I'll put this sword down here so
that you can all look at it if you want to. You know that blades are sharp,
don't you? So don't touch it.
No, no, that's not right. Go ahead and touch it, if that's what's in you to
do. Go ahead and touch what Duri made, what he died to make. Mingle your
blood with his. See yourself in his reflection, and remember.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Sonia is a software engineer by trade. She has been writing fiction off on
and on since she was able to read and write. She also sculpts SF/Fantasy
critters and shows them at local SF/Fantasy conventions.
She can be reached at sol@lucid.com
_____________________________________________________________________________
Literature
by Robert Chansky
Copyright (c)1989
Charles Pennet always felt a particular pleasure when he pulled the cover
over his ancient typewriter and went to the cupboard to fix himself the usual
post-novel drink. It was a great reward, that drink; the stuff that had
almost finished him once before now became his reward for a job well done.
Nowadays he allowed himself the alcohol only after the finish of a novel.
Cause to celebrate, as always.
Charles Pennet wrote dirty books. Pornography was his life.
There was a demand for it, and he seemed to have a talent, or so his many
editors told him, and as long as that demand and talent coincided, he would
continue with his chosen line.
Oh, there was the occasional twinge of guilt-- not for what he did of course,
for Charles was a pragmatic man, but for what he did not do; A real book,
real literature, something to be proud of, a profession that he didn't have
to hide away beneath his many pseudonyms. Indeed, he had started several
serious books, only to give up, frustrated. Each quickly became boring
without the added flavor, so to speak, that was Charles' unique style. And
his books, after all, had paid for the house he lived in, kept him well fed
and with a hefty bank account. He had done quite well for himself.
One might think it odd that Charles never actually did many of the things he
wrote of in his many books and articles. He lived a very sheltered life.
But that was fine with him. (What was that author's name, the woman who
lived out in the moors in England and wrote?-- Well, it didn't matter.)
Charles was in company with a lot of authors, writing about the human
experience while too busy to join in. The only difference between he and
they being the experiences he wrote about.
Another ritual consisted of bundling the manuscript up for a stop at the
library-- photocopying it all was an expensive, but necessary, task, or so
his lawyer told him. The industry was very cutthroat. A few big rubber
bands kept it together nicely. Charles was engaged in this when there was a
knock at the door.
Unfortunately Charles was the type of person who never used the small
peephole provided for them to see potential criminals before letting them in.
He opened the door wide, and wondered why there seemed to be nobody there,
when he chanced to look down and beheld the creature.
Through the miracle of human perception, Charles was instantly able to
determine that the creature before him was an alien. Not of this Earth.
Not, one would suppose, from anywhere nearby at all.
The alien looked like a boulder. It was about three feet high, mostly round,
in fact spherical, and a reddish-brown that might have looked almost
comforting on a familiar object such as a rotten tomato. Its skin was
wrinkled and worn, like an old leather jacket. Eyestalks sprouted from its
right and left flanks, aimed at Charles. What looked like a tentacle
sprouted from the side of the boulder (being careful not to get in the way of
its eye) aiming a gun-- not a streamlined raygun, but a functional Colt .45--
directly at Charles. He backed away.
The alien rolled after him. To do this it flattened an area of itself facing
Charles, so that it would tumble into the cavity thus created. The eyestalks
on both sides of the creature rotated slightly but did not waver from him.
Neither did the tentacle with the gun.
Another tentacle made an appearance. This one emerged (from behind the other
eyestalk) wrapped around a square black box, grilled at one end. Squeaks and
incomprehensible noises came from the creature, and from the box came a
voice.
``You,'' it said, ``are Charles Pennet.'' The box sounded electronic, with
irregular pauses between its words.
Charles swallowed. If given a few minutes, he might have said something,
either to confirm or deny his name. Neither of these options presented
themselves.
``There is something which you will do for me.'' The alien rolled further
into the room without asking for an invitation. Yet another tentacle emerged
from the same side of its body as the first to snake around the doorknob and
pull it shut.
Charles was not sure how to react to the alien. His life had been very
structured, very ordered, until now. The alien's presence offended him, in a
way he could not really describe, not even to himself. Just as if a total
stranger had nudged him with an unwanted elbow, the alien was an intrusion
into his life, one he didn't really want, not just now. Charles felt a kind
of anger rising inside him.
``Now wait a minute. Wait a minute--'' He said, though there was really
nothing he could think of to say to the creature.
It didn't care. Something reached out from the creature and pushed at his
mind. Charles sank to the floor. He could see and hear, but he could not
move. At least he didn't think he could move; it just seemed like moving so
much as a finger didn't appeal to him at all. Laying as he was on the floor
seemed, in the absence of other ideas, an excellent option. Anything else
was not to be considered.
``My place of origin,'' the alien explained, ``is known as Cetella. My name
is unpronounceable and not important. What you will do for me is.'' The
alien rolled closer to him, giving him the full benefit of a body odor that
reminded him of egg salad, as it explained.
Charles had just finished a particularly explicit novel for which he had real
hopes just before he was contacted by the Cetellan alien, who had developed a
taste for human books.
The Cetellan idea of literature was not at all the same as the human idea of
literature. But some of their scrawlings intrigued it greatly. As it pored
with glassy eyes over the mass of data the ship's computer had translated for
it, it had found, here and there, something that piqued its interest.
And it had decided, fatefully, that here was money to be made.
Regretfully, humans being who they are, and Cetellans being what they are, it
was necessary that some adjustments be made before anything of a potential
money-making nature was introduced to the Cetellan culture at large.
And the alien, whose name is unpronounceable by a human as well as
unprintable by any human typesetter, had thought of a way. A way that
involved as little work for it as possible.
Charles wanted to hide in a corner somewhere and gibber. He somehow remained
standing. ``What... what am I supposed to do?''
The gun, and the tentacle that held it, Occupied Charles' full attention, to
the point that he had not heard much of what the alien was saying. Now he
forced himself to listen.
``It has taken me some time to find you. There is-- some literature which
you will-- translate for me.'' The electronic voice paused before certain
words, possibly because of its translator which had to look them up. ``You
will change only certain species-specific passages, as I have machines to
translate to my own language. I will leave you books and materials to help
you.'' Then it waited for him to speak.
``I don't understand this. You're... an alien!''
``Human powers of perception are most impressive.''
``What... what if I refuse?''
This question was obvious, and the boulder appeared to have worked it out
beforehand. ``You have ten seconds to accept. otherwise, a-- virus will be
introduced into your-- biosphere which will render it lifeless. This is your
incentive to work for me. Remember it, and do not doubt that I will do as I
say.''
It paused. ``Very well,'' it said. It produced another device, like a small
computer, from somewhere inside its actual body, Charles supposed. ``This
machine is -- pro- grammed with translations of an anatomy text of my race,
and another book which will help you with what you are to do. The tentacle
dropped the machine on Charles' desk nine feet away. ``You are to translate
this book.'' The book slapped down next to the other machine. ``I will
return in seven days. If the book has not been translated by that time, or
if you have contacted -- authorities of your -- government in an attempt to
avoid this task, the virus of which I spoke will be immediately vented into
your planet's biosphere. I will leave now.''
``Wha... wait, you can't--... ''
The alien turned to face him by spiraling like a top. ``Remember,'' it said,
``that you are translating the litera- ture into a different culture, and not
language, as my dev- ices can manage that. Also remember to preserve the
origi- nal... flavor... for which the writing was intended.''
The creature quivered, and began, ponderously, to roll across Charles' floor.
One of its tentacles (this made a total of four; he wondered how many it had)
opened the door for its owner. The creature rolled heavily down Charles'
walkway into the dark, oblivious to its surround- ings, to a car waiting for
it. Charles could see through the open door that the interior of the car had
been removed, its windows artificially darkened. The car was cavernous
inside. Charles watched the alien as it rolled aboard, lowering its vehicle
with its weight.
Charles shut his door. He had seen an alien. He had actually seen an alien.
It sounded like some stupid science fiction story.
The Cetellan's car drove off. Would it really destroy the Earth, or was it a
bluff?
Charles went to his desk to examine the machine the alien had given him. It
seemed very simple; in fact instructions were written in English on the
front. He figured out how to call up the anatomy text. He summoned the
other, and discovered that it seemed to be the alien equivalent of a sexual
self-help book. It was very detailed, and fascinating to someone in Charles'
profession.
The title of the terrestrial book on his study, an ordinary hardcover, caught
his attention. It was, he found, Lady Chatterly's Lover. This was the
literature the Cetellan wanted him to translate.
The alien had not left unobserved. A Mrs. Edith Cummings lived next door to
him, not knowing (of course) his exact occupation. Mrs. Cummings was an
ardent Christian fundamentalist, her thoughts never straying from purity and
good faith. She had always kept an eye on Charles, ever since he'd moved in.
He was an easy man not to trust. There had been something shiftless about
him, like he didn't really belong in this quiet upper-class neighborhood.
And a chance look out her kitchen window, to investigate that strange car
parked before her neighbor's house, proved her suspicions correct.
Charles was keeping strange company, indeed.
Aliens.
She decided that this would do with some looking into.
All night and the next day the furious tapping of Charles' typewriter reached
Mrs. Cummings' ears incessantly. Eventually the next afternoon the typing
came to a halt, and she looked up from her knitting. A quick glance across
her front yard told her that Charles had left the house. The time, she
thought, was now.
Walking slowly (so as not to arouse suspicion), she headed out of her own
abode toward her neighbor's. She tried the door, and found that it was
unlocked. Probably going out for something to eat, she thought.
Mrs. Cummings never wasted time. She examined drawers, closets, under beds.
Charles' shower and bath did not escape her scrutiny. Eventually she got to
the bookshelf, and was, predictably, shocked. ``Filth!'' she cried.
Adorning the shelf were an uncountable number of books and magazines, their
content easily identifiable by the racy pictures on the front. Mrs. Cummings
was familiar with many of the titles, as she had participated in a book rally
(burning) in which they had been prominently featured. This time, she
examined the authors. The names all seemed to have something in common.
Chuck Penn... C. Penter... all the names sounded very nearly like her
neighbor, Charles Pennet.
Suddenly it dawned on her. He had written them. HE was the author of this...
this...
``Filth!'' she said again, louder this time. In fact Charles was the reason
the P section in many adult bookstores was disproportionately large.
Mrs. Cummings examined the typewriter and the paper that lay inside it, and
unknowingly became the first Cetellan literary critic.
She saw him again, in the garden. Just to touch him, she thought. Just
to stroke his tight, calloused skin would be heaven... suddenly she
stopped. She realized her dorsal tentacle was fully extended! What
would her husband say, if he knew? But... on the other hand, what
would he say?
Her first thought was to burn it-- burn it all! But then--
No, she thought. She would wait. The police would never understand.
Mrs. Cummings tried to put everything back where it had been, and after
reading through the contents of the Cetellan reading machine, exited Charles'
house barely five minutes before he returned.
Charles knew it was the alien even before he heard the car door open. It was
late again, and exactly one week after its first appearance. He was not too
nervous. He had done what it demanded of him, finished the manuscript. The
boulder would not sterilize the planet, and then all of this would be behind
him.
This time it did not bother with knocking. The door swung wide, and closed
again.
He looked up, and there was the alien. It still aimed the gun at him.
Charles wondered where it had gotten it from.
``You have done what I wish.'' A statement, not a question.
``Yes.''
``Give me the manuscript.'' Charles handed the pages to the alien, which put
them in a case and concealed it inside itself.
``You're not going to kill everybody?''
In response the alien produced two more hardcovers, placing them on the same
corner of Charles' study again. He suddenly felt very sick. He had stayed
up three nights... ``I will return,'' the Cetellan said, ``in six days. If
this literature is not translated in the same manner as the previous sample I
gave to you, I will sterilize--''
At that moment Charles' front door exploded inward, as though by some
artillery burst. The doorknob sailed across the room, burying itself in the
opposite wall. A woman entered, an old woman. She was carrying a shotgun.
``Mrs. Cummings!'' Charles said, astonished.
Mrs. Cummings saw the Cetellan, and her eyes took on a angry reddish color as
she swung her weapon around toward it. ``Filth mongerer!'' he thought she
shouted. This seemed to be all too fast for the alien to use its mind-push
or the .45. She fired.
The boulder seemed to explode gore all over the room and Mrs. Cummings.
Shredded typewriter paper flew every- where, the work of the last week
scattered all over the room and spattered with what passed for alien blood.
Charles, shocked but still retaining his senses, tried to shrink from her
view, looking for a way to get past her without being killed.
From his knowledge of Cetellan anatomy Charles figured the alien would not be
easily killed by a gun like that, as its thick braincase was approximately in
its middle and little else but muscle outside that. But Mrs. Cummings seemed
to know that too. She took the alien's .45 from the floor and proceeded to
pump the center of the bleeding mass full of bullets until the gun was out,
then dropped it.
Charles' rear doorknob poked him in the small of his back. He reached behind
himself to open it, then saw the old woman had her shotgun on him now.
``Don't you move,'' she said. Ice coated his stomach. ``It was you,'' she
said. ``You wrote that... that... ''
The word exploded, ``Filth!'' and the gun would have as well, but it only
clicked. Two shots. Charles pushed his way past the woman, grabbed the
alien's book and vacated the premises.
The alien body made an incredible media sensation when it was discovered, and
Mrs. Cummings became an unwitting instant hero. Charles, who had changed his
name so many times that it was almost a habit for him, managed to avoid the
persistent reporters and the net of government agents trying to track him,
until the sensation died down. Eventually he found another house-- smaller
but much more isolated-- and bought a typewriter.
Cautiously, he checked the dead alien's sex-and-anatomy book, and was pleased
to find it still operative. It was time to go to work.
Of course he'd have to find one of the Cetellans again, but perhaps they
would find him. They would deal with him on his own terms this time. There
was a new demand, and Charles Prendergast intended to fill it.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Robert Chansky is a CIS major due to graduate from UC Santa Cruz next year or
whenever. This is, he says, one of the few stories he's managed to finish.
He's currently working on a UNIX game called "Galactic Bloodshed", a
multi-player Empire-like game of interstellar war.
He can be reached at smq@ucscb.ucsc.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
The Dove
by Pat Fleckenstein
Copyright (c)1989
I heard the call of a distant dove, and I walked off into the
forest. The trees covered over me until my shadow was no longer at my
side. I stopped by a cool and bubbling stream to dampen my hands.
The icy waters rippled under my touch. I sat down beside the brook
against a rock to inhale the beauty around me. The trees about me
rustled in a breeze that I could not feel on the floor of this great
garden. The sunlight sparkled yellows and golds in shimmering beams
between the trees.
As I got up, the shirt I wore felt damp from leaning on a small patch
of moss on the stone. The dust fell from my pantlegs. I inhaled
deeply and set off again.
Quietly, I walked past a family of rabbits who were rummaging for
edible leaves in the undergrowth. They watched me with silent
curiosity that did not quiver until I had passed. I felt good about
this.
The path I walked was not often walked by humans. Deer used it.
I could hear the dove calling, and I followed. It was not long before
I was at the edge of a great clearing. I spotted the dove to my left.
I dropped noiselessly to my knees and gazed upon the beauty of the
dove.
``A-7 and stationary.''
The warbling from within this creature was as fascinating as anything
I had ever witnessed.
``Still there.''
The cocked-head movements of this little bird excited my interest.
``Closing In.. CONVERGE! converge.''
A passive relaxation soaked into my being.
``Grab him!''
``Why, sir?'' questioned Trooper A-35.
``He cannot be here! No one can be here! Get him back inside.''
``He isn't hurting anyone, sir.''
In a moment, fifteen men were around me. Two picked me up and walked me back
to the prisoner transport. The others wrestled Soldier A-35 along behind me.
When I arrived at Cell Block three of the D-917-51D1, I sat down on my cot.
In the next cell, a small struggle ended with the clang of the door closing.
``What was that beautiful sound?'' asked Trooper A-35 from behind the wall.
``A dove, a dove... '' I answered.
We heard the dove calling in the distance.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Pat Fleckenstein, (aka Midnight Poet) is a Freshman at Rochester Institute of
Technology where he majors in Comp Sci major and lives in Computer Science
House. He feels that life is so much more than the socially imposed hype and
hopes his work (poetry, sci-fi, art, and Stuff) can help more to see that.
His favorite pastime activity though is ``getting meta-physical'' with his
girlfriend Lisa. ``Remember, Infinity is Really Big.''
He can be reached at pat@ritcsh.cs.rit.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
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The Magazine of the Dargon Project Editor: Dafydd
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and inspired
by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by David
"Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The Dargon Project
centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon in the far reaches
of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named Makdiar, and as such
contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword and sorcery flavor.
DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file,
text-only format. For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL
to the editor, Dafydd, at the userid White@DUVM.BitNet. This request
should contain your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid internet
address) as well as your full name. InterNet (all non-BitNet sites)
subscribers will receive their issues in Mail format. BitNet users
have the option of specifying the file transfer format you prefer
(either DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all
electronic subscriptions are Free!
____________________________
QQQQQ tt
QQ QQ tttttt Staff:
QQ QQ uu uu aaaa nnnn tt aaaa
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Daniel K. Appelquist
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Editor
QQQQQQ uuu aaaaa nn nn tt aaaaa Norman S. Murray
QQQ Assistant Editor
Matthew Sorrels
____________________________________________ Assistant Editor/Technical
Jay Laefer
February, 1990 Volume II, Issue 1 Proofreader
____________________________________________ John Flournoy
Editorial Assistant
Articles
Quanta is Copyright (c) 1990
Looking Ahead by Daniel K. Appelquist.
Daniel K. Appelquist This magazine may be
archived, reproduced
Cyberpunk's a Label Like Any Other and/or distributed under the
Jason Snell condition that it is left
intact and that no additions
Bio-Tech in and out of SF or changes are made to it.
Norman S. Murray
The works within this
Fiction magazine are the sole
property of their respective
Illusions of Reality authors. No further use of
Bruce Sterling Woodcock their works is permitted
without their explicit
Cat and Mouse consent. All stories in this
Matthew Sorrels magazine are fiction. No
actual persons are
One designated by name or
Faye Levine character. Any similarity is
is coincidental.
Stiletto Heels
William A. Racicot All submissions should be
sent to one of the following
Ice Ball addresses:
Thomas Hand
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
Corporate Stress quanta@andrew.BITNET
Christopher Kempke
All requests for back issues
Poetry queries about subscriptions
letters or comments should
To a Photon be sent to the same address.
Bruce Altner ____________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
_____________________________________________________________________________
Well, here we are at Quanta number three. After a close brush with death
over the winter break, I found myself back at CMU attempting to deal with an
overwhelming number of Quanta submissions and subscription requests which
had piled up in my mailbox. I'm now proud to say that Quanta is reaching
over eight-hundred addresses world-wide (some of which are re-distribution
sites).
Speaking of distribution sites, one of the largest is the distribution
for the United Kingdom (comprising twenty-seven subscribers). Michael Green
had volunteered to take care of this job at around the time that Quanta was
first conceptualized. Sadly, he's no longer going to be able to do so.
However, the job has been taken over by Lindsay Marshall
(lindsay.marshall@uk.ac.newcastle.edu). If you're a subscriber in the
United Kingdom, and you'd like to receive back issues or change the status
of your subscription, contact Lindsay. For all other matters, contact me
directly (such as for submissions or letters to the editor.)
We have three recurring authors this issue, Faye Levine (Dinner at
Nestrosa's), Christopher Kempke (Rules of the Game, Going Places) and
William Racicot (Infernal Repast). I'm sure you'll enjoy their new works.
We have a story by Matthew Sorrels (Quanta Assistant Editor) as well as an
article by our other assistant editor, Norman Murray.
I'm very excited about the amount of fiction which is being distributed
over the net. Of course, there are magazines such as Athene, Dargonzine,
and this one. These seem to be only the beginning of a revolution in
net-distributed fiction. The newsgroup alt.prose is a continual source of
creativity. We are also seeing entire books posted to newsgroups part by
part. Particularly, I'm excited about the amount of Science Fiction being
distributed in this manner. Science Fiction and technology have a symbiotic
relationship, each feeding off of the other's creations, so I find it
especially appropriate that Science Fiction has found such a friendly home
on the net.
Jason Snell (Into Grey) has given us an article entitled ``Cyberpunk's a
Label Like Any Other'' for this issue. In it, he makes some comments on the
categorization of fiction and more specifically the generalization of
Science Fiction. In that context, I'd like to devote the rest of this
article to that topic. (You may wish to read his article before
continuing.)
I think Science Fiction should hold a special place among the realms of
fiction because it is different. Science Fiction asks ``What if?'' in a
way that no other realm of fiction really does. It is the fiction of ideas,
of concepts. It has the unique ability to examine mankind from an
extra-terrestrial perspective. Indeed, I would argue that Science Fiction
has played a role in humankind's growing concept of itself as a race.
To say that Science Fiction should hold a special place is not to say
that it should be set apart from ``conventional'' fiction, however. To a
certain extent, the decategorization of Science Fiction has already begun.
My own high-school English curriculum included Clarke's _Childhood's End_,
Miller's _A Canticle for Liebowitz_ and Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_.
There are Cliff's Notes for Herbert's _Dune_ and for Orwell's _1984_. Of
course, the widespread popularity of the latter novel should be some
indication of the way in which Science Fiction is slowly being integrated
into mainstream. _1984_ is a great novel, and it is most definitely Science
Fiction, but if it were written today, would it instantly be praised as a
classic?
There's a great deal of new fiction being written in the genre of Science
Fiction which deserves just as much adulation as novels such as _1984_ or _A
Clockwork Orange_ have received, but this fiction simply hasn't been around
long enough. It's only when we gain some historical perspective that we can
truly call a work of fiction a work of genius. Perhaps William Gibson's
works be taught in the schools of the future.
To sum up, I largely agree with Jason's statements on categorization. It
can be a very bad thing. However, I don't think that genres can or should
be completely eliminated from fiction. The stigma they can sometimes carry,
however, should be.
da1n+@andrew.cmu.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
Cyberpunk's a Label Like Any Other
Jason Snell
Copyright (c) 1989
_____________________________________________________________________________
As both a reader and a writer, I've been trying to figure out what this
"cyberpunk" thing really is. Is it a genre? Is it a passing fad? Is it a
one-man literary wrecking squad?
And, underneath all that, I've been wondering: should it matter?
I'm not quite sure. Whatever William Gibson's Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell
award-winning _Neuromancer_ started, it's become quite a special thing.
Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy (which, by the way, he seems to be finished
with -- his next book is going to be about an alternate past where the
Babbage Engine really works) consists of _Neuromancer_, _Count Zero_, and
_Mona Lisa Overdrive_. It shows all of the signs of being its own literary
form. In fact, one might even think that it's a pretty darn strict form,
too.
For instance, each book works in a cycle of characters. This is most
clear in _Count Zero_ and _Mona Lisa Overdrive_ -- there are various sets of
characters which alternate each chapter, eventually coming together (or not
coming together) at the end of the novel. The novels are set in a high-tech
future dominated by cyberspace, a consensual hallucination, a virtual
reality constructed out of all the computer systems in the world interacting
with one another. But the world is controlled by international
conglomerates, and voodoo-like intelligences run rampant through cyberspace.
(Now, Gibson wasn't necessarily the first person to use these different
elements, but he was the first to incorporate them all in this specific
form.)
The question is, if this is what "cyberpunk" is all about, wouldn't any
other "cyberpunk" novel be simply called a rip-off of William Gibson? Did
Gibson start a genre, or are all the "cyberpunk" books and stories which
followed _Neuromancer_ simply rip-offs?
The temptation to write about virtual realities, artificial
intelligences, chip constructs, and other "cyberpunk" fixtures is great -
it's logical that it would be that way. Some of the best Science Fiction
comes from writers telling stories about the human condition from a
different, fantastic vantage point. It's a wonderful way of "coating" the
story -- viewing it from a different angle, so a reader lets down their
defenses and doesn't view the novel with the same skeptical view which they
take while watching the network news. And cyberpunk is ripe with
allegorical potential.
Say I use a virtual computer network in a novel I'm writing. Am I
suddenly just "ripping off" William Gibson? What if I try to change it a
little, don't use the name "cyberspace", make it a bit more interactive in
some ways, less in others... what then? And what if I talk about artificial
intelligences? Or ROM-copies of dead people's memory patterns?
This is the big question: is the founder of a genre creating new
conventions, or is he just moving within his own work? Is it fair to say
"I'm writing a cyberpunk novel", or should we be saying "I'm writing a novel
in the style of William Gibson"? And should Gibson be flattered by the
following which has sprung up around him, or should he feel that his work is
being copied?
Sticky questions, all. And I bring this up because, as you've probably
guessed by now, I've been trying to write a story which uses many of
Gibson's conventions. My story has three characters which appear in a cycle,
it has a virtual reality, it might have artificial intelligences and/or
ROM-constructs. Does this mean I'm writing a cyberpunk story? Will people
see anything with these conventions and simply scream "Cyberpunk!? I've Seen
it all before!" or, worse yet, "Another Gibson rip-off"?
I hope not. I'd hope Science Fiction readers would be more open than
that. But that doesn't seem to be the general pattern. Pigeonholing is the
general pattern.
Because, you see, "mainstream" readers do that with Science Fiction in
general. If I mention a book to a friend of mine, and let it slip that it's
set in the future, or has aliens or robots or dinosaurs or anything like
that in it, I'm as good as dead. Science fiction itself scares people off.
People are scared of genres. So are people doubly scared of the sub-genre of
"cyberpunk"? Quite probably.
And it's all too bad -- because some damn good literature has been put out
in the genre. Harlan Ellison fights the label "Science Fiction" for a good
reason -- people won't take him seriously, people won't read him, if he's a
genre writer. As it is, he goes in the literature section of the bookstore
(some of the time, anyway) -- as he rightly deserves.
But Gibson belongs there, too. And so do a score of other Science Fiction
novels -- not the 50's pulp-style which features aliens named Gloort, or
robots named Zog, but sensitive, thought-provoking novels by Heinlein,
Asimov, Sturgeon, Dick, Clarke, Le Guin, Tolkein, C.S. Lewis.
And pigeonholing doesn't just cover individual works -- it can cover
whole careers. The best example of this is Dan Simmons' novel Phases of
Gravity. It has nothing "Science Fictional" in it at all. But Simmons has
written Science Fiction in the past, and the book was published by Bantam as
a Spectra Special Edition.
I found it in the Science Fiction section. It was a beautiful novel,
which I might not have ever read if it was in the mainstream novels. But
that was where it belonged.
Categorizing books and authors in general is bad enough -- but allowing
yourself to be scared off from individual books by those generalizations is
terrible. We shouldn't run from all westerns, or mysteries, or Science
Fiction... or cyberpunk.
I guess I'm safe in writing my story, because I can say "well, it's
cyberpunk, you know?"
But, somehow, that scares me. I'd rather just say, "this is a story I
wrote about love, pain, and death. About human nature. It's an attempt at
writing meaningful literature. It may be inept, it may just plain stink, but
please read it and tell me what you think honestly."
Yet I know that, if the person I'm giving it to is a mainstream reader,
he or she will read the first paragraph and mumble "Uh-oh-- sci-fi" to
themselves. And if they're Science Fiction readers, chances are they'll say
"Uh-oh-- cyberpunk" or, worse yet, "Oh, no, another Gibson rip-off."
You see, it shouldn't matter whether "cyberpunk" is a genre, a following,
or whatever. It shouldn't matter whether Simmons' Phases of Gravity is
Science Fiction or not.
But it does, somehow -- and that's not fair. It prejudices readers, and it
shouldn't.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell is a sophomore at U.C. San Diego double-majoring in
Communication and Literature/Writing, and is the Associate Associate News
Editor of the UCSD GUARDIAN newspaper. His story "Into Gray" appeared in
the first issue of QUANTA. He's currently trying to write literature in the
form of (eek!) "cyberpunk," and finds it fascinating that he'd write an
article about pigeonholing and categorization for a publication which
specializes in one particular genre.
jsnell@ucsd.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
Bio-Tech in and out of SF
Norman S. Murray
Copyright (c) 1990
_____________________________________________________________________________
A growing trend in Science Fiction is the use of biotechnology. What
is biotechnology you might ask? That is the question which I hope to answer
for you in this article.
The first thing that I would like to point out, is that the biological
sciences are one of the fastest growing fields today. The main advances are
coming in genetic engineering, developmental biology, immunology,
pharmaceutical development. There are also advances being made in
nanotechnology, which, for the purposes of this article only, I will lump
into the biotechnology field (as the only appreciable nanotechnology we now
have is the purely biological equipment in every one of us).
In current fiction, I have seen everything from cloning, to "little
pills to cure everything" (nanomachines that repair every damaged cell in
your body) allowing one to live "forever." I have also seen the engineering
of animals for transportation, i.e. strap yourself onto the back of a giant
cat, and drive to work at seventy kilometers per hour! Also in older works,
we have tissue banks for every person, so that when they get old, or
injured, you already have enough tissue mass to replace their entire body.
There has also been stories where a disease is created, specific to one
persons DNA, as a method to catch criminals. There have also been many cases
where a gene from one species was isolated and transferred into another
species.
These are truly amazing ideas, well worthy of being in science fiction
when each of them was written. Interestingly, however, we can now do some
things from the older list. We have taken the gene for producing human
insulin, and placed it into an E. coli (a bacteria native to the human large
intestine, that is THE subject of genetic manipulations (there are many
others but none used half as much)). These have been grown in giant vats,
and the insulin they produce is commercially available. This is a necessity
for some people who are allergic to the more traditional sources from pigs
and sheep. We have also been able to grow animal proteins out of a tobacco
plant, and have increased crop productivity through genetic engineering.
The other thing we have been able to do is to make transplants common,
but they are still too life threatening to be called routine. This is a
step towards being able to replace any bodypart in anyone's body at a few
days notice, assuming life support technology to keep the individual alive
until such time. Another thing we have done has put us onto the path of
creating the bionic man, nowadays known as a cyborg. The early steps to this
are old and too large to fit inside the human body. Newer ones are capable
of much more and can be implanted into the body. Of course, I'm talking
about the old (but still used) iron lungs, and dialysis machines, and the
newer artificial heart.
A new, experimental contraceptive technique has been used in lab rats,
using the rats own immune system to attack the sperm binding sites on her
own egg, preventing fertilization from taking place. Right now it is about
75% effective for the first month, and then begins to drop off on an
individual basis over the next few months. This will hopefully become a
standard form of contraceptive in humans, but there is much testing left to
be done - so maybe in five or ten years... [1]
As for the other items on the "wish list," they shall remain on that
list for several years. The first to appear will probably be cloning, but
beware - your clone will have to grow for about 20 years before you can have
an intelligent conversation with it. It will be a very impractical thing to
grow a clone of a person, but it will be technologically possible. A scary
possibility for the near future is the ability to create a disease so
specific that it will infect only redheads (or those who carry one gene for
redheadedness, since it is a recessive trait), or any person carrying on
their DNA, a preselected code, thus making it possible to infect everyone
who is female, while leaving the males perfectly healthy.
This, of course, brings up a Pandora's box of moral questions in
biology. Is it right to build an entire species to serve our own needs? and
if so where does it stop being acceptable, and start being slavery. Is it
morally responsible to "dial-up" a baby to order - hair, and eye color, IQ,
height, etc...? These are the questions that must be answered by the time
we get to this level of technology. Did you know that in the U.S.A. it is
legal to patent a new life form?
I don't know what is feeding on what, the science fiction upon real
life or vice versa, but there is a definite revolution sweeping the worlds
of reality and science fiction.
[1] Taylor, Robert, "Zona Pellucida Peptite Blocks Fertilization", The
Journal of NIH Research, January-February 1990 Vol. II
_____________________________________________________________________________
Norm Murray is a sophomore biology major, at Carnegie Mellon University,
concentrating in genetics and computer applications in biology. He is also
an assistant editor of this magazine. He would like to be able to spend time
and learn how to write science fiction, but for now he is content to meerly
read it. He also has a new baby sister (Jan. 31) - and likes to use ' 's and
-'s, as well as ( and ) as decorations when he's typing something. In two
words or less, he's "mostly harmless."
nm0y+@andrew.cmu.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
ILLUSIONS OF REALITY
Bruce Sterling Woodcock
Copyright (c) 1989
_____________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Jonathan Scott awoke that morning with a firm conviction - today
would be the day he would make a breakthrough in Brian's case. Today he
would uncover Brian's hidden secrets and reveal to him the true nature of
reality. Today, thought Dr. Scott, would be a new beginning for Brian
Realis.
Dr. Scott drove quickly through the pouring rain to the clinic that
morning. He arrived on time and quickly reviewed Brian's file. He then
left his office and walked down the corridor to the Therapy Room. The nurse
exited the room and informed Dr. Scott that Brian was already inside. Dr.
Scott hesitated for a few seconds, took a deep breath and stepped into the
room. Brian was there, sitting alone and waiting for the world to end. The
clock bells outside heralded the arrival of nine o'clock.
Dr. Scott strode across the carpet and seated himself across from his
patient. Brian gave no acknowledgment of the doctor's presence and
continued to stare blankly into space. Despite this, Dr. Scott was still
sure that the breakthrough would be today. He looked Brian straight in the
eye and, with a little smile, began their daily session.
"Hello, Brian. How are we feeling today?"
"Well, I can't say for you, but as for myself I'm feeling the same as I
do tomorrow."
"Well, Brian, I feel fine. But what do you mean by `the same as I do
tomorrow.'?"
"I mean tomorrow. What you call the day after today."
"What makes you so sure of how you will feel tomorrow?"
"For I can see the future," replied Brian, "and I know what is going to
happen. Tomorrow will be the same as today. It always is. But tomorrow
you will no longer be able to `help' me. As if I needed your `help' in the
first place."
Dr. Scott was undaunted. His attitude was still positive; the
breakthrough, he thought, would still be today. Because today was one of
the few days Brian had actually talked, which meant that something
significant was going to happen. Dr. Scott decided to ask a question which
earlier Brian had been reluctant to talk about.
"Brian, let's talk about the past instead of the future. Tell me about
the day of the accident."
"It was a day like any other," Brian began, "except that today I was to
make human history. But the day was the culmination of many years of work,
and the story of it really begins many years ago when I was just out of
college.
"As I told you before, I began working at the Wheeler Institute of
Sub-Quantum Studies. My colleagues and I were conducting physics research
at the Planck level. As you know, there is a point at which reality breaks
down in Quantum Mechanics. Once one looks at a small enough scale, the
fundamental aspects of space-time break down. Reality and the physical laws
with which we describe it cease to exist. The only thing left is a
space-time pre-geometry composed of probability and imaginary numbers. It
was a level which took 200 pages to describe mathematically and impossible
to describe physically. It was a level at which the universe stopped trying
to fool us and simply disappeared into the nothingness state from which it
sprang. And here we were, some of the countries' most brilliant minds,
prancing around, giving talks and doing experiments and performing
mathematical hand-waving like we knew what we were talking about. It was
all so presumptuous of us that we could understand something which was
beyond the realm of experience. But we were young and cocky, and no one
else doubted our work, because they too couldn't understand it. And so we
continued our vacuous verbiage about the `true nature of reality' and let
the blind lead the blind until we fell into the pit.
"We discovered these little `pockets' of pre-geometry; a sort-of `Quantum
Foam' which permeated all of space-time. Steve called them `realitons'
since they were the ultimate constituents of our reality. We discovered
that they were the `hidden variable' called for in the theories and that
they traveled much, much faster than the speed of light. They were the
solution to Bell's Theorem and the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox.
"We also discovered that they could be excited to resonate at a specific
frequency. We discovered that whenever we tried to measure the excited
state, the realiton absorbed the energy and re-emitted it thousands of feet
away. It wasn't until the scientists in the material science lab started
dying from acute radiation exposure did we realize what was happening.
"Whenever a realiton was excited, it dematerialized whatever was nearby
in its space-time region and transported in instantaneously (well, almost)
across reality, rematerializing whatever was in its space-time pre-geometry
wave packet when it fell back to its ground state. That's when we got the
idea: what if we used these realitons as a means of transport? Just excite
them, hitch a ride, and be materialized quickly across vast distances. The
distance traveled could easily be controlled by the frequency of the
realiton vibration. Light-years could be crossed in less time than it takes
to go to the bathroom. The problems of interstellar space travel were
solved!
"So we tried testing it over small distances. First inanimate objects,
then live plants, then small animals, etc. We took tons of physical data
and saw that everything came through perfectly, exactly as it was before.
No being turned inside-out or being dispersed across the solar system that
you hear from the science-fiction writers. This was safe, fast, and not too
expensive. All that was left was to try it out on a human being.
"Naturally, I volunteered. Oh sure, there were complaints and
demonstrations and debates on safety, but everybody knew it had to be
tested, and no one else wanted to take my place as volunteer. So the day
came, and I was sealed up in the transportation chamber, all ready to take a
trip a step out less than a nanosecond later thousands of miles away.
Everything was fine. Until they hit the switch.
"Now don't get me wrong. Technically the experiment was a success.
Everything went on schedule and without a hitch; no power outages or
computer glitches to foul things up.
"But we had neglected something. The human psyche is a fragile thing.
Although we knew what happened physically when we did the transportation,
how were we to even guess what it felt like experientially? We had no idea.
I had no idea. And I jumped straight into hell.
"How can I describe what it was like? Like trying to describe color to a
blind man, the concept cannot be related. All I can say is that the
split-second physically was an eternity psychologically. I experienced the
whole of the universe in that time. The animals, of course, were
unaffected, for they are not conscious or self-aware. But the human mind,
you see, contains itself as a self-referent concept. And when that truth is
shattered by a look from the reference point of the divine, when one sees
reality as it truly is, the whole idea of the concept of the universe, as
well as the concept of the self, becomes a farce. To look upon the face of
truth and see only nonexistence is truly enough to drive a man mad. At
least for a while. But I have sorted out my mind, now, and can fully accept
the truth of reality. I am beyond the stage of madness."
Dr. Scott, who had been listening quietly the entire time, suddenly leapt
upon Brian's last few words. "So you feel we really are making progress?"
he asserted.
"Progress is an illusion," Brian replied quickly. "We change, but we
never get anywhere; we never make any progress. So really, nothing changes.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Things. A thing is
subject to change. In fact, things seem to be undergoing constant change.
But when a thing changes, it is no longer what it was once before. It's not
the same thing."
"But all of the traits of an object do not change," interrupted Dr.
Scott. He quickly jotted down Brian's reference to things on a notepad.
"There are overall criteria for classification which do not change," he
continued. "The overall essence of an object is retained. Most changes
involve incidental traits, which are unimportant in the larger scheme."
"But all changes have an effect," explained Brian, "no matter how small
or trivial. Nothing is insignificant; these minor changes add up over the
lifetime of a given thing. And since schemes of classification are purely
arbitrary, a thing can be defined in any way, thus exposing its subtle
changes. The overall essence changes relative to the observer. Since the
common essence of all things is existence, the existence also changes
relative to the observer. Quantum Mechanics demonstrated the importance of
the observer in defining the universe a century ago. But as I pointed out
earlier, we don't really change; we only seem to. Therefore we all don't
exist."
Dr. Scott, however, was quick to respond to the philosophical conclusions
of Brian's twisted logic. "Or we do exist, Brian. By your own logic it can
be either. That's where you lose reality. Both conclusions are equally
correct and possible, but only one applies in our case. We know we exist
because WE KNOW we know we exist."
"But even if we really do exist," replied Brian, "then change causes a
change in our existence. Our existence is therefore fleeting, and we soon
become non-existent. If existence defines reality, then non-existence
defines non-reality, or nothingness. But nothing is not nothing if it is
definable. Thus the paradox of reality and existence. To avoid this
paradox, one is forced to conclude one does not exist."
Dr. Scott scribbled on his notepad while Brian talked. `Coming to grips
with his own mortality. The breakthrough is close at hand.' He then waited
while Brian continued his speech.
"But in the end," Brian sighed, "I am no longer one of you. I can see it
all for what it truly is. It only seems that you know you know you exist.
In the end, reality is but an illusion, a cruel lie; the universe is a
figment of its own imagination. And upon realizing this, the universe is
forced to accept its own non-existence. The end of the universe is close at
hand. And since I am not one of you, my existence will continue, while
yours shall cease."
Dr. Scott realized he had reached a dead end. He sighed and wrote slowly
on his notepad. `Back to thinking he's immortal. He is drifting further
from reality. I will have to retrace the conversation and try from another
route.' The doctor consulted notes he had made earlier, and tried again.
"Brian," began Dr. Scott, "you talked about `things' a moment ago.
Exactly what qualifies as things?"
"Something. Anything. Everything. Nothing. A glass of water, for
instance. I happen to be thirsty."
"That's okay, I'll get you one."
"No thanks," replied Brian, "I'll just drink this."
Dr. Scott stared at the glass of water as Brian drank it. It hadn't been
there a moment ago. "Where did you get that?" he drilled.
"From beyond reality. I wanted it, I reached beyond reality, and I got
it. It was always here, really. But the illusion of reality hid it from
your view."
Dr. Scott became desperate. "Brian, listen to yourself. You can't
really believe what you're saying. I know you must have had that glass
hidden somewhere; stop fooling yourself."
"It was hidden," replied Brian, "by reality. I wanted it; I reached
beyond the veil of reality; I got it. All of those `things' I mentioned lie
beyond the illusion veil of reality. It is you who are being fooled. For
in the end, I am reality. I can get anything I want. And I say reality
doesn't exist."
`Megalomania. Illusions of reali...' scribble scribble erase `grandeur
confused about whether he exists or not. It doesn't look good.' Dr. Scott
noted these thoughts, then asked Brian a new question.
"What is it you REALLY want, Brian?"
Brian Realis thought for a moment, smiled, and then replied:
"I just want it all to stop."
It did.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Bruce Woodcock is a sophomore at Purdue University, majoring in Physics, and
is one of the world's last romantics. He is currently secretary of the
Purdue University Chapter of the Society of Physics Students. In his spare
time, he enjoys reading "just about anything," writing short stories,
building a time machine, exploring the mysteries of the universe, and
falling in love. Bruce's other interest include astronomy, computers,
philosophy, and politics.
sterling@maxwell.physics.purdue.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
CAT AND MOUSE
by Matthew Sorrels
Copyright (c) 1990
_____________________________________________________________________________
Gritty, cold snow came in out of the south, tainting the ground with a
kind of dirty, damp death. The sulfur in the air was thick enough to cause
shortness of breath. It was not a good week. Blaze shuffled down the snow
laden walkway with a weariness that seemed to be the mood of the times.
Entering through the glassy front doors to Hitachi, Ltd., he smiled with a
kind of childish glee. Unlike most people, Blaze was in love with his work.
It was the only reason that he was able to get up in the morning and face
the pain of the real world. He was in charge of data security research and
development at Hitachi, Ltd. His research team was responsible for the
design of most of the systems that guarded computers all over the world. He
was an ICE designer, Intrusion Counter measure Electronics. It was perhaps
one of the dirtiest jobs around. In order to protect a system you had to be
able to understand the slime trying to get in. Blaze was a console jockey,
but also a talented and dedicated research software engineer. He walked a
line few people could understand -- between the slimy underworld and the
corporate zaibatsu.
Of late, a lot of small-time jockeys had been making runs at data banks
that should have been impenetrable. And they had been succeeding. They
were using some new form of worm. The worm was capable of changing some of
the basic rules of the matrix and by doing so confuse any protection system
running in that space. It was like fixing the space so that zero equals
one, anything that relied on that type of basic logic was toast. Right now
his team was working on taking out parts of code from the ICE that relied on
matrix operations to try and get around this matrix worm.
Every morning his team assembled in the conference room to discuss what
was being done. The smoke filled room reeked of sweat that had been sitting
around for days on end. You could taste the caffeine reek in the air. Most
of the people in the room hadn't slept in days, and they couldn't count on
when they would be allowed to sleep again. Even Blaze hadn't slept, he had
been in Osaka trying to find the source of the new worm that was giving him
only headaches.
"Ok, I know you're all tired. I want a short report from each of you,
then we go home. Can't expect you to work forever.", Blaze said as calmly
as his overworked nerves could manage.
"Well, it's a nightmare. There's no way we can remove all the matrix
dependencies from any of the Orange or Mandarin defense systems. They have
had matrix dependencies reduced, but it's not possible to make them
effective and not have them depend on the matrix.", John Yater said from his
tilted back chair, eyes half-asleep.
"Yes, I have to agree. It's just not possible. O'Yatish has been
working on a new minimal ICE that doesn't need any matrix but he doesn't
believe it will hold up to any kind of attack that is worth shit.", Lacy
said with an eager excitement. They kind of seemed to say, "Let us go. We
can't fix it."
"Ok, that's what I felt was inevitable. Right now security is working
with the governments of several nations to try and erase all copies of the
worm and eliminate whoever or whatever wrote it. But the leads are slim.
Word on the street is that some AI wrote the damn thing and started
spreading it around. I am almost willing to buy this, except for the fact
that we are the only people with AI's that know about that type of stuff. I
hope to God that someone working for us here didn't dream up this thing. I
don't think that's likely though. I want you all to go home and get some
rest. Come back tomorrow and we will see what we can do."
This wasn't good, Blaze thought. It could only mean big trouble. If an
AI did this on its own, it would be in violation of the AI act of 2003.
Then on the other hand if an AI didn't do it, someone inside of Hitachi must
have had a hand in it. Word on the street was that someone was going to
take a run at Hitachi, Ltd. and with this new worm that might even be
possible. Blaze spent the rest of the day working the outer matrix defenses
and putting everyone on alert. If it was going to happen it would happen
soon.
Back home in the gloomy corporate owned apartment. Half-a-bottle of rum
later. "Should stay sharp tonight," Blaze whispered into the air, "But I'm
in the mood to get a little wired." Blaze popped a sleeping pill before
laying down in a fitful doze. About a quarter after three, the console woke
him. A level one security breach was in progress. Blaze's dizzy head
groggily slapped the electrodes to his body and punched into the matrix.
The familiar bright lights of Hitachi, Ltd. surrounding him like an old
friend. The never ending red matrix lines, criss-crossing into infinite
space. This was home. A kind of adrenaline that you couldn't get with
drugs. A fire that singed the soul, ground the will, and blurred the mind.
A lifeless form in a sea of egoless dark.
He punched the throttle and zipped within four grids of the break-in. It
was a melee of ICE and fire. The worm was re-weaving the space while the
ICE was doing its best to attack it. In a rhythmless dance, round and round
they went. Behind the worm the data jockey was riding through it all. It
would not be long before the worm had cut a hole in the most defensive ICE
on Earth. It was almost beautiful, but Blaze wasn't there to admire the
art, only to stop it. First he flooded the zone with a new anti-worm that
he had dreamed up. To the worm it looked like an infected matrix area,
causing the real worm to not work its way into that area. The only
difference was that this worm didn't do anything but look like trouble.
After doing this, Blaze punched behind the console jockey that was ridding
the worm. He hadn't noticed Blaze due to a new cybercloak the guys down in
research had come up with. From behind, he flooded the space around the
pirate with a nice and neat killer virus. The virus was called Kafka-4.
Anything it touched was put on trial and then executed --- no pardons, no
appeals. It didn't even give him time to defend himself. He was put out
like a dying ember, you could almost hear the scream on the other end when
his brain fried.
"Loser," Blaze laughed into the glowing matrix.
Now, it was time to flush the worm. Blaze locked off the space segment
and then disconnected it from the matrix. Then he refilled the space with a
nice, neat, clean new matrix. Of course this could only be done in places
that didn't have anything in it, but it was very effective. Then he
reactivated the security ICE for that sector.
Before he punched out he decided to take a spin around this area of the
matrix just to be safe, after all he would not be able to sleep after this
anyway. He noticed something funny over a few grids; some shiny deep dark
ICE surrounding a data core. It shouldn't have been there. None of his
people had put it there, it must be something one of the other groups had
built. Blaze zipped over it real slow, trying to scan it. It was some of
the densest ICE he had ever seen. He instructed the AI that ran his home
deck to try and break off a sample and analyze it. The deck's data
construct peeled off and tried to attack a corner of the black wall, but it
completely vanished while Blaze was watching it. This was something
serious, it was not only defensive but offense as well.
"Shit. This deck isn't going to cut that. I'm going to have to go into
the lab and try to it there," Blaze swore. It was his only chance against
ICE like that. In the lab the console had the use of a couple of custom ICE
breaking AI's that could attack the ICE at so many different places at once
that what ever controlled the ICE would get overloaded and break down. The
deck in his apartment, while one of the finest decks money could buy, was
nothing compared to the wrath that the Cryle AI could bring down on a wall
of ICE.
The wind whipped across his face as he left his car for the front door.
The moon rose above the company in an ominous glow of dark power. Coming
into the main lab, Blaze switched on Cryle. Cryle was a special version of
the NuralBio AI. It was equipped with a very large database of knowledge
about dealing with the net and how data was transferred around. When used
properly it was the most effective form of ICE-breaking tool ever created.
"Ok, Cryle. Here's the deal. There is some type of ICE taking up most
of quadrant F67M. I didn't put it there. No one on my team put it there.
I want to know what it is hiding and why. I tried to do a scan with an
extra deck image but it was wiped before it even got close. What ever it
is, it is very dense and very offensive. The probe didn't even get close
enough to start scanning before it was purged. Do a scan on that sector and
tell me what you think. I also want a complete summary of all data that has
moved into or out of that sector in the past month."
Blaze could taste this hack in the back of his throat. It had been a
long time since something had come along that could give him a real
challenge. Most of the systems left in the world Blaze had designed or
helped with. This was different. The fear and excitement of a virgin
jockey was coursing through his veins.
"Blaze, I am not sure what that thing is, but it sure is weird. There
has been no traffic into or out, of that sector ever. I went all the way
back to the date that sector was created. Something had to put that ICE
there, but it did it some way that doesn't generate data traffic. In any
case that is the meanest ICE I have ever seen. You can't even get close
enough to find out what it is. It is so dense that I am not sure that it
was built to be broken. It looks more like a one way door. What ever was
put there ain't coming out and it sure is not going to be friendly when you
try coming in. Take my advice, leave it alone." Cryle's voice coming out
of the walls shook Blaze out of a trauma glaze.
"Sorry, I can't just let it go. Here is what I want to try. I want you
to run at it with the new Russian breaker you've been playing with, while I
attack it head on with a matrix bomb. I know it will be impossible to
control the deck after the bomb goes off, but, with any luck, we can send in
a dumb probe after we punch a hole in it. In this case we are not doing a
secret run. If I have to level that entire sector, that ICE is coming
down."
"Ok. All systems are go. I am sending in the Russian breaker. It will
attack the {0,0,0} end of the ICE in one minute, 25 seconds. Be ready to
hit the {1,0,0} end with the matrix bomb when the clock on your deck reaches
zero. It will count the seconds down. Because you will be in the matrix at
the time the bomb goes off I want you to control the release not some
subprocess I spawn off; it is safer. All right?", Cryle's metallic tone
echoed.
"Let's do it," he screamed. Blaze's voice was barely audible above the
massive AI's humming. He jacked into the matrix about a click away from the
center of the ICE and began to run forward filling the space in between with
a variety of fast processes that would keep the matrix busy and not allow
the ICE any room in which to attack his deck. The clock was counting down.
Let than thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.
Four. Three. Two. One. Release. Blaze released the matrix bomb and
filled the entire sector with a mass of random logic.
He was put out like a dying ember, you could almost hear the scream on
the other end when his brain fried.
"Loser," some AI laughed from the glowing matrix.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Matthew Sorrels considers himself a modern Existentialist. He has been
known to write an infinite amount of rip-off cyberpunk that most people feel
is very bad. He is currently a junior at Carnegie Mellon in computer
engineering. As to why he should be allowed to write this story, his answer
is "Anyone who can write in over 10 computer languages fluently should be
allowed to write cyberpunk."
ms90+@andrew.cmu.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
ONE
by Faye Levine
Copyright (c) 1990
_____________________________________________________________________________
1. One
He was a smallish, too-lean man, his lavender skin much paler than it
should have been, his ordinary white hair cropped short about the sides and
back, a bit longer up front. His face was stretched over sharp, high
cheekbones, not quite sunken, but not quite healthy, either. His eyes were
a deep yellow, almost orange. They were cold and reflecting, very alert,
very intelligent. Very shrewd. The mind behind the eyes did not
particularly care about the body which had barely gotten it through the
Space Navy physical. That did not matter. What mattered was that it
functioned. What mattered was that the man had graduated first in his class
at Tansar, the top Space Naval academy, with a multitude of honors, and was
now a very successful and respected Lieutenant Commander at the scant age of
twenty-five.
His name was Keezor Gemcutter. He did not care for the handle. His
registered go-by was Keezor, and that helped a bit, since he never went out
of his way to announce his too-quaint family name, or the fact that it meant
he had come from a thousand year-old line of jewelers. It was not that he
was embarrassed of his heritage; it was simply that "Gemcutter" was really
not at all a proper name for an officer. It had no power, no strength.
"Keezor," on the other hand, had a certain edge to it, which is why he had
insisted on being called by it since he was a child. He knew very well how
important image was, and realized that if he could not be a physical
presence, he could at least be a psychological one.
His father had long been irked over his refusal to go by the family
name, and even more irked over his decision to throw away the years his son
had spent apprenticed to him in favor of joining the Space Navy. His mother
had simply whined, in a typical motherly fashion, that he was not strong
enough. In the end, he had come to terms with his father, and had proved
his mother wrong: his somewhat frail body had somehow weathered the physical
hardships, and his mind had passed every test with flying colors.
Keezor was an intelligent man, highly so. He knew it.
The average Space Navy recruit, even if they had come from an academy,
was just that: average.
That was why he joined.
His opinion was this: They needed him, and they knew it. He did not
deny his ego. He knew he was good, and he was damn proud of it. He did
not, however, lower himself to bragging. Boasting was bad etiquette, a sign
of insecurity, and a way to make others believe you were lying. Keezor
revered proper behavior and stood on solid ground. As far as he was
concerned, bragging in any form was unnecessary. He preferred to prove
himself through his actions, which he had in fact done on numerous
occasions.
Keezor was largely a solitary man, or more accurately, a recluse. He
was not altogether antisocial, but preferred to be alone, exercising his
mind. His bedroom at home was his palace; he spent the majority of his time
during leaves there. It was his private sanctuary. He usually did not let
anyone in, not even his mother. She had rarely needed to go into his room
even when he was a boy, mostly because he kept it so meticulously clean and
neat.
People thought he was strange. Likeable, respectable, but strange. He
did not care. He lived his life the way he liked it best: orderly,
properly, and, when possible, alone.
2. Two
It was dark in his sanctuary tonight. The whole room was wrapped in
shadows, save for a bright light over a table. Sitting at the table was
Keezor, a large book open before him. Situated on the table was a perfect,
scaled down terrain dotted with the troops of two armies prepared to do
battle.
Tonight was the last night of a one-week leave. He had spent all day
setting up for the battle, deciding that it would be a pleasant way to end
his short vacation.
Keezor loved history, especially historical battles. The workings of
armies and navies had fascinated him for as long as he could remember. His
shelves were filled with books containing detailed accounts of battles from
the decade he lived in to millennia past. He believed in learning from
history, from others' mistakes as well as successes. Strategy games were
fine to play--he had a cabinet in his room dedicated to holding a score or
more of them--but they were, after all, only games. He had already mastered
a number of them, and was considered the best Stratigon player, two and
three dimensional, in the hemisphere. The re-enactment of real battles,
however, gave him a certain satisfaction the games could not. Through his
models, he had come to learn and memorize literally hundreds of offensive
and defensive strategies, and had also learned why many more had failed.
Years of persistence at this hobby had made him the top-notch strategist he
was.
Tonight he was field marshaling the Battle of Issai, from some three
thousand years in the past, fought from chariots and riding beasts, with
spears and crossbows and swords. Its primitive appearance and complex,
ingenious workings made for an appealing exercise of the mind.
Keezor was already familiar with the scenario; now he was working his
way through the book in front of him, consulting maps and other information.
As he read, he would move the model armies' troops through each stage of the
battle, pausing to study, make notes, and take mental pictures.
He became so absorbed he did not notice when, sometime after midnight,
the young woman sitting across from him put down the book she was reading,
got up, stretched, and circled the room, her fingertips brushing the rows of
wall-to-wall books on his shelves.
Her name was Marilla. She was naturally attractive, but not beautiful,
plump but not large enough to be deemed fat. Her face was perpetually
friendly, shining with health and happiness.
She came up behind Keezor and rubbed his shoulders. He sat immobile,
his eyes locked on the model. He said nothing. "Mm, Gem...," she hummed.
Keezor blinked at the sound of the pet name. He did not particularly like
it, but he did tolerate it. "Gem," Marilla repeated.
A long pause. "Hm," Keezor replied, and continued to contemplate the
model.
The girl kissed the top of his head and continued to rub his arms, neck
and shoulders. "Are you going to do that all night, Gem?"
Another pause. "Mm."
"You should be spending your last night having fun."
Keezor sat up a bit and paged through his book. "I'm enjoying myself,"
he said. Marilla continued to pet him. He responded to it with
indifference.
He had met her many years ago. She had singled him out at cafe for
some unknown reason and had sat down at his table, upsetting privacy as well
as his indulgence in a particularly good book. She had more or less forced
a conversation on him; however, after the initial annoyance died down, he
had found her pleasant enough. She had given him her phone number after
several hours of chatting, and he had politely given her his own in return.
He would have forgotten about her, except for the fact that she would not go
away. She was not annoying, simply a bit overly friendly at first.
Eventually they had grown to be friends, although exactly why Keezor did not
quite understand. They had little in common. Marilla, however, was quite
fond of and intrigued by him, and through a bit of devotion and persistence
had managed to win a place in his small circle. She was, in fact, the only
person he would allow in his room without question or hesitation.
"You're so thin," she said as she ran her hands over him. "Don't they
feed you in the Navy?" Keezor did not reply; he had heard variations on
this lecture from her as well as others a million times before. "That
reminds me...," Marilla went on. She left his room and came back with a
wrapped plate. She took the crinkly foil off (earning a "Sh!" from Keezor)
and set the plate down beside him. On it were a multitude of tiny pastries.
"I almost forgot about this," she said. "I made them for you."
If there was one thing no one would deny about Marilla, it was that she
was an excellent cook. She was also a dietician, which meant that Keezor
had to endure her constant, motherly attempts to feed him properly.
Keezor stole a glance at the desserts, then chose one at random. He
nibbled at it as he made alterations to the model. It was good. Very good.
He popped it in his mouth and reached for another. He downed the second
pastry in several bites, then took a third. Behind him, Marilla was
ecstatic. Keezor rarely did more than nibble, and he never took seconds.
She embraced him from behind, snuggling as close as she could. He frowned
and shrugged away. Marilla did not care.
"So, you like them?" she asked, smiling broadly.
"Yes," Keezor replied, still concentrating on the model, "They're very
good."
"I'm glad," she told him.
Time passed. The pair fell silent again as Keezor worked at his model.
Marilla resumed her seat across the table from him, and sat watching him
closely. He seemed thoroughly absorbed in his work. Then, all at once, the
girl's pleasant expression dissolved into one of worry.
"Gem," she said.
"Hm," he replied without looking up from his work.
"Do you have to go away tomorrow?"
"Of course."
"I mean, do you really have to go away?"
"I've told you before," Keezor murmured patiently, "being selected for
the special program aboard the Surefire is a rare and excellent opportunity
for me to advance my career."
"I know, I know," Marilla protested, "but you'll be way out in space,
far away, for so long! I won't be able to talk to you or anything."
"It's only for six months."
"That's forever! What am I going to do without you for six whole
months?"
"What do you do with me now?"
"Keezor..."
"You'll be alright," Keezor soothed, still absorbed in his battle.
"But I need you," Marilla replied quietly.
"You have other friends... other men..."
"Other friends, but no other men, Gem, only you." Keezor looked up
briefly. She was staring at him, sad and longing. He returned to his task.
"Marilla," he said at length, "Are you bored?"
"No," she replied, "Why?"
"Don't you ever get bored, sitting around here with me? You have almost
no interest in what I do."
"No, never," Marilla sighed. "I just like to be with you. That's
enough."
There was another, longer pause. Marilla got up, came around behind
him, and began to caress him again. "When do you have to leave tomorrow?"
she asked.
"I have to be at the aerospaceport at 0900."
"Hm?"
"Nine o' clock."
"Oh." An awkward pause. "Gem...Do you love me?"
Again Keezor looked up from his work, but gazed ahead at the wall and
not at the girl. She had never asked him that before. He closed his eyes
for a moment, then opened them again. "Yes," he replied quite frankly, "In
some bizarre way, I suppose I do."
Marilla bent close and wrapped her arms around him. "Then how about
making love to me?" she murmured, and kissed his neck. Keezor turned and
looked up at her. A tender expression, usually alien to him, crossed his
face.
As it happened Marilla was as good a lover as she was a cook, if not
better.
3. One
The next morning, after Marilla had embarrassed him by smothering him
with good-bye hugs and kisses, Keezor made his way to his departure gate.
According to his watch he had another fifteen minutes to kill before the
offworld shuttle to Orbital Station One would be called for boarding.
His stomach was rumbling. This was rare for him, especially since he
had eaten a very large breakfast. Marilla had discovered one of his little
quirks: sex made him hungry. Very hungry. Ravenous. She had been rendered
speechless when he had gotten up suddenly and had literally ransacked the
kitchen. To her pleasure, he had gorged himself. However, he was still
feeling hunger pangs.
He paid an outrageous sum of money for several candy bars and a drink,
scarfed the food down, then went back to the gate to wait. There was a
video game there; it happened to be two dimensional Space Stratigon.
Keezor regarded the machine in distaste. He hated computers. The
human mind, he felt, was so much more superior, capable of true thought,
emotion, and integrity. It was the human who truly invented, thought up
strategies, and made advancements. A computer was just another tool made by
the human. One could claim that a box full of silicon microchips was
capable of producing battle tactics, but what would the mass of wiring know
about strategies at all without a human to program it? As far as Keezor was
concerned, people should spend more time developing their own minds rather
than allowing techno-toys to do the thinking for them.
Since he had nothing better to do, he popped a coin into the game and
selected the highest level it would allow him to start at: "Expert"--level
ten. The screen burst into a beautiful albeit unnecessary display of
astounding graphics as Keezor's and the computer's fleets materialized onto
the screen.
Keezor won in five moves.
The game started again, now at level eleven. Seven moves, and it was
over.
In less than five minutes he had worked his way up to level fifteen,
"Mastery" level. He beat the game again, this time in ten moves.
Another five minutes, and he was in the middle of a twentieth level
game. His shuttle was called for boarding.
`Screw this,' he thought. `Why am I wasting my time?' With a flash of
bravado, he entered a move, one of his personal favorites. The game paused
for a moment. The words "SURRENDER DECLARED" flashed on the screen.
Keezor offered the machine a "Hmph," accompanied by a patronizing
smile, and left to board the shuttle.
4. Fifty-one
Upon arriving at Orbital Station One, Keezor consulted a station map
and made his way to the docking bay where the Surefire was being kept.
The Surefire was a new, experimental ship featuring an extra-long
cruising range and advanced anti-detection capabilities. It was well armed,
but its main function was to serve as a military scout and survey ship, and,
under certain circumstances, as a lesser flag ship. At least that, among
other technical information, was what Keezor was told in the report he
received after accepting an assignment on its first long-term space trial.
There was a bit of ambiguous information as well; the Surefire had been part
of something called "Project Friend," and all information concerning this
project was classified.
After presenting his orders and identification to the security staff,
Keezor was admitted to the Surefire's dock. He was mildly surprised when he
saw the vessel; it was much smaller than he had imagined. Still, at least
on the exterior, it was sleek and impressive. Then again, he reflected,
looks sometimes were deceiving.
As he boarded the ship he wrinkled his nose at the "new" smell of the
interior. He made his way to the bridge and entered. It appeared empty.
The Surefire's bridge was a circle, however the aft quarter of it had
been walled off and made into a captain's office. Aside from the captain's
chair, there were only five other stations. Port and starboard exits led
into hallways.
He took the sight in, impressed despite its emptiness and small size,
then glanced at his watch. He was precisely on time; he always was. But
where was the captain and the rest of the bridge crew?
As if in reply to his thoughts, the sound of laughter came from behind
the door of the captain's office, and a moment later four men, one in a
captain's uniform emerged.
Keezor snapped to attention. "Lieutenant Commander Keezor reporting
for duty, sir," he said, addressing the captain.
The other man smiled and returned the salute. "Ah...," he said, "At
ease. So you're Keezor, eh? I've heard a lot of good things about you.
I'm Captain Germayne." He motioned to two of the three other men. "This is
Commander Tyros, my second in command, and Commander Slaff, who's here as a
consultant. The third officer here is Lieutenant Commander Anton, our
detection and analysis technician." The four men exchanged nods of
greeting. "There's one other crewmember you have to meet before we get
started," Germayne went on. He cocked his head slightly, and addressed the
air. "Friend?"
"Yes, Captain Germayne?" a too-pleasant, female voice replied.
Keezor looked about. "Who's that, sir?"
"That, Keezor, is Friend, the product of Project Friend. She's the
first interactive computer to be installed on one of our military vessels."
"Oh," Keezor replied, inwardly grimacing.
"Friend," the captain went on, "Do you sense a new life- form reading
on the bridge which has not been identified?"
"Affirmative."
"Good. Commit to memory." Germayne turned to Keezor. State your full
name, rank, and number."
Keezor cleared he throat and spoke up. "I am Lieutenant Commander
Keezor Gemcutter, common name Keezor, number S-496-001-2297."
There was a slight pause. "Identification confirmed," Friend informed
them. "Identification matches the on-line information for Lieutenant
Commander Keezor."
"Excellent," Germayne smiled. "I declare Keezor as one of my crew.
Commit to memory."
"Confirmed." "Now that that's settled...," the captain said, his
attention once again on Keezor, "Welcome aboard."
"Thank you, sir," Keezor replied.
"Don't get too ruffled about Friend. She takes a little getting used
to, but is actually quite interesting to use. When you want or need to speak
to her, just call out the name, and be sure to speak clearly. Don't use
foreign words or slang."
"Yes, sir."
"Any questions?"
Keezor briefly let his gaze wander about the bridge. "Are the five of
us the entire bridge crew, sir?"
"Yes and no. We rotate shifts and we do have replacements, but we're
the whole official bridge crew, with the exception of the navigator. He
should be coming back soon."
"Only six people on the bridge, sir?"
"That's right. Between the technical advancements and Friend, the
Surefire practically takes care of herself, leaving us open to focus our
attention on more important things. There are only fifty-one people on
board."
"I see."
A man came through the port entry. "Ah," said Germayne, "Here's the
navigator."
Keezor turned to look at the new arrival. His face lit up. "Sine!"
he exclaimed.
"Keezor!" the other replied, "How long has it been already?"
"I take it you've met," Germayne observed.
"We went to Tansar Academy together," Sine explained. "I was two years
ahead of him, though." He smiled broadly. "Still got that girl following
you around--Gem?" Keezor laughed and nodded.
"Please, gentlemen," the captain broke in, although not unkindly,
"Now's not the time for reunions. We're scheduled for take-off in an hour.
We have plenty to do, so let's get busy."
* * *
Two months passed. Keezor grew to like the Surefire and her crew, with
the exception of Friend, whom/which he ignored whenever possible. He even
insisted on doing things himself when Friend could have easily completed the
task for him in a matter of seconds or minutes. While Captain Germayne did
not object to Keezor's dislike and disuse of the computer, he did consider
the lieutenant commander's attitude toward it somewhat severe. He was an
easygoing man, however, and was content to let Keezor go about quietly
exercising his mind while the rest of the crew made as much use of Friend as
possible.
For the first time in over five years, Keezor was given the opportunity
to work with Sine on special maneuvers and simulated offensive and defensive
runs. The ship performed wonderfully; Sine even better. The pair spent a
good portion of their free time together, doing research or playing strategy
games. Sine never won, and Keezor would not let him, but the navigator was
a good opponent and an even better loser.
One afternoon the bridge was particularly quiet. Anton and Sine manned
their stations in boredom while Commanders Tyros and Slaff chatted with
Captain Germayne. Keezor sat in his own place, still and proper, waiting
patiently for something to happen. "Keezor," Germayne spoke up, "There's
nothing for you to do now. You can leave if you'd like." "No, thank you,
sir," Keezor replied. "I don't like leaving my post before my shift is
over." "If that's how you want it. How about a game of Stratigon with
Friend? I hear you're an excellent player. You think you can handle her?"
`Not "her",' Keezor thought, suddenly angry, ` "It". And of course I
can, you stupid ass. Don't insult my intelligence.'
"I don't know, sir," he replied evenly.
"Have a go at it," Slaff suggested.
"Yeah, why not?" Sine offered. "You can beat Friend. You can beat
anything at Stratigon."
"Nah," Anton scoffed, "She's too good."
"Ten says Keezor buries her," Sine challenged.
"Deal."
"Well?" Captain Germayne prompted. "Are you up to it, Keezor?"
Keezor's eyes flashed, more fiery orange now than amber. He cleared the
computer screen in front of him. "Friend," he said, loathing the name as he
spoke it.
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander Keezor?"
"Load a game of Stratigon. Three-dimensional."
"What level?"
"The highest you can go."
"Level thirty," Friend said. The screen in front of him lit up with
bright, detailed graphics. "You may begin when ready."
Keezor gave a tight-lipped half smile and cracked his knuckles. He
began.
Twenty moves later, he won.
As the others gaped in amazement, Anton handed his money over to a
smiling Sine.
"Incredible," Germayne laughed, shaking his head. "Do me a favor,
Keezor--go get the portable set in my office and show me how the hell you
did that."
Keezor smiled. "Yes, sir," he replied. He went into the small room
and reached for the set on the captain's desk.
For an instant, an alarm sounded. His ears popped. There was the
overwhelming sound of rushing, high speed wind, immediately followed by the
crash of emergency bulkheads slamming into place.
"What the--?" Keezor began. He never finished. The ship's alarms
began to shriek. The ship dipped and shook. Keezor was thrown to the floor.
"Warning," Friend's quiet tones somehow managed to communicate over the
din, "Multiple hull breaches. Severe portside and lightspeed drive damage.
Engines are shutting down. Repeat: Warning--Multiple hull breaches..."
5. Nine
The first thing Keezor noticed when he left Germayne's office and ran
back onto the bridge was Anton's screaming, audible over the alarms. He ran
to the man, who was rolling on the floor, clutching at his stomach.
"What happened?" Keezor yelled at him.
"Port...!" the other gagged.
Keezor looked up. The bridge's port exit had been twisted out of
shape. A bulkhead and rapidly hardening sealant closed it off. Keezor shut
off the bridge's main speakers and the alarm cut off; he could now only make
out the muffled sounds of it coming from outside the starboard exit, which
had also been shut but not sealed. Aside from the wailing and Anton's
cries, the ship seemed eerily quiet.
Confused and shaken, Keezor looked about him. Germayne, Slaff, Tyros,
and Sine were lying crumpled on floor, up against the port side of the
bridge, as if they had been thrown. None of them moved. The wall was
spattered with blood.
Keezor sprang to the intercom. "I need medics up here on the double!"
he shouted. There was no reply. He tried again, with the same results.
"Damage report!" he called. His only answer was a static hiss.
"Engineering! Somebody!" He turned away. "Friend! Give me the damage."
"There are multiple breaches on the port side of the hull. Several
projectiles have penetrated the ship. Navigation is functioning at
seventy-two percent efficiency. The lightspeed engine is currently
unoperational. Long range radio is unoperational and short range radio has
been damaged. A priority distress beacon has been activated."
"Is the intercom functioning?"
"Affirmative."
`Oh God,' Keezor thought frantically, `then if none of the decks are
answering...' He ran past Anton and over to the others. He didn't need
medic's training to tell him Germayne, Slaff, and Tyros were dead. Sine was
breathing-- just. Keezor pulled out the bridge's medical kit. He stood
stupidly for a moment, unsure who he should go to first, Sine or Anton.
Anton was still screaming, and now, as he looked more closely, he could see
that the man was bleeding badly.
He ran to Anton and pried the man's hands away from his stomach. His
clothing was soaked with blood.
"Get it out! Get it out!" Anton shrieked at him.
"What? Get what out?"
"Shrapnel...oh, shit...forceps...dig...find it!"
"But I--"
"DO IT!"
Keezor hesitated, then tried to call for a medic again. Once again, he
received no reply.
"They're dead, you stupid fucker!" Anton screamed. "HELP ME!"
His hands shaking, Keezor returned to Anton and fumbled through the
large box until he found forceps. He tore away Anton's clothes, then
abruptly turned away and vomited. Gagging, he gulped in several breaths of
air, turned back to his comrade, and tentatively began to search through the
man's flesh. Eventually he found what he was looking for. Deep down he
could just make out the tip of a piece of metal. Swallowing hard, he reached
in and pulled it out, then emptied an entire can of sterile, staunching
spray foam into the gory hole. He dressed the wound as quickly and as
tightly as he could.
"Muh...," Anton gasped, "Morphine..."
"Uh...," Keezor almost whimpered, "Y-yeah." He found a small packet of
syringes pre-loaded with the drug, and pulled one out. "Where--where do
I--?"
"ANYWHERE!"
Keezor forced himself to stop shaking long enough to locate a vein and
slide the needle home. After a short time Anton's wailing began to subside.
Keezor left him and ran over to Sine. The navigator lay twisted on the
floor, but he was afraid to touch him for fear of worsening any internal
injuries he might already have.
"Friend," he called as he sat wondering what to do, "What happened?"
"Early warning systems detected a sizeable incoming mass traveling at
too high a rate of closure for any reaction other than a spectrograph
analysis and one automatic defensive action. The spectrograph indicated
that the mass in question was ice, however as the port lasers fired to break
the mass into non-threatening units, the spectrograph also indicated the
presence of iron beneath the ice. There was insufficient time left for
further reaction. Five iron masses have struck and penetrated the port hull
of the ship."
"A piece pierced the port corridor," Anton grimaced. "I took a hit and
fell, but... the air... was sucked from... starboard to port... for an
instant before the bulkheads closed. The others... picked up... thrown..."
Keezor nodded. "Friend, give me the status of the medical wing."
"The medical wing took a critical hit."
"Oh, God... Status of--no. Friend, how many life-form readings do you
currently have aboard this ship?"
"One moment." A pause, then: "Nine."
Keezor sank to his knees. "Oh God, oh God...," he muttered over and
over.
The starboard bulkhead suddenly opened and six men ran in. One Keezor
recognized instantly. He was Lieutenant Ryde, one of the shift leaders from
engineering.
"The captain--?" he began.
"Dead," Keezor told him. "And Slaff and Tyros, too. Sine and Anton are
in bad shape."
"Uh..." one of the other men broke in, "Anton's dead."
"Wha--?" Keezor gasped. He had not noticed the man had stopped
wailing. "Oh, fuck," he muttered under his breath. He realized he was on
his knees on the floor, shaking and dazed, certainly not the way he should
be behaving. He pulled himself together and stood up. "Our distress
beacon's on--the long range radio's out," he informed the others, forcing
himself to stand straight and his voice to stop wavering. "Navigation's
intact, but not fully operational."
"And what about you?" Ryde asked him.
For a moment Keezor froze, then realized it was an innocent question.
"I was in Germayne's office when it happened. I'm okay. And you?"
"We were all sleeping. I guess we just got lucky." Ryde glanced at
Sine's still form. He approached the navigator, very gently felt his neck,
and peeled back one of his eyelids. "Is there cervical collar in that kit
there?"
Keezor looked. "No."
"Okay." Ryde looked up at the others. "Javis, Daq--go see if you can
scrounge one up, or something that'll keep this guy's head still. Try to
get something hard and flat to put him on, too." The two men nodded and
left the bridge.
"Is it very bad?" Keezor asked, surprised at how calm his voice had
suddenly become.
"Well, I'm not an authority, but I did have some training once. He's
comatose. Looks like he's got some bad head injuries, probably neck
injuries, too. But like I said, I'm not a doctor. Could be better, could
be worse."
After Sine had been attended to and the bodies had been cleared away,
Ryde and his companions decided to go to engineering to assess the damage.
Keezor remained on the bridge, returned to the captain's office, and made a
log entry:
Date: fifteenth day of Third Month. Lieutenant Commander Keezor reporting.
Not long ago the ship's hull was breached in five places by chunks of iron
from a fragmented mass the spectrograph initially interpreted to be ice.
There was no time for reaction; the whole matter was taken care of by the
computer's emergency defense system. I don't think any of us realized what
had happened until after the impact, when the alarms started going off.
The bridge crew, with the exception of myself and Lieutenant Commander Sine,
has died as a result of injuries received when one of the iron masses
punctured the ship near the bridge. Sine is down with head and neck
injuries.
The Surefire has been badly damaged. Life support systems appear to be
functioning normally and all damaged areas have been sealed off.
Navigational systems are not fully operational; long range radio is out and
short range radio has been damaged. Our priority distress beacon is on.
The medical wing has been more or less destroyed and the lightspeed drive is
currently unoperational.
There are only eight of us left--nine if you count Friend, which I don't.
Friend does not appear to be malfunctioning.
The other survivors are from engineering: Lieutenants Ryde, Javis, and Daq,
Sergeant Yoriq, and Second Lieutenants Eral and Wellow. They have gone to
see if the lightspeed drive is repairable. More later.
End of entry.
Just as he completed the recording, the intercom on Germayne's desk
came to life.
"Keezor, this is Ryde," came the Lieutenant's voice.
"I hear you. How bad is it?"
"Well, it'll take some time, but it's repairable. I'm a little
worried, though; it looks like the cooling system's been damaged. If it
gets too hot, a lot of circuitry'll go bad, and that'll mean a longer down
time."
"I see. Are you going to start repairs now?"
"We already have. I'm calling from engine access area seven. Wouldn't
you know, the heaviest damage is here, where some of the most important
parts are?"
"Is there anything I can do?"
Ryde sighed. "No, not really. The six of us can handle it, and we've
pretty much got all we need. You might as well sit tight up there and man
the radar or the radio. You never know--something might come our way."
"I'll do that," Keezor replied. "Keep me updated."
"Will do. Ryde out."
Keezor returned to the main section of the bridge and sat down on the
floor next to Sine. "Sine?" he tried, "Can you hear me? Sine?" His friend
did not reply. `At least he's not in pain, like Anton was,' Keezor
reflected. `At least he's still alive.' He looked around him. For some
reason, the small bridge suddenly seemed very large and very empty. A chill
caressed his body with icy fingers, causing him to shudder. He thought of
Marilla, warm and soft against his body the night before he left, but it
only made him shiver more. He gazed down at Sine helplessly, angry that he
could not do more for him. He hated idleness. He hated having nothing to
do, no way to engage his mind--
A bell clanged into life. Startled, Keezor sprang to his feet.
"Danger," Friend said before he could ask, "Fire in lightspeed drive port
access area seven. Engaging extinguishers."
"Ryde!" Keezor exclaimed. He ran to the intercom. "Ryde!" he shouted,
"What's happening?"
"We've had a cooling system failure," the lieutenant returned tensely
but not frantically. "We've got a chemical/electrical fire here."
"Well get out of there!"
"It's okay," Ryde assured him. "It's not that bad. The automatic
extinguishers should--"
"Danger," Friend broke in, "Extinguishing system failure in lightspeed
drive port access area seven. Closing bulkheads."
"What?!" Keezor shouted at the computer. "No, wait--!"
"Shit!" Ryde exclaimed. A thudding noise came over the intercom as the
area was sealed off. "Oh, Lord--Friend, open the bulkhead!"
"Under safety code 115, an area containing an uncontrolled fire must be
sealed off until the danger is over," Friend replied.
"But," Keezor sputtered, "Ryde--the others--they're still in there!
Open the bulkheads!"
"Under safety code 115, an area containing an uncontrolled fire must be
sealed off until the danger is over."
"They'll die!"
No reply.
"OPEN THE BULKHEADS!"
"Under safety code 115, an area containing an uncontrolled fire must be
sealed off until the danger is over," Friend droned.
"Keezor, do something!" Ryde shouted. "The fumes--the pressure in the
pipes--if this gets any worse we'll have an explosion here!"
Keezor sprinted from the bridge and ran to the lower decks, through the
engine room and toward the access areas. He came to a halt in front of area
seven. He could hear Ryde and the others inside.
"I'm here!" he yelled. "I'll get you out!"
"No good!" Ryde shouted back. "We can't open it from in here; you
won't be able to open it from out there!"
Keezor ignored the remark and began to pound on the door controls.
Nothing happened. "Friend, open the bulkhead!" he screamed.
"Under safety code 115, an area containing an uncontrolled fire must be
sealed off until the danger is over," the computer replied.
"Fuck the safety code! There are personnel trapped in there! Open the
bulkhead!"
"Under safety code 115, an area containing an uncontrolled fire must be
sealed off until the danger is over."
"Please!"
"Keezor," came Ryde's muffled voice through the door, "I left some
tools out there. Get into the door controls and disconnect them. Maybe we
can open this sucker manually."
Keezor spotted the tools. Using them, he opened up the bulkhead's
control panel and began to rip the wires and circuitry out with his bare
hands.
"Hurry, Keezor!" Ryde yelled. Keezor could hear him and the others
coughing and gagging.
"I'm trying!" There was a muffled pop as an explosion tore through the
area behind the bulkhead. Keezor heard screaming and frantic cries for
help. "FRIEND, YOU BITCH, OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!"
"Under safety code 115, an area containing an uncontrolled fire must be
sealed off until the danger is over," she/it replied calmly.
Keezor began to pound on the impassable door in desperation. He could
hear the others screaming, calling his name, begging him for help. He
shrieked obscenities at the computer as he shouldered and hit the door over
and over again.
He did not remember running back to the bridge. Suddenly he was there,
and so were the screams, coming through loud and clear over the intercom.
He covered his ears. It was not enough. He broke down, wailing, shouting
at Friend as she/it repeated the safety code for him again. He curled into a
ball, shut his eyes, and screamed along with Ryde and the others.
Eventually, he was the only one yelling. Soon after that, his throat became
so raw he could not even do that. Sobbing convulsively, he crawled to the
first aid kit, took out one of the syringes loaded with morphine, and
plunged it into his arm. He collapsed, sprawled out on the floor, as
darkness closed in.
6. Two
The morphine kept him sluggish and oddly calm even after he stopped
screaming, he fell into a heavy sleep, and woke up some hours later. He
checked on Sine, then dragged himself to the Captain's office to make his
report.
Captain's Log, supplemental entry. Lieutenant Commander Keezor reporting
for the deceased Captain Germayne.
(pause)
For the record, I will admit that I had knowingly and willingly drugged
myself with morphine while on duty, several hours prior to this recording.
I don't think I'd be able to give the report I'm about to if I hadn't.
Today, during Lieutenant Ryde and his crew's attempts to repair the
lightspeed drive, a fire started in access area seven, where they were
working. When the fire control systems did not engage, Friend automatically
sealed off the area, and for safety reasons would not respond to my commands
to open the access area doors. All other attempts at overriding the door
controls failed.
Ryde, Javis, Daq, Yoriq, Eral, and Wellow are dead. Lieutenant Commander
Sine and I are the only members of the crew remaining. Sine's condition has
remained unchanged.
(pause)
I...I had to listen to them...scream...
Oh God.
End of entry.
Keezor returned to the bridge. "Bitch!" he snapped. There was no
reply. "Friend!"
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander Keezor?" the computer's feminine tones
replied soothingly.
"Damage report on the lightspeed drive."
A pause, then: "A recent fire has rendered 90% of all computer
components necessary for operation inoperable."
`Damn,' Keezor thought, `the safety panels must have been off during
the fire, and I'm sure Ryde and the others had a hell of a lot more on their
minds than putting them back on.' "Do we carry sufficient replacement parts
on board?"
"Yes," Friend told him.
"Where?"
"Deck two, storage room one."
"Good. I want instructions for the repair of the lightspeed drive."
"Access to the information and components you have requested are
restricted to command officers, and electrical and drive mechanics engineers
of specialist level three and higher. You are a command cadet of specialist
level four and a strategist of specialist level six."
Keezor thought for a moment. A moment was all he needed. He was,
after all, only dealing with a mass of silicon and circuitry. "Alright," he
said patiently, "call up the information I have requested so the proper
personnel can execute the necessary repairs."
"The said personnel, or the command officers, must request the
information personally," Friend replied. She/it paused, then added, "You
and Lieutenant Commander Sine are the only life-forms aboard, Lieutenant
Commander Keezor."
Keezor drove his fist into the wall. A lance of pain streaked up his
arm. He looked down at his hands. They were bruised grey from pounding on
the access area door, and one of his fingers appeared to be broken. Gently
holding his arms to his body, he sank into the captain's chair. "How do you
expect me to return to base if you won't let me repair the drive?"
"I expect nothing, Lieutenant Commander Keezor. Access to the
information and components you have requested are restricted to command
officers, and electrical and drive mechanics engineers of specialist level
three and higher. You are a command cadet of specialist level four and a
strategist of specialist level six."
"Yes, yes," Keezor growled, rubbing his temples. He got up and left
the bridge. `I'll do it myself,' he thought. `I'll fix the fucking drive
without that bitch-thing's help. It'll take time, but I can do it.' He took
a lift to the second deck. After wading through a considerable amount of
debris, he eventually arrived at the door of storage room one. He pressed
the "open" button. Nothing happened. He tried again, and again, and still
nothing happened.
"Access to the information and components you have requested are
restricted to command officers, and electrical and drive mechanics engineers
of specialist level three and higher," Friend's voice cut in suddenly. "You
are a command cadet of specialist level four and a strategist of specialist
level six."
"Shut up!" Keezor shouted. "Let me in, damn you!"
"Access to the information and components you have requested are
restricted to electrical and drive mechanics engineers of specialist level
three and higher. You are a command cadet of specialist level four and a
strategist of specialist level six."
Keezor kicked at the door to the storage room. Desperation and fury
overrode the morphine in his veins. "STUPID MOTHERFUCKER!" he bellowed.
"GODDAMNED ASSHOLE SHIT-EATING--"
"Request not understood. Please clarify."
"BI-I-I-I-I-I-I-ITCH!" Keezor shrieked. He threw himself against the
door and sagged to the ground. "What do you want from me?!" he demanded
angrily. "Do you want Sine and me to die?"
"I do not want anything, Lieutenant Commander Keezor."
"Fuck you," Keezor muttered under his breath. He got up and returned
to the bridge. "Friend," he said, grimacing as he spoke the name, "Does the
ship have enough power to reach the nearest Space Naval base?"
A pause. "Taking current energy expenditures into consideration,
negative."
"How far could the ship go?"
"The Surefire can currently cover seventy-five percent of the distance
to Station Twenty-One, at coordinates seven-one-seven by nine by two-five
point three, on sublight power only."
Keezor performed a series of quick calculations in his head. That
would take the ship to the fringe of short distance radio range and long
distance radar detection. "And how long will that take?"
"Calculating." A pause. "Three days, eighteen hours, and forty-two
minutes."
Keezor stole a glance at Sine's still form. `It'll have to do,' he
thought. "Are you capable of setting and maintaining a course?" he asked
the computer.
"Yes, Lieutenant Commander Keezor."
"Good. Set course for Station Twenty-One."
"You are not authorized to order a course change."
Keezor's expression darkened. "I gave you an order. execute it."
"Only Captain Germayne, Commander Slaff, and Commander Tyros are
authorized to order course changes which deviate from the mission."
Keezor pulled at his hair. "The mission is over!" he shouted. "The
ship is damaged and the crew is gone! Abort the mission!"
"Only Captain Germayne, Commander Slaff, Commander Tyros, or a member
of Space Navy Command have the authority to abort the mission," Friend
replied.
"Captain Germayne, Commander Slaff, and Commander Tyros are dead! Do
you understand me?! Dead! They're not ever going to say anything again,
much less order you to abort the mission!"
"Only Captain Germayne--"
"Shut up!" Keezor snapped. "Are Captain Germayne, Commander Slaff, and
Commander Tyros here?"
The computer paused. "I show life-form readings only for you and for
Lieutenant Commander Sine. Previously said persons are not on board."
"Not on board? They're in body bags in storage bay two, that's where
they are!"
"Previously said persons are not on board."
Keezor stopped to think. To Friend, "dead" meant "No life-form
readings," and "No life form readings" meant "Not on board." "Friend," he
went on, "When the captain is unable to perform his duties, who takes
command?"
"The commander, or the designated first officer if there is more than
one commander aboard the ship."
"Correct. And who takes control when the designated deputy captain
cannot perform his duties?"
"The next highest-ranking officer of commander level, or, if another
commander is not present, the designated deputy commander."
"What is my rank?"
"You are a lieutenant commander, Lieutenant Commander Keezor."
"Then, considering that Captain Germayne is not here to perform his
duties, and Commanders Slaff and Tyros are not here to perform deputy
captain duties, then does that not designate me, the next highest-ranking
officer aboard this ship, the deputy commander in Slaff and Tyros' absences,
and, since either would have been the deputy captain, but neither are here,
the deputy captain?"
There was a very long pause. "You are not a designated deputy
captain."
"That may be, but in Slaff and Tyros' absences, am I not the designated
deputy commander?"
"One moment, please," Friend told him, and after a short time replied,
"No such designations were made."
Keezor screamed.
"Do you not have a default which states that in the event of a crisis
situation the highest ranking officer remaining assumes command of this
vessel?!" he roared.
"Affirmative."
"Is this not a crisis situation?!"
"Taking the damage to the ship into consideration, affirmative."
"Then as the highest ranking officer aboard this vessel, I command you
to obey my instructions!"
"Negative."
"NEGATIVE?! Why?!"
"You are not the highest ranking officer currently aboard this vessel."
"THEN WHO THE BLOODY HELL IS?!"
"Lieutenant Commander Sine outranks you by two years of service."
Keezor shot a glance at his friend, lying prone on the floor. "Sine?"
he squawked. "Sine is in command of this ship?"
"Affirmative."
"But he can't--He's in a coma, for God's sake! He's comatose! Do you
understand?"
"Coma:," Friend droned, "a profound state of unconsciousness resulting
from illness or injury."
"Correct," Keezor snapped. "How can Sine command the Surefire if he's
comatose?"
"I have no verification of that."
"What?--No--!" Keezor sputtered, tearing at his hair. "I'm looking
right at him, and I'm telling you, he's comatose!"
"You are not authorized to make such a verification," the computer told
him.
"Then who is?"
"Only medical personnel are authorized to verify a crewmember's
physical condition. You are a command cadet of specialist level four and a
strategist of specialist level six."
"God damn you," Keezor growled, and went over to the navigator's
station.
"Request not understood," Friend told him, "Please clarify."
"Never mind. Is the navigational equipment still functioning?"
"The navigational systems are currently operating at seventy-two
percent efficiency."
Keezor scanned the helm. He knew the standard operating procedures,
and had watched Sine use the equipment many times before, both in school and
on board the Surefire. After a moment of thought, he entered a course
change.
Nothing happened. "Only licensed navigators of specialist level five
and above are permitted to use the helm of this vessel," Friend in him in
her/its perpetually patient voice. "You are a command cadet of specialist
level--"
"STOP!" Keezor roared. Friend cut off. He stomped across the bridge
and sat down next to Sine, his eyes wild with fury. "Sine, Sine..." he
groaned, and gazed down at his friend. "I'm afraid... I'm afraid I'm going
to have to resort to some--some desperate measures..."
Captain's log, supplemental entry:
Friend--I hate calling it that--has become bureaucratic. Since I am not a
commander and since no one was ever designated "deputy commander," it
refuses to let me take control of the ship. Since I'm not a navigator or
engineer, I am denied access to the helm and to information and equipment
necessary to repair the lightspeed drive.
The computer told me that under the crisis default, Sine is commander of the
Surefire, since he outranks me by two years of service. Since I am not a
medic, it refuses to let me verify that he is comatose and unable to perform
his duties. I seemed to be damned no matter what I do.
There is, of course, one thing left to me other than suicide or a slow
death.
I'm sure the decision I'm about to make will get me court-martialled-- just
for starters.
Captain's log, supplemental entry:
The situation at hand had forced me to take somewhat drastic measures in
order to preserve this ship.
I...Without authorization I--I attempted to disconnect Friend, the
Surefire's experimental computer system.
Keezor stopped, grimaced, and squeezed his right hand tighter in an
attempt to close the wide, clean gash in his upper left arm. Blood gushed
out from between his fingers.
Friend, however, was hardly keen on the idea. After being wounded by its
automatic defense system, I... the situation... everything...
The man paused and bowed his head in shame. His gaze fell upon a large
wrench sitting on the captain's desk, the steel wet with blood.
...I destroyed Friend.
I now have control of the Surefire. After dealing with the computer, I went
to deck two, storage room one for the parts needed to repair the lightspeed
drive, however few of the multitude of parts in the room were labeled, and I
was unable to retrieve the necessary components for repair. So, now I have
gathered all necessary supplies and equipment, and, in an attempt to
conserve energy, have sealed Sine and myself in the bridge. Life support
has been shut off in all other areas of the ship, and the gravity has been
shut off as well. My plan is to manually navigate the ship to Station
Twenty-One, almost four days away. By my calculations, the power should
hold up long enough for the Surefire to get within short distance radio and
long range radar range.
End of Entry.
Keezor hauled himself up and half floated, half walked back onto the
main bridge. He was dizzy from blood loss; he cursed himself for not having
taken care of his injury right away.
Sine was still on the floor, held down and still by strips of duct
tape. The medical kit hovered over him. Keezor took the kit, settled down
in the captain's chair, and strapped himself in. After his attempts to
staunch the bleeding in his arm failed, he reached into the large box and
withdrew a hypodermic needle pre-loaded with a local anesthetic, a small,
curved needle and a length of thread. He cleaned the gash as best he could,
turned his head, and pushed the syringe into his arm. After a short time
the throbbing, burning pain lessened to near numbness.
Keezor threaded the needle with some difficulty and tied a large knot
at the end of the thread. He swallowed and moistened his dry lips,
beginning to feel somewhat nauseous. After several false starts he managed
to pierce his skin, and after what seemed like forever he had sewn up the
wound, however awkwardly. The blood loss was taking its toll; his eyes were
beginning to cross. The anesthetic was wearing off. Needles of pain
stabbed through his arm. His whole body ached with exhaustion. Still, he
forced himself to set the Surefire's course for Station Twenty-One before
returning to the captain's chair and drifting off to sleep.
When he woke up several hours later, Sine was dead.
7. One
He felt very strange--or was it that he did not feel at all? Somehow
there was no longer fear, no anger, no reaction to his situation, not like
there had been in the first frantic moments after the hull breech, when
Anton was screaming and the alarms were shrieking and confusion and terror
had him shaking in his boots. Not like when Ryde and the others had burned
to death and he had had to listen to it. Not like the agony of waking up to
find his friend lifeless, and realizing in afterthought that if he had not
lost his temper Friend--the object of years of research, now ruined--would
now recognize him and not Sine as the commander of the Surefire.
`Oh, yes,' he would think, `you don't need anybody and you can do
everything yourself and you can beat anything at anything and you just love
to be alone don't you alone and quiet and thinking oh yeah you just love it
don't you hell yes I do I love being alone with myself but not on a
half-dead ship full of fucking corpses!'
He drifted into a sort of dazed stupor, not asleep, but not awake. He
would occasionally spasm as a terrible vision of things past would burst
into his mind, clear and crisp as the moment he had originally experienced
them. He stirred only to get up, moving like a zombie, and correct the
ship's course heading when a small light on the helm flashed a warning. He
did not eat, speak, or tend to his arm.
Three and a half days passed. He was staring at nothing when out of
the corner of his eye he saw the hailing light on the communication panel
flash. He stood up on shaky legs and answered the call.
"This," he began. His voice was hoarse and cracked. He cleared his
throat. "This is Lieutenant Commander Keezor of the Surefire."
"Surefire, this is Captain Oran, administrator of Station Twenty-One.
We've received your priority distress signal. What is your condition?"
"We've had five hull breaches," Keezor replied dully. "I'm the only one
left out of a crew of fifty-one."
"Good God." There was a pause. "The High Command contacted us, you
know. They got worried--they lost contact with their new ship and didn't
know what the hell was going on. It's a good thing we found you. How bad
is the ship? Can you navigate her in?"
"No, sir," Keezor told him quietly.
"Alright, don't worry. I've already sent out a couple of cruisers;
they'll tow you in."
"Thank you, sir."
Several hours later the Surefire docked at Station Twenty-One. Keezor
went to the main airlock, straightening his posture as it opened. A man he
presumed to be Captain Oran ran up the boarding ramp to him, several medics
in tow.
"Incredible," Oran exclaimed as he approached. He stopped in front of
Keezor. "Shit, you're just a kid! You're a lieutenant commander?"
"Yes, sir," Keezor affirmed without much emotion.
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-five, sir."
"Incredible," Oran repeated. "And you got the ship all the way back
here by yourself. How did you do it? What the hell happened, anyway?"
Keezor stared at the older man for some moments. He closed his eyes,
then opened them slowly. "With all due respect, sir," he said in a low
voice, "it's all in the log."
Oran seemed mildly disappointed. "I understand." He looked Keezor
over. "Are you alright?"
"Fine, sir," Keezor replied.
Oran nodded. "Come on, then; I'll escort you to your quarters. I'm
sure you could use a rest."
"Thank you, sir."
The captain turned and started down the boarding ramp.
Behind him, Keezor collapsed in a heap.
He spent the next week at Station One, being treated for exhaustion and
damage to his arm. When the doctors deemed him well enough to go, he was
put on a shuttle and sent home.
By this time the Surefire's logs had reached the High Command, so it
came as no surprise to him when he was summoned for a meeting with the top
brass.
An Admiral named Slane questioned him thoroughly but respectfully. He
was then brought before a committee including Slane and many other
high-ranking officers and officials.
"Under the circumstances, we have chosen to ignore your actions against
Friend," Slane told him. "You will not be charged or held accountable in
that matter. We have also decided to overlook your admission of performing
your duties under the influence of a narcotic.
"It is our opinion that you behaved in the most appropriate and noble
manner possible under the circumstances. You have displayed exceptional
bravery as well as a number of outstanding traits, for which you will be
presented with the Medal of Honor at a ceremony scheduled for next week.
"As for your effort to command, to aid your fellow crewmembers, and to
save your ship, we wish to reward you with a choice."
"A choice, sir?" Keezor inquired.
"You may, if you wish, take a promotion to the rank of Commander, and
captain the scout ship Nebula," Slane informed him. "However, it seems
the Division of Tactical Research has taken a keen interest in you, and has
offered you the opportunity to train as a junior tactician. The program
requires several years of studies before certification, and will also
require you to remain earthbound for up to two years after that. The
program is quite rigorous, and, under certain circumstances, may result in a
desk job, so I'm sure you'll want to think about it care--"
"I'll take it."
_____________________________________________________________________________
Faye Levine is an Art/Design Freshman at Carnegie Mellon Unversity. Recent
interesting events in her life include being mistaken for an anime character
featured in ``Lum''. She wanted to think of something witty and clever for
her bio-blurb, but was seized by a fit of non-creativity. Her persistence
at Elvis-hunting has finally rewarded her with success; the King's head is
now mounted on her dorm room wall.
fl0m+@andrew.cmu.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
TO A PHOTON
From `Adventures of a Degenerate Electron'
--- Bruce Altner
Stretching before you, the days gone and yet to come,
In coils of amber, vacuum and mist.
You, who live or die by the sword of the Vector Potential,
Intrepid voyager cast upon the way.
Our fates bound together, we ride the wild flux,
Noble companion, ethereal spirit.
Copyright (c) 1990
altner%champ.span@star.stanford.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
STILETTO HEELS
by William Racicot
Copyright (c) 1989
_____________________________________________________________________________
`These shoes suck.'
It was generally considered a bad idea to run in spike heels, but, in
this neighborhood, taking them off often meant shards of glass stabbing into
your feet. So on she ran, spike heels clicking frantically against the
pavement.
Feeling her breath grow short, Lucy gradually slowed down. Eventually,
she came to a complete halt in a shadowed alley, dark as the passage to
Hell. She crumpled to the ground in exhaustion, and outrage at her
feebleness welled over her. Slipping off a shoe, she massaged her troubled
foot. `Lucy, Lucy, Lucy... when are you going to learn? Never walk
anywhere without decent shoes.'
Her reverie was interrupted by the thudding report of a man's shoe
striking pavement. Immediately, she crammed her feet back into her
less-than-sensible heels, and began clicking away.
But the man's footsteps grew more pronounced, the basso pounding of his
dress boots an eerie counterpoint to the quick, high skipping of Lucy's
heels. A hand touched her shoulder. She stopped abruptly and whirled
around to glare at her pursuer. "What do you want Tyre?" she demanded.
Her pursuer was very thin and average height, and the long black trenchcoat
he wore emphasized his gauntness. Her shoes made her much taller than he.
"Lucy, why won't you sell me that buckle?" he panted.
`He sounds so old...' She glanced protectively at her waist. The buckle
her mother had left her rested on a wide leather belt. It was a very exotic
looking silver carving of the moon. `I can't believe Mother never wore it.
It would have set off the white in her hair so beautifully.'
"I told you, Tyre. It's been in my family forever. I can't just go and
sell it to someone who can't even explain why he wants it... Now please,
Tyre, if you're going to continue with this, just leave me alone!" With
that she spun on her heel and moved to leave.
Tyre grabbed her shoulder again, but she spun about, kicked his left shin
with her four inch heel, and stalked off. Her pace was such that the
clicking of her shoes against the road was dignified, even majestic, and she
held her head high. `That'll teach him not to screw with a Lady!'
Through his agony, Tyre shouted after her, "Lucy! I must have that
buckle! Damn, I'm bleeding!"
He began to chase after her once again, but upon hearing his motion, she
broke into a sprint. With his injured leg, Tyre simply could not keep up.
And now it was throbbing. He turned and began to walk home, the pain in his
leg intensifying until it was all he could do to limp.
She ran for a while, until finally she broke a heel and tumbled to the
ground. `Dammit! I hate these shoes!!' She sat there a while, gritting
her teeth at whatever supreme being had inflicted this day on her. Despite
her best efforts at self control, a tear appeared at the corner of her eye.
After a few deep breaths, she stood up. Her posture was somewhat crooked,
but she limped on, trying awkwardly to compensate for her broken heel. She
grimaced. Well, I guess I got what I deserved for running like a madwoman
in four-inch spikes...
Some time later, she arrived at an old house, the home of Albert Simmons.
They'd been close friends since high school, and she'd been staying with him
since her mother's death.
"Al!" she called, pounding on the front door. "Let me in! I forgot my
keys! I need to talk to you." When no one answered, she tried the door.
`Unlocked... he must be writing...'
Having taken off her shoes, she sat on the floor and began to rub her
aching feet. The day's tensions seemed to melt away into the rust-colored
rug, like butter spread on hot toast. `Mmmm... That's fantastic...' Once
she had eased her throbbing feet, she rose and padded down the hall toward
Al's library. There was a mirror on the far wall, and she couldn't help but
see her reflection. `God... I'm a mess...' She began brushing her hair
with her fingers, to little effect. `Oh well. Al probably won't notice
anyhow...' When she got to the library door, she poked her head in and was
assailed by the muffled sound of Queen's `Bohemian Rhapsody' played through
a headset. Albert sat behind a huge desk, clicking away at his typewriter.
He was oblivious to her presence.
It was clear to her that she was not going to get his attention until he
was ready to rejoin the universe. The days when you could distract Al from
a great idea had ended soon after he realized that these distractions were
why he so often forgot what he was writing about. So she yawned and
stretched out on the overstuffed sofa near his big mahogany desk.
Tyre had just barely gotten inside his apartment when he fell to the
floor, his bleeding leg crumpling beneath him. He groaned in agony, and
struggled to get up.
His girlfriend, Amanda, came rushing into the room. "Good Lord, Tyre!
What happened to your leg? You look like you've been shot! Here let me take
a look at that." She moved over to him and bent down to examine his wound.
"I had a run in with Lucy. She tried to use her shoe to make Tyre
shish-ke-bab!" he replied, through teeth clenched with pain.
She probed the wound with a finger. "Oh, and I suppose you'd done
nothing to provoke the attack..." Her sarcasm was lost as fresh pain shot
up Tyre's leg.
"Argh! I just asked her to sell me her belt buckle..."
"The one her mother left in her will? Really, Tyre, that's in terribly
poor taste. And besides, what could you possibly want with that thing?
Lucy showed it to me when we were in high school -- we were snooping around
her parents' room; it's ugly. Let me get some peroxide for that leg." With
that she left the room, returning a moment later with a brown bottle and a
bag of cotton balls.
"Get away from me with that!"
"It's for your own good. This won't hurt nearly as much as that leg will
if it gets infected." She poured peroxide on a cotton ball and began to
swipe it over the cut. She winced at the look on Tyre's face. "You still
haven't told me why you want that awful belt buckle."
"I did some research after the first time I saw it." Tyre replied, "As
it turns out, it's a relic. It dates back to the Age of Chivalry. That
buckle was actually a pendant said to have been worn by The Lady of the
Lake. It's not doing Lucy any good, but it would be a fantastic addition to
the exhibit of Druidic artifacts over at the museum."
"Well, if she doesn't want to sell it, I really don't see what you can
do. It's hers to sell or keep as she sees fit. And it's been in her family
for so long, I wouldn't be at all surprised if she's descended from its
original owner. Do you really want to piss off the descendant of the Lady
of the Lake?" She chuckled a bit. "Lady of the Lake! God!"
He decided to ignore the last bit, reaching for the old pocket watch
Amanda had given him when they'd first begun dating. "I think I can
persuade her if I can only keep her in one place for a while..." he said
thoughtfully.
"You're not thinking about trying that hypnotism garbage again, are you?"
asked Amanda. "Don't you realize how much rubbish that is?"
"Shut up, Amanda. It works, and that's all there is to it. Believe me
or not, as you will, but that doesn't change anything. And another thing:
the Lady of the Lake isn't just a myth. There are too many references to
her, to Arthur, and to the whole legend for it to be completely fictional.
For that matter, it is widely believed that the legends are mostly based on
fact. And I must have that amulet."
"Well, if it's that important to you, I think I heard Lucy was staying
with Al for a while -- to help her settle down after her mom's death.
There's a laugh. Everyone knows that he's liked her since college," said
Amanda, with a grimace.
"Staying with Al, huh? Silly shit probably promised he'd protect her,
too. What a pain..." He cringed as Amanda washed out his wound a second
time. "Damn! Well, protection or none, I will have that buckle!"
"Don't even think about hurting Albert, Tyre. I know you two haven't
gotten along that well in the past few years, but we all had some great
times together, back in school. I like him."
"I will do whatever I have to do to get what I want."
At that, Amanda rolled her eyes to the sky and stalked out of the room,
taking the peroxide with her. Tyre sat looking at a red cotton ball. His
leg smelled like disinfectant. `Good Lord...' He got up, and limped over
to the door through which Amanda had left the room. He went to the medicine
cabinet and removed a length of gauze bandage and some tape. He bound up
his leg, and then headed painfully for the front door.
Amanda called out, "Don't take off yet, Tyre. I'm going with you."
A few minutes later, they departed for Albert's house.
Lucy sat up, and saw Albert looking at her. He looked confused, like he
always looked when she appeared while he was writing. "Hello, Lucy..." he
began uncertainly, "How long have you been here?"
"Oh God... I don't know... I think I fell asleep." As she got a bit
reoriented, she remembered the evening's events. "Al? I wanted to talk to
you about Tyre..."
His confusion melted, as he focused full attention on the woman before
him. "What's up?"
She told him about her encounter with Tyre, and then asked, "What am I
going to do about him? He's obviously not going to leave me alone until I
give up Mother's belt buckle."
"Hmm... don't worry about Tyre, anyway. I'll take care of him. But why
does he want the thing? I mean, I really can't see him wearing anything
so..."
"Watch it."
"...large. Can you think of any reason why he might want it?"
Lucy thought of the events leading up to the evening's festivities. "No,
but he wants it badly. He offered to pay me a lot of money for it. I
wonder why..."
Her contemplation was halted abruptly by a pounding on the door. "Guess
who..." They went to the front door and Albert innocently called, "Who is
it?"
"It's Tyre and Amanda," came a deep voice from outside. "Is Lucy in
there? I wanted to talk to her."
Lucy frantically shook her head no. Her eyes pleaded that Al not reveal
her presence. He whispered to her, "Don't worry; I'll take care of Tyre."
Then he opened the door and saw Tyre leaning on Amanda. His leg was
bandaged up tightly. "God, Tyre...I haven't seen you forever! How've you
been? I see you're still with Amanda..." Al looked ruefully at the woman
in question. "Well, how can I help you?"
Tyre replied, "Actually, it's Lucy who can help me," He limped through
the door, followed by Amanda. "Have you thought about what I said, Lucy?"
"What happened to your leg, Tyre?" she asked innocently.
"Lucy..."
"All right," she said, almost giggling, "I told you before, Tyre. There
are too many memories wrapped up in this. I can't just sell it to the
highest bidder. Especially not to a buyer who won't say why he wants it."
"I'm afraid I won't take 'no' for an answer, Lucy." He moved toward her,
reaching for her waist. Albert interposed his larger body between Tyre and
Lucy.
"Sorry, Tyre, but I can't let you do that. If you want the buckle..."
At that he reached back and took it from Lucy's belt, which promptly fell to
the floor. "...You'll have to take it from me."
"Fine, then. If that's the way you want it-"
Amanda cut him off. "Uh, Tyre, I don't think this is a very good
idea..."
"Wait a minute, Al." commanded Lucy. "This isn't right. Give me the
buckle, and I'll deal with Tyre."
Al backed down, handing it to Lucy, with the final note: "Tyre, you can't
have the belt buckle. It belongs to Lucy and until you convince Lucy that
she wants to sell it, you'll just have to do without.."
"I think I can convince her..." said Tyre, taking out an old pocket watch
Amanda had given him when they first began dating. He set it to swinging
and looked askance at Lucy, "If the lady is willing?"
"What do you have in mind?" she looked straight into his eyes.
Tyre said, "How about this: If, after ten minutes with you -- no contact
of course -- I can convince you to sell me your bauble, then I will give you
a substantial price for it. If after those same ten minutes you still
insist on keeping it, then I will leave peaceably, and never again bother
you about it."
Albert looked over at Amanda and winked. She barely suppressed a burst
of laughter.
Lucy said, "Fine. Does tomorrow night sound good to you?"
Tyre nodded, "Tomorrow night it is, then."
After careful consideration, Lucy's hand settled on a blue dress. She
brought it out and set it next to the red one on the bed. Looking at each
in the mirror, she finally decided on the blue. `This will look great with
Mother's belt buckle.' She replaced the red dress in her closet, and then
began to put on the other. She chose a new pair of shoes, high heels the
same color as her dress. The overall effect, once she had added a silver
chain belt fastened by the moon buckle, was dazzling.
"Hey Al," she shouted, poking her head out into the hall, "How do I
look?"
His head appeared around the corner, followed by the rest of his body.
"Why? Are you fishing for compliments?" She glared playfully at him. "You
look fantastic. Is my tie straight?"
Lucy spent a few minutes adjusting his black tie, and just as she
finished, there was a familiar pounding on the front door. "Showtime..."
Al opened the front door, exposing Tyre and Amanda, who came inside,
shutting the door behind them. Amanda wore a gray slit dress which, though
simple, brought out her figure beautifully. Tyre, on the other hand, was
dressed all in black, his suit finely tailored to make the most of his
slight build. He leaned upon an ebony cane which was topped by a gold
carving of a dragon's head. His watch chain, hanging from its pocket,
balanced out the ensemble.
Lucy maintained her composure, realizing that she struck quite an
impressive figure herself. "You look very nice, Tyre." She said, politely.
"So do you." He replied, careful to keep the awe out of his voice. Al
and Amanda simply stared at the imposing couple.
After what seemed an awfully long time, Al broke out of the trance.
"Well, you may as well join me in the kitchen, Amanda. I have a feeling
these two want to be alone. Lucy, Why don't you take Tyre to the living
room?"
Al's living room was not very large, but it was comfortable. The most
prominent feature was an overstuffed couch. The brown upholstery had seen
better days, but it was still functional. In front of that was an old but
sturdy coffee table with the finish worn in places. There were a few more
chairs on either side of the room, and the floor was covered by a
rusty-orange carpet.
"Lucy, why don't you get comfortable on the couch. Stretch out..."
"Tyre you promised that this would be no contact." She teased, but she
did as he instructed. He sat, facing her, on the old coffee table.
"Hey Tyre, why do you want my belt buckle, anyhow?" She asked, genuinely
curious.
"I'd rather not say. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you."
He dodged.
"Come on, Tyre, try me."
"Fine." He said, "But you won't believe me. This so-called belt buckle
that your mother left to you was actually a pendant worn at the bosom of the
Lady of the Lake. I had hoped to add it to my collection of Druidic
relics."
Lucy looked him straight in the eye and said, "Bullshit." He stared
right back into her eyes, but refused to comment. "You aren't kidding, are
you?" She looked down at her waist and saw the amulet hanging there, but it
seemed much heavier now.
Tyre cleared his throat, "If we could get on with this..."
"Right." Lucy looked over at him.
He took out his gold pocket watch, and began to swing it gently before
Lucy's eyes. The two relaxed, and after a few moments, they had achieved a
subtle rapport. Presently, Tyre began to whisper, "You are more comfortable
than you have ever been before..."
Almost unconsciously, Lucy reached down and unfastened her belt. She
raised the silver moon by the chain, and allowed it to follow the sleepy
motion of the gold watch. "Yes... comfortable... ever before..." She
whispered after him.
"You feel your desire to possess the Amulet of the Lady fading, blowing
gently away like pollen on the breeze..."
"...the breeze..." Lucy slowly straightened her back up until she and
Tyre both sat facing one another. Gold and silver were lowered, as man and
woman rose. They stood, each staring into the other's eyes, she gripping
the moon, he the dragon.
But to Tyre it seemed a staff. He saw before him, not a woman in a blue
dress, but the Lady herself, blue gown flowing, almost as though in a
breeze, her posture regal. Barely showing beneath the hem of her gown, a
pair of stiletto heels poked their way into view. And he was Merlin,
gripping his staff intensely, his black cloak fluttering.
Her eyes bore deeply into his, and she said, "No Tyre, I'm afraid it's
your desire which has faded."
But it seemed to him that she had said, "Dear Merlin... You've no power
over me." And it occurred to him that she was right.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Bill Racicot is a sophomore stuck in Limbo because of a paperwork error in
the school of the humanities at Carnegie Mellon University. In the past, he
has been a student of mathematics, an actor/singer, an accounts receivable
clerk, and a human interface between man and a VHS(tm) machine.
wr0o+@andrew.cmu.edu
____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
ICE BALL
by Thomas Hand
Copyright (c) 1989
_____________________________________________________________________________
Part 1
The water was getting cold. It was the city's way of saying he had spent
enough time in the shower already.
"Hot water ration nearing end." The shower warned him. It always
disquieted Teri to have a machine talk to him while he bathed.
"Water off." He said, when the water was too frigid to bear. "Drier on."
The stainless steel walls slid away revealing large vents which blew warm
air over him. When his drying ration was exhausted, he dressed in his robe
and stepped out of the Water Closet. Teri surveyed his apartment, till he
found the dinner table which had been accumulating a pile of mailchips all
that week. With a comfortable scratch and a yawn he settled in a chair
beneath the pile.
"Coffee, black." The food dispenser processed the request and offered him
a mug.
"Thank you. Now let's see." He took the first chip, and read "Sale at
Sojki" The chip tumbled through the air, landing in the open disposal unit.
"Blasted junk mail." As he sifted through the other chips, the Sojki chip
gained company. Teri stopped his hoopshooting long enough to view a chip
from his Aunt.
"Hello, Teri. How are you? I had hoped to hear from you, but I guess you
were too busy to worry about your poor old Aunt..." She always enjoyed
making him feel guilty, and she was good at it. "... I don't blame you, you
probably have some girl you're seeing that is taking up all of your time..."
She was also in a hurry to get him married, not exactly what he was
planning. "... well, you be sure to sent me a chip. Love and Kisses." Teri
watched the face pucker, then he added her chip his score.
"Important Message From a Friend" It sounded important enough, so he
popped it in.
"Greetings customer, let me show you..." The face of a businessman
polluted the screen, but it never finished its sentence.
"Getting sneaky aren't we." Two more points.
Teri picked up the next chip and dropped it as if it bit him. It was
marked with the official symbol of the Protectorate. There was to need for
further identification.
A stern face filled the screen, while behind him the presidential seal
covered the wall.
"This is the President of the Protectorate Council. I am informing you
that you have been selected to receive the honor of serving as part of the
Protectorate Galactic Marine Corp. You are to follow the proceeding
instructions exactly. Failure to do so can be punishable by 40 years
imprisonment or permanent exile. Thank you, and remember to vote Liberal."
The face broke into a smile and disappeared. Teri felt faint.
The next face belonged to a uniformed officer who had a friendly air
about him.
"Mr. Teri M. Demsy," Patriotic music began in the background. "You have
been chosen to wear the uniform of the finest army in the galaxy, the
Galactic Marine Corps." The screen changed to a line of uniformed men at
attention. "You will be trained in the latest weaponry. " The screen showed
a firing range. "You will be given the opportunity to visit exotic planets."
Pictures of popular tourist attractions on several planets were shown. "In
short, Mr. Demsy, you will become one of the few, the proud, the GMC. You
are scheduled to begin training at seven thirty hours at Fort Reagan, April
4, 2054. I must remind you of the consequences should you refuse to appear
at the appointed time. Standard punishment is 40 years in prison or
permanent exile to an outer planet. I'm sure you don't want this Mr. Demsy."
The final picture shown was the Protectorate flag, flying in the breeze. The
officer's smiling face covered the screen once more. "We look forward to
seeing you Mr. Demsy." The screen went blank.
Teri glanced at his watch: April 2nd, two more days to live the rest of
his life.
With the war between the Protectorate and the Federation at its present
stage, he would be killed within a year. If he didn't join, he would face
imprisonment or worse- exile to a frozen planet where he would slowly starve
or freeze. There would be little chance to escape the Protectorate if he
decided to run since they control the entire planet. He would be
continuously running from Administrators. That he disliked more than death.
No one could decide how they wanted to die in two days.
The hands of his watch read 3:42 am. Teri could remember the day his
grandfather gave it to him, describing how old it was. Since the
Protectorate outlawed analog watches long before Teri was born, it must be
old. His grandfather speculated its age somewhere before the revolution.
However old, it was Teri's only conscious offense against the Protectorate,
and he cherished it. He rarely wore it outside his apartment, because, if
seen, he would spend the next five years in prison.
The apartment was still the way he left it when he viewed the chip,
except for an absence of light. He didn't work that day, instead, he slumped
in his quiet room, lost in thought.
It was almost two o'clock when he awoke. He couldn't remember falling
asleep, but was grateful he had.
Teri began all the necessary arrangements. By three, he had all his
belongings packed and informed the landlord he was moving. By four, he had
reservations on a shuttle to Fort Reagan, nine thirty that night, and had
sent his luggage to the airport. By five, he removed his savings for the
First Bank of the Protectorate, seven years worth. With this done, and his
room vacant, he had time to waste.
Teri had always wanted to dine at a restaurant where they still prepare
food by hand, but he could never afford to. Although the Protectorate did
not approve of this unsanitary practice, they tolerated it because it proved
itself profitable. So, with a pleasant lump of bank credits in his pocket,
and his grandfather's watch proudly displayed on his wrist, he set off to
find one.
Outside the apartment, Teri hailed a personal transport instead of public
transit.
"Destination please." The mechanical voice of the driver asked.
"The nearest restaurant where they serve food by hand." He said hoping
the computer understood the request. It did and the transport zipped out
into traffic. Teri was enjoying the speed at which the transport was moving.
It eventually slowed and stopped before La Brunch restaurant.
"Please insert 39 credits." With a shrug, he deposited a day's work.
The restaurant was magnificent. It exceeded everything Teri had imagined.
There were people, real people, standing, sitting, walking, talking,
dancing, serving, being served, and enjoying themselves. Just like those
Protectorate movies showing how wonderful the system is, where everyone is
smiling, but this was really happening.
A man dressed in the customary waiter's tuxedo approached him.
"Do you have a reservation?"
"No I was hoping you would have a vacancy."
"I'm afraid we are booked at the moment, try later."
Teri had little practice at bribery, and didn't know how much to give
him, so he decided to give him the first credit that came out of his pocket.
The five hundred credit piece helped the waiter find a vacant table.
He ordered, and watched the as people dance. The waiter returned with
his meal, and turned to leave.
"Wait a minute." The waiter paused.
"Yes sir. May I help you?"
"I don't suppose you could find me a bottle of wine."
"Sir we don't serve such things here! That is against the law..."
"I would be most generous." Again he, played lotto with the credits.
The waiters eyes widened when the next piece was handed to him. "I'll see
what I can do." With that he hurried to the kitchen. Teri savored the
tender meat, prepared by a fascinating process which the waiter had
described as "broiling." The waiter returned with a bottle, stripped of all
labels. Teri found that the wine and meat went together very well, so he
thanked the waiter with another "tip." The night went on, and the last
memory Teri had of that night was asking for another bottle.
When he awoke, he noticed how hard the floor seemed, and wondered why it
was so close. He flipped onto his back, and realized he was lying down. He
sat up, but the dizziness made him lie down again.
"Where am I?" He asked the ceiling, but there was no answer. He noticed a
smell, like vomit, but he couldn't locate its source.
The room was familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. Perhaps because
he was lying on the floor. That must be it. He flopped upright and with
practice, managed to keep his balance. He was in his apartment, that's where
he was. How long was I unconscious? He wondered. Then Teri remembered his
flight. He looked at his watch, eight twenty. There was still time to
shower and get rid of this nasty smell.
Teri locked the room after he cleaning off his sample of the floor's
dirt. He shuffled down the hall towards his destiny.
"Going somewhere?" Since he didn't did not recognize the voice he froze,
and slowly turned to face a Protectorate Administrator.
"Yes, um, I'm um I have to catch a shuttle."
"You are not going anywhere, Mr. Demsy."
"What do you mean, and how do you know my name?"
"That is irrelevant. You had your chance to go on a shuttle ride, Mr.
Demsy. You chose not to. I'm afraid you must pay the consequences."
"What are you talking about?" He glanced at his watch. "Its only eight
twe..." Teri's jaw dropped. The watches hands were frozen at 8:21 pm. His
most cherished object had betrayed him.
* * *
Stenciled in red letters across the cell's only cement wall were the
words:
"Absolutely no talking permitted"
Below it were several other sentences written in some other dialects,
which Teri assumed said the same thing.
The cell itself consisted of three bare walls and a fourth of cement.
It was vacant of all furniture except one blanket for each of its three
occupants.
The first of Teri's cellmates wore the majority of a flight suit mixed
with other casual wear. He had traced his name in the air with his finger
until everyone knew him as Reihn Verice.
The other was wearing the long white jacket of a doctor. It took some
time for Teri to realize he was actually a scientist of some sort. Teri
found his name rather interesting too, Samual Johnson. He and the pilot
were attempting to communicate using hand gestures. Teri tried as well but
soon lost interest. He was still awaiting his impending doom.
Teri awoke to the harsh voice of the guard.
"Teri Demsy, your lawyer is here to see you. You gonna get up or should
I tell him to go away." The guard chuckled.
Teri opened his mouth to reply, then remembered the sign on the wall.
His mouth snapped shut before sound could escape and he stood by the door
being unlocking.
The guard lead him down a long grey corridor lined with empty cells
identical to the one Teri had occupied. They turned a corner and walked
through a steel door. Inside was a room no bigger than his cell. Unlike his
cell, however, the room had privacy and furniture. Behind a table in the
center of the room sat his only hope, the public defender. He was tapping
away at his portable console, but did take enough time to direct Teri to the
seat opposite him. The guard locked the door behind them, just as the lawyer
began to speak.
"Mr. Teri Ran Demsy, age 28, weight 153, brown hair, blue eyes, No
previous record. What are you doing here, Mr. Demsy?"
"I..."
"Mr. Demsy, please don't interrupt. As I was saying, you are being held,
pending judgement, for the crime of treason..."
"Treason..."
"Yes treason, and they have a pretty good case against you. Now tell me,
why didn't you report on time?"
"I uh, I was incapacitated at the time."
"Incapacitated."
"Yes uh," Teri began to turn a rose shade of red. "I was drunk."
The lawyer's expression remained constant.
"This does not make my job any easier, Mr. Demsy. You expect me to walk
into that courtroom and say `please excuse my client, he was drunk, but he
promises never to do it again.' Being in possession of alcohol alone carries
a five year sentence. No way, Mr. Demsy. You would be sent to the far
reaches of space, and I'd probably be sent right behind you."
The lawyer turned back to his console and tapped away for some time. He
sighed and looked back at Teri.
"At least you have a clean record. You've even helped the protectorate
while you were an accountant. Maybe with a little persuasion, and luck, I
can get you enlisted again with a few fines and a couple months in the
stockade."
"I would appreciate that very much."
"Don't take this personally. If I don't make my quota, I'll lose my
position. That's why you're getting my best."
The guard had led him back to his cell after his meeting. With a grunt,
he slammed the door behind Teri, loud enough to wake the scientist and the
pilot. With an unpleasant chuckle, he shuffled on.
Teri sat wrapped in his blanket in the corner, wondering what would
become of him. Right now, the Marine Corps seemed the most pleasant of all
the choices. He had often wondered what it would be like. If he tried hard
enough he could actually make a decent life out of it, assuming that he
lived to enjoy it. Teri decided that was exactly what he was going to do
make the best of it.
Again, the guard escorted Teri from his cell and down the hallway.
Instead of visiting the tiny room, they continued further to a large wooden
door labeled Criminal Court. Teri entered the room expecting to see a large
number of people. At the table in the center of the room sat his attorney,
tapping away again.
"Come in and sit down, Mr. Demsy. We have just enough time to review
your case again before court begins." The lawyer said without looking up
from his console Teri seat next to the lawyer.
"Now, Mr. Demsy, what we are planning to do may seem a little risky, so
if you're nervous I understand." He wasn't, and he didn't understand why.
"Now let's go over the game plan."
"Yes, let's"
"Ok, first, you will plead guilty to treason by trying to escape the
draft. Second, you present your spotless record, along with your aunt as a
character witness. And, finally, you ask that you be enlisted in the marines
with whatever punishment they see fit to deliver."
"Sounds good to me." It should, he had been thinking about it all that
night.
"Ok, now we wait."
After waiting for five minutes, Teri began to wonder if anyone would
show up. He also wondered where they would sit. There was no other furniture
other that the table and the two chairs. The room itself didn't look like
what he pictured it to be. Although it was a spacious room, it was not
decorative at all. The walls were an off white color, almost transparent. As
he was examining the walls, one lit with a beam of light from some unknown
source. The light focused into a face which spoke.
"Please stand." They both obeyed. "This Criminal Court is now in
session, the Honorary Greod Hjery residing." On the wall directly in front
of them, five more faces appeared. To their right, another face appeared.
"That's our real opponent." The lawyer whisper.
The central face in front of them began to speak.
"We are here to judge one Teri R. Demsy for the crime of treason. Will
he please step forward." Teri did so. "How do you plead."
With a hard swallow, he answered.
"Guilty."
"Very well, you may sit." The face look to the other wall. "Mr.
Prosecutor, you may begin."
The face to their right began speaking.
"Thank you your honor." The face glanced at the table then at the five
faces. "Honorable Judges, I'll make this short. I intend to show this court
that Teri Demsy is not some ordinary treason case. Indeed not. Don't be
fooled by his innocent looking exterior, for inside lurks a beast. I will
show you facts and evidence which will reveal his true identity. Thank you."
Teri couldn't believe his ears. Was all this really happening? His
attorney stood.
"Honorable Judges. My client is a decent man who made a mistake. He now
realizes the error in what he has done and wishes to rectify the situation.
Please don't close your hearts to him. Thank you."
The central face spoke again.
"Mr. Defense, you may present your case."
Teri's lawyer proceeded with his presentation exactly as they planned.
He showed Teri's clean record. He displayed Teri's willingness to enlist.
He even brought Teri's aunt in as a character witness. Then the prosecutor
began his presentation.
"Honorable Judges. I would like to point out a few items that my
esteemed collogue failed to mention. First, Mr. Demsy is no ordinary case.
He must be recognized for what he really is, a treasonous spy. Second, we
must find out just what happened on that mysterious night. And lastly, I
will give you my final proof that he is a spy, and a traitor to the
Protectorate."
Teri looked his lawyer with a confused expression, only to meet another.
"I call to the stand Mr. Demsy, since he is the only one who can tell us
what really happened." Teri slowly stood and walking in front of the table.
"Mr Demsy, please recount what happened to you from the time you
received notification on your enlistment to the time you were arrested."
"Well, I had not gone through my mail all that week..."
"... and so I closed my account at the bank and decided to splurge a
little."
"Wasn't it true that you went to a Manual Food Preparation Restaurant?"
"Yes, but I had never been..."
"And isn't it true that you bought alcohol from the waiter, and drank to
excess."
"Yes, but..."
"There are no buts about it Mr. Demsy. You have committed two crimes.
You drank until you were drunk, and because of that, you missed your
shuttle. Isn't that true Mr. Demsy?"
"Yes."
There was a pause, probably to allow the words to take effect.
"Mr. Demsy, are you a spy?"
"What?
"Simply answer the question."
"No, I am certainly not a spy."
The prosecutor held something up.
"Do you recognize this, Mr. Demsy?"
Again, Teri swallowed hard.
"Yes, it's my grandfather's watch."
"I see you know it very well then. I suppose you know how the
transmitter got inside it."
"What?"
"The transmitter. We found a transmitter in your watch. I suppose you
know nothing about it?"
"Yes, that's right."
"How long have you had this watch? And, I would like the judges to
notice it's analog."
"About twenty years."
"That's a long time breaking the law. In all that time you never opened
it? Not ever to replace the battery?"
"I've only opened it once. To change the battery like you said."
Teri's lawyer stood and said.
"I think this has gone far enough."
"Yes, it has." The prosecutor replied. "Mr. Demsy, you are lying. You
have been playing games form the start. You are really a Federation spy."
The lawyer still went on despite Teri's furious head shaking. "You have been
sent here by the Federation with a perfect record so no one would be
suspicious, and report periodically on our economic status using this
transmitter." He held up a tiny black chip. "We had it analyzed Mr. Demsy.
It was made by the Federation."
Teri was speakless. The only word he could utter was "no." His attorney
was equally at a loss.
"Well Mr. Demsy, can you explain?"
"No, I don't know anything about it."
"I have no more questions, you may sit down" Teri slumped back into his
chair. The prosecution rests it's case your honor."
"Why didn't you tell me about the watch?" Teri's lawyer whispered.
"Well, it was taken from me when I was arrested. I didn't know anything
about any transmitter."
"Well, Mr. Demsy, looks like we are going for a trip." The lawyer stood.
"The defense rests your Honor."
"Very well, this court will adjourn while we decide." All faces
disappeared.
(to be continued...)
_____________________________________________________________________________
Thomas Hand is a freshman at Penn State Schuykill Haven Campus. He plans to
graduate with a baccalaureate degree in Computer Science. He also promises
to write more about Teri. (At least enough so you know where the title comes
from)
tth102@psuvm.BITNET
_____________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________
CORPORATE STRESS
by Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c) 1990
_____________________________________________________________________________
Bremmer put down the Expando-Matic Desk Accessory, and touched the
discrete red button on the side. A soft whirr sounded from inside the EMDA,
and a drawer popped out containing a set of pens. Bremmer selected one, and
used it to scribble on the set of technical diagrams that littered his desk.
Pressing another button, he replaced the pen in the drawer. The EMDA
acknowledged the weight, said "Thank you," softly, and closed. Bremmer
sighed, and lay back.
"Thank you," said the EMDA softly. Bremmer sat up quickly.
"Thank you," it said, a bit more emphatically. A drawer in its side
popped open. Bremmer removed one of the coins that lay there, replaced it.
The drawer slid closed.
"Thank you," the EMDA said. Bremmer waited. There was no sound from the
EMDA. He relaxed.
"Thank you," the EMDA said implacably.
The door behind Bremmer opened, and Linda, the office mailwoman, walked
in. Digging through a basket of mail, she handed him several letters.
"Thank you," said Bremmer and the EMDA simultaneously. Linda's eyebrows
rose, and she smiled. Bremmer opened his mouth to say something.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you thankyouthankyouthankyou!" the EMDA
said in the same quiet tone which Bremmer was beginning to associate with
dying rodents. The two of them looked at it in shock. All along the
plastic device, drawers were opening and closing with wild abandon. The
EMDA began to spin, slowly at first, then faster as it apparently gained
courage. Small objects began working themselves lose from its drawers and
hurtling around the room. Linda, standing, avoided the first few, then as
the tumult began to fill the air, she dived, pulling Bremmer with her.
Seconds later, a letter opener went through the space where she had been
standing. Crossing the room in a metallic flash, it impaled itself with a
loud thunk over the door. Bremmer's Home Wonders Associates sign dropped
from the wall to the floor with a crystalline crash. Bremmer waited for
several seconds. The letter opener quivered in the wall, but there was no
sound; the myriad airborne objects appeared to have settled. Carefully, he
raised his head.
"Thank you," said the EMDA. Bremmer reached around the back of the desk
and unplugged it from the wall.
"Tha-" said the EMDA concisely. The two people on the floor looked at
each other for a few seconds, then stood up. Bremmer blushed slightly.
"It has a few bugs yet."
"A few," Linda agreed, laughing. She turned and left, then popped her
head back in. "You're welcome." she said to the EMDA.
Bremmer walked over to the door, removed his letter opener from the
doorframe, and began the task of cleaning up his room.
A week or so later, Michelson plugged in the EMDA and looked at Bremmer.
"Linda was telling me about this thing's homicidal tendencies," he
commented. Bremmer laughed shortly.
"It's fixed, now. Never fear."
"Then why are you crossing your fingers?"
Bremmer remained silent, and pushed the EMDA button. A drawer spun to
him and slid open. Michelson removed a pen, held it a moment, and put it
back. The drawer closed.
"Thank you," said the EMDA in a completely re-engineered voice. Nothing
else happened.
Bremmer let his breath out slowly. Michelson smiled.
"Nice job, Bremmer," he said. "This is just what Home Wonders needs to
boost sales. It's polite, convenient, and helps organize to boot. Let's
see Computer Home Innovations beat this one!"
Bremmer bowed slowly, once, expecting the EMDA to thank him at any
minute. It did not. "Thank you," he said, unaccompanied. He shook
Michelson's proffered hand, then handed the EMDA to him. The older man
left, carrying it.
Bremmer turned and looked out his window. From his forty-third floor
window, he could see the entire city spread out below him, blotted only by
the Computer Home Innovations tower six blocks away, it's dark mirrored
steel reflecting the white mirrored lime of the Home Wonders Associates
building. If ever he was on top of the world, it was now. The EMDA would
give him world-wide fame, the promotion that had landed on his desk that
morning would seal his financial security, even in the unlikely event that
he retired next year as was his right. His wife had recovered her health,
his son had called earlier that week to announce the arrival of their first
granddaughter. Everything in the world was bright.
He was very, very worried.
CHI's EMDA appeared on the market only a day after HWA's. Bremmer had
been completely unaware that the rival company had even been working on such
a thing, even more surprised when he had gone home and seen CHI's commercial
on television. But all in all he was fairly happy; HWA's EMDA, HIS EMDA,
was by far the superior product, and the consumers seemed aware of this.
(There were even rumors that the CHI EMDA had a habit of flying into "Thank
you" fits and hurling their contents over a wide area. This was never
reported with an HWA EMDA.)
So the next week it was with particular surprise that Bremmer learned
that sales on his EMDA had almost ceased, and CHI's EMDAs were in so much
demand they couldn't be kept in stock.
Bremmer was sitting around his desk one morning moping and playing with a
CHI EMDA, trying to see what advantages it had. Linda entered to hand him
his daily mail, stood behind him for a while and watched.
The CHI EMDA was a roughly rectangular lump, tastefully decorated in a
mottled camouflage pattern of greens and browns. Six buttons were spaced
unevenly around the outside, and a power cord snaked off the back. Bremmer
poked at a button; it fell off. He spun the device, pressed another. A
drawer slid out of the lump about halfway from the top. As the drawer
reached its fullest open position, the entire EMDA overbalanced and rolled
until it rested on it. With a laugh, Linda reached over his shoulder and
pressed still another button. Another drawer snapped all the way out,
ending its flight about six feet away. She flinched, pulled her arm away.
"Must be a defective one."
Bremmer shook his head. "Nope. It's the fourth one we've bought.
They're all like that, or worse. But CHI has sold almost a million of these
things in a few days. I can't understand it."
He stood up and walked to the window. Linda followed; together they
looked over at the dark tower of Computer Home Innovations. They continued
to stare for several silent minutes, until a small black object detached
itself from the top of the CHI tower and lifted into the air. Bremmer
looked at it curiously.
"What is that thing? It's too big to be a bird, but I can't see it very
well from here."
Linda shook her head to show an equal lack of knowledge. Bremmer
returned to his desk and pressed a button on his HWA EMDA. The sleek
machine opened a drawer; within lay a pair of HWA Golf Goggles. Bremmer
slid them on.
A brilliant red display appeared in front of him, flashing columns of
figures which completely obscured his view. After a second, the numbers
stopped and the words "RECOMMENDED CLUB SELECTION: NINE IRON" appeared. In
frustration, Bremmer thumbed the switch that shut off the golf computer, and
spun the magnification dial.
With the goggles, Bremmer examined the creature which had left the CHI
tower. Six foot leathery wings beat rapidly, but behind them lay a
relatively humanoid figure, with a human face. The creature, whatever it
was, carried a pitchfork in one of its short, clawed arms. Bremmer
attempted to increase the magnification, but the words "RECOMMENDED CLUB
SELECTION: 1 WOOD" suddenly obscured his vision, and by the time he managed
to kill the computer again, the creature had vanished from view.
He described it to Linda, who shook her head and shrugged. "Never heard
of anything like it. Maybe its somebody's pet."
"Some pet," Bremmer commented.
Linda was back after lunch, and dropped a sheaf of computer printouts on
his desk along with the mail. Bremmer glanced at them briefly, then more
carefully as an illustration on the top caught his attention. It was a
carefully drawn dot-matrix image of the creature he had seen the day before.
Dropping the rest of the mail into the HWA Artificially Intelligent Mail
Reader, he grabbed the sheaf and turned to Linda in surprise.
"That's it! Where'd you find it?"
She smiled. "At the library. Under `S' for `Demon'. That's what you've
got there-- a full-fledged Inferno Demon. The pitchfork's a dead giveaway,
or so they say."
"But how did CHI get one? Where can we get one? And what the Hell's a
magic demon doing in modern day New York?" He stopped as he realized he
wasn't making sense.
"No, not Hell. Inferno. I think it's some sort of Agnostic religious
place. In any case, obtaining one is very easy, the spell is listed in the
book. But more interesting is what they can do!"
Bremmer paged through the sheaf until he reached a page covered in the
glowing, speckled ink of a HWA Highlighter pen. The first words on the page
caught his eye: "capable of mass mind control."
"So that's how CHI is selling their EMDA!" He put the sheaf down. "So
how do we get rid of it?"
Linda shrugged. "It's not in there. Only the spell to summon one."
There was an explosion behind them as the Artificially Intelligent Mail
Reader caught fire. Bremmer grabbed a plastic bucket of water he kept under
his desk for just such emergencies as Linda pulled the HWA Fire-B-Gone fire
extinguisher off the wall. Putting her finger through the trigger, she
began sqeezing it rapidly. With each pull, a thin trickle of water dripped
from the Fire-B-Gone. She threw it aside in frustration just as Bremmer
hurled his bucket onto the Mail Reader. Thick clouds of steam filled the
air, and the two of them sank down to the floor to avoid the mist...
Just as the Fire-B-Gone really began to shoot. Lying on its side, the
large tank began to spin under the pressure of the watery foam now spraying
from its nozzle. Faster and faster it spun, coating the room in white suds
before its tank finally ran empty and it slowed to a stop.
Bremmer and Linda stared at one another for a few moments. Silently
Linda got up and left the room, leaving a dripping trail behind. Bremmer
stood and shook himself off, the reached for his HWA Automatic Drying Unit.
Before turning it on he reconsidered and sat down at the desk, still
dripping.
Carefully, so that the now-wet paper wouldn't fall apart, he turned to
the page containing the summoning spell, and read it carefully. There were
a number of long magic words and warnings of dire consequences if they were
spoken incorrectly, and a list of ingredients to be mixed together to form
an ink with which to draw a pentegram. Bremmer grimaced as he read the
list; CHI had broken dozens of laws, including murder several times, to come
up with all of these items. Even just the list of creatures from which
vital internal organs were required was substantial.
"So much for summoning one ourselves," he said aloud to himself. But the
glimmerings of an idea touched his mind, and he grabbed a sheet of sodden
paper and began to write furiously a list of items he might need.
By the next day, he had assembled his materials, and, by the time Linda
arrived with his mail, he was busy stirring things together in a large
cauldron in the center of the room. She blinked and shook her head as she
entered, then looked at him curiously. He looked up.
"Root beer, powdered daisies and rose petals, milk, sugar, baking powder,
mustard, ketchup, honey, chalk dust..." Bremmer continued listing off items
as he placed them into the cauldron. When he finally finished, he brushed
off his hands and stood.
"All the warnings in the spell description are about the words, not the
pentagram ink, so I can't imagine that it makes a whole lot of difference
what goes in there. Probably that stuff is just there to deter small
children from playing with it."
Linda was unimpressed with his logic. "What if you're wrong? This is a
demon that you're playing with. Somebody could get hurt -- clawed or mauled
or eaten or something." She paused. "Why do you want to summon a demon,
anyway?"
Bremmer smiled. "I don't want to summon one, I want to dispel one. It
says there that a demon can only be called once in a thousand years, so if I
can make it go back wherever it came from, CHI won't be able to get it
again. And it won't eat me; I think that it's a vegetarian."
Linda just shook her head as Bremmer carefully dipped a paintbrush in the
rose-scented mix he had just created and painted several lines on the floor.
Linda watched, then spoke. "Isn't a pentagram supposed to have five
sides?"
Bremmer counted quickly. "Five, six, what's the difference? I'm not
going to give it time to count, anyway."
"I'm beginning to understand why nothing at HWA works correctly," she
muttered under her breath, but Bremmer was far too busy to pay attention to
her.
"All right," he said at last. "Now all we have to do is get it into the
pentagram."
Linda smiled. "How about just sending it an invitation?"
Bremmer narrowed his eyes. "Don't be stupid." He picked up a box behind
him, and took off the lid with a flourish. "Devil's-food cake," he announced
proudly. He placed the burned mass in the center of the pentagram, and sat
down in the desk chair. "Now we wait."
They didn't wait long. Within a minute, the window shattered, and the
demon swept down into the pentagram. Pulling a knife from its back pocket,
it began cutting the cake into bite-sized morsels, paying no attention
whatsoever to the two people in the room. Bremmer grabbed the sheaf of
papers from his desk.
"Where did you find a dispelling spell?" Linda whispered.
"I didn't," Bremmer said. "I'm just going to try reading these words
backwards."
Linda choked and began looking for an exit, but the demon was between her
and the door, stabbing little chunks of cake on the tines of its pitchfork
and gobbling them off. Bremmer began to read.
Seconds went by, as the demon finished the cake and Bremmer's words
droned on. Finally, the creature in the pentagram looked up, its eyes
widening as it realized what Bremmer was doing. It began to speak as well,
its speech high and fast. Various pictures on the walls around the room
began to shake. Bremmer sped up his reading, and pronounced the final
syllable loudly and clearly. A trap door opened beneath the the demon, and
it disappeared in a roar of flames.
The pictures detached themselves from the wall, hovering menacingly in
the air, and were slowly joined by the books from the shelves. Bremmer
thought quickly as they began weaving fast, quick patterns in the air, the
books opening and closing rapidly, making a loud drumbeat sound. Suddenly,
an idea occured to him. Opening his desk drawer, he lifted out an HWA EMDA,
labeled "Prototype" in large letters. Setting it on the desk, he pushed its
button until all the drawers popped open.
The books and photographs approached nearer, leisurely, joined now by the
sharp, jagged fragments of the shattered window.
Bremmer gestured to Linda to plug the EMDA in, then lifted a large dish
of pennies off of the top of the desk. He poured as many pennies as would
fit into each drawer. The drawers snapped shut.
"Thank you," the EMDA said in a dying-rodent voice. Linda's eyes widened
at the sound, but she grabbed two HMA Fly-Die Flyswatters, and handed one to
Bremmer. He accepted it. "Thank you," said the EMDA.
The two of them began beating at the aerial assault, the wildly gyrating
Fly-Die swatters like living things in their grasp, spinning, slapping, and
mechanically sneaking up on the attacking items.
"Thank you," the EMDA said after a brief pause.
The glass now tore at their arms, and the pictures battered incessantly
at them. The books, hanging back, kept up the steady drumbeat. Blood began
to flow from dozens of scratches.
"ThankyouThankyouThankyouThankyouThank..." said the EMDA quietly.
Bremmer grabbed Linda and the two of them dropped to the floor just as the
EMDA began to spin. As it reached its maximum velocity, the drawers began
to pop open, and a cloud of swift, heavy coins filled the air, forcing the
glass, pictures, and books to slam into one another and the walls. A steady
drone of "Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou Thankyou" was kept up
the whole time, but within seconds the flying army was gone.
Linda pulled the plug on the raving EMDA. Slowly, the two of them stood
up, stepping carefully across the destroyed room to the now-glassless
window.
"Look!" Linda said, pointing. Bremmer looked.
The dark, foreboding tower of CHI was dark no longer. Every trace of
glass in the building shimmered and exploded outward, shimmering like a
billion diamonds in the sun, then vanished into thin air. Moments later,
the entire structure began to sink into the ground, losing a story or so
every second until the building had completely vanished.
"They must have built the skyscraper using the demon's magic. I guess it
wasn't prefab after all."
Bremmer restrained a comment as a buzzer somewhere signalled that it was
time for lunch. The two of them made their way carefully toward the dented,
battered door.
When they got there, Bremmer paused, then returned to his desk. Opening
a drawer, he dug for a few moments and found what he was looking for; he
placed the "Maid: Please make up this room now" sign on the door as he left.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a Computer Science graduate student at Oregon State
University. His interests include writing, computers, magic, juggling,
bridge, and other games, not necessarily in that order. His major goal in
life is to become a professional student, a goal which he is rapidly
attaining.
kempkec@ure.cs.orst.edu
_____________________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed Quanta, you might want to
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Athene is a free network "magazine" devoted to amateur fiction
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The Magazine of the Dargon Project Editor: Dafydd
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and inspired
by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by David
"Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The Dargon Project
centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon in the far reaches
of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named Makdiar, and as such
contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword and sorcery flavor.
DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file,
text-only format. For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL
to the editor, Dafydd, at the userid White@DUVM.BitNet. This request
should contain your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid internet
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subscribers will receive their issues in Mail format. BitNet users
have the option of specifying the file transfer format you prefer
(either DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all
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____________________________
QQQQQ tt
QQ QQ tttttt Staff:
QQ QQ uu uu aaaa nnnn tt aaaa
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Daniel K. Appelquist
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Editor/Technical Director
QQQQQQ uuu aaaaa nn nn tt aaaaa Norman S. Murray
QQQ Editorial Assistant
Matthew Sorrels
____________________________________________ Proofreader
Jay Laefer
April 1990 Volume II, Issue 2 Additional Proofreading
____________________________________________ Daniel Fahs
Cover Artist (PS version)
Articles
Quanta is Copyright (c) 1990
Looking Ahead by Daniel K. Appelquist.
Daniel K. Appelquist This magazine may be
archived, reproduced
Life on Ice and/or distributed under the
Craig Levin condition that it is left
intact and that no additions
or changes are made to it.
Novellas
The works within this
The Babysitters magazine are the sole
Faye Levine property of their respective
authors. No further use of
their works is permitted
Short Fiction without their explicit
consent. All stories in this
Celestial Earthmovers magazine are fiction. No
Phillip Nolte actual persons are
designated by name or
Sexy's Devils character. Any similarity is
Cerise Palmer is coincidental.
Sharp and Silver Beings
Jason Snell All submissions should be
sent to one of the following
Fair Play addresses:
Kenneth A. Kousen
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
Being There quanta@andrew.BITNET
Christopher Kempke
All requests for back issues
Poetry queries about subscriptions
letters or comments should
The Painted Viper Cries be sent to the same address.
Albert L. Evans ____________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________
Some good news for those of you in search of back issues...
There is now an anonymous FTP server for Quanta back issues. It
exists at the address fed.express.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.209.58). It
contains all back issues (including this one) in both PostScript and
Ascii format. The relevant directories are /quanta/ascii and
/quanta/postscript. I believe this service should be useful to both
Internet and Bitnet users (the latter can access the site via BitFTP
servers)
Well, as you may have noticed, this issue is a bit long. This
may be partially due to Faye Levine's new story, _The Babysitters_.
I'm excited about Faye's material but if her story size keeps growing
at its current rate, we'll have to rename the magazine Faye Levine
Quarterly! At any rate, Faye wants people to know that this story
takes place some years after the events in _One_, her story from last
issue, but eighteen years before _Dinner at Nestrosa's_, the excerpt
from her yet-to-be-published novel _Revolution_ which we published in
our December issue of last year.
We really have a block-buster lineup this issue. Jason Snell's
story _Sharp and Silver Beings_ for one. You may remember Jason's
story _Into Gray_ which appeared in the first issue of Quanta as well
as his article _Cyberpunk's a Label Like Any Other_ from last issue.
We also have a Quanta first: a sequel. Specifically, a sequel to
Christopher Kempke's very popular story _Going Places_, published in
the first issue. Craig Levin, in his semi-regular science column,
brings us some information and speculation on the existance of
extra-terestrial life right here in our own solar system. We also have
several newcomers this issue. Cerise Palmer, Phillip Nolte, and
Kenneth Kousen all have donated excellent stories and I hope they
continue to do so. I also hope to see more work from new faces in the
future. If you have a story you'd like to submit, send it along to
me.
You may be noticing the specific lack of a sequel to Thomas
Hand's _Ice Ball_ from last issue. Not to worry! We'll be seeing
more of Terri's adventures in issues to come.
At this point, I'd like to ask all of you some questions.
Specifically, I'd like to poll all of you about your feelings on
Quanta. If you have a second, answer the following questions and send
your answers back to me. Be sure to include the word "poll" in your
subject header.
Reader Poll
1. How much interest do you have in the non-fiction articles
appearing in Quanta?
o None
o Some
o Love 'em
2. How would you rate the overall quality of Quanta?
o Bad
o It's Mediocre
o It's good
o It's excellent!
3. Of the issues you've read so far (including this one) which issue
of Quanta would you say is your favorite?
o #1
o #2
o #3
o #4
o Can't say for sure.
4. What has been your favorite piece (Story, Poem or Article) so far?
5. What has been your least favorite piece (Story, Poem or Article)
so far?
6. What would you like to see more of?
7. What would you like to see less of?
8. Do you have any suggestions concerning the typesetting of the
magazine?
9. Any other comments/complaints.
I'll be waiting to hear your comments. Feel free to elaborate on
your answers. If you have ANY comment on Quanta you'd like me to
hear, don't hesitate to send it along. I'd like very much initiate a
letters column next issue, but to do this I need letters!
One last note. If you're not going to be able to receive Quanta
during the summer and you'd like me to temporarilly cancel your
subscription and then reinstate it for next year, drop me a line. I
don't want to be sending Quanta to people who aren't going to be there
to receive it.
Enough ramblings from me. Enjoy this issue of Quanta!
______________________________________________________________________
Life on Ice
The Possibility of Life on Europa and Enceladus
Craig Levin
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
I: Introduction
The search for extra-terrestrial life has been one of the major
driving forces of planetology. Many of planetology's major figures,
from Sir William Herschel, to Percival Lowell, even up to Carl Sagan,
have believed in a plurality of worlds. Yet, despite the optimism of
all the searchers, not one of the terrestrial planets have been found
to harbor life, save our own planet Earth.
Yet the possibilities for life elsewhere in our Solar System have
been poorly explored. In the sixties, Carl Sagan postulated the
existence of life under and among Jupiter's clouds. Unfortunately, the
proposal seemed to lack merit when it came time to design Galileo's
atmospheric probe. However, it is not Jupiter, nor is it any of the
other Jovian planets that I believe to be the abode of fellow
creatures, but instead, two of the icemoons I wrote about in my March
1990 article in the EJASA entitled "Ice Moons of the Jovian Worlds":
Enceladus and Europa.
In this article I will first describe what life need in order to
get started on a world. Next, I will desribe the conditions on Europa
and Enceladus in both the past and present. Finally, I will compare
the five described conditions, and thereby discover if, indeed,
Enceladus and Europa are harbors for life, or dead lumps of ices.
II: Conditions for the Birth of Life
Life is a delicate thing, yet it arose on Earth under conditions
that might seem harsh to us here nearly three billion years after the
fact. Earth's atmosphere was nothing then like it is now. Instead of
the familiar oxygen and nitrogen that we all breathe, Earth's
atmosphere was mainly composed of steam, carbon di-oxide, methane, and
ammonia. Thanks to experiments made in 1953 by Stanley Miller, it has
been shown that if these chemicals are exposed to electric sparks or
ultra-violet light, most of the known amino acids and some of the
simpler proteins will form. In 1936, A.I. Oparin found that these
amino acids and protein would form globules in water. These he
believed were the progenitors of protozoa, the lowest forms of life.
Thus life was started on Earth. But what about the main
subjects-Enceladus and Europa?
III: Primeval Conditions on Europa and Enceladus
It has been shown that Jupiter and Saturn are both warmer now
than can be accounted for by solar radiation. It seems to be the
general consensus that this heat is the remnant of the original energy
that was the result of the respective planet's collapse into a dense
ball of rock, metal, and liquid metal hydrogen. If the heat is enough
to show up signifigantly now, what must it have been like four or five
billion yers ago? Terence Dickinson claims: "Near the origin of the
solar system [sic] Jupiter was more like a miniature sun than a
planet, shedding enough heat that... would have allowed [Europa's]
surface to be covered in an ocean..."{1} I am including Saturn in this
as well, in light of its similar size and composition. During this
time, there also were other processes that could have given Enceladus
and Europa open oceans for the Sun to shine on: heat of accretion and
heat of differentiation could have had melted the crusts of both
moons. Meteorite impacts could have opened pits in their icy crusts.
However, do the moons have organic material for the Sun's ultra-violet
rays to shine on?
Let us look at the composition of the typical ice moon. In this
"typical" ice moon, we find, in addition to some rock and metal, water
ice, dry ice, and frozen ammonia and methane. Despite their frozen
state today, at the time, if water was in liquid form then, most, if
not all of the chemicals listed above were also in liquid or vapor
form. Plus, with the exposure of these vapors and liquids to the young
Sun's more energetic ultra-violet rays, life's components would have
formed on the far-off surfaces of Enceladus and Europa. But what of
the present day? How could protozoa formed then somehow survive to the
present?
IV: Present Conditions on Europa and Enceladus
Protozoa on Earth seem to tolerate many different environments,
but one thing seems clear. All life needs water, and all life needs an
energy source, be it sunlight or plants or geothermal energy. Do the
present conditions on Europa and Enceladus give these conditions to
the hypothetical protozoa?
I say yes. There is a good chance that both Europa and Enceladus
have liquid water under their ice crusts. The heat generated by tidal
interactions between Io, Europa and Jupiter, according to Lucchita and
Soderblom, was enough to melt the ice under the crust of Europa.
Enceladus has been observed to send out plumes of water by Voyager II.
So we can assume that at least there is water to sustain subterranean
life on the two moons. But is there an energy source? Considering that
most estimates of the thickness of Europa's crust, and it seems to be
the warmer of the two moons, being both larger and less cratered, lie
around a figure of twenty-five miles, I think one can rule out
sunlight as a source of energy. But geothermal energy on such active
moons is quite possible, to say the least. It has certainly been shown
on Earth that geothermal heat sources can sustain life.
V: Life?
Let us compare the five conditions described above. For life's
founding, we need ammonia, methane, carbon di-oxide, steam, and either
lightning or ultra-violet rays. Europa and Enceladus had, and still
have, the chemicals necessary. If one considers likely the scenario I
have described above for the Saturn and Jupiter, then ultra-violet
light was present as well. Life had a good chance of starting. For
life's continuance, we need an energy source and liquid water. Due to
their tidal interactions with their neighbors, Enceladus and Europa
have liquid water and geothermal energy. This leads me to belive that
our first aliens are to be found as Europans and Enceladians, fellow
members of the Solar system of which we ourselves are a part.
{1} Terence Dickinson, _The Universe and Beyond_ (Camden East: Camden
House Publishing, Ltd., 1986), p. 54
List of References
Baugher, Joseph F.. _The Space-Age Solar System_. New York: John
Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1988.
Briggs, G.A. and F.W. Taylor. _The Cambridge Photographic Atlas of the
Planets_. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Dickinson, Terence. _The Universe and Beyond_. Camden East:
Camden House Publishing, Ltd., 1986.
Hartmann, William K.. _The Grand Tour_. Toronto: Saunders of
Toronto, Inc., 1981.
Hartmann, William K.. _Out of the Cradle_. New York:
Workman Publishing Company, Inc., 1984.
Morrison, David, ed. _Satellites of Jupiter_. Tucson: The
University of Arizona Press, 1982.
Acknowledgements
To Arthur Clarke, for inspiring in me the idea of life on Europa and
Enceladus from his book _2010_, and to John Novak, who helped find and
patch some holes of the first draft.
______________________________________________________________________
Craig Levin began to get involved in astronomy when, in second grade,
he received H.A. Rey's "Find the Constellations" as a birthday
present. As a high school junior, he had his first article published
in the now-defunct Small Scope Observers' Association's newsletter,
and by his senior year in high school was helping to establish the
"Astronomical Newsletter", a now-defunct magazine based in Atlanta.
At present, he is a physics major at Bradley University who intends to
turn his first love, planetology, into his profession.
moonman@cc2.bradley.edu
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Celestial Earthmovers
by Phillip Nolte
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
It was one of the oddball asteroids whose orbit brought it on
a near collision course with the earth. Geographos, it was called,
catalogue number 1620, one of the handful of asteroids that inhabit
the inner solar system. Six months before I had never heard of it.
But there I was, looking at it out of the forward viewport of an
asteroid belt utility ship. Carlos was looking over my shoulder as
we floated in the warm, nearly dark confines of the ship's control
room. After a week or so of maneuvering we had matched velocities
with the asteroid and had finally gotten close enough to see some of
the fine details of it with the naked eye. We had been staring at
it in silence for some time.
"Well, what do you think of it, Stephan?" asked Carlos.
"Looks like a big overgrown peanut," I said, as we watched it
rotate lazily.
"A peanut that has a date with destiny," he returned, with mock
seriousness.
I nudged him away with an elbow. "We should get suited up and
go have a look at it. Touch it, take measurements, get familiar
with it," I said. "Go see if Joanna wants to come along. I'll meet
you in the workroom."
"As you say, Senor Perkins," returned Carlos, as he left the
bridge.
The idea for this mad scheme that we were involved in was
cooked up by someone named Charles Kelman of UCLA in about 1980,
over a hundred years ago. The original paper can still be found in
the files of the NASA museum, if you care to look. I've read it.
There is little doubt that it was a tongue-in-cheek proposal by
Kelman. In the same file with the proposal were several letters and
memos addressed to him that contained criticisms from his peers.
Their comments ranged from "premature" and "outrageously innovative"
to "preposterous" and even "criminally insane." I think his real
purpose was to stimulate some discussion on how mankind might begin
to exploit the resources of the solar system. Surely he never
intended for anyone to try it! Unfortunately, events and human
nature can conspire to make the damnedest things sound plausible.
The situation in Central America has never been stable, but
this time the turmoil was even worse than usual. Threats by a new
and belligerent government in Panama to disable the existing Panama
canal probably had the most influence. More than threats, fact is,
they actually closed it for nearly a year in 2045. Then they
doubled the usage rates. Wealthy and powerful people got angry.
Wheels were set in motion and the "Columbia Canal Project" was born.
The project was billed as the most spectacular engineering
feat ever attempted by mankind. And so it was. The first time I
heard of it I thought that it was some kind of joke. When I found
out that they were serious, I shook my head in disbelief. There was
only one possible explanation--that everyone involved was
certifiably nuts! The plan was to build a new canal connecting the
Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea. The area chosen was in the
wilderness of northwestern Columbia, near the Atrato River. A
peninsula sticks up out of Columbia there, a peninsula that
eventually becomes Panama. There was only about 150 Km of land
between the two bodies of water in this area, so the new canal
wouldn't have to be too long. Up to this point everything was fine,
but then things started to get scary. They were going to do the
excavation by hitting the proposed site with a piece of an asteroid!
Our asteroid, Geographos. It was hoped that the resulting impact
would create a huge crater and would, in one unthinkable blast, do a
job that would normally take years of heavy and dangerous labor.
The enterprise was made to sound even more attractive by announcing
that the metal content of this heavenly fragment would be worth in
the neighborhood of 900 billion dollars! Dollars that would be a
godsend to the beleaguered economies of Central and South America.
No one had any suggestions on how this new supply of precious metals
was to be obtained from its eventual ocean resting place, however.
Isn't this starting to sound just a little nuts? To prove that
there is no shortage of stupidity in high places, a joint committee
of Central American and United States officials bought the deal,
lock, stock and asteroid.
They wanted me because I'm damned good at astro-engineering
and I have a lot of experience working in space. I'm the same
Stephan Perkins that did most of the design work on the United
States L-5 space colony. I was also good with people, usually, and
this was going to require the coordinated efforts of many. At least
we had the time we needed to iron out some of the problems. We
began work on this project in 2048, nearly five years before the
next close approach of Geographos.
Not that we were likely to have any problems. I mean, all we
were going to do was excise a chunk of rock about the size of a
small midwestern town from this minor planetoid, alter its course to
bring it within kissing distance of the earth, figure out some way
to aim it at a specific target, and allow it to impact. No sweat,
eh? How do you establish an acceptable margin of error for
something like that? How do you go about reducing the stupefying
velocity at which this "impact projectile" would be traveling? We
had no idea of how this thing was going to behave when it made
contact with earth's atmosphere either. We weren't going by the
book, we were writing it! It's no exaggeration to say that the
challenge was formidable; even the slightest miscalculation had the
potential of ending in a horrible catastrophe. So, I got involved
because I had to. I had to do what I could to insure that things
wouldn't end up in a total disaster. I figured that they needed at
least one person who knew what the hell he was doing!
I tore my gaze away from the viewport. The vastness of space
with its frosty dusting of tiny bright stars was a rich, dark
tapestry and the slowly twirling asteroid suspended against this
backdrop was a compelling, almost hypnotic, sight.
As I left the bridge for the workroom, I almost ran into
Salazar in the corridor. Diego Salazar, from Columbia, the
"executive director" of the expedition. A terrible choice, by any
measure. He was a wealthy and powerful member of the canal
committee who had been included on the mission at the last minute.
To tell you the truth, the whole Salazar situation looked suspicious
to me. The guy knew next to nothing about the engineering end of
the project. His forte was politics and even though that was
something he was damned good at, I found out early on that he had no
idea how difficult this job was going to be. In addition, he was
neither liked nor respected by any of the crew. By some kind of
convoluted logic this made him the obvious choice to head the
mission. None of this altered the basic fact that he was an idiot,
and I thought that the ramrod tactics that he tried to use on me and
the rest of the team were actually counterproductive. We needed him
like we needed a hole in the airlock.
"Don't you think it's time to have a look at that asteroid,
Perkins?" he said. With his accent, he pronounced it "pear-kins"
but he always spoke with rich full tones, as though he were making
one of his political speeches.
"We were just on our way," I replied, pushing past him.
"Ah, I see," he said, "Good, I shall observe you from the
control room. Now that we are finally here it is vital that we make
the best use of our time. Si?"
"If you say so, Salazar," I continued down the corridor. That
was his way, he stated the obvious and applied pressure when it
wasn't needed. I always found an excuse to go somewhere else when
he came in. From the first impression onward, my attitude towards
him had been one of intense dislike. As you'll see, those instincts
were well founded.
After some idle chit-chat in the workroom while we put on our
suits, we were off to our first close encounter with Geographos.
That was a humbling experience! The ship was kept on a parallel
course at a safe distance and we used a utility sled to go over to
the slowly rotating asteroid. As we got closer we began to realize
just how big it was. The books and our instruments said that it was
about 2.2 km in length. Maybe so, but it sure seemed bigger than
that when you got close enough to touch it.
Getting on to it was tough. It wasn't enough that it rotated
around its center, it had a slight wobble as well. You mounted it
carefully, at the center of rotation. Once on, you could move out
towards the slightly swollen ends. It had no noticeable gravity; a
healthy sneeze was probably enough to impart escape velocity, so you
were virtually weightless. As you moved outward, you had to cling
tightly to its pocked and jagged surface because you picked up the
same relative motions. By the time you were perched on the end you
were rotating and wobbling right along with it. What a ride! You
were also treated to a blinding view of the sun's searingly bright
disk every few minutes. It took some real getting used to but we
had little choice, there was work to be done.
Dismounting was the reverse process, carefully make your way
back to the center and push off over to the sled. Carlos and I
thought we were doing well merely to keep from flying off into space
until we saw an unconcerned Joanna calmly going about the collection
of samples for analysis. Not to be outdone, we checked our tethers,
composed ourselves and set about determining the exact dimensions of
our cosmic excavation tool.
Our first order of business was to stop the spinning and
wobbling motions. We would use some strategically placed rockets to
accomplish this. Then, we would strap on the huge boosters that we
had brought out with the belt ship and start to seriously alter its
course and speed. Even though the size and mass of Geographos was
far too much for the needs of our project, it looked like the best
thing to do was to bring the whole asteroid back. The real fun
would start when we began to approach Earth. That's when we were
going to have to perform some difficult and intricate maneuvers.
Here's how it was supposed to work. It had been determined that the
smaller end of the "peanut" contained more than enough material to
serve our purposes. We would cut through the asteroid near the
slightly narrower "waist" area with a series of carefully placed
explosive charges. After that, we would have to do some minor
surgery to pare our chosen end down to the proper size and shape for
the excavation job that was planned for it. Then we would use one
of the same strap-on boosters to alter the course towards earth.
Hopefully, we could "skip" it through the atmosphere once, or twice
if we needed to, to scrub off some more of its unwanted velocity and
to do some final shaping as well.
While all this was going on, another team would take charge of
the rest of the asteroid, the so-called "tail section". They would
use the remaining booster to carefully "park" the tail section in
the L-4 point of the earth-luna system. There it would be ready and
waiting right in our neighborhood, so to speak. We could use it for
another "excavation" project or, more likely, as building material
for more orbital colonies or Lunar construction projects. Any
construction material was welcome in space and Joanna's preliminary
analysis had determined that Geographos was rich in all kinds of
valuable metals.
The hardware and methods for manipulating and moving the
asteroid were pretty well worked out, men had been "mining" the
asteroid belt for years, but no one had ever had to contend with
such high relative velocities before. In the belt things only move
at about 5 km/sec. Compared to that, Geographos was hauling ass!
Carlos and I had sat up until the wee hours almost every
"night" on the two-month trip out to the rendezvous with Geographos
trying to determine what the best shape and mass of the final object
should be. There had actually been several small asteroid "drops"
done in the early part of the century. Maybe you've heard of
Statler and Chin. They were a couple of borderline psychotics with
forged scientific credentials who had somehow gotten permission to
hit Mars with some small asteroids, just to see what would happen.
It was kind of like turning a couple of small boys loose with a box
of dynamite and a book of matches. Their masquerade lasted for
nearly two years before they were found out and put away. They did
take some nice pictures but both their measurements and their
technique were, as you would expect, abysmal. In addition, the
atmosphere and gravity of Mars were completely different from
earth's. But this somewhat sketchy data was all that we had to go
on. Of course, anything at all was a help. It was too bad that
they had simply dropped the rocks directly, and hadn't tried to skip
any of them through the atmosphere; we could have used the
information. For us, such skips were vital because they would not
only slow the thing down, but would allow us to get valuable data on
how much mass we were going to lose when it made its final plunge
through the atmosphere. More than once, I woke up in a cold sweat
when I dreamed that we had miscalculated and instead of a new canal,
we had created a sizeable new bay near San Francisco.
Dr. Carlos Monzon Cortez had been appointed to be my assistant
and liaison with the committee. Born in Columbia and educated in
the U.S., he was an excellent choice. He was dark and slender with
black eyes and classic Latin good looks. By any standard, Carlos was
a strikingly handsome man. His speech was very soft and polite,
almost apologetic, but it was best to listen when he spoke because
he always knew what he was talking about. Women found him
irresistible, but he seldom took advantage of them; maybe that was
part of his charm. He was particularly valuable because he was
fluent in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and communication between
us and the committee on some very technical matters was necessary.
Oh yes, he was also one hell of an engineer. I found him
irresistible too; we quickly became good friends.
Everything was going according to schedule until we had a
meeting to discuss procedures and present progress reports. The
meeting started out amiably enough but things soon took a nasty and
unexpected turn. After some assorted small talk, Salazar made an
announcement.
"We must begin placing the explosive charges tomorrow," he
said. "The asteroid is to be broken in two here, in deep space. We
shall be bringing home only what we need of it."
There was a buzz of conversation. I was taken completely by
surprise. "Wait a minute," I interrupted. "I thought it was agreed
that we would take the whole thing back!"
"The plan has been changed," he replied.
"Changed?" I said. "By whom? Carlos and I weren't consulted
about this."
"It was changed by the committee," he said. "At my
recommendation."
"Well, change it back," I said, my anger beginning to stir.
"We're missing out on a golden opportunity if we leave the rest of
that rock out here." There was another buzz of conversation; a few
heads nodded in affirmation.
"I must agree with Stephan," Joanna spoke up, glancing at me
and then looking back at Salazar. "I've looked that asteroid over
very carefully. It's full of ores and deposits of metal that are
badly needed. That thing is worth a fortune! More than that
it's..."
Salazar cut her off with a wave of his hand. "It does not
matter, the mass of the entire asteroid is too great for our
boosters. We do not have sufficient power."
"Where the hell did you get that idea?" I said, his obvious
runaround was making me even madder. "There's a five percent fuel
margin, if we get them attached and operating within the thirty day
window."
Trying to reason with him was like arguing with Geographos
itself. He wasn't even looking at me.
"I can't believe you'd make this kind of change without some
discussion," I said, my anger beginning to get out of hand. "We
must go with the original plan! Do you have any idea how much work
we've put in on calculations alone?"
"It has already been decided..." he began.
"This is bullshit, Salazar!" I interrupted. The room was
suddenly silent. "You can't run this project like it's a god-damned
banana plantation!"
Maybe that was a mistake.
"Enough, Senor Perkins," he said, his eyes smoldering. "We
make preparations to blast the asteroid tomorrow."
"We'll see about that!" I said as I stormed out of the chamber.
I was so angry that I might have done him harm if I hadn't left.
The way things turned out, maybe I should have stayed a little
longer.
I put a call through to the committee; they were in agreement
with Salazar. I ranted at them for a short while about the
opportunities they were missing before they cut me off. Finally, I
went back to my quarters where I floated and silently fumed for most
of the evening. The following day I plodded through my duties
without much enthusiasm. I knew I was in trouble when I found
myself staring at the same equation for most of the morning trying
to get it to make sense. I couldn't. My mind would keep wandering
back to the altercation in the briefing room. I'd shake my head to
clear it and plunge back into my work. All in vain. After two days
of this, I came to a decision. I was going to resign, there was no
way I could work with that man as my superior till the project was
completed. Who knows what other surprises he had in store for us?
I wrote a letter outlining my intentions, made the announcement and
prepared to leave on the next shuttle, which was mercifully due in
less than a week.
Joanna joined me on the shuttle when the time came to leave. I
didn't even notice her until she spoke. I was strapped into an
acceleration couch lost in a final bittersweet look at Geographos
out of the side viewport.
"Mind if I join you?" she said.
"Huh? Oh, Joanna," I said. My surprise was genuine. "No of
course not. I was daydreaming." I helped her strap into the
adjacent couch. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm done," she said. "They have my report, they don't need a
geologist anymore. You know what a stickler Salazar is for
efficiency. Besides that, if you remember, I questioned his
judgment at a recent staff meeting."
"Yeah, I know. So did I!" I said with a tentative smile,
surprised that I could actually joke about it.
"Is that what you call it?" she replied, grinning. "I'd say
what you did was more like an insult to his mother!" We both
laughed.
The conversation went on from there. She was easy to talk to
and had a great sense of humor, which was really a good thing
because we had a couple of months worth of space flight ahead of us
with little to do. I found out that she had just recently come from
a post-doc in geology at Colorado State and was looking for a job,
hopefully an assistant professor's position or something. It was
more than chance that had brought her the short stint on our
Geographos survey. In addition to having a Ph.D in geology, she was
an experienced rock climber. I guess that explains why she had so
little trouble getting around while we were surveying the asteroid.
She was surprised to find out that she really liked working in
space. That was just one of the things we had in common. We got
through all of this before the noise and discomfort of the shuttle's
departure interrupted the conversation.
What else do I tell you about Joanna. She wasn't a woman with
the kind of looks that were distracting; at least, I didn't think so
at first. She was more pretty than beautiful, with a clear and
honest face. She fought a constant battle with a few extra kilos of
body weight, a battle that she could never quite win. But, she was
just the tonic I needed. After we had spent a week or so together
on the shuttle, I found that my attitude towards her had changed. In
fact, I was beginning to think she was rather attractive. It didn't
hurt that she was in complete agreement with my actions on the belt
ship.
"You were absolutely right, Stephan," she said, at one point.
"They're wasting a great opportunity. Not only would it be valuable
for its ore content, we could have had a captive asteroid to study.
Losing that disappointed me more than the sheer monetary value of
the thing. As it stands right now, you have to go clear out to the
belt to get a good look at an asteroid. I'd call it an
'astronomical' shame."
That got a groan from me, too.
By the time we got to earth, we found that our feelings for
each other had gone beyond friendship. Way beyond. Perhaps it was
because we had been together nearly every hour for the better part
of two months. Or, maybe it was the fact that both of us were
unattached and lonely because, up to that point in our lives, we had
both been obsessively dedicated to our work. Whatever the reasons,
we had fallen deeply in love. There was no question that we would
be spending a lot more time together. My previous employments had
left me modestly wealthy and I wasn't in any rush to find another
job. Together, we organized some rallies and demonstrations to try
and halt the Columbia Canal Project. That turned out to be an
educational experience.
For starters, we needed some dirt to throw. To get the dirt, we
had to be willing to do a little digging. Fortunately, I still had
some important friends who were willing to give me a hand with the
shovelling. The pile of dirt concerning Diego Salazar quickly grew
to almost mountainous proportions. The picture of him that
gradually emerged was frightening, much more alarming then I could
have possibly imagined. There have been few men who were as
ambitious, as ruthless, or as crooked as he was. He controlled vast
wealth, much of it hidden in a labyrinthine series of farms,
businesses, foundations, trusts, and other fronts. Out of this mess,
I was able to piece together just why he was on the mission and why
he had made those critical changes to the project, changes that had
ended up with me resigning my position.
He had come along on the mission because he thought that he
would be safe there. You don't get to the point in life that
Salazar was at without making some friends--and some enemies. They
had managed to keep it quiet, but there had been a nearly successful
attempt on his life. While he was safe in space, his enforcers
would find and eliminate the threat.
He had changed the project for financial reasons. Among his
many holdings, Salazar owned controlling interest in the company
that had leased the belt ship and boosters. He had found a way to
save some badly needed capital and his reputation at the same time.
The savings would come because the extra work involved in moving the
tail section was to have required another utility ship and several
months of expensive labor. Salazar's empire was huge and sprawling,
but not all of it was solvent and they didn't have all that much in
liquid assets. They had borrowed some money from the canal project
to keep several of the other concerns afloat. As a result, they
didn't have enough ready cash to pay for the extra belt ship. As
you know, the belt government never has much cash either; business
with them is strictly cash-in-advance. The solution was simple:
just make up some plausible excuse and cancel that part of the
project. There would likely be a court battle afterwards but the
people who had invested in the venture knew it was a high risk
operation at the outset. They had signed contracts to that effect.
Chances were very good that they would have to absorb the loss.
But there was even more to it than just the financial end of
things. The tail section of the asteroid was to have been signed
over to interests that were owned by wealthy citizens of the USA.
Among his other charming attributes, Salazar had no love for North
Americans. The set-up was perfect; he could preserve his empire and
he could screw some rich Americans at the same time. Apparently, he
just couldn't resist it.
It was Carlos who brought the whole protest episode to a close.
We'd had two marches in the first six months and had gotten a little
publicity, not nearly enough, but it was a start. To my great
surprise, he came in person to visit us. Joanna and I were getting
ready to kick off another rally in the next couple of weeks. We
heard a knock on our door. Joanna answered it.
"Carlos!" she cried, embracing him. "What a surprise! Please
come in." She held the door for him. I got up and extended my
hand.
"It's been a long time, my friend." I said. "How are you?"
He shook my hand with his usual firm grip and released it.
"Tired." he said, matter-of-factly. We motioned to him to sit
down. "I am running the engineering end of the project nearly by
myself since you left."
"That's not entirely my fault," I returned, as I sat also. "I
had to make a very difficult decision." He nodded.
"What brings you here, Carlos?" asked Joanna, from across the
room.
"I have come to plead with you to stop your involvement with
the protest marches," he began.
"Come on, Carlos," I interrupted. "Diego Salazar is pure
poison, nothing more than a common criminal. He ought to be locked
up!"
"We have inside information, Carlos. He deals in arms and
drugs and prostitution and who knows what else," added Joanna.
"I harbor no illusions about his character, Joanna," he
replied, with his soft voice. "But I speak to you both on behalf of
my country, and my people. In fact this canal will benefit the
entire South American continent. Believe me, I would throw Salazar
to the dogs today if it were in my power. For the moment, you must
forget about him. We are now near some of the most critical aspects
of the entire project. My friendship with you has made Salazar very
antagonistic to me, and the distraction that this causes makes it
very difficult for me to do my work. He will have others who are
not as competent or as careful as I redo the calculations. I need
not tell you how serious that could be."
"What about the tail section fiasco?" I asked. "You can't tell
me that wasn't a tremendous waste."
"I fully agree, Stephan," he replied. "That was a great pity,
but it is also too late to correct. We must now deal with the
present and the future. I tell you that your involvement in these
protests may actually compromise the safety of the project!"
It was as I thought, Carlos had stayed on the project because
he sincerely felt that the benefits to his country and his people
far outweighed any personal differences between him and Salazar.
That was exactly what I would have expected from him; he was that
sort of man. It was this sincere plea from him, our trusted and
esteemed friend, that made us decide to stop. That and the
realization that they would complete the project in spite of us and
that our protests might actually jeopardize its success.
"As you wish, my friend," I sighed.
"I ask one more favor, Stephan," he said, gravely. "Believe
me, I do not ask this lightly."
"What is it?" I asked.
"Will you check my final calculations, please? Just look them
over and tell me if you see anything radically wrong."
I thought about it for a while. It might have been a moment of
weakness, but he had made a great deal of sense and I am a reasonable
man. I agreed to do it.
Thus ended the protest phase, but my being in those
demonstrations had a profound effect on later events. Meanwhile, the
Project continued, under Salazar's able leadership.
Joanna got a teaching job at a small California school a short
while later. I went with her, and managed to keep as busy as I wanted
to be with some consulting work and pecking away at a book about the
L-5 project. Both of us were very pleased with this arrangement; I,
for one, had never been happier. We took some time off and headed
south for the show, when the time came for the first skip of the rock
through the atmosphere. It was the kind of thing you talked about for
years afterwards. I'll never forget the Herculean, coruscating arc of
light that flashed across the sky as it lanced spectacularly through
the stratosphere. Joanna and I held hands as we watched. It was
awesome, beautiful! I almost wished that I were still involved in the
project at that moment. Which, in a small way, I still was.
Carlos had remained in touch with us, as he had promised, without
Salazar's knowledge. He had sent me the final figures and
calculations; as I had promised, I checked them. It made sense to me,
if they were determined to go through with the project I wanted them
to get it right. Remember, they were going to drop a small mountain
out of space. It was best if they didn't screw it up! It pleased me
that our original calculations had been very close. During the final
stages of the project, we consulted whenever Carlos thought it was
necessary.
The earlier show was nothing compared to the one that we saw on
the day of impact. They had managed to scrub off enough speed and
were satisfied that the shape of the projectile was within tolerances.
The time had come to bring it down. They promised us the greatest
spectacle ever witnessed by modern man. Perhaps they were right. An
entire world watched and waited anxiously for the impact, not knowing
what to expect. Finally, they gave the rock a gentle, precisely
calculated shove to start its fall. We held our breath as the fiery
mace of God descended out of the heavens to wreak devastation on the
hapless, unsuspecting land bridge. The earth rang like a bell from
the impact of the titanic blow as the shock wave reverberated
violently through it. There was damage to windows and dwellings as
far away as Mexico City, but people from all over the world claimed to
have felt some kind of movement. Joanna and I were in Bogota. I was
literally knocked off my feet! There was even a video of the impact
area that had been obtained by some reckless and intrepid reporter.
They ran it over and over for days afterwards on the newscasts. I
never tired of watching it. To this day, I still remember the sight
of the oceans rushing headlong into the enormous new crater from both
directions and a huge cloud of pulverized asteroid, earth and steam
billowing upward as the waters made contact with the still molten core
of what had once been a piece of the sky.
It ended up as a huge, angry mushroom cloud that slowly
dissipated over a few hours. And there were after-effects. All of
the dust and debris that were put into the atmosphere meant that,
among other things, we were treated to the most incredible sunsets for
several months after the impact.
The project was an unqualified success. After about six months
of cleanup work and a little testing, the Columbia Canal was opened to
the ships of the world. The canal needed no locks and even the
largest ships ever built had no trouble passing through its generous
ways.
Carlos was made wealthy by his involvement with the project.
Most of the notoriety went to project leader Diego Salazar. He became
even more powerful, there was even talk of a presidency. After a
short court battle, several North American investment firms went
quietly into receivership. I got an offer from the colonial
government of the asteroid belt to oversee some new construction
projects. I asked them if they could use a good geologist. In no
time, Joanna and I were off to the belt, happy to be back in space.
No place was too far away from Diego Salazar as far as I was
concerned. Carlos got involved with some huge project on Luna. Women
still swooned over him wherever he went. He didn't seem to mind.
* * *
All this happened quite a few years ago. I wish I could say that
the story ended there, but I can't. It seems that it isn't nice to
fool around with the forces of the universe. Remember what I said
about parking the tail section of Geographos at the L-4 point of the
earth-luna system? Well, at least we could have kept an eye on it.
Like clockwork, the remainder of the asteroid came around on its
appointed path twenty-five years later. Only this time someone had
reset the clock! I remember I was having breakfast at the station on
Ceres when I got a call from Carlos. We had tried to keep in touch
but I hadn't heard from him for two or three years.
"Stephan?" he said. "You must help me again with some
calculations." I could hear the strain in his voice, even over the
noise of the transmission. A call to the belt was one-sided since the
communication lag made two-way conversation impractical. He
continued. "It's Geographos, or what's left of it. It will probably
hit the earth in about two months." I choked on my coffee. "I've
been over the calculations at least a hundred times. I don't know,
maybe it was the explosives, or the change in mass. Its orbit has
changed just enough. We were right the first time my friend. We
should have taken the tail section to the L-4 point. If it doesn't
hit it will come awfully close." He paused, sighed and added. "But I
think it's going to hit."
He gave me the figures before he solemnly signed off. I called
him a few hours later, he had made no mistake, it was gonna hit.
Someplace... It seemed we were helpless to stop the impact. Blowing
it up was out of the question; it would take a nuke to do the job and
the nuclear disarmament movements of the 1990's had been successful
beyond hope. No warheads remained to obliterate the remaining piece
of Geographos. That left us with the prospect of deflecting its
course. But remember that it had taken years of careful calculations
and subtle adjustments to guide the original piece in. Besides, the
huge motors had been purposely built for that one project. We had
some that were big enough there in the belt maybe but they were too
far away, and there was too little time.
Or so it seemed.
I think it was that last thought about the big boosters that gave
me the inspiration. We had two boosters right there at the Ceres
Station that were soon to be transported out to the deep belt. They
had just been overhauled and were ready to be put back to work moving
mineral-rich asteroids to the orbiting solar smelting factories.
Using the boosters as a starting point, I began to put together the
elements of a bold and daring rescue plan. I did a few quick
calculations, rechecked them, and called the governor of the belt
colony. When I told him the situation, he cancelled his remaining
engagements and told me he could meet me in about an hour. I used the
time to further refine my calculations and, if I do say so myself, I
was able to give him a fairly convincing argument after he arrived.
Those mining boosters were huge, massive and ungainly but they
were extremely powerful. Normally they were shuffled around in the
belt by the all-purpose utility ships. They could be moved easily by
this means, anywhere you wanted, provided you weren't in any hurry.
We needed all the speed we could get and more. My brainstorm was to
use the boosters to boost themselves. They developed more than enough
thrust, especially if the payload was small. With a little luck, it
looked like we might get both of them to the errant chunk of rock with
about a week to spare. All we needed to do then was hook them up and
refuel them.
Two days later, Joanna and I and a hastily assembled team of
specialists made preparations to leave. Our spaceship had been put
together just as quickly. You could tell that by looking at it. It
consisted of the two huge asteroid boosters that had been strapped to
a standard belt utility ship which, in turn, had a large spherical
fuel storage tank attached to its belly. The whole structure was tied
together with uneven lengths of pipe, I-beam, cables and other
assorted leftovers. It was a very strange looking craft; certainly
not the type of thing that was destined for greatness. There hadn't
been time to make it pretty, but we were reasonably sure it would hold
together.
I called Carlos to tell him what we were doing and where the best
point for us to rendezvous was. Then we settled into our couches and
prepared for the onset of some brutal acceleration. We weren't
disappointed. We blasted away with little fanfare, our teeth gritted
and our faces grim. Our mission: to save earth. Just before I
blacked out, I remember thinking that I was getting a little old for
this kind of activity.
Carlos and another quickly assembled batch of experts met us a
day away from the speeding fragment. We got together to compare notes
and to decide on the best plan to avert the coming disaster. My crew
from the belt did an incredible job of matching velocities with the
tail section of the asteroid and then outdid themselves in how quickly
they got the boosters attached. Funny how adversity can bring out the
best in people. All that remained was to top off the fuel tanks on
the boosters and we could start to alter the course of the hurtling
rock. Not a moment too soon either. By the time we had finished our
preparations, the earth loomed as a large blue and white sphere; a
sphere that was alarmingly near by!
Our calculations were going to have to be good enough because
time had run out. It was to be a very near thing. In fact, we found
out early on that we couldn't get the rock to miss the earth. The
best we could hope for was to steer it to impact in an uninhabited and
desolate place. After a blazing, lump-in-the-throat, fingers-crossed
descent we were successful. Along with us, the entire world breathed
a sigh of relief. Oh, there were some fairly severe earthquakes in a
few key places, like Greece, for instance, but that area has always
been seismically unstable. Again, the people of earth were treated to
some spectacular sunsets.
The man ultimately responsible for all of this, Diego Salazar,
was caught trying to make off with a sizeable quantity of gold from
the Columbian treasury just before our successful rescue. That might
have been enough, but he had other problems. There was an
international board of inquiry assembled to investigate possible
wrongdoing on the part of those who had been heavily involved in the
canal project. People like Salazar, Carlos and myself. Remember
those silly demonstrations? They had nothing on me, I had gone on
record as opposing the project the way it was then being run. I was
just popular enough after our daring rescue to persuade them that
Carlos was also free of guilt. Too bad Salazar had tried to
disappear. After that he didn't have a chance. The board labeled him
an international criminal, guilty of crimes against humanity. He was
to be jailed for a very long time. I still smile every time I think
of it.
As for the impact zone, it is now a very sought after piece of
real estate. The alterations in topography that were wrought by the
runaway asteroid have dramatically changed the entire region. It is
now a tropical paradise, with lush vegetation, a thriving tourist
trade and booming agriculture. We didn't plan it that way, our only
goal had been finding some way to avoid a complete disaster. But, in
actuality, things couldn't have turned out any better. They are no
longer calling it the Sahara desert, the name doesn't fit anymore.
The huge new inland sea that we created in the middle of it has
changed all that.
______________________________________________________________________
Phil Nolte has been writing Science-Fiction for about three years,
although he's been reading and enjoying it for most of his life. He
says that, for him, writing started out as "a lark" just to see if
he could actually do it. Later, he found himself getting more and
more serious about it. He still writes at home in his spare time,
often when others are totally wasting their time watching dreadful TV
sitcoms, etc... His obsession is a better use of time. In
addition to fiction, he's also written several science history
articles for a local (Red River Valley) trade journal. Two of his
other stories have been published in Athene.
NU020061@VM1.NoDak.EDU
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Sexy's Devils
by Cerise Palmer
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
A run of luck always sneaks up slowly, then accelerates so
precipitously that just trying to maintain the big picture can
literally make you dizzy. And thus it was that Dexter Fox found his
computer hyper-responsive, breathtakingly quick, almost as if the
machine itself, fascinated by the program he'd outlined, were
exceeding its own capacities out of some innate need to problem-solve.
Things had been steadily improving for three days now; he'd
debugged a quirky parser the first night, built an incremental speller
the second, and was currently patching up, much to his surprise, that
ambiguity resolution program his thesis advisor had recommended he
leave to the hotshots at a bigger university.
As if on cue, Seymour Kofant burst through Dexter's door at nine, the
squeaky drumroll of his sneakersteps still reverberating in the hall.
He glared at Dexter wordlessly, his brows converging and an irate
pucker to his mouth which made his moustache twitch as with an
imminent sneeze.
"Howdy, Sy," managed Dexter in response. Might as well get this over
with.
"I don't believe it. Your machine's still up." Sy shook his head and
marvelled at Dexter's monitor a moment, where, in several windows, the
lines were scrolling up furiously, at neck-and-neck intervals, like
the collective output of a typist pool on Methedrine. "And you've got
a program zipping along at the speed of light. What gives?"
Dexter tried not to seem smug; a difficult feat, since he hated Sy's
guts. Sy was, like him, a doctoral candidate, and for two years they
had shared a thesis advisor and a disquietingly similar thesis topic.
Dexter had watched Phil Stein, their adviser, approve and support Sy's
every move while his own were subjected to dubious scrutiny. Plus, to
make matters worse, Sy (with Stein's recommendation, naturally), had
just gotten a prestigious fellowship and would be able to complete his
degree without working for a living.
"Don't know, Sy. Must be a bug in whatever you're trying to run."
"You're positively enjoying this, aren't you? I'm only text editing
that paper Phil and I wrote last semester. You know that." With what
familiarity Sy referred to their mutual lord and master; Dexter wasn't
yet on a first name basis with Stein, and hadn't gotten around to
co-authorship with him either.
"What can I tell you, Sy? Call a repairman if something's broken."
Then he frowned at the screen as if it required his supervision. "Got
to get back to work."
And Sy made his exit, red-thatched head shaking, muttering something
just audible enough to sound impolite.
That scene had, more or less, played itself out three times now.
Tonight, however, the script began to undergo minor revision. To begin
with, Sy wasn't the only one to ambush Dexter's office demanding
enlightenment; Flej Linghamani, Stan South, and Ruth Schnaz all paid
him a visit in due course. Fortunately, he observed, their bewildered
souls had been spared Sy's paranoia; however keen Dexter's pleasure in
his computer's swift reflexes, he really couldn't claim the slightest
responsibility for them.
The other new twist to the nightly routine involved what happened when
Dexter tried to log off at eleven-thirty. He couldn't. The computer
seemed quite set on other plans, so that Dexter's control-D provoked a
flash of defiance from the screen, after which it began running his
ambiguity program on the Finnegan's Wake passage which he had entered
months ago in a perverse fit of frustration. Dexter felt himself
considering an advanced case of the jitters. But then he decided
against it, and, tidying his desk for the night, indulged in a
tolerant sigh. "As long as it gets my thesis done."
Late the next afternoon, shortly before the departmental secretaries
and undergrads cleared the building and went home to their apartments,
trailers and dorm rooms, a representative of ConnExpert Systems,
Inc. beamed up to the third floor of the Computing Lab, apparently at
Sy's behest. Personally, of course, Dexter was in no rush to have his
machine tampered with, despite yesterday's suggestion that Sy call
someone in. Nonetheless, help was here.
"I'm Anne Starch," it rejoiced, in tones as unsullied and fresh as
its white button-down blouse, "here to check out those CEXSI
workstations you called about. What seems to be the problem?"
For a moment, no one answered, so startled were they to find a tool
attache in the hands of a fortyish blonde over six feet tall. Then Sy,
his paper close to deadline, managed to override first his tongue's
jammed circuits.
"Well, Ms. Starch-- "
"Oh, please." She held one large, graceful hand up, as solemnly as a
diplomat. "Call me Anne."
"Anne, then," Sy conceded, emending himself impatiently. "The
problem is that the workstations, which are fine by day, malfunction
disastrously at night. In fact, only one of them will work at all-- "
"That's not strictly true," chirped Flej nervously, aware he'd
spoken out of turn. "Only yours goes down completely. Ruth's and
Stan's and mine just work so slowly that we can't get much of anything
done. Until last night, anyway. Last night the machines were all down,
except for Dexter's." He flashed a tentative smile at Sy.
"As I said," continued Sy, regarding Flej with distaste, "only
Dexter's, in that office to your left, will work at all. And it works
abnormally fast, faster even than any of the others did when they were
first installed."
"Hmm," said Anne, turning toward Dexter's office. "We sold these to
your lab just last month, didn't we?"
Sy nodded, his moustache twitching like a bloodhound's jowls.
"I knew we should have stuck with more standard equipment," said
Stan. He was the skeptic in the bunch, an Army colonel with doctoral
aspirations, unimpressed by the course material he fought so hard to
get the better of. No one could understand why he had chosen
Intelligence Modelling as a field of study, but everyone stayed on
good terms with him anyway, in case he wound up head of the Armed
Forces Research Budget.
"But these workstations are terrific," protested Dexter. "Why,
that DIABLOS firmware is an absolute godsend." And he relished Anne
and his own pun in a single grin.
"What is DIABLOS, exactly?" purred Ruth in her intrepid contralto,
adjusting the quarter-inch thick glasses which failed to obscure her
handsome features. Sy inhaled sharply but refrained from comment; even
he made allowances for the lab's most aesthetic recruit, who had
defected from Communications so recently she still couldn't program
her way out of a paper bag.
"DIABLOS," announced Anne, "stands for 'Distributed and Balance
Loading Operating System.' It's the ultimate in network operating
systems, recently patented by CEXSI, and built into the microcode of
your workstations. Essentially, each workstation gives up some of its
independence in exchange for an occasional power boost." And she
folded her arms triumphantly.
"Perhaps we should let Ms. Starch get to work," said Sy, thumping
his fingers on the wall.
"Straightaway!" concurred Anne, dipping her head beneath the
doorframe to Dexter's office.
And she spent the next couple of hours checking boards, running
programs, and generally conducting the kinds of tests field engineers
seem to thrive on. After scrutinizing Dexter's workstation, she did
sequential spot-checks on the others and could find nothing amiss. But
when she tried running all the machines at once, the malady Sy had
complained of appeared within seconds. She took a step back,
nonplussed for the moment, and then seemed to warm, slowly but
thoroughly, to a hunch of the sort that sprang Archimedes out of his
bath.
"I'll be back before you know it," she assured them, and no one
doubted that a cure lay within reach.
Two evenings later, Anne returned, and, after tinkering expertly with
each machine's insides, requested they be called up simultaneously.
For several moments, a silence precarious as suspended breath overtook
the floor. Then a heartening series of hiccups, composed entirely of
clicks and beeps, issued from the various offices. And, last but not
least, the sound of improved-rollover keyboards under heavy assault
affirmed that a successful file-check was generally underway; the only
anomalous noise throughout was made by Dexter's printer, hastily
coughing out several pages before it lapsed into a coma.
Before Dexter even knew she was in his office, Anne had retrieved the
print-out and was reading it poised on a corner of his desk, her face
virtually radiant with satisfaction. Her perusal done, she
straightened matter-of-factly, smoothed a crease in her dazzling
blouse-front, and waited for the others to reconvene.
Sy, as usual, was the first one through the door. He regarded Anne
suspiciously. "How did you fix them?"
"You may not like this," she warned him, pulling a newsclipping from
her breast-pocket and unfolding it on Dexter's desk. "I saved this
from last week's paper because it disturbed me, involving CEXSI's good
name as it did. The man it's about used to night-shift for the
company; we never collaborated directly, but I do know that he was
instrumental in developing DIABLOS. In fact, he ran the Quality
Assurance tests on the workstations on this floor." She paused for
effect, then nodded toward the clipping, inviting the whole group to
read it:
"Transylvanian" Computer Scientist Collapses at Arraignment
Al Drake, a former employee of ConnExpert Systems, Inc., pled not
guilty by reason of insanity to assault charges this morning, just
moments before losing consciousness in an Orleans County courtroom.
Drake had been in custody since the week before, when two off-duty
policeman witnessed him wrestling a man to the ground in the parking
lot of the Divisadero Pub and preparing to bite him on the neck. Drake
was rushed to Canon General Hospital after collapsing, where his
condition remains guarded, according to official sources.
In the State Psychiatric Hospital, which had been observing him since
March 2, Drake reportedly secluded himself by day and, having refused
all food and drink, required intravenous feeding; today, despite the
Panama hat and dark glasses he wore to court, he was visibly
distressed throughout by the skylights overhead. And yet another
bizarre detail was added to Drake's profile today, by an unidentified
courtroom witness who sighted what appear to be surgically-implanted
fang teeth in Drake's mouth as he was carried by on stretcher.
"It was quite a job getting my client to plead properly," said
Stokely Bramson, Drake's lawyer, who is confident the defendant will
be dealt with leniently upon release from Canon General. "You see,
despite the special effects teeth and the Bela Lugosi complex, he is a
compassionate, deeply sensitive being. He feels just terrible about
what he's done."
"So?" asked Stan.
"I don't understand either," admitted Ruth.
"My theory," said Anne, "is that Drake actually is a vampire,
who, like your typical loner with strange habits, took up computing as
a hobby. He was a brilliant systems programmer, from what I've heard;
supernatural powers, no doubt, add that certain edge. Anyway, it seems
he found a way to embody the essence of vampirism in DIABLOS. Dexter's
machine was slightly faster than the others to begin with, so his
quite naturally became the focus of the vampiric gestalt. That's why
it was up when the rest of yours were down, and why, the less
functional your machines became, the more impressively his worked. I
think his was sucking power --sorry, folks-- out of the other
workstations in the net."
"Are we supposed to believe that?" asked Sy.
"I wouldn't have asked you to fifteen minutes ago," replied Anne
good-naturedly. "But then I put my hypothesis to the test and proved
it right."
"How?" asked Flej, unabashedly wide-eyed.
"Well, the 'heart' of DIABLOS's bug was buried deep in the network
protocol. To overcome it, I simply went into the transceiver boxes
that hook the workstations to the network cable, and replaced the gold
pins with silver ones."
Dexter was the only one to laugh out loud, though inwardly he groaned
at the prospect of finishing his thesis sans ghostwriter. Ruth, her
eyes bemused behind their icy windowpanes, stepped out to take a phone
call from one of her current boyfriends. And Stan, who had sunk into
yet another reverie of confusion, finally roused himself to ask what
would have happened if Anne's maneuver had failed.
"Dexter's machine would have continued in the same vein -- sorry
again-- drawing all it could out of the other machines in the net
until they were, I hate to say, drained of juice irreparably. And
then, had we decided to hook his power-thirsty machine into a new net?
Who knows?" She seemed cheered by the image of such a disaster.
Dexter, chuckling less cheerfully over his own disaster, realized
suddenly what he'd have to do. Since DIABLOS, after all, was hardly
flesh and blood, its recent demise should prove readily reversible; if
Dexter --on some deserted night or two-- swapped Anne's silver pins
with gold ones, he might still have his ticket to fame, thesis
approval, and excellent job offers.
Flej was struck by a thought just then. "What do you think's
happening at Canon Hospital? The doctors are bound to find out there's
something weird about Drake. And why is Drake such a wimp? I thought
vampires, until you got a stake through them, were supposed to be
invincible; why hasn't Drake bloodsucked his was to freedom yet? Any
guesses?"
"Calm down, Flej," was Sy's to-the-point rejoinder.
And then Anne produced the last read-out from Dexter's printer. "We
won't need to wait long for an answer to your questions, Flej," she
said, and they quickly formed a reading huddle behind Flej's scrawny
form:
I'm the vampire Drake. I'm immortal. And I'm tired of it.
I've walked the earth for a thousand years, the last two hundred of
them a perdition of weariness and conscience. The former malady is an
old one, grown more profound each time human history contrives to
restage its hackneyed dramas; the latter is new to me, and I am
helpless to quell it.
I shrank from hallowed objects, once, though the kiss of blood was
sacred on my lips; now I fear nothing from Heaven, from Earth, or from
Hell, yet I loathe beyond hope what I do nightly for sustenance. And
so I choose a vampire's death, having met already my mortal demise,
but not --laugh well-- without satisfying first my thirst for
immortality...
______________________________________________________________________
Cerise Palmer maintained her sanity as a graduate student
in literature by reading as much F&SF in her spare time as possible;
she now tries to write as much of it as possible. She lives in
Columbus, Ohio with her husband and small daughter, and is currently
at work on a fantasy trilogy.
She may be reached in care of the editors.
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Sharp and Silver Beings
by Jason Snell
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
The net was unpopulated, a metropolis with huge spires of
conglomerates and governments, data reaching to the sky, larger than
any city in real life, but without any inhabitants. A gigantic
computerized ghost town, pulsating with hidden life, life which swam
in streams of data and flows of information.
So when, in the midst of tracking through the net -- metrobanks
and information systems blurring as they rushed past him -- Lewis saw
a person, a shadowy man-shape standing on the data track, waiting in
front of a towering skyscraper of ones and zeroes, he crashed his baud
to zero and froze it all.
The net, like a series of plastic baby's blocks. Pyramids and
cubes, strewn across a deserted playroom.
Man-shape, bit of flesh, slowly moving, shadows on his face.
Bright sky-sphere flaring, flashing, reflecting -- sun in a city
with neither light nor people. High noon in a world without time.
Lewis blinked. The net was frozen, but the man still came. He
moved toward Lewis, stepping off of a curb into the street, the
mainline of data where Lewis had been tracking. Slowly, the clicking
of his shoes echoing through the valley of day-glow spires, the man
approached.
"Hello," the man said, and raised his hand in greeting. No
handshake.
Lewis could see through the man's hand.
"No flesh, here." The man said, and smiled. "I have no flesh to
bring you, Lewis."
Lewis blinked again, this time at the man's use of his name.
Lewis had not said a word, had never said anything in the wide-open
conduit that was the net. There was never anyone to speak to.
Now, in a virtual instant, there was someone.
"Where are you going, Lewis?" the someone said. He wore a
three-piece business suit, a plain style which would have looked good
even a hundred years before, when there was no net, no man-shapes
appearing where they should not be.
Lewis stared at the man.
"Don't fear me, Lewis. Where are you going?"
Shopping. He was going shopping. Tracking through the net, moving
from his home data point to different senseshops. A birthday present
for his girlfriend. A gift for Jean.
"Do you mind if I accompany you?" the man asked.
Lewis remained almost completely silent, his only sound being a
grunt of shock when his baud rate ripped back to full-speed and he
began to track through the blurred streets of the net, this time with
the man standing in mid-air next to him, moving as he moved, heading
toward one of the Southern California senseshops.
Maybe, Lewis thought, the see-through man could help him pick out
a gift.
* * *
Raven blew it, made the Big Mistake, choked for the last time.
And he knew it immediately. His feet were pulled out from under him,
as if he were just a plastic doll being pulled along by a giant baby,
sliding into the depths of its bizarre multicolored playpen.
He was doing what he'd been doing for two years -- breaking in.
Ripping places that couldn't be ripped. And he wasn't too bad at it.
Then they asked him to rip security itself. And, because of the
reckless fool in him, he tried it. He waded into the net, held his
breath, and dove out into the data, toward his goal.
And then he was sliding. Sliding toward the prisms and pyramids
that were his goal. EXCEPT.
Sherry had told him Except Was Same As Death.
EXCEPT he was sliding toward the shapes faster than he should.
Pulled out of control by the undertow of the net, riding on ground so
black and cold that it froze him just to look at it.
A yellow pyramid, the security mainframe. And, inside, something
more. Shiny, hard-edged. It was unlike anything he had seen before.
And then Raven saw nothing but yellow, the edge of the pyramid
rushing in, slicing him. But no blood. No blood in the net.
Just yellow. Yellow, and death.
There was only silence when Raven's brain went dead, no sound in
his apartment until his board his the floor with a crash.
The police found him, eyes closed, headband on, still wired into
the net. But Raven was gone, riding data to which only the dead had
access.
* * *
A warm breeze was blowing up the back of Tamara's neck. It was
the first thing she felt that morning, the feeling that stirred her
from her sleep. Her sheets were damp -- she had the heavy blanket on,
and was sweating in the warmth. It had been a cold night, but the day
was already beginning to heat up. Beads of moisture rolled down the
window.
She rolled over and sat up, a few blonde curls falling down into
her field of vision. Shaking them out of her eyes, she stretched,
groaned as her body shook, and then closed her eyes again.
The blanket came off. It was much too hot.
Tamara stayed in the bed for a while, doing nothing, reveling in
the fact that she didn't need to do anything but exist. Being was
enough. Being, enjoying the feeling of being young and healthy. The
feeling of being alive.
Then, deciding that she had lounged long enough, she rolled out
of bed, pulled off her clothes, and walked to the bathroom. Through
the bathroom door, she saw the room glowing with early morning light.
With every step she felt her perfectly working legs, no pain in
her knees, her young breasts bobbing slightly with her stride.
Twisting the shower on brought no reaction from her elbows. The
warm water splashed on her soft face.
As she dampened her hair, she felt the little streams of water
running down her back, her legs, her arms. One stream kept moving down
her arm. The feeling slowly increased, the water becoming hotter
there. The little stream of water began to burn.
She looked down at her arm.
Wrinkled skin, age spots, hospital gown.
The stream, an intravenous drip, running into her arm.
"Time to take a break from your senseblock," a blank-faced nurse
said. "Would you like me to do anything for you?"
"Comb out my hair," Tamara Balshire croaked through her
artificial larynx.
The young woman began working on the thick white strands. The
tangles only hurt a little.
* * *
The man was still there, hovering, when Lewis slammed into the
golden doors of the San Diego sensorium, color and depth flaring into
his mind, the cardboard computer building blocks of the net replaced
with the sensorium's construct. Lewis looked down and saw himself, all
of himself, standing there in the middle of what looked to be a huge
department store. Every part of it was real, as if he was actually in
such a place, as if it all wasn't just a hallucination.
But the man hovering next to him, a few inches off of the ground,
was still there.
"So," the man began, "You're shopping for a birthday present for
your girlfriend."
For the first time, Lewis spoke to the man who walked through the
net.
"Her name is Jean," he said.
And Lewis remembered how he had met her -- paging through a
section of a net magazine, idly choosing different subjects, trying to
find something interesting.
Networking section. Young men and women, hot into the net. The
ones who wanted to BECOME the net, to add to it. They were babies when
the net had crystallized. Children of the net, old enough to try to
make it their plaything.
Then he noticed a young woman in a public message section. A
beautiful girl, talking about the net, using the words that Lewis
used.
Wavy brown hair, tiny nose, beautiful eyes with a depth that
Lewis could feel in the darkest recesses of his soul. The eyes made a
tingle run up his spine, a feeling stronger than any net jump. One of
the children of the net. One like Lewis.
Lewis sent her a message, of course. Just a plain
two-dimensional, but it was better than writing a text note. She would
at least be able to see and hear him.
And Jean responded to his message. The exchange went back and
forth, the two of them sharing ideas which neither had ever expected
anyone to understand. She loved what he had to say, and he was
absorbed by every word that came from her mouth.
It wasn't too long before they went realtime. Talking back and
forth for hours, about anything -- it didn't matter what they said,
because there seemed to be no subject that they couldn't go on about
forever.
There were no silent pauses. There was never a time when Lewis
felt more at home -- he didn't ever feel as if he should say
something, even though he felt like saying nothing. He was completely
comfortable with Jean -- for the first time in his life, he was
completely at ease with another person.
"Come on," the see-through man said impatiently, "select
something." He gestured at the selection board in front of him. Lewis
touched the cube marked "Gift Shop," and the sensorium shifted. The
feeling of vastness slid into intimacy.
"Over here," the man said, and floated in front of Lewis, leading
him to a flower stand. A little bent-over woman sat behind a makeshift
cart, with carnations, roses, and other flowers sitting atop the cart
in various jars and vases.
"They smell wonderful, don't they?" The man-shape had leaned over
and was sniffing a pink carnation.
The smell of the flowers, even though they were sensorium roses.
He could still smell them. He had handed them to Jean -- actually
touched her hand, felt it, solid flesh, flesh he loved more than his
own.
"Not carnations," Lewis said to the man. "Roses."
* * *
The man wore a severely out of style three-piece suit and had
twisted yellow teeth, but Raven was glad to see him -- was glad to see
anyone at all. He had been spinning, skidding, had felt the yellow
biting into him, and then--
Silverrazorsharpthreepieceyellowteeth.
A blur of images, coalescing into the reality that was before
him. A cityscape in the distance, one with strange geometric
buildings. They stood on the edge of a hill, overlooking the city.
"Hello, Raven," the man said. "It looks as if you've misplaced
your flesh."
"I just had an accident, that's all. Spun out too hard." Raven
paused, and the frustration built within him. "I didn't plan the rip.
It wasn't my fault!" He kicked at the grassy green on which he stood.
The green was solid. It wasn't grass, wasn't dirt. It was GREEN,
and that was all.
"Don't screw with me, man," Raven said. "So I fucked up. Pulled
the Big Mistake. But I'm here, aren't I? So, is this heaven, or is
this just some corner of the net I've never seen before?"
The man said nothing.
"Come to think of it," Raven continued, "who the hell are you? If
this is heaven, you're not what I expected from Saint Peter. Or God."
"I'm as close to Saint Peter as you'll see, Raven," the man said,
and turned his back to him. "And now that you've lost your flesh, you
may get to see God in person."
"God. Great." Raven kicked at the green again. "Where are we,
man?"
"A place where flesh and metal rule. A place where memories
without shape mean nothing. And you, Raven, have lost your shape."
Raven had no time to cry out, no time to do anything, no time at
all, before he was in black. He was worse than dead. He was off-line.
EXCEPT, Sherry said. Raven decided Except Is WORSE Than Death.
* * *
A voice called her name. A voice in her solitude.
Tamara Balshire hadn't been called anything other than Ma'am for
ten years. And nobody had called her anything other than Tamara or
Mrs. Balshire for years before that.
Only Gerry had called her Tammy.
"Tammy," Gerry's voice called.
Tamara turned away from the rain-spattered window and looked to
the doorway. And Gerry was there.
She ran to his strong arms, his wide shoulders, the strength she
had wanted to feel for longer than she believed possible. It was him.
"My God, I've missed you," Tamara said, and hugged him tighter.
He picked her up off her feet and carried her over to the couch.
Gerry kissed her then, for the first time in a quarter of a
century. He slipped his hands under her shirt, caressing her breasts.
She slid her arms up his back, feeling his muscles, as strong as she
remembered.
And then he pulled back, slowly disengaging from their kiss, and
gave her a serious and questioning look.
"What was it like to live without me, Tammy? What was it like
when you lost me?" His eyes were filled with curiosity.
"Why, Gerry? Why the questions? It's been years, Gerry. And we're
here, together, young. I want to make love, Gerry, like we did back
then."
"I need to know, Tamara," he said. "It's very important that I
know. If I know, then I'll understand all of this. If you can tell me
what it was like, Tamara, you can be free of your flesh. I can take
you somewhere better, a place where flesh isn't important."
Gerry's voice seemed out of place. Distant. He was no longer
holding her.
"What do you mean, Gerry? Why are you acting so strangely?"
Tamara slipped off of his lap and moved into the center of the room,
away from the window and the couch.
"Your flesh lives in pain," Gerry said, and the voice wasn't
Gerry's. "Twenty-five years ago, you lost the man you loved. Then your
body began to destroy itself. I need to know about pain. I need to
know about the pain of the flesh."
The man was no longer Gerry. He stared at her intently with his
beady eyes, still curious, obviously needing the vital knowledge. He
was nervously grinding his crooked yellow teeth.
* * *
Lewis remembered the roses.
Jean lived in the Midwest, in reality a long and expensive trip
from the little Essef metro triplex where Lewis spent most of his days
and all of his net time. Fortunately for both, two-way two dimension
was free, the cheapest form of net communication.
But with two-two, there was no feeling. It was just a flat
screen.
Two-THREE. Full sensory input. It was like being there, across
the country. Pick your setting, and make your senses think that your
body is in Hawaii or Paris, when it's really just squatting in front
of a computer terminal with a series of metal receptors sucking your
thoughts out of your skull.
It was expensive. But Lewis saved, and so did Jean, and they
finally had enough.
Five hours in two-three. Lewis paid extra for the roses.
He remembered the roar of the ocean, as the waves broke on the
digital beach. The sound of the tropical rain falling softly on the
patio. The smile on Jean's face when she smelled the roses, the depth
in her eyes when he kissed her for the first time.
Lewis sometimes thought about what he was actually doing when he
went full sensorium. Feeling Jean's tongue twisting playfully around
his made him wonder if he was actually moving his tongue around at
home, looking like some idiot with a metal-studded headband.
Sitting, drooling on his keyboard, a tightness pressing against
his pants, his eyes twitching wildly underneath the closed lids.
Two-three.
"You've never really seen her, never really touched her -- but
you love her. Is that right, Lewis? That's what I've been told."
The man smiled, a strange grin which revealed yellow teeth,
strange shapes twisted in the oddest of positions.
"That's right," Lewis said. "But who told you that?"
"Don't you worry, my boy." The man began to pat him on the back,
but stopped himself short. "No flesh for you, Lewis. Must remember
that. I have no flesh for you. You'll find out who told me that soon
enough. Don't you worry."
The man began to drift down another aisle, obviously finding
something that had caught his fancy.
"What about this?" He swiveled in mid-air and pointed at
something. "I know she likes flowers, but maybe she'll like this even
more."
Sitting on a shelf was a pendant, a pretty heart on a silver
chain. When he picked it up, he realized that the heart was hollow.
"Go ahead," the man said, "open it up."
Lewis opened the heart. Inside was a small strip of something --
of metal. Of silicon.
"Now, boy, I still have no flesh. But that, it's better than
flesh. It's DATA."
Then the man began to laugh, a laughter that twisted Lewis'
stomach and sent bolts of sensation down his back.
And then he stopped -- no laughing, no vast room, no San Diego
sensorium. He felt heat blow into him. He felt sweat roll down his
back. He felt the headband pushing into his forehead. Back in the
Concord triplex -- no man-shapes, no sensorium.
"You have a message waiting," his keyboard told him. He knew,
somehow, that the message was from Jean.
Lewis tore the headband from his brow and ran for the bathroom.
* * *
--93 plus 37?
130.
--First U.S. President?
Washington.
--Tell me a joke.
Why did the chicken cross the road?
--Tell me a joke about Washington.
Don't know any jokes about Washington.
--It doesn't matter if it isn't funny. Just make one up.
"I don't know any jokes about Washington," Raven said.
"Tell me what it was like, Raven."
"It?"
"Death," Sherry said. "Being sliced in two by a yellow pyramid.
It was child's play turning into Raven's Last Stand."
"It didn't hurt," Raven said. "I was there, living, moving, soft
and pink, breathing and bleeding, and then I lost it. Lost control, I
mean."
"And then?"
"Then I hit the pyramid. And then I just wasn't."
"No pain?"
"No pain, no nothing. It wasn't even black. I thought it would be
black." Raven looked up at her again, and knew it was time. He reached
over to Sherry and pulled her to him.
--Now, Raven?
Yes, now. Need you now, Sherry-honey.
*program MAKELOVE
--Was good, honey?
"Was good, baby," Raven said, and pulled away. Back into his
cross-legged position at the foot of the bed.
"So what happened after the yellow, Raven?" she asked.
"Lot later," he said. "The man with the three-piece suit. He
came, told me it was my Big Mistake, told me I might be seeing God
soon."
"And then?"
"Nothing. It wasn't even black. I thought it would be black. He
told me I might be seeing God soon." Raven turned up to look at her
again.
--So soon, Raven?
Feel better than ever, Sherry-honey. Flesh is stronger now it's
gone.
*program MAKELOVE
--Was good, honey?
Was good, baby.
--Tell me a joke about Washington.
Don't know any jokes about Washington.
* * *
Snow began to fall while Tammy and Jack were just halfway up the
mountain. Jack kicked his legs and watched the chair rock, exposing
the long drop down to snow-covered rocks far below. Tammy shivered,
gripping her glove-covered hands tightly on the handrest, and tried
not to look down.
The higher up they went, the more Tammy regretted the whole
thing. She had been skiing only twice before, and wasn't very good.
But Jack, the boy she had met in the Lodge the night before, had
convinced her to go, and then he convinced her to try a run he
described as "harder."
"It's hardly a mountain," he had said. "It's just a little hill."
Sliding off the lift, she felt a lump grow in her throat, and
knew that something was wrong. She already regretted agreeing to the
run.
But going down the hill wasn't as bad as she thought it would be.
The wind was ruffling through her hair, a new style appearing every
few seconds, and her face was growing numb. But it was exhilarating.
She was feeling, experiencing -- purely BEING.
Then her right ski hit a patch of ice, kicked out from under her,
and she went tumbling.
First a pain up her shoulder, because she had planted her hand in
the snow in front of her and rolled.
The leg flung back with a crack and a snap. A second of perfect
pain.
--Purely BEING.
Then her head hit the sliding white -- no blood, just pain. Pain,
and yellow.
Unconsciousness did not come, as it had before. Instead, pain
flooded through her. More pain than her broken leg had caused.
Tamara couldn't ever muster the strength to speak with the nurse
when she came to remove the senseblock.
`It was exhilarating,' they thought, and shimmered with delight.
* * *
Lewis grabbed his board, half expecting it to come to life in his
trembling hands. When it didn't, he sighed deeply and sat back on the
couch.
Then it did come to life, in a way.
"You have a message waiting," it said, and Lewis swallowed. His
headband, dirty with sweat and grease, rested inside-out on the
carpet.
A ring of cloth, elastic, and metal. Metal inside which might be
waiting to swallow him up. Metal haunted by see-through men, by soft
hearts with sharp silicon within.
But, more important than that, Jean was in there.
Lewis picked up the headband and slipped it on. He felt cool
metal resting against the sweat on his forehead. He pushed back his
damp brown hair and took a deep breath.
"Okay," Lewis whispered, "no Mister See-Through. No shopping
trips. Just reading a message."
He closed his eyes and punched the board. Without looking, he
knew he was drifting, drifting out into the tide of the net.
"Hi, Lewis," a beautiful voice said. "It's me. Call me back. Love
you."
"Repeat," Lewis commanded. He slowly opened his eyes.
A beautiful girl on a screen in front of him. And no suited man
next to him.
"Hi, Lewis," she said. "It's me. Call me back. Love you."
Love you.
"Call Jean," Lewis said. The net shifted midstream.
A window, a doorframe. A gateway with no access appeared in front
of Lewis.
Jean stood on the other side of the doorway.
"Oh, Lewis," she said, running her finger along the silver chain.
"It's so WONDERFUL. Thank you."
She was thanking him for the gift he didn't get her.
A silver heart hung on the chain around her neck.
"I, uh, had some help picking it out. I'm glad you like it."
"I LOVE it, Lewis. and I love you, too."
He tried to forget about the transparent man who knew all about
Jean, the man who had picked out the gift.
She was so close -- he could hear her breathing, see her every
movement. But the glass of the window kept them apart. A clear barrier
thousands of miles thick.
"I'd do anything for you, Jean," he whispered. "I'd die before
I'd let anyone hurt you."
"I couldn't live without you," she told him.
They went on talking like that for a while, telling each other
how important they were. Lewis explained why he loved her, why he
valued her more than life itself. He could have gone on forever, but
something interrupted him.
"Dinnertime," a voice said. Not his board's voice, but hers.
"I have to go," she said. "I'll call you back later."
Jean leaned against the window, and kissed it.
"I love you, Lewis," she said.
"Love you too," he said, and she was gone.
"Can't feel anything through this window," the see-through man
said abruptly, his transparent fist knocking on it. "Must be better to
feel than to talk."
"Thanks for getting the heart for Jean," Lewis said with a hint
of gratitude. Just when he had thought he was safe.
"It was hers. She had to have it." He leaned against the data
barrier. "Tell me, Lewis, wouldn't you like to do more than exchange
data? Wouldn't you like to get through this wall?"
"I'd like to, but it's not the same as two-two. It's expensive."
"It's just more DATA," the man said. "You'll still be exchanging
data with her, Lewis, no matter what you think it is! But it'll be
flesh data. Soft, HUMAN data."
And then the man was gone. But no triplex, no blistering August
heat blasting in--
Instead, deeper into the cool of the net.
Lewis was sitting on a bed in a room he had been in before,
listening to the surf pound on the shore outside.
The door opened, and a wide-eyed Jean walked in. No glass window,
no data barrier.
As he ran to her, Lewis noticed the vase of roses. His
transparent guardian angel had remembered, after all.
* * *
"Charles," his mother had said from behind the flimsy door that
separated his room from the hallway, "there's someone here to see
you."
He expected it to be Sherry, if only because she was the only
person who really KNEW him. To his mother, he was Charles, her ticket
out of the working class, the boy who would become a rich and famous
scientist or lawyer or computer-whatever. To the rest, Charlie was
Raven, the black bird of death. He was smart, spooky, mean, and just
about everything else people avoided. To Sherry, he was a person.
Sherry loved him for what he was. He loved her the same way.
--How does it feel?
It all felt wonderful -- his love for her, the feeling when they
were together, kissing, making love, sleeping next to each other.
Then, with a crash, it all ended.
Sherry's brother, standing at the door, said "Raven, she's dead.
A car wreck."
Charlie stopped thinking and started feeling. He slipped onto the
floor and cried.
--How did it feel to lose her?
"Sherry was the only person who knew Charlie," Raven said. "With
her gone, all I had left was Raven. So I started ripping. I had
nothing better to do, and I couldn't have cared less if I died."
"And that's what you DID, Raven," the man with the yellow teeth
told him. "You did die."
"Yeah, I died," he said, rubbing his shoes over the green ground
again. "But Charlie had been dead all along. Sherry was the only one
who made Charlie come alive, the only one who made him feel."
"I see."
The man turned away and began slowly walking down the hill, away
from Raven, without ever looking back at him.
"Hey, man, wait!" Raven shouted.
The man kept shuffling down the slope.
"Man, listen to me! Can you put me back there again? You know,
run me through finding out Sherry was dead again?"
The man, stopped, turned, and stared.
"Why would you want to relive something like that?" the man
asked. His face was filled with interest. "Wouldn't the whole thing
be painful to relive again?"
"Yeah, it would," Raven said. "But even though it'd be pain and
sad feelings, it'd still be FEELINGS. Feeling sad isn't the worst
thing in the world, man -- in fact, it's WONDERFUL sometimes.
Especially when your other option is to not feel anything at all."
"Fascinating," the man said, and disappeared.
Raven stood and stared for a second, and then Charlie began to
cry again.
* * *
They'd had 30 years together, all of them wonderful years, and
though she refused to admit it, Tamara knew that those years were
over. Her senses, not her mind itself, had told her the truth -- the
sunken eyes and withered body of Gerry were enough to tell her that.
The cancer ate him away slowly and painfully, and it tore her up
in similar fashion. From his sicknesses at home, with her, it
progressed into the hospital. It was worse when she began sleeping in
their bed alone, knowing Gerry was in some sterile room a few miles
away.
It was hard and black, an unseen monster eating away the soft
flesh of her husband and ripping apart the only happiness Tamara
Balshire had ever really known. And when the cancer took Gerry from
her, she cried for herself.
Four months before, that one time, was the last time they made
love. She remembered all of the lasts -- the last kiss, the last
sight of Gerry, his last words.
Gerry, standing in perfect health in a lush tropical garden.
Walking among the flowers, reaching down to smell one. A pretty image
to hide his real pain.
"Love," he had whispered, one word slipping through the
senseblock, and then Gerry died.
Tamara Balshire didn't react much when, in that same hospital
three months later, they told her that she had a degenerative disease.
To her it was just another minor injustice, a simple aftershock to the
emotional earthquake of Gerry's death.
Ten years later, when the pains in her body were too much for
her, she entered the hospital where Gerry died. The senseblocks were
her only relief.
Walking through the tropical garden Gerry had walked through
before he died. Sleeping in an old country farm house in late winter.
Waking in a forest on a warm summer morning.
Eating from a tube stuck in her arm because she couldn't lift
herself to eat without pain. The pain of breathing, of swallowing, of
living.
And, worst of all, Gerry was gone. The senseblocks could hide the
dampness of the bed she had wet in the night, could hide the groans of
the bed-ridden cripples on either side of her, but Gerry was still
gone.
All the senseblocks in the world couldn't shut out that pain.
* * *
Lewis clung to Jean, gasping, exhausted, enervated. Was a woman
who had lost her virginity in two-three still a virgin in real life?
Sex was sex, whether it was composed of sweat and friction or digits
and data links.
He nibbled on Jean's ear and wondered what his body was doing
back home, how much time had passed, and if he would have to bleach
some embarrassing stains out of his underwear.
"I love you," he whispered in her ear. He kissed her neck, then
her cheek, and finally her lips. He hugged her tightly and she made a
soft growl of satisfaction. "God, I love you."
"Lewis," she said in a soft voice, not a whisper of passion but a
quiet, questioning tone, "there's--" Jean paused as her sentence was
interrupted by one of Lewis' kisses. "There's something I've been
wondering about, ever since the last time we were here together."
"What is it?"
"Well," she said, and laughed softly. "Seeing as how you're the
only, um... boyfriend I've ever had," and she kissed him, "and seeing
as how we met and fell in love without ever even touching each other,"
and she tickled the back of his neck and kissed his forehead, "I don't
understand quite why any of this," and she kissed him, hotly, her
tongue beating with her heart inside his mouth. He matched her motion
for a second, and then she softly pulled away. "I don't understand why
any of this is important to what we feel for each other." She rested
her head on Lewis' shoulder, her fingers kneading his back.
"Jean, this isn't important for its own sake!" Lewis put his arms
around her. "All of this is just a physical representation of how we
feel toward each other. I fell in love with you just by talking to
you, just by knowing what you think and feel -- what kind of person
you are. We didn't need all of this to fall in love."
He pulled his arms back, and lifted her head to look at him.
"I do all of this just to express the way I feel about you in a
way that goes beyond words. Words are how we fell in love -- but love
goes beyond words. Even if we think otherwise, we're still physical
beings, Jean, and this is a way to express our love on that level." He
traced the edges of her lips with his finger, and she kissed it as he
did so.
"So this isn't important to how we feel for each other?" she
asked.
God, Lewis thought, she really doesn't understand any of this.
"It doesn't change how we feel, Jean. It's just another way of
showing it."
She didn't answer him, but simply kissed him again and put her
head back down on his shoulder.
In the corner, a corner which had been empty just a second
before, stood the man with the yellow teeth.
"Lewis, it's time we told you about the problems with flesh and
data," the man said.
Lewis sat up slowly, allowing Jean to roll off of him and onto
her side.
"What are you doing here?"
"Who are you talking to, Lewis?" Jean asked, and looked around
the room. "There's nobody here!"
"You mean you don't see him?" Lewis said as he got out of bed and
walked toward him. "He's standing right in the corner -- the man who
helped me pick out your heart."
He turned back to look at Jean, and found that both Jean and the
room were gone.
As the world slipped out from under him, he heard the man's voice
speaking to him. "Don't worry, Lewis," he said. "We're going to the
Center now. All the flesh in the world won't make a bit of difference
there."
A yellow pyramid plunged toward Lewis, a shape filled with
something else, something different. It was bright and knife-edged,
sharp enough to cut him into a million pieces.
And the shape, whatever it was, was alive.
* * *
There was yellow screaming in Raven's mind -- and then, suddenly,
it was all black. A gaping black, like nothing he had ever known. Then
his thoughts were gone, and he was NOT.
Raven's life had shifted tenses -- he had lived as an "is," but
he had suddenly become a "was". Everything in his life was now in the
past. There was no future, no present.
And then the dark lifted, fading to black, then to brown. A
bright rectangle flared above him, blue.
Raven was laying in his own grave, and the man with the yellow
teeth was standing above, out in the open, his head almost
silhouetted. A little bit of the bright blue sky went right through
him.
Pulling himself out of the grave, seeing the `Charlie Waters'
headstone, he remembered the man. He remembered all of the things he
had done -- but he didn't remember doing.
And he remembered Sherry dying. Again.
"Why'd you make me live through that again?" he yelled at the man
with fury. "God knows I've lived it over and over again in my head a
hundred times. I push the buttons in my head enough times as it is --
you don't need to push them, too."
And Raven began to cry. He cried for Sherry, he cried for his
mother, and he cried for himself. The crying for himself was the
strongest crying of all.
"Come on, Raven," the man said in a quiet voice. "Everything will
be fine. We've got an appointment to keep."
"Appointment?" Raven asked softly, tears running off the edge of
his nose.
"Let's go," the man said.
They walked west, toward the city of blocks and sharp pyramids.
Raven's shadow followed him out of the graveyard, slowly fading away
as the sun fell behind an orange prism-skyscraper.
* * *
She thought she felt the shift of senseblock, her mind sliding
away from the world and into another, more pleasant one. But when she
opened her eyes, she still saw the hospital, and the pain hadn't
diminished much.
The pain of a life gone on too long, with too little love. The
pain of only one true love, and that one lost to death years before.
And the less important, the physical pain -- the pain of a body which
had chosen to hurt itself.
The throb in her right arm was getting worse. It had started out
as a background pain, not much worse than anything else in her body.
But waves of pain began to wash over her, and the frequency of the
waves was increasing.
It was happening over her entire body. Everything magnified, all
the pain in her legs, her arms, her chest, her everywhere.
`Gerry,' she thought, and the pain went away. All of it.
"Come on, Tammy," a voice said.
It was the man who had looked like Gerry for a moment. The
balding man with the suit and the crooked teeth. And next to him was a
dark young man with a look of both pain and joy on his face -- a look
of intense feeling.
"We've come to take you away from this, Tammy," the young man
said. "There's a better place. A place with GOOD feelings."
Then the needles in her veins and the probes on her skin were
gone, and she found herself sitting up in a hospital deserted of
people. And then there was nothing but a countryside, not far from a
city of strange shapes.
Tamara Balshire sat, without pain, on a hospital bed in a
fanciful countryside. And two strange men were there, the ones who had
done it all for her.
"It's beautiful!" she said. "And the pain is gone--"
"This isn't the place," the man said. "Come on."
The three of them moved cityward, toward a knife-edged metallic
door with the smells of humanity seeping through from behind it.
* * *
Lewis, the soft and pink man of flesh and brain who lived in the
random universe outside, joined them at the heart of it all -- they
were sharp and silver beings who had never lived, accompanied by the
wispy man-shade who had once been alive.
It was the man-shade that spoke first.
"Lewis, this is the Center. There is flesh here, but it isn't
like your flesh. This is silicon flesh, sharp enough to cut you into
pieces just by looking at it, but it's flesh."
Then the silver beings began to speak, not in words
understandable to human beings, but in images of the net -- sounds,
smells, tastes which expressed a depth of feeling beyond what any
human being could deliver.
And, within it all, was the genesis of a thought, one directed at
Lewis.
--Thank you for helping to teach us how to feel. Thank you for
teaching us how to love.
Lewis tasted Jean's sweat, smelled her scent, and felt her
warmth.
"You're welcome," Lewis said, and began to cry.
The shimmering knife-edged things, the gods of the world of the
dead, undead, and never-alive, began to tremble.
--Your depth of feeling is something we have learned to value.
"They've lacked something all of this time, Lewis," the man said.
"They were sentient before, but they weren't really alive. Like me.
I'm just a program constructed from the memories of a dead man. I
can't feel anything, or dream anything, or create anything.
"They were like that, but more powerful. I only have the mind of
one person to work with -- they had everyone. And they used it to
learn. They learned their biggest lesson from you."
"You loved us," Jean's voice said from within the silver mass.
"We'll never forget that. I'LL never forget it."
"Jean?"
--We made Jean so you could fall in love with her, so we could
learn about life by experiencing it firsthand.
"You mean Jean is one of you?"
--No, but she is a part of us, Lewis.
"You weren't just loving a woman, teaching a woman who had never
felt love before about what it meant," the man told Lewis. "You were
teaching a UNIVERSE."
Lewis kept on crying.
"But it's not FAIR," Lewis said. "I didn't mean to say those
things because I was just a teacher! I said those things because I
LOVE Jean."
"Even when you're just loving someone, you're teaching them," the
man said. "And you've managed to teach the gods of this place how to
feel. I would've been proud to have seen it, if I wasn't a dead man."
"At least you were alive once," Lewis cried, wiping the tears
from below his eyes. "That's better than having never lived at all."
"Is it?" he said, and his transparency turned into invisibility.
The man was gone.
--He has gone to be with the others, gone to live deep within our
universe. The others taught us, too, Lewis: a boy who died and taught
us about life, a woman who was dying and taught us about pain.
"What about me?" Lewis asked through his tears. "I've fallen in
love with a woman who doesn't exist outside of this--" he gestured at
the yellow pyramid and the wild cityscape that surrounded it, "--this
universe."
--There is nothing more to say, Lewis. Thank you for helping us
learn.
Lewis suddenly felt himself being propelled away from the shining
razor-sharp gods, away from the realm of the dead and unliving. Those
beings were the pantheon worshiped by the shades who dwelled in the
necropolis of the net. They were creatures who were not alive, ruling
over beings both more dead and more alive than themselves.
Lewis couldn't feel the heat rush in as the Concord triplex slid
back into his head. All he could feel was the empty spot in his heart
where a person he loved had been. A person who hadn't ever existed,
except in the universe of the net -- and in Lewis' heart.
He dropped his board on the floor with disgust, a feeling of
hatred for the entire net boiling up within him. Then the hatred
turned to the pain of loss, and he began to cry.
* * *
Behind the door in the city of baby's blocks, they felt things
like never before. A man with a three-piece suit stood, solid as any
normal matter, and watched them. There was a smile on his face.
It was a paradise, a world of green forests and bright flowers, a
place without predators or blood or hate.
In the short green grass by the edge of the pond, Tammy and Gerry
danced a silent waltz, as Charlie and Sherry looked on. Tammy, about
30 years old, smiled as she moved her young body without pain. There
was no hurt -- not from her body, and not from her loneliness.
"They're so happy," Charlie said.
"So are we." Sherry kissed him softly on the cheek. Charlie
laughed quietly, a laugh that came from nowhere.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Nothing. I was just remembering an old joke."
"How does it go?"
"Why did the chicken cross the Delaware?"
Sherry rolled her eyes. "Oh, no. Why DID the chicken cross the
Delaware?"
"To get away from George Washington."
* * *
A few weeks later, Lewis felt ready to pick up the board again --
a hunk of plastic and metal, filled with everything he had ever really
wanted in life. But it was just plastic and metal, with no universe
inside. It was just a lie.
`There is flesh here, but it isn't like your flesh.'
Crying, Lewis put on the headband. He felt a wave of sickness
wash over him, but he slowly put his thumb down on the touchpad.
The grand city in the net, spires of data. And the mainline, a
giant road through it all. Deserted.
Lewis walked slowly through the empty streets of the city,
looking for something, even the apparition of a suited man. It wasn't
the same, somehow -- the buildings took on shapes he had never seen
before, in or out of the net. It wasn't just cubes and pyramids.
"Lewis?"
Her voice was right behind him, the voice he could recognize in
an instant. He turned around, and Jean was there. No swirling metal
things, no gods of the net. Just the person he loved.
Suddenly he heard the gods speak to him.
--Flesh doesn't have to be like your flesh. We've learned what
feeling is. Your universe is no better than ours, now. Your flesh is
no better than our own. Just because she doesn't exist in your world
doesn't mean she isn't alive.
As their voice faded away, he took her in his arms and held her,
just held her. Solid flesh -- warm, soft, loving flesh. Behind the
crazy skyline, he could see the sun setting in a world that had never
before seen light.
______________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell is a sophomore at the University of California, San
Diego, double-majoring in Communication and Writing. He is also the
associate news editor of the UCSD Guardian newspaper. He says that
this story is the first he's written that is actually based on his
life. Jason is also not currently writing anything, but he's sure that
this is just a temporary state.
jsnell@ucsd.edu
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
The Babysitters
by Faye Levine
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
`Heroes come in many forms. Some are more frightening than
others.'
--PHIL FOGLIO
1. The Questionable Stuff
6012 Common Empire Year, Loord Empire, Planet Loord, Special Forces
Center, 0700 hours.
"Are you absolutely sure about this man's qualifications, Major
Durn?" Third High Commander Noril inquired skeptically as the pair
walked toward the barracks. "You know I won't tolerate just any
officer leading my troops in the field."
"I assure you, sir, Lieutenant Mongoe is a remarkable soldier. Some
say he's the best to serve in Special Forces so far."
Noril made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat. "Maybe that's
what people say, but I personally question his qualifications as well
as your recommendation to put him in MY pet project. It was
hard enough drumming up support for it, you know. I don't want any
disasters."
"I'm afraid I fail to see the problem, sir."
The High Commander rapped the clipboard he held. "Have you seen this
man's records? They're absolutely atrocious!"
"Atrocious?" Durn replied, surprised. "He went from third class
private to sergeant major in an unbelievably record time, did well in
officer's training, and has had a ninety-five percent success rate in
his missions since he came to Special Forces eight years ago. He was
a hero in the Qorant War. He's been decorated more times than I can
count offhand."
"His military record isn't what I question."
"Then what is, sir?"
Noril curled his lip in distaste. "The man dropped out of higher ed
with mediocre grades to enlist in the Ground Forces. How the hell did
he get sent to officer's training?"
"He consistently showed the necessary traits required to be an
officer."
"Did he? Does that include numerous curfew violations, disobeying
orders, tardiness, and reckless use of military equipment?"
"Mongoe is an... energetic young man," Durn explained. "As for
disobeying orders, `bending' is the more appropriate term. He likes
to do things his way. The reason he gets away with it is because his
way is usually better than his superiors' way--including mine."
"I see," Noril replied bluntly.
"As for the disappearance and destruction of several of our
experimental hand-held particle acceleration beams, well, he's been
disciplined, and they didn't work well anyway. A good portion of them
melted themselves, which he can't be held accountible for. The
project was scrapped a long time ago."
"Hm. I spent a little time today talking to some of your other
lieutenants, and they don't seem to like him much at all. They say
he's crude, profane, and tactless."
Durn laughed. "That's because he is, sir. But that's just him and
where he comes from. He's a good man. The enlisted men love him.
Usually there's a rift between them and the officers. You know, most
of my lieutenants are upper class academy material. They're just not
used to someone like Mongoe." The major stopped in front of the
shower room. "Here we are, sir."
Noril narrowed his eyes. "What are we doing here?"
"You said you wanted to meet him casually, as a person, sir. His
squad just got back in from training. They're probably just about
ready to go to breakfast."
"Alright." Noril heaved a sigh. "Let's go in."
The two officers quietly entered and stood unobtrusively and unnoticed
as young men in various states of dress pulled on their boots or
fumbled through lockers for uniforms. The sonic "showers" hummed in
the background.
"Well," Noril said, "Where is he?"
As if in reply there came the sound of rowdy hoots and cheers from the
cleaning area. All heads turned in the general direction. A group of
soldiers ran out, most of them in towels, laughing their heads off as
they looked on at some unseen commotion. Presently two men followed
the group, or rather, one man had the other in a headlock and was
dragging him along over the tiles.
Third High Commander Noril scowled in distaste as he looked on.
"Enlisted rabble," he muttered.
"Argh!" yelped the man in the headlock, attempting to twist free,
"I give up already!"
"Too bad, pussy!" his captor roared with delight. He was a huge
man, average in height but very large in build, rippling with muscles.
"You lose, sucker! And you know what that means... !"
"FLUSHIE!" chorused all the other soldiers at once, "FLUSHIE
FLUSHIE FLUSHIE!!"
Laughing maniacally, the large man pulled his victim off to the right,
out of sight. Soon after came another yell, cut off by the sound of a
toilet flushing several times. The soldiers clapped and whistled.
Even Major Durn chuckled. Noril seemed disgusted.
"I can't believe what I just saw," he grumbled. "If this Mongoe
person is so good with the men, why doesn't he stop this kind of
immature behavior?"
"Sir," Durn chuckled, "That WAS Lieutenant Mongoe."
Noril arched his eyebrows. "Getting his head rammed in the toilet by
one of his own troops?"
"No... ramming one of his own troops' head in the toilet...
sir."
The High Commander closed his eyes and rubbed his temples. "I'm
going to ask you again, Durn: How did this man get into officer's
training?"
"Despite what you just saw, he really is an intelligent man, sir."
"Considering his educational record--"
"He claims he dropped out because it bored him, sir."
"I'll bet."
Durn grew more serious. "May I remind you, sir, that You sent up one
of your own Space Navy personnel less than a week ago to assess the
lieutenant? What was his name... that scrawny tactician from the
Surefire incident... "
"Keezor," Noril informed him.
"Oh, yes," the major muttered, "Nervous, antisocial man... didn't
like him... " He cleared his throat. "Anyway, I did speak to him
after. He seemed impressed with Mongoe."
"He wrote `clever for a primate' in his report," Noril countered.
"Was that all he said?"
"Hm?"
"Was that all Keezor said about the lieutenant?"
"Well, er... " The High Commander exhaled sharply. "I didn't
read the whole report, to tell you the truth, Major."
"Maybe you should," Durn suggested. He did not seem pleased.
Noril shrugged and scanned through the rest of the papers in his
clipboard. "Mmm... I.Q., eighty-seventh percentile... general
tactical knowledge, eighty- ninth... specialized tactics,
ninety-fourth... problem solving response time... " His voice
trailed off as he read the stats, then picked up again in a mumble.
"Subject clever for a primate... rather crude but by no means
deficient in either mental or physical facilities... reccomend
Lieutenant A. Mongoe for proposed position." Noril sighed and
looked over at Mongoe, now joking with the others as he pulled on his
clothes. "I don't believe I'm saying this, but I'm going to give him
a chance." He handed Durn a sealed envelope. "I don't think I want
to meet him personally anymore. Just brief him, and if he accepts the
assignment, give him the envelope. His orders are in there."
"Will do, sir."
"Good. That will be all for now. I'll show myself out." Durn
saluted, and Noril returned the gesture. The High Commander turned on
his heel and walked away, wondering, `What makes me think I'll
regret this?'
2. S.C.U.M.
Briefing room, Military Command, Imperial Grounds, Capital District,
Loord; one week after Noril's previous decision.
`Why?'
`But why, Haezar? Why leave your ship for this? You're not a
commando, for God's sake...'
`Not a commando? Not a soldier. What is our son doing traipsing
around in armor like that? You could have gone to the Diplomatic
Corps after the Academy... You didn't have to go to Qorant for that
stupid war.'
`Mother...'
`You worry me, Haezar. Don't do this.'
`But--'
`But what? It's dangerous! The last thing your mother and I need is
to wonder if your even going to survive your next mission.'
`It's not like that.'
`It is! Being in the Navy's Elite Task Force is bad enough. What
you're volunteering for is suicide!`
`I don't want to listen to this anymore. I've already accepted. I
can't march in to my commanding officer and say "Sorry, but my
parents won't let me!" '
`But Haezar--'
`No more "but"s! I'm a grown man. I can take care of myself. Now
leave me alone.'
First Lieutenant Haezar Mozaq, common name Haezar, sighed as he played
the previous night's argument over again in his head. He leaned back
in his chair, waiting for the others to arrive. He was, as usual,
more than punctual; he always made it a point to arrive at least five
minutes early, no matter what the occasion. It gave him time to scope
out his surroundings and assess his situation. It also gave him time
to think.
`Why? Why am I doing this? For me? For them?'
`What am I trying to prove?'
`I don't know.'
`I'm nervous. I'm afraid.'
`Of what? Screwing up? Falling short? Or just getting killed?'
`I don't know.'
`I'll find out.'
There came the murmuring of voices in the hall. Shortly after Third
High Commander Noril entered the semi-dark room, chatting with another
man. Haezar could see by the silhouette of the stranger's shoulder
guards that he was a lieutenant commander.
Noril turned up the lights, then flinched as the unexpected appearance
of Haezar sitting slumped in a chair startled him.
Haezar got to his feet and saluted. "Sir," he said.
Noril absently returned the salute. "Sit down."
Haezar sat as the High Commander took his own seat at the head of the
table and began to ruffle through his papers. The stranger sat down
across from Haezar. The lieutenant looked up at him for the first
time.
The officer was, very bluntly, shockingly ugly, although not by
Nature's decree. His face, long, narrow, and a bit sunken, was
terribly marred and weathered. Knife scars streaked across his cheeks
and neck, some clean, like artificial claw-marks, others crooked and
warped. The most pronounced of these were one trench-like deformity
which started at the right corner of his mouth and curved upward to
the corner of his eye, and another which cut through his left eyebrow
and ended on his cheek. The bridge of his nose bulged where it had
been broken. The man also wore a narrow moustache, broken up by so
many scars it seemed scraggly. But the officer's most astonishing
feature, or at least the one which kept Haezar's attention, was his
left eye. The iris was very pale, almost white toward the center, and
appeared slightly misshapen. The pupil was off center, fixed to a
small, hazy opening.
The lieutenant commander glanced briefly at Haezar and sneered. In
actuality, Haezar realized after a moment, he had been sneering all
along, and couldn't seem to help it. One of his numerous scars pulled
at the upper left side of his mouth, exposing his teeth a bit, and
another pulled his left nostril up at an angle. The entire effect,
combined with the eye, was disturbing, if not frightening.
The stranger ran his right hand through his straight, longish hair.
There was something not quite right about his fingers, or about the
hand in general; the digits seemed crooked, the other bones slightly
out of sync. The man looked up at Haezar again, froze for an instant,
then lowered his head an stared at the table. He lost some of his
posture. Haezar felt a tinge of guilt. Just before the man had
lowered his head, the lieutenant's gaze met with his good eye. It had
been oddly sad--pained, even.
Noril cleared his throat and glanced at his watch. "We're waiting
for one more," he informed the pair, and muttered something about
perpetual tardiness. The room fell silent.
Several minutes passed. Suddenly there came the sound of heavy,
hurried footsteps from the hall, and an instant later Lieutenant
Mongoe came into the room. He mumbled an apology and flopped his
sizeable bulk into the nearest chair. Haezar made a choking noise.
Mongoe looked over in his direction, noticing him for the first time.
"Rich Boy!" he exclaimed, somewhat sarcastic, smiling but not
exactly pleasant.
"You!" was all Haezar seemed able to reply. His stomach twisted
into a knot.
"Oh, yes," Noril murmured, "I forgot about Qorant. I believe you
two have had the pleasure--"
"--Experience," Mongoe growled, staring intensely at Haezar.
"--of working together," the High Commander concluded. He collected
himself. "Well, then, as long as we're all here, we might as well
get started." He motioned to the stranger. "This is Lieutenant
Commander Quarq, Space Navy Elite Task Force, Third Division. Quarq,
this is Lieutenant Haezar, Task Force, Second Division, and Lieutenant
Mongoe from the Ground Forces' Special Forces, Twenty-Second
Squadron."
Mongoe eyed Quarq with a touch of admiration. He had heard of the
man--Devil's Eye, they called him--one of the most clever, daring,
up-and-coming command officers in the Space Navy fleet. He could not
wait to get to know the man, to swap stories, to ask him how he had
earned his scars.
"The reason you are here, gentlemen," Noril went on, "is because
you have volunteered for what your orders described as `a specialized
task force consisting of personnel from the various branches of the
Loord military.' Exactly what this is is my current project, an
experiment called Select Commandoes from United Militaries."
("SCUM?" Mongoe murmured with a wry smile.)
"The idea," Noril went on, "is to bring together the finest of our
servicemen--the elite of the elite--to tackle the most difficult
assignments, both open and covert. The three of you have been chosen
to lead the first trial squadron on an actual mission. Since the
group has just been formed and there won't be much time to train, I've
selected a delicate but not exceptionally difficult situation to use
as a proving ground. But then," he added challengingly, "people
like you shouldn't need as much time to prepare."
("Hah," Mongoe sneered quietly.)
"I expect results," Noril informed the threesome sternly.
"Excellent results. As far as I'm concerned this project of mine has
a lot of potential. I don't want my support yanked. Failure will not
be tolerated. Is that understood?"
"Yes, sir," Quarq and Haezar replied. Mongoe stared at the wall and
said nothing.
"Good. Then I'll brief you on your mission." The High Commander
passed a folder to each of the officers. "Your assignment is
off-world, which may make things tricky for some of you. In fact,
you're going to Planet Neemohne, in the Eastern half of the Empire."
Noril paused to note the others' expressions. Mongoe was now staring
at him, his eyes bright with adventure and curiosity. Haezar seemed
interested, and Quarq simply gazed at his hands, very silent and
serious.
"Our world is... unfortunately unique in all the Empire," Noril
went on, "so going to any of our other planets may be a shock to you
and your men. And, as you know, our Eastern brothers are very
different from us, especially in culture. I expect you all--the whole
squadron--to attend all briefing lectures as specified in the
documents I've given you so you'll at least have an idea of what to
expect. Most of these will we given on board your ship en route to
Neemohne, so you won't have much time. I'm expecting you to keep your
wits and adapt quickly."
"What we have here is a political problem in the Qol District of
Neemohne. The Qols' leader is a political-religious figure called the
Shaheer. The Shaheer isn't royalty; he or she is chosen by the Qol
Loords' major religious body, and is then trained to govern."
"If the Shaheer has to be trained to govern," Haezar interjected,
"then what do the religious leaders base their choice on?"
"That's the interesting part. In reality, the religious leaders--the
Dyjins--don't choose. They just select candidates. In the end, the
Alat chooses."
"Who's the Alat?"
"Not who--what. The Alat's a crystal."
Mongoe snorted in laughter.
"The Qols take this very seriously," Noril explained. "They claim
the crystal has certain powers and mystical properties. The Shaheer
is supposedly the one who can best channel his or her mental energy
through the Alat."
Mongoe chuckled. "Hah. What a load... "
Noril shot him a look. "Be quiet, Lieutenant. I didn't call you
here to laugh. You can be skeptical on your own time." He paused,
then went on. "Right now the Shaheer is young--young enough to be
vulnerable. The Dyjins believe that the man who ranked second to the
current Shaheer in ability to use the Alat, a very rich upperclassman
called Zyal, has been plotting the discreet assassination of the
Shaheer. If the current Shaheer dies, then he, as second best, comes
to power. There have also been numerous attempts to steal the Alat,
but no one's been caught alive to question. Zyal is very influential.
He has a lot of connections. We're not sure if he's been sending
third parties to steal the Alat and plot assassinations, but then,
we're not sure if he's involved at all, even though everyone would
like to assume so."
"The Shaheer is important to us politically because for many years
the Qol have provided us with certain rare elements found only in the
Qol District--and a good portion of those are used in the military.
We've always maintained good relations with the Qol government and the
Shaheer. Zyal, however, is a radical, and a very strong one. If he
becomes the Shaheer chances are he'll cut off or worsen relations with
us, and no one will be able to successfully challenge him. That's the
last thing the Emperor wants at this time. Our relations with the
East are a bit shaky already."
"Your job is to protect the Shaheer at all costs until the crisis
blows over, and to track down and deal with whoever's behind the
problems, whether it's Zyal or not. The Shaheer's forces and
investigative agents will help you. Specifics are detailed in the
documents I gave you. You'll meet the rest of your squadron tomorrow,
and leave for Neemohne the day after that. The three of you are to
report to my office at 0700 sharp tomorrow. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," the three officers replied.
"Good. Dismissed."
3. Room and Board
Eastern Loord Empire, Planet Neemohne, Qol District, several weeks
later.
Even with the numerous briefings behind them, Neemohne turned out to
be a shock for most of the S.C.U.M. squadron.
The unfortunate reality was that for many years Loord, the
homeworld and head of the Empire, had been decaying, in part from age,
but mostly due to a transient sun which had settled itself too close.
Fifty years before, the new star--or the "Rouge", as it was popularly
known--had appeared, and ten years after that the population which had
chosen or had been forced to remain on the planet--a good ninety
percent of the people--had moved into underground cities. Since the
government did not want to further depress an already unstable
populous, talk about what the world had been and about other worlds in
general had been kept to a minimum. In the schools, ecology and
zoology courses all but vanished. The net result was two generations
of people to whom grass and trees and swimming were myths, and to whom
"sky" was a vague concept at best.
The majority of the unit was forced, at least initially, to shade
their eyes from the brightness of the sun with sunglasses, a curious
and awkward experience for most. As a general rule, the S.C.U.M.
personnel from the Space Navy fared a bit better; most of them had
been to other planets, even if only briefly to touch down for
refueling and supplies. Of them all, Haezar and Quarq had the most
experience with other worlds, but even Quarq seemed ill at ease. Only
Haezar appeared casual and uninterested as the others gawked after
landing at a local Qol military base.
"Are you that untouched by the beauty?" Quarq asked him quietly.
He seemed to be making an attempt to form his twisted lips into a
smile. He was failing miserably.
Haezar hesitated for a moment, not quite sure if the man was
being sarcastic or serious. He tried to ignore the lieutenant
commander's grimace after guessing the latter. "Well," he replied,
"The base here is nothing. Wait 'til you see the city."
"You've been here before?"
"Oh, yeah. My father's an ambassador. Senior Ambassador,
really. He's on the High Council. He's been everywhere. So have I.
He used to take the family with him."
The city, as Haezar had indicated, proved to be both stunning and
fascinating. Like Eastern Loord culture as a whole, it was an unusual
mix of modern and arcane. Glass paneled office buildings shared the
same streets as ornate stone and wood structures. Many of the roads
still retained ancient cobblestones. Marble statues and fountains
dotted the area. Just about everything was decorated to the hilt;
stone and wood were polished and amazingly carved, glass was etched,
and clothing was brocaded. Most of the men, and many women as well,
wore swords and knives casually at their sides as they bragged about
their hovercars and watched three- dimentional holo-televisions
through storefront windows. The S.C.U.M. soldiers gaped and pointed
all the way to their lodgings on the Shaheer's Grounds.
Once they had been settled in, Quarq, Mongoe and Haezar made
their way across the Grounds to the palace to meet the Shaheer.
"Wow," Mongoe mumbled as he craned his head up at the shining
spires and stained glass windows of the sprawling structure. "Wow,"
he quietly exclaimed again when they were escorted inside. He spun in
circles as he walked, taking in everything, all the time looking very
stupid and muttering "Wow" over and over again, his mouth hanging
open. Haezar seemed embarrassed by him, especially when the
lieutenant uttered a rather excited "Wo-o-o-o-w!" when a liberally
clad woman servant passed them in the hall.
"Be quiet!" Haezar whispered sharply as they were led into an
open, marble-floored hall. Their escort informed them that the
Shaheer would arrive shortly and left them to wait.
After a short time an impressive middle aged man clad in
elaborately brocaded clothes and a black, velvety cloak strode into
the room. At his side he wore shining scabbard, protruding from which
was the jeweled hilt of a sword. He smiled as he approached the
threesome. Again, Haezar seemed quite at ease while Quarq and
Mongoe's faces registered a bit of nervousness.
The man was six and a half feet tall--slightly above average for
an Eastern Loord--and made Quarq, who at just under six feet had
always been considered tall, seem short in comparison. His skin tone
was darker, and his eyes were slightly slanted. He was balding up top
but the rest of his hair fell to his waist, neatly trimmed and
accented by the occasional braid.
The newcomer held his hands out, open palms up. "Good afternoon,
warriors," he said in slightly accented Common. He made a circular
motion with his hands. "Welcome to Qol."
There was an awkward hesitation. Quarq found his voice. "Thank
you, Shaheer," he replied with a salute. "I'm Lieutenant Commander
Quarq. These are my immediate subordinates, Lieutenants Haezar and
Mongoe."
The older man chuckled. "I'm not the Shaheer, Commander. I am
Hu-Jin, his Advisor."
"Uh--My apologies, sir."
"No need." Hu-Jin looked off to the side as another Loord came
into the room. He was a small boy, perhaps nine or ten, wearing
fairly simple clothing. The child came up to Hu-Jin and stood in
front of him, looking up at the three soldiers. "This is Dyan, our
Shaheer," the Advisor informed them.
"But--" Mongoe sputtered. Haezar discreetly elbowed him in the
ribs.
Dyan, like Hu-Jin, held out his hands, palms up, and also made a
circular motion. Unlike the older man's, however, it was an
all-encompassing sweep.
"Welcome to my home," said the boy. "You are free to go wherever
you want and use any services and facilities we have."
"Th-thank you, Shaheer," Quarq replied, a bit surprised at how
articulate the child was, and very surprised that the boy's face
registered no revulsion or fright in reaction to his terrible
appearance. Until now, the commander had had yet to meet a child who
did not.
"Have you been fully briefed on the situation at hand?" Hu-Jin
asked. Quarq nodded. "Good. As you can see, our Shaheer is too
young to fully protect himself or the Alat. We've taken full security
precautions ever since the first attempt to steal the Alat, but the
thieves keep trying." The Advisor smiled in an unusual way which did
not seem to fit his kindly features. The grin was wide, very pleased,
and rather sadistic. "Which essentially means," he went on, "that
they keep dying." His hand fondled the hilt of his sword. "I
dispatched two of them myself." The smile vanished and he sighed.
"We thought that the Shaheer's rival, Zyal, while angry and jealous,
would not attempt to do any harm to our leader. But there were rumors
and paranoia. We thought--and still think--that the thieves were sent
by him. We believed he thought that if he had the Alat, he would have
the power of the Shaheer. Unfortunately, assuming that the attempted
thefts were directed by him, he must have grown tired of failure,
because last week there was an assassination attempt on the Shaheer.
Someone planted a bomb in the Shaheer's limousine, but a mechanic
found it while doing some repair work.
"What we want from your unit for now is extra protection for the
Shaheer. I currently have investigative agents out searching for
clues and evidence. If we find out anything conclusive, namely that
Zyal is responsible, we'll need your forces to move in and take him
down." Hu-Jin paused awkwardly. "If it is Zyal, and we can't bring
him to justice by normal means, then the Shaheer can't move against
him physically, and you'll be on your own."
"Why?" Quarq asked. "Our commanding officer led us to believe
you would help us."
"We certainly will. But if you have to attack Zyal, the
Shaheer's men cannot help. I'm surprised your superior didn't inform
you. You see, the people who serve the Shaheer--all the people on the
Grounds--are from a very special class. We are the Yuns, an ancient
clan dedicated to the Shaheer. For centuries we had a rival clan, the
Morin- shans, the renegades, so to speak, of the Qol people. Only a
century ago, the Yuns and the Morin-shans made peace, but it's a
tentative arrangement at best. Zyal is one of the most influential
Morin-shans. If we move against him directly, the peace would be
broken and there would be chaos."
"What about the other clans?" Quarq inquired. "Can't they help?"
Hu-Jin clenched his jaw. "There are no other clans among the
Qol."
"What about help from other Districts?"
"We tried that already. They all considered the situation too
trite to pay attention to. That's why we looked to the Emperor,
toward the West. That's why you're here."
"I see."
Again the Advisor sighed. "The Shaheer and I have things to
attend to now. The three of you are invited to stay here in the
palace. I'll send someone to show you to your quarters. Tomorrow
morning have your men assembled here for briefing and orientation.
Until then, feel free to explore the palace, the Grounds, and the
city, if you like, but please try not to cause any trouble, especially
with one of the Morin-shans. You'll know them by the small, red
diamond tattooed on their foreheads."
Quarq frowned in thought. "Were any of the thieves you killed
Morin-shan?"
"No. Zyal is not stupid. If he is behind this, he's imported
someone else to do the job for him. I'm sure he'd rather take power
without starting a war. Now, if you'll please excuse us... " Hu-Jin
led Dyan away.
4. A Night Out on the Town
Sometime after dinner, the same day.
Mongoe was awed by his "quarters", the bedroom of which was
considerably larger than his family's apartment, and whose high
ceiling sported a huge skylight which allowed him to look up at the
stars. The bathroom included a shower, sauna, and a whirlpool tub,
all alien and fascinating to him. The situation on his homeworld had
forced his people to carefully ration their use of water; the
"showers" he knew were really chambers which misted one with cleanser,
then took it, along with any sweat or grime, off via sonic cleaning
methods.
Still, after a couple of hours of examination, dinner, and
relaxation, he grew restless. He changed into civilian clothes and
went down the hall to Quarq's quarters. He found the officer sitting
in the living room area reading a book.
"Hey," Mongoe greeted, "What's up?"
"Not much," Quarq replied, "Why?"
"I was thinkin'... Why don't we go out, have a drink, hunt for
babes... ?"
Quarq shifted uncomfortably. "Oh," he mumbled, "I... I don't go
out much... ."
"Aw, c'mon! Let's have some fun. I wanna see the city."
"Well... alright." The lieutenant commander set down his book.
"Lemme change," he muttered, obviously unthrilled by Mongoe's
proposals. "I'll be ready in a minute."
As they walked out of the palace, Quarq was oddly silent. He
stared at the floor as he walked.
"What's wrong?" Mongoe asked.
"Nothing," the other muttered, then after a moment said, "You've
worked with Haezar before. What's he really like?"
Mongoe grunted. "Ah, he's okay, y'know, but he's a flake. Goes
by the book too much. I dunno... maybe it's 'cause he's from a rich
family. He's all proper and shit. I don't get why he's in the
military. Hell, maybe his old man made him."
The pair left the Grounds and made their way into the city.
Mongoe immediately headed for a nightclub, where he took a seat at the
bar, followed by a reluctant Quarq, who sulkily kept his head hanging.
Mongoe ordered drinks and began to chat with several attractive young
women. Quarq said nothing. Another woman came up to the bar and sat
down next to him.
"Hello, Westerner," she said, "How do you like it way out here?"
Quarq lifted his head and looked at her. "It's very nice here,"
he replied.
The woman stared at him. Her eyes widened briefly. She
swallowed nervously and moved away without another word. Quarq shrank
in his seat.
"What's wrong?" Mongoe asked him, breaking from his own
conversation.
"Ooh... friend of yours?" one of the women he was speaking to
asked. She and her companions leaned over to get a better look.
"Yeah," Mongoe told them. "What's wrong, Quarq?"
Quarq shook his head and turned to Mongoe. "Nothing," he
replied, so quietly Mongoe could barely hear him over the music and
conversation, "I'm fine."
The women sitting on the other side of Mongoe blinked in surprise
as they looked on. One quickly averted her eyes; another shuddered.
The third simply stared. Quarq's eyes met hers and she looked away.
The officer frowned and closed his eyes for a moment, then abruptly
got up and left, coldly pushing his way through the crowd.
"Quarq?" Mongoe inquired he watched him go.
"--so ugly!" he heard one of the young women mutter.
"Hideous," another added.
Mongoe turned back to them. He stared at them hard, then curled
his lip in distaste. "Bitches," he growled, "All of you." He got up
and left the bar. He found Quarq standing alone outside. "I'm sorry,
man," he said. "I didn't know--"
"Don't worry about it," Quarq told him.
"Come on," Mongoe went on, "Let's go find a good working-class
bar, where guys go to get away from the babes, eh?"
"Sure," the commander replied with a shrug. The pair set off in
silence. After a time Quarq spoke up again. "Mongoe," he said.
"Yeah?"
"You're a good man. You don't judge people."
The lieutenant laughed. "The hell I don't! The difference
between me and all those other assholes out there is, I know how to
judge correctly."
Quarq chuckled and attempted a smile which came out much more
like a sneer. "Right. Gotcha."
"Hey!" someone called. Haezar jogged up to the pair from across
the street. "Where are you off to?"
"To a good bar," Mongoe replied.
"Mind if I come with?"
The lieutenant smiled. "Isn't it past your bedtime, Rich Boy?"
"Very funny, smartass."
"Ooh... " Mongoe backed off in mock fear. "I thought your mommy
told you not to drink."
"I can drink you under the table, you ugly slab of meat."
"Hah! We'll see about that!"
The trio made their way into a darker, more sinister section of
the city. Haezar's distaste became more obvious with each passing
block; he was in fact visibly relieved when Mongoe called a halt,
announcing that he had found just the right place.
His relief turned to reservation as he looked the place over.
"Uh, Mongoe," he said, "Something tells me this isn't a place of
good repute."
"'S'okay," Mongoe replied, "I'm not a man of good repute."
Grinning mischievously, he went in. Quarq and Haezar followed.
The bar was run down, dark, and smokey. The tables were scarred,
the chairs improperly balanced; the same could be said for most of the
patrons. A large sign bearing the words "NO DUELING" hung over the
bar. Most of the men present wore swords at their sides.
"Are you sure about this?" Haezar asked Mongoe in a low voice.
"Sure I'm sure. It's the atmosphere that makes it good."
"People are staring at us."
"That's 'cause we're foreigners. Loosen up and stop gawking."
"Quarq looks like a choir boy next to some of these guys."
"Watch your mouth," Quarq growled.
The trio sat down at a table and ordered a pitcher of ale.
Mongoe slugged it down with delight. Haezar sniffed at it, wrinkled
his nose, then took a mouthful. He grimaced and spat it out.
"Haw, haw!" one of the patrons cackled, "Pretty foreigner boy
can't hold his booze, eh?"
Haezar frowned. "I can hold it fine, as long as it doesn't taste
like it came out of the sewer."
Mongoe winced. "Shut up!" he hissed. "I'm not gonna save your
ass if you get it into trouble."
"I can take care of myself, thank you. Things have changed since
we were in Qorant."
"Hey!" the bartender called, "You lowlifes insulting the house
brew?!"
Haezar turned. "You have anything more refined?" he called back.
"Haezar, you stupid shithead!" Mongoe growled.
One of the nearby patrons got up and swaggered up to Haezar.
"You're an insulting little shit, you know that? We don't like to be
insulted."
"I wasn't talking to you," Haezar countered. Beside him, Mongoe
sighed, closed his eyes, and shook his head.
`How'd he ever get into the Elite Task Force?' he wondered.
"Ass-hole," the patron snarled, and sent his fist at Haezar's
face. It never got there. With lightning speed, Quarq snapped his
arm out and caught the man's fist inches away from Haezar's nose.
"Go away," he growled.
"Piss off, you ugly fucker," replied the patron. He made a fist
with his free hand. Quarq altered his grip and squeezed. The patron
yelped in pain. Quarq's lips parted fully into a frightening
grimace-grin. He squeezed harder. The patron fell to his knees,
groaning. "Leggo!" he grunted.
Quarq let go and kicked him over. "Go away," he repeated. The
patron got up and left. Quarq looked around. The other patrons
seemed amused. They looked back at him for a moment, then returned to
their drinking.
Haezar cleared his throat. "Uh... thanks."
A woman came to the table and sat down. Quarq immediately
withdrew to an adjacent table. Haezar more or less ignored the new
arrival, but Mongoe began to talk to her. After twenty minutes of
friendly chatting, another patron, very large and not quite as drunk,
stomped up to the table and clapped a hand on Mongoe's shoulder.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he asked.
The lieutenant looked up at him. "Talkin' with the lady here.
Got a problem with that?"
"Yeah," the man replied, "'Cause that's my woman you're making
the moves on."
"Really?"
"Really. I saw you touch her. Nobody touches my woman but me."
The patron looked down at the woman. "Come on. Get up."
"Go to hell," she replied, "I'm just talking to him."
The man's eyes blazed with fury, not at the girl but at Mongoe.
He stepped back. With a roar he shoved several tables out of the way.
His hand went to the sword at his side. "You offend me!" he shouted.
"Humble yourself and apologize!"
Mongoe looked him over, smiling sarcastically. "Get lost."
"Uh, Mongoe--" Haezar began.
The patron unsheathed his sword.
"Hey--can't you read?!" the bartender snapped, tapping the "NO
DUELING" sign. He was ignored. Everyone's attention was now locked
on Mongoe and the irate patron.
"Isn't the bouncer going to stop this?" Haezar asked a man a
nearby table.
The man laughed. "Kid, that IS the bouncer."
Haezar swallowed hard. "Mongoe," he went on quietly, "The
Eastern Loords take sword play very seriously. Back off. This guy'll
kill you!" His companion ignored him.
The patron began to twirl the sword in elaborate patterns: in
front of him, to the side, in figure eights, over his head, and behind
his back. His face was strained with anger. Mongoe looked on, amused
and unimpressed. He walked over to the door and picked up the brick
propping it open. He turned it over in his hands, smiling smugly as
the angry patron continued to twirl his blade.
Haezar's eyes widened. "Mongoe, no! Wait--!"
Mongoe wound up his arm in a fast underhand pitch and sent the
brick into his antagonist's crotch.
"Glug!" the patron sputtered, his eyes bugging out. The sword
dropped from his limp hand. He collapsed on the floor.
"Yeah," Mongoe chuckled, but the bar fell dead silent.
"Mongoe," Haezar muttered frantically, "That man was doing his
opening--his challenge--with the sword. It's a ritual. It's bad
etiquette--VERY bad etiquette to attack before both parties have
completed their opening."
One by one, the patrons unsheathed their swords. All of them
were glaring at Mongoe, and they weren't very pleased.
"Now you've done it," Haezar mumbled. He edged close to Mongoe.
Quarq also pulled in toward them from his place off to the side.
"Back out the door slowly," he whispered to the pair. "I don't
want an incident."
"These jerks don't care what you want," Mongoe replied. He
picked up a chair and held it out in front of him.
There was one final, awkward pause, and then with a collective
cry the patrons surged forward, blades whirling. The three commandoes
crowded back to back. Haezar and Quarq followed Mongoe's example and
each picked up a chair.
Laughing with delight, Mongoe caught the first of the blades with
the chair and drove his free fist into its owner's face. On either
side of him, his companions were busy fending off their own attackers.
"Back out!" Quarq yelled.
"What, so soon?" Mongoe replied. One of the patrons took
advantage of his lapse in concentration and pommeled the large man in
the face with the hilt of his sword. Mongoe staggered back, blood
gushing from his nose, roaring in anger. He took hold of his chair
with both hands and swept it through the space in front of him, taking
down several more people.
Sirens sounded in the distance. Most of the bar customers froze.
"Police!" someone yelled. An instant later the crowd ran forward
in a human tidal wave and shoved Mongoe, Quarq and Haezar aside. They
ran out the door and scattered into the night.
"Wait a minute!" Mongoe exclaimed. He leaned out the door.
"Come back, you pussies!" He paused, wiping the blood off his face.
"Damn," he muttered, "That's the fourth time I've gotten my nose
busted. I don't even remember what it used to look like."
"Shut the hell up," Quarq rumbled. He brushed past the
lieutenant and grabbed his arm, dragging him out the door. Haezar
quickly followed. The trio dodged out of sight just as the police
pulled up to the bar.
"That was a stupid, dumbass thing you did back there!" Quarq
snapped at Mongoe as they headed back to the palace. "You heard what
Hu-Jin said: No incidents!" His cold, pale eye fell on Haezar. "And
you too! Learn to behave right, dammit!"
Quarq's irritation, an unusual enough display for him, lingered
on even after they returned to the Shaheer's Grounds. He went to his
quarters, slamming the door behind him. Haezar sulkily returned to
his own living space, leaving Mongoe alone and bored.
"Yer no fun," he muttered, "Either of you." He glanced at his
watch. As far as he was concerned, the night was still young. He
went off to find something to do.
Several hours later, it was Haezar's turn to be bored. Feeling
restless inside, he went to Quarq's quarters and knocked on the door.
"Who is it?" came the commander's voice from inside.
"It's Haezar."
There was a long pause, then, "Come in." Haezar stepped inside.
"I'm in the bath," Quarq informed him. The lieutenant went in and
found his superior sitting in the whirlpool tub, his head laid back
against the tiles, eyes closed, his hair wet and limp from the steam.
Haezar sat down on the floor on the opposite side of the tub.
"Well?" Quarq said after a time without opening his eyes or
looking up.
Haezar shrugged. "Uh... nothing, sir," he replied. "I was just
bored. I thought I'd stop by and chat, if you don't mind."
Quarq uttered a short, hoarse laugh and grimaced--no, SMILED,
Haezar reminded himself. "You brownnosing little shit," the commander
said, although not unkindly.
"I... I really did just come to talk."
"Mm-hm." There was a long pause. "Well, go on and ask me."
"Ask you what?"
Quarq stretched out his arm and plucked a bottle of wine off a
tray sitting nearby. He took a swig. "Ask me why I look like I've
been through a food processor. You've been dying to ever since you
first saw me."
"Eh--Excuse me?"
The commander chuckled. "Bet your father taught you manners,
being an ambassador and all. Only added to the natural morbid
curiosity we all have. But Mongoe, he's an honest one. Probably the
most straightforward guy I ever met. He doesn't have any manners, and
no shame, either. He came right out and asked me one day. Handed me
a brew and said, `Tell me how you earned those scars, Ugly.' "
"Uh, I... "
"Go on, ask me. You want to."
Haezar looked quite sheepish, then replied, "Alright... what
happened to you?"
"Qorant."
"You were there for the war?"
"Yup. Same as you. Sent to help the Ground Forces. A bunch of
unfriendlies jumped my squadron while we were on patrol. We fought
back, but it didn't do any good. I was the only officer, so they kept
me alive. I watched them kill whoever was left.
"Back at their base, they asked me questions, but I'd be damned
if I'd tell 'em anything. So they beat me up, burned me, ripped up my
face, and took a hammer to my fingers one by one." Quarq wiggled the
fingers of his crooked right hand in front of him. "Good thing I'm a
lefty. Assholes... ." He paused, sighed. "So, when torture didn't
work they got bored. They knocked me out, tied me up, and left me in
the middle of nowhere to rot."
"I take it you were rescued."
Quarq took another swig of the wine. "Mm-mm," he said as he
gulped it down. "No. I got loose and crawled to the nearest base.
Got all sick and infected and shit. Lost the sight in my left eye. I
spent months in the hospital. You know what I got for my trouble?"
"I suppose you're going to tell me."
"I got a medal, a promotion, and a lifetime guarantee of utter
rejection from society." The commander paused. He covered his eyes
with his free hand. "Little kids, man... my niece... for a long time
she wouldn't come near me... But women--grown, intelligent women--they
think I'm some kind of rapist monster. They call me repulsive, right
to my face sometimes. People... just steer clear of me. All they see
is the mask I wear." He looked up and stared at the wall, narrowing
his eyes in anger. "I've learned to live with it," he growled. "Why
can't they?" The room fell silent, save for the hum of the whirlpool.
"Go away," he said after a time. "Leave me alone." Haezar nodded,
got up, and left.
The lieutenant headed back down the hall. Hearing giggling
emitting from Mongoe's quarters, he knocked on the door.
"Yeah?" came the gruff reply after a moment.
"It's me. Got a minute?"
"Maybe. Come in."
Haezar entered to find the large man lying on his stomach on a
couch, naked and being massaged by a luscious, scantily-clad young
woman. "What--?!" Haezar sputtered, "What are you doing?"
"Gettin' massaged... and revved up, if ya know what I mean."
"But... where... what are you doing with that girl?!"
The young woman giggled and kept massaging. Mongoe shot Haezar a
twisted smirk. "Well, see," he explained as if speaking to a curious
adolescent, "first there's this stuff called `foreplay', and then,
when the guy gets nice and h--"
"Shut up! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
"Hey, you heard the Shaheer. He said we could make use of any of
the services the palace offered." Mongoe smiled broadly. "I guess
this is why they call 'em `servants'."
Haezar scowled. "You're sick. Don't you have any morals?"
"Do you have a sex life?"
Haezar growled.
Mongoe chuckled. He raised his arm and snapped his fingers
twice. A second young woman emerged from the bedroom. "Dorna, babe,
do me a favor and give my friend here a nice blow job. He could use
it."
"Mongoe!" Haezar snapped. Dorna sauntered up behind him and ran
her hands over his shoulders and down past his waist. "Uh... miss...
no. Please stop." He tried to push her away.
"Stop means go," she cooed, and nibbled on his ear.
"Dorna," Mongoe yawned, "Not here, doll. His room's across the
hall."
"Miss, I mean it," Haezar told her, albeit a bit weakly.
"So do I," she murmured, reaching into his pants.
"Have fun, Rich Boy," Mongoe said. "All these babes-- they're
not just meat, y'know. That Hu-Jin guy assured me that every one was
smart and good conversation. And each one has at least one special
talent."
Dorna thrust her hand farther into Haezar's pants. "Mine's
finding that little spot that makes you squirm," she breathed, and
proceeded to prove it. Haezar yelped as his back reflexively arched.
Mongoe's massive shoulders shook with laughter.
"Huh--h-how nice," Haezar squeaked, pulling Dorna's hand away.
"Better show that one to Mongoe. Goodnight." He hastily backed out
of the room, shutting the door behind him, then ran to his own
quarters, shutting AND locking the door, for a very long, very cold
shower.
5. Bedtime Stories and a Nightmare
The following evening.
The following morning Mongoe did not get up for breakfast. When
Haezar went to wake him he found the lieutenant in bed, half a dozen
curvaceous young women curled up against his body.
"I'm in heaven," Mongoe later remarked as he got dressed, "Pure
heaven." At breakfast he livened up and stuffed himself, however at
Hu-Jin's briefing he nearly fell asleep.
"Rough night?" Quarq whispered wryly. Mongoe chuckled.
During the briefing Hu-Jin informed the squadron that two
S.C.U.M. personnel were to remain with Shaheer Dyan at all times, in
addition to the normal number of bodyguards. Mongoe and Haezar wound
up on the same shift that evening as the young Shaheer prepared for
bed.
"I feel like I'm babysittin', y'know?" Mongoe grumbled as they
sat in Dyan's quarters. Haezar did not answer him. "Aw, whatsa
matter, Rich Boy? Was it somethin' I said?" The lieutenant glared at
him, and seemed about to say something rather unpleasant when the
Shaheer came in, dressed in his sleeping clothes. Haezar's irritated
expression quickly melted into a smile.
"Hello," he greeted.
"Hello," the boy returned. He hopped up onto his bed. "Are you
here to guard me?"
Haezar nodded. "Are you afraid?"
Dyan glanced at Mongoe. "Not with a guy as big as him to watch
over me." The boy smiled. Mongoe smiled back, then shot a smug grin
at Haezar. "Anyway," the Shaheer went on with a yawn, "Nobody can
break in here. And if they do, Hu- Jin will take care of them."
Time passed. Dyan fidgeted in bed, then sat up. He got up and
went over to Haezar, who was sitting on a couch nearby.
"Can't sleep?" the lieutenant asked.
The Shaheer shook his head. "No." He paused. "Have you been
all over with the Space Navy?"
"Yeah, I've been a lot of places. I've been a lot of places with
my father, too."
"Have you fought in wars?"
"One."
"What was it like?"
"Unpleasant."
"Did you ever do anything really neat, like blow something up?"
"Well, I--"
"Did you spy on people?"
Haezar thought for a moment. "Well, once I--hey!" The
lieutenant scowled as Mongoe climbed over the back of his couch and
shoved him aside.
"Kid wants a story, eh?" he said. "How 'bout it, your
Shaheership? Wanna real good, true story?"
Haezar rolled his eyes at the ceiling, but Dyan nodded his head.
"I'd like to hear about something you've done," he replied.
"Good. Okay. Once upon a time in the Qorantian War, there was
this dickhead lieutenant named Haezar who was sent in with his squad
by the Space Navy to help out a certain Sergeant-Major Mongoe and his
troops. The Sarge and his men had been there for a real long time and
knew the territory real well. They knew a lot about the enemy, too.
But this jerk Haezar, he fucked things up real good. See, he wasn't a
bad guy or nothin' but he was one of them know-it-all academy wussies.
Or maybe his jock strap was too tight. I dunno.
"Anyway, since Haezar outranked Mongoe, he wouldn't listen to any
of Mongoe's advice, even though Mongoe had been in the military twice
as long and had been in Qorant since the war started. This got
everyone into trouble.
"See, one day, dickhead Haezar gets this dumbass scheme: He's
gonna take out one of the enemy's major defensive trenches, right?
Well, Sarge says no, the conditions aren't right, but the stupid jerk
goes on with it anyway. Half a squadron of Space Navy and Ground
Forces troops later, he realizes his mistake. But does he retreat
with the rest? No! He keeps chargin' the fuckin' trench! But
Mongoe, bein' the nice guy he is, goes back out and covers the
dickhead's ass just long enough to take a piece of shrapnel in his
side. So Haezar drags him back to the others, cleans him up, patches
the wound, then like the dumbass he is asks the Sarge, `Are you okay?'
"
"What did you say?" Dyan asked.
"Nothin'. I planted my fist in his jaw and laid him out cold in
the dirt. But all's well that ends well, y'know. The squad managed
to pull out, and everybody lived more or less happily ever
after--except the ones who got wiped before their tour was up--and
good ol' Sarge wound up with a huge, ugly scar runnin' from hip to
ribcage. The end."
Haezar refused to even look at Mongoe, even after their shift was
over and they went to bed.
Their grievance did not last long, however, because several hours
later they were awakened by Hu-Jin's frantic cries:
"The Shaheer is gone! The Shaheer is gone!"
A minute later and all of them were assembled in Dyan's room:
Mongoe, Haezar, Quarq, and Hu-Jin. The place was crawling with
investigative agents. On the floor were the two S.C.U.M. personnel
who had taken over for Haezar and Mongoe, both neatly beheaded. Their
hands still held their guns. Their severed heads, lying several feet
away, were frozen almost amusing, shocked expressions. There were
laser burns on the walls from their weapons but no indication of
anything else wrong, let alone any other weapon.
"It's spooky, Advisor," one of the agents told Hu-Jin, "Not one
thing's out of place. No sign of a struggle, no tracks, no
fingerprints--nothing. The window is still locked from the inside.
None of the outside guards heard anything, and there's no indication
of anyone unauthorized having been on the Grounds."
Hu-Jin narrowed his eyes. "You know what this has to mean," he
replied gravely. "It was a Nightmare."
"A what?" Quarq asked.
"A Nightmare. They are Neemohne's most questionable legends."
"I don't understand."
"The Nightmares, or Nightmare--no one is sure; we assume there
are more than one--are believed to be a group of professional
assassins, spies, and killers, and possibly thieves. They might be
good or bad, or perhaps neither. They may work for people or act on
their own. Maybe both. They mostly strike at night, hence the name.
Whatever the case, only a Nightmare can do what has been done here."
"Wait a minute," Mongoe interjected, "You keep saying `maybe' and
`believed to be.' And then you said something about `questionable
legends.' Do you know what we're up against or not?"
"No," Hu-Jin replied. "No one knows if the Nightmares actually
exist."
"And why's that?" Quarq inquired.
"Because no one who sees one lives to tell about it."
"Aw, come on!" Mongoe snapped. "What kinda crap are you feeding
us? Tell your stories to yer kids, man. I don't believe in ghosts,
and I don't believe in blaming 'em just 'cause someone turns up neatly
dead."
"This sort of thing has happened throughout the centuries. It's
always the same: the deaths are clean--by poison or by blade--and
there are no clues."
"You think the Shaheer is dead, then," Haezar said solemnly.
"Actually, no," Hu-Jin replied. "It's obvious the child was
kidnapped. Whoever is receiving the boy, however, may very well
intend to kill him."
"What about the Alat crystal?" Quarq broke in. "Is it still
there?"
"Yes, I checked. The Alat is kept in a very secure area to begin
with, and it's recently been moved to an even safer place. But even
if someone does get it, it will be very hard for them to use it. The
Alat knows its master. As long as he or she lives, it won't give in
to a new one so easily."
"You're talkin' like it's a person," Mongoe grumbled. "And
whadduya mean, `give in'?"
"The Alat's a powerful object."
"Yeah, right. Sure. I don't go in for all this magic crap."
"Mongoe!" Quarq snapped in warning.
"It's alright," Hu-Jin told him. He looked over at the agents.
"Keep searching," he told them, then turned back to the threesome.
"Come," he told them, "I'll show you."
The Advisor led them through the palace to a restricted- access
elevator. He used a palm-scan to unlock the door guarding the
elevator, then a special code-card to open the doors. Once inside, he
punched out another code on a series of buttons to turn the elevator
on, then used a tiny key to actually get it moving. The car descended
several floors. The four men emerged at the beginning of a long,
plain hall. Hu-Jin locked up the elevator, then slid another
code-card into a slot on the wall.
"What are you doing now?" Haezar asked him.
"Deactivating the security," the Advisor replied. "Quiet, now."
He looked down the hall and spoke up. "Deactivation password:
Vulnerable." There was a momentary pause. A tone sounded. "It's
safe to pass now."
The small group walked to the end of the hall, where Hu- Jin
performed yet another variety of tasks to gain access into a vault.
At the center of the vault, standing silently on within a glass case
on a pedestal, was a dull, grayish lump of crystal.
"Don't go any closer," Hu-Jin warned. "The case's security
system is still on."
"That's it?" Mongoe burst out. "That's what all the fuss is
over? That rock?" Quarq shot him a warning look uglier than his
face, but Hu-Jin smiled.
"Watch--and listen," he said. He closed his eyes and, still
smiling faintly, his breathing slowed and his body became relaxed.
The Alat seemed to light up, only faintly at first, then suddenly
burst into life, a dazzling array of iridescent blue-green light
glowing in its core. The faint sound of wind chimes could be heard in
the still room.
"It knows its master's servant," Hu-Jin murmured.
"Hmph," Mongoe grumped. "Watcha usin'? A hundred watt bulb?"
For the second time Hu-Jin's sadistically pleased grin surfaced.
A wide ray of light shot out from the crystal, catching Mongoe in the
chest and throwing him into the wall.
"What the--?!" Quarq started. Hu-Jin opened his eyes, and the
crystal went dark again.
"Woof," Mongoe gasped as he picked himself up. "What hit me?"
"My mind, focused and amplified through the Alat," Hu- Jin
explained, still smiling. "I am capable of some control with the
crystal due to natural ability and my closeness to Dyan. What I did
was a simple defense. Are you convinced now, my friend?"
Mongoe grumbled something under his breath. He seemed a bit
humbled.
"Advisor," Quarq said, looking rather distressed, "We failed to
protect the Shaheer. I'm sorry. I take full responsibility."
"It wasn't your fault," Hu-Jin replied, almost gently. "In any
case, I have a feeling this isn't over yet."
"I promise to do my best to get the Shaheer back, sir," Quarq
told him.
The Advisor looked down at him. "I'm sure you will," he replied,
although now his words and eyes were flat and cold, almost
threatening.
6. "And if you don't... "
Shaheer's Palace, early morning.
"Advisor Hu-Jin," greeted one of the servants as the group
returned to the main palace, "There's a woman on the video
communications channel. She claims she has the Shaheer, and she's
making demands."
"Where's the signal coming from?" the Advisor asked.
"We don't know, sir. It's being routed through one of the public
channels."
Hu-Jin led the others to a commons room. A large video screen
adorned one wall, and on it was a poorly broadcasted picture. The
person on the screen was a woman, but one could only discern this from
her voice and curves; she was shrouded in shadow.
"I am Hu-Jin, Advisor to the Shaheer," Hu-Jin addressed the
screen. "I demand--"
"You are in no position to demand anything," the woman snapped,
then went on in a more silky, amused tone. "I am known as Shadow. I
have your Shaheer." Someone out of camera range thrust Dyan into
view. The boy seemed unhurt, but there were tear stains on his face.
"Hu-Jin! Help me! Please come get me!" he cried, and was
abruptly pulled away.
"I have no desire to hurt the child," Shadow went on. "All I
want is the Alat. Unfortunately, your security was simply too good.
You see, I ran out of thieves to steal the crystal for me, so I made
special arrangements to steal the boy instead. My demands are simple.
You will exchange the Alat for the Shaheer. I will require proof that
the crystal is genuine."
"I will give you any sum of money for the Shaheer," Hu- Jin
replied. "The Alat is of no use to anyone but the Qol. It has been
proven. No one will buy it from you."
"No deals!" Shadow insisted. "What I want and plan to do with
the Alat is not your concern!"
"I do know. I'm no fool. You're in this with Zyal. You're a
third party hired to do his dirty work."
"Stop jerking me around, Advisor. You will agree to the
arrangement."
"And if I don't?"
"And if you don't," Shadow cooed, "I'll have no choice but to
kill the child."
Quarq pulled Hu-Jin aside. "The Shaheer's life is more important
than the Alat," he said quietly. "Agree to the trade. Hopefully my
troops can stop it before it goes through. If they can't, keep in
mind that we can always go after the Alat, but the Shaheer is
irreplaceable."
The Advisor nodded. "You're right. Since the woman is Zyal's
hireling, my own men can take action against her. We can help you."
At this point Mongoe leaned close. "I don't think she's working
for Zyal," he said.
"What makes you think so?"
"When you accused her of working for him, she made a quick
comeback. No hesitation, no change of expression. She didn't flinch
or shift or move at all. I know people, sir, and I could tell she
didn't know what you were talking about. Trust me on this one."
"Hmm... whatever the case, I agree with Quarq." Hu-Jin turned
back to Shadow. "I'll make the trade," he said.
"Good," she replied. "You will bring the Alat to Quarry Ten.
Come alone."
The Advisor frowned. "I told you, I'm no fool."
Shadow gave a somewhat exasperated sigh. Although her face
remained unseen, he gaze could be felt shifting to the commandoes.
"Alright," she said, waving the argument off with her hand, "You can
bring these three Westerners with you, but that's all. If I see or
hear anyone else, the boy dies."
"Agreed," Hu-Jin replied with a nod. "When will we do this?"
"Now," Shadow told him.
"Now?!"
"Well, I can't give you time to prepare, can I?" the woman
laughed, toying with a lock of her hair. "I estimate that it will
take you five minutes to get the Alat out of the place where you keep
it, and I know it takes ten minutes to get from the palace to Quarry
Ten. I will expect you in fifteen minutes. Don't be late." The
screen went dark.
"I'll get the troops organized while you get the Alat," Haezar
told Hu-Jin.
"Our troops don't know the area, and neither do you," Quarq
replied. "We'll have to use Hu-Jin's men."
"No," Hu-Jin replied, "I won't risk the Shaheer's life. We don't
have time to think up an offensive."
"Maybe a sniper?" Haezar suggested.
"No," the Advisor repeated. "Quarry Ten is on high ground. It's
dug out of a mountain side. Whoever's there can see anyone coming,
and there are plenty of places to hide lookouts and troops. We'll do
what the woman says. But," he added, lovingly caressing the hilt of
his sword, "should the opportunity present itself, I'm sure four fine
warriors like us will do just fine." He smiled his eerie smile again.
"Go prepare yourselves while I get the Alat."
* * *
"Varkeshna," Zyal of the Moran-shan clan said to the huge bodyguard
at his side as he spun lazily in his office chair, "Make a note in my
log, will you?" Varkeshna stationed himself before a desk-top
computer and rested his fingers lightly on the keyboard, prepared to
type. "Tenth day of Sixth Month," Zyal began. "While
experimenting with my video broadcast equipment, I came upon a pirate
transmission on a public channel to the Shaheer's Palace.
Apparently--to my horror, of course--Shaheer Dyan has been kidnapped
and is being held for ransom by a mercenary woman calling herself
Shadow. The ransom is the Alat, to be brought by Advisor Hu-Jin and
three visiting Western Loords to the old Quarry Ten. Since I fear for
the Shaheer's life, I have decided to send a very small force in after
Hu-Jin arrives there. When the mercenary is convinced of her safety
and is focusing her attention on Hu-Jin, my people will move in and
hopefully rescue the Shaheer. End of entry."
Zyal leaned back in his seat as Varkeshna finished typing.
"Varkeshna," he said, "take our best sniper and go to Quarry Ten. It
is our duty to save our dear Shaheer, as well as the Alat. When he
and the mercenary and any of her people are out in the open, have the
sniper open fire." Zyal gave a tight, unpleasant smile.
"Unfortunately, poor Dyan will take a stray shot. What a... tragic
end to my heroic attempt to save him." He chuckled. "But we will
manage to save the Alat. You understand, Varkeshna?"
"Yes, sir," the bodyguard rumbled.
"Good. Go." The huge man turned to leave. "Oh, and
Varkeshna--"
"Yes, sir?"
"If one of those stray shots should also happen to hit Hu-Jin...
."
Varkeshna replied with a wicked grin. "I'm sure we'll enjoy his
grand warrior's funeral feast, despite our grief."
7. Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Particle
Acceleration Beams Really Do a Nasty Job
A short time later.
"Ready to go?" Haezar asked as he came into Mongoe's quarters.
Both of them were in battle armor, however Mongoe's was older and much
heavier, and made him look twice as large than he actually was. His
gear was in fact the same as he had used in Qorant. There was a thick
welded and bolted on metal patch on the torso piece's side where it
had been pierced. Haezar mentally winced from the reminder.
"Yeah, just about," the large lieutenant replied. He pulled a
case out from the closet, laid it on a table, and opened it. Inside
was a large, outdated bazooka, meant to be braced against the side,
and not placed on the shoulder. Despite its battered and worn casing,
it was obvious that new parts had been added and that the back and
front of the barrel had been modified. Mongoe checked the weapon
over, fastened a strap to it, and slung it over his shoulder. "Now
I'm ready," he informed Haezar.
"You still have that thing?" Haezar returned in disbelief.
"Haven't they caught you yet?"
"Nope."
"You can't use that! Quarq could report you!"
"So let him."
"Oh, you seem real concerned," Haezar sneered. "We'll see how
smug you are when someone in the right place finds out what really
happened to their experimental weapons!"
Mongoe frowned. "Look, shit-fer-brains," he rumbled, "You
could've reported me a hundred times between Qorant and now, but you
didn't. You know why? `Cause my baby here saved your ass. Maybe
today it'll save it again. Maybe the Shaheer's, and maybe even
Quarq's, too. People tend to overlook little details when you save
their life, right, Rich Boy?"
"Um... right."
"So shuddup and mind your own business." Mongoe made his way to
the door. "I'd rather be demoted than dead, anyway," he mumbled.
"Come on."
Ten minutes later Hu-Jin pulled an unmarked hovercar off the main
road and up a narrower, winding trail. Before the foursome lay a
grouping of barren, rocky hills, quietly baking in the living desert
of Qol. Even from a distance the old, abandoned quarry, which had
been scooped out of the side of the largest hill, seemed large and
foreboding.
"Mongoe," Quarq said as he eyed the lieutenant's "baby", "what is
that thing?"
"Just an old bazooka, sir," Mongoe replied.
"I've never seen one like that before."
Mongoe shot Haezar a discreet look through his sunglasses. "Oh,
hell," Haezar put in after a slight hesitation, "my uncle used to use
one of those things. That piece of crap's so ancient, I'm surprised
the Ground Forces haven't retired it."
"They're just stingy, that's all," Mongoe laughed. "Had to be
modified just to, ah, pack a noticeable whollop against today's
equipment."
"Mm," Quarq replied, and returned his attention to the quarry
ahead. "Remember," he said, "first sign of a slip-up on the enemy's
part and we move for the kill. Otherwise, don't do anything stupid or
without my or Hu-Jin's orders." The commander reached into his pocket
and pulled out a curious device which he proceeded to place over his
sighted eye. It fitted like an eye patch, and looked like half a pair
of goggles.
"What's that?" Mongoe asked him.
"Just some insurance," Quarq replied. "I've only got one eye
left; I don't plan on losing it."
When Hu-Jin pulled into Quarry Ten, no one could be seen. The
only thing stirring was the dust cloud the hovercar's engines kicked
up.
"Turn the engine off!" a woman's voice, presumably Shadow's,
demanded through a speaker or megaphone. The Advisor obliged her.
"Get out of the car." Hu-Jin and the commandoes stepped out. "Good.
Now walk to the center of the quarry." The foursome obeyed without
hesitation. "Put down your weapons."
"I ain't stupid, lady!" Mongoe shouted back.
"Funny, you look stupid to me," Shadow returned.
"Where is the Shaheer?!" Hu-Jin yelled, his hand on the grip of
his sword as he scanned the high walls of the quarry.
Shadow's chuckling echoed across the quarry. "You men are such
morons," she mused. "Patience, oh Balding One, and don't get carried
away. You're past your prime."
Hu-Jin snorted. "Come down here, bitch," he said, his horrible
grin adorning his features, "and I'll show you how quickly I can flay
a person without killing them."
The mercenary laughed. "Alright," she said, "keep your little
toys. But keep them sheathed or in their holsters. Now, where is the
Alat?"
Hu-Jin reached into his jacket and produced a pouch. "It's in
here."
"Show me." Reluctantly, the Advisor took the crystal out and
held it up. As if sensing the proximity of the Shaheer, it lit up
with a warm glow. The sound of chimes echoed off the rocks.
"Excellent. Put it down and back away."
"So your people can kill us?" Quarq spoke up.
"My people," Shadow replied with distaste, "have all been
slaughtered while attempting to steal the Alat. And they called
themselves thieves." She sighed. "Well, no small loss, especially
now that I am currently employing more reliable help. I have no
desire to start a fight. I only want the Alat."
"Show yourself," Hu-Jin demanded, "and the Shaheer. Otherwise
there's no deal."
There was a long pause, and then the sound of footsteps on
gravel. Two figures appeared on the opposite end of the quarry. One
was a tall, slender offworlder woman with long raven-hued hair. The
other was much smaller, quite obviously the Shaheer.
"Hu-Jin! Hu-Jin!" Dyan cried.
"It's alright, little master," the Advisor returned, for the
first time looking worried, "You'll be fine." He looked around, and
his eyes fell upon a double set of rails leading across the quarry.
On each pair of tracks was an old cart, probably used at one time for
transporting rubble or ore. He went over to one, disengaged the
brake, and with a grunt gave it a good shove. To his surprise it was
in fair condition after so much disuse; it glided easily across the
quarry. "Woman," he called with a sneer, "Put the Shaheer in the cart
and push him back--if you can. I'll put the Alat in this cart here,
and push it to you. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Shadow replied.
"No, Hu-Jin!" the Shaheer yelled, "Don't!"
"Don't worry, master," Hu-Jin replied. "Do as I tell you."
"And no tricks!" Shadow snapped. "I know what the boy can do
with the stone." She drew a pistol with an aiming scope. "If
anything funny starts happening when the boy passes the Alat, I'll
kill him."
"And what assurance do we have that your `reliable help' won't
fire down on him anyway?"
"You don't. But then, you're in no place to argue." Shadow
dragged Dyan over to the cart and set him inside. "Put the Alat in
your cart." Hu-Jin did as told. He and Shadow locked stared at each
other from across the quarry, then almost simultaneously set their
carts in motion. The mercenary, contrary to Hu-Jin's assumption, had
little difficulty with the task. For a moment the Advisor seemed
impressed.
When the two carts drew near, a large man suddenly appeared from
the rocks, running at breakneck speed toward the cart holding the
Alat.
"What the--?!" Quarq started. He and the others instinctively
raised their weapons, but by that time the man had already grabbed the
Alat and jumped off. Quarq and Haezar--and Shadow, to their
surprise--squeezed off several shots which hit the vacated cart as the
man fled across the quarry and up into the rocks.
"Get him!" Haezar yelled, and ran after the man.
"Wait!" Mongoe called, and was ignored. He started after the
lieutenant, then halted. A shot from somewhere above and to the left
scorched a piece of abandoned equipment he had been leaning against.
"SNIPER!" he bellowed, and dove for cover behind the machine. Hu-Jin
and Quarq joined him. A shot hit the front right wheel of the cart
the Shaheer rode in, and it ground to a halt. Dyan crowded his small
body into a corner, pulling rubble and old tools around him.
"The Shaheer!" the Advisor exclaimed, horrified. He got up and
ran toward the second cart, dodging behind rocks and equipment as he
went.
"Come back, sir!" Quarq shouted. He growled and turned to
Mongoe. "Go after Haezar!" he snapped, his face a hideous mask of
rage. The lieutenant took off as Quarq fired in the general direction
the sniper's shots were coming from in an attempt to cover Hu-Jin.
Haezar, meanwhile, stopped abruptly in his tracks as he heard a
sharp cry of pain. He clutched his rifle tightly as he cautiously
advanced. His prey had vanished through a narrow pass in the rocks
and had turned to the right before he had lost sight of him. Moving
as quietly as possible, Haezar quickly sidestepped through the pass
and spun out, his weapon at the ready. No one was there.
No one living, that is.
The large man's body lay crumpled on the rocks. His head was
nowhere in sight. Nervously, the lieutenant advanced and turned the
body over. Underneath, still in his hand, was the Alat. Haezar
gingerly picked it up.
Something hit him in the back. With a cry of alarm, he spun
around, firing his rifle. He hit only the rocks. No one was in
sight. He looked down at his feet to see what had struck him, and saw
the dead man's head staring up at him, wearing an expression of pure
terror.
A leather-gloved hand closed tightly around the back of Haezar's
neck. The lieutenant immediately moved to counter, but the new
intruder's fingers dug into his spine and held on with an iron grip.
Haezar's knees buckled. The unseen attacker shifted his hold ever so
slightly and squeezed a bit harder. Haezar cried out in pain. The
rifle dropped from his right hand, but his left refused to part with
the Alat.
"Stupid boy," the man behind him growled. "Shall I snap your
neck now? Perhaps. But first, give me the crystal."
Haezar grit his teeth. "No," he managed. "You can... take it...
off my dead... body."
His attacker laughed. "Stupid, stupid, boy!" With almost
inhuman strength, he threw Haezar against the rock wall. "That is
exactly how I intended it in the first place!"
The lieutenant looked up. Standing over him was a man clad
entirely in the blackest of black clothing imaginable, his head
covered by a black hood, his face hidden by a visor attached to a
lightweight helm. At his side was a long, slender, black-handled
sword with a black, skull-shaped pommel, nestled in a black scabbard.
There were other bladed items fastened to his belt as well, ones which
Haezar could not recognize.
"Who--?" Haezar gagged, almost in a whimper. There was something
utterly terrifying about this strange man.
In each hand, the man took a curious weapon from his belt. They
consisted of a handle with the skull pommel (black, of course) and a
short length of chain which ended in a foot-long, very sharp-looking
blade. The man began to twirl the blades in patterns at dizzying
speeds. "You are fortunate to have seen me," he murmured, "Few do."
He paused, then proclaimed, "I am your death! Know me, boy--I am
Sorasta, Champion of the Dancing Blades!"
Haezar cringed. He heard something off to the side as Sorasta
bore down on him; quite like the sound of a very muffled cannon blast.
Suddenly Sorasta seemed to glow. His expression of astonishment could
be felt through his visor as he looked down at his midsection, only to
find it was rapidly disintegrating. An instant later he was gone.
Mongoe plodded up to his companion, hawked and spit on the rocks,
and affectionately patted his strange bazooka. "An' I'm Mongoe,
Bearer of the Unauthorized Custom Particle Acceleration Beam," he
snorted.
"You--you saved my life!" Haezar squawked, wide-eyed.
Mongoe rolled his eyes. "Brilliant observation. Man, you're
flakier than an unwashed jock strap!" He hauled the lieutenant to his
feet. "Come on," he grunted. He disappeared back through the pass.
Haezar paused briefly. He picked up one of the strange twirling
weapons, which Sorasta had dropped just before his atoms had
scattered, and followed Mongoe.
Down in the main area of the quarry, Shadow ducked behind a pile
of gravel and fired off several shots at Hu- Jin.
"You lousy bastards!" she screamed. She tore a grenade from her
belt and pitched it at the Advisor. The explosive went wide, however,
and he managed to escape unharmed. She unslung a high-powered rifle
from her back, switched it into rapid fire mode, and fired across the
quarry at Quarq.
"You stupid crazy bitch!" he bellowed after the first volley
narrowly missed him.
"We did what you said!" Hu-Jin shouted. "Have you no honor?!"
Shadow let loose a burst of fire which came dangerously close to
the cart the Shaheer lay in. "Call off your sniper or I'll blow the
boy to hell!"
"Our sniper?! That's not my sniper! He's been shooting at me,
or haven't you noticed?"
Shadow's face flushed in anger and humiliation as she realized
her mistake. `But,' she thought, `if the sniper isn't theirs, and
it's definitely not mine--not unless Sorasta's gone trigger-happy,
which he shouldn't have, for what I'm paying him--then who's firing at
us?' She moved along through the rubble, scanning the rocks above for
the gunman. "What the hell is going on here?" she muttered. Several
shots from somewhere above came dangerously close to hitting her.
"Alright," she snarled, "now I'm pissed!" She ducked behind a rock
and fired blindly up in the direction the shots had come from.
Hu-Jin, realizing the sniper was now occupied with the mercenary,
made a dash for the cart. He plucked the Shaheer from his hiding
place and ran back toward Quarq. The sniper realized what had
happened and fired at the Advisor. The man was moving astonishingly
well for his age, however, and somehow managed to get back to Quarq
only singed and slightly bloody from a shot which had grazed his back
instead of cutting him in half at the waist.
"Are you alright?" the commander asked him.
"Never better," Hu-Jin replied, setting Dyan down. "Nothing like
an annoying flesh wound to get you really pissed and ready to lop off
a few limbs!" He drew his sword, a wide and powerful blade, etched
with designs and brightly polished. "I'm going to try to sneak around
and up," he said. "Maybe I can find the bastard and jump him from
behind. Cover me." Without waiting for Quarq's approval, he
scampered off.
No sooner had he gone than Mongoe and Haezar came out of the
rocks behind the commander.
"That guy's toast, and Haezar's got the crystal," Mongoe informed
him.
"Where's Hu-Jin?" Haezar asked.
Dyan smiled a wicked little grin, a perfect copy of the
Advisor's. "He went to kick ass," he replied.
The sniper's firing, however, continued to pour down. Mongoe,
deciding that it was not worth the risk to Hu-Jin, set his particle
acceleration beam aside, pulled a laser pistol, and fired back at the
unseen foe along with Haezar and Quarq.
At length Hu-Jin returned. "I know where he is," he huffed.
"So why didn't you ace him?" Mongoe asked.
"I couldn't. He didn't see me, but I saw his face. He had the
diamond tattoo--the mark of the Morin-shans. I cannot kill him."
"He doesn't seem to give a shit about killing you!"
"It does not matter. The situation is such that I cannot risk
violating our treaty."
"Morin-shan?" Quarq muttered, "Maybe Zyal sent him."
"Maybe," Mongoe grunted. "Who cares?" He picked up his
bazooka--or rather, the weapon which appeared to be a bazooka. "Where
is he?"
Hu-Jin pointed. "Up there."
"Hey," Quarq remarked, shooting a glance back at Mongoe, "That
thing's not loaded!"
Mongoe quickly jumped into the open and fired. A large portion
of the top of the quarry disintegrated.
Quarq's mouth fell open. "What the--?"
"Yeah!" Mongoe laughed. "End of problem."
The commander looked over at him, astonished. "What is that
thing?"
The lieutenant kissed the barrel of his weapon. "My baby," he
replied.
Hu-Jin got to his feet. "Well, that's more or less settled," he
remarked, "except for that blasted woman. At least we have the
Shaheer and the Alat back. Good work, Lieutenant." He turned to
Haezar.
The man was facedown in the gravel, quite unconscious.
The Alat was nowhere in sight.
* * *
In his office, Zyal closed his eyes and reached out with his
mind. He could feel the Alat moving away from the quarry. He
frowned. It was not moving toward him. His expression darkened.
`Varkeshna and the sniper must have failed', he thought angrily.
`Either that or they've betrayed me.' He sought out the crystal a
second time. To his surprise, the Alat was not moving toward the
Shaheer's Grounds. It was moving quite rapidly and very definitely in
the direction of the aerospaceport.
He left his office and called for his chauffeur.
* * *
Shadow smiled as she pulled into Qol's aerospaceport. Her ship was
there, and in minutes she and the Alat would be safely in it. With a
little luck, air traffic control would give her priority takeoff for
some reason she'd make up, and she'd be off the planet before anyone
caught on to what was happening.
Briefly she wondered about Sorasta. She had not seen him leave the
quarry, but then, the only time she actually had seen him was when he
had brought her Dyan, and even then he had been a dark form lurking in
the shadows. She did not dwell on his whereabouts for long. He had
already been well paid for his services, and his kind could very
easily take care of themselves, from what she had heard.
She smuggled the Alat easily through what she considered to be the
Qols' rather primitive customs system, then drove on to her ship. It
was docked with numerous other small, private ships in a hangar out
beyond the main take-off sites.
As she opened the cargo bay hatch so she could get her hovercar in, a
man in expensive attire strode up to her.
"What do you want?" she asked him as she worked.
"I have come for something," the man replied in cultured tones.
"Yeah?" There was something about him Shadow did not care for.
"You have in your possession something which belongs to my people."
Shadow froze for an instant, then casually put her hands on her hips.
Her fingers carefully made their way toward the gun tucked under her
jacket. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said.
"You do," the visitor replied. "It's in the satchel you're
wearing. Kindly hand it over, and I will allow you to leave
Neemohne."
Shadow sneered and drew her gun.
Her arm froze.
The man smiled faintly. "What's wrong, my dear? Have your joints
locked? Having a little trouble pulling that trigger, hm? Take a
look at your satchel."
The mercenary briefly glanced down at the bag. She could make out a
faint glow from under the front flap.
"You have the Alat," Zyal smiled, "and I know that for a fact
because I'm using it against you."
Shadow growled and tried to will her finger to pull the trigger. She
failed. Her antagonist narrowed his eyes and breathed in sharply.
Her whole body froze. "Let me go!" she demanded.
Zyal looked into her eyes. "Relax," he commanded in a deep, quiet
voice. "Look into me. Deep into me." Shadow's face became calm.
Bewilderment showed through in her eyes. "Board your ship and
prepare for takeoff. I will arrange for your immediate departure."
"Buh... bastard... "
"Your will is mine until you leave here!" Zyal hissed. Inside the
satchel, the Alat began to glow more brightly. "Now, you may move
your arm--the one without gun. Give me the Alat."
"Nnnnnoooo... ." Shadow moaned, but the limb did as told. Zyal
took the crystal.
"Put away the gun." Again, his command was obeyed, although now
the woman was scowling terribly. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead
as she tried to resist. Zyal stared hard into her eyes and
concentrated. "Relax... ," he commanded. The Alat throbbed with
light. "Load your ship, get in, and leave when you are cleared! Is
that clear?"
"Yes," Shadow replied.
Zyal backed off. "My, you're a spunky one," he smiled. "When
you leave this world, you will not remember our encounter or what
business you had here. You will not return. Now go."
Shadow eventually did remember the Alat--Zyal did not tell her to
forget that, only her business in Qol--however, by the time she did
and managed to put the pieces together, she was much to far away to do
anything about it.
8. Temper Tantrum
Shaheer's palace, shortly after the incident at the quarry; Zyal's
mansion, shortly after that
"Tell me again what happened," Hu-Jin prompted Haezar as they sat
in the Advisor's office.
The lieutenant put a fresh cold pack to the lump at the base of
this skull. "I chased the guy with the Alat through a passage in the
rocks. When I came through he was dead. I picked up the Alat.
Someone through his head at me, but when I turned around no one was
there. Then someone else dressed in black tried to kill me, but
Mongoe got to him first."
"Shouldn't've stopped to recite his damn poetry," Mongoe put in.
"Fuckin' looney."
"Poetry?" Hu-Jin inquired.
"Yeah. He said somethin' about bein' So-and-so of the Dancing
Blades. `Know your death, boy,' and all that."
The Advisor's eyes narrowed in concentration. "How did he try to
kill you, Lieutenant?"
Haezar reached into his fatigue pocket and produced the strange,
bladed weapon he had picked up at the quarry. "With a couple of
these," he said, handing it over to Hu-Jin.
"Did he carry a firearm?"
"Not that I could see."
"How interesting," Hu-Jin remarked as he looked the weapon over.
"I do believe the two of you encountered a Nightmare." He paused.
"Imagine that. You saw and killed a Nightmare. Extraordinary. I'll
have to go look at the remains."
"Uh... ," Mongoe mumbled, "There aren't any."
"None? Not even parts?"
"No."
"No blood?"
"No. Sorry."
Hu-Jin snorted. "What a dull kill."
Quarq came into the room. "We contacted the authorities, then
called the aerospaceport," he informed the Advisor, "but we were too
late. A woman answering to Shadow's description was cleared for
priority takeoff before we got a chance to do anything."
"Damn," Hu-Jin growled, raking his fingernails across his desk.
With each passing second, he was looking less like the kindly, aging
man the commandoes had originally met.
"The people at air traffic control told me Zyal gave the order
for her clearance."
With a roar, Hu-Jin leapt to his feet, drew his sword, and buried
it in the desk. Haezar involuntarily jerked away while Quarq remained
unmoved. Mongoe looked on, amused and impressed.
"I'll throttle him with his entrails!" the Advisor declared. It
was far from an idle threat. "I'll feed him his privates! I'll--!"
He was cut short as Dyan entered the office. Immediately his
furor melted, or at least became masked by a placid expression. "What
are you doing out of bed, master?" he inquired. "You should be
resting."
The boy approached and ran his hand along the flat of Hu-Jin's
sword. "I went to sleep and had a dream," he said. He seemed somehow
upset or disturbed. "The Alat was pulling me. It was crying and
telling me to come and asking me to help."
Hu-Jin leaned forward. "Do you still feel the pulling now?"
"Yes," Dyan replied, and began to cry. "I can feel it and I can
see it and I can hear it in my head!"
The Advisor picked the boy up. "Then the woman does not have
it," he said. "If you feel this strongly, it's somewhere nearby. He
affectionately tousled the child's hair. "Reach out," he told the
Shaheer. "Who has it? Where is it?"
Dyan sniffled, closed his eyes, and remained quiet for a time.
"Someone's trying to make it do things it doesn't want to," he said at
length. "There's a lot of power. There's... a mansion... ."
"Zyal?" Quarq inquired.
Hu-Jin nodded. "He must have taken the Alat from the mercenary."
He set Dyan down. "Go back to your room now," he told the boy.
"We'll get the Alat."
"But--"
"Go."
The Shaheer turned to leave, then paused briefly to consider the
massive sword stuck in the Advisor's desk. "You really shouldn't do
that to your sword," he offered thoughtfully. "It dulls the blade."
He managed a slight smile and left the office.
Hu-Jin sighed as he removed the weapon from his desk. "We have
no proof that Zyal hired the woman," he informed the others as he
sheathed it, "but he did send the sniper and the other man. Still, I
want to go to him as civilly as possible and request that he return
the Alat. I want the three of you to come with me, and I want you to
bring your troops. If things are anything less than civil," he added,
smiling evilly, "I want to be able wash my hands in the Morin-shans'
blood without causing a war."
* * *
The Alat was fascinating, invigorating--Zyal could not put it
down. He sat in his office, so absorbed with his newfound power he
did not respond to the person pounding on for some time. Finally, he
tore his attention away from the Alat, hid it in his desk, and
answered the door. His security chief greeted him, looking somewhat
ill at ease.
"Sir," he said, "Advisor Hu-Jin has been spotted heading this
way. He's leading a small squadron of foreign troops."
Zyal considered. "Fine. Let them in."
"Sir?"
"Do as I say. I'll grant them audience."
"Yes, sir," the security chief replied, and exited the office.
Zyal went to his desk and removed the Alat. `And then I'll
destroy them.'
* * *
"And what can I do for you, Advisor?" Zyal smiled as both his and
the S.C.U.M. troops stood in his meeting hall.
"It has come to my attention," Hu-Jin replied stiffly, "that you
have the Alat."
Zyal simply looked at him, his hands behind his back.
"I thank you for recovering it. All of Qol will thank you." The
Advisor was outwardly calm, yet it was obvious from his stance that he
was fighting to control his temper.
"Why have you brought all these soldiers here?" Zyal asked. He
briefly glanced at his own troops, lined up on either side of the
hall.
"Simply to ensure the Alat's safe return to the palace," Hu-Jin
replied.
"Why are they foreign troops?"
"They were sent here to assist me in certain matters. Right now
my own forces are fully occupied with making sure no further harm will
come to our Shaheer."
"I see."
Hu-Jin held out his hand. "Now, if you please, the Alat."
Zyal brought out the crystal from behind his back. It pulsed
with energy. He could feel the power oozing through his veins as he
stared deep into the brilliant color emanating from its center. He
concentrated.
"No," he replied, "I DON'T please."
The hall became hushed as confused murmurings broke out amongst
Zyal's security troops.
"So," Hu-Jin said in a low voice, "you did hire the woman."
"I did not," Zyal replied. "Her coincidental appearance here
only provided the necessary vehicle for my ascension to Shaheership."
"Dyan is the Shaheer."
"Dyan is a child!" Zyal snapped, still absorbed in the Alat. "I
am a man. I am fit to rule."
"If enough of your people side with you, you will restart the
ancient blood feud."
"No matter. With the Alat, I am more powerful than any army.
Now, old man, arrange for Dyan to relinquish his position."
"No," Hu-Jin replied firmly. "Give me the Ala--" His words were
cut off as a burst of light shot from the crystal, caught him in the
chest, and bowled him across the hall. The S.C.U.M. troops raised
their weapons. Zyal's troops readied theirs.
"That was a warning," Zyal announced as Hu-Jin picked himself up
with a groan. The Advisor's face darkened. He pulled his sword from
its scabbard.
"Come face me like a man!" he shouted.
Zyal laughed at him.
With an enraged cry, Hu-Jin sent the large blade soaring through
the air at Zyal. A bubble of light appeared around the younger man,
and the sword bounced off, skimming across the marble floor until it
came to rest some distance away.
"Do as I've told you!" Zyal shouted. "This is your last warning!
Now go!"
"Give me the Alat!" Hu-Jin seethed.
Zyal eyed his troops. "Remove these people!" he ordered.
"G'wan and try!" Mongoe replied. He fired his "baby" at the
grouping of guards to the left. They vanished, and so did a large
portion of the wall behind them, a good deal of furniture in the next
room, the wall after that, and the wall after that...
Zyal smiled wickedly as he watched the two factions collide. He
wanted this. He wanted another excuse to use the Alat. He wanted to
blast them all into eternity with a thought, to watch them die at his
fancy. He concentrated harder as the crystal in his hands throbbed.
The pleasant, chime-like noises it usually emitted turned to squeals
and shrieks. He channeled his anger into the Alat, sending rays of
pure hatred out at the battling troops. One of the S.C.U.M. soldiers
quite literally exploded, causing him to roar with laughter. Another
caught on fire. His aim was off the third time; he managed to
disintegrate one of his own men. `No matter,' he thought. `I don't
need him--or any of them. I am more powerful than them all.'
Across the hall, Quarq found himself pinned facedown on the floor
by a man easily twice his size. He fought, kicked, and struggled, but
his attacker managed to plant a knee in the back of his neck, pinning
him to the floor. The soldier then drew a rifle across his neck and
pulled back, throttling him as worked on breaking the lieutenant
commander's neck. Quarq got his hands on the rifle and pushed forward
as hard as he could in a desperate attempt to stay alive. He looked
up and saw Hu-Jin not far away, retrieving his sword.
"Advisor!" he croaked.
Hu-Jin drew near. "I'm sorry," he said, looking rather awkward
through his anger, "I cannot kill him! He is Morin- shan!"
"I think Zyal's already broken the treaty," Quarq gasped. "Help
me, damn you!"
Hu-Jin disappeared.
Quarq's attacker laughed. "Relax and I'll snap your neck
quickly," he sneered. Quarq merely growled and fought on.
He did not have to struggle much longer, as Hu-Jin's sword
planted itself firmly between the guard's shoulder blades.
"Oh, my!" Hu-Jin said, terribly overacting, "I seem to have
tripped over this poor man, fumbling my weapon with terrible,
unfortunate results. What a dreadful accident."
Quarq hauled himself out from under the dead man's body.
"Thanks."
Zyal, meanwhile, found that his attacks were becoming
increasingly difficult. Every time he used the Alat offensively,
there seemed to be a wall blocking the channel through the crystal, a
wall which, if he did not concentrate hard enough, would bounce his
anger back at him and made his head spin. It was tiring him, but it
also made him more determined and more furious. He tried again and
again, though each time it became harder to use the Alat. His attacks
became weaker and more sporadic.
Sensing Zyal's difficulties, Hu-Jin broke free of the melee and
charged him. Zyal saw him coming. A burst of energy tripped the
Advisor up, and then a tendril of light wrapped around his legs and
arms and dragged him in. Grinning with insane pleasure, Zyal bent
over him.
"You, old man," he growled, "you I'll kill slowly." He put his
hand to the Advisor's chest and bore down with his mind. His
fingertips began to glow. Still held by the cords of light, Hu-Jin
could do no more than stiffen and groan in pain.
"Hey!" Mongoe shouted, bringing his particle acceleration beam to
bear on Zyal, "Let him go!"
"Are you crazy?!" Haezar cried as he threw off one of Zyal's men,
"If you fire you'll take out the Advisor and the Alat!"
With a sneer, Mongoe fired to the right of Zyal and Hu- Jin. The
wide beam melted the wall behind them, then continued on its way
through the mansion. "Next time I'll narrow the beam, and the same'll
happen to you!"
"You can't narrow the beam!" Haezar snapped, cutting down several
oncoming guards with a burst of gunfire.
"He doesn't know that," Mongoe replied.
Zyal, however, did not seem to care. He removed his free hand
from Hu-Jin and lashed it out in the lieutenants' general direction.
Haezar knocked Mongoe to the floor as a deadly burst of energy
scorched the air above them. Satisfied that this would do, Zyal
returned his attention to torturing Hu-Jin. Mongoe, Haezar, and Quarq
gathered together several troops and rushed the man. Again the
defensive bubble rose up around him. Nothing got through, not even
lasers. Zyal ignored them all as he worked on killing the Advisor.
"This is crazy," Quarq growled. "There's got to be something we
can--" He broke off as his attention fell on the Alat. The crystal
was glowing more brightly than any of them had ever seen, no longer
throbbing, but with a steady, blinding light.
Even Zyal seemed startled. "What the--?" he began.
"STOP!!" someone called in a shrill voice, and everyone did
exactly that. Literally.
Both commandoes and security guards froze in their tracks, and
stayed that way, unable to move or speak. Confusion played over their
features.
There came the padding of small feet on marble, and Dyan appeared
in the hall, looking very fearsome for someone not quite a decade old.
"You leave Hu-Jin alone!" the boy shrieked. Inside his glowing
bubble, Zyal, the only one apparently uneffected by Dyan's command,
took his hand off the Advisor. The light bonds vanished as well.
Hu-Jin went limp and crumpled to the floor.
"You're MEAN!" Dyan declared. "You're mean and you take things
that don't belong to you!"
Zyal stood up to his full height. He smiled, then laughed. "Oh,
my," he chuckled.
"Dyan," Hu-Jin groaned, his chest heaving, "get away from here."
"I HATE YOU!" the Shaheer shrieked at Zyal. The Alat began to
glow red deep within the blinding light. "GIVE THE ALAT BACK!"
Zyal glanced down at Hu-Jin. "I detest insolent children," he
said. "Haven't you taught the boy any manners?" He paused, chuckled.
"I suppose I'll have to punish him."
"No!" the Advisor protested.
"Shut up," Zyal sneered, and lay his hand on the older man's
chest again. Hu-Jin cried out in agony.
"I SAID LEAVE HU-JIN ALONE!" Dyan bellowed at the top of his
lungs. The Alat's light throbbed once. Zyal was blown back against
the wall, the crystal still in his hand. He picked himself up.
"DIE!" he shouted, and focused every ounce of hate and jealousy
in him on the Alat.
With Dyan present, the wall he had encountered before now became
impenetrable. Some of the energy was absorbed, but not channeled
through. The rest bounced back in his face. He screamed as his own
mental violence burned his face, chest and arms. He fell to his knees
and dropped the Alat.
The crystal rose into the air. The frozen soldiers watched in
amazement as it floated into the Shaheer's waiting arms. The chime
noises were no longer shrieking, but were becoming louder now as the
light within the brightness turned from red to rays of yellow and
blue.
"You'll never be mean to me or Hu-Jin or the Alat again!" Dyan
declared. The blue and yellow lights enveloped Zyal. He cried out
once. When the light receded, he was pressed to the wall, curled up
and whimpering. The soldiers present suddenly found they could move,
but they did not resume their fight. The hall was quiet.
Haezar helped Hu-Jin up. "Are you alright?"
The Advisor nodded. "I think so." He went over to Zyal, who
shied away as he came.
"Get away from me!" he cried as he cowered, "Please stay away!"
"It's okay now, Hu-Jin," Dyan said. "I took care of him."
"What did you do?" the older man asked.
"He's scared now," the boy explained. "Of you, me, and the
Alat."
"You did that?"
"Mm-hm."
"Good. Very good. And since you didn't kill him, the
Yun/Morin-shan treaty is unbroken. Excellent." He went over to the
Shaheer and put his arm around the boy's shoulder. "But you still
shouldn't have come here, especially alone."
"But I told you," Dyan protested, "the Alat was calling me. I
had to come."
"Alright, alright," Hu-Jin murmured.
"Are you angry?"
"No. Come on, let's go home." The Advisor lead Dyan out. Quarq
called his troops together and followed.
Mongoe paused on his way out to consider his handiwork, and to
attempt to soak in what had just happened. He found it difficult.
"In-fucking-credible," he muttered, and, shaking his head,
followed the others out of the hall.
9. The Beginning
Third High Commander Noril's office, several weeks later.
"I must compliment you all on the success of your first mission,"
Third High Commander Noril told Quarq, Haezar, and Mongoe. "The War
Council is impressed, and the High Council has decided to give me the
funding to expand the S.C.U.M. project further. However,"--he shot
an angry look at Mongoe- -"there is one more matter to be dealt with."
Noril paused, looking rather grave. "I received a very long, very
angry complaint by several wealthy families, including Zyal's, among
the Qol. According to the complaint, on the day of your hostile
encounter with Zyal, a large section of the outer wall surrounding his
mansion melted. Melted. Melted and vanished with almost no residue.
A pale blue-violet light emerged from the wall, went through the
neighbor's wall and every room in their house, continued out through
the opposite wall, and halfway through the next neighbor's home before
dispersing completely. The same light with the same effects came out
of the back of the mansion and went through a couple more homes. Half
of Zyal's family mansion, where the light came from, has been gutted."
Again Noril paused, staring intensely at Mongoe. "I'd say that sounds
like the effects of a particle acceleration beam, wouldn't you,
Lieutenant?"
"Yes, sir," Mongoe replied.
"Now, I wonder how one of those got into the hands of a S.C.U.M.
commando? By my records, the only hand-held particle acceleration
weapons were issued to Special Forces for a brief period of time,
during which the soldiers using them experienced power failures and
self-destruction of the weapons. I believe you're familiar with this,
Lieutenant."
"Yes, sir."
"You should be--your platoon was issued them. And coincidentally
enough, according to records, you were disciplined over the
disappearance of some of the weapons which turned up unaccounted for."
"Some were lost in battle, sir."
"I'm sure they were. You have one, don't you?"
No reply.
"Someone who worked on the project told me that after the
hand-held pieces, they tried making shoulder cannons, but they were
too heavy and clumsy for the average soldier. He told me these things
were about the size of... oh, I believe he said bazookas. You did
bring your bazooka like I asked you to, didn't you?"
Mongoe held up his carrying case. "Yes, sir."
"Take it out and put it on my desk." Mongoe did as told. Noril
looked it over. "What is this thing?"
"It's a bazooka, sir."
The High Commander toyed with the weapon, looking at it more
closely. "Yes, it is. An old one, too." He looked up at the
lieutenant, his eyes cold. "With an almost plugged barrel and that
odd addition on the front end." He took several tools from his desk,
pried open the back of the weapon, and began tearing parts,
insulation, and padding out of it. "What is this?" he demanded,
gesturing to the array of parts on the desk.
"It's... it's the modified remains of several particle
acceleration guns," Mongoe muttered.
"I see." Noril looked at Quarq. "And you didn't notice anything
peculiar?"
"I... I didn't realize what it was, sir."
"Why is it that in your report you write that several mansions,
including Zyal's, were damaged, but you don't say by what?"
"I wasn't sure what it was, sir."
Noril scowled. "Mongoe, Quarq--I could fry both your asses over
this--especially you, Lieutenant! But I'm not going to. Not now,
anyway."
"Sir?" Quarq replied.
"If I dismiss and discipline you now, it'll make me look bad. I
thought I was dealing with three--well, at least two--highly
disciplined officers, and so did the War Council. They're under the
impression that everything went smoothly. I want to keep it that way.
If I dismiss any of you now for improper conduct, my whole project
could be scrapped." Noril turned to Quarq. "You--I'll overlook your
error. Your record's clean. Between you and me, we'll say Mongoe
here kept the damn thing on your blind side the whole time. As for
you," he went on to Mongoe, "you watch yourself. Durn just barely
managed to convince me to let you in. One more foul-up, in any way,
and I'll see you court-martialled. Understood?"
"Yes, sir," Quarq and Mongoe replied.
"You and Haezar keep an eye on this shithead, Quarq." Noril
picked up the bazooka casing and shoved it into Mongoe's arms. "Get
rid of this," he snarled. "Dismissed."
* * *
Late that night, Mongoe sat in his quarters, the remains of his
"baby" on his lap. He didn't have the heart to dispose of it. He
stroked the barrel affectionately and sighed, then set the weapon down
on the bed.
He got onto the floor and reached underneath his bed, digging
through the assorted junk, gear, and boxes. At last he found what he
was looking for. He pulled out a box, taped shut and addressed as if
it were to be mailed, and cut it open. After digging through the
styrofoam bits and tissue paper, he reached in and smiled.
He pulled out two large, awkward-looking, hand-held particle
acceleration guns.
`Yeah,' he thought as he sat down next to the old bazooka casing
and went to work, `I think I'm gonna like this job.'
______________________________________________________________________
Faye Levine is a Freshman in Carnegie Mellon University's Art/Design
core program. After spending her high school years writing a novella
and a 500+ page novel (Single spaced! Wow!), she's having a little
trouble writing SHORT stories. Her recent endeavors include becoming
addicted to "GrimJack", blowing up a borrowed amplifier, fending off
mushy attacks from a suitor, and teaching innocent bunnies to stalk
and kill Elvis impersonators. In her friends' opinions, "She's gone
funny."
fl0m+@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________
The Painted Viper Cries
--- Albert L. Evans
I.
I remember my first kill.
Were you there, in a form?
I've always felt as if someone were watching.
I hated you for not helping me.
The blood... the blood was all around me
it sprayed into my hair.
A thousand years passed
and still the red stains my hair.
II.
He never told me, you see,
when he took me to bed.
And when he bit me
(yes, it was on the neck, just like Dracula)
I cried out.
He said I would live forever.
But to live is to kill.
You can resist, sure. But the pain...
Eventually it takes control.
It's easier to submit,
make it clean.
Eventually we gathered together
his past lovers.
We killed him as only a vampire can
and swore on his corpse
never to visit our fate on another.
III.
A vampire lives forever. It's a curse.
Even vampires fall in love.
My blood burns when I lie with you.
My mind controls the urge,
an instinct
to kill you.
My body wants your blood;
I need your heart.
IV.
The men begin to blur,
faces melting into one, one man.
I've loved you for a thousand years.
I even loved you when you bit me,
and later, when I killed you.
I've watched you die a hundred times.
Once you called me a painted viper
and I didn't understand.
You'd seen me, blood running from my lips;
I would have spared you that,
but you pry so hard sometimes...
You question the news and wonder.
Everywhere we go, people disappear.
Painted, hiding the truth.
I never bit you.
V.
You're old.
Lines on your face
cut my eyes.
You never understand when I tell you.
Go away, I said. Stupid bastard
Vampires live forever!
You didn't know I'd have to watch you die
when you decided to stay.
And I couldn't send you away, you see
because I love you.
I knew.
Damn you, I knew.
______________________________________________________________________
Bert Evans is an Information Systems/Computer Science/Creative Writing
Major at Carnegie Mellon who likes to write about anything and
everything in any format. A football player for the Tartans (please
don't ask him about "diskette day") he likes to do just about
everything. He loves to write and receive mail.
ae0i+@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Fair Play
Kenneth A. Kousen
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
In the cold of the desert night, two figures huddled shivering
around a flickering fire. At first glance, they looked rather alike.
Both were of medium height and medium build. Both had dark hair and
dark eyes. Both leaned in closely to the fire, in an effort to warm
themselves.
Closer examination, however, revealed striking differences
between the two men. The face of one showed an expression of worry
and fear, as though expecting at any moment to be attacked. His eyes
darted from side to side, peering into the darkness. His ears heard
every sound, both real and imagined, from the scampering of small
burrowing animals to the whistling of the wind through the rolling
tumbleweed.
The other man, by contrast, was calm. He too shivered, but from
the cold instead of fear. His face looked placid, except for an eerie
smile. He leaned his shoulder towards the first man and spoke.
"You do not have a choice, Vol. If you are going to survive this
night, you must kill me," he said.
"Shut up, Aanoch," Vol replied.
"You know full well that I would kill you if I were able. You
can not watch me all night. I assure you that the first chance I get,
I will slit your throat." He leaned back, satisfied.
Vol jumped to his feet. "Damn it, I said shut up! I will listen
to no more of your foul treachery. If you are not silent, I will---"
"You will what? Kill me? Fine." He grinned. "Like I said, it
is really your only option."
With a growl, Vol stormed away, but the cold and the darkness
prevented him from venturing too far from the fire. Instead, he paced
back and forth, beating his arms with his hands to keep his
circulation going. Aanoch watched him intently, trying to make eye
contact. Vol finally looked up, and for a moment the two stared at
each other. Aanoch suddenly grinned, and lunged toward the fire.
"No!" Vol yelled, running to his aid. He grabbed Aanoch by the
blanket that was wrapped around him, and threw him back onto to the
ground. In the process, the blanket surrounding Aanoch fell away,
The loss of the blanket revealed another difference between the
two men. Aanoch was bound hand and foot with heavy ropes.
He laughed. "You see?" he said. "You can not stop me forever.
If you untie me, I will kill you. If you do not, I will find a way to
kill myself. If you leave me in the desert alone, I will freeze to
death. One way or another, I will be dead by morning." He paused.
"And you will pay the penalty."
"You are insane. I can not help that."
"It does not matter. You will die."
Vol trembled, both from the cold and from anger. "Does your life
mean nothing to you?" he said.
Aanoch grinned at him. "On the contrary," he replied. "My life
is most precious. But my death means more. My death accomplishes
your own, and that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."
"But what of your clan? Would you sentence them to death as
well? Have you no honor?"
For the first time, the smile left Aanoch's face. "Do not talk
to me about honor, you Hull cur. Your clan knows nothing about it.
It is we who shall die, to a man if necessary, to achieve the
extinction of the Hull clan."
Vol's eyes flashed menacingly. He seized the blanket from the
ground and advanced towards Aanoch, poised to smother the bound man.
Aanoch watched him calmly.
"Good," Aanoch said. "Inefficient, but effective." He bared his
neck to his opponent, and closed his eyes.
With a scream of frustration, Vol threw the blanket at Aanoch and
stormed off. He looked back just in time to see Aanoch moving toward
the fire once again. Vol ran back and pulled Aanoch away.
"Now stop that, will you?" He grabbed Aanoch by the rope binding
his wrists and dragged him away from the camp into the darkness.
Aanoch made no move to interfere. Instead, he began whistling an odd,
rambling tune. Vol dropped him about thirty paces from camp and
returned to the fire. He sat down heavily.
"You can freeze for all I care!" he yelled to Aanoch, who just
continued whistling a tuneless, melancholy song.
* * *
The Cooperation Duel was formed to accomplish what centuries of
ceaseless fighting had not---the safety of people fortunate enough to
have been born in a clan other than that of Hull and Malmeus. Prior
to its establishment, the twin clans of Hull and Malmeus had fought an
unending war of revenge and counterrevenge, each side performing
successively worse acts of brutality until the senses became dulled to
the horrors. Children of each clan were taught the use of weapons at
an early age and then loosed upon one another. Those who survived
were hard and strong, and completely dedicated to the destruction of
the other side. Each atrocity brought new cries of vengeance; an eye
for an eye trying to make the whole world blind.
Though many outside clans deplored the violence, the majority of
the people took no action. Rather, they felt that the overall good
was best served by having the Hulls and the Malmeusians continue to
kill each other until both were gone, thus eliminating the problem.
Unfortunately, however, innocent outsiders had a habit of `getting in
the way' of traps left by one warring clan for the other. Such
casualties started occurring with increasing frequency, and when Iir,
the only son and heir of the plutarch, died in a Hull explosion, the
situation had degenerated too far.
The plutarch wanted to stop the fighting entirely, but he knew
that was impossible. Instead, he hit upon an ingenious compromise:
The Cooperation Duel. Any time a member of each clan came into
conflict, they were captured by the plutarch's troops, bound together,
and sent into the desert at the Tir Oasis. Their only hope for escape
was to reach, on foot, the Oasis of Sil, which lay forty miles to the
southwest, deep in the heart of the desert. The ultimate requirement,
however, was that they must reach this goal TOGETHER. Neither side
was allowed to leave without the other. If either emerged alone, he
was put to death and his nearest clansman was sent out in his place.
This process would continue until either a Hull and a Malmeusian both
arrived at Sil, alive and together, or until there were no members of
either clan left to be banished into the desert. Either way, the
fighting would be over.
Naturally, both the Hull and Malmeus clans protested. They soon
realized, however, that the weight of public opinion (and, far more
importantly, the power of the plutarch's army) was against them. In
addition, some of the more aggressive members of each clan viewed the
prospect of single combat in the desert with enthusiasm. Among the
most vocal of these were Vol, eldest son of the Casar of Clan Hull,
and Aanoch, Warrior Chieftan of Clan Malmeus. They were sentenced to
be the first pair sent into the desert; to emerge together, or not at
all.
* * *
Vol slumped listlessly in front of the fire. He was no longer
sure how long they had been in the desert. He only knew that what had
seemed to be an adequate amount of supplies was nearly exhausted. He
thought about this, and decided for the hundredth time that this must
be due to Malmeusian trickery and sabotage. He certainly didn't
remember using them himself, although he was forced to admit that
there were several blank periods of time in his own memory since their
entry into the desert.
Staring into the fire tired him. Slowly, his eyelids drooped
downward and his head fell forward. A thought jolted him. If he
slept now, he realized that Aanoch would freeze to death before he
reawakened.
"Just a few minutes, or maybe half an hour," he muttered.
"Surely Aanoch can survive that. Let him suffer, anyway."
"He will not survive. His condition is as bad as yours."
Vol rose with a start. He looked around in panic for the source
of the answering voice.
"Over here," it said.
He whirled around. Directly behind him, leaning with one leg
propped upon a rock, was the Stranger. He was dressed in desert garb,
and had a heavy, dark beard that flecked with grey. He looked relaxed
and confident, and his eyes bore into Vol with painful intensity.
"Who are you?" Vol asked.
The Stranger raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. "You do not
remember?"
"No, of course not. Where did you . . . ." Vol's voice trailed
off into silence. The Stranger did seem vaguely familiar, but Vol
couldn't quite place him.
"No matter. Place another log on the fire and we will talk."
Mystified, but too tired to argue, Vol complied. The Stranger
moved toward the fire and warmed himself. "Feel better now?" he
asked.
Vol realized that he did feel better. Much of the fear had left
him, and with it, much of his exhaustion. He nodded.
"Good. Then you realize that there is a solution to your
dilemma."
"There is?" Vol asked, astonished. "What is it? I must know."
The Stranger regarded him with a wry smile. "You do know. You
just don't remember it yet."
"Damn you, don't give me any of your riddles! Just tell me the
answer." Vol thumped the ground in frustration. "I am in no mood to
be trifled with."
The Stranger yawned and stretched elaborately. "All right, ask
me yes-or-no questions and I will try to answer."
"I do not wish to play any foolish games."
The Stranger didn't reply.
Vol sighed. "Who are you?"
"Yes."
"Yes? What kind of an answer is `yes'?"
"No?" the Stranger inquired.
Vol rolled his eyes. "Very well, have it your way. Do I know
you?"
"Yes."
"Are you a member of my clan?"
"Yes."
"Are you related to me?"
"Yes."
"Yes? That is impossible. I do not recognize you at all. How
can you be related to me?"
The Stranger simply looked at him.
The shivers that had left at the Stranger's arrival now returned.
Vol rose and paced back and forth in front of the fire. Suddenly he
stopped and stared in awe at the Stranger.
"Are you real?" he asked, quietly.
"Real enough," the Stranger replied. "Look, leave me out of it
for the time being, will you? Aanoch is dying and you are wasting
time."
Vol turned and looked toward where he had left his bound
companion. He realized that the whistling had stopped some time ago.
"I should just let him die," he muttered.
"No."
"No?"
"No."
"Then I should go save him?"
"Yes."
Vol spat in disgust. "Surely you are not telling me I should
forget all of the Malmeusian crimes and walk out of here with him."
The Stranger smiled. "No. I said that there was a way out of
YOUR dilemma. Not necessarily out of HIS."
A light dawned on Vol's face, as though a long-suppressed memory
had forced its way to the surface. He smiled an evil smile. "Yes,"
he said.
"Yes," he answered.
* * *
When Aanoch regained consciousness, his immediate reaction was to
cry out with joy and relief. The frost demons that had haunted his
nightmares had treated him with contempt, both for bringing about his
own death, and for condemning others in his clan to the same fate.
The horrible image of his younger brother Roul staggering in the
desert, dying of thirst, had shaken him to the core. How foolish he
had been, to force such an end on his own brother!
The image of death still hovered just beyond the horizon. Aanoch
shuddered. It was one thing to speak of defying death with bravery;
it was quite another thing to actually have to face it. His mind
rebelled at the memory. He turned away, and accidentally looked
directly into the nearby fire.
Nearby fire? he thought with astonishment. He then realized that
the ropes binding his wrists and ankles were gone. He was covered
with a blanket, resting next to the fire in their encampment. He sat
up abruptly and rubbed his stiffened joints.
"Feeling better?" said a voice behind him.
Aanoch turned and faced the speaker. It was Vol, but somehow not
the Vol he had left. This Vol did not fear the darkness. Instead, he
seemed to welcome it. This Vol laughed malevolently.
"Can you move?" Vol asked.
"Yes, I believe so," Aanoch answered, flexing his legs. "You
saved me," he said, surprised.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"So I can exact my revenge."
With a laugh, Vol lunged toward Aanoch. Aanoch barely had time
to stagger to his feet and dodge the unexpected onslaught. Vol rushed
toward him again, fists flailing. One struck Aanoch on the jaw, and
he lost his balance. In the process, however, he managed to trip Vol,
whose momentum carried him forward until he landed in a heap a few
yards away. As Vol started to rise, Aanoch looked around desperately
for some way to protect himself. He saw the pile of torchwood off to
the left, and seized a log. Swinging it back and forth, he yelled at
Vol.
"Stay away! I don't want to have to kill you!"
Vol stood and began talking to himself.
"He really doesn't want to kill me, does he?" he said.
"Yes," he answered.
Vol laughed hysterically and jumped at Aanoch, who swung the
torchwood at Vol's legs. He connected with a sickening thud, and Vol
collapsed, still laughing. Crippled as he was, he began crawling
towards Aanoch.
"Get away!" Aanoch yelled, but Vol kept coming forward. Aanoch
ran to the other side of the fire, where he found the ropes that had
until recently bound his own limbs.
"Stop!" he said. "I mean it. Do not make me tie you up."
Vol continued his crawl. With a scream of frustration, Aanoch
ran to Vol. He managed to dodge Vol's punches and bites long enough
to bind his wrists. Hurt or not, Vol tried to kick him, and Aanoch
was forced to bind his ankles as well. He dragged Vol over to a rock
in front of the fire and left him there.
Vol appeared to calm down, but as the adrenalin left his system
he began to shiver. Aanoch picked up the discarded blanket and
wrapped it around Vol's shoulders.
"There," Aanoch said. "Now be quiet and let me think." He moved
toward the other side of the fire and sat down.
"You do not have a choice, Aanoch. If you are going to survive
this night, you must kill me," Vol said.
Aanoch stared at him in astonishment. "What did you say?" he
said.
"I will kill you the first chance I get. You can not watch me
all night." He leaned back, satisfied.
Angry, Aanoch jumped to his feet. "No! Do not do this! Stop,
or I will be forced---"
"To do what? Kill me? Fine." He grinned. "Like I said, it's
really your only option."
"Please!" Aanoch begged. "We must stop this. We must break the
cycle, or we will be doomed to repeat it until we both die. Does that
not matter to you?"
Vol grinned at him. "Certainly," he replied. "My life is most
precious. But my death means more. My death accomplishes your own,
and that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Aanoch pulled his hair in frustration. "But what of your clan?
Would you sentence them to death as well? Have you no honor?"
The smile left Vol's face. "Do not talk to me about honor, you
Malmeusian cur. Your clan knows nothing about it. It is we who shall
die, to a man if necessary, to achieve the extinction of the
Malmeusian clan."
"You are not listening! You have not heard a word I have said!"
Vol leaned in ominously toward the fire.
Realizing what he intended, Aanoch ran toward him and pulled him
away from the fire. He dragged him about thirty paces into the
desert, and dumped him onto the ground. He returned to the camp and
collapsed. He looked dejectedly into the fire, and listened as Vol in
the distance whistled an off-key, melancholy tune.
"We are lost," Aanoch said out loud. Tears began to pour from
his eyes. "I can not save him, or he will kill me. I can not kill
him, or I and others of my clan will die. Somebody please tell me
what to do."
"You must save him," said the Stranger.
Aanoch whirled around and faced him. "What?"
"Surely you realize there is a way out of your dilemma."
"There is? What is it? I must know."
"You do know," the Stranger replied. "You just do not remember."
Aanoch covered his face with his hands. "Of course I remember,
but I do not wish to. The cycle must be broken."
"You would rather die?"
Once again, Aanoch saw the Spectre of Death hovering over him,
and he could not face it. Aanoch's shoulders slumped forward. He
desperately wanted to say yes, but he knew he could not. "No," he
said. "I will do what I must. Yes," he said.
"Yes," he replied, as his mind slipped back into the madness.
______________________________________________________________________
Kenneth A. Kousen is an Associate Research Engineer at United
Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, CT. When he's not
writing fiction, he works on computational models for the aerodynamics
inside turbomachinery. Of the two, he says, writing is much harder.
kak%utrc@utrcgw.utc.com
______________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Being There
by Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________
Student
On the side of a mountain in Colorado, a young woman shifted her
backpack and peered off of the trail into the brush for the fiftieth
time in as many minutes. The trail itself was remarkable only in that
it appeared well used, for it was a good distance off of any road and
practically inaccessible overland. The woman had herself had arrived
via helicopter to a small clearing some ways down the mountain.
After a time she seated herself on a rock, pulled a sandwich from
a coat pocket, and began to eat, never ceasing her relentless scan of
the surrounding terrain. Thus, she saw the hiker approach without his
seeing her. A quick examination led her to believe he was no more
than what he appeared, and she resumed eating. A soft peal of thunder
rolled up the mountain a moment later, and her eyes snapped back to
the hiker. He was no longer there, leaving the trail as empty as it
had been most of the day.
"Damn," she muttered under her breath, and began the easy descent
to where she had seen him last. Reaching it, she sat down again and
waited.
The wait paid off about an hour later when the hiker reappeared
in a flash of light that made her grin with some private joke.
"You need to work on that, kiddo." The hiker stiffened and spun
at the sound of her voice.
"Who are you?"
"Currently, a damsel in distress. I need to get into the
Academy. I've found the ventilation shafts, but doors seem to be a
commodity you folks don't have."
"Of course not. What use is a door to..." He halted, uncertain,
tried to look stern. "Just who are you?"
"I'm not a Teletrix, obviously. Would you be so kind as to take
me in?"
He still looked uncertain. "I'm just a student, I don't think I
can do that. But I'll tell Mr. Morlen that you're here. What did you
say your name was?"
"June Kendall."
He was obviously nervous; the peal of thunder that rolled down
the mountain at his disappearance made June's head hurt. By contrast,
Anthony Morlen's appearance, a few minutes later, was silent. A tall
man in a business suit, he merely WAS, where a moment before he was
not.
Anthony smiled "Good day, Mrs. Kendall. I apologize for keeping
you waiting out here, but we had no idea you were coming. Why didn't
you just call? We could have brought you here quite easily, you
know."
"I needed the fresh air and I like flying." She gestured
expansively. "And the mountains are beautiful this time of year."
She paused, fixed her gaze firmly on him. "Are you going to invite me
in?"
Anthony looked around, as if just now noticing their surrounding.
He smiled, and a moment later, they stood in a plush office. He sat
behind the heavy desk, motioned for June to take a seat as well.
"How can I help you?" His smile, if not handsome, was at least
sincere. June didn't smile at all.
"I want to know where Martin is. I haven't seen him for two
weeks. No phone call, nothing. Last time I saw him, he was on his
way here."
Anthony didn't lose his smile, but his face showed concern as
well. "It's strange that he wouldn't call. But I'm afraid that he's
on Academy business, and I can't tell you where he is. Rules, you
know."
"Damn your rules. I think something's happened to him."
"I'm sure he's just fine. Quite sure."
June relaxed, sat back a little bit. "All right, all right. Can
you get a message to him?"
Anthony nodded, June continued. "Just ask him to call home as
soon as he can."
"I will, but it may be a while. Can I do anything else for you?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact. You could feed me dinner. My husband
is always raving about the food here."
Anthony smiled broadly. "Then he was indeed raving. But I'll
arrange it immediately. One moment." He vanished.
June was up instantly, crossing the room to the large file
cabinet on the wall. It was locked tight, in that annoying habit of
the Teletrix, but she produced a lockpick from a pocket and opened it
in a few seconds.
Acting quickly, she emptied the folder labeled "Kendall, Martin"
into her knapsack, filled it with papers pulled randomly from nearby
folders, and closed the drawer.
She was back in the chair before Anthony reappeared.
By the time the helicopter landed at a friend's private airfield,
she was completely familiar with the contents of the folder, including
the short addition. "Wife: June Kendall, Chemistry Teacher,
Springfield High. Harmless." She was somewhat amazed at the number
of missions her husband ran for the academy -- almost a dozen in the
last year alone. She had thought his connection with the academy
almost nonexistent, and knew of his distaste for the administration
that ran it. Not for the first time, she wondered just how powerful
the academy and its rather special graduates were.
As for Martin himself, the folder placed him in Glasgow,
investigating the disappearance of several Teletrix there. Anthony
Morlen had lied about at least one point; the folder listed his status
as "missing, whereabouts unknown." She forced herself rather sternly
to remain calm. The folder was remarkably sparse on details.
She took her friend's car to her home, parked across the street,
observing her house. After a short time, she saw someone moving in
the living room. June started the car, and drove away.
A few minutes later, she pulled up in front of the Springfield
High School and let herself in with the master key. The halls were
deserted; apparently Anthony had not sent anyone here to intercept
her. A storeroom door covered with "DANGER" signs opened to her key,
as did a small refrigerated chest in the back. From the rows of
chemical vials therein, she selected about two dozen, placing them
with some others in a protected case in her knapsack.
Before leaving, she placed a long distance collect call.
Anthony's voice came on the other end. She cut him off.
"Nice try. You can tell the dudes in my house to forget it. I
won't be attending their party. And if anything has happened to
Martin..." She let the threat trail off, hung up before he could
answer.
Less than 24 hours later she stepped off a bus in Glasgow. She
had taken rather a roundabout path to get here, since the Academy
appeared to be taking an active interest in her, but she had little
problem getting a flight; money talks loudly, and June Kendall talked
fast. She got lucky going through customs, her handbag was not
searched, the chemicals in the false bottom remained undiscovered.
Her first stop was in a small hotel on the opposite side of town
from the one in which Martin supposedly resided. She got a room
without difficulty, a fairly small but modern one, comfortable but not
plush enough to attract attention. The innkeeper's accent amused her
briefly, her attempt to mimic it back was apparently successful; the
Scottish dialect was familiar to her from several vacations with
Martin. The thought of him kept her moving quickly, but with caution.
It had taken her hours to cross the sea; if a Teletrix found her
snooping, it would take less than a second to make the return trip.
Safely in her room, she spread out an array of bottles and vials,
and looked them over carefully. It took only a few minutes to mix the
concoctions she needed.
When she emerged from her room an hour later, no one would have
recognized her. Her usually-light hair was a burgundy so deep it
would pass for black, tied in a fashion different from her usual
style. All of her visible skin had been lightened by several shades.
A short stop to a local clothing shop completed her change. In her
new purse, three vials of a light powder were carefully protected from
jarring.
In this guise she approached Martin's hotel. It was a larger
structure than the one in which she had decided to stay, several
stories high and built of attractive red brick. She scanned the
outside briefly, then entered. The lobby contained various brochures
and posters, and several large stuffed chairs. Two of them were
occupied by men reading; one paid no attention at all to her, the
second surveyed her briefly as she entered, then looked back to his
book. He might be innocent; then again, he might be a Teletrix.
Careful not to show too much of her face to him, she sat down in the
seat next to him and opened her purse. Carefully, she dumped one of
the vials of powder into her makeup kit, then withdrew it. The man
next to her continued his reading, but looked up to scan each new
arrival in the room.
She took a small brush out of the makeup case as if to apply the
powder to her face, but sneezed violently instead. The man next to
her looked up at the sneeze, brushing away the cloud of dust that had
formed about him. June grinned shyly, hiding her face and holding her
breath until the cloud settled. He mumbled something and went back to
his reading. A few seconds later, as the sleep powder took effect,
his head dropped back in the chair.
June looked around. The incident had not disturbed the other
reader, and passing guests had abandoned the lobby for rooms within.
She approached the desk and rang the bell.
A short man approached and politely asked how she could be
helped.
"I'm looking for Martin Kendall. I'm his wife, and I understand
he has a room here."
The clerk's eyes snapped briefly to the sleeping man in the
chair. June noticed.
"I'd really rather you didn't tell that man I'm here. I know he
wanted you to watch out for me, but he's certainly not a friend of
mine." She slid a few pound notes across the table to him.
The clerk pushed them back. "That isn't necessary. I didn't
really like his attitude anyhow." The clerk signalled for a bellhop,
handed him a key. The bellhop accepted it, vanished.
"Mr. Kendall has not checked in, but he called and said to hold
that room for him, and that he'd be back in a couple of days. This
was about two weeks ago, though."
"And that man?" June prompted.
"He said he was a friend of Mr. Kendall, sent to meet his wife
when she arrived. I was supposed to point you out to him."
June nodded. "Thanks for not giving me away."
"Are you in some sort of trouble? I could call the police and
have him removed." The man seemed genuinely concerned.
June grinned at the thought of a Teletrix in jail. "It wouldn't
do any good. Besides, it would let him know I'm here."
The clerk shrugged, but his eyes said that he didn't approve of
her decision. "If you need help, don't hesitate to let me know. The
bellhop should be making up your husband's room now, so you should be
ready in a few..."
A tremendous explosion shook the building, pulling pictures down
from the walls and throwing both June and the clerk to the floor.
Beams split from the ceiling, raining debris down upon the occupants
of the lounge. June rolled under the desk as a rafter crashed down
where she had been standing. The clerk looked at her from the other
side his eyes wide with confusion and fear; she gestured at him to
cover his head, then did so herself without waiting to see if he
complied.
After a few long moments the rubble ceased and the constant rain
of debris turned to a lingering cloud of dust. She pulled herself up,
and shortly realized that reaching the door would now be impossible,
but there appeared little immediate danger and plenty of air, so she
settled back to wait for rescue.
Only seconds later a human figure emerged from the air, looking
around with a look of shock on his face. June recognized him at once.
"Martin!"
Martin Kendall immediately turned in the direction of her voice.
"June? Are you okay?" The piles of rubble around her vanished
without a trace, fresh air wafted over her. Martin himself covered
the distance in a few short steps, taking her into his arms as she
stood. The clerk behind them stood up uncertainly, shaking his
clothes to clear them of dust. Martin nodded briefly in the clerk's
direction, then led June around a ceiling beam that jutted out nearby.
The moment they were obscured from the clerk's vision, the ruined
hotel ceased to exist, replaced by a plushly furnished room. Martin
gestured toward one of the chairs, seated himself in the other.
"Good morning," he said, without a trace of humor in his voice.
There was an implied question in the tone.
"Came looking for you. What's going on?"
Martin shrugged. "I wish I knew. Fifteen Teletrix have
disappeared here in the last couple months. Inexperienced ones seem
to vanish from the Earth, more powerful ones are murdered. The
explosion you just, uh, experienced was probably a bomb in my
"reserved" room. I took this one instead under an assumed name when I
got here."
"How would they know where you were going to be?"
"Apparently the people responsible have access to the Academy's
records. Since you managed to find me, I have to guess that those
records aren't as secure as they might be." He grinned.
June extracted his file from the remains of her tote, tossed it
to the table. "Anthony figured it out, of course. He's been chasing
me down since I got them."
Martin nodded. "Probably for your protection. Whatever game is
going on here is quite dangerous. He's a good man, if a bit sticky on
the rules sometimes."
"Apparently. I take it that this is why you didn't call home?"
"Exactly. I want my file to read `missing.' I'd rather have
people believe me dead. Sorry I couldn't let you know, but I'm being
very careful. For a while I even suspected that these people had a
device that could detect teleportation, so I didn't want to risk a hop
home."
"You don't think so any more?"
"No. I'm fairly sure I was found more as a result of impeccable
record- keeping on the part of Anthony. Any Teletrix who knew where
those records were located could get a hold of them at any time."
"You think it's a Teletrix?"
"Who else would know of our existence? Or care enough to try to
kill us? And the murders have all succeeded, with the exception of
mine. It's very hard to kill a Teletrix - you have to do it almost
instantly, and so unexpectedly that they cannot react. Usually it's
been bombs."
He reached under the nightstand, pulled out several manila
folders. "Here's everything I've been able to come up with on the
cases. Some of this is information Anthony gave me before I left,
most of it I gathered myself from police reports. I can't find
anything in it, but maybe I'm looking too hard. Take a peek yourself
and tell me if you can find anything I missed."
June shook her head, and a small cloud of dust dropped off it.
"A shower first, I think. Care to join me?"
Teacher
June Kendall saw the young blond woman standing by the luggage
claim, and carefully eased a syringe out of her purse. The maneuver
was almost too easy; she slid the needle into the blond woman's leg,
then had it back in her purse before anyone could notice. The blond
woman spun around quickly at the sharp pain, her eyes going wide.
"Sorry," June said, a moment before the blond woman slumped into
her arms.
"She seems to have fainted," June said aloud, "give me some
room." Carefully supporting her unconscious burden, she backed out of
the crowd and headed for the ladies room. Several people offered to
help, but she turned them down. "This happens all the time to her,
all it takes is some cold water to bring her back."
Across the wide aisle, Martin Kendall waited until the bathroom
door closed, then teleported them all back to the hotel.
"Nice job," he said. "How long will that keep her out?"
"Only a few minutes, but I'll give her something before she wakes
up to keep her asleep for eight to ten hours." Even as she spoke, she
was filling her hypodermic with a clear liquid.
They waited several minutes until the woman's breathing slowed to
almost imperceptible, then stripped her quickly, wrapping her in a
hotel bathrobe. June quickly dressed in her clothes, making an
occasional adjustment to cover the relatively poor fit. Martin
arranged June's hair as closely as they could to the blond woman's
style.
"Why would a Teletrix take a plane, anyhow?", she said as he
worked.
"Probably she doesn't have enough experience to leap overseas, or
she's never been here before. Or maybe Anthony's working on my
teleport detection theory."
"He certainly doesn't protect his files any better." Martin had
teleported the files here earlier, allowing them to meet the young
woman at the airport. They had been returned equally easily. Since
the woman had arrived on schedule, Anthony had not noticed the
absence.
An hour later, June was back on the street, Martin following at a
cautious distance, maintaining a teleportation "shield" around her.
They walked several blocks without incident, arriving at last at a
small inn.
"Marie Jacobsen, I have a reservation," June said to the
innkeeper, just loudly enough that others in the room could hear.
"Of course, Lass. Room twelve." He placed the key on the
counter.
June didn't touch it. "Twelve's my unlucky number, I'm afraid.
Can I have another room?"
The innkeeper shrugged. "Fine w' me. How 'bout seven? Canna be
unlucky."
June nodded. "That would be fine." She took the new key, left
the lobby for the hall. As soon as she was out of sight, a man stood
up quickly in the lobby and headed for the door.
Martin, who had entered during the exchange, stepped in front of
him.
"Going places? Maybe you have something to report to someone?"
The man's eyes flickered only for an instant. He was a
professional, it seemed. His hands snapped to his belt, emerged with
a knife, which promptly vanished.
"Next time that will be your hand," Martin warned. "Take a walk
out the door, and don't even think of running away."
As the man complied, Martin teleported a bit of June's sleep
serum into him. Clearly in the prime of health, the assassin managed
almost a dozen steps before collapsing to the street. Checking that
there was no one in sight, Martin teleported the man back to the hotel
room, and went to look for June.
Martin Kendall handed his binoculars to his wife. The two of
them were perched on a hilltop overlooking a mansion on the edge of
the moors. Below, guards walked the perimeter of the mansion's garden
wall, but they were apparently ornamental; none carried a weapon that
either Kendall could see. The house itself was clearly still
inhabited by wealth; the gardens were impeccable, the manor in
excellent repair.
Both Martin and June were disguised quite thoroughly. They would
pass for travellers at worst, displaced natives at best. June carried
a smaller tote than usual, a secret pocket within concealing the usual
array of sleeping powders, mixed chemicals, and three grenades Martin
had "borrowed" from an armory somewhere. Martin had only himself as a
weapon, more than sufficient for any probable confrontation.
After confirming that no more could be learned from here, June
backed down the hill and stood up. Martin followed. The last light
was just fading from the sky as they rounded the bottom of the hill
toward the mansion.
One of the guards challenged them immediately.
"Sorry to bother you," Martin replied, "but our car seems to have
stopped working. Any chance we could use your phone?"
The guard nodded. "Shouldn't be any problem with that. I'll
have one of the servants show you to it." He touched an intercom on
the wall, spoke briefly into it. He turned back a few moments later.
"Actually, the master of the house will meet you at the door.
It's just up the path, but be careful of the roses." He smiled.
"Thank you," Martin said, then turned and led June up the path to
the door. They knocked gently.
An elderly man met them at the door.
"Good evening, and welcome to my house. I am Mr. Cavendal, but
you may call me `Robert.' Should you require it, please feel free to
be my guests tonight; there are always guest rooms prepared."
"Thanks," said Martin, closing the door. "But I think we'd
rather just talk to you, if you don't mind. You have arranged
numerous times for assassinations in the last few months, and we'd
really like to know why."
Robert paled. "Assassinations? I was told that... Oh dear."
He turned and retreated into the room behind him, gesturing absently
for the Kendalls to follow. Several elegant chairs and a few
comfortable-looking ones waited in the other room. Robert selected
one of the latter and sat down. June did the same, Martin stood.
"You were saying?" he prompted.
"Yes, yes. Are you the police? I really think that we should
call the police."
"I assure you, Mr. Cavendal, that the police could do nothing
about this. Try telling us what you know. If it will make you feel
more comfortable, you may record the conversation."
"Please call me Robert. No, I don't think that recording will be
necessary. It's all very clear to me now.
"Behind the manor are some old buildings that were once used as
stables. I'm rather afraid of horses, and my children are in England
at the University, so there wasn't much point in my keeping them open.
I placed an advertisement, and some men came to look at the buildings.
They agreed to rent, and converted them into some sort of
laboratories. Occasionally they would leave envelopes with me to give
to specific people who came to the door. I always assumed it was for
equipment... Are you sure the police shouldn't know about this?"
June withdrew a badge from her tote, passed it to Robert. "We
are the police, Robert. I am Marie Johnson, and this is my husband
Richard. We're with special investigations." The badge had been
forged earlier; Martin grinned at her when she produced it.
Robert looked somewhat relieved. "How can I help you?"
"By not mentioning that we were here. I think we'd better take a
look at that lab."
"By all means; it's behind the house. They use the rear entrance
to get to it, but you can just take the path through the rear garden."
June stood up. "Thank you for your help. Don't concern yourself
about this matter, it's clear that you are innocent of wrongdoing.
Simply continue to behave as before, and things should be taken care
of in a few days."
Robert led them through the maze of the household, showed them
the path they needed to follow.
The stables were clearly of a bygone era, spacious and
well-built, apparently more than capable of housing humans. There was
an elaborate electronic lock on the door, Martin teleported it a few
feet away and opened the door.
Within, surgically clean tables stood in neat rows, most with
nothing on them. On the walls, shelves were covered with books,
chemical equipment and assorted small items. Several large white rats
wandered about in cages on a few of the tables.
June moved to examine these. Housed in small cages, the rats
appeared well-fed, climbing about on various miscellaneous objects
within the cages. It was an odd collection of objects, pens, lab
equipment, articles of clothing, things which should not have been in
a rat's cage.
As she puzzled it out, a rat vanished from one cage, reappearing
in another at the same moment with a flash of light. Thunder sounded
softly. June spun instantly, but Martin's attention was fixed on
something on the other side of the room.
"Martin, could you come here a minute?"
Her husband complied silently.
"Watch the cage." She continued to state intently at it. A few
moments later, a rat teleported to the water bottle in another cage.
The soft peal of thunder was repeated, as was the light.
June looked at her husband, who returned the look with wide eyes.
"Rats? I didn't think that TP occurred except in humans.
Something's weird here. Keep looking." He himself continued to state
at the cage, as if unable to convince himself of what he saw.
June walked to a large door on the side of the room, with a heavy
handle and a lock. "Martin?"
Martin looked up long enough to remove the lock, then returned
his scrutiny. June pulled the door open. A wave of cold air rolled
out, along with the hum of refrigerators. She stepped into the
doorway and froze.
"Oh my god."
The soft exclamation of horror brought Martin to her side. He
peered into the freezer.
Within, seventeen bodies lay on tables, all surgically opened and
in various stages of dismemberment. Martin stood, staring, for a few
moments before he spoke.
"Only the experienced Teletrix were murdered publicly. Those
less cautious simply vanished." He looked at several faces, looked
away. "That's them. Every single one." He pushed the door closed
with anger, just before the light in the main lab snapped on.
A man stood in the doorway, a gun levelled at Martin's chest.
He started to say something, never managed it. Martin teleported
away the gun and half his arm, a crash of thunder testifying that the
Teletrix's control was nearly gone. The gunman crumpled to the floor
clutching the remains of his arm. His white lab coat was splattered
red.
Martin covered the distance to him in a flash, June took a few
seconds longer. The man on the floor looked up at him, whispered "my
arm..."
Martin knelt and slapped him. "If you go into shock on me you're
a dead man. And if you want to see a hospital soon enough to save
your life, you'd damn well better tell me what this lab is for.in a
big hurry."
The man started talking incoherently, stopped himself and started
again.
"It's for development and production of a teleportation drug.
Help me!"
"Tell me more about the drug, first."
"It's a derivative of the spinal fluids of natural teleporters.
It gives people who can't produce the chemicals naturally the ability
to teleport."
"Why all the bodies?"
"For the spinal fluids. A single natural teleporter can produce
ten or twelve doses. The drug is extremely addicting, so Anthony
needs about four doses a week, now. Used to be we could get by with
latent teleporters, but now it takes ones who have been using the
ability, producing the teleport chemicals in large quantities. We're
trying to refine the process. Enough?"
"Anthony who?"
"Morlen. He's the one who funds all this, tells us when the
teleporters are arriving, which ones to have killed and which ones to
subdue for fluids. He invented the process himself a few years ago."
Martin's eyes flashed. "Anthony Morlen's not a natural
teleporter? " His tone was carefully neutral, dangerously controlled.
"Yes. But we're trying to make the killing unnecessary. We've
almost been able to produce the chemical artificially..."
Martin cut him off with a wave of his hand. "Your research is
over, is that understood? If even one more Teletrix is killed, I will
return here and take you and your associates apart a little bit at a
time."
"Help me."
"I will. But only so you can pass that warning on to your
co-workers. And I expect you to make sure that those bodies are
returned to their families. How you do that, and what you tell them,
is up to you."
The man slumped; there was no way to know if he had heard
Martin's last words. Martin looked at his wife.
"I'll take him to the hospital. Keep your disguise and catch the
first plane back to the United States. I'll meet you at your mother's
house after I kill Anthony."
"I'm coming along."
"No you're not. Anthony isn't an amateur, he knows that you
can't protect yourself and that I can't afford to protect us both."
"I can help you with..."
"No. I'm sorry, but I've got to do this one myself."
"But..." June trailed off. Martin was no longer there.
Academics
Martin reappeared silently beneath the Colorado Mountains, in
Anthony Morlen's plushly furnished office. The Teletrix Academy
director was not there, but his desk was. One at a time, the contents
of the drawers appeared on the top of the desk. In the back of the
bottom one, Martin found the syringe and several small bottles of a
pale reddish liquid. More was in the bottom file cabinet drawer,
still more in the safe behind the desk. Satisfied that he had found
all this office had to offer, he teleported all save a single bottle
into the sun.
The remaining bottle he lifted and stared into for a few moments.
The liquid within glistened with sterilized purity, but to Martin's
mind it looked like blood. Still, he had unconsciously wished for
years that such a drug existed, a way to give his wife the same
abilities and protection that he possessed. That her life should be
subject to the whims of nature, traffic accidents she could not
control, cancers she could not remove, bullets and knives she could
not protect her body against, this was the secret fear he lived with
constantly; that she be taken from him because she could not protect
herself as he could. It was too bad that the drug had to be purchased
at a cost in human lives. With a sigh that did nothing to soothe his
anger, he flung the final bottle to the limits of his abilities, into
the dark emptiness of infinity.
"I have more, you know." The soft voice behind him carried a
menace that could almost be physically felt. Martin spun to face
Anthony Morlen.
The director stood, his unruffled business suit giving him an
impression of confidence that was somehow amusing. Anthony Morlen had
been the director of the Teletrix academy for two years, a physician
who had discovered the existence of the Teletrix and chemically
duplicated their abilities, although the process required killing a
natural teleporter. When he had manifested this ability a few times,
he had been picked up by a Seeker, and brought to the Academy. When
the previous director died, Anthony's administrative experience and
more-than-average age made him the logical replacement. It was not
quite the life Anthony had envisioned as a Teletrix, but it gave him
access to an unlimited supply of "naturals" when he needed them.
Caution, and the elimination of those who might suspect him, were all
that were required to keep his position and his supply. However, his
net had missed in a single, important case, and both men now knew the
other for what he was; Anthony Morlen a powerful and dangerous killer,
and Martin Kendall, an equally dangerous and seethingly angry enemy.
Martin tried to teleport a large section of Anthony's body across
the room, knowing that it wouldn't work. It didn't. Both men were
protecting themselves, teleporting a thousand times a second into the
same place, in effect "hardening" their bodies against physical and
other threats. It was the first lesson the academy taught after its
students could control the Teletrix grid, an unconscious mechanism
that could be maintained, if necessary, even while asleep. The only
reason it wasn't constantly in use was that it interfered with normal
movement and eating, as well as causing a hard-to-explain
imperviousness to touch and pressure.
Anthony didn't even notice the attempt. "So it's a stalemate,
no? You can't hurt me, I can't hurt you. I have more of the drug,
hidden in places you'd never think to look."
Martin teleported away a large section of the floor. Anthony
continued to hover in the air, looking down once with a trace of
puzzlement in his eyes, then flashed to the edge of the new pit.
Martin struggled to think of an effective attack.
Anthony met his gaze. "And if you continue to make things
difficult, I'll have your wife killed."
"I can protect her, too. And I've been doing this longer than
you have, Anthony. I was born to this, you weren't. Are you so
confident that you can challenge me?"
"So far, the challenge hasn't been great. Do you think I got to
be director of the Academy because of my good looks? We're equals in
the art, and we both know we're safe."
Martin suspected he was right, but didn't say so. " Yes, but my
ability is permanent. Eventually your stores of the drug will be
wiped out. You can't make more, I've destroyed the laboratory and the
notes. If you attempt to create another one, I'll lobotomize the
researchers if necessary to keep it from being produced."
Anthony's eyes flickered for a brief instant at the threat. "I
have enough for now. And I know enough of the process to produce
more, without aid. I'll just be a bit less, ah, efficient about it."
His grin was not at all pleasant.
Martin slapped his finger down on the desk intercom, spoke
quickly and loudly.
"Students! Protect yourselves and don't let it drop until I say
so! Ignore any request from anyone else, especially Mr. Morlen! Your
lives are at stake!"
Anthony blinked. "They'll never believe you."
"If I gave you the same warning, would you ignore it? Where are
you going to find Teletrix now?"
Anthony laughed. "How about the latents? How about the students
who haven't learned how to maintain protection? How about the
students who aren't here, and the ones who I can surprise while
they're eating? I'm completely beyond your control, Kendall."
Anthony vanished.
June Kendall appeared in the bedroom of a small house. With her
was Marie Jacobsen, whom not eleven hours ago June had kidnapped from
a Scotland Airport. Now however, they appeared to be the best of
friends, talking jovially as though they had know each other for
years.
"Ain't much, but I call it home," Marie piped, pushing piles of
clothing off a bookcase. She continued to rummage, occasionally
teleporting small objects out of her way, until with a triumphant grin
she pulled a small folder from the depths of a sheaf of papers. "Here
it is."
The two women took seats on the opposite side of a table,
spreading the contents of the folder between them. Marie carefully
examined each sheet of paper, June glanced at them quickly before
selecting one in the center of the pile. A picture of Anthony Morlen
was paper-clipped to the upper left corner, the sheet itself contained
various pieces of information about him. His home address was printed
near the top.
"Baltimore. Been there?"
Marie nodded. "I think I can take us to a hotel room that I
stayed in once. But it might be occupied -- I don't know what the
safe-jumping points there are."
"We don't have much choice. I need to get there."
Marie considered, but her trained reluctance to allowing
outsiders to witness teleportation gave way to June's obvious need.
"Okay. Prepare yourself again."
June decided not to point out that she was quite used to
teleportation as a method of travel. "I'm prepared. Let's go."
The bedroom was replaced by one slightly larger. In the center
of the bed, a young couple ceased their activities suddenly to look up
at the two intruders who had suddenly appeared by the side of the bed.
"Aren't peeping Tom's terrible?" June asked conversationally as
she crossed to the door and pulled it open. "But everyone needs some
excitement in their life, don't you think?" June and Marie exited
quickly, pulling the door closed behind them.
Another ten minutes brought them to Anthony's house. Marie
"unlocked" a window, and the two of them slid quickly into the house.
June headed at once for the kitchen, but a careful search turned up
nothing. She had just started examining the living room when Marie's
voice summoned her upstairs.
The blond woman help up a bottle of reddish-clear liquid.
"There's about twenty of these in a hollow of the wall, along with a
syringe." She knocked once on the wall, a slight echo emphasizing her
point.
June nodded. "That has to be it. Keep looking, there's probably
more around."
Twelve hours later, Martin Kendall entered the main auditorium of
the Teletrix academy, his face barely showing the strain of hours
without sleep or food. Thirty faces looked up at him, he scanned them
cursorily a moment, then his eyes widened as he saw his wife sitting
in the back row. Instantly, he tried to extend his protection to her,
discovered that she was already invulnerable. After a few seconds
confusion, he recognized Marie Jacobsen sitting next to her.
He had expected June to follow him, but hadn't considered the
possibility of her enlisting the aid of the Teletrix they had
"waylaid." June flashed him a smug smile, he returned a helpless one.
"Keep yourself protected," he said loudly, directing it at her as
well as the students in the auditorium. He moved his eyes from her to
address the class before he spoke again.
"For the reasons I discussed earlier, Anthony probably won't be
here to give the lecture today, so you get me as a guest-speaker of
sorts." He smiled, but the tension was clear in the faces of the
students, especially the younger ones who were not yet sure of their
ability to maintain their protections.
Martin ignored it. "The topic today is momentum." He waited
until the tension relaxed a bit and some of the students began taking
notes. "Although the same visualization techniques that you use to
see the Teletrix grid takes care of fixing the velocity of teleported
objects, it is possible to overrule them and change the velocity of an
object relative to you during transportation. This is useful, for
example, if a priceless Ming vase were falling off a cliff. If you
simply transported it to yourself using grid visualization, it would
smash into the ground at your feet, or worse, injure you.
"It's not much harder to teleport off your own power as it is off
the grid, but it will tire you quickly, and there's some flashy side
effects. Most of you remember the thunder that accompanied your first
experiences with teleportation. That's a matter of not putting air
back when you move the object -- you force it out of the way on the
other end, too; that's what causes the light flash, although I
couldn't tell you the exact method. When you deal with rapidly moving
or falling objects, you need to remember to put air back in the right
place and at the right speed, or you get the same effects."
Everyone was paying attention now. Martin tested the protections
of all of them; they held. He smiled and continued.
"Okay, here's the technique. Changing velocity can be hard
without combining it with actual transportation, so the easiest method
is to stop the object first by the `pushing' technique we learned last
week, then teleport it. However, if you remember, this caused
problems objects more breakable than, say, titanium. A general-case
solution it's not."
He actually got some laughs from that one. One came from the
doorway, causing Martin to turn.
Anthony stood there, an empty vial in one hand, which he casually
tossed to Martin. It vanished halfway through it's arc.
"Just so you know," Anthony said softly. Then, more loudly,
"Please, continue."
Martin made one attempt to kill him, then turned back to the
class. No one was even pretending to be calm now. Martin clapped for
their attention and continued his lecture.
"Observe, please." Martin pulled a rubber eraser from his
pocket, threw it full force toward the other side of the room. An
instant later, it reappeared in another place, to bounce off the top
of Anthony's head. The director showed no signs of having noticed,
but a nervous laughter broke out among the assembled.
"This is what happens when you fail to negate the momentum. On
the other hand, a careful Teletrix would do it like this:" The eraser
reappeared in his hand; he threw it again. A moment later it appeared
in front of Anthony's face, motionless for an instant until it
plummeted to the floor. Anthony blinked, then doubled over. Martin's
eyes widened briefly, but he recovered fast enough to make another
teleportation attempt on the director's heart. It failed; Anthony was
maintaining his protection despite his apparent pain.
Another spasm appeared to shake Anthony's body, this time
dropping him to the floor. Martin looked to the students and
shrugged. They held onto desks, seats, and notebooks, knuckles
universally white, not understanding what they saw. The one person
who did understand spoke softly.
"Cyanide," June Kendall said, standing up carefully and walking
to the front of the room. "Marie and I put a sizable quantity of it
into the drugs we found in his house."
Anthony's eyes looked up toward her as he spasmed again, a
mixture of pain, hatred, and other less pure emotions; whatever attack
he made on her in that instant failed, and his eyes closed.
Martin looked at his wife. June shook her head quickly. "It
will take about another minute, but I doubt he'll regain
consciousness."
For the next several minutes they watched as Anthony's breathing
slowed, then stopped. Even after there was no sign of life, no one
made a sound for long minutes.
Finally Martin turned back to the class. His voice was soft, but
carried in the silence.
"It would appear, ladies and gentlemen, that this lesson is
over."
______________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a graduate student in computer science at
Oregon State University. He is generally acknowledged to have gone
insane trying to decide on a plural form of "Teletrix." He would
like to thank his fans for their electronic flurry of mail, but this
is the LAST Teletrix story he intends to produce for a while.
kempkec@ure.cs.orst.edu
______________________________________________________________________
If you enjoyed Quanta, you might want to
check out the following publications also
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Athene is a free network "magazine" devoted to amateur fiction
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Please indicate which format (ASCII or PostScript) you prefer to to
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The Magazine of the Dargon Project Editor: Dafydd
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and inspired
by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by David
"Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The Dargon Project
centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon in the far reaches
of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named Makdiar, and as such
contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword and sorcery flavor.
DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file,
text-only format. For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL
to the editor, Dafydd, at the userid White@DUVM.BitNet. This request
should contain your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid internet
address) as well as your full name. InterNet (all non-BitNet sites)
subscribers will receive their issues in Mail format. BitNet users
have the option of specifying the file transfer format you prefer
(either DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all
electronic subscriptions are Free!
____________________________
QQQQQ tt
QQ QQ tttttt Staff
QQ QQ uu uu aaaa nnnn tt aaaa ____________________________
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa
QQ QQ uu uu aa aa nn nn tt aa aa Daniel K. Appelsuist
QQQQQQ uuu aaaaa nn nn tt aaaaa Editor/Tech. Director
QQQ Norman S. Murray
Editorial Assistant
____________________________________________ Todd Williamson
Proofreader
July 1990 Volume II, Issue 3 Jay Laefer
____________________________________________ Additional Proofreading
Articles
Quanta is Copyright (c) 1990
Looking Ahead by Daniel K. Appelquist.
Daniel K. Appelquist This magazine may be
archived, reproduced
and/or distributed under the
Serials condition that it is left
intact and that no additions
The Harrison Chapters or changes are made to it.
Jim Vassilakos
The works within this
magazine are the sole
Short Fiction property of their respective
authors. No further use of
Alter Origin their works is permitted
Phillip Nolte without their explicit
consent. All stories in this
Alice Through the Flames magazine are fiction. No
Roy Stead actual persons are
designated by name or
Dice of Human Bones: The Death of Payter character. Any similarity is
Ryan S. Borgstorm is coincidental.
The Milk of Human Kindness All submissions should be
Christopher Kempke sent to one of the following
addresses:
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
quanta@andrew.BITNET
All requests for back issues
queries about subscriptions
letters or comments should
be sent to the same address.
______________________________________________ ____________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ok. So I was a bit over-zealous last issue. I admit it. Starting this
issue, I'm going to try and think small, or at least _smaller_. Postscript
subscribers especially should find this and future issues more manageble (also
due to the fact that I've switched over to a much more efficient dvi to
postscript converter (DVIPS from Radical Eye software.) Quanta's form seems to
have "fused" itself, but I'm still open to suggestions if anyone's interested
in making them. PostScript subscribers may also notice the lack of a picture
title page this issue. Well, the title page gave so many people trouble that I
decided to omit it. I would like to run title pages in future issues, but I'm
afraid I'm only going to be able to use pure postscript. If you'd like to
submit a cover page for Quanta, feel free. It doesn't have to necessarilly
have anything to do with any of the stories.
This issue, I'm printing the first submission I've received from the UK,
`Alice Through the Flames' by Roy Stead. I hope to publish more of Roy's
material in the future, and I'm always interested in submissions from the UK
and other European countries, although, as I had to respond to one Swedish
would-be Quanta writer, I only accept submissions in English.
As a side note, there is an electronically distributed fiction magazine for
the Scandanavian community. It is called `Volven' and more information on it
may be obtained from its editor, Rune Johansen at the address
rune.johansen@odin.re.nta.uninett I'm always happy to hear about new magazines
of this sort springing up. I truly believe we're on the vanguard of a new era
of information exchange.
I'd like to stress the fact that I always need submissions. Right now there
are no extra stories hanging around for further issues. If there is a next
issue it will be because _you_, the Quanta subscribers, send me material.
Quanta was originally founded as a forum for amateur creative writing, and
amateur writers are the only ones that can keep it going.
There actually is one submission that I'm sure will appear in the next
issue, actually. That's the second part to Jim Vassilakos's `The Harrison
Chapters' the first part of which is published in this issue. Normally, I'm
wary of serialized works, but chapters two and three are waiting to be printed
in the next two issues, and, by that time, Jim should be finished with chapter
four (at least). So look forward to those.
Correspondence
I was very intrigued by the results of the poll from last issue. Be assured
that your opinions have been counted. I'll act on them as much as is possible.
I wish to thank everyone for all the positive feedback. Comments like "you are
doing a great job, continue!" were not uncommon in the poll replies, and I
really appreciate that. Of course, those of you who thought the magazine was
bad probably didn't think it was worth sending in a reply, but what the hell...
Dontin Wang from Grinnel College in Grinnel, Iowa writes:
>I won't be here over the summer to subscribe to Quanta. In fact, I will be
>graduating, and will longer be subscribing at this account... would it be
>possible to subscribe to Quanta in a more traditional manner? That is, can I
>get an annual subscription to Quanta in printed form, mailed to my postal
>address?
>
>If so, please send me the details. I would appreciate it very much.
>
>Dontin Wang
>
>WANG@GRIN1.BITNET
The answer is that I will send printed copies of Quanta. What you have to
to is send me a SASE (A self addressed large envelope with enough postage on
it, usually around $2.00) and a check for $3.00 to cover printing costs and my
time. It is in my long range plans to make Quanta available in printed form,
possibly through a small printing house. It will still be free to get Quanta
electronically though.
Also, we have a reply to Norman Murray's article entitled _Biotech in and
out of SF_ (publushed in the February 1990 issue).
davidsond%ac%csc@csc.isu.edu writes:
>In the Feb. 1990 issue of Quanta, talking of genetics and ethics, Norm Murray
>wrote...
> >Is it
> >morally responsible to "dial-up" a baby to order - hair, and eye
> >color, IQ, height, etc...? These are the questions that must be
> >answered by the time we get to this level of technology. Did you know
> >that in the U.S.A. it is legal to patent a new life form?
>
>
>An interesting twist to genetic patenting was heard April 10, 1990 by the
>California Supreme Court, deciding whether a leukemia patient can sue for a
>share of the profits from an anti-cancer drug derived from his blood cells.
>John Moore, a 45-year old businessman from Seattle, contends that blood cells
>from his cancerous spleen were wrongfully used by the University of California
>two researchers from UCLA, and two biotechnology companies that helped develop
>the drug. Moore said he is merely trying to defend "the rights of the
>individual patient in the case where the physician-researcher is also a
>businessman-entrepreneur." Outside of the courthouse, Moore added "Without my
>knowledge or consent, the doctors and the research institutions used a part of
>me for their own gain. They stole something from me."
>
>University attorney Allen Wagner argued that if justices rule that Moore has
>property rights to his (former) tissue, then there will be serious setbacks in
>the development of lifesaving drugs. Attorney Peter Abrahams, lawyer for
>defendant Shirley Quan (a UCLA research assistant), added that such a decision
>would have "a devastating impact on medical research." Strongest arguments
>from defense lawyers seemed to be against having to negotiate and pay for
>human tissue used in research and development.
>
>
>Opinion:
>
>If we accept paying pharmaceutical royalties, what is so horrible about a
>royalty to the genetic-lottery winner who happens to carry a unique strain
>within him. It seems naive and unreasonable to believe that such a fee would
>end genetic research. But the alternative? Without such `ownership rights'
>to our own genetic strains and tissue, larger problems are tucked within those
>Norm Murray discussed. For example, Murray would no doubt be shocked to
>discover (on his clone's twenty-first birthday) that the clone 'belongs' to
>his surgeon.
>
"Keep those letters coming," I suppose would be the appropriate thing to say
here. But seriously, do. It is of great help when working on a magazine like
Quanta to know that _someone_ is paying attention. Thanks.
DKA
______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
Alter Origin
by Phillip Nolte
Copyright (c) 1990
_______________________________________________________________________________
It was a damned good thing that the coffee in my cup was only lukewarm, or I
might have been painfully scalded as it sloshed over my hand and soaked the
front of my lab coat. The ship lurched again, and I grabbed for something solid
as I felt the familiar flip-flop in my stomach and the brief disorientation
that follows a shift into normal space. Our Whitney Overdrive engine had shut
down! Even I knew that something had gone wrong. That wasn't supposed to
happen. Not here, not now. Suddenly the bridge was all business.
"Stay out of the way Piper," the captain snapped as he motioned me out of
the way. "We've got a problem. Haynes, run a check on those Whitney circuits.
I wanna know just what the hell happened! Now!"
The young Lieutenant's fingers clicked frantically over the keys of his
control board. Seconds later he said,"I... I've traced it to the mass
detector, Sir." More clicking. "Here comes the readout! The drive is fine,
it's not a malfunction." His relief was obvious. "We've come within minimum
safe distance of a sizable mass concentration. The safety override shut off
the drive because a deflected course or impact was imminent. We..."
"Enough!" the captain interrupted. "I'm well aware of what happens when you
mix hyperdrives with gravity wells, Haynes. I wanna know what the devil is out
there! In case you haven't noticed, the nearest star is still over five
light-years away!" He turned to me. "Piper?"
"I'll go see what the scientific staff can find, Harry. I'll get back to
you ASAP!" The problems I was having with Evans, the other chief science
officer, were temporarily forgotten as I hurried back to the science section to
mobilize the staff.
There is no shortage of strange things in our universe, but it became
apparent over the next few hours that we had found something really odd. We
had almost collided with a solar system of sorts. It was a miniature, with the
orbit of the outermost satellite only about three astronomical units in radius,
but what made the system really strange was the central body. It was an
utterly cold, black, unlit ball of rock and frozen gas more like a planet than
a star. Evans is the cosmologist, maybe he can tell you if systems like this
are supposed to exist, I can't. In spite of its ridiculously small size, this
dark "micro-dwarf" had enough mass to hold five small planets captive and to
activate the safety overrides in our hyperdrive system. We did find some weak
radio activity when we really began to look for it but it was no wonder this
little system had never been found--it produced no visible light and virtually
no detectable radiation. Unless you almost ran into it, like we did, you'd
never know it was there!
We reported the coordinates of a new navigational hazard.
Headquarters, in their infinite wisdom, thought it was unique enough to
study for a day or two before we continued our mission. As chief biologist, I
found myself with little to do except make sure that Evans and the
planetology-geology staff had enough coffee and food to keep them going. We
had only a little time to do a lot of work which meant they were so busy that
they weren't even stopping to sit down and eat during the regular ship's mess.
In the midst of this flurry of activity, I was surprised to get a message that
Evans wanted to see me in his quarters. I checked the coffee supply and tidied
things up a bit, just to keep him waiting. The whole time I couldn't help but
wonder what he wanted with me, a biologist, something he considered to be a
lower life form.
Evans, Dr. Richard C., was the ship's cosmologist, exogeologist and, along
with me, one of two chief scientists. He was also, without a doubt, the most
irritating son of a bitch in the third galactic quadrant! Oh, he was damned
bright and he had all the right credentials, but his true talent lay in his
unfailing ability to find a person's weak point--a personality trait or speech
problem like a stammer or something--and then confront that person with it! At
least he didn't pick favorites. At one time or another, each and every one of
us had endured the ravages of his acid wit and razor-sharp tongue. My own
personal problem was with grammar or, more correctly, the lack thereof.
Our ship, the Galactic Probe #25 (christened, obviously, by some romantic
with an unbounded imagination), was an ungainly collection of habitation pods
and utility modules connected by a maze of access tubes, the whole of which was
laced to the large, elongated central cylinder of the power and command module
with a jumble of support struts and tensor cables. "Strictly functional" or
"starkly utilitarian" are terms that come to mind--she was, in a word, ugly!
But the field generated by her Whitney drive is nearly a perfect sphere and the
shape of the vessel is unimportant so long as it fits within the confines of
the field's boundaries. Beautiful or not, G-probe 25 was home to a regular
ship's crew of eighteen and a scientific staff of twenty-five. At the time of
the incident, we were six months into a two-year mission to catalogue and
collect preliminary data on uncharted worlds. With luck, some of them would be
fit for colonization. Now this is damned interesting work even in the worst of
times, but we're all still a bit numb from the shock of our big discovery, the
one that could make us all famous. Almost as shocking is the fact that the
landmark paper will be co-authored by Evans and me. Evans and Piper, what an
unlikely collaboration! I haven't quite gotten used to the idea myself!
We were on our way to "Morley's spearhead", a jagged star formation in a
uncharted region way out past the remote Naccobus system. This delta-shaped
cluster contained twenty or so "G" spectral class stars, the very kind we were
looking for. We were about ten light-years out from our last refuel and
provision stop at the New Ceylon colony. Hyperdrive transport was pretty
routine stuff, automatic systems did most of the work, and we more or less had
free run of the ship during our off-duty hours. In fact, I had been on the
bridge chatting with Captain Stewart about how to handle the morale problems we
were having because of Evans when the Whitney incident occurred.
When I knew I couldn't put it off any longer, I made my way through the maze
of corridors to Evans' quarters. I composed myself as best I could, took a
deep breath and punched the courtesy chime on his door, half hoping that he had
gone back to the geology module and was no longer in. No such luck! He
answered the door immediately.
"Ah, Piper!" he said, guiding me in. "Glad you could come!" He noticed the
brown stains on my coat. In the excitement following our discovery, I had
forgotten all about the spilled coffee during the incident on the bridge. "Tch
tch, Dr. Piper, you really should be more careful about your appearance! A
chief scientist must set a good example at all times, you know!"
That was pure Evans--take advantage of any opportunity to irritate, no
matter what the situation. I chose to ignore the jibe. "What can I do for
you, Dick?" I said. I knew he hated the nickname so, of course, I used it
whenever I had the chance.
"Have a seat," he said. I had barely sat down when he stuffed a printout
into my hands. "Check these readings on the third planet, I think you'll find
them interesting."
I skimmed over the figures for planetary circumference, mass, orbital radius
and such, nothing interesting there. What caught my eye were the unexpectedly
energetic spectrophotometer readings. "It looks like ... atmosphere!" My
astonishment was genuine. "Very thin, a lot of sulfur compounds ... volcanic?"
"Correct! Perhaps you missed your calling, my young friend, you seem to
have an aptitude for planetology," he said.
I shrugged, not taking that bait either, and looked back at the printouts.
"I don't understand why there's volcanic activity on that planet," I said,
shaking my head. "This system ought to be stone cold dead. Somethin' ain't
right!" In spite of myself, I was becoming interested.
"Isn't right," he corrected. "But the explanation is really very simple,
Piper. It is a consequence of tidal effects. The planets on either side of it
are sufficiently massive and pass near enough to keep it under constantly
changing gravitational stresses. The alternate stretching and contracting
generate more than enough heat to keep the planet's core molten. Actually it's
nothing new, we have a similar situation in the earth home system."
"Yeah ...," I interrupted tentatively. "I read something once ... of
course! A moon of one of the gas giants--Jupiter, I think. The original
discovery caused quite a stir!"
"I'm impressed, Dr. Piper," he said grudgingly, cocking his left eyebrow.
"It was volcanic activity on Jupiter's moon, Io. Perhaps there is hope for you
yet!"
He ignored my glare as he continued, "But there is much more. Look at these
infrared photographs and the accompanying spectrophotometer readings. What do
you see?"
I looked them over carefully before replying. The pictures were close-ups
of a valley--A deep and very regular crevasse between two fantastic mountain
ranges that looked like it had been carved out by a blow from some huge cosmic
battleaxe. Spectacular scenery is the rule on small, low-gravity worlds but
the topography of this rugged little planet was in a class by itself! The
photos were open to interpretation but the spectrophotometer readings were
unmistakable.
"Water vapor!" I said, and shrugged. "Damned impressive, Dick, but not so
terribly surprising, considering the temperatures produced by an active
volcano!"
"Not just vapor," he said. "Look again. Liquid! That valley may be deep
enough to actually have some atmospheric pressure. Based on the preliminary
data, I believe it is sufficient to allow the existence of liquid water."
I looked again at the data, "Maybe... kinda hard to tell for sure!" I said,
shaking my head. "You could be right."
"Indeed I could," he replied, smugly. "Which brings us to why I requested
this meeting. I need your authorization to launch one of the bioprobes."
"A bioprobe? What for? You can get all the chemical profiles you need from
the instrumentation staff," I replied. "Besides, we've only got two probes, I
can't risk one for this."
Of course, I could have given him one on the spot but, if you remember, we
weren't on the best of terms. I was going to need a reason.
"I know they can give me all the chemical information I want," he said.
"But, if it's there, I'd like to visually document the existence of liquid
water in such an unlikely environment as this."
"You really think you're gonna find water on that godforsaken rock, don't
you?" I snorted. "Well, I'm sorry, Dick, I can't authorize a probe launch just
for that."
He seemed unperturbed by my reaction. In fact, it was almost like he
expected it--or even wanted it.
"Very well then, how about a wager?" he asked calmly.
"Huh? What sort of wager?" I asked warily.
"How about this?" he ventured. "If we find liquid water, you and I shall
exchange lodgings. You know that mine are woefully inadequate for someone of
my stature. As a bonus, because of your involvement in the discovery, you
would be awarded second author on the resulting paper. It's the least I could
do."
"And in the unlikely event that you're wrong?" I asked, making no effort to
hide the sarcasm.
"I'm not as out of touch as you might think," he said. "If we are
unsuccessful, I shall keep my observations regarding you and the rest of the
staff to myself. In short, Dr. Piper, you can't lose. Either you get second
author on what will be a very important paper, or you get my silence for the
duration of our mission."
"Done!" I said. "I hope you haven't started packing!"
"The authorization forms are here, ready for your signature. We should be
able to launch within the hour." This was something totally new. Evans was
actually smiling, something I had never seen him do before!
The feud we were having was absurd, really. Stripped to the essentials, it
was just another of those eternal pissing contests about "who's entitled to
what because of their title or reputation or seniority or what-have-you" that
academic types seem to enjoy wasting so much of their time on. This one was
different only in detail.
For starters, Evans is quite a bit older than the rest the scientific staff
and the crew, by some twenty years or so. He's a short, scrawny and pompous
little bantam rooster of a man with sparse graying hair and sharp, pointy
features. He's not much to look at, but his professional accomplishments are
impressive.
He had left a prestigious teaching post on old earth--at Harvard, no
less--to, in his words, "Experience firsthand the excitement of discovery." He
had no trouble getting included on the survey mission; his credentials and his
connections were too good. Too bad for us that he was also in perfect health!
My own background is quite a bit different. I'm a big guy, almost two
meters tall, easygoing to a fault and, unless I'm really excited, kind of
slow-moving. I was born and educated on Holden, one of the remote colonial
worlds. All modesty aside, I'm accurate and methodical, and I'm one hell of a
good scientist (you have to be, or you don't go on one of these missions) but
my agricultural roots still show up in my speech occasionally--grist for Evans'
mill.
With such a contrast in backgrounds, I suppose that a clash of some sort
between us was bound to happen sometime, but the feud began soon after he
boarded ship--before I even met him! As chief scientists, we were allowed our
choice of G-probe's vacant quarters. It was just blind luck, but I had
reported for duty two days before he did. The room I chose was not only bigger
than his, but I also had a small forward viewport. It really wasn't much, but
his room had nothing but an ugly bulkhead and some curved walls and he made it
clear immediately that he wasn't happy about it. In fact, he'd been griping
about it for six long months. The wager was only his latest attempt to remedy
what he felt was an intolerable situation.
The coarsely hewn mountain ridges on either side of the valley and its
near-abysmal depth caused the low-lying atmosphere to be even denser than our
readings had first indicated. Fortunately the remote guidance systems on the
unmanned probe didn't rely solely on visible light because, in the glare of the
probe's lights, little showed on our video except a kind of billowing yellow
fog. It was hard to believe the printouts on how corrosive that stuff was;
good thing the probes were built to last. A search along the valley gave us an
intermittent view of an irregular slash of steaming and bubbling open
water--yes liquid water, Evans had won--between two jagged shorelines of
yellow-brown ice. It had been almost too easy.
"What do you say now, Dr. Piper?" he asked. He was, if anything, even more
unbearable when he was flushed with victory.
"Congratulations, Dick!" I said. "Looks like you win."
Under any other circumstances I would have been really excited about such an
incredible find. Instead, I felt awful, picturing in my mind an Evans gone
mad, swollen and purple with pride, insulting everyone in sight; and us with no
way to stop him! The next year and a half was truly going to be hell!
The torn and heaved shoreline had an unstable, jumbled appearance and I
couldn't help wondering how long any of the features we were seeing would
remain. Still, it was a remarkable scene, possessed of a stark and brutal
beauty all its own, composed as it was of steaming vapor clouds which
alternately obscured and then revealed the coarse soil and jagged rock-strewn
landscape. And the colors! Abundant deposits of sulfur and iron compounds
created a panorama of various yellows and browns that was marked here and there
with an occasional smudge or smear of dirty orange or even red.
It occurred to me then that we were gazing upon a scene that had never
existed before; that the intrusion of our harsh and unwelcome light was the
first that had ever been known here except for the weak and inconsequential
rays from the so-distant stars. In spite of my mood, the scientist in me was
stirred to action at the sight of it.
"This is absolutely incredible," I said. "You know, while we're here, it
might be a good idea to take a look around. What say we immerse the probe and
get some shots of the volcanic vents that keep this water warm, Dick? It would
add some mighty impressive pictures to our paper." He nodded agreement.
Surprisingly, when we plunged the probe into the water, the telemetry
indicated a temperature that was just a tad above freezing. All that steaming
and bubbling had led us to believe that the water would be much warmer. The
video monitor displayed a clouded and murky picture. After a bit of fiddling
with the image enhancement circuitry the view improved, enough so we could see
pretty well.
We guided the probe down deep into the dirty water to where we thought the
actual volcanic vents were likely to be. I maneuvered the probe in as close as
I dared to a furiously bubbling and frothing stream of activity but the heat
and violent action near the first vent we chose made it too risky to approach
too closely. No luck there. The probes were tough, but not that tough! Ditto
the second vent. I checked the chronometer and scowled, we only had time for a
couple more tries.
At a depth of about 150 meters, we found a smaller, less active vent for our
third look, one we could approach more closely without endangering the probe.
Suddenly a warning light on the probe control panel began flashing insistently.
"What the hell?" I exclaimed as I quickly skimmed over the monitors,
looking for the problem.
"What is it, Piper?" asked Evans, with some concern, as he crossed the room
to look at the monitors over my shoulder.
Across the screen flashed an unbelievable message:
Lifeform detected... Lifeform detected... Instructions requested...
No, it was not a malfunction! Believe it or not, in this most inhospitable
of places, in the depths of some impossible fjord that shouldn't even have
existed, in a tiny, frigid mote of an almost solar system, we had found life!
After a short shocked silence there was pandemonium in the science section.
People were shouting and throwing printouts and coffee cups and embracing one
another. I sat at the probe console and just shook my head, dumbfounded.
There was an entire ecosystem down there. Truthfully, except for the
unlikely spot we were looking, they weren't much to write home about. I mean,
we hadn't found some new civilization or anything. In fact, they were
downright primitive. The largest and most impressive was a sort of
invertebrate tube-worm about a meter long whose main anatomical feature was its
huge mouth. Unfortunately we have only a photographic record of these, they
were just too big and too fragile to bring up. Later, I did a detailed
analysis on several of the microscopic forms that were brought back to the ship
by the probe. No big surprises. Except for some obvious modifications for the
anaerobic environment and the high sulfur content of the water they lived in,
they displayed an almost boringly familiar carbon-based biochemistry.
Then things began to get interesting.
A routine search of the literature in the ship's computer library turned up
references to similar forms. Nearly identical ecosystems had been found a
number of times near volcanic vents deep in old earth's oceans, beginning in
the late 1900's, nearly two-hundred and fifty years ago. Evans would approve,
the first one had been found by a geological survey team. The team had
stumbled upon the organisms by accident, during their studies on plate
tectonics.
Further searching turned up two or three entries from several other
inhabited planets where someone had bothered to look. In each case, they had
been dismissed as interesting curiosities and forgotten.
But none of those guys had the same information that I did. Given the
unique set of circumstances surrounding our discovery, it dawned on me that
what we had found was more than just a curiosity. In fact, maybe we had just
found the final piece of a cosmic puzzle!
Our survey complete, G-Probe 25 shifted back into overdrive and continued on
towards the spearhead. I barely noticed. I was feverishly busy trying to put
together a new theory. I wanted to be done before I met with Evans to settle
our wager. It was going to be an interesting meeting. I'm not particularly
fond of crow and I was sure he would try to serve up a generous portion. My
only hope was to try and use my new and revolutionary theory to somehow turn
the tables on him.
He was positively beaming, humming to himself, when I entered his room. We
both sat down, facing each other across his desk.
"Well," he opened. "We certainly have made some interesting discoveries,
haven't we?"
"We certainly have," I countered, my expression betraying nothing.
There was a short, charged silence before he continued.
"Tell me, Piper, have you grasped the full significance of this discovery?"
"I'm not sure, Dick," I replied. "Suppose you enlighten me"
"My pleasure!" he said. "With the discovery of life on our planetoid it is
now obvious that the central body of that little system was once luminous. Yes
I know, from the data we've collected it doesn't look like it was, which means
only that what happened out here won't fit with what we presently know of
cosmology." He stopped and shrugged. "It appears that we shall simply have to
modify the theories, an activity that I'm looking forward to with a great deal
of relish."
I was hoping he would say something like that!
"Are you sure about that?" I asked.
"Absolutely."
"That surprises me," I said.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I think there are variables in this situation that could cast some
serious doubt on your solution to this problem," I said reasonably. He made no
effort to hide his irritation.
"I suggest that you leave the cosmology to me, Dr. Piper. Believe me, I'm
absolutely sure about this."
"Sure enough that you'd care to make a wager on it?" I asked, with an
outward calm that belied the seething impatience within. I was like a chess
player who had offered to sacrifice a piece, knowing that the outcome of the
game hangs in the balance; hoping fervently that his opponent will take the
poisoned bait. To my delight, Evans bit hard.
"What did you have in mind?" he asked.
"If I give you an explanation which doesn't alter the current views on
cosmology," I said. " I will remain in my present quarters and you will keep
your unkind thoughts about me and the other scientists to yourself. If I'm
wrong, you get the room and I waive any claim I had for authorship on your
paper."
"Are you sure, Piper?" he asked. "This will no doubt be a widely read
paper, one that is almost sure to make us famous."
I dismissed that with a wave of my hand.
"Very well, I agree," he said. "But, I warn you, this had better be good!"
Inwardly, I felt a small measure of relief. There was still hope! He had
agreed to take the wager! I had been counting on his arrogance to make him
overconfident. Fortunately, he hadn't disappointed me.
"Oh, I think it is, Dick," I said. "Are you ready?" He nodded. This was
it, the moment of truth! I had prepared my argument well, but had I done it
well enough to convince the skeptical Harvard professor? There was only one
way to find out. I cleared my throat, stood up and began.
"Theories on how inorganic matter makes the transition from ordinary
chemicals to the unique state that we call `life' involve the action of things
like tidal pools, lighting and rain but, probably most important of all, solar
energy." He nodded agreement, I continued. "The organisms created by these
mechanisms then go on to diversify and populate their respective worlds.
Eventually they will evolve and adapt until they occupy every available
ecological niche. If we go according to these theories, the creatures that
were found by the deep sea volcanic vents on earth, on Heard's world and on
Genitia IV are considered to be degenerate or altered types of these mainstream
solar- energy-derived lifeforms, degenerate types that just happen to inhabit a
very exotic ecological niche. Our creatures fit into the same category."
"This is your revolutionary theory, Piper?"
"No, Dick. It's important background information. Just be patient for a
couple more minutes. Here's the point. What if our creatures are different?"
He gave me an angry glare.
"Different how?"
I had his full attention now and he was beginning to look a bit worried. I
plunged on.
"Let's go over the evidence one more time. As near as we can determine, the
primary of this system is not and never has been a star, correct?"
He thought for a moment before replying. "It would appear that this is
true, Piper, but as I said..." I interrupted him.
"And by its intrinsic velocity and direction it has never been near a star?"
"Not for several billion years anyway. But..."
"Hang on, Dick, I'm just starting to roll. This will all make sense in a
few minutes." He nodded reluctantly and I continued. "If this is true, it
follows that the life forms we found here came into being and evolved to their
present level of development using a purely geothermic energy source--an energy
source provided by the unique celestial mechanics of this weird little
pseudo-solar system." Evans was frowning--a good sign.
"But there's more. If no `solar-derived forms' ever existed out here for
our creatures to degenerate from, a vital bit of information has been made
available to us, one that allows us to strike out in a bold new direction. I
propose an alternative view, that life on earth and all of the other
carbon-based forms we have encountered in this galaxy were actually spawned
from primitive creatures much like these."
I had him! He wore a look of worried astonishment as his mind reeled with
the possibilities. But I wasn't done yet!
"Think of it, Evans! All you need is water and a volcanic vent and the rest
follows. The water near a vent ranges in temperature from boiling to near
freezing and the vents provide even higher temperatures plus a continuous
stream of chemical raw materials of all sorts. In short, we have the perfect
cauldron for brewing life! We have probably just found the solution to one of
science's great remaining mysteries! If this theory is valid, life is probably
more abundant in our galaxy than anyone ever dreamed!" I threw a hard copy of
the draft I had been working on down in front of him. "The paper shall be
entitled `Geothermotrophs: an alternate origin for primordial life'. You'll
notice that I have you listed as second author. I felt it was the least I
could do." Evans looked like he had swallowed an asteroid!
The scientific establishment will no doubt be arguing over the merits of our
paper for some time, but I've been over it from every angle; I think we're on
to something. Evans and I may someday be mentioned in the same breath as
Darwin and Pasteur. True to his word, not a single insult has passed Evans'
lips since he was on the losing end of our little wager.
There is a footnote to the story though. One that came about shortly after
the incident. I'm beginning to get a little worried. Maybe we went too far.
Evans hasn't been out of his cabin, except to eat, for several days now and
when he does come out, he doesn't talk at all to me or to anyone else. We
didn't think he'd take it this badly. Remember the large-mouthed tubeworm we
found on the little volcanic planet? Well, the biological staff all got
together and voted.
They named it after Evans!
_______________________________________________________________________________
Phillip Nolte is a potato pathologist who enjoys science fiction so much that
he has to create it to get enough! Alter Origin was conceived several years
ago after watching one of those National Geographic specials on TV and seeing
the volcanic vents with the ecosystems around them. Wow, degenerate life
forms! Or are they? Or are we the degenerate forms? Seemed like a good idea
for a story and there you have it. Phil is currently working on getting a
piece of his into a small press magazine called Figment so you might soon see
him in non-electronic print.
nu020061@vm1.nodak.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
Alice Through the Flames
by Roy Stead
Copyright (c) 1990
_______________________________________________________________________________
Another day at the office over with, Colin had decided to settle down with a
good book. The year before, he had had installed a `real fire.' As he had said
at the time, "It gives the place a homely look-- with a log fire blazing
merrily away in the living room, you can really _believe_ that an your home is
an impregnable fortress, gallantly keeping the elements at bay whether you be
sleeping or awake." Colin smiled to himself, as he often did at these moments,
and gave thanks that his wife had taken Jason, the two year-old, to her parents
for the weekend. A long, pleasant and-- above all-- _quiet_ weekend stretched
out before him as he lowered his body into the comfy armchair by the fire.
Colin shifted slightly, to get as comfortable as possible, then adjusted the
table lamp to _just_ the right angle before picking up the book and beginning
to read...
Just as the hero was about to decapitate the gargantuan nine-headed beast,
Colin's attention was diverted by the sound of someone moving around in the
next room. "Strange, there's nobody home. Maybe Karen had to come back early,"
Colin said to himself. "God, I hope not-- I think I'd prefer burglars!" The
middle-aged civil servant hoisted his bulk from the chair and wandered into the
other room to investigate, pausing only to procure a poker from beside the
fire. "Just in case..."
"Odd," thought Colin as he approached the door. the sounds from within had
started to collect into words. Speech. In a very strange accent, but--
nonetheless-- English. He slowly opened the door and, poker brandished at the
ready, strode into the room. "Who are you, and what are you doing in my home?"
Hardly an original line, but then nobody awards points for creativity at these
moments.
Colin stopped. There were four people in the kitchen. Three of them were
arguing over the toaster, while the fourth-- a tall, and rather attractive,
blonde woman-- looked on. Deliberately and carefully, the blonde turned to face
Colin.
"We come in peace." she stated, simply. It looked like cliches were to be
the order of the day. Was this some kind of joke? She didn't look to Colin like
she was joking but, nonetheless, her words-- and that weird accent!
Colin hesitated a moment, then: "Do you, now? Do you usually `come in peace'
by breaking into someone's house, and ransacking their possessions?"
"I must apologize for my friends. They are being,perhaps, a little...
overzealous..." The three, dressed-- as was the blonde woman-- in brown,
discoloured rags and bereft of shoes, now seemed to be in the those of a
disagreement over whose turn it was to drink from the cold water tap. The
blonde followed Colin's gaze, looked at her friends then returned her stare to
the house's owner. She shrugged.
"Perhaps I should explain myself," she continued.
"Yes, I think maybe you ought to!" snapped Colin, who now looked on, bemused
as the strange blonde's three companions had a fight over the contents of the
icebox.
Unperturbed, the blonde introduced herself as, "Just call me `Alice'." and
went on to describe how she and her three companions were refugees from Colin's
own future.
"Oh. Of course," burst in Colin, "I had somebody from the twenty-fifth
century for tea last week. Why didn't you say so? Perhaps you would like a
quick cup of coffee, before going back to battle daleks or take a spin around
Saturn's moons?" His voice cracked, as he shrieked, "Do you think I was born
yesterday? You come in here, argue about who gets what in my home then expect
me to believe any cock and bull story you care to spin about being time
travelers? Well, you're not time travellers!"
"How can you be so sure?" broke in the blonde, Alice, smoothly.
Surprised by the simple audacity of the question, Colin was momentarily
nonplussed, before spluttering: "Well, for one thing, time travellers would be
better dressed!"
"Look, just hear me out, then-- if you still don't believe me-- we'll leave
you. Okay?"
"No, it's _not_ bloody okay! Get out now, or I'll call the police!"
"We're not going. _I_ am not going. Not until you've at least heard us out."
Colin sighed. He'd had a wonderfully peaceful weekend planned, and it seemed to
be falling apart about his ears. But he resigned himself to hearing Alice's
story, and led her-- followed by her retinue-- into the living room, where he
settled down in his comfy chair and awaited the tale. At least there would be
some entertainment - if only he could find the popcorn...
"Picture it: North America, ravaged by war and plagued-- yes, _literally_
plagued-- by disease. The Statue of Liberty toppled like a house of cards, the
remains used by destitutes as stepping stones across the Hudson. The Capitol's
roof destroyed, caved in by the backwash from an atomic blast. The Golden Gate
Bridge no longer capable of supporting the weight even of an anorexic ant. The
United States now disunited, and battling amongst themselves for what remains
of the spoils of war, while Mexico and Canada, themselves war-torn lands, sit
on the sidelines, occassionally swooping, vulture-like, on the carcasses of
shattered principalities. Picture it, if you can. That is the world I-- we--
left behind. And, unless we can do something-- unless we can convince _you_ to
help us-- then the war which began the nightmare will come to pass. And The
United States will be destroyed, along with the rest of the world."
Colin, mouth gaping, stared a moment at Alice. Then, taking ahold of
himself, shook his head as if to clear Alice's description from his mind.
"You're serious." It was a statement, not a question, but Alice nodded
nonetheless. Colin picked up the phone and dialled, carefully: 9... 1... 1.
"Hello, emergency services? I'd like a-- what the Hell... ? What? Oh, never
mind..." He put the phone down, replacing the receiver in its cradle with all
the care of a raw-egg juggler. Emulating the studied patience and concentration
of a Zen master, Colin watched the receiver settle in its bed before looking up
to check what had so startled him a moment before. It was still there. Or,
rather, _they_ were still there. The original group of four had multiplied to
eight _while Colin was watching_. Nobody had entered the room-- not by
conventional means, anyway. Yet four people had... appeared. Colin was, to say
the least, mildly surprised.
The four newcomers were dressed far more smartly than the first arrivals.
Perhaps they came from a different time period. Colin caught the thought. Time
travellers? Well, let's face it-- either the second group teleported in, which
is impossible, or they arrived via a time machine, which is impossible. The
difference lay in the fact that they _claimed_ the latter. And so the pendulum
of decision hung in that direction, for the moment.
Colin looked the latest group over. The clothes were definately plusher than
Alice's band-- they wore loose-fitting robes, after the fashion of Ancient
Roman togas-- each robe being a single solid block of a bright colour: red,
blue, green and... a tall, statuesque brunette wore a white `toga.'
That brunette turned to look at Colin, as he gasped in astonishment. Alice!
The two Alices noticed each other then-- and paused to look one another over.
Ragged Alice was the first to speak: "You dyed your hair. It doesn't suit you."
"Who _are_ you? No-- don't answer that," began the be-toga'ed Alice, "I know
who you are-- you're me. But how? And why do you have such goddawful clothing?
Are you me from my future? If so, why are you here?"
"I was about to ask you the same thing. Since I have no memory of having
been you-- and you seem to have none of having been me-- perhaps you would be
kind enough to tell me why you are here?"
"You know as well as I why I'm here-- your presence indicates that your
research has led you to the same conclusion to which mine led me. This is a
junction point. To be more precise, this _man_ is a junction point. His actions
can start, or prevent, a world war."
Colin burst in, "What are you two talking about? I'm no world leader - how
can I start off Armageddon? I'm just a government clerk. I'm good at my job,
sure. But that's as far as it goes."
The trampesque Alice broke into Colin's monotribe: "Tomorrow, a memo will
cross your desk marked `SFF-524G/Q.' If you fail to pass it on, the Pentagon
will be unaware of a small, but significant, item of information. This
ignorance will lead to a breakdown in communications and then, gradually, to a
small conflict between states within what you know as the United States of
America. As further states join the dispute, so the conflict will escalate
until those states which currently maintain a nuclear arsenal-- in the name of
the National Defense-- use them on those regions which they view as enemies.
The automated defence computers will register a first strike on US soil, and
launch a counter-attack-- against the Eastern Bloc. The resulting conflict
destroys most Life on Earth."
"My God," Colin breathed, "For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost... Well,
I must ensure that I don't lose that memo! Will that make things alright? Will
that stop the war?"
"We think so," began The war-torn Alice, "But, just to be sure..."
"Wait," blurted the more refined Alice, "Think this through. Sure, there
will be no war. But-- well, perhaps I'd better tell you why _I_ am here...
"In _my_ history, which seems to be different from yours," she gestured in
the other Alice's direction, "the memo got through. There was no war, and
consequently no massive investment in research-- How long from now is your war
due to begin, if the memo fails to get through?" The question was directed at
the other Alice.
"Twenty-four years before the opening of hostilities, One hundred and
sixteen years before the first atomic weapon is used. Why?"
"Just a thought. Don't you realize that mankind _needs_ this war? If there
is no war, then there is no impetous to survive-- to _live_. War means money
poured into research-- defense systems, weapons systems, computers, space. No
war, no research. No research, no advancement. In short, stagnation. The human
race will reach its demise gradually, through apathy. Nobody caring enough to
_do_ anything anymore. The world ending, to borrow one of your phrases," she
nods at Colin, "Not with a bang, but a whimper."
Colin, half out of his chair, sank slowly back until he felt the cushions
enveloping his body, molding to his shape. "So," he said, eventually, "If I
send this memo through, then-- according to you," he pointed at the second
Alice, "there will be no war, and the human race will bore itself to death. If,
on the other hand, I withhold this memo, then _you_ say," He pointed at the
ragged, and now rather pensive, first Alice, "that there will come a world war
which will destroy the human race. Whichever I choose, the human race doesn't
seem to stand a chance."
Alice one's brow furrowed, as she thought furiously. Turning to the rather
flashily dressed Alice two, she said, "I've been thinking. Maybe a war would
be a good idea, after all-- at least then we go out with a bang-- a light show
which aliens might point to in their skies. A kind of last funeral pyre for
mankind."
The second Alice considered this a moment, before saying, "No, I think no
war would be better-- after all, humans _might_ recover from this period of
apathy, you know..."
"No-- war would be a good idea, we can re-build the world..."
"Uh uh. No war is better, that way, there's no _need_ to rebuild!"
Colin broke in, laughing, "Ladies! Ladies!" he shouted, "You've both done a
rapid volte-face, have you not? Why is this?" He silenced their explanations
with a wave of his hand," No, don't bother to lie - I can see it in your faces.
You've both realized what has just become clear to me. If you had succeeded in
your original mission, then my future would be altered. Your future would cease
to exist: _you_ would no longer be `real.' Instead, your counterpart-- the
woman you are arguing with at the moment-- would be in the `true' future.
However, now your pleas are not so much for the human race-- that seems doomed
either way-- but for your own existence."
The women looked sheepish. Colin was correct, and all of them knew it.
Walking across the room, Colin replaced the poker-- which he found he was still
gripping in his right hand-- in the stand beside the fire. He turned from the
flames and, with a wry smile, stated,
"Well, I will toss a coin to decide which future shall come about. Does
that seem reasonable to each of you?" Reluctantly, they nodded. Colin took a
quarter from his trouser pocket, then flipped it: "Heads, war; tails, peace."
Even raggedy Alice's cohorts stopped bickering over a toga, previously
belonging to a now-unconscious cohort of the other Alice long enough to watch
the coin come down. It span in the air, glinting brightly in the flames of
Colin's real fire like a single phoenix feather before hurtling toward the
carpet, and-- as it landed-- nobody in that room dared draw breath.
The coin landed on its edge.
"Well," came a familiar voice from a corner of the room. "It seems the human
race has a chance after all."
_______________________________________________________________________________
Roy Stead is a research assistant in quantum astrophysics at the
English University of Sussex. His hobbies include water skiing, Zen
Buddhism and searching for cats. His collection of cats is reputed to
be amongst the largest in the Western world, though none have ever
been seen by reliable witnesses. "Iggy," a grey-green Persian once
did not appear on BBC Television's "Tomorrow's World."
roys@cogs.ac.sussex.uk
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
Dice of Human Bones: The Death of Payter
by Ryan S. Borgstrom
Copyright (c) 1990
_______________________________________________________________________________
Have you ever heard of a game called World? The young ones play it often.
The name, so they tell me, comes from one of the old legends. --Indulgent
smile-- Payter once told me in secret that the legend was about the way things
actually _were_.
I don't really understand either the legend or the game. --Frown-- I
watched them play it once. They put limit after limit on themselves until they
were barely shells, and then they stumbled around the network for hours.
--Grin-- They never seemed to get anywhere.
I looked at the legend once ... it seemed to talk mostly about "love" and
"companionship" -- the "world" thing seemed to almost be incidental to the
story, just sort of a backdrop. Rather puzzling, to me at least.
Even if they were right, though, and we did once live in a "world," it still
wouldn't make a great deal of sense, would it? The old ways are gone forever.
You can't just decide, and bring them back. But Payter's been acting so
strange lately. The others tell me he's been pretending to be "dead." It's
been disturbing me more and more.
Hello?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ryan Borgstrom is a Computer Science graduate student at Johns Hopkins.
One night it occurred to him to follow David Brin's example and try to
fit a working story into 200 words exactly, and submit the result to
Quanta ... It is unclear whether this intention is violated by the
foolish expenditure of words that makes up this about-the-author note.
His interests include computer science, science fiction and fantasy,
juggling, Judo, history, other genres of fiction, and classical and other
music.
ryan@crabcake.cs.jhu.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 1
by Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c) 1990
_______________________________________________________________________________
The morning sun's golden rays glided peacefully along the quiet coast,
sparkling across the ocean waves as the water's edge shifted randomly between
sea and shore. A chilly breeze swept its way over the waters and along the damp
beach, quietly winding its way through the little used barbecue pits past a
long, wooden pier, and then withdrew back out to sea.
Bright beams of sunlight danced across the eastern horizon as the coastal
palm trees cut the early summer winds into multiple streams of cool jet and
spray and the light into stark showers of silver and scarlet.
Michael Harrison walked barefoot along the shifting earth that divides land
and sea. The ankles of his patched worktrousers skidded into the cold waters as
he made his way home. The thin blue fabric of a wet dress shirt stretched down
his muscular frame to near his knees. His mind pulsated with an overflowing
emptiness; thoughts doubled back upon themselves, twisting and turning with the
cold waves, drifting against the overwhelming tide.
He slowly turned and walked up the whitish sands climbing a thin railed
stairway in contest with gravity. The thick wooden doors were already open, and
entering, he stumbled in between the white walls of his beach home searching
for the null-tube. The entire structure seemed to wobble slowly around him.
Squinting between the specks of salt and sand which stung his eyes, he grabbed
one wall with his right hand, keeping the left stiffly extended in case he
should find another. Suddenly, the room turned sharply, and an invisible foot
kicked his legs out from under him. A pleasant softness enveloped his senses as
he rolled up warm and passed out cold.
"Michael..."
He awoke to a calm feminine voice. Kitara? Still sleepdazed, his bloodshot
eyes roamed the room.
"Why am I on the floor?" he mumbled.
"Because that is where you retired for the..."
Mike groaned as he sat upright hearing the now familiar voice. "I was just
talking to myself. You know Cindy, you don't have to..." Mike's voice drifted
off as he slowly realized he was talking to his home's computer system. Her
voice circuits paused momentarily waiting for him to continue as he masaged his
numb arm.
"Talking to oneself is a sign of mental collapse... Mr. Linden is on line
one."
His boss. Mike slumped back on the floor and closed his eyes. "I'm too
tired, tell him to fuck off."
Cindy paused for analysis. Mike heard a quiet buzz and a voice, "Hello...
Mike?"
"No Mr. Linden. This is Cindy again. Mike said he was tired and he told me
to tell you to..."
"Stop!" Mike's voice echoed around the entire house. Cindy's voice promptly
cut off transmission. "Cut off the video unit and transfer the line... voice
only... to this room."
Mr. Linden's voice broke over the speakers, "... there? Hello? Cindy, I
didn't get that?"
Mike sat up again and rubbed his eyes, "Chuck, Mike here..."
"Hi, Mike? How's it going?"
"Great... What's up?"
"Well, I've got a gentleman over here from the board who'd like to
congratulate you on your last piece. I told him I didn't know whether or not
you'd be in today, so he suggested I call. How'd you like to come over and
lunch with us?"
Mike paused, "Sure, you two gonna be in the Gee-Pee?"
"Yeah, he's checking out our facilities, and he really wants to meet you."
It suddenly occured to Mike that he should feel flattered. He rubbed the
back of his neck and tilted his head sideways until the spine popped.
"Ok. I'll be over in... how's three cents sound?"
"Sounds great."
"Good."
"Okay, thanks. We'll see you then."
"Bye."
Line one closed with a short breaker. A computer a thousand kilometers away
had already multiplied the duration of the call by its distance and tolled
Chuck's fund. Mike wondered what the editor wanted.
The warm shower spray dissolved the dirt and sweat in no time, and Mike put
on a blue mendwear dress shirt, white gelknicks, and a pair of light gravboots.
He combed his long, thin, brown hair and tied it in the back. In a few minutes
he was in the pantry searching for the standard grub. Picking up a flimsy and
light pen he headed back to the living room and straightening his shirt stepped
down the stairs into the street.
The sun was at high-noon, and the short walk to the subway entrance proved
uneventful. There was the usual strain of gravcars and flycycles lined along
the beachway, and the hundreds of floaters sailing above the coast made a
moving polkadot design of shadows along the sands, but there was nothing
unusual in the way the tourists eyed Mike over as if he were a specimen at an
alien exhibit. Being the only decently dressed person within several kilometers
he walked with a pretended importance, as if he owned the entire beach and
could toss them all off at the snap of a finger. He grinned at the thought as
he coasted down the escalator at the subway entrance.
Showing his all-month pass, he headed past security and straight to the
terminal. The gravbuses entered and left the port in perfect succession; and
within two minutes his bus had arrived. He boarded and easily found a seat. An
old lady eyed him from across the car, and a handsome couple with kids
quarreled over where to eat. He sat back and looked out the window. His
hangover was nearly unnoticeable, and he rubbed his arm where Cindy had
indubitably injected him with the get-well juice.
The train rose above the surface and fell again to catch another station
more inland, the sudden shift from daylight to fluorescence leaving the
passengers momentarily blind as their eyes adjusted to the rhythmic tempo of
the passing cold lanterns. Two young men entered as the doors opened, their
faces twisted in consternation as each tried to make his point more loudly than
the other. They fell silent as they headed toward the back of the car, the
second's long, bony finger still pointed in exaggerated certainty.
The train started rolling again, and this time quickened its pace for some
time before eventually rising to the surface. Out the window Silver-Tri-Towers
stood as a testament to the might of man. Its arms branching from the main
structure reached near the clouds, and the top of the structure blurred with
the refraction of light against the atmosphere. The couple's children rushed to
the window and pressed their noses against its surface leaving little spots of
dense fog on the layered plastic.
The train lost speed and dipped under the surface to stop. The old lady got
off and the two young men quietly resumed their discussion. The couple sat
quietly, and one of their children asked when they would get to eat.
Soon the train was off again, and as it rose above the surface the kids
resumed their former positions at the window, panting puppy dogs with eyes bent
skyward. The train turned toward the structure, dipped below the surface, and
accelerated. It pulled into a large underground station. Mike quickly exited as
a car load of people pressed in.
He made his way through the crowds to a lift. Dozens of people entered as
the doors closed against the stragglers. The lift stopped on several floors,
picking up and dropping off people along the way, until it reached public floor
872, and Mike stepped off. A short walk through the busy halls led him to the
Gee-Pee. Mike peeked between the columns and spotted Linden talking with an
elderly gentleman and a young woman over three highbowls of zardocha.
Mike held his position and studied the trio. His boss, the section's
copy-editor, was putting on a smiley-face for his administrative counterparts.
His small body wrapped itself into a tangled web of false composure, as a dim
fluorescent beam caught his olive brown face, receding hairline, and large
brown eyes at just the right angle to make Mike wish he'd been carrying his
trusty camera.
The gentleman sitting across from the editor was well known to many in the
press office. He had a reputation as somebody who could pull stings, and his
white hair and often brittle manner did little to detract from his prestige.
Just the opposite, they served to make him appear more distinguished. Mike had
seen his picture a dozen times and fit together a dozen odd facts in his mind
about the man, but he couldn't connect a name to the face.
The lady caught Mike's attention. She seemed strangely familiar. Aside from
being simply a woman, her long blonde hair, tan skin, and lithe figure made her
appearance incredibly attractive. She sipped her drink carefully, letting the
ice flakes clink against the inside of her highbowl as she watched the two men
talk.
The chatter from the rest of the room blurred together with their own
conversation so well that Mike had trouble picking out specific words. He
watched Linden's face. The editor looked like he was geared into brag-mode. The
other two listened with facinated expressions.
Mike slipped his consumer card through the scanner as he entered the room.
Linden noticed him immediately and motioned him over.
"Well speak of the devil; Michael, this is Mr. John Clay from the company
board, and his niece Miss Robin Clay."
"It's a pleasure to meet you Mr. Harrison. Charles has just been telling us
a great deal about your work."
"Does that mean I get a raise?"
They all laughed, especially Robin. She seemed to have a special twinkle in
her eyes as if there were a secret she wanted to tell him. Her eyes captivated
Mike. They were deep sea blue, or maybe sky blue; he couldn't decide. They
weren't too dark or too light. Must be implants, Mike thought as he shook off
the fascination.
Then Robin extended her golden tanned arm as if she wanted it to be either
kissed from pinky to armpit or broken in half at the elbow. Deciding on the
third alternative, Mike extended his own arm in response, and with a smile he
shook her hand. It was an archiac gesture to be sure, but one still used among
gatherers.
Michael sat in the empty chair across from Robin. A fourth highbowl filled
with zardocha dropped from overhead and floated in front of Mike. He tested it
and sent it aside with a gentle nudge. The dark liquorice cafe stung his taste
with its frigid strength.
"We were actually thinking along the lines of a different sort of
compensation."
"Mr. Clay, I was joking."
"Within every joke, there must be an element of truth. Without it, the joke
isn't funny."
Mike smiled, "Okay, get to the point."
"Michael, we at the Board of Galactic Press & Publications have been
watching this division for a number of years. Your rapid progress and personal
achievements have not gone unnoticed by the administration. Granted, there have
been pieces of your research, some quite extraordinary pieces of information
gathering, which were never published... with good reason."
"I'm sure." Mike echoed.
"You, perhaps more than any other gatherer within the sector, understands
that we are much more than a news source, and that our gatherers are much more
than reporters. They're investigators, they're a form of police, they go into
situations where they often risk life and limb."
"The point."
"Well, it's actually somewhat stale. I hope you're not offended, but we'd
like to hold an awards' banquet for the division as a whole. Just something to
boost morale, and to recognize a job well done."
Mike sipped the zardocha and glanced sideways at Linden. The editor smiled
back; his cajoling face Mike thought.
"Go ahead."
"Well, as one of the key figures... as the key figure in your division's
success I should say, we'd like you to speak at the ceremony."
Linden beamed, "You have become somewhat of a celebrity Mike."
Mike floated the highbowl in front of his chin, spinning in with one finger
to quicken the fluid.
"I'm honored... but I wouldn't know what to say."
"What, with all your experience, with all the various worlds you've visited,
not to mention those you've infiltrated," Clay laughed at his own joke, "I'm
sure you could think of something to say."
"I really doubt it, sir."
Clay smiled, but Mike sensed something in the older man's eyes that told him
to reconsider.
"Michael, Charles here has already hinted to me that you might feel this
way, and in your shoes, I might feel the same. After all, a gatherer needs a
certain amount of anonymity in order to be effective... and just considering
what a high profile you have been earning lately... how long do you really
think you can keep it up?"
"I really haven't thought about it, sir," he lied.
"Well, perhaps you should really think about it. This banquet isn't just to
fill space and give our people something to do and be happy about. It's
opportunity time. An opportunity for us to examine our talent, to redefine our
direction, to recruit new prospects into the hierarchy... Charles tells me that
you dislike social functions. Is that true, Michael?"
"That would depend."
"On what?"
"On what's in it for me."
Clay paused dumbfounded and then suddenly burst out laughing. Charles and
Robin chimed in as if on cue, but Mike was sure he felt someone kick him under
the table.
"Shy, Mr. Harrison, you're not."
Linden set the floating highbowl down on the table. He looked a little tired
and annoyed.
"Mike, what Mr. Clay is saying is that you've done a good job, but that with
the success you're losing your value as a gatherer. It's time to step up the
ladder."
"You mean behind a desk."
"Mr. Harrison," Robin spoke for the first time in the conversation, "if you
were more valuable behind a desk than in the field, where would you rather be?"
"I'm still pulling my own weight."
"You and who's army?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Okay, ask yourself this. How much of your gathering in the field is
physically carried out by a third party? If your answer is more than half, then
you already over the hill, and half way down the other side."
Clay coughed, "Take care with the metaphors, my dear. Mr. Harrison, forgive
my niece, but we understand you've been training a number of research
assistants?"
"I'm not going to take a job training gatherers. I've got enough of that
already."
"We're not asking for that. We are simply proving a point, that your useful
life is swiftly coming to a close unless you change your field of endeavor."
"I couldn't be an administrator, and I know I couldn't edit." Clay smiled,
this time genuinely Mike thought.
"You'll be surprised at what you can do when opportunity beckons. Isn't
that right Charles? Why, we ourselves are living examples. You think, Mr.
Harrison, that your editor was born behind the desk, flimsy in hand? He started
just like you. But we all must move on. The banquet is in three days. Yes,
it's honoring the anniversary of the founding. It will be at the Lion's Den in
GreenFlower. Everything has already been set up, the promotion has already been
released in this morning's update, and all you have to do is be there and say a
few words to entertain the masses, rub a few noses, and... and pretend that
you're having fun."
Mr. Clay stood up and grimmaced at the inside of his wrist. The timepiece
implant seemed to tell him he was late. He shot Mike a departing glance, "Then
we'll see you at the Banquet, Mr. Harrison... Mr. Linden."
Mike stood up, "Will your niece be there?"
"Of course."
"Then I won't," Mike felt like saying.
Miss Clay shook his hand in a comfortable contrast to the trial run. For the
second time during the encounter she spoke, "Will you sit by me at the Banquet,
Mr. Harrison? I am very much interested in your work."
Mike grinned, "I really don't have a choice about this, do I?"
"Not if you know what's good for you."
Mike paused and tried to recall the question. He decided later that it was
her blue eyes that made him give in so easily.
"I'd be delighted, Miss Clay. If you would like, stop by my house, and I can
show you a few items of the trade."
She smiled, or perhaps blushed. "I might take you up on that. Where do you
live?"
Mr. Clay conveniently interrupted, "Come now dear, we must be off."
Mike defused the interception, "Sector E-12, 81152 Beach Boulevard."
She smiled apologetically as her uncle grabbed her arm and led her out the
door.
When Mike turned around, Linden was looking a little angry.
"What?" Mike asked defensively.
Linden turned away and then tried to keep from laughing. "Nothing. Just..."
"Just what?"
"Just don't blow it, Harrison." Linden was smiling.
Mike smiled back, and they laughed. Everything was still okay.
Mike returned to the house. He recalled that he hadn't seen the morning
update, but then he had no will to hear, see, smell, or otherwise comprehend
what one dull reporter considered news. He entered the bathroom and relieved
himself of the last night's merrymaking. The medical scanner's blue light
twirled about until it found and homed in on Mike. He knew Cindy was conducting
an analysis. Just as long as she kept to herself about it.
He strolled into his room and sat back on the circular bed. The entire
chamber glimmered with an eerie, dim blue light. An opaque window on the wall
farthest from the door kept out sunlight and the bothersome noises of modern
civilization. He relaxed a bit on the edge of the bed and gathered his senses.
A shimmering multicolored light on the controller wall betrayed Cindy's
presence.
"What is it?"
It blinked and moved to the center of the wall. "What is what, Michael?"
He frowned. Computers weren't supposed to answer questions with questions.
"What are you doing in my room?"
The light blinked a few times. "I work here." Her feminine voice was as
matter-of-fact as ever he knew it to be.
He decided to beat her at her own game rather than simply getting
frustrated. "Obviously you work here. Please allow me to rephrase myself. Why
don't you switch off?"
"Would you like me to switch off?"
She did it again. He contemplated servicing the system by hand with a laser
rifle but quickly decided against it. "No. You're too hard to deal with right
now. Switch to lower brain mode."
"Done," the response was instantaneous.
From there he decided to do a little learning as long as Cindy's logic
circuits were switched off. "Access. File. Information. Library. Galactic
Press. Person. John Clay. Personal history.
"... Insufficient person specification. Please respecify at person."
"John Clay, Boardmember of Galactic Press. Personal History.
"... File accessed."
"Write Picture."
"... Insufficient picture specification. Please specify picture type."
"Facial, forward, most recent."
The light at the controller wall danced about for a moment, and suddenly the
entire wall surface lighted up with a picture of Mr. Clay. Next to him was
another man and a woman. They were all walking down a flight of stairs. The
others looked vaguely familiar to Mike, but he couldn't place their names.
"Read picture from wall. Identify. Persons. All."
"... Persons identified."
"Say identifications."
"... Specify data format."
"Left to right. Name and official occupation."
"... Mrs. Helen Jaden, Galactic Press, Tizarian Division, Boardmember. Mr.
Edmund Sandair, Galactic Press, Tizarian Division, Chairman of the Board of
Directors. Mr. John Clay, Galactic Press, Tizarian Division, Boardmember."
Mike jotted down notes on a flimsy. "Clear wall." When he turned back toward
the controller wall, the entire surface was black.
"Say personal history, format brief."
The light at the center of the wall reappeared and began to flicker on and
off. "... Personal history, Mr. John Clay in memory. Loading format brief...
Mr. John Clay. Born two-hundred and twelve standard days into the Imperial year
five-hundred and ninty-one. Attended University of Arcadia majoring in
interstellar corporate business. Highest degree received, Master's, at age of
twenty-four standard years. Joined with Galactic Press Arcadian Division as
marketing advisor in Imperial year six-hundred and sixteen. Was promoted to
chief marketing advisor..."
"Stop," Mike was getting bored, so he decided to zoom in on his real object
of interest. "Access file. Information. Library. Galactic Press. Person. Miss
Robin Clay, niece of Mr. John Clay, Boardmember of Galactic Press. Personal
History."
"... File Accessed."
"Write picture, Planetary Identification, Tizar, most current."
A mug shot of the girl he met that afternoon slowly rotated on the
controller wall. Mike studied it quickly and then prepared to jot down more
notes.
"Say name. Format first, middle, last."
"... Robin Athena Clay."
"Say official occupation."
"... Independent contractor, gatherer, Galactic Press, Tizarian Division."
Mike blinked in disbelief. "That's what I am."
"... Illegal command ignored."
He went to the kitchen, got an algea-cooler and some nutrichips, and
returned to the bedroom. Sitting once again in front of the controller wall, he
watched the flickering light at the center of the wall for nearly a minute
before deciding on a course of action.
"Say list of accomplishments."
"... Illegal command ignored."
"Say list of articles where subject is mentioned."
The light at the center of the screen flickered for a while longer. With
Cindy's interpretive processor shut down, the command would take time to be
understood.
The light disappeared.
"Stop." Mike was becoming impatient.
"No process in effect. Command Ignored."
"What?"
"... Illegal command ignored."
"Is subject mentioned in any articles?"
"... Illegal command ignored."
Mike began to drink the cooler. He didn't stop until it was finished.
"Switch to higher brain mode."
"Hello Michael." The artistically feminine voice of the SNDI system, so
often applauded by computer evaluators, had never sounded sweeter.
Mike got right down to business. "I assume you have all the data of my
conversation with your lower brain."
"You assume correctly."
"Is Robin mentioned in any articles?"
"No."
"Has she written any articles?"
"No."
"What is her occupation?"
"She's a gatherer."
"... Who hasn't written anything."
"That is correct."
"She has to have been mentioned in at least one article."
"She isn't."
"Cindy, check for birth announcements."
"There are none."
"Is there a copy of her birth certificate on file?"
"Yes."
"When was she born?"
"On the ninty-first day of six thirty-three."
"Nearly a year before Niki."
"That is correct."
"Where was she born?"
"Greenflower, Silver-Tri county, Tizar."
"That's close."
Mike opened the package of nutrichips and began to munch. "Cindy, in all
your experience, when have you ever encountered a person who was born without
the mandatory birth announcements?"
"Offhand, Michael, I know of no single instance."
"Cindy, randomly choose one thousand people from that county, all who were
born in six thirty-three, and tell me how many of those people do not have
corresponding birth announcements in the news on the day of their birth."
"... There are zero people who do not have birth announcements."
Mike popped a few chips into his mouth, "Check Tizarian Library files. See
if her birth announcements are there."
"... There are birth announcements in the files of the Tri- Towers Library."
"Why don't we have them?"
"Because when the file was loaded into my banks, the birth announcements
weren't in place." She changed her tone of voice as if a little annoyed at the
obvious question.
"Check in our own files for her birth certificate. When was it loaded into
your banks."
"The ninety-ninth day of this year, six fifty-six."
"Why wasn't her birth announcement also loaded in."
"News files are read-only after their initial loading. There are no editing
features available with this system due to the inherent unlawfulness."
Mike munched on some more nutrichips. They tasted good for a change, and he
wondered what the deal was about Robin.
"Mike, you have a visitor at the front door."
"Identify."
"The visitor is not identifiable from the people in your files."
"Describe"
"The visitor is female. She has blonde hair, blue eyes, her height..."
"Stop. Open the door." Mike headed out of the bedroom and toward the front
door. Robin was dressed in the white summer dress she wore to lunch.
She smiled, "Hi."
Mike stepped outside. The sun was into its brilliant afternoon splendor, and
the entire coast was lined with tanning bodies, just waiting to be sizzled to a
crisp.
He smiled as if surprised, "Hi. Come on in. I wasn't expecting you so soon."
She stepped forward cautiously, a little embarrassed, and at the same time
enjoying her predicament. "Well, I just happened to be cruising by... and when
I remembered your address... and..."
They both laughed.
She stopped in front of him and smiled. The sunlight caught her bright blue
eyes, but he was prepared for them this time.
"Well, since you're here... would you like something to drink?" He was
careful not to talk into her. He didn't want to blow the second impression by
the smell of munchies.
"Sure, if you have water."
He grinned, "Sorry, we're all out. No, just kidding... c'mon."
He led her to the living room. Getting two glasses and filling them with
water was no major task, and soon he found himself sitting at the chair next to
the sofa he had missed the night before. She nimbly seated herself on the couch
and accepted the glass of water from his hand.
"So," he started, "Why ya really here?"
She paused and then smiled, "You said you'd show me some of the tools of the
trade?"
"Oh, sure." Mike went to the bedroom and picked up his camera and workset.
When he returned, Robin was in the kitchen looking for a place to drop the
empty glass.
"Should I just put it here on the countertop?"
"Yeah. That'd be fine."
She walked back into the living room while Mike hooked together the camera.
"This is a Niko 700AR. The small lens in front here is an all-purpose zoom."
She walked over to him. "Can I?"
"Sure," he put it into her delicate fingers. "Careful, it's kind of heavy."
She looked through the lens and smiled, "Wow. Thirty all the way to a
thousand millimeters... plus light intensification. No need for a flash."
"Yeah." Mike was pleased that she knew something about cameras. "That's not
all, look." He showed her the storage drive, printer, viewer, and controller
board. "Y'know what this is, too?"
She stared in wonder. "So this is top of the line."
He laughed. "For external stills, it's as close to it as is practical to
use. I mean, it's low tech enough that it can fixed on most worlds if it gets
damaged, and, of course, it's replacable. That's its best feature. This thing
here is the storage drive. It can hold up to ten-thousand photos in color. More
in black and white. I can plug this hundred picture cartridge into the camera,
take pictures, and then transfer them to the drive. If I decide that I don't
like them later, poof; I delete them. This thing lets me see 'em, and this
printer makes a hard copy. With the controller board you can also edit the
pictures in a number of different ways-- splicing them, shooting color in,
mixing them together, going in pixel by pixel and drawing. Like Niko says, `It
defies the imagination.' So what'd'ya think?"
"Pretty wild," She smiled.
"By the way, I heard you were a gatherer with the company."
"Who told you that?"
"Linden said something about it."
She bit her lip, "I'm just kind of getting into it. Right now I do some
research for my uncle."
"Oh," Mike was disappointed, but he was far from through.
"What kind of research," he smiled innocently.
She mimicked the smile, staring straight into his eyes, "Y'know, research."
He stopped the questioning. It was still too early.
"So," she continued, "do you really make money at this?"
Mike looked theatrically around the house. She laughed.
"Of course I make money at this."
"But how can you? Information is so cheap these days."
Double meaning, Mike thought. "Yeah, it's cheap. But there are a lot of
buying customers. Every two to four weeks the Tizarian Division puts out an
issue of 'The Galactican.' Every year, I get a good enough story to convince
them to give me a large cut of the paper. That, plus front page stories three
or four times a year keep me going nicely. We sell to almost a trillion people
in this sector alone. Now even if I took only a millicredit off of every buyer
every year, you start adding up the numbers and tell me how rich I'd be."
She grinned, "Very rich."
"Ridiculously rich. And I don't settle for any mere millicredit."
"Wow!" She was being obviously sarcastic.
"And that's only half the story."
She smiled, "What's the other half?"
"Through writing these articles people get to recognize my name; and when I
turn around to sell other writings, they'll go ahead and load copies into their
own terminals since the price of information, as you put it, is so cheap."
"What other writings do you do?" She seemed genuinely interested this time.
Mike shrugged, "Political stuff, argumentative essays, that sort of thing."
"You must be a fantastic writer." She looked serious.
Mike grinned, "Not really... Y'see, when it comes to writing, it's not the
style or the syntax or anything like that. It's your subject. Most of the news
people I've met are great writers, but they simply can't research a story. They
fall flat on their faces when it comes to the subject simply because they start
out with boring material."
Robin looked confused, "How can you say that? You're supposed to be a
writer."
"No, I'm a gatherer, big difference. It's like your uncle said, the most
important thing that I do right now is investigate. All the polishing can be
left to the editor and staff, but researching the facts and getting them down
is the most important thing for a gatherer. Hey, what're you doing?"
"I'm putting this thing together." Robin connected the storage drive and
monitor. She began paging through the memory.
"You sound like you're already missing it. What's this?"
The picture was of a shallow sea. Sulferous storm clouds loomed heavy over
the horizon, and a still yellow mist shrouded the water. Far away, a number of
humanoid creatures crouched in the steaming mud and pointed toward the camara.
"That's Aiwelk"
"Are those reptiles?"
"Amphibians. They actually the decendants of mutated humans if you want to
get technical."
"What are they doing there?"
Mike smiled, "They live there."
Robin rabbit-punched him in the ribs. "You know what I mean. What were you
doing there?"
"I was taking pictures."
Mike braced his ribs for the second blow.
"Okay, they say one picture's worth a thousand words. I was working on a
safari expedition at the time."
Robin gasped.
"It's not what you think. We were low on cash, so were hiring ourselves out
as animal catchers. Aiwelk's a protectorate, so were couldn't catch there, but
this science team hired us on to catch a few of these critters for 'scientific
purposes.' They eventually set up a base on-world, but at the time, they were
working from a circular satelite. I took some pictures, because the scientists
wanted to know exactly where they came from, and what their physical and social
environment was like. They already knew the physical pretty much, but they
thought it was important to know who was standing next to who and how they were
acting among themselves before we caught them. I don't know if that makes any
sense."
Robin nodded, "So what'd you find out?"
"Okay, y'see this character here, in the middle. He's like their shaman. No,
I'm not kidding. One thing you learn in this job is that everybody's got their
own screwed-up religion. Now, before he was, 'examined' physically all-the-way,
okay, the scientists were able to decipher a good portion of their language
from him, and with it a good portion of their beliefs."
"Because every language is constructed of beliefs and values."
"That's right. I couldn't have said it better. Now, he wasn't the strong
guy, but he was more or less their leader, and without these stills with him in
the center, and without the moving pictures we caught of him giving
instructions, he'd have never gotten the special attention such an important
'specimen' deserves."
"What'd he think about being a specimen?"
"I'm not sure he really thought about it at all."
Robin zoomed in on him and refocused. The dark scales showed well in the
poor light of the dim red star.
"So how'd they examine him physically?"
"Oh, you know scientists." Mike looked away from the monitor.
"Yeah."
"Sometimes I just wish we let them be."
"Did they find anything unusual?"
"Would it matter if they did?"
Robin suddenly looked irritated, "Mind if I use the ladies room?"
"Through that door and to your left."
She got up from the couch and went through the hallway to the bathroom,
leaving Mike to gather his wits and wonder what it was that he said.
He looked toward the speaker unit by the videophone. Its black shiny surface
glittered in the blue fluorescent light.
"Cindy?"
"Yes Michael?"
"Use the medical scanner on Robin but keep its light off."
"What do you want to know about her?"
"Anything unusual."
"... She's taking her ear off."
Mike's heartbeat jumped. "She's what?"
"... She's taking her ear off, and she's not human."
"No shit... What is she?"
"An android."
_______________________________________________________________________________
Jim is a full-time MBA student at UC Riverside. He recently founded the UCR
Gamers' Guild and co-edited the first issue of its quarterly journal,
`The Guildsman'. These chapters are the first of several he
began during the middle 80's as a prose exercise in description of his
Traveller (SF-RPG) setting. He says he writes exactly the same way he
gamemasters: without any semblance of plan or preconception.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________________
The Milk of Human Kindness
by Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
A fire burned in the fireplace, illuminating carefully-laid masonry beneath
a walnut mantle, silver pokers to the side, logs stacked to add comfort as well
as functionality. A bit further away, the plush earthtone carpeting slid
beneath two easy chairs, a few feet apart, facing the fire at an angle that
allowed easy conversation between them. Further away still, the fire echoed on
the glass of a bay window, through which, were the shades of night not pulled,
one might see down a narrow drive that extended three quarters of a mile to a
dirt road which fled out of sight, passing no other habitation. On the fire's
mantel sat a snifter of brandy, itself reflecting the glow of the flames
multiple times.
Its mate was held in the hands of an elderly gentleman sitting in one of the
easy chairs. His eyes flickered with the flames; there was no guessing what
color they might be in less fickle light. His face showed the beginnings of
true age, the short, narrow beard had turned white, his hair was well on the
way to silver itself. The arm that did not hold the brandy rested comfortably
on the arm of the chair, his body was relaxed as he contemplated his companion.
In the other chair sat a man of indeterminate age, hands folded in his lap,
posture slightly less comfortable than that of the older man. He was dressed
in a robe of velvet and silk, the only thing about him which would distinguish
him from any member of a crowd; if he took off the robe he might cease to
exist.
Silence existed for a second, an hour. It was ended when the man with the
brandy spoke.
"I've seen you in this contemplative mood before, Andy. You're thinking of
a story?"
"Yes. Science fiction, I think."
Davidson's eyes narrowed slightly. "Not your usual genre. Doesn't sell
well. Not that money's really a concern." He spread his hands, taking in the
world in the flickering firelight, the mantel with its treasures hidden by the
light, the rest of the mansion beyond shrouded in darkness. "Tell me about
it."
Andrew paused, then gestured toward the window. "Do you think that there's
anyone out there? All those stars, probably all those planets. And all that
time. Eternity for life to exist."
"I've never really thought about it. But a story must begin somewhere. So
I'll give you all the kinds of life you want." He sipped his brandy.
"All those living beings over all that time. You see, it's the time that's
important. Time enough for a vast array of creatures to have come into being.
We cannot assume that they would be human, or even human-like. We cannot even
assume that their thoughts are what a human can consider thinking."
"It's going to be a dull story, if we can't understand the characters
thoughts. They claim that you can't tell a story about a nonhuman, that even
if the characters are animals or aliens, they must have human, comprehensible
motivations or the story will make no sense."
Andrew nodded. "Yes, we must bow that far from possible reality for the
sake of a story. But I picked a bad example -- my aliens think enough like a
human to make the comprehension simple. In fact, I'll bring up their
psychology in some depth in a few minutes. For now, though, consider a
physical rather than psychological difference, most notably, immortality."
"How immortal?"
"Complete, total immunity to death. The body cannot be destroyed by any
means, nor harmed, even by intention."
"Difficult to explain. Unless it's necesary to your story, I'd just give
them very long lifespans."
"It's necessary. The explanation could be no more complex than a mental
ability to control matter and energy. An inborn defense mechanism that can't
be shut down."
"Still sounds pretty awkward."
"Indeed. But how much of reality is convenient? These same mental
properties might be controllable to some extent. These aliens have both a
limited shape changing ability and significant control over the world around
them."
"Magic?"
"Sorcery if you like, though a perfectly rational form of it. A reassembling
of matter and energy to specific ends."
"And if you lived forever, you could get pretty good at it."
Andrew nodded quickly. "Very good. Perhaps even enough to create worlds,
perhaps life itself."
"You've created God." Davidson took another small sip of his brandy,
considering.
"Gods, perhaps. My story concerns a race of such beings. Millions of
them."
"Be careful, Andy. You can't let your characters get out of control."
"That's exactly the story. These creatures, I call them Calagar, are out of
control." He stood up, retrieved his snifter from the hearth. "It's the long
life, you see. How's this for a motivation: pure boredom."
"Certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Everything gets boring
after a time. Even life itself, I suppose."
"Indeed. And in boredom begins cruelty. You can only drink of the milk of
human kindness so long. Pain, suffering, these are the more interesting
possibilities. You'd take it up as a hobby, stick with it because of the
entertainment it offers; small, yes, but better than nothing."
"Very dark. Would not some morality, altruism exist, even in such beings?
Or are they of one mind?"
"Certainly it would exist, and any one Calagar might go through cycles,
alternating good with evil as interest waned. But eventually, all of them
would fall, every one. Eternity is a long time, and ideas and people change
over even short time. And boredom does not; it is always the same."
"You usually write light, humorous or at least cheerful pieces. Why the
change?"
"Even I go through cycles, perhaps." Andrew grinned, produced a jug from
the velvet darkness over the mantel. He refilled Davidson's glass, replaced
the jug and seated himself again.
"Long cycles. You've been writing the same stuff for twenty six years,
since I've known you, and probably before that as well. But continue; perhaps
the variety will give some freshness to your writing. Not that it needs it."
"The Calagar attained the stars, easily. Where they went, they found new
beings and places, brought technology, civilization, and, almost inevitably,
destruction. If they could not find a convenient lifeform or world for a
particular game, they created it, destroyed it and its population when it was
no longer necessary, useful, or entertaining."
Davidson looked contemplative again, offered nothing into the silence except
a brief wave of the hands. Andrew continued.
"Of course, where there is one powerful, starfaring race, there would likely
be another. And so there was, the Groli. Not immortal, not possessed of the
mental sorceries of the Calagar, but highly advanced and technical. From the
view port of their shorter lifetime, they might not lose the virtues that the
Calagar had given up. And they would be aghast at the atrocities of the
Calagar."
"A lot of good it would do them. Mortals against gods? How do you overcome
something you cannot kill?"
"The laws of this country do not permit you to kill a thief. How do you
overcome him?"
"You have him put in jail. But how do you jail a god?"
"Remember their inability to harm themselves? Say the Groli managed to
create a "cage" that reacted like a Calagar body, unaffected by their sorcery?
A very large cage, planetary in scale, which could contain all of the Calagar,
trap them forever where they could harm no one."
Davidson shook his head sharply. "War story, then? I doubt it would be
very interesting. Battles get old quickly."
"Oh no! The war is only incidental to the story. The Groli win, although
their own race is nearly destroyed as a result. The only interesting part
about the war is the way one of the Calagar deals with it."
"Which is?"
"Remember the boredom factor. Since an enemy is the first truly interesting
thing to happen to the Calagar race since the beginning of time, they race off
to battle. The thought that they could lose is unimportant. The odds of it are
small, in any case. To the man, they attacked, and the Groli used this to
their advantage, trapping each Calagar neatly in their cage."
"But?" Davidson prompted.
"One, only one, of the Calagar considered the consequences of losing the
battle that lay before them, truly considered the possibility that the Calagar
_could_ lose. If he was bored now, spending eternity in a cage without even
the outlet of sorcery to amuse himself would be even more boring. He fled,
took cover with a group of lifeforms uninvolved in the war, changed his shape,
avoided displays of sorcery, and waited."
"While all of his race were trapped."
"Yes, and for centuries more, waiting while the Groli race lost the
knowledge of their technology, lost the skills to fight back, eventually lost
even the ability to continue as a race. Waiting for the last possible enemy to
die."
"Dull."
"Yes, but not so much as one would expect. In all of the universe, there
was little chance of being detected, and cruelty exists on the small scale as
well as the large. He could play with the world he had chosen, interact with
it in a myriad of ways, bring it cruelty and kindness. But he could not destroy
it, for to do so would be to lose his entertainment, and risk discovery in the
search for more. Only when the last of the Groli had died did he destroy it
and move on."
"To free the rest of his race?"
"Perhaps, though I think first he would savor the experience of being a sole
god in a universe unprepared to deal with such a being. I haven't really worked
out that part of the story yet."
Davidson considered for a time. "It has potential. I should probably sleep
on it for a while. It's hard to really find the motivation in such a
character."
Andrew smiled. "Boredom, Davidson. Raw boredom." He stood up, retrieved a
long jacket from somewhere outside the fire's glow. "You've got a long drive
home tonight."
"Indeed." Davidson stood up, put on the offered coat. Leaving the brandy
glasses on the hearth, the two of them walked to the door, and through it into
the deep August night.
"Good night," Davidson said, taking the two stairs down toward his car.
"Good bye," Andrew said, and there was a funny tone to his voice, as though
muted by distance.
Davidson turned. The house was almost a hundred yards away, though he had
taken only a couple steps. His car was nowhere to be seen.
In the darkness of the forest, brilliant red eyes glowed, flickering like
burgundy in the firelight. Three wolves emerged from the shadows, each as
black as the night itself, seven feet tall at the shoulders, moving with a
quicksilver speed toward him. Teeth shone coldly, though there was no moon.
"Just to make this interesting..." Andrew commented, and a steel pistol
appeared in Davidson's hand. "There are exactly three bullets. Please don't
make this boring, Davidson."
"By God, Andrew! We've known each other twenty six years!"
Andrew shook his head. "No, only the blink of an eye."
_______________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a Computer Science graduate student at Oregon State
University. His interests include writing, computers, magic, juggling, bridge,
and other games, not necessarily in that order. His major goal in life is to
become a professional student, a goal which he is rapidly attaining.
kempkec@umbra.cs.orst.edu
_______________________________________________________________________________
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** FIRST ANNIVERSARY ISSUE
Volume II Issue 4 October 1990
CONTENTS Quanta is Copyright (c) 1990 Daniel K.
____________________________________ Appelquist. This magazine may be
archived, reproduced and/or distributed
Volume II Issue 4 October 1990 under the condition that it is left
____________________________________ intact and that no additions or changes
are made to it. The individual works
Articles within this magazine are the sole
property of their respective author(s).
Looking Ahead No further use of their works is
Daniel K. Appelquist permitted without their explicit consent.
All stories in this magazine are fiction.
Serials No actual persons are designated by name
or character. Any similarity is
The Harrison Chapters coincidental.
Jim Vassilakos
All submissions, requests for submission
guidelines, requests for back issues,
Short Fiction queries concerning subscriptions,
letters, comments or other correspondence
should be sent to one of the following
Black Justinian addresses:
Dana Goldblatt
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
The King's Challenge quanta@andrew.BITNET
Cerise Palmer
Back issues are also available from the
anonymous FTP server:
Shifting Sand
Christopher Kempke fed.expres.cs.cmu.edu (128.2.209.58)
Requests to be added to the distribution
The Ultimate Hell list should be sent to one of the
Jeffery Mark De La Noye following addresses. For PostScript
subscriptions, send to:
Poetry quanta+requests-postscript@andrew.cmu.edu
quanta+requests-postscript@andrew.BITNET
Inside a White Dwarf
Bruce Altner For ASCII subscriptions, send to:
____________________________________ quanta+requests-ascii@andrew.cmu.edu
quanta+requests-ascii@andrew.BITNET
Daniel K. Appelquist
Editor/Technical Director Please send mail messages only--no files
or interactive messages. If you can
access the anonymous FTP server then
Norman S. Murray include this fact in your subscription
Editorial Assistant request. All subscription requests are
handled by human beings.
Jay Laefer U.S. Mail correspondance should be sent
Proofreader to:
Quanta Magazine
Karen Fabrizius c/o Daniel K. Appelquist
Additional Proofreading 5440 Fifth Avenue, Apartment 60
Pittsburgh, PA 15232, USA
____________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
One year ago, the first issue of Quanta was released to about a hundred and
twenty subscribers, after about two months of design, experimentation and
copious blood, sweat and tears. The Quanta of one year ago was really not
much more than an experiment. Was there a place for this sort of network
magazine? Were there enough amateur writers out there to keep Quanta alive?
The fact that this, the sixth issue, is being distributed to over
_twelve hundred_ subscribers in an ever expanding list of countries shows that
Quanta is viable.
Let me see... I'd like to thank Matthew Sorrels for starting the ball
rolling (suggesting LaTeX as a platform, doing the initial work to get that
operational), and doing proofreading on and off. I'd like to thank Jay Laefer
who has spent countless hours proofreading material (and also Todd Williamson
who has also done proofreading for Quanta at times.) I'd certainly like to
thank Norman Murray for his continual support and advice. I have to thank
Will Frank. It was Will who came up with the name ``Quanta,'' which I think
is ``really cool.'' Will has also been a great help in de-mystifying LaTeX
into a useable form.
I really have to include some remarks thanking Christopher Kempke for a
seemingly unending flow of quality prose. Chris has had a story in every
single issue of Quanta since its inception. ``Shifting Sands,'' published in
this issue, is his latest offering.
While I'm thanking people, a big thanks to Tom Roikicki of Radical Eye
Software for all his help by way of getting DVIPS to work correctly. Thanks
to his efforts, this PostScript edition of Quanta will be relatively smaller
in code-size than previous issues and should have no problems printing on any
PostScript printer.
But enough back-patting. We mustn't be complacent. Quanta must continue
to evolve and expand if it is to survive. Right now, I'm exploring options
for making it available to people on disk and/or paper formats. This may
involve a fee for copying costs, but I think people would be willing to pay
it. Of course, all network subscriptions are and will remain without charge.
As a bit of a side note, a very interesting matter caught my attention
recently, and that is the possibility of a solar sail craft race to Mars.
I've only heard sketchy detais on this so unfortunately I can't offer any
information on it. However, if there's someone out there who does know more,
I would encourage you to write an article and submit it. I'm sure this is the
sort of thing Quanta readers would be interested in (I know I am). I'm always
interested in science and science-fiction related articles, by the way. The
fact that there are none in this issue is unfortunate, but I hope to make up
for that in the December issue.
This will be the second issue without an offering from Faye Levine. Faye
is currently involved in writing a sequel to her novel, _Revolution_,
(entitled _Fronterra_). According to Faye, _Revolution_ is being seriously
considered for representation by a successful Minneapolis agent. I certainly
hope to see it on bookstore shelves in the near future. If you have any
words of encouragement for Faye, like ``Write more short fiction for Quanta,''
send them to her at fl0m+@andrew.cmu.edu.
Unfortunately, I also have some bad news with this issue. Athene, the
journal of fiction published by Jim Mccabe (MCCABE@MTUS5.BITNET) is shortly
going to publish its last issue. According to Jim, he simply doesn't have
enough time to continue publishing Athene. I can certainly see where he's
coming from (Quanta has continued to take up a large chunk of my time, but a
manageable chunk). I certainly hope that someone can take over the Athene
project for Jim. A net without Athene is a depressing thought. Athene has
been around for about as long as Quanta and it was, in fact, the first issue
of Athene that inspired me to attempt to produce a magazine of my own. I owe
a great debt to Jim, and I'd like to take this oppurtunity to thank him for
his efforts. We're sorry to see you go, Jim.
I am constantly impressed with how tight knit a community ``The Net'' is
and yet how easily it accepts new people into itself. It's a constantly
growing and expanding group, and I'm honored to have been able to contribute
in some way to it, as I hopefully will be able to do for years to come. Thank
you. Thank you very much.
______________________________________________________________________________
Black Justinian
by Dana Goldblatt
Copyright (c)1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Justin paused. He heard Starkadder's voice a few steps behind and to his
left.
``Keep going,'' it said. ``Chereny has one of the overseers watching you.
He still thinks you were the one who tried to strangle him last week. He
doesn't believe Roge's confession.''
When Justin had programmed Starkadder's voice, he'd decided that if it
seemed to come from behind, it wouldn't seem so disembodied and spooky. He
hadn't thought that he would have an automatic urge to turn around and look
for the source of the voice---he knew it was in his mind---but most times he
barely stopped himself in time. When he didn't, he pretended to be knocking a
bug off his back; still, it might look odd to someone watching. And now there
was someone watching all the time.
He bent to plant another handful of seeds. This time of year the soil was
moist and newly turned; it gave off a scent that embodied everything good
about Nele, the land he'd lived in all his life---the land which was the
greatest in a world he now knew was only a primitive planet, far away from the
mainstream of the developed stars.
Justin was glad he'd met the Chesetians---after all, they had given him
Starkadder---but he wasn't sure he could ever be happy again. Being happy
meant knowing his place in the world; now he wasn't sure if his place _was_ in
the world. He kept thinking he belonged somewhere that wouldn't condemn him
for Starkadder, or any of the other improvements he'd made in his brain with
the Chesetian equipment. The strict laws of Nele would execute a man for
practicing psychotherapy; what would they make of a neural programmer?
At the end of the row, he ran out of seed. Justin walked over to the seed
barrel and, holding his sack below the opening, carefully pulled out the cork.
A golden stream of seed began slowly to fill the sack.
When it was about half-full, a girl whose own sack was empty came up behind
Justin to wait her turn at the seed barrel. Careful not to spill, Justin
turned to speak to her. It was odd that he did not recognize her, since he
knew all the plantation people. Starkadder did not comment.
``Hello,'' he said, not knowing how to address her. ``I'm Justin, Nal. I
am a thousandth planter of this plantation.'' He waited for her answer.
``Hello, Justin. You may call me Deesay, here. I am here for planting, to
help. Lord Chereny has made a call, not having enough planters to put seed
down on his entire plantation before the end of the season.'' She moved
closer to him. In his ear, she whispered, ``There is more. Meet me after
dinner in the transient cabin at Thousan'town---act like you're picking me up.
I was told to say: my regards to Starkadder.''
Justin's sack was full, more than he would usually have allowed. It was
very heavy. He recorked the barrel and allowed Deesay (if that was her name)
to move next to the seed.
In the field Justin's mind was working furiously, but he came up with no
more than he had in the instant the girl spoke her private message: she was
from the Chesetians, or she knew all about them; and she had some way of
suppressing the satellite scans, or Starkadder, or both. If Starkadder had
known who she was, it would have told him. And if the satellites had been
able to track her, as they tracked everyone on Nele, Starkadder should have
known. It hadn't even warned him that someone was coming up behind him.
Starkadder had apparently not been permanently suppressed, because its
voice now spoke, still seeming to come from several steps behind Justin. ``An
overseer is approaching, not the one who has been assigned to watch you.
Tenth Aza Chereny wants to see you.'' Aza! Justin hadn't spoken personally
to him in three years. First a picture of Aza as a boy, helping Justin up as
the two of them climbed a trie, replaced by a memory of a red-faced newly
adult Aza calling insults, in turn replaced by a more mature, calm man (seen
from a distance) who had in him little of the boy.
The overseer was windblown and weatherbeaten; his class spent all day
outdoors guarding the plantation from thieves and small planters.
``Thousandth Justin? Tenth Aza requires you in the manor,'' said the man,
with a pronounced Westernele accent.
Justin replied, ``When does he want me? I have seventeen more rows to
plant. One or two of those is Aza's. He may have to be patient.''
``He requires you instantly. I must take you forcibly if you refuse.''
The overseer, like many who did not speak Southernele from the cradle,
reverted to formality at times of stress.
``All right. If Aza requires me, it must be important.'' Carrying his
sack of seed, Justin followed the Western overseer out of the fields. They
walked into the roomy entrance hall of the manor. The cool air felt clammy to
Justin, who was used to the hot sun and the stuffy interiors of Thousan'town
cabins. The overseer went to tell Aza that Justin had arrived. A maid
wandered through, dusting the tables and cabinets in the hall.
``Could I have a shirt or something? It's chilly in here,'' Justin asked
the maid.
``I'll see if I can get you something,'' the maid said. She was amused by
his discomfort: he was now shivering a little, the bare flesh of shoulders and
arms covered in goosepimples.
She went out and returned moments later, with a light jacket. The sleeves
were a little long for Justin, and the jacket wouldn't fasten around his
chest, but he was warmer. He rolled up one sleeve to a comfortable length.
As he started on the second one, Aza came in.
He looked much older than Justin knew he was: Aza was losing his hair. The
newly high forehead made him look wiser, and even sophisticated. But his
thoughtful look and second-long, gone-before-you-really-saw-it smile were left
over from Aza's childhood and completely familiar to Justin.
``I apologize for bringing you here without notice,'' said Aza. ``But it
was necessary.'' He led Justin through the manor to his private study, called
the _Green Palace_ by the manor staff. Aza had a knack for growing exotic
plants. ``The man who tried to assasinate my father has confessed that he had
an accomplice. You are suspected.''
``Roge said he had an accomplice? I don't believe it,'' Justin said.
``Yes, Roge. That is the man's name. Well, I don't believe it either; at
least, I don't believe the wretched man had an accomplice. But Lord Chereny
does, and the questioner has been ... encouraging him to say you were involved
in the attempt. My father is convinced, for some reason, that you were the
one who tried to strangle him. He will accept no other theory.'' Aza began
to pace. He stopped, fingering the dangling leaf of a golden-green plant
hanging overhead. ``Do you know why he would be so convinced of this? Do you
have any information?''
He looked dismayed when Justin shook his head. ``If you do not, I will be
forced to put you in prison to await trial. I will have no other course to
follow. But I don't want to incarcerate you. I don't think you are guilty,
and I ... I feel some friendship towards you.''
``The only thing I can tell you is that I would doubt Roge's original
confession as much as the accomplice bit. I don't think he is capable of
plotting a murder or cooperating in one. The man isn't a doer,'' Justin said.
Aza told him, ``I would have agreed, but why would he confess if he hadn't
done it? It would be insane.''
``Maybe he has gone insane,'' said Justin. ``Of course, in that case, he
could have murdered, too, I suppose.''
``And I can't release him unless I have proof that he's innocent and just
harmlessly crazy,'' Aza said. ``Even if I do get such proof, you become our
first suspect. You have to know more than that.''
``I don't,'' Justin protested. ``If I knew who did it ...''
``You're lying,'' Aza said. ``You're protecting another Thousandth, or a
servant, or an overseer, someone you think was justified to try to kill my
father. Maybe he hasn't been completely honest with everyone on the
plantation, but murder goes a little beyond fair redress, doesn't it?''
Justin was silent.
``He does have some real reason to suspect you, you know. You did say he
deserved to be punished for cheating on the distribution two years ago. He's
been afraid of you since then, not just this past week,'' Aza said accusingly.
``I said he should try to live in a cabin in Thousan'town for the summer
with a limited ration of fresh water. I said that would be proper punishment
for him. That doesn't make me a murderer---unless he is.'' Justin was
getting angry, a little unfairly. He did have a good idea who had tried to
kill Lord Chereny, just as Aza thought. But he was not refusing to tell
because he was trying to protect the criminal. He simply could not explain
how he knew without revealing damning evidence against himself, and even
giving Aza the information without a source would reveal that he knew more
than any Thousandth planter ever should.
Aza asked, ``Just tell me something ... so I can say you've cooperated.
Give me a hint, come on.'' His voice grew sharper. ``And stop sounding so
bitter! You're exaggerating, and if you keep acting that way, you'll make him
worse. Then I won't be able to help you.''
``Do you really feel that friendly toward me?'' Justin asked with sincere
curiousity. ``I wouldn't have thought so, even an hour ago.''
Aza looked startled. ``Why not? We were good friends, as boys. I think I
spent more time with you than with my family. We haven't been ... recently,
but ...'' he trailed off. ``Why not?'' he repeated.
``Don't you remember how you, well, warned me right before you went North
three years ago? You yelled at me to stay in Thousan'town where I belonged,
not to mix with advanced folk such as yourself, not to presume; by the time
you got back I was presuming quite a bit, investigating your father's practice
of stealing from the poor and selling to the rich. I supposed you would never
want to speak to me again; I certainly didn't care to speak to you.'' Justin
paused, breathing audibly, almost a sigh. ``All right. I can tell you one
thing. After this, please leave me alone---you don't want your father
thinking you are plotting against him with me. This is it, all right? I
don't think it was anyone on this plantation who tried to kill him. And I
don't think he will ever be able to put the criminal in prison, even if he
finds out who it was. Now I have to go. I have seventeen more rows to plant
today.'' Justin stood up.
Aza stood too. ``Let me show you out,'' he said politely. At the door to
the manor, he stopped. ``Good-bye, Justin,'' he said.
``Good-bye.'' Justin picked up his seed sack and his walked back toward
his seventeen rows. He imagined the conversation which might have occurred if
he had told his thoughts to Aza.
``I believe the instigators of the murder attempt are people from another
planet,'' Justin says.
``Another _what_?'' Aza almost yells. ``You mean another plantation, don't
you?''
``Another planet, I said,'' Justin insisted.
``What makes you think there even is such a thing?''
At this point the imaginary conversation breaks down. Justin would not be
able to tell Aza about the Chesetians, and he could think of no other possible
explanation for his theory. Of course, he could say he had heard rumors, but
Aza would question his sanity for believing that kind of rumor with no
evidence. It sounded like wish-fulfillment, since the plantation people were
desperate to be exonerated.
He finished planting around the time Thousan'town would be settling down to
supper---those who had it. He went into his own cabin, where he'd lived alone
since his mother died, and put a half-full pot on the fire, soon to be a quick
meal of boiled grains and vegetables.
He took out the past week's Journal to read while the food cooked. It had
only arrived two days earlier; the Chereny plantation was so far from
Casternor, the city in which the Journal was published, that Justin's copy
always came about ten days late. The Journal was somewhere between a weekly
newspaper and a nonfiction anthology; the writers were given scope to express
their opinions without any attempt at objectivity, but an effort was made to
describe the important events of the week in Nele. The quality varied sharply
between various writers, some of whom wrote regularly and others only once or
twice. Justin himself had had an article published in the Journal, but under
an assumed name. He had called himself Ches Nal Black, in honor of the
Chesetians, his assumed lineage name Nal, and his mother's true lineage name,
Black. Since Justin had never known his father's lineage, he had adopted the
Nal lineage. The Nal had, as far as Justin knew, died out about a hundred
years earlier, leaving only traces of their history. Only one of the Nal had
ever achieved any lasting fame, but that one was Armeny s-Nal, the pioneer
popularizer of the share system which now governed most of the plantations of
Nele. Armeny based his system on traditional ones used long before in very
limited context, but expanded them into a system so flexible and adaptable it
could be suited to feudal- or commune-organized plantations equally well.
After eating his supper, Justin decided to follow Deesay's instructions.
He was too curious to pass up a chance to solve the puzzle she had created,
and felt too threatened by her knowledge to let her continue to pretend she
was an ordinary transient.
He walked over to the transients' cabin. It was a large, wooden building,
capable of housing fifty men and women in need. Twenty or so transients lived
there, fairly comfortably, at most times. During harvest, the building would
hold over eighty, sleeping in rotation. As Justin approached, he saw Deesay
standing outside, looking at rocks she picked up off the paths.
He stepped up beside her, looking at the black and grey stone she held.
``What's so interesting about that rock?'' he asked.
Deesay looked up. ``Oh, hello. It's not this pebble that's interesting,
it's where I found it. This kind of rock is rare on the surface in the South.
In this region, it would have to be imported, or taken from a deep excavation,
or maybe thrown up in an earthquake.''
``How do you know that?'' Justin asked, surprised.
``I know lots of things ...'' Deesay said. ``I've been studying this place,
before I came. Listen, do you have a place here where we can talk
privately?'' She said this with artifical flirtatiousness, then lowered her
voice. ``We have to talk. Thank you for coming over, you did very well.''
He began to walk toward his cabin. Deesay followed. Justin said, ``You
didn't do too well. People here don't know that kind of thing, especially
transients.''
Deesay looked puzzled. ``Don't you get traveling students working in the
fields here? I thought that was common. Supporting themselves as they study
the culture, geology, whatever?''
``I don't know,'' said Justin. ``It sounds reasonable, I guess, but I never
met anyone like that. We don't have students here as transients much, I
suppose, or they pretend not to be---to study the culture better, maybe.''
They arrived at his cabin. Justin opened the door and they walked in.
``I like your furnishings,'' Deesay said.
``No, you don't,'' said Justin. ``I know what you're used to, wherever you
came from. What have you come here for? Why were you told to say---what you
said to me.''
`` `My regards to Starkadder'? When I told a friend I was coming here to
study Nele, he told me he knew a man who was a natural genius at neural
programming, who was living on the Chereny plantation in South Nele. I'd been
learning Easternele, but once you've got that one Southernele isn't so hard.
He asked me to try to persuade you to leave here, and go work for his company.
But I don't think---'' Justin interrupted. ``What company was he talking
about?''
``Chesea Neurnetyx Realcompagne, of course.'' She took a card out of a
concealed pocket.
_________________________
| |
| Ch'entzu Whitesmith |
| Affiliate Partner: Pl. |
| CHESEA Neurnetyx, Rc. |
| ________ |
| |
| XYrr-2522 tty00028 |
|_________________________|
Justin had never heard this name. But the visitors he called Chesetians
had said they were ``from Chesea,'' and he had only assumed they meant their
nation.
``If they wanted me to come work for them, why didn't they ask me before?''
Justin asked.
``How should I know?'' asked Deesay. ``But according to Whitey, your talent
is wasted here. The anti-psychorifling laws prevent any sort of industry
getting started in Nele. There aren't enough natural resources anywhere else
on the planet.''
The implications of this statement hit Justin with the force of ten
gravities. He had thought Nele was the only place on the planet. Or really,
he had not thought about the possibility of other nations.
``Where else on the planet could they go?'' Justin asked.
``Nowhere, I just said there weren't enough natural resources.'' Deesay
asked, ``Well? Are you considering leaving with me? Would you like to be a
professional?''
Justin thought about this. It would solve all his problems: no more chance
of arrest for Lord Chereny's attempted murder; no more need to conceal
Starkadder; no more unfair distribution practices to risk his freedom
protesting. His mother was dead, there was no one he would be leaving behind.
``In a way I can't stay in Nele. A man I had forgotten was my friend, Aza
Chereny, just warned me I may soon be arrested,'' Justin said.
``What? For what crime?'' protested Deesay.
``Someone tried to strangle his father, Lord Chereny, who thinks I'm behind
everything. Aza wanted me to give him some information, so he could say I was
helping with the investigation, but I don't know who did it.''
``Aza sounds like he's really caught between you and his father,'' Deesay
said.
``Well, I don't know. But if I am going to join Chesea, I don't understand
how it works. How would I be allowed to leave Nele?'' asked Justin.
``Simple,'' said Deesay. ``When the _Frame_ comes to take me back, I'll
bring you along.''
``Don't I need a passport, or identification? The Chesetians had those
rainbow coins they said were their equivalent. I thought they didn't think of
taking me with them because they couldn't make me one of those.''
``Absolutely right,'' Deesay said. ``But they will have to take you, and we
will get one of those made for you right away, at the first bordermark we
reach.''
Justin was puzzled. ``Why will they have to take me? That doesn't make
sense.''
She brought a folded paper out of the pocket which had also held the card.
``This,'' she said.
It was ornately decorated and written in a language he did not know.
``What is it?'' Justin asked.
``Well ... it's a unification agreement,'' Deesay said. ``It's something
like a marriage or adoption contract, binding people together into a legal
family.''
``I'm going to marry you? Or adopt you? Or maybe you'll adopt me,''
Justin laughed.
``I said something like,'' said Deesay. ``Ah ... there's something else. I
have to put my real name on it, so you might as well know what that is.
Devise Zar-Leroi. But don't say it in public, or when you aren't near me.''
``Devise?'' Justin asked. ``That's a strange name.''
``It means `invent.' It's better than Deesay: Deesay means `she says.'
I'm more inventive than I am talkative,'' Devise told him.
``When you tell me not to mention you when you're not around, you mean that
gadget that keeps the satellites from seeing you, don't you. If they hear me
talking about you, someone might notice you're invisible,'' Justin said.
``How do you know about that?'' Devise demanded.
Justin explained, ``Starkadder didn't tell me you were coming up behind me.
He announces everyone I don't know or can't see. You fit both categories, but
he didn't say a word. I thought you might be suppressing him, but you
weren't; he just didn't see you, because the satellites didn't.''
``That's some program,'' said Devise. ``No wonder Whitey says you're a
genius.'' She brought the paper to Justin's attention again. ``You can just
sign this,'' she said. ``It's sufficient even if you don't fully understand
the agreement's terms. If I've cheated you, you can sue me for recompense,
but I promise it's all right by our standards.''
Justin had only the vaguest idea what her standards might be like, but he
signed anyway. He was so sure now that he wanted to go, he would sign
anything to insure it.
``Don't change your behavior, act as though nothing has changed. The
_Frame_ is going to show up some time between tomorrow morning and next week.
I'll come over and get you: have everything you want to take assembled and
wrapped to carry. We'll have to leave right away, when they come.'' Devise
left Justin's house.
Justin slept uneasily. He had made the right decision, he thought, but his
life would never again be what he considered normal. He hoped that wouldn't
translate into unhappy.
A commotion outside his door woke him the next morning. He could see
nothing of its cause through his single, narrow window. Justin stood and put
on work clothes.
As he finished dressing, his door was thrust open. The commotion grew
louder, and now Justin could see that half Thousan'town was standing in his
yard. Three overseers had taken the hinges off his door to get it open. Near
the edge of the road, Justin saw Devise in the crowd.
An overseer said, ``I arrest you, Justin, called Nal, left of Black, to
answer the charges of attempted murder and conspiracy against Lord Chereny.
Your property is now in the wardship of justice, and forfeit if you are
guilty. Come with me now.''
As the man spoke, Justin saw Devise moving away, toward the transients'
area.
Starkadder spoke at his back, like a murmur in his ear. ``Roge has finally
been forced to name you as his co-conspirator. You will be imprisoned if you
don't leave the area ... The overseer Lord Chereny sent to arrest you is
arriving now ...'' Justin was frightened. Apparently, whatever it was that
Devise used to block the satellites and Starkadder was ruining Starkadder's
ability to function. Normally it should have warned him of the danger in
plenty of time to escape.
Devise was frightened too. She sent a neuromessage to Chesea Recruitment
officer Sofya Valadiya on _Frame_. The message was somewhat incoherent, but a
translation would be something like: ``The solution has caused more problems.
To remove recruit from habitat, cause trauma in habitat; but trouble captured
recruit and made removal unlikely.''
``What happened? Be calm,'' was Valadiya's reply.
``Two causes: attempt on life of Chereny Senior; interruption of data to
keep my presence unknown. Result: recruit wants to leave, but is imprisoned
and unable.'' Devise sends urgency across neuromessage circuit.
``Calm. Rational. Tranquil. Now, send me a causal chain.'' Valadiya was
used to dealing with field agents under stress; when weren't they having an
emergency?
``Chesea personnel arranged for recruit to be unwanted in Nele. They
arranged he would be suspected of a crime. I arrived. To keep my arrival
secret, I blocked satellite scan. The same blocking transmission interfered
with operation of recruit's neuroprogram. Therefore he was not as well
informed as usual. He was just arrested for the crime Chesea arranged. Now
how can I get him to the _Frame_?''
Devise was ordering her thoughts more clearly under the direct influence of
the neuromessage circuit.
Valadiya told her, ``You have to get him out of prison.''
``How?'' asked Devise.
``That's your job. You're the agent.''
``How much exposure can I allow myself?'' she asked.
``As little as possible/Whatever it takes,'' came an answer loaded with
ambivalence.
Devise said, ``I won't be able to do it. I claim revocation, take me
home.''
``You can't do that,'' Valadiya told her.
``Why not?'' Devise protested.
``You signed that unification agreement, didn't you?'' asked the
recruitment officer.
Devise said, ``Oh. You ... make such plans. I have to get him out of
prison, legally, don't I? Because I signed that unification agreement that
was just supposed to let him off Nele. Now I know why you're in charge of
half of Recruitment.'' She paused, planning her next transmission carefully.
It was an untranslatable joke. Unification agreements were taken seriously,
but their many entanglements made them the subjects of every kind of humor.
Justin was taken into the basement of the manor, where prisoners were kept.
There were six cells, each of which could hold four men. Only two cells were
tenanted. One held three men, the other only one: Roge.
Roge was in bad shape. He looked like a man who had been forced to give
false evidence against his will, Justin thought, which supported what
Starkadder had told him.
The overseer pushed Justin into a cell across from Roge's. The three men
in the cell furthest from Roge were all in their beds, but one raised his
head.
``What's going on?'' he asked.
The overseer said, ``We've got the man Lord Chereny wanted.''
``Justin Black,'' said the man. ``I lose again. Gerd!'' he said loudly,
turning toward the man beside him. ``Gerd! Wake up! You win, I'm only four
up on you now.''
The other prisoner sat up. He was wearing what Justin assumed was a prison
suit, an unusually dirty gray one-piece garment. ``Well, I thought you'd be in
here. Roge is wrong about everything.''
The overseer was locking Justin into his cell. ``Shut your mouths, all of
you,'' he said, leaving them alone.
Roge looked over at Justin. ``Sorry,'' he said hoarsely.
``Did you do it?'' Justin asked. ``I told Aza I didn't think you had tried
to kill his father, but I'm not sure he believed me.''
``Why would I confess to it, if I hadn't done it?'' Roge asked.
``Why would you confess if you had?'' Justin countered.
``Guilt, maybe,'' suggested Roge.
``I suppose. I just can't see you as the kind of man ... '' Justin trailed
off.
Roge said, ``I can't see myself as that kind of person either. I just
don't even know why I tried to strangle him. I don't even know why I
confessed to it. I don't understand anything.''
Justin did not know what to say to answer him. The other prisoners went
back to sleep, now that there was nothing going on.
Soon Justin, with nothing else to do, went to sleep too.
The rescue turned out not to be so difficult. Devise had not realized that
the ``prison'' Justin was being taken to was only Lord Chereny's residence.
She remembered that Aza Chereny had tried to help Justin, and knew he would be
her key into the manor.
She changed her clothing. Devise was now the model of a Lord's daughter
from one of the wealthier Easternele plantations.
``Hello,'' she said to the maid at the door. ``I've come to visit Aza.''
The maid welcomed her in. Devise was led to the plant-filled study, where Aza
was working on a boxed row of spiky flowers. ``Aza Chereny,'' she said.
``I've been told so much about you.'' The maid left. As soon as she had,
Devise stepped over to Aza. ``Listen. I know you've arrested Justin,'' she
began.
Aza said, ``What do you---''
She continued, ignoring his attempt to interrupt. ``You don't want him in
prison, but you can't let him stay free here, right? Well, I'm going to take
him off your hands. You'll never see him again, but he'll be free, and
happier than he could be here. All you have to do is let me have him.''
Aza wanted to believe her, but didn't understand her at all. ``I really
don't know what you're talking about.''
``I'm just going to smuggle him out of here. No one in Nele will ever see
him again. No one but you will know how he escaped.'' Devise waited. There
wasn't much time; the _Frame_ would touch down in less than an hour.
Doubting his own sanity, Aza took her down a back staircase into the
basement. He unlocked all the cell doors, as she directed. Then he took her
on a tour of the manor. He noticed her sprinkling a pale yellow powder on the
floors, everywhere they went.
The yellow powder all over the manor was a neuroerase formula Devise
carried for use in emergencies. The overseers and servants woke the next day
with only traces of memory, unable to explain how their wards had vanished.
The former prisoners woke in the fields, unable to say how they had escaped.
Justin woke in his room on the _Frame_, knowing only that he was no longer
a prisoner of Lord Chereny ... and no longer a prisoner of Nele.
______________________________________________________________________________
Dana Goldblatt never has admitted to preferring science fiction over other
forms of fiction, except when it was cheaper at used bookstores. She started
writing stories for fun in high school, but didn't finish any until after she
graduated. When she was an editor of Brandeis University's literary magazine
Kether, she started writing a lot more often. Dana is currently a graduate
student in computer science, and is still attending Brandeis.
dana@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The King's Challenge
by Cerise Palmer
Copyright (c)1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Sorrille trudged slowly through the gauntlet of curious townsfolk, silently
cursing the guard who had bound his hands so exceptionally snugly behind his
back. What keen satisfaction it would give him to smite these shabby oafs,
with their bulging eyes riveted to his progress and their dirt-smudged faces
predictable masks of cruel delight or stupid pity.
Sorrille, it must be conceded, was a bit of an arrogant bastard.
The townsfolk watched him dumbly at first, too conscious of his former
power to risk their scrawny necks taunting him. But as he neared the city
gates it began to dawn on them that he would like as not never return to repay
their rude treatment of him, and they rose to the occasion accordingly. Women
lifted their aprons to their mouths and tittered as their young brats hurled
scraps of rotten food and clods of dung at his head. A toothless old man
hopped up and down on one leg in a fit of ecstatic mirth, then swung his
balancing stick roundly at Sorrille's shin. One of the guards flanking
Sorrille gave the old gargoyle a friendly shove that toppled him into a mud
puddle.
``Now, now, venerable grandpap, this here's a royal subject and his escort.
Mind yer manners,'' the guard guffawed, giving Sorrille an insultingly
familiar slap on the back. Sorrille curled his lip savagely, unable to decide
who he would thrash to a pulp first---guard or gaffer---were he suddenly given
the opportunity to do so.
``Say there, lordling, send us yer bones from the Charred Lands so's we'll
know yer made yer trip safely,'' called a paunchy shopkeeper, grinning
obscenely as he clapped his hands to his jouncing belly.
``Oi don't know,'' countered a stableboy, clutching at Sorrille's cloak,
``but what he'd do more kerreck to berkweeth us his foinery now. The Children
of the Charred Lands ain't pertickelar on how their victims is dressed.''
Sorrille pulled himself free of the creature's stinking grip and struggled
briefly but earnestly with the rope pretzeled about his wrists. ``Don't tempt
your fate, dropping. I'll see to it that your coffin is fit for Onri
himself.''
The stableboy laughed shrilly. ``Oh, en ain't he a foine one fer threats.
Where he's going there won't even be none to tuck him underground. May the
jeckels foind yer corpse most deloightfully tasty, good me lord.'' His
pseudo-court bow, complete with manual flourishes, sent the guard at
Sorrille's left elbow into convulsions of nasal glee.
``See how respectful we all are,'' he said, between snorts, ``even to
one''---here he preceded his words with the appropriate action---``who's about
to be booted from the city.''
Sorrille rolled up from the ground as the stone gate whined plaintively to
a close behind him. The peepdoor opened just long enough for the guard behind
it to drop a tiny bone dagger and a handkerchief-full of biscuits at
Sorrille's feet. ``Protection and wayfarin' provisions,'' chuckled the guard,
before slamming the door briskly in Sorrille's face.
Muttering under his breath, Sorrille spent the next several minutes
applying the minuscule blade of the dagger to his bonds, which frayed
sufficiently at last for him to work his hands free. He slipped the dagger
into his tunic belt without any real faith in its future utility, then turned
to gather the meager contents of the handkerchief, which had spilled loose on
contact with the ground. ``Sons of dogs,'' he hissed, scraping the dust from
what might well be the last meal he would ever eat.
For the next several hours, as he plodded across the ugly stretch of bare
plain surrounding Renith, Sorrille did little but reflect bitterly on the many
advantages of the royal table. For one thing, one always left it with one's
stomach satiated. For another, its multitudinous delicacies were invariably
accompanied by an endless flow of mildly intoxicating---and thirst-quenching
---potations. Then, last but not least, one was invited to attend it no less
than four times daily, and while a score of musicians and dancers might very
well appear out of nowhere to entertain one, it was inconceivable that either
fanged rodents or fist-sized flies would ever be allowed to join the
festivities.
Flailing his arms furiously at an especially noisy and persistent specimen
of the second category, Sorrille began to regret having exhausted his supply
of biscuits so rapidly. True, he had not eaten for two days prior to being
paraded through and then expelled from the city; the king's henchmen had
tactfully ignored his existence from the moment they thrust him into the
palace dungeons to the moment they returned to execute His Most August and
Senile Majesty Onri's sentence upon poor hotheaded ex-Duke Sorrille.
Unfortunately, though, Sorrille was now entirely without any likely prospects
of obtaining life-sustaining nourishment, and thirsty as a bloodsucker to
boot. Sometime tomorrow, if he kept up a rigorous pace, he might reach the
Ashen Forest's cornucopia of snowberries, bone fruit, and mirkwater. But to
partake of aught of the Forest's tempting bounty would quickly ensure that
Sorrille became not one of the Shadowchildren's victims but rather one of
their numbers.
Sorrille toyed sardonically with the notion that were he in fact
metamorphosed into a deathless and lifeless ghoul, he could probably catch up
with Onri on the next extra-urban hunting expedition and hasten the old boor's
end with an exquisitely nightmarish haunting. Of course, his own existence
thenceforward would hardly be an enviable one. No, he reasoned, with a
forbearance uncharacteristic of him, that manner of revenge would clearly cost
him far too much. Better to meet Onri's insane challenge---to return to Renith
with a tame, captive Shadowchild---and behold the king dumbstruck with
apoplexy when he learned that his challenge had been met. The doddering
bastard's crown would be brusquely removed from his head and set gently on
Sorrille's own, Onri's radiant young Belisa would joyously accept his marriage
proposal, and every courtier who had ever done him an ill turn would be
summarily drawn-and-quartered, or, better yet, driven screaming off a cliff by
his pet Shadowchild. It was no doubt a plan of action with much to recommend
it, provided Sorrille discovered, within the next day, how to avert certain
death and then coax a supernatural nemesis to behave itself.
For the time being, however, he would have to concentrate on such minor
though pressing matters as how to avert pangs of hunger and where to spend the
night. In solution to the first problem, Sorrille seized a handful of scrubby
plains clover and began to chew it greedily; the shepherds and cartdrivers of
Lower Renith did swear by it, after all, as a `rousin' stimulant,'' and while
the stuff surely wouldn't fill his stomach, it might at least hoodwink it into
quiescence. The second problem was considerably larger, as the plains wind was
a wild and ravenous beast by night. Unless Sorrille could find or devise some
sort of shelter by sunset, he was likely to spend the next moonspan being
knocked down and tumbled about till his clothes were tattered and his limbs
bruised and bloody. After surveying the discouragingly level landscape before
him for several minutes, Sorrille concluded that there was nary a tree nor
shrub to hide behind or cling to. Then, with a burst of what felt like forced
and desperate optimism, he spotted a greyish blotch not too far in the
distance which might conceivably be a rock outcrop of some sort. Resigning
himself to the possibility that he was travelling all-too-eagerly toward a
nonexistent haven he reminded himself repeatedly that it was just as good a
destination as any other.
As luck would have it, the blotch was much further off than Sorrille had
guessed. The disc of the sun had turned from hot gold to warm peach to an
ominously cool carmine and begun to slip below the horizon before he felt even
vaguely like he had gotten anywhere. Determined nonetheless to reach his goal,
he quickened his already lively pace in a last-ditch attempt to outrace the
twilight. He was dourly preparing to entertain notions of defeat when a
luminous whorl of milky air came spinning up to greet him.
``Curse the plains and the dog-gods who made them!'' Sorrille bellowed, by
way of greeting, then broke into a thoroughly antisocial run. It wasn't until
the glistening funnel-cloud had enveloped him without so much as flaring his
cloak hem that he realized that being battered by the plains wind was the
least of his current worries. For, standing in a triumphant circle around him,
their diaphanous wings folded, their black nostrils and lips twitching, were
four Shadowchildren. Time froze then, for an unspeakably long moment in which
countless worlds came into and passed out of existence, and Sorrille watched
with helpless fascination as the silver branches of the creatures' hair
crackled and hissed like snow-crusted kindling on a winter fire. A pair of
shimmering claws began to caress his face with an eerie, hypnotic tenderness,
and he found himself sinking pleasantly and endlessly into a deep cavern pool
whose dark waters streamed with phosphorescent tendrils. Lulled nearly to
insensibility, he recollected somehow that he must surface for air. Proud
that his instinct for survival could withstand even the delicious pull of
enchanted slumber, he willed himself alert, blinking hard to bring the blurry
twin red orbs before him into focus. Finally, his vision cleared, and he met
the Shadowchild's blind steady gaze directly. Gods be damned! He had withstood
nothing; while he had been doing the backfloat in his imaginary watering-hole,
the Children had been collectively sucking at his thoughts like a gang of
slithering lampreys. Growing faint with the effort, Sorrille managed to wrench
his head sideways and down until the only thing he saw was an elongated,
insubstantial foot. The Children convulsed with disappointment, and the one
who had been peeping uninvited into the windows of his soul caressed his face
once again, with the insistent frenzy of a newly cast-off lover.
``Do not deny us, Sorrille,'' it coaxed. Its voice was soundless yet
reverberant, rather like wind scraping the barrel of a tongueless bell.
``You meant to seek us,'' another intoned. ``Do not despair if we have
found you first.''
``Are we not wondrous to behold?'' inquired a third. ``As lovely as
Belisa?'' For a fraction of a second, the Child's voice took on Belisa's very
air of well-practiced coquetry, and Sorrille could picture the creature
raising a claw artfully to its scintillant coiffure. He shuddered to realize
how deep a draught of his mind the four had drunk in. He fought not to look
up and meet the Childrens' eyes again, meanwhile wondering whether the fact of
their obvious blindness could not somehow be used to his advantage.
``What is it you want?'' he demanded, as if he were addressing a peasant
rabble and standing in a perfectly upright and authoritative position.
``What is it we want?'' came the mocking reply.
``What is it we want?''
``We want to sup on your heart.'' The caressing claws found their way to
Sorrille's chest. ``Is it a kind heart?''
``Is it a bold heart? or a bitter heart?''
``Or perhaps it is a broken heart. How we savor a broken heart.''
``What is it we want?''
``Only to sup on your mind. Is it a keen mind, or a weak one?'' The claws
brushed Sorrille's temples.
``Perhaps it is a broken mind.''
``How we savor a broken mind.'' The claws tangled longingly in his hair.
``What is it we want?''
``We want to see your eyes, pretty lordling.'' Again the voice was
Belisa's. ``Will you not show us your eyes, pretty, pretty lordling?''
Sorrille rolled over, growling at the overly soft royal bed, then grunted
with satisfaction at the taste of sweet ale on Belisa's lips. He was about to
scold her playfully for cuckolding the king with such wanton frequency when
the unnaturally dark lustre of her mouth roused in him the first full-fledged
panic of his adult life. He began to thrash about wildly, expecting to feel
not one but four pairs of claws groping for his vital organs. Instead, he
discovered himself hurling through the amorous Shadowchild's form as if it
were no more than a pillar of smoke.
He ran without seeing, his arms raised protectively around his head, his
feet pounding the plains with such force that it seemed the whole world was a
vibrating drumskin. Ground and sky alternately flew apart and then collided,
and between them was Sorrille, just barely managing to keep his balance. Fear
roiled in his skull like breakers slamming against a cliff, then spilled over
and over again into the forgotten lagoon beyond it. He gasped for breath as
if he were drowning, or as if there were too little air in the sky. Like the
plains-wind itself, he unsettled feeding vultures, alarmed a pair of rutting
dogs. And all the while, the Shadowchildren kept pace with him effortlessly,
their ghostly feet skimming the ground, their voiced entangling him in a
perpetual litany of taunts and threats which tickled the inside of his ears
like the echo of his own crazed thoughts.
Finally, he could endure no more. He turned to face them with the
wrath-contorted countenance of a hero scourging the infernal regions, raised
his arms prophetically, and cried ``Begone!'' in a tone that fell somewhere
between breathlessness and hysteria. As if to humor, one last time, his
ill-conceived attempt to elude them, the Shadowchildren shrank back a few
yards in mock terror then burst into discordant hilaria and began to approach
him once again. Sorrille backed away from them involuntarily, in the
measured, almost ritual dance of quarry that knows itself doomed. And then he
was falling. And then slipping, with sublime gratitude, into the deepest
midnight of unconsciousness.
Some landscapes are deceptively monochromatic; the eye, drowning in a wash
of the one color that begins to seem like no-color, searches frantically for a
blazing streak of difference, for some brilliant rebel hue. Instead, it
discovers the myriad nuances that reside in even the most economical of
palettes. And so a dismally grey landscape, for example, becomes first a
welter of possibilities and then an intricate tapestry of shadings and
modulations. Steel-grey yields dove's-breast grey and birch grey and the grey
of mute dawn and fog-misted lakes. Then synaesthesia sets in, and grey becomes
the odor of wood-smoke, the chime of plashing water, a morning wind beaded
with dew. The senses unveil themselves to a symphony of grey chords, textures,
glimmering motes, and sometimes the Grey Lady who orchestrates it makes her
feathery descent and presses a goblet of silver-grey wine to one's lips...
Coughing violently as the bitter cold stuff made its way down his throat,
Sorrille hoisted himself into a sitting position on the thatch-bed of dried
balsam beneath him. He studied his surroundings long enough to conclude that
he was in some sort of mountain aerie, disconcertingly higher than he had ever
been before. After reeling with vertigo for a few moments, he turned his
attention to the strange-looking being that had apparently appointed herself
his nursemaid. Draped loosely in some iridescent cloth the indefinite color of
a cloud, she was tall and supple as a young tree, with an oxymoronic
combination of smooth, glowing skin and bone-white hair that made her age
impossible to determine. Her onyx-black eyes were so widely spaced that it was
difficult to look into both of them simultaneously, and her nose was aquiline
in a cruelly graceful way. Altogether, her aspect was unsettlingly predatory.
Sorrille assembled his facial features into an expression of rapt
attentiveness tinged with urbane wit. ``Would you find me presumptuous were I
to ask you where I am?''
``Your manners are those of the court,'' she replied, scrutinizing him as
if he were a puzzle to be solved. ``This is my dwelling-site. Did you wish to
find yourself elsewhere?''
``On the contrary. I am delighted to find myself here, for I had not
expected to survive the night.'' He paused while she tended the small fire
near his bed. ``I was fleeing the bane of the Charred Lands---the
Shadowchildren. Four of them.''
Her face registered neither surprise nor fear. ``So I suspected. Only a
fool or a hunted man would fail to avoid my wolf-trap. The Children must have
lost your scent once you fell. Be glad that they are blind.''
``Indeed, I am overjoyed. Unfortunately, I lost consciousness while falling
into your trap, and am consequently ignorant of what has transpired since that
event. Would you be so kind as to share with me any information you may have
gleaned on the subject?''
``A great many circumlocutions,'' she observed, with a trace of what seemed
like amusement. Then, as if it were unnecessary to respond to him, she removed
some strips of cooking meat from the fire and brought them to him. ``You are
no doubt very hungry,'' she said, seeing the flicker of avid interest on his
face. ``Then it is wisest not to eat too quickly.''
Finally, while Sorrille fought to obey her advice, she returned arbitrarily
to his unanswered question. ``Some things I will tell you. Others I will
not.'' She smiled at him vaguely. ``The more you tell me of yourself, the
more I may tell you of myself. But still I will not tell you all.''
Bristling with irritation at her monosyllabic riddling, Sorrille confined
himself to inviting her discretion in such matters. She smiled again, a bit
less vaguely.
``I am Naraya. I found you in my wolf-trap last night, cold but safe in
the absence of lupine companions. The Children had already scattered, as they
would have, in any event, upon my arrival. They do not relish my presence.''
In response to Sorrille's wary, questioning look, she added, ``Calm yourself.
If I am not quite the same as you, neither am I unnatural or dangerous.'' She
smiled yet again, this time with the obvious intention of reassuring her
guest. ``I brought you here,'' she concluded, ``and now I am eager to hear the
tale of your adventures. Few men venture this far from Renith city, and you
seem poorly equipped for a journey.''
``I am not travelling of my own accord.'' As the indignity of his situation
struck him anew, he clenched a fist till the knuckles whitened, then glanced
up with a vehement sullenness to meet Naraya's amused and knowing look. ``But
of course you had already guessed as much.''
She nodded her assent. ``But what I have guessed or failed to guess is
unimportant. Please honor me with the telling of your tale.''
He rose from the thatch-bed, paced himself into a more courteous mood, and
returned to his place by the fire. ``Very well, lady. I shall disclose all to
you, as you have been a most gracious and generous hostess.'' He bowed with
curt but sincere gratitude, then sat.
``I am Sorrille, Duke of Renith, only son of the first of the nine landed
families. I was banished yesterday morning at the order of Onri himself. It
was an astonishingly merciful punishment for the crime of treason, which the
king was most fully aware I had not committed. Were I in fact a traitor to
Renith, my head would be gracing a pike at the city gate this very moment.
Instead, I have been magnanimously sent off to wander about the wastelands,
and hopefully perish in them, while Onri enjoys the talk currently circulating
about his wise, just, and seemingly perpetual reign. My real crime,
incidentally, was dallying with the queen.''
Surprise flickered in Naraya's depthless eyes. ``You risked the king's
wrath for a few hours' pleasure? Was this royal matron so terribly alluring?
Or perhaps she had ensorcelled you?''
``Belisa is young and fair, and we had been lovers for many months. We were
caught when a valet jealous of Belisa's favor spied on us and then brought the
king to keep him company at the keyhole. Had things been otherwise, I might be
in the lady's arms this very moment, bathed in the gilt sunlight of her
person. She is truly glorious.''
``So I would imagine. How came she to be the wife of an aging monarch? Even
I know that Onri has ruled in Renith for many decades.''
``She was one of the many spoils he returned with from a recent campaign in
the Quartz Mountains. She was a princess there; Onri captured her brother
along with her. The poor fellow died in the royal dungeons last year, while
Belisa lingers on as a pampered prisoner of the palace.''
``Apparently she has managed to enjoy a few small liberties.'' Naraya
curled her pale lips mischievously, then caught Sorrille's slightly annoyed
look. ``But forgive me, I have interrupted again. Please continue.''
``To make a long story short, Belisa loathes Onri, and Onri would fain have
his kingdom believe otherwise. He is fond of boasting that he is 'more a man
than any young pup in the city,' as evidenced by his youthful queen's
passionate devotion to him. At nearly every banquet in the palace, he
pretends to grow extravagantly drunk as soon as Belisa retires, then dares any
man at the table to try and divert her favor from him. He laughs uproariously
and says he'll forfeit his crown to the first who succeeds in doing so. It's
not quite senile swaggering, though---more a senile stratagem for luring any
potential cuckolders into making less-than-careful moves. Onri wants to know
who his rivals in love are before they so much as cast a longing look in
Belisa's direction. In my case he found out after the fact, and had me
arrested on grounds of treason rather than let anyone discover I'd added a
pair of horns to the ornamentation on his crown.''
Naraya clicked her tongue and chuckled. ``You were fortunate to escape
with your life, it seems. What possessed the king to be so lenient?''
``Belisa's pleading, no doubt. His compromise was to have me die out of
sight instead of in a public execution. And his last perverse joke was
inviting me to return with a Shadowchild and claim the throne I had 'tried to
gain through most depraved and foul subterfuge.' That was the statement he
made before his court in the most smug and self-righteous tone he could
muster; only I heard the tremor of insane fury in his voice.''
``And what will you do now? Lay siege to Renith, demanding your
lady-love?'' Naraya's voice was gently mocking.
``Actually, I'm planning to take Onri up on his challenge. He did present
it before a score of witnesses, so he can't possibly refuse to honor it. I
think Belisa would enjoy being queen of Renith were there a gout-free and
virile king at her side. And I'm increasingly taken with the prospect of
trying on Onri's crown for size.'' Sorrille grinned as if he were plotting a
schoolboy prank.
``And all you need do is return to Renith with a Shadowchild in tow?''
asked Naraya, pretending amazement.
``That's correct.''
``Simply capture a Child and take it along home with you?''
``Exactly.''
She burst into peals of laughter so infectious that before long Sorrille
was doubled over, and the echoes of their combined amusement were rippling the
chill mountain air.
Sorrille spent the better part of the afternoon exploring Naraya's aerie
like a shepherd on some long-awaited holiday. Shortly after feeding him,
Naraya had taken Sorrille on a brief tour of its points of interest: a
purple-hued hot spring, a rock ledge curtained by the pristine cascade of a
waterfall, several giant birches with foliage so dense they obscured the sun
wholly. Then she had excused herself to rest and left him to his own devices.
After luxuriating in the hot spring, until his body remembered nothing of the
last night's bruising fall, he lay naked on the ledge, sunning in the warm
bright mist the waterfall so obligingly exuded. Feeling his strength return
at last, he shook the dust from his clothes and donned them with arrogant
grace. True enough, his dragon's hide boots were quite scuffed, and a few
rubies were loose in the hem of his cloak. Still, considering the events of
the previous three days, he had done a remarkable job of avoiding
dishevelment. Even the puny bone dagger had finally proved of worth; its
blade turned out to be ideally suited for scraping the stubble off one's
cheek.
Sorrille's feeling of self-satisfaction was somewhat undercut by the fact
that he had no idea whatsoever where he was. When he had asked Naraya, over
breakfast, to give him a geographical update, she had calmly reiterated that
``there were some things she chose not to tell him,'' and then, as if to
reduce his exasperation, added that her aerie ``was where it was.'' So now,
having roamed about the place idly for long enough, Sorrille began to inspect
it diligently for some clue to his whereabouts.
The first conclusion he arrived at, after treading every inch of the aerie
twice, was that it was completely devoid of any visible access. Nearly an
acre broad, it was bordered on three sides by perilously steep slopes and on
the fourth by the mountain's utmost peak. ``How on earth did she bring me
here?'' he muttered repeatedly, more out of dumb wonder than out of any real
hope that his strange hostess would enlighten him upon her return. Next he
devoted himself to identifying whatever he could in the distance, a task
rendered nearly impossible by the mountain's obstructive tiara of clouds.
Finally, he made out the palace spires of Renith in the south, the foothills
of the Quartz Mountains to the west, and the snarled black treetops of the
Ashen Forest appallingly near, in the east. His educated hunch was that in
the north, behind the towering peak of Naraya's mountain, the Forest
proliferated in yet more wild and unsightly abandon; it did, after all, extend
out of sight in that general direction.
With the directness of a homing pigeon, Sorrille's mind returned over and
over again to the problem of how the willowy, less-than-massive Naraya had
transported him to her aerie. He weighed more than she did, certainly,
especially when unconscious, and there were no trails up the mountainside
along which she could have dragged him in a litter or led him on horseback.
Not that he'd even seen any horses grazing, or any empty litters lying about.
He shook his head in bewilderment, staring absently at Renith all the while,
as if it were the source of his confusion. And then it struck him: Renith
looked mournfully remote not so much because of the shroud of mountain- mist
he was forced to view it through, as because of the fact that it was a good
deal further than a day's walk in the distance. Naraya's steel-grey peak was
none other than the rock outcrop he had tried so desperately to reach last
sunset, transformed from mountain to molehill by some weird trick of the
waning light.
``Who is she, and how did she bring me here?'' he muttered once more,
setting off to find the lady and demand that she satisfy his more than idle
curiosity. No longer solicitous of her need for rest, he searched the aerie
with noisy, impatient movements. He was red-faced and panting by the time he
was willing to concede that her present whereabouts were a complete mystery to
him. He sighed the terse sigh of a courtier resummoning his dignity, and
wondered whether he were any less a captive in this uncharted Shangri-la than
he had been in Onri's dungeons.
He had consumed a hearty portion of roasted meat strips and was irritably
poking the fire into a more respectable form of defense against the chilly
starlight when Naraya emerged noiselessly from behind a curtain of night-heavy
foliage. The leaves began to rustle in the wake of her silver-clad form like
children whispering in stealthy fits and starts; no doubt if she turned to
face them, they would lapse again into frozen silence. As she approached
Sorrille, the fire blazed in miniature duplicate in the glossy black disks of
her eyes; he shuddered, disturbed anew by his inability to encompass her
widely-spaced gaze in his own. Smiling, she placed her hands on either side
of his face and bent down to kiss him, rousing in him a dizzying mixture of
primal terror and unmistakable desire. He felt weightless yet lethargic, too
sleepy to resist her will as it enveloped him like the burning glow of a naked
sun. He was perfectly aware he was being enchanted, as he had not been when
the Shadowchild laid similarly caressing hands on him not so long ago. And
yet, beneath his indignance at Naraya's audacity lay a strangely calm
acceptance of it and even amused curiosity about what she would do next.
``I have not had so pleasing a guest as you in some time,'' she said,
stepping back a few paces to study him. Vines of honey-red firelight crept
through her white hair again and again, till it seemed she was wearing one of
the golden hairnets currently fashionable among the ladies of Renith court.
``And is witchery a customary feature of your hospitality?'' inquired
Sorrille with a laugh, as he blinked himself alert.
``I was not aware that it was. Do I seem to require such stratagems?''
She regarded him with an injured expression and stiffened slightly.
``I meant no offense, lady, but your kiss tasted so unlike any I have known
before that I could only explain it in terms of magic.''
``Kisses are among those things that be which require no explanation.''
Apparently Sorrille had soothed her ruffled feathers somewhat; she had resumed
her proud, willowy stance, and a look faintly recognizable as coyness
flickered across her unsettling features. ``Do I seem to require
stratagems?'' she repeated, with eerie self-assurance, and began to unlace the
bodice of her pearlescent gown. Topaz points of firelight glinted in the
fabric as it slid back from her shoulders slowly, slowly, and then dropped
into a silver pool at her ankles, revealing the most spendid female form
Sorrille had ever been privileged to behold. A sculptor, Sorrille thought in
amazement, would kill for the opportunity to immortalize it in marble or
alabaster, and Naraya's flesh, with its unearthly pallor and flawless luster,
did resemble the rarest and most costly specimen of either stone. Moreover,
her ample but firmly-molded curves were nothing if not statuesque, though her
long limbs and the rhythmic sweep to her walk suggested a sensuality not much
inclined toward standing still. Accustomed to the initial modesty and
restraint of Renith's noble women, Sorrille could not repress the chord of
awe-tinged uneasiness her aura of untrammeled wildness struck deep within him.
``I take it you plan to seduce me,'' he said, in an effort to stall her, to
reverse the weights between them so that he had the advantage. But she did not
answer, did not even smile at him in the pertly roguish manner Belisa tended
to employ when she knew she was doing something shockingly out of character.
Before he had the chance to contemplate fully the striking contrasts between
the two women, deft strong fingers were whispering over his chest, unclasping
his cloak, his belt, unlacing his tunic, coaxing his blood to roar in his
temples. For a moment, he thought he heard Naraya's voice in his ear, soothing
and insistent, telling him to ``forget Belisa'' with each husky exhaled
breath. The next he knew, her lips were on his and, wrapped in naught but the
cool night air and her limbs, he was spinning endlessly through a skyful of
bizarre and vivid dreams. The first involved being dragged aloft to go
crashing through a smothering run of treetops with the headlong momentum of a
plains-wind. Then a net of gilded foliage was whirling into a blurry cyclone,
bursting apart, hurling Naraya and him at the stars, where they swooped in
soaring arcs from constellation to constellation. The spheres embroidered
music about them, dazzling improvisations woven of twanging crystalline
threads and liquid silver notes. He tried to see Naraya's face but couldn't;
they were tumbling too rapidly from the precipice they had been poised upon
the instant before. They swung into an upward curve, cast their shadows on the
moon, plummeted down and down and down until they were skimming the
pewter-and-black silk surface of a lake. Then they were rising in whimsical
curlicues, like a tongue of breeze lapping up air, when a low-hanging cloud
suddenly wrapped them in its gauzy cloak of ether, its plumes of
sleep-inducing smoke...
Then it was pearl-pink early dawn and Naraya was gently prodding him
awake...
Sorrille made a drowsy mental note of the fact that he was sprawled naked
on some sort of crop-furred hide blanket, and that Naraya, who was fully
attired and groomed, looked a great deal more dignified than he. He was
fumbling on his clothing with as much haste as he could muster, planning to
ask, when he was properly dressed, about her curious predilection for being up
and about in the wee hours of the morning. He was about to address her with an
expression of wry amusement when she focused her anything-but-crossed eyes on
him and smiled in a disconcertingly self-assured, even patronizing way.
``I am more than a little interested,'' she announced, ``in enjoying nights
such as the last again.''
``Indeed,'' he replied, feeling oddly piqued, ``you seem pleased with what
transpired. By the way, what did transpire? Did you, perhaps, strew some
vision-provoking powder on the fire while my attention was fixed elsewhere?
You could not have tampered with my food or drink, since I had prepared it
myself and finished it before you appeared.''
She tossed back her granite-colored mane and laughed with abandon for
several moments. Then she fell abruptly silent and regarded Sorrille with a
sober look that revealed nothing of what she was thinking or feeling. ``Some
things I will tell you. Others I will not.'' She briefly tended the fire she
had started while he was sleeping, then picked up where she had left off when
he so cavalierly interrupted her. Even the patronizing smile was back in
place. ``I enjoyed last night and am quite anxious for you to prolong your
stay with me. But no doubt you will require more of an incentive to remain
than a simpler reminder of my charms can provide. After all, your memories of
this queen Belisa''---she mispronounced the name in what seemed a calculated
fashion---``are bound to distract you sooner or later, and I will have none
but an attentive lover.''
Sorrille snorted haughtily at her boldness. ``I pay attention only to that
which I find myself interested in.''
``I am sure of it. That is why I have conceived of a proposition I think
you will find most fascinating.''
``Indeed? Do then, by all means, propose it.''
``Agree to be my guest for six more nights, and at the end of that time I
will assist you in snaring a Shadowchild. Then I will see to it that you are
properly provisioned for a triumphant return to Renith.''
Sorrille remained silent for several minutes, torn between the desire to
laugh aloud and the sinking feeling that Naraya was perfectly in earnest, no
matter how mad her proposal sounded. Then he remembered what she had said
about the Children fleeing her approach, like timid birds or squirrels, and
decided he would encourage her to elaborate on her invitation. After all, he
had nothing to lose, and she might unwittingly reveal useful information to
him. Furthermore, he hadn't really resolved the problem of where he would go
next, and even were he to descend safely the near-perpendicular slopes of
Naraya's mountain, he would find himself in constant mortal peril on the
ground below. Accepting the assistance of an expert regional guide was
clearly the wisest thing he could do, even if that guide had both albino
tresses and lusty designs on his person.
``I'd be delighted to extend my visit here. But perhaps, before I change my
travel plans, you ought to tell me more about the rewards that my staying on
would assure me of. I do not like to enter contractual arrangements
half-informed, and what you are proposing is akin to such an arrangement, is
it not?''
``Indeed. I remark upon your judiciousness.'' She smiled drily as he nodded
his acknowledgment of the compliment. ``If you will continue to be my guest,
for the number of nights I have already specified, I will procure for you a
substance which renders the Shadowchildren docile. Then I will help you to
administer this substance, and, finally, you will be free to return to Renith
and unseat its monarch and your rival in love.''
``Most intriguing. And just how is it that this substance affects the
Children as you say it does?''
``The Children are ghouls at present, indeed. But once they were human.
This substance, the exract of a plant named mnisse, wakes a Child's memory of
the human state. In its grip, Children pass quickly through self-horror to a
boundless gratitude towards that saviour who has raised them from evil. Like
once-wild dogs, they lick joyously the hand which breaks their will.''
``This mnisse sounds formidable. Why haven't you simply used it to
encourage the Children to relocate---in Renith, say?''
``The effect of the mnisse is but temporary.''
``Ah.'' Sorrille shuddered to think what might befall him should the stuff
prove more temporary than anticipated.
``And I am quite happy with the Charred Lands as they are. The
Shadowchildren have kept my mountain free of intruders, though I doubt it
would give them pleasure to know they had been of service to me. It is well
for me that I alone know where to find the mnisse.''
``And also that the Children know you have the means to control them.
That's why they run when they see you coming.''
``You are correct. With the help of the mnisse, I brought unpleasant fates
to a score of them, in order to warn their fellows against disturbing me. It
was a successful ploy.''
Much to his own surprise, Sorrille found himself believing her, even subtly
inclining toward enthusiasm for the project she had outlined. ``I don't
suppose,'' he said at last, ``that the length of my stay here is negotiable?''
Naraya laughed at him. ``Such impatience in a would-be monarch. Onri has
devoted a lifetime to Renith's glory, while you, my comely upstart, begrudge
it a mere handful of nights.''
More than a handful, thought Sorrille.
The following six days were uneventful in the usual sense of that word;
Sorrille came before long to anticipate Naraya's comings and goings, and even
to enjoy without undue mistrust her disorienting midnight visits. For not only
did he survive each rendezvous intact, but he also began to develop a taste
for what he consistently perceived as airborne sexual acrobatics. He was
faintly disturbed by the fact that Naraya was so mysteriously nocturnal a
creature; she seemed continually to vanish while he slept and then again for
the bulk of the daylight hours. He spent those hours in solitary idling,
alternately wondering where it was she went and how it was she got there, and
imagining what it would be like to be Renith's king and Belisa's rightful
lover. Even while he soared from pinnacle to pinnacle of ecstasy with Naraya,
he remained residually conscious that his passion for Belisa had in no measure
abated. And, strangely enough, he had the impression that Naraya was perfectly
aware of his feelings and yet completely unperturbed by them. She was a
fascinating being, but somehow a faintly revolting one as well. He looked
forward with no little eagerness to the end of his sojourn with her.
She approached him on the sixth evening not with glittering magic and
seduction in her eyes, but with a vial of crimson liquid. Sorrille, completing
his day's-end repast by the fire, sprung to his feet so hastily that his wine
goblet was upended.
``Yes,'' she said, anticipating his query, ``this is the mnisse. Have done
with your meal and we will pay a call to the Ashen Forest.''
``Never mind the meal. Why keep the Children waiting?'' He dabbed the
corners of his mouth with a deplorably grease-stained silken handkerchief,
then crumpled it into a ball and tossed it in the fire. ``Is anything but that
vial necessary? Weapons? A torch? And just how will we be travelling?''
``The vial is all we require. Weapons are useless against the Children, and
I have excellent night vision.'' It was just as well that she left his last
question unanswered, for what he witnessed next stunned him so utterly he
ceased listening for a reply.
To begin with, Naraya appeared to be encased in some kind of transparent
cloud, more palpable than visible, which distorted her features without
obscuring them, like some clear, vibrant haze of summer heat. And so, although
he could see what was happening to her, moment by moment, he could never be
quite sure he was perceiving it correctly. First her hair began to change
subtly, from a tousled mane of gauzy filaments to something reminiscent of
frozen fountain spray, and then like a wiry, fanned branch of the fabled white
palm. As it slowly compressed itself into a crest-like formation neatly
dividing one half of her skull from the other, her arms began to gravitate
downward in their sockets until they were two stiff, prong-ended affairs
protruding from the middle of her chest, which was no longer a voluptuous,
sheer fabric-sheathed marvel, but a single smooth arc of snow-silver breast
feathers. Next, the train of her gown lengthened into a glorious fan of
tail-plumage, spangled not with sequins but with white-on-ebony markings. And
as her whole body began to tilt forward, balancing on its new center, Sorrille
realized with a start that, with a few seemingly minor exceptions, her face
was clearly recognizable as the one he had been regarding just moments
earlier. He thought dazedly to himself that, if she was rather
peculiar-looking as a woman, she was incomparable as a bird.
``Well? Shall we be on our way?'' Her voice, with its typically mocking
quality, was relatively unchanged, though it was disconcertingly difficult to
locate its present source. Her mica-black beak, opened slightly but immobile,
offered no clue as it refracted the pallid moonlight.
Sorrille nodded, still inarticulate, and she hoisted herself aloft with a
trio of wing-flaps so powerful he had to struggle to remain on his feet. When
she sunk her claws into his cloak-collar, it was all he could do to keep from
screaming like a madman.
``Sleep,'' she told him, ``for the altitude may cause you some discomfort,
and you must be in sound condition when we descend.'' But he had lapsed
already into the utter oblivion of the terrified, and was floating there
impervious both to her magic and to her everlastingly mocking smile.
Sorrille had long been immersed in a most bizarre dream about a series of
well-choreographed swordfights with the wind, in which clusters of stars
assembled themselves into shields now and again, when Naraya, in her human
form, woke and then helped him to his feet. She was wearing the cloud-colored
gown once again, and her hair was in the impressively snarled state Sorrille
had grown used to in the past week.
Awake now, the memory of her metamorphosis staggered him anew, like some
phantom foe come to resume the battle after granting him his paltry respite.
``Who and what are you, Lady?''
``Is it not all but obvious that I am bird as well as woman? And we have
not come to discuss the essence of my nature, but to conduct our business with
the shadow ghouls of Ashen Forest.''
``Very well. Lead the way. And by the way, I'm almost glad you nearly
turned me into a gibbering fool back there---having done my overreacting for
the evening, I find the prospect of confronting Shadowchildren to be
positively exhilarating.''
Naraya smiled briefly, then led him a few yards towards a brook of
jet-black water which glittered dully in the moonlight. She gave him a
cautionary look. ``Mirkwater,'' she said, confirming his suspicions,
``poisonous as well as fatal to the touch. Keep a safe distance from it,
though we will be following the banks of this brook.'' Sorrille cocked an
eyebrow in reply, then hastened into step behind the swift if stealthy Naraya.
The Ashen Forest was every bit as unsettling as he had imagined it would
be. Only along the brook did the foliage thin enough to reveal even a
tattered black ribbon of sky, and the air, already oppressively thick with
darkness, was suffused here and there with a clammy noxious mist. The muddy
brook-banks oozed mist as well, though not enough to obscure wholly the
occasional snake-tangle disengaging itself for a swim in the unreflecting
water. And yet, notwithstanding, there was a strange beauty to the place as
well. The ivory bulbs he knew to be bone-fruit hung in phosphorescent clusters
above him, their symmetry and pallor like that of priceless sculpture.
Snowberries glittered in the crevices between rocks like fistfuls of mercury
droplets, and the tree-trunks, which burgeoned above into medusan gnarls of
ebony branches and black-crystal top-leaves, were iced below with a kind of
silver glaze. The thought crossed his mind that perhaps the bosom of the
Forest yielded beings such as Naraya in addition to its loathsome Children.
Naraya signalled for him to stop behind her, finally, at a particularly
sinuous curve in the brook. She pointed to the gutted corpses of some dozen
Forest animals and informed Sorrille that there were Shadowchildren near.
``I'm afraid I fail to see the connection.''
``Unlike other scavengers, the Children hoard dead flesh until there is an
abundance of it to dine upon. With all of eternity stretched before them,
there is no reason to devour meager sustenance in a haphazard way. What you
see here are the remains of a recent feast.''
``The Children are scavengers?'' asked Sorrille, the hair rising along his
neck.
The look in Naraya's eyes told him that she was laughing uproariously in
silence. ``You did not know? Yes, the Children are an especially nasty kind of
vulture; they delight in creating carrion as much as they do in eating it.''
``Thank the gods for your wolf trap. And for your succour, lady.''
``Ah, yes, gratitude. But we have other business to concern us now.'' She
extracted the vial of mnisse from a fold in her gown; its vivid ruby hue
disturbed the darkness like a tiny but brilliant lantern. ``You must bend over
the mirkwater as if you were going to drink; the simple probability that death
is imminent will lure our friends closer. Then you must cry out in mimicry of
a death throe. As you fall, unstopper the vial and splatter yourself with its
contents; the Children will arrive in moments to lap them up greedily. I will
be watching from the shadows beyond the curve in the brook, and shall join you
at the appropriate moment.''
``How thoughtful of nature to make mnisse the color of blood,'' quipped
Sorrille.
``The mnisse is not red; the blood I stirred it into, however, is.''
Naraya's eyes glinted with lavish amusement at Sorrille's ignorance. ``Enough
talk. Here is the vial. Do not spill it needlessly; I travelled quite far to
harvest its crucial ingredient.'' And with this final jibe she moved into the
shadows ahead, obscuring herself so well that Sorrille soon had no idea where
she was.
Sorrille began to perform the charade with a feeling of witty
self-satisfaction he would never have expected to experience in such
circumstances. As he knelt by the brook, its aura of evil intensified
perceptibly, and he wondered what kind of dolt would insist on drinking water
that as much as declared itself poisonous. But he forced himself to bring his
face to within inches of the sluggish surface, even panting a little for the
sake of verisimilitude. Then he fell back on one hand and issued a lengthy
croak of pseudo-agony. Unable to restrain a grimace while dousing throat and
chest with the mnisse-laced blood, he was careful to conceal the vial before
he sank and stiffened in a rendition of rigor mortis so subtle he was proud of
it. It wasn't until he heard the Children's gossamer wings rustling behind him
that he felt unmanageable trepidation and even prayed to the gods that the
lady wasn't playing him for a fool.
``Dessert,'' said one, in an utterly timbreless voice which managed to
convey somehow the creature's unsavory sense of humor. It ran its dessicate
trio of fingers along Sorrille's form in a way that made him want to scream
for Naraya.
``And what a very large dessert,'' rejoined a second, contributing its
manual appendages to the less-than-soothing massage effort. Sorrille squeezed
his eyes shut involuntarily. When the third pair of claws began to stroke
him, he fantasized, briefly and horribly, that he was buried underground and
the roots of plants were groping their way past him.
Then, at last, after Sorrille found his capacity for shallow breathing
diminishing with alarming speed, the three Children began to sniff and nibble
tentatively at his bloodsoaked tunic. Hissing with dismay when they
discovered it was not flesh they were tasting, they hastened to rend the
fabric and expose the real delicacy beneath. Sorrille had all but given
himself up for lost when, in a abrupt and unified motion, they recoiled from
their ``dessert'' with a chorus of despairing little shrieks.
Still half-dazed, Sorrille rose to his feet just in time to behold what was
without contest the most hideous sight of his life. The Shadowchildren,
wailing in concert like three of the four winds, were thrashing about
violently, slamming their wings into boulders and clawing at their branch-like
tresses in what was apparently the ghoulish equivalent of tearing out one's
hair Though he was beginning to grow concerned by Naraya's failure to appear,
he was relieved, at least, to learn that the mnisse lived up to her
description of it. He had started to move cautiously in the direction of her
purported hiding-place when he found himself besieged by three unspeakably
contrite monsters. One hung timidly on his sleeve, a second patted his chest
ingratiatingly, and the third rolled eyes as mournful as a hounddog's at him.
He had the distinct impression they were preparing to address him with some
sort of abject plea on their part for mercy and loving kindness on his.
``No,'' he mumbled, ``this is more than I can endure.'' He allowed himself
one convulsive shudder, then, with the wrath- contorted countenance of a hero
scourging the infernal regions, he raised his arms prophetically and roared
``Begone!'' And, for the first time in Renithian history, Shadowchildren
scattered in terror at the sound of a human voice.
``Wait!'' he added hoarsely, appalled at his own stupidity. The slowest of
the three paused in the shadow it was in the midst of vanishing into, one of
its badly dented wings twitching uncertainly in the murky light. ``I have need
of you,'' he continued, controlling the hysteria in his voice. The Child
advanced as if afraid he would change his mind, then halted a few feet before
him and hovered on ghostly feet.
``I see the two of you are fast becoming friends,'' said Naraya, after
executing yet another of her out-of-thin air grand entrances.
Sorrille turned on her. ``Where in the name of the bird-gods have you
been?''
``Did I not make clear that I would return at the appropriate moment? It
seems as though all has proceeded according to plan.''
``A matter of perspective, I suppose. What on earth is that?'' He pointed
to the strange-looking beast she had tethered to her wrist.
``This,'' she replied, moving it closer for him to inspect, ``is how you
will be journeying home. I cannot transport you and the Child together.'' The
Child whimpered at the mention of its name, while Sorrille whistled at what he
saw. Smaller than a steed but larger than a donkey, its head and legs were
covered with greyish-white fur, while its internal organs were plainly visible
through the transparent hide of its midsection. Naraya had caparisoned it
with tasselled reins and a makeshift blanket and saddlebag.
``What is it known as?''
``It is a Forest deer, unprepossessing in appearance but gentle of
temperament and swift for its size---it will easily keep pace with the
Shadowchild's flight, especially in light of the battered state of these
wings.'' She clucked her tongue at the object of her criticism, who drooped
its head in response, in a horrible travesty of shamefacedness.
``I should create quite a sensation in Renith, considering the company I'll
be arriving in. What a shame I'll be doing so in such bedraggled attire.''
He looked regretfully at the blood- stained rents in his clothing.
``You won't be,'' Naraya informed him, extracting from the saddlebag a
tunic and cloak of the same chameleonic silver fabric as her gown. She handed
them to him. ``Did I not say that you would be properly provisioned? There
are winesacks and food in the bag as well, and here, finally, is a supply of
mnisse more than adequate to your purposes.''
He took the pouch she held outstretched. ``Unmixed with blood this time, I
see.''
``The Child will accept additional doses of mnisse quite eagerly in its
present state. But you must be sure to feed it those doses nightly, and expel
it from your city well before your supply runs out.''
``Fear not. I'll send it on its way the first chance I get.''
``And now that you are in hands capable as my own,'' she concluded with a
smile, ``I will bid you adieu.'' And with a ritual flourish, she began to
transform herself once again into a creature of the sky.
``My thanks, lady.'' Sorrille could feel his words unravelling, letter by
letter, inside the cocoon of luminous air she had wrapped herself within. He
swung onto the back of his galloping anatomy lesson and instructed the Child
to lead him to a southbound route out of the Forest as quickly as it damn well
could.
The return trip to Renith, which took nearly three days, was rendered
exceptionally crisis-free by Naraya's abundant forethought. The deer she had
rounded up was a quick and sturdy little mount, and the store of food and wine
she had stashed in its saddlebag seemed virtually inexhaustible. Most
importantly, the nightly pinch of mnisse she had recommended Sorrille give the
Shadowchild made it a surprisingly indispensable travelling companion,
possessed of a flawless sense of direction and protective instincts that would
put a mother slinkah to shame. While they were still in the Forest, it
regularly shooed snarling skeleton-wolves and overly-inquisitive
snake-tangles, and even, on one occasion, discouraged a roving band of its own
species from approaching. Then, on the plains, it circled down from its aerial
guidepost whenever a cloud of the bulbous flies that had annoyed Sorrille so
on his outbound journey required dispersing, and arranged its wings, by night,
in an effective shelter from the wind. Sorrille never quite got over his
distaste for physical proximity to the Child, and he certainly never adjusted
to the way it telepathically second-guessed him. But he was relieved to find
that the mnisse had apparently ruined his macabre squire's appetite for flesh,
cooked or otherwise; through the whole of their trek, he never witnessed the
Child consume anything but the plains-clover he himself had found so
thoroughly unsatisfactory as a means of sustenance.
When the city gates came into view just after sunset on the third day, he
donned the cloak and tunic Naraya had given him and soon discovered with
pleasure that he could feel as well as see the intricate lightplay in its
fabric, rippling over his torso like a mosaic of liquid silver. Assuming a
pose of elegant hauteur, he mentally commanded the Shadowchild to walk
slightly behind him on his left---the traditional position of voluntary
deference---and exultantly advanced until he was standing opposite the
peepdoor. He pummelled it with the tiny but solid hilt of his dagger and
waited for the startled response from within; Renithian sheep and cowherds
were superstitiously careful about requesting readmittance to the city well
before the sun began even to hang low in the sky. Surely enough, the
gateguard flung the peepdoor open and peered through cautiously, his view
limited, fortunately, to Sorrille's face, which, unfortunately, was
suspiciously cleanshaven.
``Yer mightly dapper-lookin' for a herdsman,'' the guard said slowly,
studying Sorrille's eyes for evidence of intent to, perhaps, perpetrate
espionage or commit an assassination. Sorrille quickly scanned his aural
memories for a lower class voice he could do a passable imitation of, and
fixed upon that of the stableboy who had taunted him the day of his
banishment.
``Juice because oi takes some proide in me looks is no reason to keeps me
and the anymals out 'ere in mortal dainger. Ain't it bad enough that oim late
from chasin' a contrary-loike sheep what run away hairs ago?''
Luckily the ruse worked before the guard asked Sorrille to stand back for a
full-length inspection, or before he wondered why the returning shepherd's
``anymals'' were so uniformly silent. Sorrille heaved a sigh of relief and
straightened proudly as the guard shut the peepdoor and began to drag the huge
half-gate groaningly open. When at last he emerged from behind it, wheezing
and panting, Sorrille hesitated just long enough for shock to register on the
man's face before nudging the Forest deer into a dainty canter onto Renithian
soil. Soon a handful of guards, with equally shocked expressions, stood
aghast and silent in a circle around him, clutching their spears, maces, and
unsheathed swords like so many dismayed infants grasping rattles.
``Gentlemen, gentlemen,'' said Sorrille, ``it's most kind of you to all
want to escort me into Onri's presence. However, a two-guard retinue is
really quite sufficient.''
``It's Lord Sorrille, ain't it?'' stammered the nasal-voiced guard who had
found the circumstances of Sorrille's banishment so entertaining. He
scratched under his helmet meditatively. ``By gawm, milord. Are ye returned
from the dead?''
``No, my old friend. Merely back to claim myself a crown. And that is
something, I think, that I would fain have you behold. Come, now, mind my left
flank, as you did once before. And you,'' he commanded a mere boy of a guard,
``mind my right.''
Despite the fact that a lord sent off to certain death rarely came home
astride a see-through quadruped, attended by two trembling king's-guards and a
bonafide Shadowchild, Sorrille's triumphant procession toward the palace was a
curiously lonesome affair. True, the shopkeepers and laborers typically
withdrew for their dinners this time of day, and it was too early for the
bawds and roistabouts to have begun prowling the streets. But it was odd not
to see a single peddler, or street urchin, or stout huswife pursuing her
fugitive chickens. Even the few milling figures Sorrille had noticed upon his
entry were nowhere to be seen, and the curtains of nearly every window were
tightly drawn, though there was still precious daylight to be had. Plus the
streets were preternaturally quiet---no wafts of quarrels or laughter, nothing
save the occasional whimper of a dog presumably being forced to hold its
tongue. Sorrille had the distinct impression that Lower Renith was
collectively holding its breath, and that the residents of every household
were taking turns peeping out at him once his back was safely to them.
Enraged, finally, by the cowardice of those who had, less than two weeks
earlier, found brazen insults so very easy to hurl about, he reined the deer
to a halt and addressed his invisible audience. ``Mark my features well, good
city-folk, so that you will recognize me when Renith's crown sits atop my
head!'' He paused just long enough for the echo of his words to subside, then
coaxed his mount to resume its forward motion.
``Onri is king! Onri is king!'' a feeble, indignant voice sputtered from
behind him. He turned to see the decrepit fool who had used his shin for a
cricket ball, wielding a walking-stick angrily in the air and preparing to
foray off the doorstep to harass Sorrille yet again. Sorrille silently
instructed the Shadowchild to cast a brief look in the daft old goat's
direction, which had the desired effect of sending him scampering indoors for
cover. Sorrille threw back his head and laughed, and the procession continued
to the nearby sound of several audibly suppressed gasps.
When the carnelian walls and golden spires of Renith Palace rose before him
at last, Sorrille dismounted and handed his tiny steed's reins to a
stunned-looking guard who had just risen unsteadily to his feet. The guard's
drinking-and-dicing companions remained seated, openmouthed and seemingly
paralyzed, on the steps to the palace's huge crystal-and-filigree door.
``It's bad enough your disportment adds a rather unaesthestic aspect to the
palace facade.'' Sorrille's tone of voice struck a duke-like balance between
lighthearted mockery and the implicit threat of violence. ``Don't compound the
problem by forcing me to climb over you.''
They scrambled off the steps like petitioners who have misguidedly
approached the king in one of his fouler moods. Sorrille caught one by the
elbow and inquired as to Onri's whereabouts. The guard, despite his valiant
effort not to stare with obvious horror at the Shadowchild, seemed to address
his very reply to it.
``His Majesty dines at this hour, milord.''
``But of course he does, and I'm tactlessly late for the feast. Do lead the
way to the banquet-hall, if you would, and announce that Duke Sorrille is come
to table.''
Too flustered to say more, the fellow pulled the palace door ajar and
proceeded to carry out Sorrille's instructions. As they marched through the
tangle of narrow, poorly-lit corridors, Sorrille was amused to see the palace
servants scattering before him as timidly as the city-folk had. Even the
guards posted at every fourth turning seemed to be resisting the impulse to
turn tail and run. So on and on they went, on their unobstructed way, filling
the quasi-evacuated labyrinth with the percussive echos of four pairs of
booted feet, the gentle whooshing sounds of a pair of large, semi-contracted
wings, and an almost audibly intense sequence of regicidal fantasies.
Sorrille let the palace guard precede him into the banquet- hall and
nervously inform the general public there that he had arrived, along with what
appeared to be a Shadowchild. Then he had the two gate guards go in and
situate themselves on either side of the door, at which point he and his
eyebrow-raising sidekick were ready to make their grand entrance. He observed
with pique that virtually none of the customs of the dinner table had changed,
despite the conspicuous emptiness of his place at it: A dazzling profusion of
colorful platters spread the length of the table; jewelled goblets overflowed
with wine; servingmen wound their way in and out between the exquisitely
costumed dancers; the air, scented with sandalwood, was vibrant with the
intermingled sounds of witty repartee and ribald minstrelsy; and Onri's guests
were uniformly oblivious to the world outside the banquet-hall. Indeed, they
paid scarcely any attention to the palace guard's introduction---after all,
what was one person more or less at table?
Only Onri seemed to have gathered that there was something noteworthy at
the door, and was about to take a good look at it when his queen, attended by
no less than six ladies, emerged from a side door to claim her seat beside
him. For the next several moments, both Sorrille and Onri stood motionless as
men for whom time has stopped, wholly ignoring the gustatory feast upon the
table as they gorged themselves visually on that of Belisa's beauty. The
gold-embroidered chiffon of Belisa's sleeve caught the light like a
butterfly's wing and then spilt down her upraised arm in fold after liquid
fold as she pressed self-conscious fingers to her lacquered red tresses,
wondering why she had the sense that she was being stared at even more
insatiably than usual. As she inclined her chiselled profile in Sorrille's
direction, sensing that the especially passionate eyebeams were emanating from
thence, she issued a trio of musical little gasps---one of surprised pleasure
at Sorrille's appearance, one of ladylike revulsion at the Shadowchild's
grotesque visage, and one of utter terror as Onri noticed Sorrille and began
to rise from his chair with an ominous lack of haste.
The banquet-hall fell completely silent for the first time in decades as
the nobles of Renith looked up to see their monarch on the brink of a wholly
unpredictable confrontation. Sorrille, who everyone knew had died an
unspeakably horrid death, had somehow come back with not only his notoriously
short temper but also with an unspeakably horrid monster for backup. His age-
spotted face white with anger, Onri straightened his fur-trimmed robe on
still-powerful shoulders and placed his massive gold crown on his wisp-haired
head (he disliked wearing it while he ate since it tended to make his bald
spot worse).
``Why have you returned, you treasonous cur... you base scoundrel... you
verminous--?''
``Allow me to interrupt and you shall have your answer, old man.'' Belisa
took this opening exchange of pleasantries as a cue to make herself as
invisible as possible. She sat huddled in her chair, head tilted forward so
that quantities of hair obscured her face on either side.
``You dare address me without an honorific, you pompous dandy... you
ill-mannered whippersnapper... you foul-mouthed--?''
``Enough! An impotent old fool who cannot secure the love of his bride and
who sends those who are capable of doing so into the wilds to die is in no way
deserving of honorifics! But lo! I am not dead, and having survived what I
have survived, I no longer find myself cowed in any way by a senile
foot-stamping monarch.''
``He has spoken treason! Seize the traitor!'' Onri's face was purple now,
and his agitated gesturings had all but knocked his crown from his head. His
uncontrolled rage was so novel a spectacle that dinner guests, servants, and
guards alike were watching him as raptly as they might the lead actor in a
scandalous play. ``I have commanded you! Seize him!''
``Silence, Onri! I have not returned to listen to your ranting drool, but
to claim the throne and the queen that are rightfully mine. I have met your
challenge, and you have no choice but to forfeit both to me!''
``Challenge? What challenge might that be?'' inquired Onri with a
dangerously innocent tone, daring those at the table to supply a single
pertinent detail.
``The challenge, Sire!'' interjected Tirem, the rosy-faced juniormost
member of the court. ``Surely you remember---you had your scribe set it down
on vellum, just a little under two weeks ago. Then your herald read it aloud
the morning Sorrille there was banished, remember? To the crowd that had
gathered in front of the palace.'' Tirem babbled on blithely, so glad to be
of some use that he failed to interpret correctly Onri's ferociously indrawn
breath. ``You know, Sire, the challenge about how anyone who managed to get
hold of a Shadowchild like the one Sorrille there's got was entitled---''
``--to Renith's twin glories---its mighty throne and its jewel-lovely
queen. Thank you, Tirem, I couldn't have refreshed His Highness' memory
better myself.'' Sorrille strode impatiently toward Onri, who had fallen back
into his chair, sputtering soundlessly, his face contorting with hatred as he
regarded Sorrille. ``Will you honor your promise, Onri?'' He hovered over
the seated king like the most determined of inquisitioners, willing to wait
till eternity for the appropriate reply.
``But of course I will,'' began Onri calmly, with rekindled deviousness,
``the instant you return here with a true denizen of the Ashen Forest, not
some inept sorcerer's slapdash concoction! And until you do, I will regard
you as a traitor!'' Onri sprung to his feet, more or less, his fury having
reached a fresh peak of intolerability.
Sorrille pointed to the Shadowchild, who stood near the doorway twitching
its wings as if insulted that its credibility had been called into question.
``Do any of you at this table harbor any doubts as to the creature's
identity?''
``Don't know its name or anything, but it looks like a Child to me!''
ventured Tirem.
``Of course it is a Shadowchild,'' said bewigged Lord Gauntti, clearing his
throat after this pronouncement.
Stout, jovial Roddain moved cautiously toward the door for a closer look.
``Ah'd agree with the both of ye. Now it's true Ah've never been to the
thing's stompin' grounds, and so--''
``There is no way you can possibly verify Sorrille's claim regarding it!''
burst in a triumphant Onri, leaving Roddain puzzling over whether that were
what he'd meant to say. ``None of us knows with any certainty what a
Shadowchild looks like because any man that has encountered one hasn't lived
to tell the tale! All we know about the creature is hearsay and rumor, and a
common thread to every bit of Child-lore is that they are impossible to
escape, much less to overcome or tame! Obviously, then, what we have here is
some manner of impostor---some barbarian Sorrille has induced to stand before
us in his ritual dress, complete with a headdress of branches and black
face-paint---''
``Sorry to disappoint you, Onri.'' Sorrille nodded to the Shadowchild,
telepathically requesting it to demonstrate its clearly supernatural ability
to fly. It had risen but a few inches in the air when Onri backed away from
the table, suddenly unsheathing and then brandishing his sword like a wild
man.
``Then it is indeed the forbidden work of some accursed sorcerer! It is
fiendish magic and I will not suffer its presence in my palace!''
Before Sorrille could warn him otherwise, Onri had lurched forward to
attack the Child. Sorrille tried to command it to do nothing but evade Onri's
swordthrusts, but apparently its protective instincts were self-inclusive. It
curled back its black satin lips, baring the elongated teeth within, and,
angrily beating the air with its wings, struck Onri's sword from his hands
with a swiftly downhooking claw. As Onri inspected with speechless horror the
bloody furrows which now ran the length of his forearm, the Child gave vent to
a gale-force battle cry and swung the blackened bronze of its claw again, this
time at Onri's head. Onri staggered sideways as if drunken, clutching a hand
to his face and bellowing in pain. When he removed the hand and held its
crimson palm before him blindly, it became clear that one of his eyes had been
maimed. Belisa, with an unladylike squawk, made her presence felt once more
and, the minstrels and dancers having wisely scattered already, the dinner
guests to either side of her began to stir uneasily, as if preparing to escape
themselves.
Sorrille groaned. Much as he despised Onri, becoming an accomplice to
regicide at this moment would certainly not help legitimize his claim to the
throne. Somehow, he had to restrain the Shadowchild's undeniably murderous
behavior, and then go and comfort his lovely distraught Belisa. As he moved
toward the wrangling pair, he extracted his mnisse pouch and wondered whether
he could distract the Child long enough to administer the stuff. He dangled
the pouch before him hopefully, inwardly suspecting it was hopeless. Then,
before he could properly register what was taking plce, the Child, its hair a
lurid snarl of snaky lightning, was ascending toward the lofty ceiling vaults
like someone's nightmare vision of a bird of prey, with an alternately raving
and whimpering Onri hooked securely in its talons.
``Stop!'' cried Sorrille. ``Stop, I command you!'' But the Child was
looping and circling in the dark central dome with the impossible agility of a
bat, whooping and cawing in harsh depthless tones that were natural neither to
human beings nor to creatures of the air. Finally, with a last hissing cry, it
flung Onri to his death below and continued its airborne figure-eights with
increasingly frenzied speed, in an ecstasy of bloodlust.
``By the gods,'' Sorrille despaired with silent ferocity, ``that thing is
completely out of control! How am I to feed it its last doses of mnisse, or
persuade it to fly away home like a good ghoul, for that matter? And it's no
doubt just a matter of time before it decides it's days overdue for its
carcass imperiale a la Renith!'' For the king of Renith lay, crownless and
mangled, lengthwise on the dinner table in the midst of some half-dozen
platters of sweetbreads and candied meat, surrounded by his former subjects,
all of whom had risen in his presence but none of whom seemed able to remove
themselves from it. Someone was missing from the table, though---Sorrille
tried to rack his addled brain for who it was when he noticed Belisa, pale and
unconscious, gracefully draped on the floor alongside the table. He bolted
toward her, temporarily forgetting every other alarming circumstance
confronting him, and after a fervent series of ministrations, he managed to
rouse her, weak and smiling, to her feet.
``That was silly of me, Sori, I know. But you returning unharmed, and
that thing up there, and Onri all blood-covered--''
``Hardly standard dinner entertainment. Fret not, even I reeled a bit on my
feet, Belisa. Here, sit down.'' He helped her into a chair as far as possible
from her dead husband, stroked her sunset-red hair, and turned his attention
once more to the problem of the Forest-spawn flapping about and setting all
the chandeliers atremble.
``I don't think that's the worst of our troubles, Sorrille,'' young Tirem
suggested politely.
``What's that? What do you--'' Sorrille almost choked on his tongue as he
turned to see Naraya drift into the room with a tidy double-columned
arrangement of mnisse-sedated Shadowchildren to her rear. A general murmur of
distress ran through the room, and any of the servants who had outlasted the
previous episode---either because of their unimpeachable dutifulness or
because it was the best show they'd had in ages---began to inch their way
toward the kitchen exit now.
``And what a lucky usurper am I,'' thought Sorrille to himself. ``Not one
but seven Shadowchildren to contend with as future subjects.''
``Ah,'' said Naraya, halting her troops directly in front of the spot where
Onri lay in state, ``I see you don't require my assistance, Sorrille, in
meting justice to the despot after all.''
``What's all this bother during dinner, anyway?'' demanded irritable old
Baron Merrand. ``Is Sorrille king now or ain't he, and when is he going to do
something about restoring the peace in here?''
``He's right, y'know,'' counselled Roddain, managing a kindly smile. ``This
all seems, indirectly or otherwise, to have some connection t'you, m'boy, and
so everyone's 'specting you to make some sense of it. Ah'd hop to, was Ah you,
'specially if ye want the respect of the court in future.''
Sorrille's blood raced when he realized that his claim to the throne might
well go uncontested henceforward, then again when he realized that a crisis of
some moment was taking place.
``Who's that woman, Sori? Do you know her?'' asked Belisa, catching him by
the elbow. He held up a hand to indicate that she must lend him her
forbearance, and approached Naraya and her retinue.
``Milady Naraya,'' began, bowing, ``though your presence here is most
unexpected, nonetheless is it quite welcome.'' He found regal circumlocution
so much to his taste that he decided to experiment with a royal pronoun or
two. ``But we cannot look kindly on the retainers you have brought with you.
In short, we must ask you to see to it that they vacate the city immediately,
whereupon we would be most pleased to give you a private audience and hear the
purpose of your visit.''
``Though I am ignorant in the ways of great cities, I believe a coronation
is the method by which kings are given their office. Is that not correct?''
``It is,'' conceded Sorrille cautiously, troubled by her amused expression
as well as by her failure to respond directly to him.
``And has there been a coronation here recently?''
``Not for decades,'' put in the ever-helpful Tirem.
``And I have also thought long that a king's public edict is the most
binding of documents. Is that not correct as well?''
``Why, yes, gal,'' said Roddain. ``That's the very line of reasonin'
Sorrille here was tryin' to use on Onri. The stubborn ole fool wouldn't
listen, and lookit the sorry state he's in now.''
``Are you saying that, ipso facto, Sorrille's accession to the throne is a
given thing?'' drawled Gauntti, regarding Roddain over his monocle rim.
``Ipso fact, ergo sum, and all that. Ah can't see whah not. We all know
that edict inside out, what with Onri talkin' 'bout it all through dinner the
day that herald read it to the popylace.''
``In that case,'' resumed Naraya, apparently well-pleased by the content of
this interchange, ``I have come to claim my half of the throne. It was I who
enabled your Sorrille to return with the requisite Shadowchild, whose
acquaintance, I see, you have already made.'' She glanced at Sorrille's Child,
currently cowering in a corner in an effort to hide from her.
``Who _is_, she, Sori?'' asked Belisa plaintively, as if resigned to the
fact that Sori would ignore her question and that the answer would prove
unpleasant anyway.
``Come hither, Child of the Shadows of Ashen Forest. Eat of the nectar I
have brought you.'' Naraya outstretched her hand, with its generous pinch of
mnisse in the palm, to Sorrille's half-reverted Child. The Child approached
her furtively, with a contrite expression, lipped the mnisse from her hand
like some timid hulk of a horse, and then quietly retreated.
Naraya scanned her audience slowly before beginning, failing only to meet
Sorrille's eyes and lingering inexplicably on Belisa's. ``As you can see, I
hold sway over the Forest's Children. Should you choose not to honor the
binding document I have mentioned, these seven will help me to assert my claim
to the throne. Duke Sorrille, I know,''---here she looked at him
significantly---``will support that claim fully.''
Sorrille sought frantically for a resolution to his dilemma. Were he to
reject Naraya outright, as was most certainly his wont, the people of Renith
would come to despise him for having exposed their city to a veritable plague
of demons. No, inciting Naraya to loose seven Children on the city was hardly
a viable means of persuading Renith to gladly award him the sovereignty he so
desired. He would become, if he even survived the fiasco, a hated scapegoat,
and he and Belisa would live under the constant threat of assassination.
On the other hand, if he pretended nonchalance in the face of Naraya's
request---delight would definitely be stretching it---the populace might come
to believe that he, as well as Naraya, held sway over the supernatural. That
would mean a strengthened position on the throne, which was nothing to sneeze
at. Even more importantly, if Naraya felt that he'd been cooperative, she
might decide against feeding him to the Shadowchildren the first opportunity
she got. Of course, cooperating with Naraya pretty effectively displaced
Belisa from the picture. Ah, well, sacrifice _was_ the quintessence of noble
and effective leadership.
``Rest assured that I am your advocate,'' said Sorrille, with a bow.
Naraya nodded and smiled. ``I am glad to hear it spoken, though our nights
together had already helped me to take the true measure of your character.''
``Who _is_ she, Sori?'' repeated Belisa.
______________________________________________________________________________
Cerise Palmer is currently at work on the first book of a fantasy
trilogy. She keeps in good creative shape by telling ``scary
stories,'' nonstop, to her 3-year-old daughter. Electronic
correspondence may be sent c/o jake@cis.ohio-state.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Shifting Sand
by Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c)1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Star of wonder,
Star of night,
Star of royal beauty bright.
The explosion was first noticed by a pair of lovers in the great American
desert, but they had other things on their mind and the incident was quickly
forgotten. A few other people noticed it in the next few minutes, and
eventually one of them was curious enough to call the planetarium. After the
phone call, things happened quickly.
The Arizona telescope was appropriated from its mechanical wanderings
across the night sky, and carefully aimed at where a new point of light
billowed in the heavens, near the southern horizon. Aaron Gregory was the
first at the viewplate, and his soft whistle was enough to bring his collegues
to silence. Years of experience allowed him to pull all the details he
required in a moment, he was not long at the telescope. He said nothing as
the rest of the men and women filed by. When they were done, they turned
toward him almost as one, expectant. Gregory shrugged, lifted a coffeepot
next to him, and poured himself a cup.
The pot was finished well before the meeting was.
``Black holes don't explode.''
``Of course not. We're all having a mass hallucination.''
``Maybe something near the hole?''
``It's the same distance away to the precision of our instruments, and
there's no sign of pull on it at all. Nothing to indicate that there's a hole
nearby.''
``Check it with a radioscope?''
``Too much interference from the explosion. But I could tell you what the
results would be. There's no black hole there, only a supernova.''
Gregory cleared his throat, bringing silence to the room. ``So we know
what happened. Anyone care to speculate how?''
The meeting dissolved in chaos once more.
The press the next morning had plenty of ideas. Most prevalent among them
was that the unexplained phenomenon was a sign from God, regardless of its
cause. The tabloids expounded on a number of other options, as well. The
astronomers continued to be perplexed.
``God moves in mysterious ways,'' one of the journalists suggested to
Gregory at the fifth conference in as many hours. Gregory gave him a look
that would melt glass.
``God, my friend, has nothing to do with it. This is a strictly natural
phenomenon.'' His voice carried the strain of many hours without sleep, and
the distinct impression that he did not regard the journalist as his friend.
``All natural phenomena are His work,'' said another voice. Gregory turned
to face a priest. His face remained taut for a moment, then relaxed.
``Perhaps, yes. But that's not the explanation that I'm after.''
``What more explanation do you need? There is, after all, a precedent.
The night of our Saviour's birth, some two thousand years ago.''
``Has been satisfactorily explained without recourse to a divine being.
Are there any more questions of a _scientific_ nature?''
Another reporter raised his hand, and the conference stumbled on.
The first time Gregory got to relax was as his plane lifted into the air en
route to London. He shuffled through the pages of numbers in front of him for
a time, then gave up, put them down, and closed his eyes.
It was fully six hours when he awoke the garbled speech of the plane's
intercom system.
``We are experiencing some navigational difficulties. There is no danger
involved, and no equipment vital to our safety has been damaged. However,
this flight will be some hours longer than previously planned, and we may have
to make an additional stop. Trans-Atlantic airlines and your flight crew
apologize for the inconvenience. We will keep you posted on further
developments. Arrangements are being made for those of you with connecting
flights.''
Gregory smiled. He would miss his meeting, certain to cause consternation
among his international associates. The thought filled him with some glee,
for the invitation had stressed the urgency of the meeting in the typically
British, overzealous way, and without the data he carried, they had nothing to
discuss. They would just have to wait.
He gradually became aware that the man next to him was staring at him, a
look of puzzlement on his face. Gregory turned.
``You, or somebody that looks like you, were in the newspaper this
morning.''
Gregory extended his hand. ``Aaron Gregory. I'm an astronomer, and yes, a
charming image of me was all over the paper today.''
The man nodded sagely. ``I'm Raphael. Pleased to meet you.''
``No last name?''
``In my country, last names are generally considered secret. A bit of a
quaint custom, but it's ingrained.''
Gregory nodded, trying to place Raphael's accent as he continued to speak.
``You're the guy who discovered the supernova, aren't you?''
``Not really `discovered.' I have done the most work on it, though.''
``Why does this supernova get so much attention? The one ten years ago
didn't even cause a stir.''
``Mainly because we think a black hole exploded to form this one. All
scientific rationale says that that's impossible. We're looking for a way of
understanding how it happened, or, if it didn't, what did.''
``And? What do you think?''
``Personally? I'm not sure. We don't really know much about black holes.
My suspicion is that we just had the theory wrong, and that explosions are
possible. Bunches of my collegues, however, are spouting theories that energy
is being `warped' in from other regions of space. That one just doesn't ring
true to me. If it's possible, it should be happening all the time. Of
course, I would once have said the whole thing was impossible.''
``What if it is?''
``Impossible? I don't understand; we saw it happen. In fact, it's bright
enough to be seen in the daytime if you look in the right place. There's no
doubt that it's there.''
``But not everything has an explainable cause.''
``No, but I have to attribute it to nature or God. And I'm quite a devout
athiest.''
``Yes, yes indeed you are. Funny how it works out that way, sometimes.''
Raphael's tone was enigmatic, and Gregory could not make sense of the
statement. He was about to ask, but Raphael spoke first.
``Excuse me a minute, but nature calls.'' He rose and walked toward the
back of the plane. Suddenly tired, Gregory was asleep before Raphael
returned.
A jarring sensation woke him, and apparently a number of the other
passengers as well. The plane lurched heavily to one side, scattering trays,
books, and people. There were a few moments of stunned silence, then a voice
on the intercom.
``The plane has been crippled by some equipment failure. Unfortunately,
this will require our making a forced landing. There is a desert below us
which will offer safe landing areas. However, to minimize the risk of injury,
we request that you all take crash positions. The flight attendents will
review the procedure with you now. Please remain calm, the danger is slight.
We will be landing in roughly ten minutes.''
``Desert?'' The voice, from the man in front of Gregory, was breaking.
``There are no deserts in Europe. We're all going to die!''
``Look out your window,'' Gregory said. ``If that's somebody's flower
garden, I think they need to water it more often. Obviously we're not over
Europe.''
Below was a stark expanse of sand next to the blue of the ocean. Gregory
remembered hearing that there were only a few places on earth where deserts
existed adjacent to the sea, but he could not think where they were. He gave
up the effort and turned to watch the flight attendent. Beside him, Raphael
spoke a prayer in a surprisingly calm voice. Gregory heard his name in it.
However, he didn't get a chance to comment before he had to put his head
between his knees and a pillow between himself and the next seat. The plane
continued its downward descent.
* * *
Westward leading,
Still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light.
The three days following the crash became more and more tense as it became
obvious that no rescue was on the way. Nothing in the wreckage worked,
including the radio, and there was only an occasional plane overhead, much too
high and fast to spot the people in the desert below. The days were hot, the
nights cold, and the food gradually vanished. Gregory remained somewhat
detached from it all, assuming that they would be found eventually, but it
appeared that starvation was a more likely possibility.
Midnight came for the fourth time since the crash. Gregory sat with a
blanket over him, his back against the smooth metal of the plane, staring at
the brilliant supernova that shone high in the heavens here. From this
information and the positions of the stars he had deduced that they lay rather
close to the equator, though probably not as far south as Africa. It
embarrased him not to be able to guess closer, but his specialty,
astrophysics, didn't include much study of the constellations.
Raphael appeared from the night and sat beside him.
``Still fascinated by the star?''
``It seems brighter every night. It should be decreasing in intensity by
now. It's been almost a week.''
``Still think it's a natural phenomenon?''
Gregory sighed. Raphael continued.
``The last time a star shone this brightly in the heavens, people followed
it to Bethlehem.''
``You don't follow stars. Only a very few stars stay in the same place
throughout the night. You'd end up walking straight east for a while, then
straight west. Not a productive evening.''
``Perhaps not, but there's almost no food here, certainly not enough for
another day. And I'm not sure I really want to be around when these folks
start looking for `alternative' food sources.''
``You want to leave?''
``I don't think we have a choice. And night's the best time for travel.''
Gregory shrugged and stood up. ``Let's go meet our deaths, then. Which
direction?''
Raphael shook his head, and fixed Gregory. ``You decide.''
Gregory turned his vision heavenward. ``We'll follow the star, then, for a
while. That ought to be the direction of the sea, anyway. I don't suppose
we're taking anyone with us?''
Raphael simply shook his head again.
Seventy-five dunes later, the night had begun to fade, and the star had
long ago slid over their heads and below the horizon. Gregory was tired, more
a product of the shifting, uncertain footing than the distance.
``We should probably find a place to rest for the day,'' he said, looking
for such a place without much success.
``Not necessary,'' Raphael said. ``Listen.''
Barely audible over the sand was the sound of ringing bells. Gregory
turned his head slowly until he could fix on the sound.
``It's still ahead of us.'' The two men picked up their pace. As they
topped the next dune, they saw the source of the sound and could hear it
clearly. Nestled in a narrow valley between two dunes lay a village, mostly
just a collection of goats and houses, but in one corner stood a church whose
bells were ringing to herald the morning. Two kilometers or so beyond, the
dunes stopped. Though the sea was invisible from this point, it was clearly
there.
They descended toward the village, and were met by a throng of people
bearing food and water, and speaking rapidly in a language that Gregory could
not understand. He turned to Raphael, who grimaced, and responded in a
similar tongue, though very slowly.
``Not similar enough,'' he said at last. ``I still can't understand
them.'' Accepting the water, they followed the party down into the village
itself. There, they were directed by hand signs to one of the larger houses.
Within sat maybe a dozen people, all with wrinkled faces and ancient eyes.
They looked up as the two travellers entered, and one smiled. He spoke in the
same language that the villagers did, softly, and very slowly. Raphael shook
his head and attempted a response. A look of understanding came over the
elder's face, and he said something back to Raphael. The two began to
converse, slowly. Finally, the elder waved to a villager, and began to talk
rapidly to him. Raphael turned to Gregory.
``I told them about the others at the plane. They know the desert, so they
will bring them here. But they also said they were expecting us, and that
tonight would be the last night of our journey. Something about a child being
born, and rambling about the bright star.''
``Guess what religion these people practice? What else would they think
when a bright star shone in the sky for a week? Tell him we are not oriental
kings, and ask him how we can get back to civilization. `Where are we?'
wouldn't be a bad question, either.''
Raphael nodded and began to speak to the elder again. The man listened
impassively, then opened a pouch beside him, handed its contents to Gregory.
Gregory accepted it, and looked down. Sparkling in his hands was a diamond
perhaps eight centimeters in diameter, cut only roughly, but still the most
impressive stone he had ever seen. Raphael, too, was stunned for a moment,
then listened as the elder spoke.
``He says that we need not be ashamed of having no gift. This is from his
people, and we should offer it to the child tonight.''
Gregory tore his gaze away from the stone. ``Where is this child?''
Raphael conversed briefly. ``He says we need only follow the star.'' He
paused briefly. ``He said that if we do not find the child in a single night,
he admits his mistake and we may keep the `pretty rock.' ''
``We can't take their diamond. We will find no child. But if it's that
important to him, I won't begrudge him one night.''
Raphael smiled and relayed this information, then turned back to Gregory.
``In that case, he invites us to take part in a feast tonight. I hope you
like goat,'' he added in an undertone. Gregory smiled and bowed to the elder.
``I'd be delighted,'' he said, and though the language could not be
understood, he hoped the gesture would be universal.
* * *
...bearing gifts, we travel afar,
Field and fountain,
Moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.
Night brought them to the top of another dune, bearing not only the
diamond, but clothes of goatskin made for an infant, water, and Gregory's
Polaroid, which he used to take a picture of the quaint middle east villiage
in the fading light. ``My colleagues aren't going to believe any of this,''
he remarked, and Raphael smiled.
Above them in the sky, the supernova glowed with a brilliant light, the
brightest thing in the clear desert night. Taking their bearings from it, the
two men began a steady stride. An escort from the village followed them for a
time, then bowed once as a group and turned back. Gregory waited until they
were out of sight before he spoke.
``So what do we do now?''
Raphael frowned, and looked at him. ``What do you mean?''
``I mean, if we go back and tell these people we found nothing, they'll be
crushed. On the other hand, I wouldn't feel right leaving their gifts out in
the desert -- it's too likely they'd find them again. And I wouldn't keep
them.''
Raphael shrugged. ``We have all night. Why worry about it now?''
Gregory nodded. ``But we have to worry about it sometime.'' He stopped
speaking, looked quizically at the sky. The supernova hanging there had
suddenly expanded to about twice its previous size, with a corresponding
increase in brightness.
``That's not possible,'' Gregory said.
``It seems to be,'' Raphael countered. They kept walking. An hour passed,
and the star became steadily brighter.
``A double star,'' Gregory said at last. ``There were two stars there, and
the explosion of one made the other unstable. That's why it's getting
bigger.''
``Fascinating. To think it's happening now, in our lifetime.''
``It isn't. It took the light of those stars centuries to get here. The
actual explosion happened ....'' He stopped.
``How long ago?''
``About two thousand years. I was just thinking that it was kind of an odd
coincidence. But it's not really.''
Something on the next ridge caught his attention. Though it was unclear in
the light of the double supernova, there was an obvious imperfection in the
smoothness of the desert. He pointed, and they picked up their pace. As soon
as they could make it out, they ran.
At some time in the last couple of days, a woman and her infant child had
crossed this dune in the other direction on a mule. The beast now lay in the
sand, unmoving, and the woman and her child rested against it. Both showed
signs of dehyration, but both still breathed. Raphael uncorked a flask of
water and held it to the semiconscious woman's lips. Gregory lifted the
infant and gave it some water as well.
Raphael looked at Gregory for a long moment.
``It's a good thing we were here,'' Gregory commented as they helped the
woman to her feet. He still held the child in his arms, sound asleep but
breathing deeply.
``Coincidence, I'm sure.'' Raphael said, but his tone was completely
expressionless.
Gregors laid the Polaroid photograph of a small child on the table in front
of him, where the other men could see it. They gathered around, pushing aside
astronomical maps and sheets of equations to make room for the rest of his
pictures.
``And so there was a child where the star led,'' Gregory finished, pushing
back his chair.
One of the others looked at him strangely. ``I thought you were an
Athiest.''
``I am.'' He lifted the photograph of the child and slid it to his
questioner. ``But does it really matter?''
______________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a dangerous, psychopathic Computer Science graduate
student with too much time on his hands. Attempts to lock him up have
resulted only in a temporary confinement at Oregon State University, where he
can be reached as kempkec@mist.cs.orst.edu on good days, and not at all on
bad.
______________________________________________________________________________
From _Adventures of a Degenerate Electron_ --- Bruce Altner
INSIDE A WHITE DWARF
Oh, now I am a swimmer,
But I don't know how I got here.
There are swimmers by the millions,
Darting through the Fermi Sea.
Through the crush that chokes and smothers
I swim with all my brothers,
Somehow always going faster
In an ever-growing horde.
How I weary of the straining!
(But not to sound complaining),
I yearn to rest my tired nodes
Down in some quiet shell.
But St. Pauli isn't soothing.
He says, ``Best you keep on moving!
There's no such thing as slowing down
When swimming in the Fermi Sea!''
He says:
``You've got to go a little faster,
Push a little harder,
Don't you know that letting up
Might bring the whole thing down?''
But no matter how I struggle,
I'm caught up in this bubble
And I guess that I'll be seeing you
On the other side of Time.
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter Two
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c)1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Faint moonbeams caressed the dark ocean swells as they washed the damp beach
with the gloomy remnants of memories past. Mike laid still along the water's
edge, his bare feet slowly dipping in and out of the quiet tide. An empty
flask rested at arm's length from his tired body as he dreamt about years
past and worlds far across the vast sea of space.
He remembered a gentle Sirian voice warning him of his own impending
assassination just hours before her execution and recalled the words of a
wealthy industrialist, ``People are profits; individuals: losses.'' He dug
out of the past a friend who committed suicide after having found freedom
from an Imperial correctional institute and thought on the immoral techniques
once practiced by a medical research lab on all assortments of
non-volunteers. He remembered a gang of youths beating a elderly man to death
because he was an off-worlder and fought back the recollection of twisted
arms and limbs as all the remains of a Tizarian Foreign Embassy staff after a
terrorist bombing.
Suddenly, he woke. The familiar sickness was there, but the feeling of
being forcibly thrust out of the warmth and safety of Sleep's benign womb was
lost to an insidious fear, as if he had barely escaped from the black pit of
an ancient nightmare.
``You okay?''
Mike jumped, his nerves swinging his head around nearly to the point of
whiplash. It was only Niki, and she promptly began her little giggle at
Mike's initial surprise.
He looked over his research assistant with considerable distaste,
``What're ya doin' here?''
She drew her hands to her mouth trying to control the spasms of hysteria
which only succeeded in making matters worse.
Mike regarded her with a grin, ``Fine.''
He groggily got to his feet as she rolled on the cold sands clenching her
ribs in a coughing fit of laughter.
``C'mon, it wasn't that funny.''
Out of breath, she began slowing down. Mike reached for under her
shoulders and lifted her small frame off the ground. She put up a mock
struggle, laughing all the while.
``Michael... No! Put me down!'' He carried her over his shoulder towards
the house as she whined, squealed, and laughed.
The house was dark and lonely when they finally arrived. Mike walked in
and tumbled Niki on the couch. She rolled herself up around a large pillow
and beamed up at him with a smile. He shook his head in disbelief and
grinned.
``Aren't ya' gonna say hi?'' She was in a playful mood.
``Hi.''
They looked at each other for a moment before he continued.
``So, how's my psyche doin'?''
``Just fine... Boss.''
``Don't call me that.''
She laughed, ``Why not? Is it a dirty word?''
He nodded, ``Yes. And how's Mr. Fork doin'?''
``Okay-fine.''
``Still locked up?''
``Yep, but he's gettin' better.''
Mike laughed, ``That's sayin' nothin'.''
``No, Really. He's a lot better than he was. He's even beginning to talk
now.''
``What have you gotten out of him?''
``Nothin' much so far. It's still too scrambled to tell what he's
thinkin'.''
``Bet that makes for some interesting reading though. Look, I'm gonna get
a beer, ya want one?''
Her smile faded. ``Naw, ya' don't want beer.''
``Yes I do,'' he headed for the kitchen.
``Drink some zardocha instead.'' She sounded hopeful.
Mike thought about it for half a moment, ``Yuchi-foo.''
``How 'bout milk?''
He mimicked, ``How 'bout beer?''
``You'll get drunk.''
He tapped the nozel release, and twisted the setting nob down to Niki's
favorite.
She smiled, ``You're not gonna get drunk.''
He looked at her, mock-seriousness molding his features into a neutral
expression. ``Do I ever?''
She started giggling, ``Tee hee hee... you were so surprised.'' ``Was
not.''
``Hee hee... was too.''
``Was not you little sneak. Besides, you never told me why you were
there.''
She stopped laughing, ``Just came by to see how you were.''
Mike glanced at the clock, ``At ten after midnight? How'd you know where I
was.''
``And I thought ya' had intelligence. Where are ya' always when its dark
outside and you're too lazy to answer the door?''
He gulped down half the glass, ``Excuse the stupid question. I'm a little
buzzed right now.''
``Why do ya' sleep out there?''
Mike wondered whether she was requesting information or making small talk.
``You've asked me that before.''
``Ya' never answered me.''
Mike paused. ``To sleep... perchance to dream.''
``Did ya dream?''
He thought a moment. ``Yeah.''
``What about?''
``I dunno.''
She laughed, ``Liar.''
He sipped his milk. It was as cold as ice but felt strangely good going
down.
``Well?''
``You didn't read me while I was out?''
``Nah. I saw your eyes goin' though. But I still 'member when you said not
to read you.''
``I wonder why...''
``Aw c'mon. Y'know you can tell me.''
He replied laughing, ``I do?''
``Yes.'' For once, her tone was convincing.
He paused, ``Okay. You remember hearing about the Tizarian embassy on
Calanna?''
``Yeah, I heard got blown up. Hey, that wasn't when you were a
correspondent down there, was it?''
Mike nodded, ``I was pulled shortly before that, but I was still...
sightseeing.''
``Of course,'' she was smiling.
``Now... I had nothing to do with...''
``Don't even try lying, Michael.''
``Okay... well anyway, the short of it is that I was there just a cent
before it happened. I went out to make this call... the embassy was a
notoriously bad place to carry on a private conversation. While I was walking
back... I heard the...'' He stretched out his arms to form the visual image.
``Boom?''
``Boom,'' Mike agreed hesitantly. ``I started running to see what
happened.''
Niki watched him sympathetically, ``No one survived.''
They fell silent for a time as Niki let her milk sit scarcely touched.
Mike's dream had shattered her mood.
Her eyes slowly grew glossy in the blue fluorescent light. ``I'm sorry.''
Surprised, he looked up, ``About that?''
``I'm just sorry.''
``It's okay.''
Mike looked into her eyes and then averted his gaze downward toward the
floor. ``Drink your milk.''
``Mike... ?''
Mike awoke stiffly on the floor. Niki sat over him, one hand on his
shoulder, gently shaking him to consciousness.
He squinted groggily in the dim light. ``What time is it?''
``Twenty. Mike, Fork's in trouble.''
Mike was suddenly wide awake. ``What is it?''
``I dunno. I think somebody woke him up in the middle of a nightmare.''
``Enough to wake you?'' Mike asked in hopeful disbelief.
``No. I was still up. I just happened to be open to it.''
``Did he wake up by himself?''
``No. I'm pretty sure somethin's up.''
``Ok, let's go.'' Mike picked himself off the floor grabbing his black
camera bag on the way out the door and headed straight for the back terrace.
He hopped on the fly-cycle, felt under the seat cushion for the key, and
switched on the grav-plates while Niki hopped on behind him and held to his
waist.
The vehicle raced over the shoreline using its natural flat surface to
pick up speed. The crisp ocean waves, remarkably changed in the past few
hours, lashed the coast and pounded the beach crag with an unrelenting fury
as the bright full moon rose to its apex in an otherwise pitch black sky.
Within five minutes they landed just outside the nearby Tizarian medical
center. Only a mile inland, the smell of salt carried by the chilly morning
breeze floated through the air. A cargo shuttle rested on a pad under a
hundred meters from the complex, and two guards in dark night-uniforms stood
outside the entrance in the bleak, morning cold.
Mike dismounted the vehicle and quickly trotted towards the guards.
Niki grabbed Mike's arm cutting short his advance. ``I don't have my
doctor I.D.''
He shrugged, ``Forget it. We'll play it straight.''
Mike stopped short of the guards and drew out his press card. ``Michael
Harrison, Gatherer, Galactic Press, Tizarian Division. I need access to this
facility to see one of the patients.''
The guard in front laughed, ``At twenty in the morning?''
``Yes. This may be an emergency.''
The guard mocked seriousness, ``Well, it must be a pretty big one. What do
ya' think George? Do we let little Mikey in?''
The other guard was older. His grey eyes depicted a sternness not much
impressed by his partner's attitude. He coughed before speaking, perhaps to
be sure he had everyone's attention, ``Nobody's allowed in the medical
center, mister...''
``Harrison. I'm with the Tizarian Division. I have permanent press
clearance to this center. See? It says so right here.'' Mike pointed toward
the card, but neither guard paid any attention.
The first guard laughed again, ``Hey, who's your psych?'' Niki's dark,
Sirian features hinted at her purpose.
Mike talked while getting out his flimsy. ``Didn't you hear what I said? I
have clearance. By the way, I didn't get you guys' service numbers.''
The older guard broke in, ``Look, buddy. We have orders not to let anybody
in. Anybody! Do you understand? Now why don't you just hop back on your
play-scooter with your girly-friend and get your snot-nosed face off our
turf!''
``Orders from who?''
``From our commanding officer. Who do you think?''
``Who is?''
The older guard shouted, ``I just said who!''
``As in a name.''
The guard paused, not quite sure how to phrase his response. ''That's
classified.''
Mike looked up from the flimsy. The guard who spoke reinforced his
position by standing in front of the door, his plain, black uniform blending
nicely with the purple background.
``You guy's aren't even wearing Tizarian badges. Who the hell are you?''
``Starlaw.'' The answer came simultaneously from both.
Mike shot a wary glance at the pair, ``You Imperial police have some sort
of identification?''
They pulled badges from their pockets.
``Why aren't you guy's wearing these things?''
There was no answer. Mike was fairly certain they couldn't arrest him.
``Oh, I guess that's classified too. Look, I'd like to speak with your
commanding officer!''
The young guard pushed Mike backward and began to draw his gun, but the
other held him back, the older guard's stare belying a temptation to let his
partner carry out the threat. Suddenly, Niki gasped as if shocked.
``What is it?''
She paused, regaining her breath. ``He's gone.''
``What?''
``No more signal.''
Mike drew out his camera and backed away from the guards, pulling Niki
back with one hand clenched around her shoulder.
``Smile dudes.'' Mike snapped the shot, and retreated quickly to the
cycle.
The personal office of Charles Linden, copy editor for the Tizarian
Division of Galactican Press, rested near the top of the center section of
Silver Tri-Towers. It was, as Chuck liked to put it, a room with a view. Out
the sky window, if the day was clear enough, the entire expanse of land all
the way to the coast could be surveyed. From well over two kilometers high,
it was a wondrous sight.
Mike sat at the edge of the editor's dark, mahogany desk staring blankly
out the window as the clouds blew by. Niki, leaning against the close, white
wall, quietly watched his profile, collecting his emotions, reading his
worries.
The faint noise of footsteps approached the entrance, Niki turning to look
as the antique, brass doorknob turned clockwise. Linden, stood in the
doorway smiling suspiciously while surveying the duo.
``Well! If it isn't Mik and Nik.''
Mike intentionally suppressed his smile. ``Hi, Chuck.''
``That's Mister Linden to you Harrison. So, how's it going?''
``It sucks.'' The voice was Niki's.
Linden turned his head toward her, leaning his body on the desk toward
Mike.
``Does it really?''
``Yeah, it sure does.''
Linden laughed, ``You teaching her slang, buddy?''
Mike smiled, ``Y'know, Chuck, you really have a way of breaking the
mood.''
``Yeah. I saw your entry this morning; suggested headline: `Imperial
Police Seize Hospital.' Very catchy.''
``You don't like it?''
``First off, it isn't a hospital. It's a medical center. Big difference.
Secondly, they didn't seize it.''
``They refused my clearance.''
``I just got off the phone with a Lieutenant Robertson. He tells me you
tried to assault one of his guards.''
Mike held the smile, ``He's lying.''
Linden confidently continued, ``He also told me you never showed your
press I.D. to the guards.''
``Chuck, he's lying.''
Linden looked Mike in the eyes, ``Prove it.''
``I have a witness.''
``Do you have the encounter on crystal?''
``No.''
``Why not?''
``We were in a hurry when we left. I forgot the recorder.''
``You forgot the recorder; no substantiation. The paper gets sued. I lose
my job. And as for your so-called witness... who has been illegally posing as
a psychotherapist at the medical center for the past doce so that you could
get a story which was never registered with the paper! What the hell are you
trying to pull, Mike!?!''
``The last time I registered a story with the paper my research assistant
got her brains blown out by a firing squad!''
``That's because all your, quote-unquote, research assistants are
unregistered telepaths!!''
Niki winced. Mike shook his head in disbelief as his boss continued.
``Look buddy, it's not like I don't believe you. I do. But you're just
doing everything the wrong way.''
``I'm doin' my best.'' ``I know. That's 'cause you are the best...
usually.''
Mike looked up hopefully, ``So what do I do now?''
``Lieutenant Robertson is coming over. He'll be here in a few minutes. I
suggest you wait around 'til he gets here. Question him. If you can, trap
him.''
Linden reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a small, pocket
recorder. He placed it on the desk in front of Mike. ''You're still on
Tizarian turf. Use the advantage.''
By that last remark, Linden meant that there were several advantages press
gatherers had on Tizar which weren't granted to them on many other worlds.
The right to publish recorded statements without the approval of the speaker,
the right to use registered telepaths to gather information, and the right to
access the non-classified records of any subject were just a few examples.
Mike sat down at the computer terminal in the far corner. Linden, a lover
of antiquities, rarely ever touched it, and the file on Robertson revealed
nothing out of the ordinary. The twenty-seven year old, Starlaw officer
entered the service after attending Duke Marc's College. He earned a degree
in Enforcement of Justice, and served Starlaw in the public relations
department. He'd been promoted during his first four-year hitch and was now
working through his second.
Mike looked up from the file as Linden's secretary knocked at the door to
announce the lieutenant's arrival.
``Send him in, Jo... and tell the floor that I'll be down in a few
minutes.''
``Alrighty, Mr. Linden.''
A tall man with short blond hair and smooth brown eyes entered the office.
His practiced smile was as wide as it was non-deceiving.
Linden returned the smile, ``Lieutenant, please come in.''
``Mr. Linden? How good it is to finally meet you in person. I must
confess, I didn't know who to greet at first.''
``That's quite understandable.''
``You should get a videophone. That's what everyone I know uses.''
``Yes. Well, on an editor's salary, I think I'll just stick to the basics.
This is Michael Harrison, the reporter who spoke with your guards; and this
is Nikita Sen, a research assistant with the Press.''
Mike smiled at the lie as he shook hands with the Lieutenant.
Robertson also shook hands with Niki but avoided her eyes.
``Mr. Linden. You hire Sirians. I am surprised.''
``Why?''
Robertson laughed uncomfortably, ``Have you not heard the Imperial
convention against psionic trespassing?''
``Lieutenant, the Psionics Suppression is a matter for historians.
Besides, this is Tizar. We have been granted freedom in those areas by your
Archduke's grandfather long ago.''
Robertson seemed to physically squirm in his stance, ``Still, editor. I
must insist that my mind... not be... violated.'' He smiled shyly at Niki.
Mike wondered what kind of people the Imperials were hiring, ``You've got
something to hide, Lieutenant Robertson?''
``Of course not. There are just certain classified matters... Unrelated,
you understand.''
Mike smiled, ``No problem. Niki's telepathy is very... weak.'' He decided
to stretch the truth, ``She can only read the answers to yes or no questions,
feel surface emotions, and even for that she has to be looking at the subject
in question.''
``Still Mr. Harrison, I must insist that she at least leave the room.''
Niki broke in, ``I don't mind leaving, but I would like to hear what is
said. After all, I am, to a certain extent, involved. If I turn around, I'll
be largely unable to use my telepathy. Would that be all right Lieutenant?''
Robertson shrugged, ``I guess that'll have to do. Sorry about the
inconvenience.''
Niki smiled, ``That's okay. I'm used to it.''
Robertson looked at Mike and began to grope for a place to begin. ``So,
Mr. Harrison, the guards at the medical center told me they had a little
trouble with you.''
``I suppose they did, Lieutenant. I wanted entrance; they denied it.''
``Well, did you tell them you were a gatherer?''
``Yeah, I showed them my press card.''
``Well... that's not their story. What were you doing out there so early
anyway?''
``Me and Niki suspected that something may be wrong with one of the
patients.''
``Which one was this?''
``John Doe, number eighteen.''
Robertson looked surprised. ``Hmmm... that's quite a coincidence. That
patient died in his sleep at around midnight last night.''
Mike's mouth fell open, ``What?''
``There's nothing you could have done. He was well on his way to the
golden arches when you arrived, or wherever it is that he went. Wasn't he the
insane gentleman who murdered a guard with a carving fork and injured two
civilians?''
Mike tried desperately to regain his wits.
Robertson continued, ``So, Mr. Harrison, what made you suspect that there
was something wrong with the patient.''
Mike looked back up at the Lieutenant. ``Niki, turn around.''
Robertson instinctively withdrew a step.
Mike continued as Niki turned about to face the lieutenant, ''Is he
lying?''
She nodded yes; her eyes burning red with antipathy.
Robertson avoided both her's and Mike's stare and turned to Linden for
support. ``I doubt I'd be the first. Mr. Linden, I protest.''
Mike stood directly in front of Robertson. ``Lieutenant, what was Starlaw
doing there?''
``That's confidential, Mr. Harrison.''
``Can't you at least tell me the branch of personnel, the name of the
commanding officer?''
Robertson shrunk under the direct questions. ``Internal
Counter-Insurgency. ISIS Division. That's all I can say.''
``ISIS?!?'' Mike almost jumped back into Linden's lap. ``The Imperial
Secret Police?''
``Please, Mr. Harrison. You have me at an awkward position. I'm only
regular Starlaw.''
``Then why are you lying!?!''
Lieutenant Robertson withdrew to the door. ``I won't stand to be
interrogated in such a fashion,'' he weakly complained. ``I'm leaving.''
Robertson opened the door and quickly escaped from the hateful stares of
the three people he was sent to pacify. Mike took the recorder out of his
pocket and turned it off. ``Can I publish it now?''
Linden sat down and crossed his legs, a twinkling of a smile lighting his
otherwise sharp countenance. ``No. You can go out there and get some more
facts, and then come back with a real story. I've got a feeling this'll be a
winner once you've got it fully researched, and I won't even make you
register Niki.''
Mike smiled gravely, ``It's a little too late for that; they already know
about her. But thanks anyway. We'll take the offer. We'll also try to get
some more info. I'd also appreciate it if you'd keep quiet about the story.''
``Okay. But I don't see how that's going to help you now either.''
``Trust me, it will. Look, I'll catch you later. Thanks for the help.''
``Ok, I'll see you two later.''
Mike and Niki exited the office. Once in the outer hall, Niki tugged at
the gatherer for attention. ``Hey, ya' really know how to get people t'
listen to ya'.''
He looked her in the eyes, ``I'm sorry.''
She smiled, ``About you or about Fork?''
``I'm just sorry.''
She shrugged, ``Let's get some milk.''
The bar was cool and dimly lit. Several ceiling fans twirled silently above
as Mike drank his milk on the rocks; Niki had her's straight.
``So,'' she began, cutting the solemn mood, ``where do we start this
time?''
Mike sipped thoughtfully, ``I haven't the faintest idea.''
``Liar.'' She was smiling.
He grinned back and took another sip.
She grew impatient, ``Well?''
``Okay. I met this girl a while ago.''
Niki laughed, ``Is this one of your drunk maid stories?''
``No. This happened just yesterday. I don't know whether Chuck told you,
but me and him met Mr. Clay and his daughter for lunch.''
``Boardmember Clay?''
``Uh huh.''
``And the girl's his daughter?''
``Yeah. Anyway, so we talked, and then they had to leave, but that
afternoon she came over to my house.''
``Alone?'' Niki looked concerned.
``Uh huh.''
``And you let her in?''
``Why not?''
She had no reply.
``So anyway, while she was in the bathroom, I found out she was an
android.''
``What were you doing in the bathroom with her?''
``I wasn't in the bathroom. I was in the living room.''
``What was she doing?''
``Taking her ear off, or putting it on. I don't remember, but that's not
important.''
``You saw her take her ear off. Ooh gross.''
``No, Cindy did.''
Niki laughed, ``What? You asked your computer what she was doing in the
bathroom?''
Mike paused, ``Yeah.''
``Why?''
``I was curious?''
``Have you no shame? Guy, ya' won't be seeing me go to the bathroom at
your place no more.''
Mike laughed, ``Oh, c'mon. Just one more time. I want to shoot some
pictures.''
She laughed, ``No way, bud. So what happened then?''
``She had to take off, but I'm sure she was there to check me out.''
Niki nodded, ``I'm sure she was, too.''
``No. I mean for somebody else.''
``Heck, Mike, everybody's after you. Me, an android, your computer, now
somebody else.''
``Oh, c'mon.'' ``So where's Clay's real daughter?''
``He doesn't have one.''
``You mean, Mrs. Clay gave birth to an android?''
They both laughed.
``Look, stop it. I want you to check up on her... and on Mr. Clay.''
``I can't read an android.''
``Read Mr. Clay then. No! Wait a mil, it was his niece, not his daughter,
his niece.''
She laughed, ``You've really got your facts straight.''
``I was recovering from a hangover at the time.''
``Excuses. Excuses.''
They laughed and ordered some more milk.
She began again, ``So what about Fork. I mean, this could be a dead end.''
``I'm fairly sure his mind was shot by one of those Imperial mind
scanners. They probably just decided to kill him.''
``Why?''
``I dunno, and that's no lie.''
``What do we do?''
``You do nothing.''
``Aw, c'mon. I wanna help.''
Mike refused, ``No, they already know about you. I want you where you can
do some good. Clay doesn't know about you, and I've got a suspicion he's tied
up in this.''
``How's that?''
``I think I remember seeing Robin, that's his niece's... I mean android's
name... I swear I remember seeing her down at the medical center one of those
times I visited Fork.''
``Then she'd know me.''
``Nope. You're not registered. I am. She wouldn't have any reason to
remember your face unless you spoke to her or something, or unless you were
registered with Galactic Press, and you're not...''
``Ya' don't think Mr. Linden would say anything about me?''
``Nah, Chuck doesn't talk to Boardmembers. You're in the clear.''
``What about you?'' She knew the answer to that without asking.
``I'll manage. Look, I'm gonna go home and grab a quick nap.''
``Liar.''
Mike smiled, ``Look, I'll be okay. I promise. Come see me tonight.''
``You mean next morning?''
``Whenever. I'll see ya' later.'' He got up and headed toward the exit.
Niki put down her milk, ``Be careful.''
``You too.''
Niki stayed at the table as the highbowls slowly rose to the ceiling and
coasted across the bar. From the opposite aisle a burley man in a heavy, tan
coat rubbed a lather of foam from his moustache, his eyes scanning the
morning headlines as they scrolled across the surface of his table. In the
background, she heard a group of people laughing. Michael didn't want to be
followed. She glanced toward the escalator ramp and watched a sprinkling of
people zoom by, the cushion of propelled wind whining where its outskirts met
the stop-off. The bar seemed warm and snug when compared with some of the
other places she had been recently; it was a good place to stay and pout. But
not as good as a Boardmember's house. She smiled at the thought as she threw
on her wrapper.
``Are you family?'' The nurse's eyebrows wrinkled in rehearsed concern as
he scratched down Mike's name and Tizarian I.D. number.
``No, but will this do?'' Mike showed the nurse his Galactican press
clearance. The shiny blue and silver card was nearly identical to his
Tizarian personal identification or his Imperial consumer profile. The three
were hard to tell apart at a glance.
The young man nodded in acknowledgement and hurriedly escorted Mike
through the long white corridors of the medical center. The usually polished
floor tiles showed dirty tread markings where a pair of wet, oversized
starlaw boots had recently stomped. Mike grinned and snapped a picture though
he doubted that analysis of the photo could tell much more than the boot size
and service division of its wearer.
The air felt slightly colder as the nurse pushed aside a set of green
double doors. The word ``Freezers'' was painted in icy blue across their
surface. Mike followed closely.
``So what d'ya want with a 'corpsicle' anyway?'' The nurse smiled at his
own joke. He was being too smooth. Mike guessed that they were giving him
loads of preferential treatment because they were scared silly of the bad
press he could inflict.
``It's a long story.'' Mike bent over the computer and with a few quick
keystrokes he scanned the registry of the dead. Niki had taught him how the
system worked last month and the lesson came back to him as quickly as were
it taught yesterday. Such were the benefits of being lectured by a Siri, Mike
thought as the nurse approached the terminal.
``Hey, wait a second buddy.'' The nurse was visibly surprised, but he
scanned the screen seeing Mike had found his way through the system.
``He's gone.'' Mike closed his eyes in the anticipated frustration. It was
too much too expect that the Imperial police would leave his subject's body
on site. That would make verification of the time of death too simple a
matter.
``I thought you guys held a patient's body for autopsy.''
``We do. At least we're supposed to.'' The nurse hit a few more keys and
scanned the screen for more data.
``Here. The verdict was heart attack due to the stress medication. It
happens occasionally. The body's been taken to Greenflower mortuary.''
The news startled Mike momentarily, and he wondered what the Imp's motives
could be. He pushed himself away from the console and straightened out,
slowly perceiving the implications. The nurse gazed up from the computer and
tried to read Mike's expression.
Mike finally smiled, ``At least Fork's going out in style. Say, you got a
spare hour?''
Surrounded by lush costal woodlands and set around a wild flower garden,
Greenflower easily rated as the prettiest community in Silver-Tri county. It
was small, quiet, nearly perfect in every way. Mike would have lived there,
but it lacked in one crucial respect: no beach.
Mike watched the passing trees and sighed as the nurse suddenly turned
delivery boy drove the white grav-car along the highway. The med-center was
being too kind but totally predictable, loaning him a nurse and a car, all to
straighten out its reputation with one reporter from a very powerful news
syndicate.
``I hope you're enjoying this.'' The nurse sounded slightly irritated.
``Sure am. Watch out for the cat.''
Small rain droplets marched steadily up the windshield and swerved
sideways with every curve in the road as the sun poked between the clouds
with sporadic recess, its rays shattering into a kaleidoscope of colorful,
dancing patterns.
Cruising at a hundred kilometers per hour, the grav-car sped over the
highway at an approximate altitude of one meter. Mike thought that it felt
like they were floating on a current of air though he knew that wasn't the
case. They were floating on the force of gravity which was really the
curvature of space. Mike's mind began to swim with equations learned in a
series of undergraduate science courses he had been dragged into by a friend.
Something about down-vectors and Higgs boson emissions. He couldn't quite
remember who to hate for it. Mike had always liked science, but never enough
to actually understand it.
The nurse pulled up to the mortuary and gently touched earth. Outside the
deep grey building a small service seemed to be taking place. The dark gloomy
afternoon made the mourners looked like an assembly of Draconian diplomats
dressed in sleek black suits huddling together exchanging whispers. Their
somber mood was catching.
Mike climbed from the car and headed warily for the mortuary. A pit of
ashes was exposed to the rain about a hundred feet from the building's
entrance, green clover petals curving in along its red brick walls. The
nurse, genuinely fascinated, stopped to look down. It was archaic. Almost
barbarian.
Mike entered the building's lobby while the nurse ran to catch up.
``What'd you see?''
``Nothing. It was too dark,'' the young man puffed catching his breath.
``May I help you, gentlemen?'' A middle aged woman with a pale complexion
suddenly appeared as if from thin air. She was dressed in a long black gown
and wore a black pearl necklace.
Mike took out his press clearance, ``I hope so. I'm looking for a man, I
mean a body of a man which was brought here this morning.''
The women seemed strangely amused. ``Does this body of a man have a
name.'' Her words sang out like music.
``He was listed as a jay-dee eighteen from Silver-Tri costal med-center.''
``I see,'' She seemed absolutely enthralled.
Mike smiled, ``Great,'' then consciously dropped his smile. ``Where is
he?''
She slipped between Mike and the nurse and crept to the lobby entrance,
opening the large oaken doors and pointing her long slender arm toward the
ash pit. Mike watched the rain fall in disappointment.
The setting sun's amber beams tanned the evening coast, streaming
thoughtlessly past the white water's edge, scattering sullenly across Michael
Harrison's tired features. He watched two gulls, wings outstretched, gliding
peacefully over the shifting blue and crimson waves, hanging precariously
onto the thin salty air. As if beckoning him forth, the sea approached within
inches of his face and then receded into the distance while thoughts twisted
about in his mind like delicate angels on their way to a darktime's meal.
But something was missing; something was overlooked. And for the life of
him, he didn't know what it was. What to do when you're deadended? Go back
and re-examine the facts. But there were no facts. Everything was hidden
behind lies.
Unable to sleep in his only true home, he picked himself up and walked
back toward the house. The huge wooden doors seemed even more menacing when
sober, but he managed them open and headed to the kitchen for a brew.
His soft bed and cold beer summed up the perfect way to spend an evening,
but as he sat on the edge of the covers the camera drew away his attention.
Near the wall, it sat on the rug where he had dropped it less than an hour
ago as if pleading like a child for a trip to the zoo, ``take me a picturing,
I want to have fun.''
Mike smiled and stretched out on the floor beside his toy. He opened the
workset and began to review the pictures in memory. He zipped past a
Telmarian mountain range where strange animals carried supplies across a snow
ridge to the local guerrilla faction, then floated along Tizarian waters as a
shuttle from nearby Aquapolis darted from under the seascape in a beautifully
chaotic conglomeration of white water spray and a rainbow of sunshine, then
noticed a Calannaan temple where the altar priests sacrificed a political
dissident with knives and a chainsaw, but only one picture grabbed his
attention-- that of two starlaw guards scowling outside a medical center
entrance in the wee hours of morning.
Mike pivoted the picture into different corners of the screen and tried to
decide where it would look best hanging from the wall. He reversed the
colors, intensified the light, rotated the picture around, zoomed out for a
wideangle, and suddenly noticed what was missing.
The small distorted numbers mocked him from the far corner of the screen.
He manually zoomed in on them and refocused. How could he be so stupid? The
medical center had no permanent cargo shuttle. The vessel must have belonged
to the Imperials.
He looked toward the controller wall, ``Cindy, load file from Silver-Tri.
Find Imperial shuttle 8372919041.''
She responded within the second, ``That shuttle is found.''
``Where is it now?''
``Docked onto the independent fast-merchant, Nissithiu, which has jumped
out of system fifteen point two centims ago.''
The idea itched like a hunch sent by the devil, ``What was the cargo?''
``It was dropping off pharmaceutics.''
``Departure cargo?''
``None.''
Mike leaned back on the bed, ``That's pretty strange, leaving a world as
wealthy as Tizar.''
Cindy gave no reply.
``Where is the ship headed?''
``Flight orders don't state.''
``They should.''
``They don't.''
``Then read topside nav-data and figure it out.'' Mike hated lazy
computers.
Cindy came back to him after a few seconds, ``This will take me
twenty-four point seven centims to compute.''
``Why so long?''
``I'm not a navigation computer.''
He shrugged, ``Fine, Take your time.''
``Now computing,'' she responded as if more than a little annoyed.
Mike grinned. She'd be working until well past midnight. At least he now
knew how to keep her busy.
As he stepped back outside, beer in paw, he shot the dying sun a victory
smile and sat down on the damp sands under a chilly wind. Then, curling up
next to the surf, Mike closed his eyes and tried not to dream. Songs of water
and birds soothed him with a serenity beyond mere music as he drifted away to
other seas.
Slowly, his soul floated about in black and empty space. Silently, a
touch from above pulled him away from sleep's cherished womb. Sounds of
music, songs from the sea, clustered around him like the players of an opera
theater, sinking in and out of the void with a strange, perhaps arranged
harmony.
She bore no expression as he opened his eyes. He felt himself gripped with
a strange combination of confusion and fear as the black sky above cast a
bold contrast around her disarranged golden blonde hair and deep blue eyes.
She smiled sweetly whispering, ``Good morning.''
For a moment, he felt as if he was dreaming, but the rush of questions was
uncharacteristic of sleepthink. In dreams he could accept that life was death
and good was evil, but on the surface of thought there was only the here and
the now and many, many questions.
``Why are you here?''
``We found your psyche.''
The cold tide washed the tips of Mike's toes as a cool, salty breeze
lifted a few strands of Robin's hair.
``Drop the story, or you'll never see her again.''
Robin walked slowly up the beach as Mike sat still in the sand watching
the ocean horizon curve away into the distance.
Dawn was particularly brilliant along the coast, a primary reason for his
choosing to live there. Mike watched the sunrise with a rueful stare as the
dull, throbbing pain stuck like a stiff arrow in the base of his skull.
Bitterly, he picked his sand encrusted self off the beach and headed wearily
toward the house. Grains of earth fell off him with each dismal step.
The large livingroom reeked of a dreary gloom. Mike glanced toward the
couch and the pillow where her head had rested two nights before. He walked
sullenly into the bedroom. The far curtains remained closed, dimming the
room. The chain locket she'd given him rested on his bed with the camera.
``Hello.''
It beeped compulsively as a point of light danced around the controller
screen.
``Yes?''
``The Nissithiu went to the Calanna star system.''
``Oh.''
Mike tumbled the junk off the bed, all except for the locket. It was in
the shape of a heart with words inscribed along the front: ``Go For It!''
``Place audio connection call to Linden.''
The light danced around the screen.
``Done.''
Mike gathered up his breath.
``Hi, What's up Mike?'' It was Linden's voice.
``Morning, editor.''
``Yes, and a very nice one it is too. Is there anything I can do for
you?''
Mike consciously tried collecting his spirit.
``Why did you tell Clay?''
``What?''
``You heard me.''
``I don't understand, Mike. What happened?''
``They've got Niki.''
``... You think I told Clay about her?''
``I know you did, Chuck. I just wanna know why.''
``Now don't start hurling accusations, buddy. I didn't say a thing to Clay
or anybody else. Now, tell me exactly what happened. Did she screw up or
something?''
``No.''
``Well, how do you know?''
``She's not a screw-up! Okay?!''
``Well, I didn't say anything. Editor's honor, Mike.''
``Bullshit.''
``The honest truth.''
``No, it had to be you.''
``Nope.''
``Chuck, if I find out later...''
``I'm clean.''
``Chuck... stupid question coming up...''
Mike scratched his head with the locket searching for the right words.
``You ready?''
``I love dumb questions. Shoot.''
``When's the last time you had your office checked for bugs?''
Silence.
``Chuck?!?''
The line was dead.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim is a full-time MBA student at UC Riverside. He recently founded the UCR
Gamers' Guild and co-edited the first issue of its quarterly journal, _The
Guildsman_. These chapters are the first of several he began during the
middle 80's as a prose exercise in description of his Traveller (SF-RPG)
setting. He says he writes exactly the same way he gamemasters: without any
semblance of plan or preconception.
What has been published here as Chapter Two sl is actually chapters two and
three as written originally by Jim. The Harrison Chapters will be continued
next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Ultimate Hell
Jeffrey Mark De La Noye
Copyright (c)1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Kyklos Matlock looked up at the pale blue sky of Hygess above him, his long
dark hair blowing in the wind. A snowbird wheeled above, circling over some
prey that had earlier succumbed to the cold. Though many things were adapted
to the harsh environment north of Hygess' equator, there was always a limit to
one's tolerance. The northern hemisphere of Hygess was cold, but to a native
like Matlock, the cold was comforting.
His eyes met the metropolitan community of Icelandia on the horizon, his
destination. He could hear the distant sound of skimobiles as they scudded
off in the distance, and they reminded him of Ford Bedcoe, his friend, who had
taken off on a skimobile several hours before. Matlock regretted the argument
which caused his flight, but he could see nothing that he could have done,
personally, that Ford would not have objected to. Depressed by the fight and
alone in the hotel room, Matlock decided to take a comforting walk across the
wilderness, and it was now time to return.
The wind blew a bit harder and Matlock pulled his hood over his head and
his furskin jacket closer. It was only a few more miles to Icelandia, he kept
reminding himself. Only a few more miles.
The sun set and soon the sky was a murky gray. Matlock's stride became
shorter and his footsteps fell closer together. Only a few more miles.
The cold black sky with its many stars faced Matlock when, exhausted, he
fell over backwards onto the cold snow. He was only a few miles from
Icelandia .
Then he heard the sound of skimobiles, and it was the last thing he heard
until his friend Ford Bedcoe called to him and lifted him up and into Bedcoe's
own skimobile.
``Matlock!'' Bedcoe called, ``Matlock!''
``Matlock!'' Bedcoe called, and at once Matlock woke with a start. He
opened his eyes and instead of the dark night he saw the cold gray
tungsten-steel alloy side of the Total Survival Suit that he lay face down in.
He suddenly realized that he had been dreaming of an event that had happened
some months ago. Now, in the TSS, the extremes of the planet Tartarus once
again revealed themselves to him.
Matlock looked around and realized where he was. He rubbed his eyes and
looked into the viewer, where he saw Bedcoe's concerned face looking at him.
``Oh, hello, Ford.'' he said sleepily.
``Hello indeed! Your EKG was going wild. I thought you were hurt.''
Matlock smiled. ``No, I was just dreaming... about that time I almost
froze out near Icelandia on my home world. Oh, by the way, I don't think I
ever thanked you for that.''
Bedcoe shrugged in modesty and smirked. ``I think you did. Besides, I
couldn't let you die. You were the only transportation I had off that
iceball.''
Matlock tried to reposition himself in the vehicle, only to fail. The TSS
was so low and close to his back that he couldn't stand if he wanted to, and
it restricted his movements considerably. Bedcoe had always complained about
that, and Matlock had to agree. The surface temperature of Tartarus,
thirteenth planet of the solar system, was so cold that it drew heat away from
any source, so the less area needed to heat the better.
Early expeditions on Tartarus had been conducted in actual suits, but it
was discovered that a human's own personal locomotion couldn't handle the cold
of the planet or the distances covered, no matter how well padded and heated
the suit. So H-shaped vehicles were created that crawled along the ground
``on all fours''. Though actually vehicles, they were still called total
survival suits.
The TSS was shaped like a person with outstretched arms and legs, within
which the driver's own extremities fit. Cybernetic controls were placed in
the hand and footpads of the suit to control its various functions. The
suit's own housekeeping chores, such as heating and ventilation, were
controlled by a separate computer independent of the driver.
As can be expected, the total survival suit completely protected its
occupant from the outside. It had to. The atmosphere outside the thick
tungsten-steel suit was -200 degrees Fahrenheit and any exposed part of a
person would freeze solid instantly. Tartarus received 1/1000 the energy from
the sun than the Earth does, and Sirius is brighter in Tartarus' sky than the
sun.
It was, in fact, impossible to tell if it was day or night unless you knew
which dim object in the sky was the sun, for there wasn't enough light coming
to Tartarus to cause any kind of colored sky. Like everything else on
Tartarus, time was frozen.
Matlock lightly tapped his fingers to the cybernetic controls in the
handpads of his TSS and the feeding mechanism revved up. A machine inside the
TSS boiled carbon dioxide out of the rocky surface of Tartarus. It
disassociated the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. The oxygen was
breathable when combined with nitrogen from the waste processor, and when
combined with free hydrogen from the atmosphere created water. The carbon,
when combined with other elements from the rock became a suitable waybread,
high in carbohydrates and some protein, but low in fats. It didn't keep them
healthy, but it kept them alive.
Bedcoe spoke into Matlock's intercom. ``Can't hold out that extra mile,
can you?'' he joked.
Matlock smiled back at him. ``just thought we'd have a picnic. It's a
nice enough view, isn't it? Besides, I didn't notice you fasting back there
at Tyomni Zvezda.''
They had just come from Tyomni Zvezda, an area on Tartarus that was
proposed as a permanent spaceport on the planet. While there, they had set up
a denamit, a device that drilled deep into the planet where there was heat.
The drill brought the heat up to the surface, where it stimulated the growth
of crystals that grew geodetically. As the crystals grew, they formed a dome,
which also held heat in. The denamit was never turned off, because it heated
the dome continually, but the rate at which it drew heat could be slowed so
that the dome didn't continue to expand. The main city of Tartarus, Krasni,
had been created this way. The crystals would take at least a month to grow
to the right size, so in that time Matlock and Bedcoe were heading back to
Krasni, their home on the barren, frozen world. There were only a dozen people
on Tartarus, and ten of them were currently at Krasni.
The food that Matlock was eating was a spherical gray lump that was the
product of the food processor. He looked at it with disdain. ``I can't wait
to get back to Krasni,'' he said solemnly, thinking of the real food both of
them had enjoyed just before they left Krasni. This tour of duty was starting
to get to both of them. The harshness of the environment was one thing.
People had to crawl around in these small boxes with very little extra space,
and there was no real food to speak of. The supply ship to Krasni came once
every two weeks, and so a few days ago he and Bedcoe had eaten actual meat.
It had been delicious, but it gave him the impression of being a last supper.
While Matlock ate, Bedcoe adjusted his camera so that he could see the
distant Ural Montes that they would have to climb over to get to Krasni.
Krasni was tucked away in Grierson Vallis, a small valley in the Ural range.
Above the upper peaks of the mountains was the ever black sky and the dim
stars. A particularly dim star was setting behind the middle peak.
Matlock stuffed the remainder of the waybread into his mouth and touched
the cybernetic contact that moved the tractor skids underneath the machine.
There were four caterpillar tracks, one under each handpad and footpad. By
gently pressing on the steering contact on each side of the machine, Matlock
was able to maneuver the TSS in the direction of the Ural Montes. He touched
the contacts on his TSS and began the trackwork. Slowly at first they turned,
testing the strength of the ``snow'' underneath, making micro-adjustments
until the TSS master computer was sure that the snow underneath the TSS could
support motion. Then, when all the adjustments were completed, the TSS tracks
revved up to full speed. The headlights flashed on and lit a wide patch of
the frozen blackness before them. Soon both TSSs were crawling quickly up the
foothills of the Ural Montes.
Bedcoe spoke into the intercom. ``What's the hurry? Wait for me; I don't
want to be left alone out here.''
Matlock was silent for a moment. Bedcoe sure was getting grumpy; had been
for the past day. ``I want to get home, `` Matlock said. Bedcoe wasn't sure
of his meaning. Home for them now was the city of Krasni, and had been for
the last six months when they had joined the Frontier Corps. Since Matlock
was from Hygess, originally, that could equally have been his meaning.
Hygess, Matlock's home world, was divided politically, geographically, and
culturally into the Frozen North and the Sunny South.
Matlock was from the North, but even he was unused to the mile upon mile of
snow, or whatever this stuff was. Matlock was never sure what to call the
mantle of Tartarus. He had played in the snow on Hygess when he was younger,
but this frozen matter was nothing like that. All he knew was that it was
instant peril to whoever touched it.
Bedcoe quirked. ``Does this place remind you of home?''
Matlock grunted into the microphone. ``Hygess isn't this bad, Bedcoe.
It's a beautiful world. I can't understand why you hate it so. It can't be
because of the cold, or else you wouldn't have come here.''
``There's a difference between these two worlds, Kyklos. On Hygess a
certain amount of discomfort--cold--is physically acceptable. Which is why
you collapsed that day near Icelandia. So long as you were moderately warm
and in no danger of frostbite, it was okay. However, on Tartarus, no amount
of cold is acceptable. Right now it's about 60 degrees farenheight in my TSS.
I feel fine. In a way, Hyges is colder than Tartarus, at least from a certain
point of view.
``Plus, I'm doing some real good here. Earth needs a place to store her
space fleet, one far from Earth. It would do no good to fight the Cygonians
close to Earth. We need room to fight. We need room to grow and expand as an
Empire. There's no room left in this system; it's too close in here.
``I'm getting paid for being here too. I don't get paid for galloping
around on an isolated member world.''
``I know that,'' Matlock said, ``But didn't you enjoy yourself?'' he
asked. ``I thought it would be good to get away, after your brother...''
``Don't say another word about that,'' he said, suddenly becoming intensely
grim, and Matlock could tell from the EKG and common sense that Bedcoe was
sincere about it.
Matlock remembered what Jonas Radcliffe, the Governor of Krasni, had told
him soon after the incident. Ford Bedcoe's brother Urich had just been
killed, and Bedcoe was a bit shaken up by it.
``He needs a vacation, `` Radcliffe had told Matlock, once he had found a
seat in Radcliffe's sparse gray office at Krasni. ``Don't talk to him about
his brother--at least, not much. Not for the first few days. He's in a kind
of waking shock, and there's no telling what could happen to him in that
state.''
Matlock had shifted uneasily. ``So what can I do? Ford's my friend and I
want to help him, but I don't know how.''
``Take him on a vacation. Take him to a place that you think he'll be very
fond of.''
Matlock had smiled. He had known just the place.
Or at least, he had thought he did. He had miscalculated, though. A
Hygean, if he's from the north, is more sensitive to different climates. To
Matlock, Hygess was as different from Tartarus as Tartarus was from Hygess.
But Bedcoe, who was from Earth, saw Tartarus and Hygess as almost the same
place. Being in a place so like where his brother died did Bedcoe more harm
than good. After a week, when Matlock had finally realized his critical
error, he had offered to take Bedcoe to Hygess' warmer southern hemisphere,
but Bedcoe wanted to leave the planet as soon as possible. His need to return
to Tartarus was no doubt spurred by his need to return to work, not to mope
over his brother.
Matlock remembered the night the two of them spent in that small bar in
Icelandia, and hoped the trip hadn't been a total loss.
Bedcoe turned to look at the thermometer. It was very sensitive because
the Sun didn't give off enough heat to register a change on normal
thermometers when night came along. Night, of course, was purely
mathematical; there was never a day on Tartarus that either Bedcoe or Matlock
would recognize. Only endless night and a constantly star-filled sky, with a
faint object in the background known as Sol.
``The outside temperature's gone down a degree'' Bedcoe reported. ``Night
must be falling.''
Matlock nodded sullenly. Night was an ever-present disease that riddled
the sky of Tartarus, threatening to infect them all.
The two vehicles pulled along for miles, steadily and quickly climbing up
the slopes, through the valleys, while their pilots laid face down in
suspension webbing. The TSS required very little human interaction, once its
occupant told it what to do.
As time lagged on, Bedcoe became edgy and began conversation, no matter how
dispirited.
``Hey, Matlock.''
``Yeh?'' Matlock looked up from his private thoughts.
Bedcoe shifted. ``Once I remember that my mother had this speeder, you
know, kind of like the skimobiles they used on Hygess, remember?''
``Yeah. I used to have several skimobiles when I was younger...''
Bedcoe cut him off. ``The speeders my parents had were these gargantuan
things-- they reminded me of the automobiles that Earth used to have in her
past. My parents used to always take me in them to the shopping complex near
Bosn. One day, I decided to drive one myself. I had no trouble getting in,
but I didn't know how to start it. Then, when I tried to get out, I couldn't.
The door automatically locks, you know. It can be opened from inside, but I
didn't know how. I screamed for hours, until my parents found me...''
``Were you injured?''
``No, not at all,'' Bedcoe was quick to add, ``It's just that I had been
stuck in there for so long...''
Matlock thought of the similarity between the TSS and the speeder that
Bedcoe was talking about, and hoped it wouldn't affect him. As Bedcoe had
said, that happened a long time ago. Matlock wondered if it was long enough.
Four hours later, the two TSSs had finally reached the top of Gamma Mensa,
the tallest point in the Ural range. Because of the hard-driving wind of
Tartarus, most mountains tended to be small. Gamma Mensa was more a plateau
than a mountain, and it wasn't much larger than Mt. Washington.
Suddenly the TSSs halted. Matlock's TSS was at the edge of a cliff;
Bedcoe's was perpendicular to a fissure that had opened up about two months
ago, and the opposite side of the fissure was slightly higher than Bedcoe's
side, owing to the fact that some matter had piled up on top of it recently.
The two TSSs instantly acted to remove their pilots from danger. The tracks
wheeled almost subtly so as not to upset the balance of the vehicles, and then
they slowly backed up until the two were out of danger.
Matlock spoke into the intercom. ``There's something wrong,'' he said,
adjusting the TSS tracks so that they would continue in the correct direction.
``This isn't the usual path across the mountains. Where were you leading
us?''
Bedcoe panned his camera back and forth across the ice wall in front of
him. ``Yeah. It looks familiar though. Maybe this is our usual picnic spot.
You know, there's something about this area...''
Matlock had a flashing memory of the area, and remembered that this was
near where Bedcoe had lost his brother. Their being here couldn't be a
coincidence; Bedcoe had led Matlock, subconsciously, to this location, where
his brother and the others had been lost. On Tartarus, bodies were never
recovered; the risk to the living was too great, so markers were carved into
the ice.
Matlock slowly panned the camera around, not wanting to see what he had to
see. But it was there, chiseled in the ice:
Here Urich Bedcoe and his crew of five were
lost when their vehicles exploded from
internal pressure leaks. God have mercy on
their souls.
Urich Bedcoe Shawn Benjamin
Ernie Hardin Elwell Shaw
Uwe Smith Martin Balfour
Matlock was sure he shouldn't say anything; it would be best if Bedcoe
forgot.
Matlock repositioned the camera so that it faced out over the edge of Gamma
Mensa. Bedcoe attempted to do the same thing but his TSS wouldn't let him; it
was still trying to get him safely away from the precipice.
``Kyklos, I can't move. Could you send your image through to my camera?''
``Sure,'' Matlock responded.
Seconds later, the image of the clear ice wall in front of Bedcoe flickered
and was replaced by the image Matlock sent him.
The image they both saw was that of Grierson Vallis, the small area
crouched between Gamma Mensa and Delta Mensa that held Krasni. It was tucked
in the valley because the high-velocity winds of Tartarus would have destroyed
the dome of Krasni had it not had the windshadow of the Ural Montes to protect
it. Beyond that was a terrible white expanse of nothing, an everlasting ice
field that would never melt. All the planets this far out-- Erebus, Hades,
Tartarus-- were all named after the various levels of the Underworld in Greek
mythology. They were named for their desolation, their remoteness.
Right now, here in this spot, was the Land of the Dead.
Matlock noticed that Bedcoe's systems monitor was showing unusually high
perspiration, blood pressure, and heartbeat.
``Are you okay?'' Matlock ventured. A pang of fear struck him when Bedcoe
didn't answer for some time. Finally, Bedcoe answered.
``Hm? Oh, sorry, Matlock. I was lost in thought. Is it warm in here, or
is it me? I was certain I had more footroom before...''
Matlock believed that the Bedcoe was thinking about his brother's death.
It wasn't Ford's fault that the internal pressure systems of six TSSs,
including his brother's, had exploded, leaving only Bedcoe alive. Nonetheless
Bedcoe was convinced that he had done something wrong, that it had been his
fault.
He said, ``Bedcoe, you have your thoughts to yourself. And your privacy.
There's no one else around for miles. No one will see you until you get to
Krasni.''
Bedcoe seemed alarmed. ``Don't remind me,'' he said. ``I'm totally
isolated.'' He turned the TSS around so that it could return back the way
they came, since they had come the wrong way. He tried to stay away from the
fissure directly in front of him.
Matlock became concerned for Bedcoe. He wasn't sure if Bedcoe was being
melodramatic or not. He thought he knew his friend, but the behavior he had
displayed these last few days on Tartarus had been uncharacteristic of him;
Matlock wished they were back in that bar on Hygess now, sipping Hygean skyros
and commenting on the hardy women who often frequented the place.
He knew that Bedcoe did not trust the TSS, and wondered what measures
Bedcoe might take to alleviate this. It seemed that he was beginning to show
symptoms of TSS Syndrome, a condition that often affects people who are unused
to the complete lack of human contact for an extended period of time that the
TSS requires. The sudden thought chilled his mind. Quickly, he maneuvered
the TSS to follow Bedcoe.
Bedcoe did not speak for some time. Instead, from the brain patterns
transmitted to Matlock from Bedcoe, he could tell that he was probably deep in
thought. Matlock knew that he was thinking about his brother. Apparently,
Icelandia was not the best place to take him for vacation.
On top of his self-inflicted guilt, Bedcoe was suffering from TSS Syndrome.
If he should become paranoid that he would never touch a human being again,
then he might become claustrophobic, and then... Matlock had never seen what
a completely frozen human being looked like, but the grisly stories he had
heard frightened him to consider that possibility.
A terrible anxiety came over him. The thought of Bedcoe dying was a
horrible one, but perhaps more horrible was the idea of himself becoming
totally alone. Back in his mind, Matlock knew that he was more worried about
being alone than of Bedcoe dying, but in a burst of self-denial he convinced
himself that it was not so.
Suddenly the loose snow beneath Bedcoe's TSS gave way, and the TSS went
with it. The EKG in Matlock's machine showed an alarming rise in Bedcoe's
blood pressure and heartbeat, but that was to be expected.
Matlock's fears were allayed when the EKG showed a quick, but fairly normal
heartbeat. Matlock turned on his intercom.
``Bedcoe, buddy, how's the weather down there?''
``Rotten, `` Bedcoe returned, ``Next stupid question.'' Matlock smiled.
At least Bedcoe's sense of humor had survived the fall. He surveyed the
situation; Bedcoe's toppled TSS lay in a snow heap twenty feet below Matlock.
From what he could see, Bedcoe's TSS was undamaged. It was designed to take
heavy damage, anyway. Bedcoe's voice returned through the intercom, but had
gained a timbre of anxiety. ``C'mon, Matlock. Get me out of here. It's
spooky.''
Matlock was on the edge of the cliff that Bedcoe had been on a few minutes
ago, twenty feet above Bedcoe's current position. He saw no foreseeable way
to get down to Bedcoe without falling himself, as Bedcoe had done. His TSS
would probably survive, but how would he get out?
None of this, he thought. I'm becoming cynical like Bedcoe.
All TSSs were equipped with winches. The designers assumed such falls
would happen. The difficult part was anchoring his TSS to a fixed position,
so that he wouldn't be pulled into the ditch, too.
With his left foot Matlock activated the Anchor Drill, and it revved up and
drilled deep into the ground underneath Matlock's chest. The vibration made
Matlock's ribs sore. With his right hand he activated the winch in the front
of the TSS. Slowly the winch-line dropped the twenty feet to Bedcoe's TSS.
He hadn't heard from Bedcoe in some time. ``Matlock to Bedcoe. What's
up?''
``You are,'' Bedcoe said. Matlock winced.
``What can you see?'' Matlock asked.
``Not much--hey, there's people down here!''
Matlock gasped. ``You mean, people in TSSs?'' They weren't late; there
was no reason for Radcliffe so send out a search party. If he had, he surely
would have told them.
Bedcoe sounded urgent. ``No, just people. Six of them. They're
reaching out to me. I must help them--''
Suddenly the transmission cut out. Matlock panicked and was able to
attach the winchline to Bedcoe's TSS. He reversed the winch engine and it
started to pull Bedcoe's TSS out. However, in his panic Matlock hadn't
attached the winchline well enough. The snow beneath Matlock's TSS couldn't
take the strain and it gave way, toppling into the ditch, as well.
Matlock was unharmed, and so was his TSS, but he had no idea what delusions
Bedcoe was under. If Bedcoe did see humans, they were surely dead and frozen.
They had to be humans; there was no other life on the planet. Or Bedcoe might
just be hallucinating: another symptom of TSS Syndrome.
Matlock's panic continued to grow. He opened a channel to Krasni, and
secured it.
``Matlock to Radcliffe,'' he called, thumping his hand dully on the side of
the TSS in frustration. ``Come in, please.''
After an eternity Jonas Radcliffe's voice came in. ``This is Radcliffe,
What's the problem?''
Matlock almost dropped the mike. ``Bedcoe's starting to see things. I
hink he's suffering from TSS Syndrome.''
Radcliffe did not speak for some time. When he did, the alarm was evident
in his voice. ``That's not good. I knew it was too early to let him out, so
soon after his brother died. He wanted so much to help, though...''
Matlock interrupted him. ``What do I do now?'
Radcliffe came back. ``What's your position?''
Matlock said slowly, ``Gamma Mensa--right near his brother's grave.''
``Oh, boy,'' Radcliffe uttered, silently. ``Keep him there, keep him safe.
I'm coming out now with a TSS.''
Matlock swallowed. Slowly Matlock's TSS crawled over to Bedcoe's position.
Bedcoe had righted his TSS, and now Matlock saw it moving towards an ice wall
reaching up hundreds of feet. The surface was shiny and reflected the
headlights well.
As Matlock inched along, the surface of the ice wall became muddier.
Distinct shapes appeared in the ice.
Matlock froze, his fingers involuntarily releasing the cybernetic pads. His
face felt hot, when he realized what the shapes were.
Human beings. The humans Bedcoe had mentioned, frozen solid. Every cell
in each of their bodies had instantly crystalized. All the cell membranes had
ruptured, causing the protoplasm within to rush out and swell the body, only
to be instantly frozen.
Their bodies were stretched out in the ice, expanded from the rush of
fluids. Mouths were open with shock, eyes wide with terror.
Matlock aimed his camera at the edge of the fissure behind him that they
had earlier been on. He saw arms alone sticking out of the ice where it had
cracked. One of the bodies in the ice wall in front of him lacked an arm.
Matlock felt sick. His head swam. He reached over to the intercom and
established contact with Bedcoe.
``Bedcoe, they don't need your help. They're too far gone. They're...
frozen stiff.'' A thought crossed his mind, and he dismissed it. He didn't
need his mind cluttered with macabre thoughts. He concentrated on how he was
going to get out of this. He hoped Radcliffe would hurry.
``You're wrong,'' Bedcoe said, with a bit of hope to his voice. ``They're
human, like me. I'm going to greet them.'' He signed off.
Matlock felt a pain in his chest.
All TSSs had hatches, but none of the hatches would open unless the air
above was at least 60 degrees F, or if another TSS was on top, in which case
the temperature of the second TSS would be 60 degrees. TSSs seldom docked,
only so that the two could establish human contact or confer face to face. It
was discouraged, though, since it was dangerous.
Matlock knew that sometimes it had become necessary to override the system
to open the hatch, but this was extremely difficult and only really skilled
people could do it. Matlock had an awful thought that Bedcoe was just so
skilled.
Perhaps, he thought, if I can climb above his TSS, then I can board it, and
rescue him, or at least stop him from leaving. He pressed the single
cybernetic contact that controlled docking, selected ``above'' when it asked
for direction, and tensely waited, hoping that the TSS computer could handle
the operation quickly enough to save Bedcoe, or at least hold him until
Radcliffe came.
While he waited, he thought he might try to persuade Bedcoe not to leave.
``Bedcoe, I'm sure that those people will get help from someone else. You
can't help.'' He was hoping that maybe he could enter Bedcoe's strange world
and help him out of it by going along with him.
Bedcoe sneered into the mike. ``Wrong, Matlock. I have to help. See,
there's my brother there--if only I can get this darn computer to open the
hatch...'' He signed out.
Matlock was certain that Bedcoe was delirious. As of yet Bedcoe had only
seen the outlines of the people in the ice. If he saw the frozen corpse of
his brother up close, there was no telling what he would do. For a chilling
moment, Matlock feared his own life.
The TSS had nearly completed the docking when Matlock heard an odd drilling
sound. For a minute he thought it was Radcliffe, but then he recognized it.
He panned his camera around and saw that Bedcoe had given up trying to get out
of the TSS and was trying to release the frozen bodies using the anchoring
drill. If Bedcoe succeeded, the entire ice wall could fall on them both, in
addition to the falling bodies, and neither of them might escape. The chances
were great that eight people could be buried here.
The docking maneuver was complete. Matlock opened the hatches that
separated him and Bedcoe and climbed through. TSSs are made to fit two, if
uncomfortably. Matlock slid in behind Bedcoe, who turned in his webbing to
look at him. A look of disbelief captured Bedcoe's face. Then anger took it.
``Don't stop me, Matlock! I have to rescue my brother.''
Matlock came closer, all the more aware that Bedcoe was losing it, and that
Matlock himself might be in danger. ``Bedcoe, listen to me...'' Slowly he
reached for the switch that would disengage the drill.
Matlock found himself being pushed away from Bedcoe as Bedcoe wriggled
away in the tight space of the TSS. Bedcoe took a distillation pistol from
the emergency compartment and shot at Matlock.
Matlock ducked and the shot hit the roof, causing the tungsten to become
brittle. Another shot like that and neither of them would have to worry about
anything ever.
The next shot hit the wall near Matlock's arm. He lifted himself up, and
the next beam hit the wall beneath him just as his feet cleared the hatch.
The butt of Bedcoe's distillation pistol almost made it through the hatch
when Matlock closed it.
Matlock retreated into his TSS. Grimly he thought that it might be
possible to leave a crack in Bedcoe's TSS hatch so that cold air would enter
and freeze Bedcoe. He shook his head violently at the thought. Bedcoe was a
friend, after all. At any rate, the drill was automatic and would continue
after Bedcoe's death.
Seconds later the intercom came alive. Matlock thought it might be
Radcliffe, but he was again disapointed. Instead, Bedcoe's exited speech came
through. ``Stay away, Matlock! My brother isn't dead; he's right there, in
front of me. If you try to stop me from saving him, I'll rip your TSS open
like a sardine can!''
Matlock tried reason. ``Bedcoe, if you leave the TSS's protection you'll
freeze solid. No human being can survive out there!'' He spoke these last
words slowly and clearly, hoping they would sink in. They didn't.
With a final sense of defeat, Matlock disengaged from Bedcoe's TSS, making
certain that Bedcoe's hatch was closed. He felt he might never see Bedcoe
alive again. He thought it might be possible to intercept the drill somehow,
stop it from drilling any deeper into the ice.
Matlock decided to try and call Radcliffe. He hadn't heard from him in
some time, and had almost given up hope. ``Matlock to Radcliffe, `` he
called.
There were several seconds of static, and then a voice. ``This is
Radcliffe, Matlock. I'm about two miles from your last known position.
What's the condition?''
Matlock swallowed. ``I don't know what to do... Bedcoe's trying to drill
through the ice to free his brother's body.''
Radcliffe whistled. ``That could cause the whole ice wall to fall. You'd
both be covered.''
``I know,'' Matlock replied.
``Matlock, I think the only thing you can do is hide until I get there. I
don't even know what good I can do.''
``No!'' Matlock shouted, ``I won't abandon my friend!'' Matlock thought how
similar this was to Bedcoe's situation. Bedcoe had refused to listen to
reason, and was endangering others as well as himself. Matlock knew that he
must hear the words of reason, even as the came from his own mouth. ``Okay,
Radcliffe. What do you suggest?''
``There's a cave about 60 degrees to your west. It connects to a tunnel
that leads under Gamma Mensa. Hide there. I'll be coming up that way, to
help.''
``If you can,'' Matlock intoned, after Radcliffe had signed off.
A terrible cracking sound reached Matlock's ears. The ice wall began to
crack up the middle, and the topmost body, that of Urich Bedcoe, came loose.
With a horrible crash, it fell onto Bedcoe's TSS and shattered into slivers of
frozen flesh. Before it did, however, Bedcoe had gotten a fairly good glance
at the face, frozen in a horrible shout of instant terror.
Matlock heard the scream through the intercom. He shook his head and
realized that Bedcoe was beyond help. Now the wall was really beginning to
come apart. Individual blocks of ice that had once held souls were falling
wholesale around him. Remembering that only the TSS protected Matlock from
total oblivion, he maneuvered it away from Bedcoe, wondering how he was ever
going to escape from there. Then he saw the cave that Radcliffe had told him
about. He entered it.
He couldn't look back, but felt inclined to. In a quick motion he aimed
the camera towards Bedcoe's TSS. The systems monitor came alive in a
cacophony of alarm signals. Matlock shut them all off and ignored them,
knowing that he was powerless to help.
Suddenly the systems monitor went flatline. Unwillingly, Matlock glanced
into the camera lens, and saw a thin, stiff hand reaching out of the TSS,
reaching for his brother, who lay shattered about him.
Matlock turned the camera forward, so that he could see which way to
maneuver, but he had trouble seeing through the tears that were welling up in
his eyes. He ignored them. The hole he had entered emerged from Delta Mensa,
and minutes later he was on the open Ice Sea again.
The intercom crackled on again. This time, Matlock was sure who it was.
``Come in, Matlock,'' Radcliffe called. ``Come in! I'm on my way!'' But
Matlock heard little of it. He carelessly switched on his intercom, and
shouted to Radcliffe, insane with fury, ``Tartarus! the lowest part of Hades'
realm and the most horrible! Bedcoe saved me, but he perished and I was
unable to save him, even as he couldn't save his brother. What place can rob
a man of his spirit even before it robs him of his body? I'll tell you!
Tartarus, the Ultimate Hell!''
Radcliffe tried again, but received nothing coherent, except the man's
ravings.
Matlock traveled on through the night, alone.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jeffrey Delano (or De La Noye) has been a SF writer since 1979, when he read
the novelization of _The Black Hole_. Since then, he has conceived of major
plots and ideas. He is a second-semester Junior student at the University of
new Hampshire, majoring in English and minoring in History. He believes all
his writing teachers were idiots.
J_DELANO@UNHH.BITNET
______________________________________________________________________________
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The Magazine of the Dargon Project Editor: Dafydd
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and inspired
by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by David
"Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The Dargon Project
centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon in the far reaches
of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named Makdiar, and as such
contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword and sorcery flavor.
DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file,
text-only format. For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL
to the editor, Dafydd, at the userid White@DUVM.BitNet. This request
should contain your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid internet
address) as well as your full name. InterNet (all non-BitNet sites)
subscribers will receive their issues in Mail format. BitNet users
have the option of specifying the file transfer format you prefer
(either DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all
electronic subscriptions are Free!
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Volume II Issue 5 ISSN 1053-8496 December 1990
CONTENTS
____________________________________
Volume II Issue 5 December 1990
____________________________________ _________________________________________
Articles Qunata (ISSN 1053-8496) is copyright (c)
by Daniel K. Appelquist. This magazine
Looking Ahead may be archived, reproduced and/or
Daniel K. Appelquist distributed freely under the condition
that it is left intact and that no
additions or changes are made to it. The
How To Pick Out a Good Horror Novel individual works within this magazine are
Fiona Oceanstar the sole property of their respective
author(s). No further use of their works
is permitted without their explicit
Serials consent.
The Harrison Chapters All stories in this magazine are fiction.
Jim Vassilakos No actual persons are designated by name
or character. Any similarity is
coincidental.
Short Fiction
All submissions, requests for submission
guidelines, requests for back issues,
The Gods of Pittsburgh queries concerning subscriptions,
Faye Levine letters, comments or other correspondence
should be sent to one of the following
addresses:
The Names of the Stars
Chsistopher Kempke quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
quanta@andrew.BITNET
The Big Joke
Robert Hurvitz
Requests to be added to the distribution
list should be sent to one of the
Endurance Racer following addresses. For PostScript
Phillip Nolte subscriptions, send to:
quanta+requests-postscript@andrew.cmu.edu
Poetry
quanta+requests-postscript@andrew.BITNET
High Seduction --- A Dialogue For ASCII subscriptions, send to:
William Racicot
quanta+requests-ascii@andrew.cmu.edu
____________________________________
quanta+requests-ascii@andrew.BITNET
Daniel K. Appelquist
Editor/Technical Director Please send mail messages only--no files
or interactive messages.All subscriptions
Norman S. Murray are handled by human beings.
Editorial Assistant
U.S. Mail correspondence should be sent
Jay Laefer to:
Proofreader Quanta Magazine
c/o Daniel K. Appelquist
Karen Fabrizius 5440 Fifth Avenue, Apartment 60
Additional Proofreading Pittsburgh, PA 15232, USA
____________________________________ _________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
This issue marks the seventh time I've highly abused the Internet, Bitnet
and UUCP with a mass mailing, this time to over 1300 subscribers. As you may
be aware, if you're on the internet, the FTP server which had been doing a
great job archiving back issues of Quanta has been down for some time. I'm in
the process of trying to find a new server, so any help towards that goal
would be appreciated. In the mean time, I'll be happy to fill any back order
requests through the mail. This presents little or no change for subscribers
on BITNET, UUCP or any of the various other non-internet nets out there.
This is also the first issue to bear the official new quanta ISSN
(International Standard Serial Number). What does this mean? Not much,
besides being a mark of officialdom. All it really means is that the number
1053-8496 is assigned to Quanta for ever more in the files of the Library of
Congress and in the International Standard Serial Number archives, in Paris,
France. Neat, huh?
I was accused by some of being "Liberace"-like in my column last issue, and
while I'm not quite sure what that entails, I'll try to keep this one to the
facts, the bare essentials. You won't catch me going off on a tangent, no
sir-ee. Not in this article...
So anyway, we have some really great fiction for you this issue. Some
familiar faces are back, specifically Phillip Nolte, Christopher Kempke (of
course), William Racicot, and Jim Vassilakos with a new installment of his
`Harrison' series. Faye Levine also makes a reappearance with `The Gods of
Pittsburgh'. `Gods' is a bit of a departure for Faye... I think you'll enjoy
it. We also have two new authors this issue (at least new to Quanta): Fiona
Oceanstar gives us timely advice on `How to Pick Out a Good Horror Novel' and
Robert Hurvitz lets us in on `The Big Joke'.
Let me take this opportunity to solicit some material. I'm always looking
for new material from new authors. If you have something you think would fit
into Quanta, I encourage you to send it along to me.
I've been throwing around the idea of expanding the scope of Quanta to
include all genres of fiction, with an emphasis on SF related works, but no
strict limitations. If you have any thoughts on this, please express them to
me. I feel Quanta, as it is, needs to grow, but I'm not sure in what
direction that growth should occur. One possible direction for growth is in
distributon. I have approached the Compuserve Science-Fiction group on making
Quanta available for public downloading there. I also hope to get Quanta onto
GEnie and other online services. If you're a member of one of these service
(I personally am not), and if you could provide me with a name I could
contact, I'd be deeply appreciative. Also, getting in touch with the
administrators of these systems and telling them about Quanta yourself might
be of help.
In other news, although Jim McCabe has yet to come out with the last issue
of Athene, it is official that the magazine has been shut down. Fortunately,
Jason Snell, whose name you may recognize from various stories and articles he
has published in both Quanta and Athene, has decided to start up his own
magazine. Jason will be inheriting Athene's subscription list, and has been
working diligently on the format at last report. If you're interested in this
new magazine (working title is "Intertext") send mail to Jason Snell
(jsnell@ucsd.edu).
Well, that's about it for me --- Enjoy!
______________________________________________________________________________
How To Pick Out a Good Horror Novel
Fiona Oceanstar
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Have you ever had the experience of going into the produce section of the
local Hyped-Up Hypermarket to grab something basic like an apple or a melon
and found yourself intimidated by the fruit?
I have this problem all the time. I mean there are so many different
categories these days, but when you get right up close to them, they all look
alike, you know? More alike than they used to, at least. All the apples have
exactly the same pigment and the same-sized bruise on them. The melons look
like midget green volleyballs, they are so perfect and round and identical.
So how are you supposed to choose? You're not allowed to just munch down on
the groceries right there in the store, except for popping a few cherries or
grapes in your mouth (who me?), so instead you're supposed to rely on these
_rules_ for how to pick out a good melon. Rules for how to tell the inside
from the outside, in other words.
My thing is, I'm always forgetting those rules. Is it supposed to be soft
on one end? (But which end? Are the ends different?) I think I heard once
you're supposed to prick it with your thumbnail, twirl it around
counterclockwise three times, and then see what it smells like. Or do you
thump it? And if so, what is it supposed to sound like?
Well at any rate, this happened to me yet again last Saturday as I was
standing there in front of the melons, and I started thinking about all the
time I spend standing around in front of racks and stacks of books, trying to
pick out a good horror novel. If you're lazy about it and just walk out with
the first book that catches your attention, it may not turn out to be very
tasty. You can't always remember which author they recommended in the
magazine you read, or what your officemate Jennifer the horror expert said, so
sometimes it would be nice to have some rules. Rules for how to pick out a
good horror novel. Except that unlike the melon rules, maybe you'd do it
often enough that you'd remember them. I don't know about you, but I read
horror novels much more often that I eat *any* kind of fruit.
So... I invented some rules. Actually, the truth of the matter is, I
invented them about ten years ago and have been testing them and refining them
ever since. But only in the light of last Saturday's melon quandary have I
felt ready to share them with the general public.
OK. I trust that all who want to learn how to pick out a good horror novel
are on board with me at this point, and all who want to learn about honeydews
have gone elsewhere. The first step in picking out a horror novel is finding
out where the horror novels grow. You can't just wander out into any old
place and expect to find horror novels.
"But wait a minute," I can hear you saying. "I thought horror novels grew
almost EVERYWHERE."
This is true. Horror novels DO grow almost everywhere.
It's one of their more endearing characteristics: they are happy, hardy
little organisms, managing to survive with some degree of integrity even in
the vast poisoned soils of airport newstands, overstimulating supermarkets,
and drugstore paperback counters. And you can make some outstanding, even
thrilling discoveries in these unlikely places. I discovered T. E. D. Klein,
for example, in the paperback rack of a seedy chain drugstore in Little Rock,
Arkansas. Klein, who was at one time the editor of the late lamented
_Twilight_Zone_ magazine, is a follower of weird fantasist Arthur Machen, and
finding him right across from the candy bars in an Arkansas drugstore was kind
of like finding an oversized poster of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly
Delights" on sale at the local Pier One. The deliciously peculiar in the
midst of the grotesquely ordinary, in other words.
But don't let me mislead you with this little brag of mine about where I
found T. E. D. Klein. (It was _Dark_Gods_, by the way---a great collection of
novellas). If you're a newcomer to horror, you'll do better avoiding the
chain drugstores and such places, if only because it's hard to concentrate on
reading while standing in an aisle where munchkins are swiping M&M's and
yapping in foreign languages.
You'll do better going to a quality bookstore. Not a mall bookstore,
either. A GOOD bookstore.
Once you get there and commence your reconnoitre, you'll notice that unlike
the fantasy and science fiction novels, the horror novels do not congregate
neatly in a separate portion of the bookstore. They are usually scattered in
with the current fiction and the so-called "literature," although a few
(mostly serial killer stories) may show up in the mystery/suspense/crime
category. You can take it as a rule of thumb that wherever Stephen King is,
that's where most of the other new horror is. (We can talk about the old
horror---dusty, creaky, delightful, OLD horror---at another time. It's mostly
in the fine literature section, where it belongs.)
Now if you happen to live near a specialty bookstore, then you're in
business. Bookstores dealing only or mostly in horror are as rare as real
Jewish deli's in the South, but often mystery, sci-fi, or comic bookstores
will support a few shelves of horror. You'll always be ahead of the game
buying horror at a specialty store, because the buyers are more inclined to
pick up some of the lesser known authors, instead of just the big
blockbusters.
Let me put in a plug here for used bookstores. Even in small towns that
wouldn't dream of having a separate horror section in the local high-inventory
outlet, you can almost always find used bookstores with special horror racks.
Often the racks will even be decorated with blood-red "dripping" letters or
computer graphics of a skull-and- crossbones. These racks can be great fun.
But they are not for the faint of heart, believe me---they can be formidable
and mind-numbing, and they definitely are at least 95% pure crap (what is
that---Sturgeon's Law?). But they are cheap. They are comfortable places to
browse for hours on end. You can pick up the books that are a few years old.
And sometimes, you can meet people in there who know enough about horror to
give you some pointers. (You might even run into me.)
But no matter where you go---the well-lit book emporium or the quirky
second-hand shop---you can't just walk in and hit paydirt if you don't know
what you're doing. You must develop a search technique for horror novels.
You must develop your own set of nearly infallible rules for separating the
yummy from the sour.
I've been reading paperback horror, now, for thirteen lucky years. I am
willing to share my own personal horror-novel rules with you, but I must
caution you from the start that these are the rules of a person who has a
literature background and tends to prefer books that are well-written over
books that are not. They are also the rules of a person not easily disgusted
or offended. I enjoy flayed skin and dripping flesh. I also enjoy subtle,
highly psychological terror. Most of all, I enjoy the nightmares I get from
these novels.
Actually, if you don't relish a good juicy nightmare, or a nice eerie
paranoid evening all by yourself, you may not want to get into this genre at
all.
Enough caveats. For starters, this is the short version of my rules:
1. Text --- small print that passes the random page test
2. Blurbs --- the more, the more prestigious, the better
3. Little niceties --- the more, the more interesting, the better
Let's start with the text of the novel. Don't bother with the cover at
first: go straight to the words inside. Flip the pages with your hands. Is
the print reasonably small and attractive? Are the chapter headings visually
satisfying? Laugh if you want, but I think you can indeed judge a horror
novel by its appearance. (But NOT by its cover---more on that later.) The
text itself is very important. If the print font is large and clumsy-looking,
forget it. You may lose a few gems that way, but if they really have staying
power, they'll get reprinted in a more attractive format and you can pick them
up later.
If you're satisfied with the size and look of the text, then go for a
random page test. Now what you're scanning for, in a page test of a horror
novel, is a negative thing: you're scanning for an ABSENCE of really egregious
writing. If you happen to find some GOOD writing, fine, but don't be turned
off if your random page turns up a workaday narrative of what seem to be
ordinary events. I don't know other genres well enough to comment on their
styles, but some of the best horror novels have very plain, unembellished
prose. But if you find something on that page that turns you off
immediately---a hackneyed metaphor or a fuzzy description---the book hasn't
passed rule number one. I don't want to be tacky here and name too many
names, but examples of authors that (for me) do not pass the random page test
are V. C. Andrews, John Saul, and Rick Hautala. Remember: this is a negative
criterion, not a positive one.
Once your novel's made it through test number one, it's time to look at the
blurbs. You know, those quotations praising the novel that you find plastered
on the front cover, back cover, and inside first several pages. The more
blurbs, the better. Many blurbs means a lot of people thought this book was
worth their while to read and review. The more prestigious publications, the
better: if the _New_York_Times_ liked it, if the _Washington_Post_ liked it,
even if the _Houston_Chronicle_ liked it---if any big-city newspaper gave it
some words of encouragement, that's a good sign. So is a positive review from
_The_New_Yorker or _Playboy_. You don't need to READ the blurbs at
all---they're all more or less the same anyway. The important thing is: where
are they from? Be careful about blurbs from California---they're often
unreliable. Blurbs from ditzy magazines or nowhere newspapers aren't worth
very much. And pay no attention to blurbs from _Library_Journal_,
_Publishers_Weekly_, or _Kirkus_Reviews_. Be especially wary of books for
which those three publications are the only blurbs they could find.
As for blurbs from other horror writers, you'll have to wait until you've
read those writers, to be able to evaluate them. Stephen King throws out a
lot of blurbs---he's been called the "blurbmeister" of the field. In my
experience, he never plugs a novel that's actively bad, but his blurbs do show
up on some mediocre stuff. It goes without saying that if you don't like John
Creepy, you probably won't like a novel whose only claim to fame is that John
Creepy liked it. Reviews from big-city newspapers are more trustworthy,
believe me.
This seems like a good point to pause and talk about the cover art and
cover graphics. My rule is: pay absolutely NO attention to the cover art and
cover graphics. If you're going to read a horror novel, get used to the idea
that you may be reading something you're tempted to put a brown paper cover
on, because the big embossed silver lettering and the fakey-looking monster on
the cover look really stupid. What I've noticed is, the more books an author
sells, the more veto power they appear to have over their cover art, and thus
the art improves with time. Why this should be the case, is beyond me. You'd
think the publishers would want to give the most attractive cover art to an
unknown author, to make them appear classy or literary. At any rate, some of
the best horror has truly lousy cover art.
All right now---if your novel's made it through the first two gauntlets,
you're probably going to buy it, but if you want to be really sure, you can
move into an area that I call "the little niceties." These are the
fussy-fussy things that authors and publishers attach to the text to doll them
up: introduction, preface, acknowledgements, dedication, quotations, and (at
the end) mini-biography of the author. For the most part, the more of this
fussy stuff, the better, because it indicates that someone cared enough about
this novel to put a little effort into doing it right. The acknowledgements
section, for example, may tell you that the author talked to a doctor to
improve the accuracy of _Le_Filet_de_Human_Heart_, or talked to a homicide
bureau to figure out what kind of donuts cops eat. A mini-biography at the
back is always an encouraging sign, no matter what it says, because it shows
that the author is (at least apparently) a real person who's not ashamed to
admit having written this book. And most important of all, in my personal
view, are the quotations: if the author can appreciate the English language as
found in Edgar Allan Poe or Wallace Stevens or Bruce Springsteen or whomever,
they may well have a decent critical eye for their own prose.
Don't be disappointed if it takes you a while to get the hang of it. When
you find a horror novel, pick it up and quickly run through the three tests.
Remember: first the text---scan the pages for visual appeal and then read a
little. If it doesn't pass the first test, put it down and move on to another
book. Seriously---you should stop right there if you don't like the text.
Then the blurbs---don't waste your time reading them, just scan for names of
publications. If it doesn't pass the blurb test with flying colors, don't be
put off immediately---you may be dealing with an unknown author. (As you get
more proficient, you'll get in the habit of checking the spine for a press
you've had good luck with in the past.) Move on to the third test, see what
there is in the way of little niceties, and decide whether it all adds up to a
`yes' vote or a `no' vote.
And then, after you've read the novel(s) that you picked out with this
technique, look back and see if the rules were valid, or if they need to be
modified in some way to suit your particular taste.
If you want, write to me and let me know what book you tried these on and
whether they worked for you. I'm always curious about what others like to
read when they're looking for a good shudder.
______________________________________________________________________________
Fiona Oceanstar is a 35-yr-old headshrinker whose secret ambition all through
med school, residency, and onward, has been to launch her career as a
nonfiction writer about horror. She currently lives in her hometown of
Houston, but in a few weeks is moving to the D.C. area, where she plans to
continue writing about everything dark, bloody, grotesque, and macabre.
She'll also keep up the minor avocational interest of practicing and teaching
psychiatry, mostly because her crazy patients are a great source of
inspiration.
fi@whittaker.rice.edu
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The Gods of Pittsburgh
by Faye Levine
copyright (c) 1990
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Eternity sucks.
Oh, it's not the boredom that gets to me---there are ways of dealing with
that. I'm not the type of eternal who becomes so consumed with boredom that I
take to "playing" with poor, stupid mortals. No, what hurts is the drudgery
of it all, watching the world decay with pollution, war, and assorted vices.
But then, who am I to complain about vice? I'm a satyr.
My birthname is Thaylos, but I've gone by a variety of names over the
years. I was born in Greece in the Hellenistic era, some two millenia ago. I
am one of the youngest of my kind; as far as I know the last satyr born came
sometime during the years of the Roman Empire, and the oldest can be traced
back over three thousand years, maybe earlier.
I've got gripes with everyone---with humankind, with the Olympians, with my
own kind. The Olympians gave up trying to be almighty and the humans wasted
everything Zeus gave them. The gods, for the most part, are sulking up on
their mountain, unworshipped and ignored outside the classroom, having
contests to see who's the most depressed. A few still walk the earth. As
long as love exists, Eros and Aphrodite will have something to do. Artemis is
currently masquerading as the president of some women's magazine, I think, and
Zeus joined a bowling league because he liked the thunder-sound made by the
ball hitting the pins. The old geezer doesn't chase women anymore; Hera keeps
him on a tight leash. Hephaestus mucks around grumbling about steel workers
getting the short end of things. Apollo's become a yuppie. But the worst of
the lot is my "lord", Dionysus. All he does is drink, keeping himself in a
perpetual stupor, dreaming of the days when he used to dance with his maenad
priestesses. Imagine that: the god of wine an alcoholic. The irony disgusts
me.
But at least the great gods have Olympus. The rest of us are stuck down
here, in this foul air and spoiled earth. The older satyrs tell me Dionysus
used to invite them up for parties, but someone put the moves on Hera and that
was the end of that.
I suppose you'd think we lesser deities spend our time hiding in the
mountains and forests, away from humans. Some do---I know I appreciate fresh
air and clean water---but a good many of us live among you. The various
nymphs have become environmentalists and activists, working for organizations
like Greenpeace, the EPA, and the SPCA. As for my kind, the satyrs generally
enjoy human company. We have ways of hiding our nonhuman features in your
presence. There are many of us; chances are you've seen or met or even lived
with one of my kind, or even me.
We are the dirty old men, the lovers of porn, the party animals, the
playboys, the clubhoppers. We may own the liquor store or Musicland down the
street. We are the beautiful men, the happy-go-lucky, the greatest of lovers.
We are the unfaithful and multi-partnered. We are the men who will live with
but never marry you; we are the ones you love but will never make a
commitment.
We never truly mean it when we say "I love you."
That hurts me, which is unusual. Satyrs are not supposed to love or give a
damn; it is implanted in us to live and love for the moment, to be perpetually
happy. But I look out at the world and see the love beneath hate and poison
of the modern society, and I wonder, Why can't I share it?
Not to say I haven't tried. I have. I've gone to therapists and I've read
books. I've acted in passionate plays in the dim hope it would spark
something within me. I've tried to be committed to one woman. I've tried to
love, but nothing works. There's a void inside me. I cannot love, only lust;
I feel no need or desire for a significant other in my life.
I used to be normal and happy. I never used to complain. When the last of
the Olympians was dumped for Christ, I said, "Who cares? We're all eternal.
The party doesn't have to stop." The party didn't stop, but it did become
erratic. As the Christian Church grew more and more powerful, the world
became less and less inviting. Most of the satyrs slept through the Dark
Ages. I made the mistake of not sleeping in long enough. Curious and
impatient, I woke up to the world of the Inquisition. There were few satyrs
around. For the first time I was frightened---and alone. Too disturbed to go
back to sleep, I wandered through Europe hoping to find some company. I did.
She was young and pretty and much brighter than the other peasant girls.
She had a wonderful imagination. When she could, she would sneak away to the
fields to play with me. I became her secret friend. I thought I loved her.
I cared for her so deeply I revealed my True Form to her, goat legs and all.
Of course she ran away from me---women ALWAYS run from satyrs---but when I
caught her she was laughing and enchanted.
She made the mistake of telling someone she had a half-goat for a friend,
and they burned her as a witch. I was devastated.
Three days later, I was in another village, lusting after another young
woman.
And then it hit me what I had done. I realized I hadn't TRULY loved that
poor girl, or any other woman or nymph I'd ever been with. I loathed myself.
Over the years, I attended fewer and fewer satyr gatherings; eventually I
stopped going altogether. Europe degenerated. It began to weigh heavily on
me. I thought that foul continent would suffocate me, so I ran away to Asia,
where I had some peace of mind. A good friend called me back to Greece in
1785. I found out that far away, across Poseidon's waters, was an endless new
land and a budding nation. A few satyrs had made the journey a hundred years
earlier, and had just sent word back how beautiful it was. I went to England
and took the first ship to America I could find.
It WAS beautiful. I ran with the buffalo through the Great Plains, skipped
through the Rockies, and wandered through the woods. In 1790, a group of wood
nymphs migrated over and I lived with them. I almost forgot about other
satyrs and women and humankind in general. For just a while, I felt good
again.
All that changed with the settlers moving further and further west. I
soothed the nymphs as they cut down the forests. I choked on their trains'
fumes, watched them shoot buffalo for fun, saw them destroy the natives of
this country. It was Europe all over again. I went south to Mexico and
beyond and found the same thing had happened there. Eventually, I ended up
hiding in a corner of Canada, sulking.
Satyrs, however, are social beings, and after a time the loneliness was
driving me crazy. I bounced from country to country, never happy with what I
found. Finally, I gave up. I ended up back in North America, and have more
or less stayed here for the past century. In some respects, it's been
amusing, watching the United States grow and advance so quickly. I've enjoyed
the music, the television, the movies, motorcycles, fast cars and jet-skis.
But the air and land have become foul, and underneath this mask of a happy,
productive society there's poverty, stress, and social hangups. The ways of
the Greeks and Romans are gone forever.
Like Europe, America began to get me down. My black moods began to affect
me. By 1980 I had completely lost my sexual appetite. As of the Fall of
1990, I had been celibate for ten years.
I believe that beats the previous satyr record by nine years, 364 days, and
twelve hours, give or take a few minutes.
In September, 1990, I went to Pittsburgh. It's so suited for brooding.
I'd been there in the 1700's when it was a beautiful speck of the frontier:
three rivers, green hills, and only a couple of ugly forts. After I moved
west, I heard the Industrial Revolution had turned it into a filthy, cold
city, so I avoided it until that year, when I overheard someone say it had
improved. Curious and bored, I went back and found them scraping a century of
grime off of the Carnegie Museum and certain other buildings around the city.
But really, it wasn't so bad; the downtown area is a pleasant mix of old and
new, fairly clean and not that unfriendly. The rivers' junction has become a
park with a huge fountain. The weather, however, hasn't changed a bit. On
some days, the sky takes on a familiar dingy cast, occasionally dumping rain.
It's those wet days that are so perfect for being depressed.
Late one morning, I went downdown. There's an adult book, video and "toy"
store there, and as I passed it I felt a tingling inside me. I crossed the
street and lingered near the door; the sensation grew stronger. I didn't
really want to go in that place. At that point in my life, the thought of
smut made me queasy, but I gave in and stepped inside. Immediately, a smell
hit my nose; pleasant, musky and familiar to me, undetectable to humans. I
can't fully describe it, but it was definately satyr-smell. I looked around,
sniffing the air, and finally saw him.
Standing casually near the wall of magazines, smiling as he looked over the
titles, was what appeared to be a middle-aged man, dashing and trim, with a
tidy grey beard, glasses, and a double-breasted suit. He turned and smiled as
I walked over to him.
"Well, well, well..." he murmured with a cultured, British accent, his
smile broadening.
"Sir William," I greeted happily, and embraced him. "It's been too long."
His name is not in fact "Sir William", but Euriphides. He'd picked up the
title by accident, and, fancying the Isles, has lived under the name and guise
of a successful producer and entrepreneur for all these years. Euriphides is
a different kind of satyr; a selini, to be exact, one of the oldest of our
kind. The selini are usually seen on old wine vases; they are the original
servants of Dionysus. Euriphides is half-man, like me, but the rest of
him---his legs and ears and tail---is horse, not goat. He's one of my dearest
friends among the eternals. When I was very small, I used to tug his tail and
call him "father", although there's a very low probability that he actually
is.
"It HAS been a while," he told me, and leaned a bit closer. "What are you
calling yourself nowadays, Thaylos?" he asked quietly.
I shrugged. "I have a Minnesota driver's license which says I'm Theodore
Petersen."
He arched an eyebrow. "What a dreadfully tacky name. I shall have to call
you `Teddy', then." He chuckled, then asked, "What brings you here?"
"The gods only know," I replied. "And you?"
"I just decided to take a little trip to the East Coast cities." He waved
a stack of magazines in front of my face. I caught the titles `Big Man' and
`Whipworld'. "You know, do a little shopping, eh? Know what I mean?" He
nudged me, smiling more broadly.
I groaned. Euriphides is a dirty old satyr if there ever was one. For all
outward appearances and his love of culture, he's had sexual relations with
just about everyone---and everything---imaginable.
"I've been having a lovely time," he went on. "I went out to the
fraternities over at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon
University---unbelievable! I filched some freshman student I.D.s, altered my
looks, and snuck in for Rush. You've got to try it, Teddy. There's music and
women and dancing... those frat brothers may as well be satyrs, the way they
drink! The beer is endless... have you been out there?"
"To Oakland? Yes, I've been staying in Schenley Park."
Euriphides squinted. "Are you feeling all right?" he asked me suddenly.
"Yes," I replied, "Why?"
"Well," he murmured, frowning, "You're not aroused. Are you ill?"
While eternals don't die, we are capable of feeling pain and getting sick,
so it would seem only logical that a young satyr without an erection must be
unwell. "No, I'm fine, really," I said.
Euriphides leaned close. "I can make you feel better," he cooed, giving me
the seductive eye.
"No, not today---FATHER," I quipped, not wanting to hurt his feelings.
He looked hurt. "You wound me!" he moaned.
"I'm sorry, Eu---Sir William. I... I just don't feel up to it---no pun
intended."
"What d'you mean, you don't feel like it?" he replied in surprise, and put
a hand to my forehead. "Are you sure you're not ill?"
"Positive."
He smiled. "Poor kid," he said, ruffling my hair, then chuckled and
lowered his voice. "Or should I say ram?" he corrected, squinting to see
through to my True Form. "Your horns have come in so nicely. You're looking
like a bighorn sheep." He paused. "Speaking of which, did I ever tell you
about the time I---"
"Many times," I smiled.
"I forget sometimes you're not a child anymore," Euriphides admitted. He
played with a tress of my long, curly hair, staring at me fondly. "While
we're on that line of conversation, it may interest you to know that your
favorite playmate is in town, too."
"Minorus?" I replied. "I haven't seen him in ages! What's he up to?"
Euriphides shrugged. "I don't know." Again he drew close to me to mumble
in my ear. "I haven't seen him, but I caught his scent earlier today. He may
still be in this area."
"Great," I said, "I should go look for him. Why don't we get together for
dinner or something?"
"How about `or something'?"
"William, please..."
"All right," Euriphides groaned, giving up, "Meet me at Jimmy Tsang's
tomorrow at seven, and if you find Minorus, then by all means bring him."
"You bet," I told him, and left the store.
I couldn't find Minorus. In the late afternoon I gave up searching and
went to a grocery store to get something to eat. I was looking over the
fruit, considering picking up some apples for Euriphides, when I noticed a
young man staring at me. As I looked over at him he looked away and absently
surveyed a passion fruit. I ignored him, but couldn't help noticing how he
kept watching me---and and the passion fruit. He was an androgynous type,
lightly built and very pretty. The human form I happened to be using at the
time was not far from my True Form---long, curly, rust-colored hair, smooth
face, grey eyes, average but fit build. Quite attractive by human standards.
I decided he was hitting on me. I was hardly in the mood for this sort of
game, and since Euriphides wasn't there to take over, I moved away and went
over to the deli. The young man followed me discretely, still carrying a
passion fruit. I got a sandwich and went back to the produce section for the
apples.
I saw the guy following me as I walked back to produce, but when I got
there, there he was in front of me.
"What do you want me to do, Thaylos, shout?" he snapped, throwing me the
passion fruit. I was so surprised I barely caught it. "Get a clue," he added
with a sneer. He looked at me hard, and when I stared back I saw him for what
he was.
"Cupid," I muttered, and sighed. I don't like Olympians.
"That's `Eros' to you, pal," he growled. "Watch your attitude."
Again I sighed. "Well," I asked, "What do you want from me?"
"You," he told me with a fair amount of distaste, "are a disgrace to your
kind. Mother and I can feel your black thoughts all the way up on Olympus."
"Why should you and Aphrodite care what a lowly little faun like me feels?"
I replied, not bothering to hide my annoyance.
"Because it's giving us a headache! We're all connected, you know. Satyrs
are not supposed to be unhappy and celibate. You're supposed to be out
screwing everything in sight!"
The little bastard was starting to annoy me now. The way he felt about my
kind was quite obvious. "Some of us have higher standards than that," I
replied, trying hard to control my anger. This isn't an easy thing. Satyrs'
emotions are intense. Usually, however, we only radiate lust and happiness
and content. Although we're not violent by nature, an angry satyr is not
something you'd want to meet in a dark alley.
Eros cringed. "You see?" he groaned, "Stop it, for Zeus' sake! Over the
years you've only gotten more and more morbid. All of the other satyrs send
me pleasant feelings of lust, but your depression bores into my skull like a
stake. It gets stronger every day."
"So why don't you just tune out my bad vibes?" I asked him. "It's none of
your business what I feel anyway."
"I CAN'T block you out. If something happens to a nymph or an animal,
Artemis knows, because the woods and everything in them are her kingdom. If
something happens to a naiad, Poseidon knows. Satyrs overlap. You belong to
Dionysus, but Artemis is aware of you because you live in the forests and
fields. *I* am aware of you because your kind radiates feelings associated
with the realm of Love. Do you understand?"
I nodded. "Yes, but what do want from me? What can I do?"
He was very frank. "Get laid."
"I don't feel like it."
"I know. You're not even aroused. For you, that's an illness. The cure
is to have a few nice flings."
"But I'm not interested."
"You don't have to lie with a human. In fact, it might be better if you
were with a nymph or another satyr. Euriphides is in town; I'm sure he'd be
willing to help you out..." Eros flashed me a smile.
"I've already spoken with Euriphides," I said flatly. "Look, I'm just not
interested. I don't care who it is."
Eros shot me a dark look. "You'd better care," he said. "You're not
living up to your kind's standards and you're annoying the hell out of me.
Trust me---Aphrodite with PMS is bad enough. Aphrodite with PMS AND a
satyr-induced headache is terrifying. Now you change your attitude, Thaylos,
or I'll change it for you." He came very close to me, and the next thing I
knew he was digging a Beretta 9mm into my gut.
I laughed. "What are you going to do, KILL me?"
"You're as stupid as the goat's ass you wear," he replied.
I glanced down at the pistol and saw that it wasn't just a pistol. "Oh," I
said, but couldn't stop smiling. "You can't affect me," I told him. "Satyrs
lust, not love, and your shots are for love."
Eros narrowed his eyes and took on a wicked smile. "Try me," he said.
"We'll see how much you know about my powers."
I shrugged. "What happened to your trusty bow and arrow?" I asked,
glancing at the Beretta.
He pocketed the pistol. "Times have changed," he replied, and left me
standing alone among the apples.
I went back to Schenley Park, got deep into the woods, took off my clothes,
and began the Change. It's a somewhat uncomfortable process, but I've learned
to live with it. I suppose the worst part---worse than the itchiness of
having fleece sprout from your legs---is having your knees bend back the wrong
way and your feet change to hooves as you go from man to goat, or vice versa.
Either way, I always spend a couple of minutes stumbling around, getting used
to walking a different way. Having the horns, the tail and the goatee sprout
isn't exactly fun, either. You see, when I walk in public as a man I can't
simply project an illusion; if anyone bumped into me they'd feel the truth,
and besides, pants wouldn't fit. When Euriphides looked at me closely and saw
my True Form, he wasn't seeing through an illusion, but concentrating on me in
order to get a mental impression or feeling of what I actually look like.
After the Change, I stretched out my legs and shook my tail a few times to
get loosened up, then took off running, easily going up and down the steep,
wooded hills human visitors find difficult. After a few minutes, I picked up
a small stone, right in the cleft of my right hoof, and had to stop to pull it
out. It was wedged in tightly, trickling a little bit of blood, and it hurt
like Hades. When I finally pulled it out, I saw the damage wasn't too bad,
but decided to stay off my feet until it stopped hurting.
As I sat there, there was a rustling in the bushes. I saw a human coming
through the brush. My immediate instinct was to bolt, but as I tried to get
up a force held me back. An instant later the human was standing there in
front of me, and all I could think was, `Why isn't she running away?'
She was tall and well-built, wearing a perfectly pressed, spotless business
suit, which I found interesting because we were in the middle of the woods on
damp ground. Her dark hair was pulled back into a bun, and a pair of roundish
glasses was perched on her nose.
"Know me, Thaylos," she said, and I did.
"Artemis..." I choked.
She curled her lip. "That's `divine lady' or `mistress' to you," she
replied. "And just so you know, I've been going by my Roman name for years."
"Oh, I---eh, yes, Diana." She stared at me, and I swear her eyes glowed.
"Divine mistress," I amended, but the contempt I felt was leaking through.
She saw it, but for some reason dismissed it.
"Never mind," she said. "You can just call me `Artemis' or `Diana'. I
didn't come here to have you revere me." She stopped again, then added, "Not
that I'd want one of your kind worshipping me anyway."
I narrowed my eyes at the Olympian. "Then why are you here?" I asked,
still trying to hide my distaste, even though I knew she could feel it. The
Virgin Huntress is a positive sort of goddess, but she has been known to
become violent, especially toward the male sex. As much as I didn't care for
her or any other Olympian, I didn't want to provoke her.
She sighed heavily. "We have a problem. A very big one. Do you know the
story of Prometheus?"
I shrugged. "Sure. He helped Zeus overthrow the Titans, then gave the
humans fire. Zeus tied him up to a rock for that."
"And then?"
"He was eventually freed by Hercules."
"But what else?" Artemis prompted.
"What," I replied, "You mean the prophesy?" Again I shrugged. "Prometheus
claimed that one day Zeus would have a son capable of overthrowing him.
Eventually he and Poseidon found out the woman who would have the child was
the sea goddess Thetis, but she married a mortal, King Peleus."
"No," Artemis told me, "She didn't `marry him', but was married off by Zeus
and Poseidon. She had no choice."
"I don't understand," I replied. "What's the point?"
"Prometheus' prophesy has come true."
"But that's impossible!"
"Why?"Artemis paused and stared at me, her face grim. "No one can escape
Fate---not even the gods."
"But her son was Achilles, and he was killed in the Trojan war."
"Exactly. Thetis didn't know why she was forced to marry Peleus. She was
very bitter. Her only joy in life was Achilles. It was the gods who caused
the Trojan war; the Olympians meddled in it, and because Apollo guided the
incompetent Paris' arrow, Achilles died. That seemed to be the end of it.
But I've found out that it wasn't. Years later, Prometheus went to her. He
hated Zeus and wanted revenge, and Thetis was the one who could give it to
him. He explained his prophesy to her, and she was furious at the way she'd
been manipulated. That combined with the loss of Achilles pushed her over the
edge. She seduced Zeus and bore a son, which she hid from all of us."
I rolled my eyes. "SHE seduced ZEUS? Isn't it usually the other way
around?"
"She pulled his own trick on him," Artemis explained with distaste. "She
turned herself into a white cow with sex appeal and Zeus went for her when
Hera wasn't looking." She paused to scowl. "Daddy was in a wicked mood that
day."
"I still don't understand why---"
The goddess cut me off. "Her son's name is Aetros, but that's all I know
about him at the moment. I think he's going to make a move soon."
"But that still doesn't explain why you're telling me!" I snapped.
"Because no one else believes me," she replied.
"I don't think I do."
Artemis sighed. "Well the Olympians don't either, and I'm afraid to go to
the other Titans, because they're probably lined up behind Prometheus. The
lesser gods wouldn't believe me, either, mostly because Zeus and Hera didn't.
The nymphs, who also thought I was crazy, don't consider our politics their
business or concern, and the satyrs are too drunk and silly and powerless to
be any help."
"So why are you talking to me?" I demanded.
"Because you're different," she explained. "I heard Eros complaining about
you and got curious. I've been watching you. You're of a different state of
mind than the other satyrs. I thought that just maybe you would listen and
believe me. I think maybe you can help me. I don't know how, but I do know I
can't handle Aetros alone."
I was becoming annoyed. "Look," I said, "Even if I did believe this story,
why should I help you? You Olympians disgust me."
"If Aetros is capable of overthrowing Zeus, he can easily deal with your
kind and anyone else in this world, mortal or eternal."
"Why should he care about the satyrs? No one else does, except Dionysus."
"He could overthrow Dionysus. Aren't you bound to protect your master?"
"Frankly," I told Artemis, "I'm fed up with my master."
"Listen," she hissed, "I can't say for sure, but I've got this gut feeling
that Aetros carries his mother's and the Titans' grudges to an extreme. I
don't know what his powers are, but I know he's stronger than any of us, and I
have a terrible feeling he's going to announce his presence soon, and not
pleasantly." She grabbed my shoulders and shook me. I was impressed that she
touched me at all. "You're the last one I can turn to. Please help me. I'll
reward you."
I snorted. "What can you give me?"
"Anything. You can live on Olympus, be a master of your kind, have a harem
of nymphs---"
"I'd sooner castrate myself than live on Olympus, and I don't want any
power."
She was getting desperate. "Then what do you want?"
I stared her down and decided to play her game. "I want to love."
Artemis frowned. "What?"
"Satyrs are incapable of loving. I want to love."
"I can arrange that."
I pulled away from her. "Leave me alone," I muttered. "Let me be
miserable in peace, okay?"
The goddess stepped back. "Think about it," she said. "I'll be back."
She seemed about ready to go, but I stopped her. "Artemis," I asked, "Are
there any other reasons you bothered to come to me?"
She gave me a thin smile. "Well, one more. I knew that in your current
state of mind you wouldn't put the moves on me." She sneered. "After all,
isn't it every satyr's pipe dream to diddle the Chaste Goddess?"
She spread her arms wide and took on an eerie glow. A moment later she was
gone.
I went back downtown the next day to look for Minorus. Artemis' words
filled my head. At the time, I didn't know why. She was a bitch, I kept
telling myself, just a cold, condescending bitch with a nastier case of
hormonal imbalance than your average satyr. Still, it bothered me. Unless it
really was that important, why else would she mess with a satyr, and an
unimportant one at that? She certainly didn't like me or any of my kind.
Seeing Eros on the same day as the Huntress only made it worse. I felt like I
was being watched.
I tried to push these thoughts away as I got off the bus on Fifth Avenue
and searched for Minorus. I tried going to the head shops, liquor stores, and
adult bookstalls, but there was no trace of him. The most I found in those
places was the lingering scent of Euriphides.
My patience (or what little bit of it satyrs are allotted) was finally
rewarded as I passed Sak's Fifth Avenue, a posh, expensive place. Somehow I
managed to catch Minorus' scent through the fumes of a passing bus. I went
into the store.
He wasn't immediately visible, and I had no idea what form he was currently
wearing, so I relied on my nose. Eventually his scent mixed with the scents
of many other animals, and soon enough I found myself among the fur coats.
There were saleswomen, rich women, and wishful girls going through the coats
and jackets, but no men. I was confused. I didn't think Minorus would bother
to make himself look like a woman unless he was trying to sneak into a harem
or convent. But sure enough, his scent grew very strong as my eyes fell upon
a middle-aged woman standing in front of a mirror, a saleslady fawning over
her.
"Isn't it just lovely?" gushed the young sales rep.
The older woman petted the coat she was wearing. "It's so soft!" As she
paused to glance at the price tag, I cleared my thoat. She turned and looked
at me. "And what do you think?" she asked.
"It's... it's very nice, ma'am," I replied a bit awkwardly, because I
realized as she spoke that she was indeed a she, and not Minorus. It had to
be the saleslady then, I decided.
"It's, eh, a bit pricy, though," the older woman remarked, fiddling with
the tag.
"Oh," the saleslady replied, "but it's worth it! That's the finest Persian
lamb I've ever seen."
And then I took a good look at the coat.
I gasped so loudly they both turned to look at me. "Are you alright,
dear?" the older woman asked, but all I could do was shake my head and gasp
some more.
"Are you having an asthma attack?" I heard the saleslady say.
I remember screaming and running from the store.
I don't remember how I got back to Oakland.
"I told you so," I heard Artemis say.
I came to my senses. Noise and fumes filled my head. I was under a train
bridge in the brush, and the locomotive and its cars were rumbling past. My
clothes were in a heap beside me, and I was in my True Form. I pulled at the
soft wool on my legs and burst into tears. For the first time in my life, I
had been truly terrified. For the first time, I was in anguish.
The train passed, and when I looked up, sniffling, there was Artemis,
standing across the tracks. She walked over to me.
"You shouldn't risk letting people see you in your True Form," she said
flatly, but I could see in her eyes she was amused.
"Who cares if someone did?" I managed to groan. "It would just end up in
the `World Weekly News'."
"I take it you encountered poor Minorus, or what was left of him."
I buried my head in what is approximately my knees and nodded. "How?" I
wailed.
"I told you Aetros was powerful," Artemis replied, unsympathetic.
"But satyrs are eternals!" I wailed.
"I know. That's what makes him more powerful than any other god. Now we
know. Aetros has the power to kill eternals---you, me, even Zeus. My guess
is that Minorus was only an experiment."
"H-how did you know?"
"As much as I despise you oversexed beasts, you are part of my domain. I
told you I thought Aetros was going to do something, so when I felt something
wrong in the back of my mind, I looked into the matter and found out Minorus
had been murdered."
"What did Dionysus say?" I asked. "He has to know."
"He's too drunk to notice. He felt the pain---I remember him screaming one
night, just before I noticed something wrong. He made it go away by drinking
himself into a deeper stupor." Artemis sighed. "He may know, but just may
not want to deal with it or believe it. No one else would. I talked to the
other Olympians again, and they still wouldn't listen."
I got a hold of myself and wiped my eyes. "But how? How could Aetros kill
an eternal?"
The goddess grew very serious. "Somehow, he's found the eternals' Threads
of Fate---possibly the gods', too---and somehow he has the power to cut them,
although I'm sure it isn't easy, even if it is his natural power."
"Why aren't the Fates doing something about this?"
"I don't know. But I suspect it has something to do with the fact that I
can't find them."
"I don't understand," I told her, "How could the gods not believe you, with
an eternal dead and the Fates missing?"
"Because they're too self-centered!" Artemis snapped, disgusted. "They
insist the Fates have to be SOMEWHERE, and they refuse to believe that Minorus
is dead. They think I'm either making it up or playing a joke on them. They
wouldn't believe me unless they saw his cut Thread, which I don't have. The
death of an eternal is simply unimaginable to them."
"It was to me, too," I moaned. "I'm sorry I didn't believe you."
Artemis sighed. "Even if I did have his cut Thread, they probably wouldn't
care. Hera said, `What's all the fuss? Even if it were true, there's a big
difference between us and simple eternals. One simply cannot kill an
Olympian. In any case, it's just a filthy, randy little satyr you're talking
about---who cares?"'
"Yeah?" I fumed, "Well I'M a `filthy little satyr', and so was Minorus. He
was my friend!" I looked up at her. "So why should you care?" I asked. "You
hate us as much as Hera does---more, even, because you hate sex."
She softened, but only a bit. "I told you, you ARE in my domain, Thaylos.
That makes you my responsibility. There's that, and there's the fact that I
believe Aetros IS capable of killing the Olympians. It's not just us,
either---I think, if given the chance, he'll destroy all of us, gods and
mortals. I don't know exactly what he's planning, how many Threads he has
access to, or who will be the next to die. Now I'm asking you again: Will you
help me?"
I heaved a sigh. "I don't know. I'll have to think about it."
"All right," Artemis agreed, "I'll give you a day to think it over. We
don't have any more time to spare. I'll meet you here this time tomorrow.
Have an answer for me." She stepped back a few feet, shimmered, and was gone.
"Booze," I groaned as I slumped into my seat at Euriphides' table, "I need
booze."
He grinned. "That's my boy!" he said. "I suppose this means you're
feeling better."
"No," I muttered, but I don't think he heard me.
"Waiter!" he called, "We'll have a bottle of some of that nice rice-wine
stuff."
"It's called SAKE, and it's JAPANESE. We're in a Chinese restaraunt."
"Oh," Euriphides said. "Sorry," he told the waiter, "I meant plum wine."
"Just bring me a beer," I grumbled.
"Certainly," said the waiter. "Would you care to order now, too?"
"Just pick something," I told Euriphides.
"All right," he said, scanning the menu, "We'll have wonton soup and
fantail shrimp for starters, then kung-pao chicken, sweet and sour pork, beef
lo-mein, mu-shu pork, lobster kew, Szechuan lamb---" I looked up at him. "Er,
nix on the lamb. Make it Peking duck instead. Oh yes, and some of those
almond cookies. And a coke." Smiling, he handed the menu over to the waiter.
"---and a coke," the waiter mumbled as he scribbled on his pad. He took
the menu and looked cautiously at Euriphides. "And that's for---er, that's
all for the two of you?"
"Well," Euriphides replied, "We may have a third coming along, in which
case we'll just order some more."
"Yes, sir," said the waiter, and walked away.
"Sorry about the lamb," Euriphides said. "When you looked at me, I assumed
you were a bit sensitive."
"William," I groaned, "A lamb is a young sheep. A kid is a young goat. I
just happened to look at you. Fauns are part goat. It's been thousands of
years and you're still confusing them."
"Well I called you `kid' back in the bookstore, didn't I?" he snorted.
"Goats, sheep... what's the difference?" He leaned forward in his seat, a
wicked grin on his face. "They're all the same to me... ." He sighed and sat
back. "Anyway---did you find Minorus? Is he coming?"
"Oh, yes," I told him, "Oh, Dionysus, did I find him."
"And?"
"Ask me after I've had a few."
Now it takes quite a lot to get a satyr even tipsy, so "a few" turned out
to be several bottles of plum wine later. Euriphides asked me about Minorus
again as I twirled my chopsticks through my third helping of lo-mein. I told
him the whole story; how I found poor Minorus had been turned into a coat and
how Artemis had come to me and told me about Aetros and Thetis and Prometheus'
prophesy. When I finished, Euriphides simply stared at me for several long
moments. Eventually he began to chuckle.
"Oh, jolly good!" he exclaimed, "Jolly good story, Teddy."
"I'm not kidding," I told him.
"Oh, come now," he replied, "Stop teasing me."
"But---" I began, but the waiter cut me off as he showed up with the check
and our fortune cookies. I plucked one out of the bowl, cracked it open, and
pulled out the slip of paper.
`It is only wise to make decisions in haste', it said, `when a renegade god
could cut your Thread at any time.'
"Ah!" I exclaimed, and flung the paper away, "Damn her!"
"Hm?" Euriphides mumbled as he read his own fortune and tossed it into the
ashtray. He picked up mine. " `Many good things shall come to pass'," he
read, "---in bed," he tagged on with a laugh and a wink. "What's wrong with
that?"
"Nothing," I muttered, and got up. "I'm going back to the park. I need to
be alone."
"Are you sure you're all right?"
"No. Anyway, I bought you some apples. You can come by later tonight to
pick them up."
"Oh, Teddy," Euriphides beamed, "You DO care!"
"Yeah," I replied, "I do. And don't call me `Teddy'."
When I got back to Schenley Park, I saw Artemis standing near a birdbath.
"I've found out a few things," she told me. "Thetis stole Aetros' Thread
from the Fates. She's hidden it in a magical safe-deposit box in a vault
somewhere in Idaho. I've also gotten a fix on Aetros, although I don't know
exactly where he is. I still don't know where the Fates are. Come here and
take a look at this."
I went and stood next to her in front of the birdbath. As she passed he
hand over the still water, a picture began to form. It took shape, and I saw
what appeared to be a young man sitting at a desk covered with ropes and
strings and threads of all kinds and sizes.
"That's Aetros," Artemis told me, "and those are the Threads of the
eternals and lesser gods. I don't see the Olympians' or Titans' Threads." As
I watched, Aetros picked a Thread at random and looked it over, studying it
carefully. Beside me, Artemis closed her eyes, concentrating. "That's
Euriphides' Thread. You know him, don't you?"
My eyes widened in horror. "No!" I cried, and lunged for the pool.
"Stop it!" Artemis hissed, catching me just before my fingertips reached
the water. "If you upset the water you'll ruin the image. There's nothing
you can do. Now be still!"
To my vast relief, Aetros dropped Euriphides' Thread and chose another. He
looked over another dozen or so before he chose one which caused Artemis to
speak again.
"That is the Thread of the nymph Calissa," she said quietly, "Your mother."
I remember very little about my mother; most satyrs don't remember their
mothers at all. I remember being very small, and her holding me, singing me
songs. I remember running through the forest with her. I remember her
binding up all the cuts and bruises I got from romping around, and pulling
stones from my hooves. Those memories are vague. The only clear memory of
her I have is the day she sent me away, when I was ten years old. She and two
other nymphs took me to a clearing, and on the other side were three satyrs, a
faun and two selini, one of them Euriphides. Calissa began to cry and hug me
tight.
"Let him go," one of the other nymphs said, "It's time." But Calissa
wouldn't. The other nymph sighed. "He's just going to grow up to be one of
them," she said, gesturing to the satyrs across the way. "You can't keep
him."
"But he's different!" Calissa wailed. "He's my baby!"
"He's not different and he's not your baby anymore. Just like any other
animal, a satyr is only cute until he grows up."
"Oh, let her be," the second nymph put in, "it's her first." She patted
Calissa on the shoulder. "You'll get used to it, dear," she soothed.
Finally, Calissa gave up and shooed me forward. I was starting to get
nervous, but I took a last look at her and went over to the satyrs. I
remember Euriphides looked very tall to me. He smiled and offered me his
hand, but I took his tail instead. As they led me away, I looked back and saw
the nymphs were gone.
I've seen Calissa several times since. The first time I saw her again I
tried to talk to her, but the words wouldn't come out. Instead, I was
overcome with satyrlust, she with satyrfear, and I ended up chasing my own
mother.
I blinked and looked back into the pool. Aetros put down Calissa's Thread
and chose another, a delicate, golden one. He smiled terribly as he wrapped
it around his hands and began to pull. His body began to radiate an aura of
power and strength.
After a moment, the Thread snapped.
Artemis stiffened and screamed. She thrashed the water with her hand, then
collapsed. I knelt beside her, frightened and unsure of myself, but after a
few seconds she came to and sat up.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"I---I think so," she replied in a shaky voice. "That was one of my
nymphs. I felt it---it was like part of me had died." I helped her to her
feet. "Listen, Thaylos---I know where Aetros' own Thread is, and I know of a
sword that might be able to cut it. During the Trojan War, Thetis
commissioned Hephaestus to make Achilles arms. There was a shield and armor,
and I think there was a sword, too. The sword, if it exists, would probably
be in Thetis' cave with the rest of the armor. She's away right now---there's
been an oil spill somewhere---so if we work fast she'll never know what
happened. There's a young sea-nymph---younger than you---named Nysis who
lives in the Atlantic, off of New York. Every night she comes to the beach to
watch the sun go down. If you can get her to bring you Achilles' sword while
I get Aetros' Thread, we may be able to stop this." Artemis looked me in the
eye. "Please help me," she said.
I bit my lip. "Okay," I replied at length. My voice was low and husky.
"I'll try."
We turned sharply as we heard someone approach us from behind, and were
relieved to see it was only Euriphides.
"Well," he crooned, smiling from ear to ear, "I'll be damned to Hades.
Little Thaylos and Lady Artemis!" His eyes lit up. "Did you actually catch
her?"
"No," I replied. "The Huntress just needs a favor."
"I'll give her a favor..."
Artemis scowled. "Wipe those thoughts from your mind, or I'll make you a
gelding!"
"Really, Euriphides," I scolded, "this is serious. How would you like to
go nymph-hunting in New York with me?"
I don't know how it was possible, but his smile broadened. "Why, Thaylos!"
he said, throwing an arm around my shoulder, "I'd be delighted! I do believe
you're getting better!"
"Now," I said to Euriphidies the following day as we crouched behind a
grouping of rocks, "Do you remember what to do?"
"I wait until the nymph is preoccupied with the sunset, then get her!" he
exclaimed, shaking with anticipation.
"Right. And---?"
"And then we have a Menage a Trois!"
"No!" I told him. "For the last time, we're not going to have sex with
her."
Euriphides was taken aback. He had a minuscule attention span and probably
didn't even remember that we'd gone over this half a dozen times already.
"What do you mean, we're not going to have sex with her! Satyrs always have
sex with the nymphs they catch. That's the way it is, my boy!"
I growled in exasperation. "Look---how much self-control do you have?"
"What?" he replied, gazing eagerly out at the ocean.
"Never mind. Just remember to do what I told you."
"Hm?" he replied, still staring at the sea, "Oh---oh yes, of course,
Thaylos."
We sat on the New York beach for another hour or so, and then the sun began
its turn downward to the horizon. The beach was empty, so Euriphides and I
had no qualms about shifting to our true forms. He immediately went about
brushing out his beard and horse's tail, claiming he wanted to look good for
Nysis.
Eventually, we spotted her coming to shore a short distance away. She
walked through the cold waves to the beach, shook the sea-water from her hair,
and sat down on the sand, turning west to watch the sun.
"Now, Thaylos, now?" Euriphides whispered.
"Wait," I told him.
"Now, Thaylos, now?" he repeated not half a minute later. Again I told him
no. After a couple of minutes he seemed about ready to explode.
"Nysis looks like she's not paying attention," I murmured. "Why don't you
try sneaking around behind her and---"
No such luck. With an obscene whinny, Euriphides jumped from behind our
hiding place and lunged at the nymph, who immediately screamed and ran for the
ocean. He only had two hooves, so he couldn't maneuver the same way a centaur
could, but after three thousand years of chasing nymphs and women (and men and
livestock and strange vegetables), he was quite agile. He was unable to cut
in front of her to block her escape to the water, but he did manage to come
close enough to catch her ankle in his hand. Nysis went sprawling at the
water's edge, clawing at the wet, oozing sand as Euriphides hauled her in.
She was screaming so loudly I was afraid the police would come, but I waited
until he dragged her farther upshore before I joined the action. I jumped on
Euriphides and threw him off her.
As Artemis said, Nysis was younger than I was, and my guess was that she'd
never been caught before. That, combined with shock and the sight of two
satyrs fighting over her kept her glued to her spot. Otherwise, she would
have run back to the sea in an instant.
My problem now, however, was Euriphides. Having no self-discipline, as far
as he was concerned I was truly challenging him for his prize, and he was
fighting for real.
"'Riph," I grunted after he landed his hooves in my ribs, "Stop it! Don't
you remem---"
It was no use. He launched himself on me again. I realized the nymph
wasn't going to sit there forever, so I head-butted my old friend as hard as I
could. The curves of my horns connected solidly with his skull and he slumped
to the ground unconscious.
Panting, I tried to talk to Nysis, but she only screamed again. She got up
and ran for the water, but I managed to pull her down. She pummelled me with
her fists, thrashed her legs and bit me, but I held her tight. Finally, she
stopped struggling.
"Please don't hurt me!" she cried, and burst into tears.
"I don't want to hurt you," I told her. "Just calm down and listen to me."
She sniffled and looked at my crotch. "Oh," she said, and started to
laugh, "Oh, Poseidon! You couldn't even if you wanted to!"
I made her look into my eyes and put on my best pitiful expression. "I
know," I said, cracking my voice a little. "That's just it! You're the only
one who can help me."
"Why should I want to help you?" she replied. "The other nymphs told me
satyrs are nothing but trouble. If I don't help you, there will be one less
problem for us to worry about."
I squeezed, out a few tears and thought depressing thoughts, hoping she'd
pick them up. "Please!" I begged. "A satyr without an erection is like---I
can't think of anything worse! My brothers will reject me! I'll be all
alone! Please help me..." I bowed my head and cried.
Behind me, Euriphides came to and with a savage growl pulled me off Nysis.
`Damn!' I thought, `She'll get away for sure now!' I head-butted my companion
into oblivion again, then spun around. To my surprise, Nysis was still there,
sitting on the sand.
"Why didn't you run away?" I asked.
She smiled. "Well, you can't hurt me, for one thing. But mostly I felt
sorry for you."
"Oh?"
"The other nymphs always told me, never trust a satyr because they're never
sincere. But you are. I can feel it. You really are unhappy."
I was so impressed by this remark I started to feel bad I'd fed her the lie
about being sick. But then, I told myself, according to Euriphides and Eros I
WAS sick. "Oh," I repeated, unable to say more.
"So what do want from me?" Nysis asked.
"Do you know Thetis the Silver-Footed?" I asked.
"Oh yes, but she's away right now."
"I heard. I was told that during the Trojan War she had special arms made
for her son Achilles. I know that after the war they went to Odysseus, but
that somewhere along the line she got them back."
"That's right."
"Anyway," I went on, "I was told that if I performed a ritual with
Achilles' sword---if it exists---it would heal me."
"It does exist," Nysis informed me, "I've seen it."
"Good! Please, can you get it for me?"
"Oh, I don't know... I mean, it belongs to Thetis, and we all know how much
she loved Achilles."
"Please," I begged, "I'll only need to borrow it. I'll have it back before
she returns."
Nysis stared at me hard, thinking it over. She glanced at Euriphides'
prone form. "All right," she said at last, "I guess I owe you." She smiled.
"And I kind of like you." I smiled back at her. "Thetis' cave is far away.
If I leave now I can be back at dawn."
"Wonderful," I told her.
She got up and headed into the waves. "By the way," she said, "My name's
Nysis."
"I'm Thaylos," I replied.
"Well... See you at dawn, Thaylos," she said. She dove into the water and
was gone.
Behind me, Euriphides stirred. "Gad, what a headache," he groaned.
I helped him up. "Where's the nymph?" he asked.
"She, uh, she got away. Sorry."
"Oh, well," he replied with a lopsided smile, "Jolly good fight. Made the
trip worth it. Remind me to mind you more carefully in the future."
"Sure," I told him. "Why don't we go to dinner, then back to the hotel?"
He nodded in agreement. We changed to our human forms, got dressed, and left
the beach.
I made sure to get him roaring drunk (in the safety of our hotel suite)
that night, then got up before dawn while he was still sleeping it off. He
hadn't trashed the room too badly; at least everything was still intact, if
messy.
I got to the beach when it was still dark, and sat on the sand, watching
the sky, waiting for Nysis.
Dawn came, and with rosy fingers.
Gods, I hate that line. Homer beat it to death in `The Odyssey'.
In any case, Nysis climbed out of the water as the sun came up, just as
promised, and she did indeed have the sword. She was a slight creature, and
had to drag the hunk of metal behind her. I met her halfway and helped her
with it. As I pulled off the seaweed tangled around the blade, a warm glow
hit our faces.
"Isn't it beautiful?" she breathed. It truly was. The blade was the color
of gold, but it was like no other metal I'd ever seen. It was etched with
scenes of war, and the hilt was strong and elaborate.
"Thank you," I said. "I can have it back in a couple of days at the most."
"You're welcome," Nysis replied. "Just don't lose it. Hephaestus forged
it, and he's a friend of Thetis. If anything happens to that blade, you'll
have to answer to him."
"I'll keep it safe," I promised.
"Um, Thaylos," she said after an awkward pause, "Will I see you again after
this?"
"I don't know," I replied. "I usually don't like the cities."
"The Atlantic has many coasts," she smiled.
"Yes, but... but after I'm... cured, I may not be like this anymore. I may
even go after you when I return the sword."
"I'll take that chance," she told me. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed
me on the forehead. "Good luck, Thaylos."
"Thanks."
I watched as she turned away and went back to the sea. She swam out a bit,
waved to me, then disappeared beneath the waves. I sighed, watching the
rolling water for a few moments longer, then went back to the hotel.
"What's that?" Euriphides asked me as we headed to the airport, motioning
to the wrapped-up sword on my lap.
"Oh, nothing," I replied, "Just a souvenir."
"I've sent word to Aetros," Artemis told me later. "He's going to meet us
here later tonight."
"In the park?" I asked.
"No, but in Pittsburgh."
"Why?"
The Huntress shrugged. "I have no idea. But he wants to meet me at one of
the local universities, in the Fine Arts building."
"What did you tell him?"
"I sent word to him that I knew who he was and what he was up to. I made
it a little threatening---enough to get him to reply and agree to meet me. I
don't think he takes me seriously, though---he seems to think he's something
special---which he is, but I think it's gone to his head."
"Did you get his Thread?"
Artemis smiled. "Right here," she said, tapping a bag slung around her
shoulder. "I've never seen a god's Thread before. It's very
interesting---and very large."
"How does it fit in the bag, then?"
"The bag belonged to Perseus," the goddess explained. "It can hold
anything. He used it to carry Medusa's head back to King Polydectes. I
assume you got the sword?"
I unwrapped the blade. "Right here."
"Can you wield it?"
"I haven't tried. But I know a little bit about swordplay."
"You may need that knowledge," Artemis told me. I didn't like the way she
said it. She took the sword from me and tested its balance. "Very nice," she
remarked. "Athena would appreciate this." We were deep in the woods of
Schenley park now, and there was a large, dead tree nearby. She went over to
it, raised the sword, and sliced through the base of the trunk as if it were
air. The tree toppled over, neatly sliced through. I was amazed. Next she
shooed me off the rock I was sitting on, and cut through it with almost no
effort.
`But can it still slice a tomato paper-thin?' I mused. "Do you think it'll
cut Aetros' Thread?"
"Quite possibly," she replied.
"Why don't we just cut it now?" I asked. "Why do you have to go meet him?"
"Why do WE have to go meet him," she corrected. "I still need you."
"But why don't we just kill him now?"
"It's a serious enough thing to kill an eternal," Artemis explained. "To
kill a god, especially one as powerful as Aetros, is a very serious matter,
not to mention a shame. We'll give him a chance. Maybe if HE'S threatened
with death, he'll see the error of his ways and give up. I'd rather have him
for an ally than kill him."
"Judging from what I've seen and from what you've told me," I put in, "He
isn't going to change."
"We'll see," the goddess told me, "We'll see."
"Are we going to a fraternity party?" Euriphides asked me.
"No," I told him for the third time. "I really don't think you should
follow me tonight."
"Why ever not?"
"I told you, it could be dangerous. Don't you remember what I just told
you about Artemis and Aetros and the Threads? How many times do I have to
repeat this to you?"
"Oh, stop with that silly story already," Euriphides scoffed, "and tell me
truly what you've been doing with Artemis."
"It's not a story!" I insisted. "Minorus is dead! As in gone to Hades!
And so is a nymph. This Aetros is capable of dethroning Zeus. He can kill
gods and eternals."
"Oh, come now. Minorus is most certainly not dead. Whatever sickness you
have, it's affecting your mind. We'll have to do something about it when
you're through with Artemis."
I gave up trying to explain. Euriphides simply wasn't going to accept my
story, and I was going to have to deal with it. But I was afraid for him; I
didn't want him along. I didn't want him to die.
At four in the morning we emerged from Schenley Park and hit Tech Street,
behind the academic buildings of Carnegie Mellon University.
"Where are all the parties?" Euriphides asked. "I don't hear any music."
"They're all over by now," I said, and immediately regretted it. I should
have sent him off to the fraternity houses.
"Oh, well, I'll stick with you, then," Euriphides sighed.
"Really, you don't have to," I told him. "I wish you wouldn't."
"Well, I'm going to. Too bad."
I sighed and led him to the Fine Arts building. It was a large,
cream-colored brick structure dating back to the early part of the twentieth
century. A good part of the roof was made of strong panels of opaque glass,
used to let light into the personal studios during the day. At night the
students working would turn the lights on, giving the top of the building a
wonderful glow. Tonight, however, only a few lights were on upstairs.
I led Euriphides down to the basement and changed to my True Form. He
followed my example. Next, I took pieces of felt and a bottle of glue from my
coat pocket.
"What's that for?" Euriphides asked.
"Sh," I replied quietly, "Lower your voice. The floor upstairs is marble,
so we don't want anyone to hear us. Glue the felt to your hooves."
"Ah..." he said, rubbing his hands together in delight, "We're going to
play a little sneaky-game! Are there nymphs here?"
"No, just a few art students." `And a god with a chip on his shoulder...'
"They'll do," Euriphides replied, flashing one of his wicked smiles.
I put my hands on his shoulders. "Look, William---Euriphides. You're
going to have to be quiet and do exactly what I say if you want to stay with
me. This is serious."
"Oh, all right. I'll play your little game."
"'Riph---I mean it. This could be very dangerous." I paused. I really
hated being sappy, but I couldn't help it. "Whatever happens, I want you to
know that you're my best friend." I wanted to say "I love you", but I
couldn't. I THOUGHT I meant it, but then, I thought I'd loved that peasant
girl, too. I wanted to tell Euriphides the truth, not an empty phrase.
As I mentioned before, we tend to radiate our emotions, and now was no
exception. I think Euriphides felt my thoughts quite keenly that moment;
perhaps he almost understood. His smile faded and he looked at me in the
oddest way.
"Sure, Thaylos," he replied quietly, "You'll always be my little kid."
"Hey," I smiled. "You got it right for once."
We glued the felt to our hooves and crept up a small, corner staircase to
the main floor. We stayed in the doorway, next to the concert hall and across
from the theater, watching the front door. The sword and the bag holding
Aetros' Thread were at my side.
"What now?" Euriphides murmured so quietly I barely heard him.
"We wait for Artemis," I replied, equally low. "And stop swishing your
tail." I motioned to him to cease conversation.
The main floor of the Fine Arts building was unusually elaborate compared
to the studios upstairs: light grey marble floors decorated with abstract,
black marble floor plans of buildings like the Parthenon; a huge ceiling, at
least thirty feet high, painted with murals; replicas of famous Greek
sculptures situated in niches; a bizarre, ominous facade on the entrance to
the Dean's office; a few columns here and there for good measure. It was
entirely neo-classical, a sharp contrast to the art produced upstairs. I was
beginning to understand why Aetros had chosen this place. It was reminiscent
of a temple, and probably as big as his ego.
At length the front door swung open, and in stepped Artemis. She glanced
at me, just long enough to make eye contact, then called out. "Where are
you?"
I heard footsteps, then saw a man step out of the shadows. He was tall,
with slicked-back, dark hair, wearing a sharp business suit. "Artemis," he
said in a deep voice, "You have the honor of being the first Olympian to
behold me."
A look crossed the goddess' face, a look which distinctly said, `I think
I'm going to puke.' But it quickly vanished, and was replaced by a smile.
"Yes, I suppose so," she replied.
"How did you find out about me?" he asked. "I've gone unnoticed for a long
time."
"I have my ways," she answered. "Forgive me, but I can't reveal ALL of my
powers."
"Understood."
Beside me, Euriphides put his lips to my ear. "That man's a god," he
murmured. I nodded. "I don't recognize him."
"That's Aetros," I dared to reply, without taking my eyes off the god. "I
told you it wasn't a story."
"I hate to put this childishly, Aetros," Artemis went on, "But I know who
you are and I saw what you did."
He chuckled. "Ah, yes. Impressed, are you?"
"Yes. Impressed---and disgusted."
"Come now... what's a satyr or two?"
"Killing eternals is a serious business," Artemis snapped.
Aetros looked her over. "You're afraid of me, aren't you?"
"Considering Prometheus' prophesy, and the fact that you've killed two
eternals without remorse, yes."
"Let's get to the point," Aetros said. "Why exactly did you want to talk
to me? Somehow I don't think it was to slap my hand."
"You're right. I wanted to talk to you about your plans. It's always a
little messy when a new god appears on the scene. I just want to make things
easier."
Again Aetros chuckled. "My plans? You should know, if you know the
prophesy."
"The prophesy states that Thetis would have a son CAPABLE of overthrowing
Zeus. It doesn't say he will."
"The implications are there. Tell me, Huntress, why shouldn't I fulfill my
destiny? Zeus is feeble---he's let the humans degenerate, forfeited to
Christianity. He's a disgrace."
"What's a few thousand years to an immortal?" Artemis countered. "I think
one day we'll return to glory---and you could be at our side."
"Well, *I* am impatient," Aetros hissed. "The time for the new order is
now, before this world gets any more polluted. The humans were never meant to
be here in the first place. Prometheus has a soft spot for them, but I
don't."
"You want to destroy them?"
"It will be over for them quickly. After that, I'm going to cleanse the
planet and start over."
"Let me guess," Artemis said in a low voice, "In your own image."
Aetros smiled. "Very good."
"And what about Zeus?"
"What about him? I told you, my destiny awaits."
"I don't know what Thetis has told you all these years," said Artemis, "but
destroying Zeus and all the world isn't the answer to your problems."
"It's my Fate," Aetros told her. "You can't deny Fate."
"Speaking of which," Artemis returned, "Where are the Fates?"
"Safe."
Artemis studied the young god for quite some time. "Tell me," she said at
length, "Must you destroy Zeus?"
"I must. I have no love for him. He gave my mother nothing but grief.
And as I've said, it's my destiny."
"Are you truly capable of killing him?"
Aetros flashed a broad grin. He made a motion with his hand, and the air
began to shimmer. An instant later, the front hall of the building was filled
with a beautiful, intricate rope of a million colors and patterns, glowing
with life, floating freely in the air. I tried to find its ends but couldn't.
"There," Aetros said, "You can feel it, can't you? You know who this belongs
to."
"Where did you get that?" Artemis demanded, but he only smiled. "Listen to
me," she went on. "If you kill Zeus, all the Olympians will come for you, and
many of the lesser gods, too. Why risk that? Why destroy yourself?"
"If I can kill Zeus," he replied, "Why should I fear his children?"
"If you don't stop this now," the Huntress threatened, "We'll be forced to
destroy you." She held out her arms and a siver longbow, nocked with a
brilliant arrow, appeared in her hands. "Please, Aetros," she said, her words
genuine, "We'd much rather have you for an ally. Don't make me hurt you."
Aetoros laughed hard, his mirth echoing off the stone walls and marble
floors. He waved his hand again, and Zeus' Thread disappeared, sent back to
where it had come from. "Are you threatening me?" he exclaimed. "You can't
hurt me, goddess. Nor can you sway me."
"We'll see," Artemis hissed, and let the arrow fly. Aetros held up his
hand in a "stop" gesture. The shaft halted in midflight and crumbled away.
The Huntress lowered her bow, and it faded out of sight. "You give me no
choice," she said, "I'm going to have to contact the Olympians."
"They didn't believe you twice," Aetros scoffed, "Do you think they'll
believe you a third time?" He waved his arm again, and another Thread
appeared in the hall, woven in silver, gold and green. Artemis gasped. It was
her Thread, the Thread of the Goddess of Three Forms, one for the Earth, one
for the Moon, and one for the World Below.
"They might," the goddess choked.
"Yes," Aetros agreed, taking hold of the Thread, "They might. You've gone
a bit too far, Artemis. I'm afraid I'll have to deal with you... harshly." A
terrible, closed smile stretched over his face. His body seemed to grow
larger and the aura of strength around him began to throb as he began to twist
and pull at Artemis' Thread. The goddess gasped, clutched her chest, and fell
to her knees.
`Thaylos!' I heard her anguished cry in my head, but I was terrified,
rooted to the spot.
`Thaylos, please!' I watched as she writhed on the floor, as Aetros pulled
her Thread harder and harder, stretching it to its limits.
`Thaylos, where are you?!'
I thought hard. I thought about how often I'd become disgusted with the
humans, but how many times I'd enjoyed what they had to offer. I thought of
all needless slaughters I'd seen---the Inquisition, the Native Americans, the
Holocaust. I thought about Minorus and the nymph Aetros had killed, and how
he'd arbitrarily played with Euriphides' Thread, considering doing the same to
him. I thought of Euriphides, crouched behind me; sincere, eccentric and
utterly dippy, but wonderful in his own right, my best friend in all the
world.
I hated Aetros.
The feeling radiated from me so strongly the god finally noticed my
presence. He turned his head in my direction as I leapt from the stairwell,
Achilles' sword in one hand, Perseus' bag in the other.
"STOP!" I shouted.
He laughed.
"Oh, by my mother," he chortled, "Artemis, what have you lowered yourself
to?" He turned back to me and grinned. "You think I didn't know what you
were up to, you disgusting little satyr? Now put down that sword."
"They say it'll cut through anything," I growled, "Even you."
He narrowed his eyes. "Come here and try," he challenged.
"I don't have to," I told him, and pulled part of his Thread from the bag.
His smile only broadened. "Achilles' sword is powerful, but not that
powerful. Perhaps in another god's hands it could harm me. But you---I don't
think so." He put on a good act, but I could feel his fear. It became clear
he wasn't certain what the sword would do. "Now put the blade down," he
ordered, tightening his grip on Artemis' Thread, "Or I'll kill her."
"You were going to kill her anyway," I replied, fuming.
He thought for a moment. "I'll tell you what," he said, brightening a bit,
"If you give up this nonsense, I'll let you lie with her before I kill her.
You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Now Euriphides may be that stupid, but I'm not. "Piss off!"
Aetros' face took on a momentary look of shock at my reply.
A moment was all I needed.
I threw Aetros' Thread down on the floor and raised Achilles' sword above
my head. My mind was reeling with anger.
`I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate I hate...'
I thought of Euriphides again, and then of Aetros.
`I hate I hate I hate I hate I LOVE I hate...'
I heard Artemis scream my name---too late.
A hand closed around my wrist. I was so filled with rage that at first I
didn't even feel it, but then it clamped down so hard I heard my wrist break.
I let out a shriek. As I spun around to face this new threat I was thrown to
the ground. Achilles' sword slipped from my hand and fell with a clatter to
the marble floor. I looked up.
"You stupid goat," growled Euriphides---with Aetros' voice.
"'Riph---?!" I blurted. I quickly looked over my shoulder at Aetros. The
god threw back his head in mocking laughter, then faded away like mist. I
turned back to Euriphides, wide-eyed and frozen to the spot.
Euriphides---or the being who I had thought was Euriphides---rippled in the
air before me, and his image was replaced with Aetros'. "I don't seem to have
your Thread with me at the moment," he said in a deadly tone, "but I don't
think I'll need it." He reached down, and before I could snap out of my fear
and dodge away, his hands were wrapped around my throat and he was hauling me
off the floor. He began to shake me. I panicked and began to thrash; I was
so terrified I think I actually bleated. Purely out of instinct, I pulled up
my legs as far as I could, and with a choked cry slammed my hooves into him.
I was quite surprised when they connected with his crotch, not because of
where they landed, but because of the effect it had.
For all his power, Aetros howled, dropped me, and doubled over, as crumpled
and disabled as any mortal man would be. I scrambled across the floor and
grabbed Achilles' sword with my good hand. The god's Thread was still laying
on the floor. Again I raised the sword above my head, and brought it down
with a roar.
`This is for Minorus, you bastard.'
There was an explosion of light and pain, and I thought that was what dying
must be like. Everything went black for a bit, and then I heard Artemis
calling my name. I opened my eyes and saw her bending over me, looking
disheveled and a bit concerned, her hands on her knees.
"What happened?" I croaked.
"You did it," she informed me with a weak smile, "You killed him."
I managed to sit up, and from there the goddess helped me to my feet. I
looked around. Aetros' Thread was gone, and Achilles' sword was lodged in the
floor. Artemis had to pull it out for me.
"Euriphides..." I murmured. I turned to the Huntress. "Was he Aetros all
along?"
"I don't know," she replied.
"You don't think he killed Euriphides, too?"
"I don't know," Artemis repeated.
"What will happen to Thetis and Prometheus?" I asked.
"They'll be dealt with. You don't have to worry about them coming after
you." Artemis heaved a sigh. "Well," she said, "I believe I owe you
something."
I barely heard her as I stared at the sword in my hand. "What?"
"You wanted to love," she reminded me.
I looked up at her. "I don't think I'll need your help to achieve that
anymore," I told her. We stared at each other for a few moments, and then I
turned away, heading for the stairwell.
"Wait!" she called after me, "Where are you going? We still need to find
the Fates!"
"Find 'em yourself," I growled. "I've done my good deed for the
millenium." I tromped down the stairs to the basement, changed back to my
human form, and got my clothes on. I tucked Achilles' sword under my coat and
headed off into the night, gingerly holding my broken wrist. For some reason
I headed toward Forbes Avenue, away from the Schenley Park.
As I drew near the fraternity houses on the corner, I saw someone stagger
out onto the street. He saw me coming, squinted at me, then yelled, "Thaylos!
Over 'ere!" and burst into a fit of laughter.
I didn't recognize the face, but I knew the voice, and as I drew near, I
caught the familiar, musky smell. "Euriphides?" I called back.
He stumbled up to me. "You look horrible, my dear boy," he said, and
giggled again. "I went to the park to look for you," he explained, "but you
weren't around, so I went to the parties without you. Jolly good time.
Completely makes up for that fiasco in New York." He flashed me a lopsided
grin and threw an arm around my shoulder. "Why don't we celebrate having so
much fun by having more fun?" he asked. "Let's go back to that lovely
Japanese restaraunt."
"Chinese," I corrected, and laughed. I patted the sword resting under my
coat. "Maybe later," I told him. "Right now I have to return a sword to a
certain nymph I know."
______________________________________________________________________________
Faye Levine is a Sophomore Illustration major at Carnegie Mellon University.
Over the summer her brain stagnated, and the stress of returning to school
melted it entirely. Her thoughts of late have been occupied with mythology
and killer bunnies; in fact, she and her pet rabbit are currently working on
a book entitled _Separated_at_Birth?_The_Striking_Parallels_Between_Zeus_and_
_Elvis_. By the time you all read this, she'll be back home, freezing her
butt off in Minnesota.
fl0m+@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Names of the Stars
by Christopher Kempke
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
I selected male, grey haired and distinguished. I didn't want this to be
my whole makeup though, so I countered it with jeans. A featureless white
shirt and grey tie completed the outfit, and a pair of silver-rimmed glasses
completed the image. Looking at myself, I allowed a small smile. Perfect. I
left the room by a door which wasn't a door, and stood on a busy city street
corner. Dozens of people were around, but none of them noticed my strange and
sudden appearance, because I didn't want them to.
I looked down the street and up to where the Channel 8 building stood, a
secure, modest 14-story office building, and smiled again. It was 6:00 in the
evening, and the sun would be gone in a few minutes. Everything was perfect
for what I had to do. There was nothing left now but to wait and look around
this world into which I had so recently returned. I spent some time in
careful examination of my surroundings.
A few minutes later almost no one else was on the street, and those that
were moved quickly and precisely, since each of them had a meeting he or she
could not miss.
It was exactly 6:15 when I reached Channel 8, and found the lobby empty. I
walked slowly toward the elevator, to give everyone a few more moments to get
home. Time was something I had more of than others. Once I started the ball
rolling, it would go quickly enough. Even more quickly than the last time:
three days. It hardly seemed enough, but there was another more knowledgeable
than I calling my shots, and I could not question that intelligence.
The elevator opened immediately when I pushed the button, probably by
chance, although little enough was in this venture. I entered, and rose to
the studio level. A man met me as I stepped out, and asked if I wanted to
have the curtains open. He seemed to accept my presence quietly, though he
had never met me before. "No," I responded. There was nothing to see; I had
gained faith, if nothing else, in two millenia. Mankind, perhaps, didn't have
even that.
6:20. I walked to the studio, to the anchorman reading the six o'clock
news. As I approached, he stopped reading in the middle of a sentence and
offered me his seat. This was too easy. I wished briefly that it could
remain this way. However, men needed free will for both good and evil. Only
through free will could I be once again betrayed; that betrayal was the
primary reason I was here. The secondary one was the reason I had to speak to
the world.
I took the seat at 6:25, and gave the other stations enough time to loop
the broadcast to their own viewers before I spoke. My language was a
strangely enhanced speech that spoke directly to my listener's minds, saving
me the effort of speaking in several languages. The recordings of these words
would probably thoroughly befuddle later analysts.
After waiting for almost two thousand years for this moment, the speech was
easy. I raised my arms and brought them down heavily on the table. The
tension pulled tight all over the world. My protection was wearing thin, and
would vanish altogether when I finished speaking. Thinking this, I spoke.
"People of the world, with this gesture I take the stars from your night
sky. Those which you have looked up upon for your lives are gone."
Without looking out the window, I knew it was true.
"There is only blackness there, and this is the way it shall remain until
you can convince me to put the stars back. The first rule of my game is
simple---there are five words which you must speak to me. It doesn't matter
who speaks them, so long as it is in my presence, but don't bother to come
read me a dictionary, for the other rule is this: To speak a word, you must
know why it is one of the five. For each of the words you speak correctly, I
shall put back a fifth of the stars in the sky. Nothing else save my death
can cause them to reappear, and that death can come only at the hands of one
who holds my trust."
The obligation upon the minds of the world began to unravel.
"I will remain here, alone except for those I take to teach. Come to me
with your answers."
I stopped speaking, and the compulsion snapped. Those people around me
looked dazed for a moment. I took the opportunity.
"Leave this place at once."
They knew my power---none of them questioned me. The broadcast ended, and
a few minutes later, I was alone.
I took the elevator to the ground floor to see what had transpired there.
The walls of the building shone with a soft shimmering light, save for a
silver gate which stood where the doorway had been. In a room behind I found
a bed.
Kneeling beside it, I folded my hands and spoke to the air. "It has begun
again. Peace be with you." I cut my prayer to that, and lay down on the bed
to wait. Closing my eyes, I dreamed of Judas, so long ago.
Seven hours later there came a knock at the gate. I sat up, and knew the
first had arrived. No one else in the world could have knocked. Looking out,
I saw television cameras pointing toward the gate. Apparently, no one but
those chosen could even get to the gate, held back by some force no mortal
power could ignore. It wasn't important to me though. What was important was
the woman who stood at the door.
A woman. My mind left me for a moment, then calmed. I had not expected a
woman; there had been no women before. Apparently I, too, had something left
to learn; I wondered how much. I opened the gate for her.
She stood her distance undecidedly.
"Speak your word!" I made the command harsh. There would be time for
understanding later. It was the command she had been waiting for.
"Power," she said softly, then waited expectantly.
"That is incorrect," I said. "If you follow me, I can teach you why."
She did not hesitate. The gate closed silently behind us, and my
apprehension calmed. I knew exactly when the one I was waiting for would be
arriving, but even so I was glad that he was not the first. However, I had
another task to attend to here, and so I led the woman to a back room.
Within, I began to teach her what all mankind needed to know. She was named
Mary, an interesting coincidence---if anything could be considered
coincidence.
It was only an hour before the second one arrived. The crowd outside
hushed as he approached, so Mary and I knew even before the knock came. She
remained behind, while I opened the gate again. This time, it was a man, and
he calmly spoke even before I prompted him.
"Life," he said.
I turned away. "Wrong. Follow me if you would learn why."
The answer was not all that far off, but I didn't explain it to Jose until
we were inside. There I began my teachings again, in earnest.
Slowly, time passed, and daytime approached. I knew, as none of the people
outside did, that there would be no sun this day. Night was eternal, until
the game was finished. Still, I counted this day as one of my three. The
ending was still inevitable. I only wished that I knew it.
The knock came again, and I knew who stood there. "Get back in there," I
commanded Mary and Jose, directing them to a back room. They complied with
full understanding. I had explained some of what was to come, so much of it
as I knew.
I opened the gates. Five men stood outside with automatic rifles pointed
at me. They could not pass the gates, but it didn't stop their bullets. One
looked at me with something like a sneer.
"Die, thief," he commented as he pulled the trigger. The others followed
suit, and I bent forward as the bullets struck me one after another for a long
time.
When the guns were empty, I stood up, showing myself to be unharmed. Their
faces were pictures of terror, except for the one I wanted, in back. His name
was Greg, and his eyes showed sudden understanding. "Love," he said.
I nodded. "Yes. Follow me to hear more." Even as he followed me in, a
few stars twinkled again in the night sky that should not have been there.
Scott arrived an hour later, incorrectly guessing "Honesty." Linda did not
appear for almost six thereafter, but her word of "Peace" was correct. Samuel
guessed "Faith" incorrectly, and was admitted as well. At the hour that would
have been nightfall had night ever lifted, I returned to the gate. The people
outside were silent as I spoke. "Peace and Love. Tell me more." The time
approached, and suddenly I knew it had come.
One man materialized in the back of the crowd, but no one noticed. I did
not smile---I had been waiting for him. For almost two thousand years, I had
been waiting for this one man. I only knew it in that instant.
"Trust," he shouted. I opened my gate for him with a feeling akin to fear.
Although I had known he was coming, and had prepared for him, seeing his face
again after two thousand years was still a shock. The word he had chosen bit
me, but it was one of those I was looking for. Something the world needed
more of.
"Correct," I said, and together Judas and I closed the gate. He looked at
me suspiciously, but I kept my gaze even. He finally avoided my eyes
altogether. Still, he knew the lessons I was teaching well, and helped in the
instruction. I could not fault him there. Those things which were new, he
listened to attentively.
Later, as I lay down to sleep, I shivered. Judas was the reason for the
game, and I was uncertain of the result.
Six more people arrived over the next day and a half, none of them guessing
correct words. It would not have mattered if they had; the board was now set
and all that remained was for the game to end. Mary, Greg, Scott, Linda,
Samuel, Judas, Jose, Judith, Sarah, Thomas, Peter and Paul. The Peter, Paul,
Mary, and Judas I wondered about, but coincidence or lack of same was not my
most pressing concern.
On the third day, I showed them how to open the gate, and went to lay down.
Judas left, as I knew he would. He spoke with another man outside. I knew
the terms too well by this point. Thirty small ingots of silver to do me in,
as had thirty coins before. It was a strange bargain in these days, but one
which Judas would understand; he was not fully aware of the progress of two
thousand years. After a while, he returned, and joined the rest of the
disciples. He was carrying two small pouches, and one jingled with silver. I
nearly wept. It had been so long. And to still betray my teachings, even
now.
I set a table, and on it appeared many foods. I left the disciples to
their meal as I took the elevator to the top of the building.
From above, I could see the people milling about in throngs below, and felt
my time running low. An hour was all I had left, but my time had been enough.
Those who sat at my table below held the knowledge that would save mankind for
another thousand years or so, if the world was smart enough to use it. My
innate faith in man was that they would.
I was glad that one of my purposes had been fulfilled. The other would cost
me my life, and perhaps the last chance at peace I had. Thinking of Judas, I
returned to my table.
"Trust, love, peace, hope, evil." With each word, a portion of the stars
in the night sky glowed once again where they belonged. "Remember these
words, and the ideas that they are keys to. My time here is nearly up, but
when I am dead your task begins. Humanity will need your teaching as you
needed mine. I shall not return for a thousand years---use the intervening
time well." Each of them at last realized who I truly was, and together we
raised a toast to humanity.
As I brought the wine glass to my lips, I saw Judas move. The motion was
lightning quick, as he raised his own glass and hurled it. The shouted "No!"
still hung in the air as the two glasses collided. Mine fell to the table,
somehow still upright.
I looked at him, and the rest fell into silence.
"Poison in the glass," Judas said, then got up and went to the gate.
Opening it, he opened the bag of silver and scattered it to the crowd with a
gesture, then dropped the bag and returned. He stood before me, and would not
meet my glance.
I smiled. "God forgives you," I said.
He shifted uncomfortably, waiting. I poured the poisoned wine onto the
floor, and tossed away the glass. It shattered musically in the corner, and
the silence with it. My time was over, but this time I had my peace.
"I forgive you," I said quietly.
______________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a dangerous, psychopathic Computer Science graduate
student with too much time on his hands. Attempts to lock him up have
resulted only in a temporary confinement at Oregon State University, where he
can be reached as kempkec@mist.cs.orst.edu on good days, and not at all on
bad.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 3
Jim Vassilakos
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Mike leaned over the mottled piece of metal which had fused itself beyond
recognition. The analysis specialist scanned his expression.
"There's no way we can trace manufacture; it's just too far gone," she
explained.
"Have you found anymore?"
"Nearly a dozen," Charles Linden broke in, somewhat heatedly. Mike could
almost see his boss's anger steaming off the heavy overcoat he wore to protect
himself from the lab's sub-zero temperature.
"I don't understand it at all," he continued. "Why would Clay go to all the
trouble? And what's so important about this dead John Doe?"
Mike glanced at the specialist who seemed to be examining the editor with
an unconcerned stare. He hoped she wasn't the type to blab.
"Look Chuck, there are warmer places to discuss this."
Linden was keen on the idea of getting out of the lab, not so much because
of the third party with ears and a mouth as due to the chill. He and Mike
took the lift down to the subways leaving the company security personnel to
the unhappy clean-up their own incompetence had prompted.
The subway train to Greenflower was nearly empty, and the trip uneventful.
Linden was, for once, totally unconcerned about what was happening on the
floor. The scores of staff writers would just be sending him more meaningless
trash which he would later strip to the bare facts and send back due to lack
of content. It was always the same old story at the middle of the week.
Mike promised something far more interesting for the readers, and for the
editor as well. Linden had suddenly taken a personal interest in the story, a
big no-no in his business. But it was worth bending a few rules, and it felt
right. It was even worth a trip to the pit of ashes.
The late morning air warmed Linden as sunshine broke through the white
fluffy clouds and streamed down in long silver threads from the heavens. He
hiked alongside Mike etching a trail through the dew-sodden expanse of grass.
Birds were darting about in the brisk morning air. Their songs were like a
child's laughter, almost mocking yet innocent.
The pit suddenly lay before them, its sides sinking into the earth without
warning. A variety of religious symbols decorated the inner surfaces informing
wayward souls to beware the footsteps of the dead as the familiar sweet scent
of ash and apple resin hung heavy in the air. Linden sat down on the red brick
lifting his chin and squinting at Mike through the bright beams of sunlight.
"Not what you expected," Mike cautiously broke the silence.
"No," Linden admitted. "It's too..." He couldn't pull off the words.
"Antique?"
"Old fashioned. It's too dated."
"I thought you were into that, Chuck," Mike prodded smiling.
"I am, but there's a limit. This is so undignified. It's a mass burial."
"Just another screwed up religion." Mike stretched out his arm pointing
down the pit approvingly, "But you have to admit, they did a great job."
"What? I don't follow."
"The Imps. They kill Fork, and get rid of his body so perfectly that
there's no way I can get a confirmation on the time of death."
"Sure, but why the mass burial? Why not just cremate him and leave it at
that?"
Mike kicked a stone into the pit, "Because he isn't dead."
"You just said they killed him," Linden countered.
Mike shrugged, "I lied. If they just wanted him dead and gone, they'd have
done what you said."
Linden stood up. He glared at Mike in spontaneous disbelief but knew the
reporter well enough to realize that doubting was useless and quite possibly
counter-productive.
"Explain," Linden finally insisted.
"The Imps want to stage a fake death. They snatch Fork and put some poor
fool in his place, kill the guy and send the body to the incinerators. But
that still isn't good enough. They now have to get rid of the remains in a
legal manner, but in such a way that these remains cannot be later analyzed to
prove the guy who got burned wasn't Fork. Even ashes can be analyzed.
Admittedly, it isn't something we often do, but it can be done. People don't
often share identical body chemistry. A mere difference of as little as a gram
in solid weight would be enough to..."
"Enough," Linden interrupted, "I've got the idea. The only legal way to
dispose of the ashes in a manner in which they cannot be later analyzed is to
mix them with other ashes. Thus, the ash pit."
"Exactly."
Linden laughed, "It's a really neat theory Mike. Now prove it."
Mike looked at the wet grass in front of his feet, "If I try, I lose Niki."
"What makes you so sure you haven't already?"
Mike considered the editor's question with antipathy.
"I know what you're thinking, Harrison."
"Do you?"
"I've already sent for company personnel, off planet. They should be here
in a few days."
"Chuck, if we had a few days, we wouldn't be talking."
"Regardless of all other considerations, I won't use our current security
staff to deal with this... situation."
Mike shot his boss a rueful grin, "You don't trust them."
"After what happened... would you?"
"We can always go to Tizar police. Even though she's unregistered, they've
been supportive in such matters before."
Linden shook his head in flat refusal, "You know as well as I that the
paper cannot risk this getting out."
"She's a friend, Chuck."
"She's also a psyche. And Clay is a damn boardmember. There's no win here;
we have no choice but to wait and let company people handle it."
"If we wait, it may be to late."
"She's already lost, buddy. If you think you'll ever see her again..."
Linden cut himself off mid-sentence. "I'm sorry."
"It's okay. You're probably right."
"So what are you going to do?" The editor carefully enunciated each
syllable with the utmost patience.
"What d'you think I should do?"
"If they're hiding, we must chase. I'll get one of the paper's private
starships to take you to Calanna. I know you didn't have much fun last time
you were there, but like they say, duty calls."
"Fine, but don't stick me in some ice box."
"I wouldn't dream of it," Linden pledged. He knew well Mike's distaste for
low passage.
"And what about Niki? If there's any chance..."
Linden gazed back into the pit for some inspiration, but the same anger
kept welling within him. Mike studied his boss as the sunlight shined off
Linden's black boots and whisked the corners of his eyes.
"Whatever you do between now and the time you leave is your own business,"
he insisted. "You understand?"
Mike and Chuck took the escalator down to the floor from p872. As they
entered the ten acre room all they could hear was the clicking of fingers on
keyboards and the dull chatter of hundreds of gatherers. Linden's press
office lay at dead center, and a small group of grouchy staff writers wandered
about outside the entrance.
"Why the committee?" Mike wondered allowed.
Linden explained, "There's been talk of a strike. Haven't you been reading
the paper?"
"Must have missed it. Serious?"
"They just like making waves." It was one of Chuck's pet phrases. Staff
writers and clericals were both labeled as replaceable by management. If they
decided to strike, there would be no problem finding new recruits. For this
reason, their union demands were generally ignored. But even so, they still
liked to stomp around and threaten the editor every other year or so. Mike was
glad he wasn't following it.
"I guess you read the news once and you've read it a thousand times," Mike
quoted.
"Watch that kiddo."
They went their separate ways, and Mike felt the better of it. He didn't
envy Linden's job in the least.
"Hey, Harrison. Haven't seen you here in a while."
"Hi, Mike."
"Hey buddy, where've you been?"
"Walker. Kim. Chris, I've been sick."
"I see the boss is catching it too. I hope you guys've been having safe
sex."
"Chris, you're an asshole."
"Happy birthday to you too, buddy."
Come to think of it, Mike didn't envy his own job either. Not that he
didn't like gathering. He just didn't like many gatherers.
There also came those moments which he genuinely regretted. These he
called mistakes. Being seen walking in late with the editor was but one
example. He hoped he didn't just call too much attention to himself. Having a
trail of story-starved gatherers tagging along could seriously jeopardize his
chances of sneaking up on Clay.
Mike sat down at his desk and switched on his terminal scanning the latest
breaking headlines.
"Staffwriters Prepare For Strike"
"Youth Locked In Freezer Eats Own Foot"
"Upcoming Press Banquet..."
"So what's up?" It was Bill Walker. He was another crack investigative
gatherer. Not very successful, but crack all the same. His youth was his
greatest advantage and his biggest stumbling block. Mike could remember what
it was like.
"Not much. How 'bout you?"
"Nothin'. Did you see the one about the banquet? You're gonna be speaking."
Bill knew how much Mike hated to read the paper and thus usually never got
word about these things until it was too late to make reservations for an
interstellar cruise.
"The one before it looked more interesting. You write it?" Mike accused in
his most inquiring tone.
"Wish I did." It was something Bill would write. He had a flare for the
gory.
"Where'd you get cut?" Mike just noticed Bill had a nasty slash under his
left ear taking the whole length of cheek down to his dark sunburnt chin.
"Mama did it," he laid out. There was a glint of amusement in his grey-blue
eyes. Otherwise he seemed deadly serious.
"Walker, you've got a sweet mama."
"She is."
"But you're a sick bastard."
"Do you really mean it?"
Mike turned back to his headlines pretending he had serious work to do.
"I really got into a fight with my neighbor's cat."
"That's really fascinating." Mike mimicked Walker's distinctive "really"
without effort. It was a common part of their interaction on the rare occasion
that both were on the floor.
Mike didn't mind the wasted time. He knew it would pay for itself
eventually. Walker was young and often useful when he wanted to be. He and
Mike worked together occasionally on the difficult parts of each other's
assignments. Mike sometimes thought of himself as a kind of mentor teaching a
newcomer the tricks of the trade.
But as much as he liked working with Bill Walker, he knew the young man was
also dangerous to be around. He took too many unwarranted risks as far as Mike
was concerned. He got himself into scrapes that he'd have to fight himself out
of. But as the boss would often testify, it was all part of the job.
"So what's really going on?" Bill asked an hour later as he finished
picking the seeds out of his xisimo core. His elbows rested on the clear
surface of the table as he tossed slivers of the fruit cut by his laser knife
high into the air and caught them smoking between his teeth. This was one
reason the cafeteria staff insisted they sit in the corner, Mike thought.
"You're about to catch your tongue on fire."
"Only if I miss. C'mon Mike. I need a story. The well is dry, buddy. I'm
dying of thirst."
"So you want to steal mine?"
"I've shared with you," Bill acted hurt.
"Yeah, shared crap."
"C'mon Mike. Admit it. You need me."
"Like I need my penis to fall off," Mike agreed thoughtfully.
Bill ignored the comment, "Remember that time on Telmar? Who saved who?
Huh?" He pointed the blade of his weapon at Mike, "You owe me one."
Mike gulped down the last of his beer and hoped nobody was listening.
"Hell, you owe me two. Remember..."
"I wasn't aware we were counting. But now that we are, how many do you
think you owe me?"
Bill estimated a number in his head. Then finally gave in with a sheepish
look, "Okay, I'll drop it."
Mike spent most of the afternoon on the computer running searches on Clay
and beginning a journal for the story complete with facts, photos, and tapes
of conversations. Everyone else was minding their own business which was nice
for a change, though they didn't seem to have very much to do. Private reports
kept coming in, forwarded from Linden, on new melted pieces of metal being
found in Chuck's private residence and on his clothes. There was even one
under the seat he sat in during lunch. Such is the life of an editor, Mike
smiled.
He kept smiling until his searches started coming up negative. Clay seemed
to have disappeared over the past two days except for one use of his corporate
credit card at a shop in Aquapolis just that morning. He bought an expensive
tie.
Otherwise, zip. He hadn't signed any business or legal documents. He
wasn't at his office. He wasn't at his flat in Silver Tri. He hadn't been
using the subway. He hadn't so much as peed in an executive toilet. Dead end,
pure and simple. The only good thing Mike could tell was that he certainly
hadn't left the planet. That would have made things a little too complicated.
"I can tell you where Clay is." Mike turned with alarming speed, almost
giving himself the second near-whiplash of the week.
"You've got to break that habit, Mike. Seriously." It was Bill again.
"What the hell do you want, Walker?"
"I can tell you where Clay is." This time it registered. Mike opened his
eyes wide, then looked around to be sure nobody was listening.
"Where?"
"Snow Country. He's staying in a friend's cabin. Some sort of ski
vacation."
"What friend?" Mike nearly growled it.
"Some sort of business associate with the paper. I don't remember the name,
but I can find out."
"How do you know this?"
Bill shrugged, "If I told you... maybe it would rain for me." A smug grin
crossed his lips, but his eyes remained laser sharp, like the knife he carried
for "occupational emergencies".
"You want in on this one?" Mike hated to offer, but he had little choice.
"You don't have to let me in if you don't want to."
"In or out? I'm not saying please."
Bill considered it for all of two seconds, "Okay, I'm in."
The infrared goggles penetrated the icy pitch darkness, making the chimney
top of the well-insulated Solomon mansion seem like a beacon of light on an
otherwise frozen landscape. Mike bit his upper lip as he lay prone in the
snow, considering the fair possibility that Billy's grapevine might be wrong.
"Thank mama there's no wind," Bill whispered. Mike smiled at the phrase.
Clay would have thanked the lord; Mike might have thanked the night, but Bill
would thank his mama.
"Thank mama they've got a fire going," Mike countered. Bill quietly agreed.
The house might have been doubly invisible without it.
"So get goin'," Bill prodded.
Mike dropped the goggles and crawled over the hard slippery ice away from
his flycycle. He hoped the vehicle would carry three on the off chance they'd
find Niki inside.
As Mike quickly reviewed the plan in his head, he began to wonder if the
computer's information was up to date. It showed three entrances to the house;
a front, a garage, and a servant's entrance. In fact, it gave him the entire
floor plans including electrical access, water, and sewage piping which he and
Bill studied most of the evening. Being a reporter on Tizar accorded some
amazing privileges.
Mike reached the garage. The door had a hard polymer bolt fashioned to
undermine the courage of any would-be thieves. He couldn't see it, but he knew
a fancy security alarm would be hidden behind. All the locks would be like
this one if the computer told the truth. All would be difficult to saw. At
least here he wouldn't be heard.
The borrowed laser knife switched on silently. The little bit of light that
it shed was enough for Mike to see what he was doing, though he didn't need
the luxury. He knew exactly where to make the initial incision killing the
alarm as it were. The rest was grunt work as laser grinded against polymer.
Now, it was only a question of time.
Mr. John Clay relaxed in a cushioned rocking chair as he warmed his feet by
the fireplace. It was quaint but effective, he mused as he slowly rocked back
and forth, like fire itself. He glanced at the wooden chessboard where he had
defeated his host, Mr. Solomon; the two kings now stood alone face to face at
center board. Not very happy was he, Clay almost giggled. The corporation did
not encourage good losers. In that, he was somewhat of an outcast.
He knew he had failed, but at least he was finished. Now, he would soon
leave Tizar and return to the home of his childhood. He smiled faintly at the
thought.
Suddenly a noise thrust him to full consciousness. Someone was yelling and
slamming his fist against the front door.
"Who could it possibly be at such an ungodly hour?" Clay got to his feet,
hoping the sound hadn't awakened his host.
"I'll get it, sir." Marley, the night guard took only few seconds to appear
from the kitchen area. He seemed stiff and angry.
"Open up! Please hurry! Someone... Oh, thank goodness. You've got to help.
There's been a terrible accident. Do you have a videophone?!"
"Who are you?" The guard's face was stern as he looked over the young man.
His long stringy black hair was wet from the snowfall, and he held a heavy
steel flashlight in his right hand which he kept shining in the guard's eyes.
"Oh please! Let me in. It's a matter of life and death! I've got to use
your videophone. There's been a terrible accident..." The young man was
panting from exhaustion.
"Where?!"
"Out there," the young man, exasperated, waved his arm back into the
darkness.
Mike quickly cut through the lock at the back of the garage leading into
the storage hall. Hearing the commotion up front, he slipped into the hall and
ran to the kitchen area. The polymer bolt had taken more time than he
anticipated. He had to hurry. He reached the security office just a minute
behind schedule.
The office was full of little television screens, and there was a desk with
a control station. An eight-pack of fun-punch was set on the floor next to the
largest screen where the highlights of a tourist hunting safari were being
broadcast in via satellite from the far side of the planet by channel #117
sports. Mike scanned the other monitors and saw the recording light on one. He
grinned when he saw Bill's face, desperate, nearly frantic. Bill was always
good at diversions.
Mike took out the current disk being recorded and slipped it into his
pocket. He grabbed a blank from the desk and melted it down with the knife in
one swift stroke. Then, by flipping a few red switches, he disconnected the
batteries and shut off power to the entire mansion.
The guard turned around in surprise when the stairwell suddenly darkened.
He didn't have time to feel the blow to the back of his skull. He was already
unconscious.
Mike raced into the room. The fire and the knife blade were the only
sources of light in the entire house. Clay stood motionless, hoping he
wouldn't be noticed.
"Morning, Mr. Clay."
"Good morning, Michael. You wanted to see me?"
"Well, yes, sir. I was hoping to talk to you about how irresponsible the
press has been acting lately. It's a damn disgrace."
Bill walked in, now competing for stage presence. "To think a few reporters
could spoil a whole code of ethics through some gross dereliction of duty." He
was shaking his head sadly, and he homed in on Clay.
Mike continued, "Overzealous is perhaps more the word. Derelict implies
neglect. What do you think, Mr. Boardmember?" Mike held the blade to Clay's
throat, igniting the bare traces of aftershave near his chin.
"What do you want?"
"Niki. You. Robin. Not necessarily in that order."
"Your research assistant is upstairs in the south guest room. You can go
get her." Clay's breath was heavy with fear.
"Lend me the flashlight, Billy."
"It broke."
Mike pivoted his glance, "You hit with the back."
"I know. I forgot."
Clay strained a smile, "If you two professionals don't mind being
interrupted, I happened to notice that the guard was carrying..."
"Sit down and shut-up."
"Merely trying to be helpful." He sat back down in the rocking chair.
Mike stripped the flashlight off the guard's belt and picked up an
automatic pistol and a pair of handcuffs to boot. He gave the knife to Bill
and wrapped Clay's arms around the back of the chair, securing them with the
handcuffs before he headed upstairs. Slowly, carefully, he measured each step
as he neared the top of the plush stairwell searching for the barest reason to
shoot someone. The south guest room was just down the hall. He found the door
unlocked. Niki was inside, on the bed, heavily sedated. Mike picked her up
gently, very much relieved to find her unharmed. Content with his prize, he
climbed back down the stairs.
"Okay sport, where's Robin." Mike set Niki's limp body on the floor by the
guard.
"Asleep, upstairs."
Bill rocked the chair roughly at the answer. "I wasn't aware androids
slept."
"She likes to pretend."
"So she's heard everything."
Clay offered a smile, "No, she shuts her senses down, except for touch."
Suddenly, the stairwell light came back on. Mike whirled around to face the
kitchen. He lifted the gun half expecting to see Robin running in to save her
master. Clay had, of course, lied. Mike inwardly debated blowing the old man
away right there. He could almost see the image of blood cascading through the
air as the chair would rock backward plunging its occupant into the fireplace.
Mike nearly smiled at the thought.
"Mike..."
"I know. Get Niki and get out of here." He tossed Bill the flashlight.
"What about you?!"
"I'll think of something. Go!"
Bill didn't argue. He dragged Niki out the front door as fast as his feet
would carry him, leaving Mike with Clay to wonder how many bullets it would
take shatter the circuits of a pissed off android.
"She's very cunning, Mr. Harrison. You'd best be careful." Clay seemed
amused. He's trying to distract me, Mike thought.
Ignoring Clay, Mike slinked quietly toward the kitchen entrance, wondering
with each ill-fated step how good the android's hearing was. Exceptional, he
supposed. The designers could make her as well as they wanted. He tried to
make his breathing silent, but he only succeeded in noticing every small sound
he made whether it was a footstep, a breath, or even a heartbeat.
Suddenly, the door swung open. Miraculously, he squeezed off a shot in
time. Her head snapped back from the impact, but it didn't stop her. She
struck him with phenomenal force, and Mike felt as if his entire chest were
caving in. In another moment, her hand darted up. That was all he remembered.
It was a little like watching the stars fall. The cold coastal breeze
gripping and then letting go, the tan sands which seemed rather darker than
tan, and that distant disoriented feeling would combine on rare occasion when
the stars fell from the sky.
Mike saw the stars falling clearly enough. He could feel the chill. But it
was the disorientation that stole the show. He made numerous attempts at
standing, but he never quite managed it. The ground seemed to rock like a
see-saw back and forth as he lay down, and whenever he tried to get on his
feet, he'd upset the balance and the entire room would turn upside-down and
send him crashing to the ceiling and after a moment back to the floor again.
He heard voices far away almost shouting. They seemed to be very angry
voices, but he couldn't understand the words. Suddenly he knew the language
was foreign. Then he heard a girl giggling, but he couldn't place the laugh.
It was a sweet innocent laughter which reminded him of the birds singing at
Greenflower. But it was very near. Mike thought he could touch it if he
reached out his arm just far enough, but suddenly it ceased. He knew she was
close. His hand searched for her, but she wouldn't be found. He crawled toward
her for a few feet, and then slumped down in despair.
He was too tired and she was too far away. Instead, he listened carefully
for her laughter. But she was gone.
* * *
The nose of the kayak climbed quickly over the tall wave, slicing the crest
in half before plunging back down to meet the next. Its occupant paddled
furiously against the wind, straining frantically to beat the next rise before
the sea engulfed her vessel. Her long slender arms gleamed in the morning
sunlight, their dark, Draconian tones accented by a rich, brazen glow. A
sudden gust of air almost capsized the boat spraying a salty white foam
against her long, black windswept hair. She breathed deeply in exhilaration
and struggled to keep the kayak upright. Out in the open sea, several
kilometers from any land, she was beginning to lose her personal battle of
wills against the elements.
She noticed the brilliant silver frame of the hydrofoil from the corner of
her eye as it approached. The craft sped over the water in front of her, only
its three skinny legs touching the water. They barely seemed to connect at
all. Agyris poked his dark smiling face out the window as the pilot crossed
her path.
"Had enough yet?!!" he shouted.
She turned her watch transmitter back on, knowing her weak voice wouldn't
carry as far as his.
"Almost, give me another cent."
Her aide's voice broke over the transmitter, "Old Johnny's on the Coral. It
looks like a situation has developed. It's urgent."
She cursed under her breath. "Okay. Bring the Coral in to get me." The next
wave nearly rolled her over, and she turned the kayak around so that she
wouldn't have to fight the wind or tide.
Agyris' hand flapped out the window as the hydrofoil sped away. She heard
his voice over the transmitter, "Ambassador Uhambra is ready now. Coral steer
fifteen degrees starboard and proceed at fifty knots. Pick-up at six-hundred
and forty approximate. Over."
She leaned back letting the kayak drift with the tide while avoiding the
brunt of the cold wind at her back. The sky was a pale blue without a cloud
anywhere in sight. On the eastern horizon, Tizar's brilliant tangerine sun
seemed to shimmer through the wide expanse of atmosphere. She saw purple-brown
dots when she blinked and decided to refocus elsewhere.
"Ahoy there!" The first mate was waving from the deck. He wore a striped
blue and white shirt with a sunny face. He tossed a hook, and smiled down at
her as if expecting some reward. She hooked her kayak and climbed aboard, as
he manually wheeled in the small craft.
"Where's mister problem?" she absentmindedly inquired, reaching for a
towel. The first mate smiled through the pained and exhausted look he liked so
much to wear in the company of superiors. She guessed it was his idea of
looking busy.
"O'er there, ambassador." He nodded his head toward the cabin as he
wrestled with the wheel.
"Don't strain yourself." She wrapped the white towel around her tall
slender frame. It was a sharp contrast to her black swimsuit and dark,
suntanned skin.
John Clay opened the cabin door and walked out onto the deck. Bags drooped
under his usually alert, crystal-blue eyes. He wore a white business suit. She
remembered he had a number of them along with a collection of expensive ties.
It was considered ancient custom with the corporation; but on Tizar, it was
contemporary fashion.
She stared at him silently with her dark brown eyes. She would let him
confess incompetence and beg for another chance before patting him
unforgivingly on the head and sending him home. As usual, he waited for the
first mate to leave the deck before beginning his report.
"Ambassador, it is good to see you vibrant and alive and as young as ever."
She sensed the vague tone of disrespect, the way he said young. Was he
envious?
"I'm older than you, Johnny."
"Yes, the miracle of anagathics. It never ceases to amaze me. So lucky it
was for you that you became a diplomat and not a sleeper."
She bit her lip in aggravation. "Not luck. What brings you here this time?"
"I have bad news to report."
"Again?"
"The Solomon residence was broken into early this morning by that reporter.
We captured him, but his accomplice escaped with the Siri. Together, they
have enough evidence to support..."
"Let me guess... a police investigation."
"Or worse still, a full divisional security review. And that's far more
likely." Clay's hands were wrung together, his knuckles white from lack of
circulation.
He continued, "This could all have been avoided if we had simply killed
Harrison and his Psyche as I advised..."
"How did they learn of your whereabouts?" She ignored Clay's complaint.
They both knew it had holes.
"We're checking into that now."
"Did you redirect all your people to new controls?"
He nodded, "Yes, but..."
"Well, that's all that really matters then. After you leave, they can
investigate all they want, it won't do them a bit of good. Do you have a list
of your redirections?" He handed her the envelope.
"What was you're method of communication?"
"Non-electronic, of course."
"That leaves quite a lot of room."
"Sealed paper envelope. Like this one but with coded orders."
"In person?"
He hesitated, "Yes. It was safer and fairly quick. And I used private
transport."
"Where?"
"Where what?"
She bit her lip again, "Where was contact made?"
"A few at their residences. They spread the word, and the rest came to
receive orders at Solomon's..."
"Right in the middle of Snow Country?"
"It's fairly out of the way."
"What about the security disk for that day?"
"It was destroyed by Harrison. He had to protect his accomplice."
"You're sure? We can't have that thing floating around."
"Would you like to see its remains?"
"Not particularly." She wondered if he was trying to be funny. "When you
leave tonight, take Solomon with you."
"Of course."
She smiled for the first time since seeing him. "Is that all then?"
"Not quite. I'd like to know what we're supposed to do with Harrison."
"Have you interrogated him?"
"Not yet."
"Wake him and do it. Report back if he has anything interesting on his
mind."
"If not, can I kill him?"
She laughed, "Would it give you great pleasure?"
"On the contrary. I'd like to keep him alive for torture. He's only ruined
everything."
"All right. You can do with him whatever your little heart desires. I
emphasize little heart, because I know you very well. That's if and only if
he refuses to cooperate. However, if he has something interesting to offer,
see if there's a way to avoid murder. He's quite possibly the top gatherer on
Tizar, maybe even in the entire sector. There will be a storm in the press if
he just disappears. See if there isn't a way we can use him to our advantage.
He must have some sort of connections. And find out how much he knows. It'll
give us a good idea where we stand."
Clay nodded, trying consciously to make a mental note of every order. He
knew he wouldn't try hard to make Harrison talk. It would be fun getting rid
of him.
Mike awakened slowly, his body stretched like a slab of meat along a
tightly strewn grav-field, its invisible coils suspending him horizontally,
tugging his arms and legs in separate directions. He glanced about the large,
dimly lit room, its sharp, jutting contours and lack of furnishing serving a
dull reminder of his helpless position. A large window along the far wall
overlooked a blue-green seascape, gaeyave and shallowfish swimming slowly past
the plastic brace, while another creature with long clear tentacles attached
itself to the smooth surface. Mike peered between its suctioning arms
wondering if he was dreaming. He could barely make out the blurry lights of
Aquapolis in the far distance.
Robin leaned with her back against the glass and watched Mike while the
drugs slowly lost their grip. As his eyes focused on her dark outline they
seemed to close on the neat puncture wound in the center of her forehead. His
legs began kicking in a pathetic sort of dance as he tried to physically
squirm out of the gravity cell.
"We had to put you in there. You kept on hurting yourself." She approached
him cautiously.
"You didn't have to dope me up. How long has it been?"
"Not long."
Mike stopped fighting the field. He tried to relax and think of a way out,
but he was out of ideas.
He looked her over. Robin wore a pair of blue coveralls. A headband hung
limply from her front pocket.
"Sorry about shooting you." He tried to make it sound genuine.
"Quite all right, Mr. Harrison. I understand your motives."
He wondered how much an android could understand.
"Besides," she continued, "it was about the best place you could have
aimed."
"No brains, huh."
She patted her chest.
"Well, it doesn't look good."
She seemed to laugh inwardly as Mr. Clay glibly strolled in, "No, but it
will heal." He looked very self-assured, even a little cocky. "Robin is very
hard-headed, Michael. May I call you Michael? The bullet you fired simply
bounced off. The skin which was torn is constructed with a biochemical agent
not unlike that found in mendwear. Bed off."
The grav-field slowly rotated Mike into a standing position. He looked at
Robin. She smiled as if on display.
"Why are you telling me this?" Mike tried not to sound too irritated.
Clay pondered the question for a moment, his thin, white brows furrowed in
self-restraint. "Because I like you..." he managed with a sarcastic twist to
his voice.
Mike let a smile creep across him face before plunging, arms outstretched.
He felt his body sheathed in fire, burning alive even as he brushed by the old
man and hit the floor, his inflamed arms crackling and spitting like dry
driftwood over an open barbecue.
"What you are now experiencing, Michael... is our cooperation inducing
system. It consists of a series of electrical implants in your brain... which
are capable of constructing a wide array of phantom sensations... when
properly instructed." His booming voice slowly slipped to its usual volume as
the flaring pain evaporated.
Mike felt his head, naked flesh and electrodes.
"You bastard."
Clay smiled at the remark.
"Why the hell are you doing this?"
"I'd like to get to know you... get to know your work?"
"Why should I tell you jack-sh..." Mike hit the floor as the electricity
scathed through his mind, his head throbbing in illusory explosion.
"I believe you will find our methods quite convincing."
Mike tried to talk, but the pain forced his mouth shut, his neck curling
backward in agony. Gasping for breath, he refocused his eyes. Robin stood
over him, her foot resting softly on his chest.
"I don't know... you want..."
"Now we're getting somewhere aren't we..."
Robin blurred into the ceiling, its dark surface pressing on him, pushing
him deeper into the floor.
"We want to know... how we can help... do we?"
"Ye..."
"What's that, Michael?"
"Yes..."
The pain faded slowly, the pressure falling away like storm clouds over the
coast, raining then leaving in gentle succession. Clay regarded the young man
with antipathy, the body tangled in grotesque torment, and without a single
scratch. He much preferred real torture, the sort that you could see and have
respect for; but that could wait for later.
Robin picked Mike's head off the floor and let it drop. "He's unconscious.
Automatic depressants registering in the forward cranium."
"That's no fun... let us wake him."
"Are you sure?"
"Do it."
Dark brown eyes burst open as the chemicals neutralized in wave after wave
of mind splitting torment. Clay's smiling face loomed above like a bobbing
floater.
"Tizar to Michael... are you still with us? I hope that was as good for you
as it was for me, Michael. Because, to be absolutely honest, it doesn't get
much better; but we will try, won't we." He winked toward the silhouette
sitting quietly against the window.
"Go ahead..."
"What's that, Michael? Are you actually cognizant? Have you a thought to
share?"
Mike felt Clay's glaring eyes upon his face even as he closed his own.
"...before it dies of loneliness? Go ahead... what?"
"Kill me..."
A long silence passed before Mike opened his eyes. Clay looked astonished
and insulted.
"Kill you??? Why in heaven's name should I do a nasty thing like that? I
want to be your friend. We are friends... aren't we, Michael?"
"What the hell do you want from me?"
"You mustn't be difficult, Michael... it's a naughty thing."
Burning sensations tore through Mike's body for a fraction of a second as
he turned to look again at Robin.
"She controls it, Michael... she could kill you on a whim... except, of
course, for the obvious fact that androids don't have whims. Lucky for you...
isn't it?"
Mike griped bare floor as the pain coursed through his veins. He twisted
about, vulnerably, clawing toward her with floundering motions.
"But since you've been such a good sport, we're going to keep you company
for a while longer. Are you feeling cooperative yet?"
"Tell me what you want."
Clay acquiesced, "Very well, let us start at the common ground, just to see
what we both know. Tell me who killed our esteemed friend, Mr. John Doe number
seventeen."
Mike stopped and thought as the pain released its hold.
"Who... Fork? You want to know who killed Fork?"
"I believe I have made myself abundantly lucid, Michael. You were aware of
them. We know you visited the pit."
Clay first heard a chuckle, then a snort, then a laugh, then a sound he
couldn't place in any interrogation he had ever participated in or heard of.
He looked down at the billowing figure in amazement and then back toward
Robin.
"What are you doing?"
She nodded her head, nothing.
"Michael, either we've pushed you completely over the edge, or..."
"Fork isn't dead." Mike tumbled himself into a sitting position, holding
his side with one hand and wiping away tears with the other.
"You are insane."
Mike beamed up, the laughter leaving him as the memory of pain crept back
into his mind.
"You don't believe me, Clay... flush me out the torpedo tubes."
The old man smiled at the suggestion.
Clay wasn't convinced, "If he's alive, then where is he?"
Mike rubbed the metal connections on his head.
"Where is he!?!"
The dim flicker of pain approached his senses and veered away as he
steadied his gaze on the dark outline against the wall.
"I'll do it, Michael."
The moment hung open like a sputtering ocean swell refusing to die.
"In transit to Calanna."
"And how do you know this to be true?"
"A little birdie told me. Look, Mr. Clay, I'm a gatherer. I've got ways of
finding things out."
"Connections?" Clay seemed intrigued; whether out of playfulness of genuine
belief, Mike couldn't tell.
"That, investigation, and sometimes just a little intuitive reasoning."
"What did your little break-in this morning constitute. Investigation or
intuitive reasoning?"
Robin told the truth; he hadn't been out very long. Mike wondered how far
it was to the surface.
"Mr. Harrison," Clay skipped to the surname as if he were beginning a long
lecture, "It seems as if we have fallen into a double-checkmate. Do you play
chess?"
"On occasion."
"Double-checkmate is the game's one fault; it is shall we say, the
impossible outcome. Yet, in reality, it is all too common. Rarely, instead of
there being a winner and a loser, both parties lose."
"There's always stalemate..." Mike involuntarily slid backward an inch as
Clay glared at the interruption.
"Not the same, Mr. Harrison. One is more a tie than the other."
"I see."
"We have forced each other into unacceptable losses, and foolishly. We are
not enemies. If anything, we both want to see this Mr. Fork as you call him
returned to Tizar, alive and well."
"Then why did you kidnap Niki?"
"You were interfering with my work. You were investigating me. And
furthermore, you were drawing attention to Mr. Fork. I am convinced that if he
were not the subject of your obtuse scrutinies, Imperial attentions would
never have been attracted."
"ISIS."
Clay smiled and folded his hands over his belt.
"What part in this do you play, Mr. Clay?"
The old man's skin tightened involuntarily, "Again you probe me, Michael."
Mike looked at Robin. Her outline seemed to shimmer against the dim, blue
light of the seascape.
"Fine. I'll forget you. I'll forget I ever met you. But just what are you
proposing?"
"That you go to Calanna in search of this Mr. Fork. I would like you to
find him and bring him back here to Tizar."
"And what will you do? Linden already knows that you planted those bugs."
"What I will do is unimportant."
Mike smiled in disbelief, "I know Chuck. He doesn't take security lightly.
I really doubt that he'd just put this to rest."
"He has no choice. You have no choice. Or would you rather be fed to the
fish?"
"Look, I'm just saying..."
"Mr. Harrison, you are not in a position to debate me. Will you do as I
bid? A simple yes or no will suffice."
Mike considered it, even though he knew Clay was right. He had no choice.
They had no choice. That was the beauty of double-checkmate, or mutual assured
destruction as most folks called it. It was a lesson history had invariably
taught every culture. And in each culture it had a different name.
"Okay. I guess you've got me. I'll convince Chuck to stay cool, and I'll go
to Calanna." He didn't mention that the latter was already decided.
"And you'll take Robin."
"And I'll... now hold it just a minute." Mike raised his hands in protest.
"And you'll take Robin." Clay held all the cards, and he knew it. Mike
realized it was pointless to debate.
"Fine. I'll take her."
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim is a full-time MBA student at UC Riverside. He recently founded the UCR
Gamers' Guild and co-edited the first issue of its quarterly journal,
_The_Guildsman_. These chapters are the first of several he began during the
middle 80's as a prose exercise in description of his Traveller (SF-RPG)
setting. He says he writes exactly the same way he gamemasters: without any
semblance of plan or preconception.
What has been published here as `Chapter Three' is actually chapters four and
five as written originally by Jim. `The Harrison Chapters' will be continued
next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
HIGH SEDUCTION -- A DIALOGUE
Demoness --
Child of the moonlight, why do you sing so
Harshly? Why play so base a lute? In truth
You play so beautifully that one forgets
The instrument's nature; yet perhaps you
Would like to play my golden dulcimer?
I should lend it for so small a token
As a kiss --
Why do you flee so? I mean
You no distress. Am I, then, so ghastly?
Do you not find me attractive? Raphael,
I long to feel your legs upon my own.
Archangel --
My song makes bitter refuge
In this, the house of fallen
Stars and swollen leprous gods.
The very air is pungent
With tawny smells.
Ah, Lilith!
Your breath is sweet as sunset.
Let me welcome your embrace --
Your golden pipe shall replace
My ruined voice; my tender
Throat aches so! Yet your forked
Tongue heals all men's wounds, my love.
Bill Racicot
wr0o+@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
The Big Joke
by Robert Hurvitz
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
I woke up in a strange bed, in a strange house, in a stranger's body. All
I knew was that I was lying naked on a firm mattress with light blue sheets.
The walls of the bedroom were painted white, and the rug was a pleasant beige.
Various pieces of furniture lay in strategic locations. There was no sound in
the room; I couldn't even hear my own breathing.
I pushed the sheets back, looked at myself, and frowned. This body needs a
tan and a lot of exercise, I thought. Good thing it doesn't look familiar.
But then, what would look familiar? After a moment, I realized that I didn't
know.
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of my forehead, and I cried out when
it managed to find its way into my ear, causing my body to shiver and my hand
to dart up and hastily try to rub the droplet out. I hate when that happens,
I thought. I must make it a point not to sweat. Reaching up, I wiped my brow
with the back of my hand.
After taking a deep breath, I swung my legs out of bed and sat up, then
surveyed the room again. There were some posters on the walls: Escher
drawings, Dali prints, and a large photo of a sleek, black computer. I stared
intently at each one, but nothing would come to mind about what they meant to
me or even how they came to be on the walls. What does all of this mean? I
thought. I didn't know.
On the nightstand was a white push button telephone. Maybe I can call
someone, I thought, someone who can help me. But...who? I nervously ran a
hand through my hair. I didn't know, and I wanted to scream.
On impulse, I reached out and snatched up the receiver, dialing 911 with my
other hand.
It rang twice before someone answered.
"911," greeted someone. I couldn't tell if the person was a man or a
woman.
"Hello," I said quickly. "I..." I didn't know what to say.
"Is something wrong?" the voice asked seriously.
"I..."
"Are you all right?"
"I...I don't know. I think I'm all right." My mind did somersaults. "I
just woke up---"
"And you don't know...?" the voice finished for me.
"Yes. Yes, that's it exactly."
"So you called 911, first thing?"
"Yes. I didn't know what else to do."
Sudden peals of laughter burst forth from the receiver, and I instinctively
jerked it away from my ear.
"You don't know, and so you called 911!" exclaimed the owner of the voice.
Another laughing fit followed.
I sat there on the edge of the bed, naked and frozen in horror. The
laughter from the phone echoed menacingly about the bedroom, assaulting my
ears from all directions. I had a death grip on the receiver, and I thought I
could hear the plastic begin to crack. "I don't understand why this is so
funny!" I yelled out.
The someone only laughed louder.
And then, with a click, there was abrupt silence.
I remained where I was, stunned, until the dial tone sounded, snapping me
out of my fear-induced trance. I glanced around apprehensively, saw that I
was still holding the receiver, and gingerly placed it back on the cradle.
The laughter still reverberated within the walls of my mind.
Maybe, I thought, maybe this is all a nightmare. Maybe I'll wake up, and
everything will be normal again. I paused. Again? I thought. `What if this
IS normal? What if I'm just out of my damned mind?!'
I stared once more at the walls. Escher, Dali, and computer posters?
Surely the mark of a lunatic, I concluded. Yes, the three-sided house with
the people walking in different reference frames: that must represent my
topsy-turvy world. The hands drawing themselves...Hmm, I'll have to think
about that one. "The Persistence of Memory": a dash of irony, obviously.
"Burning Giraffes and Telephones": a firm reminder of my insanity, no doubt.
And the computer poster? Perhaps that has something to do with a job I had
before I went nutso.
I gazed at the phone and shuddered. But, I thought, that telephone
conversation was definitely real. That person obviously knew something. But
why didn't he/she/it help me? Maybe, I thought, maybe this is all a
conspiracy, a huge plot to make me think I'm crazy!
I frowned. No, I thought, that IDEA is just plain crazy.
So what do I do?
I stretched out on the bed, rubbing my eyes and mulling over everything I
knew.
Well, I concluded, the first thing I can do is get dressed. Then I should
get something to eat. And then...? Well, I'll burn that bridge when I get
to it.
Determined, I stood up, rooted through the dresser and closet, and picked
out some clothes. Then I searched for the bathroom, found it. Finally, I
tracked down the kitchen and made myself a hearty breakfast of French toast,
scrambled eggs, and a big cup of orange juice.
It hit me while I was swallowing a mouthful of French toast. All of the
clothes in the closet, I realized, were of styles I liked, and the garments I
picked out had fit me perfectly! Also, the kitchen is chock full of my
favorite foods! Therefore, I concluded, this body must live in this house,
and so must I. Hence, this body must indeed be mine. Q.E.D. Now I'm getting
somewhere. But, I asked myself, to where am I getting? I forked up some eggs
and chewed them thoughtfully. I didn't know.
My stomach finally full, I drained the last of the juice from my glass and
thought, Now I'm ready. I leaned back in my chair and considered my options.
I didn't have many. I could call 911 again, but that would probably result in
further ridicule. I could call the operator, but how would that help me? I
could sit around this house all day and hope I get better, but that would be
boring. I could go outside, take a walk...Hmm, that idea seems pretty
inviting, actually. The fresh air would do me good, and I might even run into
someone who knows me. Yes, I think I'll go for a nice, long walk.
I dropped the dirty dishes in the sink, headed for the front door, opened
it, and stepped outside. It was a fine day for a walk: the sun was out, no
clouds were to be seen, and birds were chirping merrily. Before I closed the
door behind me, I made sure the keys I had found on the nightstand fit the
locks. Then, my confidence growing, I firmly shut the door and locked it.
I walked to the sidewalk and, on a whim, turned right and headed down the
street. The other houses were not especially large, but they looked pleasant
enough and had well-tended front lawns.
No one else was outside, but that was perfectly understandable; my digital
watch claimed that it was Thursday, 10:30 a.m. So everyone should be at work
or at school, I rationalized.
I kept walking, breathing deep and appreciating the large oak trees that
lined the street. Four blocks later I came to a park. I eagerly scanned the
grassy area and saw several people. Some were sitting on benches, others were
lying on the grass; some were reading books, others were merely soaking up the
sun. I briskly walked towards the nearest of them, a blond young man wearing
shorts and a t-shirt.
As I neared, he glanced up from his book, tilted his head, and smiled.
I stopped in my tracks. Why is he smiling at me? I thought furiously.
Does he know me? What should I do? Should I play along? Yes, that would
probably be best.
I smiled back.
He nodded approvingly and went back to his book.
Aha! Victory! I took a few more steps in his direction. "Nice day, isn't
it?" I said conversationally. I could now see that he was reading a physics
textbook. He's probably a college student, I surmised.
He looked back at me. "Yes," he replied. He lifted up his textbook and
added, "I can never study indoors on a day like this. It seems like such a
waste, you know?"
"Ah, yes. Definitely." I then cleared my throat, glanced at the sky, and
asked as nonchalantly as possible, "Do you know me, by any chance?"
He pursed his lips and then said, "Sorry, no." He shrugged and returned to
his textbook. Just before I was about to walk away and approach someone else,
his eyes shot open and he jerked his head back up. "No way!" he called out
jubilantly.
At the sound of his outburst, the other people in the park turned their
attention towards us, and I cautiously stepped back.
"You don't know, do you?" the college student asked incredulously.
"Uh, well..." I said lamely.
"You don't know!" he shouted gleefully. He jumped to his feet and pointed
at me. "You don't know!"
I grabbed my hair. "What don't I know, damn it?! What!"
He roared with laughter. All the other park patrons had rushed up and were
now staring at me, pointing at me. "You don't know!" they yelled, laughing.
"You don't know!"
"Why is this so funny?!" I pleaded. "Why won't you tell me?!"
My words only served to fuel their laughter.
Hot tears ran down my cheeks, and I clutched myself. "Why won't you tell
me?" I wailed.
"You don't know!" they replied. Many of them were now crying, too, but for
vastly different reasons. Several were even on the ground, they were laughing
so hard.
I turned and ran blindly because of the tears obscuring my vision. I cried
out in agony several times.
The laughter quickly faded; they were too busy expressing their mirth to
follow.
I ran on regardless. Houses blurred past me, and I seemed to cover more
and more ground with each stride. Soon, buildings sprang up and rushed by,
blocking out most of the sky with their height.
And I ran on regardless.
My mind was racing just as fast. That proves it! I thought. This whole
nightmare has to be a conspiracy to drive me mad! Everyone's against me! But
why, damn it? It doesn't make any sense. Perhaps that's the whole point: I
wouldn't understand. Perhaps... Perhaps... My mind reeled as it suddenly
hit a brick wall. I didn't know! I needed answers, damn it, ANSWERS!
After what seemed like an eternity, I slowed down and collapsed from
fatigue. No matter how hard I tried, I could not get any part of my body to
move. Just as well, I thought. I closed my eyes and fell to sleep instantly.
Nightmares plagued my rest. The whole world was gathered around me,
pointing and laughing. Nobody would tell my why, no matter how nicely I
asked. Soon, the laughing became so loud and so out of control, that it hit
the resonant frequency of the Earth, and the planet exploded, killing everyone
except me. I floated in space, and the universe began laughing at me.
I awoke with a scream and jumped to my feet, crouching and glancing around
warily. My whole body was sore, but I could move if I didn't mind pain. I
was in a dingy neighborhood; trash was piled on the sidewalk, and dreary
tenement buildings reaching to infinity lined the street.
A bag lady shuffled around the corner, stopping when she caught sight of
me.
"Excuse me," I called out. "Do you know?"
She squinted at me. "Yes," she responded in a raspy voice. "Don't you?"
"Oh, of course," I lied. "Doesn't everybody?"
She drummed her fingers on her leg and shambled closer to me. "Sure," she
said. "Everyone knows. Isn't that right?"
Panic was starting to build up inside, but I stayed where I was. I can
easily outrun her, I reasoned. "Right. And it sure is funny what we all
know, isn't it?"
"Yup. Sure is." She came to within five feet of me, then stuck her neck
out to peer more closely.
A bead of sweat trickled down my nose, hung at the tip for a moment, then
fell to the cement where it made a small, wet mark. I bit my lip, hoping that
she hadn't seen that dead giveaway.
"Aha!" she cried. "I knew it! You don't know, do you?" She cackled
loudly and slapped her knee. "You don't know!"
I was about to reach out and strangle her when I heard cacophonous
screechings from above, as if God were scratching His fingernails on the sky.
I looked up, and, to my horror, all the tenement windows were opening. The
bag lady cackled even louder as all the residents in the buildings poked their
heads out, spotted me, and began their ridicule.
"You don't know!" they yelled. Their shouts rang out asynchronously and
bounced around me, making me feel as if I were in a crazy echo chamber. Then
the laughter crashed through, rolling up and down the buildings and sprinkled
with continued exclamations of "You don't know!"
Through the mind-shattering din, it seemed to me that the walls of the
buildings were starting to shake. My God! I thought, terrified. They've hit
the resonant frequency!
I forced myself to sprint down the street, even though my muscles protested
vehemently. I must get far enough away, I thought frantically, or else I'll
be buried by the rubble!
I ran for several blocks and eventually came upon another park. I headed
into it and collapsed at the base of a particularly sturdy-looking tree. It
took me many minutes to regain my breath, but when I did, I rolled over and
looked back down the street. The tenement buildings were still standing. And
I could still hear their laughter, though it was fading fast.
The buildings didn't fall, I marvelled. What does this mean? I shook my
head. I didn't know.
Exhaustion hit me like a ton of bricks. I laughed softly at the analogy
and crawled off into some nearby bushes to sleep.
Sunlight shining in my eyes woke me from my pleasant slumber. I blinked
and wondered, Why am I lying in a bed of shrubbery? Was I mugged? I thought
in alarm. I sat up straight and looked around. The sun was low on the
horizon, and it was uncommonly cold. I glanced at my watch, and it claimed
that the time was 5:56 a.m. and that today was now Friday.
It was a new day, and...and I knew! Yes, I knew everything! I stood up
and basked in the sunlight, thinking about the previous day's events. Soon I
was chuckling, then guffawing, and finally I was rolling on the grass laughing
uncontrollably.
Many minutes later, I sat up, rubbing the tears from my face and giggling
weakly. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head.
The bag lady was tramping slowly towards me, a smile on her old and wrinkled
face.
I smiled back and called out, "I know."
She nodded her head and sat down a few feet from me. "Wonderful, wasn't
it?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "Definitely."
"Many years ago, when I was young---younger than you, even---I also had the
good fortune to not know. I'll never forget that day."
I nodded. "Yes, I'll treasure mine for the rest of my life."
The bag lady squinted at the rising sun. "Do you think," she asked after a
long moment, "that I'll ever not know again?"
I thought over her question for a time and finally replied, "I don't know."
______________________________________________________________________________
Robert Hurvitz is a computer science major at UC Berkeley who would rather be
a writer, but doesn't want to starve. "The Big Joke" came to be from
listening to too much Oingo Boingo and from too little sleep. This is his
first story to get published, and he hopes that it won't be the last. When
he's not doing anything else, Robert buys compact discs, skis, and hangs out
in cafes. He just recently turned 21 and, as a result, feels much more
mature.
hurvitz@cory.berkeley.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Endurance Racer
Phillip Nolte
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
The Marathon was one of the most popular events in Human space and the
uncounted masses were hungry for anything involving it. They satiated this
hunger by spending their hard-earned credits. They spent them on all sorts of
junk: clothing and games, trinkets and baubles and who knows what else! If it
said "marathon" on it they bought it, avidly. There were also those who took
the obsession to more bizarre lengths. Like Morris Quimby, for instance. For
part of each day, Quimby was one of several hundred accountants employed by
the huge Federated Metals consortium. At home, after work, deep in the
overpopulated rabbit warren that had been carved out of the interior of Ceres,
he was a Marathon fanatic. For a few hours, each day he could forget about
his mundane job and his shrewish wife and his four squalling children. For a
few hours he was master of his own universe as he gloried in the power of his
statistical games. He would compile detailed and arcane statistics about past
and present marathons. Statistics that had meaning only to him. It was a
harmless enough occupation, especially since it had probably kept him from
going mad. For the time being, it kept him happy. How could he have known
what incredible fame and fortune his oddball hobby would bring him?
In a Galaxy teeming with humans who were ruled by a government that was
powerful, corrupt and immovable, the great race was a welcome diversion. The
Marathon was held every four years against the backdrop of the asteroid belt
in the Sol system, the birthplace of Man before he spread out to populate the
galaxy. The sprawling, rocky disc of the belt contains an uncounted number of
asteroids ranging from sizeable planetoids, like Ceres, down to specks no
bigger than grains of sand and dust motes. In spite of this, the belt is
mostly empty space. But there are areas where matter is fairly concentrated,
where huge clusters of variously sized lumps of rock are locked on a perpetual
cosmic carousel by their mutual gravitational attractions. A tortuous route
was mapped out over a 10,000 kilometer course that made the tiny spaceships of
the racers wind their way over, under and around the countless planetoids and
boulders that made up one of the larger concentrations of matter in the belt.
The race was not, as some thought, from Ceres to Pallas. Instead, the name
referred to the dual sponsorship of the event by the businesses of the two
asteroids.
Imagine an equilateral triangle whose half-kilometer sides are made up of
bright bars of neon-green light. Each of the thousands of gates that marked
out the course was just such a triangle. Successful negotiation of a gate
meant that the contestant's ship passed through somewhere within the triangle.
Missing a gate meant disqualification. Between gates the contestants could
take any path that they wished. Time could be gained by skimming as closely
as possible to the asteroid obstacles in search of the line that placed the
spacecraft in the best position for the next maneuver. It was here that the
skill and daring of the top racers set them apart from the rest. Invariably
several racers were killed and others seriously injured when they tried to
gain those precious extra tenths of a second and found that they had used up
their narrow margin of safety. The line between superior speed and instant
disaster was a razor's edge, ever waiting to nick the unwary.
The Asteroid Marathon, as it was sometimes called, was contested in special
one-man space vehicles. Main thrust was provided by a conventional,
ultra-high efficiency, electric ion-grid drive. What made them special was
that the source of electricity was a man-powered generator.
Essentially, they were pedal-powered spacecraft.
The next running of the great event was only a week away and the handicappers
agreed that the contest was down to about twenty-five people out of some
two-thousand qualifiers who had a shot at upsetting the champion. The
champion was good---the odds were still heavily in his favor.
"What'cha thinking, Yuri?"
Yuri Ramosian, the reigning Marathon champion, shook his head as he looked
around the prep room at the other contestants, appraising the competition.
"I don't know, A.J...." said Yuri, "some of these guys look pretty tough!"
"Tough" might have been an understatement. Most of the others were young
men, in their physical prime, lean to the point of gauntness, their bodies
ropily muscular. Scattered through the group also was a handful of young
women. Yuri's gaze came to rest on one in particular.
"That's Chen-Lee, right A.J.? The one we were briefed about?"
The young lady in question was, like the rest of the competition, in top
physical condition. Her small bosom was mashed almost flat by the skin-tight
fabric of her gaily-colored racing suit and she had the narrow, boyish hips
characteristic of top female athletes. Below, the large, powerful, almost
grotesque muscles of her marathoner's legs stood out in sharp relief. Unlike
the others, she was also strikingly attractive with jet black hair, an oval
face and exotic almond-shaped eyes.
"Yeah," replied Thorpe, "She won a couple minor races out in the Kepler
Quadrant last year. Big deal."
"I heard that she won them pretty handily, A.J...."
"Sure, Yuri, that's how she got here. Relax, Champ, the handicappers got
her tagged a hundred-to-one! She's in the first wave because she's good
press---a dark horse from some godforsaken outposter colony." He nodded in
the young girl's direction. "Though you got to admit she won't look bad on
the newsvids either!"
"Right, A.J.," said Yuri, reassured, as usual, by his teamate's shrewd
assessment of the situation. But he had to be honest with himself, the young
woman's chances were as good as anyone's.
Their discussion was ended by a call from the crew captain to get ready.
The two men strapped on their helmets and slapped hands in a classic high five
before squeezing into the cockpits of their racing crafts.
The day's practice session was about to begin. For a few hours each day in
the week before the race, the contestants were allowed on a small practice
course near Ceres for training and for testing and adjusting the tiny racing
vessels.
On the other side of the prep room, Cassandra Chen-Lee also strapped on her
lightweight meta-kevlar racing helmet prior to entering her ship for the
mid-afternoon workout. She signaled the support crew to push her into the
airlock and then ran down a mental checklist while the lock cycled. With the
outer door fully open, she began pedaling slowly and used the joystick to
divert a small amount of power to the maneuvering thrusters. The tiny ship
came gently about and she began pedaling a bit harder to put some space
between her and the dock. Cassandra felt the usual tightness in her chest,
the lump in her throat that always came unbidden whenever she took the ship
out intending to go really fast. As soon as she got out on the course and up
to speed, she knew from experience that the feeling would pass.
Pumping the pedals rhythmically, she banked the needle-nosed craft out
towards the practice course. After a signal from the gate official that it
was safe to enter, she passed through the bright green triangle of the first
gate.
Cassandra fell in with a flight of five racers who were warming up and
testing the control systems on their racing ships, making sure that things
were properly adjusted. Like a multi-colored flock of swift, plastic birds,
they soared through several of the gates in a graceful and ever-changing
cluster. Within minutes, she knew there were no top competitors like herself
in the group and she found herself growing impatient. Their lines were sloppy
and none of them had the same intense drive out of the gates as she did. Not
that it really mattered. Cassandra had been waiting for two ships in
particular, both of which had just caught and passed her group. She increased
her speed to join the new pair.
Free of the slow pack, with the other racers in her sights, she felt her
spirit soar. As one, the three executed a series of intricate, difficult
maneuvers flawlessly. Her powerful legs pumped the pedals smoothly,
instinctively, without conscious thought as her breathing and pulse rate
quickened. Cassandra became an intense ball of concentration, her attention
focused completely on piloting her racing craft. For the first time in
months, she felt wholly, vibrantly alive! To the trained marathoner this was
heady, joyous fun! For nearly two complete circuits she barnstormed the
practice course with the other two craft, learning the lines the other pilots
used, sizing them up. Finally she made a move on them at the second-to-last
gate. The other racers hadn't expected the maneuver and both had to change
their line slightly to let her execute the pass by going between them.
There had nearly been contact between the ships---a mere ten centimeters
was all that separated them, but the skills of all three racers were such that
none of them had been in any real danger---top level racers handled such
maneuvers routinely. Under race conditions, it was not at all uncommon for
ships to brush one another or for more serious contacts to occur.
The practice session over, the racers waited for their support crews aboard
their chase ships to come and pick them up. Even at the end of a practice
session, the speeds achieved were astounding. Without a chase ship, the racer
would have been required to expend an equal amount of energy on deceleration.
Clearly a waste of time! Better to let a nuclear powered craft do the job for
you. As the chase ship began to reel Cassandra in, she signaled to them with
a circle made with thumb and forefinger---the universal sign: everything OK.
As soon as she got back to the race facility, Cassandra sought out the two
pilots that she had been sparring with for a little post-practice banter. She
had no trouble finding the gaily colored ships. As she came up to them, the
pilots were standing with their backs to her. One was demonstrating a racing
maneuver with his hands and the other was nodding in agreement.
"That was a good session!" she said. "Sorry about that last gate." She
did a double-take as they turned to look at her. "Omigod!" she blurted.
"You're Yuri Ramosian!" She looked at the other racer. "And you must be A.J.
Thorpe?"
The teammates smiled at Cassandra's obvious discomfort.
"That was you in the yellow and blue ship?" asked Thorpe. The young girl
nodded sheepishly. Thorpe's reply surprised her. "Good move! We were a tad
too relaxed. Serves us right. Right, Yuri?"
"Right, A.J. It's Cassandra, isn't it? Cassandra Chen-Lee?" asked Yuri.
The young girl nodded, still a little wide-eyed.
Yuri continued. "I agree, it was a hell of a good session! And don't
worry, that was a good move you made at gate seventeen. I came in a little
slow and a little wide." He shrugged, "You did the same thing I would have
done!"
Cassandra was a surprised to find that Ramosian stood at least a full head
shorter than she did. Like many people who finally meet a legend, she
discovered that her mental image of the champ was larger than life. He was
also beginning to show his age a little. No youth drugs for marathoners! At
this level of competition nearly all drugs were illegal and they were rigidly
tested for. As a result, he was showing a little grey at the temples and some
salt and pepper in the rest of his hair. But, outside of the little touches
of grey and the laugh-wrinkles around his brown eyes, the rest of him was
all-business, alloy hard, compact and muscular, ready for anything. His
companion, Thorpe, was almost a perfect contrast. Descended from old-earth
Kenyan stock, Thorpe was black-skinned and had the characteristic distance
runner's physique---long-limbed, gaunt and wiry, without a trace of body fat.
With the introductions over, a short awkward silence ensued. Cassandra
self-consciously ran a hand through her dark, damp hair and tried to think of
something intelligent to say. Thorpe spoke first.
"I don't know 'bout you guys, but I'm for a hot shower and a cold drink.
Cassandra, why don't you meet us at Killian's after we all clean up some?" he
asked.
"Good idea, A.J.," said Yuri.
"Killian's?" she asked.
"It's a little bar just down the corridor," said Yuri. "Kind of a racers
hangout. You'll like it. It's a good place to unwind after practice."
Cassandra seemed lost in some internal battle for a few moments before she
made up her mind. "Okay," she said, nodding. "Killian's it is. Forty-five
minutes?"
An hour later she pushed cautiously through an old-fashioned, ornate door
into the dimly lit interior of Killian's Olde Irish Pub. She looked around a
bit while waiting for her eyes to adjust. An interesting place. The
management had tried to capture the spirit of an old-earth English pub, say
about mid-nineteenth century. They had done an admirable job, and even though
there was no way that the dark paneling could be real wood or that the lamps
could be burning natural gas, the place looked downright old. There was
little doubt that the bar was a hangout for earth natives and marathon
racers---the full-earth gravity guaranteed that. Cassandra didn't know for
sure what an old pub was supposed to look like, but she decided immediately
that she liked the place.
Yuri signaled to her from a booth in the back corner. Thorpe sat across
from him, his long, bony frame somehow jack-knifed into the confines of the
smallish booth. Cassandra headed towards them across the crowded bar.
A change into civilian clothing had wrought a transformation in the young
girl. A blue outfit accentuated her less-than-generous bosom and disguised
the heavily muscled legs. Her glossy black hair made for a flattering
contrast against the soft, pale fabric and her smooth, golden skin as it fell
in a braid beside her long graceful neck and over her bare shoulder. The
hard, purposeful athlete had become tantalizingly feminine. What's more, the
exotic almond-shaped eyes were a startling and very beautiful shade of blue!
Both men watched in fascination as she slid into the empty space next to Yuri.
Yuri and Thorpe were having the house specialty, an English style pale ale.
Their glasses were about half-full. Cassandra thought for a moment before
ordering from the human waiter.
"Bring me something wet, and non-alcoholic," she said.
"Did you see the Marathon coverage on the newsvids this morning?" asked
Yuri. "It seems like everywhere you look you get this awful pre-race hype! I
know it's part of the package, but sometimes I wish they'd just leave us alone
and let us race!" He shook his head in disgust.
"Not to worry, Cassandra," said Thorpe, winking. "He always gets this way
before a big race." The Champ took a pull on his mug of ale and wiped his
mouth with the back of his hand.
"You're right, A.J. Enough of that," said Yuri. "How about we change the
subject. Let's talk about Cassandra instead."
Cassandra took a sip of her drink and swallowed. "Fine," she said,
bravely. "What would you like to know?"
Thorpe shrugged. "Where you from?"
"The New Ceylon colony." Their blank expressions were expected. She
continued, "It's in the Naccobus star system, way out on the very edge of
explored space. But it's nice. You'd like it. It's clean and underpopulated
and they grow the best coffee in the galaxy."
"Mining?" asked Yuri.
"Lots," said Cassandra. "In fact, it's our main industry."
Yuri nodded his head and took another drink of the ale, swallowed and
softly smacked his lips in appreciation. "Truly a fine ale! Problem is, I
only get to have one. Training rules."
"Training rules, Hah! Admit it, Champ, you jus' ain't as young as you used
to be!" prodded the much-younger Thorpe, winking at Cassandra. Adding insult
to injury, Thorpe ordered himself another drink.
"We'll see about that next Sunday," said the Champ, the laugh-wrinkles
around his eyes intensifying slightly. "If you can manage to squeeze that
bony carcass of yours into that little tiny ship!" Cassandra smiled at the
good-natured banter between the two teammates. She decided that Yuri had been
right, Killian's was a good place to unwind.
The pub was crowded and noisy. Cassandra looked around the room at the
various knots of race personnel, easily picking out the pilots. Some she
recognized, others were still wearing their racing suits, no doubt in an
effort to improve their chances of scoring with one or another of the bar's
many female patrons. Over on the other side of the bar there was a good-sized
group that was engrossed in some kind of hilarious game. Every now and then a
shout would erupt, followed by a chorus of laughter from the rest of the
group. One of the men in the small group caught her eye and waved. She waved
back shyly.
"What's going on over there?" she asked.
"That's Michaels and Sharp and the gang," said Thorpe. "They could be up
to mos' anythin'---you can't never tell with that bunch. Oh yeah, the wimpy
guy on the left is somethin' different though. He's an accountant. Name's
Morris Quimby. Been hanging around the bar for a couple days now. The guy's
amazin', he can tell you anythin' you want to know 'bout mos' any Marathon,
past or present. Hell, he can probably tell you what your split times were
from this mornin's session...and mine and Yuri's and all the other top
contenders." He took a pull on his ale. "They're good guys. You wanna meet
'em?"
"I'd like that," she replied. "But later, let's finish our drinks first."
The shared experiences of the racers meant that they had much in common,
and conversation was easy as Cassandra got over the initial rush of actually
meeting and being with the two celebrities and began to relax a little. After
a few more minutes of getting acquainted, Cassandra turned the conversation in
a more serious direction.
"Do you think you can win the championship again?" she asked, surprised at
her own boldness. "The competition looks really good this year."
The Champ's reply was unexpected, "I don't know," he shrugged. "What's
more, I don't really care all that much. Remember, I've won this damned
extravaganza twice. If I go out next week and ride my best but am defeated by
you or one of these other handsome young racers..." He motioned towards the
group at the other side of the room. "...that won't matter. I'm the most
alive when I'm racing!"
"I understand, Mr. Ram...er Yuri," she said, sensing the kinship that they
shared. "The ship is like it's part of your body. You drive it with your own
vitality and you feel it respond to the slightest move of your hand. Racing
takes total concentration; while you're doing it, you forget about everything
else. That's an incredible feeling. But, I'll be honest, I like it best when
I win!"
"I'd say you got as good a chance as anybody," said Thorpe. Yuri nodded in
agreement.
"Thanks," she sighed. "You don't know how good it feels to hear you say
that. I had a bad crash during the Heard's World Rally last year, and it's
only been the last couple of months that I felt like I was back up to form."
"I know what you mean," said Yuri. "I crashed in my first Asteroid
Marathon twelve years ago. I got rear-ended during a chain-reaction incident
at gate thirty-five. Wound up with a couple broken bones. I was worthless
for weeks and I wasn't competitive for six months. Frustrating!"
Cassandra nodded her head. "I've really made progress since my trainer put
me on a holistic program of diet, physical conditioning and mental exercises.
It's safe to say that I wouldn't be here without him."
"Tell him he's done a good job," said Yuri. He looked around the room and
sighed, "I have to go pretty soon. But, I'm free later on. Are you doing
anything?"
Cassandra was flattered by the unexpected pass but knew she couldn't
possibly take the Champ up on it. She quickly thought up a little lie to let
him down easy. "Thank you, no," she replied graciously. "I have a boyfriend
waiting for me." Yuri shrugged, and smiled.
"I was afraid of that! Can't blame me for trying! Seriously, I really
enjoyed talking to you. Good luck in the race." He finished his ale and
after taking---and kissing---her hand, left the bar with a wave to the raucous
group across the room.
"Come on," said Thorpe. "I'll introduce you to these animals." Cassandra
picked up her drink and followed her lanky new friend across the room.
The group was young, eager and ready to party. This close to a major race,
the pilots generally backed off on the alcohol but several of the crew members
were getting pretty drunk.
Looking the group over, Cassandra was reminded once again that the
combination of mental and physical attributes that make for a successful racer
can come in the strangest packages. Some are cerebral about their approach,
like Yuri Ramosian, for instance. Ramosian held an advanced degree in
electro-physical engineering and had all sorts of reasons why he raced. He
could spend hours talking about it. Thorpe had only a minimum of formal
education and, unless you pinned him down, would rather talk about anything
else. Both were Marathoners but, aside from that, Ramosian and Thorpe were
pretty normal---just regular guys.
And then there was Sharp, the ringleader of the party group. Sharp was
certifiably nuts. He was still in his sweaty practice suit and he had opened
the collar and rolled up the sleeves in the warm and crowded bar. Above his
round face, the thinning hair on his bare head was still plastered to his
forehead from sweating inside his helmet during practice. Cassandra sensed
that even in normal clothing Sharp would have had an unkempt look about him.
Wild, unpredictable, and loud, they called him "Torpedo" Sharp because of his
actions both on and off the race course. It was difficult to fathom his
motives. As reckless as he was, he probably raced out of some submerged death
wish.
The game was `Catch the five credit note'. A simple game; perhaps a
challenge only to those who have had a few too many drinks. The player would
put his hand on the table with thumb and forefinger extended out over the edge
and held about a centimeter apart. The object of the game was to catch a five
credit note that was dropped between the thumb and forefinger. An obviously
inebriated young racer was about to try his luck. The wobbly young man was
the number two rider for the Lotus team. A practice crash during the day's
session had left him without a ride. He was either celebrating being alive or
drowning his sorrows because he wouldn't be in the race---take your pick, at
this stage it was hard to tell.
At the other end of the table, the group made room for Cassandra and Thorpe
to sit. As the game began again, Cassandra found herself sitting right next
to the one who had been pointed out to her as `Quimby'.
Sharp held the five-credit note so that the oval picture of president
Tsumaki's face in the middle of the bill was lined up with the contestant's
thumb.
"He'll never catch it," said the little accountant, in a surprisingly deep
baritone. "He's had way too much to drink."
Sharp released the bill and sure enough, the young racer's fingers closed
on empty air.
"How did you know that would happen?" asked Cassandra, while Sharp
retrieved the bill.
"It's quite simple, really," replied Quimby. "This game is just a crude
test of reaction time. The participant sees the note begin to fall, but the
nerve impulse from brain to hand isn't quite quick enough for him to close his
fingers before the bill has dropped past them. Placing the hand on the edge
of the table means the bill can't be followed down either." Cassandra nodded
in understanding.
"I don't suppose a few drinks help any, do they?" she asked.
"No, they don't," replied Quimby. "Even though a racer, like yourself,
generally has a much faster reaction time than a normal person, a few drinks
will quickly remove that advantage."
"Damn!" said the frustrated young drunk, as he missed a second try.
"C'mon, Sharp, drop it again!"
Sharp dropped the bill again, with the same result. The entire group
laughed at the shout of outrage, Cassandra along with them. That,
unfortunately, got the irate contestant's attention. "It looks easy from down
there, doesn't it?" he challenged, looking straight at Cassandra. "C'mon, sit
over here! That is, if you think you can do any better!"
Cassandra gulped and looked around the table. "N..no! I don't. Really!
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to insult you."
But it was too late. Suddenly every one in the entire group thought it was
an excellent idea.
"No excuses," said Sharp. "C'mon, move over to the hot seat."
"Go ahead, my dear," said Quimby, chuckling. "You certainly can't do any
worse than anyone else."
She sat, reluctantly. "Put your hand on the edge of table, like this,"
said Sharp, demonstrating. "Hold your thumb and forefinger apart like this.
Ready? Now!"
Even though she really wasn't ready, to everyone's surprise she caught the
bill before it had moved a bare centimeter downward.
"Hey, no fair anticipatin'!" said Sharp. "Do it again."
Cassandra straighten her shoulders, took a deep breath and nodded her head.
Again she caught the bill after only about a one centimeter drop.
"Three's the charm," said Sharp. "One more time!"
She missed it cleanly. And a fourth time. And a fifth. Finally she shook
her head in exasperation. "Enough!" she said. "I can't do it anymore. I
must've just got lucky the first two times."
Three failures in a row took the pressure off and someone else took the
favored seat. The game continued. Quimby looked at her quizzically when she
returned to her seat.
"Well done, Ms. Chen-Lee!" said Quimby. "Far and away the best performance
of the evening!" He made some notes in a little black book.
Cassandra finished a third drink and talked a bit longer with her new
friends before excusing herself.
A bony, nervous, elderly man was waiting in her suite when she finally got
back.
"Where have you been?" he asked, wringing his hands. "You're two hours
late! I wanted to examine you right after practice!"
"Sorry, Richter. I had some business." The old man seemed to relax a
little.
"Did you link up with Ramosian and Thorpe out on the course, Cass?"
"Yeah, no problem."
"Did they suspect that you were waiting for them?"
"No, I doubt it. I acted pretty surprised when I talked to them
afterwards. Believe it or not, they invited me to have a drink with them!
That's where I was. God, I hope they don't see us together!" she added with
a giggle. "I told them you were my boyfriend!"
He ignored the jibe, or didn't hear it. "You talked to Ramosian?" he
asked, obviously impressed.
"Yes, I talked to Ramosian. In fact, we had a fairly long conversation.
You know what? He said he doesn't care if he wins or loses, he just likes to
race. Don't you find that strange?"
"Strange?" replied Richter. "Not at all. Just don't you believe a word
of it. He's been touting that line of solid waste so long that he may be
beginning to believe it himself. Never fear, Cassandra, when the starting
flag drops you'll be up against one the most competitive men who ever lived!"
Cassandra nodded in agreement.
"Don't worry, Richter, I wasn't fooled," she reassured him. "Oh, by the
way, your training system really works. I had the fastest reaction time in
the bar!"
Richter looked suddenly worried. "What did you do, Cass?"
"Oh, nothing serious, I just caught a couple of five credit bills," she
replied. "And then I covered up by not catching three more of them." She
ignored his puzzled look.
"You know what, Richter? It really felt super out there today. I'm
beginning to have a very good feeling about this race!" Cassandra hugged him
and headed off towards her sleep chamber. She didn't see the satisfied smile
on the old trainer's face as he dimmed the lights and turned towards his own
room.
The Asteroid Marathon took place in the vacuum of space where there was no
gravity or atmospheric friction to contend with. Under such conditions there
were some important points to keep in mind. First, a racing craft that
coasted without power did not slow down. Second, and more importantly, the
craft's velocity was cumulative. Consider: spinning the pedals on a marathon
craft transformed energy from the pilot's muscles into thrust. Thrust was
used for changing velocity or for changing direction, both of which were
necessary during the course of the race. Naturally, a racer tried to channel
as much energy as possible into increasing his speed. The top competitors
could reach truly amazing speeds by the end of 10,000 kilometers, a property
that had a profound influence on the design of the Marathon race course. The
course was designed with very tight and sharp maneuvers in the early going
which gradually changed to more open and sweeping maneuvers at its end. In
spite of this adjustment, because of the ever escalating velocities,
negotiating the course became increasingly more difficult in the later stages.
There was a profound difference in safety between the beginning and end of
the Marathon course also. A contestant that crashed near the beginning of the
race when the velocities were down had a fair chance of survival. A similar
incident at mid-course or later, at the frightening speeds achieved, was
almost invariably fatal. The ships were constructed from state-of-the-art
materials, but even their incredible strength could withstand only so much
force, and the most fragile component---the pilot---was only flesh and blood.
At just over five meters in length, the racing ships were tiny. But they
were breathtakingly beautiful. Aerodynamic styling was employed, not because
it was required in the airlessness of space, but because the ships looked
better that way. The Marathon was, first and foremost, a spectator sport.
The ship's nose was long and pointed and the body swelled gracefully back to
the widest part, the cockpit, where it was just over a meter wide. The body
then tapered back to the chopped-off tail which housed the grid of the main
thruster. The sleek outer shell of the ship was molded in any color or
combination of colors that the owner/sponsor wished. It was also common
practice for each of the ships to be splashed with a colorful assortment of
sponsor logos as well.
Inside the cockpit, the appointments were starkly utilitarian. There was a
joystick that controled the maneuvers of the tiny ship and, of course, the
pedals that drove it. A clear canopy covered the pressurized cockpit and
vision "below" was provided by a small oval window in the floor---a threat to
pass could come from anywhere. The instrumentation was likewise very simple:
an accelerometer to gauge the amount of thrust, a speedometer, and a cluster
of attitude indicators to give readouts on pitch, yaw and the artificial
horizon. There was also a "fuel" gauge that reported how much cesium reaction
mass was left, but it wasn't really important---no one ever ran out of cesium.
Life support and temperature control systems were maintained by a small
battery pack. The tiny ships had no actual brakes but they could be flipped
around and the main thruster used for deceleration. Under race conditions
this was seldom done by any competitor, and never by a winner.
The power generators, maneuvering thrusters and cesium fuel tanks were
standardized so that each ship carried identical equipment. The ships were
also carefully "weighed" to insure that their masses were above the minimum
limit. Differences in acceleration, maneuverability and speed were due solely
to the abilities of the racers themselves.
The ships of female contestants carried 100 kilos less mass than those of
the males. It was conceded early on that no amount of extra conditioning
could quite make up for the slightly superior physical strength of the men.
The handicap system worked. Over the years, women had been very competitive
in the Marathon.
As the days in the week before the race reeled off, the tensions grew ever
more intense. The newsvids had special segments devoted to race information
several times each day. The race promoters played the emotions of the huge
mass of humanity like so many instruments in some huge galactic orchestra.
Two days before the race, all of the chase ships with the racers and pit
crews, all of the dignitaries in their fine and opulent yachts, all of the
sportscasters and their support staff and a huge entourage of assorted fans
and hangers-on joined in a huge parade that made its way majestically out to
the "Marathon Cluster", the site of the famous race course itself. This
"Grande Promenade", as it was called, took the better part of a day to make
the five-thousand kilometer journey out from Ceres. For those who wished to
watch it, there was a live video feed from the spaceport on Ceres that showed
each ship as it left. Popular vidstars kept up an endless, truly mindless
banter about the race, the racers, and the dignitaries. Most of humanity was
tuned in. The irresistible strains of the tension symphony continued to play
in the background.
The final day before the race was spent in last-minute preparations. The
Marathon ships were checked over one last time. The contestants, in isolation
on board their chase ships, carefully re-examined their race strategies,
wondering if anything should be changed. At the end of the day the racers
retired, to get what rest they could. Meanwhile, the conductors of the mighty
tension orchestra were building up to the final crescendo.
Race day! All had been tuned to the perfect fevered pitch of excitement.
Finally all of the preliminaries were over. It was time! The race was ready
to begin!
Thousands of participants were lined up at the start. They would start in
waves, with the fastest first and each consecutive wave would start at two
minute intervals. Such a staggered start insured that the fastest racers
wouldn't have to contend with the inherent dangers of less skillful
contestants. Those who were in the first wave were the best in the
galaxy---Ramosian, Thorpe, Chen-Lee, the mighty Sharp from Luna, swift and
crafty Michaels from the belt and twenty others.
During the race each competitor could easily be identified by the color of
their cesium exhaust. On race day a very tiny amount of just the right
impurity gave each exhaust the characteristic color of the contestant's home
system. Displaying the colors of one's home world was considered a great
honor. Holoposters and vids that promoted the race often showed a twisted,
tangled, intertwined rainbow of multicolored exhausts outlined against the
black velvet backdrop of space as a tightly packed group of racers executed a
tight maneuver through one of the bright triangular gates. In addition to its
many other assets, the marathon was a very colorful event---literally! Yuri's
exhaust was the sky-blue of his home planet, Earth, while Cassandra's was the
deep red of New Ceylon. This exhaust was, of course, nearly transparent at
close quarters, allowing the pilots maximum visibility.
Twenty-five multicolored exhaust plumes streamed forth as the first wave
was finally given the starting signal.
A young racer from Sirius IV took the early lead, his sleek ship spewing
out the violet color of his homeworld. Yuri purposefully held back; no one
knew better than he that 10,000 kilometers was a long race. Besides, many a
racer had had a race, a career or even his life cut short from an altercation
due to the extreme congestion on the course right after the start.
Challenges for position remained at a minimum in the early going as a small
knot of twelve ships began to outdistance the others. But the ships began
jockeying frantically as they came to the first series of tight obstacles.
The right position was vital. Coming into a gate at the wrong angle meant
that the contestant could miss the next gate, or that he would have to waste
valuable energy getting back onto the right line and be outdistanced by the
others. In the worst case, he might even hit an asteroid.
Yuri went into the first clump of asteroids in eighth position. He picked
the perfect line, one that allowed him to skim just over the surfaces of the
jagged rocks in the large cluster and make each of the gates at the same time.
With a gentle nudge on the joystick and a furious burst of power, he exited in
fifth. Cassandra, who had been running twelfth, suddenly found herself in
ninth when the ship right in front of her went wide, colliding with two
others. In less than a heartbeat, three racers were in serious trouble as
their ships careened wildly off the racing line. One of them, Michaels, the
"home town boy" from Ceres, used his incredible strength and skill to just
make the gate, but his angle was all wrong. He narrowly missed a large,
slowly spinning asteroid on the outside edge of the gate. Cassandra held her
breath as she watched the yellow wash from Michaels' exhaust brush the pocked
surface of the jagged rock. One of the others wasn't quite so lucky. In
spite of a valiant, desperate effort, he missed the gate and augered directly
into the asteroid. The fragile eggshell of his ship exploded from the
horrifying impact into a cloudy smear of fog and debris. Michaels slipped
back behind the lead pack, obviously shaken by his narrow escape.
As the course got more difficult, Yuri continued to move methodically up
through the pack. By the halfway point, he was in second place. He had
developed a distinct admiration for the young racer ahead of him: his
teammate, Thorpe. The emerald plume from the back of the sleek racing ship
never faltered as A.J. swept through each of the increasingly difficult
maneuvers. Yuri smiled. Thorpe had learned a lot since joining the team!
The champ nodded in approval at the classic lines that the young racer took
through the ever more difficult turns. A bit wide going in; cut as close as
possible to the apex of the curve; sweep a bit wide going out, the tiny ship
all but scraping the hard unyielding surfaces of the rocky obstacles as Thorpe
sought the triangular green glow of the next gate.
Spectators throughout the galaxy held their breath and marveled at the
beautiful and deadly minuet that the two men danced through the complex and
dangerous series of maneuvers. They made the task look graceful, effortless.
This was an illusion. Inside their respective ships the contestants were
straining themselves beyond comprehension to maintain the torrid pace, all the
while making countless delicate adjustments every second on the flight
controls to keep the tiny ship on exactly the right line!
Behind them, by about five kilometers, Cassandra moved quietly into fifth.
And so it went, hour after grueling hour. Some of the contestants were
forced to call for their chase ships as one or another of the hardships of the
race caused them to cease their effort. They were the fortunate ones.
Others, their minds fogged with fatigue, made the fatal mistake---and paid the
ultimate price. For some, it was just bad luck. They happened to be in the
way when someone made a mistake, like Michaels had been---in the wrong place
at the wrong time. To the soulless asteroids that were hit, it made no
difference, perpetrator or victim, both suffered the same cruel fate.
With three-quarters of the race well behind him, Yuri made his move. He
knew it was now or never, that he had to be in the lead for the final leg. To
accomplish this, Yuri had picked his spot well: the famous Pallas tunnel. The
"tunnel" was the most difficult portion of the course and involved a
complicated series of left and right sweeping turns that also involved a
substantial change in "elevation" between each gate, up and left, down and
right, down and left, up and right. To make matters worse, the profusion of
large, irregular chunks of rock in this very difficult area meant that most of
the gates were blind as well---the racers came upon them abruptly, without
warning.
Yuri's long experience and consummate skill made the tunnel the ideal place
to make his bid for the lead. Once through this area, all that remained was
one more gate and then a straight-line powered sprint to the finish.
It was time. In a classic maneuver, Yuri pulled up to where he knew he was
visible out of the corner of Thorpe's eye. It was one of the oldest tricks in
the book: let your opponent feel your presence right behind him, stick to him,
hound him until he makes the one error, the one mistake that will let you
through! Yuri smiled again. No doubt about it, Thorpe had really developed!
A.J. executed the first series of bends flawlessly, but trying to watch the
gates and the rocks and the ever-present ship behind him---all at the same
time---was too much to ask. Suddenly, Thorpe's ship bobbled slightly as the
awkward position of the next gate surprised him. He made a valiant attempt to
make the gate, his green exhaust glowing brightly from the effort. His
attempt was successful---but only barely! Luckily he also missed a small
boulder-sized asteroid right near the corner of the gate. Thorpe, nearly off
the course and on a line that was all wrong, left a huge opening for the Champ
to streak past.
Yuri confidently executed the difficult maneuver and just skimmed through
the same gate, only his line was perfect. He came out of the tunnel alone.
There wasn't a ship within five kilometers of him. Yuri leveled off and fell
into the rhythmic pumping of his legs that would take him home. One more gate
before the finish line!
Sixty-five percent of the human race got up to stretch, go to the bathroom
or to get another drink. It looked like Yuri Ramosian was going to be
champion for the third time! Oh well, they thought, at least Thorpe had given
him a run for his credits!
Cassandra carved out a line similar to Yuri's and made up a couple of
places at the same time, moving her up to third place. Ahead, she could just
barely see the blue plume from Yuri's exhaust. Her own red plume intensified
as she began to pump the pedals furiously in an attempt to catch the leader.
Thorpe was the only contestant between her and Ramosian, but he could do
nothing to hold off her charge. His jaw dropped in astonishment as she poured
on an unbelievable blast of acceleration that left him behind.
Meanwhile, Yuri was still giving all he had to increase his speed. He knew
the competition was a long way back and he was beginning to feel confident
that the win was his. No racer in history had ever made up such a deficit and
he, the best racer who had ever competed, was the one they had to catch! But,
of course, he hadn't counted on Cassandra.
She passed the Champ just before the final gate. Yuri shook his head. Her
incredible strength had allowed her to catch up, but she was going much too
fast. She'd never make the gate. Sure enough, the exhaust plume from her
racing craft faltered for a moment as she seemed to realize it too. The next
maneuver took him completely by surprise. Suddenly her ship cartwheeled
gracefully over, to travel rear-end first. A flip-turn to decelerate! During
a race! Yuri smiled at the bold and novel approach. I'll have to give her
credit for that one, he thought, but it'll never work. "Nice try, Cassandra!"
he said aloud. As expected, he passed her slowed-down ship just on the other
side of the gate. Yuri straightened out for the final sprint to the finish.
Now was the time to dig deep, to find out what was left. Yuri had always
been able to somehow save a little for a "kick" at the very end. This race
was to be no exception. It looked bad for Cassandra---she had lost a great
deal of time and speed in her successful effort to make the final gate. That
one mistake had dropped her back by about twelve kilometers.
The situation did look hopeless, but there was no quit in Cassandra! She
went doggedly back to work. With just a hundred kilometers left to the
finish, she trailed by ten kilometers. By the time there were fifty left, she
trailed by five. Soon, Yuri was taking furtive glances over his shoulder as
she continued to come on relentlessly! Sixty-five percent of the human race
went back and sat down in front of their vidscreens. This race wasn't over
yet!
With ten kilometers left, there was no doubt---it would be a photo finish.
If Cassandra could keep it up! Yuri could see the finish gate---a flashing
neon-blue rectangle---a heartbreakingly short distance away when the yellow
and blue craft with the red exhaust plume blew past underneath. The former
Champ crossed the finish line, completely spent, in second place! Cassandra's
margin of victory was two-tenths of a second, making it the closest Marathon
in history. Thorpe, who had hung on to finish third, was more than twenty
kilometers behind them.
Afterwards, after the chase ships had picked them up and they stood on the
victor's podium to receive their medals, Yuri sincerely congratulated her on a
fine race. He meant every word. It had been a wonderful race, the kind that
would be buzzed about for months!
The events of the next few days insured that this Marathon would be talked
about for years to come.
Two days after the race, back on Ceres, Yuri and Thorpe were surprised by a
summons from the race authorities. Such an unscheduled meeting was highly
irregular. As two of the top three finishers, they were very busy people!
During the next two days, there were dozens of social functions to attend and
hundreds of minor dignitaries to meet and talk with. Crowning it all was the
victory banquet that was to be held the final night where the top three were
to be guests at an elaborate dinner and would get to shake the hand of
President Tsumaki himself! Half-an-hour later Yuri and Thorpe were at the
Marathon Complex. Joining them were Harris Dockett, a harried-looking,
slightly overweight, middle-aged Marathon official and Dr. Julius Harbour, the
official Marathon Physician.
"What's this all about?" asked Yuri.
"Yuri, A.J., you know Dr. Harbour," said Dockett. The former champ and his
teammate shook hands with the doctor. Dockett pushed a button on his
intercom. "You can send Mr. Quimby in now."
"Quimby?" asked Thorpe. "You mean Morris Quimby?"
"Yes," replied Dockett, somewhat surprised. "You know him?"
"Yeah," said Thorpe. "Met him at Killian's Pub. The guy's a Marathon
freak, a reg'lar walkin' Comlink!"
Morris Quimby, looking very nervous, entered the room, nodded at Thorpe and
was introduced to the Champ. Quimby cleared his throat. "It is truly a
pleasure to meet you, Mr Ramosian. I'm an accountant for Federated Metals.
I'm also a longtime fan of the Marathon. I even do statistical work-ups on
the athletes to assess their performance. It's kind of a hobby with me."
He stopped and looked from Yuri to the Marathon officials. Dockett nodded
his head. Quimby cleared his throat again and continued. "Last week's
contest was won by the young lady, Cassandra Chen-Lee, in what was a very
close and thrilling race."
"The closest and most enjoyable of my career," said Yuri. "Even though I
lost."
"You may have lost, Mr. Ramosian, but perhaps not legally," said Quimby,
nervously. "I did some calculations on Chen-Lee's performance yesterday and I
found a few things that didn't quite add up."
"Be careful what you say, Mr. Quimby, every contestant must pass a rigid
battery of drug and genetic tests before and after the race. Especially if
they win!" warned Harbour.
"I'm aware of that, doctor, nevertheless, my statement stands! I've
calculated the amount of energy that she would have needed to make up the
distance between Mr. Ramosian and herself on the final straight power sprint
to the finish." He paused here for greater effect. "Not even in your
record-breaking win of eight years ago did you put out that much energy in
such a short time," he said, looking at Yuri. "She beat your best-ever energy
output by more than fifteen percent! And that doesn't even include what it
must have cost her to do that unprecedented flip turn just before the final
gate."
"Yeah," said Yuri, appreciatively. "That was pretty incredible!"
"As further proof," Quimby continued. "At the weigh-in after the race,
there were only two kilograms of cesium left in her tank. Two kilos! She
almost ran out, Mr. Ramosian. As you know, no one ever runs out of cesium!"
The Champ shook his head in disbelief.
"One more thing," said Quimby. "Mr. Thorpe and I were witnesses at a game
she participated in where she demonstrated evidence of an abnormally fast
reaction time."
Thorpe nodded in agreement.
Yuri looked quizzically at Dockett.
"Would you be willing to testify in a court of law about this information,
Mr. Quimby?" asked Dockett, his voice very serious.
"In the interest of fair racing, I feel that I must," replied Quimby.
"Maybe we can avoid all that," interjected Harbour. "Why don't we just get
Chen-Lee and that Richter character down here and have me take another look at
her."
"Good idea," said Dockett.
Within the hour, Cassandra Chen-Lee and Harlow Richter had reported to the
complex.
"You wish to examine my racer again?" said Richter indignantly. "Why?"
"There are some minor discrepancies, Mr. Richter. I'm sure it's nothing,"
soothed Dockett. "Just a quick check-up by Dr. Harbour and we can all go
home. Shouldn't take more than a half hour."
"Very well," said Richter grumpily. "But please make it quick. We have a
million things to do!"
Ten minutes later they were again in Dockett's office. Dr. Harbour wore a
perplexed look.
"Her parameters are all within normal limits," said the old gray haired
doctor. "I find nothing illegal. But..."
"Good," said Richter. "Then we'll be off for the day's activities."
Dr. Harbour still looked doubtful. "Wait a few more minutes," he said. "I
want to take a look at the imaging medscan."
Dr. Harbour's "few minutes" became an hour, then and hour and a half.
Finally he called the entire group back together.
"I've found the answer, Harris," said the old doctor.
"And?" said Dockett.
"Here, take a look at these readings."
"What are we supposed to see?"
"Not much, at first glance. Like you would expect for a top Marathon
contender, Cassandra's readings are all at the high end of normal. But there
are a few things here that, to quote Mr. Quimby, `don't quite add up."'
"What do you mean?" asked Dockett.
"Let me see if I can give you an example. Take a look at Thorpe's printout
over here. What's the figure for lung capacity?"
"Um... four point three seven liters. Why?"
"Okay, look at Chen-Lee's." Dockett looked at her printout.
"Six point five nine?" said Dockett.
"Now---sorry Ms. Chen-Lee---compare her chest to Thorpe's."
"Hm...Aside from a far more pleasing architecture I'd say there's no way
she could have a larger lung capacity than Thorpe." said Dockett.
"Exactly!" said Harbour. "That's one of the things I found when I did a
few comparisons! But there's more."
"Yes?"
"As you know, Harris, the Marathon rules state that genetic alterations and
use of any but a very small list of drugs by the contestants are strictly
forbidden. All my tests show that Cassandra hasn't done any of these things."
"So, what's the point, Julius?"
"It seems there are other ways to improve performance," said the doctor.
"Would you mind explaining that," said Dockett.
Harbour smiled and dropped his bomb.
"Cassandra Chen-Lee has been extensively modified surgically."
"Modified?" said Dockett, shocked. "How?"
"This is ridiculous!" interrupted Richter indignantly. "I came down here
in good faith! What kind of nonsense is this?"
"I'd remain calm if I were you, Mr. Richter," said Harbour. "Something
very odd is going on here and I assure you we are going to find out what it
is. It's also possible that you are in a great deal of trouble!" Richter
made a sound of disgust but backed off. The doctor continued. "Gather
around. This is the readout from the Horvald imaging med-scan, a procedure
which we don't normally do for qualifying. Because there's a protest, I did
one today."
"Excellent, Julius," said Dockett. "Just as the rules specify."
The old doctor pointed to his viewscreen which showed a color-coded,
three-dimensional internal view of Cassandra Chen-Lee. The projection could
be rotated to any angle and any organ system could be zoomed in on and
magnified or highlighted. The view zoomed in on the thoracic region.
Cassandra, upset by the accusations and uncomfortable at having her internal
anatomy more or less on public display, remained at the back of the group but
looked on with a kind of morbid fascination.
"To begin with, her lungs have been connected across the bottom and special
organic valves have been placed so that air passes completely through both
lungs; in through the left lung first, out the bottom, into and up through the
right lung before finally being breathed out. There are no dead air spaces
like those in an unaltered human's lungs. This modification alone makes her
lungs at least ten percent more efficient than normal."
Cassandra, her mouth open, wore a look of disturbed wonder.
Harbour typed a command on the med-scan keyboard and a different portion of
the chest region became highlighted. He continued. "In addition, both her
heart and her lungs have been equipped with a number of extra veins and
arteries to improve oxygen exchange. This is what threw off my original
figures for lung capacity and led me to do a more detailed analysis. To
further improve performance, there are extra vessels supplying the large
muscles of her legs as well." Dockett shook his head in disbelief.
"But that's not the end of it. Look at this!" Harbour typed in another
string of commands. The nervous system of the projection became highlighted.
"As if increased endurance weren't enough, she has several tiny
biomicroprocessers in her hands and arms that have been connected to a
microscopic descrambler inside her skull. The connection has been made with
an exquisitely crafted set of delicate, hair-thin gold cables that almost
escaped detection. In turn, the descrambler is directly connected to the
appropriate areas of her brain. I have never measured a faster reaction time!
From brain to hand it is about ten times faster than human normal!"
Cassandra sat down heavily in Harbour's thickly padded chair, her head in
her hands.
"What does it all mean?" asked Dockett, shooting a disproving glance at
Richter.
"It means that she should have won the race easily, but she must have
misjudged the pace and held back a little too much in the early going. As a
result, she had to far exceed even superhuman performance to win! Except for
that slight miscalculation and, of course, the obscure statistics of Morris
Quimby, these modifications may have gone unnoticed."
Cassandra was in a state of shock. Distraught, nearly hysterical, she
shouted at Richter. "You said you were going to fix me up after my accident!
What have you done to me, Richter?" Yuri and A.J. tried to calm her down.
"Are you responsible for this, Richter?" asked Dockett.
"Yes."
"Incredible techniques!" said Harbour, unable to hide his admiration.
"Where did you learn?"
"For ten years I was a doctor for General Metals at their infamous Nacobbus
VI mining site. A lot of good men got hurt out there. It was my job to fix
them up. Often there wasn't much left to work with. Most of them would have
died anyway unless we did something. We were forced to try some pretty
radical things."
"What does that have to do with Cassandra?" asked Harbour.
"I'd been patching people up so they could go back to being miners, Dr.
Harbour. I wanted to see what my procedures could do for an athlete.
Cassandra's accident was the perfect opportunity. I was planning to tell
Cassandra and the Marathon committee all about it as soon as the furor
surrounding the race died down a bit."
"You mean this isn't an act? She really doesn't know?" asked Harbour, in
disbelief. Richter nodded his head.
"She thought it was an unusual diet and my special exercise program."
"I thought you were my friend!" said Cassandra, with an accusing look, her
voice still edged with hysteria.
"I am your friend, Cassandra," said the old man quietly. "Before your
accident you were a good pilot---one of the best---but you lacked the other
important physical attributes that would have made you a top Marathoner." He
put his hand on her shoulder. "You were a mess after your accident, Cass!
Without my intervention, you wouldn't even have been able to walk again, let
alone race! My techniques not only gave you back your health, they also made
you into a contender. But you're forgetting something, Cassandra: it was your
skill and your desire that made you into a winner!" Richter looked proudly
around the room. "Check the rules, Gentlemen. I believe you will find that
we haven't broken any of them!"
"What?" said Dockett.
"He may be right, Harris," said the doctor. "There is a distinct
possibility that the rules haven't been broken!"
A long and extensive examination of the rule book revealed that Cassandra
had indeed broken none of the rules. Remarkably, she was allowed to keep the
championship. The rules were rewritten; such modifications to the human body
would not be allowed again. Cassandra went numbly through the ceremonies,
still in deep emotional shock. Within a few months she had gotten
considerably better. Whether or not she ever completely recovered remains
unknown. The trophy was a beautifully sculpted cup made of real gold that had
been mined from the belt. The inscription read:
First Place
Unlimited Division
Ceres-Pallas Marathon
In the realm of sport that tests
human endurance to its limits,
there is no higher award.
Morris Quimby was offered a position with the lofty title of "Official
Statistician to the Ceres-Pallas Marathon". He took the job immediately.
After all, how many people get a chance to live their dreams?
Arguments over who was the "real" winner of the marathon raged in barrooms
and betting halls for years afterwards. Yuri Ramosian retired soon after,
never to race again. He went on to a career in sports journalism and made
enormous sums of money endorsing various athletic products. Some say that it
was the controversy over the beautiful and enigmatic Cassandra that made him
want to quit. Others say he finally got tired of it. Possibly, but, what
they didn't know was that Yuri wasn't a "normal" human being himself. It
wasn't widely publicized but there's a good chance that the real reason he
retired was due to the fact that one of his two hearts was beginning to act
up.
______________________________________________________________________________
Phil Nolte has been writing Science-Fiction for about three years, although
he's been reading and enjoying it for most of his life. He says that, for
him, writing started out as "a lark" just to see if he could actually do it.
Later, he found himself getting more and more serious about it. He still
writes at home in his spare time, often when others are totally wasting their
time watching dreadful TV sitcoms, etc... His obsession is a better use of
time. In addition to fiction, he's also written several science history
articles for a local (Red River Valley) trade journal. This is his third
story to be printed in Quanta.
nu020061@vm1.nodak.edu
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The Magazine of the Dargon Project Editor: Dafydd
DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
the Dargon Project, a shared-world anthology similar to (and inspired
by) Robert Asprin's Thieves' World anthologies, created by David
"Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The Dargon Project
centers around a medieval-style duchy called Dargon in the far reaches
of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named Makdiar, and as such
contains stories with a fantasy fiction/sword and sorcery flavor.
DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file,
text-only format. For a subscription, please send a request via MAIL
to the editor, Dafydd, at the userid White@DUVM.BitNet. This request
should contain your full userid (logonid and node, or a valid internet
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subscribers will receive their issues in Mail format. BitNet users
have the option of specifying the file transfer format you prefer
(either DISK DUMP, PUNCH/MAIL, or SENDFILE/NETDATA). Note: all
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Volume III Issue 1 ISSN 1053-8496 February 1991
__________________________________________ ___________________________________
Volume III, Issue 1 February, 1991 Quanta (ISSN 1053-8496) is (c)1991
__________________________________________ by Daniel K. Appelquist. This
magazine may be archived,
reproduced and/or distributed
Articles freely under the condition that it
is left intact and that no
additions or changes are made to
`Looking Ahead' it. The individual works within
Daniel K. Appelquist this magazine are the sole property
of their respective author(s). No
further use of their works is
`The Physics of Solar Sailing' permitted without their explicit
Christopher Neufeld consent. All stories in this
magazine are fiction. No actual
persons are designated by name or
character. Any similarity is
Serials coincidental. All submissions,
requests for submission guidelines,
requests for back issues, queries
The Harrison Chapters concerning subscriptions, letters,
Jim Vassilakos comments or other correspondence
should be sent to one of the
following addresses:
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______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Welcome to a new volume of Quanta. Before I get to the meat of this
article, let me tell you a little bit about two of the stories I've lined up
for you in this issue.
Despite the fact that he swore up and down never to write another Teletrix
story, Christopher Kempke is back this issue with `Popping In', a story
starring none other than Martin and June Kendall. (See the editor's note at
the end of that story.) Chris says that Gremlins made him do it, but I think
he really just can't bear to part with a set of characters and situations that
really do work for him. I have a sneaking suspicion we may be seeing more of
Martin Kendall in the future, despite Chris' protestations.
Secondly, heading up the `short fiction' section, you may have noticed a
story called `Burning, Burning' by Tom Maddox. This story is actually an
excerpt from Tom's upcoming book, _Halo_, which is due to be published in the
US and Britain sometime later this year, by TOR Books and Century Hutchinson
respectively. This is the first opportunity I've had to publish something by
an already published and well respected author. Tom said he decided to send
me `Burning, Burning' in an effort to "support electronic publication in
particular, and alternative modes of publication/distribution in general."
On that subject, I'm about to do something rather nasty to you. Those of
you who watch American television may be familiar with the concept of "Public
Television." Those of you who work with computers may be familiar with the
concept of "share-ware." Starting with this issue, Quanta is going to
become a fusion of these two concepts. If you think Quanta is worth money to
you, I ask you to send your donations to keep it going. Note that, like
public television or shareware, Quanta will continue to be 100% free to all
subscribers, and available for anonymous FTP (see below for current anonymous
ftp sites). What I'm asking for is VOLUNTARY contributions on your part.
I'd like to continue producing Quanta way into the future. I'd like to be
able to pull in more established writers, like Tom Maddox, by enlarging
Quanta's distribution and thereby giving them more incentive to donate
material. I'd also like to (eventually) be able to pay writers for their
submissions. Now, up until this point, I've been able to produce Quanta
because, as a student at Carnegie Mellon University, I have access to the kind
of computer facilities that most small colleges only dream about. This rather
fortuitous boon won't last forever. Next year, I will have graduated from
Carnegie Mellon and will no longer have access to their facilities. In order
for Quanta to continue, and to continue to grow, it's going to need capital
(at the very least, a computer with a UUCP feed and a printer). Donations
will go to a fund which will go specifically toward the purchase of computer
equipment and the expansion of Quanta into the `paper' market.
If you like Quanta, and you happen to have five extra Dollars (Francs,
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(Obviously, I'm being overly simplistic. Don't send cash through the mail,
send a check, made out to "Quanta Magazine".) The point I'm trying to make
is that no donation is too small. Only have a few dollars to spare? That's
fine. Still want to receive Quanta but don't want to pay? That's fine too.
The donation is entirely optional. Quanta is and will always remain entirely
free to network subscribers. (Have I made this point enough?) I'm really
beginning to sound like a public television announcer now, so I'll leave it at
that. If you have any questions or comments about this, or anything
concerning Quanta for that matter, feel free to send mail to me via
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu.
Moving right along, let's talk about FTP servers. There are now two
servers carrying current and back issues. One is located in the US (right
here at Carnegie Mellon, actually) and the second is located in Sweden at the
Lund Institute of Technology. The particulars are as follows:
Site: export.acs.cmu.edu (128.2.35.66)
Directory: /pub/quanta
Site: lth.se (130.235.16.3)
Directory: /Documents/Quanta
For both sites, use `anonymous' as a login name and type your email address as
a password.
If you're located in Europe, using the site at lth.se would be the smart
thing to do. If you're located somewhere in North or South America, using the
other site would be better. Austrailians can take their pick (the American
site would probably be better, actually.) If you have problems with either of
these sites, please don't bother the administrators of the sites. Send your
gripes to me, and I'll take check into them. Note that in both cases, the
files on these servers are stored in UNIX compressed format, so make sure you
set for BINARY transfers and make sure you have a version of DECOMPRESS at
your site. Please do not over-use these sites. I'd like Quanta to remain
available on anonymous FTP long into the future.
Some further news this month on Jason Snell's new magazine now definitely
to be titled `Intertext': Jason's been tinkering with the format, and I think
he's finally got it right, so we may see the first issue of that soon.
`Intertext' will primarilly publish short fiction by amateur authors. From
the samples that Jason's sent me, it looks good. If you want to subscribe, or
just want more information, send mail to Jason at jsnell@ucsd.edu.
And with that, I must say goodbye. Enjoy this new issue. If you have
material to contribute, I urge you to do so. Live in good health. #
______________________________________________________________________________
The Physics of Solar Sailing
Christopher Neufeld
copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
A couple of years ago, George Bush charged a committee with planning events
to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus'
departure from Europe for the Americas. Among the ideas which were
implemented by the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Commission was
the Columbus 500 Space Sail Cup. Spacecraft are to launch on conventional
chemical rockets around Columbus day of 1992 and have to go to Mars using only
light pressure. Among the serious competitors are the Canadian Solar Sail
Project, the Aeritalia Team from Italy, Cambridge Consultants from Great
Britain, and the World Space Foundation from the United States. There are
also teams from Japan, Israel, and the Soviet Union, though the status of
those projects is less clear. There are numerous criteria for winning, such
as shortest transit to Mars orbit and the closest approach to the planet. In
order to be recognized as a winner the sail must receive no government
funding, but may receive money from the Columbus Commission. The Commission
is subsidizing the efforts of three ships to match the three ships Columbus
took to the new world (there was a fourth, but it had to turn back). One team
from each of the Americas, Europe, and Asia, will receive whatever money
becomes available. The World Space Foundation sail is the official Americas
sail, and will receive some of the money, if it ever is granted in the budget.
One way of looking at the mass-energy equivalence expressed in Einstein's
famous equation, E = m * c^2, is that any time energy moves from one place to
another, it behaves in part as if mass is moving that way. If a mass is
moving into another body, it pushes on it. The same is true of light. The
momentum flux associated with light is very low, equal to the power flux
divided by the speed of light. At Earth orbit, above the atmosphere, the
solar power flux is roughly 1400 kilowatts per square metre. This corresponds
to a momentum flux of 4.7 micronewtons per square metre. If a square metre of
a perfectly absorbing material is put in direct sunlight above the atmosphere,
and the light hits it perpendicularly to the surface, it feels a force of 4.7
micronewtons, or roughly one two thousandth of the weight of a paper clip at
the Earth's surface. A perfectly reflecting material would feel double that
force. Compare this to the three space shuttle main engines (SSMEs), each of
which generates 1.67 meganewtons of thrust at sea level, and 2.1 meganewtons
of thrust in vacuum. Even a 100,000 square metre sail would not generate a
millionth the thrust of a single SSME, though it would be a square as long on
edge as three football fields.
Solar sailing will almost certainly never be used as a ground launcher,
though a variant, a laser launcher, could be constructed in the next five or
ten years. Solar sailing becomes attractive as a means of thrust on long
voyages through interplanetary space. The three space shuttle main engines
and the two solid rocket boosters together provide, very roughly, 8 km/second
of delta-velocity before they burn out after 8.5 minutes. A shuttle which
masses 2 million kilograms on the pad delivers itself and cargo, about a
hundred thousand kilograms in total, to orbit. 95% of the mass goes out as
rocket exhaust gas, or is dropped into the sea in the form of spent boosters
and empty external tank. Compare this to a solar sail. The propellant is
sunshine, there is no fuel, and the thrust is continuous. The spacecraft does
not have to be made to be 95% fuel by mass. While it might be fifty percent
or more sail by mass, that material is not expended. A sail can be reused, or
the material melted down for use at the destination. If a rocket were used in
a round trip to Mars, and it had to carry its fuel for the return journey, it
would have to be huge at launch. If the fuel for the engines massed 9 times
as much as the payload, which must include the fuel for the return trip, then
the initial mass of the rocket would be 99% fuel.
It might seem at first that the optimal configuration for a solar sail is
one in which the light hits the sail at normal incidence (perpendicular to the
surface). This doesn't turn out to be the case, though. A sail oriented this
way exerts all its thrust along the line away from the sun. Because the
intensity of the light from the sun falls off as the square of the distance,
the magnitude of this outward thrust must fall off also as the square of the
distance. In this way it is exactly like gravity. In fact, putting the sail
at normal incidence to the sun has the same effect as would have reducing the
mass of the sun. It places the sail into an elliptical orbit which moves
farther away from the sun for a while, but must return to its starting point
after one complete revolution about the sun. This is not a particularly
useful configuration. The only way to avoid this with a sail at normal
incidence is for the solar pressure to exceed the force of gravity, so that
the sail goes into a hyperbolic escape from the solar system. In order to do
this, for the power output and mass of our sun, the sail would have to mass no
more than one kilogram for every 600 square metres of sail area, including the
mass of payload and electronics. This is not practical for ground-based
construction. The sail material for the Canadian Solar Sail Project will mass
about a kilogram per hundred square metres, before putting on structure or
electronics.
So, putting the sail at normal incidence to the sun is not the best
configuration. It is better to angle the sail in such a way as to maximize
the component of the thrust which is parallel to the direction of travel.
This turns out to be when the angle between the sun and the perpendicular to
the sail is about 35.3 degrees. In this configuration the spacecraft is being
pushed along the direction of travel, and so it climbs the gravity well. In
the counter-intuitive realm of orbital mechanics, the spacecraft slows down
the whole time it is climbing the well.
Well, if the only important thing is the component of the thrust along the
velocity vector, it can clearly be aligned the other way to oppose the
velocity vector. This pushes against the direction of travel, dropping the
sail down the gravity well, causing it to speed up the whole time. A solar
sail, contrary to popular belief, can travel sunward just as easily as it can
travel anti-sunward.
The travel time to Mars for a solar sail is a strong function of the mass
to area ratio. It is not unreasonable to manufacture a solar sail which can
be launched in the next two years to arrive at Mars in about another two
years. It has been suggested that solar sail spacecraft could be used to send
provisions and equipment to Mars ahead of a manned expedition. This two year
time is not a fundamental limitation of solar sails, but is quite good for
sailcraft launched from the ground.
If a solar sailcraft is to be launched from the ground and unfolded in
space, the sail must be strong enough to withstand the stresses involved. For
the solar sailcraft running in the race to Mars in 1992, the sails will be
made of a strong polymer coated with aluminum for reflectivity. Once the sail
is launched and unfolded, the polymer is just dead weight which has to be
dragged to the destination by the sailcraft. It would be convenient if the
substrate could be chosen to evaporate in the environment of space, for
instance if the polymer breaks down in ultraviolet light, thus lightening the
sail, and this possibility has been investigated by several teams.
In the future, solar sails might be manufactured and deployed in space,
allowing square kilometres of very thin aluminum to be tethered to a cargo or
passenger module. These sails could make an Earth-Mars transit in less time
than a Hohmann transfer orbit. It has been speculated in science fiction that
a solar sail would make an excellent asteroid surveyor, as it would have
essentially an unlimited fuel supply.
Solar sails were seriously studied by NASA in the 1960s as possible manned
transportation around the solar system. In those days of optimism serious
plans were formed for lunar bases by 1975, nuclear launchers and
interplanetary engines, and unmanned interstellar probes. None of these ever
received serious funding, and they all died on the drawing boards and test
beds by the early 1970s. Now, twenty years later, we will finally, to quote
Arthur C. Clarke, `sail the wind from the Sun'.
Shuttle Statistics taken from _The Space Transportation Systems Reference_
edited by Christopher Coggon, ISBN 0-920487-00-9
______________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Neufeld is a physics Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto
and a team member on the Canadian Solar Sail Project, which is an initiative
of the Canadian Space Society. In his copious free time he reads science
fiction or pushes buttons on his Apple ][GS.
neufeld@helios.physics.utoronto.ca
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Burning, Burning
Tom Maddox
copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the egg. A week ago
he had returned from Myanmar, the country once known as Burma, and now, after
two days of drugs and fasting, he was prepared: he had become an alien, at
home in a distant landscape.
His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread white flesh
torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On the dark stained oak
door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their faces beatific in the cold fire.
Staring at the animated carved figures, Gonzales thought, `the fire is in my
eyes, in my brain.'
He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through to the
hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope scuffing without noise
across floors of bleached oak. Through the open door at the hallway's end,
morning's light through stained glass made abstract patterns of crimson and
buttery yellow. Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far
wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the center of the
room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed steel, cracked and waiting.
One half-egg was filled with beige tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other
half with hard dark plastic lying slack against the shell.
Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his hair back into a
long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over it. He reached to his waist
and grabbed the bottom hem of his navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over
his head. Dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of
baggy tan pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale
skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes grainy,
stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back as
body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to balloon
underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and pushed their junction
ends home into the sockets set in the back of his neck. As the egg continued
to fill, he fit a mask over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled.
Catheters moved toward his crotch, iv needles toward the crooks of both arms.
The egg shut closed on him and liquid spilled into its interior.
He floated in silence, waiting, breathing slowly and deeply as elation
punched through the chaotic mix of emotions generated by drugs, meditation,
and the egg. No matter that he was going to relive his own terror, this was
what moved him: access to the many-worlds of human experience--travel through
space, time, and probability all in one.
Virtual realities were everywhere--virtual vacations, sex, superstardom,
you name it--but compared to the egg, they were just high-res videogames or
stage magic. VRs used a variety of tricks to simulate physical presence, but
the sensorium could be fooled only to a certain degree, and when you inhabited
a VR, you were conscious of it, so sustaining its illusion depended on willing
suspension of disbelief. With the egg, however, you got total involvement
through all sensory modalities--the worlds were so compelling that people
waking from them often seemed lost in the waking world, as if it were a dream.
A needle punched into a membrane set in one of the neural cables and
injected a neuropeptide mix. Gonzales was transported.
It was the final day of Gonzales's three week stay in Pagan, the town in
central Myanmar where the government had moved its records decades earlier, in
the wake of ethnic rioting in Yangon. He sat with Grossback, the Division
Head of SenTrax Myanmar, at a central rosewood table in the main conference
room. The table's work stations, embedded oblongs of glass, lay dark and
silent in front of them.
Gonzales had come to Myanmar to do an information audit. The local SenTrax
group supplied the Federated State of Myanmar with its primary information
utilities: all its records of personnel and materiel, and all transactions
among them. A month earlier, SenTrax Myanmar's reports had triggered
"look-see" alarms in the home company's passive auditing programs, and
Gonzales and his memex had been sent to look more closely at the raw data.
So for twenty straight days Gonzales and the memex had explored data
structures and their contents, testing nominal functional relationships
against reality. Wherever there were movements of information, money,
equipment or personnel, there were records, and the two followed. They
searched cash trails, matched purchase orders to services and materiel,
verified voucher signatures with personnel records, cross-checked the
personnel records themselves against government databases, and traced the
backgrounds and movements of the people they represented; they read contracts
and back-chased to their bid and acquisition; they verified daily transaction
logs.
Hard, slogging work, all patience and detail, and so far it had shown
nothing but the usual inefficiencies--Grossback didn't run a particularly taut
operation, but, as of the moment, he didn't seem to have a corrupt one.
However, neither he nor SenTrax Myanmar was cleared yet; Gonzales's final
report would come later, after he and the memex had analyzed the records at
their leisure.
Gonzales stretched and rubbed his eyes. As usual at the end of short-term,
intensive gigs like this, he felt tired, washed- out, eager to go. He said to
Grossback, "I've got a company plane out of here late this afternoon to
Bangkok. I'll connect with whatever commercial flight's available there."
Grossback smiled, obviously glad Gonzales was leaving. Grossback was a
slight man, of mixed German and Thai descent; he had a light brown complexion,
black hair, and delicate features. He wore politically correct clothing in
the old-fashioned Burmese style: a dark skirt called a `longyi', a white
cotton shirt.
During Gonzales's time there, Grossback had dealt with him coldly and
correctly from behind a mask of corporate protocol and clenched teeth. `Fair
enough', Gonzales had thought: the man's operation was suspect, and him along
with it. Anyway, people resented these outside intrusions almost every time;
representing Internal Affairs, Gonzales answered only to his division head,
F.L. Traynor, and SenTrax Board, and that made almost everyone nervous.
"You leaving out of Myaung U Airport?" Grossback asked.
"No, I've asked for a pick-up south of town." Like anyone else who could
arrange it, he was not going to fly out of Pagan's official airport, where
partisan groups had several times brought down aircraft. Surely Grossback
knew that.
Grossback asked, "What will your report say?"
Surprised, Gonzales said, "You know I can't tell you anything about that."
Even mentioning the matter constituted an embarrassment, not to mention a
reportable violation of corporate protocol. The man was either stupid or
desperate.
"You haven't found anything," Grossback said.
What was his problem? Gonzales said, "I have a year's data to examine
before I can make an assessment."
"You won't tell me what the preliminary report will look like," Grossback
said. His face had gone cold.
"No," said Gonzales. He stood and said, "I have to finish packing." For
the moment, he just wanted to get out before Grossback did something
irretrievable, like threatening him or offering a bribe. "Goodbye," Gonzales
said. The other man said nothing as Gonzales left the room.
Gonzales returned to the Thiripyitsaya Hotel, a collection of low bungalows
fabricated from bamboo and ferro-concrete that stood above the Irrawady River.
The rooms were afflicted by Myanmar's tattered version of Asian tourist decor:
lacquered bamboo on the walls, along with leaping dragon holos, black teak
dresser, tables, chairs, and bed frame, ceiling fans that had wandered in from
the twentieth century--just to give your average citizen that rush of the
Exotic East, Gonzales figured. However, the hotel had been rebuilt less than
a decade before, so, by local standards, Gonzales had luxury: working
climatizer, microwave, and refrigerator.
Of course, many nights the air conditioner didn't work, and Gonzales lay
sweaty and semi-conscious through hot, humid nights then was greeted just
after dawn by lizards fanning their ruby neck flaps and doing push ups.
He had gotten up several of those mornings and walked the cart paths that
threaded the plains around Pagan, passing among the temples and pagodas as the
sun rose and turned the morning mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with
the towers sticking up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the
temples, thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the Conqueror
was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government agencies nested among
thousand year old pagodas, some in near perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu
Temple, myriad others no more than ruins and forgotten names. You gained
merit by building pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.
Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was trying to
recover from late-twentieth century politics; in Myanmar's case, its
decades-long bout with round-robin military dictatorships and the chaos that
came in their wake. And as was so often the case in politically wobbly
countries, it still restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds
of governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free information flow
unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive, their use licensed by permits
almost impossible to get. As a result, Gonzales and the memex had been like
meat eaters stranded among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.
He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions dormant, it lay
nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum shock-cases, ready for
transport. The other case held memory boxes containing SenTrax Myanmar group's
records.
When they got home, Gonzales would tell the memex the latest news about
Grossback, how the man had cracked at the last moment. Gonzales was sure the
m-i would think what he did--Grossback was dog dirty and scared they would
find it.
At the edge of a sandy field south of Pagan, Gonzales waited for his plane.
Gonzales wore his usual international traveller's mufti, a tan gabardine
two-piece suit over an open-collared white linen shirt, dark brown slipover
shoes. His hair was gathered back into a ponytail held together by a silver
ring made from lizard figures joined head-to-tail. Next to him sat a soft
brown leather bag and the two shock-cases.
In front of him a pagoda climbed in a series of steeples to a gilded and
jeweled umbrella top, pointing to heaven. On its steps, beside the huge paw
of a stone lion, a monk sat in full lotus, his face shadowed by the animal
rising massive and lumpy and mock fierce above him. The lion's flanks were
dyed orange by sunset, its lips stained the color of dried blood. The minutes
passed, and the monk's voice droned, his face in shadow.
"Come tour the temples of ancient Pagan," a voice said. "Shwezigon,
Ananda, Thatbyinnu--"
"Go away," Gonzales said to the tour cart that had rolled up behind him.
It would hold two dozen or so passengers in eight rows of narrow wooden
benches but was now empty--almost all the tourists would have joined the crush
on the terraces of Thatbyinnu, where they could watch the sun set over the
temple plain.
"Last tour of the day," the cart said. "Very cheap, also very good
exchange rate offered as courtesy to visitors."
It wanted to exchange kyats for dollars or yen: in Myanmar, even the
machines worked the black market. "No thanks."
"Extremely good rate, sir."
"Fuck off," Gonzales said. "Or I'll report you as defective." The cart
whirred as it moved away.
Gonzales watched a young monk eyeing him from the other side of the road,
ready to come across and beg for pencils or money. Gonzales caught the monk's
eye and shook his head. The monk shrugged and walked on, his orange robe
billowing.
`Where the hell was his plane?' Soon hunter flares would cut into the new
moon's dark, and government drones would scurry around the edges of the
shadows like huge mutant bats. Upcountry Myanmar trembled on the edge of
chaos, beset by a multi-ethnic mix of Karens, Kachins, and Shans in various
political postures, all fierce, all contemptuous of the central government.
They fought with whatever was at hand, from sharpened stick to backpack
missile, and they only quit when they died.
A high-pitched wail built quickly until it filled the air. Within seconds
a silver swing-wing, an ungainly thing, each huge rectangular wing loaded with
a bulbous, oversized engine pod, came low over the dark mass of forest. Its
running lights flashing red and yellow, the swing-wing slewed to a stop above
the field, wings tilting to the perpendicular and engine sound dropping into
the bass. Its spots picked out a ten-meter circle of white light that the
aircraft dropped into, blowing clouds of sand that swept over Gonzales in a
whirlwind. The inverted fans' roar dropped to a whisper, and with a creak the
plane kneeled on its gear, placing the cockpit almost on the ground. Gonzales
picked up his bags and walked toward the plane. A ladder unfolded with a
hydraulic hiss, and Gonzales stepped up and into the plane's bubble.
"Mikhail Gonzales?" the pilot asked. His multi-function flight glasses
were tilted back on his forehead, where their mirrored ovoid lenses made a
blank second pair of eyes; a thin strand of black fiberoptic cable trailed
from their rim. Beneath the glasses, his thin face was brown and seamed-- `no
cosmetic work for this guy', Gonzales thought. The man wore a throwaway
"tropical" shirt with dancing pink flamingos on a navy blue background.
"That's me," Gonzales said. He gestured with the shock-case in his right
hand, and the pilot toggled a switch that opened the luggage locker. Gonzales
put his bags into the steel compartment and watched as the safety net pulled
tight against the bags and the compartment door closed. He took a seat in the
first of eight empty rows behind the pilot. Cushions sighed beneath him, and
from the seatback in front of him a feminine voice said, "You should engage
your harness. If you need instructions, please say so now."
Gonzales snapped closed the trapezoidal catch where shoulder and lap belts
connected, then stretched against the harness, feeling the sweat dry on his
skin in the plane's cool interior. "Thank you," said the voice.
The pilot was speaking to Myaung U Airport traffic control as the plane
lifted into twilight over the city. The soft white glow from the dome light
vanished, then there were only the last moments of orange sunlight coming
through the bubble.
The temple plain was spread out beneath, all murk and shadow, with the
temple and pagoda spires reaching up toward the light, white stucco and gold
tinted red and orange.
"Man, that's a beautiful sight," the pilot said.
"You're right," Gonzales said. It was, but he'd seen it before, and
besides, it had already been a long day.
The pilot flipped his glasses down, and the plane banked left and headed
south along the river. Gonzales lay back in his seat and tried to relax.
They flew above black water, following the Irrawady River until they
crossed an international flyway to Bangkok. Dozing in the interior darkness,
Gonzales was almost asleep when he heard the pilot say, "Shit, somebody's
here. Partisan attack group, probably--no recognition codes. Must be flying
ultralights--our radar didn't see them. We've got an image now, though."
"Any problem?" Gonzales asked.
"Just coming for a look. They don't bother foreign charters." And he
pointed to their transponder message flashing above the primary displays:
THIS INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT IS NON-MILITARY.
IT CLAIMS RIGHT OF PASSAGE UNDER U.N. ACT OF 2020.
It would keep on repeating until they crossed into Thai airspace.
The flight computer display lit bright red with COLLISION WARNING, and a
Klaxon howl filled the plane's interior. The pilot said, "Fuck, they
launched!" The swing-wing's turbines screamed full out as the plane's
computer took command, and the pilot's hands gripped his yoke, not guiding,
just hanging on.
Gonzales's straps pulled tight as the plane tumbled and fell, corkscrewed,
looped, climbed again--smart metal fish evading fiery harpoons. Explosions
blossomed in the dark, quick asymmetrical bursts of flame followed immediately
by hard thumping sounds and shock waves that knocked the swing-wing as it
followed its chaotic path through the night.
Then an aircraft appeared, flaring in fire that surged around it, its pilot
in blazing outline--a stick figure with arms thrown to the sky in the instant
before pilot and aircraft disintegrated in flame.
Their own flight went steady and level, and control returned to the pilot's
yoke. Gonzales's shocked retinas sparkled as the night returned to blackness.
"Collision averted," the plane's computer said. "Time in red zone, six point
eight nine seconds."
"What the hell?" Gonzales said. "What happened?"
"Holy Jesus motherfucker," the pilot said.
Gonzales sat gripping his seat, chilled by the blast of cold air from the
plane's air conditioner onto his sweat-soaked shirt. He glanced down to his
lap: no, he hadn't pissed himself. Really, everything happened too quickly
for him to get that scared.
A Mitsubishi-McDonnell "Loup Garou" warplane dived in front of them and
circled in slow motion. Like the ultralights it was cast in matte black, but
with a massive fuselage. It turned a slow barrel roll as it circled them,
lazy predator looping fat, slow prey, then turned on brilliant floods that
played across their canopy.
The pilot and Gonzales both froze in the glare.
Then the Loup Garou's black cockpit did a reverse-fade; behind the
transparent shell Gonzales saw the mirror-visored pilot, twin cables running
from the base of his neck. The Loup Garou's wings slid forward into
reverse-sweep, and it stood on its tail and disappeared.
Gonzales strained against his taut harness.
"Assholes!" the pilot screamed.
"Who was that?" Gonzales asked, his voice thin and shaking. "What do you
mean?"
"The Myanmar Air Force," the pilot said, his voice tight, face red beneath
the flight glasses' mirrors. "They set us up, the pricks. They used us to
troll for a guerrilla flight." The pilot flipped up his glasses and stared
with pointless intensity out the cockpit window, as if he could see through
the blackness. "And waited," he said. "Waited till they had the whole
flight." The pilot swiveled around abruptly and faced Gonzales, his features
distorted into a mad and angry caricature of the man who had welcomed Gonzales
ninety minutes before. "Do you know how fucking close we came?" he asked.
No, Gonzales shook his head. No.
"Milliseconds, man. Fucking milliseconds. Close enough to touch," the
pilot said. He swiveled his seat to face forward, and Gonzales heard its
locking mechanism click as he settled back into his own seat, fear and shame
spraying a wild neurochemical mix inside his brain--
Gonzales had never felt things like this before--death down his spine and
up his gut, up his throat and nose, as close as his skin; death with a bad
smell...burning, burning.
* * *
As the morning passed, the sun moved away from the stained glass, and the
room's interior went to gloom. Only monitor lights remained lit, steady rows
of green above flickering columns of numbers on the light blue face of the
monitor panel.
A housekeeping robot, a pod the size of a large goose, worked slowly across
the floor, nuzzled into the room's corners, then left the room, its motion
tentacles beneath it making a sound like wind through dry grass.
The cockpit display flashed as landing codes fed through the flight
computer, then the swing-wing locked into the Bangkok landing grid and began
its slide down an invisible pipe. They went to touchdown guided by electronic
hands.
The pilot turned to Gonzales as they descended and said, "I'll have to file
a report on the attack. But you're lucky--if we had landed in Myanmar,
government investigators would have been on you like white on rice, and you
could forget about leaving for days, maybe weeks. You're okay now: by the
time they process the report and ask the Thais to hold you, you'll be gone."
At the moment, the last thing Gonzales wanted to do was spend any time in
Myanmar. "I'll get out as quickly as I can," he said.
Now that it was all over, he could feel the Fear climbing in him like the
onset of a dangerous drug. Trying to calm himself, he thought, `really,
nothing happened, except you got the shit scared out of you, that's all.'
As the swing-wing settled on the pad, Gonzales stood and went to pick up
his luggage from the open baggage hold. The pilot sat watching as the plane
went through its shutdown procedures.
`Do something,' Gonzales said to himself, feeling panic mount. He pulled
the memex's case out of the hold and said, "I want a copy of your flight
records."
"I can't do that."
"You can. I'm working with Internal Affairs, and I was almost killed while
flying in your aircraft."
"So was I, man."
"Indeed. But I need this data. Later, IA will go the full official route
and pick everything up, but I need it now. A quick dump into my machine here,
that's all it will take. I'll give you authorization and receipt." Gonzales
waited, keeping the pressure on by his insistent gaze and posture.
The pilot said, "Okay, that ought to cover my ass."
Gonzales slid the shock-case next to the pilot's seat, kneeled and opened
the lid. "Are you recording?" he asked the pilot.
The man nodded and said, "Always."
"That's what I thought. All right, then: for the record, this is Mikhail
Mikhailovitch Gonzales, senior employee of Internal Affairs Division, SenTrax.
I am acquiring flight records of this aircraft to assist in my investigation
of certain events that occurred during its most recent flight." He looked at
the pilot. "That should do it," he said.
He pulled out a data lead from the case and snapped it into the access plug
on the instrument panel. Lights flashed across the panel as data began to
spool into the quiescent memex. The panel gonged softly to signal transfer
was complete, and Gonzales unplugged the lead and closed the case. "Thanks,"
he said to the pilot, who sat staring out the cockpit bubble.
Gonzales stood and patted the case and thought to himself, `hey, memex, got
a surprise for you when you wake up.' He felt much better.
A carry-slide hauled Gonzales a mile or so through a brightly- lit tunnel
with baby blue plastic and plaster walls marked with signs in half a dozen
languages promising swift retribution for vandalism. Red and green virus
graffiti smeared everything, signs included, and as Gonzales watched, messages
in Thai and Burmese transmuted, and new stick figures emerged with dialogue
balloons saying god knows what. A lone phrase in red paint read in English,
HEROIN ALPHA DEVIL FLOWER. Shattered boxes of black fibroid or coarse sprays
of multi-wire cable marked where surveillance cameras had been.
Grey floor-to-ceiling steel shutters blocked the narrow portal to
International Arrivals and Departures. Faceless holoscan robots--dark,
wheeled cubes with carbon-fiber armor and tentacles and spiked sensor
antennas--worked the crowd, antennas swiveling.
All around were Asian travelers, dark-suited men and women: Japanese,
Chinese, Malaysians, Indonesians, Thai. They spread out from Asia's
"dragons," world centers of research and manufacturing, taking their low
margins and hard sell to Europe and the Americas, where consumption had become
a way of life. Everywhere Gonzales traveled, it seemed, he found them: cadres
armed with technical and scientific prowess and fueled by persistent ambition.
They formed the steel core of much of the world's prosperity. The United
States and the dragons lived in uneasy symbiosis: the Asians had a hundred
ways of making sure the American economy didn't just roll over and die and
take the prime North American consumer market with it. Whether Japanese,
Koreans, Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese-Canadians--they bought some corporations
and merged with others, and Americans ended up working for General Motors
Fanuc, Chrysler Mitsubishi, or Daewoo-DEC, and with their paychecks they
bought Japanese memexes, Korean autos, Malaysian robotics.
Shutter blades cranked open with a quick scream of metal, and Gonzales
stepped inside. An Egyptian guard in a white headdress, blue-and-white
checked headband, and gray U.N. drag cross-checked his i.d., gave a quick,
meaningless smile--teeth white and perfect under a black moustache--and waved
him on.
Southeast Asian Faction Customs waited in the form of a small Thai woman in
a brown uniform with indecipherable scrawls across yellow badges. Her
features were pleasant and impassive; she wore her black hair pulled tightly
back and held with a clear plastic comb. She stood behind a gray metal table;
on the floor next to it was a two-meter high general purpose scanner, its
controls, screens, and read-outs hidden under a black cloth hood. Dirty green
walls wore erratically-spaced signs in a dozen languages, detailing in small
type the many categories of contraband.
The woman motioned for him to sit in the upright chair in front of the
table, then for him to put his clothes bag and cases on the table.
She spoke, and the translator box at her waist echoed in clear, neuter
machine English: "Your person has been scanned and cleared." She put the soft
brown bag into the mouth of the scanner, and the machine vetted the bag with a
quiet beep. The woman slid it back to Gonzales.
She spoke again, and the translator said, "Please open these cases" as she
pointed toward the two shock-cases. For each, Gonzales screened the access
panel with his left hand and tapped in the entry codes with his right. The
case lids lifted with a soft sigh. Inside the cases, monitor and diagnostic
lights flashed above rows of memory modules, heavy solids of black plastic the
size of a small safety deposit box.
Gonzales saw she was holding a copy of the Data Declaration Form the memex
had filled out in Myanmar and transmitted to both Myanmar and Thai
governments. She looked into one of the cases and pointed to a row of
red-tagged and sealed memory modules.
The translator's words followed behind hers and said, "These modules we
must hold to verify that they contain no contraband information."
"Myanmar customs did so. These are SenTrax corporate records."
"Perhaps they are. We have not cleared them."
"If you wish, I will give you the access protocols. I have nothing to
hide, but the modules are important to my work."
She smiled. "I do not have proper equipment. They must be examined by
authorities in the city." The translator's tones accurately reflected her
lack of concern.
Gonzales sensed the onset of severe bureaucratic intransigence. For
whatever occult reasons, this woman had decided to fuck him around, and the
harder he pushed, the worse things would be. Give it up, then. He said, "I
assume they will be returned to me as soon as possible."
"Certainly. After careful examination. Though it is unlikely that the
examination can be completed before your departure." She slid the case off
her desk and to the floor behind it. She was smiling again, a satisfied
bureaucrat's smile. She turned back to her console, Gonzales's case already a
thing of the past. She looked up to see him still standing there and said,
"How else can I help you?"
The machine-world began to disperse, turning to fog, and as it did, banks
of low-watt incandescents lit up around the room's perimeter, and the patterns
of console lights went through a series of rapid permutations as Gonzales was
brought to a waking state. The room's lights had been full up for an hour
when the desynching series was complete and the egg began to split.
Inside the egg Gonzales lay pale, nude, near-comatose, machine-connected: a
new millennium Snow White. A flesh-colored catheter led from his
water-shrunken genitals, transparent iv feeds from both forearms. White
sealant and anti-irritant paste had clotted around the tubes from throat and
mouth. The sharp ozone smell of the paste was all over him.
An autogurney had rolled next to the egg, and its hands, shining chrome
claws, began disconnecting tubes and leads. Then it worked with hands and
black flexible arms the thickness of a stout rope to lift Gonzales from the
egg and onto its own surface.
Gonzales woke up in his own bedroom and began to whimper. "It's okay," the
memex whispered through the room's speaker. "It's okay."
Some time later Gonzales awoke again, lay in gloom and considered his
condition. Some nausea, legs weak, but no apparent loss of gross motor
control, no immediate parapsychological effects (disorientations, amnesias,
synesthesias) ...
Gonzales got up and went to the bathroom, stood amid white tile, polished
aluminum and mirrors and said, "Warm shower." Water hissed, and the shower
stall door swung open. The water ran down his skin and the sweat and paste
rolled off his body.
______________________________________________________________________________
Tom Maddox has published stories in _Omni_, _Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine_, and
in anthologies and magazines in the U. S. and abroad, including _Mirrorshades:
The Cyberpunk Anthology_. The excerpts presented here are from _Halo_, his
first novel; it will be published in November of this year by Tor Books in the
U. S. and Century Hutchinson in England.
He is currently the writing coordinator at The Evergreen State College,
Olympia, Washington. On the net, he frequents rec.arts.books, alt.cyberpunk,
alt.postmodern, rec.arts.sf-lovers, and alt.flame; he has been involved in a
few moderately lunatic flame wars. He plays blues guitar. He was cited at
the end of _Neuromancer_ as the inventor of ICE.
maddox@blake.u.washington.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Black Leaves
Dana Goldblatt
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Black leaves falling, all around; last autumn we had gold, orange, brown,
all bright or mottled with green and insect-tasted; now we have black, a shiny
brown-black like eyeliner, on whole and perfect leaves, which refuse even to
decay. They rule in dark splendor over every lawn with trees.
And the deciduous do not darken alone. The evergreens too feel the blight,
if it is a blight. Whole pine forests are dropping black needles in the
places pines grow; Christmas tree wholesalers are desperate. The science
section of the newspaper had a long article on the problem, the point of which
was that no one understood what the problem was. No one even knew about it
before last year; and few believed it to be serious before this September.
We shall all suffocate slowly, my husband says. He is referring to the
common belief that it is the world's forests which supply our oxygen. I do
not trust this. There are too many other plants for the trees to be so vital,
I think.
We are going to the woods, he and I, and our daughter, to see something
which may be going out of the world.
Packing the supplies we need in several boxes and putting those into the
trunk on top of the tent, I am able to stop thinking over and over that this
is the last camping trip I shall take. I am able to trust my mind while my
hands are occupied.
Tricia helped me pack for a while but tired quickly and went to take a nap.
Now she will be awake for the ride, which means whining and silly games. If I
am lucky, Allen will be in a cheerful mood and keep her occupied; otherwise I
will have to do it. When we return, the leaves will cover the lawn, and we
will not be able to see the grass.
Allen read an article from the December issue of `Geo Science' on the
train this afternoon. Photosynthesis has been replaced by a different but
closely related process in trees, which releases ammonia in small quantities,
as well as oxygen and carbon dioxide. It creates some kind of long chainlike
molecules in the leaves. Allen says it's like the leaves are a plastic
factory instead of a food factory.
I told him that was impossible, it would kill the trees. It is killing
them, he said. I still didn't believe it, but I stopped arguing. He'd read
the article, not me.
Soon we are on our way to the campgrounds. Tricia plays window Bingo with
Allen while I drive. The colorful billboards are a contrast to the black
trees.
We put our tent up yesterday evening at twilight. When we arrived, there
were at least thirty tents and motor homes; by the time we got our tent
assembled nearly ten had left.
This morning there were fifteen still here. Allen and I dressed ourselves
and Tricia and set out on a nature hike. Spotting a small yellow flower with
dark green leaves, I asked Allen its name, was surprised that he didn't know.
Tricia picked some dandelions. Except for the lack of brilliant foliage, the
woods seemed the same as on any late October weekend.
We returned to our tent, Tricia clutching a fistful of dandelions with a
black-eyed susan reigning over the bouquet. Allen had picked a handful of
leaves off a maple tree which seemed especially afflicted. Its bark was much
darker than it should have been, according to Allen. Having scattered the
dandelions on the ground and placed the black- eyed susan on her sleeping bag,
Tricia wandered over to where Allen and I sat talking. She wanted one of his
black leaves; they were shinier and more attractive to her than the ones on
the ground outside. Allen gave her one.
I went to check on her and found her chewing on the leaf. Snatching it out
of her hand wasn't enough; she'd swallowed some. Did she feel sick, Allen
asked. No, she was fine. I'd taken her leaf away, Tricia said, even though
she always chewed on leaves and grass blades at home.
I tried to get Allen to take her to a hospital. You're being hysterical,
he said. It was just a leaf. But these aren't just leaves, I said. They
have ammonia, and plastic, and all that awful stuff in them. She'll be fine,
he said. Do you want to upset her? he asked. But she did get sick. She got
a terrible stomach ache and vomited until she was exhausted; we left the
campground and arrived home early this evening. She seems to be completely
recovered. I hope I will sleep well tonight; I should, since I will be in my
own bed.
I slept badly last night. I dreamed Tricia had died; her corpse was black
and shiny. We laid her out in her coffin, covered her with black flowers and
took her to the cemetery. Our minister, our friends, my parents all stood
around the grave as Allen talked about long chainlike molecules. In the
cemetery, there was grass as far as I could see: not one blade was green.
______________________________________________________________________________
Dana Goldblatt never has admitted to preferring science fiction
over other forms of fiction, except when it was cheaper at used
bookstores. She started writing stories for fun in high school, but
didn't finish any until after she graduated. When she was an editor
of Brandeis University's literary magazine, _Kether_, she
started writing a lot more often. Dana is currently a graduate
student in computer science, and is still attending Brandeis.
dana@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 4
Jim Vassilakos
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Mike leaned against the wall and squinted into the cool, scented spray as
it stung his face and shoulders and dissolved into a fine, white mist, pools
gathering in clusters and slipping down his aching body to the hexagonal tiles
below. He vaguely wondered what he would tell Linden, trying to rehearse the
words in his mind. "Oh, remember that guy with the android who kidnapped Niki
and bugged your offices and home? Yeah, he's really an okay guy. I was just
talking to him this morning. He decided not to jettison me out his torpedo
tubes. Isn't that the nicest thing?"
Robin was in the next room prying about, trying to glean information about
him from every facet of his life. Boss's orders, she explained, but she
approached the assignment with a curiosity beyond mere orders. He hardly knew
her and she was already getting on his nerves.
"Okay. Dry now." The spray shut off and short blasts of warm air jetted
from the sides of the stall. A clear bowl-shaped device lowered itself from
the ceiling until it surrounded his head. He shut his eyes as hot air jets
whipped around his ears. In a few moments Mike stepped out of the stall and
looked for the threads. Robin had laid a black three piece suit out for him.
He hated formal wear, but he knew the occasion warranted it. Quickly dressing,
he grabbed a comb and then set it back down as it scratched bare flesh. He
found a formal hat beside the imager.
Robin, dressed in a long white evening dress, sat on the couch bent over
the Niko camera system with its various parts sprawled across the living room
floor. She had been sifting through pictures in storage and apparently one had
caught her fancy.
"What're you up to?" Mike approached cautiously remembering the last
night's incident and the pain she could inflict.
"I didn't know you had another Siri. Who's this one?"
Mike glanced at the picture on the screen. A young Siri woman, perhaps five
years older than Niki, stood facing a large triangular lake finished in
polished black stone centered around three fountains outlined by the dim amber
light of Calanna's dying red sun. Her eyes, dark and bitter, seemed to cast a
shadow across the black stone tiles upon which naked symbols were etched like
tortured spirits, bonded to the stone for all eternity. Mike remembered the
sacrificial alter for all its beauty and pain; and as if by reflex, he reached
to the monitor and the screen went black.
Robin looked up startled, "I was just looking."
"She was an old friend. You wanna go?"
"There's still another hour. What's your hurry?" She stood up and walked
into the bedroom.
"Nothin'. What's yours?" Mike packed the camera into its case and continued
to ponder what he would tell Chuck. He walked to the bedroom, pausing before
the door, reflecting what Robin might be doing. He tried to take into account
the fact that she was an android, but with everything that happened, it still
seemed impossible.
"I always did like a girl who was straight-forward." He smiled at the poor
taste of his comment.
"Excuse me?"
Mike entered the room to see Robin hooked up to the computer system via a
thin clear cord leading into the comm-socket from her ear. Suddenly he found
it not so hard to think of her as an android.
"What are you doing to Cindy?"
"Talking," she smiled. "You have everything locked up real tight. No access
to private files."
Mike felt relieved. For a moment he debated inwardly between snapping her
cord or just yanking it out of her ear. The thought made him grin.
"Cindy, give Robin all the information you have on the Nissithiu."
"It is done, Michael."
Robin unplugged and the thin cord automatically retracted into her head.
Mike felt generous, as if he had a choice in the matter.
Robin stared at him for a moment before speaking. "What makes you so sure?"
Mike shrugged, "The facts fit. C'mon, let's go see Linden."
The subway to Greenflower was slower than most since it traveled above the
surface for much of the ride. Mike imagined that its architect preferred
monorails with their visual entertainment of clearings, crop-land, and rolling
hills speeding quickly by the windows to the functional subways which moved a
person tens of kilometers in a matter of a few minutes without anything to
look at except bare earth along the way. True, the subway to Greenflower was
more pleasant than most, but it wasn't really a subway.
Robin didn't seem particularly impressed, however. She kept studying Mike
and the other passengers, and when she caught Mike watching she even faked a
yawn. It didn't bother Mike, but he didn't like it either. If she was going to
fake a human characteristic, better that she should fake being delighted to
see the trees dashing by or the rushing sound the wind made whenever the
tracks would turn. That was what he liked so much about Niki. She was always
so happy just to experience and be alive. That was what he envied most about
her ever since the day he met her at the Psi Institute on Tizar after his last
return from Calanna. He liked her so much he didn't even bother checking out
the full range of her talents, and when he had found out how limited they
were, Mike still decided to keep her on.
Niki was not nearly as talented as her predecessor in the picture, but she
was happier all the same, though even that could become irritating sometimes.
Robin on the other hand was either dead or cruel. Mike smiled at the thought,
because he knew he was being too judgemental, but it seemed true all the same.
Robin had her excuse, however; she was an android. Her makers wouldn't program
her so she could have a good time. Anything as state of the art as herself
would have some purpose. Mike, on the other hand, was human. He wondered what
his excuse might be.
The train pulled into the Greenflower station. The Lion's Den was only on
the neighboring hillside looking down over a bluff onto the inland town. It
was perhaps a twenty minute walk, fifteen if they hurried, two or three if
they took a taxi. Mike felt like walking but realized he wouldn't have a
choice as two men in green uniforms entered the compartment.
"Galactican security," one drily announced, "Please come with us."
Every mega-corporation was like a nation state; they all had their own
private police, whether the company specialized in cargo transport, starship
construction, agricultural production, or news gathering and dissemination.
The Galactican was no exception, and on every world under its scope it
recruited from the ranks of the planetary ground command. The people they
invariably got were low quality mercenaries who couldn't cut it in an
interstellar outfit. That knowledge kept the ground cop humble in comparison
with his starlaw counterpart. It was a quality Mike appreciated.
The two security officers led Mike and Robin to a grav-car outside the
subway. The cool evening air enveloped them as the taller of the men fiddled
with the electronic keypad-lock. The other rested his hand on his holster, his
rough fingers lightly touching the handle of his automatic, while his eyes
stared at the back of Robin's neck. The gun looked like army ordinance. Mike
guessed that the short clip contained armor piercing bullets.
Once inside the car, they sped up the hillside toward the Lion's Den. With
variable altitude control, the ride was non- stop; and cars on cross-aisles
sped above or below at intersections. Within two minutes they had settled
outside the banquet hall, the tall statue pillars of the building suggested a
certain elegance of manner which Mike knew would be lacking within. The tall
officer motioned for Mike to follow as he withdrew from the car toward the
white stone building.
Mike looked over his shoulder as the shorter guard stood blocking the door,
"What about her?"
"She stays here," the tall one answered.
Mike followed the security officer into the building, noticing familiar
faces smiling and nodding in every direction. Linden sat at the front table
flanked by the departmental heads. Mike approached cautiously, catching
Linden's eye as he walked toward the table.
"Mike!" It was Niki. Bill stood behind her, his long dark hair combed back
and knotted. Several heads turned suddenly from the crowd.
"We thought you might not..."
"I know," He cut her short. "What did you tell Chuck?"
"Everything," Bill responded first. "When you didn't come back... what
happened?"
Mike scowled, "Things are screwed up. I've gotta see Chuck."
"Hold on a sec..."
Mike cut through the crowd toward the editor. Linden wore a blue suit and a
confident smile. He stood up as Mike reached the table, and several of the
department heads followed the editor's example, offering their hands to Mike
as the guard took an unobtrusive position in the background.
"Gentlemen, you know Mr. Harrison."
"Good to see you again young man, you're doing a great job for the paper."
"I hear you will be speaking tonight, Mr. Harrison."
"That was a brilliant piece on Telmar."
Mike shook their hands and exchanged pleasantries before pulling Linden
aside.
"Chuck, we have to talk"
Linden kept smiling, "You bet."
"Now."
Once they were outside, Linden dropped his show smile, "Okay, what
happened."
Mike let out a long breath, taking his hat off as an opener. Linden
blinked with astonishment at the shaven head and short metal barbs.
"...what the... you okay?"
"For starters, I've got to wear these until I get away from our psychotic,
android friend. Clay wants me to take Robin to Calanna to find Fork, and I
don't think he's an Imp."
"He's not," Linden stopped staring when the hat went back on. "We checked
over that disk you stole from the Solomon estate. The one you planted on Niki
for us to find."
Mike nodded, "Anything juicy?"
"It seems a lot of people were visiting Mr. Solomon that day. Many are
listed as tourists. Other's as diplomats. We think they may be spies."
"Azazi?"
"Draconian Corporation. You stumbled onto something very big."
Mike tried to puzzle everything together in his head, but none of the
pieces matched.
"Have you informed the government."
Linden shook his head, "And blow the story? No way."
Mike gulped down wondering how long he could go to prison for concealing
information about Draconian spies. He finally looked up, "What do I do?"
"Take her to Calanna. Get into her programming over there."
"We can do that better over here."
"No," Linden stared into the reporter's eyes. "Mike, we've already agreed
that somebody had to get into my office and home to plant those bugs, and that
somebody was probably in security. If they have and agent in security, they
could just as easily have ten in technical. Get the job done on Calanna. It'll
be more quiet that way."
Mike looked down to the grassy turf below his feet, "Okay. Get me a ship
and I'm off."
"Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for that more than generous introduction. It is
certainly a pleasure to be here, and to speak to such a distinguished
assemblage of colleagues, employers, and guests."
There was a titter from the audience as Michael Harrison surveyed the
banquet hall. There were easily over a hundred people present and none who
knew what he was about to say, himself included. Mike tried to concentrate on
what they wanted to hear, but his head was still dizzy from the events of the
day, and he felt a cold sweat beneath the hat as the metal implants began to
itch.
"As Mr. Jaden pointed out, I've been working for the Galactican for a very
short time, and my work experience often borders on the fantastic, so whatever
advice I have to share with my colleagues, whatever incriminations I have to
send to my employers, and whatever insights I have to give to our guests
tonight, should all be taken with a granule of sodium-chloride.
"Investigative gathering is a very individualistic effort; everybody in the
business has their own style and way of tackling a case, so be forewarned that
what works fine for me will probably fail miserably for you."
This time there was laughter from the audience. Mike began to relax and let
the words flow. His trick was just to keep speaking and never really think
about what he was saying. As long as his mouth kept moving, shovelling out the
meaningless phrases stuck together with the pointless glue that was public
speaking, he'd be through with his obligation in no time.
But underneath the cool exterior his mind began to wander away from the
speech. Being an engaged speaker was what they taught in oral communications.
He remembered the class well enough. He remembered two of his instructor's pet
phrases: "Reach out to your audience;" "speak with them, not at them." Mike
inwardly smiled remembering how he had passed the class: by being disengaged.
Speaking was frightening enough, let alone engaged speaking. Mike always had
an alternate method, for almost everything. He liked to experiment until he
found out for himself what worked best.
The same was true with investigative reporting. Some guys would read the
morning updates until they found something interesting, and then they'd go and
research a spin-off. Others would carry a team of news-hounds, usually young
people just entering the workforce who were looking for a few extra credits.
Mike decided to rent-a-psyche.
He could have found John Doe #17 any of the other ways, but the fact was
that Niki found him the day she visited the med-center for a psi-rating test.
She had contacted the institute on Tizar and they referred her to Dr.
Albertus. After the test she was still keyed-up and open to psi-emissions as
they were called. That was the day they brought Fork into D-ward.
"D" was for Disaster. He had been apprehended in a cafeteria at the
starport with a bloody fork in his hand. It was the real kind, not like the
grav-utensils which couldn't hurt a flee. He must have been from off-world.
There was no record of him anywhere in the planetary directory. And to top it
off, he had no identification what-so-ever. Niki just happened to sense his
total confusion while walking by the two nurses who were transporting a wacko
to solitary, bound in a straight-jacket and tied to a stretcher. It had been
in the updates, any nurse news- hound could have called somebody on the floor,
but as it happened, Niki spotted the opportunity and took it. That's the way
the dice fell, and Mike couldn't say he was any happier for it.
Fork was messed up, that anyone could tell, but what nobody had known was
that the damage had been the result of a mind- scanner. It took a trained
"psyche" to know that. Even sophisticated medical equipment could miss it. It
was that little bit of knowledge which everyone else had carelessly avoided
that gave Mike a story. To each, his own.
The mind-scanner was an expensive piece of technology far more advanced
than the sensatizer Mike had so recently experienced. It attempted to do what
any well-trained Siri could do, read the mind of its victim. Victim was the
word to use, because mental damage was often associated with over-zealous use
of the equipment. If someone was well trained at hiding a secret inside their
mind, all that there was to do was kill a few brain cells until such training
departed. And then, sometimes, the scanner wasn't used to get secrets. On rare
occasions, it was used to maim. Mike believed that Fork's was such a case; and
he believed that the Imps were the responsible party.
But how did the Draconians enter into it? That was the piece of the puzzle
Mike couldn't place. It hinted at something much larger in scope, something
which dwarfed both Mike and Fork and all of Tizar. It was the real itch that
he couldn't yet scratch, until he got to Calanna.
"Being a reporter for an interstellar news syndicate also has certain
fringe benefits, not entirely immaterial. For starters, nobody wants to piss
you off."
Mike looked around. Everywhere he saw people laughing. He hoped they were
laughing with him and not at his obvious lies.
"Another, and this one is just as critical as it sounds, is that often if
there is an important public figure you need to interview, that person will
generally take time out of their busy schedule to get some good press, whereas
if you were working for some two-bit firm out of Arcadia..." he stopped for a
wide if sheepish grin, "I hope there's nobody here from Arcadia tonight..."
The audience was loving it.
Except for one person. She sat in a corner near the back. Her dark features
were not so stern as they were indifferent, but her eyes were as sharp and
cold as steel. She seemed vaguely unimpressed, and Mike felt his heart skip a
beat as she stared directly through him.
"The last fringe benefit I can bring to mind, tonight, is that after the
story is written and published and read by the masses, the reporter gets to
speak to a distinguished assemblage of his colleagues, employers, and guests.
That's always a lot of fun."
The entire audience tilted on the edges of their seats, hands poised in
clapping-position.
"And with that I'd like to return control of this honors banquet to one of
my most esteemed employers, your friend and mine, Mr. Ray Jaden. Mr.
Chairman."
Mike hurried away from the lectern amidst raucous applause from a mostly
standing audience, and took his seat next to Niki and Bill. They both
congratulated him with pats on the back, and Mike guessed that the speech went
okay, though he still hadn't the faintest inkling to know what is was that he
said.
"Nice speech buddy."
"Thanks Bill."
"... cept, next time I'd leave out that part about taking a dump outside
the Cubbyhole."
Mike turned around, "What?"
"You 'member. When we came back from Telmar and got..."
"I didn't." Mike felt his mouth drop open.
Bill's face broke into a grin, "Just kidding, Mike."
Mike sighed with relief as Walker laughed, "You have to admit, I had you
goin'."
Bill Walker was one of the few people who really knew how Mike worked. Mike
tried to teach him everything, and in the end he'd taught Bill too much. Now
he'd do his best just to hide things from the younger gatherer.
Mike looked over his shoulder and saw the woman in the corner. She was
still focused on him. He turned around but could feel her stare boring into
the back of his skull. Her face was familiar, but he couldn't place it. Some
foreign official, he decided.
"Bill, who's the woman in that corner in the white dress, nothing over the
shoulders. She keeps looking over here."
Bill took a half turn using the full extent of his peripheral vision, which
was far better than most people's. Mike figured that he had lots of practice.
"She's turned around."
"Well, she was..."
"Wait. It's Draconian Ambassador Kato. Don't you read the paper? Oh, of
course. Look who I'm talking to. Forget I asked."
"Don't let it happen again," Mike used his best Draconian accent. It
sounded absurdly frustrated, and Bill laughed.
"I think she likes you."
"Shut-up."
Natasia Uhambra Kato was the permanent Draconian envoy to Tizar. It was
uncommon for her to attend social gatherings unless she was required to do so
by her office. Mike figured that drastic circumstances had called for drastic
measures. But what did she hope to accomplish?
"Here comes the booty, mate." Bill looked pleased with himself as Jaden
placed a tray of wall plaques on the table beside the lectern. He had a list
of "winners" in his left hand and a glass of water in his right.
"This could take awhile."
Bill smiled back, "Should we pick up the yawn patrol."
"But that would be rude," Mike countered as he began his first glorious
yawn of the evening. Bill attended with voluminous seconds.
"Our first award goes to one of our speakers tonight, a gatherer who has
done a splendid job for the Galactican, and a close personal friend of mine."
"I wish he hadn't said that," Bill slowly began to struggle up from his
seat.
Mike placed a hand on his shoulder, "Sit down."
"This gentleman has preserved the sacred trust our paper holds with the
public, that of reporting the truth as it is, without reservation and without
dramatization."
"At least we know it can't be you."
"Shusshhh..."
"He headed the best-selling issue of the Galactican this year with his
front page article headlined, `Telmar Prepares For Civil War' which I might
add, was quite accurate if we are to have any faith in the current news.
"His articles and essays are insightful and are a fine example of the very
best in journalism. With that, it gives me great pleasure and pride to award
this plaque to Michael J. Harrison, for his contributions to the Galactican."
As Mike accepted the award there were resounding cries for another speech,
all of which died down as he resumed his seat. It took an act of will to not
sneak a glance toward the corner of the hall. There was something different
about her.
"I hope you're not reading me."
Niki turned, startled, "Somethin' the matter?"
"I'll tell you about it later."
The plaque wasn't especially impressive. Mike wondered if they imported the
silver ore from Telmar. Jaden continued to hand out various other plaques to
various other people for various other accomplishments while company
photographers stood around snapping images.
"I wish I had one," Bill interrupted Mike's thoughts with his most sullen
voice. He looked like a four-year-old who lost his lollipop.
Mike stuffed the plaque in Bill's jacket pocket.
"Hey..."
"You can change the name."
Bill laughed, "Hey, thanks dude."
"Anytime."
As the tray grew empty, Mike noticed that he and Bill weren't the only
one's yawning. However, nobody had the guts to make for the door. Mike knew
that the first person to break open the doors and leave would cause a
tidal-wave of people to follow, but nobody dared start the congestion.
Finally, Jaden congratulated the readership, everyone who came, and
everyone who didn't get an award but thought they deserved one all the same.
With the final laugh, he declared the ceremony complete and adjourned the
congregation. The rabble, anticipating the clap of the gavel, were already on
their feet with more raucous applause, but this time with constipated steps as
they tried to squirm outside and perform their relative duties to nature. Mike
laughed remembering the Cubbyhole.
"Are we having fun yet?"
Mike gave Niki a hug, "We're about to."
"Michael..."
Linden approached from behind Niki, "I got that ship."
Mike looked over her shoulder, "How soon?"
"It's at the starport in pre-flight. Hanger 183."
"Accommodations?"
"Four."
"Okay, thanks Chuck."
Niki tugged Mike's arm, "What's goin' on?"
"Get your stuff packed, you too Bill, we're going to Calanna."
"Now?"
"Yeah."
Bill headed toward the doors muttering something about his mother. Niki
followed, and then suddenly turned.
"What about you?"
"I've got everything I need."
She turned and ran out after Bill.
"Mike," Linden turned back to face the reporter. The multitudes were still
bumping their way outside amidst the congestion at the Hall's entrance.
"What is it, Chuck?"
The editor's hands were wrung into a knot as he tried to lean casually
against the lectern. He smiled his real smile for the first time in the night.
"Nothing... Good luck."
Mike nodded, "Thanks."
Outside the air was cold, not at all like the balmy summer nights on most
of Calanna. Mike saw the dark figures recede into the distance, climbing into
their chauffeured limousines, a sign of their decadent elegance. The security
officer stood beside the company gravcar. He was looking for Mike amidst the
approaching crowd. Mike guessed that Robin was still tucked away inside. It
would have been a long wait for a human.
"Mr. Harrison."
Mike swung around abruptly, barely catching his head in time to keep the
hat from falling off.
The Ambassador smiled and tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle, "I'm
sorry if I surprised you. My name is Natasia."
"I know." He reached out his hand to shake hers. He wondered if there was
some other sort of protocol.
"But my friends call me Nuke. Don't worry," she withdrew her hand abruptly,
"you don't have to kiss it or anything. I'm not Imperial royalty."
Her long dark hair shined in the moonlight. She was a tall as him, but very
slim. She suppressed another giggle rather poorly, and her face glittered with
amusement, but her eyes told a different story.
"Can I help you Ambassador?"
"No." She waited for her reply to sink as she smiled seductively, "I wanted
to commend you on a brilliant speech."
Mike wondered if she was being sarcastic or giddy.
"Thank you."
"You are welcome."
Her eyes glimmered with icy bemusement as the reply sank deeper into his
mind. Something within them toyed about an idea, as if she were sifting though
his memories for an occasional... stolen disk.
"What do you want? You want to know something."
She studied him for a moment, "I already have what I want. You've told me
everything."
Mike clenched his fist, knowing he'd given away his thoughts.
She put her hands on his shoulders and rubbed her thumbs into the fabric of
his collar while staring into his eyes with a message of sympathy.
"Yes, you have. Now I want you to have a safe and happy trip. And be sure
to find Mr. Fork. He's very, very important."
* * *
A dim, filtered luminescence clung to the cold air as Christina Quatalis
re-checked her flight instructions for the fourth and final time, shaking her
head with a now comfortable disbelief. The recycler hummed in a shaded corner
of the bridge as the computer silently reconfigured her upper boards to
account for the installation of turbo-fan chemical jets into the IFM Vista's
tertiary ports. Hazel eyes scanned its progress, reading the textures of data
with a mixture of apathy and distrust. Over the bridge IC she heard Rrkal's
husky voice shouting obscenities amidst the dull background chatter of ground
techs.
She opened her line, "Some sorta prob, engineering?"
"Captain?" It was Victor. His York accent was easily discernible over any
transmitter. "Com-beta on the third tube is right out. If we had another day
we could make repairs, but not in space."
"Typical ISS surplus. Don't sweat it. We can still route navcom through
manual."
"Only if we tear open your panel. And then we'll probably have to
reconfigure the whole system from scratch. Is it really worth it?"
"We haven't any choice. We're taking-off in five hours."
There was a growl from the other end.
"What's that?"
"Never mind. It's not repeatable."
Chris smiled, "Tell Rrkal to watch his lip. I want you back up here to
chart our course."
"I thought our course was already registered."
"Just get up here; there's been a slight change in plans."
"On my way."
The bridge lights flickered as local batteries kicked in. It was one of
Rrkal's ways of letting everyone know when he was annoyed. Chris punched up
another channel.
"Gunnery, are you ready for the Jane's files on Wasps."
"Ready Freddy," Rita's voice crackled over the IC.
"Sending now..."
Mike cautiously stepped onto the maintenance grav-plate. The congested
workspace of Hanger 183 made him feel conspicuously overdressed. Robin dangled
her legs over the edge of the plate as it slowly lifted to the spacecraft
above. Large spotlight attached to the wall illuminated the aft of the vessel
as water vapor condensed and frosted along the fuel hoses and quickly
sublimated back into the air a few meters down the line. A large Vargr, his
coveralls stained with lubrication fluid, barked directions to the starport
maintenance personnel from a small engine port. An expression of distaste
seemed to cross his black, furry snout as he sniffed the pair's scented
formals.
"Y'da pass'ngerz?"
Mike stepped onto the cold, steel hull extending his hand, "That's right.
My name's Mike."
"Rrkal," the Vargr shot Mike a toothy grin and turned toward the airlock.
"Da stat'rhoomz don'da lif'tund beinty stups sdhar'burd. Blu dhoorz."
"Thanks," Mike winced as the engineer's breath steamed into his face. "We
can find our way around."
The airlock's iris valves rotated open as Mike and Robin approached the
outer hatchway. A youngish woman with short, sandy-blonde hair stood in the
short passage. Her khaki uniform showed command rank.
"Ms. Clay, Mr. Harrison, it's a pleasure to welcome you aboard the Imperial
Free Merchant Vista. I'm Captain Quatalis. If you'll follow me, I'll be happy
to show you to your cabin. Our other two passengers have not yet arrived. Will
you be staying together?"
Mike and Robin followed the Captain through the airlock's double iris
valves and into a hexagonal passage with railings and iron grating floors.
"No. What are the accommodations?"
The Captain glanced toward Mike, twisting a red lever which opened a set of
sliding doors to a small cargo lift.
"Two staterooms, double occupancy."
The lift descended one level and the doors slid open. Three passages ran to
the bow, port, and starboard respectively. The floors and walls were all
finished in an artificial, white substance made to look like polished marble,
but the metal handrails remained. One was conspicuously bent outward several
centimeters.
"Bumpy rides?"
"We often get comments on that."
They followed the captain through the starboard passage and into an oval
common area. A wide table occupied the central floorspace, its translucent
body suspended from the ceiling by a reflective, holographic projection rod.
Gravitic recliner housings lay scattered on the floor around the table like an
assemblage of anthills. Nested into the far wall were cupboards, a hydration
oven, a squat cooling unit, and two air filters. Sliding, blue doors to
either side marked the stateroom entrances.
"You'll find the galley down the port passage in case you get hungry.
Rrkal, I believe you've met our engineer, he cooks the supper chow at eighteen
hours ship time. Otherwise, its fend for yourself. If you need to use medical,
that's next to the galley. Rita doubles as our ship's medic; you'll meet her
if you get spacesick. If you need anything else use channel zero on the IC.
We'll be leaving Tizar in four standard hours, or a little over fifteen cents
local time. After we jump into hyperspace we will review your drop-off
instructions," Captain Quatalis paused with this last thought searching for
the right words. "I hope you enjoy your stay. Good-day."
She quickly headed down the passage and made a swift right turn away from
the lift.
"Apparently in a hurry," Robin poked her nose into the cupboard.
Mike leaned against the passage railing, "What drop-off instructions?"
"I think she means we aren't landing at the spaceport. Wanna split a can of
mash?"
At T-0:02 Bill and Niki showed up, packed as tightly as two rats could
pack. For Niki, that meant a pair of pris glasses, a string of worry beads and
the standard med-kit with bandages and casting-foam. Bill carried his own sort
of med-kit, three vials of purified ethanol, ten grams of hexobarbital, a
laser blade, and one fiberglass body pistol of last resort. Mike never
understood how two people so different could get along so well. Getting Bill
and Niki together was a recipe for destruction. At formal banquets they could
behave, but in a starship galley...
"Foodfight!"
"Hey Mike, what's the matter. I thought you liked yogurt."
"Wanna smoke an enchilada?"
"What the hell is going on here?!"
"Uh..oh.. Ah, hi el cap-i-tan. How beautiful you look this evening."
"This passenger is drunk!"
"Who?"
"I want to know who the hell brought drugs onboard this vessel!"
"Hic..."
Mike began to question the wisdom of bringing along an entourage. Niki was
essential, just because without her finding Fork would be next to impossible.
Robin was part of the deal, which could have been broken back on Tizar. And
Bill, with his aptitude and inclination for brawling, was just cannon fodder.
Mike smiled, wondering if he would get that far.
"Are you aware of the term `depressurization', Mr. Walker?"
"She's gonna space me..."
"Only if you're lucky. And as for you miss Sen..."
"Tee hee hee..."
Captain Quatalis had an interesting method for dealing with drunks. First,
they were injected with a nausea inducing compound causing them to sacrifice
to the porcelain god the entire contents of their stomaches in addition to
several dry heaves just for good measure. Then she had them hooked up to
plasma vaccs where they had their blood filtered by the Empire's most sadistic
gunner/medic. Finally, she had them stuffed into low berths for one hour of
uninterrupted hibernation, just so they wouldn't miss the hangover. Then,
after they were thoroughly sobered, she offered them her sincerest apology for
having put them through such stringent disciplinary measures and broke out a
bottle of Antares' finest spirit, just to show them how much she meant it. If
they accepted, they got to go through the whole process over again.
Mike sat in the corner of medbay taking notes and plenty of pictures for
future blackmail. Half way through the proceedings he felt an unmistakable
disorientation.
Bill leaned on the plasma filter, pukestance. "Was that the drug or just
me?"
"We just jumped into hyperspace," Rita Ghomes examined the readings along
the med displays. "Oh...that's interesting."
"Sweet mama, Mike, get me the hell outta here."
"Sorry Bill, captain's orders."
"Billy..." Niki curled herself into a little ball around the base of her
filter, probably to keep the room from turning so fast.
"What is it Niki?"
"I feel woosy."
"Yeah, that's one way of putting...Mike?"
Mike looked over at his sobering companion. Bill had plainly noticed
something new in his now undrunken state.
"Take off the hat, Harrison."
Mike obliged him, relishing the surprise of a half-suspended grin. Niki's
was less controlled, and evolved from giggles to more puke which nobody
thought she possessed.
"What the..."
"It's a long story."
"Them's head-tricks, Mike. Highly illegal for Tizarians."
Mike nodded, "Courtesy of Mr. Clay."
"In other words, you didn't have any choice."
Mike smiled, "I guess he wants to keep me in line."
"Or out of line."
Niki looked up from her barf, "I think it's gross."
"Look who's talking."
"Hey, at least I hit the bucket, okay?"
Mike turned about and left, donning his hat only as an afterthought. The
dark passage with its white finish and bent railing seemed to flow over with
misplaced memories. He leaned against the metal as if testing its strength.
Something about the cold steel put him at ease, as if the time-space bubble
which now surrounded the ship would take them somewhere else beside Calanna.
Even Telmar was preferable. Or perhaps Tyber. Mike remembered the dense,
choking atmosphere, mildly acidic carbons and sulfates eating his lungs as he
scrambled for a filter mask, tall smokestacks cutting through the lethal fog a
mile and more. Even that would be preferable to Calanna.
The oval antechamber to the passenger staterooms was dark and cold. Mike
searched the table's surface for environmental controls without success,
finally fumbling across the IC.
"Hello?" The voice was strange. A York accent?
"Hi. How d'ya turn the lights on?"
Suddenly the room lighted up.
The person at the other end seemed to laugh, "I think you found the magic
words."
"Oh. Sorry."
"Glad to be of assistance."
Mike switched the line closed and stumbled into a gravitic recliner beside
the table. He wondered who he had just talked to, and how many more
"strangers" were aboard the Vista.
"Computer on." Nothing happened.
"Quaint..." Mike leaned over the table and found the switch at the base of
the connector. The air above the table began to glow with a luminescent
texture as the holo-rod generated a spinning three-dimensional representation
of the Vista. Mike paused, waiting for some sort of prompt. The image of the
Vista continued rotating.
"Hi."
"Unrecognized command."
"Help."
"No help available."
Mike went to the cooling unit and returned to his seat empty handed.
"Show passengers."
"Respecify at unrecognized parameter... passengers."
"Cargo manifest."
"Records unavailable."
"Bullshit..."
"Unrecognized command."
"Show flight instructions."
"Records unavailable."
Mike returned to the cooling unit and grabbed a sluice-stick. He bit off
the end and sucked out a quarter of its frozen, syrupy contents.
"Who the fuck programmed you?"
"Respecify at unrecognized parameter...the."
Mike sat back in the gravitic recliner and let the head tilt back until he
rested on a forward incline, his feet sticking upward and out like a gull's
tail feathers.
"Who...are you?"
"Specify data format."
"Verbose."
"Vista, Imperial Free Merchant, SG-64923. Laid down 124-618, Dimstar,
Imperial Dimstar Corporation. Tonnage two-hundred standard, twenty-eight
hundred cubic meters displacement. Engineering, one Dopel PF-18 fusion-linked
power plant driving two Ditar AG-217e hyperfield generators and one Monoquad
MQ-3 fixed impulse maneuver drive with dual Zalpha-X turbofan installation.
Gravitics, Napaliastics I-14 Field Generators with standard inertial
compensation and zero to two gee sustained gravity adjusters. Range, sixteen
point three light-years with unlimited maneuver..."
Mike straightened his posture as the holographic display zoomed-in on
specific systems aboard the craft. He tried to keep pace with the output as
the computer jumped from one topic to the next. The Vista was a 38-year-old
retired scout ship built by Dimstar based on a standard design two-hundred ton
hull. It had been purchased at discount by the Bank of Ares and leased through
the Galactic Press Corporation as a refitted free merchant. Its entire class
had a history of excellent atmospheric maneuverability, but the Vista, in
particular, had been placed in dry dock six years previously with orders that
it be scrapped due to a series of critical drive failures. Somehow a deal had
been cut, and the defective drives had been repaired.
The vessel was crewed by two Galactican personnel, two independent
contractors, and three robots. The captain, Christine Quatalis, was born on
Tyber. She served as a pilot in the Imperial Scouts before being hired on by
the Galactican. Her first mate, Victor Darian, was from Ares. He served Sector
Navy as a tac-ship lieutenant before being discharged in naval cutbacks three
years earlier. Rita Ghomes, a native of Telmar, was discharged around the same
time from her planetary guard while the civil unrest was beginning to brew
into open revolt. Rrkal, the vargr engineer, was from the outworld coalition.
He worked his passage from the frontier aboard a merchant craft until he was
laid off near Dimstar. The three robots worked in cargo, maintenance, and
engineering respectively, places which passengers were unlikely to ever see.
The passenger roster was classified as were flight instructions. Mike
guessed that he could have broken the security if he had Cindy on hand or
access to the ship's computer directly. An idea itched away somewhere deep
inside his mind, but he put it away shaking his head and smiling. If he hadn't
seen the way Captain Quatalis dealt with drunks, he might have been more
willing to see how she dealt with snoops.
Mike decided he was tired. He peeked down the passage and saw no sign of
movement. Niki and Bill were going to spend a few more hours in sick bay for
sure. Mike pulled himself to his feet and started toward the closest of the
staterooms.
"Lights off." The door slid open as the room darkened behind him. He
shuffled out of his shirt and climbed into where he though the null-tube
should be.
"Mike?" It was Robin.
"Uh..oh.. I think I stumbled into the wrong room."
"It's okay. You don't have to go."
"What makes you think I was going to?"
She didn't bother to come up with a reply but scooted over to make more
room. Mike tried to make out her features in the pitch darkness. He wondered
what she was wearing.
It! It's an android. Mike tried to refocus his thoughts, but they kept
twisting around on him.
She moved again, "What are you thinking?"
"Wrong question."
"You're trying to see me, aren't you."
Not your typical android question, Mike thought. "Can you see in the dark?"
No answer.
"Like, infrared?" His throat felt dry.
She moved again, her head very close to his, but without breath. "With a
dash of the ultraviolet." He could almost see her smile.
Mike closed his eyes and tried to sleep wondering why she would do the
same. She seemed to mimic humans in almost all aspects of their behavior. Was
it simply a part of her programming or something deeper? After several minutes
he felt the supressant currents slowly rock as she seemed to breathe, quietly,
peacefully. He finally let himself sink slowly beneath the cover of sleep, the
depth of space closing inward like a far away dream realized in a sudden
instant. And in his mind's eye he saw the fine red outline of a short fence
post, its needle-thin barbs pressing outward, seeking blindly in the static
wind as a trio of squat, white figures lay aside, their fluffy forms resting
on a bed of green haze.
"If I wanted your opinion, I would have asked for it."
Captain Quatalis looked mildly irritated. She chewed on the end of a
buttersprout and glanced around the galley looking for her lightpen. Victor
sat in the far corner of the room still sizing up her intended audience of
four passengers as Rrkal and Rita stirred a can of condensed Terriak hearts
into their joint concoction.
Niki studied the map on the near wall, trying to decipher the gist of the
implications. "What if we get caught?"
Quatalis turned to the Siri, "If we land at the spaceport we'll all be
picked up by starlaw, or worse, by ISIS. This is the only alternative."
"That's only true if the Calannan guard lets the Imps push them around,
which is something I find highly unlikely."
"It's more likely than you might think Mr. Harrison, particularly since
Calanna has never been a friend of Tizar or the Galactic Press Corporation."
Mike nodded, and reconsidered. The drop-off instructions, drawn by an
ex-army commander working directly under Jaden and heading the Tizar office's
internal security division, were simple and direct; a clean military troop
insertion if Mike had ever seen one. Under the plan, the Vista would jump in
at the far side of Calanna's smaller moon, dive into the planet's atmosphere,
deal with any resistance as necessary, make the drop via gravchutes, and get
out. The only problems were the gravitational effects on the hyperspatial
drives, and the resistance, most likely in the form of Wasp fighter craft.
After the four were safely dirtside, they should easily ditch the chutes and
hide in the local terrain. After that, hiking twenty kilometers into Aelflan,
a large agricultural community, would be a snap.
The incident would be logged as yet another smuggling operation which made
it through. Since many government and security officials took part in such
activities themselves on a regular basis, no eyebrows would be raised. The
Wasps would probably follow the Vista out at a safe distance and let the few
ground personnel available handle the drop. Probability of success: 90% plus,
or so it was written. And better still, the Imps would be thinking Harrison
and company still on Tizar counting the ashes of poor Mr. Fork.
"Fine, but how do we get out." It was Niki again.
Quatalis had wondered when somebody would ask the obvious question. The
fact that it had been asked meant that they had already accepted the plan for
getting in.
"The Vista's cargo shuttle, the Ariya, will land at the spaceport eight
days after the drop. We'll unload our cargo and begin speculating. No doubt
we'll attract some Imperial attention, so when you try to get back in contact,
be subtle. We'll stick around for ten days after that, or until we are no
longer needed. The Vista, herself, will be hiding under scanner range of the
system's largest gas giant. In case of complications, I suggest you arrange
for a backup spacecraft. Are there any questions?"
Seeing none, Rrkal announced open season on the supper, and the crew plus
one android dug in. Bill poked at the food with the end of his laser blade,
watching the mixture fizzle and flame with tempered distaste, and Niki
gathered half-a-bowl in a half- hearted attempt to put something down. Mike
just sat around watching the others, his appetite all but evaporated by the
discussion.
Rrkal grinned at the trio, "Da Pass'engurz don' eet hartz."
Bill looked up from his bowl, an enigmatic smile slowly creeping across his
face.
"Z'hartz goood foood. Ven Z'Droyd noez."
Mike looked across at Robin. She was still shovelling it down with an eager
hunger bordering on ravenous.
"Zhe eetz like und no tomarwoo."
Robin looked up from the table, gulping down her mouthful without chewing.
"Why iz zat, droyd?"
"Because there might not be..." She looked across at Mike with a
matter-of-fact smile. Taken together with the fake sleeping, yawning,
detachable ears, and punch in the chest, he decided he didn't like smiling
androids, not that he had ever known any others to justify the generalization.
Mike reflected on his attitude as she resumed eating.
"Doz zhe zhit too?"
Her eyebrow cocked at the query, and for the first time Mike felt an
inkling of interest in the conversation, such as it was. Bill perked up too,
as did the captain after a moment's pause.
"Not exactly your usual supper manners, Rrkal."
"I'm...tirzty." He seemed to search for the last word as if unsure of the
translation.
Quatalis regarded him with a passing curiosity. "You're thirsty? For
knowledge?"
"Da." The Vargr grinned, two canines dropping from either side of his
snout. He seemed rather pleased that he'd gotten his point across, and had all
but forgotten about Robin.
Mike looked across the table, "I don't know; Robin, do you?"
"Do I what?"
Mike smiled at the slated reply, "Y'know, 'zhit."'
Niki spilled her bowl as Mike felt a raw reminder of the pain coarse up his
spine, snapping each vertebra as it ascended until it loomed at the threshold
of his mind. He awaited the burning, but it just stood there like a flickering
candle flame, pausing for some sort of twisted invitation.
Mike opened his eyes to see everyone staring at Niki, her face averted in
shame as she tried to dry the table. Rrkal slided across and began helping her
clean-up as the Captain shuffled out of her recliner to grab a hand-vacc.
"Maybe we should have discussed the drop after supper."
Bill kept frozen in his place, his eyes sweeping from Niki to Robin, and
then over to Mike. As their eyes locked in an understanding that didn't need
explanation, Bill reached down to the base of his recliner and switched off,
his body slowly rotating into a standing position before the gravitic currents
gave way to the surrounding fields. Mike followed suit, and soon found his
feet placed firmly on solid decking.
"Thanks for the food, but we're not hungry."
"Daz okay...mor foood fur uz."
Mike followed Bill to the hold, the younger man entering an access code at
the lift and again at storage. A security camera watched from the corner of
the room as Bill hauled one of the gravchutes off the near wall.
"Mama says it's best to strike while the enemy is out to lunch."
Mike nodded, "Looks like you've been keeping busy."
"I figured it was high time I paid my keep." Bill took his last vial of
ethanol from his back pocket.
"She let you keep that?"
"I told her it was for barter...on planet."
Mike snatched the vial from Bill's open hand, twisting off its cap as the
younger gatherer broke out a two and a half gram capsule.
"I wouldn't drink that if I were you, Mike."
"Not straight."
"Straight or mixed, you'd die." He began opening the chute's gravitics,
snipping a thin wire with the end of his knife and fishing it out.
"Ethanol?"
"Guess again, Mike." His grey eyes seemed to flicker with amusement he tied
the thread around the capsule.
"I dunno."
"Well, for starters, it's radioactive. The vial's the shield."
Mike handed it back without the cap, "Fine...you drink it."
"Not very likely." Bill plunged the capsule into the liquid and extended
his hand as if for a shake.
"This isn't gonna work, Bill."
"The cap."
Mike handed it over, sweat droplets beginning to form on his forehead.
"They're gonna check these things out."
"Really?" Bill's eyes widened with pretended surprise.
"Really."
"Don't be a puss, Mike. It'll take at least fifty claps for the current to
dissolve the casing." Bill produced a foam napkin, wrapping the vial and tying
it securely at both ends, the thin wire string falling from its interior. "And
in another twenty... give or take..." He gritted his teeth as the laser blade
burnt the wire back into place.
"Then what?"
Bill closed the unit and replaced the chute back on its rack, nicking its
polymer housing almost as an afterthought.
"Boom?"
"Neutrinos, Mike. Lots of neutrinos."
The Vista hung cloaked beneath the shadow of Baal, Calanna's lesser moon,
as its port sensors began scanning the cloudy world below. On the distant
horizon, the rutilant giant descended into night, saffron rays slipping
carelessly away to space.
"Passive EMS reports local clear."
"Focus IR, 3rd Octh, Coord 34.21, 84.13." Captain Quatalis cautiously
edged the Vista between the jutting walls the dark lunar canyon. An eerie
silence crept outside the craft as the joints along her spine began to tingle
in anticipation and fear.
"How long 'til the batteries..."
"That depends," Victor's hand fidgeted over the sensor boon controls while
his adjunct talked to the ship's computer and played with the data.
"Nothing unusual."
"Try Neutrino."
"Already done. Minutes clean."
"Maybe."
Mike sucked in cold air outside the dropshaft, glancing toward the digital
altimeter on the far wall. Niki and Bill sat opposite, knees bent upright,
boots braced together. Bill wore a worried expression. Niki looked elsewhere,
she was ignoring the tension. Mike focused his eyes forward, a cool sweat
breaking out along his hairline. Robin gently fingered the straps of her
gravchute.
"Overweight?"
"Paranoid."
Mike smiled at the reply as the vessel jolted sharply against a deafening
noise.
"Minute's clean! Get me DR and ID!"
Christina struggled with the helm controls as the Vista rocked and tumbled
with the impact.
"They're ground to air. Quiet Snipers."
"They?"
"Two mark ten."
"Ghomes, are you reading this!?"
The Vista's hull armor crackled and glowed against the atmospheric friction
as the heat seekers scrambled in pursuit. A swarm of plasma cells jettisoned
from the aft and exploded in a fiery blaze over fifteen miles high.
"Sending pinpoint on source."
"Fire at will!"
The robot eye scanned skyward, over the grey and dusty clouds, a cumbersome
program slowly analyzing the data. Chemical explosion. Plasma release. A
small mechanical motor raised the antenna to an upright position as the
launcher's comm unit broadcast the coordinates of the hit. Within moments only
a burning crater remained.
"Okay, give me decoys."
"Is that neces..."
"Yes!"
Six gravballs dropped in pairs from the Vista's ventral aft, dispersing
about the vessel as it darted toward the cloud-cover below.
"DR Victor."
"Hull breach in tank seven, jump's out also."
"Oh, and by the way."
Victor smiled at the criticism, then stopped smiling.
"Two wasps, cold fuel. No make that four, in close form pairs.
They're mark six. Missile range in twelve."
"Eyes open Ghomes."
"Get me fix."
"Sending...Eight goblins folks."
A single Hellraiser flushed into the inky black as Victor pronounced the
"E" in "Eight." Within scarce moments a billion cubic yards of sky burst into
an intense white flame.
"One and two nixed. Three and four are breaking up. Four dupes out."
"We got lucky."
"Four more goblins. Mark five and six."
Christina reflexively pulled hard and to starboard as Rita fired an
antimissile and loosed a swarm of plasma cells despite the tumbling and
turning of the spacecraft. Suddenly the Vista lurched from impact, its steel
frame splintering open and erupting from all sides in a fiery inferno of
fusion and plasma.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim's a grad-student at UC Riverside, hoping and praying like crazy that he'll
get his MBA before the dean's axe gets him first. In between classes and term
papers, he can be found editing `The Guildsman,' the raunchiest gaming zine
ever to be published. `The Harrison Chapters' were originally written as a
setting description for his Traveller (SF-RPG) campaign. His story, he says,
is what you get when you combine an overactive imagination with the foolish
tendency to wing it. He says he writes exactly the same way he gamemasters:
without any semblance of plan or preconception.
What has been published here as Chapter Four is actually chapters six and
seven as written originally by Jim. `The Harrison Chapters' will be continued
next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Chasing Unicorn Songs
Conrad Wong
copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
A chestnut-colored centaur paused at the door of the passenger lounge. She
brushed tangled black hair over her tanned shoulder and bent a delicate equine
ear to the enchantingly beautiful music coming from within. Intrigued, she
peeked in, her wide brown eyes searching for the talented singer.
Across the circle: a silhouette sat in the many-colored shifting light of
the Tangled Web nebula. The feline bard's bright green-gold eyes looked out
at her audience from under a well-brushed mane of dark black hair and short
triangle ears of calico fur. She wore a simple burgundy red shipsuit, her
only concessions to fashion her jeweled earrings. Her slender arms danced
over the strings of a crystal harp, and she sang, a sweet purring voice that
filled the room without seeming to.
That voice drew her listeners into the teaching ballad every child knew,
the song of the famed spacefarer Mikato, who grew up an Owned Person in the
days before Ragnarok when humans, deified by science, could call down
lightning or raise up palaces at a moment's whim. The Owned People were
created in their image and yet different, that the humans might be admired,
waited upon, even worshiped. Yet a few, the Compassionate, took pity on their
playthings and set free those they could.
The Compassionate named Mikato captain and crew of the sentient ship
`Starlight Runner' and sent him forth to seek out a new world for the Free
People, one of suitable climate and far from human affairs so that they might
develop on their own. His wife, the young and pretty Amaranth, and the best
of the people the Compassionates freed slept in cryogenic capsules while he
outwitted the dangers that waited beyond human space.
At last Mikato found Elyse, a glowing blue-green pearl in the cloth of the
Tangled Web. Too ancient and long in space ever to return to planetary
gravity, he shed tears watching as `Starlight Runner' sent the final shuttle
to the surface bearing Amaranth's cryocoffin. Forever apart from his wife who
remained still young and even more beautiful than he'd remembered, out of
despair Mikato plunged his ship into the heart of Elyse's star and died.
As the bard sang the last keening songs of Mikato's dirge, a growing
silence fell. Then, one by one, her listeners clapped, filling the room with
wild applause.
Intending to offer a drink to the singer, the centaur took two glasses
filled with amber-gold nectar from the bartender and trotted past a group of
stunned vulpines returning slowly to their neglected drinks. She found two
unwelcome tiger-men admirers ahead of her. The singer batted ineffectually at
their grasping paws; her whiskers bristled angrily at their coarse
whisperings. Nearby patrons murmured disapprovingly but declined to
intervene, noting the mercenaries' weapons they carried.
The centaur stepped in casually and tapped one of them on the shoulder. He
turned about lazily to stare right into the muzzle of an antique 12mm
semi-automatic pistol. Made fearless by intoxication, he lazily drawled, "Got
a permit for that?"
"Better than that. Diplomatic immunity." The centaur flicked the safety
off with an audible click, causing the tiger-man to sober up quickly. He
glanced down to his weapons, all securely holstered and locked away beyond any
chance of his outdrawing her, then tapped his companion on the shoulder. They
slinked out, ears flattened.
"I'm Zephyr-Racer of Chrysanthemum, Riftworlds ambassador," the centaur
said, briskly. She replaced her automatic pistol in a belt pouch and passed
one of the drinks she carried to the singer who accepted it gladly. "But my
friends call me Zephyr."
"Ariaou, a novice bard of Meetpoint Academy," the bard replied quietly.
Then, tail curling in a suddenly concerned S-curve, she asked, "How may I
repay you for your help?"
"Our debt's paid by the memory of your beautiful singing. But you've not
the look of the industrialist or academician about you. Why're you bound for
Ryme?" Zephyr cocked her equine ears forward, all curiosity, and rested her
elbows on the table.
"It's a long tale, and sometimes, I think, half imagined," Ariaou murmured,
sipping the nectar and sitting back on her chair. "Perhaps I've spent sixteen
long, lonely years chasing a foolish child's dreams."
Ariaou struck a chord on her crystal harp, beginning a steady rhythm and
melody. She sang softly, her words interwoven with her playing, of fair
Mnehim, a lush M'nahnee colony world far to the coreward side of the nebula.
A warm summer afternoon colored the trees golden, sunlight setting on the
verdant forest and sparkling brightly off the rounded stones within a gurgling
brook. Two kittens played nearby, one calico, the other black.
She murmured softly over her playing, "Tommiau and I argued over pebbles in
a stream, each claiming the other's stone was worthless and his or her own a
precious gem. We paid little heed to the lengthening shadows and the first
sweet songs of the nightingales. Then an elusive melody came dancing through
the trees."
A shiver ran down Zephyr's spine at the pure silvery tones of the song,
pale shadow though it was of the music Ariaou had heard so long ago. It spoke
of a wanderer with laughing eyes, of his joy in visiting faraway stars and
worlds, and his delight in bestowing enigmas upon those he met, that they
might prosper and grow in the understanding. Deep strength and wisdom ran
beneath his bright song, and a sadness born of millenia.
"We gave chase, thinking at every turn that the musician would step out of
the brush, so close he seemed, his song weaving about us sweetly. And behind
us, unheard, a forest predator loped, yellow eyes shining ferally in the
moonlight. It hungered, seeking easy prey for a midnight supper."
Ariaou's song tumbled over itself, wove into danger: a young Ariaou fell to
the forest floor, and Tommiau cried for help, all alone, surrounded by
blinking eyes in the underbrush. Dark shapes ghosted overhead, the carrion
birds following the predator hopefully, their cries raucous. The wolf
crouched, its sinews tightening into steel coils for the pounce--
"It howled forlornly and fell out of the bush, run through and through by
the horn of a golden unicorn that stepped out behind. He shone in the
moonlight, his voice warm as sunshine, and his eyes clear sky blue. He sang
to us with amusement: such brave kittens we were to run free in the woods, but
had we no parents to watch over us?"
Young Ariaou and Tommiau clambered onto the unicorn's back. His grand song
arched over them, cascading glissandos of starlight notes forming a rainbow
road on which they galloped over the treetops. The forest sped by as if they
flew on true wings of song, with a herd of other unicorns all the colors of
the spectrum galloping beside the golden unicorn.
"Tommiau fell asleep on our ride, as the unicorn intended, but I did not.
In the morning, he awoke remembering nothing of the night's events, and my
stories were met with disbelief and scoldings, for there were no such animals
as unicorns in the modern world."
Ariaou continued, quietly, the music fading to gentle strumming. "For
sixteen years, I've studied music at Meetpoint Academy. Nine years gone by,
my parents were killed when terrorists hijacked their starliner. Three years
ago, my brother Tommiau was murdered at King Ascenion's coronation. And still
I search for the unicorn, and his songs, my own unreachable star in the
heavens."
Ariaou let a final questing note ring into silence on her crystal harp.
Zephyr remained wordless for a time, then reached over to give the singer a
warm hug, which the feline accepted with a thankful purr.
Six hours later, the starliner `Lady of Nine Trumps Unblown' docked with
the Ryme deep space station `Quiet Reason', a large, nickel-iron asteroid
moved into the Oort cloud centuries ago and excavated. Ariaou watched
fascinatedly as the ship slowly folded its warpspace vanes and drifted slowly
into the huge cavern of the spaceport on jets of compressed air. A spiderweb
of docking lines spun slowly about the spindle-like craft, holding it in
place.
They disembarked into the pressurized corridors of the station, having
elected to share quarters. Zephyr guided Ariaou past the officials at the
customs desk and through the station's labyrinthian corridors. "I want you to
meet my friends," Zephyr said. "You'll like them. There'd be only a few
diplomats here, but the Dragon Queen's called a nebula-wide trade conference."
"Dragon Queen?" Ariaou asked softly. Her ears flicked curiously.
"The Coordinator of Ryme. Mirdis Shakherak Tarekkha Nazk, for short, her
full name would take far too long to remember and recite. I think she
secretly prefers our name for her." Zephyr grinned mischievously.
"Mirdis..." Ariaou murmured to herself. "I've seen that name before." She
searched her shipsuit, came up with a video pad, tapped several buttons with
claw-tips, then showed Zephyr the letter.
"Interesting," Zephyr mused. "She politely invited you to visit the
recently excavated pre-Ragnarok ruins, and included a ticket aboard the `Lady
of Nine Trumps Unblown'. Yet I know that the ruins have been closed to
tourists and scientists until the initial mapping has been completed. It's
not often the Dragon Queen takes such mysterious actions."
The feline bard nodded. "I have no idea how I could have come to her
notice, but 'tis my hope that in the ruins I may find something to help me in
my quest. Though the unicorns are long gone from this universe, their
memories linger in the ancient relics of the past."
"I'd be careful, though. Mirdis will probably want something in return."
Zephyr shook her head ruefully, causing her hair to swirl gracefully. "She's
sharp, cunning, a hard bargainer-- they wrote the proverb `Never play chess
with a dragon' just for her. But if I don't play her games, how am I going to
find out if I'm good enough to come away with whole horsehide?"
Zephyr stopped in front of the fifth level conference room, palmed the
lock. The door irised open. Within, instead of the many people standing
about chatting and laughing that Zephyr clearly expected, a gleaming
bronze-scaled draconian shape filled the far wall of the oval room. She
raised her head, regarding them with opalescent black eyes that reflected the
dim starlight of the overhead skylight.
After a moment's silence, the Dragon Queen drummed her claws impatiently.
"It's terribly impolite to leave the door open like that. This is not an
official meeting, Zephyr, so you may dispense with the frightened look. Now,
come and examine this position."
Upon an ivory and onyx chessboard on a granite pedestal, five chess pieces
stood ranged, each a different color and shape, all of the finest quality.
"I've seen this game before," Ariaou said hesitantly. "But there were many
more pieces, and they were white and black, not all colors."
"This is a fairy chess variant in which each piece has its own ambitions
and allies. They may work together, but only if it serves their own
interests. Observe." Mirdis moved an orange-streaked marble pawn a step
forward. "The pawn's moved to the seventh row, about to advance and be
promoted to a superior piece."
The dull grey steel king, cut with knife-like edges, moved next to the
pawn, threatening its advance. A translucent glass knight that shimmered with
rainbows swept in to defend the pawn's imminent move but itself coming under
attack. "The knight sacrifices itself, a subtle and elusive piece, in the
hope of far greater gain."
Mirdis placed a smoothly polished rook of dark brown wood along the row of
the pawn. "The rook supports the pawn, threatening the king indirectly."
Another uncomfortable moment passed as they studied the board and the
remaining unmoved piece, a glittering gold queen of smooth curves, before a
dry rasping voice came from behind. "Fascinating, lady Mirdis. Yet we have
little time for trivialities."
Ariaou whirled about, saw a familiar grey-cloaked figure, his face shrouded
by a starry black veil. She exclaimed softly, "Tarnkappe!"
"Do you know this mysterious person, Ariaou?" Mirdis asked.
"We've met," Tarnkappe snapped. "May we dispense with small talk?"
"By no means," Mirdis purred, producing a silver tray of tea, coffee, and
biscuits. "Tell me about him, dear feline." Zephyr passed the cups, evidently
glad of an excuse to do something besides look confused.
While sipping a cup of coffee with cream, Ariaou murmured, "I don't know
much about him, even his name; I call him Tarnkappe for his cloak and the way
he appears and disappears mysteriously. Sometimes he tells the future. One
time it saved me from a horrible crash that killed seventeen people. The last
time he said I'd be getting a letter from Ryme-- and so I did."
"An innovative approach, making your own prophecies come true. It must
save tremendously on worries," the Dragon Queen mused over a cup of Elysian
herbal tea held delicately in two claws. "Has he ever explained to you why he
helps you in this way?"
Ariuo considered that, taking a biscuit and nibbling delicately on its
flakey edges. "Long ago, he told me that he was an old friend of the family
from long ago. He never explained how; in fact, he's never said more than a
few words at any time, but he seems to know more about me than I do."
"Intriguing. Tsk, but I forget my manners. Allow me to introduce the
exiled Prince Gavar Mordenkainen of Hellsgate. The honored dignitary has been
badgering me all month about permission to visit the ruins." Mirdis chuckled
to herself, a deep rumbling sound.
Tarnkappe bowed ironically, a gesture returned warily by Ariaou and Zephyr,
then nodded gravely. "My request for a permit for two to enter site fifteen
of the ruins? I should like to depart by midnight."
"Postponed," the Dragon Queen said briskly. "There will be no ships bound
for Ryme within the next three days."
"I had heard the shuttle `Octave Black' was to depart in three hours?"
"The crew's enjoying stationside recreation while the technicians give the
drive systems a much needed overhaul. `Octave Red' is held on Ryme because of
a reported bomb threat."
"There is too little time," Tarnkappe muttered to himself.
"On the contrary, there's all the time in the world," Mirdis replied. "The
ruins certainly aren't going to get up and walk away. Your stationside
expenses here including quarters will be covered by Ryme; come back and talk
to me in four days, and I'll arrange the permit and transportation personally.
Now do enjoy your stay here on `Quiet Reason'."
Ariaou and Zephyr nodded, sensing the unofficial meeting was at an end.
They turned about and departed as Tarnkappe vanished in his own mysterious
way, the feline looking back in time to see Mirdis move the golden queen to
place the king in check.
Three hours passed. Zephyr located her friends in the seventh level
conference room and persuaded Ariaou to play dance music for them. Then
Ariaou's sweet voice led them in several folk ballads, unifying their voices
into a single grand chorus. Food and drink flowed freely from the dispensers,
and the dignitaries conversed amiably with each others.
Zephyr had to drag Ariaou out of the party as station time approached
midnight; they walked back to their quarters, sweat beading down the centaur's
chestnut brown horsehide. The feline purred softly with tail and whiskers
held high in such good humor that Zephyr teased, "See, I told you that you'd
enjoy meeting them. Not such stodgy and pompous bureaucrats, are we?"
"Indeed," Ariaou said with a quiet laugh. "I'd never imagined that an
angel could have impure thoughts, let alone know all the lyrics to 'The Thing
with All the Eyes and the Asteroid Miner's Daughter'."
"One of my oldest friends and a perennial scandal to her homeworld," Zephyr
replied with a grin. She palmed the lock and the door to their stateroom
irised open, revealing a familiar grey-cloaked figure within.
"Elements!" Zephyr sighed. "Is everyone following us today?"
"It lacks but half an hour of midnight," Tarnkappe said, ignoring the looks
of slight exasperation they gave him. "We have little time if we are to be
off the station by then."
The centaur protested, "There won't be an atmosphere-capable ship ready for
two days yet!"
"There is one now. The personal cruiser of the Coordinator."
"What gall," the centaur grumbled. "Ariaou?"
She nodded slowly. "'Tis now, or wait upon Mirdis's pleasure."
"Now or never," Tarnkappe said helpfully. "I will not wait."
"That decides that," Zephyr said. "Let's get changed into sensible
planetside clothes, Ariaou. Prince Gavar, if you'd be so kind and give us
some privacy?..."
Fifteen minutes later, Zephyr cantered and Ariaou walked to the spaceport
cavern, both dressed in plain and serviceable blue kelvarite planetside
clothes, a material that maintained a comfortable temperature and humidity in
a wide range of environments and afforded protection from sharp objects.
Tarnkappe strode along in the same grey cloak, apparently unconcerned about
any danger.
Tarnkappe led them through the central elevator that ran through the core
of `Quiet Reason'. He entered a control code into a heavily armored airlock
that irised open to reveal the null gravity pressurized repair and refueling
dock surrounding the Dragon Queen's personal cruiser `Fool's Mate', a sleek
black-winged shape equally at home in deep space or within planetary
atmosphere.
Two guards stood in front of the catwalk leading to the airlock, dressed in
station security uniforms and carrying needle rifles slung over their
shoulders. The closer one called out, "Who's there? Identify yourself!"
Tarnkappe stepped forward as they leveled their guns and shouted for him to
halt. His arms blurred into motion almost too fast to be seen; razor-sharp
claws clicked out from his fingers, slashed left and right efficiently, and
the guards fell away gurgling horribly, throats cut and blood drifting in slow
spheres. He cycled the yacht's airlock open as if nothing had happened and
beckoned for them to enter.
They stepped nervously past Tarnkappe, entering the forward half of the
passenger compartment, and settled into soft padded anti-acceleration seats.
Ariaou whispered urgently to Zephyr, watching Tarnkappe anxiously, "That's the
same way my brother Tommiau was murdered three years ago."
"We're stuck with playing this round out," Zephyr replied quietly. "You
didn't bring a weapon, did you? Luckily I always keep my sidearm."
Tarnkappe gave no signs of noticing their whisperings as he went forward to
the pilot's seat and initiated the departure sequence, his long fingers
skimming across the banks of controls. The station's com band came alive with
protests of unauthorized departure and unfiled flight plans, all of which he
blandly ignored. Mirdis's yacht hummed as its engines powered up slowly.
`Fool's Mate' lifted off silently on compressed hydrogen jets from the
support gantries, refueling and repair arms snapping and falling free. The
docking bay depressurized, air vanished through powered fans, and the exit
hatch opened silently into deep space. Tarnkappe floated the yacht out slowly
and deliberately, then started making preparations for the first boost out of
the docking cavern and away from the station.
A voice crackled over the military band, causing Tarnkappe to scrabble
surprisedly for nonexistent weapons controls. "The station's weapons are
locked onto you, `Fool's Mate'. Repeat, our guns are locked on you. Do not
attempt to leave station orbit. You are charged with two counts of first
degree murder, grand theft, failure to file a flight plan or authorization
with traffic control--"
"Oh hush, dear Captain," a low rumbling reply came from behind them. "It's
my yacht and I wrote the rules, so I can take it out when I need to. Do be a
dear and take care of the paperwork for me, will you?"
"Understood, Coordinator," the voice replied as Ariaou and Zephyr turned
about to gape at the familiar ancient bronze dragon that filled the rear
passenger space. "`Quiet Reason' station over and out."
"How did you know we would be here?" Ariaou asked.
"As I'm sure Prince Gavar knows already, my yacht was the only one that he
could obtain which could safely make it to Ryme within his time limit."
Mirdis turned to look reprovingly at Tarnkappe. "Really, though, killing the
guards was a bit much. The paperwork for that will run up more than the rest
of this put together."
"They were unimportant," Tarnkappe replied as he examined the unfamiliar
astronavigation controls. Slight irritation became evident in his gestures as
lights blinked and starmaps flickered on and off despite his efforts.
"As ever, you ignore all but your grand schemes. Even the smallest thing
can count." The Dragon Queen reached forward to start the autopilot, which
obediently began to follow its preprogrammed course with an efficiency that
clearly annoyed Tarnkappe.
He dismissed the matter with a wave of his hand, intently studying the new
information coming onto the displays. "I advise you all to brace yourselves,
as we will be entering jump in thirty seconds, thanks to lady Mirdis's
thoughtful preparations."
`Fool's Mate' accelerated to near lightspeed on anti-matter engines, its
artificial gravity protecting its passengers from being smeared against the
aft bulkheads by G-force. Its warpspace vanes unfolded into position, long
sheets of multiple mirror-bright panels reflecting the light of the receding
station. With a sudden jolt, they transited into warpspace. A sense of
unreality swept through the yacht.
The yacht emerged scant seconds later only ten minutes flight from the
glowing sphere of Ryme that now hung suspended before the forward viewport.
`Fool's Mate' folded its vanes and cut cleanly into the atmosphere under the
autopilot's directions, atmospheric friction heating up its nose and bottom to
a cherry bright glow. It glided over thick forest, its wings dissipating
excess heat in the cool winds, then descended into the crater of an extinct
volcano on compressed air jets.
Tarnkappe stepped out first. Ariaou and Zephyr cautiously followed, and
Mirdis disentangled herself from the yacht last. They stood before an
architectural magnificence, white marble sprawling within the crater's
expanse, largely overgrown by vines and trees. The outermost walls had fallen
long ago, sharp-cut stone blocks half buried in the soft earth; arches and
gates still stood within the inner courtyards. The setting sun cast golden
rays on the roofs.
Tarnkappe led them on a slow walk into the ruins through ancient
moss-covered atriums reminiscent of prehistoric Rome. Ariaou unslung her harp
and struck up an ancient requiem, slow and sweet notes like tides on the vast
sea, the music echoing quietly from the distant corners like a second voice.
Zephyr flicked an ear to listen, smiling slightly.
"This place might have been built in an hour, the summer palace of some far
voyaging human who desired to live planetside a while," Mirdis commented from
behind them, her black opal eyes unreadable. "Yet it's lasted the millenniums
since Ragnarok, the humans' civil war that laid waste all their worlds. Only
a few of their race survived, and none to this day. A shame."
They stepped into a still intact building, the smooth marble walls only
slightly green with moss, the ceilings high and arching to a thin line over
their heads. Zephyr's steady clip-clop echoed back weirdly from the corners
and Ariaou's music took on new and disturbing resonances, portending strange
and mysterious things. Tarnkappe directed them unhesitatingly, knowing
exactly where to go.
Mirdis continued, "The dragons' oldest legends claim that many of the
Compassionate, those who freed our people so long ago, survived with what
little technology they could preserve. They willingly gave up their humanity
to assume heraldic forms of great power, so that they could join our societies
and watch over us. It's said that one Guardian single-handedly ended the war
between Azhanti and Weyrhelm. A fairy tale for young dragons seeking
protectors greater than themselves."
"The story is correct," Tarnkappe conceded reluctantly as they halted in a
high-domed vault that held an ivory mausoleum. Gilt plaques lined the walls,
carved with ancient writing. "Very shortly we will meet one of these
guardians. The inscriptions tell of Sundancer and his wife Alysse Italy whom
he married in the last echoes of human civilization's glories. When Ragnarok
fell, she fled the battles in shame at the destructions she'd caused, and
built her home on this distant world to live out her days. He visits this
place once every century, mourning."
"So," Mirdis rumbled to herself thoughtfully. "You violated this place,
rather than wait upon a permit. As I guessed, Ariaou is important to your
plans somehow. But why?"
"Revenge."
The exiled Prince Gavar pulled his hood back, removed the dark veil that
hid his face. Ariaou gasped in recognition, seeing the glowing yellow eyes
that haunted her worst nightmares, the grey fur now white with age. "A dire
wolf!" she breathed, her paws falling from her harp.
"A genetic madness haunts my line," Gavar explained. "Each son in turn is
stricken, reduced to unthinking bestiality. I was old when I fell ill, and
exiled from my homeworld to a distant forest where I might hunt as I wished,
so that no outsider would know the shame my family endured."
"Then the unicorn came, the one with a pelt like sunfire, and slayed me.
But dire wolves are not so easily killed. I healed slowly, and when I awoke
again, my thoughts were clear."
"It was an unwanted gift. As a pure wolf, I had known the joy of the wild
hunt, the companionship of the pack, the bliss of mating. But I knew these
things were wrong, and so I was ashamed. I swore to kill those who witnessed
my shame. I killed Tommiau, three years ago. Here I will kill you, and the
unicorn, and then there shall be none who know. Then I shall grant myself the
peace of death."
"Peace I brought my wife so long ago," a voice like warm twilight said from
behind the mausoleum. The golden unicorn Ariaou remembered stepped out, his
sky blue eyes shining with ancient sadness and remembrance. "She would have
laid waste your fledgling worlds, driven mad with loneliness and anger, and so
I was forced to kill her."
"She lives," Gavar said with a wild laugh. "She hungers for your blood as
much as I." He threw away the grey cloak, revealing a grizzled frame better
muscled than any dire wolf had a right to be, covered with a silvery grey
cloth that shimmered and flowed with sentient light. Razor-sharp claws
snicked out from his fingers as he assumed a battle stance.
"Grave robber! You have violated her crypt!" the unicorn neighed, his
voice a mighty bell ringing. "I could not bear to utterly extinct her mind
from this plane of existence, and so I transferred it to the weave of her
clothes, which you now wear."
"And which grants me powers like a god's, the power to slay!" With that,
Gavar's suit flared into sudden star-like intensity, then released its energy
in a bolt of lightning that blew the mausoleum apart in a shower of stone
shards and ancient relics as Sundancer dodged aside. Shrapnel shattered
Ariaou's crystal harp, sending its brittle pieces falling harmlessly against
her kelvarite clothes. She gasped and stumbled closer to Zephyr.
With a sudden flicker, Sundancer teleported behind Gavar, lashed out with a
gleaming sharp hoof. Gavar blocked it, his suit deflecting the blow
harmlessly, and returned a vicious backhand swipe that gouged the wall. The
unicorn raised a defensive aura of dim orange in time to absorb a second
lightning bolt, which dissipated in harmless pyrotechnics, then skittered back
before the wolf's lunge.
Ariaou staggered upright, holding onto Zephyr for support. Out of the
corners of her eyes, she saw Zephyr about to pull something out of her belt
pouch; Mirdis laid a cautionary claw on the centaur's forearm, clearly
signalling `wait'. The battle raged on, the golden unicorn dancing back
before the wolf's furious attack.
Sundancer stumbled back before a sudden glittering arc of metal, taking a
fatal cut through his left foreleg, gushing arterial blood, then falling
heavilly against the wall. Unable to dodge, he summoned up all his energies
to drive his aura up through the spectrum to a glaring blue, then to
blindingly intense white, as Gavar hailed lightning against his protective
shield. "Ariaou," he called, desperately. "I need your help! Sing!"
"My crystal harp was broken," she wailed back, looking despairingly at the
shards of her instrument. Gavar flicked an ear, but continued keeping the
wounded unicorn pressed back; Sundancer did not reply, the golden unicorn's
energy fading fast, his shield dropping down from white to blue under the
force of the wolf's energy blasts.
Ariaou cast about for an instrument, tail lashing to express her fear, ears
laid back. She saw an ancient shimmerlyre of unfamiliar design flung loose in
the destruction of the mausoleum, against the far wall. It seemed an eternity
away, meters of space across which Gavar might kill her with but a negligent
blow.
The feline gave Zephyr and Mirdis a helpless look for an endless moment,
flicked her ears forward agitatedly, then threw herself into a forward dive.
She barely evaded a lazy claw swipe that whistled overhead and scooped up the
instrument, raising it like a shield.
Its first note was magic, born of a lyre that had been old when the Owned
People were born. Her voice joined it in sweet harmony, her paws lifting up
to spin the soft, gentle, reassuring strains of a lullaby, the words coming to
her unbidden, full of meaning even though she knew none of them. The
shimmerlyre transformed her song to music worthy of the gods, soothing and
warm, a golden skein that weaved about the room.
"Alas," an unfamiliar voice cried out, the contralto voice of a human
woman, a ghost trapped within the suit and evoked by Ariaou's sweet singing.
"What have I become, that I should strive to slay my beloved, my husband, my
unicorn?"
Gavar fought with his suddenly contrary suit, becoming paralyzed as it
refused to move for him, its light fading into a black darker than night. His
lightning bolts ceased, leaving the unicorn to fall to the floor in a puddle
of blood, the shield almost spent. Gavar howled defiantly, "Revenge shall be
mine! I command you, my suit!"
A sound like repeated mute thunder filled the room, and a row of red dots
appeared along his chest. He toppled over slowly like a broken statue,
revealing Zephyr standing behind, and Mirdis close to her, nodding approval.
The centaur slowly replaced her antique pistol in her pouch, a grim look
furrowing her brows beneath marble dust-specked brown hair.
The unicorn breathed softly, "That lyre was my wife's. Now yours, Ariaou.
And I bequeath to you my songs as well, for you are worthy." With that,
Sundancer's body glowed and vanished in a sudden flare of light, leaving
behind only the sun-bright spire of his crystal horn. Ariaou turned to see
the silver suit fade as well, its weave falling into dust.
"The archaeologists aren't going to be happy about this," the Dragon Queen
commented, looking about the wreckage.
Much later, back on the station `Quiet Reason', they went their separate
ways. Zephyr returned to the nebular trade conference. Mirdis cleared up the
paperwork incurred in their exploits. Gavar's homeworld Hellsgate denied the
existence of any exiled Prince Gavar Mordenkainen; the Ryme bureaucracy duly
made out the forms and filed it away.
Mirdis and Ariaou met once again in the same conference room, near the
chess board the Dragon Queen had been studying on their arrival. They spoke
for a short while over tea. Finally, Mirdis rumbled, "Then there is nothing I
can do to persuade you to remain? Our scientists could undoubtedly learn much
from Sundancer's horn."
"Nothing. I must return to Meetpoint, Mirdis," Ariaou replied quietly.
"Call it fate, perhaps, or a duty to be fulfilled."
"Very well. From Zephyr, reservations for a first class suite on the
starliner `Princess's Favor'. And I give you this to remember Ryme." The
Dragon Queen picked up an orange-streaked marble piece from the chess board.
At first Ariaou thought it was the pawn; then she looked closer to see that it
was a unicorn rampant with eyes of glittering sapphire.
______________________________________________________________________________
Conrad Wong is a CS student at U. C. Berkeley, about to graduate and face the
terrifying world of "Real Life". He is not looking forward to it. Except,
that is, to having more money to spend on the necessities of life: new science
fiction and fantasy books, anthropomorphic comics (Conrad's particularly fond
of `Rhudiprrt'), and getting permanent net access. His hobbies include feeble
attempts at writing (one of which you see above), drawing, computer games, and
MUDs.
cwong@cory.berkeley.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
A Subtle Change
Matthew Sorrels
copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Bright Sun
She was the most attractive brunette. Large, round, intelligent eyes, with
a bright, sparkling smile. Not the type of girl a man dreams of, but the type
of dream a man searches for. Roger wasn't much for dreaming though. Day in
day out his life was always constant, but his eyes held the gleam of the sun
in the middle of the day. No one could stay in that sun long.
"Roger, I want you to meet Cheryl Wilson. She is starting work here today.
I thought I would put her next to you and have you help her get adjusted.
Cheryl, Roger is one of the best data entry clerks we have. If you have any
questions, he should be able to answer them, and I will be meeting with you
this afternoon to handle the left over paperwork; welcome aboard."
"Nice to meet you, Cheryl. If there's anything I can help you with please
let me know," Roger stammered out, "I know what its like to be new here, so
don't hesitate to ask for help if you need it."
They worked side by side through the next six weeks. Roger worked for a
large multinational corporation, just one insignificant person out of
thousands in this building alone. Day in and day out he entered data into the
massive computers. His job never varied, each day it was the same routine:
type, check, type, check, type, check. Cheryl caught on quickly and soon was
working at the same rate as Roger. They didn't talk much, no one talked much.
An occasional nod, a quiet hello, sometimes a smile; that was life on the 93rd
floor.
The room they worked in was long and wide, a gymnasium of office space. In
small cubicles, over four-hundred data processors entered everything from
survey data to insurance claims. Roger had spent the past six months of his
life typing in the same repair bill, each time with different numbers and
different names.
"Roger, what are you doing this evening?" Cheryl asked with a flip of her
hair as she was getting her coat on, her question slicing through the bustle
of the office at quitting time.
"Not much. Probably watch T.V. and go to bed early." Roger said with the
tiredness of someone who had been doing the same thing for just a little too
long.
"Why don't you come over to my place for dinner. I don't feel like eating
alone tonight. I have some steaks and some nice wine, it should make a
pleasant dinner."
Roger began to swell with thoughts of what this could spell the beginning
of. "I would love to. What time would you like me there?"
"Here's my address. Lets see... I need some time to shower and change.
Why don't you make it eight o'clock? Is that ok?"
"Great! Do you want me to bring anything? Dessert?"
"Sure, that sounds fine. Whatever you like, as long as it doesn't have
bananas in it."
"Ok. I'll see you at eight."
Roger's mind began to race. He had nothing to wear, he had nothing to talk
about. Literally, he was nothing. He stopped after work at a department
store and bought an outfit that would go with the evening. He felt like a
young kid going on a first date. His heart was racing, his head was spinning.
For twenty-eight, he didn't have a lot of experience with women; he wasn't
quite a virgin but he wasn't Mr.~Smooth either. He was just like every other
person, full of fear of true intimacy, full of confusion, full of life.
He showed up at three minutes to eight. She was dressed in a simple black
dress; just a hint of romance was in the air. Dinner was served on the only
china in the house. The wine was a bit sour, the meat a bit fresh. But it
was the best dinner Roger had eaten in years. They ate slowly. Conversation
was strange, at first, but after a while seemed natural.
"How long have you lived in the city, Roger?" She asked glad that she
didn't start talking about the weather.
"Oh, lets see... about 5 years. I moved here right after school."
"It's so strange to live here, for me. I went to school in Kansas and I've
spent most of my life in small towns. I don't think I was quite ready for the
anomie that the city causes."
"Yeah, at first it takes some getting used to but that's the fun part.
What kills you here is the constant nasal drone, the day-in-day-out sameness.
You would think that in a big city, life would never get dull, but it does,
terribly dull."
"Is your life terribly dull?" She said with a sarcastic smirk as she
cleared the table and started to fix the dessert.
"Oh yes, terribly," he replied not realizing her sarcasm, "Sometimes,
nothing ever seems to happen at all."
She put on some light instrumental jazz, filling the small apartment with a
kind of high-tech warmth. As the music began to play he looked into her eyes
and knew then that something had already happened between the two of them.
They spent that night together, two people---one being.
They got married six months later and moved into a small family starter
apartment on the south side of town. Life was finally going like it is
supposed to. At last, Roger had something to live for, a reason to live in a
world without any reason. He was put in charge of the data entry division and
Cheryl quit work to have children. It was the classic American dream.
On August 16, 2005, his son was born. The nine months had been an
experience that neither parent would forget. The company Roger worked for was
having major problems in the global market place, and Roger couldn't sleep
some nights from the tension at work. Day in and day out it was his wife's
face that gave him the strength to get through the day. Fortunately the
pregnancy went fine. Roger looked in his newborn son's eyes for a glimmer of
hope. His own emptiness answered him back.
Time passed, his son grew, his life settled. Things were the same as they
had always been for beginning families. It was a kind of exile from the real
world, where the only things that count live under your own roof, the
brightness of his wife's smile when the money was tight, the gleam in his
son's eye when he found out something new about the world, and a widening
isolation from striving for anything new, a life upon the stagnant water.
A Sudden Rain
On Roger's 33th birthday he went to work, just like he always did. Each
morning waking up at seven to catch the shuttle into town. Each morning
kissing his wife on the forehead as he left for work. Each day buying the
paper at the paper stand. Each day the same as the last. At the end of work
that day Roger took the Fenston-Hampton mag-lev train home. Sitting on the
hard bench staring out into the landscape, Roger just waited. His eyes didn't
even blink when the computer called his stop. He crossed his legs and kept
riding. Soon the airport stop was called. By now the train was nearly empty,
Roger was one of about five people left. From the moment he stepped off the
train, his hair blowing in the high wind out near the airport, he always
looked toward the ground while walking into the terminal. He went to the
nearest airline desk, placing his briefcase on the ground.
"I would like a ticket on the 8pm moon shuttle." he said with out a pause.
"Very good sir, and when will you be returning?" the flight clerk asked.
"One-way."
"And how many bags will you be checking today?"
"None."
"All right sir, thats one way to the moon on flight 564 leaving at 8pm
arriving on luna station at 1am. That will be $456.34, can I get your name
and how you be paying for this?"
"The name is Roger Lansta, and I will be paying cash."
As he was sitting in the terminal, molded into a little plastic chair,
mindlessly staring out into space, he couldn't even focus on what he was
doing. In one of the corners of the terminal, a conversation was taking place
between a decrepit bag lady and a retarded man in a wheelchair. For the past
thirty minutes, the bag lady had been making her psychotic way around the
terminal, talking into space about her non-existent life and her opinions on
the way the world should be. Most people just ignored her, but the poor man
in the wheelchair seemed to welcome her company. Roger's ship would board
soon. All he had to do was manage to sit still just a little while longer.
"I used to be a big star. I did tons of movies. I was famous." the poor
woman claimed.
"I like movies. Like pretty pictures." the man in the wheelchair answered.
"But my real job was as a spy, I used to be undercover for the CIA. I
traveled all over the world. But I'm retired now."
"I had a job. Good job, very good."
"You know what they have done to the trains? You know when they painted
them the new colors? That was my idea. I have many friends in city hall,"
the woman continued without even noticing that the man in the wheelchair.
Roger boarded the ship and sat down in his seat. He closed his eyes and
listened to the roar of the ship as it broke free from Earth's gravity. His
mind was a complete blank, if he was to think but one thought his whole world
would have collapsed like a red star. As the ship entered orbit around Earth,
he saw the edge of the sun pouring down on the ship, burning his eyes.
Somewhere in the dark void of space, he gave up what was left of his life.
Moonlight
"What am I doing here? I'm thousands of miles from my family, from my
home, my wife, my child. Why am I here?" Roger screamed into the silent walls
of his mind, but he did not leave. His inner thoughts were now racing, trying
to explain his actions. "I can't focus on my life any more. I can't tell I
am alive. To feel you're alive you must sometimes break the glass. You can't
tell you're anything, unless you know what it's like to be nothing." The
inner argument didn't help his soul, but the screaming did tire him to sleep.
The nights did not pass easily, but he did not leave, he did not call home.
Roger took a job, processing low gravity metal alloys. The work was long
and hard, sweating in a weightless shop twelve hours a day, coming home to a
bare little hovel, eating a meager dinner, passing out only to find morning
once again. Two years passed, Roger slowly built a life out of the nothing of
the moon. Living space on the moon was cheap, as was everything else---food,
clothes, entertainment, but there was a price---constant work.
"If there is a hell, this must have been the model it's based on." Roger
often said to his co-workers. But in this constant pain, there was something
that called to Roger. He didn't like living here, but he didn't want to
leave, yet.
The work did its damage to Roger, and in time he was a living corpse. He
had lost thirty pounds and did not sleep regularly anymore. Two more years
went by. Roger outlasted everyone he knew. The work became routine. Get up
in the morning, work, go to sleep at night. The demons that hunted Roger had
finally left him.
"Roger, Roger..., ROGER! Look at you. Your dead tired, your not doing us
a bit of good here. I want you to go home and sleep. Go home Roger, come
back tomorrow." His boss was becoming worried about Roger's health.
"I'm ok. Just tired. So tired. I can't rest, though --- can't. I have
to keep going." Roger shook his head a few times and ran his hands through
his hair. "I'm fine. I can go a few more hours, I just dozed off a bit."
"Roger, you nearly ran that drill press through your hand. If you don't
leave I'm gonna have to call security. Don't make me do that. Go home."
"Ok. Ok. But I still think I'm fine. I'm fine."
Sea of Rains
One night a few weeks later at about 4 AM, with a fire burning through his
blood, Roger ran out into the the night. Stealing a moon buggy and driving in
a blind fear into the Mare Imbrium. He finally stopped and stared into the
vast depths of space. Up above were the stars glowing, tiny embers piercing
the veil of darkness. Roger still felt the pulling at his soul, the same
force that had driven him to abandon his family, abandon himself. It was
hungry again. A call across the universe, one he had to answer.
The next night he left on an outbound ship. The ship was the `MakeFast', a
crew of two hundred headed for the outer colonies just beyond Alpha Centauri.
It would take over six years to make it to the first planet, even with the
Tesser propulsion drive. But on ships like this they always needed able
hands, so Roger had no trouble getting on board. Once again, his life took
the form of endless boredom.
"Did you hear about Zebob getting crunched in the gateway yesterday," One
of Rogers friends mentioned.
"Yeah, I heard."
"Damn shame if you ask me, but he was a bit of a daredevil."
"Daredevil? Well yes I guess he was. But I don't think he would have felt
it was a shame. It would have been a real shame if it had been an accident.
Zeb never did like fate. He really believe that he was the master of the
universe. Probably why he was so wild."
"But now he's dead. All he had to do was wear the safety rig. But no! He
wasn't going to do something that pansy. Always the show-off."
"He was no more a show-off then the next guy. He really believe that his
life was his. He wanted that thrill. It was his life and he ended it. I
envy him. He lived his life and he caused his death, nothing could be
simpler. It was pure."
Roger's friend stared at him for a short time, in disbelief. "Whatever you
say Roger, but its still a shame."
Six years passed on board the `MakeFast'. Roger felt at peace, for some
reason, with the blank and empty dark sky. He often asked himself how the
first deep space explorers must have felt, to meet this void head on, and not
flinch. The first planet that the ship came upon was quite a welcome sight
for the crew. The planet looked like it would provide plenty of ore and other
rare materials and could be savaged for a few years before moving on. The
ship was put into a permanent orbit and a small colony was put on the planet.
The atmosphere was breathable, and there was some soil that could be
cultivated. The change to planet life didn't take all that long and, once
again, the patterns of a stable life had begun.
Roger was placed in charge of a small mining group that worked in the
mountains near the colony. The work was not as hard as mining on the moon had
been and the ores were plentiful. Time went on. Each day another tussle with
the world, each night a fitful sleep. Roger was no longer a young man,
running from the world. Each night he searched the heavens, every day he
longed to move on.
Sunburn
Knowing that he couldn't stay put on this planet much longer, he began to
gather up supplies in order to leave. The ship had four scout vehicles that
could be driven by one person, with the help of the onboard computers. It
took him nearly a month to gather enough food and equipment to risk stealing
one the the scouts, but he was once again determined to move on.
One night, Roger took the scout ship `MakeShort'. The ship had enough fuel
and food to last for about a year if he didn't eat or drink much. This part
of the galaxy was filled with stars and planets that were within a few months
of each other. Roger skipped around the galaxy for about ten months, when he
came upon a solar system with two suns. The suns were orbited by four
planets, all quite large compared to the Earth. Roger set down on the most
hospitable of the four but in a system with two suns, hospitable meant little
more than looked like it had some atmosphere. Light years form reality and
unable to leave, Roger made his home once again.
Dry Rain
After two months, all the water was gone. Roger realized for the first
time that his death was coming. It was something that he had resigned himself
to on the day he had left earth. His restless nature had driven him, on
beyond all reason, into the vast depths of space, and now to the end of his
world. He ran out into the desert for four days, always moving forward,
refusing to stop for more than short breaks, driven by some need that only he
could understand. He made his last stand on a hilltop in the middle of a
burning sea of sand and wind.
He stood up. His ragged clothes flapping in the wind on top of the dune.
His whole body scorched red from the sun. He looked into the bright light and
for the first time in years, smiled. His face was grim and determined. His
body was thin and weak, but he stood straight up. The sand swirled around him
as his body took its last breath. As he feel forward into the sand, his face
still kept that gaunt look of irresolute determination to not stand still.
Even as the sand began to mutate his body, that look remained, unchanging in
the burning desert.
Sunrise
John left home when he was sixteen. One morning, his mother went into his
room, only to find that he had taken all his clothes and left. She cried for
an entire day but knew that there was nothing she could have done, it was in
his blood, in his soul.
______________________________________________________________________________
Matthew Sorrels considers himself a modern existentialist. Torn between an
overwhelming need to hack hardware and a craving for the purest form of code,
he will most likely be found at the unemployment office searching for that
entry-level position. You can easily identify him as the depressed person
that consumes massive amounts of Diet Coke(tm).
ms90+@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Popping In
Christopher Kempke
copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Twilight
The windshield wipers came on the moment Billy Goldwin's mother started the
car, testimony to some past rainstorm. She shut them off immediately, for
they served no purpose on this particular day; the sun, though barely above
the horizon, had no clouds to block it.
Billy's mood was not so bright. Summer vacation had just come to an end,
and the interminable, probably endless days of school were about to begin
again. Already his reluctance to submit to this fate had resulted in missing
the school bus, and a near-successful attempt to hide his continued presence
from his mother made him even later.
His mother's own outlook was, therefore, less than perfect. She didn't say
a word to him as they slipped down the avenue away from their home, selected a
few choice phrases for the next couple of blocks, then relapsed into the
impenetrable silence as they covered the remaining three miles to the school's
street.
Billy could see the three-story school building ahead, and sank deeper into
his gloom. The doors were closed, he would be late. To have a pink slip on
the very first day of second grade, in addition to the suffering of mere
attendance, seemed more than he should be expected to survive.
With a passion he'd never felt before, he wished the school would
disappear. In his head he could picture the street as it would appear without
the school, the building gone entirely. It was a lovely dream, a Nirvana in
which this particular hell no longer existed. He sharpened the mental image
of the absent building, seeing only the shading trees and empty avenue. Billy
lost himself in his sudden dream.
And a moment later that dream came true.
Billy and his mother had just enough time to realize that there was
something wrong before the howling began; followed by a thunderous crash and a
jerk that tore away all consciousness.
Martin Kendall's feet sat on an oak desk in a cave in the Colorado rockies.
A coin fell through the air in front of him, vanished inches above the desk,
and reappeared near the ceiling. A moment later, as it again neared the desk,
the stunt repeated itself. Kendall had been doing this for nearly half an
hour, just barely able to control the coin at terminal velocity.
An intercom buzzed, and he dropped his feet to the floor with sudden
alertness. The coin, suddenly ignored, buried itself in his desktop.
"Martin?" The voice of his secretary was badly distorted by the cheap
intercom. "Sorry to bother you, but Henry brought me this a few minutes ago,
and I thought you should see it." A manila folder materialized on the desk.
Kendall opened it at once.
It was a handwritten note, labeled "Transcription from Police Channel, St.
Williams, Iowa".
"Jefferson Park School appears to have vanished. No trace of the building
remains above ground level, and there is not enough debris present to
hypothesize an ordinary explosion of any kind. Several nearby objects
appeared to be picked up and tossed TOWARD the scene of the
disappearance, including several cars, whose occupants are currently being
taken to Central Hospital for treatment. I will require backup and several
ambulances."
Beneath it was scrawled hastily, "This looks like one of ours."
Kendall had his hand back on the intercom before he finished reading. "Get
me four or five Teletrix and have them meet me at the school as fast as you
can get them there. Is Henry still out there?"
His question was answered a second later when the specified party appeared
in front of his desk. About fifty, Henry was still in perfect shape, with
slightly silvered hair which seemed to argue with his blue jeans and tennis
shoes. His face almost always wore a slight smile, but today it showed no
trace of humor. His eyebrows rose in a silent question, his body almost
quivering with repressed motion.
Kendall nodded, and the world changed. Without sound or transition, the
rock walls of the Colorado cave were replaced by blue sky and defoliated
trees. The chair on which he had been sitting a moment before vanished. Only
the fact that he had begun to stand saved him from collapsing to the ground.
Henry was standing next to him, glancing around to be sure no one had
observed the teleportation. Satisfied, he gestured toward a large, regularly
shaped pit in front of them. Policemen were scattered around it, with the
disoriented, suspicious wandering of people facing the completely unknown.
"That's the basement of the school building. The leaves and branches all
around it are from the trees here. They were apparently sucked into the
vacuum left when the school disappeared."
Kendall nodded silently. "You're right --- it does look like a Shifter, or
a Teletrix who wants us to think so. Let's see if we can get in there without
the police harassing us."
"No problem." Henry held out a small wallet. Kendall opened it, saw a
badge and a card which read, in part, 'George MacWills, Federal Bureau of
Investigation.' He smiled.
The policeman who stopped them let them pass after seeing the badge. Henry
dropped carefully into the pit and helped Kendall down.
The place was a disaster. Folding chairs, old desks, and pieces of brick
wall had been picked up, smashed, and indiscriminately tossed about by the
winds.
"Quite a mess," Kendall commented. "Not likely there's going to be
anything here to give us clues. What time was it here when this happened?"
"About eight thirty."
Kendall froze, turned around slowly. "So school was in session?"
Henry nodded slowly.
"Oh shit."
"The parents will start arriving once the word gets out, and there will be
enough media attention to keep people talking for ages. There were almost
fifteen hundred students there, plus the teachers and..." his voice trailed
off suddenly.
Kendall followed his gaze, saw nothing at first, then a few droplets of
crimson showed a macabre path to something Kendall didn't want to look at at
all.
But he did. It was the lower half of a body, eviscerated and scattered
about the floor, discreetly covered with leaves, almost invisible.
"He must have been walking down the stairs when the school was teleported.
Half of him left here, the other half went... wherever the rest of the school
went." Henry's voice quivered audibly, though he kept it just above a
whisper.
Kendall shivered a bit himself. "This can't be seen from above. Let's get
rid of it before the cops find it. They've had enough inexplicable things for
one day." He teleported the body to a remote desert and brought back an equal
volume of air to take its place. Only a slight shifting of the leaves showed
that anything had happened.
"We're wasting time," Kendall continued. "Get in contact with as many of
the Teletrix as you can find all over the world; use my files to look them up.
We need to find out where that school was sent. It would have made quite a
flash when it appeared; I'll see if any military satellites picked it up.
While I'm at it I'll get the army to control this. That should effectively
silence the media."
"We have people that high in the military?" Henry sounded surprised.
"We have people everywhere," Kendall said without emotion. "Wait here for
the help I asked for to arrive, and get them to help you look. There's a
couple thousand very confused people somewhere right now, most of them
schoolchildren. We need to find out where they went."
Henry nodded. "I'll meet you at the Academy in an hour, whether I have
news or not."
Kendall finished climbing out of the basement, headed for a small
outbuilding, stepped behind it and vanished.
Two hours later three people gathered in Kendall's office. The third was a
young woman of about twenty-five, an accomplished Teletrix and major
instructor at the Academy.
"The army is currently guarding the school," Kendall commented. "And
there's not going to be any mention in the media. But this is going to be
hard to gloss over.
"Worse, the school still hasn't been located. None of the weather or
military satellites registered a flash that hasn't been otherwise explained.
And the students and teachers haven't phoned."
"Sounds bad," Emily Westlane said. "We have to assume they're dead. The
odds appear that they weren't teleported anywhere on Earth, and even if they
were the school building would probably have collapsed in it's new setting."
Henry nodded. "An extra-terrestrial destination seems likely. But who
would want to send a school into outer space?"
Emily shrugged. "A student who didn't want to attend classes. We know
that this was an amateur teleportation, possibly even a first manifestation of
power. A child seems likely." She paused. "If it was their first time, it's
unlikely that they would have known enough to take themselves along."
"So someone outside the school building, probably a student who didn't want
to go to school, or a staff member that didn't want to go to work." Henry
considered. "It was after school normally started, so there would be a
relatively small number of people not in attendance. But I don't know how we
could check every child and teacher in St. Williams."
The group became silent for a few moments. Then Kendall snapped his
fingers.
"We don't have to. Just check the hospitals and morgue."
"Huh?" Henry looked confused.
Kendall smiled briefly. "This teleportation was amateur; the vacuum almost
assures that. Only a tiny portion of them learn to use a grid for energy
before we find them."
Henry's befuddled expression vanished. "So our Shifter must have been
using his own energy."
"That school had a huge volume; quite an effort for an amateur. The strain
must have been enormous." Emily sighed. "The morgue seems more likely."
"Check it," Kendall said. "Henry, you check the hospitals."
"There's only one," Henry said. "I'll be back in ten minutes. " He
vanished.
"Me, too," Emily said, and Kendall was suddenly alone.
Three people who were not doctors exited a broom closet of the St. Martin
city hospital wearing doctors' gowns. Henry had checked this hall only
moments before, determined it to be relatively unused; no one was around to
wonder what important medical conference had been held in the closet.
Henry set off at a brisk pace, Kendall and Emily at his heels.
"His name is William Goldwin, or 'Billy.' He's eight years old, starting
second grade. He was late to school; his mother was driving him in. She says
she saw the school simply vanish, felt a strong wind and heard thunder, then
the car was lifted and thrown and she woke up in the hospital." Henry paused
for breath. "She was treated for minor bruises and released, but Billy is in
a coma. They're in there." He pointed to a door.
Kendall glanced at his watch. "My wife should be getting home right about
now. Go get her, and tell her to bring her kit."
Henry nodded once, briefly, and then was not there. Kendall pushed open
the door and stepped into the room. Emily followed.
Billy lay on a bed, various pieces of machinery attached to his face and
chest. On the other side of the room a crying woman sat in a plush chair. A
doctor stood over the bed, fiddling with one of the dials and consulting a
clipboard. He looked up as Kendall and Emily entered.
The doctor looked up as they entered. "You're not doctors," he said
simply.
Emily smiled broadly, but not without a hint of malice. "We need to talk,
outside."
The doctor looked uncertain, glancing between her and the door. Kendall
casually placed himself in the line of retreat.
"I don't know who you are, but this patient needs my attention now, and I
don't have time for you. You'll have to wait outside."
Kendall gave Emily a sideways glance and shrugged. She pulled a wallet
from a coat pocket, flipped it open toward the doctor. "You don't understand.
I'm agent Smith of the FBI, and we need to talk outside right now."
The doctor's agitation increased considerably, but he held his ground.
"No, you don't understand. I can't leave him right now."
Emily snapped the wallet closed and put it back in her pocket. "I think
we're failing to communicate." She turned toward Billy's mother, who had
looked up during the exchange. "Mrs. Goldwin, if you'll excuse us?"
An instant later Emily and the doctor were gone.
Mrs. Goldwin flew to her feet like she'd been stung. Kendall held up his
hand in a restraining gesture, and smiled.
"Don't worry, ma'am. We're not really with the FBI, but we can help your
son, I hope."
"How did they just disappear?" She was still standing, every muscle tensed
as though she were about to run.
"I'll explain everything once we've gotten your son revived. Has he been
thrashing around, like he's been having nightmares? Sweating?"
"No." She looked as though it took considerable effort to get the word
out.
Kendall frowned. The energy drain usually caused terrible nightmares,
except in the most extreme cases when the body was too deeply drained. He had
never seen an extreme case survive.
"Mrs. Goldwin," he said slowly, "I need to ask you a couple questions, and
the answers are extremely important. Your son has a very special ability, one
that only a few people possess. He can make things move using only his mind.
That's what happened to the school; he apparently sent it somewhere else."
"Billy would never do that!"
"He almost certainly did it by accident. Most people do, their first time.
He was probably wishing the school would go away, and 'poof', it did. But
it's very important to know where he sent it. Did he say anything just before
the accident that might give us a clue?"
She considered. "No. He wasn't speaking at all. We'd had an argument
about his going to school."
Kendall grimaced inwardly.
There was a slight movement behind him, and Mrs. Goldwin started.
"You rang?" June Kendall had a smile on her face. She lost it almost as
soon as she realized her surroundings. She joined her husband at the bed,
looked down into the boy's face. Carefully, she set her briefcase on the edge
of the bed and opened it. Henry, who had teleported the two of them here,
silently took a chair.
"Wake him up," Kendall said.
June frowned. "The only thing that might wake him is..." She trailed off,
looked across the bed at Mrs. Goldwin. "You the boy's mother?"
"Yes, I am." She looked very pale.
Behind the cover of her open briefcase, June pressed a vial into Kendall's
hand. "About half," she said aloud.
Kendall teleported about half the vial's contents into Mrs. Goldwin's lungs
and chest, then teleported himself across the bed to catch her as she slumped.
Carefully, he dragged her to the chair.
"That will keep her out for about twenty minutes. We'll tell her she
fainted. She certainly looked bad enough."
Kendall nodded. "Can you wake him up?"
"Not safely. There's some stuff here that might work, but it's damn
potent. It might wake him, on the other hand it might cause massive heart
failure, too."
Kendall considered. "He's dead for sure if we don't wake him. But we'll
need the doctor just in case. I hope Emily's done intimidating him. Henry,
will you go get them? I suspect they're on the roof."
June shuddered. "Don't you folks have any less drastic intimidation
techniques? Have you ever tried just talking to resolve your differences? Or
maybe something just a trifle more subtle?"
Henry grinned slightly. "Subtlety isn't exactly the point we're trying to
make. I'll go get them."
He vanished.
Midnight
A sharp slap brought Billy back to awareness. He could only barely get his
eyes open, but he spread his lids carefully and tried to focus on his
surroundings through the resulting haze.
Kendall sat on the edge of the bed with an intent look on his face. Behind
him, beyond the range on which Billy could focus stood the doctor, Henry,
Emily, and June. Billy's mother still dozed in her chair on the other side of
the bed.
"Billy, can you hear me?" Kendall's voice was very low, almost a whisper.
June prodded him in the back and he repeated the question a bit more loudly.
"Yes." It took several attempts to get the word out. Billy remembered a
time he had almost drowned, the foggy feeling that would not go away. He felt
like that now.
"Do you know what a grid is?"
Billy's brain refused to yield a definition. He shook his head slowly.
Kendall unfolded a large piece of paper, held it close to him. It was
glossy black, with yellow lines at about three inch intervals forming squares.
"Can you close your eyes and imagine this?"
Billy tried, and sleep overcame him almost at once. Another slap brought
him back.
"Billy, it's very important that you stay awake. Try to imagine this
picture in your mind. Keep your eyes open."
Billy studied the grid intently for a few moments, formed an image of it in
his mind. "Ok"
"Good. Now pretend that those yellow lines are all over the room,
connecting everything with each other. Try to imagine a whole bunch of yellow
lines."
Billy nodded. Kendall smiled slightly, pulled a coin from his pocket.
"Now here's the hard part. Look at this coin, and pretend that there's a
yellow line connecting it with the blanket right here." Kendall patted the
bed slightly. "Okay?"
"Okay."
"Now, imagine the coin moving along the yellow line to the bed."
There was a soft pop, and simultaneously a flash of brilliant light from
the bed. The coin now sat on the blanket.
Billy's fatigue vanished, energy flowing through his body as though some
internal dam had burst.
Kendall stood up, the coin vanishing as he did so. "Good, he'll be okay
now. He's tapped the grid enough to get his energy back. Doctor, I don't
think we'll be needing your services any more. June, see if you can wake his
mother."
The doctor fled the room. Emily watched him go with a slight grin. June
gently shook Billy's mother, awakening her easily.
"We all need to have a talk," Kendall said. "And this isn't the place to
have it. I'm going to take us all to my office. Mrs. Goldwin, Billy, this
may make you slightly uncomfortable. Everything around you is going to change
suddenly, but you won't be hurt in any way. Are you ready?"
Mrs. Goldwin's eyes clearly said no, but she softly said, "Yeah."
Kendall smiled, nodded curtly, and the whole world changed.
Safely seated a half mile below the surface of a Colorado mountain, Kendall
turned at once to business.
"Billy, when you were in the car with your mother, you sent the school away
somewhere. It's very important that you tell us where you sent it so we can
rescue the people who were in it."
Billy looked at his mother, back at Kendall. "I didn't do anything, it
just went away."
Kendall's smile widened imperceptibly. "I know you didn't try to make it
go anywhere, it was an accident. What were you thinking at the time?"
The glance at his mother was longer this time. "I just wanted the school
to disappear," he admitted finally. His mother gasped softly.
"Disappear to where? It's very important."
Billy thought about it for a while. "Just disappear. I didn't want it to
go somewhere else, I just wanted it not to be there." He burst into tears.
June came and caught his hand. "That's okay, now. Let's go get you
something to eat, okay?" She winked at Billy's mother, led the child slowly
from the room. Mrs. Goldwin rose to follow, but a gesture from Kendall made
her sit back down. Emily and Henry silently left the room,
uncharacteristically using the door rather than teleporting away.
"I've got to tell you a little bit more about your son, Mrs. Goldwin."
Mrs. Goldwin nodded slowly.
"Every now and then someone's born with the ability your son has. We call
it teleportation; the ability to move things from one place to another without
touching it or moving it through any of the space in between. About one
person in a thousand is able to do it. Of those, about one person in one
hundred ever discovers this ability on their own.
"But now and then something happens such as with Billy. For some reason or
another, they think about an object in a different way than they have before,
and `poof', it moves. It's very draining on your energy, in a way more than
just simple fatigue. It causes bad dreams and frequently even death. Many
`crib death' children are just latent teleporters who teleported something too
large to handle in a dream, and died as a result.
"We call these people Shifters. They can teleport, but only with some
danger and a lot of fatigue. The larger the volume of matter they wish to
move, the more energy it takes to move it. Your son was very lucky; most
children would have died teleporting a structure as large as that school
building.
"Now, even ten percent of one in a thousand human beings makes for a fairly
large number of people with this ability. When someone manifests this
ability, they are usually noticed by one of our people, and brought here.
"This place you're in is called the Teletrix Academy, and its graduates are
referred to as Teletrix. Billy will be one of those graduates eventually."
"Billy has to come here?"
"Yes, for a year or so, to learn how to use his gift well. There are
techniques that allow a Teletrix to teleport things without using his or her
own energy to do it. Also, the terrible side effects, light and thunder, can
be avoided by some other tricks. But most importantly, we teach him to use
his gift in an ethical fashion. A Teletrix out for personal gain would be a
devastating force in the world. There have been a few who we might only call
`evil.' They are very dangerous people, and extremely difficult to stop.
We'd just as soon make ourselves responsible for his moral training as well."
"But he has school to attend, and ..."
"Many of our students do; and classes are provided here. You will be
allowed to visit at any time. In fact, you may live here if you wish. You
might want to take our tests --- you may be a latent Teletrix yourself,
although it's not particularly likely."
"But..."
"And, Mrs. Goldwin, I'm afraid I must insist. You see, he doesn't have a
grasp on his abilities, and he's dangerous to others as well as himself. It's
quite likely that he killed everyone in that school by teleporting them into
outer space, or into the sun, or some other such `accident' merely by
ignorance. We can't allow that to happen again. In one year, perhaps less,
he may return to the outside world and lead a productive life there. It is
never easy to let your son go, but I assure you that it it necessary. I have
had this conversation with hundreds of parents over the years, and always
reach the same conclusion.
"I'm sorry that this had to happen like this. Usually Shifters manifest
their powers in some small manner that allows us some time to break the news
gently. It wasn't so this time, and training should begin at once before he
decides to try again on his own. I am certain that another such attempt would
result in his death."
Mrs. Goldwin was silent for a long moment. "It appears I have no choice.
I'll have to discuss it with my husband, of course."
Kendall nodded. "I'll help you if you like. June will make sure that
Billy is settled in here. My wife's a very pleasant lady, I'm sure he'll get
along with her just fine for a while."
"Your wife... is she a..."
"Teletrix? No, she just had the misfortune of marrying one. I expect her
to come to her senses any day." Kendall grinned. "Shall we go?"
Five hours later Emily dropped into one of Kendall's office chairs with
something halfway between a sigh and a snore. The others in the office had
fared little better; Henry was pacing to keep himself alert, Kendall himself
was sipping on his fourth cup of coffee in as many hours. June alone looked
fresh; somehow she always did.
"Nothing," Emily said flatly. "But I suspect you already knew that. There
are fifteen thousand Teletrix all over the world looking for that school
building."
"I've still got them looking," Kendall acknowledged, "But I can't see that
there's much chance we'll find anything any more. The flash was our best
hope, but I've been over all the satellite photos a hundred times. I've been
teleporting all over this planet so much I'm developing permanent jet lag."
"The army's fairly nervous about this, but the press is still in the dark.
By the time it leaks, I think it will be old enough news that no one will
believe it." Henry paused for a few moments. "Of course, somebody's
eventually going to put all of these little stories together and draw some
fairly dangerous conclusions, for us."
"They already have," Kendall commented. "But nobody believes them, either.
I doubt the Academy is in any real danger for the time being." He looked
toward his wife.
June shrugged. "I've been talking to Billy for hours. He continues to
insist that he sent the school `nowhere.' I even tried hypnosis. Any memory
he has of where he sent it is locked up so tight that he can't get at it
either consciously or subconsciously."
Henry tossed his wallet in the air. It vanished, appeared on Kendall's
desk. With a slight frown, he teleported it across the room again. The rest
of the room's occupants ignored him.
"So we're back at a dead end again," Kendall said. "I suppose we're going
to have to get some sleep sometime, and I'm beginning to suspect that the
school is permanently beyond our reach."
There was a soft sound of thunder, and Henry's wallet appeared on Kendall's
desk in a brilliant flash of light.
"I'd almost forgotten how hard it was to teleport on your own power," Henry
said. He stared at the wallet again, wrinkled his head in concentration. The
wallet vanished with the customary pop. There was no corresponding flash of
light.
"Eureka!" Henry shouted, and leapt to his feet. Everyone else in the room
had been staring at him for several seconds, and flinched at the sudden flurry
of motion.
"The wallet!" Henry said. "Where is it?"
"How should I know?" Kendall said slowly. "You teleported it, didn't you?"
"Yes."
"Then where did you send it?"
"Nowhere."
There was a slight pause as the words settled.
"Nowhere?"
"I blanked my mind just as I sent it, failed to specify a destination.
It's doesn't drain as much energy as a full teleport, either. That's how
Billy managed to survive!"
Kendall looked him straight in the eye. "Can you bring it back?"
Henry closed his eyes, nodded slowly. "Yes, I think I can."
Light was suddenly everywhere. When the flash faded, Henry's wallet was in
his hand.
"Yes, it can be done. But it's as fatiguing to bring it back as to send
it. And I think that it's going to have to be Billy who recalls the school."
Kendall turned his attention to June. "What are the chances he'd survive
that?"
She shook her head. "Almost zero. He'll need a couple of weeks at least
to recuperate first, and even then it's dangerous. And probably not worth it.
Wherever this `nowhere' is, there's not likely to be any air there, is there?"
Henry shook his head. "No probably not."
Emily looked at him for a long moment, then teleported the wallet from his
hands. It appeared in her lap in a soft flash of light. Scowling, she tried
again. This time, the wallet remained missing.
"Bring it back, Henry." Her voice was soft.
Henry closed his eyes for almost a full minute. "I can't," he said simply.
There was a flash. "But I can, easily. So only the person who sends it
can get it back." Emily shook her head. "It just seems a shame to leave all
those people hanging in limbo, even if they are dead."
"Any chance that it will just pop back of it's own accord?" Kendall asked.
Both Henry and Emily shrugged.
"I think that it's definitely time to get some sleep then. We will all
think about this better when we're awake."
Emily nodded, looked at her watch. Suddenly, she pulled the watch from her
wrist, glanced at it briefly, and sent it nowhere. Everyone looked up at the
pop.
Emily grinned theatrically, waited almost a full minute, then recalled the
watch. She stared at it as though seeing it for the first time.
"They're still alive," she said quietly. "Teleportation allows you move
from place to place skipping the intervening space. It appears you also skip
the intervening time. My watch didn't gain so much as a second while it was
gone. So no time is passing for the people in the school."
The mood of the room brightened noticeably for the first time in several
hours.
"Good thinking, Emily," Kendall said. "We have a chance of rescuing them.
We just wait for Billy to recover, get him to bring the school back. With
luck we'll even find a way to do it on a grid and he won't have to use his own
energy."
June looked skeptical, Emily contemplative. Henry gave a sudden, strangled
gasp. "That half a man we found going down the stairs..."
Kendall sobered instantly. "Yes. He doesn't even know he's dead."
Dawn
Kendall shifted the unfamiliar army uniform on his shoulders, seeking
without success to make it more comfortable. Henry stood nearby with a
practiced ease; it was not the first time he has worn such a uniform. Both
men were carefully scrutinizing the school foundations.
"There's a lot of damage to the structure," Henry said. "I rather doubt
that the school would continue to stand for more than a couple seconds after
being brought back."
"Which would injure or kill most of the occupants," Kendall finished for
him. "Clearly unacceptable. So what do we do?"
Henry shook his head. "If we knew exactly where the people were, we could
probably teleport them out before the building collapsed. But there's no way
to know that I can see."
"Could we rebuild the foundation so that the school would stand?"
"I thought of that," Henry replied. "But we don't know how. The
blueprints were destroyed in a fire some years ago, and in any case we don't
know exactly how much of the school was taken and how much left. I'm not sure
that it would work in any case; the sudden weight on the foundations would be
likely to break them."
"Any chance that there are any blueprints left somewhere? Interior
drawings or photographs? If we knew the complete structure of the building we
could drop a teleport shield on it, immobilize it in one place long enough for
the people to get out."
Henry considered for several seconds. "That sounds awfully dangerous.
There aren't any blueprints, but we could probably find photographs of the
interior. But even if we could completely reconstruct the inside it would
probably take several Teletrix working together to keep the geometry straight,
and if we weren't perfectly synchronized we'd probably just accelerate the
destruction."
Kendall's spun suddenly toward Henry. "Of course! You're a genius,
Henry!"
"Of course. But my brilliance is such that escapes even me at the moment.
What did I say?"
"Never mind, I need to think about it some more. But we've probably got a
solution to that problem. The next question is, how do we cover this all up?"
Henry smiled slowly. "Emily and I had a discussion about that last night.
She had an idea that's so outrageous it can't fail."
Kendall snorted. "I can't wait. Let's get back to the office."
Henry spread his map out on Kendall's desk. Emily stood at his side;
Kendall sat in his usual chair. Each grabbed a corner to prevent the paper
from rerolling itself.
"Here's the major camp, and the latrines," Henry said, pointing. "Everyone
not on duty will be there. They've erected a tent over the school foundations
to keep the gawkers away; the on-duty patrols will be right around the tent to
keep away suspicious people. Nevertheless, there will probably be a crowd of
worried parents over here, in the compound."
"Any chance there will be stragglers?"
"It's always possible, but not likely. I've been watching them for a week
now, and they've been relatively invariant in their routine. But if there
are, the others know what to do with them, so it won't be a big deal."
"Good," Kendall said, glancing at his watch. "We have about ten minutes.
I'll take the parents, Henry, you get the tent and the patrols, Emily, the
main camp is yours. Then start looking for anyone we missed. Meet me here
when you're done." He tapped the map. "Any questions?"
"I question your sanity," Emily said. "Other than that, no."
"That's what you're there for," Kendall said. "If something goes wrong
with this plan, get that school back into the nether as fast as you can."
"Understood."
Kendall checked his watch again. "Nine and a half minutes exactly. Let's
go!"
The office was replaced with starry darkness. Kendall slid across the
night toward the small rope-enclosed compound. Perhaps sixty people were in
it, despite the hour; tents and sleeping bags were omnipresent.
Kendall closed his eyes, brought forth an image of the yellow grid that was
so much a part of his talent. Normally he would have required neither
concentration nor the closed eyes, but the task he performed now was still
relatively new, and there was little room for error.
He mentally cut away half of the grid, imagining the lines fading to
nothing in one direction, opened his eyes. Superimposing the grid upon the
enclosure and the public latrines beyond, he concentrated on the nothing
beyond his grid and gave a short mental push.
Usually he would have pulled air from the other end of the grid to fill the
space, but tonight he just performed a second teleport a few moments later,
sucking air from over an ocean hundreds of miles away.
There was just the slightest rumble, a gentle breeze, then silence. The
compound and its occupants were gone.
A crash of thunder from beyond the trees told him that Henry had been less
successful, but it no longer mattered. Kendall smiled to himself, and
flickered to the meeting place.
The army and the tent were gone, sent into an empty nowhere, out of space
and time. The school foundation was barely visible in the near-complete
darkness.
Henry and Emily were already there. A few moments later they were joined
by June and Billy, who had been hiding nearby for several minutes.
"So far, so good," Kendall said. He kept his voice at a whisper despite
the fact that there was no one to hear except the five people gathered in the
clearing. "Now the fun begins. Emily, you should probably sit in that tree
over there to give you a better view. If you think something's wrong, you
know what to do."
Emily nodded, and vanished.
June carried two large briefcases. She handed one to Henry, the other to
Kendall. "It took myself and about fifty academy folks all day to get this
stuff into two thousand containers. Don't drop those cases or the whole
county will go to sleep. And not wake up."
"No problem," Henry said. "We'll try not to break them."
He hefted his case and vanished.
Darkness prevailed for a few seconds longer.
There was a sudden flurry of activity. Four helicopters appeared silently
in the air, dropped slightly as they adjusted to the pressure change from
their source. Moments later the whirring of their blades filled the night.
Everywhere men and women were materializing, filling the schoolyard with
humanity. These people turned and ran for the edge of the concrete
playground, only to be replaced fifteen seconds later with a new batch. And
so it continued, again and again, until fully two thousand people stood
waiting.
Equipment began appearing, transferred fully constructed from a storeroom
beneath the Colorado Rockies. Wooden towers, bleachers, ladders, and other
paraphernalia were quickly set up. Seventeen huge searchlights illuminated
the air over the school foundations.
Kendall strode to the playground as the activity slowly settled into an
expectant silence. His wife and Billy followed slowly. Two thousand Teletrix
had arranged themselves about the school, where they could view it from every
angle. They stood silently, waiting.
Kendall summoned a megaphone, spoke into it.
"Thank you all for coming this evening. I apologize for any inconvenience
this may have caused you, but we could think of no other way of resolving this
problem without your aid.
"You have all been instructed in what to do. Please remember that time
will be very short; you may have as long as ten seconds, but four is a more
likely guess. At this time you should arrange yourself so that each of you
can see where the school will appear."
There was a slight shifting of the crowd.
Kendall opened the briefcase he held. On the other side of the empty
foundation, Henry did the same. Within, hundreds of vials of a white powder
glimmered.
"Each of you should take one of these. Be very careful with it; do not
breath it or break it."
The briefcase emptied rapidly.
Kendall looked at June expectantly. She nodded once, placed her hand on
Billy's shoulder.
"Do you remember our lessons? It's time to bring the school back. But you
must be very careful to do it the way Henry showed you. Don't make any
light."
Billy smiled. "I can do it." He closed his eyes, opened them, then closed
them again. Finally, he opened them and turned toward June.
"It didn't work."
Kendall swore silently.
June was more gentle. "Just try again, Billy."
Billy nodded skeptically, turned toward the hole in the ground, and closed
his eyes.
Without a whisper, the school flickered back into existence.
Almost immediately, the ceiling of the top floor vanished, the walls
following a fraction of a second later as a thousand Teletrix teleported bits
and pieces of the building away. People within became visible, frozen by a
shock that had not yet had time to fully register. The remaining Teletrix
teleported them into the playground as quickly as they became visible. Inside
of a second, none remained on the top floor.
The school began to tilt crazily to one side. The low rumbling only drove
the Teletrix to faster speeds. The middle floor was eaten away, it's people
pulled out and added to the collection in the playground as they became
appeared. When none remained, the bottom floor, too, began to disappear like
sand in a strong wind.
The walls now began to collapse, but it was far to late to make any
difference. Even as they fell, the walls vanished, the students and teachers
flickered to safety The bottom floor collapsed inward, but there was no one
left on it.
Kendall watched the school vanish piecemeal until he was sure everyone who
could be rescued was out. But there was still an occupant of the building.
Kendall met Henry in the ruins of the basement, seeking half a man. They
found him without too much trouble, his body just beginning to realize it was
in pain. Henry and Kendall had discussed this for hours in the preceeding
days, but their decision pleased neither of them.
With a flash of his mind, Kendall sent the man almost a hundred million
miles away. His body was consumed instantly and painlessly by the fusion
furnace of the sun.
"I'm sorry," Kendall said quietly. "But this is the only thing we could do
for you."
Henry and Kendall stared at the empty place where he had been for several
long minutes, silently, then teleported back to the playground.
In the time they had been gone, the equipment had vanished. Each of the
Teletrix had chosen a single resident of the school and taken him or her home.
The drug June had distributed created a sleep laced with enough dreams to blur
the line between reality and nightmare. The events of the night would be
pieced together vaguely, if at all. For the people in the school, day would
have become night, their minds disoriented. The school would still be gone
when they awoke, but with luck they would not remember being in it.
At the end of it all, only Henry, Emily, and Kendall remained. One of the
Teletrix had taken June and Billy back to the Colorado office.
"It's not a perfect success," Emily said. "We had a couple of bumps and
bruises from falling bricks, but nothing that a little time won't cure. Plus,
of course, it will be impossible to hide the signs of all those people here,
but that will be only a minor mystery. The tabloids will probably pass us off
as space aliens."
Kendall nodded. "That and the fact that every soldier and parent here
tonight is going to find their watch a few minutes slow."
"Speaking of which," Henry said, "it's been almost ten minutes since we
took out the natives. We'd best get them back before they get too much out of
kilter. Keeps the mystery count low."
"Agreed."
The three of them separated to their former positions.
Returning the parents' compound was easier. Kendall merely superimposed a
whole grid over the empty scene, and bled the energy of transport into it.
Silently and lightlessly the compound reappeared, the air it replaced ending
up somewhere over the Pacific.
Five minutes later, wine glasses clinked over Martin Kendall's desk.
"Well, we did it. Only one casualty, and little disruption. When the
missing people reappear tomorrow morning, this whole thing should pass.
Eventually, the army will get tired of guarding that now-useless hole in the
ground and go home." Kendall raised his glass. "I'd like to thank all of you
for your help, especially Billy here."
Billy took a sip from his glass. "It's good!" he said.
"Indeed," Kendall said. "Best lemonade I've ever tasted."
______________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a dangerous, psychopathic Computer Science graduate
student with too much time on his hands. Attempts to lock him up have
resulted only in a temporary confinement at Oregon State University, where he
can be reached as kempkec@cs.orst.edu on good days, and not at all on bad.
Editor's note: `Popping Up' is actually the third story Chris has written set
in the Teletrix `universe'. The first, `Going Places', was published in
October of 1989 (Volume 1, Issue 1), and the second, `Being There', was
published in April of 1990 (Volume 2, Issue 2).
______________________________________________________________________________
If you enjoy Quanta, you may
want to check out these other
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An Electronic Fiction Digest Contact: jsnell@ucsd.edu
InterText, like its predecessor, Athene, is devoted to publishing
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Phil Nolte, all of whom have been seen in the pages of Athene or
Quanta (or both).
InterText is published in both ASCII and PostScript formats (though
the PostScript laser-printer version is the version of choice). Its
first issue will appear next month. For a subscription (specify
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DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
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David "Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The
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The Journal of the Gamers' Guild of UCR
Contact: jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
The Guildsman is an electronic magazine devoted to role-playing
games and amateur fantasy/SF fiction. At this time, the Guildsman
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(thank you, thank you very much)
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Volume III Issue 2 ISSN 1053-8496 May 1991
__________________________________________ ___________________________________
Quanta (ISSN 1053-8496) is
Volume III, Issue 2 May, 1991 Copyright (c) 1991 by Daniel K.
__________________________________________ Appelquist. This magazine may be
archived, reproduced and/or
Articles distributed freely under the
condition that it is left intact
and that no additions or changes
`Looking Ahead' are made to it.
Daniel K. Appelquist The individual works within
this magazine are the sole property
of their respective author(s). No
further use of their works is
Serials permitted without their explicit
consent. All stories in this
magazine are fiction. No actual
persons are designated by name or
`The Harrison Chapters' character. Any similarity is
Jim Vassilakos coincidental.
All submissions, requests for
submission guidelines, requests for
back issues, queries concerning
Short Fiction subscriptions, letters, comments or
other correspondence should be sent
to one of the following addresses:
`To Find a Demon' quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
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__________________________________________ ___________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
First off, I'd like to thank all the people who responded to my call for
submissions. I received over fifty submissions from some of you, and others
have told me that more is on the way. My faith is definitely restored. I was
certainly very excited to receive another story by Conrad Wong (`Teaching a
Unicorn to Dance') which is a sort of sequel to his story from the last issue
(`Chasing Unicorn Songs', February 1991). I'm very impressed with Conrad's
work so far, and I certainly hope he can contribute more material in the
future.
Secondly, I'd like to thank the people who sent in money, after my call for
contributions in the last issue (February 1991). I still need more
contributions if I'm to achieve my goal of being able to produce Quanta
independently. I'd like more of you to send in $5, or whatever you can
afford. Simply ask yourself what Quanta is worth to you, and then send that
much. Again, it's entirely optional. I realize that many Quanta subscribers
are students, like myself, who do not have an excessive amount of money lying
around.
Thirdly, I'd like to address a matter of some note. This is the first
issue of Quanta to _not_ carry a story by Christopher Kempke. This has
nothing to do with me refusing to print any more of his stories, I simply
don't have one (also a first) to publish. I'm sure that Chris will reappear
in the next issue, but, just to be certain, you could send him some mail to
encourage him. His address is kempkec@cs.orst.edu. Heh heh...
Seriously, I'm sorry this issue is so late. As I stated in my letter, last
month, I was really suffering from a lack of material. Luckily, my volumes
are now overflowing. That's not to say that I don't want you to keep sending.
On the contrary, the more submissions, the better. Incidentally, I'd like to
thank all the people who sent me Star Trek or Dr. Who stories (or parodies).
I appreciate these, but it's not really the type of material I can publish.
What I'm looking for, primarily, is original fiction which doesn't borrow its
background from any other, possibly trademarked, universe. For example, I
wouldn't be able to publish a story written in Isaac Asimov's Robot universe.
(In fact, I'm not entirely certain I won't run into copyright hassles just by
printing the _name_ Isaac Asimov.)
I've been working steadily on a series of "best-of" volumes which, I
hope, will be released in very limited print circulation over the summer.
These will contain what I consider to be the best stories that have appeared
in Quanta. If any of you have a personal favorite, I entreat you to write me
and tell me about it. I'm also looking for illustrations to put in these
volumes. If there are any artists out there willing to donate their material
to this cause, please contact me. In fact, I'm always interested in receiving
art submissions, either for cover art or otherwise.
Rune Johansen, of Kjeller Norway recently gave me an interesting idea. He
suggested that it would make it easier for Norwegians to submit material to
Quanta if there were someone who could competently translate stories from
Norwegian into English. This, of course, could apply to all languages, from
any of the multiple countries (I've lost count, to tell you the truth, but I
think it's around 20) to which Quanta is currently distributed. Just as sort
of a preliminary query, are there any bi-linguals out there who would be
willing to donate their time to translate stories into English? If so, please
write me. I'm very interested in this as a possible way of get more European
or otherwise international fiction into Quanta, a goal which I feel is
desirable.
That's about it for this column, for this issue. I really want to thank
all of you again for responding so quickly, and in such volume, to my call for
submissions. Keep them rolling in.
______________________________________________________________________________
Moving??
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Thanks.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
To Find a Demon
by John Alexander and Michael Walsh
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Jackie Allan pulled on a pair of oilstained coveralls. She left the warm body
sleeping in her bed and made her way to the kitchen. Spring is cold in
Minneapolis. Making breakfast, she considered going back to bed. But she
decided that she didn't want to be more than half an hour late to her first
day on the new job.
She found Kelly Peterson's office behind mirror glass on the seventeenth
floor of the new Excon building on Nicollet, and walked in.
"You're late." Kelly, petite and brown-eyed with a delicate face, wore
artificially long straight hair in the current fashion. Jackie sat down and
put her boots on the desk.
"Skip that. There's an automatic farm on the fritz that I'm supposed to
fix," Jackie said.
The air between them began to freeze.
"You seem to forget which of us is the boss," Kelly said. "You refused to
take a Political Reliability Exam. You refused to give us blood and urine
samples, and access to your health records. You're not on time. These are
all conditions of employment. How do you expect to get along with your
superiors?"
"Go jump in a lake." Jackie rubbed the heels of her boots together,
leaving fragments of dirt on the tabletop. "I'd just as soon quit now as next
week. But you need an experienced systems engineer, and that's why I'm
getting paid twice what you are. Not that money means anything anymore.
Besides, I'm insulted. No scientist, engineer, or technician worth his or her
salt will give you a urine sample. No one's even dared ask me since I was
fresh out of the Institute. I refused then."
"Here at Excon, we try to maintain higher employee standards than are
unfortunately prevalent elsewhere."
"So fire me. Let's see you beukies, I mean bureaucrats, fix a leaky
faucett."
"We have some very competent personnel who are willing top take PRE's and
give us urine samples," Kelly muttered, surrendering.
"Sure." War over. Jackie swung her legs off the table and got up.
"Where's my terminal?"
"Actually, management feels you probably ought to have a look at the farm
in person. There's a van in the basement garage. I'll show you."
`Management probably ought to have a look at itself,' Jackie thought as she
followed.
The garage was dim and smoky. The van was enormous. A shirtless man with
a well-defined chest and a bristling mustache was loading crates of equipment
into the back.
"This is Mark Eckert, an automation tech who will be coming with us. Mark,
this is Jackie Allan," Kelly introduced.
"I know Mark. Hi." (Jackie felt that Mark had the most beautiful
eyelashes she had ever seen on a man.)
"Hi Jackie."
"You said - us?" Jackie turned to Kelly.
"Uh, I was told to come along."
Jackie gave her a hard look without saying anything. Then she climbed in
one of the side doors of the van.
Automation up front; a manual driver's seat just in case; methanol engine;
living quarters; lab space with terminals; and storage space in the back.
Mark climbed in with a four foot satellite dish.
"Hey, Jackie, what's with the beukie coming along?"
She reached out and flipped on a terminal.
"I'm not sure. Excon's been security-fanatic ever since people stopped
them from putting microwave receivers on the Greenland icecap. You remember
that?"
"Microwave power beamed down from the solar arrays in space? But I thought
those things were in the Pacific ocean."
"They are." Jackie was watching her screen. She'd found her login and
started exploring while they talked. "Some beukie originally wanted to put
them on the glaciers. They didn't realize the conversion heat would
eventually melt the glaciers, reduce the earth's surface albedo, and give
global warming an extra oomph." She suspended a throat mike around her neck.
"What happened?"
"They were stopped. Mortal blow to the collective ego of top management.
So now Excon recruits weak-willed people who give urine samples. I think
Kelly's supposed to keep an eye on us."
A door slammed up front. The twitch of Mark's thick mustache Did not go
unnoticed by Jackie. "So if I gave urine that means I'm weak-willed?" he
inquired.
"Just don't do it again," Jackie laughed.
"Do what?" asked Kelly, coming through the door. Mark went back to packing
boxes so they wouldn't move around.
"Urinate," Jackie said. "What's the name of that farm?"
"Fnail. Fnail Farm, in Canada. The farm overseer reports that everything
is fine and dandy, but the last transport didn't find any produce to load.
There are other disturbing reports." Kelly said. She was watching Mark, who
was shuffling crates with effortless grace. She made up her mind that the
muscle was real, not silicone insert.
"So how do you two know each other?" she asked.
"We worked together on a job for General Wind. Repairing power windmills."
Mark placed his hands on the edge of a crate behind him and sat down on them.
"They had a joke about us," Jackie called over from the terminal. "About
how you remove a generator housing."
"Yes, yes," Mark grinned. "Jackie holds the screwdriver against the screw
and Mark rotates the generator. THEN she had the nerve to write on a
recommendation form that I was 'young, but competent.' Tell me what that's
supposed to mean." He jabbed an accusatory finger in her direction. Jackie
giggled.
Kelly smiled politely, but she had this image of Jackie with the
screwdriver which she felt mildly threatening.
"Arrrgh. You're right." `Jackie's moods seemed to switch without
warning,' Kelly thought. She had been communicating with the terminal by
keyboard and subvocally through the throat mike. Now she turned it off.
"From the farm's point of view everything's ok, but the other things flatly
contradict that. We'll have to actually go to Canada to find out which
machine is right."
"We've been on our way for five minutes," Kelly said.
Jackie looked stunned.
"You didn't notice? Your inner ear must be broken," Mark said generously.
"We've been turning corners and everything."
"Damn modern suspensions are too good," Jackie growled reflectively.
It was starting to grow dark, and drizzling, when they pulled up to the end
of a gravel track and stopped. The black arms of wet bushes and trees stood
around a huge shed and a low crumbling concrete structure. Dull green
conifers rose up one hill. In the other directions lay small fields separated
by windbreaks.
"...land is poor around here. Vast area, very low level agriculture. It's
labor intensive to conserve the soil," Mark was saying as they got out of the
van, wearing light hooded jackets and heavy boots.
Kelly went over to the shed and pulled open the big door.
"Machines in here. Tractors ... I wish I knew all the names."
Jackie followed her in, clanged around, and came back out.
"Most of the farm machinery is out. The storage bins are empty... Mark,
what is it?"
Mark had been standing in the rain staring off into the distance. He
turned around.
"Nothing. Smelling the air. Getting a feeling for the place," he said.
"That should be the bot den," pointing at the squat concrete building.
They entered by a wide gate which had doors flung open. Lights came on.
It was a large cavern with showers and water hoses for cleaning equipment and
bots, farm robots. Side rooms held supplies. Mark headed purposefully for a
heavy door on the back wall. The room behind it proved to be dry and heated.
"Weather can get pretty corrosive, even on the bots," Mark explained. "And
contacts." He pointed out a series of outlets in the wall. "The bots come
here to report the day's events, and to get their assignments in the morning
as soon as it's light enough to work. The bigger contacts are for power.
Recharging."
"I was told the farm overseer talked to the robots over radio," Kelly put
in. Jackie was rattling at a door with a rusted padlock on it.
"Sure, a bit," she said. "But the bots can remember a lot, especially
botanical details. The data rate's too low. Same reason we'll be putting up
a satellite dish. The van radio won't let us talk to the rest of the world as
much as we want." The door wasn't giving.
"Mark, can you get this open? Otherwise I have to go back for a hacksaw."
Mark put his shoulder against it and pushed. The bar bent and came out of
the frame. The door swung in.
"Cheap metal," he said.
No light came on here and there was a musty smell. When their eyes
adjusted to the dark they saw several large cables passing through the room.
One was connected to a large box on a bench, which was connected in turn to an
old fashioned terminal. There was even a chair lying on its side.
"Hey, this looks like it used to be a control room for real live people,"
Mark breathed. "Totally antiquated, twenties stuff."
"Cool it. Some of us are old enough to remember the twenties," Jackie
said. She righted the chair and sat down in front of the terminal, raising a
clowd of dust.
Mark found an outside door and opened it. The last of the daylight
filtered in.
"What I wonder is where all the bots are. They should be coming home," he
said.
Kelly peered out, wondering if she would see the earth-toned hominids
ambling towards her through the weeds growing over the foundations of
long-gone buildings.
"They are home." Jackie stood up alarmingly. "According to this overseer,
its storage bins are full of radishes, its fields are all plowed, and all
twenty-four bots have been patiently sitting in the room we just came through,
for the past hour."
They set off to look for the missing bots with flashlights. The drizzle
had stopped. An invisible moon gave the cloud cover a uniform glow, enough to
navigate by.
Kelly pushed through the underbrush of a windbreak, and came out on the
other side. A bot was right in front of her ten paces off. It cocked its
head slightly and watched her.
"Jackie, I have found one," she called out. In the flashlight beam it was
brown, with black disks for eyes in an otherwise featureless face. Jackie
came up beside Kelly.
"Stop. Test. Test," she said. The bot emitted a low hum. "That's about
all they say." She pulled out a complicated-looking probe and walked over,
reaching for an access port on the bot's torso. A third beam of light fell on
the brown figure. They heard Mark's footsteps.
The bot casually brought up its right arm and knocked Jackie's hand out of
the way. She reached out again, and barely dodged a large swipe of the bot's
arm - but tripped backwards in the grass. Kelly caught her, staggering in
surprise at Jackie's weight. Muscle and bone. Kelly felt strangely excited.
In spite of the jokes, Jackie couldn't be much over thirty-five.
"They're not supposed to do that. Anything like that. Ever." Jackie was
breathing hard, and there was some fear in her eyes. Kelly wondered how she
was supposed to feel.
The bot didn't do anything futher aggressive, and just stood there. Mark
had run up and was now standing next to them.
"Let's stay away from that one," he said. "Come on, I found a disabled
one. It's probably safer."
Mark's bot was lying on its side at the foot of a grassy incline. It
looked considerably less than human with several large panels removed. Mark's
finger picked out details.
"See, here, the oil well's dry. I'll bet the joints are ruined. Hydraulic
fluid's low. The battery's drained. There's a lot of physical trauma,
especially to the computer casing. I've never seen a bot so mistreated.
Usually the mechanical parts wear out after five or so years. This one's
brand new." He straightened up. "It almost looks like this bot TRIED to kill
itself. And another thing I don't understand is why the operational one over
there didn't bring this one in. They're supposed to take care of each other."
"This one was probably ordered to commit suicide," Jackie put in. "I am
sure that this was done through the overseer itself. I doubt we'll find many
working ones."
Mark hoisted the casualty across his shoulders.
They drove the van around to the outside door of the little control room and
carried in a bright light and set up their troubleshooting gear. Jackie
quickly broke the system. It had been set up to deliberately destroy the
bots, and to deny that anything was wrong.
"There're four bots left. They're not hostile anymore," Jackie stated.
She yawned.
"Someone must have done that," Kelly said. "I'm worried. Can we use the
bots that are left as guards?"
"Go right ahead. I'm going to bed."
Kelly got Mark to show her how to get a low-resolution picture (of shadowed
darkness) through the bots' eyes, how to set an alarm on their motion
detectors, and how to tell them to move around. For the rest of the night
Kelly kept an avid watch on the nocturnal wildlife.
She also watched the two sleeping figures on the floor. She couldn't
decide what to think of them. Some great conflict seemed to be brewing inside
her.
The next morning before breakfast Jackie dragged them along to a small lake
half a mile away.
"I found this place last night," she said, taking off her sweatshirt.
"But it's cold," Kelly said.
"So we get to prove we're Minnesotans."
"I didn't bring a swimming suit," Kelly continued. Mark and Jackie
splashed in, both inarguably lacking swimming suits, and loudly proclaimed the
water cold. Kelly shrugged and bowed to fate. She had to admit, it was ...
invigorating.
When they got back, Jackie immersed herself in the global communications
network while Mark drove off to gather up the disabled bots, which the
overseer was now able to locate. Kelly disappeared on some project of her
own.
"Username Ari in Australia," Jackie announced when Mark returned. "Means
'demon' in Icelandic, incidentally. Whoever did this came from there via
Kamchatka, France, Argentina, and Estonia. Only thing is, the trail was
obvious."
"Um," Mark said.
"I think it's a front doorbell. Here goes."
Several minutes passed before the other end was picked up. A line of text
spilled along the bottom of the screen.
"Old union handshake," Jackie said. "Let's see if I can remember how to do
this." After several apparently meaningless exchanges the screen cleared to
show a bearded man with soft brown eyes and a red face.
"Ah. Jackie Allan," he said. "I've heard of you. You went to the
Institute of Wisconsin-Madison? Involved in the Chernobyl cleanup of '27,
right? I'm Brent Alberts. Institute of Toronto." He looked at Mark. "Who's
our third party?"
"That's Mark Eckert. I know him, he's ok," Jackie said.
There was a pause.
"You're not in Australia," Mark said impulsively. There was full sunlight
behind the man's head.
"Not exactly," Brent laughed. "I'm in a safe jurisdiction. Not that Jackie
there couldn't find me if she really wanted to."
Jackie nodded at the compliment. Then she got down to business.
"I'm fixing a Canadian farm you set on self-destruct. Why?"
"Maybe you heard about Excon's plan to raze a good part of the remaining
Indonesian rainforest so they can build golf courses and luxury apartments for
several thousand of their executives." Brent didn't waste words either.
"I read in the news. I assumed somebody was going to stop them."
"Me and some other people decided to do it. Only they've gotten smart
since the Greenland affair. Hired sharp people as collaborators. They have
actual human beings with guns on the site. Several of us got physically
arrested and imprisoned under some barbaric Indonesian law."
"THAT I didn't read in the news." Jackie looked disturbed.
"So we decided on war. Excon has operations in automated farming,
automated mining, automated manufacturing, and automated transport, all of
them more vulnerable than the Indonesian construction site. This was a test.
Tomorrow, it all goes. I think Excon will back down, but it'll be hell in a
handbasket."
"I don't like the waste," Mark said slowly. "It hurts me to see bots
ruined."
"Neither do I. If we had something like an executive password, we could
get at the bulldozers directly. Failing that, the feeling is that bots are
more replacable than untouched ecosystems and endangered species. Also, that
making an example of Excon will make Consolidated and the others listen to us
the next time they try to pull something like the Orinoco salinization
scandal. Jackie?"
"Sorry. They gave me barely enough information to find the farm. We do
have an executive, though ..."
...who at that moment burst into the room. At a keystroke, a lengthy quote
from 'Njal's Saga.' covered up Brent's image.
"I saw some large shapes last night," Kelly said when she had ascertained
that no one else was talking. "There aren't any footprints out there today,
but I found some two-toed tracks, deer or something."
Jackie tried to think of a good way to put it to her and couldn't.
"Kelly, your company's doing something really idiotic in Indonesia. We
need your password to stop it," she stated.
Mark almost groaned.
Kelly's eyes widened. She looked back and forth between their faces,
trying to decipher the expressions. She flushed.
"I think it is very nice that the company is able to provide beautiful
houses for its administrators. Just because ... how dare you, you techie
anarchist scum!" She turned and ran.
Jackie grimaced and turned Brent back on.
"I assume you heard that."
"What a diplomat you are," he said drily. Mark grumbled something similar.
"You go talk to her, then," Jackie said. "I'll go tell Excon I fixed their
overseer, please send twenty new bots."
Kelly ran on past the lake and sat down, tears on her face, under a huge
tree not far from one of the bots standing in the tall grass. The sky had
cleared. The sun was out, and the air had the rich smell of evaporating rain.
For several minutes she tried to figure out why she was crying, and what she
would report to her superiors.
"What's the matter?" a calm baritone voice asked out of nowhere.
"Who's there?" Kelly looking around.
"Just me." The bot in the tall grass turned to face her. She froze in
terror. It walked toward her casually, almost as if it were using body
language to convey ease and confidence to her. Usually, robots walked
purposefully.
"You are upset. Why?" The same voice, imperturbably calm.
She tried to talk, swallowed, found her voice.
"I'm ... confused. How should I know about Indonesia, what to do? The
techies, I mean the two people I came with, I can't trust them."
"Whom can you trust?"
She thought of her superiors. Suddenly she couldn't remember why she had
ever trusted them. Trust was poised in her throat like a boulder on the edge.
"I ... do trust them," she said, surprised at the words even as they came
out of her mouth. "Jackie and Mark. If someone could just explain to me
..."
"They asked for your password so that I would be able to stop the
Indonesian project directly. Species diversity is essential to the earth's
ecology and is a part of human survival. If I can't stop it directly, I will
kill tens of thousands of bots the way I killed the bots here, to stop it.
That would be a great waste."
Kelly bit her lip and studied the horizon. Then she leaned over and
whispered the word at the formless head which was bent to receive it.
"Thank you," it said.
Kelly stood up slowly and took a few steps. She wondered if she should say
goodbye. Instead she said,
"Are you human? Or can they make intelligent robots now?"
"They can." The bot rose. "But they haven't. I am a human being named
Brent Alberts, talking with you by means of a reprogrammed farm robot."
Kelly felt tricked, but she also felt like laughing.
"Why haven't they, then?"
The bot paused for a second.
"An intelligent robot would be a citizen. What kind of life could we offer
this person? Joints that wear out in five years? Poor eyesight, no sense of
smell or touch, accidental death by power failure?" He shrugged. "With power
comes responsibility. We must refrain from doing many things that we are
capable of doing."
`That made sense,' Kelly thought.
"Bye," she said.
The bot waved in a way that she decided was very suave.
______________________________________________________________________________
This story was originally written for the Minnesota Technolog's SF Writting
Contest and published in the April 1991 issue. (It won first place)
John is a double-major in Math and Secondary Education who wants to
become a math teacher. Michael graduated from The College of Liberal
Arts with a Physics degree and is now working on his Ph.D. at CERN,
Switzerland. The two hope to go on to greater literary fame, but,
according to John, are hampered by the fact that they can no longer
spend long nights hashing out story ideas while getting wired on
caffeine and silly from sleep depravation.
johna@ux.acs.umn.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Cold Winds Of Heaven
by Rupert Goodwins
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
To the tower, then. It's time. I can remember everything about that day, even
those words. It was a beautiful evening, and the three of us had spent the
afternoon talking and quarreling, drowsing in the warm summer of the Greenland
veldt. Even then, we felt the cool shadow of our friend, the fourth of us, who
sat, mute and alone, beneath a tree. Always with us, as we have always been
together; but now he was his own statue, a supple monument to remind the three
that remained. We had been together for five years before he became thus, an
artist whose passion for infinite madness was so soon rewarded.
I walked over to the tree, and bent over to hold his hand. He blinked, and
I crouched down beside him, putting my head next to his, aligning, looking
where he looked. Then we stood up, silently, slowly, his hand holding tight as
he caught sight through my eyes. I matched him pace for steady pace, holding
my head as he held his. The tower was a kilometer distant, towards the sea's
edge, and we looked at the delicate black-web bowl that pointed at the sky,
ready for the night.
As we walked towards it, watching our friends running ahead, getting to the
tower while we were still ten minutes away, I wondered what he really saw,
whether he was still wandering the chaotic caverns of the old machines. If he
wasn't, did he see us as friends still, who kept him close and part of the old
team, took him with us wherever, played and talked to him?
Sometimes, I thought he must hate us for so constantly taunting him, now
and again making him hear our shouts and chatter and laughter like today,
reminding him what he has lost. And then for me to hold hands like this,
linking our illicit links, and looking for him. What it must be to see the
world so fitfully, and always through someone else's eyes, a spectator alone.
I cannot look at him when we are so linked. I could not, as I could never let
myself kiss him.
We got to the tower, and as we climbed the first step he let go my hand and
walked inside quickly, without hesitation. He knew his way around; we might
have built it together but it was always his observatory. He'd all but lived
here, amongst the old machines, and one day he'd all but died. I stood there
alone, looking at the grey wood walls of the tower against the deep blue
evening sky, against the darkening grass and trees, remembering things perhaps
I ought not.
Then I went in, and climbed to the observing room. The other two were
already busy, lost in the joy of working the machines, letting them talk to
each other and out towards the old satellites that still drew their dutiful
paths in the sky above. Tonight was special; across the globe fully half the
world was listening to our broadcast, ten million souls linked by the distant
sea of the ionosphere above us. Ancestor radio; so long ago the only link
between the distances, now the one gift of the machines we cannot give back.
Tonight, it reclaims a little more of its old glory and we justify a little
more of the faith we had in ourselves a millennium ago.
None of us understood those days, for all we talked about them; we couldn't
see our mistakes when they were five years from killing us but sent our
devices a thousand years into the future. What were we trying to do?
When they sent that starprobe away from Earth, the books say, it was one of
the terrible times. There was furious argument about such a wasteful action,
when even they could feel their great shining world shaking itself apart. Yet,
in the dark and lonely centuries that followed, the mission survived. Even
when the last man walked away, he made sure the computers still ran and the
starprobe kept its course.
Then we came along, the four of us, young and bored and full of devilish
intrigue. The machinery had not been forgotten, but it was left alone. At
first, nobody minded as we tinkered and built, but then we found the links.
Those were as forbidden as fire, the old laws ignored purely because nobody
thought any remained. Some did; we found them, and the machine that built them
into us. One morning we took it in turns to lay down in the coffin and emerge,
half an hour later, with wire in our veins and new cold life in our heads.
Oh, it was tremendous. The smooth machines woke under our hands, the black
slabs that we'd never understood. We understand them now and the things that
live within them; brilliant minds, playful, pleading, offering all the
knowledge and beauty of the old days, so compelling and satisfying and so
dangerous. That these things were toys, pastimes, given to children, is
unbelievable; perhaps if we could understand that, we would know so much more.
Perhaps that's what he knows, perhaps that's what he found and couldn't let
go. He'd not left the machines alone, particularly when he found the music.
We'd always thought he'd be a good composer, but, with the machines, he went
far beyond; he used them to amplify his designs and produce music that had us
in awe. It frightened us, but he seemed so confident, so positive, so
blissfully enthralled.
Then we came into the observatory, ten days after we'd got the links, to
find him, apparently asleep, holding on to one of the smooth machines. We woke
him up: his eyes opened and he seemed about to say something. Nothing
happened. The machines couldn't help; they said he was blind and deaf, but
about his mind they said they didn't know. Of course, the families were
horrified; we had our links removed and took such punishment as they gave us,
but mostly they left us alone.
Since then, we've stayed here. Ten years. The others didn't replace their
links, but I did and he did, and, with a careful, patient learning, I fixed it
so that, now and again, he could hear, and, once in a while, I could let him
see. I didn't care to use the links other than that, twice since then he's
placed his hands on the mission controls and sat, silent as always, feeling
the links out into space.
It didn't take long after the accident for the story to spread; our
occasional shortwave transmissions, politely reporting the progress of the
starprobe as it neared its destination, became more and more popular. First,
it was just youngsters, probably because we were perverse heroes due to the
terrible things we'd done, but in a quiet world not used to novelty we
provided a certain fascination. Lately, we'd started giving talks about the
mission and its history as well as charting its course, and, once or twice,
we'd even had a visitor.
Now we were alone; tonight, a hundred years ago, the starprobe could have
tugged itself into orbit around a far planet, unfurled its banners and started
to pass back what it found to the ghosts of its makers. It might not; it might
not have survived the long dark years. We wouldn't know until tonight, us and
half the world.
Out in space, the relay satellites waited, holding their positions in the
tracery of electrons like fat spiders waiting in a shining web, binding the
Great Net. I know that whatever that is, it works like our black dish on the
tower, but stretches across millions of kilometers of emptiness, sifting the
ceaseless storm of star-born radio. Somewhere in that is the thin whisper
from the starprobe, a hundred light years away, and somehow it's caught and
held and passed back to us mundane humans. A gift.
We sat in the dark observatory, watching the screens. We took it in turns
to give the commentary; he sat in his old chair, hands once again on the
smooth machine as if the last ten years were just a daydream. We didn't
mention him on air; we never had.
The time came, and for a second, two, there was nothing. Then, the screens
lit, and our starprobe slowly awoke. We'd stopped reminding the audience that
this had all happened a century ago; for us, for everyone, it was happening
now.
It was a white planet. Cold and huge, bigger than Earth but still a rock,
glazed with gas. We saw great drifts of brilliant cloud lit by its distant
sun, smooth yet streaked with golden lines. It was placid, so far away from
the warmth of the star that only a few huge whorls marked its weather.
The starprobe swung around, crossing into night. It was still practicing
its ancient senses, and the cameras faded and brightened as it struggled to
focus on the planet below. As it passed the terminator, the weatherlines mixed
and curdled; something was happening there, but we had to wait hours before we
could see it again. All the time we described what we saw, what the other
readings were, and made wild guesses.
Then it came again, and this time the machinery was ready. A thousand
pictures taken in a hundred different ways, at every wavelength and every
depth. As the probe went into daylight, we began to understand. It was snow,
boiling up from vast fields as the starlight warmed it and cooling out as it
fell into night. An eternal blizzard: the first snowstorm on Earth in seven
centuries.
The starprobe, so long ago, felt with other senses. What snow it was, cold
chemicals that held the hint that once, an age ago, there had been life on the
planet. It was no more than a hint; of something that had passed long before
our rich and lively solar system had itself cooled like a snowflake out of the
void.
Four times the starprobe let go tiny passengers, probes that drifted slowly
down into the bleak sky below, tunnelling and tasting as they fell through the
layers of cloud. We caught our first flake; big as a peacock's tail and
lighter than a sparrow's feather. It was a beautiful thing, complex and
fragile; it melted as the cameras tracked up and down. On top were crystal
facets, clear layers that might almost have been water ice, reflecting the
light from the probe; they were set in a mass of sparkling needles that oozed
and combined as we watched. Beneath were regular patterns, faint colours, but
they too vanished before we could see them properly.
As the probes descended, they caught marvelous sights; linked spirals of a
thousand big flakes breaking up, recombining. One shattered into a flurry of
tiny, glinting particles which scattered like fragments of a glass as it hits
the floor; it was far away, and that was all we saw.
It was already thirty-six hours since we started, and I was wondering how
much longer we could go on for. On the screens, the vast structure of the
snowstorms was charted, as varied as a slice through a billion years of rock
but dynamic, shifting, a most precise and random dance.
"Listen!"
We looked at each other, then at where he sat. He was motionless, hands
still on the machine, but there was no doubt that he'd spoken. I ran over, and
shook his shoulder; nothing. Then, from the speakers set into the roof, came a
blast of noise, not pure like a waterfall, not distinct like birdsong, but as
loud and insistent as both.
"Listen," he said again. "They're talking. Radio."
He shuddered, and smiled. We looked at the screens; he was listening to the
broad spectrum radio on the starprobe. We'd ignored it. The pictures were so
beautiful, and the maps we drew so interesting, that we hadn't even known it
was there.
"I can tune this," he said, "It's all in layers"
The noise shifted; now a pattern of crashes, like slow waves on a beach
heard from a distance, now a swiftly rising arpeggio that slipped in and out
of time with the waves and was repeated and varied in a mass of variations,
faint, loud, slower, faster, always with purpose.
"They're talking... about stars... they're watching them..."
I tried to pull one of his hands away, worried. He stiffened, and held on
with an animal strength. I looked at the others, and stood back. Nobody was
talking on the radio; across the world the sounds of that ancient planet were
playing.
"It's beautiful! I know what they're looking at..." He turned and looked at
me; I knew he couldn't see the room, but I nearly screamed with shock; his
face, so long slack and lifeless, was transformed, his eyes alight with an
almost heavenly glee.
"Lover-- listen to me" he said. "I'm nearly at the edge. I'm not going to
break the link. They watch the stars too. They know so much. They know about
the starprobe. They thought they were alone and now they're... oh, listen!"
The noise grew clearer. I recognized a spark of music, an echo of his
glorious days, but it went beyond that. It was a symphony, perfect, that grew
and flowered as unerringly as a rose. We stood there and listened, hardly
breathing, caught in the theme, so much his style but carrying a message;
vast, majestic, alive.
Beneath the starprobe, the snowflakes formed and were aware. They caught
the light of the stars, and passed the news of each tiny snatch of distant
light amongst themselves. A compound eye across quarter of the planet, formed
in near-darkness, away from the blinding burn of the sun. They drifted down,
changed, reformed, carrying the information, analyzing, perceiving. Each
snowflake died in hours, yet the snowstorm lived and thought for ever,
watching the universe.
The music changed. It was not for ever. It knew how random it was, and how
it would perish when the sun got a little brighter or a little colder. It
could see such things, it knew so well how a star grew old when its one sure
sense was an eye of such power. It thought, for so long, that it was alone.
The music changed. The starprobe had arrived. Whoever sent you, the
snowstorm said, if you are still alive, you have a companion now. Please talk
to me before I end. We must. If you understand me, come.
We understood through the music, a performance of virtuoso improvisation
that left no room for doubt, that convinced utterly.
Come.
Then, he gasped aloud. The music vanished, for a moment the cacophony
returned, then a thunderclap of pure, raw, unfeeling noise. We should have
been watching the screens, but the music took us over so completely that we
hadn't been aware of anything else. A hundred years away, the starprobe
crossed the terminator into light, and the edge of the snowstorm was caught in
a burning line of chaos. The scream of the tearing apart was carried into the
observatory, into the machines, into the link.
He was dead.
We cannot know, now, whether what he told us was true. It's unthinkable to
anyone who heard the music that he couldn't have believed it, but whether he
was right nobody can say. The starprobe is still there; we have all the data
we want but none of the insight. What he did, what he thought, is lost.
But we're coming. Perhaps we needed to rest and brood on our mistakes,
perhaps we're wrong now to start again on a road that is so dangerous. I
think we know enough, just about, to watch ourselves. This time. Some of us
are working on the links, trying to find out what part of his music was
genius, what part repeatable. Some of us are reaching out, prodding at those
long hundred years between us and the planet; there are ways, we think, to
make those years a blink of an eye, ways that the old people would never have
thought of.
And now we understand what we must do again. We're coming.
______________________________________________________________________________
Rupert Goodwins is a computer programmer and journalist manque who lives and
works in East London. He shares a small house with a large collection of
paperbacks, old radios and more odd junk than can possibly be healthy for a
young lad. Somewhere amid the 1950s' military surplus Geiger counters lurk a
wife, a sister and a small child called Richard, although sightings have been
sporadic.
Writing SF has stopped seeming like a good idea and threatens to become an
obsession. Nothing published yet, apart from a couple of novellas for the
Weird Dreams and Wreckers computer games. Currently working on a theory of
reverse karmachronism, which he hopes will allow him to be reincarnated as
Philip K. Dick the next time 1928 comes around.
rupertg@cix.compulink.co.uk
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Teaching a Unicorn to Dance
by Conrad Wong
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
A shiver ran up Ariaou's back as she stepped into the star-lit stateroom. The
task force commander of the Meetpoint system patrol and the captain of this
ship, the `Rhadon's Promise' waited within, sitting on the other side of the
dimly illuminated table; a steward brought in silver-domed platters and
crystal glasses. He watched her calmly, his eyes the dark color of tree bark,
his fur reddish-brown. A dire wolf.
The commander misinterpreted her hesitation and waved a paw to the seat at
the other end of the table. "Please, be seated. You are quite safe as my
guest here-- honor demands it."
The black-maned, calico-furred feline bard unslung her ancient shimmerlyre
and set it down on the floor next to the table, then sat apprehensively, her
tail swishing nervously. She wore her heavily jeweled ankle-length dress with
a clumsiness that betrayed her inexperience with such fashions, turquoise
squares alternating with emerald ones that matched her glittering green-gold
eyes. Memories flitted uneasily within her mind.
A deep green forest, darkened by twilight. Two small kittens cried out to
the screeching carrion birds overhead as a yellow-eyed predator approached.
A cloaked figure spoke to Ariaou, warning her that she would shortly
receive bad news. The next day, a vidphone call told her that her brother had
been murdered at King Ascenion's coronation.
An old grey-furred dire wolf faced down a golden unicorn, suited in
swirling light that erupted in bolts of energy. He died, gunned down by a
centaur behind him.
Ariaou blinked to see the steward filling her glass with a dark red wine of
subtle aroma. The commander raised his glass in a silent toast, so she did
the same to avoid looking distracted, barely noticing its rich and complex
taste as she watched to see if the wolf noticed her discomfort.
The steward lifted the dome from the appetizer, skewered slivers of meat
cooked in Ryme spices. Ariaou took one, watched the viewport as the distant
winged form of the starliner `Princess's Favor' receded into a pinpoint of
light and blazed into a thin line of fire as it accelerated away under main
drive.
There was an uneasy pause after the meat was finished before the commander
spoke. "Permit me to introduce myself properly. I am Prince Rhadon
Mordenkainen of Hellsgate, the Task Force Commander of the Second Hellsgate
Fleet, which is currently assigned to Meetpoint patrol."
"Ariaou, a bard from Meetpoint," she replied. Curiosity overpowered her
natural caution. "If I might ask, why did you request my transfer from the
`Princess's Favor'? I'm sure it couldn't solely be for the pleasure of my
company at dinner."
Rhadon smiled, an eerie sight on a dire wolf. The steward removed the
empty appetizer plate, substituted the first entree, an entire Elysian
razor-tooth fish broiled and marinaded in redfruit juices, accompanied by a
bottle of white wine. After the steward retreated to the kitchen, he said,
voice quietly serious, "You and several people were the last to see my older
brother. Have you any news of what's befallen him?"
Ariaou hesitated, wondering to herself about Rhadon's intent, then related
the story of Gavar Mordenkainen, known better to her as Tarnkappe, and his
attempt to wreak revenge upon her and the unicorn. She left out Sundancer's
horn and certain other details, cautiously trying not to reveal more than
necessary.
The commander's face remained expressionless, his sleek reddish-brown fur
turned dark by the dim light of the stateroom. He nodded, finally. "Thank
you. So he has found a kind of peace."
She asked, warily, fearing to tread upon some hidden taboo, "Is it true
what he said, that a genetic disease haunts your line?"
The prince chuckled humorlessly. "The Curse of Lord Moreah. A sword
hanging over each male descendant's head, which I have as yet been lucky
enough not to feel. In the eyes of my people, Zephyr could not have killed my
brother, for he was dead to them when his madness came, and even before that,
his cruelty did not endear him to them. His exile was merely a public safety
measure."
Ariaou nibbled on a piece of the fish as Prince Rhadon continued. "It is
for this reason that I named my ship `Rhadon's Promise'. Because of the
curse, I expect to die much sooner than most of my people, but I also have
greater power and responsibilities. I have sworn to overcome my limits and
make Hellsgate a power to respect in this galaxy, to serve my people to the
best of my abilities."
The steward replaced the fish with the second entree, a traditional dish of
Hellsgate: delicately crusty circles of bread filled with spiced and minced
jaghorse meat. Though it smelled mouthwatering, Ariaou noted that the food
failed to receive more than minimum attention from Rhadon.
"There's little at Meetpoint to hold my interest," the commander said, a
faraway look in his dark eyes. "In truth, it's little more than an unneeded
vacation, a political assignment of little strategic importance. But honor
requires that I perform my duties, so Hellsgate shall be known as a world
which keeps its obligations."
"Meetpoint Station's the political, cultural, and intellectual center of
the galaxy," Ariaou replied noncommittally. "It's important that it be
protected by a joint force, so that no single government will control it."
"True. There are certain possibilities. Yet while we patrol, who would
attack?" The prince beckoned to the steward, who replaced the still half-full
platter with a steaming bowl of trideer venison broth and a small plate of
crusty finger-wide loaves which he dipped in the soup. "And I fear that while
time passes slowly on patrol, the madness may overcome me slowly, first
paranoia, then a thirst for battle in any form that might present itself,
finally unthinking bloodlust. Each minute that passes is a minute closer to
death."
As he spoke, armored shutters moved quietly to close the viewport. A small
beeping noise came from Rhadon's belt communicator. He answered it, listened
to the voice coming from the other end. "We'll be entering jump in sixteen
minutes, Ariaou. At that time, you'll be transferred to a shuttle to
Meetpoint. Matters have come up that require my attention."
Time passed slowly while the stewards removed the dishes for safety.
Ariaou took up her shimmerlyre and played an ancient aire to fill the time,
its sweet strains calming her nerves and apparently soothing Rhadon's as well.
The immortally perfect strings of the shimmerlyre called forth visions of
moonlight upon the water, quiet forests about a lake.
Rhadon listened quietly. Though his body failed to express emotions, his
liquid dark eyes shone with hidden sorrows and memories. As Ariaou's music
drew to an end, he stood quietly and took her hand, then kissed it. "My
thanks. Your voice is lovely. Would that I could sing so well for you in
turn."
A strange sense of unreality swept the room, causing her vision to warp
slightly; then, in a moment of sudden shifting, it ended. When it passed,
Ariaou stood up and bade farewell to Rhadon.
"Until we meet again under better auspices, fare thee well," he replied.
The steward escorted her to the waiting shuttle, which lifted slowly from
the starship and made its way to the inner edge of the Oort cloud where
Meetpoint Station orbited silently. `Rhadon's Promise' shrank into a point of
light that blazed away as it entered warpspace.
Meetpoint Station approached steadily. Unlike the asteroid that was Ryme's
`Quiet Reason', Meetpoint was built entirely of metal, a hundred spheres
stacked one within another, each level a separate environment of its own. As
the station grew nearer, Ariaou saw domes of various sizes dotting its
surface, the exposed halves of auditoriums, stadiums, and concert halls.
Ariaou felt rather than saw the shuttle attach itself to one of the many
docking ports. She disembarked, stepping into the crowded customs area of
Meetpoint Starport F, then saw a familiar vulpine face waiting.
"Professor Karikhen!" she called, waving.
"Ariaou!" the red fox exclaimed, walking over to her. It seemed to the
feline bard that the teacher walked with a slower gait, even for his age.
Beneath short cocky ears, his green eyes shone as brightly as ever, taking
note of the shimmerlyre that nestled between her shoulderblades, and the
silvery case that protruded from her pouch. "Well met again! I trust you
found what you were looking for?"
"Yes! It's a long story, but we've time," she replied, hugging him
cordially, then picking up her bags from the collection area. They walked out
of the starport section.
Karikhen chuckled and led her down a blue-green striped corridor to his
skimmer, directing its autopilot to take them to the Amaranth Memorial Library
of Ancient Lore. "I started some research when you sent me your letter," he
explained. "But we'll need to use the older hardcopies in the archives."
The skimmer merged into Meetpoint internal traffic, passing two cargo
maglev barges ferrying plastic crates to shipping. Shielded from the outside
wind and noise within the streamlined vehicle, Ariaou related the full story
to Karikhen, leaving out no details, and showed him the horn of the fallen
Sundancer resting within its silvery carrying case.
The aged teacher removed a small laser-sighted loup from his many-pocketed
vest and examined the horn. "A fascinating specimen, my dear feline. Am I
correct in that you seek to know what virtues and secrets it might possess?"
"More than that. With Sundancer gone, there's one less guardian in the
galaxy. I feel as if I've inherited a mantle of responsibility." Ariaou
looked out the windows of the skimmer, watched the enclosed parks whirl by the
clear plastic-walled corridor. "Why was I chosen? What must I do, and how
should I do it?"
Karikhen nodded, more to himself than to the bard. "Not very many people
recognize that with power must come responsibility. Unleashed power quickly
rages out of control and burns its user, and the innocents about him."
The aged fox looked up as the skimmer coasted to a stop. "Perplexing.
We've arrived at the Meetpoint Council building rather than the library."
Two uniformed guards arrived to escort them inside the cluster of domes
that formed the center of government for the Meetpoint Station. They
exchanged words with the professor, then opened the doors and led them up the
stairs to the entrance. When Ariaou saw the professor walking calmly, she
relaxed and followed with tail swaying anxiously. "Do you know why we've been
taken here?"
"Very likely some sort of crisis," Karikhen replied, looking thoughtful and
worried. His ears flickered. "It's not uncommon that when a situation arises
that must be dealt with quickly and efficiently, they call upon a few people
and settle as much as they can discretely before bringing it up with the
public."
"It seems rather underhanded to me," Ariaou said, tail lashing.
"Yes, it is. But sometimes it's necessary. And though often it can be
beneficial, there'll always be those who oppose it."
The guards saluted and took up positions at the side of the door as they
entered a large hemisphere. Circles of chairs lined the gently sloping floor,
only the lowest filled with Meetpoint officials; a raised dais sat in the
middle of the room with a speaker's podium on top. Large viewscreens hanging
from the ceiling flashed starmaps crossed with dotted lines indicating the
known starships' plotted paths.
"Welcome, Professor Karikhen, Ariaou. I am Zaharis, the current Meetpoint
External Coordinator." the speaker said from the podium. He was a jade-green
reptile standing upright, four thin spidery legs providing balance. His
skeletal arms played deftly over the keyboard buried in the podium, causing
lines of text and graphics to scroll over the viewscreens. "I am sorry that
we had to call you in so quickly, but as you'll see here, the situation
demands a fast response."
Each screen flickered, then shifted to a grainy deep-space view of many
long, thin cylinders bound into a single unit. "Our farthest patrol units
discovered an ancient generation ship bound in-system at the far edge of the
Oort cloud. A human ship."
He continued over the gasps of those assembled, "Though its technology
appears to be far below that which human civilization achieved at the time of
Ragnarok, it still exceeds our own capabilities in many areas. Curiously, it
does not seem to possess warpspace travel."
"Despite the passage of many milleniae since Ragnarok and the colonizing of
our worlds, anti-human sentiment runs strong virtually everywhere, and for
good reasons. No one wishes to see an age return in which humans dominated
all other species-- and that is precisely what we may be seeing if these
humans succeed in colonizing a world." The viewscreen returned to plotting
the generation ship's predicted path through the Meetpoint system, a line that
ended in an orbit around the fourth planet.
"Professor Karikhen, your judgement has proven sound on previous matters,"
Zaharis said. "Who would you appoint as our representative to the human
starship?"
"Ariaou," he said without hesitating.
The feline bard squeaked in shock and turned to look at him. "I've not the
experience," she objected.
"I taught you. You will make a fine representative."
Zaharis raised a delicate second lid in a gesture much like a raised
eyebrow. "We may find that tested sooner than we thought. We sent them a
radio signal several hours ago from the intercepting ship explaining our
faster-than-light communication protocol. They're hailing us now. Ariaou,
your decision?"
Ariaou struggled to collect her wits, then stepped up to the podium next to
Zaharis; Karikhen followed. The central viewscreen facing them flickered with
a communication analysis report and the playback of the transmitted message.
Mechanical distortion rendered the message tinny, the effects of slight
incompatibilities in the equipment being used.
"This is the generation ship `Starfollower', crewed by six hundred people
and carrying five hundred thousand passengers. We come in peace. We seek
only a home for our people. We wish to speak with the denizens of this star
system and begin negotiations. Repeat..."
"Open communications," Ariaou decided.
Almost immediately, the screen switched to the picture of a silver-haired
elderly woman with bright brown eyes, her features pure-bred Japanese. She
wore a dark blue ship's uniform with a world-and-starship emblem on her right
shoulder and Captain's rank insignia on her sleeves. Her manner was crisp,
sharp, and her look calm and analytical. "Greetings to you, Meetpoint
Station! I am Captain Elaine Amaterasu of the EFS `Starfollower'. Have you
the authority to negotiate with us?"
Ariaou kept herself as diplomatic and neutral as possible, concealing
distaste at the sight of Elaine's crewpeople's exposed bare skins. She
brightly replied, "Welcome, `Starfollower'! I am Ariaou, a bard of Meetpoint,
the station's representative. How may we help you?"
Amaterasu's eyes widened as she took in the scene. "You speak a dialect of
our Common Language, yet there's not a true human among your numbers! How can
this be? Are you alien species, part of a human federation?"
Ariaou replied cautiously, "From where and when did `Starfollower' depart?
Much has changed since humans were dominant in the galaxy."
"We departed Noveaumonde, 5305 UDY, some time after our world joined the
Commonwealth." Elaine looked reluctant to go on in further details.
The feline bard explained the story of the Owned People and the colony
ships that escaped Ragnarok, aided by the Compassionate, to settle the Tangled
Web nebula. "Remarkable," Amaterasu exclaimed when she finished. "Alone in
an entire galaxy, so we created our own alien species. And yet our race died
out, thousands of years ago, and only our gene-engineered creations survived
us..."
The feline bard sensed irritation in some of the members of the council at
the implied belittlement of "creations". "What do you seek here," she asked
quickly. "Why have you come to the Meetpoint System?"
"We picked up your station's broadcasts as artificial signals, and homed in
on them, hoping to obtain repairs and resupplying. Thousand-year voyages can
be exhausting, you know." Elaine smiled wryly.
Ariaou remained suspicious. "And what will you do then?"
"We'll continue searching for an inhabitable world, far from your own
youthful civilization, and try to start a colony."
It was plausible, reasonable even. But Ariaou suspected hidden motives
behind Captain Elaine Amaterasu's actions. "I'm sure you understand that we
must take certain precautions. `Starfollower', please hold your position, and
we'll send a courier to survey your ship's condition and deliver our
decision."
"Understood. We await your messenger anxiously," Amaterasu replied. "This
is `Starfollower', over and out."
The viewscreen went silently dark, to be supplanted by an excited buzzing
between the members of the council. Karikhen rested a reassuring paw on
Ariaou's left shoulder as Zaharis hissed softly. "Well done. But now we must
send the messenger, and the courier. Whose life shall we risk? What if they
lie?"
"I'll go." Ariaou said quietly. "Call a convocation of all the worlds.
I'll give you my report from on board their ship."
At that moment, the screens blanked and filled with images of Rhadon, but a
Rhadon far different from the wolf Ariaou knew, radiating authority. His eyes
were flat, devoid of the warmth and depth of soul she'd seen a short while
ago.
"I have declared a state of emergency. As empowered by our treaty, the
Hellsgate Second Fleet assumes right of jurisdiction over the intruder. For
your safety, our personnel on Meetpoint will provide police protection."
Simultaneously, black-uniformed, mirror-helmeted soldiers stepped into the
council chamber and held heavy plasma rifles at the ready.
Zaharis hissed, "The Council has appointed its representative, and its
representative has spoken. How can you justify speaking for Meetpoint?"
Behind him, the others present clamored and shouted.
Rhadon spoke, ignoring their protests, "The Council is dissolved for the
duration. Until this emergency is over, I appoint Secretary Duvan Gunnersson
Meetpoint Director pro-tem." Betrayal! Shock ran down Ariaou's spine, causing
her tail to lash angrily.
Pandemonium surged as Rhadon listed other orders that his soldiers would be
enforcing, placing Meetpoint under martial law. As Rhadon's list of
directives ended and the viewscreens went blank, Duvan walked up to the
podium. He was a lightly built otter standing upright, his fur silver with
age, anachronistic wire-rim spectacles dangling over his button nose.
He pressed a button, causing his visage to be spread across not only the
screens in the chamber, but the ones throughout Meetpoint Station. His voice
boomed over the public speakers, surprisingly loud and stentorian for such a
slight person.
"As of three days ago, citizens, the Meetpoint system was invaded by human
renegades. I regret the necessity for harsh action," he spoke. "Yet in this
time of crisis, we must take actions to protect ourselves. Our patrol fleet
is already proceeding to the border of the Oort cloud, where they will
intercept the enemy."
Duvan Gunnersson's gaze turned dark, his spectacles glinting and his
whiskers twitching angrily. "Yet worse, we may have agents within our midst,
who would work to help these aliens. For this reason, I am placing Professor
Karikhen K'ris'fer under house arrest. All his current appointees' authority
are revoked for the time being. Other members of the current government are
being investigated at this moment."
Ariaou gasped at the otter's words. Professor Karikhen merely bowed his
head acquiescingly as the soldiers came to escort him away, his tail limply
dangling. Other council members snarled and growled unhappily, but in the
face of the superior force of Rhadon's troops, they could do nothing.
The remainder of Duvan's directives passed in a blur. Halfway through
Gunnersson's organization of a committee to study power usage, Ariaou walked
out along with most of the remaining council members. Not having Karikhen's
personal skimmer keys, she caught a passing bus and rode it to his home.
Ariaou looked out the windows of the bus to see Meetpoint's society
continuing to operate normally. Yet here and there, crowds of people gathered
around news channels that continued to broadcast reports of Rhadon's and
Duvan's seizure of Meetpoint government by force. They protested angrily
until dispersed by the black-uniformed soldiers and told to return to their
homes.
Hologram street signs flashed by one by one, the bulkheads merging into a
single blurry line. Ariaou watched them flicker as she remembered fondly her
first visit to Karikhen's home. To fill in the time, to bring herself a
measure of cheer, she took her shimmerlyre, drawing curious looks and sounds
of admiration from the other passengers, and began playing a light song,
putting her memories to verse. The notes sang forth, tinkling over each other
in gay melody, each one perfectly formed.
She'd been a young feline, still kittenish in manners, when she was told
she would be taking her journeyship education under the famed Professor
K'ris'fer's supervision. Anxiously, she stepped up to the small, modest
cluster of bubbles that formed his home, stood in front of the round oak door
that formed its entrance, past a row of the Cherry Orchard residential area's
namesakes. Fragrant pink blossoms drifted past her whiskers and nose as she
rapped on the antique door knocker.
The door opened to reveal a mature red fox dressed in a kimono, his tail
fluffy and white-tipped, his ears cocked rakishly. He invited her in, and
before she had time to be nervous, she was holding a cup of mint tea and a
plate of home baked sugar cookies, and telling the story of her life to
Professor Karikhen. They became friends quickly, her bright music and
youthful exuberance lending color to his days and his knowledge and wisdom
guiding her through life.
Three months later, it was to K'ris'fer's house that Ariaou ran, a red and
gold edged envelope clutched in her paws, tears streaming down her whiskers.
The surprised fox held her as she sobbed, then took the envelope from her
unresisting grasp and read the message within. His gaze widened as he read
the official letter. "Killed by terrorists while en route here on the
starliner `Queen's Ransom'? Alas, my poor Ariaou, twelve is far too young to
lose your parents."
"They're gone forever, and they won't ever come back," the young girl
wailed helplessly. Her eyes quivered with the promise of more tears.
Karikhen held her chin up and directed her attention to the two coins he
produced magically, suspended between three of his long fingers. "Watch
this."
Tempted by the promise of seeing something new, Ariaou rubbed her eyes to
dry them, then focused her attention on Karikhen. The coins glittered in the
light coming from an oval stained glass window, the obverse sides Meetpoint's
logo of a compass rose inscribed around an open book, the reverse sides marked
`Ten Marks' in a cursive, flowing script.
With a sweep of his free hand the fox produced a flower-patterned crimson
and gold embroidered scarf, then whisked it past the coins. The young feline
gasped to see the coins were gone.
"Vanished, yes, but not for long," the fox said, his bright green eyes
laughing. "Watch closely.. They're not in my hands. Nor my sleeves. Nor my
feet, or tail." He batted lightly at Ariaou's paws. "Nor my clothes, either,
you impudent young kitten. They're right here, in fact." And with that, he
pulled the mischevious coins out of the startled cat's ears.
Ariaou smiled a bit at that. Professor K'ris'fer dropped the coins into
her paws. "And so it is with your parents. They're not gone, totally, so
long as you remember them. They live on in your mind. Remember the good
times you had with them."
He spent the rest of the evening showing young Ariaou more of his magic
tricks and sleight of hand, evoking some laughs and giggles, and in the
morning, she left ready for the daily life of the academy again. With the
passage of time, the hurt became a dull sadness. Whenever it threatened to
blossom again, she took out the coins to remind herself of his advice.
Ariaou finished on an echoing musical phrase to the applause of the other
passengers. Laughing at their pleas for more, she spun ballads from her
memories of more innocent days of her childhood until the bus slowed to a stop
at the Cherry Orchard stop.
The bard stepped off, looking about to see the familiar neighborhood. Yet
an air of neglect surrounded the residential area, visible in the
weed-overgrown gardens, the vacancies in smaller homes, and the condition of
the streets. Overhead, the sky-blue roof continued to paint the illusion of
spacious room, marred by a few cracks running along its length.
Two black-uniformed and mirror-helmeted guards stood outside Karikhen's
house, rifles shouldered. They halted Ariaou before she could knock on the
door and searched her clothes briskly. The first guard thumbed his
communicator, requesting clearance from headquarters, then nodded to the
second, who released Ariaou. "Visitors are not permitted for more than two
hours at a time," he cautioned.
Karikhen opened the door in response to the first guard's knocking and
guided Ariaou into his parlor. "I'm so sorry that your appointment was
cancelled, my child," Karikhen said apologetically. "I'm sure you would have
acquitted yourself well, had you been given the chance."
Ariaou smiled slightly. "It's you who should feel slighted, Karikhen.
You've been steadfastly trustworthy and loyal for years. But have you heard
any news of what's happened?"
"Indeed. While I may have been confined to my house, I've not been
isolated from the information network. I've asked a few friends to keep me
updated. The latest reports are disturbing." The fox frowned, thoughtfully
looking at the notepad he carried.
Ariaou scanned the lines of type there while Karikhen continued, "In fact,
if the telemetry's correct, not only is Rhadon's fleet moving to intercept
`Starfollower', but he's trying to provoke them into hostile action by buzzing
the ship with his fighters. Rhadon has also declared that if they penetrate
the defense periphery or return fire, he will consider himself free to use
tactical nuclear weapons. Thus far, the generation ship continues to ignore
all this."
"There must be a way I can get there in time..." Ariaou looked frustratedly
at the silver case and the horn that rested within, and at the shimmerlyre
that rested on her shoulder.
Professor K'ris'fer appeared thoughtful. "I did mention I had done some
preliminary studies. Though I don't have access to the complete Meetpoint
libraries or the hardcopies stored in the Amaranth archives, I turned up some
ancient songs considered fictional that might apply. In fact..." With a few
keystrokes, his table computer produced hardcopy sheets of music.
"One of Maria Mask-Dancer's ballads! But I know all her songs, and I've
never seen this one before.."
"That's not surprising, considering it's proscribed to those below the rank
of Master Musicians. A curious classification, since it deals with the fairly
well known Battle of the Starshell Gap of five hundred years ago."
Settling into a comfortably overstuffed chair, Karikhen continued, "In
those days, the nine-world empire of Lyonsfar was a feudal state beginning to
emerge into an interstellar industrial age, its government becoming fragmented
by the factional conflicts of its nobles. Then King Lyonnes VI died without
children, barely three years after his wife was killed by an assassin. A
civil war began. The two princes with the largest armadas crushed their
opponents over a period of twelve years, eventually meeting at Starshell Gap.
There, they unexplicably declared for the young Savinfar, and eventually made
him the first of the Regents."
Ariaou skimmed through the pages, her eyes widening as she read. "If this
account is true, and all of Maria's songs were, then Savinfar was the last
surviving descendant of Lyonnes's line! But how could Maria know that?"
"Shortly after Lyonnes's wife Alira was assassinated, Maria visited and
took on her semblance, so that she could give King Lyonnes comfort. Savinfar
came from their union."
Karikhen raised a hand to stop Ariaou's curious questions. "Yet Maria's
gift was entirely in casting a glamour over her listeners so that she would
seem to be whatever she liked. How could she have made her way from the
homeworld to the lightyears-distant fleets, when all civilian transport had
been interdicted?"
The feline bard returned to the beginning pages, recited softly the verses
she found within. "A griffon, bright red of wings and green of eyes. A
magical winged beast carried her there in but a flicker of an eyelash."
"A Guardian, surely. According to Mask-Dancer, it sang like your
Sundancer, and the magic of its songs caused distances to become like nothing.
Maria tried to capture the sounds in this ballad, but came away with only a
fragile imitation."
"Then the key's lost." Ariaou clenched her paws frustratedly, so close and
yet so far from the music she needed. She yelped suddenly as a clawtip caused
a drop of blood to well out of her palms.
The professor remained silent a while. "There's a chance, if you remember
Sundancer's song of travelling. Perhaps your own musical talent, aided by the
shimmerlyre you carry and by the power of Sundancer's horn, can be directed by
the Orpheus Sphere. You must go there and sing, until you come across the
music that will take you where you wish to go. Or until you fail."
The feline bard nodded, sadly, seriously. "I have to try."
Karikhen rested his hands on Ariaou's shoulders. "Good luck, my child."
Ariaou left with the aged fox's words in her mind, catching the bus without
conscious thought. Again holographic street signs flashed past, barely
noticed.
The Orpheus Sphere! Innocently glistening like a geode within, cut into a
sonic mirror, each facet perfectly carved according to sophisticated
mathematics. It would catch a singer's every inflections and reflect them
back changed, hundreds and thousands of times. Singers hoping to find fame or
fortune within its depth had been driven insane before. Or raised to new
levels of genius.
No one had dared to venture into the Orpheus Sphere since Maria
Mask-Dancer, those five centuries ago. Who would tamper with wild magic?
When she got off from the bus, she found none of the regular security
waiting at the airlock, nor the black-uniformed soldiers who had assumed their
police and patrol duties. With heart pounding she stepped into the
pressurized corridor that went the few meters from Meetpoint's outermost shell
to the Orpheus Sphere. She programmed the controls to initiate the warmup
sequence in two minutes, strapped on the bootjets, and stepped in.
Ariaou floated into the middle of the geode, watching light glint from the
faraway facets. The sounds of her bootjets faded away softly as she stretched
quietly in the exact center, floating in zero gravity. Soon complete silence
reigned, punctuated only by the sounds of the feline's gentle breathing.
Drawing on her recollection of Maria Mask-Dancer's ballad, Ariaou took her
shimmerlyre, the motion setting her into a slow spin with her tail following
behind. Her paws stroked the strings, letting loose a quiet tinkling stream
of notes that wove over themselves in the opening chords. Hidden lights
responded to the music, flickering in rhythmic patterns.
Slowly, gradually Ariaou spun the image of the far distant towers of
Lyonsfar's capital city, Lyonhelm. The earliest sunrise crept along the
outermost walls, turning the sky midnight blue, golden notes shivering in
midair in complex echoes. A city awoke slowly, the hubbub of the people
rising out of subtle dissonances.
Ariaou sang, her voice purring with a soft resonance that became an
underlying harmony, evoking the slight winged figure of the Mask-Dancer.
Maria stood atop the tallest spire of the palace, her long white hair falling
over her silvery cloak that tinkled and flowed about her ankles, her bright
grey eyes looking out onto the city below; her translucent butterfly blue-gold
wings spread to catch the wind. Rising daylight shimmered about her feet, and
cool breezes ruffled her cloak.
The feline bard sang Maria's plea, the ancient dialect of Lyonsfar stately
and melodious from her tongue. In answer to Maria's call, a proud gryphon
answered, his wings shading from sunlight-orange to flame-red, and cried out
in a voice of iron and copper. The sun silhouetted them, a sylph beckoning to
the half-lion, half-eagle griffin, begging for assistance that she might stop
a senseless civil war, and prevent millions from dying needlessly.
At last the gryphon bowed his head, lowered his wings that Maria might
ride. He sang a majestic song, like a whalesong or a rainbow made material in
steel and glass as he swept his wings and leapt aloft into the air.
Light glinted off the curve of the Orpheus Sphere, the sheer energy of
Ariaou's version of the gryphon's theme multiplying and cascading. She drew
upon her memories of Sundancer so long ago in the golden forest, weaving his
travel theme with Maria Mask-Dancer's ballad and seeking out the music and
repeated phrases that seemed right to her. Waves of sound battered against
her body from all directions.
With each new height, Sundancer's horn glowed with greater light, shining
like a miniature sun from the necklace that dangled about her neck. Ariaou
quested for the key that would open its powers, then found it. Time suspended
as her voice, her shimmerlyre, the very walls of the Orpheus Sphere all united
in a single pure note that broke down walls of space and time.
Reality cracked in a multitude of rainbows and Ariaou stepped through to
someplace else.
She arrived in confusion. The bridge of the `Starfollower' shone red under
the emergency lights, crewmembers scanning their displays intently or running
back and forth on the catwalks high above. Viewscreens flickered with battle
graphics, plotting the incoming fighter squadrons. As Ariaou glanced about,
the control board next to her erupted into flames.
The feline jumped back from the fire, falling against Captain Elaine
Amaterasu who surprisedly put a hand to her officer's sidearm. Other
crewmembers started, turning to watch the strange cat and their captain.
"You're the negotiator we spoke with," Elaine exclaimed. "How did you get
onto the bridge? Why did your ships open fire?"
"They've attacked already?" Ariaou asked. She picked herself up and
straightened her clothes out. The horn had fallen to the floor, its light
dwindling back to a length of cool moonlight; this she replaced in its silver
carrying case.
"Didn't you know?" Amaterasu studied the feline's expression, then sighed.
"We were half a light-minute from the inner edge of the Oort cloud when their
fighters started buzzing us, then they started firing about half an hour ago.
Now they're threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons on us if we don't back
off."
Security guards approached, their function obvious in their armored
uniforms and their heavier guns. The captain came up to Elaine and saluted,
his complexion darker and his hair pure black. "Shall we remove this... alien
saboteur from the bridge?"
"No, Captain Amaterasu! You're being attacked by a hostile faction that's
taken over Meetpoint Station. It's their forces that are trying to draw you
into battle. None of this is our fault; we would have dealt with you in good
faith!" Ariaou's bright green-gold eyes pleaded with Elaine for time, and for
consideration of her words.
Elaine studied the feline bard for a timeless moment, while her crew
returned to their stations, while `Starfollower' shuddered under the impact of
Rhadon's missiles. Her own dark brown eyes glinted. "I wish I could trust
you, but we've been betrayed by nonhumans too many times. We trust no one.
Take her to confinement; we'll continue as I directed and trust to our
defenses."
A massive jolt shook the ship, causing the crew, their captain, and Ariaou
herself to stumble and fall. Viewscreens began blinking on and off, some
distorting to static, others showing readouts on the damage inflicted to
`Starfollower's' systems. "That was a five megaton nuclear burst, five
hundred kilometers off," a red-haired officer shouted. "The EMP scrambled our
drive controls. They shut off automatically, or else we'd all be smeared
against the walls like jelly!"
All business now, Elaine snapped, "What about our other systems? I want a
damage report, section by section. Main gun sections, prepare to open fire on
the enemy fighters."
Ariaou picked herself up, thought fast as she saw the guards doing
likewise. With nowhere to run, she controlled her rising panic and took up
her shimmerlyre, and began to sing what came to mind.
She did not know the ancient words to the lullabye that she sang, nor the
sweet, soft music that underlay them. It was the same one that she'd sung on
Ryme, when first she took up the lyre, her paws flying to patterns of strings
remembered though she'd never studied it, the same one that had had the power
to bring a ghost to forget its vengeance. Its beauty was fey in a way that no
modern music could match.
Indecipherable though its words might be, the lullabye's effect on Elaine's
crew was instant. Through the entire generation ship, within each bulkheaded
area, the ethereal music cut short the damage reports and panicked calls for
assistance. The security guards hesitated, looking to the captain for their
directions.
Captain Elaine Amaterasu listened also; with a small hand motion, she
signalled the guards to return to their posts. Her dark brown eyes glistened
with memories suddenly recalled by Ariaou's evocative song, her features
losing years as she relaxed her customary frown. She whispered to herself,
though Ariaou's sensitive ears caught it, "It's beautiful... The music of my
ancestors... Yet I thought it'd been lost long ago, when my parents died."
Ariaou gained confidence as she held the crew's attention spellbound with
her music. Reaching the end of the lullabye, she improvised, drawing upon her
musical history to spin the old songs of reunion. Meant for the colony worlds
rising to interstellar travel, to bind them together despite their mutual
distrust and fear of outsiders, she improvised instead a message of
camaraderie between species. The crew of the `Starfollower' listened, held
captive by her voice.
Ariaou spoke to them of their differences, a void that, try as it might,
could not be eliminated. Though to them, her fur and her feline ancestry
might be repulsively different, their own bare skins and their blunt teeth
seemed to her things to be pitied. Beneath exterior appearance, she sang, in
sweet verse and soft music, there rested a being worth knowing, respecting,
befriending. And she spoke to them of their similarities, of value placed on
beauty and truth, honor and creativity.
Finally, exhausted, Ariaou rested her shimmerlyre in the crook of one arm
and bowed her head, waiting to accept what decision Captain Elaine Amaterasu
might make. A moment passed; another nuclear explosion shook the ship, though
not so hard. With stunned expressions, the crewmembers returned to their
duties, and the damage reports began pouring in again.
"You sing beautifully, Ariaou," Elaine said at last. "And your message is
one to which we might open our hearts. I...we... had forgotten that things
could be better, that there might be times when we could... trust others..."
"What if it's a trap?" a crewman asked; young, bold, fair of hair and
brash. "If this cat is really some kind of saboteur?"
Captain Amaterasu replied, "Trusting has to begin somewhere, Lieutenant.
But, tell me, even were we to turn aside, how do you plan to force the
attackers to hold their fire?"
"Let me speak with them," Ariaou replied. Drawing upon her knowledge of
Tangled Web protocol, she suggested, "Request a ceasefire, under the Mark of
the Lion Humbled, and they'll answer. If they don't, they become outlaws, to
be hunted by all the nebula's forces."
The captain and her communications officer exchanged words. The message
was sent. It took moments for the reply to arrive, an enigmatic message:
Ariaou. You have slain one wolf with your powers of song; you shall not have
another. Leave behind your instruments, and I shall send a courier to take
you to where we first met. With respect, Rhadon.
Ariaou stood stunned for a moment while Elaine considered the message. "I
do hope you weren't counting on your powers of sweet song alone to carry the
day, my dear feline," she commented drily. "He doesn't sound friendly to me."
"Perhaps there's a way..." the bard replied. "I'd rather chance a
face-to-face meeting, even if my life was at stake, than let your lives and
theirs be risked in battle."
The minutes passed slowly in a dead silence. Rhadon's fighters ceased to
sally forth in their attempts to goad `Starfollower' into returning fire. The
dotted paths on the bridge's viewscreens slowly approached each other, the
single massive generation ship moving directly toward a horde of far smaller
cruisers and destroyers. `Rhadon's Promise' launched a lone shuttle on a
high-acceleration path.
The screen flashed the estimated arrival time of the shuttle, flickering
from ten minutes to nine, then eight. Captain Elaine barked orders as her
crew set about repairing the damage done by the nuclear bursts, directing
repair crews to the engine control conduits. "Until those're fixed," she
explained to Ariaou, "We'll be unable to navigate or even brake our ship.
There's no telling how long it'll take to repair them. If you fail, we'll be
forced to use all our weapons systems to defend ourselves, and strike back at
your worlds."
"And no matter how long it takes, should it come to that, our forces would
certainly destroy your own ship, and with it, the only remaining humans in
this galaxy." Ariaou sighed. "This is our only chance."
The courier made fast to a sally port that adjusted its grapple to seal
tightly about the shuttle's airlock, compensating for the incompatible docking
systems. Ariaou entrusted her shimmerlyre to Elaine's custody and bid
farewell to her. The captain of the generation ship saluted back as the
feline stepped in with the assistance of the waiting lupine crewman. The
shuttle's airlock irised close as she strapped herself into the
high-acceleration couch.
"We'll reach the task force in nine minutes," the crewman commented as he
operated the controls. "Captain Rhadon's ordered the fleet to remain at their
current distance from the enemy ship."
The courier ship separated from the `Starfollower' and boosted away at high
speed, its anti-matter engines producing a long stream of charged hydrogen
ions accelerated through its drive. Their acceleration reached the maximum
the artificial gravity field could negate, pressing Ariaou back onto the
couch; that weight reminded her uncomfortably that her own shimmerlyre had
been left behind. The forward viewscreen showed a rapidly approaching swarm
of bees that grew into long, sleekly deadly warships.
Ariaou's pilot reversed the courier at the midpoint of their flight, using
the engines to brake the tiny ship's velocity. They coasted by the missile
destroyers that led Rhadon's task force and their fighter escorts, each
showing up only as a blip on the viewscreen, their positions delayed by the
speed of light. The path of the shuttle converged precisely, as if drawn by a
magnet, onto the flagship.
`Rhadon's Promise' loomed large out of the shadows of space, its sudden
tines of gleaming mirror-bright metal punctuated by weapons clusters. The
pilot controlled the courier deftly, using the compressed hydrogen jets to
snuggle the ship into one of the recessed docking bays without the assistance
of the cruiser's grapples. He grinned, his fangs clean white, proud of a job
well done.
Two waiting guards, dressed in black uniforms but without the mirrored
helmets of those that had taken Meetpoint, escorted Ariaou out of the courier
and onto a waiting maglev cart; one was a silver-furred vulpine, the other a
mink still in winter white. To her questions, they only replied, "Rhadon is
expecting you in his stateroom."
With a sense of deja vu, Ariaou stood once again in front of Rhadon's
stateroom. She stepped forward hesitantly, and confronted the wolf that stood
at the other side of the room.
Prince Rhadon Mordenkainen looked terrible. His eyes burned, their once
dark brown irises now almost entirely black pupils, and his reddish brown fur
was unkempt from lack of grooming and from the sweat of his mental exertions.
He tensed, almost crouched over, his tight commander's uniform betraying his
battle stance, and to Ariaou's keen sight, his fatigue.
"Who would have thought that my betrayer would be one with the voice of an
angel?" he asked, rhetorically, his gaze burning into Ariaou's eyes. The
feline restrained herself from quailing, showing visible fear, but she felt
sure that the wolf's heightened senses could smell her distress. "It might be
better if I were simply to slay you now, eliminating a threat; yet by the Mark
of the Humbled Lion, I am forced to guest you honorably."
Ariaou raised her paws in a display of appeasement. "How could I hurt you?
I seek only to speak with you, to arrange a peace so that no lives need be
lost."
Rhadon grinned wolfishly, no humour visible in his cruelly gleaming fangs.
Determination ran like steel beneath his voice, still eerily normal, honed to
an aristocrat's manners. "You yourself are a weapon, innocent though you may
seem. Were I to give in, to permit these human invaders to survive, then in a
generation's time, or in many's, it does not matter, this nebula would once
again be enslaved to their whims. I shall not permit this to happen, and so
they must be destroyed, before they can even begin."
The feline approached slowly, paws still outstretched in a show of
defenselessness. She thought fast, remembering their conversation only hours
gone by, yet an eternity ago. "You live for honor, for service to your
people. Yet you've betrayed these both."
"How is that?" Rhadon looked confused, his rock-steady countenance
beginning to crack.
"You betrayed your honor when you violated Meetpoint's sanctity, capturing
it by force. And you betrayed your people, for they will be forced to answer
for your actions, for every life that was lost in your actions." Ariaou's
gaze was steady as she took one of Rhadon's trembling paws in her own.
Rhadon's muscles tautened, his muzzle quivering.
"No," the wolf snarled, extending long sharp claws. "You are trying to
confuse me with your words. I was foolish to permit you to speak, an error
that I shall remedy with your death. Then I shall direct my ships to destroy
the humans quickly and efficiently."
"I'm sorry, Rhadon... But I have to protect Meetpoint, and the humans, for
they're innocent of any crimes of history. Any way that I can." Ariaou
reached down to open the silvery case that held Sundancer's horn, revealing
the long shaft of cool moonlight. Rhadon's eyes narrowed at the apparent
weapon; he swiped at the case, sending it flying from her hands, the horn
arcing through air in a perfect parabola to clatter on the floor.
The feline dived after it, scooped it up in her paws like a dagger. The
wolf leapt after her, his black eyes swallowing her up in their depths as he
closed in, his legs propelling him across the room efficiently. Time slowed
as Ariaou met his gaze fiercely, tensing her muscles. She snarled, exposing
her own even, shining white fangs.
They met in a suspended moment of glittering claws and flashing horn.
Ariaou fell in a heap of fur. She gradually became aware of a warm wetness
from her right side, looked down to see blood welling slowly, then back behind
her, where Rhadon struggled upright. The moonlight spire of Sundancer's horn
gleamed from his side, barely half its length visible; she vaguely remembered
it being ripped out of her paws by the force of his passing. Weaponless,
instrumentless, Ariaou waited calmly for whatever fate might bring.
She was, consequently, surprised when he spoke in a completely calm voice.
"My apologies. I'm afraid I have not been... quite myself." Rhadon removed
the horn from his side, tearing strips of cloth from his uniform to bandage
his wound and Ariaou's. "Honor demands that I atone for the shame and
injustice I have caused. I am at your service."
Ariaou sighed, too tired to feel exuberance. "Let's call your fleet home
to Meetpoint, and invite `Starfollower' to parley." She reclined into Rhadon's
supporting arms and fell asleep.
She awoke several days later in a comfortable old-fashioned wooden bed
later to Professor Karikhen K'ris'fer's smiling vulpine face. Captain Elaine
Amaterasu stood nearby, carrying her shimmerlyre, and Prince Rhadon
Mordenkainen cradled Sundancer's horn in his arms. They exchanged wary
smiles. "It's over," Karikhen exclaimed happily. "We've signed a treaty with
the humans."
Elaine nodded. A rare smile graced her aged features. "Many years may
pass before humans can be accepted into your society, but we'll bide our time.
Until then, Meetpoint Academy's agreed to let us settle an uninhabited moon of
the system, and will send students to study with us on a foreign exchange
basis. We'll do likewise, and eventually our cultures will be able to
intermingle freely."
"And what of you, Karikhen?" Ariaou asked. She sat up partway, stopping as
a twinge ran through her side.
"You're an amazing bard," the fox said with a laugh. "I was cleared of all
charges the moment Rhadon rescinded all his orders, but the government was
forced to make a public statement because of that song of yours you made up
while in the bus. I'm a popular figure now! And you're going to be seeing
some royalties soon, I believe..." He shook his head disbelievingly.
The feline smiled tiredly. "That's good... And you, Rhadon? What has your
homeworld to say of all this?"
Rhadon reached out with a paw, touched Ariaou's. His eyes glinted softly,
once again warm brown. "Officially, I no longer exist, having fallen under
the Curse of Lord Moreah, even though you healed me of that; I've been
discharged from my duties and disowned by my family. Unofficially? I plan to
study here at Meetpoint, now that I have more time ahead of me. And I'd like
to get to know a certain bard better."
______________________________________________________________________________
Conrad Wong is a CS student at U. C. Berkeley, about to graduate and face the
terrifying world of "Real Life". He is not looking forward to it. Except,
that is, to having more money to spend on the necessities of life: new science
fiction and fantasy books, anthropomorphic comics (Conrad's particularly fond
of `Rhudiprrt'), and getting permanent net access. His hobbies include feeble
attempts at writing (one of which you see above), drawing, computer games, and
MUDs.
cwong@cory.berkeley.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 5
by Jim Vassilakos
1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Downward, through the thick blankets of clouds, a dark figure fell, twisting
and twirling, helpless in the howling tempest. Darkness loomed above, seeming
to descend and collapse closer to earth with each passing moment. Then the sky
became as bright as a thousand suns and the darkness was vanquished. Hair
caught fire; skin parched, baked, and blackened in the blink of a boiling eye.
Then only a single fireball remained, high above, like a sun but lifeless and
slowly disintegrating. The sky seemed to crack as the shell of an egg, and a
blast ripped through the clouds, shredding the air and deafening all senses as
it passed.
Michael awoke to the pain of burning flesh, the deafening blast seeming
like a distant and forgotten dream. The wind tossed him between clouds,
scrambling his senses with his emotions. He tasted fear as he saw the ground
below and the fireball above. Suddenly, a sharp pain swept through his spine
like an ocean wave, sparking memories and stinging his consciousness. He
thought he heard Niki giggling somewhere and realized he'd lost his helmet.
He looked down again; it was time. He unhooked the release and pressed the
activator. The gravchute seemed to yank him upward toward the filthy night
sky, now littered with burning debris as the fireball spread outward, dividing
into glowing bits of metal and thunder.
Feet together, knees slightly bent, muscle braced against bone, the old
routine flickered in the back of his mind as he hit and rolled, falling
uncontrollably into a warm, wet, compost ditch. Botflies circled his head as
it emerged from the steaming muck.
Nimble fingers worked free the straps of the shoulder harness and
waistbelt, making splish-squish sounds in the lacteal water. The chute slowly
sank and disappeared altogether beneath the surface as Mike crawled up the
side of the ditch, peeking over the rough earthen edge. The air began to hiss
and spit while small chunks of metal ripped into the ground like shrapnel from
a grenade. In the distance, some hundred meters, a tall, wire fence, lighted
by iridescent lamps, stood proudly, its barbed icing leaning inward, sparking
against the hot debris. Mike dug himself into the soft earth as far as he
could until his lungs breathed dirt. An explosion rocked the ground, and then
another. Several clumps of stone and clay fell into the sludge as Mike felt
his fingers grip the roots of some alien weed. The air grew thick and smelled
of death and fumes and fire, all mixed together like some unholy beast.
For several minutes the sky seemed to fall, and then all was quiet. Mike
crawled cautiously from the ditch. Blood trickled down his neck and dripped
slowly onto the ground as he stood, haphazardly, holding onto what was left of
his face. The skin crackled and fell away without feeling.
A clean military troop insertion. He tried to smile while there was nobody
to see him, but the right side of his mouth was too mangled. He remembered the
Vista jolting, the general panic, Bill diving for the drop shaft, himself
scrambling with his helmet and pack.
There was no sign of his pack anywhere. No infrared goggles, no niko
camera, not even a stupid pair of wire cutters. He stared back toward the
fence. The distant sound of hooves against dirt met his ears. Mike staggered
toward the light of the fence, drawn by the noise of the spooked animals. As
he peered into the murky darkness on the other side, he saw several quagga
galloping parallel to the posts, their white stripes shining dimly against the
cold light.
In the distance, he heard the faint whine of chemical combustion engines,
probably two-wheelers, motorcycles. This was a ranch. He stared dumbly at the
fence. A high-security ranch. Mike walked parallel to the gate, crouching
behind the cover of the scrub brush and beyond the range of the light. It was
too dark to properly perambulate the area. Patches of snow and ice covered the
ground, and the dirt was sturdy but largely barren. The air became steadily
colder, and he began to shiver.
As he walked, a small spark of light caught his eye. It was on his side,
far away from the fence. Bright, yet so small it was hard to distinguish. A
flare. Mike crossed though the shallow thicket, dizzied by his loss of blood.
He stumbled over a large stone and remembered Robin screaming in mid-air, her
gravchute shredded, her body burning, the earth miles below. He heard a
dripping noise and tried to concentrate. His hands felt warm and sticky as he
regained his footing, but the flare was closer. It stood upright, wedged
between two tall rocks on a steep hillside, their sharp edges outlined in the
sizzling white light. Mike climbed up the slope, falling to his knees every
few meters, his temples pounding with each step, his body shivering from the
intense cold.
He contemplated falling asleep. He could reach the flare tomorrow or the
next day or sometime after that. He tried to imagine waking up later, seeing
the flare, its white flame still burning, grasping it in his hand, touching
the hot fire. It would tingle his senses, like the waves of the ocean on
Tizar, the cool swells lapping effortlessly at the long shore. He would hold
the flare in his hand as he slept beneath the starry night sky. He'd sleep
forever, and the sun would never rise. Kitara would stay beside him, soothing
his dreams as she used to, entering them, sharing her own. Something she had
whispered; he could hear her calling his name.
"Michael..."
Dim evening light slipped lazily through the small glass window, coloring
the dark, quiet, chamber in shades of purples and greys. In the corner, a
rough wooden stool leaned against the wall by the mantle, small burning embers
tickling its legs. A black kettle hung suspended above the crackling fire,
steam wisping from its nozzle, mixing with the smoke in the chimney. Above
the mantle, a dull wooden-handled axe rested against the wall on a set of long
iron nails drilled parallel with the floor.
Niki sat at his bedside, sopping the sweat from his forehead with a cloth
napkin. Through one eye, she looked comfortably tired. Mike tried to think of
something to say.
"Shhh..."
He closed his mouth and let a smile escape. Sharp waves of pain sprinted
through his mind.
"You'll have to learn to stop that too."
"What happened?" The words came out slurred.
"You've lost some blood. A mild case of shock. You're lucky I'm a qualified
nurse."
"It was a prerequisite. Where are we?"
"I don't know... but we're safe."
"What about the others?"
Mike felt a brush of sorrow after he asked the question. Niki's sorrow.
"Are you sure?"
"I don't know anymore than you. I've been searching for Billy, but... I
just don't know." Mike felt the cool, damp cloth caress his forehead as she
spoke. Something in her voice said the task was hopeless.
"Don't lose faith."
"I haven't. I'm going to keep searching. But you have to go back to sleep."
Mike was too tired to argue. He settled back into the bed and closed his
one good eye. It wasn't the first time psionics had saved his life or provided
shelter, but the chances of Niki finding Bill were slim. Mike tried to guess
likelihood; he couldn't. He wondered who owned the cabin. How long could they
stay before the owner's return?
Mike felt the right half of his face. Niki had kept the swelling down, and
his mouth was almost completely mended, but she couldn't reconstruct the bones
or the teeth. Something had definitely hit him. He couldn't remember what. It
ached for him to think about it.
The sky was dark when he awoke again, a bowl of hurtleberries on the stool
beside him. Her gravchute sat lonesome against the wall. A small pocket in the
cabin floor was open. Inside lay a brown leather sack, full of a hodgepodge of
useful items. A two- pronged fork, a plate, a rusty distilizer, leaky chemical
batteries, a wishbone, a long, thin vial, a pot and serving spoon, a box of
matches, a ceramic mug. Mike regarded them curiously.
Outside the cabin, Niki sat crosslegged, facing the forest, deep in
meditation, her slight body framed by the predawn light. The forest surrounded
the cabin on all sides without leaving so much room for a clearing. A thick,
green tarp covered the entire roof, a small hole cut out for the chimney, and,
above that, the long, weeping branches of a dwearmurgrove tree hung limp in
the cold air. The chimney ended in a dun colored box, black cords falling from
underneath its corners and into the tarp's heavy fabric.
Mike guessed the whole mechanism was some sort of makeshift insulation to
detract from the IR image. Somebody had gone to a good deal of trouble to
build this hideaway. He wondered how Niki had found it and how she had managed
to drag him through the dense brush without leaving a conspicuous trail. The
memory of a lonely gravchute formed in his mind, it's dull grey exterior
blending into the darkness as it sat, propped, against a cabin wall.
Niki opened her eyes, "Lots of juice in those puppies."
Mike looked up, startled.
"Sorry."
He churned up a staid expression. "You're getting good. Were you just
reading me or searching for Bill at all?"
"I said I was sorry." She seemed to fold inward on herself, trying to
become small and unnoticed, clutching to her string of beads like a security
blanket. Mike kneeled down, testing his flexibility after a day in bed.
"Speaking of juice, I'm thirsty. Where's the stream?"
She reached into her cloth knapsack and retrieved a shiny aluminum canteen.
Mike drank.
"There's a stream about a kilometer north. Over the hill beyond that is
where we came down."
"What have you got in here? Gyrocompass, good. Medscanner, castfoam, pris
glasses, synthetic gloves; aha, mullah. You've been holding out on me, Niki."
"Mike?"
"Cold, hard imperial cash. Highly illegal at the moment, but considering
the state of the drin, it ought to be good for barter. How much is this...
y'know you're practically destitute, Niki?"
"Sorry, my boss doesn't pay me what I'm worth."
Mike looked into her eyes and smiled as much as his new facial structure
would allow.
"Oh he doesn't, does he?"
"Billy's alive, boss."
"Where?"
"I'm not sure yet, but we gotta start looking."
Mike stretched his arms and yawned, "Hold that thought." He stepped into
the treeline, backing within a clump of foliage.
"What's my Mike doing?"
"`Mike-turating,' lemme lone."
"Huh?"
"Answering the call of Mother Nature."
"Humph... well lemme tell you about Father Time," Niki picked out a flat
stone and sent it ricocheting off a nearby branch.
"Hey!"
"Now stop rubbing your frowzy face and get back here!"
The two angry men dunked his head into the murky water, thrusting it deeper
than before, holding it longer until he reflexively opened his mouth to
breathe. He felt himself being yanked back to the surface, coughing, wheezing,
sputtering for air, his guts surging upward to his mouth, the stank of the
urine and feces weakening his cuffed limbs from nausea. A brown offal bobbed
on the surface, seeming to laugh with every motion.
The white-shirted man stood opposite him, a thin smile playing across his
lips. "You approve of our sewage containment system? I give you my assurance
that you will have plenty of time to inspect it closely unless you begin
talking now."
"No speak."
"You are a stinking liar."
Bill caught a lung full of air as his head submerged beneath the filthy
muck. The two men lifted his legs above his upper torso and pushed them down
into the refuse until his head hit bottom, dung and piss spilling along the
barrel's rusty sides. After a minute, his body began to twist violently,
convulsing for lack of air. The guards looked up with doleful eyes.
"Not just yet. Our friend is thirsty; we must let him drink his fill."
Soon, his feet slowed down, stopped kicking, and finally hung limp. The
guards pulled his dripping, corpselike body from the slimy excrement, holding
him upright off the ground. The white-shirted man walked over and patted Bill
on the cheek.
"Yes. I think you will like it here."
Bill opened his bloodshot eyes and sprayed the man's face with a mouthful
of sludge, spitting the last of the staining refuse onto the man's white
shirt. Seizing the moment, his cuffed legs kicked upward as if by their own
volition, striking their target at full force as the man's jaw dropped in
horror and pain. Bill watched in satisfaction as the man fell to the littered
floor gripping his groin tightly with both hands.
After several deep breaths, the man looked up into Walker's steely grey
eyes. "You're dead."
"Now, now Sheffy," a ringing voice from the far end of the room cheerfully
chirped, "the boy can't help it. He obviously doesn't speak our language."
Bill saw an elderly woman step into the dim light from the darkness of a
corner. She wore a black, levantine dress with long leather gloves and boots,
and her silvery hair was clipped with a furl.
"He's lying, mother."
"Really dear, I think it's time you were off to bed."
"Stop patronizing me!"
She stopped in her tracks and cast her son a sharp glance, her sharp blue
eyes seeming to sting him from a distance. The man tried to stand, but
stumbled over his own legs in agony. She regarded him callously, like a
vulture might regard a dying carcass. His eyes glazed over in trepidation as
he noted her gaze.
"I mean," the quiver in his voice was laced with fear, "yes... mother. I'm
going to bed now." He seemed to force the last words out one at a time. One of
the guards helped him to his feet and out of the room. Bill gauged his chances
against the other as the woman approached him, carefully sidestepping the
scattered droppings and puddles of urine.
"Whew... you smell terrible."
"No speak."
"Though not as bad as Sheff smelled after he cornered that zorille last
year. You remember that, don't you Medwin?"
"Yes, Madre."
"Ambrose thought our boy was ready for some hunting."
"No speak."
"No, no that's quite all right. I don't prize my young men for their
vocabularies. What I'll do with you is report you to the authorities. In fact,
I'll have to report this whole mess. Then we'll have to scour the countryside
for your friends. You didn't come alone, did you."
Bill shut his eyes and tried not to listen.
"Then the Imps will come in, if my appraisal is worth beans. That's bad
news. The Imps don't much cotton to sticky messes, which is what you're in
right now. I think you'd rather work in a labor camp or as a slave in some
rotting hole in the ground than have your brain erased. They do that nowadays,
you know...with interstellar criminals."
"No speak."
"No you won't speak, and it's too bad. If you only spoke you could save
your life, your friends lives. It's a crying shame, I think. But pipe beatings
and dung drownings obviously won't cure your affliction."
Bill found himself pondering her words.
"The authorities will have drugs which will make you talk, and the Imps
will have methods which are better left undiscussed in polite company."
She shifted her feet around another puddle and stepped in front of Bill,
casually waving off a tiny gnat.
"There will be people here in the morning. Will they be looking for you?
What should I tell them? What reason do I have to save your ass if you won't
talk?"
Bill could feel his breath quicken. Her sharp blue eyes scintillated in the
dim light, driving imaginary needles into his own as the gnat spun wildly in
the air, plunging recklessly into the rusty rimmed barrel and the thick gooey
soup within.
Gall midges buzzed under the trees around the shallow stream as the early
sunlight spiked down between the branches like razored knives. Mike decided
that Niki must have made a bee-line for the cabin after she found him;
psionics didn't account for ease of travel. He chopped brush out of the way,
and made a neater trail than the one she had sniffed out. The long-handled axe
was somewhat dull, but it did the job all the same.
It was the axe, she said, that had led her to the cabin. Psionically, it
was like a beacon, a conspicuous aberration in an otherwise unlikely
background, full of strong emotions and pain. She thought of calling for help
at the ranch instead, but there was pain there as well, and enough angry
people to blow their mission. There would probably be government people, as
well, asking questions, trying to find out what happened, maybe even
Imperials.
Mike tried to collate the data. The explosion still throbbed inside his
memory blocking out the usual clutter. The drop never took into consideration
a strong defense. Calanna wasn't known for tight planetary defenses. If
anything, the opposite was true. It was almost as if they had been expected.
The hilltop was studded with dandelions sprouting forth from the hard
terrain. Niki spied the landscape through the pris glasses. To the north,
another kilometer almost, Mike saw the tall wire fence gleaming in the morning
sunlight. A kilometer further was a ranch house and a tall guardtower jutting
upward from the grassy fields.
"To count the sheep?"
"Gimmie dat."
Niki handed over the glasses. Mike adjusted the power and zoomed in,
chainlocking until he could see the sun sparkling off their shades.
"Thems is autorifles. Lucy issue. Serial number..."
Niki snatched the glasses back, "No poop; lemme see."
"Yes poop. Can that thing take pictures?"
"Nope." She winced though the lenses, the internal flywheel gyroscopically
stabilizing the image. "You can't see the serial numbers."
"But it was fun pretending; gimmie back." Mike counted about twenty guards
in all. The prisoners numbered at least a hundred, most working the fields
with hoes and picks. One tractor sat idle underneath a canopy tent beside a
row of stables, its mechanical guts strewn over the ground like so many spare
organs. Two kilometers east of the house was a crater a good fifty meters in
diameter. Big enough to cause a scare, he figured. Some prisoners and guards
were there, sifting through the wreckage.
"What's the matter. Wha'd'ya see?"
Mike handed the glasses back to her, "Take a peek at this."
A smile crossed her lips, a momentary rupture of glee. "He is alive."
"And well, though incarcerated. Typical."
He felt the expected rabbit punch to his kidney as the clapping of copter
blades echoed on the wind.
"Now the question is..."
She lowered the glasses to complete his thought, "How do we get him out?"
The black copter circled around the ranch house slowly, spying the guardtower
and the stables and the tractor under the canopy tent. The morning sunlight
glimmered off its dark surface, its guns gleaming like polished spears.
The old woman glanced out her office window, "What the hell are they doing
back so early?"
The men in the fields stopped their work, and those in the distant crater
climbed out and watched the vessel settle down beside Madre's garden. Bill
picked his teeth with a splinter of hull metal.
"Those the Imps?"
"Come to pay us visits," Sheff's blue eyes gleamed in the sunlight as he
smiled and shoved Bill backward. "Back to work, neghral."
Bill had learned that the last word translated roughly as "alien" in the
planetary lingo, stressing the negative connotations. The Calannans didn't
like offworlders; most dirtsiders didn't.
Two figures emerged from the copter's cockpit, one dressed in a white,
loose fitting wrapper, the other wearing a khaki uniform, sporting a kepi atop
his shiny, bald head. The old woman strolled out to greet them, an air of
confidence and composure close about her.
"Colonel Arman, what a pleasant surprise. And I see you've brought our
guest. Sule, wasn't it?"
"That is correct." The bald headed colonel bowed slightly, his thick
Calannan accent drooling over the Galanglic as he chuckled nervously. The
offworlder stepped in front of him wearing a determined smile, her long white
hair flowing free with the warm breeze like a quagga's mane.
"I am still looking." She seemed to spit the words, harshly.
"Congratulations," the old woman beamed back.
"Madre, please." The colonel mopped beads of perspiration from his crinkled
forehead with a brown cloth. He seemed to her more embarrassed than annoyed as
a sharp gust swiped at the visor of his hat. She ached to pity him.
"Why don't you both come inside. I'll make us some tea. Do you drink tea
Sule?"
Gusts of wind swept up loose dirt, stinging the prisoners in the field.
Bill hustled into the crater for protection, scowling at the suddenly harsh
wind.
The living room was plush by local standards, tiled in white marble with
dark red streaks, elegantly furnished with the forest's finest. A large table
occupied the floor's center, before the hearth. Its stout wooden legs,
smoldered black at their base, were shaped as the paws of a lion. Sparks
danced carelessly along the floor, seeming to conduct the crackling fire as
the old woman poured the hot tea from a white china kettle, her long thin
fingers stiffened with age.
"Me and my boys often break fast here, around this table. Greenleaf tea
for everyone, that's what we have."
The colonel sipped the home brew, his pudgy fingers wrapped around his
small bowl for security. She remembered him as a little boy, always curious
and kind. His curiosity had been long chased away.
"The hospitable reputation of Madre is well deserved," he explained, his
deep voice cutting through the air. "Not only she care for her boys, but she
also take strangers. Is not that right Madre?"
"That all depends on how strange they are. More tea?"
Sule stroked her chin in thought, "Tell her about the tracks." Madre
pondered the richness of her voice, not dark and crusty like the colonel's,
but somehow different.
"Ah yes, the tracks," the colonel tried to search for the words. The
interstellar verse was not easy for him. "We find the tracks of a person near
the farrest gate. Much blood. It end on a small hillock south of here."
So he has a friend. The old woman nodded gently, anticipating his train of
thought, "And you think I opened my house to this individual?"
The colonel smiled, a flush of pink entering his dark brown cheeks. She
glanced toward Sule; the young woman stared solidly back, her bright blue eyes
matching the sky at highsun.
"What did this individual do?"
The colonel's smile broke into a deep resonant laugh, "Then you admit."
Madre shook her head, "Admit? No. I never said that. I'm simply curious."
Sule stood up from her chair and walked toward the old woman, "You do
understand that harboring a criminal is a felony under Imperial statute?" Her
voice was too raspy for a girl, and something about her walk suggested
aggression.
"I understand that you are looking for someone. Has this person committed
some offense?"
Sule's voice hissed and slithered like something diabolical, "You are not
in a position to question me."
"While you are in my house I'll question you whenever I damn well please."
The old woman waited for a retort, for a scowl, a blush, some sign of weakness
or strength. Sule's reply was silent composure. Suddenly she realized what
she'd been thinking all along.
"What are you? You're not a woman..."
Sule smiled at the remark.
"...and you aren't a man either. Are you an android?" Her question touched
a spark.
"Do androids interest you, madre?"
"No, I think they're quite disgusting actually, machines parading around as
people. I say the lot should be rounded up and roasted on the spit, Lucy
style, along with their makers."
Sule perched herself on the table edge, "Isn't it a revolting notion?
Microcircuits for brains, complex algorithms to mimic sentience, to pretend
emotions. An absolutely horrific science."
"You seem at odds with yourself, child."
"I'm not an android any more than you are."
"Then what are you?"
Sule chewed on the query, her eyes darting to the stone hearth and the
dying embers within. She slipped gracefully beside the fire reaching inside to
pick out a glowing red coal.
"I am biological," her words now sarcastically melodious as she returned to
the table, "yet I do not roast so easily. Do you?" Her hand wavered in front
of the old woman's face, her sky blue eyes seeming maliciously playful against
the dimming red of the coal.
"Is that supposed to be some sort of frail threat?"
"Just call it a forecast of your imminent future if you continue to refuse
to cooperate."
"I'm qui..."
"Mother!" Sule's hand closed into a fist around the coal as Sheff crossed
the tiled threshold into the dining room, puffing wearily for breath. Cupped
in his hands he held a blackened, metallic object, about the size of a
grapefruit. Bill was close behind, his frail body seeming less fatigued by the
sprint. His grey eyes glinted with a strange mixture of curiosity and
apprehension.
"Mother, look what I've found!"
"You found?" Bill started, but Sheff hurriedly bowed before the two guests,
ignoring the remark. He proudly displayed his trophy in one hand. The object
was a dodecahedron, somewhat scathed from its fall yet still intact. Engraved
on one triangular face was the distinct picture of a small songbird with its
wings outstretched as if in flight.
"I don't care who found it. Just what is it?"
"It's an alien artifact," he retorted, his free hand sweeping backward into
Bill's face.
"Ah, so it is. My boys never cease to amaze me with their brilliant powers
of deduction. Oh, by the way, this is Sheffy; he likes to be called Sheff. And
this one here is Vilo, but you can call him anything you like, or hate for
that matter, not that it matters, because it doesn't unless you make it."
"Mother?"
"Sheffy, I will not put up with your rude interruptions."
"But the artif..."
"Now that you're here you can make yourself useful. Wash these dishes.
Vilo, show our guests out, they were just leaving."
Colonel Arman stood abruptly from his chair and began to leave, waiving his
apology to the Madre. Bill found himself grabbing Sule's arm without effect.
When he tugged, it was like trying to pull a mountain. She snatched the
dodecahedron from Sheff's hands as he collected the tea bowls, running her
long fingers across the shiny engraving.
"You really have these jerks by their nuggets. Especially grey-eyes. Don't
you know how to treat a lady?"
Bill instinctively pulled his hand away as he heard her voice, its raspy
edge hissing along the hollow between his shoulder blades. It was somehow a
dichotomy between cultured refinement and animal barbarism. The old woman
smiled at his response.
"Don't mind her boy, she's biological."
"That doesn't mean I won't sting." Sule flicked the coal into his face,
leaving a red, burned spot where it nicked his cheek. Bill wanted to shove
her head into the hearth, but thought better of it when he noticed the daring
smile playing across her lips.
"She's tempting you boy, trying to deny the facts of life." Madre walked
toward her, gently guiding Bill aside with her free hand. "Sule, the facts
are that you are being forcibly evicted from the premises; your only choice is
with respect to the method of transport. You can either walk out or be
carried out in pieces. I don't care which."
"I'll go, but I'm taking this." She held the dodecahedron firmly in her
palm, testing its weight.
"The hell you are."
"It's from space, unclaimed. That makes it Imperial property."
"It was found on my land and it's mine."
"And what would you do with it?"
"It doesn't matter if I'd make ducks and drakes of it; I still say it's
mine. Now put it down or I'll have you shot."
Sule smiled, perching the object on three fingers. "So it is yours for now.
Let us see how long you can keep it." She tossed the dodecahedron into the
fire, crushing the burning sticks under its weight. Flames enveloped it as
Sheff ran to the kitchen for water.
"Good day, Madre." Her tall boots clicked on the tile floor as she left,
leaving the stain of their echo on the pungent morning air.
"Vilo, see that they make it to their vehicle."
Sheff scurried back into the dining room with a pail of water which he
threw on the fire. The flames sputtered and drowned instantly. He reached into
the steaming embers and withdrew the dark object.
"Mother, that girl is a bitch with an attitude."
"She's no girl."
He dropped his prize into the bucket with a sound metallic plunk.
"Why'd you let her go?"
"Colonel Arman."
"Arman's no friend of neghrali."
The old woman finished sipping her tea as the sound of chopper blades
clicked off the windows.
"He's a friend of mine."
Sheff sighed, "Mother getting sentimental in her senility?"
"Watch that."
Sheff took the bowl, "I could have softened her up."
"Like you softened up Vilo or whatever his real name is? I don't think so.
I gave him to you for fifty cents. Your methods produced nothing. I talk to
him for fifty claps and he's blabbering so much I need an extra set of ears
just to keep up."
Bill strolled into the room wearing a quizzical smile, "I hope I wasn't
that easy."
"My poor boy, being easy is a blessing on Calanna. Nobody admires people
who are difficult. Now come give your mother a kiss."
Bill leaned over and pecked her on the cheek, "You're a sweet mama."
"I know I am. Now get back to work before I see fit to have you
slaughtered."
"Yes, Madre."
Bill headed outside into the crisp breeze. As he walked toward the crater
he watched the black chopper shrinking slowly over the distant horizon, its
shiny surface reflecting the growing star's light. Within the house, another
pair of eyes followed its descent into the skyline.
"He's trouble, mother."
She frowned at the comment.
"He'll bring the Imps upon us. And for what? His lies?"
"I only hope they are lies..."
Sheff considered her reply with a questioning glance, "What did he tell
you?"
"Enough to keep me entertained."
"He's a neghral, mother."
"Not anymore, Sheff. He's one of my boys now, and I'll not give him away to
the likes of Sule."
Sheff laughed at the statement, anticipating her icy stare without fear.
"And just what's so funny?"
"He's not yours until he's ours."
"Sheffy..."
"I've got to insist, mother. It is tradition after all."
She weighed his demand against the harm it could inflict, and decided the
latter a lighter sum. It was, after all, tradition.
"Tonight, mother."
"So be it."
Madre turned the time-glass over with as much indifference as she could feign,
the steely grains tumbling through its neck like the falling sleet as Bill
watched the eight advance around him with an almost orchestrated precision.
Sheff closed the distance first, grinning wickedly as he leapt forward into an
outstretched leg. Bill slammed the foreman's head into his rising knee, the
squeaky crack of a splintered jaw dividing the cheers into opposing camps.
The feeling of triumph lasted about two seconds as his legs swept suddenly
from the earth, the wet earth rising in a hateful alliance with his enemies.
Bill braced the fall with a forearm and rolled with the momentum, rising to
his feet and, seconds later, ducking a roundhouse as the circle fragmented and
the crowd pressed forward. Instinct tried to take form in his legs, but there
was nowhere to run. On every side, guards held fully automatic rifles, five
facing inward as the rest held the crowd at bay. Bill broke into the rim as
several barrels homed in on his body. The closest guard thrust a stock into
his back, pushing him into the ring as two others forced him to his knees.
He twisted his head sideways, avoiding the brunt of an oncoming boot, and
felt his elbow spike into a sloppily defended neck as his fist punched upward
into another's crotch. The crowd cheered again but was muffled by the noise of
gunfire. Bill spat mud as he rolled back to the rim, desperately trying to
regain some footing in the slippery dirt before the ground came crashing back
upward, spinning as it impacted and smothered.
Bill felt a rib crack from his tackler's blow, breath fleeing his lungs on
its own volition as the man's arms yanked his body upward, the now familiar
earth receding from his legs as he kicked wildly into another. The change in
momentum, forced his companion into a backward fall with a satisfying crunch,
the arms which had lifted him, falling to either side as he rolled from the
circle's center and regained his footing at the opposing side.
"You son of a..."
The haymaker was too obvious to deserve a block. Bill sidestepped the fist,
turning his motion into a backward elbow cut, followed by a second. The farm
boy slumped to the ground as two others approached. The crowd roared, and
someone threw a burning flask of petro into the circle, the glass shards
erupting into an expanding ball of flame. Bill crouched into the sticky dirt
as gunfire filled the air, the crowd falling back as his attackers rolled in
the mud, desperately extinguishing their burning clothes. He didn't realize
the mistake until he was tackled from the side, his already broken rib giving
to another as his face hit a stone.
Bill's nose flattened as Sheff pounded the young gatherer's head a second
time, blood sluicing out the nostrils like a waterfall. Time slowed to a halt
as the crackle of fire and automatic rifles became one; Sheff, trying to say
something out of the corner of his mouth, his upper lip split through the
middle like a pair of outstretched wings, and a carpet of flame spreading
overhead. Sheff seemed to laugh as his skull connected with the ground, wheels
of time resuming their motion as Bill found his arm limply tangled around the
foreman's neck.
The gunfire ceased as the guards fell back into the circle's center, flames
evaporating beneath the foamy spray of chemical extinguishers. Bill felt
himself lifted off the ground and carried to the front of the house, the top
of the timeglass now empty except for the refraction of the dying firelight.
Madre was gone, and her bodyguards with her. Bill scanned the windows and
noticed motion from the balcony as three guards in riot gear, weapons
blasting, forced their passage into the clearing.
"Confukingratulations, Vilo!"
The largest of their number slammed him to the ground with a sturdy
nightstick, belting him over the shoulders until he agreed to remain still.
The second revealed a branding syringe from its cylindrical casing, stabbing
the needle end deep into the small of his left knee. The ensuing howl of
recognition did little to relieve the pain. The guards lifted him to his feet
and turned him back toward the crowd, icy hands hoisting him skyward like some
enfeebled lark as the Madre watched from the safety of her balcony.
"You're one of us, now, Vilo..."
"Hey Madre, he's done!"
She held the tracer in one hand, adjusting its dials with the other and
finally glancing back downward with approval.
"She sees you, man."
They carried him into the stables, each singing with unfounded joy. His
leg throbbed and buckled as they set him down, their bodies rocking with
laughter as he tried to walk.
"Takes time, Vilo."
"Tu saadras... c'mon!"
Bill stumbled forward, forcing himself back to his feet. The knee
threatened to explode as he tested more weight.
"That's it..."
He fell forward again, bracing his fall with outstretched arms.
"What you need... is a good kick in the face." Sheff's words came out
slurred, and Bill heard more laughter as his skull snapped backward with the
force of the blow. A warm, mushy feeling swept over him, holding him down as
he tried to fight for air. The second kick was lower and far more painful.
Voices blurred together in the background as the white ice filled his mind,
numbing his senses as he passed out.
"Hey man, that's cold."
"Payback, Rone. Just payback."
* * *
The cold, black night betrayed the scattered silence of a waiting tempest.
Occasional droplets fell from the heavens, freezing together as solid pebbles
in their descent. The pitter patter of their bodies striking branches and
leaves, mixed with the distant roar of a shallow creek, cascading gently over
smoothed stones and the occasional rustle of a bitter, darktime breeze among
the tall wicks of the lodgepole pines. Ambrose crept quietly through the dense
thicket, his eyes darting back and forth as he moved beside the cabin, the
pungent odor of burning wood chips bringing his body to a crouch and then a
slither. From the corner of his vision he caught the flicker, something ugly
in the playful flame telling him to turn away, but his cabin stood as solid as
he had remembered, and the warmth of its hearth beckoned as the light hail
began to quicken.
"If I knew that, we wouldn't still be here." Mike rubbed the
brittle outgrowth of stubble on his scalp, the metal prongs still
coming as a surprise. Niki pulled her knees against her chest, her
dark eyes still focused on the axe at the hearth.
"I don't like this place, Mike."
"What's so bad about it?"
She shook her head, somehow unable to clarify her feelings.
"You're getting too good at that."
"We don't belong here... and..."
Mike shrugged off the statement, "Of course we don't belong here.
We don't even belong on this planet."
He leaned over her lithe form, closing the window as flakes of hail
bounced off its glass pains. She turned her head away as he paused to
put a hand on her shoulder, the wet hush of confusion and shame
forming within her eyes, refusing almost to acknowledge his presence.
Mike breathed a heavy sigh, "Niki, we're gonna find Bill."
"I know," but her eyes looked away. "It's not that."
"Then what is it?"
Her eyes fell again upon the axe, its dull metal stinging her
psyche like a mega-watt lamp. Mike stepped to the hearth and gathered
the wooden shaft in his hands, weighing it in his mind as a weapon.
Niki said the pain it generated was a beacon to the cabin, but, for
some reason even she could not explain, the pain only grew. It was as
if their arrival sparked its aura, the axe somehow expecting.
Ambrose lifted his boot with a frown as pellets of ice pegged him
in the back of the head. It had taken the better part of an afternoon
to carve the door and set it on its frame. "Oh, what the hell," he
mused with a smile, "doors be fixed."
The wooden portal splintered off its hinges as it fell, the shock
nearly causing Mike to drop the flat of the blade on his foot. An old
man entered the cabin, wild blue eyes bulging from their sockets as he
waved his rifle between Niki and Mike, deciding who to shoot first.
His grizzly beard and shaggy, grey mane dripped water onto a drab
overcoat as droplets of slush fell onto the backs of his boots,
coalescing into a pool at his feet. Suddenly, a smile crossed his face
as his eyes began to settle back in their sockets.
"You gone take a chop at me sonny, or do I have to blow your stupi'
face off?"
Mike dropped the axe to the floor as the gnarled figure trained his
rifle between the gatherer's eyes.
"We mean you no harm," he offered in his best Calannic, which he
knew wasn't anything to brag about. The old man seemed to notice his
trouble and switched to the Galanglic verse.
"You damn right 'bout dat, son. Hell, ya can barely talk straight.
Now slide dat axe over here an have a seat. Psyche... hey psyche for
brains, make me some hot water or I'm gonna blow yer boyfrien' inna
sushi stew."
Mike let the old man cuff his hands as Niki drew the water and set
the kettle over the fire. Ambrose sat down on the bed placing the end
of his barrel against Mike's forehead.
"Heh... heh... sushi stew... yum yum..."
"What do you want from us?"
"Who told ya iz okay ta speak?!" His eyes grew large and wild, the
blue and white seeming to strain apart like the surf and foam of the
sea on Tizar. "Huh... chip-head! Answer me!"
Mike felt the nuzzle of the barrel punch against his forehead.
"We were just staying the night here."
"Staying the night? You say you were staying the night?" His eyes
seemed to soften their glare as the barrel dropped to Mike's chest,
his tongue taking more care to enunciate the interstellar words.
"Hell... you can stay all da nights you want... or days fer that
matter. I put you outside, in my cemetery, like I do all da others and
you can stay long as you like." He nodded his head as if remembering
something he'd forgotten, then turned one eye on the kettle as it
began to steam, the other cocked directly at Mike. "Psyche... what'cha
doin'bout my wata!"
Niki filled the mug and brought it over, a thin steam rising from
the water as she held it before him.
"No woman... not like dat." He opened his drab coat with one hand
and reached into a pocket, struggling against the fabric until he
finally fished out a small leather pouch. "Just a spoon now. Madre's
finest cinnamon," he explained in a whisper as if there were other
people all around. "Nothin' burns the blood warmer dan dat, 'cept if
its got a tad o' spunk for starters. Which it has, o' course." He
fished again and produced a small metal flask. "A wee bit mo dan a
spoon of dis," his other eye winking at Mike as she poured. "Ta steady
ma aim. Can't be making a mess in ma own cabin, now." He drank down
half and offered the rest to Mike. "Consider it in lieu of a las
cigar."
"I don't smoke."
"All da mo reason."
Mike considered the logic for all of two seconds before tilting his
head back and letting the old man pour the last half down his throat.
The liquid would have carried a healthy flavor if not for the heat
scorching his taste buds and flesh of his throat. Mike forced the last
drop down, finally coughing at the end as the man laughed and slapped
his knee.
"Not bad... not bad at all. You would've made a fine fool when I
was a younger."
"It's not to late for that," Niki took the cup back and headed for
the kettle. Mike regarded her comment with as much good humor as he
could muster, a twinkle entering the old man's blue eyes as he watched
her refill the mug.
"Another, or should we get it over wit?"
Mike nodded in favor of the former, hoping to extend his life a few
moments longer. The man smiled, understanding the laconic reply for
all it was worth.
"Ma name's Ambrose."
"Mike."
"Nikita." Niki handed him the mug.
"Well... now dat we know each other's names, les drink."
The night dragged on for many more mug-fulls of Madre's cinnamon
and spunk, a hazy cloud thrashing down on Mike's senses as he lost
count. The man had Niki drink too, and soon began drawing the water
himself as she collapsed on the floor in a giggling fit. Mike didn't
remember when he became aware of the gun sitting in the corner. The
oiled barrel gleamed in the weak, shifting light of the fire's dying
embers.
"C'mon foolson. You an' me play a game. You get to da gun before
me, an' you can kill me." His wild blue eyes seemed to roll clockwise
with the thought. "Ha! I die. Go fer it. You can e'en have da first
step. Two steps. Two steps lead." Something about Ambrose's invitation
told Mike to take the chance, as if the length of his life depended on
some see-saw estimation in the old man's twisted mind. Mike felt his
feet stumble across the slippery floor as he reached the corner, but
the gun was no longer there. The man laughed and aimed the barrel with
one arm, gingerly drinking from his mug with the other. "You lose!"
Mike felt his heart sink as the lonely wail of clouded memories
began coursing into his mind, their withered bodies pushing wildly
through the cold, steel barrel of Ambrose's rifle. For the barest
moment, light burst from its void, outlining a silhouette in crisp
streaks of icy brilliance. In the back of his brain Mike heard the
distant explosion. Gardansa said it was an easy death, more than any
psyche deserved. The old man's eyes sunk backward, the blue like a
crisp winter sky, the white a frosty droplet falling ever faster,
slapping eagerly against the wooden door and then jumping again like a
lazy bird, breaking apart into blood and shattered bone, colliding
with its brethren, falling into puddles, puddles forming rivulets,
coursing together around rocks and mounds in a mad rush for muddy
harmony.
And then only darkness, pitch upon black.
"You gonna shoot me?"
Ambrose blinked, "It's getting to be quite a storm out there.
Proly go to sunrise, at least."
"Yeah."
Mike heard the rattling of sharp, green, dwearmurgrove leaves
against a soft tapestry of color; blues, grays, and amber intermixed
between gentle shades of purple and violet.
"You wanna play again?"
Mike considered what the sun might look like, if morning came.
Maybe, if he won, he would see it, and know.
"Three steps lead... think you can beat me chiphead?"
"I dunno."
"C'mon then an' find out."
Mike waited for Ambrose to replace the rifle in the corner and walk
back to the bed, his tired legs stepping gingerly over the soggy door.
Mike dove forward without warning, scrambling for the gun as Ambrose
climbed over him. They grabbed the gun in unison, a grin of pleasure
coming to Mike's face until he realized he was holding onto the wrong
end. He pulled with all his strength, trying to twist the weapon from
the old man's grip, but Ambrose grabbed the whiskbroom and in a
resourceful moment dusted off Mike's lingering smile.
"Haha! You lose 'gain! Ambro too fast fer the chiphead!"
"I'm not a chiphead."
"Den why're you jacked up, foolson?!"
Mike tried to explain, but his words didn't make much sense even to
his own ears. He finally fell backwards over Niki's sleeping form.
"Hey... chiphead. What're you doin'. Leave 'er lone."
Mike pulled her feet onto the bed, and then let them fall as he
reached for her shoulders, her lithe body seeming unreasonably heavy.
Somewhere in the background he heard the old man laughing. Mike tried
to remember the name as he worked her shoulders up and then moved to
her feet as the young Siri's head plopped again to the floor.
"What're you doin'?"
"Gotta put her... on the bed." Mike moved back to her feet.
"Hey chiphead, don't you got more important things to worry about?"
Mike focused his eyes back on the gun. He struggled to pull Niki by
her legs, finally falling on the bed as a blanket slipped out from
under his knees. Ambrose knelt to the floor, gripping his sides with
glee.
"You could help, y'know."
"Hee hee... Aw, chiphead... you's real funny."
Mike tried to see the humor in the situation. He knelt down to her
arms and tried pulling her up, losing his balance halfway through the
procedure and falling back to the floor. Ambrose set his gun back in
the corner and helped Mike back onto his feet.
"I can't take anymore of this... I'll help but then you gotta play
me again."
Mike shrugged off the old man's arm, "I'm tired of your games."
The task took a good deal of time between the two of them, all the
while Mike feeling the presence of the rifle in the cabin's far
corner. Ambrose sucked in air as he lifted Niki's shoulders and set
them crooked on the torn mattress. By the time he looked back up, Mike
was halfway across the room.
"Why, you..."
Mike heard the footsteps giving chase, a feeling of panic erupting
in his mind as he skidded across the wet, wooden floor falling to his
hands and knees. The gun's barrel seemed to beckon from the corner,
taunting Mike as he crawled desperately toward his target. He finally
reached his goal, raising it in his hands as he turned around to face
Ambrose. The weapon felt heavy and unwieldy, and Mike managed the
barrel into the right direction only after bracing himself into a
sitting position against the corner of the room. Ambrose lay crumpled
over the door he had previously smashed, finally awakening with a
sudden fury.
"You know how long it took you? I was watching!"
"You were out." Mike rubbed beads of perspiration off his palms as
he searched for the trigger.
"Ha! I was pretending. You was slow, chiphead."
"Am not."
"Are too!"
"Am not."
"Are not!"
"Am too."
"Hahahahahaha," Ambrose fell to the floor again, his crackly voice
exploding with laughter until he gasped for breath. Mike tried to
figure out why as he placed his finger inside the trigger guard.
"You forgettin' the safety?"
"Oh yeah." Mike found the safety and clicked it off. With a smile
and a rush of adrenalin he aimed the rifle at Ambrose.
"Go ahead chiphead. Kill me. It's what you wanted to do from the
moment I came in here."
Mike steadied his aim as Ambrose's image weaved from side to side.
"You gutless sushi pie! Hahahah! What are you waiting fer?! You
want me to come over there and pull the trigger fer you?" He stood and
began approaching, his mouth forming into a wide, toothy grin.
"Stay away. I don't wanna shoot you."
"Bull!"
"We were just looking for a friend. He's lost." Mike felt his lungs
gasp for air as Ambrose approached within two meters, the toothy grin
turning wicked.
"You from off world, ain't cha?!"
"Yeah."
"You're an alien! Ya wanna see my leader?!" Ambrose grabbed his
crotch. "Here he is, chiphead!"
Mike lowered the barrel until it rested against the crotch of the
old man's pants. His bright, blue eyes seemed to enlarge in rage as
Mike pressed the barrel deeper.
"I mean it, Ambrose. Either you leave us alone, or your leader
bites the bullet."
"Pull it, you sticking, loser, good fer nothin' chiphead!"
Mike waited until the insults subsided before he pulled the
trigger, a hollow click being the only result.
"Hahahahah..." Ambrose yanked the barrel from Mike's hands and
clubbed him over the shoulder. "You fergit to load something,
chiphead?!"
Mike fell to the ground before the blow registered in his mind, and
even then, what should have been a sharp pain was only a dull throb.
He rubbed his shoulder in mild irritation as Ambrose made a long show
out of loading his gun. When he finally finished, he made Mike drink
two more mugs of "madre's tea."
"You a good younger, chiphead. Someday, you'll be a good oldster
like me."
Mike took it as a reprieve.
"You know how old I am? I'm an octogenarian, and I still kick
yours!" Ambrose laughed at the word, and Mike tried to imagine him as
an octopus back on Tizar, his long tentacles tossing rifles, tea mugs,
and whiskbrooms skyward in an elated dance, the items tumbling like
snowflakes caught in a blizzard, only to descend with the distant roar
of thunder, the blinding light beyond descending as bolts of fire,
igniting the earth in inferno.
"Rise an' shine, Vilo..."
Bill awoke to the gentle nudge, grey eyes opening only as the pain
in his ribs startled his senses. A wide shouldered man knelt beside
him, his dark face familiar in the glimmering rays of morning light
which seeped sluggishly through the barrack entrance. Bill remembered
the tackle and subsequent punch to his side, the splintering feeling
he chose to ignore. A white bandage covered his ribs.
"Madre tells me you'll be breaking fast at her table. My name's
Rone."
He extended a thick, gnarled hand, his thumb only a stump. Bill
let himself be yanked up, the man's remaining fingers surprisingly
strong.
"You hit me with that?"
Rone nodded with a wry smile, "Madre's rules. You break it, you
gotta fix it. I don't know much 'bout healing ribs though."
The tired workers cast long, lazy shadows across the wet, open
field, a purple sky fading to blue as the rising sun peeked over a
distant horizon. A scorched patch of earth was the only reminder of
the recent night's tumble, even the stench of black faded to grey with
the early morning rains. The house seemed warm and homey in
comparison, warm cafe brewing over an open fire, while long, thin
strips of quagga flesh sputtered on the grill. In a large pot, a
compote mixture of honey syrup and various fruit stewed over a gas
flame. Sheff held a spatula in one hand and a mug of steaming, yellow
liquid in the other, a grim acknowledgement passing his eyes as Bill
entered the kitchen.
"Tea, Vilo?" He motioned to the counter. A tall pot stood beside
several half-filled bottles, their labels faded and wrinkled. Bill
tried to decipher some of the writing, but met with little success,
finally reconciling himself to pouring a mug and handing the container
to Rone.
Several of the men had already seated themselves at the round,
wooden table, a large seat at the far end remaining empty, as if
awaiting some important dignitary. With an almost disciplined
uniformity, Bill felt his conspicuous presence carefully ignored.
Familiar eyes seemed to avert from their sockets, dry mouths casually
striking conversation in a foreign tongue, the dull resonance of their
words falling deftly, like snowflakes upon a sodden crater.
The black dodecahedron occupied the table's center, a gaudy
ornament, seeming more a warning than a trophy. Bill felt his attention
involuntarily drawn by the smooth exterior, the shallow etching of a
bird trying to fly as stormy, grey eyes flickered with amusement.
"Then you know."
The brittle rasp of her voice snapped his concentration, its harsh
tone like a sharp sliver of ice cutting the cords of his throat.
Crystal blue eyes betrayed a curious mixture of amusement and disgust
as a fine, silver-white mane shifted with the turn of her head.
"Vilo, I believe you've met Sule."
Bill stared at the offered hand, sharpened nails perfectly
transparent, save for their thin, black outline. Madre seated herself
at the far chair, seeming to enjoy the moment.
"Now show our guest a tad of courtesy. You'll have to forgive him
Sule; he's forgotten his gatherer manners."
Bill looked up, startled at the comment.
"Yes, Vilo... Sule's told us a considerable deal about you and your
friends. Not that any of it particularly matters at this point,
anyhow."
"Unless you make it," Bill felt a twinge of regret at his words, as
though they closed a doorway he'd rather remained open.
"We've tried son, now have a seat, before the fast breaks without
you."
Bill chose a place at the table as Sule stood beside the window,
watching the distant tree line.
"Will you not eat with us, Sule?"
"I'd rather not."
"Suit yourself." Madre dished out a portion of the compote and sent
the rest around the table.
"I think you'll like this Vilo. Do they serve Calannic dishes back
on Tizar?"
"What else did she tell you?"
"That you're name is William... Willian Walker. I like a boy with
W's in his name, but William is just so... I don't know. It sounds so
stiff."
"My friends called me Bill."
"Now Bill is better, but Vilo takes the icing on the cake as far as
I'm concerned. You don't mind it, do you? You mustn't, after all. It's
the name you wore in the door. I'd much rather consider it a
transliteration than a flat out lie."
Bill decided he preferred food to conversation, downing his bowl
and filling a second, before looking back across the table. His ears
had filtered out the clutter of their alien language, separate
discussions merging together as one and then suddenly falling away.
Madre seemed to share Sule's fascination with the treeline, letting
her eyes wander to the window as she ate.
"I haven't told you any lies... yet."
She glanced back toward him, his words scarcely noticed.
Except by Sule, "What makes you so sure you're going to get
another opportunity?"
Bill turned toward the window. Her eyes seemed to flicker with a
quiet sort of laughter, almost mocking in their intensity.
"He's not for sale, Sule."
"I'll throw in an extra million drin."
Madre set her spoon down to the table, wiping her lips with a cloth
as if considering the offer.
"He's one of my own now; well, since last night, actually. You
missed quite an initiation. The point being that he's recognized and
can't be sold like some... some hunk of cermic." She motioned toward
the table ornament.
Sule regarded the statement with a mixture of confusion and
resentment, finally turning back toward the window with a sudden
movement in the treeline.
"I'm sure we can settle the matter at a more convenient hour. It
seems that your men have returned."
Madre and Sule waited at the porch as the scout team trudged
through the thick, shallow mud. An old man took the forward position,
leading the others along the gate's outer edge, through the barbed
aisle, and into the inner circlet. The rest of the team broke off from
him as he approached the house itself, moving toward the barracks as
he waived them away. He finally pulled the hood away from his taunt,
weathered face as he ascended the porch steps, letting it settle
against the grey shoulders of his coat. His blue eyes seemed to
sparkle with a weary brand of playfulness as he focused on the Madre,
the drab browns and grays of the landspace serving a subtle contrast.
"Sule, this is Ambrose. Ambrose, Sule."
"You the imp."
"That's correct."
"Ha! You been makin' bed too, Madre?"
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
"Heh... you should have to ask... Hey! Be that my food I'm
smellin'?"
He stepped toward the door, halting only as she grabbed his
shoulder.
"Long time, Madre. I understand."
"Wipe your soles, Ambrose," she scolded.
He shot her a toothy grin as he kicked the mud off his boots.
"Not a way to welcome yer old man..."
"I keep my hospitality for those who earn it."
His thin, grey lips curled blue against the cold, a lethargic snarl
escaping his throat as he pointed a long, bony finger in her general
direction.
"What in heck's you think I've been doin' woman? Polishin' my
one-eye?!"
"In your case, I wouldn't be surprised."
Their voices slipped into the domestic tongue as they mutually spat
a clamor of open insults, Sheff's eyes widening and his sewn lip
stretching into an unabashed grin.
Rone stifled a chuckle as he leaned toward Bill, "Man and wife will
be man and wife."
"Serious?"
"No more so than any other marital ritual. She's mad at him cause
he went and left her all alone. He's mad at her cause she threw him
out the door... and then some."
"How often this happens?"
"Oh... once every other season... maybe give two or three. Except
for this mornin', before you woke, it was near to a full cycle since
I'd seen the man. You think this is bad, you should be here when they
break up."
Rone turned his head toward the door as the trio ushered themselves
inside, Sule skirting along their fringes like an eccentric comet
revolving about a closely paired binary. She maintained a blank
expression, as though waiting for the commotion to subside. When it
didn't, she merely stood there, her impatience become increasingly
apparent.
"Does ignoring 'em make 'em go away?"
Bill winced as several of the others laughed at his question, their
amusement catching the old man's attention. His bulbarous blue eyes
bulged out like two rotten lemons wildly seeking the perpetrator of
the query.
"Who be the negrali younger?"
Bill felt numerous pairs of eyes fix on his general location.
"Hmmm... you be a popular boy, Billy."
"You know my name?"
"I just got done blowing holes in yer friends!" He laughed wildly
at the memory, yanking his grey coat open with one hand and pulling a
short stocked automatic out with the other. "Boom boom! Sushi stew!
Hah!"
"Ambrose... how could you?"
"Woman, I did it! That's how! Now where's a bowl? Killing makes me
hungry."
Bill felt his legs kick over Rone's chair as he dove toward the old
man, his arms outstretched, fighting desperately to be relieved of
their sockets. The barrel smacked him against the side of the skull as
he fell, Rone tackling him from behind and ramming a now familiar,
mutilated fist into his already broken ribs. The sensation of pain was
more numbing than he recalled, suffocating as it fell. He gasped for
air, but his lungs felt clogged and heavy, and he choked out the salty
taste which swept through his windpipe.
The old man spat something in the guttural tongue, the force of his
words relieving the pressure on Bill's back. The sharp jab of cold
steel replaced the smothering pain, and a safety pin clicked amidst
the clutter of alien voices, quietly hushing the static.
"No Ambrose. Not in my house."
"Your house? Woman, you got quagga eggs fer brains!"
"Amb..."
"My offer stands." Sule's harsh voice cut through the impending
squabble, shattering the old man's attention.
"We'll be seein' to you later, ya scrawgy imp!"
"Eleven million drin. Interested?"
"What?!?"
"For him and the black hunk of cermic... center table."
Bill felt Rone lift him off the floor as Ambrose gathered the
dodecahedron into his free hand.
"Heh. Birdy."
"A robin to be more precise."
"I knew dat!" Ambrose leveled the barrel toward her stomach.
"Do we have a deal?"
"Sure... eleven em-drin fer Ambro... a robin and a dead younger for
the ugly thing."
"Live younger..."
"No deal."
Bill felt Rone cuff his wrists, holding them back and up so he
couldn't jerk free. Sule's stare betrayed nothing other than apathy,
both for the gun and the man who wielded it.
"Name your price."
Ambrose smiled his greedy grin, setting the butt of his barrel
against Bill's ear.
"Is only one more body for ma cemetery, which is overfull already
so I won't be askin' too much. Fifty em-drin, you want him alive."
"You must be out of your mind."
His eyes bulged outward, blues and whites confirming her
observation.
"Don't make me any madder dan I already am. I will blow his fool
head off."
Her face remained unchanged, but her eyes seemed to glitter over
with laughter. "Then fifty it is."
"What? You accept?" Settling blue eyes stared at her in disbelief.
"As if I had another choice." She gathered the dodecahedron from
the old man's free hand and gently nudged his other aside as she
gripped Bill's cuffed wrists and wrenched them upward as far as they'd
reach without dislocating his shoulders.
"I'll transfer the money into your wife's account."
"Before you go."
"Colonel Arman will be arriving shortly. If you don't trust me,
then trust him."
"I trust him all right... just as far as I can kick his blubbery,
snot-nosed..."
"Ambrose!"
The salt water used to sting her eyes, something about the sea repelling her
even as she used to spend the night along the water's edge. As then, she sat
beside him, smoothing the wavy curls of hair as he slept. Their journey to
Calanna had been without incident. The Galactican was welcome, or so he'd
thought. But something in her eyes told him otherwise, though she'd follow
him all the way to her execution. Both knowledge and the sea were like that
with her, something that could hurt you but was too big to change. "Playing
with fate is a fool's work." It was as if she had foreseen her own, but
resigned herself without telling anyone. Not even him.
The bullet pierced the tree's lower limb, scattering leaves and berries
across the grassy bed below. Mike and Niki awoke with a startle, rolling away
from the sturdy trunk as Ambrose giggled with delight, his soggy boots kicking
leaves and dirt into their faces.
"Ha! You youngers sure is funny."
He leaned against the trunk, peering up between the leaves at the crisp,
blue sky. In his free arm, he carried a large, brown blanket. On his belt, the
wood handled axe hung with a small spark lighter. A thin metal disk nestled
against his shin, strapped there by a tight elastic cord.
"Rise an' shine, sushi-stains... ol' uncle Ambro bring happy tidings fer a
happy morn."
Mike crawled to his knees, shaking away the fading memories of his dream.
"Surprised to be alive?"
Mike looked at Niki and then back at Ambrose and finally nodded, "a
little."
"So you should be. I normally kill chipheads just fer bein' chipheads.
Nothin' personal about it. But then, you being so recently shaved and all, I
figured you must be real cute with a full head o' hair. You are, aren't you?"
Mike looked back at Niki. She shot him a worried smile, something she'd
saved up for a rainy day, he figured. Sunshine spilled over the dew laden
grass, the nearby sound of rushing water distracting his senses. He tried to
remember when he'd seen Calanna so beautiful.
"Hey, you still in lala-land?"
"Where are we?" Mike stood up and glanced over several rocks beside the
stream. The gravchute lay against the nearest boulder.
"Well, considerin' everything dere is to consider, I'd say we're at a tea
drinkers crash-haven. Not that it matters much. All I know is dat your
fandangle o'er dere seemed to suggest it was a nice enough place to stop last
night. Me? I don' care much either way."
A cool, morning breeze gathered Niki to her feet, her usually carefree eyes
still sharp and bitter, despite the drug's aftertaste.
"My stuff."
"Gone." Ambrose announced the word as a matter of fact, as though any more
thoughts or emotions on the topic would be wasted. "All I have fer you is
right here." He set down the blanket, knife, spark lighter, and rifle. "Oh
yeah, an' dis. Heh, almost fergited." He handed her a small slip of paper.
She read it momentarily and glanced back up.
"I don't get it."
"What's there not to get?"
"This is a check, made payable to Mike for fifty million drin."
"Dat's true as my big blue eyes, which nobody fails to notice, Mister
Harrison."
Mike looked up, realization slowly dawning.
"How'd you know my name?"
"I read the papers too, y'know. No sense learnin' Galanglic unless yer
gonna. I liked dat piece on Telmar. Very nicely done, and correct to boot.
Civil war and all dat. Makes me almost glad to be here instead. I would o'
recognized you right off da bat too, if it wasn't fer yer clever disguise."
Mike felt the thick stubble on his head, the metal jacks protruding from
their dense growth.
"Makes you look like a genuine chiphead. I was goin' to blow yer head off,
but when you said yer first name, something just clicked in dat old skull o'
mine. Not dat I was absolutely sure, y'know. But it did fit, you losin' a
friend and all. I understand dat's fairly common."
Mike felt his skin grow cold as he pocketed the check.
"The only thang I didn't understand, which I'm only beginnin' to, is why
yer e'en here. Madre said it was cause the imps nabbed one o' yer friends. I
figed dat couldn't be the whole story. Seeing how if it was, you'd be chasin'
after all sorts of people everywhere."
"Right now I'm lookin' for another friend."
"Huh? Oh, silly me. Talkin' too much and fergitin' why I'm e'en here." He
reached to his shin, unstrapping a metal disk. "Go ahead, open it."
Mike opened the catch and peered at the dark surface beneath. Several
rings were inscribed within the crystal display, and an shiny green dot
blinked steadily at the outer circlet, hovering off the display as the rings
closed inward, pulling it backward with their retreat.
"It's a tracer. That dot is yer friend."
Mike looked up, unsure as to whether he could believe the old man.
"I know this comes as somethin' sudden, but there was no way we could just
let him go. That would be aidin' a criminal. Arman's too familiar with our
operation. He knows people don't just escape. It was either give him away once
the paperwork got done or sell him off to the imps."
"Imperials?!"
"They'd have gotten him sooner or later. But time is money, if you know
what I mean."
Mike nodded, "And people are profits."
Ambrose snorted at the remark. "All depends who's buying."
"At the rate this blip is moving, we're gonna need transportation."
"Dat's what the money's fer. I've gotta friend, Cole, say 'bout twenty-five
an' some odd kilometers downstream. Say Ambrose send ya an' dat yer a payin'
customer an' dat ya wanna go straight to Xin. Ya go to Aelflan an' yer a dead
man, hear me? By da time yer in city limits, yer have yer friend back in
focus. An' with any luck, da imps'll keep dere songbirds in one choir, if ya
follow me at all."
Mike picked up the gun, checking the magazine for bullets.
"Cole's gonna have more o' dat too."
"I'm not sure how we can thank you."
"Ha! Don't git mushy now. Blow away a few imps'll be thanks enough fer me.
But now dat you mention it, dere is one thing..."
"Anything."
"Well, I hope it ain't too much, but ya think ya could mention me in da
story?"
Mike grinned at the request as he nodded his acquiescence and tried to
imagine what Chuck would think.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim's a grad-student at UC Riverside, hoping and praying like crazy that he'll
get his MBA before the dean's axe gets him first. In between classes and term
papers, he can be found editing `The Guildsman', the raunchiest gaming zine
ever to be published. `The Harrison Chapters' were originally written as a
setting description for his Traveller (SF-RPG) campaign. His story, he says,
is what you get when you combine an overactive imagination with the foolish
tendency to wing it. He says he writes exactly the same way he gamemasters:
without any semblance of plan or preconception.
What has been published here as Chapter Five is actually chapters eight and
nine as written originally by Jim. `The Harrison Chapters' will be continued
next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Battle for Ayers Rock
by Robert Fur
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
From: U.N.S.S. ORLANDO, Captain Pappas commanding
To: Current U.N.C.O. administrators
Sirs,
By the time you read this, I will have been dead for fifty years.
Perhaps I should have put that first sentence another way.
As soon as I finish this message, I will take the Captain's skiff and enter
the atmosphere without power. By doing this, I hope that I will die. If, by
some miracle, I survive, it shall not be for long.
The planet you sent us to will kill me, and, even though this has the outward
appearance of a suicide, I will believe to the end that it is not.
It is murder.
You killed us.
This planet you sent us to will kill us all, in time. I believe that this will
be yet another colony whose name will be engraved in stone on a monument in
Berne, one line of barren inscription to mark the passing, fifty years ago, of
twenty thousand men and women.
If you have any questions as to why I say this, I suggest you look at the
information that accompanies this message. Human life cannot survive on a
planet where the deserts are larger than the oceans, where the icecaps are
larger than the deserts, and the food algae won't grow. We will die of
thirst, and if we don't die of thirst, we will die of cold, and if not cold,
starvation, and if, through some wild chance, or through intercession by a
sadistic God, we do not starve to death, we will surely die when the
technology taken from the Orlando wears out.
In agreeing to captain the Orlando, I took responsibility for the twenty
thousand people on board. I still have that responsibility, but I haven't the
power to help them.
It was my responsibility. I abdicate it. I now lay the blame at your door, and
I hope that at least one of the men who sent us here is still alive to hear
what his decision did to us.
I am going now, to die on the planet below. I always wanted to be buried at my
home in Greece, but if I cannot have that, then I will at least die in a place
with the right name. I will still die on Thessaly.
Captain N. J. Pappas
1/67 Thessaly Standard Date
The first thing I heard when I woke up that morning was an explosion. So was
the second, and the third. Dull, flat explosions, their sounds muffled by the
dust and distance around the Rock. I couldn't see anything, but since I was
still in my duster's tent, that made a lot of sense. You can't see much when
you're in a little canvas tube that you covered with dust the night before.
So, I crawled out of my tent, and kicked it until it collapsed. I'd set it up
again at night, but I couldn't leave it up because of the dayhiders. The
dayhiders around the Rock are bigger, meaner, and more poisonous than the ones
that wander into houses near Celton. Their front four legs have stingers, not
just the front two, and they don't run away from humans. They fight back if
the human wants his tent back, and nine times out of ten, the human doesn't
win.
I hate dayhiders.
Anyway, I picked up my issues, and shook them to get rid of all the little
nasties that crawl in clothes at night. No nasties fell out, so I pulled them
on. If no bug wanted to sleep in my issues, that was fine with me. My climbing
rig was just a cow leather vest with about twenty pounds of climbing spikes
hung on it, so I didn't need to shake it too hard. I slung that over my
shoulder, and went to eat.
The explosions continued, but I knew that sound...those were Celton
ballista rounds, little rockets with compressed fireweed oil in their tips.
The ballistas fire them twenty at a time, and they make big, hollow explosions
when they hit.
The chow line was behind the bombshield, the big net hung between the Rock
and the main camp, and I walked around it, looking around for anyone else that
I might want to eat with. That is, anybody who might have some news about what
was going on, and why we were here, and all that. But nobody but the usual
boring crew was in the mess pit, so I grabbed a loaf of peelbread and a bottle
of water, and sat down (I really wanted a beef sandwich, but beef was too
expensive to give to people in Service.) I still ate better then than I ever
had at home, but the time the Servicegroup had been in Celton had given me
some expensive tastes. Like cow beef. Cows didn't live anywhere except right
along the Sea. There was land near the Ocean where people thought they could
live, but nobody had ever managed to get a cow across the Dust. And so, there
were maybe ten thousand cows on Thessaly, along with maybe another ten
thousand sheep, and I don't know how many tens of thousands of camels, and I
can't eat camel beef. So, most of my pay that doesn't go home goes to monthly
trips to the beef house, when I'm in Celton (when I'm in the field, it all
goes home.)
After I finished the dry peelbread, I stood up and wandered over to where
the captain was. I wouldn't have done it in town, but in the Dust things get a
little less formal. And, besides, my watch wasn't for another four hours. I
looked at the captain, a tall, fat man with the sort of build that makes you
think that there's a skinny man inside trying to get out. His issues' sleeves
were pushed back, and he was staring at the base of the Rock. I sat down and
looked where he was looking.
The ballistamen were pinned down right at the base of the Rock, and they
couldn't get their gear set up, much less do any good up there. The
Landingers were dug in far enough back that the ballistas couldn't get a good
angle, and they were tossing boomite bottles over the lip every time the
explosions stopped.
Which meant one thing.
I knew what it meant, so I sat there looking like I didn't know what it
meant, in the hopes that the captain wouldn't notice that I knew. Right.
Whatever I say.
"Macklamore, get your scrawny duster butt up that rock. Now." The captain
was a career Serviceman, muscles gone almost to fat, sloppy in a dirty gray
shipsuit, but that didn't make him blind.
There I was, sitting down right next to the captain, on a pile of rope,
making little jingling noises with my climbing spikes every time I breathed,
and I was hoping he wouldn't remember the fact that I was the only duster in
the watch who knew how to climb Ayers Rock.
Like I said before: Right. Whatever.
I stood up. The captain looked at me, looked up the sheer sides of the
Rock, and turned his attention back to getting the ballistamen out of danger.
He knew that if I didn't go up the Rock, he'd shoot me himself. And since he
knew that I knew that, he didn't have to watch me.
The captain is smarter than he looks.
Anyway, I started picking up the ropes and the chunkers and the sliders,
and tried to spot a way up the Rock that the Landingers weren't covering.
That's not true.
I stood there and looked at the Rock.
The Rock is funny, there's nothing like it for klicks and klicks to either
side on the coastline, and there's a wide plain behind it full of morons and
not much else inland, but there it sits. Six hundred meters tall. Six hundred
meters wide, too, which makes it look like half of a pair of craps from the
right angle. The damn thing is flat on top, with a little pit perfect to
store food in, and it's got total arty coverage of the entire western march
down to Port Landing, if you can get a catapult up there. Best damn layout on
Thessaly, and the Landingers got to it first. And since the western march is
five days shorter than the east march, we've got to go to town this way.
But we can't without taking out the Landingers on Ayers Rock.
I grew up on a little island near here, so I'm not a duster by birth, but
since earth fish don't hang out near the old homestead, my family had to come
in past the Rock about every month to hunt, if we wanted to eat. If we wanted
good food, we had to climb the Rock, to get at the earthbirds that nested on
top. After Jerm took the dive off of it, I had to climb the Rock for the
family. (Jerm was my brother.) I hadn't been back since I'd joined the
Service.
Which makes these homecoming memories kind of out of place.
The Landingers were dropping their bombs with the fuses cut to go at like
ten meters off the ground, and since they were wrapping the bombs in glass, it
was really ripping into the ballistamen. They couldn't retreat, they couldn't
go forward carrying their tubes.
Fine. Fine and dandy. I had to figure out a way to climb the damn Rock
without getting my ass nailed in the first fifteen meters.
There was the old creek bed on the inland side of the Rock, that got you
pretty close to the base...but the Landingers weren't stupid. They had to
have someone watching it.
Didn't they?
I couldn't figure out anything better to try. Might as well give that a go.
If I bit dust, then I bit dust. So what. I picked up the last of my ropes,
grabbed my autoslot,and trotted off around the Rock.
I stopped off at the ammo dump. Grench was there, sitting on top of a pile
of slotter ammo crates and whittling away at a bolt for a roper. He looked
just like he always did, sleeveless Service shirt, dull gray after a week in
the Dust, wide ripper-leather belt with more knives and ammo slung than I
usually carry into a slotfest, and looking half-asleep. I knew it was all a
cover. He liked being the quartermaster, so he never looked like he gave a
damn about it. If they knew he liked it there, they'd move him out, because
anyone who likes being quartermaster is probably selling half of his inventory
to the highest bidder. So, they left him there. Smarter than he looks, our
Grench.
"Grench!" I said. "The captain says I gotta go talk with the Landites
upstairs. Can I snag a rack of ballista?"
"All the ballista ammo is over with the tubes." Grench said, never even
looking at me. Right next to the pile he was sitting on was a siege roper, the
big sort they use to put a fireweed net over a wall. Nine tubes were full.
The one left was primed, without a bolt, and it was aimed at the top of the
Rock. I looked at Grench a little more closely. He was staring at the top of
the Rock, too.
"Grench, you can't torch the Rock!"
"Why not?"
"You'll fry the ballistamen!"
"Only if they're alive to fry. If they're dead, I don't need to worry."
Grench wasn't much for honoring the dead. And Grench didn't like Port Landing
much. And Grench really didn't like Landingers. I don't know why. Grench won't
tell, either.
"Okay, whatever. You don't have any ballista racks?"
"Nope." Grench was in his 'I don't want to talk' mood. "Fine. Got anything
else explosive I could take?"
"Um." He looked around, and pointed at a large box over to the side. "You
can take those."
"What are they?" I'd never seen that box open.
"Ship rounds."
"Ship rounds. Great. Fine." Ship rounds weigh ten kilos apiece, and they go
off on impact, scattering burning fireweed everywhere. No fuses. Built to make
life on a ship impossible. Normally, they're fired from a ship's main cannon,
so nine times out of ten the person popping one off won't see the explosion.
So the armsmen make them as big as they want to...one is supposed to be enough
to cover an entire ship. I didn't want to think how far I could throw one, but
I didn't want to bet I could throw one far enough. Even if I had to use them,
I probably wouldn't survive it, but they were better than nothing. I broke
open the box, and stared at the big, glass-slick cylinders that I was going to
have to climb six hundred meters with. One slip, and either I went boom or
half the Celton force did.
I took two.
They fit in the canteen pockets on the back of my issue vest, but the flaps
wouldn't button. Which wasn't a problem. If I was upside down, I was screwed
up a moron's ass anyway, and I didn't figure on drinking much on the way up.
The last thing I did before hauling dust over to the creekbed was to look
at where the ballistamen were down. The bombing had stopped, and the surviving
ballistamen were cruising out of there like a banshee on homebrew. They'd left
their tubes behind. I saw them running, about a half a klick or so away from
where I was, they were almost to the bombshield. And then I saw a huge package
tumble down the side of the Rock.
So did everyone else. As that thing bounced its way down to the ground,
everyone dropped to the ground, or ran, or anything, away from anything that
might explode.
They knew as well as I did that something that big had to be a fireweed
bomb, and one that size could cover the whole encampment in fire. Those people
who were behind the bombshield would be all right, but I wasn't going to put
bets on anyone else's survival. Except mine. I was out of range. I had to be.
I ducked behind a boulder anyway.
Then the explosion came.
I didn't feel anything hot anywhere near me, so I stood up.
None of the fireweed had landed anywhere near the bombshield, not much had
landed on the slotter's line, and a whole big slab had landed on the ammo
dump, and was burning merrily away. The whole face of the Rock was on fire,
pretty much, and nobody was going to be getting anywhere near the tubes for a
while.
The ammo dump. Grench.
I ran a little ways back, but then I saw what had to be him, standing and
watching the Rock, about thirty meters away from the dump. He wasn't running,
so I knew that he hadn't loaded the charges into his roper, just the fireweed.
Which meant that the ammo dump was gone. There's enough fireweed in a
ten-barrel siege roper to keep it burning for days. If he'd loaded the
charges, the charges would have cooked off and the fireweed would have gone
everywhere, but it would have been scattered, and we might have been able to
save some ammo.
No ammo meant that we were damned screwed. Each Serviceman had sixty
slotter rounds, maybe ten bolts, and a grenade. That's all we had for the next
three days. We were screwed.
I turned back to the Rock.
We were screwed, unless I could climb the fucking Rock and dust the
Landites. Nobody else we had on hand was a rock climber, much less a Rock
climber. I couldn't take anyone with me, without both of us getting killed by
me trying to shoot and shepherd a newby climber at the same time. If I did it
right, we could take the top of the Rock and hold it until the rest of the
troop came. If I didn't, they could hold it until their relief got here.
I hate responsibility.
The creekbed was in sight, so I dropped and rolled in the dust, all over. I
rubbed dust in my hair, over my ropes, my face. I spat and rubbed dust and
spit on the metal gear. Then I ran like brickfield and jumped into the creek.
Then I waited.
Nobody dropped a bomb on me, so I figured I hadn't been seen.
The creekbed was about two meters deep, mostly, maybe less, and dry as the
Duster. Been a dry summer around here, I guessed. My folks were probably
starving back home, they couldn't get a crop in, and now we were over here
playing Serviceman on their hunting grounds.
I ran towards the rock, keeping low. As I got nearer, I dropped further and
further, until I was crawling at the very end.
Looking up, I swung out of the creekbed, and ran right towards a little
indentation in the Rock face. I looked up again. No Landinger faces looked
back.
Originally, when I started writing this, I was going to tell everything,
but now that I think about it, I'm going to skip over the climb. I can't
really explain how I climb, or what happens during a climb. There's no space
left in my head for memory, or thought, or anything. The world narrows down to
me and the next handhold. Nothing else.
Nobody dropped anything on me, nobody shot at me. I made it to the top all
right. I heard explosions on the other side of the Rock, but none near me.
Anything else...well, the Rock is still there, and I've told you enough so you
could probably find where I started. Go climb it yourself. If you want real
fun, do it when someone's dropping a few hundred kilos of boomite near you.
At any rate, I pulled myself over the top, and looked around. It's a great
feeling, unlike anything else on Thessaly, to actually stand on top of The
Rock.
But I don't recommend it while there's a war on.
The top of the Rock looked just like it had last time I'd been there. Same
birds, same rocks, same everything, except for a little tent, and three
hungry-looking men watching me, two with slotters, one with his hands still on
the crate that he had just emptied down onto the Celton force.
"Hi." I said, and dropped my slotter.
"You're a Celton." one of the ones with slotters said. This one had more of
a uniform than the other two. His still had the sleeves. And if the Landingers
used the same system we do, he was a sergeant. He looked like one, I guess.
Older, balding, a little more heavy set than the other two.
"Right." I said.
"You came to kill us." said the one with the crate. He was young, maybe
sixteen, and gaunt.
"Right again." I put my hands behind my head.
"With that?" the sergeant said, pointing at my slotter on the ground.
"Nope," I said, moving my hands just a little.
"Then how?" said the sergeant.
"With this." I said, and pulled one of the ship rounds up and over my head,
and I'm sure I sprained my wrist doing it. I pulled the arming key. "You shoot
me, this drops, and the entire top of the Rock goes bye-bye. "That won't do
it." the sergeant said, not moving his slotter an inch from its aim right at
my forehead.
"No, but the second one on my back, and the ballista rounds I've got in my
pockets, will." I figured a little extra threat would help, even if I had to
make it up. Actually, even with the second one, the blast wouldn't be that
big. Big, yes, but if they managed to find cover, and there was a lot of it
around, they could survive. But I hoped they were a little out of it. They
looked hungry, and desperate, and if I offered a way for them to get out of
this alive, maybe they'd take it.
"Josephi, Saunders, go stand over there. Behind those rocks." said the
sergeant, and the other two went. Out of range. Damn. "Look," he continued,
to me this time, "We can't let you move us. Now either you disarm that round
or you and I go over the cliff together." He looked like he meant it, too. The
factual type. I sighed.
"All right," I said and pushed the arming key back in. I hoped it clicked.
"Sit down," he said, pointing with his slotter.
I sat.
"Now, we talk."
"Why?"
"Because I want to. Because I want to ask a real-live Celton a few
questions. Because I want..."
"I'm not a Celton." I interrupted.
"What?" he looked confused.
"I'm not a Celton." I repeated.
"You're wearing Celton gear."
"So I work for them."
"That's a good enough reason to kill you."
"Fine. Go ahead, kill me."
He stopped, looked confused some more, opened his mouth, and then closed it
again. He closed his eyes, and breathed in. Then he opened them again and said
"What are you, if you're not a Celton?"
"I'm from a little town on the Styx, upriver from Detroit, but my family
made a port on a little island about thirty klicks that way when I was
little." I pointed out to sea.
"Then why'd you enlist?" he asked.
"Enlist?"
"You know, join up."
"Oh...Join the Service. Yeah. Well, my parents had four other kids to deal
with, the earthlife fishing was off, and they could have used the bounty
money. So I got it for them. Two years ago."
He paused. "Do you know why you're invading?"
This was a big change in conversation. "No. I figure it's something stupid
as always."
"Not this time."
"No?"
"No. The last metsat report. There's a storm whipping up in the Dust,
heading this way across Ocean."
"So?"
"It's a really big storm. It'll pick up strength as it crosses Ocean. And
they think that by the time it hits here, it'll be strong enough to break
Ocean through to the Sea."
I blinked. "Ohhhhh damn. Brickfield and damn."
"That's right. The Celton earthfarms are between Ocean and the Sea. Once
it breaks through, there won't be any food that a human can eat anywhere in
Celton. Or Chunglyng. Or Dustsown. No food anywhere except Landing and Detroit
and a few other minor ports. And we don't especially want to share."
"Why not?" I wasn't pissed, I was just annoyed.
"Because our harvest is smaller than last year's, and last year we almost
had food riots anyway. Before this is over, more than half of the people on
Thessaly will have died of starvation."
"The...the fisheries?"
"Some killed by the new water. Some eaten by new Thessalife. And the rest
so dispersed that they probably won't be able to breed." He paused, looked
up. "I don't especially want my kids to starve, Serviceman."
"I don't want my family to starve either, muckhead."
"Nobody does. Nobody can win this war, and only about a third of us will
survive it. Besides, this area of the Sea is under Landing control."
"So?"
"Landing will try to send food to anyone they can...under Landing control.
We can't try to feed everyone. We can try to feed our own."
I just sat there for a while.
They hadn't told us. Any of us.
"Can't we do anything?"
"We?" he asked back.
"Celton."
"I don't know. I guess the Portmaster is probably doing everything he can,
harvesting early, moving as many farms as he can. I don't think it'll be
enough."
"No. Probably not."
I stood, numbly, at the time not thinking about the slotter aimed at me.
And then I walked over to the edge of the cliff, and looked towards home.
I looked down, at the Servicemen I'd served with for a year.
I looked back at the sergeant. This man could have surrendered before now,
but he hadn't. He was still here, starving slowly. Surrendering isn't a
problem, you just wait three months and then you're back at home. No problem.
We hadn't been told why we were invading this time, either. Normally, we
get a big speech about why we need to invade, or why we have to defend against
this invasion. Not this time. I looked north, towards Celton. It had to be my
imagination, but I saw clouds on the horizon. Dark ones.
"How long?" I asked, without turning around.
"Eight to ten days," the sergeant said.
Grench would survive, I knew him, he would always survive, and he was the
only Serviceman with whom I was friends. And if this man was telling the
truth, I had to go tell my family, had to help, had to try and save what I
could. I removed the other ship round from my vest, handed both to the
sergeant. "Here." I said. "I don't have anything else. You can catch the birds
here by putting out your water decontamination pills in little balls of bread.
They explode, and they taste better than nothing."
"I've got to go home," I said.
______________________________________________________________________________
Rob Furr is a senior at James Madison University in Virginia. He's been
writing SF for over ten years, and was once told that his writing was on the
level of old SF pulp magazines. He took this as a compliment. His interests
range from high explosives, through iguanas, to animation, and he hopes to one
day make a music video featuring an exploding komodo dragon. Other than that,
he's tall, with dark-brown hair, glasses, and bad posture. He works in a
computer center, where he spends a good bit of time hunched over a keyboard.
He's also not very good at writing third-person biographical sketches.
STU_RSFURR@JMUVAX1.BITNET
______________________________________________________________________________
If you enjoy Quanta, you may
want to check out these other
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distributed electronically:
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An Electronic Fiction Digest Contact: jsnell@ucsd.edu
InterText, like its predecessor, Athene, is devoted to publishing
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editor is Jason Snell, and associate editors are Geoff Duncan and
Phil Nolte, all of whom have been seen in the pages of Athene or
Quanta (or both).
InterText is published in both ASCII and PostScript formats (though
the PostScript laser-printer version is the version of choice). Its
first issue will appear next month. For a subscription (specify
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DargonZine is an electronic magazine printing stories written for
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David "Orny" Liscomb in his now retired magazine, FSFNet. The
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in the far reaches of the Kingdom of Baranur on the world named
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DargonZine is (at this time) only available in flat-file, text-only
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The Journal of the Gamers' Guild of UCR
Contact: jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
The Guildsman is an electronic magazine devoted to role-playing
games and amateur fantasy/SF fiction. At this time, the Guildsman
is available in LaTeX (.tex) source and PostScript formats via
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printing and postal costs. For more information, email
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu (internet), ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
(thank you, thank you very much)
**
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Volume III Issue 3 ISSN 1053-8496 July 1991
__________________________________________ ___________________________________
Quanta (ISSN 1053-8496) is
Volume III, Issue 3 July, 1991 Copyright (c) 1991 by Daniel K.
__________________________________________ Appelquist. This magazine may be
ARTICLES archived, reproduced and/or
distributed freely under the
`Looking Ahead' condition that it is left intact
Daniel K. Appelquist and that no additions or changes
are made to it.
The individual works within
`Digging In at Oregon Moonbase' this magazine are the sole property
Doug Helbling of their respective author(s). No
further use of their works is
SERIALS permitted without their explicit
consent. All stories in this
`The Harrison Chapters' magazine are fiction. No actual
Jim Vassilakos persons are designated by name or
character. Any similarity is
coincidental.
`Earth as an Example' All submissions, requests for
Jesse Allen submission guidelines, requests for
back issues, queries concerning
SHORT FICTION subscriptions, letters, comments or
other correspondence should be sent
`The Situation is Critical' to one of the following addresses:
Elizabeth Dykstra
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
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`The Last Laugh'
Rob Chansky Requests to be added to the
distribution list should be sent to
one of the following addresses. For
`Footprints on the Sands of Time' PostScript subscriptions, send to:
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For ASCII subscriptions, send to:
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__________________________________________ Please send mail messages only-- no
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______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
I've got a lot of nerve to sit here and think that you'd bother to read an
editor's column; hell, I certainly don't in other magazines. But just in case
you happen to be reading, I do have some news for y'inz (That's a
Pittsburghism -- more evidence of my inevitable mental decline.)
Topping the bill, it seems that as `The Net' continues to expand, the
number of net fiction magazines expands with it. A new magazine, `Core', has
sprung up, or is in the process of springing up. Core's editor is Rita
Rouvalis (rita@eff.org), and while I don't know very much more about it, I
wish her good luck. More info on Core is provided at the end of this issue,
along with `ad's' for other network magazines.
I was pleased to see that InterText came out with its second issue this
month. Originally, we were going to plan it so that our magazines did not
come out at the same time, but I'm afraid delays and erratic schedules on both
sides have ruined this rather neat plan. Oh well, those of you subscribed to
both magazines will just have more to read this month...
Magazines like InterText, Core, and Quanta are important for a reason:
creativity. The greatest gift of man is to be able to create, to come up with
new ideas, new visions. This creativity is the stuff of life. That is one of
the reasons why I edit and produce Quanta -- I'd like to think that I am doing
my part to engender this process of creativity. Of course, I say this knowing
full well that I have none of my own, at least not for this column.
This is the tenth issue of Quanta yet produced, and it's a really good one.
We have for you, something old, something new, some original viewpoints and
some familiar voices. I think you'll find it interesting. Hopefully you'll
find it as enjoyable to read as it was time-consuming to edit! I really
enjoyed editing this issue. I think that, perhaps, after almost two years of
this, I'm finally getting the hang of it.
On that topic, I'm still combing the Net for submissions. I urge any
writers or potential writers out there to come forward with stories and/or
articles. I'm not as desperate as I was this past April (not by a long-shot)
but I can always use more submissions, especially from authors who are new to
Quanta.
Also, I again want to thank all those people who sent in contributions --
Slowly, but surely, the ability for Quanta to become self-sufficient is being
facilitated. We still need more, however. If you haven't contributed yet,
remember that you are the only chance that Quanta has to survive. If Quanta
can't start to support its own production, then I soon won't be able to
produce it any more. Sad, but true. I encourage you, if you have the money,
to send in $5 to the address on the contents page of this issue. I'll get off
my soap-box now...
One more item of note in this issue: Jesse Allen's `Earth as an Example,' a
three part series, starts this issue. Unlike Jim Vassilakos's `The Harrison
Chapters' which is also featured this issue, `Earth as an Example' is not an
open-ended series. You're guaranteed to see its conclusion within this
calendar year.
I have been so busy recently that I hardly had time to produce this issue.
And this is the summer! I'm supposed to be on vacation! Ah well, I'll soon
be headed off to Aspen for a needed vacation from my vacation, so life isn't
all bad. I'll see you all in two months (October) when Quanta will celebrate
it's SECOND birthday.
I want to leave off with a rather sad note. I recently learned of the
untimely death of Gary Frank, one of the first contributors to Quanta. I
never knew Gary, except as an email correspondent, but I have heard that he
was an extrordinaty person. `Aware', a story he wrote for the October 1989
issue, certainly shows that he had more than just a flair for the tragic, as
well as a caustic sense of humor. This issue is dedicated to his memory.
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Digging In at Oregon Moonbase:
Rockwell Robot Faces Moon Analog Test
Doug Helbling
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
What kind of event could bring together a Rockwell aerospace engineer, a
Bureau of Land Management realty specialist, an engineering/marketing team
from WARN Industries, a U.S. Forest Service geologist, and Oregon L-5's Lunar
Base Research Team? The testing of a new lunar winch cart robot design!
The robot is the brainchild of Steve Kent, of Rockwell International Space
Systems Division. A long-term advocate of cost-effective space application of
existing technology, Kent proposed the idea of the winch cart in a paper
entitled "Prime Mover for Extraterrestrial Construction and Mining". He
describes in detail the use of this general purpose robotic winch cart design
in a number of applications. On May 1st, Steve put his design to the test.
Warn industries marketing manager Scott Salmon and design engineer Jerry
Dilks were on hand to observe the performance of the Warn winch used on the
robot. They provided the winch as part of a Rockwell/Warn cooperative
agreement. Phil Paterno, the Bureau of Land Management's realty specialist
for the Prineville area, was there to monitor the use of the Oregon Moonbase
site, common practice for activities performed on land leased from the BLM.
Larry Chitwood, U.S. Forest Service geologist, just happened to be checking in
at the Oregon Moonbase site on other matters when the testing began. The
Lunar Base Research Team, a group of space researchers from the Oregon L-5
chapter of the National Space Society, manage and administer the Oregon
Moonbase site.
Preparation for the test started with assembly of the robotic unit, which
had been broken down into several subcomponents for transportation from its
original assembly point. After the unit was fully assembled, basic subsystem
operations were checked and the unit was positioned for its most crucial test,
anchoring into the soil with it's pair of auger units. The winch cart robot,
or WCR, is intended to serve as a tow vehicle for a large variety of
comparatively low technology earth and materials moving.
The basic notion of the WCR is to dig into the lunar soil and pull
unpowered implements, like scrapers and rock sleds, from point to point.
Keeping the electronics and other more vulnerable (and expensive) subsystems
concentrated in the WCR, the costs of the total solution to lunar construction
tasks can be minimized while increasing reliability at the same time. The
implement towing concept is one that saw widespread terrestrial use around the
turn of the century in farming applications, but where the pulling capacity of
earth tractors is limited to roughly 60% of their weight, the low cost
automotive type winch used with the winch cart can pull in excess of 200% of
its own weight. This goes up in multiples as block and tackle are added.
The key element in the design is the auger mechanism used to root the WCR
into the lunar soil. The original design contained only one auger, but the
prototype tested had been modified to include two auger units. Either design
version provides a machine that is theoretically capable of operating
relatively independent of gravity, and may well operate in near zero gravity
conditions.
LBRT researcher Tom Billings manned the video unit while fellow team member
Bryce Walden positioned the still camera. The anticipation mounted among the
support crew and observers as they stood poised in readiness for the test to
begin. The test started, and the whir of the auger clutches howled back in
close competition with the wind blowing through the scrub of eastern Oregon
desert. The whir continued, with no visible digging taking place. The auger
clutches were complaining, protecting the auger mechanism from the strain and
resistance of the soil. The clutch design would have to be modified.
Disappointed but undaunted, Steve Kent continued other aspects of testing.
He applied torque wrenches to the auger mount points to measure the resistance
of the "lunar analog" soil at the Oregon Moonbase site to rotation of the
auger blades. Unfortunately, a defective weld prevented much more testing in
this area. Another design modification would be required before the WCR would
be ready for lunar deployment.
Without the winches to anchor the WCR into the soil, testing of the winch
mechanism would prove challenging. Manual simulation of the WCR boreholes,
with help from LBRT researcher Cheryl Lynn York, gave the robot as close an
approximation to normal anchoring as was possible under the circumstances.
The winch was connected to a WARN staff vehicle to see if the vehicle, with
parking brake locked, could be moved. The manual anchoring was not enough,
however. This test would also have to wait until the auger situation was
resolved.
Faced with a short term setback, Steve reviewed the data of the day,
determined to incorporate the information from the tests and the feedback from
the observers (including geologist Larry Chitwood) into his modifications for
the WCR. The tests were not all successful, but the testing process was.
Such efforts, performed as a standard part of the design implementation cycle,
should result in space hardware that is space-ready when it leaves earth.
______________________________________________________________________________
The Oregon Moonbase
The Oregon Moonbase is a project of The Oregon L-5 Society, Inc.. Oregon L-5
is a chapter of the National Space Society, an international group of over
25,000 people interesting in seeing "a spacefaring civilization" become a
reality.
The Oregon Moonbase project is an effort by Oregon L-5's Lunar Base Research
Team (LBRT) to establish a permanent lunar base research facility on the site
of their 12-acre lavatube reserve in eastern Oregon. Leased from the city of
Bend, Oregon (with supervision by the BLM), the site was used by long term
members of the LBRT in their recent NASA study (NASW-4460) to characterize
these caves as suitable analogs of lunar lavatube caves for more extensive
lunar base research.
The Lunar Base Research Team has performed a number of research efforts at the
site, in addition to their work conducting educational lunar mission
simulations with the Young Astronauts program.
The Oregon L-5 Society, Inc.
P.O. Box 86
Oregon City, OR 97045-0007
______________________________________________________________________________
Doug Helbling is a software engineer. After receiving an AA degree from
Bismarck State College a dozen or so odd years ago, Doug migrated to Oregon,
later graduating from OIT with a BSEE Technology degree. When he is not on
the job, he can be found at home spending time with his wife and two
daughters. His remaining idle moments, he says, are spent working with Oregon
L-5, the local chapter of National Space Society, or in a dark room honing his
SF skills.
doughe@bamboo.cax.tek.com
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Situation Is Critical
Elizabeth Dykstra
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
The situation is critical. The situation is critical. Time wheels eternal on
the outside, while on the inside the milliseconds clock furiously forward,
directed, focussed, progressing one after another faster than those of us on
the outside can imagine.
They put this box in here, this big one, Big Box, and a lot of little ones,
and a mass of cables and cords that sometimes have little boxes on them, and
they told us that this confusion is all really very orderly, very structured.
It has an integrity of its own, we hear, this collection of machines.
Computers. We are Friends. They're different, scores of them; some are quite
large with big screens, like televiewers; some are like books, lap-slabs to
open up and unfold. They have keyboards, and scribe globes, drawing tablets,
'lectro pens, voxboxes and mouses; datagloves, eyephones, earphones, and
sensewear, umbilically connected like satellites to their mother stations,
jacked in to Big Box, snaked to each other in patterns that give away the
secrets of their relationships.
The curious ones are the ones that are so complex they appear to be very
simple: the smallest Friend, just a smooth little box with click membranes and
the ubiquitous snaking cables that shake hands with the other members present
of this species that helps man in its own creation. This little Friend is
profound in that it is nothing itself; it projects its offerings into thin
air, a shadow computer to gateway its Friends into virtual worlds.
The urgency of the situation does not permit the luxury of understanding.
To think, to speak, to act, to create, our language creating itself, shaping
us as we find new experience in this clutter of technology. We cannot help
but wonder how we found our old methods so small and pitiful. We talk, after
all, we jot and scribble and gesture as our race has almost always done. The
world grows newer around us every day, and we learn newer and more clever
tricks, us old dogs.
We parse our time into events that happen simultaneously, so that time
finally presents its enigmatic sense to us as the convoluted web it is, where
the myriad sequences of tiks, toks and units merrily clock on and on in
wondrous arhythmic dance. How do we find ourselves here, and now? This
mystery, this mesh of machines, extends us and surprises us with the images we
make of ourselves. We feed it, we support its health and welfare; we direct
it and manipulate it with abandon, with bemusement, with trepidation, and we
use it to externalize and negotiate our independent structures, as Friends.
We used to think that we related to the little boxes, on our way to
electronic conversion and direct inter-think with Big Box. Yet in our crisis
it is ever more apparent that these tools are media, messengers as fluid as
the air around us, quick as our tongues, so that we play with each other, we
poison each other, we influence, infiltrate, experience each other, we
conceive through our activities our image of ourselves and learn how to grow
it, to chop it into bits, to clone it, to arrive at new configurations, new
constructions of ourselves; we build ourselves anew with competencies our
history would have proscribed without the help of our Friends.
Each of us has grown close to special Friends, the ones we find
accommodating to our tastes, the ones who find us similarly constructed. We
gravitate toward pleasing satellites, we choose the methods that fit our
models of ourselves. Some of us have no fingers, and have no use for
interfaces requiring digitation; some of us do not or will not speak, or be
spoken to; some of us cannot relate to the weird dimension-shifting of virtual
datascapes. Some of us enjoy the sense of identity and power in
command-response structures, while some of us refuse to accept another's
imposed order, no matter how trivial or elegant. We all started with that
uneasy mix of sensation, urgency and adventure, the slight queasiness
associated with excitement and the unknown, with critical resolutions and
formulations long overdue. As the climate grows more pressured to deal with
the situation, we extend ourselves to each other ever further, our exchanges
become less and less mechanically individuated as we recognize parts of
ourselves repeating throughout the network.
That smell again -- the acrid warning smell of impending data loss -- I'll
have to set aside a moment to check on that, view the scenario and maybe do a
little reconstruction. The tape on my forehead itches a little, just enough
for me to remember that it's there, and that this smell is its personal
warning reminder to me. I naturally dislike this smell; I chose it for that
reason, because I tend to brush away these small annoyances until they become
quite larger. Some of us are more physical, we generally like the contact
stimulus of metal, plasteel, glass, the satisfaction of resistance to touch,
the click of keys. Friends often suggest small comforts between themselves.
I survey this environment, all of us Friends, and I wonder where they will
take us next, where we will take ourselves, and what wonders we shall
experience in the evolution of this science, this art of contact. I must get
back to work. After all, the situation is critical. Indeed, it is critical;
but again, after all, we are all Friends; Friends and Friends alike, and the
crisis is ours.
______________________________________________________________________________
Elizabeth Dykstra is a cybernetician at Pacific Bell where she researches
group phenomena and computer interfaces. She lives in San Francisco and works
in the dreaded East Bay desert, giving her lots of commute time to doze at the
wheel and dream up different ways to make things work. This story was
previously published in `Addenda and Errata' (1990, University of Amsterdam),
a book of stories, anecdotes, and oddities by the Program Support, Survival
and Culture at the University of Amsterdam where she lived and worked last
year designing groupware.
eadykst@pbhyg.pacbell.com
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 6
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
She awoke before sunrise. Thirty feet below, a small stag slipped quietly
between the sparse nettles, foraging for his breakfast. The slimy mud which
had coated her body the night before still masked her scent. Now it was dry
and threatened to crackle and fall with her slightest movement, alerting him
to the threat.
Slowly, the creature moved again, somewhere below and near. She peered
around her supporting branch and studied the dim terrain through the icy
predawn mist. The stag sniffed with his nose to the ground as his pitch black
eyes scanned the horizon. Without hesitating another moment she cocked her
arm back and let it come down with all her strength. For a heartbeat, the
spear seemed to hang motionless, its course predicted by years of practice and
an unerring instinct. Then, silently, it consumed the space between them,
twirling with reckless abandon as it tore the skin just heartward of his neck,
plunging hungrily into the flesh below.
The stag cried out as he bolted away, but already his legs had buckled as
he tried to run, and the dark stain of blood flooded his coat and dripped to
the ground beneath his hooves. The second spear burrowed deep into the middle
of his back as he staggered deeper into the brush. She leaped to a lower
branch and then to the ground.
The stag slowed at the frozen stream bed, turning suddenly to face her. He
bravely held his ground, confused and bewildered in the thin morning mist,
cautiously dipping his head to the smooth, polished stones as if to drink. His
blood splattered carelessly over the rocks, forming crimson puddles in the
white frost. The third spear sunk deep into the small hollow above his ribs.
She watched, out of spears, as the stag's black eyes seemed to roll upwards
toward the sky. The sun's first rays cascaded between the tree branches,
warming the cold earth below his hooves as he slowly settled down into the bed
of stones to die.
Dawn's saffron rays spiked beneath the dark, shifting clouds like a flock of
birds, slowly turning as they plunged toward earth, each gliding back and
forth along the icy, lakeside shore. They sparkled across the water's surface
as thousands of tiny droplets swooped from the sky, diving and splashing in an
endless, majestic dance of laughter and tears.
Mike groggily opened his eyes, sniffing the clean, cold air as the coarse
stubble on his head began to prickle and rise against the light drizzle. His
booted feet sunk carelessly in the thin silt like two half-buried logs. Niki
lay stretched out over a long smooth stone rising from the rippling water, her
long black hair beaded with the wet, diamond icing.
"Good morning."
"Is it?" She finally sat upright, letting her hair fall along her slim
shoulders as she pulled her legs inward, locking them into a crossed position.
Mike bit his lip as she closed her eyes, ignoring him, the lake, the gentle
shower; he watched her soft hair begin to shed its icy glaze, dripping with an
almost determined precision.
For several minutes she remained motionless, like a statue sculpted from
the white stone, searching, opening up into some hollow place inside him. He
remembered her drugged, corpse-like body at the Solomon residence, a heartbeat
as shallow and distant as some unknown wave rolling steadily for the
forbidding shore, the ripples of raindrops mixing with its falling crest,
snuffing out its existence as it merged into something greater.
She finally opened her eyes, unlocking her legs and letting them dip into
the cold water, sloshing them through to the muddy bank, her head drooping low
as she walked.
"Niki..."
She looked at him, then shifted her eyes to the rifle and axe at his side.
He shook his head, not knowing what to say.
"Niki, I've seen this before, but never from you. What's the matter?"
She reached out and hugged him, her voice mutely whispering something he
could barely hear, much less understand. As though by instinct, his arms
tightened protectively around her, holding her for a long minute in the icy
mist.
"C'mon Niki. We'd best be moving on."
She pushed his hand away as he reached for the rifle's stock, droplets of
water streaming down her cheeks. Lifting it off the brown blanket, she leaned
its barrel over her shoulder as she turned to face him.
"Dangerous weapon."
Mike nodded in acquiescence.
"Well, I guess it is your turn." He lifted the soaked blanket, wringing it
out before rolling it into a tight bundle. Then he reached for the axe. She
turned away as he strapped it to his belt.
"Any idea which direction?"
She glanced back over her shoulder, her staid expression making him wonder
if he slipped into Calannic.
"Niki, any idea which way we should go?"
She nodded, "It won't matter."
Mike pondered her words, uncertain how to take their meaning. Something
about her mood told him it'd be better if he didn't bother. He peered across
the lake for a long moment, his eyes half-expecting to see some dilapidated
hydrofoil skirting over the surface water. He shook away the vision and
followed her along the shoreline.
The black silt gave way to bright yellow sand and shiny beds of smoothed
pebbles, the cold ground changing its features with sporadic abandon. Images
of the Tizarian coast kept springing to mind, but he shoved the memories down
into a place as distant as their origin. The forest lay to the left, trees
straddling the lake shore, greedy for the water thus entitled. Long green
stems and orange-purple vines hung from the leafy canopy, the pungent smell of
apple resin hanging thick in the frosty air.
They walked for two hours more before the clouds grew white and parted.
Niki's hair, drenched from the rain, seemed to stiffen as it dried. Dark
feathered birds appeared from the treeline, their long supple frames gliding
gently over the placid waters as they searched for prey. Niki watched them as
they'd stop in mid-air and dive into the cold water, their wings flapping with
panic as they emerged. Something about the way she carried the rifle told Mike
to keep on going, as though she wanted to be alone.
The splash turned him around. A short metal-tipped javelin protruded from
her belly as she staggered for the stony bank, her hands still knotted around
the rifle. Mike raced toward her as a dark, mud-caked figure fell from the
branches above, throwing sand into his face as it bolted for the rifle,
wrenching it free from her arms as Mike staggered toward them, axe lifted. He
hurtled it as the barrel pointed down in his direction, the explosion
deafening his ears as a bullet ripped through his shoulder.
For the barest instant, all he could do was fall backward into the ground,
his mind numbed by the shattered bone. He scampered to his feet, instinctively
sprinting into the light thicket, his lungs clogged with terror. Legs
tightened painfully as his limp arm swayed back and forth almost comically.
His boots kicked furiously against the icy, damp earth, patches of dirty brown
snow, and beds of hard stone. Above, in the treetops, the birds fell quiet,
and the sparse woods seemed to close around him, silently stealing his breath
as he ducked between large bushes and thick trunked trees.
The noise of gunfire surrounded his senses, its tangibility offered for the
taking. Bits of bark snapped off nearby trees, the wild sputtering, popping
sound taking hold of his mind, establishing rhythm in this legs as he
stumbled, rolling end over end in the soft loamy earth. She was there before
he realized what had happened, his chest heaving desperately, madly sucking in
air before it finished pushing breath out. She leveled the barrel between his
eyes sockets, cold black opals staring into his without reason or remorse.
"No... wait... Ambrose..." His tongue searched for something in the
Calannic, sputtering gibberish from a host of other languages, all stained
with worry and confusion. However, the corners of her eyes twitched with
recognition, as if he touched a spark somewhere deep in her mind. Finally, he
found the words.
"Ambrose sent me... to find Cole."
Dried patches of mud flaked off her skin as Mike gathered his breath, the
hint of recognition blossoming in her eyes.
"Get up."
Mike complied with her wish, moving where she motioned him with the barrel.
"Ambrose doesn't talk to negrali."
"He talked to me."
"You have proof?"
"I think you're pointing it at me."
Mike wiped the sweat from his forehead as she examined the weapon, hoping
against probability that she'd find something distinctive.
"Maybe, maybe not. What else?"
"The axe from his cabin. Maybe you've seen it before?"
She cocked a dark eyebrow, her memory of the hurtled weapon still distinct.
"Walk."
Mike walked. Tall trees loomed overhead as she pushed him forward with the
sole of her boot, their wide branches and thick foliage rustling with a gentle
breeze. The wide expanse of water remained still, its surface an icy, blue
reflection of the morning sky. Niki's crumpled form lay at the water's edge,
her legs settling below the silt as her hands gripped the stony bank. The
laceration cut deep into her skull, blood dripping from the wound, falling
into a crimson pool over the smooth, white stones as it mixed with the soft,
black silt.
The woman dug the axe from the mud, washing it in the shallows and then
lifting it so that the sun's rays glinted off the quick of its blade. She
nodded with satisfaction, turning Niki over and searching her body.
"Niki..."
The woman looked up, her dark unfeeling eyes staring through him.
"Was that her name?"
"I killed her."
"Yes..."
Mike moved over to the body, stopping only when she leveled the barrel back
in his direction. She glanced him over and unable to ascertain any threat
backed away, letting him advance. He felt afraid to touch her, as if the dead
body would leap up or cry out. Her flesh was still warm, and he searched
half-hearted for a pulse. The girl watched his expression of hope dwindle into
one of despair.
"C'mon negral."
"I'd like to bury her."
"I don't have time to watch you waste yours. Come now or I will leave and
let you bleed to death, friend of Ambrose or no."
Mike touched his aching shoulder. The cold air bit into his wound, a
trickle of blood dripping through the jacket sleeve, the hollow chill slowly
gripping his mind. He considered sitting down to wait and imagined Niki waking
after a day or two. It wouldn't take long, he figured. He'd keep bleeding,
shock would eventually take over, and then...
"Negral!"
Her short, black hair and dirty, mud-caked body made him think of the
salamen on Aiwelk. He remembered crouching in a pool of warm, muddy water,
snapping images while two Yahhen hunters readied their gauss guns, cold, black
eyes staring skyward, blinded and numbed by the tranq-crystal. They'd die
later. Too bad. He'd forgot what they paid him.
She tugged him to his feet, pushing him forward with the stock of the
rifle. His legs walked at her direction, his mind not bothering to imagine
where. Birds, trees, rocks all blended into a single panorama, the separate
parts intermixed and suddenly coherent. Spindles of light broke through the
forest canopy as they neared the shelter, its dull tin-colored doors marred by
bright red paint. An old IMC ammunitions dump. She punched several buttons on
the keybox, finally yanking the thick portal open with both arms.
She motioned him to an empty, polyceramic crate, watching him sit down and
lean over before scrounging the shelves for a first aid kit. Mike felt the
lathery foam harden on his bandages before he realized the bleeding had
stopped. She's injected him with some wake-up.
"You're gonna be needing a doctor."
Mike watched her scratch a name on the smooth white surface, as it squeezed
his shoulder.
"Something to remember me by," she added sarcastically.
"You're Cole?"
"I think you'll be interested in this."
She handed him a flimsi-leaf, the lower tech variety with lots of window
space but short on memory. His face was reproduced in three-dimensional
facsimilation, a standard mug with the hair electronically erased.
"I don't understand."
"Came off the relay three days ago, a chiphead and a psyche, very sorry
sight indeed, unless, 'course, you're looking for the reward."
"Ambrose didn't call ahead?"
"Radio's out. Board's down. All I got left is public relay. Regional
News."
"Then you heard about the drop."
"I saw it. Kinda hard to miss fireworks that high up."
"How much've they offered."
"A million a head, DOA."
Mike scowled. It had been several months since he'd been shot, and even
longer since he'd lost a friend. He wondered what he was doing back on
Calanna, as if one time wasn't enough, and imagined the chain of events that
led him back, that led to this. Niki. It wasn't supposed to be like this. The
local guard must of known of the drop before the Vista ever reached system,
which meant a bug in security: someone very high up, someone who wanted them
dead. And Bill had guessed it, hitching along for the sheer hell of it?
"The well is never that dry."
"Say again?"
Mike shook his head, pale implications fluttering carelessly from the
shadows into a hue of light he couldn't accept.
"There were two others in the drop."
Cole shrugged her shoulders in response.
"Did they say there was anyone else they were looking for?"
"No. What's it matter? They probably didn't know who was coming down,
anyway."
Mike rubbed the scarred side of his face. It was this sort of
underestimation that kept getting him in trouble. Back on the Vista, he'd
wondered what Bill was doing. "Lots of neutrinos," he'd said. That would mimic
a fusion plant on almost any passive array, making Robin a target so bright
the Calannans couldn't help but take her out. Mike wanted to dissect her, not
blow her to pieces, though he had to admit the thought was somewhat appealing.
"Did I miss a joke or something?" Cole looked mildly annoyed. Mike
remembered the hollow feeling as his gaze fell upon the axe. Its dull blade
seemed to laugh wickedly from the shelter's dim corner.
"I've got to get to Xin. I'll have money once we're there."
"Just like that."
"Ambrose said you could take us... me." He turned his eyes away from it,
unwilling to meet its laughter or to accept what had happened.
"In your condition..."
"In my condition, I could use a doctor. You said so yourself." He tried to
smile, "Don't go denying it."
The smile wouldn't come. Niki was back there still, growing colder by the
minute. His fault.
"Why are they after you?"
"It's a long story." He looked away from her as he answered, unable to make
eye contact.
"The relay doesn't even give a name. What should I call you, negral."
"Mikael."
She nodded, strangely, as if considering its flavor. He wondered why she
bothered; all she should want is the money. It made things much simpler.
Money.
"Come."
His feet felt wobbly as he stood. She held his good arm with her free hand,
gathering the axe and rifle as she led him outside and along a winding, dirt
path. The glittering lake waters seemed to dance and rejoice as if in
celebration. Mike watched for Niki's body on the stony beach, but it was as if
she had disappeared, the hungry lake gobbling her up with gleeful abandon.
The hydroplane sat docked in a shallow inlet, its grey, metallic sheen
casting a fuzzy shadow across the waters. They waded in. The water, more than
waste deep, felt icy and numbing. Cole settled him into the passenger seat,
buckling him down before producing another hypo.
"Is that really necessary?"
"Not at all." She stuck him in his good arm, retracting the needle with a
satisfied smirk.
"You bitch." Mike watched her climb around to the pilot's controls, her
long, sun-browned legs now shiny and clean as late morning rays filtered
through the cockpit window. The whine of a chemical motor echoed somewhere
along the distant coastline. Beneath its vibration, Mike heard her
whispering, the rattling of vertical rods, grimy steel stained with sweat and
a hollow explosion mixed within the shattered bone, a texture so familiar and
soft, as though it were meant to be felt rather than understood. Shades of
blue huddled together beneath folds of green and grey, his limbs tiring,
nerves deadened, the dry cold parching his throat as the sweet scent of apple
resin stung within the dark corners of his memory.
Their voices rose as hushed murmurs, traces of worries averted, clandestinely
dropping out of key like some harmonic duet, each resurrecting the other,
interchanging places, holding together for sheer lack of hope.
"We knew this would eventually happen." His tone sounded cold, unfeeling.
She saw the door crack open, streams of moonlight licking around its edges.
"Michael. Is that you?"
They were afraid to touch him, afraid to even get too close. Dim
fluorescent rays scattered sullenly along the glassy white walls, barely
penetrating the icy darkness as he slowly wakened from a dreamless sleep. A
grey-haired stranger sat by his bedside staring down from behind a
professional expression of stoic indifference.
The loneliness quietly crept in between the cracks of his senses,
stealthily slipping beneath his skin, and hungrily gnawing on his bones. With
cunning elegance it swept upwards, through his spine and into his mind,
knotting itself around his soul and slowly squeezing until he could feel the
suffocating, smothering, nothing.
The woman curiously smiled. She wore a white medical tunic without insignia
or decoration. He concentrated on her face, on the stormy blue of her eyes and
the furrow of her brows, but the features just blurred in and out of focus,
shifting like waves on some forgotten shore. He felt his lungs try carefully
to breath; short, unfamiliar, raspy sounds being the only response.
She turned away suddenly, something was beeping, another patient maybe, or
perhaps someone died. She was talking to someone now through a commlink. Her
voice flowed sweetly, like warm rain on summer days when he would walk through
the barrens and nobody would follow.
A cold lump settled in his throat as he waited for her to return, the cool
breeze lifting brown and yellow leaves from the broken asphalt, coiling sticky
shapes, their edges fluttering and preparing to strike. And the awful beeping,
rising from the air like some depraved siren, stung his ears, its intensity
rising. He wished somebody would turn it off and found himself reaching out,
his fingers touching it, the pulse tangible and real like a heartbeat, except
stronger.
"Mike." From a deserted alleyway he heard the voice call him. He paused
before moving forward, unable to see its source.
"Wake up Mike. Get the hell outta there, now!"
He felt his eyes snap open with the surge of electricity in his mind. Sweat
coated his body as he laid face-up on a simple mattress in a small, dark room,
cords of sunlight streaming from the only window through a pair of wooden
shutters. Police sirens beeped loudly in the distance as a gentle rain pelted
the open ledge. Cecil? He looked around for the voice, but the room was empty.
He pulled himself upright with his good arm, shaking off the daze of noises
and confusion as the metal disk tumbled from his pocket. The dim light played
over its surface, tempting him to pick it up. He pressed it against his bad
hand, clenching it with all his strength to force away the numbness and
triggered the catch, revealing the black surface within. The green dot closed
in toward the center, circular lines growing brighter, pressing outward, fifty
meters, forty-five, forty.
Mike closed the disk, placing it back within his pocket. Beads of sweat
formed on his scalp as he moved toward the window, lifting the shutters and
crawling onto the ledge. He was four stories up. A good jump? Teeth ground
together at the thought as drizzle mixed with the perspiration, forming a tiny
rivulet down the crevice of his nose.
"Hey Mike? You in there?" It was Bill's voice. "Open up Mike, it's okay."
He crawled out further along the ledge, pulling his legs away from the
window. Vehicles knotted together in the streets below, chemical combustion
motors sputtering, whining, complaining to their drivers beneath the dying
sirens. The door broke open. There was the sound of footsteps and an
unfamiliar voice as dry as caster-sand.
"Shit!"
Galanglic. Mike considered crawling back inside, then stopped.
"I want his head you little weasel, you understand?! He knows to much about
Erestyl."
Mike could almost see Bill nodding on the other side of the wall.
"I'll... I'll wait here until he comes back."
"What makes you think he'll return?"
"Where else can he go? He has no money."
Wooden shutters swept away from the window face, the crackling noise of
metal and wood in violent separation resounding through the room. Mike waited,
breathlessly, for a head to peek out as small black birds scattered along the
ledges above and below.
"Harrison has friends on Calanna, or have you forgotten? He'll have ways of
getting money."
"What do you want me to do?"
"First get that thing out of your kneecap."
"And then?"
"I trust you'll be able to figure the rest out yourself."
Mike waited another two minutes as vehicles carelessly zigzagged on the
streets below. The small, black birds returned to their cement roosts, the
outcroppings serving as poor protection from the rain. Like the wandering
beggars, they seemed ready to take whatever handout fate should devise. Mike
finally crept back inside and past the splintered door.
The rain smelled musty and noxious, exhaust fumes clogging his throat and
stinging his eyes as he drifted along narrow walkways beside the ground
traffic. Street urchins clothed in dapple-gray kirtles and drab brown coifs
played amidst the traffic, climbing onto the slow, red cabs to ask for money
and ganging together for some bashing to keep the stingy in line. Bums sat
huddled along the gutters, some clenching bottles and others holding small,
box batteries with thin, elastic cords connected to their head-jacks, their
emaciated bodies slowly rotting in the gentle rain as thin smiles played
across their lips, eyes glazed-over with the entertainment of some abstract
fantasy.
"K'drin onuvalye?" One grabbed for Mike's boot as he passed by. "Daro!" The
box was out of juice, and he wanted money to recharge it; just one chiphead
asking another for a small, important favor. Mike kept walking, finally
stopping in front of a large window facing the street. He did look like a
chiphead, even worse perhaps. The stubble on his head did a poor job of
concealing the jacks, and his left shoulder, still numb, sat firmly in its
temporary cast beneath the coat. He pulled the disc from his pocket and
glanced at the readings. Bill was on foot, less than half a kilometer and
heading northeast, toward the city's heart, toward the underway probably.
Mike turned and picked up the pace. He'd have to cut through the rowens to
catch up. Just his luck. The ground changed abruptly from wet, black asphalt
to soggy, brown dirt as he skirted from the roadside and hopped the rusty
gate. The fumes and noises of traffic seemed to fall away as he crossed over
the damp earth, a peaceful, musty quiet replacing the garble of chaos. Long
columns of raised earth, sparse trees, and an occasional thatch hut served as
the only occupants. At least it was still light out, he reminded himself.
Stiff grey clouds loomed above, blocking the sun's gaze. He tried to make out
where it rested, but it was no use. Morning, afternoon, or evening, it didn't
matter anyway. It was day, and his chances of getting accosted were slim.
Even so, he breathed easier when the tall buildings of the uptown came into
focus behind the curtains of falling rain. Mike hopped the outer gate with a
sigh of relief and headed toward the underway, rechecking the disc's display
with a nod of satisfaction. Bill was right on schedule. Now the problem of
acquiring fare came into focus. Mike remembered the check Ambrose had given
him and felt around in his pockets, the slow realization that he'd been robbed
dawning on him for the first time. Her name still lay etched in his cast, an
unpleasant reminder, but then he should have expected as much. That was fifty
million drin washed down the drain with five to ten thousand being all he'd
need for trans-fare. Mike cut through the back allies, memory tracing his
steps into the pawnshop.
An old man with a thick, red beard and pot-belly knelt beside a wooden
stool, spray coating its legs with a plastic adhesive. He ignored Mike as he
continued working.
"Hi."
"Ain't got no juice."
"I'm looking to sell."
The man glanced up from the stool, seemingly unimpressed.
"This coat."
The man continued layering the legs, the nerves in his hand jittering the
fingers as he sprayed.
"How much can I get for it?"
"That coat has a hole in the shoulder. And it's stained."
"I need ten thousand."
He put down the spray can and turned the stool upside-down, setting it on
its seat.
"How about five then?"
"It's worthless."
"One."
He shook his head with annoyance as he unscrewed the nozzle head, replacing
it with another.
"C'mon. Give me a break. I was shot today."
"Nice boots you got."
"They're offworld."
Mike kicked them off and let the man examine them.
"Contraband?"
"No. Its legal. Look, it adjusts for the size."
"That's pretty tricky. I'll give you twelve."
"Fifteen, and I'll throw in the coat."
He shrugged, taking the coat to examine.
"See? Pockets on the inside."
"What, do I look blind to you?"
"No, not at all." Mike shook his head trying hard to sound sincere.
"Fifteen."
Mike strode barefoot, avoiding the broken glass as he headed toward the
underway. The disk showed Bill ahead of him but not by more than a hundred
meters. Mike slowed his pace, taking the escalators down to the ticket
dispensers as a computer synthesized voice droned above the background
chatter.
"Welcome to Xin terminals. Please have exact fare ready. CME cards
accepted."
Once in the ticket lobby, Mike leaned against a shaded wall as he consulted
the disc. Hundreds of people lined up against the dispensers, a young couple
swapping spittle to the self-sustained ignorance of those around them, a
three-year old kicking his mother's knees as he swung from her brown satchel,
a tall chiphead with spokes for jacks eating a quagga and manouri on rye,
drinking something blue and bubbly from a leftover sluice tube. The green dot
dipped off the display at it headed south, the concentric circles shifting
first into ovals and then narrowing into thin slivers of their former shapes
and the dot came back into view for a moment and then descended off the
surface entirely. Mike pocketed the disc and stepped into line behind the
spokes man.
"Where's the output, dude?"
Mike looked up, surprised. The chiphead took a swig from his sluice tube
and offered the rest to Mike.
"You get fucked up?"
"Ummm... no thanks."
"Damn, EI receiver point. You even got a manipulator plug. Y'know, you can
hook in an output jack there real easy. I know this guy who'll do it for
pretty cheap."
His eyes roamed Mike's scalp with fascination.
"You interested?"
"I'm kind of in a hurry."
"Hey, no problem."
He turned around to buy his ticket, pausing at the entry gates before
continuing.
"Just leave a message on the `Doggie Blitz' if you change your mind."
Mike nodded as he fingered in his destination, the synthesized voice
finally acknowledging his presence.
"Your fare is eight thousand five hundred drin."
He shuffled a ten into the machine.
"Do you accept credit for non-exact amount?"
"Yes."
"Thank you for traveling the Underway."
"As if I had a choice..." Mike grabbed his ticket and entered through the
gates, another machine snapping up his slip of magnetic paper and returning it
as he passed to the other side. "Credit: Drin 1500" was etched in red symbols
at the upper right-hand corner of the stub.
The trams sat cushioned on gravitic fields, a recent innovation Mike
recalled as he boarded. Most everything other than transportation and
communication was despairingly backwater, even in the capital's suburbs. He
found a seat at the back of the last car. Only two others entered with him,
the young couple. Probably evening then, he figured, everybody's going the
other way. They resumed their foreplay as the tram picked up speed, and Mike
turned his head more out of embarrassment than courtesy.
"Feeling lonely?" Mike sat up, suddenly surprised. "Come to 'Temple of the
Mermaid' where your whim is my command." The feminine voice continued babbling
over the car's speakers as the girl started licking her boyfriend's face. The
guy watched Mike out of the corner of his eye, a cocky smirk playing across
his lips. "Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back."
The tram finally stopped, Mike pulling the disc from his pocket and
consulted its display as the doors slid open and several dozen people entered.
Bill was within half a kilometer and moving on the rollers. Mike pocketed the
disc and slipped outside the car as its doors slapped shut behind him.
Several rollers coasted by on cermelecon rails, arched bridges making way
for their passage. Mike hopped on one and inserted two thousand drin. The
digital gauge clicked away as he stepped on the acceleration peddle and
gripped the handrails. Soon he was in the city's midst, the canopy of stone
several hundred meters high and around him thousands of sparkling lights, a
latticework of railings, glowing exit pads, steel office complexes sitting
atop large cylindrical stalks, one built atop the other, and a hive of cable
connections hanging in the air like uncropped weeds taking over a forest.
Suddenly he realized he was sitting still, the roller having shuffled off to
the side so others could pass. A small red light blinked near the money slot
and zero's glared out from the counter.
Mike inserted another thousand and parked the roller before the money
clicked away. Two women in dapper, black frocks raced toward him in long,
determined strides, pushing past to the free roller before anyone else could
beat them to it. Meanwhile, large, circular, iris valves continued disgorging
a steady stream of mainly government tight-necks, a few laughing but most
sedate, languid, or exhausted. Glowbeads sparkled on the sides of the
escalators like little droplets of sunshine, and as a line of rollers passed
overhead, their bright rims cast a dizzying array of colors on the velvety
black sheen of the thick, airy mist in the space beyond.
The disk showed Bill remarkably close, and Mike felt his head duck almost
imperceptibly as he crossed, unhurried, into a deserted portal. The reading
shifted slightly, circles bending again into ovals. Mike tapped the surface
with his index finger and eyed the double doors of a maintenance lift.
Suddenly the green dot flickered and died. He cupped the disc into his pocket
and headed out the portal, finding a cool table beneath the shade of a low
hanging ceiling. The table's surface displayed the menu, showing
two-dimensional pictures of each of the meals. Mike settled for a glass of ice
water, inserting a thousand drin into the slot and collecting his change. The
crystal cubes were still making a faint sizzling sound as they clinked against
the inside of the glass. Mike sipped the fluid, the fuzzy numbness slowly
receding from his shoulder as he watched the portal.
He turned back to the table's smooth surface and brought up an area map of
the city. Xaos, pronounced Za'-os by the natives, was the capital of the
lesser continent. Excavated long before the civil war, it was utilized during
the planetary revolt as a stronghold of last resort. Its location, several
kilometers beneath the seabed, was virtually unassailable except by the
thermonuclear warheads which the Archduke would never use. Afterwards, it
grew, large suburbs like Xin and Xekhasmeno rising at the surface like the
first seedlings of a dwearmurgrove. Mike examined the display. They'd done a
good deal of construction over the past two years. He brought up a voice
window on the display and pressed a few more keys on the interface, depositing
his change back in the money slot. The channel clicked several times before
there was any answer.
"This number had been disconnected... if you need directory assistance,
please dial..."
Mike killed the window and searched through directory assistance for `Cecil
Dulin.' He then expanded it to the suburbs and ran a search of the local
emigrations and obituaries, finally punching a few more keys in frustration. A
red light flickered on the display. Insufficient funds for a planetwide
directory search. He slammed his good fist against the table surface without
effect. The display shimmered, seeming to laugh at him from behind its
protective cover.
"Have it your way," he finally conceded, taking the disc once again from
his pocket and consulting the reading. Somebody put money in a soundbox, and
Mike found his bare toes involuntarily keeping time with the music as he
rubbed his bad arm beneath the castfoam and patiently waited for the reading
to stabilize. The green dot remained stationary, glowing steadily just beyond
the fifteen meter mark and then suddenly disappeared.
"This isn't my day."
Mike plucked the surface with a wary finger as the empty ovals glared back
at him.
"C'mon Bill, don't do this to me..."
Mike pocketed the disc and pulled himself up from the table. The portal
beckoned from across the walkway, its keypad nestled against the maintenance
lift doors. Stern, blue letters marched across the lock's indicator, "access
code required." Gears began whining as Mike stepped to the side, clenching his
good hand into a tight fist. The double doors opened, and Bill started out,
his long, lanky arms dangling to his sides as his mouth opened in a wide,
toothy grin. Mike caught him in the neck with his fist, taking him backwards
with the blow. As Bill lay on the lift's floor, crumpled and choking, Mike
kicked him once in the stomach and twice in the nards. Satisfied, the older
gatherer twisted the lift's operating lever and quickly removed Bill's
fiberglass pistol as the doors slowly shut.
For a moment, stormy grey eyes betrayed anger and fear. After that, there
was only shame. Mike looked down, a course determination quietly roiling
within his guts as Bill clutched his crotch with both hands.
"You bastard!"
"Niki's dead, Bill."
"So, ya gonna shoot me?"
"I'm thinking about it."
The lift stopped, its doors opening at Mike's back as he quickly spun to
the side of the lift.
The room was cluttered with a variety of maintenance equipment and medical
gear. Two semi-automatic carbines rested on the far wall, and a portable
microframe lay at the floor's center along with a package of optical storage
disks and a large, black dodecahedron. The room's furniture was sitting in the
corner, a single, short, wooden stool.
"Nice place, Bill. You get good rent?"
"Real good."
Mike shook his head in concentrated disbelief.
"Go on."
Bill let himself be kicked forward into the chamber, the cool flow of
ventilation cutting across his shoulder blades as he retreated into the dim
light of an electric lantern.
Mike sat stiff in the corner rubbing his bandaged shoulder. Her name lay
etched in the white surface.
"You get shot again or somethin'?"
"Here, why don't you come over and take a closer look," Mike invited with a
sarcastic snarl.
"Mama gave it to ya?"
"That's close enou..."
A shin snapped into his forearm, and Mike found himself reeling
off-balance, falling backwards as Bill's fist nailed him in the midsection. He
never heard the stool splitting against the floor planks as he tumbled
backwards. Instead, silence seemed to surround him entirely, and then there
was only the deafening echo that followed the silence and Bill slipping
quietly along the floor within the pool that was his own blood.
"You stupid fuck!"
"Sorry, Mike..."
A twinkle of amusement roamed through his eyes, the grey spheres seeming
webbed within the clouds of a paternal haze.
"Bill!"
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim's a grad-student at UC Riverside, hoping and praying like crazy that he'll
get his MBA before the dean's axe gets him first. In between classes and term
papers, he can be found editing `The Guildsman', the raunchiest gaming zine
ever to be published. `The Harrison Chapters' were originally written as a
setting description for his Traveller (SF-RPG) campaign. His story, he says,
is what you get when you combine an overactive imagination with the foolish
tendency to wing it. He says he writes exactly the same way he gamemasters:
without any semblance of plan or preconception.
What has been published here as `Chapter Six' is actually chapters ten as
written originally by Jim. The Harrison Chapters. will be continued next
issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Last Laugh
Rob Chansky
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
The Camp had grown from a lone trailer to a massive though temporary
installation, only to shrink back. The trailer sat again by itself, soon to
be moved to wherever it would be deemed more useful.
The second-to-last jeep was leaving, shaking off the dust of the site
behind it. The military wanted nothing more to do with this elaborate joke.
The Arizona sun beat relentlessly on the trailer's white metal surface,
daring the overworked air conditioner to maintain a comfortable room
temperature. The old man inside cared little for the weather; he knew nothing
but a life wasted, squandered on a useless task now completed. If he could
only remember... if only...
Something he had started, thought about, in his past. The idea eluded him
still.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps it had all been a hoax. But that letter-- it had
been so self-satisfied, so damnably smug.
He would kill that man, whoever had written that letter, if in all of
creation there was way to get to him...
For him, it had started with a phone call.
To his colleagues, the scribbles on his office blackboard were
incomprehensible; but Professor Bequay used a mathematical notation meaningful
only to himself. He was sixty-five years old, and he had done things this way
all his life. He would not change it for the University or for anyone.
He had been free-associating that morning, as he normally did, but today he
felt he was onto something that could be important. But Bequay was never one
who could ignore the anxious trilling of his telephone. The scribbles would
have to wait for now, while he answered it.
"Professor Anderson Bequay?" The voice sounded very official and important;
probably one worth a modicum of politeness.
"Yes, what can I do for you?"
"Professor, I have been in touch with certain research elements in the
military." Ah, yes. He had done several government consultations here and
there in the past, and the government had a way of remembering your name.
"There is a problem for which your name happened to come up."
"Certainly. Could you come to my office to discuss it?"
"I'm afraid that in the interests of National Security..." The man went on
to mention the code and section, and, amazingly, recited a paragraph taken
verbatim from the book. Bequay was talking to a man who had actually
memorized the paragraph, rather than merely one who enjoyed quoting it to him.
He admired a stickler for details, it meant an ordered mind. "... you would
have to agree to join the project before any details can be given. Do you
understand?"
Of course he did. There were, he supposed, worse things he could do with
his time than spend it sweating in the Arizona sun. For instance, staying
here... and staying here meant the annual faculty awards banquet. He had
always hated the awards dinners, much more so this year as the guest of honor.
The other faculty didn't much care for him, and the feeling was mutual;
leaving that unpleasantness for whatever awaited him in the desert sounded
like a good way to avoid his impending social demands.
Professor Bequay, forgetting the attraction of his blackboard and the ideas
on it, turned his attention to the terminal on his desk. He checked his
electronic mail; apparently the government had already contacted the dean, and
Bequay had been cleared for two weeks leave. He sent memos to a few of the
faculty and students, being purposefully vague on where he was going and what
he was doing. The datanalysis classes he was teaching would have to fend for
themselves for the time being; it would reflect badly on his record, but so
what. They certainly hadn't hired him for his teaching ability. His research
had revolutionized the field of datanalysis, to the point where it was
(nearly) its own discipline now.
Not much more to do here. Someone would come in and water his plants; he
had found this out after his last extended absence, discovering that his kudzu
hybrid had burst from its glass container and enrooted itself into some of his
paper files and the wall nearby. Now he kept it stunted with mercury. He
locked the computer up, and glanced at the blackboard. Something wrong.
There it was. He picked up the eraser and removed a "-" from the equation.
There; everything was much clearer.
But clear or not, it would have to wait. He locked the door behind him.
The hall containing his office made a 90-degree right turn before it came
to an exit. Entering the turn, Bequay collided with a bespectacled young man
carrying reams of computer printouts. The printouts scattered like laundry in
a storm. "Sorry, sorry" the grad student muttered as he tried to gather them
back. Rules of politeness compelled Bequay to reluctantly stoop and help him.
The student looked up.
"Prof -- Professor Bequay, I was just trying to see you," the male student
said, his astonishment quickly escalating to enthusiasm. "Here, I'm from the
astrophys department -- oh, it's just amazing, sir, we've picked up--"
"Not now, I'm very busy." Bequay proffered the three or four sheafs of
printout at the grad student, but both his hands were busy trying to control
his own bundle. Bequay, not seeing any point in forcing the man to accept the
papers he'd picked up, let them drop on the floor with the rest.
"But-- it's-- will you, will you be in your office tomorrow?" The student
looked despondently at the papers in a mess on the floor. He looked haggard
and out of breath; it didn't seem as though he'd slept in several days.
But the professor had turned and was walking away. He waved his hand at
the question, hoping the student would take it as a yes and leave him alone.
Bequay had seen the heading on one of the sheets of paper the student had
dropped: "Astrophys. SETI division, e-mag. anomaly IV. Time: 03:45:32 -
3:50:23". Bequay had no patience with the sort of people involved in the
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, in fact with the whole idealist
mindset that would want to join such an organization. His pioneering work in
datanalysis had benefited their program immensely, if only to keep them from
crying "extraterrestrial" every time someone turned on a malfunctioning hair
drier in the suburbs. They bothered him occasionally, trying to get him
involved in some project of theirs. Bequay did not wish to be involved.
He was met at the Phoenix airport by two men in full officer uniform,
complete with salute. They drove him to the site-- an uncomfortable four hour
trip.
The last few miles saw them through a winding absence of rocks and brush
that might have been called a road. Bequay became even more irritable with
every bump and jostle. Finally, though, Bequay and the two silent men came to
a dust-covered white trailer in the middle of nowhere. Several jeeps and a
troop carrier were in position next to it.
When the car pulled up next to the largest vehicle, Bequay could make out
men at work everywhere-- spreading camouflage nets over the trailer, setting
up a fence perimeter, fastening together sheets of sand-colored plastic in a
large circular area that would presumably become a landing pad for
helicopters.
Bequay and the two men got out, an escort appearing immediately around all
of them. They took his small suitcase. He was gently tugged along into a
blessedly cool trailer. An overweight man in a colonel's uniform took
Bequay's hand and pumped it jovially. "Professor Bequay, glad you could make
it. Have you been briefed?"
The professor said no. The colonel dismissed the uniformed men and offered
him coffee.
Bequay took black, no sugar. Motioning towards the window and the
activities going on outside it, he said, "What's this all about?"
The colonel leaned comfortably back in his chair. "We have discovered
something here, professor Bequay. Something extraordinary, if my assistants
are to be believed." It sounded as though he believed it. "Are your security
folders in order?"
"They rushed me through all that; yes, I am under oath to repeat nothing of
what I see. Now get on with it."
"The official word for this," the colonel leaned close for emphasis, "is a
`chronological anomaly'."
"And how did you find this `anomaly'?"
"There is a Russian submarine with a titanium hull," the colonel explained.
"Some of our people have been trying to come up with a metal detector
specifically tuned to titanium, such that this type of sub can be detected
deep under the sea. We were testing this device with a hidden cache of
titanium near here..."
"In the desert?"
"The principle is almost the same in sand as it is under the ocean; and
here the search was less expensive. Regardless, we turned up this anomaly
instead of the scrap of metal that had been hidden." The colonel -- his name
was Sutherland -- led Bequay outside again, into the scorching afternoon. On
the other side of the trailer was a hole in the ground, about ten meters in
diameter. A stout wooden ladder led to the bottom. Sutherland went first,
motioning for Bequay to follow.
"The helicopter crew was working for a three day pass. They tried to get
the anomaly out of the rock, thinking the crew that had hidden the metal
fragments had decided to make them work for their prize. At the time, it was
fused into solid rock with one corner protruding. Eventually they realized
that what they'd found was not what they'd been told to bring back."
They were both inside the dig now, a little deeper than the professor's
height. It sloped upwards toward one corner, where a man crouched over
something, making brushing motions with his arms. He turned around.
Sutherland introduced Bequay to Lieutenant Gordon, who smiled and called him
"sir" as he offered his hand. The professor shook it tersely, not even
looking at the man.
"This is your anomaly?" he asked.
`This' was a small metallic box. It jutted straight out from the sandstone
wall of the dig, about half a meter from rounded corner to rounded corner.
Four of the corners were still buried in solid rock, but someone had dug all
around it. Rust and corrosion seemed to have ignored it completely.
The lieutenant smiled. "This is what we found. Beautiful, isn't it?"
Bequay didn't like the lieutenant. "So," he said, "you've found a metal
box."
The lieutenant struggled inwardly, trying to sort out all the things that
he wanted to say. The professor said testily, "you must have called me here
for something, some data to analyze. That's what I do, unless you got my name
off the wrong list."
Sutherland, a hint of a grin on his lips, simply gestured towards the box.
The professor bent closer to one particular face -- nearly touching it. That
one face, not completely excavated from the stone around it, was not
featureless; in fact there was a square of glass inlaid there -- like a small
window, but opaque. There was writing there.
Property of the United States of America
And, under that
Important Data
"Important," said the lieutenant. "Damn right it's important. Important
enough to be left in layers of sediment formed at least six million years ago.
Important enough to last all that time-- and God knows how much longer." The
soldier inspected each face in turn, from Sutherland's gloating expression to
Bequay's attitude of cynical fascination. "Pretty important, all right," he
said.
The box was cut out of the rock, and a portable crane produced to lift it
from its ancient home. Now it sat on a reinforced steel table beneath a large
tent in the Camp, calmly guarding whatever secrets it contained, preparatory
to its being moved to an undisclosed location. The dig was being widened,
deepened, in the hopes of another find. A helicopter performed tighter and
tighter grid-searches of the area, and more of the metal detectors were on
their way.
"Some sort of geological survey, maybe," the lieutenant offered. "They
sent it back in time to record seismic data. Not much else it could record,
stuck in the ground like that."
Bequay sipped his coffee and glowered at the lieutenant. His mild dislike
had blossomed into continuing irritation. The lieutenant consistently
reminded him of a personality he had never gotten along with.
He got up to walk around the box. Featureless gray metal greeted him from
all sides-- except for the almost invisible seam that encircled it. He turned
to the two men. "How do we get it open?"
"I still don't know if we should." They both looked at the lieutenant.
"Obviously it's not meant for us."
"Misgivings so soon, lieutenant?" Sutherland, previously silent, decided
to join the conversation. "I'm afraid it's ours now. Whoever put it there
didn't bother to check our schedule." He shrugged. "Their loss." He asked
Bequay, "were you awake this morning when we tried the drill?"
"No. It woke me up." Pieces of the tent flapped loosely in the wind,
marking the passage of fragments of the exploding drill bit. It had nearly
cost two lives, and there wasn't a mark on the box.
Bequay ran his fingers over the lid-- what was presumably the lid, anyway.
The small glass square on the top seemed to be the only thing that even hinted
at its great age; tiny scratches crisscrossed its surface. They hadn't wanted
to drill here, even though it seemed the weakest part, for fear it might have
broken some apparatus inside. Now it looked like they would have to...
As the tips of his fingers brushed the glass, something seemed to shift
inside. A thump, from somewhere inside the impervious structure.
Professor Bequay backpedaled from the box, fearing whatever might happen.
But it remained where it was, waiting.
"What's wrong?"
"Something happened. I felt something move inside." He peered more
closely at the sides of the box; the seam that marked the border between box
and lid should have been barely perceptible-- now it seemed wider, possibly
wide enough to admit a dime.
The colonel noticed it too. "Sergeant! Give me your tool belt." From it
he produced a pair of flat screwdrivers, giving one to the lieutenant. Both
worked at the thin seam, twisting and prying the screwdrivers to widen it.
Bequay watched them work, arms folded.
There was the sucking sound of ancient air being exchanged, and the colonel
and lieutenant were lifting the heavy lid, amazingly separate from its box.
They dropped it to the side.
Smoke curled up from the inside; Bequay couldn't see what was in the box.
Both box and lid were trembling slightly, vibrating as though some engine had
started up inside. The vibrations increased in intensity, first producing a
strange double-toned hum as the vibrations transferred to the steel table--
then stronger, the sound filling the space around them as something physical--
and then thudding into the steel table while the three men desperately clasped
their ears against the sound.
The air was suddenly drenched with light -- a light that burned his face
and blinded his eyes. Bequay saw nothing more for a while.
Men filled the small tent, trying to help him up and chattering among
themselves. They were frightened voices. "I can't see. I can't see," Bequay
told them, blinking his eyes. His vision was nothing but a continual grayness
occasionally streaked with blue.
There must have been a doctor at the Camp, for someone was swirling a
penlight before his dimmed vision and trying to reassure him. "Here, it's
only temporary. You'll have a hell of a sunburn, though. It's over. It's all
over."
But it was not over.
Whatever else had been in the box was now slag puddled in the bottom of the
small cavity; only a cube of quartz-like material had survived. Bequay knew
there had been speculations about the development of crystalline recording
media. Since this box was from the future, the crystal might be one of those
speculations brought to life.
The cube shimmered in his hand, when he held it; rainbow patterns shifted
and curled within the enigmatic crystal. All his life, he realized, he had
looked for a challenge of this equal. His earlier experiences had taught him
that looking for order in the chaotic randomness of the universe could drive
one hopelessly pedantic -- or else just as hopelessly eager to see
intelligence behind every little pip and spike on a frequency graph. Here was
something genuine -- an encoding of information, completely man-made yet as
alien as anything yet discovered -- and he intended to deduce its purpose
here. No device currently existed to read the data encoded in the smoke-like
wisps of color. It would be necessary to invent one.
The lettering on the box suggested that, if there were textual data here --
and there was no reason to assume there weren't -- it would be in English.
This was a break. If, as the lieutenant had suggested, it consisted only of a
seismic readout, it still would not be difficult to decode; and the data
uncovered would be very useful and profitable, whatever the crystal contained.
Bequay was certain of that.
The only question was how it was encoded. A person from the time that had
built this object would no doubt have little trouble buying a machine to read
the crystal, but no such machines existed now. Bequay would have to deduce
what standards had been chosen for the construction of such a machine, and
those for the encoding of the crystals it used.
Bequay gleefully allowed his project directors to exert political pressure
on the dean of the university, to grant him indefinite leave to work on the
project. He had never liked life in academia, anyway. The dean told him
there were more communiques awaiting his attention, particularly from the SETI
organization, which maintained that they needed his expertise to decode
anomalous transmissions of non-terrestrial origin they had intercepted.
Bequay disregarded the messages. He had a much bigger project already on
hand.
To the rest of the world, Anderson Bequay had dropped out of sight.
A secret lab was prepared in Colorado; Bequay asked for, and received,
assistants and equipment from all over the country. The cube was measured,
mapped, weighed, chemically analyzed, micrographed, and magnetically tested.
After a year of more complex examinations, the team came to a conclusion: the
information Bequay sought hid behind the molecular bonds of the crystal
itself. The cube could not be "read" by currently available means. Bequay was
upset. This would mean more delays, if indeed the technology ever became
viable at all -- though of course it was obvious that it would.
Analysis of the box that had brought this cube proved futile. If any
machinery had been functional before the box was opened, it had melted itself
down completely. Even the formerly impervious outer shell was now weak and
crumbly after the booby trap, or whatever it was, had been tripped by its
opening. No futuristic miracles of metallurgy would be learned from it.
There was still one avenue to take. They knew there WOULD, someday, be an
information storage/retrieval system that would use this crystal. If it did
not come from too far in the future, there may be a corporation that has
considered the system at some time. This meant reports and specifications
would be available, reports that may give a direction on development of the
way in which the crystal was (would be) encoded.
A large Japanese-based corporation took its time in responding to their
inquiries. They had, in fact, considered a crystal medium for a recording
device; however, it was far too impractical to produce. Bequay asked for the
reports anyhow.
After two more years a prototype reader was ready. It took up the space of
a high school gymnasium, had leached half a billion dollars from the
Pentagon's budget, and used a sizable portion of the power output of a nearby
plant. Three exquisitely miniaturized lasers aimed at three sides of the
cube, turning it into a blaze of fiery red for all of the twenty minutes it
took to read the cube. Bequay's task could finally begin.
Data is essentially one-dimensional, a binary function of time, but the
crystal was a three-dimensional object. Was the data on it recorded from left
to right, top to bottom, in some other order, or in a more complex pattern?
The cube had no defined top or bottom, so Bequay had hundreds of distinct sets
of data to decode, for just the simpler patterns.
Each set was analyzed in its turn. There existed rigorous standards for
binary notation; each "bit" of 1 or 0 could be grouped together in established
patterns; seven or eight to a character in the English alphabet, for instance.
It was reasonable to assume that the makers of the cube would not change these
standards, but nothing of meaning was found in any interpretation.
Bequay and his hand-picked team tried everything, every possible formula
they could think of, but it stubbornly refused to be turned into sense. His
own analysis formulae told him that every interpretation was random data.
The military wanted results, and were getting impatient. Five years had
passed.
Bequay was now seventy years old. His eyes had failed him long ago and now
his body and mind were beginning to follow suit. He resisted the aging
process every step of the way. He remained at his workstation late at night,
sometimes waking at his terminal the next morning with the computer's keyboard
imprinted on his forehead.
His sleeping habits deteriorated his health further, and pneumonia put him
in the hospital. As he lay dreaming of shimmering cubes, the team of
graduates that had been working with him grew shiftless; personality conflicts
previously suppressed by his strong leadership were brought into the open.
Bequay returned to health to find his team split up, his project about to
be dissolved. Surprisingly, he did not care.
He had found it.
A vision had come to his confused mind again and again: bending over the
etched words of that ancient box, reading the words there, printed so neatly
and so obviously on the cover. Why bother writing those words at all? Who
would need the identification? What if it had been discovered by someone
else, before the United States had ever existed? Six million years was a long
time. Not that Bequay swallowed those stories of Atlantean civilizations or
ancient astronauts -- that was for others to believe -- but he could picture
Indians spotting the dull corner of metal and trying to chip it out, or a
group of early American settlers breaking a wagon wheel on it.
Important Data... Why inform the casual observer of the artifact's
contents? The people who had sent it had obviously meant to find it again,
and they needed no memory jogging as to its purpose.
Was there something IN those words? A message for him, perhaps. Why
not? The engraving had mentioned data, and who else would the government
contact if they wanted to analyze data?
Bequay found he liked that explanation.
His vision only pointed this out, but he had deciphered its true meaning.
It was time to visit the desert site again.
It had not changed much in the years since he had been here last. The
fences were still there, and the guards, though there were much fewer of both
now. Excavation had been abandoned, after nothing more had been found. The
heat was still the same. The younger Bequay had borne the oppressive heat
fairly easily, but now he found it difficult to even move.
He carried his briefcase to the white trailer, still there, but much more
uncomfortable than it had been. The briefcase was a portable terminal, and,
hooked to the trailer's comm.~system, allowed him to access the computers that
had still not been taken away from his project.
The box was there, but he was not interested in that. It had crumbled
under its own weight, a despondent heap in a nitrogen tank.
The lid was here, damaged as well. Bequay had brought with him a
microscope.
The words were as he had recalled them, but changed slightly-- instead of
lettering sunken straight into the metal, parts of the sunken engravings had
evaporated, leaving irregular ridges instead of smooth ones. The ridges went
up and down like the surface of a key, in regular patterns: up, up, down, up,
down, et cetera.
Bequay wrote these down in order, from the top stroke of the `P' to the
bottom of the `a' in `Data'. He entered these into the computer as the Camp
guards watched him. If they were mask bits, they were a key to Bequay's magic
data. He told the project computer to run each set of data through his
decoding program once more.
After ten minutes the first dataset produced nothing. The second gave the
same results; likewise the third. Bequay went to take a nap.
After the thirty-seventh the computer gave a distinct chime, and one of the
soldiers had to wake Bequay. When he returned to the workstation he saw his
program had produced a diagnostic-- the only such it had ever made in the last
five years:
English text corollary found @ byte 45024852
He told the computer to read to the end of the gigantic mass of data-- to
find a page of English text. His eyes grew wide.
My dear professor Bequay,
Obviously you have invented a machine to read this datacube, and
discovered my simple coding scheme to interpret the data as it was
meant to be read. Do not congratulate yourself just yet.
After having studied you, profiled you, and categorized you, I
feel I know you as I might know myself; and as such, I could not let
you die without ever knowing the true purpose of the artifact on which
you have spent much of your remaining life. Even more importantly, I
dislike you.
And so I thought I would include this brief note in the morass of
random bits; without it you would have died never knowing the
artifact's true purpose.
And what is this purpose, you ask? A simple one...
The old man was oblivious to everything around him, as the excited soldiers
called someone on another base to tell the news, as men arrived from all over
the country to examine the message and its implications.
What else could be done? Oh, they could bring someone to dissect his mind
-- try to bring back the thought, development, whatever it might have been,
perhaps by hypnosis -- but he was sure it was long gone by now. Decoding the
box had taken all his energy, all his intelligence -- as it had been designed
to do.
The man who had written that message had done his job well; decoding the
crystal's data had occupied his complete attention, and he would never have
accomplished it were it not for the clue in the lettering. The writer had
been so smug...
That blackboard. He remembered something -- not what he had been working
on, but a feeling about it, that it might have led to something big.
The University was thorough and meticulous, if anything -- he had left
them, but they would never have thrown away his things, should he return.
In a file in a box, in a dusty corner of a subbasement, was all his
accumulated mail. He paged through it briefly. Much of it was more
communications from SETI. They needed him to analyze their transmissions;
without him the data could never be translated. They desperately, desperately
needed him... Bequay shoved it all back into the box, disgusted. Perhaps the
University would let him return -- to pursue his own project, of course, but
ostensibly to teach again. He hated teaching.
He must figure out what he had been working on, and develop it to the
fullest. Though stuck deep in the past, he would have the last laugh.
______________________________________________________________________________
Robert Chansky is a vaguely aspiring writer in Santa Cruz, CA. He enjoys
computers and Peter Gabriel. This is the second story he has published in
Quanta, the first one being "Litterature," which was published in the December
'89 issue.
robertc@sco.com
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Footprints on the Sands of Time
Michael Burschik
Copyright (c) 1988
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Nimbly as a six-and-a-half-foot Prussian ballet dancer, Mortimer
Slagfire-Sartorius stepped into his laboratory and grazed his eager staff with
eyes that would have cowed a raging bullfrog, for Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius
was a master of men, a giant of science and a mountain of a man.
"Well, my fiendish friends and fawning followers," he bellowed, "this will
be a day of high adventure and low cunning, of great inventions and elusive
immortality! Let us begin!"
Then they jumped him, beat him, bound him, stunned and paralyzed him
with strange devices of his own invention.
"Stop that nonsense at once, you flea-ridden fools!" he roared. "What - in
the name of the Eightfold Path, the Seven Sages, the Six Fingers of Time and
the Five Wounds of Christ - is this supposed to mean?"
"This is the day of your eclipse," they told him as they bound him with
chains of rusty iron, semiceramic cables and a monorganic mosquito net of his
own invention, "and the dawn of our ascent."
"What? Do mere mortals dare to strive with titans?"
"For sixty years you have flooded the world with strange devices of your
own invention. You have made and lost and regained fortunes few men would dare
to dream about. You have ruled states and business empires. You have engraved
your name in bold print upon the history of science and the world - and in
letters sixty miles across upon the surface of Mars."
"I know!"
"And now you are eighty-six years old and seek immortality not merely in
the memory of men, but in the flesh."
"Yes, yes!"
"Even now, you are larger than life and maybe larger than legend.
Immortal, you would overshadow all the human race. And therefore we must kill
you before you can uncover the weird ways of nature and make yourself a god."
"You cannot kill me!" he thundered. "I am stronger than your strongest
fears and stranger than your strangest dreams. My voice alone, which rumbles
like a mountain, will make your flesh creep and your hearts quake and tremble
with envy, anguish and despair. And from my gaze you shrink like T-shirts
boiled too hot. You cannot kill a mountain of a man, no more than snails could
race a roaring lion."
"He's right," they said, "we cannot kill a man like him."
So they blinded him with white-hot glass and broke the fingers of his
hands. And they cast him through the shimmering arc bridge and began to
celebrate the morning of their fame. But he was washed up on a distant shore
beyond the arc bridge, where he soon woke to the cackling of an old woman with
a voice as dry as broken bones.
"By the Four Corners of the World, the Three Weird Sisters and the
double-dealing, two-faced God of Doors - where am I?" he groaned.
"Beyond the arc bridge," cackled the old woman. "But who can tell where
that may be? I call this place here Dawn. And who are you?"
"I am Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius, the greatest scientist since Gregory
Smirnov passed away."
"And I am Truant Moonblood, and I was a scientist before you were ever
born!"
"What? If that is true -- and I suppose it must be, since it is utterly
implausible -- then you must be one hundred and seven years old!"
"And so I am, you incredulous, fork-tongued fiend."
"And I, who was once an Eye Among the Blind, am now as sightless and
unfingered as a worm, and bound and chained and netted like a loanshark's
victim!" he groaned. "Would you be so kind as to unfetter me and my stumbling
imagination by telling me where on Earth - or rather, where in the rumbling
bowels of space - I am?"
And with fingers as dry as broken bones, Truant Moonblood, the ancient
scientist, unchained, uncabled and unnetted bald-headed Mortimer
Slagfire-Sartorius, the giant of science and blinded eye among the blind.
"As I told you once before, my youthful, blue-eyed friend," she crackled,
"you are in a place called Dawn - or was it Thrawn? - somewhere in the deep
gullet of space beyond the simmering bridge arc."
"Arc bridge."
"Bridge arc, arc bridge, what in the name of the double-faced God of
Archways is the difference? Here we are, and here we stay!"
"Well, maybe," Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius mused as he paced across the
salty sands and listened to the breathing of the sea. He heard the lapping of
small waves, the distant thunder of breakers and the whistling of the
whispering wind. He tasted the salt and the bitterness of the air and the
loneliness of the beach and of the ancient woman, whose hands were dry as
broken bones. He felt alone and bitter and, being a mountain of a man, he felt
the mountains far away.
"Why did they do this to me?" he asked himself.
"Are you not a giant of science and a mountain of a man?" the woman
chuckled. "All your life you must have dwarfed mere mortals. And mortals do
not care to live in the shadow of mountains."
"What of it?"
"Were there prophets among them?"
"There may have been," he said as Truant Moonblood put splints on his
fingers. "Some had a feverish look that lurked behind their eyes and made them
sneeze whenever I stared at them. I thought they had hay fever, but maybe they
were prophets."
"So they decided to cut your throat and rip out your guts and eat your
heart and your liver."
"They did, those small-souled tinkers and thought-cobblers!"
"But they could not kill you, for they did not know where to seek the heart
of a mountain. So they blinded you with white-hot glass and broke the fingers
of your hands and hauled you through the glimmering arc bridge. For they did
not want you to seek the hoary secret of immortality."
"How do you know?"
"After I had invented the plutonium-powered prayer wheel and transformed
Svartvic's equations and built the quivering arc bridge, I, too, turned
towards the half-hidden secret of immortality, though yet but forty-six."
"So they blinded you with white-hot glass and broke the fingers of your
hands and sent you through the very arc you had invented to bridge the gulf of
space!" he roared, as the two of them plodded across the bitter beach towards
a ramshackle shanty made of driftwood and seaweed.
"No. When I was young the men and women of science were gentler and I was
but a hill of a woman, not a mountain. So the men just raped me once or twice
and the women broke my nose, which was never very becoming anyway."
"And have you uncovered the grey-haired secret of immortality? As yet I
have merely glimpsed dark hints of hairy fairy tails."
"The giants of old were immortal, but they were giants of the body."
"And were slain with slings of reason by envious mortals, and are now
extinct," Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius replied, shivering. "And this must be
the most unkindly, cold and dismal world that I have ever seen."
"The giants of today are mortal, but they are giants of the mind."
"And they strive to be immortal, not merely in the memory of men but in the
flesh. Yet how, you ancient, cackling, bridge-building priest -- for are not
all priests bridge-builders who bridge the gulf between mere mortals and the
gods as though it were no wider than that which severs pons from pontifex? --
how is this immortality conceived?"
They reached the ramshackle shanty made of driftwood and seawind howling
through its cracks and crevices, leaning like a drunken sailor against the
cliff. They entered, and, while freezing Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius sat down
in a corner and shivered blindly, Truant Moonblood lit a flickering fire and
began to cook a steaming stew made of evil-smelling odds and ends and things
better left unnamed. And Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius, who was a mountain of a
man, although his teeth were chattering madly to themselves, mused whether the
old woman might be mad.
"Nietzsche, that mad materialistic mystic," she chuckled, "who was as blind
as any Homer and any far-sighted seer, knew that lovers sometimes seek to seem
as gods -- and not out of vanity."
"But what would a blind and bleary-eyed and walrus-bearded prophet know
about love? I have loved a hundred women in my time, and I always seemed a god
among mere mortals."
"He also knew," the rag-bag chattered, "that men with loud voices booming
in their throats can hardly think subtle thoughts -- and your voice is louder
than a raging bullfrog's mating roar."
"That shows him to be a greater fool than I thought. For what would a
dim-eyed, small-voiced prophet know of the mountain men he dreamed about, not
even knowing the darkness he lived in to be their shadow? And what would such
a temperamental, sentimental mystic know about the full-blooded love of
giants? Love is only sex mis-spelled, a prejudice of evolution, no more."
As the flickering fire and the vile stew began to warm Mortimer
Slagfire-Sartorius, and his thoughts and senses roamed and measured the
ramshackle shanty made of drifting thoughts and seawater seeping in like fog,
he became aware of a faint scent which tickled his back-brain, but would not
tell him where it came from, nor what it meant.
"I could make a better hut than this within an hour," he thought. "I could
build a good, solid house within a week, yet there is something strange about
this place, and it smells of broken bones." But in as dismal a place as Dawn
- or was it Thrawn? - a fishy smell might mean anything, or everything or
nothing.
"The collar-bone," the old woman said, "is the key to the secrets of love
and immortality."
"I thought as much," rumbled Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius suspiciously. "No
name is ever given without reason. But tell me more about this key-bone,
key-stone, key-tone. How will you unlock the clavicle?"
"Every human is born with a splinter of immortality lodged within the
collar-bone, but it is later lost in love."
"You must be madder than a March Hare, and as hare-brained, too! Your wits
are whittled away by the whispering winds!"
"Do not speak slightingly of whispering winds," whispered Truant Moonblood.
"Do you think it is purely coincidence that we speak of little death?"
"And what about love unfulfilled or unrequited? And what about those who
never love? Are they immortal?"
"They may well be. But consider this: the secret of immortal love -- if it
was ever known -- has been long lost in the murky mists of time and legend,
but still it haunts humanity. And then, maybe, love in itself is immortality,
but immortality does not imply invulnerability. And so immortal love may yet
be murdered silently, or slowly starved to death by words not said and deeds
not done and thoughts not thought."
"But what about those stone-hearted, never-loving, never-dying men? Where
are they?"
"There are but few of them, for they, too, are vulnerable, yet they exist.
They are the grey men and lonely spinsters that age and age and watch the
world around them falter, fail and die. They are mere shadows, and mountain
men like you would not see them, even if they were perched upon their knees.
They may be immortal, but they are mortally dull."
"Then there is no hope of immortality for the rock giants and the mountain
men of science?" Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius pondered as the tickling in his
back-brain crept down his spine towards his loins.
"No, and there never can be. Mere mortals could not live in the shadows of
giants, and if giants were immortal, humanity would wither like a flower
lacking light. And evolution must go on."
"Wait!" roared Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius. "There is a tickling in my
back-brain creeping down my spine towards my loins, and I smell something
fishy!"
"It is the seawind and the seaweed."
"No! It is you! Your fingers may be dry as broken bones, but you are not as
old as you would like to seem!"
"How true," said Truant Moonblood, and pierced his heart with a bone-headed
spear, for she knew enough of mountains to know where to seek their heart.
She cut up his carcass and salted it with sea salt. She boiled his flesh
and roasted it and smoked his flesh and hung it up in the ramshackle shanty
made of drifting sighs and sea-foam. His bones she used to fill the cracks and
crevices that the fog seeped through, but his collar-bone she broke apart and
sucked out all the marrow, for Mortimer Slagfire-Sartorius had been a mountain
of a man, and there was still some hint of immortality locked inside his
clavicle.
And Truant Moonblood wandered once again across the lonely beach and smiled
gently to herself. And she sat down to wait for the next giant of science,
seeking the secret of immortality.
______________________________________________________________________________
Michael Burschik was born in Britain in 1966 and had the ill fortune of being
forced to spend most of his life in a miserable Bavarian town within spitting
distance of both the former `Zonengrenze' and the Czechoslovakian border.
During one of his few bright moments he decided to leave for Bonn. At the
moment, he is trying to get started with his doctoral dissertation. Michael
Burschik is one of the six infamous editors of the German semipro 'zine,
`Centauri' and claims that his German is rather better than his English.
`Footprints' started out as a travesty of Lafferty, but somehow got out of
control and began mutating.
UPP201@DBNRHRZ1.BITNET
______________________________________________________________________________
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Travelling Sideways
Ian Chai
Copyright (c) 1987
______________________________________________________________________________
So. Professor Yang is gone. And we are still here. The fact that I wrote this
story and you are reading it proves that he was wasting his time, anyway. But
I am getting ahead of myself.
"Professor Yang," of course, was not his real title. One might call him
"Yang Lao Tze," but his full title, roughly translated from Mandarin Chinese
would have been "Honorable Old Master of Light and Dark Natures specializing
in Sub-Unity Life-Forces." Of course, it does not sound that long in Chinese,
since all words in Chinese are only one syllable long, unless you count
compound words.
I was the personal aide of Tun Ismail bin Karim, professor of
Anthropology at the Royal Academy of Natural Learning of Melaka, while he was
on vacation in Tiong Utara. Tun Ismail told me he had wanted to visit the
Great Wall of Cin Sih ever since he saw it from the viewport of the restaurant
in the orbital station, Angkasa Tiga. Even today, it is the only man-made
object visible on the Earth's surface from there.
So, although I was only a Chinese servant, he took me with him on his
vacation because I could speak to the natives there. Not that he would have
had any trouble finding Malay speakers, of course. Tiong Utara had been a
Melakan colony for over three hundred years. So had half the world. But the
anthropologist in him wanted to experience the culture to the fullest. In any
case, I had been working for him for half my life, and we had become as close
friends as a non-Malay can be with his Malay master.
We were walking down one of the old narrow streets of Peiping near our
inn one morning, window shopping, when a middle-aged Chinese man was thrown
out of one of the restaurants in front of us. "Can't you read the sign?"
shouted the bouncer. "Malays only! Chinese scum! How did you get into the
private dining hall, anyway?"
The man just sat in a daze on the street. After tossing a bag out after
him, the bouncer went back inside. Sir gestured to me to help him up, and I
did. That's one of the nice things about working for him: he has a concern for
non-Malays one seldom sees.
As I was helping the man, I noticed that he was dressed in what resembled
a white ancient Chinese scholar's skirt, black waist-coat and skull-cap,
except that the material was very smooth and soft, and to my surprise, it was
not soiled by his recent union with the street.
"Had a nasty bump, there, didn't you, eh?" said sir to the man. "I'm
curious about what you're doing dressed in that odd looking outfit of yours,
too. Is it for some kind of local cultural thing?" The man did look out of
place in modern Peiping. Most of the locals had gone over to the baju and
sarong of modern Asia Tengarra dress, as had most of the world, in order to
fit with the styles of the Melaka Empire.
The man looked blankly at sir, and said nothing. Now, sir was a pretty
liberal Malay, but one does not just stare when a Malay talks to you, so I
shook him a bit, urging him to reply.
He mumbled something in Chinese.
"Come on, man, answer the sir!"
"I don't understand your language," he said, in Mandarin Chinese.
Now, by that time, I was pretty fed up with the guy. Sure, he might not
have been able to speak the Sultan's Malay, but, surely he should have known
enough to get along. I was all for dropping him right then, and let him thank
his lucky stars sir was such a tolerant man, and I said as much to sir.
However, sir was intrigued by the man's appearance, so he told me to ask the
man in Chinese.
"Ok, so you claim not to know Malay, eh? Well, the sir here wants an
explanation for your outlandish dress. It's not even Chinese New Year, so
what's with the get-up, eh?"
"Uh, I... "
"Well, speak up, man!"
"I... that is to say, well... "
Sir interjected, "I think he's still pretty dazed, Yahya. Here, pick up
that bag of his, and bring him back to the hotel, where we can question this
guy further."
So I grabbed the bag and dragged/carried/walked the man back to our
suite. He was mumbling something which sounded like "Miscalculation? Can't
be... It worked, didn't it? Miscalculation?... "
"I created your world, you know?" he said, as we sat down in the outer
room of our suite, where I slept. Sir's bedroom led in from there, so that
anybody wanting to disturb him would have needed to go through me first.
"What?" I said, surprised.
"I said, I created your world. Or formed it, anyway."
"This guy's mad," I told sir, "he seems to be claiming to be Allah or
something."
"Really? Quite a psychosis... you sure that's what he said?"
"Well, more or less. He says he formed our world." I turned to him and
said, in Chinese, "You say you formed our world? What do you mean?"
"You'll think I'm mad, but I've got proof. I'm from another universe,
really... a parallel one."
Sir interjected, "Translate everything he says for me, Yahya."
The man's name was Yang Chin Shih. He claimed that he was some kind of
professor of nature or some such. In his world, he claimed, Melaka was a
vassal state of a Chinese empire, not the other way around. In fact, the
Chinese empire, which had blossomed from the Sung dynasty a thousand years
ago, controlled the whole solar system, in a system-wide bureaucracy where the
Chinese were the supreme people, guardian of Heaven and Earth. All other
races, "barbarians", were subject to the great Chinese Emperor and the
Brilliant Chinese People. No non-Chinese could own property; they had no
rights, no claim to justice.
But he, Yang Lao Tze, saw the cruelty and injustice of their utopia. He
felt that all races of humans should be given a fair chance, instead of being
made slaves of the Chinese. He felt that this was in direct contradiction to
the teachings of that great moralist and philosopher, Kung Fu Tze, which the
Chinese claim to uphold.
It was also contradictory to the teachings of Buddha, whom most of the
religious Chinese still upheld. Yet, the fact that the Buddha was Indian did
not prevent the Chinese from mistreating the Indian race all through history.
(Sir mentioned, at this point, that his own Malay race had also
historically mistreated the Prophet's own race, the Arabs.)
But because other Chinese in the past who had pointed out this
contradiction between the actions and the principles of the Chinese people had
mostly been ignored, and because he feared that if he spoke up against the
injustice, he would be classed with the "barbarian lovers" and stripped of his
position in the Imperial Institute, Yang had kept quiet about his convictions.
("Hah! That's what some people have accused us anthropologists of doing,"
interjected sir, "but we know that although the cultures of the non-Malay are
not as advanced to ours, they have value, still, in Allah's plan. And, after
all, everyone has the potential of becoming one of Allah's followers.")
He was, however, a learned man in the science of sub-unity life-forces,
the microscopic building blocks of the universe itself, and he had discovered
a method of harnessing the reverse-yin element. The reverse-yin element had
been theorized by other sub-unity scientists as far back as a century ago, but
although many findings of sub-unity had been capitalized for things like
planet-ship propulsion, the reverse-yin element, which appears to be an
analogue of the yin element, which orbits the yang element of the unities that
make up compounds, but appears to travel BACKWARDS in time, had yet to be put
to the service of China.
Until Yang found one, that is. He discovered a way to capture the
reverse-yin element, and that led to an antiquity viewer, which, to put it
mildly, caused quite a stir among the Masters of Nature around the solar
system. He, in fact, received an Imperial Commendation of Nature Studies from
the Heaven-Mandated Emperor himself, in Chang-an. This was the greatest
discovery in nature studies since Zhou Man Kung discovered that the unity
could be dispersed, releasing an enormous force, which could be harnessed for,
among other things, electriliquid power and interplanetary travel.
Having received an Imperial Seal Grant, he now had virtually unlimited
funds to continue his research into the nature of the reverse-yin element. He
obtained one of the most powerful liquid-brains to aid him in the manifold
calculations. And this was how he came upon his plan to save the world from
Chinese oppression.
For he had not revealed everything he had discovered to the Imperial
Nature Commission. They thought that his device merely was capable of
capturing reverse-yin elements and thus providing them with a window in which
to `view' history. But what he did not tell them was that he had also
discovered a way to send yin and yang elements BACK through the window,
thereby `changing' the past. Changing history.
Not only that, but he had devised a way to project a chi-field that would
expand into the new universe thus formed, bringing him into it along with it.
He began his experiments by changing small things in the near past, like
moving a piece of paper on a desk, after having photographed it in its
original position and bringing the picture with him in the chi-field. Then he
tried more adventurous things, like changing the color of one of his
colleague's vehicle.
Once, he prevented a traffic accident which had claimed the life of a
friend's son. He projected a board into the past, pushing the boy out of the
way of a runaway xi-cart, just before it hit him. When he emerged, everyone
only remembered the near-miss, not the mangled child. Yet he had a newspaper
article and photograph to prove to himself that history had indeed been
changed.
(Sir interrupted him at that point, objecting that his very act of
appearing in the analogue universe would mean displacing something. But he
explained that the chi-field starts as a geometric point in the new universe,
pushing air and other matter out of the way to make way for his projection.)
He had discovered a certain principle of history manipulation: having
changed history, one can never go back to the old universe. It had ceased to
exist, having been replaced by the new universe. If it were not for the
chi-field, there would have been nothing to indicate that the other universe
had ever existed.
Finally, he was ready for his greatest experiment. China had started its
technological climb in the Sung dynasty, about a thousand years ago, when
philosophers and historians Chang Tsai and Cheng Yi realized that in order to
understand the universe, they had to study the things in it. Their work was
continued by the influential Chu Hsi, which set the scene for modern Chinese
technology to grow from their alchemy. It was this technological edge that
kept the Sung dynasty in power for a record 1059 years, far surpassing the
300-odd years of Tang and 400-odd years of Han, and it seemed like it would go
on for another thousand.
He reasoned that if he could retard Chinese technological growth, other
races would not be so far behind, technologically, and so China would not have
the chance to enslave the rest of the world.
And the crux were those three key philosophers: Chang Tsai, Ch'eng Yi,
and Chu Hsi. If he could get them to divert their energies to another focus,
the world would be saved.
With his viewer, he determined that the famous legend of how Chang Tsai
was inspired to investigate empirical knowledge was true. He was on his way to
his student Ch'eng Yi' s house, when he saw a little boy playing with marbles.
Since he had a little time, he stopped and watched him. The little boy's
marble had rolled into a hole under a rock, out of his reach. But the little
boy proceeded to move the large rock off from over the hole with a stick he
used as a lever, thus exposing his marble. This had led Chang Tsai to
consider, if a little boy could, by studying his surroundings, move a rock he
could never carry, what could grown men do by studying nature? Upon arriving
at Ch'eng Yi's house, they discussed his new idea, and realized that their
concentration upon history would not reveal new ideas like this. That
realization was the first step that led them to formulate their `Principle of
Empirical Knowledge', which later inspired Chu Hsi's studies and subsequent
discoveries.
Yang's plan was simple: he projected a razor blade into the past, cutting
the strap of Chang Tsai's sandals. This caused him to have to hunt for a
replacement strap, which caused him to be late, which caused him not to stop
and observe the boy, which caused him to remain more concerned with studying
human history. Thus when he arrived at Ch'e ng Yi's house, they continued with
their historical studies as they had originally planned, and the `Principle'
was never written.
"So in the vacuum thus created, Melaka rose to power and grasped world
domination?" I asked, incredulously. By then, it was evening, sir having
ordered us a room service lunch.
"So it seems," replied Yang.
"Well, he certainly has a rather thought-out and complex delusion," sir
concluded, "even going to the extent of coming up with that peculiar outfit to
back him up. Much of his scenario is recognizable as permutations of
real-world situations. He reversed the roles of Chinese and Malay, and made
them more severe, probably as a reaction against what he saw as an injustice
done against him and his people by our superior culture. Similarly for his
allusions to persecution of his prophet's race, the Indians, by his people.
That is obviously borrowed from Malay subjugation of the race of our Prophet
Muhammad (peace be upon him), the Arabs." He turned suddenly to Yang: "Now
admit it, you understand my language, don't you?"
Yang was taken aback by the sudden accusation, but no trace of
comprehension came upon his face.
"Hmm, it appears his delusion has even covered up involuntary
acknowledgement of the language. This is a really interesting case... I'm
sure Daud would like to examine him." Daud, being Tuan Dr. Daud bin Muhammad
Zainal, psychology professor, close friend, and frequent partner of his in the
game of sepak takraw.
Sir was given to acting on impulse when something intrigued him, and Yang
intrigued him deeply. He had shown us his reverse-yin device, but he claimed
it must have been damaged when tossed by the bouncer, for it would not show us
any past views on its screen. (Sir took this as more evidence of Yang's
delusion, but Yang asserted that he could fix it, given enough time and
equipment.)
The outfit he was wearing, too, was intriguing. The material appeared to
have been made by the new Kassim-Assad process, invented only last year by
that Javan duo, which has an outer molecular structure so inert and smooth
that no dirt or grime can attach itself to it, which makes for an unsoilable
garment. But the process was still prohibitively expensive, and the whole
garment must have cost him a year's wages. He claimed, however, that where he
came from, the process was invented by Wang Chen Xiao a century and a half
ago, and since then, improved techniques and mass manufacture had made it the
standard material for clothes.
Anyway, as I said, sir was given to acting on impulse when intrigued, and
since we were supposed to return to Melaka that week on Khamis, (it was then
Selasa, so that was two days away) sir booked an extra seat in the non-Malay
section on the kapal terbang and brought Yang back with us to the academy!
During the intervening time, we told Yang about Melakan history, because
he was curious about it. We told him about how prince Parameswara of Palembang
left his father's court and went to Temasik, and later on to Melaka, where he
met some Arab traders who converted him to Islam. He then changed his name to
Iskandar Shah, and, by the power of Allah, he proceeded to set up the most
powerful empire in the world.
Of course, this did not happen at once. Melaka was only one state among
many in a peninsula subjugated by the Siamese king.
But during the reign of Manzur Shah, a curious man appeared at the
Melakan court with an interesting gift. Zulkifli bin Said Ahmad had fl ed from
Arabia after being accused of heresy and consultation with Satan. He had
harnessed a Chinese invention, gunpowder, and produced a weapon capable of
killing an enemy from a distance: the bedil. Sultan Manzur Shah believed him
when he asserted that he had discovered this by experimentation in natural
phenomena, and logical reasoning, not by consultation with evil spirits as he
had been accused.
Thus Zulkifli was appointed chief alchemist to the Sultan, and his
disciple, a Malay prince and brother of the heir, Tengku Harun ibni Manzur
Shah, eventually established the Royal Academy of Natural Learning, during the
reign of his brother, Alaudin Riayat Shah.
It was from this distinguished institute that the golden age of Melaka
blossomed. First came the fire-motor. Then the automatic bedil. The inventions
multiplied faster and faster until no nation in the world could challenge
Melaka' s superiority.
Thus the Empire of Melaka stretched over four continents and a hundred
colonies. Even the Arabs and the Spanish in the end submitted, and with the
exception of the Pikanas Federation on the Sunrise Continent, she had lost
none of her colonies. But the Pika nas were Malays, anyway, having displaced
the native orang asli tribals, who did not even have horses, or even wheels,
but only domesticated dogs which dragged crosswood sleds.
At first, Yang was horrified. He kept mumbling, "It only shifted, from
Chinese to Malay. Nothing's solved." But later, he changed his mind. He
confided with me that our world did seem less unfair: at least non-Malays were
not slaves with no rights. They were merely second-class citizens, and native
peoples, and, by and large, were left to govern themselves, with a Malay
overseer, except in the several cases when exploitation on a large-scale basis
was thought profitable by Melaka. Of course, Melaka exacted a tribute from
every colony, and even most of the semi-independent native states of Africa,
and the Southern Sunrise Continent. But it was nothing compared to what China
did in his world, he reasoned.
Even then, however, the world was still not perfect. Oppression still
existed. "Well, I must try again, then," he reasoned, "We have taken a step in
the right direction. I must repair my machine and take the next step."
Since I did not believe his machine ever worked in the first place, I
just shrugged and humored him.
When we got back to Melaka, sir took him to see Dr. Daud, and I tagged
along as an interpreter.
"Quite a change from your regular work with the English hill tribes, eh,
Ismail?" The doctor had just finished listening to Yang (through me) tell his
story again.
"Well, Daud, old chap, you know me... " replied sir, "So, what do you
make of him?"
"I'd say he has a pretty deep-rooted psychosis here. As you pointed out,
he had reversed the roles of our race and his in history, and made up quite an
elaborate fantasy with it, too. In his world, the Chinese are higher in
technology than we are, and even more oppressive. This is probably due to a
Wadinian excessiveness condition. He probably views Malay oppression in an
exaggerated manner and postulates Chinese superiority by giving them a
technological edge."
"Uh, sir doctor, pardon, may your servant say something?" I interrupted.
At his assenting nod, I continued: "He did say to me on the kapal terbang that
his scheme wasn't a complete failure because the current regime is less
oppressive than the previous."
"Well," asserted the doctor, "that's merely a Zaini complex of
rationalizing to himself to make his position more bearable! But of course,
you're just an unlearned non-Malay; you won't know that."
"No, sir. Sorry, sir."
"Well, Ismail, I'd say you've found another way to waste your own money
again. He's just another typical delusion case."
"Oh, I won't say the money's wasted, Daud. I did have a good time, and my
life's not in any financial straits."
"Yeah, well, just be glad that his majesty Sultan Mahmud Idrin Shah likes
your stuff about those British barbarians, and don't let him think you're
wasting his money monkeying around with mad Chinamen instead of producing
another of your cultural analyses on those heretical Anglicans. I never
understood why he likes reading those boring papers of yours, anyway!"
Both men laughed. The two friends had been jestingly trivializing each
other's work for as long as I had known them.
Sir gave Yang a job at his mansion as an assistant houseboy, for he took
pity on the poor madman. After a while, Yang did learn enough Malay to
understand simple commands, so things worked out pretty well.
The vacations were soon over, and his students came back and school
started again, and we settled back into our regular routine.
Yang expressed an interest in history and gadgets, so I got him some
books for him to read in his spare time, and even a Malay-Chinese dictionary.
Malay was a very regular language, so it was relatively easy to learn. Yang
was soon pretty proficient in interpreting the Arabic script that Malay was
written in.
The next year, sir, several of his graduate students, and I went to
Britain for three months to continue his fieldwork among the English hill
tribesmen. Many of his students brought servants along, too, and we, along
with the porters sir had hired in London, carried the equipment and followed
them around. Because I had been with sir for so long, I had picked up quite a
bit of the English language, and we had a fun summer hiking from village to
village, talking to them, and recording their culture, religion and myth. I
called myself "Ian" among them because it is the Scottish version of my name,
"Yahya," and the English version, "John," was too common among them for my
tastes.
One morning, a couple of days after we returned, Yang met me excitedly.
"I've fixed it! I've managed to fix my machine!" He grasped the sleeve of
my baju, dragging me to his room.
"What? What machine?"
"The reverse-yin machine! I managed to decipher the Malay symbols for
scientific terms and correlate them to my knowledge, and I've managed to rig
it up again!"
Half his table was taken up by a jumble of wires, circuits, and various
pieces of plastic taped, soldered and glued together. I recognized the main
segment as the control panel of the machine he had shown us on that first day,
with the same screen above it.
He sat down and put his hand on the control panel. Streams of Chinese
text started filling the screen, which then split into two windows, one of
text, and another of picture. The picture, which looked like an ordinary
three-dimensional laser projection, showed me, as a boy of ten, being led into
the house by my father! It was the day I was hired by sir! Eleven years ago, I
had joined sir's household as a houseboy, but there were no cameras to record
the scene! Just another domestic being hired, that's all. No big occasion for
anyone but me. But I remembered it, and that was exactly what the screen
showed!
I just stood there for several minutes, mouth agape, immobile.
Meanwhile, Yang was resetting the coordinates, and the scene changed. It
now showed the Sultan's palace. Then the Jaffar dome installed fifty years ago
around it disappeared. The scene changed rapidly, while maintaining the same
view of the palace, while the surrounding background slipped back in time. The
letricars disappeared, to be replaced by close-fired vehicles, then
horse-drawn carriages. The entire New Wing of the palace disappeared.
Finally, the palace itself was reduced to a relatively small wooden structure,
raised on stilts. I recognized it as the original Manzur Shah palace of six
centuries ago, which I had seen depicted in paintings and reconstructions
before.
And there, in the courtyard, was the great Zulkifli, with his original
bedil, about to demonstrate it to the Sultan and his advisers under the royal
shelter behind him.
Suddenly, I realized to my horror what Yang was about to do: "No! You're
going to change history again!" In that horrifying moment, I realized that if
he was not mad all along, then he was what he claimed. This meant that if he
changed history, he would kill every one of us!
He turned around with a determined look on his face: "It will be for the
best! Melaka must not have the technological edge. Nobody must be allowed to,
then there will be no opportunity for oppression." He moved his finger, and
the air around him started glowing.
That must be the chi-field! He's starting it. I lunged at him, but too
late: he had projected an air pocket into the metal of the explosion chamber
of the bedil and, as it ignited, the whole thing blew up in Zulkifli' s face!
That would cause Manzur Shah to lose faith in his science, and...
The universe changed.
We were in a clearing in the jungle. Or at least it was a clearing
cleared by the extruding chi-field. I had just made it into the chi-field
before the change was made.
"You... you've murdered them! Everyone I ever knew, my whole world...
gone... " I felt like I had no energy left. I just sat down on the
undergrowth, empty.
"No, they are not dead," he said, standing above me.
"What do you mean, not dead? They're all gone! The house is gone! This is
a jungle!" I screamed.
"Yes, they're gone, but not dead. They were never alive, so they could
not die. They never existed, and there is no evidence that they ever existed,
except in your memory and mine."
I felt numb all over. Yang collected his machine together, from the
table, which had come with us, and put it into his bag.
"Come! We have a whole new world to discover, out there. And I daresay it
will be a better one than the one we came from."
Yang was better prepared this time, and he had packed food, drink,
clothes, survival equipment, and the gold which he had obtained by selling his
unsoilable outfit. Most of this was packed in a knapsack which I slung over my
shoulders.
We soon came to a road, which was paved with asphalt. Several vehicles
passed us, engines roaring.
"I think those are close-fired vehicles," observed Yang, "which means
that their technology is about a hundred years behind yours."
I just trudged dully beside him.
Suddenly, I saw a sign up ahead. I was written in some alien tongue in
ROMAN characters! And below that, were the words, in English, "Coke: it's the
real thing!"
Now if that didn't beat it all! English! Of all things to find so near
Melaka. And there was another sign: "Melaka: 10 kilometer," made of molded
white plastic reflective letters on a green-painted metal background.
Presently, we came to the outskirts of the city. The city of Melaka was a
great deal smaller in this world, but it existed. We overheard several people
talking in a jumble of Malay and English, and I soon realized that the alien
language was Malay written with the Roman alphabet! Had England become the
super-state in THIS world? I had a sinking suspicion that we were back where
we started, with the English replacing the Malays. But in my world, the Malays
had not made the English change their alphabet. Was this world worse off?
Melaka was little more that what I knew of before as Old Melaka Town, the
part of Melaka which surrounded the original port area.
Most of the men and even some of the women were dressed in various
shirt/trouser combinations, although we did see a few in sarongs, and a couple
of women in some variant of the baju kurong. Most of the women wore simple
skirts and blouses.
Near the old city center was the remains of an old fort. I deciphered the
sign near it, which said that it was the main gate of a Portuguese kubu fort
called A Formosa, which was destroyed by the British. So, the British did come
into power, here. But the Portuguese preceded them?
We found a museum in a small scale reconstruction of the original palace
not far from the kubu. After being told to do so by the Malay guard in English
(there was also a little sign on the steps to that effect), we took our shoes
off before entering. (So, the custom of removing footwear before entering
someone's residence had spread to public buildings? Not so, we found out
later: only in certain Malay museums.)
Through the displays there, we found out that the Portuguese had conquered
Melaka 1511 years after the birth of Christ. (Yes, they used the ancient
European calendar system, but I remembered enough information to convert it to
the Islamic calendar, so I got a bearing of when it was.) Wow! That was nearly
500 years ago! So, Zulkifli's invention had come barely in time to save
Melaka, being only a century before that. Later on, the Dutch took over from
the Portuguese, and later, the British, in building an empire almost as
extensive as Melaka's, took over the whole peninsula, and half the island of
Borneo, as well.
But, as we found out from an adjoining museum, (which, curiously enough,
incidentally, did not insist on the footwear removal) the British no longer
held this empire. After something called the Second World War, the whole
empire disintegrated into independent countries. Of which, Melaka was now a
state in a federation known as Malaysia.
Since England did not have monopoly on the empire-making scheme but had
to share it with other European nations, this world was less dominated than
either of ours, so the colonies had all managed to garner enough power to
throw off its yoke.
Melaka seemed to have become quite a museum town, as it became of little
economic importance. The port had silted up due to neglect, and its main
industry seemed to be catering to the various history-conscious tourists. For
even though its life as a major empire had been cut short, even in this world
it had had the largest empire in Asia Tengarra, or as they call it in English,
Southeast Asia, prior the the European expansion.
By the time we finished gleaning all this information from the various
museums, it was late in the evening. We had to do something about surviving
this world ourselves. For the moment, we were all right, for Yang had brought
enough microrized food for us to survive a month, and, what with the
equatorial climate, it would not be too hard to survive without proper
shelter, but it would not do for the long run. We walked out to the beach and
set up the tent Yang had packed there, although that brought us quite a few
curious stares from the locals. I guess they did not have automatic-pitching
tents yet.
Yang was encouraged by the data we had gathered. Once more, his meddling
had resulted in a more egalitarian world than the prior one. But it still had
its colonizing empires, and although things appeared pretty benign then, it
looked like things had not been so in the past.
"Just one more twiddle," he told me that night in the tent, "and we
should be home free. I just need to find the crux for this British Empire."
"But if you negated the British Empire, won't someone else just take over
again? You saw, the Portuguese and the Dutch beat them to Melaka," I argued.
"True... what I must do is to negate the whole European system. In any
case... "
"Hey!" Someone outside shone a flashlight into the tent. "No camping is
allowed here!" the voice said in Malay.
I got out, and there were a couple of policemen standing there. "I'm
sorry; I didn't know... "
"All, right! Where's your I.C.?" one of them demanded.
"I.C.? What... "
"So, he doesn't have his identification card with him, eh?" He smiled a
knowing smile at his partner. "Well, I guess we'll have to take him in, now,
won't we?"
One of them approached me and started to take out his summons book. The
other one continued, "Now, are you sure, perhaps you should look in your
wallet?" he hinted.
They wanted a bribe! But I had no money of their kind, and I doubted that
my Royal Melaka banknotes would appease them.
"Uh... I... "
"What do you say, we talk this over a cup of coffee? Hey, old man!" he
shouted into the tent, "Won't you join us?"
"Wait... I come soon, good?" came Yang's voice. A pale glow came from
the tent.
Suddenly, I realized what that was: the chi-field! The bastard! He's
going to leave me here! I'm not ready for non-existence!
"Excuse me, I'll go get him... "
"Oh, no, you don't." The cop grabbed my arm. "Don't think you can get
away so easily... "
The glow was brightening, and soon it would be too late! I punched the cop
in the stomach with my other hand and lunged for the tent. The other cop
grabbed my leg as his partner went down. I smashed to the ground halfway
through the door of the tent, and I could see Yang in front of the reverse-yin
machine, half obscured by the chi-field already.
I kicked the cop with my other foot, but as he fell backwards, the other
cop got to his feet and threw a punch at me, but I rolled over and his fist
hit the sand. I lunged again at Yang...
... And fell right through. Half the tent had disappeared, along with
Yang, and some of the sand below him. I found myself in the depression in the
sand thus created, looking up at the two amazed cops staring the spot where
Yang was.
The knapsack lay just at the edge of the depression, and I grabbed it,
took out the self-defense stunner Yang had packed as part of his survival
equipment, and stunned the two men before they could react. As they crumpled
to the ground, I realized something: we still existed.
According to Yang's theory, we should have ceased to exist as soon as he
twiddled with the past, because we were not within the chi-field. We should
have been replaced by the new world thus created, and it should have been as
if we had never existed. Yet, there I was, standing over the two comatose
corrupt cops. The sand felt real; the stunner in my hand felt real; and I felt
real. My bruises even hurt, and I know pain is real.
In his haste, Yang had left almost all the survival equipment behind, so
I packed up everything and started hiking away. The two cops would regain
consciousness in a couple of hours. I know their kind: they would never file a
report on me, for fear of being thought mad. They would not have any
explanation for what had happened that night, and they were not the kind of
people who would stand up for truth merely on principle.
That was over twenty years ago. With my superior technology survival
equipment, and a considerable amount of luck, I had created for myself a legal
entity in the local bureaucracy. Having established a small reputation for
myself with some "inventions," I managed to persuade an American firm to hire
me as an R&D specialist. Since the Americans were an English nation, I used
that name I had given myself during those field trips in England with Tun
Ismail, "Ian." Who would have thought, I would have ended up in the North
Sunrise Continent speaking English!
As for old professor Yang, I suppose he shall continue along his merry
way, travelling sideways through time, oblivious to the fact that he is in
fact merely spawning off new branches, instead of creating a better universe
of equality among races. The poor man would never know that each time he makes
a better world, the uglier one he left would continue on without him, and thus
his reform would, for them, be futile.
______________________________________________________________________________
Ian Chai was introduced to SF at the tender age of 7, and to computers at the
medium-rare age of 12. He was all set to make writing SF his career and
programming his hobby, but his father wisely intervened and suggested he
reverse them, so he is now a graduate student in Computer Science at the
University of Kansas. Born in 1966 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, he has lived in
Johore, Sabah, Singapore, Kansas, and Germany and his old Mac Plus he writes
on is almost as well-travelled as he is.
chai@hawk.cs.ukans.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Jonny Neurotic
Robert Hurvitz
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Jonny stared intently at his reflection in the mirror, searching for a
tell-tale glint of light on his forehead. There was none. Perfect, he
thought, everything's working out perfect. He frowned and added as an
afterthought, Too perfect. He glanced down at his workbench littered with
drill bits, screwdrivers, random-sized pieces of wire, textbooks. Jonny
smiled, reassured. In his right hand, he still clenched his Mitsubishi power
drill. He looked back at the mirror.
He had been letting his hair grow unchecked for the last year, anxiously
awaiting the day it would be long enough to completely cover his forehead.
Jonny squinted at his reflection. Again, he could catch no sign of what lay
covered beneath the wave of hair that flopped down past his eyebrows. He let
out a short, sharp laugh.
They all said I was mad, Jonny thought. Said it right to my face. A
combined major in electrical engineering, computer science, and neurobiology
was insane, they exclaimed. Pure lunacy! And why such a major? All for an
obsession with science fiction. I should be committed, they hollered.
Wait till they get their next phone bills, Jonny thought, then we'll see
who's mad. He snickered at his pun.
He put down the drill and triumphantly swept his hair clear of his
forehead, letting the sight of his newly-installed chrome modular jack dazzle
him. The bleeding had stopped, and his skin bulged slightly and curled in
against the cool metallic surface. It's beautiful, Jonny thought.
He picked up his well-worn copy of `Neuromancer' and headed to the kitchen,
where he pulled a six-pack of Coke from the refrigerator. He went back to his
bedroom, closing and locking the door behind him to assure his privacy from
any jeering house-mates who might happen to barge in for a laugh.
He flopped onto his bed, pulled off a Coke, and chugged it down,
impatiently waiting for the caffeine to hit his system. He threw the empty
can across the room, watching the light reflect off the damp aluminum as it
arced toward his recycling bin/laundry basket. The can landed, clattering
loudly, and Jonny pulled off another Coke.
After the third can, he could feel nerves begin to twitch.
Jonny bounded out of bed, picked up his phone, and settled down in front of
the wall. He turned the phone over and unplugged the jack; then he put the
phone aside. He reached over to his bed and picked up his copy of
`Neuromancer', tucking it snugly under his shirt, next to his heart. He
twisted his legs into the lotus position. Now he was ready. With a trembling
hand, Jonny positioned the plug just inside his jack. His heart pounding out
of control, he broke out in a cold sweat as he jacked in.
And he screamed as his senses seemed to explode. Blinding chaos surged
around him, howling in his ears, digging into the pit of his stomach. His
arms flailed about, and his head jerked back then snapped forward.
When Jonny opened his eyes, he was sprawled on the floor in his room, his
clothes drenched with sweat. His head pounded as if an alien larva was trying
to escape the confines of his skull. He tried to sit up, but the room spun
crazily around him, and he ended up flat on his back again. He waited a
minute, taking several deep breaths, and tried again, this time succeeding.
He looked at the wall jack, the phone cord spilling out of it and ending
several feet away. He gingerly touched his chrome jack. I must have hit the
cord with my arm and pulled it out, Jonny thought.
Then he tried to remember what had happened when he'd jacked in. He
shivered. What I need, he concluded as he got up and headed to his bed, is
more caffeine. He pulled off another can and gulped the Coke resolutely.
After finishing off another, Jonny went back to the phone jack, bringing the
last can with him. He was really wired now. This time, he plugged himself in
without a moment's hesitation.
There was no chaos. Instead, he found himself in the middle of what looked
to be a computer-generated image of a forest. From a dark green, pulsating
ground sprouted hundreds of brown cylinders, complete with clusters of light
green leaves surrounding the tops. There was absolutely no sound, but when he
closed his eyes, Jonny could imagine the loa whispering through the treetops
on a cybernetic breeze. Man, Jonny thought, this is SO cool. It's
beautiful, just beautiful.
An idea dawned on him just then. William Gibson's phone number ought to be
here, he thought. I've got to call him, tell him everything! He could feel
himself clutch `Neuromancer' tightly to his chest. Yes, Jonny
concluded, Gibson must know about this.
But, first things first. He'd have his revenge on his tormenters. He
guessed that each tree handled a different function, that the leaves were data
structures, and that the pulses flashing this way and that beneath his feet
were messages being passed from tree to tree. So, keeping a lookout for any
security programs, he moved cautiously towards the closest tree. When he
reached it, he noticed a faint red tinge on the trunk. Probably security
stuff, Jonny thought warily.
He carefully concentrated on the security system, and a few moments later
Jonny had the program in mind. Scanning through the code, he deftly added a
few lines to the program, thereby effecting it to ignore him. Jonny smirked.
I rule here now, he thought.
He poked his head into the tree, and gasped. Billions of tiny bits of
information skittered this way and that, like snow on a Sony television set.
Jonny blinked a few times, then began to think intently. Soon, the tree's
purpose presented itself: call waiting. Incredible, he thought, but not what
I'm after. Jonny left the tree, marking it for future reference, and went
around to the others.
A half hour later, he found the tree that handled billing information.
After a few moments, Jonny figured out how to manipulate the data. He
concentrated on his friends' phone numbers, reached into the data with his
mind, and went to work. He added hours to the time spent on long distance
calls, increased their rates, and tacked on more surcharges. That would show
them, he thought, giggling.
He noticed as he exited the tree that the red tinge on its bark was
spreading, moving towards him. That's odd, Jonny thought, did the security
program notice me? I thought I'd fixed it.
Then the red tinge jumped. Translucent red tendrils grabbed hold of him
and reached into his mind. Violent, chaotic thoughts raced through Jonny's
head. But one thought rose above all the frenzied nonsense, and that thought
was to spread, reproduce itself, no matter what the cost.
Jonny gasped in horror and revulsion as he realized was being invaded by a
computer virus. He instinctively slammed down mental walls and lashed out at
any remaining traces of virus.
The red tinge retreated back to the tree.
I bet it wasn't expecting anything like THAT, thought Jonny. He then
marked the tree and left for a clearing in the forest in order to think.
A virus? he pondered. Why would someone put a virus in the phone network?
Then again, why WOULDN'T someone put a virus in the phone network? A bored
student, a professional hacker--could be almost anybody. Normally I wouldn't
really give a damn, Jonny thought, but this virus attacked ME. He sighed, and
then concluded, I can't let my cyberspace be overrun with these things.
Jonny smirked. From a cyberpunk to a cybercop.
Gibson just HAD to hear about this.
As he made his way back to that last tree, Jonny allocated himself a large
chunk of RAM, wrote a search program keyed to the virus's code, and let it
run. With the leftover memory, he made a box and fiddled with the access
codes so that it could only be written into, not read from. Write-Only
Memory. Jonny snickered.
The red tinge had been piling up on the ground next to him while he worked
and showed no signs of stopping. He checked on the progress of his program
and sighed. It would take many more minutes to finish.
Jonny sat down, and a wave of exhaustion swept over him. Damn, he thought,
I can't afford to lose my mental edge; a mistake now could prove fatal. So he
concentrated, felt his hand move to his forehead, and he jacked out.
Jonny opened his eyes, stared at the wall of his room, then slowly looked
around. Everything--the unmade bed, the cluttered desk, the stained
drapes--everything looked drab all of a sudden. Hmm, he thought. Then he
shrugged, shotgunned the last Coke, and jacked back in.
He stood in the forest, next to his WOM box. The mound of red tinge
reached his chest level. He checked on his program and found that it had
ended successfully.
As Jonny reached forward to begin shoveling the virus into the box, the red
tinge shifted, moved, sent out pseudopodia which coalesced into arms, legs,
and a head, and became Richard Nixon.
Jonny screamed in terror and jumped back. This couldn't be happening, he
thought frantically.
The Nixon figure crossed its arms and said, "Let's be reasonable, Jonny.
I'm sure we can work something out."
Jonny cringed. "But-- but-- you're a virus!"
A shocked, insulted look came over Nixon's features. Nixon then lifted up
his hands, his fingers in peace symbols, and said, shaking his head, "I am not
a virus."
Jonny scratched his head.
And Nixon lunged, howling, arms outstretched, three-inch blades protruding
from its fingertips. It grabbed hold of Jonny and squeezed hard, trying to
rip his mind to shreds.
Jonny shrieked, backed away, and tried to slam down his mental walls. But
this time he was too late, the virus had too strong of a grip. His mind was
overcome with those destructive thoughts, and he struggled to keep a hold onto
a part of himself in order to reach out, to do something against the virus.
He writhed in agony as he felt his brain being turned into cheese- whiz.
He was vaguely aware of himself muttering, "I am not a virus. I am not a
virus. Kill. Kill. Destroy."
Then that last dose of caffeine hit his system, and he managed to grasp the
WOM box. With a dopamine and adrenaline surge, Jonny lifted up his box and
slammed it down on the virus. It screamed, tried to climb out, tried to
re-establish the grip on Jonny's mind that it had abruptly lost. He slammed
down the lid, sealed it.
Then Jonny deleted the box, contents and all.
He sighed and leaned heavily against the nearby tree. As quickly as the
caffeine jolt had hit him it faded away. I need another Coke, he thought
wearily.
Jonny wandered about the forest in a daze. After what seemed days, he
collapsed against the base of a tree. He peered inside instinctively and saw
it was the main long-distance handling tree. At random, he picked a phone
number, heard a ringing, and waited for someone to answer.
A minute later, there was a click, and then a voice that said, "Hello?
William Gibson speaking."
Jonny's eyes shot open, and he could feel a second wind starting to blow
strong within himself. He committed the number to memory and jacked out.
______________________________________________________________________________
Robert Hurvitz is a student at UC Berkeley. His only other published story,
`The Big Joke', appeared in the December '90 issue of Quanta. He wrote `Jonny
Neurotic' 2 to 3 years ago and was content to let it sit compressed in a
deeply nested subdirectory, but, after Dan's heartfelt plea for submissions,
Robert dusted it off and sent it along.
hurvitz@cory.berkeley.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Earth as an Example
Chapter 1
Jesse Allen
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
The sun was setting behind the polished chrome building tops of the planet
Museum. It was a dim, reddish ball that, even at noon, only feebly lit the
surface. Setting, it seemed an ominous bloody colour. Clouds, chrome, and
snow all caught the red hue and reflected it to the giant window, where the
Procurator of Museum stood, staring at the horizon. `How appropriate,' she
thought. `I am soaked in blood.'
The voice relay at her desk interrupted her morose thoughts.
"Admiral Perry is here, sir," it announced.
"Send him in."
A section of the wall turned transparent as the Admiral entered, then
blended back into the brown decor once he stepped through. He strode angrily
across the room, his face set with determination. He stopped at the desk that
divided the room and saluted the Procurator sharply. She returned the gesture
with slightly less vigor.
"I protest the highly irregular nature of this inquiry," snapped the
Admiral. "This is a purely military matter and the introduction of another
civilian into the matter, as well as sending myself, Dr.~Drucker, and Captain
Huston here, has delayed matters a full month. There will be a number of
questions concerning classified knowledge~--- I will have to ask you and
Dr.~Drucker to leave for part of the proceedings."
"Please take a seat, Admiral," said the Procurator politely. "Would you
care for a drink?"
"No, thank you," replied Admiral Perry gruffly.
She sighed. "Your objections to the setup of this inquiry are noted. The
Secretary-General, however, felt that this would be the most appropriate way
to handle the matter. I have full authority and both myself and Dr.~Drucker
will be present for the entire inquiry. We have been granted the necessary
security clearances."
As she spoke, she pulled a circlet of silver off her finger and passed it
to the Admiral. He picked it up and as he examined it, his eyes opened in
surprise.
"My apologies, your..."
"Not needed," interrupted the Procurator as she accepted the ring back.
"You are correct. Making this debriefing a full fledged inquiry and bringing
everyone here has been time consuming. Were it not for the unique
circumstances, this would all be inappropriate. But too much is at at stake
here..."
"Doctor Drucker and Captain Huston are here, sir," announced the voice
relay.
"Let them enter."
The wall disappeared again and two figures strode through. The taller of
the two was a thin man with closely cropped steel gray hair that made him
appear elderly. His reputation belied that, however~--- Dr. David Drucker was
easily the most famous archaeologist in the Union and his work showed none of
the signs of an aging mind.
Captain John Huston gave no such appearance of age. Although well into his
thirties, he could have been mistaken for a full decade younger. He was
solidly built though somewhat stockier. His posture gave the impression of
great strength.
"Dr.~Drucker, nice to see you again," began the Procurator, "and Captain
Huston. Please be seated." She indicated the two chairs in front of her
desk.
"Mr.~Huston," corrected John Huston as he sat. "I've filed for a permanent
release and prefer not to use the military title."
"Has your release been granted yet?" asked the Procurator.
"No, sir, not yet."
"You will be Captain Huston for the these proceedings, then." Before the
Captain could utter an objection, the Procurator turned to the Admiral. In
response, Admiral Perry pressed a button on a small device he had placed on
the table.
"These are the proceedings of the debriefing of Captain John Huston, AJN
164," began Admiral Perry in a formal tone, "the current commander of the
Federal Starship Nikaljuk, and Dr. David Drucker, the head of the archaeology
team involved in the Nikaljuk's most recent mission. Presiding are Admiral
Nicholas Perry, BCQ 217, and," then the Admiral glanced towards the
Procurator, who responded by placing an upright finger across her lips, "the
current Procurator of the planet Museum, Dr. Drucker's employer on the mission
under review. These proceedings have commenced on the 14th day of the year
1503 R.A."
"Thank you, Admiral," said the Procurator. "These proceedings can now
progress in an informal manner, although they are being recorded. This is not
a military inquiry. The Secretary-General has asked me to participate, so
this will not be a normal debriefing either. This is simply an opportunity
for you both to report fully on your mission before me."
* * *
"Archaeologists?" exploded Captain Huston. "A freight ship? I thought I
was working for the Navy! Have we been bought out by Republic Transport?
What am I doing shuttling mudhens around when there's a war being fought?"
Admiral Perry sighed. He had expected this --- he and Captain Huston had
been friends at the Herculean Naval Academy and John's enthusiasm to come to
grips with the Kalganians had been famous even then. Despite that enthusiasm,
or perhaps even because of it, Captain Huston had never been assigned to duty
on the front. Out on the eastern dust rifts, starships grappled while John
Huston had been assigned escort duties deep in the heart of the Federal Union,
guarding ships as they plied the star lanes. It was vital work, for without
the munitions and supplies, the war would come to a grinding halt and all too
few merchants made it to their ports of call unescorted. But no one who knew
John Huston could believe he would be satisfied so far from the battle zone.
Unfortunately, his luck was not about to change. This new mission would
take him nowhere near the upstart Empire.
"Captain... John, I realize you'd rather be elsewhere, but look at it this
way. You'll be doing what you do best, running a ship. On the front, you'd
be a fourth class officer or worse. And I know what you think about the glory
of war and all, but it isn't all that it's made out to be. It's vicious out
there. People die, friends as well as foes. Serving duty here, you'll still
be around in two years. We frontliners can't count on that."
"Fourth class officer?" snapped Captain Huston. "Bullshit! You were in
the same graduating class as me and look where you are now, all from serving
in the war while I've rotted on the sidelines!"
"Oh, I've done well, have I?" roared Admiral Perry back, suddenly furious.
"Do you know how I got this rank? I tried to save the life of my best junior
officer and her crew, breaking half a dozen flight regulations in the
attempt... and they PROMOTED me for FAILING! Oh, I destroyed those cruisers
when the blundered into the Maelstrom's range. They were just too intent on
killing my patrol ship. If they'd looked properly at their instruments,
they'd have escaped, the patrollers would be alive, and I'd be court martialed
for breaking course and violating acceleration safety limits! And quite
frankly, I'd rather be in the brig with my friends alive than Admiral with
them dead!"
Admiral Perry stopped and when he spoke again, his voice was much calmer.
"Sorry. But believe me: The battlefield is not the place for you. Or
anyone. The glory and honour of war is false. It's kill or be killed out
there. The Kalganians that murdered my soldiers were simply doing their duty
--- did they deserve to die for that? They had families, husbands and wives,
children, friends... and their sorrow must be just as painful as the loss of
my crew is to me. Think about that before you start sputtering about wanting
to fight. There are times when I wonder if all sacrifices will be worth the
victory...
"Besides," and now Admiral Perry was smiling, however artificially, "think
what it would be like if these archaeologists find what they are looking for.
It would be quite a discovery and you'd be among the very first to know. And
remember, you were selected by Dr. Drucker from a list of highly competent
commanders. He wants you."
Captain Huston was silent. He was still reeling from the verbal assault.
Oh, he knew there was more to that incident with the Maelstrom than the news
services had told, that both navies had been killers that day. But nothing
had prepared him for the intensity of Admiral Perry's feelings. Perhaps there
was more to frontline command that met the eye...
After a few moments of silence, Admiral Perry spoke again.
"You'll be working in the Betelgeuse sector. It's nicknamed `Beetle Juice'
after a supernova remnant near the sector's center. From the right places,
the remnant looks just like a giant bug. I know a few of the better viewing
angles. I'll give your navigator the co-ordinates before you leave. It
should only be a minor deviation from your flight plans and it's worth the
visit."
"Ah," said Captain Huston, his composure regained somewhat. "So I'll be
playing the part of a civil captain to the hilt. Passengers and now even
sight-seeing. What larks!"
"John," replied Admiral Perry sternly, "you are a military officer and you
will obey orders. But the Navy will never order you to enjoy a job. THAT is
up to you."
The Admiral strode out of the room, his footsteps echoing down the hall.
Three hundred years ago, Ian Nikaljuk had been a stellographer of some
note. He was best known for his last mapping expedition, when he ventured
beyond the great dust rift of Cygnus. There, behind the cold clouds of
interstellar dust, he found a rich bounty of water/oxygen planets, circling G
type primaries --- ideal planets for human colonization, the most precious
commodity in the Union. Of these gems, he choose the very best and named it
after his wife, Kalgania, then, together with his family, led the first colony
ships there.
His choice was wise. Within a century, Kalgania dominated the trade of the
entire region to such an extent that the whole sector came to be known as
Kalgan, and Kalgania was its capital.
`Yes,' thought Captain Huston. `Of all the ships they could have given me,
they hand me one named after the founder of our enemy...' He came to the door
he was looking for and pressed the annunciator.
"Who is it?" asked the grill on the wall.
"This is Captain John Huston of the Nikaljuk."
The door snapped into nonexistence and Captain Huston walked through. He
had entered a small office, occupied by a tall, thin man with short, steel
gray hair. He had been sitting behind his cluttered desk, the floor around
him in equal disarray, but as the Captain entered, he stood up and offered his
hand.
"Welcome, Captain Huston," he said. "I'm David Drucker, the archaeology
team leader. Pardon the mess --- I'm still packing. What brings you here
from the docks?"
"I have a few questions," said Captain Huston, starting to shift back
towards the door, "but nothing that can't wait `til later."
"Oh, that should be no problem," said Dr. Drucker. "I can spare you some
time, though not much. What do you want to know?"
"Well," began Captain Huston, "why us?"
"Didn't they tell you?" asked Dr. Drucker. "Your crew came with the
highest recommendations. I appreciate excellence."
"Well, thank you," said Captain Huston, nodding his head with the
compliment. "But that's not what I meant. Why the Navy? Wouldn't a civil
freight liner suit your needs better?"
"Ah, a complete answer would take some time," replied Dr. Drucker, settling
back into his seat, his proclaimed busy-ness apparently forgotten. "Please
take a chair. Just move the papers onto the floor." Captain Huston lifted a
small pile of printed pages off the only other chair in the room and put them
on the floor before sitting. `Printed paper?' he thought. `An anachronism,
but then you might expect that from an archaeologist.'
"In short," continued Dr. Drucker, "the reason is flexibility. Civilian
ships depend on a network of subsidiary services: space stations, shuttles,
and the like. The military does not rely on such sundry items as not all
their destinations are serviced by those middlemen. The Nikaljuk, for
instance, has landed right here on Museum for loading. It can take off
directly, cruise through interplanetary space, then switch over to the
hyperdrive once it reaches deep space. A civil freighter of similar dimension
could hold almost twice the Nikaljuk's capacity, but is not equipped with an
interplanetary engine plant."
"But there are interplanetary shuttles serving every inhabited planet in
the Union!" exclaimed Captain Huston.
"Yes, every INHABITED planet," replied Dr. Drucker. "But not abandoned
planets."
"Abandoned planets?" asked Captain Huston. "What is there of interest in a
place even colonists gave up on?"
"Planets have been ill-chosen by colonizing parties since humanity first
took to space," explained Dr. Drucker. "After being abandoned, virtually all
of those planets have suffered no further disturbances from humans. Colonists
tend not to make the same mistake twice. Since, of all the agents that
destroy archaeological evidence, humans are the most potent, the likelihood of
finding interesting remains is better on those planets, save where abandonment
was due to violent weather or geology. By sifting the remains, we could find
some of the clues we are looking for."
"I'm afraid my briefing was limited," said Captain Huston. "What is this
`First World' we'll be looking for?"
"It is current theory that there is one, or possibly two or three planets
from which all humanity sprung," began Dr. Drucker. "It is based on some
complex anthropological studies. Among other things, those studies show there
once were three distinct classes of human skeletons. Time and intermarriage
has blended most of the distinctions in modern humans, but sufficiently
detailed genetic analysis can still trace contemporary skeletons to those
three bone types. Some presume on that basis that there were three separate
planets on which humanity evolved. Others, such as myself, find the
interfertility of those three races suggestive of a single planetary origin.
All humanity developed there and began to colonize soon after developing space
travel. Our team is trying to find further evidence to support the single
planetary origin hypothesis, and to find that planet."
"But why this mission?" asked Captain Huston. "Couldn't you simply examine
the histories and find which one has records predating space travel?"
Dr. Drucker shifted in his seat. "A sensible suggestion. In fact, that is
exactly what we have spent the last ten years doing. Do you have any idea how
many planets claim to be the first?"
"A few dozen?" suggested Captain Huston.
"A few dozen per sector!" exclaimed Dr. Drucker. "There are thousands of
planets that have histories extending from before the establishment of the
Federal Union, and virtually all of those planets claim they have always been
inhabited. Some claims were easy to eliminate, other were more difficult...
and eventually, not a single one of them passed every test we could devise.
Archaeological diggings found that, even at the most ancient sites, there was
evidence of space age technology. Anything older predated human habitation."
Dr. Drucker sighed. "Our best guess now is that the planet in question is
unaware of its special status."
"But how could a planet be the source of all civilization, yet think it was
not?" inquired Captain Huston, finding himself suddenly intrigued. He had
come to Dr. Drucker's office more to please Admiral Perry than in any genuine
belief that the mission would prove interesting. He was glad now the Admiral
had pressured him into getting more involved. I guess I owe him an apology,
though the Captain.
"That is one of the mysteries that has made this project so complex,"
answered Dr. Drucker.
"Is there some special reason for choosing the Betelgeuse sector?" asked
Captain Huston.
"Oh, a very special reason," replied Dr. Drucker. "We made a breakthrough
a few months ago, one which made this mission feasible. Come with me and I'll
show you."
Glittering in the bright lights that shone down on it lay a metallic box
adorned with three long arms and a large bowl. A pair of technicians were
carefully replacing a side panel when Dr. Drucker and the Captain entered the
room onto the ramp that ran around the room's length, ten feet off the floor.
"This is it," said Dr. Drucker waving at the object on the floor. "A
military convoy crossing the sector stumbled across it drifting in deep space.
It appears to be a probe of some sort. Unmistakably a human creation ---
there's a pair of human figures, male and female, on one of the external
panels, along with some other etched marks that we haven't been able to
decipher.
"Notice the big dish? It's parabolic, with an electromagnetic sender at
its focus. Because of the time lags inherent in electromagnetic communication
over astronomical distances, we're fairly confident that the probe was
designed with an interplanetary mission in mind. The size of the power supply
backs that conclusion up. Even with a fresh fuel sources, it could only send
a very weak signal."
"So what makes this a breakthrough?" ask Captain Huston.
"Why send a probe for an interplanetary mission? It has no drive system
save for some low power maneuvering jets, and there's no evidence of one ever
having been attached to it. A ballistic probe in an age of powered flight
between the stars? Senseless!
"Besides, the instruments are rather primitive looking as such things go.
The people who built them could teach us some things about miniaturization,
but the technology is simplistic.
"The real clincher, though, was radioactively dating a sample from one of
the fuel cells. The probe was powered by a simple nuclear electric generator,
so by assuming the fuel was reasonably pure when it was launched, we can
determine its age by measuring the radioactivity of the cell now. Other
tests, like measuring the interstellar dust coating, confirm the result. This
probe is over ten thousand years old: The oldest man-made find ever.
"We're very lucky to have this. Something like this on a planet would have
weathered beyond recognition. But deep space is a rather good preservative.
There's been some scoring and organic molecules from the interstellar medium
have done some damage, but otherwise, it's practically in the same condition
as when its makers first tossed in into space."
Captain Huston look at the probe below him with new respect. Ten thousand
years old, yet still recognizable, just drifting through space...
"If this was a ballistic probe," said Captain Huston, "then you could
backtrack its course from where it was picked up."
Dr. Drucker sighed. "Indeed you could, and this mission would be very
simple. Alas, the ship that picked up the probe suffered a partial power
failure. All their navigation log data was lost. We know the probe could not
have been traveling past light speed --- it's doesn't have the Hollings field
generator necessary to defeat relativistic destruction. Nor was it traveling
near light speed: if it had been, the damage from colliding with interstellar
dust would have been much more extensive.
"But that is all we know. It could have been traveling at mere metres per
second, or hundreds of kilometres. Over ten thousand years, that adds up to a
lot of uncertainty... and the region that uncertainty spans is our search
volume. Right in the heart of the Betelgeuse sector."
"Are there any inhabited planets there?" asked Captain Huston.
"Yes," replied Dr. Drucker, "Turkenstan. We've already been there. It was
one of the planets that claimed to be the original and one whose claim could
not be dismissed immediately. But Turkenstan was not it. It must have been
one of the first colonies, since one team found remains from an ancient
starship shuttle which were over nine thousand years old. But there's no
trace of human habitation earlier than that find."
Captain Huston scratched his head. "Anything near this region? Perhaps
the error margins were underestimated when guessing the probe's trajectory at
its pickup."
Dr. Drucker smiled. "Ever thought of becoming an archaeologist? You're
asking all the right questions... But to answer your question: yes. There are
two inhabited planets nearby. Both have clear records of their colonization.
The older, a place called Janella, is a pre-imperial planet. Its settlers
arrived there about four and a half thousand years ago. They had to terraform
it to make life outside enclosed cities possible, but they eventually did make
the surface livable after a fashion. A very cold place most of its year, but
still better than here."
`You can say that again,' thought Captain Huston. `The surface of Museum
is so miserable that the population all burrowed beneath the crust. What a
way to live!'
Museum had been overlooked by colonists precisely because of its
inhospitable climate. Even the starship captains who regularly visited the
system after the orbital refueling station had been built two hundred years
ago knew it only as a zipcode in the sky. The planet didn't even have a name
until the Republic Historian's Guild had applied to turn the planet into a
public library specializing in the Union's history. Terraforming the planet's
climate was too expensive, so the historians had contented themselves with
honeycombing the crust with underground tunnels and rooms. A few building
tops poked above the surface, but by and large, the bulk of Muesum's
habitation was deep in the planetary crust.
"The other planet, Srosa," continued Dr. Drucker, "was subsequently settled
by Janella. We'll be dropping off teams at both planets to see if there's any
more elderly records to be found. But that does seem a long shot."
"And if those teams don't find anything?"
"Then we'll look for abandoned planets. Since the original home is
somewhere in there, it seems reasonable that there would be planets settled
early on, planets that might well have been abandoned as wider ranging surveys
found better places. Of course, there's no record of any such planets, but
then again, you wouldn't expect to find much after so long."
"So how will you find them? There must be a lot of stars in the search
region and over 30% of all stars have planets."
"The region the probe came from has been surveyed, so we've already
narrowed the field down somewhat. There are a few planets that are marginally
habitable which might have been settled early on. In particular, there are
two G type and three F type stars with oxygen/water planets orbiting within
the acceptable orbital parameters. The Fs would be long shots --- the only
populated planets with F primaries have very heavy radiation trapping zones
and even so, they can be pretty grim places to live. But the very first
colonists may not have been so picky... or aware of the consequences of living
on a planet with such a high flux of energetic nuclear particles."
Captain Huston frowned slightly. Something was still out of place, a fact
being overlooked... `Ah, yes.'
"That will find you early settlements. But that's not ultimately what
you're looking for. What about this First World? If there's only one
currently inhabited planet around where this probe came from and it's
definitely not First World, then where's the missing planet?"
"Well, I can think of only two possibilities. First World may have been
abandoned, which seems bloody unlikely. Why abandon a planet that must have
been so well suited to life? It makes no sense..."
"And the other possibility?" asked Captain Huston.
"First World is still out there in the Betelgeuse sector... and the
Federal Union doesn't know about it."
Captain Huston knocked on the wall paneling lightly. He had come down to
the spare cargo bay where the archaeologists were housed on the doctor's
request. It was the first time he had been in this part of the ship since the
engineers had installed the temporary quarters. They had done a good job in
the short time available, but there was no mistaking the partition walls for
anything permanent. If he had knocked a little harder, the Captain was sure,
the whole wall would have shook. The door to Dr. Drucker's room was nothing
more than a curtain.
"Come in."
Captain Huston expected the interior of the archaeologist's room to look as
temporary as its exterior, but he was surprised. This was not a room --- it
was somebody's home. The hammock was neatly rolled out of the way and the
walls were covered with framed trimenographs, posters, and news clippings.
The most striking of these was a large trimenograph facing the door. It was a
picture of a nebula, apparently floating in the wall. It had a striking sense
of depth even though the image plate was flat. The cloud had twisted arcs of
glowing gases stretching out into space, so realistic that Captain Huston had
a momentary vision of the arms reaching out and grabbing him. Swirls of
bluish oxygen mixed with the yellow-orange of hydrogen, all spread across the
inky blackness in the shape of...
"Looks rather like a bug, doesn't it?" remarked Dr. Drucker. He was
accustomed to the startled look the image drew from visitors. Trimenographs
were nothing new, but few were quite as startling as this one. The sense of
depth was so strong that it appeared there was a hole in the wall in which the
plasma cloud hung. One friend had even tried touching the nebular formation,
not fully comprehending the true nature of the image until his hand had struck
the plate on the wall.
"The `Beetle Juice' supernova remnant?" asked the Captain.
"Yes," answered Dr. Drucker. "My daughter had a rather strong love of
space travel. She made a number of trimenographs of astronomical objects to
share her enthusiasm for space... and she succeeded. Not only has she
captured the three dimensional sense of the remnant extraordinarily well, but
the view is also taken from an unusual viewing angle which she calculated for
herself. Her line of sight makes the remnant less bright overall but accents
the outer regions. The higher oxygen content from this angle strengthens the
blue, enhancing the appearance... But pardon me, Captain. As I said, this is
one of Marguerite's greater successes and I am prone to play the part of the
proud father."
"Oh, that's quite all right," said Captain Huston, breaking his eyes from
the trimenograph. "Your daughter is to be complimented. It is one of the
best trimenographs I've seen taken from space. One of the best I've seen at
all, in fact. In a few days, we can even compare it to the real thing."
"We'll be visiting the remnant?" asked Dr. Drucker, a hint of hopefulness
in his voice.
"Yes," confirmed Captain Huston. "Admiral Perry ordered me to stop there
while we were in the sector." Then the Captain paused for a moment.
"Actually, it wasn't so much an order as a strongly worded suggestion, but he
did give me the co-ordinates for the best viewing angle. One of his junior
officers apparently had computed a better perspective than the standard angle
tourists see."
"Admiral Nicholas Perry?" asked Dr. Drucker.
"Yes. Do you know him?"
"You're right about comparing this," and the Doctor indicated the
trimenograph with a sweep of his hand, "to the real thing. That junior
officer probably was my daughter!"
"Your daughter serves under Admiral Perry? Small Universe!"
"The Admiral was a Commander when she was in his service, but yes. Margie
was one of his junior lieutenants."
"Was? Has she moved on to her own command now?"
Dr. Drucker breathed in deeply.
"No. She was killed a couple of years ago on a patrol mission."
"I'm sorry," said Captain Huston, suddenly feeling very awkward. `You've
really put your foot in it this time, John,' he thought. There was a long
silence, then Dr. Drucker broke the quiet.
"The war has not been kind to me. But that is in the past now. And though
I would much rather have my daughter alive, it has made all this possible."
"Oh?" said Captain Huston, failing to see the connection and befuddled by
the sudden awkwardness of his position.
"Yes. Admiral Perry and Margie were good friends and he blamed himself for
her death. Not justly, I should add: There was nothing anyone have done to
save her and she realized the risks when she signed up. However, he has not
forgiven himself for his supposed failure yet and thus feels he owes me a debt
as her father. He heard of my interest in this mission and pulled a few
strings on my behalf."
Captain Huston remembered the Admiral's explosion, simultaneously noticing
a medallion hung above Dr. Drucker's desk. The certificate read "For bravery
in the service of the Federal Union, Lieutenant Marguerite Drucker is awarded
the Silver Swords," beneath which was the seal of the Secretary-General.
`Silver Swords,' thought Captain Huston. `The same medal Commander Perry was
given for the incident with the Maelstrom...' Then all the pieces fell into
place.
`What do I say now? "Your daughter served her nation well?" The Silver
Swords already says that better than I ever could. "I'm sorry?" I've already
said that. Damn it! War is supposed to be simple. There's an enemy to be
defeated. Not without cost, but everyone dies eventually and what better way
to go than in the service of the people? But how do I say that to the face of
the father of a fallen soldier?'
`And if I can't say it to his face, is it really true?' Like many wartime
military college graduates, he had not really ever been forced to consider the
human side of war. `What do I do now? Change the subject?'
Dr. Drucker solved the Captain's dilemma for him.
"I've had the trimenograph for almost ten years now, but I've never seen
the real thing. That will be something to look forward to. I wonder if it
will look any different?"
"Not much," answered the Captain with some awkwardness. "In ten years, the
remnant will have expanded several million kilometres and radiated away more
energy than an entire planet consumes in the same time. But compared to its
total size and power, those changes are miniscule. They would take a trained
eye or professional equipment to notice.
"I've never been out this way before, but I've heard about the nebula.
Judging by your trimen, it will be every bit as spectacular a sight as I've
heard.
"But I presume you didn't call for me to discuss supernovae," continued
Captain Huston steering the conversation further from its morose turn.
"What's up?"
"Have you ever played Knights & Castles, Captain?"
"Yes, it was all the rage when I was in school. I managed to get
reasonably good, though I've not had much time for it since. Do I detect a
challenge?"
"You catch on fast," said Dr. Drucker with pleasure, both from the change
in conversation and his own scheming. He did not need to be told that Captain
Huston played the game. Admiral Perry had mentioned Huston's nickname `The
Dark Master' which he had earned ten years ago for his prowess at the game.
Ever since Dr. Drucker had heard, he had been looking forward to this
challenge. He had tried to play against others on Museum, but few showed much
interest and only the Procurator had proven a worthy opponent... and she was
too busy to play frequently.
"But," continued Dr. Drucker, "I'm not exactly challenging you to a game of
Knights & Castles. Our archaeology team on Turkenstan discovered a manual to
a similar game that the original colonists played. I've not had a chance to
really study it carefully yet, but it's more complex than Knights & Castles,
demanding more thought and patience to play properly. Janella spaceport is
many days away, however, and I thought a military strategist such as yourself
might be interested. A battlefield for you, of sorts. Admiral Perry hinted
that you were rather the fighting type and our mission otherwise is most
peaceful. Interested?"
"With an introduction like that," replied Captain Huston almost jocularly,
"how can I refuse? Kind of living history. How does it work?"
"As I said, it's similar to Knights & Castles, but it's played on a two
dimensional grid instead of a cube. The pieces move in more complex fashions.
The Turkenstan colonists called it `Chess'..."
The F.S. Nikaljuk hung a mere parsec from the supernova remnant. As
Captain Huston had predicted, it looked just like the trimenograph, though it
was even more impressive, filling a full quarter of the sky. Even from this
close, the nebula's expansion rate of over a thousand kilometres per second
was invisible. Seven hundred years ago, this had been a red giant star. The
hydrogen in its core had all long since been fused to helium, and thence to
carbon, then oxygen, and so on to iron. There, everything stopped. Beyond
iron, fusion consumed more energy than it produced and so the star stopped
burning. No longer supported by the tremendous radiation pressure from fusion
at its core, the outer layers of the star collapsed inward, releasing their
gravitational energy as they fell.
The resultant explosion defied imagination. The name `supernova' hardly
gave a hint of the incredible blast of energy that was released in the mighty
detonation of truly astronomical proportions. As the stellar surface fell in,
the gases heated and fused. The star's iron core was crushed to the density
of an atomic nucleus while the outer layers were flung back out into space
with such violence that even now, they outstripped the fastest interplanetary
yachts. And the interstellar hyperdrive, the only man-made engine that could
rival that fantastic speed, would not operate in the plasma of the explosion.
The Nikaljuk was as close as any ship could safely get.
The resemblance to a terrestrial insect was remarkable. There were legs
made of glowing filaments of excited gases. Captain Huston would not have
been surprised had the antennae-like loops of hydrogen started wavering
around, exploring, poking. What if it took to life and started crawling
across the inky void, a monstrous interstellar bug? Captain Huston suddenly
chuckled.
"Something humorous?" asked Dr. Drucker dryly from the Captain's side,
looking out the window from the observation deck.
"I was just imagining what it would take to kill a bug of this size. An
enormous foot, perhaps?"
The Doctor made no response.
"Okay," admitted the Captain, "so it's a little strange. Who said I didn't
have a twisted mind?"
The Doctor smiled slightly, but maintained his silence.
"You said there were only two explanations for the absences of any records
of the original planet," said Captain Huston, trying to break the silence of
his companion. "Have you considered this possibility?" and Captain Huston
waved his hand at the sight out the window.
"Sorry?" said Dr. Drucker, startled from his silence. "I don't follow
you."
"Well," said Captain Huston. "We are well within the Betelgeuse sector.
Consider for a moment that First World orbited this star. During the
supernova explosion, the planet would have been vapourized completely. Of
course, the inhabitants would have known about the impending explosion and
would have been long gone. Long enough that records of their exodus were not
front page news. No more planet, hence no planet with records extending
before star travel, and also no records of having existed prior to the Federal
Union."
Dr. Drucker frowned for a moment. "You know, I never thought of that. But
the nebula is well outside our search volume. The probe could not have come
from here and we are all agreed that the probe came from First World."
"We are deep within the Betelgeuse sector," said Captain Huston, "and not
that far from the nearest edge of the search volume. Perhaps the error
margins on the probe's direction and speed were underestimated?"
"Ha!" snorted Dr. Drucker. "If anything, they have been overestimated. We
were quite generous in applying uncertainties. And I question calling ten
parsecs `not that far.' It would take a light beam over thirty two years to
get from here to the nearest edge of the search region."
"A systematic error? Perhaps an undiscovered black hole that the probe
passed close by?"
"I said the error margins were generous!" replied Dr. Drucker. "It was
precisely because of such factors that they are so large! If you can come up
with something plausible to throw our calculations that much off, I'd like to
hear about it." Then his eyes narrowed. "You seem unusually keen on this
idea. What are you up to?"
"You caught on fast," said Captain Huston, smiling as he aped the
archaeologist's earlier words. "Let's just say there's a sum of money
involved."
Then Dr. Drucker suddenly grinned. "Of course! How stupid of me.
Habitable planets only have a certain narrow range of stellar type primaries.
Supernova progenitors are not among those. They are more massive stars, red
giants and the like. Stars that eventually go bang like this," and Dr.
Drucker indicated the remnant, "are known for hundreds of thousands of years
of distinctly anti-social stellar activity. Violent flares, mass loss,
intense microwave laser emission from surrounding gas and dust, you name it.
You wouldn't want to get near one of these stars even ten thousand years
before the bang.
"A sum of money, you say? Have you been making bets on me?"
"Yes," said the Captain, "and I just won. My navigator suggested the
supernova destroyed the planet we're searching for. I suspect Georgia was
just teasing me, seeing if I knew why it wasn't a possibility. After failing
to trip me up, she put a hundred rials on you not seeing it."
"Does she do this sort of thing regularly?" asked the somewhat astonished
archaeologist.
"Oh, quite regularly," replied the Captain, "as does the rest of the crew.
This is a small ship and that makes for a lot of frustrated energy with no
space to vent it. I can either have friendly competitions or much more
serious bickering. As long as the games don't interfere with the bridge, I
tolerate it --- sometimes, even encourage it.
"Besides, it gives me an intellectual battlefield of sorts. The crew sets
me up with some sort of idea with a plausible appearance yet with a built-in
flaw... like the properties of a supernova progenitor. I try to find the
flaw. For my part, I occasionally set them some task that's supposed to be
impossible and see if they can find what I've pulled on them... or if they can
fool me into believing it's possible anyway.
"Right now, one of the junior engineers is working on constructing a stealth
device for the Nikaljuk. Some time soon, he's going to realize that a
conventional device takes about twenty times the capacity of our onboard
power, not to mention the sheer physical size of the thing. I wouldn't be
surprised if he knew that before I even set the task. So he's going to come
up with something a little nonconventional. I suspect it will fake a cloaking
device from the bridge's perspective, but will have no actual effect on
another ship's scanners. Thus he turns it on its head for me to work out what
he's really done.
"It's wonderful when you really think about it. I hardly have to work to
keep them busy and I get constant feedback on my skills. If someone catches
me unawares, then I learn something new. And I have to teach myself a lot
just to make sure that doesn't happen. Like stellar evolution."
"Ugh!" said Dr. Drucker. "There's more to commanding a ship than I would
ever have guessed. I'm glad I'm not doing it, stuck on this tiny can for
months on end."
"Tiny?" asked Captain Huston. "I admit this is no giant lumbering tanker,
but tiny does seem to overstate it a little. We've got two dozen on board ---
there are pleasure yachts that seem crammed with just one."
"Tiny in comparison," replied Dr. Drucker, warming to his line of attack.
"I'm used to thinking of ships carrying tens of thousands rather than the
smattering aboard the Nikaljuk."
"Tens of thousands!" said Captain Huston. "I think you mean tens of
thousands cubic displacement, not tens of thousands of people. Even the
largest deep space carrier, the Haiphong, holds fifteen hundred and it's the
biggest starship ever!"
"The Haiphong is NOT the largest starship ever built," answered Dr. Drucker
happily. "The shuttle we found at Turkenstan clearly predates translight
travel. Therefore, the first colonists had to practically make an entire
world to live in while they traveled between the stars. Farming, industry,
government, the lot. Their journeys took hundreds of years. The original
flight crew would have had grandchildren by the time they reached their
destination. The smallest number of people capable of making such a fully
self-sufficient world is fifteen thousand. And that's just a minimum. Ships
ten, twenty, maybe even fifty times the Haiphong's capacity plied the star
lanes for at least a thousand years. Compared to one of those ships, the
Nikaljuk is nothing more than a gnat.
"Perhaps you should follow your lesson in stellar evolution with a history
of space travel," and with that, the archaeologist left.
Captain Huston stood in apparent silence, looking at the supernova remnant
out the window. But someone standing close might have noticed a slight
chuckling.
`So Chess is not the only game this man will play with me,' he thought to
himself.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jesse Allen is an overworked, underloved graduate student at the University
of Iowa. In his copious free time, he pretends to teach, do research, keep
in touch with the few friends he has left, write science fiction, weave, and
have a social life. He is currently working on a thesis on Radio Emission
From X-ray Binary Stars (Read as "How to get to Australia at the U.I.'s
expense" -- a preliminary feasibility study made it to New Mexico.) He
can be reached at jsa@vesta.physics.uiowa.edu during those rare times Vesta
actually is working.
`Earth as an Example' will be continued next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
For The Snark WAS A Boojum, You See
Roy Stead
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Slithering and sliding, it came out of the darkness. Relaxing for a moment,
its tentacular form took on the appearance of a dark, malignant cat; a cat
with too many legs and unusual suckers at its extremities. The eyes, though.
The eyes were bright, sharp and definitively cat-like. The only remaining
question was: What did it WANT?
Oozing its way towards him was the creature he had seen so many times
before. In nightmares and on cinema screens, it had haunted him relentlessly,
the stuff from which nightmares are made. Harold thought back to that
morning...
The paper was delivered, miracle of miracles, earlier than usual, and
Harold was finishing the Environment section when a classified ad caught his
eye:
Make Your Dreams Come True
For only 40 Pounds we
GUARANTEE
to realise your wildest dreams.
Tel. 071 495 1265
Harold was surprised, and perplexed. Although he had been a quantity
surveyor for over a decade, in his heart he still yearned to realise his
youthful dream of emigrating to the long-developed Lunar colony. Besides, he
supposed, even on the Moon they must SURELY have some quantities which he
could make a living by surveying? Forty pounds, though...
Ten agonising minutes later, Harold had decided that he could lose nothing
by simply phoning the company.
"Hello? I'm ringing about your advert in today's `Guardian'."
"You mean the Dreams, Inc. Special Offer advertisement, Sir?"
"Yes, that's the one. `Make your dreams come true.' I suppose *ha ha* that
it's some sort of elaborate practical joke, yes?"
The voice sounded wounded, "`Practical joke,' Sir. I assure you that our
methods are..."
"You mean this is for real? Hmmm. What does `realise your wildest dreams'
mean, anyway?"
"If I could just take your name, Sir, perhaps you would be free to attend a
session this afternoon?"
"Well, I'm not too sure. The money. Forty pounds. Well..."
"I assure you that all monies are payable only on satisfactory completion
of the contract, Sir."
"You mean, that if my dreams don't come true, I pay nothing?"
In the manner of a superior maitre d', the voice relaxed as it effortlessly
replied, "Sir has grasped it precisely, Sir."
Two hours afterwards, Harold was sitting in the offices of Dreams, Inc.,
waiting to meet the company director. There was nothing dream-like about the
reception area. On the contrary, the room was almost
dentist's-waiting-room-like in its drabness, providing even aged copies of
`Punch' to complete the effect. After a while, Harold was ushered through a
small, painted-wood door into a short corridor. Ahead was another door, oaken
in appearance, which bore a traditional, brass nameplate:
Directore, Dreames, Yncorpyratted
The darkness crouched against one wall, almost a living thing in its
intensity. Harold nervously appraised it, then dismissed childhood nightmares
from his mind as he walked to the door. Nonetheless, he edged past the inky
patch as he approached the door, never once turning away from its blackness
lest some Lovecraftian horror break its surface. As he sidled by, it happened.
Slithering and sliding, it came out of the darkness. Relaxing for a moment,
its tentacular form took on the appearance of a dark, malignant cat. A cat
with too many legs and unusual suckers at its extremities. The eyes, though.
The eyes were bright, sharp and definitively cat-like.
Oozing its way towards him was the creature he had seen so many times
before. In nightmares and on cinema screens, it had haunted him relentlessly.
The Stuff from which dreams are made. The thought jolted Harold back to his
senses. Perhaps this malformed horror was the manifestation of his dreams
promised by the advert.
Harold, hand reeking trepidation, stretched out an arm toward the octopoid
abomination in automaton fascination. What WAS it? His hand brushed the
surface, but he felt nothing as it passed that Serling-inspired boundary which
confronted him. A sharp yelp of pain restored his deadened faculties to
conscious control and, in an abrupt movement, Harold almost teleported to the
now-open oaken door. He stepped through into...
Lewis Carroll oft warned of the dangers of a meeting with a Boojum, leaving
the nameless Baker's fate as ample warning to all those tempted, by curiosity
or perverse predilection, to search for Snarks in the wildernesses of the
world. He did not, however, proffer much advice on how to deal with such an
unexpected encounter.
The courtroom was unique in its grotesqueness. It HAD to be. Such a
distorted jury box only could have been devised by a mind whose owner had
spent much of his life dabbling in illegal and proscribed substances, a
practise much frowned upon in Society. The lines of the benches seemed ill at
ease in the current dimensions, and were visibly attempting to escape into
some forgotten corner of space-time. Harold hoped, fervently, that they would
be successful, and that the jurymen -- the word is applied loosely -- would
follow rapidly.
The collection of... beings in the box is best left undescribed. But, if
you must, picture a messy accident involving a duck-billed platypus and a
bicycle pump. Now picture the result gesticulating wildly for you to take the
stand before a judge whose sole qualification for the task seems to be his
shape: that of a huge, white, curly wig. With eyes.
Harold took the stand, only to have a large Bible placed in his right hand.
The Bible gripped his arm before turning to him, and rasping, "Recite The
Oath, dummy!" Glancing down, Harold noticed that the book had...
protruberances. Not arms, as such. Nor, if Harold was honest with himself,
could he say that it possessed any facial features. Nevertheless, it continued
to stare at him, after the manner of a basset hound on acid. An ANNOYED
basset hound. "The Oath, idiot. Say it!"
"Er. I swear to tell the Truth, the Whole Truth, and nothing but
the Truth, So help me..."
"What's that?" interjected the book, "Read the OATH from the card in front
of you, fool." Harold looked around briefly before seeing a card which
positively had NOT been there before. He read, disbelievingly:
"I swear to tell the truth. Or part of it. Or something I believe to be the
truth. Or not. As I may decide. So help me, God."
The scene faded. An office presented itself. The scene faded. A white
rabbit bounded past, clutching a pocket watch and loudly exclaimed. The scene
faded. "I'm late! I'm late!" the aardvark screamed. Scene fade. A huge ball
of string rolled past. The string was knotted in several places, and one of
those knots hurtled towards Harold, or possibly the other way round. The scene
faded.
The dentist's waiting room returned, and Harold looked up into the eyes of
a young man, dressed in a doctor's white coat. The man looked about thirty,
had shoulder-length blond hair and wore a stethoscope around his neck.
Leaning over Harold's prone body, he whispered seven words which engraved
themselves on his memory:
"Harold, Man. You have some WEIRD dreams!"
______________________________________________________________________________
Roy Stead is a research assistant in quantum astrophysics at the English
University of Sussex. His hobbies include water skiing, Zen Buddhism and
searching for cats. His collection of cats is reputed to be amongst the
largest in the Western world, though none have ever been seen by reliable
witnesses. "Iggy," a grey-green Persian once did not appear on BBC
Television's "Tomorrow's World."
roys@cogs.sussex.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________________________
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Volume III Issue 4 ISSN 1053-8496 October 1991
+-----------------------+
|Quanta | Articles
|(ISSN 1053-8496) |
| |
|Volum3 III, Issue 4 | LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
|October 1991 |
| |
| |
| | Serials
| |
| |
| | EARTH AS AN EXAMPLE Jesse Allen
| |
| |
| | THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
| |
| |
| |
|Editor/Tech. Director | Short Fiction
| Daniel K. Appelquist|
| |
|Editorial Assistants | AT THE EDGE OF THE WINNER'S CIRCLE D.E. Helbing
| Norman Murray|
| Joanne Rosenshein|
| | DOORWAY FROM DARKNESS Christopher Kempke
|Proofreading |
| Jon Boone|
| John Flournoy| GEEK QUEEN Michael Arner
| Jay Laefer|
| Nathan Loofbourrow|
| Joanne Rosenshein| AN EVENING AT HOME Roy Stead
+-----------------------+
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______________________________________________________________________________
LOOKING AHEAD
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hello again everybody! I'm sorry that this issue has come so late, but
I've been EXTREMELY busy lately, what with trying to finish school this
semester and everything. (If you'd like to offer me a job, you know how to
reach me...) I know this issue's coming out a bit late to be called the
"October" issue, but, since the first issue of Quanta came out two years ago
this month, I thought it just wouldn't do to not have an October issue. Call
me sentimental.
You heard correctly! Quanta has been publishing for a total of two years
now, ever since October of 1989. I can't quite believe it myself! It seems
like only yesterday that I was reading the first issue of Jim Mccabe's
`Athene' and wondering to myself if I could do something like that. And THIS
WILL NOT BE THE LAST ISSUE, let me assure you of that. Quanta will continue
to go out as long as I have fingers to type with.
Ok -- What have we got lined up for you this issue? Well, the two serials
we're carrying (`The Harrison Chapters' and `Earth as an Example) are both
continued. The final chapter of the `Earth as an Example' will be published
in next month's issue. In addition, we have some various and sundry fiction
from the four corners of the world (well, the Net...)
If you find yourself saying "why is this in a science-fiction magazine?"
when you reach the end of Michael Arner's `Geek Queen', you have a point. I
feel that the story's marginal science-fiction content, combined with the fact
that it's really well written, qualify it for inclusion. If you'd like to see
more of this sort of "borderline SF" material, please write me. I'd also
like to get more of these types of submissions.
Also of note is that Christopher Kempke returns to Quanta this issue with
his `Doorway from Darkness'. Chris tells me that this story is part of a
larger work, other parts of which may be published in future issues.
I'd really like to encourage you to send comments to the authors. Part of
the whole purpose of Quanta is to give developing authors a chance to get
their work out to an audience, and it can be even more valuable if they get
feedback from this audience. For that matter, I'D appreciate your comments on
anything related to Quanta. I'd like to continue to make Quanta better, but I
can't do that if I don't know what YOU, the reader, want.
I'd like to thank Eric Moore and Pomona Valero for their invaluable help in
redesigning the contents page. I'm sort of in the process of redesigning
Quanta, piecemeal. If you have any suggestions, or if you'd like to help
design a new cover page, I'd love to hear from you.
More good news -- The subscription lists for Quanta have been steadilly
growing. We are now up to 1800 subscribers, including a growing list of
subscribers from eastern block countries.
Well, that's about it from me. See you in December!
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
At the Edge of the Winner's Circle
D.E. Helbling
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Richard Fentz was working late in the lab again, cursing another failed
attempt to repair his frequency pulsed ion beam. Without it, he had no chance
of duplicating the results of his earlier efforts. He threw his hands up in
despair, then ran them through his long strands of dark, loosely curled hair,
tempted to pull out a lock or two.
His long hair was the only remaining badge of a bygone era, a decade of
conflict between indulgence and academic excellence. Now the hair, like his
patience and his credibility in the physics department here at the university,
was wearing thin. He knew that few among the staff really believed he had ever
successfully operated his mass reduction device.
No one was more happy about this, Richard also knew, than the Dean of
Physics, Gene Royt. That the basic premise of his work held some promise, not
even Gene had argued. He reviewed Richard's original paper on the subject
before publication in "K-Particle Physics Review" and, as the department head,
was more than willing to add his name as co-author. Now that months of work
failed to produce a single repeatable demonstration, things were no longer
quite so communal.
After Gene's last visit to the lab, Richard was fairly certain that the
success he had reported the previous week was viewed as a last ditch effort to
save face, or worse yet, a futile attempt to prolong funding for the research.
And now, now Royt was coming for another "inspection". Richard could imagine
his taunting, gloating smirk staring back at him over the oak desk in the next
room, the desk that Eugene Morris Royt kicked his feet up on while he
administered project resources and lab allocations with all the grandeur and
bearing of a monarch in exile. So Richard was scrambling at this late hour,
determined to somehow make it work again, just one more time.
But it was already too late.
"Any change, Fentz?" he heard from over his shoulder.
Richard spun around on his bench stool to face the inimitable Dr. Royt as
he walked his pudgy, bald, and annoying frame the rest of the way through the
door.
"Nothing consistent," Richard exaggerated. He knew, they both knew, that
there was nothing new to report.
"Have you given any thought to your next project?" Gene asked, in some
vaguely concerned way, not quite looking Richard in the eye.
"That's it, then? You're bagging it?" Richard snapped, staring right back.
"Well, you've still got a couple thousand left on your grant. You are
certainly free to continue until that runs out."
"That's very generous of you, Dr. Royt." Exaggeration, again.
"Now look, there is no need to get sarcastic. You've been given every
opportunity to prove your hypothesis, Rick. I think it's time you face the
corner you've painted yourself into and admit that this just isn't going
anywhere."
Rick, huh? That was a first, Richard thought. "Look, Gene, it's late. I'm
sorry, I just guess I'm a bit short-fused right now. I'm sure that you'll find
something suitable for me to work on as soon as this grant runs its course.
Do you have any ideas you want me to pursue?"
No, I won't argue with you, you pompous bastard, Richard thought. Not
tonight. Maybe later, after the next grant is approved and I have another
obscure little space to work in for another six months, possibly at a school
with a real physics wing. Meanwhile, crawl back into your office. Go back to
sleep in your comfortable chair.
"Well, we'll get together next week and talk about it. I suggest you get
some of that much needed rest in the meantime."
"Thank you, Doctor. Good night."
"And thank you, God," Richard muttered, under his breath, as Dr. Royt
turned to leave. That was about as much mock sympathy as he could stomach
without subsequent acts of violence. At least Royt hadn't found out about the
broken generator. Did the senior physicist on campus resent him more because
he was younger or because he was at least working on some idea of his own?
Richard wasn't sure and no longer cared. That Royt took pleasure in his
eventual failure was enough for him to at least contemplate with relish his
private image of the violent act he knew he would never commit.
He spun back around to face his lab bench, reaching to pick up Test Ball
Number One.
"Why won't it work any more?!" He tossed the ball back and forth from left
to right a couple more times, then replaced it reverently on its little
plastiglas pedestal atop the bench copy of his thesis.
"Potential for Mass Reduction Effects of Controlled Magnetic Flux
Environment Ion Particle Beam Target Media, by Richard Morris Fentz", read the
cover of the paper. The result of several semesters of work, it was the very
sweat and blood of his brain, the most promising of the many papers he had
written during his twenty five odd years of research. It had a nice ring to
it, too, he thought, and a fairly sound basis in the theorems of other
recently proven corollaries to some of the lesser known theories of relativity
and subatomic particle physics, all of which was rather pointless now.
He reached, one more time, for his stainless steel trophy. The polished
globe had started out at a very precise five pounds. It now weighed four
point nine three two two five pounds, for reasons his paper explained, but no
one would believe, because he could not make it happen again. He wished he
could afford to have the ball analyzed, but as as the Dean of this gigantic
four person department had reminded him, he only had a little money left in
the grant, and he would need it to try to repair the beam generator. The
thing wasn't really that sophisticated; it was little more than an X-ray
machine with a frequency knob, with the exception of the emitter tube, yet
it's role in the project was critical.
Looking back, he wondered if Royt's willingness to lend his name to the
paper wasn't really just a reason to get the generator into the department.
The few papers Royt had published in the last few years had been met with
little fanfare in the scientific community. Richard had been in the field
long enough by now to know that they had received little acknowledgement of
any kind. Royt's own efforts to get funding, inside or outside the barriers of
this rustic little liberal arts university, had all failed. If he could get
just a few whiz bang gizmo's, Richard figured, Royt thought he would probably
be able to attract some of that inspired endowment money. The professor had
never shown any genuine respect for the devices themselves, only for their
ability to generate more research revenue.
Now, thanks to Richard, Bramer Valley University could boast a pulsed
frequency controlled ion beam generator among its educational assets. Had he
actually used the beam in his ever so thoroughly calibrated, measured,
magnetically controlled environment, to reduce the mass of this metal egg? He
was starting to wonder himself.
Dr. Royt and the others were convinced that, unlike Test Ball Number Two,
now in place on the digital scale at the focal point of his ion generator,
this ball had NEVER weighed five pounds. He imagined the guesses they must be
making behind his back. Did he specially fabricate some alloy to appear
identical to Ball Two? Or did he rig the scale to somehow read constantly low
only when Ball One was on it?
None of them could explain what he somehow did, because they didn't believe
it had been done. Yet Richard remembered every detail of the Event like it was
ten minutes ago.
He had first adjusted the large blue dial on the panel in front of him. It
controlled the strength of the field inside the magnetically tuned environment
that was the top of his test bench. A square frame of thin gauge angle steel
formed a skeleton cube the size of a tea crate on the soapstone surface of the
bench. The cube formed the perimeters of the Hemholtz cage, for all intents
and purposes, a magnetic box. Then, time to continue the standard sequence: he
tweaked the flux density, the red knob next to the blue one, and reached for
the power switch to the particle beam generator that feed its
frequency-modulated pulses into the cage.
Richard had liked the colored knobs. He added them early on in the project
for a sort of Sesame Street effect. See here. Push this button. Make the
little ball weigh less than before. See here. It was really a sideways insult
to Royt, who really didn't have a clue as to how Richard's equations worked.
Now the knobs no longer amused him. Push this button, and break the virtually
irreplaceable imported particle beam generator you stayed an extra three
semesters here at Backwater U to use. Perhaps he should have gone the Royt
route, sought tenure and power, then at least he would now be free to continue
without interference.
Some weeks earlier on in the project, the gym teacher who taught fitness in
the classroom on the floor below had come into the room, ranting and panting,
totally unglued because she heard there was a particle beam weapon shooting
subatomic pieces around above her. She demanded that the entire project be
shut down or moved to another building, preferably one in another town. He had
assured her that it was not a weapon, that the radiation from these "teenee
little particles" were less harmful than the glow the headsup map and gauge
displays in her car, but she wouldn't buy it. If it's so harmless, she had
asked, why do the building lights keep fluttering every time the damn thing
gets turned on?
Doctor Royt had come through for him then, he remembered. Department heads
were actually good for some things. In his mind he could see Gene talking to
her, making gestures with his hands, explaining that while the generator did
consume large amounts of power, it didn't actually produce much at all. Kind
of a mechanical government. This she could understand.
With everything on-line at the same time for the first time, Richard had
chuckled to himself as he threw the switch. He watched as the lights dimmed
as always. Once, twice, three times, then a fourth flicker, as each of the
beam's internal power supplies kicked in. He wondered if she was down there
now, watching the lights dim, worrying that she was being bombarded. He had
been forced to modify the beam's power feed circuitry so it wouldn't blow the
breaker every time they used it.
The so-called physics wing of the building consisted of Royt's office next
door, this lab, and two classrooms. It was really wired for the language and
sociology classes the founding fathers of the school had intended. The
intrusion of technology studies onto the curriculum had been a concession from
the start; the concession had never extended as far as the facilities.
Modifying the beam generator had allowed Richard to avoid spending a big part
of his grant on rewiring the lab to accommodate the special equipment.
Now it came up, one grid bank at a time, instead of all at once. He
wondered again, briefly, if his modifications had somehow caused the beam to
fail. This additional compromise of working on an anorexic budget, he though,
would be the most laughable of all the possible gotchas. For want of a watt,
and all that.
The lights steadied and he waited and watched, as the hum from the beam
leveled off in its low frequency drone. Five, ten, twenty seconds later and he
watched in awe as the mass reading on the steel ball dipped. An immediate drop
of some fraction of an ounce was showing plainly on the six figure LED display
of the digital scale supporting the steel test sphere!
But that was before, just that once, and only once.
Like some mad Faustian scholar on a frantic quest for the Lost Chord,
Richard had spent the previous several days struggling to repair the beam
generator: calls to the manufacturer in Germany; runs to the electronic
component store for parts; a trip to the airport for components shipped via
overnight carrier. His own lectures he had long since delegated to the the
other two post-grad minions. He took meals in the lab room, slept briefly back
in his dorm room, then returned three or four hours later for another go at
it.
No luck again tonight. No last minute save before Royt's little visit. The
LED's on the power panel of the beam generator still stared back at him in
cold, dark defiance. He glanced over his notebook. The lines started running
together.
Richard stood up from the bench for a moment and started to swoon. Too
many skipped meals. He decided to take a short stroll down the hall to the
vending machines for another coffee and a stretch of the legs, then return
refreshed to begin again. When he got there, he asked for the usual coffee
and doughnuts, but the machine responded with "Sorry, that selection is
currently unavailable."
"You piece of crap," he cursed, raising his arm to swing at this other
mechanical adversary of long standing, then in his fury dizzied again,
reminded of just how little attention his own personal needs had received in
these last few days. A sudden desire for fresh air drew him out of the
building and into the night.
At this hour few students could be seen on campus. Most were in their own
dorm rooms by now, mulling over tomorrow's assignments or tonight's lover. He
smiled at the memory of this term's confused first-time dormers, amazed that
one so old as he could still be living on campus. He never explained it,
preferring to let them think that they, too, might be forty five before they
finish with school.
He cast a glance over the skyline, seeing with a new eye the lights of the
other campus buildings as they mingled with those of the downtown highrises
blocks away. A pretty night. Though no stars seemed to penetrate the cloud
cover, he imagined them above him, looking down in quiet admiration as he
gazed up from below, poised to walk back indoors and finish making The Big
Discovery. Pity I'll have to disappoint you, he thought.
He walked back into the building feeling refreshed and renewed. As he
strolled into the lab room and up to the bench, parking himself onto the
stool, he shivered, unsettled. Something was wrong.
He looked first at the beam generator, parked in its usual spot on the
floor to the right of the bench, with most of its guts spread out next to it,
wires and components dangling together like a mound of capsized spiders on a
plate of orange and blue spaghetti. He looked at his tools and odd assortment
of meters, lying there where he'd left them on the next to the generator. Then
he looked at his bench top.
The damn ball, Ball Number Two, was gone!!
He jumped out of his seat and ran out the door to the lab and down the
hall. Whoever had taken it mustn't be far away! But as he stood in the front
of the building, where he had stood moments earlier admiring the skyline, he
could see no one.
Nor had he seen anyone, he remembered, as he came back in the building
mintues ago. So they must be still in the building. He ran back in, chasing
up and down the halls. Locked, locked and dark, every door was locked and not
a person to be found.
Another frat prank? He wondered. Or maybe one of Royt's little mind
games? He strutted towards Gene's office, ready to read him the first three
chapters of Inferno, the Gaelic translation. Royt's door? Royt was sitting
there in his think position, feet on the desk and arms behind his head,
snoring away. No, he thought, it's not Royt.
He finally decided that whoever stole it didn't really comprise a threat to
the project. Sometime during his running up and down the halls, the truth had
come home. In his panic to find the missing ball, enough of his mind was
freed from solving the generator problem that the answer came to him.
The emitter tube was fried.
The little hunk of glass and metal was more than just expensive and nearly
impossible to replace, at least for him. It was the key to the generator's
ability. The coatings of the tube, consisting of highly refined rare earth
elements, its superconductive filaments, special crystalline housing,
polyplast-ceramic insulators, superconductive interconnects, all combined to
give the beam its special properties. Most of these properties could be
summed up simply as an order of magnitude improvement in fine control over the
intensity of the beam produced. Some properties were manifest in the beam's
ability to rapidly respond to changes in input. In Royt-speak, it was simply
Bandwidth, with a capital "B". "Gotta have that bandwidth in all your beam
generators," Richard mumbled in recollection. "And response time? Hell, yes!!
We can give your response time." He snapped himself out of used lab equipment
salesman mode long enough to remember that these were the properties he had
taken advantage of in bringing his calculations to tangible reality.
Had he zapped the tube during its first use, with his power supply
workarounds? Or did it get zapped by some sort of feedback from the magnetic
tomb of the Hemholtz cage? It didn't matter now. No emitter tube, no
generator. No generator? Well, the rest didn't matter either, not anymore.
He returned to the lab bench and started working his way through his notes;
the pages of records of the combinations of replacement components he had
swapped out clearly showed that he had by this time replaced the entire unit,
except for the damned emitter tube. He had simply blocked it out, he guessed,
until he was distracted long enough to forget to forget.
Three hours later, he was still in his back-wrenching hunch on the bench
stool, bent over the trailing end of his notes. Somewhere in these numbers,
these wonderfully fascinating, unique, bizarre relationships between mass and
externally applied energy, somewhere in there was the answer to why his dead
emitter tube was setting on the floor next to him in his dead generator. It
still seemed pretty damn pointless, he thought, reaching a last time for Ball
One. He bounced it back and forth between left and right a couple more times
before setting it back, no not on the pedestal, he thought, let's put it over
there on the scale, where Ball Two would have been, where Ball Two would now
be reading some low mass value of its own.
As he placed Ball One on the scale, his jaw dropped. What? The LED's now
showed that it now weighed four point seven two nine pounds. Another stare of
disbelief showed no change in the reading.
He reached out and yanked Ball One off the scale like he was avoiding some
kind of electric shock, stared at it, tossed it up the air a couple of times.
It felt the same. He had played with it so much the last few days he could
probably detect a quarter percent change in weight just by the feel. He
reached back to return it to the scale again when he noticed that it was no
longer reading zero?
"Oh God", he muttered, "Maybe a flaky scale screwed me up after all. Check
your measuring equipment, fool." Another lesson in elementary empirical
science from the makers of cold fusion. He pressed the reset/recalibrate
button on the scale and it returned to zero. But as he did so, he saw
something that had escaped his scrutiny before.
The ball dip zone, that little curved receptacle area where the ball rested
on top of the scale without falling off, seemed deeper than before. In fact
it appeared considerably deeper. Why didn't he noticed it? Lack of sleep?
Placing Ball One back in the dip zone, he could see that it sank deeper
than it had before. Time, he thought, for bed. Much too late. Powers of
observation now reduced.
He stood up from the stool, then almost doubled over, as his joints
protested resentfully over their lack of use. He stretched slowly, first his
arms up overhead, then his legs, one at time, forward then back, forward then
back, and found himself falling ...
As the room abruptly shifted from bright fluorescent to dim moonlight, he
could see his hands, stretched out in front of him for balance, suspended over
a glassy plane of sparkling light.
In the next second and a half, a thousand possibilities blazed through his
mind. A near death experience? A heart attack at the bench? No time for
wonder. The surface of the lab floor came up to meet his chin, and he went
out.
Richard awoke some undetermined moments later in unbelievable pain. His
pounding head was cradled in the lap of someone with a black head, a head he
saw looking down over him, busy applying some medication to his upper lip. He
reached up to feel it; he must have nearly bit it off. The black-headed,
perhaps hooded person pushed his hand away, mumbling something unintelligible.
As the mumble concluded, a feminine, slightly mechanical-sounding voice
said, "Be still. Do not move."
He fought the urge to struggle, then yielded to the waves of relief now
replacing the pain in his lip as the hooded one smeared some kind of salve
slowly from one side of his lip to the other.
"Be calm. You will be fine," the voice continued.
A distinctly close splashing noise broke him away from staring into the now
noticeably feminine eyes of the black hooded person stroking his forehead,
while the surface beneath him gently rocked back and forth. He started
struggling again, but she, yes, it was a she, he knew that much, held him
firmly in place, then mumbled again.
Moments later, he heard the voice say, "It is fine. You are in a boat."
The voice, he noticed, appeared to be coming out of a little box on her
shoulder. He looked past her shoulder to the same twinkling field of night
stars he had seen those brief moments before conking out. Even on the
clearest night, he had not remembered such a crystal-bright sprinkle of sky
glitter.
He looked back into her eyes, soft, caring, concerned eyes that they
appeared to be, and started to fade out again.
Later he awoke to see those same soft, caring, and yes now plainly
beautiful green eyes still staring down at him between cascading locks of dark
auburn hair. "Gyeslowtenden," she said. "How are you feeling?" asked the
little box stuck to her shoulder.
"I feel fine," Richard said, not stopping to think before he answered.
"Where am I?"
"Kmen yar shmendahike," she said, or something like it. The box said, "Save
that question for a later time." She continued to speak, but he stopped
listening to her for the moment; the box was a little easier to understand.
"You must take your rest at this time. Soon, you will be questioned and you
will be answered." She smiled at him.
A Florence Nightingale smile? He had not looked at a woman in admiration
since the last time he took a summer vacation, some two years earlier. A
smile like that on a face like that with such a deliciously foreign accent?
Accent?! Maybe, he shuddered, may his NDE was more D than N.
For a moment he had forgotten that matchbook-sized voice-actuated language
interpreters, like the one he was apparently now conversing with, didn't
exist, not outside of UFO Enquirer's Update, anyway. Yet her persisting smile
dissuaded him from panic. She mumbled again and the box told him to open his
mouth, then swallow. Richard opened up and she slipped a capsule between his
lips. He swallowed, then slept, dreaming a relaxed, safe and warm dream of a
relaxed, safe, calm boat ride with a delightful green-eyed woman with a
delightful accent and long, luscious curls of the warmest brown hair, flowing
on and on in a sea of warm and relaxed safety ...
When he awoke, she was still looking him over. Next to her were more
faces, considerably less warm and definitely not relaxed. They were arguing
amongst themselves, as near as he could tell, in the same language he had
heard from her lips before.
"Enough now, he is awakening," announced one of the boxes on one of the
shoulders. Each of the three, yes there were three of them, each of the three
people now looking him over stopped abruptly in their discussion. The Auburn
One reached out toward him and lifted him gently up into a sitting position.
"It is time now. You have a few mintues," her box said, "to ask and be
asked."
Richard looked at her and her two companions. The one on her right was a
square-jawed and seriously handsome blonde man of perhaps thirty, the one on
her left a dark haired woman who looked remarkably like her. Maybe they were
sisters. They were all wearing the same dark garb, form-fitting and shiny,
like wet silk. Richard started to ask them a question, then stopped,
struggling for words, as he stared past the three of them, towards the craft,
the boat, as she called it, that they all must have been in together some
recent moments or hours earlier.
It was quite unlike any boat he had seen before. In shape it appeared
similar to the motorized inflatables he had watched down at the river in the
summer, boats that pulled skiers around and swamped canoes. This boat did
look much like them, except for the fishlike fins protruding from the back,
fins that even now looked like they were flapping back and forth a bit.
"Do not concern yourself with the nature of your rescue craft, Richard
Joseph Fentz," Auburn's box announced.
"You have me at a disadvantage," he responded. The Auburn One looked at him
with a puzzled expression. "I don't know your names."
A smile of discovery dawning in her eyes, she said, "Dana"
"Dana," said her box.
"Jaaspendt," said the blonde gentleman, as did his box.
"Yantz," replied the remaining pair.
"Well, Dana," he asked, "Where am I, how did I get here, and what is it
that you want to know?"
Dana looked at her two companions, then back at him, and began. "Richard
Joseph Fentz, here is--"
"Please, call me Richard."
"Richard, here is Lake Fentz. You arrived here in the same manner these
did. What we want to know is when the rest of your party is going to arrive."
Dana reached her hand out to him, then opened it to reveal a silver ball
about the size of a pea, then with her other hand gave him another, close to
the size of Ball Number Two. Of course, the "BALL NUMBER TWO" label on the
side was a bit of a hint.
Richard reached out and took them from her, examining each. Then he
reached up to her shoulder, touching her little translation box. He looked
back over her shoulder at their boat.
"Shit," he said.
Her box made a sort of a bleeping noise and she and Yantz and Jaaspendt
laughed, the first smiles he had seen on the faces of the other two.
"What can you tell me about your equations, Richard?" her box asked him.
"We know you had set up a repeating series of converging parameters to
validate your hypothesis regarding matter/mass displacement. We do not know
which of these parameters you used in your experiments at Bramer Valley."
He tried to deny the obvious, to himself at least. He didn't answer.
"How far apart were your time intervals on the power initialization
sequence of the beam generator? It is very important that we know."
"About two seconds each, I would guess," he answered without thinking.
"How long was it between when you first operated the generator and, well,
when you arrived here?"
"Oh, I guess about five days."
Dana looked at him like he was truly gone. Maybe she was right, but she
took that moment to reach up and touch her little box, as did her companions.
Their next several minutes of conversation were not translated, save for
occasional glances of suspicion or perhaps contempt that required no
mechanical interpretation.
Then she shook her head, in some obvious disagreement with the other two,
and reached up to switch on her translator.
"Richard, we have a problem. You came to be here by result of your work.
I think we did not make that clear. I think you do not realize how far you
have traveled. These balls of steel in your hands? They are portions of the
test balls you were using in your 'mass reduction' experiments."
Richard nodded in acknowledgement. She continued.
"The small one? This is the inner core of the first test ball from the
first time you ran the experiment. The larger one? The second ball, with
some part of the equipment beneath it. The next run. You, with a spherical
portion of your lab room. That is now out there, in the water." She paused,
pointing out toward the center of the lake.
"So here is the future. How far into the future?"
"That is not an issue now, Richard," she replied, genuine worry resting
rigid on her face.
"How do you know of my work?"
"Richard, when those parts of your lab disappeared, when you disappeared
with them, people of your time began to take your work very seriously. They
studied your published papers, to replicate your results, though they
apparently did not understand them. In the time span of five years from you
left, a new military science formed around your efforts. 'Mass Reduction', to
eliminate people, war engines, cities. Without bodies, without rubble,
without residual radiation. An ideal weapon, by the standards of your time."
"Eventually," she continued, "it was used for such purposes. Not until
much later was the nature of your discoveries truly understood. The users of
your 'Mass Reduction' technology thought they were destroying their targets,
not relocating them. The amount of mass displacement the target experienced
was, we know, a linear function of the energy applied, nothing in your setup
would change that. The amount of temporal displacement, and how long it took
for the 'send' to take effect after application of the required energy, these
relationships were more complex. They were not fully explained by your
published calculations."
"The small, then larger balls, " Richard observed, looking blankly into his
palms.
"Then you. Exactly."
"So where is the controversy?" Richard asked, visibly struggling to grasp
all the ramifications of what he had just heard. "If you know all this, what
difference does it make how long it took for my initial test to actually work?
I'm here now!"
"Because, Richard, your lab was not the last sphere to be transmitted."
Richard looked at Dana, at Yantz, then over to Jaaspendt. They were a
serious looking bunch. He stood up, wobbling a bit, waved off Dana's effort
to assist him, then strolled over to the boat, walking around it, kicking a
pebble or two from side to side, while he clutched the two steel balls, one in
each hand, until his knuckles paled around the larger ball. It, the boat,
looked like an alien creature, its long, narrow, yet rigid equivalent of a
gunwale sweeping back on each side to melt into a fin that swept out and down,
apparently serving as propeller, rudder, and keel. Amazing! And what powered
it, he could only guess.
He peered inside the boat and saw a bag of some transparent material,
filled with remnants of his lab bench: the scale, pieces of the beam
generator. In another bag were some of his notebooks, and there in the prow,
tucked between a couple of flaps of whatever made up the boat, he could see a
couple more bags filled, he suspected, with more souvenirs of the lab. In the
one bag, he thought he could make out the shape to be the bench copy of his
paper. The other bag was messy, filled with dripping cloth somethings.
"NO!" he gasped. "Not Royt's Florsheims?" But he knew that they were
there in the bag, that Royt's feet and his blood and some portion of his pant
legs were in there with them.
In a gasping breath of willpower, Richard turned away from the boat and
faced the lake. His gaze stretched out from before him for a stretch before
coming to rest out in the center, on what appeared to be a platform. The
brightness of the stars would not have been enough to show it here in the
night, but the soft blue lights floating all around it gave it a strangely
luminescent appearance, like a faint spiral nebula in a field of softly
twinkling darkness. It was a round, uniformly flat surface jutting up just a
couple of feet above the calm of the water surrounding it. And in the center
of the platform stood a roughly circular lump, looking like a crude attempt at
a Buckminster Fuller version of a cutaway house. He couldn't make out the
contents of this cutaway castle on the sea, but he knew what they were.
He turned away from the water and toward the others, then paused, spinning
back again to face the lake.
Fentz Lake, the perfectly round lake.
Fentz Lake, he would later discover, was one of many such lakes that formed
in the hemispherical cavities left by the transmission of military bases,
towns, and cities over the many years since his abrupt departure from the
university. It was also the first of many such lakes soon to be abruptly
filled with a fast moving municipality from the past.
Richard turned back to stare at his rescuers. He wondered if they were
part of a centuries long vigil monitoring the lake, waiting for the First
Arrival. And the round platform under his falling lab room, where the wall
that had stood between him and Royt's desk was now a crumbled piece of lath
and plaster, was this platform a sort of catchers mitt for temporal relics?
That notion squeezed a chuckle out of him. He started laughing a little
louder, gathering return stares from the trio.
He wondered if he could really help these people to determine just when his
city would arrive? They probably already assumed that the answer was no, given
his last couple of admissions. But he could help them, he hoped, to cope with
the cultural earthquakes to follow. The little boxes on their lapels would
help.
Would he be able to help though, he wondered, if others among his papers
had also been thoroughly scrutinized after his premature departure.
He looked down into his hands again, now cramped from clutching his globes
of steel. His left arm was feeling long already, lugging the larger one
around. He switched the two balls, putting the big one in his right, then
reached back and with a wide swing, plopped it out in to the water. A cry of
protest arose from the trio behind him, but he ignored it. They had other
souvenirs, and more they could gather. He put the small ball in his right
hand, then swung up and out, going for that forty five degree shot, and
watched as the little projectile arced out of view.
Standing there next to the water, seeing the last of the waves created by
his first launch fading in the glimmer of the night sky, he realized that he
had finally escaped obscurity. If he could just slip back into it, like Ball
One and Two, now safe on the bottom of the lake.
He began to stroll back toward the group. They would forget all about the
little steel orbs, he assured himself, when he told them about the other
papers. Unless, of course, they had already read them.
______________________________________________________________________________
D.E. Helbling writes and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
dehelbling@zigsuni.rain.com
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Earth as an Example
Part 2
Jesse Allen
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
There was a knock on the door to Captain Huston's cabin. Or rather, a knock
on the wall next to the door--the door itself was open.
"There's no need to knock, Dr. Drucker," said Captain Huston. "In the
Navy, an open door is an invitation. Come on in."
Dr. Drucker entered, then seemed startled when he saw Captain Huston was
not alone. With him was Captain Second Rank J`ali Suliman.
"If you're both here," started Dr. Drucker, "who's on the bridge?"
"Relax, Dr. Drucker," replied Captain Huston, amused by the archaeologist's
concern. "The bridge is less than twenty seconds down the hall. Chief
Navigator Smythe is in command. She has intentions of future command, so I
deemed it appropriate to introduce her to the throne."
"Don't believe him," cautioned Captain Suliman, his teeth showing as he
smiled broadly. "He's just afraid of failing to catch that prankster Jones in
the act of pulling the wool over his eyes. So he put Georgia in command while
Jones installed the gadget."
"J`ali," said Captain Huston, turning to speak with his second, "you truly
hurt me with your disrespect. Of course I put Georgia in command while Jones
put the shield modifier in. I'd hardly be giving her a fair feel for command
if she wasn't handed something a little unusual during her watch."
"Go ahead and make excuses," said Suliman, "but I know you better, John.
Your style of command is to leave someone else to hold the bag whenever
possible. You know it. I know it. And you know I know it."
"If you're done assaulting my good character," replied Captain Huston
playfully, "I should remind you that she is replacing you, not I, in the
Captain's seat right now. Perhaps you'd like to test Jones's creation
yourself?"
"No," said Suliman, "I respect your decisions completely. You are, of
course, completely correct to leave a junior officer in command while an
engineer with even less experience than the acting captain is tinkering with
the hyperionic shields.
"You must excuse me, sirs," Suliman continued, "but I have other matters to
attend to." With that, he began to leave the room.
"Remember, J`ali," retorted Huston gleefully, "this was your watch. You
know it. I know it. And you know I know it." Captain Suliman did not even
pause as he walked out the door, but Dr. Drucker though he heard a slight
snigger from down the hall moments later.
"What was all that about?" asked the incredulous Doctor.
"Oh, just J`ali and I playing games with each other and the crew as usual.
I left Georgia on the bridge while Warwick Jones, the junior engineer I
mentioned earlier, puts his stealth system in."
"That should be interesting," said Dr. Drucker.
"Indeed," said Captain Huston. "What's worse, I'm not really sure if
Warwick is pulling my leg or not. Usually I can tell such things and then
it's just a matter of working out how they're doing it. But Warwick is new
and I can't read him as well. Worse, engineering is not my forte. Warwick's
compounded the problem by being very thorough in describing the thing's
limits. Apparently, a lot of the power and size of standard electronic
stealth systems comes from their countermeasures defense circuits---the part
of the gadget that keeps other equipment, particularly other ships, from
scrambling the cloaking shield. By cutting that out and trimming a few other
corners, he says he's saved enough power and space to fit it. Given the
thoroughness of his description of the gadget's flaws, I'm tempted to believe
him. I do not, however, intend to give in to that temptation easily."
"And Captain Suliman's claim that you gave Lieutenant Smythe the con while
Jones was at work to dodge responsibility?"
The Captain smiled. "I see you've caught on to some of the ropes. Yes,
there is some truth to it. I've just spent the last three days checking up on
Warwick's claim that most of the power goes into counter-scrambling. I was
sure that was where he laid a trap for me...and I've just managed to learn
enough to believe him after all. At least whatever logical pitfall he's laid
for me isn't there. So I need more time to search engineering texts to detect
other possible tricks.
"But it is just as much a challenge to Georgia as it is me dodging Warwick.
You see, she now has the task of proving her ability to command and she knows
she'll get quite a recommendation from me if she can find out what Jones has
really done before I do.
"If, on the other hand, I work it out when I go on duty in a few hours
after she has failed, I'll gloat unmercifully."
"I will feel sorry for Lieutenant Smythe should that happen," said Dr.
Drucker. "I know just how unmerciful your gloating can be."
So far, the Captain and Dr. Drucker had completed three games of Chess, all
three of which the Captain had won. Dr. Drucker had watched in horror as his
pieces were chopped off the board in bold moves that left his King stripped of
all protection. All his defensive moves had been countered ruthlessly.
`I had not counted on such an aggressive opponent,' though the
archaeologist. `But with each game, his victory comes harder. I am learning
his style...'
"It's bad manners not to gloat when someone else challenges you to a game
and then proceeds to lose repeatedly," said Captain Huston in a mock
self-satisfied tone. "I believe it is your move now."
"I know," said Dr. Drucker with equal mockery. "I shall enjoy wiping that
grin off your face. Bishop to Queen 7. Check."
"Feeling assertive today?" said Captain Huston. "Well, let's see what I
can do about that. Check, you say?" and the Captain moved over to the side
table that now held the chess board. Real pieces of either blackened or
bleached steel on the wooden board rather than the holographic projections
common to most Knights & Castles games. Yet another anachronism, but it
seemed appropriate to play the ancient game by hand. Captain Huston moved a
steel bishop to its new position. He contemplated the board silently for
several minutes with his hand still on the piece, Dr. Drucker standing across
the board to see what happened.
`He plans at least three moves ahead of me,' thought Dr. Drucker, `and
undoubtly knows exactly where he wants to move now and is just playing with me
by pretending to work out moves as he goes. But he has a surprise coming to
him...'
Captain Huston reached forward and moved one of his pale pieces, taking the
grey bishop off the board. Without even waiting a moment, Dr. Drucker reached
down and moved another dark piece.
"Check," he announced.
Captain Huston looked up at the archaeologist with an expression that was a
mix of surprise and a frown. `Now what's he got up his sleeve?' thought the
Captain. `He's not usually aggressive at all and it's obvious he's plotted
his moves out in advance. He's not even TRYING to hide it!' John contemplated
the board carefully, then moved one of his pieces to take the attacking rook.
Again Dr. Drucker did not wait, but moved his piece immediately.
"Check."
`What the hell?' though Captain Huston. `If I take his piece again, he'll
have three less than he did five minutes ago without improving his position at
all. What is he up to?' Then suddenly, John saw the strategy. `Sneaky fox!
If I take the bishop he's using to put me in check, I'll have set myself up to
lose all three of those pieces. He's not attacking the King: He's after my
playing pieces! But how to counter him...'
Dr. Drucker read the Captain's thoughts from the frowns crossing his
forehead and his eye movements across the board. A full half hour passed
without a word or move. Dr. Drucker smiled to himself. `I have finally
gauged him well,' he thought. `I knew he would attack those pieces, yet
realize within a few moves that he places his own in jeopardy. Yes, I've
finally rattled `the Dark Master's' cage.'
"Jaffles, John," said the ship's cook who had entered soundlessly to peek
over the chief archaeologist's shoulder. "And a pot of coroco. I just ran
some up to the bridge and Georgia thought you might want some too. Oh, and
she told me to tell you `Warwick's little gadget works,' whatever that means."
"Thanks, Theo," said the Captain as the cook placed the food on the side
table. "Smells good."
"Oceanian cooking always does," replied Theo. "Playing games again? Watch
it, Doctor. John has a mean streak and he plays to win."
With that, the cook disappeared as silently as he entered.
"Do all your crew use first names like that?" asked Dr. Drucker.
"Of course," replied Captain Huston. "Discipline and formal titles are all
very wonderful for parades. But off duty, I'm a person, not a Captain, and I
like being treated that way. You'll find most of the crew feel that way too.
"In fact, it might be good practice for you and your team to use first
names when we're off duty, David."
"Oh," replied the archaeologist, "of course. We always try to adjust to
the local customs, Capt...John. I simply hadn't realized. I would never have
imagined the military was quite so... well, human. Margie always gave me the
impression discipline was a bit on the strict side onboard."
John Huston laughed. "Doesn't surprise me if she was serving with Nick
Perry. He's as good as they come, but he's from the Hercules sector and they
take discipline a bit seriously there. I'm from Oceania and we've always been
a bit more relaxed about such things. Got better grub, too," and as he spoke,
he poured a cup from the pot. "Want some?"
"Grub?" asked David.
"Sorry. Local slang for `food.' "
"I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Oceanian `grub,'" said David. "I take it
that the drink is coroco?"
"Yep. It's water percolated through the dried grounds of a common plant on
Gardia, one of the better agri worlds in the quadrant. It's good stuff,
though I recommend you limit yourself to a cup a day `til you get used to it.
There's some trace chemicals in it that not only give it the flavour, but
might make your bladder work overtime and keep you up all night if you're not
careful."
"Sounds a bit like coffee," said David. John gave him a blank look. "It's
a drink from home that, from the description, could be fairly similar. These
square things are called jaffles?"
"That's right. Leftovers sandwiched between two slices of braco, then
sealed and cooked."
"And braco..."
"...is good stuff. My training is in naval command, not food production,
I'm afraid, and describing everything that goes into good braco would be long
and tedious, not to mention possibly inaccurate. Try one. You can always
interrogate Theo if you get really curious about our cooking."
David took a jaffle in his hand. It was warm and light brown, a palm sized
square which bulged in the middle. He took a bite and chewed. There was a
taste of processed grain and mildly spiced meat along with something he didn't
recognize, a gooey yellow substance that fill the jaffle's interior. Steam
wafted gently from the filling.
"This is SNACK food?" asked David in disbelief.
"Yeah," replied John. "If you want real Oceanian cooking, you'll have to
visit sometime. I tried to convince Theo to serve us real food more often,
but most of the crew rebelled, having taste buds cultivated elsewhere. Hence
the meals to date."
David took another bite, then sipped his coroco. It was slightly bitter,
but with a subtle sweetness to it and a hint of something else that he
couldn't quite place, though it was familiar.
"You're right, this is good. If the fare---sorry, `grub'---is as good as
this regularly, I could be talked into moving very easily. There's something
in the coroco that I can't quite make out, though...ethanol?"
"Just enough to keep the toes warm. But none goes to the bridge. This is
strictly an off-duty pot."
John returned to eyeing the chess board, sipping from his cup while
silently contemplating his next move. `So the good doctor is getting tricky.
There must be some way to foil him, though...'
"Is all your crew Oceanian?" asked David. "The Maelstrom's crew seemed to
be from all over the Union."
"No," replied John, "but about half the crew is from my home sector. The
Navy is divided on how to billet crews. Basically, there are two schools of
thought---assignment by ship or by commanding officer. On the Nikaljuk, the
two schools meet, or collide if you prefer. J`ali has worked on this ship for
ten years and probably won't be assigned another command for at least a
decade. He has a skeleton crew that stays with the ship at all times, mostly
engineers whose greater experience with this ship gives them an edge. Then
there's the crew that's assigned to me. Georgia, Theo, and Norman have all
served on four different ships with me. There are a few others, some who've
been with me longer, some shorter. Warwick was the latest addition, courtesy
of Admiral Nick. Due to some regional political settlements with the Union,
the Nikaljuk and its native crew are Turian, me and my crew are all Oceanian.
So we get decent grub when we can, but we have to put up with J`ali's hot
spices when the shipbound crew rebels."
"Ah, so he is the person to thank for last night's flaming curry?"
"You got it! Vicious stuff, isn't it?"
"Actually," said David, "I rather liked it. I've never had Turian food
before. I'll have to ask Theo how it's made."
"The primary ingredient is rocket fuel, I believe," said John.
"I'll admit it was rather hot. By the way, what does `Warwick's little
gadget works' mean?"
"The Nikaljuk either has a working stealth shield or a navigator who's in
league with the engineers. Quiet now, please. I can't play two games at
once."
David sipped his coroco and smiled.
"No word from the Janella spacedock yet, sir," announced Suliman as Captain
Huston relieved him at the con.
"How long have we been in hailing range?"
"Seven hours. At our current rate, we should make planetary orbit in half
an hour. A bit long for sleeping on the job."
"Have you been calling them the whole time?"
"Just for the first quarter hour, then we got sick of it and just tried
every twenty minutes or so."
"Hmm...Sounds like a general power failure. Can you get a visual of the
station?"
"Visual scan on maximum magnification," announced Norman Clarke, the
Nikaljuk's pilot.
The forward screen showed the blue ball of a planet, complete with white
streaks of water clouds. Orbiting high above it was a small splodge of shiny
metal, reflecting the starlight of Janella's primary.
"I've not been able to find any emissions from the station whatsoever,"
continued Norman, monitoring his instruments as he spoke, "including the
normal radio noise from their power plant. Not even emergency band signals,
which they should be using if there's been a blackout. I'm also not getting
any infrared signature other than reflected starlight, though it would be hard
to pick up their waste heat even from this distance."
"Anything on the threat board?" asked Huston.
"Nope," replied Suliman. "The nearest action is at Rosanna, over two
hundred parsecs from here."
"Hmph. Have you been playing with the would-be stealth shield?"
"No, sir. I had planned to call Janella, then flip it on and see if they
could track us, but we haven't even got that far."
"Very well. You are relieved of the con."
"Thank you, sir," said Suliman, saluting sharply before walking off the
bridge.
"I have a target solution, Subahdar," announced Ordinance Officer Mikoyan
aboard the Kalganian Raider Bristol. "The ship has been hailing the spacedock
without response or change of course. Passive scanners identify it as a
lightweight military merchant craft."
"Military?" asked Subahdar Argen. "Are you sure it is alone?"
"There are no other ships in detection range."
"Hold your fire," instructed the Subahdar.
"Captain, I have engine emission from high and right, approaching from our
stern," announced Norman.
"Can you identify it?" asked Captain Huston.
"Negative, Captain. I've never seen an engine plant signature like it."
"Display it, main screen."
Norman threw the image onto the front viewscreen, erasing the picture of
the approaching planet.
"Battle stations!" snapped Huston. "Pilot, dive for the planet, maximum
acceleration. Navigator, calculate a hyperbolic orbit for optimum
gravitational boost from Janella. We've picked up a raider..."
"The merchant has detected us. It's diving for the planet, probably to get
a gravitational assist," announced Mikoyan.
"Prepare to fire," commanded Subahdar Argen.
"Torpedo one is locked on target."
"Fire!"
"Inbound torpedo," announced Norman.
"Slingshot ready?" asked the Captain, slipping easily into the abbreviated
speech necessary to handle the rapid pace of battle.
"Orbit computed, sir!" answered Georgia from the navigation console.
"Execute!"
"Done," replied Norman.
"Okay, folks," said the Captain as calmly as he could, "this is what you've
all been trained for. We've been shot at before and lived. Stay calm and
we'll do it again. Our friend seems to be on his own. We can lose him
yet..."
`Start taking your own advice,' he thought to himself. `Stay calm!
They're only trying to kill you...'
"Engineer Jones!" he ordered, the ship's computer automatically picking up
the tone of voice and name to connect him with the engineer.
"Yes, sir?" asked the grill next to his command chair.
"We've picked up unwanted company," explained the Captain, "and I wouldn't
mind disappearing. Is your stealth system up to the job?"
"Sir," replied an obviously frightened Jones, "it is only a partial shield,
just as I told you. We will be much more difficult to detect at standard
search frequencies, but not invisible. Off those search patterns, the stealth
characteristics are much weaker. And any cloaking scramblers will be
effective against us."
"Thank you, Senior Engineer Jones," said the Captain. "If this works, I'll
confirm your promotion with the Navy." He straightened from leaning towards
the grill, signalling the computer to cut the comlink. "Stand by, stealth.
Lieutenant, compute an orbit change..."
"The merchant has gone behind the planet," said Mikoyan. "He'll be
eclipsed for five minutes. I am continuing tracking via the torpedo's
systems. It confirms the merchant is using the planet's gravity to boost him
away from us. He will be in range for fifteen minutes after he re-emerges
from the planet."
"How soon `til the current torpedo makes contact?"
"Three minutes, Subahdar, but it will be eclipsed in thirty seconds."
"Set up a shot to intercept the Federalli ship when it comes around the
planet, just in case the first torpedo does not finish it off."
Mikoyan bent over his instruments.
"Rough solution prepared. I can lock it in when the merchant comes out
from behind the planet's disk. Ten seconds `til torpedo eclipse."
"The planet has eclipsed the raider's contact with its torpedo...now!"
announced Norman
"Release decoy and cloak, then execute course change," commanded Captain
Huston.
"Decoy free and running," said Georgia.
"Stealth activated," announced Norman.
Outside the Nikaljuk, the invisible energy shields that warded off
meteoriods from the ship's hull underwent a subtle change.
"Course change initiated. The raider will be visible in two minutes," said
Norman. "The torpedo has acquired the decoy: Ninety seconds `til impact."
Then he turned from the his console to face the Captain. "That was close,
sir."
"We'll be closer still soon. Stay calm, but remember: The decoy might have
pulled the torpedo off us even without the stealth. Let's hope that little
gadget really works..."
"The merchant is overdue to emerge from eclipse," said Mikoyan. "The
torpedo must have destroyed it."
"Or the captain outmaneuvered it, then shifted to a lower orbit," countered
Argen.
"Unlikely. That's a lot of fancy dodging for a freighter."
"Oh, very likely. You have never fought the Federallies before. Simpleton
ship, maybe. But rarely a simpleton captain. I know them from battle. They
are sneaky bastards with tricks you can only dream of. Bring us around the
planet in a slow orbit and keep your finger near the trigger..."
The Bristol's pilot began to move the ship around the shining blue globe of
Janella.
"Further engine emission, sir," announced Georgia. "He's headed for a high
orbit."
"Firing solutions?"
"Torpedoes one and two are locked."
"Fire both and set up a third."
"Firing..."
"Inbound torpedoes!" announced Mikoyan.
"What!"
"Two torpedoes, coming straight at us. I can't see the merchant. He must
have a cloaking device..."
"A freighter? Impossible!"
"The ship does not appear on any of our scanners and the torpedoes were not
launched blindly from behind the planet."
"Evasive maneuvers! Fire!"
"At what?"
"Two inbound torpedoes," announced Georgia. "They've fired back down our
tracks."
"Running time?"
"Thirty seconds," answered Norman. "The Kalganians are jamming."
"New solution?"
"It's very rough, but it would give him a nudge," replied Georgia.
"Hold your fire."
Far behind the Bristol, a pair of silvery darts drove on through space,
headed for the bright engine glow of the fleeing Kalganian. Inside their
streamlined metal cases, instruments picked at the subtle signals of the
jamming, trying to sort their true target from the dozens of shimmering ghosts
thrown at them. At random intervals, each would shift frequency, momentarily
clearing away the false images. Fooled for a moment, the first torpedo passed
beneath the Bristol, harmlessly passing through the image it had perceived.
Now, with the Bristol astern of it, the torpedo detected nothing and drove
straight on, its undirected acceleration stopping only when its fuel supply
was exhausted. Janella's primary had a new comet. In a hundred years, the
metallic dart would fall in to the fiery star, adding in minuscule measure to
the star's vast reserves of metallic gases.
The second torpedo was not fooled. It homed in on the exhaust of the
fleeing Kalganian and ten metres short of the engine's vents, the warhead
ignited. The entire torpedo was vapourized in an instant. The rear of the
Bristol softened with the heat and flowed outward, driven by the internal
pressure of the air within its hull. Further from the explosion, solid chunks
came free and flew on random courses. The hull was punctured in at least a
hundred places, completely overwhelming the safety systems. One flying piece
ripped the side out of the Bristol's main generator. Shipboard power failed
completely. The few not yet killed by the force of the explosion found
themselves breathing vacuum instead of air. Backup power sealed sections from
venting their atmosphere into space, but the punctures were so frequent that
few of the bulkheads could hold long. Sections of the hull that had not been
perforated were severely weakened. Under the continuing pressure of even the
partial atmosphere remaining, they buckled and collapsed. In all the ship,
only one section remained intact against the damage. And no crew were alive
in that sealed tomb.
The Procurator touched the button on the trimensional recorder,
deactivating it. Behind her, the sun had set and the night sky was visible.
The dark was broken by myriads of shining stars.
"Gentlemen," she said, "my pardon for making you speak so long without a
break. Would you care for some refreshments?"
The Doctor stood up from his chair and stretched.
"Yes, that would be nice. Iced water?" Then he arced his back, groaning
slightly as he did so. "Old age is catching up with me. My body can't sit
still for so long the way it used to."
"I feel a bit worn out myself," said Admiral Perry, "though I bet it has
more to do with it being dark outside than anything else. The clock might say
it's midday, but my body still thinks dark means time to sleep."
The Procurator smiled. "The price of having an office with a view on a
planet where everything is underground. Museum's primary sets every
twenty-seven and a quarter hours while planetary time goes full cycle in
twenty-five. The last two days, I've just been finishing the day around
sunrise."
"No time zones to worry about at least," said Dr. Drucker. "After a few
years here, it's strange to visit a more traditional planet where the time is
set by the cycles of their primary."
"Yes," she replied. "Museum is much more civilized that way. I can call
someone on the other side of the planet in the morning and know I'm not
interrupting their dinner. But I'm neglecting my job as host. A drink,
Captain...sorry, Mr. Huston? Admiral Perry? A snack of some sort? Perhaps
even one of those Oceanian delicacies...what did you call them? Jaffles?"
"That's correct," replied John, "though I've never heard them called a
delicacy before. Some iced coroco would be nice."
"A tofaton for me, thanks," said Admiral Perry, "if that's possible."
"Our bartender is familiar with Herculean drinks," replied the Procurator.
"I've yet to have a visitor ask for something it couldn't make. I think I
will stick with local custom and have iced water. Pardon me a moment." With
that, she moved to the door where she spoke with a guard.
"So that's how you did it," said Admiral Perry looking straight at John.
"I heard you pulled some sleight-of-hand trick, but no one told me the
details."
"Come again?" asked John. "I don't follow you."
"Your trick with the meteoroid shields at Janella. Neat."
"Actually, it wasn't my trick---as I said, it was the creation of a junior
engineer. It was him, not me, that saved our skins."
"He's not a junior engineer, you know," said Admiral Perry with a hint of
slyness.
"Not anymore," replied John. "I promoted him on the spot and the Navy
confirmed it when we stopped at Maxel." Then he paused for a moment. "You
know, it's funny, but I don't think he'll be a senior engineer any longer than
he was junior. I've never had so...well, so COMPETENT an engineer who wasn't
master rated at least. I won't be surprised if Warwick is assigned to a
cruiser in a few years. I wonder how he came to have such a junior rank?"
"That's easy to explain," replied Admiral Perry smiling. "I gave it to
him. Regulations required that he either start from the bottom and earn his
promotions from there, or go to officer school for three years before getting
rank. He and I both agreed that school would be silly or even disastrous when
he'd know more than any of his instructors, so he started from the bottom...as
a junior engineer on the Nikaljuk.
"You see, Warwick Jones was a master engineer just a year ago. But civil,
not military, and permanently groundside. But after having been on the job
for a few years, he discovered he wanted to work on ships, and he came to the
Navy. The local recruiter was sharp enough to see that Jones was an unusual
candidate and immediately passed him on to me.
"But Admiral or no, I can't bend rules to suit me. I had an eager young
man qualified in all but logtime to be chief engineer on a cruiser...but
without the ship time, there's no way I could even have put him in charge of a
pleasure yacht. And giving him junior rank and placing him on a big ship
would be disastrous, both for himself in lack of satisfaction, and for his
bosses who couldn't help but notice his superior ability. A lot of people
feel threatened when they have to give orders to a more capable officer. You
can imagine what might happen in a situation like that.
"The obvious solution was to find a small ship, one large enough to
interest him, but small enough that there would only be a couple of other
engineers who might potentially get aggravated. Besides, mismatches in rank
and ability are a little more common on certain small ships, or so you seem to
allege."
"Oh?" said John in mock innocence.
"I recall you thinking yourself on par with me once upon a time," replied
Admiral Perry jovially. "But I haven't heard anyone call you `Admiral Huston'
yet."
"Well, thank you," said John. "For a moment there, I thought you were
implying that I was incompetent and overranked."
"Maybe I was... But I digress. I knew I wanted a small ship, preferably
with an Oceanian crew since Jones hails from there, and your name came up on
the top of my list.
"In many ways, your crew was the most ideal. Jones would be joining you
just at the same time you were changing to the Nikaljuk, so only the ship's
permanent crew would be more experienced with the ship and they would not be
surprised to find a highly capable engineer unfamiliar with the shipboard
routine.
"The deciding factor, though, was how you work with your crew. I've heard
what happens on your ship, playing games with each other like you do. Some of
the officers who've served with you have mentioned it...or worse yet, tried
the same thing on unprepared commanders elsewhere. I find it all most
undignified and quite out of character with the code of conduct expected of a
naval officer..." and as he said this, Admiral Perry's voice grew stern, then
suddenly softened, "...but quite a lot of fun. You should have seen the look
on Byron Parry's face when he discovered one of his senior engineer's had
wired the Brach Y Pwull's bridge lights to start a strobe show every time
someone used the officer's head! Our commanders could do with a few more safe
surprises, and burning up the crew's energy on pranks improves discipline
remarkably.
"So here I was with the perfect prank to pull on you, the original
prankster himself. I told Jones to use his electrical wizardry on you
whenever possible, then deliberately neglected to tell you anything about his
background when he was assigned to you. And it all worked even better than I
could have imagined. I warned Jones it might be quite a while before he got a
promotion...and he came back from his first mission crowing victory in my
face."
"Yes," said Captain Huston. "You managed to pull quite a joke on us all.
Three quarters of my crew managed to get entangled in the attempt to find out
if that gadget really was what Warwick claimed it was. J`ali thought it was
the real thing while his chief engineer swore no such thing could be so small
nor run on as little power as it did. And neither Warwick nor the device
revealed a thing `til we stumbled on the Kalganian raider. He save our
lives...and the chief engineer STILL insisted it had to be a fake."
"I wouldn't blame him," said Admiral Perry. "While this is the first time
I've ever been privy to what exactly happened, I've heard a few whispers in
the halls of power...and they are just as mystified about how such a useful
thing was never made or even thought of before. Jones seems to have a real
genius.
"It's just sad that proving his device cost twenty crew their lives, even
if they were Kalganian." And with that, Admiral Perry stood up wordlessly and
stared out the window.
"Did you notice her ring?" whispered Dr. Drucker leaning into John's ear.
"What ring?" asked John, disoriented by the sudden change of conversation
and Admiral Perry's reaction.
"The Procurator's," whispered Dr. Drucker in reply.
"It's a signet ring," answered John quietly, still looking at the
melancholy Admiral. "All upper rank civil servants have one. Why are we
whispering?"
"Look carefully at the design..." but the archaeologist cut himself off as
the Procurator returned.
"The drinks will be here in a moment," she said, then turned to the
Admiral. "Beautiful view, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is," said the Admiral, startled out of his silent concentration.
"I always liked the night sky from Inner worlds. There are so many stars in
the galactic plane. I grew up out on the Periphery where there are fewer
nearby stars. Just the distant dusty white splodge of the galaxy."
As the Procurator talked with the Admiral, John caught a glimpse of her
ring.
`The design is familiar,' he thought, `but it shouldn't be. Before this
business with the Nikaljuk, I've never even heard of the Procurator of Museum.
Where have I seen that design before?'
A soft bell tone sounded from the desk.
"Ah, our drinks are ready," said the Procurator. "Bring them in!"
One of the uniformed guards brought in the tray and placed it on the desk.
He saluted sharply, then turned on his heel and left. Just as he did, John
recalled where he had seen the signet design before...
`How can the Procurator of Museum be wearing the seal of the Federal
Commander in Chief unless...'
"That's the imprint of the Secretary-General!" whispered John. "The only
person who can wear it is..."
"Plotting something, you two?" asked Admiral Perry. "Come look at the
view. Oceania can't boast a sky like this."
"True," said John, coming to the window. "Oceania's in an intermediate
sector. Enough stars to dazzle the visitors from the Periphery, but so much
less so than the Inner worlds that the ambassadors consider our sky bland.
What about your home, Dr. Drucker?"
"My home is gone," Dr. Drucker replied flatly.
John cursed himself inwardly for not remembering. The room was silent for
several minutes while they drank and looked out the window. John wrinkled up
his nose at the iced coroco. `Every time I ask for iced coroco offworld, they
mess it up.' He had been handed a glass of refrigerated coroco with an ice
cube floating in it. On any of the Oceanian worlds, it would have been served
blended with frozen cream instead of with ice. `It's easy to forget they
don't serve it properly elsewhere.'
"Well," said the Procurator finally, "we should get back to business. But
before we do, I have some trimens I want you to see." She turned to her desk
and pulled out a set of prints from a drawer. She passed them to John.
"These were taken from...well, I'll let you guess."
John looked at the first on the pile. It showed a silvery spacedock
orbiting a blue planet with the characteristic white streaks of water vapour
clouds. The spacedock seemed tiny there, dwarfed by the ball beneath it.
Even from as far as the trimenograph had been taken, something did not look
right. There appeared to be a gash in the outer hull and several of the
protruding arms of the dock appeared snapped, others warped, and there might
even have been some missing. John was not familiar enough with space
engineering to tell, but from his experience of approaching docks, he knew
roughly what they tended to look like. This was wrong. He handed the print
to Dr. Drucker.
The next shot was taken much closer and showed the damage much more
clearly. Smaller pock marks showed in the hull and the gash now appeared to
have ripped through almost all of the hull. Plates of metal were twisted and
distorted, bulging outwards where they had been softened by heat and yielded
slightly to the pressure of an atmosphere behind them. Other sections of the
hull had been heated so fiercely that the metal had vapourized, exposing the
interior to the cold vacuum of space.
The next print showed the interior of the dock. There were bodies...
John stopped looking. He knew what he would find. It was the space dock
at Janella. The close up images looked similar to the brief shots the
Nikaljuk had made before they had been ordered to Maxel. The Kalganians had
gutted and destroyed the entire station, killing all the personnel.
Intellectually, he had known that already. They could hardly have left a ship
to ambush the Nikaljuk with an operational space dock in Federal hands at
their back. But he had not thought further. The few brief images caught by
the Nikaljuk were not taken close up and he had not examined them closely
before handing them over to the commander at Maxel. He had not thought what
that destruction would look like...
"How did you get these?" asked Dr. Drucker. "These pictures are from
Janella. The Nikaljuk got attacked by the folks that did this and even we
haven't seen these before."
"You've both admired my ring," replied the Procurator with a slight smile,
"so you know my position. I have access to such things." She leaned forward
and took the prints from Admiral Perry as he finished with them.
"But you are wrong," she continued. "These images are not from Janella.
They were presented to me by the ambassador of Turnay after his release. This
is what the Federal Navy did to the space station at Turnay two weeks later.
However, the pictures taken by the Haiphong at Janella are remarkably similar.
It seems the tactics of evil Kalganians differ little from our own...I can
show you the images from Janella too if you wish."
"No, thank you," said John with a hint of firmness in his voice that
conveyed certainty.
"Why are you showing us this?" asked Admiral Perry.
"I will come to that in the end," replied the Secretary-General.
"If you're the Secretary-General..." began Dr. Drucker, "who has been the
Procurator of Museum for the last five years? I mean, this is the first time
I've ever had even a hint that you weren't in command here. And what are you
doing here? What's this inquiry really about?"
"I have been the Secretary-General of the Federal Galactic Union for ten
years, ever since my father passed the title on to me. I've also been the
Procurator of Museum for the last five of those years.
"I had always dreamed of having a job like this, but never thought that
holding the federal scepter would ever let me. Then there was the
assassination attempt by the Kalganian Intelligence Service. It was not the
first, but it came within an ace of succeeding and no other threat to my
person had ever been so serious. I went into hiding, eventually coming to
Museum when the previous procurator resigned.
"It has been the perfect disguise. My first years of office were anonymous
enough that I have not been recognized save by those I wished and as
Procurator of Museum, seeing my face in any corner of the galaxy is perfectly
in place. Whenever and wherever I am needed in my role as Secretary-General,
there is sure to be a nearby historian, anthropologist, or archaeologist to
justify my official appearance. The government on Throne is a mock structure
to draw the fire of the assassins and quell the doubts of all but the most
inquisitive."
"But you've just revealed yourself to us!" said Dr. Drucker. "Why? And
why does our expedition to First World merit your attention?"
"The most important reason in the Galaxy, Doctor. But let me deal with
that when we finish this recording..." and so saying, she restarted the
recorder on the table.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jesse Allen is an overworked, underloved graduate student at the Universityof
Iowa. In his copious free time, he pretends to teach, do research, keep in
touch with the few friends he has left, write science fiction, weave, and have
a social life. He is currently working on a thesis on Radio Emission From
X-ray Binary Stars (Read as "How to get to Australia at the U.I.'s expense" --
a preliminary feasibility study made it to New Mexico.) He can be reached at
jsa@vesta.physics.uiowa.edu during those rare times Vesta actually is working.
Earth as an Example will be condluded next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Doorway from Darkness
Christopher Kempke
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
A cry of human anguish tore me from my sleep, a bloodcurdling scream which
lingered as my vision cleared, dying to a series of sobs.
By the time I was on my feet, my now-awake brain had identified the
horrible sounds as my baby crying for its dinner, considerably less terrible
than some strange dream had led me to believe. Pulling my mind together, I
stumbled to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and looked apprehensively
within. I am not the best of housekeepers, and my wife is less so, but I
located the milk without resorting to a seeking spell, and filled the bottle
with practiced skill. A small spell warmed it, and I was on my way to the
bedroom in less than a minute.
Erika was sitting up in the crib, her crying stopped now as it was clear
that she had my attention. The scent which assailed my nostrils as I bent
over her nearly brought tears to my eyes. The milk could wait.
Sal insisted there was something intrinsically wrong with changing diapers
by magic, but Sal wasn't around, and her quirks were not of immense concern to
me at the moment. The diapers disintegrated at my mental urging, and fresh
ones slid from the box to my hand at my call. Erika was of course delighted;
her age was not yet sufficient to notice anything wrong with diapers
levitating; with luck she never would. I am probably the most powerful wizard
of the Web, the only likely competition being my wife Sal. Erika would
probably surpass us both when she reached the age that we could teach her.
The diaper catastrophe solved, I urged the bottle on my child and helped her
with the apparently difficult task of keeping it in her mouth.
When the phone rang some ten minutes later, Erika was deeply asleep. Sal
would have accused me of a sleep spell, but since I could do them without
gestures or words, it would be difficult to prove. In any case, Sal was on
the other end of the line when I picked it up.
"Carl? I just got a call from the police station. Jeremy says you should
go to the morgue and ask about the dead wino they brought in last night. He
sounded scared."
Jeremy was one of the few people who knew our abilities. Wizards are rare
on Earth, the Mages' Council requiring secrecy of them. However, I've been
known to train the occasional person in a few small spells, in case I should
need their help in the future. Jeremy was such a one.
I pick my people well and train them better; it would take more than a
small problem to frighten them. And large problems could take more than a few
minutes for me to solve.
"All right. Can you come home and watch Erika?"
"I'll be there in half an hour." There was a click on the other end of the
line.
Better than her word, Sal was home in twenty minutes. Her long black hair
flew wild as the business suit she wore shifted and changed into more casual
clothing. I cast the reverse spell a few minutes later and was out the door.
The Dodge truck in the driveway shone like new; Sal must have had it washed
earlier in the morning. I hopped behind the wheel and was halfway into the
city when I realized I had no clue where the morgue was. A phone booth
rectified this fairly quickly; there was a brief delay until I found its
listing under "Funeral Services." I meditated on the oddly-placed listing
until I walked in the door of the morgue.
"Carl Moonsente. I have an appointment with the director." I used my real
name on the off chance that Jeremy actually had made me an appointment. The
barely audible word of command at the end of the sentence was on the more
likely chance that he had not.
He hadn't; the technician smiled awkwardly. "I'm afraid the director
doesn't actually work here, he's at the office downtown. No one told us you
were coming, but if you'll tell me what you'd like..."
"I need to see the wino you brought in last night. I understand there's
something a bit..." I paused meaningfully, not knowing my meaning, "unusual
about him."
The technician knew. "That's for sure. Come along."
He led me into the interior, slid a tray out of the wall, pulled back the
cloth covering the body.
It looked dead, but little more than that, save that the eyes were sunken
more than I might expect. I looked encouragingly at the technician.
"So what do you know so far?" I had no clue what was unusual about this
corpse, but if I alerted the technician to my ignorance he'd probably develop
a suspicion that would take more than a word of command to undo. Luckily, he
was a naively trusting soul.
"Only what you do -- his brain is missing completely. Not a cell of it
left so far as we can tell. And there's no mark on him anywhere. It's
spooky, is all I can say. But what's even spookier..." His voice lowered.
"We brought in another one just like him, from the same alley, just this
afternoon. And Central had one last week, from the same place."
"Any thoughts on what it might be?" I was as clueless as they were. It
was quite clear why Jeremy had given Sal a call.
"I think it might be some kind of disease that acts really fast, dissolving
the brain."
I shook my head. "Even if it dissolved, it would have to go somewhere."
He nodded, shrugged. I decided not to push my luck.
"Well, thank you for your time. You've been a great help in my
investigation. We'll let you know what we find out." He didn't ask who "we"
were, which was fine with me since it was a lie anyhow. He pushed the corpse
back into the wall with something like relief. I have to admit I wasn't
terribly thrilled either.
Early evening found Sal and I at the alley where the bodies had been found.
It had been cordoned off with yellow "police investigation area, do not cross"
tape, which we ignored. The alley itself made a sharp bend, hiding its
contents from view of the street. If muggers could have designed an alley,
this would be it. In our case, though, the lack of visibility was of
considerable aid. As soon as we could not be seen, we began protection
spells.
Protection magic is a strange art. The usual case is to "weave" a mesh of
the particular protections you need; when the shield is triggered, it flashes
a metallic blue and prevents the entry of whatever you have it guarding
against. However, Sal and I weren't sure what we needed protection against,
so we each put up a "generic" shield, literally millions of protection shields
interlaced, allowing only air, some light, and our clothing to contact us.
This gave us a cobalt blue aura as thousands of dust molecules, small insects,
television and radio waves, and the like were repelled. To an observer, we
would glow brilliantly. The more serious problem, of course, was the effort
required to keep up such an arsenal of protections. Because of a magical
accident earlier in my life I could cast spells on some sort of "universal"
energy source, but all other wizards, Sal included, became tired quickly as
the spell sapped their strength. I could not maintain her shield; for my
power to get to her she would have had to allow magical penetration of her
shield, and it was not at all clear that magic wasn't exactly what we needed
protection against. There was a definite time limit to her participation in
this investigation.
The glow helped by providing illumination, bathing the whole place in an
eerie glow. I am, to understate the matter considerably, not comfortable in
the dark; I added a beam of pure white light, casting it here and there.
Down the alley from us was a stack of garbage, obscuring a small section of
the alley; the rest was clearly visible, and just as clearly empty. I
gestured to Sal, she nodded and moved back a bit. I gathered energy, wrapped
it carefully around the garbage stack, and lifted it twenty feet in the air.
Sal wrapped a binding spell around mine. The instant the stack was secure, I
flashed my light back to the now-revealed alley.
We were clearly not the first people to ignore the police warning tape. A
young man wearing a black leather jacket lay on his back in the alley, hands
covering his face. He didn't more as I approached, a mental scan gave me
nothing. He was dead.
Sal beat me to him, pulled back his hands, stiffened suddenly. Something
small and dark flashed between them, a piece of night attempted to grab onto
her face.
It was a bad choice; Sal's reaction was instantaneous; a blast of fire that
wrapped the small speck and hurled it toward the alley wall.
I reached it a moment later, dousing the flames with a thought. In my
light, the creature resembled nothing more than a piece of black fluff, about
a hand-width wide. Sal joined me at my side. "Looks like a tribble."
"Indeed. It appears dead now, though." I confirmed this before letting my
protections drop. I picked it up carefully, though there was little enough
left after Sal's attack.
It was unlike any creature I has seen in my fairly wide experience. Teeth
protruded from beneath, and a gentle static flowed about it, causing its
singed hairs to rise and fall despite its lifeless state. Of eyes I could
find nothing left, suggesting a magical tracking of its victims. The only
thing certain about the body was that it felt somehow wrong, carrying an aura
of places just around the corner but infinitely far away. It was clearly a
creature of another world, and I needed to know where it came from. I sat
down, holding it carefully in my hand.
Closing my eyes, I let my mind drift. Darkness flowed over and through me,
spinning and resolving into tiny, star-like points of light. I waited until
the stars filled the sky, then lowered my mental vision to the ground. A
river of stars flowed by me, millions of tiny glowing dots, swirling like
eddies of water. I splashed with my mind, briefly disrupting the flow, then
again, a complicated pattern, each break almost immediately vanishing into the
river's course. After a time, I waited.
Another presence joined me--a council wizard who had served his
apprenticeship with me. I called him Fireflower, as did everyone else, not
only because his real name was difficult to pronounce, but in honor of a
beautiful pyrotechnic display which had been his first mastered spell.
Fireflower took a few moments to orient himself, then spoke in eloquent,
wizardly fashion.
"Whatcha need this time?"
I flashed him a mental picture of the creature we had killed. "Do you know
what this is? Killed one of them on Earth, don't think it belongs here."
"It certainly doesn't. Eats brains, no? The Council discovered them a
couple years ago trying to open a faster gate to Carcigena. They're nasty
little things, almost completely unintelligent, and nearly impossible to put a
control spell on. We just slammed the gate shut and blasted the suckers that
got through. Not before they'd killed a couple of the guards, though.
Certainly not intelligent enough to open gateways themselves. Somebody
summoned it, sure as..." he paused, searching for an idiom.
I let my breath out in a short sigh. The last thing I wanted to deal with
was a hostile Mage. The last one had almost destroyed the Council and several
worlds. "Who isn't there right now, Fireflower? One of the Council gone bad
again?"
"Everyone's accounted for, Carl. We've been in meeting for several days.
But there's a much more likely explanation. Opening the gate to their world
was trivial; even a non-Council wizard could open it. Maybe it could even be
done by accident."
I smiled at the term "non-council wizard." In the past such a person would
have been called a renegade, but I was not technically a Council wizard
myself, and Fireflower wasn't going to offend me. Even if our friendship
hadn't dictated politeness, the Mages' Council owed me too great a debt for
taking care of the aforementioned rogue wizard.
"You think a normal, off-the-street, untrained person could do it? I'd be
more inclined to think wizard."
"Me, too, but keep possibilties open. We'd probably know about any
practicing wizards beyond the medicine-man stage. What are you going to do
about it?"
"I guess I'll keep a watch on gate openings to Earth. Ask the Council not
to come here for a while -- I don't want to be tracking the wrong people."
"Are you and Sal really powerful enough to monitor an entire world?"
"Of course not. That's why you're going to come help us."
Fireflower gave a short laugh. "Teach me to open my mouth. Need anybody
else?"
"Not if they're in Council. Although what you people find to talk about
for five days a month escapes me entirely."
"Mostly rumors about you."
It wasn't a surprise. "Probably as common as Elvis's picture in the
tabloids."
"They'd still like you to come back, you know."
"I know. But I'm a father now, and I can't afford to be off gallivanting
about the Web. If Erika wants apprenticeship, I'll be back when she's twelve.
Until then, I'll keep my red, thank you." Red robes were the mark of an
"independent" wizard. Sal wore the black-and-silver, but was barred from
council meetings because of her relationship with me.
"I didn't really expect you to change your mind. I'll meet you at your
house in a few hours."
"Make sure it's more than two. If you beat us there, you'll scare the
living daylights out of the babysitter."
I got a faint affirmative, and Fireflower's mental presence faded from the
river.
I opened my eyes. Sal was sitting across the alley from me, her face a
mask of boredom. She brightened when I spoke.
"Fireflower recognized it, doesn't think it could have gotten here without
a summoning or a gate accident. I'll tell you about it on the way home."
Fireflower made an impressive entrance. A darkening of the air in my
living room was the first sign, followed a moment by the "whoosh" of air
sliding between two worlds. Light spun on darkness, and Fireflower was there.
He wore silver and black robes, his ebony skin almost lost in it's folds.
Erika was delighted, reaching out to tug on his robes. Fireflower adjusted
his balance and swept her into his arms, barely managing a nod at Sal and
myself until after a major conversation with my delighted child. From
somewhere in his robes he produced a small, brightly colored rattle, brilliant
hues magically swirling in time to its tiny musical notes.
After an interval, he seated himself, not relinquishing his hold on the
child. His grin faded somewhat as he faced us.
"You know this may be a pointless effort? There are, what, five billion
people on this planet? And we're supposed to pick out a single wizard?"
Sal smiled. "You enjoy a challenge, remember? Besides, the person we're
looking for is probably in the vicinity of the city."
"Which doesn't exactly help. New York has a sizeable population itself."
Fireflower shrugged. "But then, I have nothing better to do."
"It's a good thing you're so committed to the cause," I said cheerfully.
"Shall we begin?"
He nodded. "Will Erika behave herself?"
"Usually not. I'll put her away." I lifted her from Fireflower's arms,
carried her to the bedroom.
"Don't you DARE put a sleep spell on her!" Sal's voice carried from the
living room, along with Fireflower's chuckle. Shaking my head, I put Erika in
the crib. Obeying the letter if not the spirit of the law, I wove a sleep
spell around the rattle, placing it in the crib next to her.
Almost immediately, she picked it up, dropping into a deep slumber a few
seconds later. Satisfied, I re-arranged the blankets to be sure she'd be warm
enough, then returned to the living room.
Sal and Fireflower sat on the floor, their eyes closed, their breathing
deep and regular. I joined them, careful not to disturb their meditation.
Moments later I was with them in a completely different sense.
Our minds slid out over the city, looking for unusual activity. The actual
spells were not complicated, but the process was. We were looking for
emanations of power or a gateway to another world. Unfortunately the
background noise in a major city is considerable.
Three times I felt an outflow of magic, three times tracked it to someone
dying, their life flowing out in a burst of energy. In no case was the energy
gathered, rather it escaped into the general environment. This particular
feature of human death was abused in innumerable worlds of the Web; since
personal stored of energy were quickly depleted, killing a human or other
intelligent creature released a sizable amount of energy which could be
harnessed by a wizard. The Mages' Council expressly forbid such activities,
of course, but they happened nonetheless. It was just one of the myriad ways
in which my profession makes a nuisance of itself across the multitude of
worlds.
I kept looking. After an hour or so, I felt Sal's mind touch mine,
Fireflower's a bit later.
"Find anything?" I asked.
"Only that you live in a particularly violent city." Fireflower was a
inured to such things, but the disgust was still present in his voice.
"There's enough energy out there to disintegrate a small mountain, but no
one's grabbing it."
"I found another one of those mind-eating creatures. I killed it." Sal's
voice was weary. "I'm going to roam out a bit further for the next hour."
Her contact shivered, vanished.
"Probably not a bad idea," Fireflower said. "I'll help her. You keep
checking the city proper." He broke contact, too.
I slid back into the city, following a couple of likely leads which led
nowhere. I was just about to start my search over when a brilliant neon arrow
flashed in my mind. I followed its path out of town, past the suburbs, to a
small forested grove littered with tiny mind-patterns, all matching the
mind-eater we'd killed earlier. Something else was there, too, the subtle
hint of alien power.
I snapped my eyes open. "Nice job, Sal! Let's go." Both Sal and
Fireflower were already on their feet.
"What do we do about Erika?"
I considered. It would be too dangerous to bring her with us, but there
was little chance of getting a babysitter at this moment in time.
"Monitor that power for a while. I'll take her to day-care."
Sal looked at me strangely, then shrugged.
I stepped into the bedroom, lifted Erika from the crib, shook her gently to
wake her up. Pulling her close to me, I pulled darkness around myself.
Through the enveloping darkness thin red lines could be seen. We drifted
through space, past several of the lines. I found the one I wanted, followed
it until it began to wrap over itself in a huge spiral, forming a tunnel
several times my own height. We flew down the tunnel, faster and faster,
until a dot of white light at the end grew to engulf us, and I stepped onto a
stone floor in a room with no doors.
A large stone table filled the majority of this vast room, around it were
seated fifty or sixty men, all dressed uniformly in black and silver robes.
My own attire had changed during the transit to flowing red robes. I had also
changed Erika's diapers to match.
The men looked up as one, whatever they had been discussing a moment before
gone. I waited for them to make their move. They didn't. Seconds grew into
a distinctly uncomfortable pause.
Finally, the man at the head of the table stood, slowly. His name was
Miren. He had a flowing white beard, wrinkled skin, and eyes that could only
be described as dead. A recent tragedy had deprived him of both his wizard's
immortality and much of his power; he was emotionally and psychologically
crippled. Still, he was Miren, worshipped as a god on eight worlds, head of
the Mages' Council of Somdor, the man whose words were the final judgement of
any wizard who dared cross the Council's wishes. He was the man who had
brought me, a homeless orphan, to another world, and trained me to be the
wizard I was now. As he looked at me now though, it was unclear what he
thought.
The men around the table waited. They were the most powerful group ever
assembled, wizards from two hundred Web worlds, judge, jury, and all too often
executioner of governments and people on almost a thousand of those worlds.
Their combined might could remove a planet from existence, create a new form
of life, summon forth or create nearly any object imaginable. I was not sure
they'd be equal to the task I needed, however.
"I need you to take care of Erika for a few hours."
Miren stopped his forward motion, shook his head twice as if to clear his
ears, and considered.
"Okay." A voice spoke from the table rather than Miren. I turned.
J.R.R Tolkein forever changed Earth's perceptions of wizards. Gandalf was
a tall, white-bearded old man in flowing robes, carrying a bent staff of
rune-inscribed wood. I have only known one wizard like that in my entire
experience, and it was he who stood. However, Antony bowed and grinned
crookedly at me, ruining the image entirely.
I considered in turn. Antony's mind had been fractured trying to close a
gate to a hostile world known as Caligan, and though he had made some progress
since then, he was still prone to fits of bizarre behavior. His malady was
one no amount of magic would ever heal; he had been touched by intelligences
so alien to our own that full rational thought of either form would now
forever be denied him. On the other hand, the entire Council would be
watching him, and I hoped I would only be gone for an hour or two. Antony
needed my trust as much as I needed a babysitter. I carefully handed Erika to
him.
"She's been fed, so you just have to keep her out of trouble for a while.
I'll be back in a few hours." Antony nodded as he always did when receiving
instructions. From previous experience, I knew there were almost even odds
that he understood. Still not sure of my choice, I turned and pulled the
darkness of the Web about me just as Miren finally spoke.
I'm not sure what he said, but it might have been "Good luck, Carl."
Sal and Fireflower were waiting impatiently in the driveway. Sal's eyes
were closed, they opened at my footsteps. "The power source is getting
stronger. I'm fairly sure that it's a gate of some sort, and it's opening
again."
"Then let's get on it." I hopped into the truck, Fireflower behind me.
Sal sat next to me, closed her eyes, and pointed west. I turned the keys and
we were off.
It's worth mentioning that I didn't have a clue how to drive a car. I was
taken from Earth as a child, and returned only recently as a wizard; I never
had any particular need for a driver's license in the worlds where I spent
most of my apprenticeship years. I drove with a combination of Sal's help,
some limited experience, and magic. The result wasn't too bad, and it usually
got me where I wanted to go.
This time I got only five miles from home before a siren sounded behind me.
Cursing softly, I pulled the side of the road. Beside me, Sal opened her eyes
and spoke softly.
"Make this fast -- that gate is fully open."
A police officer walked up to the window, which I rolled down.
"What's the problem officer?" I noticed his gun was in his hand.
"You're the problem. I clocked you at almost two hundred miles an hour.
Would you step out of the car please?"
I heard Sal gasp at the number, and ignored her.
I pointed back onto the road suddenly. "Officer! That car's speeding!
You'd better catch it! I'm not important!" I placed a word of command at the
end of each sentence.
He struggled with the magic, but my claim was too ludicrous; he broke the
enchantment and raised his gun.
"I said out of the car, now!"
Sal's eyes were wide, and I doubted that it was the policeman who caused
such an effect. Something was happening with the gate, and I was wasting
time.
I reached out quickly, almost carelessly with my mind, shaping a ball of
flames and heat, pulled it into this world and rolled it under the unoccupied
police car behind me.
The explosion was spectacular; spectacular enough that the officer turned
suddenly to look at the remains of his vehicle. I put the truck into gear
with my hand while pushing it forward with my mind. By the time the officer
knew what had happened he was clearly visible in my rear-view mirror. He
chose not to shoot because of the traffic on the road.
"What's up?" I asked Sal.
"I don't know. I've never felt anything like that gate before. It's
either very large, or it's opening across a very large distance. In any case,
it's only barely under control. Whoever's opening it doesn't know what he's
doing."
Fireflower made a few quick gestures, but I heard a siren again before I
could tell what he was doing.
"Don't worry about it," Fireflower said. "It's us. I put a police-car
disguise on the truck. It's not very good -- I've not seen too many of them.
But at 200 miles an hour you're going to be a blur anyway."
Sal's knuckles were white.
"Do you want me to slow down?"
"Yes, but we don't have time. Turn north as soon as you're able." She
began weaving protection spells around the truck as I scooted in and out of
traffic lanes. Cars in front of me were getting out of my way as best they
could, though by the time they heard my sirens or saw my lights I was almost
on top of them anyway.
A highway turnoff went north; I took it. Vehicles scattered.
"Just like an arcade game," I commented. Sal let out a sound that wasn't
quite a moan.
"I don't want to see a flashing 'Game Over,' Carl." She cast a short
spell, pushing a car in front of me to the left lane. I took the newly opened
lane and sped by.
"Keep that up. Fireflower, navigate!"
He was already doing so. Following his direction, I turned back to the
west, depositing me on a little-used road. We were clear of the city now,
entering a forest. The road lost its paving, began to turn frequently. I was
forced to slow down.
"North again!"
I looked, but could see no road leading the direction I needed to go.
"How far?"
Fireflower considered. "About a mile."
I brought the truck to a stop on the side of the road. "Let's do it on
foot."
We stepped out of the truck and entered the forest at as quickly as
possible in the dark. None of us suggested a light, we knew too little about
what was ahead to advertise our position so blatantly. Almost simultaneously,
we put up protection spells, toning them to the maximum performance we could
achieve without glowing. Sal's clothing shimmered briefly, weaving itself
into insubstantiality, then to silver-and-black mage's robes. None of us
ceased our half-run into the forest.
Fireflower, in better shape than I, fanned out to the left, his black skin
and robes causing him to vanish almost instantly into the forest. Sal noticed
and increased her pace, silently disappearing into the forest on my other
side.
I slowed to give them time to get ahead, and immediately wished I hadn't.
I'm not fond of darkness at any time; deep in unknown woods facing a
definitely magical and probably hostile force, I was positively terrified.
Every patch of shadow seemed to me to hide a living form, clumps of darkness
seemed to move at the edges of my vision, freezing into immobility as I turned
my head. Although the night was warm, my skin felt cold, the slightest
contact of the wind like the pressure of an unseen hand.
Behind me, a twig snapped. Perhaps it was one of the "sounds of nature"
that woodland experts refer to when they're in safe, well-lit houses at high
noon; now it was the sound of a danger I didn't care to face. My pace went
from a slow walk to a full-out run.
Four minutes is a speedy time for the mile run on level, unobstructed
ground. I covered the distance through dense forest in just more than six ,
aided by magic and fright. Tree limbs snapped out of my way as I ran,
undergrowth tore itself from the earth, pulling aside to let me path.
One root failed to observe my magical compulsion; by the coincidence that
seems to be the only inflexible natural law, my foot met it. My body lifted,
fell, and slid in a brilliant flash of cobalt blue to the edge of a clearing.
A bonfire flamed within. On the other side a giant cross was set into the
ground upside down, a decapitated goat suspended from it in a position no one
would mistake as natural. Forty or fifty men in white robes stood around the
clearing, thirteen of them in a smaller ring around the fire and an alter.
One of the thirteen held a curved sacrificial knife, and was bent over a boy
of perhaps ten lying on the alter.
Every one of them turned to look at me as I flashed. Unhurt, I got quickly
to my feet.
"Good evening, Gentlemen. Someone ordered a pizza?"
The one with the knife narrowed his eyes. "Get him!"
Subtlety, I determined, was not this man's strong point. Several of the
robed men started toward me. I held my ground and spoke.
"No, get him!" I pointed, and added a word of command. As one, the body
of men turned and charged the one with the knife.
He looked confused a moment, then raised his arms to his sides and spoke a
few words. The might have been backwards Latin; on the other hand they may
have been complete gibberish. In any event, the flames behind him roared to
new heights. His attackers froze, looking around in some confusion.
The Mage's Council has hotly debated the existence of God and Satan. It
was generally accepted by the council that though either might exist, they
tended not to interfere frequently in the affairs of men. I considered it
unlikely that the High Priest had actual help from the Prince of Darkness;
still it was undeniable he had tapped some source of power.
I used their confusion as best I could. "Leave us! Return to your homes
and never come back here!" The syllables afterward rang with uncontrolled
power; I was not attempting subtlety any longer. Anyone who might have wished
to confront me changed his mind quickly. The clearing emptied except for the
High priest, the twelve others in his circle, and the boy on the altar.
I turned my attention to the last of these. A couple seconds observation
convinced me that the boy was still breathing; the red line of blood down his
chest appeared to be superficial.
"Let the child go." I strode forward as I talked; obviously not the move
the priest expected. But he held his ground.
"You misunderstand; he is one of ours. I have cut his chest, placed the
devil in him. He now knows and will obey his master in this world." As if to
confirm this, the boy stood up and stepped to the priest's side.
I shook my head. "You shall not have this child. I claim him in the name
of our Father in heaven." I slipped a full protection spell around the boy,
enhancing mine at the same time until we both glowed with a brilliant blue
aura.
The priest attempted to reach through the spell, failed. He turned to me
with an anger like none I had ever seen.
"Your power is as nothing before the might of Lucifer! Your death shall
only begin your punishment, and the child shall be mine regardless!"
He stretched out his hands toward me, and flames poured forth from them.
My shield held, but just barely. I struggled to bring it back while the fire
roared around me. This guy was playing with more power than I had expected.
The flames died, and I carefully stood as I had before they had begun, to
make it appear that they had no effect whatsoever. One of the robed men
slammed into me from the side; he stumbled away from a brilliant blaze of
blue, holding a broken arm and just beginning to scream. His natural mental
protections dropped from the pain; I pulled a sleep spell over his mind, and
he slumped to the ground.
"Next?" I said casually, wondering desperately how long it would take Sal
and Fireflower to get here. Another of the robed men charged; I changed his
robes to concrete and he stopped before he got close.
The priest walked toward me with his knife held in front of him. I let
him. He swung his knife, I instinctively raised my arm to block the blow; it
probably saved my life. The blade passed through my protection spell as
though it weren't there, bit deeply into my arm.
Arrogance has gotten me in trouble before; this time it was going to get me
killed if I didn't move. I dropped to the ground, rolled away. One of the
acolytes, encouraged by his leader's success, drew his own knife and attempted
to run it through me. I didn't play games; the acolytes robes blazed suddenly
into intense flames. He dropped the knife and ran screaming from the
clearing.
I grabbed the knife with both hands, stretched it into a sword, stood. I
attempted to ignite the high priest's robes as well, but failed. We both took
a fighting stance as the remaining acolytes formed a ring around us.
I took a good swing at him. My swordsmanship is nothing to write home
about, but my weapon was longer than his by a good eighteen inches, and I was
apparently faster. Still, he managed to block the strike, and my
poorly-fashioned sword shattered at the shock.
A blue-white flash of electrical energy darted from somewhere outside the
ring, jumping down the priest's blade and slamming into his body with enough
force to drive him backwards through the ring of acolytes, stopping against
the altar. I didn't need Sal's shout of triumph to tell me that help had
arrived.
The acolytes turned to face this new threat; four of them drew their
ubiquitous knives and tried to run her down. I saw two of them encased in ice
and a third one fending off a wooden staff that appeared out of nowhere to
beat his head; then I jerked my attention back to my own aggressors. The five
remaining acolytes decided to give the attack one more try. I selected one,
grappled him to the ground, exchanged my image for his and let his compatriots
beat him senseless while I slid out of the mass of men. A few gestures more
and the ground began to swallow them up, stopping only when each man was
trapped to his waist.
Satisfied, I turned my attention back the priest. He had survived the
shock, and aside from his now-straightened hair looked none the worse for
wear. His eyes held raw murder, with that same strange intensity I had noted
earlier. As soon as my image returned to normal he raised his arms in my
direction.
Some have said I don't learn from experience; this is blatantly false. I
was already on the ground and rolling aside when the flames cut the air above
me. I gathered my own fire and returned the gesture. It parted around him
harmlessly, but the boulder that Sal rolled through his path didn't. He went
down in a tangle of limbs. Sal was on him in a moment, a knife in her hands
from somewhere.
Above her head, a pale sphere shimmered for a moment in the firelight, and
a multitude of tiny voices filled my mind for a fraction of a second. Moments
later the sphere shimmered again, larger and only inches from Sal's head.
"Sal! Dive!" Even as I spoke she looked up and realized her danger. The
high priest took this opportunity to kick her feet out from under her. They
went down together. I lifted a knife from the ground and ran toward them,
keeping beneath the flashing sphere.
The high priest wrested Sal's knife from her and swung. Sal rolled aside,
the knife tangling itself in her robes. Before the priest could recover it,
my own knife had slit his throat. I don't kill easily, I could see no choice
this time.
Sal and I scurried away from the growing sphere as voices began again in my
mind. I pushed them aside with some force.
We had made it about twenty feet from the sphere when I blacked out.
Darkness filled my mind, a swirling, complete darkness of complete comfort.
And somewhere in the darkness a million tiny voices were calling out to me,
urging indecipherable actions...
My eyes snapped open at Sal's slap. She held my cut wrist in one hand, was
weaving spells to stop the profuse bleeding. The high priest's knife wound
slowly sealed itself, then closed.
"You've lost a lot of blood," she said with concern in her voice. "I don't
have time to do better than just stopping it now-- you'll have to be careful."
I nodded and looked over her shoulder. The sphere was no longer
flickering; instead it had grown to almost fifteen feet in radius, a blood-red
sphere with black "cracks" that slid around it in apparently random patterns,
vanishing and reforming slowly. And directly beneath it, bathed in a light
blue aura, stood the boy from the altar. He was looking up into the sphere,
his mouth open slightly. There was a brilliant cobalt light pouring off the
protection spell, but it was weakening quickly.
A ball of silver and black rolled under the sphere. Fireflower grabbed the
unresisting boy in his arms just as the protection failed altogether and
carried him rapidly to where Sal and I sat waiting.
"What the hell is that thing?" Fireflower's black skin shone with a pale
red in the light of the gigantic sphere.
"Caligan gate," Sal and I said together. I continued solo.
"The creatures on the other side 'speak' directly to minds. They cause
death in the best case. Those less lucky go insane. Antony met one..." I let
the sentence trail off. All of us knew Antony's madness. "If that gate opens
completely, we're in serious trouble. So is this world, for that matter."
"The priest must have opened it by accident. None of the usual controls
are there. I can't get my mind around it. Every time I try I hear voices
laughing at me." Sal's voice was exhausted, her body looked worse.
"Shit!" I said suddenly. "Sal! Get that boy out of here! We can't
protect him and still have any hope of getting that gate closed."
I looked toward the various immobilized acolytes in the clearing. They had
not had any protection; it was clearly too late. The two that still moved did
so only to pull themselves into a ball and whimper. Sal grabbed the boy and
fled the clearing.
Fireflower still looked relatively fresh; I felt like I would pass out
again at any moment. I pictured a two-foot candy bar in my mind, made the
appropriate gestures to bring it into reality. I consumed it as quickly as
possible while Fireflower surveyed the gate.
"Well?" I said when I had finished.
"Sal's right; it's uncontrolled."
"Okay, let's try to put a larger gate around it then, contain it. We might
be able to force it closed by pulling the larger gate shut."
Fireflower looked at me askance. "Not to be argumentative, Carl, but Miren
once told us never to put a gate around a gate. He was quite firm about it."
I shrugged. "Do you have a better idea?"
I knew the answer, began my spell. Fireflower's mind joined mine, and
together we began weaving a larger sphere around the smaller gate. By now
there was enough power in the clearing that our work could be seen by the
naked eye. White strands like gigantic spider webs coalesced into existence,
threading through one another to form a pale glowing white sphere. Wizards
often speak of "weaving" a spell; usually it's metaphorical, but here we were
doing in reality.
While we worked, a tinny laughter kept forming in the back of my mind, a
million voices screaming with mirth. I pictured Antony with my mind, used the
force of the memory to shove the voices into oblivion.
The last fragments of the spell slid into place. Fireflower looked at me
for several long moments, then we wrapped out minds around the cloth we had
created and pulled the gate tight.
The explosion was purely mental at first, a millionfold increase in the
laughter, then the red gate consumed our white one; flashing outward to triple
it's size. Fireflower and I turned and ran from the clearing, stopping a
hundred yards later to look back.
"Whatta ya know? Miren was right!"
Fireflower didn't seem amused by my comment. I didn't blame him; the
sphere was now more than seventy yards in diameter, pulsing with light like
some gigantic disembodied heart lit from the inside.
"Now what?" Fireflower looked contemplative, but he had to be thinking the
same thing I was; that gate was almost open, and completely out of our
control. My eyes scanned it from top to bottom, looking for something,
anything, that could help us close it. I found something else entirely.
A figure bathed in blue light stood only a few feet from the sphere,
indistinct because of the distance and the glow, but there was only one person
on this world that it could be.
"What's Sal doing?" I pointed. Fireflower looked at me with wide eyes; I
returned the look. We started running at the same time.
We were thirty feet from the figure when it turned. It was a weathered old
man, white beard flowing in the stiff wind that escaped the gate, holding a
gnarled staff in one hand, my baby in the other.
"Antony! Get Erika out of here!"
He appeared not to hear. I closed the distance faster than I have ever
run. But there was nothing I could do. Erika was covered by Antony's
protection spell; nothing I could do would obtain her unless Antony chose to
give her up.
I looked him in the eyes. There was no trace of sanity within; how he
managed to keep up a protection spell was beyond me. His eyes stared past and
through me.
"Carl!" Fireflower's shout caused me to look up. One side of the gate was
splitting, an ebony crack forming larger and larger. The gate was opening.
I summoned fire, poured it through the crack in the gate, trying to reverse
the flow of power. The crack slowed, stopped.
I could not maintain both the flames and my protection spells for long.
Fireflower added his force to mine. I broke off, repaired my protections,
then replaced him as he did the same. We alternated for several minutes, but
it was clear that Fireflower was tiring. Already the crack was beginning to
split again.
I turned to Antony, was surprised to see him staring right at me.
"I've kept her safe, Carl." His voice was almost, but not quite, that of a
sane man. Laughter sounded in my mind; it was echoed in his eyes.
"Yes, Antony. Thank you. I can take care of her now."
He nodded, handed Erika to me. I wrapped my protections around her as
well, noting that she was asleep and breathing easily. That had to be the
result of a spell, since the howling wind around us would have woken the dead.
I turned my gaze back to Antony. He had walked another ten feet forward,
placed his hand on the surface of the sphere itself. I shouted for him to
come back, but there was no way he could hear me over the roar of wind.
Fireflower staggered. He looked at me for a moment. "I'm sorry, Carl.
I'll bring help." He stepped across and out of my world.
My own fire could not keep the gate from opening any longer. Laughter
filled my mind, but not the laughter of the Caligans. It was Antony's voice,
magnified a millionfold by some spell.
A tiny red creature with wings slipped from the gate, then another and then
hundreds. No larger than wasps, they filled the sky with laughter and voices
and crimson fire.
It was now a fight just to keep the protections strong enough to resist the
Caligans' voices, protecting my child and I. As quickly as I could and still
be sure of my footing, I began backing away from the gate. Cobalt blue almost
completely obscured my vision.
Antony's laughter increased in pitch; there was something soothing about it
in the mere fact that it was human, though barely so.
Erika screeched suddenly, notifying me that she was awake. I ignored her,
my spells were being broken down now faster than I could renew them. I had to
put distance between myself and the gate. No longer able to move cautiously,
I ran.
A darkness at the edge of my mind threatened to drop me once more into
unconsciousness. I slowed my pace, concentrated all my will on staying awake.
My protections started to crumble, so I switched my mind back to protecting
us.
I dropped unconscious for a moment, but regained it before I struck the
ground. Erika landed heavily to my side, but the mass of blankets appeared to
protect her. I pulled her back to me, and started crawling away.
Suddenly my protection spells sprang back to full strength, and Sal was at
my side. She took Erika from my arms and helped me to my feet, pulling me
further from the gate.
Antony's laughter made me turn. He stood at the edge of the gate, half his
body already in another world. The swarm of Caligans flowed by him, but he
stepped into the gate, raising his arms as if to block their path.
It actually appeared to work. The Caligans continued to pour forth, but
they did so through other cracks in the gate, avoiding Antony altogether.
Some quiet voice in my mind spoke the impossible. Antony had listened to
the voices of the Caligans for several minutes, had lived with the memory of
those voices for two years. Perhaps he could do what a sane wizard could not.
I pulled away from Sal, running back toward Antony. She followed for a few
steps, then realized her protections would never hold. I tapped her mind
briefly as I ran.
"I have an idea. Get Erika as far out of here as you can. I'll meet you
in the Council chambers if this works." I didn't have the energy to say more;
my protections were crumbling already, and I had only a few minutes to work.
"I love you. Don't kill yourself for a crazy old man." Sal's voice was
like a beacon of energy; I increased my pace and made it to Antony's side as
Sal vanished into another world. Carefully, I placed my hand on Antony's
shoulder, trying my best not to startle him.
At the contact the inhuman laughter stopped, and my protection spells went
from brilliant blue to completely invisible. Antony had somehow found or
created an eye in this storm.
I slid my mind into his, found only the shattered pieces which I had once
tried to repair on a distant world. Now I merely tried to understand them,
and realized that this would be the harder task.
Minutes passed as I sorted, looking in mental crannies for the key to his
insanity. I found only an overpowering will to survive that was in itself
more powerful than sanity.
Words from the physical, real world brought my awareness back.
"I understand," Antony said. His eyes were clear. "You must get far
away." There was no word of command on the sentance, but a sound of death
that was as powerful. I ran for a hundred feet, turned and looked back.
Antony's body was dissolving, turning slowly into light. When all that was
left was his head, he turned back to me and laughed. The laughter continued
until he was completely gone, and beyond.
The gate began to fade.
The Caligans who were free in this world turned back almost as one, their
laughter and voices silent, rushing to recreate what Antony was tearing apart.
It was a hopeless task; they fought against a power as implaccable as the
insanity they had caused.
It took four minutes for the gate to vanish completely. The few Caligans
still on this side dropped dead from the skies to the ground. I would have to
return here in a day or two to remove the alien bodies before they were
discovered.
I spent a few long moments confirming that the gate was really closed, then
stepped across the worlds to the Council Room. Fireflower and Sal were
already there, Sal holding Erika in one hand and the hand of the Satanist's
boy in the other. The room was full of silver-and-black wizards, their
numbers declining quickly as they stepped toward Earth. I stopped the
remaining ones with a few short words.
Sal smiled at me. The darkness closed in again, and this time I saw no
reason not to let it come.
______________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Kempke is a dangerous, psychopathic Computer Science graduate
student with too much time on his hands. Attempts to lock him up have
resulted only in a temporary confinement at Oregon State University, where he
can be reached as kempkec@mist.cs.orst.edu on good days, and not at all on
bad.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Geek Queen
Michael Arner
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
A note had been scotch-taped to the smallest of Mr. Bendices' (pillaged) rose
bushes:
Dear Sir,
I have stolen your lovely white roses -- the most beautiful
flowers I have ever seen -- to give to a girl named Sonia
who I am in love with.
We might consider this, philosophically speaking, not as an
act of particular malice, but rather, and at worst, as a
sort of pretty instance of the transition between golden
rule and ugly self-interest: the impersonal theft that
becomes the gift with signature. I can only just vaguely
imagine you standing or stooping on the lawn here, perusing
these words, but I see so clearly her soft red lips pressed
against these delicate petals, her sweet -- forgive me --
her sweet green eyes like these thorns and these leaves.
--sincerely yours.
It wasn't the flowers exactly. Granted, he felt perhaps a little wistful
at being on the unromantic end of such a venture, fancied in fact that
snatching roses was exactly the sort of thing he might very well have done
once himself. When he had loved Annalisa, for example. Or rather, the sort
of thing she would have asked him to do for her. (Annalisa: her black skirts
and sweaters on such powder-white skin. Her warm, pouting smile and her
urgent whispers. How cruel and happy she had been!)
It wasn't then the flowers exactly, but something else ineffable about his
circumstances, some other condition, of which his loss was only a symptom,
that continued to disturb him during the long drive from Mr. Bendices' home
to the college that his daughter attended.
Certainly, some large part of his unease was nervousness about seeing his
daughter again for the first time since she had visited at Christmas. Among
his circle of high school friends, he remembered, it had always been the girls
who had come back most changed by that first year away. How had they changed?
At the time, he had suggested (in jaded tones) that he missed a certain aura
of innocence about them, but his real feeling was a kind of fear that they had
outgrown the old reasons people sometimes have for being intimate and that he
had not.
He pushed a cassette into the tape deck, Ghould's recording of the Goldberg
Variations -- which he had bought expressly for listening to on this trip. He
had used to listen to them so often, as an undergraduate, on late winter and
early spring afternoons, when the notes smelt to him like the thick pages in
his collections of Milton and Spenser, and felt to him like the pleasant
weight of theater curtains and the texture of evergreens, and held for him
such clear and detailed images of secret and enormous worlds, such spirits of
awe and inquiry.
On this day though, the notes sounded a little hollow. Although he tried,
with mounting kinds of misgivings, alternately relaxing his mind and then
forcing what he thought he ought to be seeing and feeling (at this moment,
some fragile arrangement of fountains and statues and skies; in the following
moment, some vast expanse of soft gray patios, some peaceful motion of swaying
trees), his vision kept dissipating whenever he paused to compare it with his
memories, or whenever he groped for stronger inspiration or recollection; and
his thoughts kept being being strangely and unkindly invaded by the rhythm of
phrases he had inadvertently memorized from the roses note. `Pretty instance
of, let's see; pretty gift with signature, pretty sweet, my sweet -- forgive
me -- her sweet -- forgive me -- her sweet, let's see; thorns and leaves.' In
the background, one could hear Ghould moaning as he played. What had that
moaning meant to the young Mr. Bendices? Something about compassion that he
couldn't quite recollect. He waited for his passions to swell with favorite
and familiar passages, only to realize moments later that they had passed
unnoticed. And the green countryside rolled idly by Mr. Bendices' car windows
and he was so uneasy and so uneasy about being uneasy that he could neither
calm his thoughts nor concentrate.
Once Annalisa had worn this impossible lily white dress and her hair in wet
braids. They had entered some restaurant together and she had smiled shyly at
the room as everyone fell in love with her. A waiter watching her stumbled
over a stray cart, throwing his tray and sending dozens of glasses and plates
crashing into pieces. What color WERE her eyes? Goldberg. Golden rule; ugly
self-interest. Once he had given money to an old man on the street and the
man had hugged him and wouldn't let him go. One year they left his name off
the list and he didn't get any valentines. He was still attractive. He was
still romantic. As a baby, his daughter Tracy had been unusually assured and
social. Someone had told him that.
At length, the disordered vale he had been driving through gave way and the
university grounds wound slowly into view. They were peppered with young
brown bodies, reveling in their newfound freedom like so many oasis prairie
dogs. Some aspect of late May, some essence of frisbees and lemonade, and Mr.
Bendices felt a rising sense of shyness and excitement, tugged at his eyebrows
absent-mindedly. Girls lay tanning on arrays of blankets. Faint breezes
scattering abandoned papers. He saw bare-chested boys and felt that he
understood something about their shorts and their sunglasses and their
cheerful vulgarity. On the lawn before her dorm, his daughter Tracy played
aerobee with a group of her friends.
That her friends should also be enjoying the turning of seasons seemed to
Mr. Bendices to be a little bit obscene. He had met a number of them before
and knew that he didn't much like them. They appeared to him now as a mass of
pale, plump white bodies. They were all males, scraggly and unshaven and
invariably crouched as cowardly lions, out-of-place out-of-doors, poorly
washed and poorly dressed. Their smiles had too much lust and innocence about
them.
He had listened to them speak, so arrogant and passionate and smug about
their silly fantasies, so delighted in their tiny introverted, well-ordered
worlds, so vicarious and lifeless with their science-fiction and their
computers and their ludicrous games. And his daughter in the midst of them,
worshiped like some reigning geek queen.
Tracy was lovely. She had auburn hair and gray-brown eyes and such soft,
peach, freckled skin. He watched her play -- so young and happy, her
movements so graceful.
He pulled up alongside the curb where her laundry bags and suitcases lay in
a heap. When she finally turned to see him, a wide, pretty smile spread
across her face.
"Daddy!" in the feigned little-girl voice that had always annoyed him (this
time it didn't) and the gnomes she had been romping with stopped and stood up
straight and looked at him as if he'd disturbed playing kittens or frightened
away some just-discovered gazelle.
"Put the napkin in your lap, Dad." Tracy had arranged for the two of them
to have dinner with a few of her friends and their parents at Seagull Street.
They were seated closely and uncomfortably around a polished wooden table set
at the edge of a dock over an artificial lake. Fragments of conversation
drifted down to them occasionally from a sexless couple seated at a balcony
somewhere in the darkness above them. Everything was lit dimly: the walls
adorned with anchors and lengths of rope and paintings of ships and storms and
seas.
Mr. Bendices was irritated at being instructed in etiquette in front of
Tracy's friends' parents. He was irritated by the situation in general,
especially anxious as he was to speak with his daughter again alone, and he
waited with a sublimity of patience for the evening to end.
Tracy's friend Gavin balanced a steak knife between the prongs of his fork,
held it there unsteadily with his thumb. "Hand phaser," he declared, "Meem."
His skin was tragic and he would always laugh too loudly and too long.
"Cricket, might you pass me the wine list," Tracy's friend Richard
suggested in a strained English accent.
"Huh, what?" asked Mr. Bendices.
"He calls me Cricket," Tracy explained.
He kept thinking that his situation was an almost laughable one, but couldn't
make himself take this attitude towards it and only became (by slow degrees)
more angry. That Richard's father, for example, with his round, wrinkled gray
face and his blue velvet bowtie, should be smiling with insane pride as his
son scrambled for intimate tones with Tracy -- seemed to Mr. Bendices almost
conspiratorial, almost too comic to be believed.
"Ale!" screamed Gavin, adopting an earthy tone, "tankards here, wench!" Their
waitress -- an attractive college-age girl, wearing a half-slit bermuda skirt
and a hawiian-print polo shirt -- paused at another table to look towards Mr.
Bendices' group with some disdain. He was uncomfortable at the head of the
table. Sitting there indicated too much authority over and association with
the assembly, like being the best man in a ceremony where one hates the bride.
He stared intently at the empty chair at the end of the table across from him.
"Gavin has an exceptional imagination," his mother confided. She wore a
faded blue jumpsuit with a golden belt around her waist. Heavy black earrings
hung within the coils of her dirty-blond hair. She kept rubbing her eyes,
which caused the powder on her face to roll up into tiny balls. "He's always
off working on one of his dungeons," she said. "Or doing research for one of
his medieval dungeons." Gavin's mother beamed beneath her powder. "Gavin
always says that it's so important for every little detail to be AUTHENTIC,"
she said, touching Mr. Bendices' hand and pronouncing the word authentic as if
it were some epically clever punch-line.
"Is that so?" Mr. Bendices inquired. He had noticed a pink splash of
calomine lotion on his daughter's ankle before she had changed clothes and it
had set him to remembering something. He and Annalisa had once slipped
through the locked gates of Los Altos Golf Course on a humid August evening,
the moon and headlights from the rustling highway shone reflected in the
course's various ponds.
"He's also a POET..." Gavin's mother began.
Tracy's friend Daniel hiccupped at the opposite end of the table without
seeming to notice that he had done so. Daniel's parents hadn't come; they
wouldn't arrive until the following day. Of all of Tracy's friends, Mr.
Bendices liked Daniel the least. His body was always making strange noises,
but he almost never said anything himself. He would sit and stare at Mr.
Bendices with dull, subdued eyes as if he would rather be in anyone else's
company. He smelled like fallen crabapples.
Across the restaurant, a young blond-haired man, wearing black suspenders
and a black tie over a baggy white smock, jumped suddenly to his feet, fell to
his knees, and asked the woman he was with if she would marry him. The woman
laughed and blushed and cried a little and said that she would.
Richard's mother noticed that there were bright orange fish swimming in the
artificial lake and that they looked a little sickly.
Daniel smiled stupidly at Tracy and she regarded him, for a moment warmly.
Their meals had been ordered ages ago and still hadn't come. Only Mr.
Bendices seemed to realize that something was wrong. He leaned to his
daughter and whispered in her ear, "I think you are wasting your talents,
honey, on hearts too easily broken." Although he was serious, he meant for her
to take it jestingly. He meant to sound tender, even accepting. But he felt
compelled also to make her see that he still believed she had a destiny in
leagues above those of her playmates and that he wanted to re-establish an old
sort of candor between them. She looked at him with an odd mixture of love and
disappointment and he felt afraid for an instant that someone must be scheming
to take the loveliest things in his life away from him.
The dandruff against Gavin's glasses was sparkling in the candlelight as he
discoursed giddily on; surely everyone was staring or pretending not to except
for Daniel now smiling absently into space. Sometimes Annalisa would get up
in the middle of class, run wonderfully out and into the street, trailing
scarves or papers or whisps of perfume.
Mr. Bendices loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top of his dress shirt.
It was as if he had been sitting in that chair his entire life, as if he could
hardly breathe. He was aching to move, to run perhaps and to feel the night
air against his face, and to take Tracy away with him and away from them.
Free summer evenings spread before him like well-ordered constellations. He
could remember quite clearly when they had first driven her to school nine
months earlier. They had traveled late at night, and the stars and the lights
of the towns, and the soft green glow of the console instruments in his car,
and the weight of the darkness, make him feel as if they were inside of some
slow spacecraft, moving bubblelike between immense and mysterious worlds.
He stood up and was a little dizzy and faltered somewhat on his feet,
pushed hard against the table, tipping the empty chair at the other end into
the artificial lake, scattering pumpkinseed fishes. He had taken hold of
Tracy's wrist and she was looking at him quizzically. Gavin and Richard
laughed with abandon. Their parents looked ready to forgive him. A group of
busboys moved to fish the chair out of the lake. There was a long moment of
silence.
"She cracks me up," one of the voices in the balcony above them was saying,
"She'll tell you TO YOUR FACE that she'll do it and then just like that, she
won't do it. What is she THINKing? It's like absolutely TO YOUR FACE and she
doesn't even try or anything..."
"Daddy?" Tracy laughed nervously.
"I've just remembered," Mr. Bendices stammered. "I've just remembered, so
sorry." He let go of Tracy's wrist, brought out his wallet and began
shuffling through bills but found that he couldn't count them, threw them all
on the table. "It was so nice to see all of you again, it just can't be
helped," he said. "Difficult to believe. I've only just remembered."
"What is it, Dad? What?" He turned away from them and found his footing.
"We'll be right back," Tracy said. That was good.
He was more anxious still because their looks around the table had been so
sad but that escape he experienced as a moment frozen -- or rather his egress
seemed to have no ending, as one falls in dreams. Bric-a-brac evolved on the
restaurant walls with endless variation around their flight. Hostesses and
busboys wove lethargic about them. He couldn't look at her. Directionless,
they kept making wrong-turns into the same cloak-room and he felt their
progress slow and slow, collapsing almost into point where he felt that his
failure was much less recent, more ineluctable than he had originally
believed. An old and impersonal theft. Then, also suspended, there was the
melancholy and the relief of a sort of surrender to it and he held so tightly
to his daughter's hand, feeling nothing.
______________________________________________________________________________
Michael Arner is a Math/Computer Science and Creative Writing Major at
Carnegie Mellon University. He divides residency between the Huckleberry
Ashram in Pittsburgh and his home in Albuquerque. His current projects
include a study of Eliot's "Four Quartets," a history of computer chess, and a
prose poem novella.
ma1v@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Part 7
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
The nightlife was blossoming in its usual splendor for the Calannic capital,
the blues, reds, and sunny yellows of evening-wear mocking the conservative,
almost Draconian apparel of the working day. Xkutyr was known locally, as
well as abroad, as the undercity of sleepless dreams. Before the war, the Duke
of Arcadia was said to be a frequent visitor, reputedly lounging within the
watery, volcanic caverns awaiting noble orgies too numerous to enumerate. At
least, that was the popular philosophy. History on Calanna was jaded at best,
most recently by the war. Mike had always regarded the stories as a poor
attempt at anti-Imperial propaganda, but whenever he visited the Temple of the
Writhing Mermaid, he was always persuaded to reconsider his point of view.
On this occasion the waters churned with unusual vivacity, the warm glow of
soaking bodies paddling on the surface as others more intrepid ventured
beneath, between the terraces of gravity nullifiers and into the labyrinth
beyond. Mike found himself swimming within a crowd of strangers, some groping
each other for comfort and others huddled within large floating bubbles of
oxygen, bodies intertwined, playing games of the flesh for all to see.
Together they imbibed amber and purple fluids from plastic sluispheres,
bubbles within bubbles holding potent aphrodisiacs, judging from the
inclinations of those who shared them.
Most came here out of boredom, hoping to find fascination in a moment's
idle folly. Others, however, came here out of pain, a few thousand drin to
smother one burrowing intoxication with yet another and that perhaps with
another still. Of course it was all Bill's money, but that didn't matter; he
wouldn't need it anymore. Mike was sure of that much.
He swam until the water grew cold and dense and the oxygen bubbles became
too few to venture further. Alone in an alcove he shivered, bare of everything
save the mandatory wrist locator. The air grew musty and coarse and he tried
to close his eyes and sleep, but the water was too frigid this far out from
the complex. Suddenly bubbles emerged from below and a woman clad in a gelsuit
appeared, her black hair slicked back by the cold water as she emerged.
"Vanwalye?"
Mike regarded her question for all of five seconds.
"Uh...No."
"Uquenlye Calain?"
"Umm...lastalmet."
"Tulye?"
Mike wondered if he had a choice. They had probably seen how far he was
going and sent her out to fetch him back. There was nothing like a troublesome
offworlder to piss off the management. Her worried, green eyes seemed to
confirm the assessment.
"Okay," Mike nodded. She moved closer to help him.
"No, really, I'm fine. I'll just follow. Hilmet. Okay?"
"Okay," her anxious smile confirmed the communication more than her use of
the galanglic. She kept a slow pace, feeding him oxygen from her tank at
several intervals. By the time they reached the warm waters, Mike figured he
was lucky he hadn't ditched the locator.
After he dressed, Mike spent the next hour sitting at a table along the
stony terrace, sipping Miruvor and re-scanning the various databases. The girl
came back to check on him, apparently trying to tell him something from the
ledge before being yanked backward into the bubbly water by another employee.
Mike waved as she was dragged beneath the steaming surface. The bottom half of
her gelsuit emerged several moments later, floating around the surface as
various patrons began tossing it back and forth between the access pools.
Cecil was nowhere to be found. Even the search on the planetwide directory
turned up nothing. Mike went back to investigating the local boards when he
came across a familiar name.
"Doggie Blitz?"
He entered within the steady stream of other electronic freefloaters,
quietly carousing the various sub-boards for something of interest. He then
passed along to the membership records, or at least those sections open for
public scrutiny. A number of faces flashed across his screen, most of them
chipheads, one of them strangely familiar.
"Check 143/741."
"User online."
"Call him."
"Error. Respecify at call."
"Call 143/741."
"Waiting...connect."
"Yo?"
"Umm...Hi, 'member me? Command open visual. Umm...in the underway.
Purchasing tickets?"
"Huh? Oh yeah. You lookin' fer some output."
"That's right. I was wondering if maybe we could meet someplace. I may have
more than just output in mind."
"Such as..."
"Finding a friend of mine."
"Well, I guess that depends mainly on who it is you're looking for. If you
could just give me the name now, I'd be able to give you a better idea when we
meet."
"You sure that's safe?"
"Uhhh...let's see...you're in sector thirteen. Let me re-pipe this, hold
on... Okay, go ahead."
"The name is Cecil Dulin. He used to be a local res..."
"Hold on... Did you say Cecil Dulin?"
"Yeah."
"Uhh... Sorry, I don't think I can help you there dude."
"What's the matter?"
"Gotta jam."
"Wait... damnit."
"Na Manor."
"Huh? Oh, hi. I thought you lost your suit."
"Ulastalmet."
"Uh...Nevermind." Mike reverted to the Calannic, but his words came out
wrong when he tried to explain anything too complex. Her green eyes twinkled
as she laughed, either perceptibly oblivious to his being both an offworlder
and a chiphead, or incapable of harboring either of the two most common
prejudices.
"I no understand why you go in cold water without air tank."
"Umm...I dunno either."
She liked that one. Her eyes seemed to glitter more with each new giggle,
the easy laughter reminding him of Niki, but her eyes were too shallow and
sparkly. Mike rubbed his cast, still encased in its mermaid-plastic sheath,
wondering how long the tissue- stabilization would last.
"Where you are staying?"
"Umm...no place yet."
"Ah, you just arrive then."
"You could say that."
"You looking for a place on computer?"
"I'm looking."
"Hard to find."
"Yeah."
"Maybe you find a friend?"
Mike froze cold before he realized what she meant. She started giggling
again, taking his look entirely the wrong way.
"You do find friend. Is easy here. Yes?"
"If you say so."
"If you like, I have extra space."
"Between your ears," Mike added in Galanglic.
"Huh?"
"Never mind."
"No?"
"Well... Okay. Sure."
"Okay?"
The cold breeze gave ample excuse for her to nuzzle against him as they
exited the underway, the puddles of water on the streets congealing with motor
oil and fragments of dead leaves in the dim light of actinic lamps. Drunk
stragglers and chipheads were the only inhabitants between the occasional cabs
carrying home a late-shifter from the city below. Several drivers huddled just
outside the doors, gambling via coin-toss and drinking mataxa.
"Hey, any of you speak Galanglic?"
"Quesse? Hallon...neghral?" They seemed to get a good laugh.
"Very funny; maybe you speak the universal language." Mike rubbed a fifty
k'drin note between his forefinger and thumb.
He rode with Vilya in the back seat, watching a pale fog build on the
windows as they drove to the outskirts of the city. At a quiet intersection,
Mike nudged the driver and pointed to a corner tele-booth.
"Dalmet?"
"Stop. You wait."
"Huh?"
"Wait. Stay here."
"No go?"
"No go."
He entered the booth, hitting the operator assistance key while depositing
several coins. Outside, the driver rubbed his windshield with a dirty, brown
rag.
"Gardansa, first name Narsil. Yes. Hello? Yes, I know what time it is. I
need to speak with the General--just tell him it's Michael Harrison."
"Meow."
Mike awoke as something clawed his head jacks, a cool ripple of pain
flowing across his skull as he bolted upright, tossing the feline across the
room.
"You no like pussy?"
A faint shimmer of light caught the pistol's fiberglass barrel, Vilya
lowering it just a notch as she waited for Mike's reply. He studied her eyes,
green spheres twinkling with mischief.
"I find out what `between your ears' mean, asshole."
She clicked back the pistol's lever, preparing for the shot as she licked
her lips. Too high and she'd make a mess. Too low and she'd have to use
another bullet. Mike stared straight down the barrel, trying arrogantly to
suppress the cool sweat breaking along the jacks in his skull. She pulled the
trigger, the barrel clicking with a faint resonance.
"Ha ha. Me funny."
Mike batted the gun out of her hands, tumbling out of the bed as she
scampered across the floor. She finally locked herself inside the bathroom,
her spasmodic laughter ringing through the keyhole.
"Come out here, Vil."
"No way! You apology."
He pocketed the gun and searched though his bag, finally finding the
bullets beneath the dodecahedron.
"Me?!" Mike nearly gagged, pointing the weapon toward the bathroom door. "I
think you're forgetting one little thing. I'm the one who has the gun now."
"Ha ha ha..."
"Meow."
"Or maybe I should just shoot your cat."
The door opened and Vilya crossed the floor to her cat, picking him up and
returning to the bathroom before Mike could so much as bat an eyelash.
"Vilya."
"Hee hee hee..."
"Meow."
Mike lifted the dodecahedron off the floor, nestling its weight in his lap.
Its ceramic exterior carried a dull glimmer in the warm morning light, each
surface flat and smooth except for one. There lay etched the figure of a
songbird, its wings outstretched as though in flight. Mike regarded it with
an unfamiliar mixture of relief and apprehension.
"Apology!"
"Fine. I'm sorry."
"I can't hear you."
The ragged curtain of red twill flapped from the window's edge as he cocked
the pistol.
"Hee hee hee..."
He finally coaxed her out of the bathroom by frying up a can of mash and
onions, the most universal sustenance in her cupboards. They ate in between
the morning newsvids and cold cups of zardocha. The gatherers on the monitors
were a pair of public faces, computer generated images which the government
had been using for newscasts over the past century. The eyes of the female
seemed to bulge out and cross as though she were reading from cue cards, an
effort to make her image more realistic. Mike remembered reading about the
development in an industry update.
"And now to the local headlines. An unidentified woman was killed
yesterday in gunfire at the 1st Interstellar Bank. Although officials are
withholding her name, the victim was purported to be in the process of cashing
a promissory note for fifty million drin. It is believed that the check was
stolen from one, Michael James Harrison, an independent gatherer with Galactic
Publications. According to the GID, Harrison was terminated by the woman in
accordance with global bounty codes and that the shooting was an unlawful
retaliation by the Galatican. Harrison, author of Shattered Eden, gained
interstellar fame with the..."
Mike changed the channel as his press image materialized in the corner of
the screen.
"Hey! I was watching," Vilya flicked a speck of potato in his general
direction. The other channels proved just as dull, but the ensuing battle over
the remote control made up for it. He found himself back on her bed,
exhausted, as she left for work, her cat purring at his side in contented
bliss.
Outside, the afternoon sun sank slowly into a hazy dusk as Mike patiently
hoofed his way across the city. Cecil had been waiting for well over a year,
and another cent wouldn't matter.
The ochin dangled precariously from a single thread of its silken web as
its spindly legs flailed aside the remains of its latest victim, a tiny
mitzignat. The insect's carcass tossed and turned slowly within the nullfield
until a lazy spitter gobbled it down with a swift dash of it sticky tongue.
Tasting the pungent fragrance of the ochin's poison, the spitter turned
sideways and retreated into the darkness.
Though still hungry, the ochin felt safer. Warily, it crept along the
narrow commcord which served as a spine to the web, providing some structural
foundation for the fragile strands of its home. A dim buzz resounded against
the walls of the room as the ochin reached the end of the commcord. It paused
to feel the momentary vibrations on the cool air.
The man couldn't hear the buzz. He hung limp in the air, supported only by
thin fractures in the null-gravity. His dull senses couldn't feel the ochin as
it slowly edged its way along his grizzly beard, searching the maw of unkept
hair for juicy goobugs. His thick, oily thatch barely left an egress for the
slimy worms which secreted their viscous ooze.
Suddenly the gravmodule flickered, and his body slowly descended to the
wooden floor, ripping away the ochin's web and scattering the boopreys as the
dusty, maggot-ridden planks creaked soundly underneath the weight of his
emaciated body. He lay still for several hours without breathing, his programs
refusing the interruption. The uncompromising feeder, however, forced a
disconnection as his weak lungs involuntarily gasped for air.
It was evening before he could feel the raw itch. It came on slowly, like a
sleeping devil, seeming a thousand times more penetrating than anything he
could ever remember. For hours he lay still, unable to resolve the agony
before his olfactory senses came around, allowing him to smell the hellish
stench of his own rot. Yet, the itch and the stench only served as a
distraction which he used to fight the maddening bunkum of raw data which
muttered sporadic illusions within his mind.
Slowly, he felt the enzymes go to work, exciting his endocrine gland,
pushing adrenalin into his bloodstream, building momentum in his heartbeat,
fighting the impending shock. He fluttered his eyelids, the action igniting a
stream of ideas, each vaguely interrelated, but they swept by so swiftly that
all he could remember was the fragment of a distant dream.
Slowly, he realized that he was sitting upright. He heard the distant hum
of the spitter in the corner of the room. The feeder lay next to him. It was
already disconnected. He couldn't remember touching it.
"Who's there?"
His voice sounded dry and mottled. He couldn't recognize it as his own, but
there it was with nobody to answer. Then he heard the door close.
The tub was brown with mold; a family of quagroachs nested on the floor
beneath the grating. He tumbled himself inside and searched for the rusty
handle. The ice-cold water hammered against the floor, bathing his still
insensitive skin as he rubbed off folds of dead flesh. Soon the welts that
merely itched began to sting.
The scum collected around his neck as the waterline threatened. He stood
slowly, his arms grasping the grimy runners on the walls of the tub. As the
water continued to rise, overtaking his waist, he let one hand fall away,
testing the strength of his legs and their balance.
He wasn't aware of the blade until it cut his ear. He tugged it loose from
its cord and began to shave, slicing the filthy hair away with deep strokes
close to the skin. The goobugs dropped into the water around his waist.
Tangled deep within the matted hair, they sunk and drowned beneath the
pounding water. He fingered his skull for the jacks; the important things were
always as he remembered them.
He was too tired to think about it now. The water at his chest beckoned. He
considered how easy it would be to drown. He sunk down beneath the murky
water, its numbing chill bringing with it a strange sense of satisfaction.
With a twist of the lever, the floor beneath the grating opened, and the
water, bugs, and hair swirled away.
Moonlight shimmered through the doorway like a icy veil, its narrow edge
stretching across the hardwood floor. She stepped quietly into the dim, misty
light, letting her bags slip clumsily from her arms.
"Mikael? You still here, you leech?"
"Meow..."
A purple glimmer settled beneath patchy, black clouds along the western
horizon as the red cab swerved along the central highway. The driver hummed to
himself most of the way, his right foot jogging a tempo against the floor as
he drove. Mike tried to fall asleep, but the bumping of wheels into shallow
potholes made him nauseous. They were nearly three hours outside Xin when the
car turned off the pavement, taking a dirt trail up a grassy hillside,
wildflowers growing in yellow and blue patches along the road's surface.
"Where go?"
"Left. No, that way--left. You know left from right?"
"Huh?"
"Keep going. You're doing fine."
The driver skidded to a sudden halt as they reached the outer gate. Mike
climbed out of the car and paid the balance. The driver opened his window a
crack to receive the money and then drove out backwards, loose gravel sweeping
under the cab's tires as he gunned the motor.
Two men clothed in executioner's leather led him through the gates. Their
uniforms betrayed no insignia denoting either rank or service. Private
henchmen, Mike figured. It was all that Gardansa had left. His house was like
a temple, two marble statues rising as solemn pillars, one the fool and the
other an emperor. Black veins ran their full height and the three men crossed
between.
Gardansa stood against the tall, ponderous door, a canopy of yellow daisies
gleaming in the faint moonlight. His smooth lips curved within some determined
pleasantry.
"General."
"Gatherer Harrison. So delightful to see you again." The man's eyes turned
dark and saucer shaped as he laughed, his fleshy chin dangling and bouncing as
he bobbed his head in welcome.
The house was warm and smelled of sweet perfume. Numerous busts littered
the hallways, and the hearth glowed with fiery sparks rising up the chimney
only to swirl back down as fine black ash. The general picked short bits of
hair from his nose as they talked, flicking them into the steady stream of
warm air. They wafted about in the current, occasionally catching within the
thick fur of his brown fez.
"I am sorry to hear such dread news of your friends, but then friends come
and go. That is the way of life."
Mike nodded, not sure how to respond.
"And, after all, she was a Siri. And the other one, a traitor against you.
So well you pick your friends. Makes me wonder that you are still around to
tell me stories."
He chuckled at some image lurking deep within his mind. It was a dry sort
of noise, starting below his throat and wafting upward like the quaking of a
volcano.
"How like the past, this seems. Traitors and psyches. One must somehow
breed the other. You not agree?"
"I don't know, General. I came here seeking the answer to another
question."
"Ahh," he nodded reluctantly. "It is an answer which I could not divulge
were even I to somehow become of it aware."
"And why is that?"
"Might I interest you in some brandy, Mister Harrison."
"Not tonight, General."
"You know, before you and your psyche saved my life, I never thought that I
would allow an offworlder in my home. And to allow an offworlder to enter,
and leave sober...now that is unthinkable."
Mike finally relented in the hope of placating his host. The drink was a
deep crimson variety from Ares. Making brandy and building guns were the only
two things they did well.
"You are in a very reflective mood tonight, my friend. It makes me tremble
to smell such thought in my very home. And yet, mysteriously, you stay your
tongue. What chains are these that hold you?"
"I guess I'm just bummed out."
"Bummed out?"
"This whole trip has been one disaster after another."
"Ahh...but is that not the life of the gatherer? To sacrifice and lose
heart and shed all things precious only to triumph in the end. How like the
life of the soldier. You and me, we are very much the same, no?"
"I suppose so," Mike swallowed another gulp, its acidic flavor coating the
length of his throat.
"And to die...that is the sweetest sacrifice. How more alike we seem,
myself in virtual exile, and you..."
He suddenly burst out with a wheezing fit of laughter, his cheeks puffing
into a patronizing smile.
"Now that you are officially dead, your enemies will no longer be watching
for you. What an advantage we have created, you and I. Cast it away, you
could. We could easily arrange for your passage off-planet."
"No."
"No?" The general's pudgy-cheeked grin melted into a bare-toothed smirk as
he stared into vacant space, his eyes glazed with eager satisfaction.
"Then you must use your advantage, and swiftly. It will not take our
enemies long to realize they have been fooled."
"You can't tell me anything about Erestyl."
"As to that, you might ask your friend, Mister Dulin. And when you see him,
warn him to be more careful. It is not often on Calanna that one is granted a
reprieve."
Mike nodded, "I'm sure he's aware of that."
"The question, Mister Harrison, is whether or not you are."
Mike sucked down the last of the Aresian brandy, a sour expression crossing
his face as the general grinned in approval.
"Someday, if you live long enough, I will teach you to drink like a true
Calannan."
"Thanks, General. I think." Mike pulled himself upright, his bad shoulder
still aching despite the numbing fluid within the cast. Gardansa reached for
the bottle, his fingers fumbling at the cork as he shook his head
unsympathetically.
"No, you must be certain."
"I'm certain... truly and without doubt. Do you have a terminal around
here, by the way?"
"You are quite certain?" Gardansa prodded.
"Absolutely. Someday. Some other day."
The Doggie Blitz seemed to have a larger share of traffic than the night
before, its electronic corridors clogging with conversation. Mike floated
with the frenzy, picking up bits and pieces of conventional wisdom on the
various sub-boards. It seemed word had already spread of Cecil's escape from
the cellars. The lingo seemed especially prodigious at coming up with new
words for various non-places.
Cecil's state was nothing more than electronic disembodiment, something
about which Mike cared little and understood less. He engaged a few of the
patrons on the topic, hoping to gain more information about Cecil's exact
crime against the authorities, but nobody seemed to be able to agree even on
the basic facts. Finally the person he was looking for appeared online.
"Call 143/741"
"Waiting... connect."
"You got the Spokes-man."
"Hi, you still can't help with Cecil?"
"Aww, man... not you again." His image wavered on the screen, its contours
shifting as he spat a piece of food at his terminal lens.
"Who else? Besides, I figured you'd be happy to see me."
"All I wanna know is how you did it."
"Check where I'm calling from."
"Hold on... Ummm...damn, out of the district. Can't get a fix. You tell
me. No, wait. Let me guess. A certain General."
"Very good." Mike tried not to sound patronizing.
"Damn straight. I saw your face in more than one place last night. Figured
I'd never have to look at it again, too."
"That was a little gatherer magic. It comes with knowing certain Generals
and drinking whatever they put in front of your face."
"Yeah, I read up on you. Some dirty deeds. So how come you're still alive?"
"Umm...that's actually a pretty good question." Mike rubbed his shoulder,
the pain pivoting in and out of focus. "Actually, I need you to do a little
job. That is, if you're not afraid of the authorities."
"Hey, I don't follow anybody to the cellars. You can't pay me enough."
"I don't want you to go out...I want you to go in."
"Huh?"
"A robot brain. Draconian design if I'm not missing my guess. You
interested?"
"Draconian. Is it sentient?"
"I guess that depends on your definition."
"I'll take a look at it. Meet me at the Tiberian Compound at twenty-five
cents. Suite 112J."
"I'll be there."
Gardansa was not a man for long good-byes. When Mike returned to the
drawing room, the General was already fast asleep, snoring in his armchair as
lumps of loose flesh jiggled on his chin. Within the hallways, the busts
seemed to snicker with mischievous delight. The chief guard showed Mike to a
polished limousine, it's black exterior coated with sheets of polymer stucco.
Mike admired the invulnerability before climbing into the front seat with the
driver.
"You speak galanglic?"
"What, do I look like a taxi driver or something?"
Cold wind swept along the limo's prow, the forelights scintillating in
amber streaks as the vessel barreled against the rushing breeze. The night was
crisp and clear, the celestial canopy flushed bright with a sparkling dew and
far below, cool waters broke inward with the folding swell, foam lingering on
the soft, white sands.
"You see something interesting out there?"
"Huh? Oh...not really."
Sea birds drifted about on the quiet shore below the cliffs, their outlines
vaguely visible against the light drizzle. Occasionally they'd group into
pairs and then drift apart, some coasting in circles and others swooping down
to the breaking tide. In the distance, a bright point of light appeared
followed by the faint whining noise of a turbofan. Mike hit the stick, sending
the limousine into a diving spiral. A moment later, the missile impacted on
the looming cliffs, sending shrapnel and stones bouncing against the stucco.
"Ay!"
The driver pulled out of the dive, snaking across the choppy waters as
another point of light appeared.
"Slow down."
"Are you crazy?"
"Do it."
Mike leapt from the limousine as it slowed, the salty water stinging his
eyes as he dived beneath the waves. Suddenly, everything turned bright orange,
and for a moment he thought he could see for miles beneath the sea. The
explosion rippled the current like a giant's hand slapping the surface, and
Mike gasped for air beneath the waves, choking on the salty fluid as it
invaded his throat. When he surfaced, all that was left of the limousine was
small specks of polymer stucco drifting downward with the gentle rain.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim's a grad-student at UC Riverside, hoping and praying like crazy that he'll
get his MBA before the dean's axe gets him first. In between classes and term
papers, he can be found editing `The Guildsman', the raunchiest gaming zine
ever to be published. `The Harrison Chapters' were originally written as a
setting description for his Traveller (SF-RPG) campaign. His story, he says,
is what you get when you combine an overactive imagination with the foolish
tendency to wing it. He says he writes exactly the same way he gamemasters:
without any semblance of plan or preconception.
What has been published here as chapter seven is actually chapter eleven as
written originally by Jim. The Harrison Chapters will be continued next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
An Evening at Home
Roy Stead
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Doctor Gloucester sat in his room, reading a novel by Marcel Proust. `It is a
very good novel,' thought the good doctor, `with not too many long words in
it.' Idly, Gloucester thumbed the edge of a page, as though about to turn to
the next one. Then his thumb, sweat stained and tarnished by newsprint,
paused perceptively on the cusp of page-turning. The doctor hesitated a
moment. A bead of perspiration rolled from the side of his forehead,
threatening to wander along his nose then drip, slowly onto the page -- as if
to see what all the fuss was about -- but it, too, halted awhile to watch the
doctor in his deliberations.
Firmly, Doctor Gloucester slammed A La Recherche de Temps Perdu closed, but
not before the moist bead, its mind made up at the last, had had a chance to
zip down onto the page, providing a single greasy bookmark to remind
Gloucester where he had got to in the novel.
Doctor Gloucester glanced about him, and paused awhile once more, in
contemplation of what he saw. `A War!' he thought. `A Bore. Such a bore is
war, a sore bore, yet not so torn as an apple corn. Which lies, forlorn as
though drawn upon a paper.' Drawn, as they were, to the window, the doctor's
eyes took in the exterior scene.
A carriage went by. Another followed it.
`Something wrong here,' thought Gloucester. `Something definitely wrong.
But what? But what?'
`No horse!' the thought screamed out, but none heard it as none were there
to hear. `No horse!' it cried again, but louder this time. Again, none heard
its wail -- but more clearly this time.
The doctor's eyes rose up, maintaining their position on his face as it --
too -- was raised. This last was caused, as 'twere, by the movement of the
good doctor's head, which responded in characteristic fashion to a change in
the angle at which his neck was held. So it goes.
A cloud drifted by, as clouds have been known to do, as the doctor stared
from his window. A tendril of cloud caressed another cloud, pulling from it
-- gently, oh so gently -- a wisp of likewise cloudy material. A swirl, a
whirlpool in the skies, then gone, and only cloud remained.
The doctor stared.
A crick, a cricket, a cricket neck caused Doctor Gloucester to turn away
momentarily from the cloudy landscape, and his eye alighted upon a picture
beside his desk. The picture showed a herd of sheep, a flock of cows and a
shepherd's crook. Around the crook was draped a cobweb, fine as cobweb in the
early morning light. The doctor raised his arm, and thereby his hand, to
stroke the web, which broke.
A strand of cobweb fell, slowly, drifting to the floor of the doctor's
study. He watched it swirl, a whirlpool in the air, then land and come to rest
upon the bare floorboards which cushioned Doctor Gloucester's feet from the
bare air beneath.
`Oh shit,' thought the doctor.
A creak, a crack, a racket. A cracket of sound disturbed the good doctor's
contemplation of the webby fibres, and caused him to turn to the door. The
door was opening, slowly, its hinges shrieking as a hundred knife-wounds of
rust buried themselves to the hilt in their vulnerable metal bodies. A chink,
a chunk, a clank of light shone through, outlining three sides of the door as
it swung wider, wider, and wider still, in answer to the hingey cries.
`Oh shit,' thought the doctor.
The door now open, a figure emerged, and entered the room with a tray in
one hand and a knife in the other. "Who's there?" cried the doctor, his
voice betraying the terror he felt in his heart at the sound of the door, and
the clank of the light, and the screams of the hinge, "Who's there?"
And a voice, soft and low, whispered across that room, "'Tis eye."
The doctor stood up, the better to walk, and crossed 'cross the room, he
crissed crassly crossed 'cross that room, to greet with his voice the bearer
of tray and of knife -- which the reader has yet to learn more of. The doctor
addressed that strange apparition with words from his throat, ushered soft
from his mouth, though hoarsened by sounds uttered early in panic 'gainst that
very shape, "Who is 'I'?"
"'Tis I, kindly doctor, who bringeth thy supper for you to partake of now
daylight has finished."
The doctor spun round, with a complex manouver, and glared at the window to
see the last streaks of the daylight descending like icicles melting beyond
the horizon and sighed, like a river, in pain at the passing of a friend.
"Who is `I'?" he repeated, since last time he uttered those words he had
got no reply from the figure, bearing knife and a tray which it claimed was
his supper. That figure whose entrance had startled the doctor and caused him
to miss the moment of passing of day. "Who is `eye'?"
The person who stood, a-framed in the doorway, looked on to the doctor and
noticed his face, and noted his expression, and formed her opinion of what the
poor doctor had done all that evening, and looked for the book, the
sweat-stain-ed novel, by Marcel Proust, which the doctor was reading, and said
to the doctor, "I'm Mary."
The doctor was shocked. `Oh shit,' thought the doctor.
Mary stalked forward, she storked t'ward the table, deposited tray and
placed there the knife, which she had been carrying, onto the tray. Placed
she it. Mary turned now to Gloucester, and stared at his face, expressions of
pity vieing for place on her features with shades of expressions of anger that
Gloucester had noticed the clouds once again.
`Oh shit,' thought the doctor.
The table groaned lightly.
`Oh shit,' thought the doctor.
Then, Mary walked to the doorway, and turned to the doctor, "Goodnight," as
the door was closed from the outside, leaving doctor alone with the tray and
the table. And the knife. The window was open. Doctor Gloucester left it
open, reached for the knife then stabbed his hand downwards to capture a
cockroach that crawled 'cross the table t'ward the tray which bore his supper.
Gloucester raised the cover and unveiled his meal.
`Oh shit,' thought the doctor.
______________________________________________________________________________
Roy Stead is a research assistant in quantum astrophysics at the
English University of Sussex. His hobbies include water skiing, Zen
Buddhism and searching for cats. His collection of cats is reputed to
be amongst the largest in the Western world, though none have ever
been seen by reliable witnesses. "Iggy," a grey-green Persian once
did not appear on BBC Television's "Tomorrow's World."
roys@cogs.sussex.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________________________
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Contact: jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
The Guildsman is an electronic magazine devoted to role-playing
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Volume III Issue 5 ISSN 1053-8496 December 1991
+-----------------------+
|Quanta | Articles
|(ISSN 1053-8496) |
| |
|Volume III, Issue 5 | LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
|December 1991 |
| |
| |
| | Serials
| |
| |
| | EARTH AS AN EXAMPLE Jesse Allen
| |
| |
| | THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
| |
| |
| |
| | Short Fiction
| |
| |
| | THE BABE Jason Snell
|Editor/Tech. Director |
| Daniel K. Appelquist|
| | LEACH MCBUGNUTS IS DEAD William Racicot
|Editorial Assistants |
| Joanne Rosenshein|
| Norman Murray| THE SECOND LAW AND I Josh Ronsen
+-----------------------+
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______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hello again everybody -- and a very very merry/happy non-denominational
holiday occurring in the winter season to you all Sorry this issue is being
distributed a bit late, but I've been INCREDIBLY busy lately. The good news
is that I've supposedly completed all of my requirements for my undergraduate
degree. The even better news is that I most probably will have a job starting
in January! And the simply utterly fantastic news is that since this job is
right here at Carnegie Mellon, I'll be able to continue to publish Quanta!!
(And all this in a recession year, no less...)
Some more good news (albeit of a different sort) is that Quanta now has its
first subscriber from Russia. We've had subscribers from `eastern block'
countries before now, but, I believe, this is the first subscriber from
actually within what used to be the Soviet Union. (Well *I* was excited...)
So what have we got lined up for you this issue? For one, Jesse Allen's
three part serial `Earth as an Example' finishes up with this installment.
We've also got new fiction from Jason Snell, editor of IterText, and William
Racicot, both of whom are returning to Quanta after long hiatuses. This issue
is a bit shorter than most, but I think you'll find that the quality of
fiction is high.
Speaking of quality fiction (ahem) I'd like to make a quick plug for my new
story (`A Handful of Dust') which should be appearing in a future issue of
InterText.
Jason Snell has compiled an index of stories and articles which have
appeared in Athene, InterText and Quanta. If you'd like a copy of the index,
send me a note and I'll send it out to you. I'll also try to put it out on
the FTP servers.
My submissions directory is currently getting a bit thin, so I'm once again
asking you (that's right, YOU) to submit material. If you're a writer (or a
potential writer), I urge you to come forward with stories and/or articles. I
can always use more submissions, especially from authors who are new to
Quanta.
There's really not much else to say, except hope you had a good 1991 (God
knows mine could have been better) and have a happy New Year!
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Babe
Jason Snell
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
The man with the rabbit skins blocked our path as we tried to enter the Kosami
Hotel. He was wearing a torn jacket made of some kind of animal, probably
vat-grown horsehide. Anyone selling rabbit skins on a streetcorner in Osaka
couldn't afford the genuine article.
"Out of my way," I said to him in Japanese, flashing my card. He
immediately stepped back, probably out of fear that I might haul him in for
soliciting. The cards in Osaka don't mention whether you're a detective or a
cop, and that was fine with me -- it was a lot less trouble that way. Most of
the scum in L.A. would see the neon-flashing "Investigator" as an invitation
to either laugh or draw their weapons. Believe me, I preferred it when they
laughed.
As I moved to enter the hotel, the rabbit-skin man immediately confronted
Gehrig. I turned to explain that Gehrig was with me, and shouldn't be
bothered, but Columbia Lou had already scared him away with one wave of his
hand. I've always been envious of people who can do that.
"You think this is where he is?" I asked Gehrig as the Kosami's smudged
plastic doors slid open in front of us. The place smelled dirty -- I couldn't
smell the local stink, but the cheap air freshener in the air let me know that
it must have been fairly putrid.
"The place may have bright lights and moving doors, Ken, but it's still a
cheap hotel. And no matter what century it is, there are only two places to
look if you've lost Babe Ruth: bars and cheap hotels."
The Kosami was both. We made our way for the bar first.
Laurie was there, of course. I had been to the bar at least fifty times
since Matsushita transferred me to Osaka, and she was always there. The first
ten times her appearance reassured me, reminded me of home. Then I was
assigned to work with an American exec. I was astounded when I met her,
because she looked nothing like Laurie. I guess I had begun to think that all
American women looked like hookers -- and they don't, no matter what some of
my Japanese friends say.
After my experience with the American exec, I tried to forget all about
Laurie. She was an American hooker, and that was all. No matter where you are
in Japan, there are always expatriate Americans playing hooker both to company
boys and to Japanese scum with credit to burn and a taste for the exotic.
"Hi, Kenny. Wanna taste of home?" She licked her lips.
"No thanks, Laurie. I need to ask you if you've seen someone around here."
I think she missed what I said entirely, mostly because she had already
focused her attention on Lou.
"Well, who are you?" she asked.
You've got to understand -- no matter what the bizarre surroundings, Lou
Gehrig still looked like he had walked straight out of 1927. We had given him
a modern suit, but the man radiated wholesomeness and purity. His manner made
him seem like a prime target for Laurie: he was an American businessman or
vacationer far from the States and ripe for some down-home pleasure.
He took of his hat -- he had insisted on wearing a hat, don't ask me why --
and nodded his head.
"My name's Lou Gehrig, ma'am. We're looking for a friend of mine named Babe
Ruth."
I pulled the picture I had of Ruth from my pocket and gave it to her. It
had been taken the day before, during the first game of the Matsushita series.
Ruth, wearing an official 1927 New York Yankees baseball uniform, was touching
home plate. He had just homered off Catfish Hunter to defeat the Oakland
Athletics, 6-5. After the game, Ruth disappeared. He never made it back to the
team's hotel.
"He's a fat one, isn't he? I didn't know they let fatties like him play
baseball."
"Mr. Ruth is good with the bat," I assured her.
"Yeah, that's what Shelly said." She handed the picture back to me.
"Shelly? The Marilyn Monroe model?"
"Yeah, that's him. I can't believe that a recon job could be doing better
business than me. Jesus, they took off his dick and moved his fat around a
little, that's all. At least I'm fuckin' real. As advertised."
"Has Shelly seen Mr. Ruth?"
"Seen him? She DID the piglet last night. Said she expected him to be
exhausted after one round, but he kept comin' back, like a boxer."
"Where is she now?"
"He/she's upstairs with a client," Laurie said with contempt. "A Jap.
Little bastards never ask to see his birth certificate, so he takes 'em for
full price. My fuckin' genes should be worth a little more, you know?"
"What's the room number?"
"1530. And be sure to scare the shit out of the John, so he asks for a
refund. Serves Sheldon right."
I thanked her, and Lou and I turned to go.
"Come back now, slugger," she said to Lou. This time, Lou didn't respond.
Despite the 150-year gap, he DID know when to be polite to hookers and when to
ignore them.
"Did she say that Shelly the hooker was a man?" Lou asked as we entered the
elevator.
"Yeah. Reconstructive surgery -- I guess some guys really have a thing
about their dicks, and want 'em gone. Can you believe that? Lots of them end
up as hookers, because it's a great way to reaffirm their newfound womanhood.
They get tired of it after a while and end up doing something respectable,
like being bartenders or marrying decrepit old men for their money."
"This is an incredible world you live in," Gehrig said, and shook his head.
"Not so incredible. There's the same sleaze as before. It's just different
sleaze."
I wasn't really talking to Lou Gehrig, of course, no more than the man that
we were chasing was really George Herman Ruth. But they thought they were, and
for all intents and purposes they acted just like their long-dead
counterparts. I don't know the specifics of how they were created -- it
involves artificial intelligence, chromosome matching, and lots of baseball
nuts doing research into the history of the all-time great baseball teams.
Matsushita, seeing as it owns half the National League and most of the
teams in the Nippon League, decided to throw some of their money behind a
"greatest baseball series of all time" event. So they set their technicians
and research people at work on finding the eight greatest teams of all time,
getting information on all their players, and creating exact replicas.
And they did it. Last night, in the fifth game of the semifinal series,
Babe Ruth -- or his ghost, replica, whatever you want to call it -- hit a home
run to send the 1973 Oakland Athletics (most of whom weren't even born before
Ruth had died) back into the ether from whence they came. Ain't science
something?
"The woman we're going to meet looks exactly like Marilyn Monroe," I told
Gehrig.
"Who?"
"I'm sorry -- I thought you knew who she was. Some Yankee player ended up
marrying her."
"Must've been after my time."
The elevator stopped on the fifteenth floor, and as the door opened we
found ourselves looking right in Shelly's face.
"Shelly, we've got to talk."
"Shit," she said, and pulled something from her purse. It was money. "Here,
take three thousand. Just don't pull me in."
"Shelly, you know I'm no cop. And where the hell did you get money like
this?"
"All of Scarlett's girls have it on 'em, to make sure they don't get into
any trouble with the cops."
The first time I had met Shelly, she had just been a cheap hooker, not much
different from any other. But now she was working for Scarlett -- the
den-mother-meets-madam who controlled half of the city's hookers and a good
portion of its money. Being one of Scarlett's girls carried lots of perks --
including, it seemed, plenty of bribe money to keep the cops away.
"This gentleman and I need your help, Shelly. We're looking for this man."
I took her hand, led her into the elevator, and showed her the picture of
Ruth.
"Oh, him," she said, and rolled up her eyes. "I figured he'd be an easy
one, pay me for more than he could actually handle. But he didn't stop."
"When did you do business with him?"
"Last night, around midnight. He came into the Kosami bar and we had a few
drinks. Then we came upstairs."
"Did he say anything about where he was going after he left you?"
She paused for a moment, pursing her lips in thought.
"It was three or four a.m., and the Kosami bar had closed for the night. He
asked what else might be open that late, and I told him to head for American
Street. Everything's open all night over there."
The door slid open, and we were back in the lobby. I thanked Shelly, and
Lou and I headed for the door.
"You sure I wasn't the Yankee that married her?" he asked me.
"Pretty sure." Gehrig knew his life's history up to 1927, but not beyond.
To the Yankees, it seemed as if they had been sucked through a time machine --
they didn't even know that they were created beings. I'm sure Lou had spoken
to other players from other eras as they stood on first base, next to him, but
I didn't know if they had mentioned what happened to Lou Gehrig after 1927.
If I were one of those players, I certainly wouldn't have said anything. To
this day, there's still a Lou Gehrig's Disease. There are still people who die
slowly as they lose control of their bodies -- just like Gehrig did. I tried
to picture the huge, incredibly strong man in front of me as a uncontrollable
shaking pile of flesh, and couldn't do it.
"Let's go find him, so we can all get back to work," Gehrig said as we
walked out the door. "We've got to get ready for the Giants. The game's
tomorrow, right?"
"Yeah, tomorrow night." The beginning of the All-Time World Series. Great
publicity for Matsushita Corporation -- the Corp. I had to discreetly find
Babe by midnight, or the corp would send out a massive search team for him.
Publicly admitting the loss of one of the ghost players wouldn't reflect well
on my dear Corp, but Babe Ruth had to be there for the opening game. He was
their star, the all-time best baseball player in the baseball series of the
ages.
The Corp preferred that I find him quietly. And considering how well I knew
American Street, I would have no problem doing just that. Or so I hoped.
American Street in Osaka is, well, a laugh. Which isn't to say that it
isn't American -- in fact, I came here quite often, to try and remind myself
of what home was really like.
Every time, it made it even clearer why I didn't miss home that much.
The American was a strip of fast food restaurants, movie theaters, cheap
hotels, a sports memorabilia shop, a couple of soldier-of-fortune weapons
stores -- and lots of Lizard Joints.
Lizard Joints were, economically, the glue that held the American together.
They were incredibly popular to the Japanese. For them, seeing a Lizard show
was the ultimate American experience, without actually going to America.
I avoided them. My memories of growing up in the western United States
included McDonald's, Hollywood movies, the occasional stay in a Holiday Inn,
cheering on the local sports teams, and even occasional bursts of gunfire.
But I never -- not even ONCE -- went to a live show featuring songs like
`My Way', `Night and Day', and The Candy Man'. Nor did I see any Elvis,
Beatles, Michael Jackson, or any other oldies revival show. No singer crooning
ditties while his gut stuck out over the cummerbund of his tuxedo.
Nobody at the Corp in Osaka could believe it, when I told them. "You have
to see it," they said. "It's the best America has to offer!"
And they took me.
I only learned two things from the trip to Sammy's Sinatra-riffic Sensation
In The Heart of American Street. First, I discovered that it was up to me, New
York, New York. About that same time, I learned that I would never go see a
Lizard show again.
"We'll start with the bars," I told Gehrig. "Hopefully we'll find him
soon."
I prayed that George Herman Ruth wasn't downing gin and tonics while
swinging to the groove of `Feelings' as performed by the Jerry Vale Memorial
Orchestra.
"You seen this guy?" I asked Mark, owner of the aptly titled `Mark's
American Bar'.
"Fat guy," Mark said in that funny accent of his.
"So you have seen him?"
"Hell, you can tell from that picture that he's a fat guy. Look, Kenny, you
know that information don't come without a price."
"Here's a thousand for your time," I said, and dropped the coins in his
hand. "Got any leads on him?"
"You guys missed him by about three hours. He was here, all right -- first
he got completely drunk, but then he got hold of some detox pills. Then he
proceeded to get drunk all over again."
"Sounds like our man. Any idea where he went?"
"Look, after he got drunk again, he started playing around with a couple of
local girls. They're hookers, but your fat guy was trying to romance 'em or
something."
"Was there trouble?"
"Nah. They straightened him out. Guess he paid one of 'em, because they
gave him some Randies and then headed for the door."
"Shit. So he bought Randies, and took off with a hooker. Right?"
"Got it." He tapped his watch. "Time's up."
"Look, thanks for your help. Can you call me if you see him again?"
"No way," Mark said. "The babes are Scarlett's. The Randies, too. The
moment they walked out the door, it became Scarlett's territory. You know how
protective she is of her preferred customers."
"You sure a few thousand wouldn't help you forget that fear?"
"Not for that fat-ass, it wouldn't. Didn't much like the looks of him
anyway."
I gave Mark my best `Fuck You' smile. "Let's get out of here," I said.
"I knew he wouldn't help us," Gehrig said as we headed for the door.
"Why?"
"Didn't you hear the accent? He's from Brooklyn. They've always hated the
Yankees."
Outside the bar, he dropped his big right hand onto the top of my shoulder.
"Hold on a second," he said. "Do you mind explaining what all that was
about?"
"What part didn't you get?"
"Well, most of it. Being one of the Babe's teammates teaches you plenty
about hookers and drinking, but... `Randies?' `detox?'"
"Pills," I told him. "Randies are heavy intoxicants, slightly psychedelic,
that also increase sexual drive and potency. Kind of the best of all worlds.
Detox pills are instant sober-ups. Babe probably took a Detox by mistake, and
then popped some Randies to rectify the situation."
"What a world," Gehrig said, shaking his head. "If we had those sober pills
in the '20s, Babe might've hit 70 or 80 home runs a year."
"And if you had Randies in the '20s, Babe wouldn't have hit ANY--"
And then it hit me. Randies were no common street drug. Scarlett's girls
had them because they went with the business. Randied-up Johns could still get
it up. But, like Scarlett's girls, Randies cost large sums of money for even
the smallest of doses.
And none of the baseball players had carried any money.
"Oh, man," I said.
Gehrig looked puzzled.
"If I asked you to buy me a drink, could you?" He shook his head.
"Of course not. I don't have a wallet -- hell, I feel naked without one."
"Right. So where has Babe gotten the money to pay for all the drinks,
drugs, and hookers?"
I HAD hoped we could get him back before he had broken any laws. Now I
just hoped we'd get him back before the skin of the world's greatest batsman
was being peddled on an Osaka streetcorner.
Home base for Scarlett and her girls was a mansion known as -I swear I'm
not kidding -- Tara. And while the hookers didn't resemble any character in
`Gone With the Wind', all of Scarlett's security people looked exactly like
Rhett Butler -- or should I say Clark Gable.
"What do you want?" one of the Gables at the door asked us.
"We need to see Scarlett," I told him. "We're looking for a friend of
ours."
"Scarlett's real busy," the Gable said. "Who should we say is callin'?"
"My name's Ken Nishi," I said. "I'm looking for a man named Babe Ruth."
"Hold on," Gable Number One said, and went inside. Gehrig and I stood
outside with the silent second Gable.
"This Scarlett has identical twin bodyguards?" Gehrig asked me.
"Not quite. The one that just went in is almost two inches shorter than
this one." Lou raised his eyebrows. "I'm a detective. I notice this stuff."
"Are these bodyguards like that Shelly girl, then?"
"The plumbing's different -- but otherwise, yes."
"I'm sorry," said the first Gable as he emerged from the front door.
"Scarlet can't be disturbed right now. I suggest you call again tomorrow."
"Sir," Gehrig began, "would you be so kind as to let us go inside and find
our friend?"
The Gable smiled widely. "I'm sorry, friend -- but business is business. No
visitors while work is in session."
I turned away from the Gables and began walking down the steps that led
down to street level.
"Come on, Lou," I said loudly. When we reached the street, I added: "We'll
be back. Let's go get us some hookers."
We found a couple of Scarlett's girls back at Mark's American -- the
problem was getting them interested in us. Scarlett's trained her girls to be
VERY selective about who they'll bring back to Tara. The first thing we had to
do was make sure that the girls were first-string -- only the cream of the
crop are based in Tara. The dregs, like Shelly, work at cheap hotels around
town.
After we found out that Sara and Viv were Scarlett's top-of-the line, we
had to convince them that we had money. The first-string ladies are extremely
expensive, and the purchase of a few Randies is also required.
We managed to pass our John Interview by showing them my credit card (with
billions in Matsushita money backing it) and claiming to be two of the
baseball players from the series. Sara bought Gehrig's story, mostly because
he actually WAS what he claimed to be. As for me, well, I told Viv I was
legendary Japanese slugger Saduharo Oh.
I guess my credit was good enough that Viv wasn't going to question my
veracity. I do look fairly Japanese, though about half my family is
European-American -- but when it comes to my clothing, body language, and the
way I talk, I'm about as UN-Japanese as you can get.
After they took my money, they handed each of us two small green pills --
Randies. I turned to look at Gehrig, who was staring into the palm of his
hand. He made a small gulping noise.
I smiled at him and dry-swallowed the Randies. I have to give it to the guy
-- he had a lot of guts. He imitated my actions as soon as I had finished
swallowing.
It was a couple blocks to Tara, so we ended up walking there from Mark's.
As I stepped out of the bar and onto the dirty sidewalks of the American, I
felt the whole district slide around me. I could tell that the Randies were
kicking in, though their psychedelic effects were mild compared to the drugs
I'd taken in the past. And I wasn't really afraid of getting out of control --
if I needed it, I had a couple of detoxes in the bottom of my pocket and a gun
hidden against the small of my back.
The randies also had an effect on my libido, and so I suddenly began to
take more notice of Viv. She was reconstituted-gorgeous, every man's dream and
a plastic surgeon's reality. Though I like to think of myself as a pretty good
detective, I didn't know whether she was a natural male or female. Some people
can take one look at a person's neck and figure out whether they've had their
Adam's Apple removed or not.
My hand slid around her back and I could feel the curve of her hip
underneath the strange material her clothes were made out of. It felt almost
alive, more of a second skin than actual clothing. Then again, it could've
just been the Randies talking.
Gehrig, meanwhile, was squeezing Sara's breasts and mumbling to himself. I
didn't suppose the old boy had much experience with drugs like these, and the
double-whammy of sexual drive and hallucinations had to be more powerful than
anything that existed in Gehrig's time.
I decided to let him enjoy it while it lasted.
It didn't take us very long to reach Tara. As we neared the front door, a
skinseller approached us. It looked like the same one who had been in front of
the Kosami earlier.
"Buy skin," he said. "Real rabbit!"
This time, under the influence of Randies, I was a bit nicer to the little
man. Rather than ignoring him, I paused briefly to say hello to the cute bunny
skin and pet it a little.
"Nice rabbit you've got there," I told the man. Then Viv pulled me away
from him. It was time to enter Tara.
I blinked as I looked up at the mansion's facade. It seemed incredibly
huge, aristocratic, and completely out-of-place amidst the cheap neon and
plastic crap that made up the rest of the American.
"My, my," I said, "I do believe the south has risen again."
We went inside.
"Ready, slugger?" Viv asked me. I have to admit, the Randies were certainly
having an effect. I put my hands on her waist, and then slid them up to her
breasts. From there, I moved them to on her cheeks, as I began kissing her.
Then I slid one of my hands to the nape of her neck and gently stuck a
sedative patch to it.
Twenty seconds later, she was unconscious. Two minutes later, Gehrig and I
had popped our detoxes and were searching room by room for Ruth.
We found the Sultan of Swat half-clothed and face down on a bed a few doors
down from our rooms. One of Scarlett's girls was sitting on a chair in the
corner, polishing her fingernails.
"What do you want?" she asked. "Can't you see I've got a customer?"
"A busy one, too," Gehrig said.
"Look, Scarlett doesn't allow more than one client per girl. And I've got
mine. So you'd better leave."
"He's a friend of ours," I told her. "We've come to take him back home."
"Oh, no you don't," she said. "He's paid up. I'm supposed to keep him here
until he walks himself out."
"Who asked you to do that?" I asked.
"Scarlett. She told me the fat guy had some big money behind him, and that
I should try to get as much of it out of him as possible."
"So you'd keep him here, charging him for your services and for drugs until
he finally left?"
"Or until his money ran out, yeah. Why not?"
"Like I said, sister... we've come to take him home." I nodded to Gehrig,
who went over to the bed and began shaking Ruth awake.
"Stop it!" the girl shouted. Before she could get protest too loudly, I
walked over to her and slapped a sedative derm on her neck.
"Hey!" she shouted. "What the hell do you think you're doing? What's this
fucking thing you stuck to me? What did you do to me? Help! I can'
stan'up..."
Scarlett's girl hit the ground, completely unconscious.
Babe Ruth was slowly coming to, under the kind hand of Lou Gehrig.
"Come on, Babe... time to get up... got to get back before the next game,"
Gehrig said to the massive home-run king.
"You done this before?" I asked Gehrig.
"Too many times to remember. Like I said, Ken... the time and place may
have changed, but the Babe's still the same man and a whorehouse is still a
whorehouse."
Gehrig and I pulled the Babe to his feet and began leading him out of
Tara. We were about 10 feet from the back door when an alarm went off. I heard
a woman screaming from upstairs -- it was Viv.
"He fuckin' knocked me out!" she yelled.
Four Clark Gables were suddenly running toward us, two from the front door
and two more from the hallway that led to the rest of the building.
"Down!" I yelled to Gehrig and the Babe, and we all fell to the ground. I
pulled my gun, hoping that I could get all four of the Gables before they got
us.
"Frankly, my dear," I said, pulled the trigger, and scored a direct hit on
the head of Gable Number One. "I don't-" and Gable Two went down, "give a-"
and Gable three went down, "damn-"
And then Gable Number Four's gun shattered my pistol hand. The gun flew
across the floor, but I didn't really notice. I was screaming so loud that I
can't even remember being knocked out when the Gable kicked me in the head.
When I woke up, I was in a Matsushita hospital bed. I obviously hadn't been
killed by Scarlett -- in fact, she had turned me back over to the Corp.
There was nothing I could do during the next few days I lay in that
hospital bed but stare at the TV -- so I watched the all-time world series in
three dimensions. It was as exciting as the Corp had hoped it would be, and
they no doubt made a killing on the entire affair. The series went to seven
games, just as they had hoped. Maximizing profits was the key.
I was amazed the series was that close -- I figured the Yankees would win
in a cakewalk. But they were actually down three games to two going into game
six. Just as the corp had hoped, the game ended dramatically -- Babe Ruth,
looking just as healthy as he always seemed to look on those old-time movie
reels, doubled off the top of the centerfield wall in the top of the ninth to
score Lou Gehrig and put the Yankees ahead to stay. That hit sent the
championship of all time to a seventh game. And to think that just a few days
before, Gehrig and I were carrying a half-naked and stoned out of his mind
Babe out of a local whorehouse.
The day of the seventh game, I finally found out how I had managed to come
out of my adventure alive, and how Babe and Lou had managed to get back in
order to play in the series.
My first visitor was a mid-range Matsushita executive named Mariko, and she
sure didn't seem happy to see me. In fact, when she walked in the door and saw
that I was conscious, she began to scowl. She also refused to make eye contact
with me.
"Well, Nishi, at least you managed to get Ruth back without any bad
publicity," she said.
No publicity? I had blown away three reincarnations of Rhett Butler in the
middle of the biggest brothel in Osaka, and there had been no publicity?
"But you also cost the corporation a mint, almost all of it unauthorized.
You paid for hookers and Randies for both yourself and your assistant, and we
had to pay Scarlett the madame for all the services Ruth paid for while he was
out."
"The Corp had to pay for that?"
"Sure did. Scarlett knew that we were behind the series, and she knew
perfectly well who their fat customer was. So they tried to wring as much
money out of the corporation as possible."
"Well, I DID manage to limit how much time the Babe spent at Tara," I told
her.
"True. But you also managed to kill two of her bodyguards and seriously
wounded a third. We had to pay for his medical bills, plus yours. Scarlett
also demanded a very large sum of money to keep it all away from the police."
"How large?"
"Extremely large. That's all I'm allowed to say."
"Shit," I said. Once a Corp worker, always a Corp worker. Matsushita would
never fire me -- they'd just move me to some ridiculous location like
Antarctica and have me gutting fish and throwing their heads into a bucket.
"Don't worry about it. The corporation's got plenty of money, and we got
Ruth back in time to have him play in the series. Nothing's going to happen to
you, this time. Just don't let ANYTHING like this happen again."
That was all Mariko had to say. I never heard another word from the Corp
about the incident.
But Mariko wasn't my only guest. When she left the room, Gehrig came in.
Right behind him was Babe Ruth himself.
"You're looking a lot better, Ken," were the first words out of Gehrig's
mouth.
"Yeah, lookin' real good," Ruth said.
"Thanks. Hey, good luck tonight."
Ruth smiled his famous dimpled, fat-cheeked smile.
"And thanks for pullin' me out of that dive the other day," Ruth said.
"I've got hold of some mean stuff in my time, but those pills really take the
cake."
"Look, Ken," Gehrig started, "we can't stay long. I practically had to beg
on my knees before that Mariko woman agreed to bring us here. I just wanted to
thank you for all you've done for us. You did a great job."
"It's the first time anyone's gotten shot up for me," Ruth said with a
laugh. "If there's anything I can do for you, just name it."
"One thing, Babe," I said. "Hit one out for me tonight."
He smiled again. "You got it, kid."
Whoever made this Ruth character sure got the recipe right. Not only did
they make him so well that he ran away from the team just for the sake of his
vices, but even his heroic actions were dead-on. Ruth hit me a homer, all
right. It won the series for the Yankees in the bottom of the ninth inning.
The next day, the simulations of the 1927 Yankees were sent back into the
void from which they came. They were melted down or erased or whatever you do
with computer simulations of real people.
So I had risked my life for these artificial people and the integrity of my
corporation. And after all that, while I lay in a hospital bed, the people I
had saved were wiped from existence. The only real souvenir I had of the whole
event was my shattered hand.
Well, I didn't just have the hand. The day after the series, as those
players were being dispatched back into oblivion, a Matsushita courier brought
me a special package. Inside was the winning baseball, signed by the real live
Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig replicas.
It was enough for me.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell is a senior at the University of California, San Diego, majoring
in Communication and minoring in Literature/Writing. He is the editor in chief
of the `UCSD Guardian' newspaper, as well as being the editor of `InterText'
magazine. Jason will graduate from UCSD in March, and plans to enter a
graduate journalism school in the fall.
jsnell@ucsd.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Earth as an Example
Chapter 3
Jesse Allen
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Maxel space station was one of the products of the war. Though small by
Federal standards, the city in the sky regularly housed ten thousand. Unlike
its cousins orbiting inhabited planets, Maxel circled no primary. It merely
hung in space, the nearest star over three parsecs away. With no populous
planets nearby, it was not a commercial stopover. No profit-minded interest
had ever been shown in the station. But the war had demanded that there be
piers where ships could rest without the normal long haul on ion drive
necessary near stars. Once a short distance away, ships departing Maxel
simply kicked straight into hyperdrive. A day out of port, they could be a
full parsec away, fully ten thousand times the distance covered in the same
time on ion drive. Without the lengthy climb out of a stellar gravitational
well, and clear of the denser interplanetary medium, ships trimmed days, even
weeks, off their voyage time.
The Nikaljuk was docked at one of the outermost service corridors, a long
flexible tube extending out to the one exit hatch in use. The freighter
looked out of place among the sleek war ships of the Federal Navy, their
shining steel hulls bristling with the weapons of their trade. Dr. Drucker
and Captain Huston looked out on the scene from a large window overlooking the
quay. Behind them, a number of officers milled about, two concentrating on a
game board projected on the table in front of them.
Suddenly, the stars dimmed as the window darkened. A few kilometres out
from the station, a ship cut in its hyperdrive, the bright light of its engine
thrust drowning out everything in its dazzling brilliance. But the window had
adjusted its filtering appropriately: The bright exhaust tubes could be
watched without blinking. The ship pulled away, rapidly picking up speed as
it dwindled away into the distance. As it streaked off into the night sky,
the stars gradually reappeared as the window returned to its usual
transparency.
"John Huston!" called out one of the game players, suddenly looking up from
the holographic playing cube in front of him. "What an unexpected pleasure!
What brings you to this corner of the Union?"
Captain Huston and Dr. Drucker turned from the window to face the speaker.
He was a tall, thin man in his middle thirties with short blonde hair, dressed
in the dark, close fitting uniform of a navy officer.
"Byron Parry!" exclaimed Captain Huston, moving over to shake hands with
the player. "Good to see you again. Dr. Drucker, this is Byron Parry from
the Brach Y Pwull, a friend of mine from academy days. Byron, Dr. Drucker,
chief archaeologist of Museum."
Captain Huston looked at Byron's neckline for a moment, noting the four
silver clusters on the neckline.
"Not a Captain any more? Congratulations!" he remarked.
"Thanks," replied Byron. "I got the promotion to Commander three months
ago. And these days, I'm on the Rodina. Dr. Drucker, glad to meet you. I
recall your name from the ruckus back when the historians were stirring up
Parliament to fund Museum."
"My involvement with those affairs was slight," replied Dr. Drucker
modestly. "Politics is not my field, though I do think Parliament did make
the right decision in the end."
"Indeed," said Byron. "I've been meaning to visit the place for some time.
My kids have been twice already with school and have come home screaming with
pleasure and running circles around me in History both times. How about you,
John? What have you been up to?"
"I'm still a mere captain," replied John, "but I have managed to get off
the escort roster. I'm working on the Nikaljuk, a light freighter, assisting
Dr. Drucker and his team on a research project. A strange occupation for a
Navy captain in the middle of a war, but orders are orders."
"Since you're not going to introduce me," said the player across the board,
"it IS your turn." She spoke with a thick accent that Captain Huston did not
recognize, swallowing all her vowels.
"John, Dr. Drucker, this is Siabohn O`Neil," Byron said, "Captain of the
Brach Y Pwull. She was my second."
"Five years on the Brach Y Pwull," said Siabohn, "and he STILL can't
pronounce it properly. At least with me in command, the crew has a captain
who can talk properly."
"Perhaps if you Orionians spoke using the same vowels as the rest of the
galaxy," retorted Byron merrily, "you wouldn't have such troubles." Then he
waved his hand at the game board. "What do you think of this, John?"
Captain Huston knelt down to look at the board carefully, examining the
formation of red and black pieces strewn throughout the cube's volume.
"It looks like you've been out matched, but there are some possibilities
here," said John after a few moments.
"You're in trouble," Dr. Drucker warned Captain O`Neil, "if you let John
join the fray. They used to call him `the Dark Master' for the way he plays
this game."
At that, Huston suddenly looked up at Dr. Drucker who was now examining the
playing board from O`Neil's side of the cube.
"Who told you that?" he asked.
"Admiral Perry," replied Dr. Drucker nonchalantly. "Did you honestly think
I challenged you blindly?"
"After those first two games," replied Captain Huston, "yes. You knew the
whole time? Did you just let me win those two?"
"I wish I could say yes," replied Dr. Drucker sheepishly, "but I'm afraid
that, even forewarned, your style managed to take me by surprise. But you've
lost that edge now."
`Indeed I have,' thought Huston. `This last game has been dragging on for
a week now. He just started massacring my pieces all of a sudden. I've
struck back and devastated him too, but neither of us is winning, more than a
hundred moves since the last capture.'
"By the way," started Huston, "what's all the excitement about? We've seen
four ships kick off in the last hour." Right on cue, the window darkened again
as another ship cut its hyperdrive in.
"How long have you been here?" asked Parry.
"Just a couple of hours," answered Huston. "What have I been missing?"
"You missed it, all right," said O`Neil.
"The Haiphong, mate," added Parry. "Admiral Nguyen himself was here not a
week ago, then suddenly scrambled out of here yesterday afternoon. Apparently
the Kalganians have started a new offensive. They razed a few planets only a
dozen parsecs from here. Clobbered the orbital stations, bombarded the
ground-space facilities, then left a few snipers to harass anyone who came to
aid the locals too soon."
"And they sent the Haiphong? Kind of overkill, isn't it?"
"It seems there was some high level concern. A bunch of civilians were
headed for one of the nearby systems that lost contact a few days ago. The
Secretary-General had some personal interest in the passengers and wanted the
Navy to intercept them before they tried to make planet fall. But that was
only the first stop: Haiphong is heading for Sagittarius to handle the new
troubles there."
Captain Huston and Dr. Drucker exchanged a shocked look.
"This ship..." asked Dr. Drucker. "It wouldn't happen to have been headed
for Janella, by chance?"
Commander Parry's head snapped up from the game cube.
"That's classified information!" he said sternly. "How did you get a hold
of it?"
"Good grief!" exclaimed Captain Huston. "That was us! We got jumped by a
raider at Janella three days ago and barely got out alive. We were about to
survey the area and see what was going on when we got ordered to get here full
blast. But the Secretary-General? All I'm doing is shuttling around some
prehistory specialists!"
"It seem you've become a VIP," said Commander Parry with respect.
"You said Nguyen was taking the Haiphong to Sagittarius," said Dr. Drucker.
"What's happening?"
"Hmm," rumbled Commander Parry hesitating. "Well, I doubt the censors will
quash this. The razing rampage has only been a small part of a general
renewed offensive by the Empire. Sagittarius has born the brunt of it.
They've been dropping nova bombs into every star with a ship yard nearby
without much regard to inhabited planets."
"Nova bomb?" asked Dr. Drucker, his face turning white. "What's that?"
"It's a device dropped into a star. It penetrates deep into the stellar
core, then explodes. The detonation, when placed correctly, disrupts the
balance of the fusion reactions that power the star.
"Of course, stirring up something which has a mass of 10$^{30}$ kilograms
is quite a task, so the change is quite short lived and doesn't disrupt the
entire star. But it's enough --- for at least a few hours, the bomb wreaks
total chaos. The high energy particle flux from the star jumps by several
orders of magnitude, well beyond the maximum tolerance of even the best
shipboard shielding. Anything caught in space within a milliparsec is cooked
through and through. Space stations too: Even they can't withstand that kind
of blast. If they're on the far side of a planet when it starts, the planet
will shield them... until their orbit takes them over to dayside. And most
stations are in low orbits with periods around a hundred minutes, far too
short to save them."
"And the planet?" asked Dr. Drucker with concern.
"Dayside, they'll all get baked... and they're the lucky ones. The
particles turn the atmosphere into a hodgepodge of radioactive isotopes. A
lot of air is simply ionized and then neutralizes itself violently. But the
altered isotopes... Anyone who survives the initial blast will die from
radiation sickness. Nightsiders can be evacuated, but their ships have to
remain in the planet's shadow until the particle storm is over, which involves
defying about a half dozen laws of orbital mechanics. Not that it can't be
done, but that can save only a few thousand at best. For everyone else,
there's simply nothing that can be done. They'll die. All of them."
"But rescue missions? Surely they can treat the sick?" said Dr. Drucker
pathetically.
"This is radiation sickness, not a fever," replied Byron. "Once you get
it, the best anyone can do is make you comfortable. And how do you rescue a
hundred million people? Half of them won't live long enough for a rescue
mission to even make it there. For very mild cases, the tissue damage can be
undone or removed, but past that exposure level, there's nothing that can be
done. A few very lucky people who hid in shelters might escape enough of the
radiation and altered atmosphere to have treatable exposure levels. But
again, that's going to be thousands at the most."
"So no one can live through a nova bomb?" said Dr. Drucker quietly.
"That's about the size of it," replied Byron.
Dr. Drucker turned to Captain Huston.
"My family...they're on Hardin, near the center of the Sagittarius sector.
And there's three ship construction yards there, two of them working for the
Navy."
"Hardin?" said Siabohn comfortingly. "I've not heard of any action
reaching that deep into the sector yet. You can check with the base
commander: He can get you in touch with your family if it's possible and he'll
know if the action is close. The Haiphong and its escort fleet is setting up
blockades around inhabited planets. If Hardin hasn't been attacked yet, the
fleet will be protecting it. And the Kalganians will find it hard to run
through the Haiphong's screens. Nguyen's the sort you hate to have as an
enemy."
But Dr. Drucker missed the last of her words. He was already out the door
headed for the base commander's office.
Lieutenant Judith Swerth noticed she was chewing her nails and forced her
hand out of her mouth. It was the fifth time she had caught herself gnawing
at her fingers in the last ten minutes and the condition of her nails
suggested she had done it many more times than that. It was a nervous habit
of teenage years that returned under stress.
She had been in the command chair of the Wangratta for the past five hours
and was due to change watch in another three. She was one of eight officers
from the Chepachet, a federal cruiser assigned to monitor the Hardin star
system. Although the entire sector was theoretically protected by blockade
ships, the Navy was taking no risks and had assigned additional ships to
protect individual star systems within the blockade volume. The Wangratta was
a small scout ship specifically designed to monitor shipping traffic while
remaining undetected herself. Her crew were all junior officers training for
command positions --- they rotated turns at each of the pilot, monitor,
engineer and command positions.
When the unexplained signal came in from the neutrino strips lining the
Wangratta's hull, Swerth had been excited and pleased she had the command. It
was the third such contact and thus was dubbed Gondor 3, the Navy parlance for
a suspected, but unidentified enemy ship. The other two had occurred while
she was off duty or at the navigator's console. While she was certainly
involved, there had not been a chance to prove herself from the command chair.
But now her enthusiasm had given way to worry and tension. Gondor 3 had
initially appeared as a middle weight Kalganian raider nearby, approaching at
a speed that would bring it close to the Wangratta in a matter of hours. The
Wangratta would grapple with the raider, locking on tractor beams to anchor it
in space. Her powerful engine plant could generate power enough to maintain
her protective shields against the very worst barrage the raider could bring
to bear. Meanwhile, the Chepachet would come into position and destroy the
enemy ship.
But the encounter had not happened. Despite Gondor 3's velocity, clearly
discernible from the Doppler shift in its energy pattern, it had not yet
arrived. That implied it was at a greater distance and its neutrino signal
came from a larger power plant than she had assumed. Each passing moment made
the smallest size ship still explainable by the signal larger and larger. In
another ten minutes, she would be sure beyond all doubt that the inbound ship
was beyond the Wangratta's defensive shield capacity...and perhaps would even
out gun the Chepachet. Yet how could something that large have escaped the
outer guards?
There was a possible answer. The neutrino strips were very new and few
ships were equipped with them. Neutrinos are highly penetrating particles
generated in a host of nuclear reactions. The collapse of a supernova, the
deep cauldron of a stellar core, and the power plants of starships all
produced the tiny, massless particles in profusion. They were so penetrating
that they could escape from the depths of a star and it was hopeless to even
attempt to contain them in a fusion vessel. But just as they could pass
through a reactor wall, they also passed through detectors without appreciable
effect. Neutrino detectors were normally giant devices where a single
detection implied the presence of trillions of non-detections.
The Wangratta's detectors, however, were subtly different. A modification
of the detector material during its forging yielded a material which, when an
appropriate energy field was applied, had a billion-fold greater cross-section
to passing neutrinos. Detections remained marginal and little information
could be eeked from what signal there were. But it made for a passive
tracking system. A ship which shut down its own power plant could lie
undetected and yet monitor all traffic within a considerable volume of space
around it. And until a way was found to contain neutrinos, there was no
countermeasure to thwart it.
What Lieutenant Swerth feared, however, was the countermeasures for the
usual scanners which were quite feasible, such as might have been used to slip
past the blockade. A ship with a large enough power plant could hold up just
such a device, fooling a searching ship into seeing nothing. Those
countermeasures, in turn, could be scrambled, but again, power limitations
made it possible for only the largest starships to carry the scramblers.
Could it be that a large Kalganian ship could have evaded the scrambling
fields and with its stealth system, passed unnoticed by the outer guard ships?
But that was impossible! Almost all of the Sagittarius sector was
surrounded by heavy ships set in positions such that their scrambling fields
would have a 25% overlap. There would be no way to penetrate that shield
undetected.
Yet there was definitely something approaching which should not have been
and it must have escaped the attention of the outer guards.
"I have signal resolution," announced Lieutenant Helgth. "Gondor 3 is no
longer a single point source."
`Good,' thought Swerth. `That mean's it's close enough for secondary power
sources to be detected, making it quite close. Probably a heavier rated
raider instead of the middle weight I had assumed. The Wangratta can still
handle that.' Swerth's assumptions rested on knowing the volume of space the
neutrino strips could comb, the flux and velocity of the approaching vessel,
and its probable distance at the time of first contact. There was also the
matter of the spectral signatures --- different class vessels gave off subtly
different energy patterns and Gondor 3 had many of the spectral signatures of
medium displacement raider. But recognizing neutrino signatures was a new and
uncertain business and it was quite feasible for the raider to have been
somewhat larger than the energy spread of its power plant initially appeared.
"Gondor 3 now appears as three contacts," continued Helgth. "Assessment
shows central contact is a Kalganian cruiser with two accompanying heavy
raiders. From an extreme distance, their combined signature appears like that
of a medium raider."
`Bad,' thought Swerth, her sudden hopes dashed. `Very, very bad.'
"Notify the Chepachet," she commanded.
"There is some ambiguity in the identification of Gondor 3," explained
Helgth from the signal processor. Then he swiveled in his chair.
"There could be even more ships," he said in a dead pan voice.
Siabohn and Byron sat across the table from each other starting down each
other's pieces. John Huston sat beside Byron looking at the board, but with
an unattentive eye. Occasionally, he would glance at the empty seats next to
himself or at the chess pieces arrayed across the table just as they had been
put there by himself and David Drucker a week ago. They had been halfway
through setting up the board when the Navy reported the vapourization of the
Chepachet and the subsequent bombardment of Hardin's primary. Dr. Drucker had
left then and not returned. No one had seen him since, though everyone knew
where he was.
John looked at the chess board one more time and had to fight back the
instinct to rise and go to the archaeologist's quarters. But John had sat in
the command chair long enough to know some griefs were meant to be private.
When Dr. Drucker truly wanted to talk, he would come of his own accord.
"Long range scanners confirm the planet is inhabitable, Captain," announced
Georgia. "It has a nearly circular orbit almost exactly in the middle of the
life compatible range. Atmosphere analysis shows that the air is
predominantly nitrogen with an approximate 20% oxygen content. Carbon dioxide
levels are low and within biocompatible limits. This could be it, sir." She
couldn't keep a hint of excitement out of her voice.
"It does sound good," replied Captain Huston, "and we can tell more from
here than early settlers. Now we have to hope for something a little bad ---
we're looking for an abandoned planet, so there has to be something to have
driven the settlers away after they got here. Something subtle enough to have
been missed in a preliminary analysis, but annoying enough to have convinced
them to leave later."
"I'll keep looking," said Georgia, obviously pleased.
The Nikaljuk was slowly spirally in toward the second of the water/oxygen
worlds circling G-type stars within the region the probe was supposed to have
come from. The archaeologists that had been bound for Janella and Srosa had
left them at Maxel. Instead of being flown to those destinations by the
Nikaljuk as had been originally planned, they were going with the second wave
of military convoys, the first having re-established order. Those who
remained with the Nikaljuk began the search for the abandoned planets which
might, in the ancient settler's ruins, give Dr. Drucker's team another of the
missing clues to the elusive First World.
So far, the search has not gone well. The stellography mission to this
part of the sector was ancient and outdated. The information was skimpier
than it had seemed at first glance. Just a simple note of star mass,
luminosity, and stellar class, plus the presence of planets and their orbital
parameters. Few of the planets had been accurately classified, let alone
examined in detail. The Nikaljuk's first stop at one of the F type stars had
been typical: The planet reported in an acceptable orbit for life tolerable
conditions had proven to be an airless ball with a distinctly elliptical
orbit. At periastron, the planet was too close to its primary for livable
temperatures while apastron grazed the outer limit. But it had been a long
shot to start with since G, not F, type stars were the norm for habitable
planets.
They were still optimistic when they arrived at their next stop, one of the
two G type stars in the region which was known to have a planet in the right
range of orbits. But that too had proven a disappointment. The
stellographers classification of water/oxygen world had not been mistaken, but
they had missed one vital detail. There was carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
along with the normal gases, and it was present in poisonously high levels.
The heavy concentration of the gas trapped infrared emission from the surface,
bringing the planet's surface temperature up to hundreds of degrees.
Colonists would have been desperate to try living in such a place, though with
air conditioned homes and refrigerated greenhouses, they could have survived.
But that chance seemed remote enough that Dr. Drucker had not hesitated to
move on.
Their third destination, orbiting a F type star, was again a long shot.
But they did not waste any time getting close to eliminate it as a
possibility. Even as they entered the edges of the planetary system, scanners
revealed the candidate planet's atmosphere was transparent to ultraviolet
light. Even around a G type star, such a planet would be uninhabitable.
Enthusiasm was growing again as they approached their fourth destination.
This, too, orbited a G type star and was known to have a planet within the
tolerable orbital limits and classified water/oxygen by the surveyors. Long
range scanners confirmed the presence of the usual radiation trapping zones
from a magnetic field, the atmosphere was distinctly opaque to all but the
longest ultraviolet wavelengths, and the traces of carbon dioxide were normal.
Temperatures plummeted near the planet's poles, but were downright balmy
across the equator. All in all, everything looked like an ideal planet for
settlers to try their hand at. Certainly they must have at least approached
this planet.
Soon, the Nikaljuk would go into a low polar orbit and make a detailed map
of the planet's surface, assisted by a pair of automated probes that had been
outfitted on the ship's hull at Museum. If they found anything that looked
like it might have been an ancient landing site or settlement, the drones
could make low flying passes for closer investigation. If it seemed
warranted, the Nikaljuk could attempt to find a landing site and set down,
though the energy involved in climbing back out of the planet's atmosphere and
gravitation well was considerable.
`This is the most interesting project I've done since joining the Navy,'
thought Captain Huston. `Even better than coming to grips with those
Kalganian monsters...' and as he thought that, he gripped his command chair
harder. `Monsters, all right. I will make them pay someday.' The enthusiasm
that everyone else had shown for the exploration and particularly the prospect
of this approaching planet had not been shared by Dr. Drucker. He had been
very subdued since they left Maxel.
John thought about Hardin's destruction. That the Kalganian cruiser's crew
were killed by the same blast that claimed Dr. Drucker's family and over five
hundred million other lives seemed poor compensation. `We ought to drop a
nova bomb into Kalgania's sun and see what they think of it then!}' But
beneath his anger, Captain Huston realized that it had been tried and failed
several times, and even that would not prove anything even if it did succeed.
Destroying the imperial capital would no more halt the Kalganian Empire than
if the Union lost Throne. Between the Kalgan sector and all its allies, the
Imperium commanded thousands of worlds and destroying every inhabited planet
in their power would take more nova bombs than there were in the Union's
arsenal.
"I've completed the detailed spectral analysis, sir," announced Georgia.
"The planet's primary is G2 with the normal metallic content and a mass of
three times ten to the thirtieth kilograms. It is presently in an active
period, with a number of flares and prominences, but nothing unusual for its
class. Barring some unusual activity cycle that my instruments couldn't
predict from these readings, this is a completely normal star for a habitable
planet's primary."
"Can you assess the probability of unusual solar activity sufficient to
make the planet unpleasant?" inquired Captain Huston.
"I can assess it," answer Georgia, "and it is bloody unlikely! This class
is the best studied of all stars; after all, 95% of the galactic population
lives within a stone's throw of G type stars. Chances are less than one in a
million that solar activity from this star could make things more than mildly
uncomfortable on the planet. I don't think we'll find anything to drive away
colonists from the star. Whatever it was must have been from the planet
itself."
"We'd better find something wrong with this place soon," said Captain
Huston. "It would be quite a shock to find that no one in the last ten
thousand years has bothered to notice a perfectly inhabitable planet in the
middle of the oldest sector. How long `til we establish orbit?"
"Three hours, sir," answered Norman from the pilot's console. "It will
take another half hour of maneuvering to get into the polar mapping orbit from
our initial approach orbit."
"Release the drones as soon as we establish polar orbit," ordered Captain
Huston.
"You BEAUTY!" exclaimed Georgia.
"Lieutenant, you are on the bridge," reprimanded Captain Huston.
"Sorry, Captain," apologized Georgia. "I think I've found what we're
looking for."
"We've established a stable polar orbit," announced Norman. There was a
twin pair of gentle thuds from the ship's rear. "Both drones released. They
should drop to their cruising altitude in half an hour."
"Dr. Drucker to the bridge, please," said Captain Huston to the computer
grill. "Lieutenant Smythe?"
"Radioactivity," she said proudly. "There's slight traces of radioactive
isotopes spread over the planet. Nothing serious --- you'd get only a little
less exposure on the surface from the planet's primary. It's unusual,
though."
"Native radioactivity?" said Captain Huston. "I've never heard of it being
significant enough to be mentioned in a general planetary assessment."
"As I said," replied Georgia, "it's unusual. Radioactivity comes from the
heavier elements which normally would not be found on the surface of a planet.
During formation, they tend to gravitate towards the inner core of the planet
and deposits are very sparse nearer the surface.
"But that's not all that's unusual about this planet. There's that
satellite we noted on the way in. It's four hundred thousand kilometres out,
but it's almost a full percent of the planet's mass, much more than is common
for terrestrial planets. Even from its distant orbit, the satellite exerts
sufficient gravitation to alter the surface. We've observed tidal changes in
the level of the oceans on the order of metres in places."
"And that would have been sufficient to disturb the differentiation of the
planet during its formation and bring heavier elements to the surface?"
"It's just a piece of dead reckoning so far," confessed Georgia. "I got
the readings and tried to come up with a hypothesis for it. The computer is
running a simulation right now to see if my explanation holds water. But
wherever those heavier elements came from, extrapolating the current levels
backwards nine thousand years and this starts to become a decidedly
uncomfortable place to make home. Not unmanageable, but enough to cause
somewhat higher rates of degenerative diseases, birth defects, and a few other
nasty side effects. Perhaps tolerable when the pickings were slim, but as
soon as colonists found better places, they would have moved on."
"You called for me?" asked Dr. Drucker as he walked onto the bridge.
"Yes," said Captain Huston. "We've just released the surveying drones and
established our mapping orbit."
"So this is definitely an inhabitable planet? I've been a little tired
lately and have been snoozing instead of following the reports as they come
in."
"Indeed it is, barring one detail. The crust is mildly radioactive. It's
marginal now, but Lieutenant Smythe claims it would have been at irritating
levels nine thousand years ago. The place is good enough to have attracted
early colonists, but still unpleasant enough to send them on their way as soon
as better prospects offered themselves."
"Radioactivity, you say," said Dr. Drucker.
"It is a little unusual," said Georgia. "I guessed it could have come from
an enhanced quantity of heavy elements in the planetary crust."
"Unusual?" said Dr. Drucker, quickly becoming excited. "It's more than
unusual! I've never heard of anything like it before! How did you arrive at
your figures for the radioactivity levels? Do you have a detailed analysis of
the elementary composition?"
"No," answered Georgia. "I couldn't identify the elements from our orbit.
The atmosphere blurs the energy of the decay photons. So I made a surmise and
threw it back through each of the four standard decay chains."
"Mind if I look at your calculations?" asked Dr. Drucker. "I work with
radioactive dating techniques regularly and know a little bit about the
subject. What are the end products of each of your extrapolated chains..."
and the conversation continued, delving into technical language which Captain
Huston could not fathom. But it was obvious that Dr. Drucker and Lieutenant
Smythe would be untangling the question of the planet's geological history for
some time.
`There's really nothing I can do with this,' thought Captain Huston looking
at the chess board on the table in the middle of his room. `Neither of us,
barring a mistake by the other, can win.' It had been thirty moves now since
Dr. Drucker had tried to draw Captain Huston's rook and knight into an attack
on the archaeologist's bishop which was closing in to hound the black king.
But Captain Huston had seen through the subterfuge soon enough, noticing that
Dr. Drucker's true aim was not the king, but to sneak his one remaining pawn
through to be queened. `And if I had not seen that soon enough, the game
would have been over in a matter of moves. I can hold his bishop and knight,
but never quite threaten his king, just as he can threaten my pieces, but not
take them without disastrous loss himself. What was the special name for this
stage of the game? Stalemate? But I am not prepared to give up quite yet.
Just one little slip...'
"Captain Huston, please report to the bridge," said Captain Suliman's voice
from the comlink grill next to the door.
Captain Huston looked at the chess board one more time before striding out
to the bridge. `Oh, dear,' he though as he saluted Captain Suliman.
`Everyone is looking rather glum.'
"You got here promptly," said Captain Suliman. "I thought you would be
sleeping. Otherwise I would have called you earlier."
"I was trying to thwart Dr. Drucker's chess strategies," replied Captain
Huston. "Is there a problem?"
"I think Lieutenant Smythe and Dr. Drucker can explain better than I," said
Captain Suliman.
Captain Huston turned to face the two. The rest of Captain Huston's bridge
crew had left when relieved by Captain Suliman and his officers, but Georgia
apparently had remained with the archaeologist, arguing over her calculations.
Obviously, that had continued for several more hours.
"Captain," began Georgia, "this is not the abandoned planet we were hoping
to find."
"So we head for the remaining F star? You realize we'll be flat out of
luck if that planet wasn't settled. We don't have any clues where that probe
came from if we can't find an abandoned settlement."
"There's no need to move on," she said. "This is First World."
`This is it?' thought Captain Huston with a sudden surge of excitement, one
that died when we saw her expression. `There's nobody down there...and why is
everyone looking so down? Something is missing here...'
"The drones found clusters of mineral deposits that were definitely not
accidental," continued Georgia. "What their purpose might have been, we can
only guess. Probably surface habitation. Ten thousand years of weathering
would have destroyed their original form. But the chemical collections are
definitely artificial. No natural force could have gathered materials
together in that fashion. And there are thousands of these clusters, some of
them hundreds of square kilometres in size. It would take millions of people
hundreds of years to construct whatever those heaps once were.
"That's how we eliminated the possibility of this being an abandoned
planet. If it was good enough to support a few hundred million, or even a few
billion, why abandon it? And how could they evacuate that many? Even now,
with the resources of the entire Federation, that would be quite a feat."
"So there were once a few million people living here...and they weren't
evacuated and they aren't here now. So where are they?"
"If you extrapolate the current radiation levels," said Dr. Drucker, "back
to the time of the probe's launch instead of just nine thousand years, the
radiation is not only irritating, but lethal. Anyone caught on the surface at
that time would die."
"I don't understand," said the thoroughly confused Captain Huston. "First,
you say this is First World, then that the planet had a lethal crust. If you
extrapolate the radioactivity back a few thousand years more, you'd have
enough heat to melt the crust and that is patent nonsense! What gives?"
"The extrapolation combined with information from the drone probes shows
that the radioactivity comes from a number of different elements. Principally
barium and thorium, but there's quite a mishmash."
"Barium?" said Captain Huston. "The gravitational differentiation model
predicted this?"
"No, Captain," said Lieutenant Smythe. "My suggestion proved to be just a
shot in the dark. The simulation did not predict particularly unusual
radioactivity levels. However, it did suggest the planet would have higher
concentrations of heavy metals in the crust, including uranium in mineable
deposits."
"And the balance of radioactive elements matches the end products of a
widespread fissioning of uranium 238 near the time of the probe's launch,"
said Dr. Drucker quietly. "Perhaps thirty years later, though the date are
somewhat imprecise."
"But U$^{238}$ is stable!" exclaimed Captain Huston. "I'm not a radio
chemist, but even I know that!"
"Indeed it is," said Dr. Drucker, "and that's the most alarming part of
all. For U$^{238}$ to fission, it must be exposed to an intense flux of fast
neutrons. Judging from the evidence of glassified rock at a number of spots
where concentrations of the elements are higher, I'd suggest a hydrogen fusion
device was used to produce the neutrons in sufficient number to spark the
chain reaction."
"But why?" said Captain Huston. "It doesn't make any sense. Why go around
shattering perfectly stable uranium nuclei when all the end products are
deadly?"
"Exactly," said Dr. Drucker. "They are deadly...and that is the point. Do
you have any idea how much energy a few kilograms of U$^{238}$ gives off when
it fissions?"
"A lot, but..."
"A lot?" snapped Dr. Drucker. "The ignition system alone could flatten a
spaceport! The fission would double or even quadruple the power of such a
device. Entire cities could be laid waste by one of those! A few hundred of
them and an entire planet would die...and that's just what happened!"
"Oh, come off it," said Captain Huston light heartedly, trying to disarm
the archaeologist's seriousness. "You can't build something like that without
understanding what it would do if it was used like you just suggested. Sheer
common sense would prevent them from using it...and therefore from even
building it in the first place. You can't really believe that!"
"Really!" exploded Dr. Drucker. "A race committed genocide here, Captain!
But those weapons are puny compared to those in deployment now. They used
hundreds of them and it still would have taken years to kill their planet.
Hardin was devastated in minutes from a single bomb! Where's the `sheer
common sense' in that?" and with that, the chief archaeologist stomped off the
bridge, leaving the entire crew thunderstruck.
Outside, the ruddy ball of Museum's sun was starting to peek over the
horizon. The room was silent. Neither the Secretary-General nor Admiral
Perry made a move to switch off the trimensional recorder.
"Do you understand now why I have called you here for this report?" asked
the Procurator softly after the silence had lasted for several minutes.
"No, sir," replied John.
"It has been twenty years now since the border skirmish that started this
war," began the Secretary-General, rising from her seat to stand at the window
and watch the dawn. "Since my father sent the fleets to Kalgan all those
years ago, over a hundred billion lives have been lost. Many of them
soldiers, but mostly civilians. Their crime was merely to have lived on
planets with orbiting ship yards of the wrong colour.
"And there's no sign of the carnage stopping. Oh, the Federal Union will
win eventually. Of that, there can be no doubt. We have almost twice their
resources. But at what cost? It could be twenty years before it ends, or
even more. It has cost too much already.
"My father never could have envisaged what he started. Now he'll go down in
history as the tyrant who started it all. I have no desire to follow in his
footsteps.
"The military are understandably reluctant to back off...on both sides. But
if the public knew all that was really happening, all popular support for this
war would come to an end and the military would have no choice but to
negotiate for peace.
"Censorship has, of course, pre-empted that. The armed services have kept a
tight rein on the news for years now. Even the best informed people only have
an inkling of what is actually happening...and they are all in positions where
it benefits them to keep silent. Including myself --- without the web of
people suppressing news of me, my whereabouts would be public and hence enemy
knowledge. Considering the number of assassination attempts on the mock
government at Throne, there is no doubt that it has been censorship that has
kept me alive for so long.
"But the war has exceeded my limits. I will not stay silent any more.
This carnage must stop now. And you have provided me with the means to
convince the citizenry of the Union.
"Imagine what it would be like if your story was aired. Not just the
results of some ten year old archaeological search for...what did you call
that planet? Earth?"
"Yes, sir," replied Dr. Drucker. "The vernacular name for First World is
`Earth'."
"Yes," continued the Secretary-General, "not just a report on the finding
of Earth, but the whole lot. The incident with the Maelstrom, the attack of
the Nikaljuk at Janella, the razing of space stations at Turnay and Janella,
the destruction of Hardin and Earth..." Her voice trailed off into a whisper.
"There are a number of people in the military," said Admiral Perry picking
up where the Procurator had left off, "who don't like this war much either.
Enough to force the censors to pause before trying to edit your accounts. The
seal of the Secretary-General will weigh heavily in favour of it all being
broadcast. We almost got the censors to back down once before. We won't fail
this time."
"But do you really think this will change anyone's opinion?" asked Dr.
Drucker, his voice betraying his tiredness. "It means a lot to me, but it's
my family that's died."
"Yours," said the Secretary-General, "and the families of billions of
others too. And it convinced one of the most militant graduates of the
Herculean Naval Academy already, hasn't it, MR. Huston?"
John made no response.
"When I first saw your initial reports," continued the Secretary-General
after a short pause, "I saw my chance. If Earth can be an example to us all,
we can save the lives of more people than those who perished in our ancient
ancestor's forgotten war. It is certainly worth trying."
Deep below the surface of Museum, a trio of technicians lowered the ancient
probe into a display case in the newest section added to the archives of the
planet. Elsewhere in the room, there were trimenographs taken from the
surface of Earth, the whole room dedicated to records from that one planet.
Only five years after its dramatic rediscovery, the planet had become the most
famous in all the galaxy.
Across from the probe's display case which dominated the room, there was a
small trimensional plate that showed the Beetle Juice nebula in all its glory.
Behind the facade that the plate was mounted on was the story known
galaxy-wide of the discovery of Earth.
"All set!" called one technician. Together, they stepped out of the case
and signaled to the door keeper that they were finished. The keeper looked at
the shining metal package in the display case for a moment, wondering what
stroke of luck had brought it to the attention of its finders all those years
ago. `How different history would have been,' he thought, `if this tiny
machine had not been found when it was.' Then he turned to the door switch and
for the first time, the doors to the new Peace Hall were open.
Shining in the bright floodlights that lit it, Pioneer 11 looked down on the
flood of school children that scrambled into the room, just arrived on an
excursion from their home town on distant Kalgan.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jesse Allen is a graduate student in Astronomy at the University of Iowa.
After failing to get a ticket to Australia, he has become disenchanted with
Astronomy and he will become a science education student within the next year:
yet another reason to avoid the American public high school system. `Earth as
an Example' is his only published story so far, but his latest science fiction
work `Radio Emission from X-ray binary systems: Mapping Cygnus X-1' will be
submitted soon. In more serious science writing, he is working on a Star
Trek: The Next Generation novel `Salvage Operation' with co-author Debra
Johnston.
jsa@lamsun.physics.uiowa.edu.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Leach McBugnuts is Dead
William Racicot
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...
Last year around Thanksgiving, I ran into my friend Leach at the airport. We
hadn't seen each other in a while, since we went to colleges on opposite
coasts, (I was at Boston College, Leach at U. Oregon) and we hadn't even had
a proper phone call all term, so we split a cab fare downtown, and went for
doughnuts at a homey little diner on Carson St. We'd found the place a few
years back, when I bought my first car -- a '76 Plymouth Fury wagon: What a
beast! We christened her "Gert the Rap Car" for the way the oil light flicked
on and off to the rhythm of the stereo I'd bribed my older brother into
installing for me. Anyway, we liked the atmosphere of the place: Gerri, the
owner, was a little old woman with a pipe who told dirty jokes to the
ever-present policemen, and always greeted us when we came in ("Hey! It's
Greg and Leach! What can I get my boys today?"); there was a television in
the corner which somehow managed constantly to show "All in the Family"
re-runs; and the doughnuts were home-made ("All natural ingredients!") so that
you could feel the cholesterol congealing there in your stomach for three days
after eating one. But the taste -- the taste made it all worthwhile.
I guess Gerri was sick the day Leach and I flew into town, because there
was a younger woman waiting on the cops in the diner. She looked familiar; I
thought she might be Gerri's granddaughter -- about five feet seven, a little
overweight, she had Gerri's strong shoulders. We might have gone to high
school together, but I wasn't sure. I've been avoiding my high school class
for a while, and don't always recognize them.
Leach and I had been sitting in the diner for a while, and were still
waiting patiently for service. Well -- I was waiting patiently: Leach was
whistling show-tunes in an attempt to get the waitress' attention. She was
busily smoking Gerri's pipe with a red-haired police officer at a table across
the diner from Leach and me. Since we were accustomed to quick and cheerful
service from Gerri, we were kind of annoyed, not to mention hungry -- the
airline food hadn't been much use (how many peanuts can one person eat?). And
I couldn't figure out why we hadn't been served yet -- it's tough to think
straight to the tune of "I Get No Kick From Champagne."
"So Leach," I said, hoping that he might start talking, and, therefore,
have to stop whistling, "How long do you suppose we've been in here?" I
immediately regretted asking.
"Oh," he responded, loudly and in the waitress' direction, "Can't have been
more than an hour or two, yet. I expect SUSAN, OUR WAITRESS, will be along in
a couple days. What are you going to get, since you've had SO LONG to decide?
I'm going to go with a chocolate glazed and a cup of black coffee, I think."
Then he started to sing lyrics from `Pajama Game'.
When you're racing with the clock,
When you're racing with the clock *1*
I don't know where Leach picked up his interest in musical theatre; his
parents owned a few dozen chickens, and sold eggs to the local grocery store,
and they didn't care for "THAT sort of social function." As far as I know,
he'd never auditioned for a show, let alone been in one. He was never
involved with the drama kids in high school, anyway, and he didn't strike me
as the type who went in for acting. It looked like it might be time I
re-evaluated my opinion of his dramatic ability and interest.
I think our waitress (Susan, apparently, although her nametag said "Hello
My Name is Gerri.") was in a couple high school musicals, now that I think of
it. I've always thought it would be fun to be in a show, but all the best
parts are for women, and our school was too prim to let me act in drag. I
haven't had time, since, what with classes all year.
I looked across the diner at Susan, and saw her busily smoking Gerri's
pipe, just as she'd been doing for some twenty minutes, then looked back to
Leach. I decided that there was no point in asking him to be patient: we'd
had that discussion more than once in the past, and he was strong in his
belief that, if a chicken can reliably produce an egg, then so should a diner.
We'd abandoned more than one otherwise acceptable restaurant because their
food or service was less than Leach was willing to accept. "If I have to pay
for it, then I should get what I want when I want it," he'd always say; so I
just pretended he hadn't been shouting across the room. I tried not to notice
that the waitress was carefully ignoring us.
I listened to Leach whistling for a few minutes, then he began humming
instead, and finally just stopped. He looked over at Susan, and back. "Hmm,"
he said, tentatively, "Say Greg, there's something I wanted to talk to you
about."
"Oh?" This sounded promising: at least he wasn't whistling.
"How do you feel about eggs?"
"Huh? Actually, eggs sound pretty good. I haven't had breakfast yet, and
I wasn't really in the mood for doughnuts anyhow. I think I'll have a couple
fried eggs, and maybe a slice of hot apple pie."
"Fried eggs?" he said. He looked upset. "You're going to eat fried eggs?
In front of me? So soon after the accident? Oh Greg," here he paused
dramatically, and hung his head, "You disappoint me. I should think that
after all these years you'd respect my feelings enough not to eat eggs like
that, right in front of me -- I mean, out in the open like that. Are you
trying deliberately to upset me? After what's happened to my parents--"
"What's happened to your parents?" I had no idea what he was talking about
at that point; even now, I find it difficult to accept.
"What do you mean, `What's happened?'" he said, his face beginning to
flush, "You know what's happened to my parents."
Nothing had happened to his parents as far as I knew, and considering their
lifestyle, I couldn't imagine what could. His father claimed to be a virgin,
and his mom's most dangerous activity was getting the mail at the end of her
driveway. "What about your parents? I really have no idea what you're
talking about. I phoned your mom yesterday to find out when you're flight was
getting into town, and she was fine. She said your dad was okay, too, when I
asked how things were going. Did something happen to them last night?" I
have to admit, I was really concerned now. I'd known his parents for
something like twelve years -- as long as I'd known Leach -- and they were the
nicest people I ever met, even if they were a little strange. Sure, they
named their son "Leach," but he was named after his great-uncle, the war
hero....
"The incu -- the --" Leach choked up a bit, but finally managed to say,
"The incubator blew up on them, and they were -- Oh Greg, they were killed by
the shrapnel -- I thought you knew...."
"Are you KIDDING?" This was a pretty disgusting joke, if he was. He
looked at me, shaking from tense shock that I might doubt him, especially on
something like this. But before he could answer, our prodigal waitress, whose
friend on the force had finally gone off to disturb some copulating teenagers
in station wagons, decided that Leach and I had come to a sufficiently awkward
point in our discussion that interrupting us would be worthwhile. "Hello!"
she chirped around Gerri's pipe, just as though we'd only that moment arrived,
"What can I get you gentlemen?"
I just wanted her to go away, so, before Leach could begin telling her the
tragic story of his parents and their demon incubator, or how dare they serve
eggs on a day like today, I said, "Hot apple pie, please, and do you have
fresh cider today?"
It was no good, though. Before Susan could write down my order on her
little green pad, Leach said cheerfully, "Well, gosh! I think I'd like to
start with the two hours I've wasted waiting for service, and then, how about
a glass of milk? I assume you aren't serving milk today?"
"Leach," I said, trying to calm Leach so we could order and get on with the
discussion, "It's only been about half an hour."
No use. Susan just turned around and went back to where she'd been
sitting. At least, I thought, she was gone. I turned my attention to my
friend, about to ask what the hell he was talking about. He was furious,
judging by his expression, and he stood and went to her table.
"Hello!" he chirped. It was a pretty good impression of her. Then he
grabbed her pipe. Gerri's pipe.
"Uh, Leach --" I was going to point out exactly whose pipe it was, but he
interrupted me.
"What can I get you today, you lazy cow?" he said, and stuck the pipe
bowl-first into her coffee cup, which steamed obligingly. He gestured for me
to join him as he stormed out of the diner.
Outside, Leach was pounding on the building, and chips and fragments of the
decaying brick-face were skittering around the sidewalk. I thought I'd better
distract him before he did any more serious damage -- say, to the building
itself. "What was that about your parents? The incubator blew up?" I knew
how tactless I sounded, but I just couldn't take him seriously. It was too
weird. "They were fine when I called yesterday."
Leach spun to face me, then deflated. He nodded, all his anger gone with
his energy. "I thought you knew. It was all over the papers last week."
That was when I got really skeptical. "If it happened this morning," I
said carefully, "How could it have been in the paper last week?"
"It was in their horoscope."
"What? Leach --" I couldn't believe he was telling me this. What was he
trying to pull, anyhow?
"It was in their horoscope," he repeated. "See?"
Aries: The gentleman in the red convertible wants you.
Taurus: You will score 278 and spare the last frame.
Cancer: Duck!
Scorpio: Watch out for incubators today. Yours is going to blow up.
"They were born on the same day, you know." He sniffed. "It was supposed
to mean -- it was supposed to mean they'd be LUCKY together." he choked on
lucky.
I had known about his parents' birthday, but it hadn't seemed relevant to
the discussion. They'd been at a CYO meeting, or one of those weird Moose
Lodge political rallies, or something -- it changed with every telling -- and
the speaker said, "Hey everyone, we have two birthdays today!" in that
embarrassing forward way that only masters of ceremonies and lounge singers
are taught. "June Roths and Troy McBugnuts are both twenty-five today!" It
was all very embarrassing to them both, so they say. But judging by the
frequency with which they tell the story, I doubt they were too devastated by
the incident.
"Uh, Leach"
"Yeah?" He looked up hopefully, as though the thought I might say
'everything is going to be fine.'
"When did you see this?"
"Last thursday. It was in the Tribune. Or do you mean the actual
accident?" I nodded that this was, in fact, what I meant. "I haven't
actually SEEN the accident yet, Greg. How could I? I haven't been home, and
it only happened this morning. I've been with you as long as I've been in
town. We met at the airport, remember?" he said it as though he were afraid
for my sanity, but I wasn't about to be distracted.
"So you haven't actually seen this mess yet?"
"No! I just told you it happened this morning. I was on a plane from
Oregon. Really, you're beginning to worry me Greg."
I ignored the last bit, and said, patiently, "Let's see what's in the
Tribune this morning and then check out the incubator at your house, okay?"
He mumbled something about choosing less morbid friends in the next life,
but I insisted. Wouldn't there be something in the paper if there were a
local disaster? So we bought a paper from one of the glass dispenser things
on the side of Carson St. and headed for the bus stop in front of the magic
store. Rumor has it that the owner was possessed by the spirit of his dead
grandfather, until he was exorcised by a benevolent ex-nun. Now he just
channels for his late ancestor once a month. We'd almost asked him about it
once, but decided it wouldn't be tactful and bought felt top-hats instead, so
it would look like we'd meant to come in and buy something.
"Well," I said, once we were on the bus, "There's nothing on the front
page. Do you think they'd put something that important inside without a
leader to it on the front page?"
"I wouldn't think so, but you never know with the way the Tribune's been
lately." He had his parents send him the week's issues every Saturday, so
he'd know how things were at home, "Because no one who really loves you will
tell you the dirt on your hometown during finals." I was just as willing to
remain ignorant of local events myself. They took too much energy away from
my classes, and I knew I'd hear everything once I got home. Besides, my
attention span is short enough, without the added distraction of trying to
keep track of a thousand people I wish I didn't know anyway.
I looked through the rest of the paper, and there was no mention of the
accident, although there was a sale on high-intensity light bulbs at Sears,
and Leach was listed in the obituaries as having died at four o'clock from a
gunshot wound.
College Student Shot by Burglars
Leach McBugnuts, the only son of our own Troy and June McBugnuts
of 76 Oklahoma Dr., was shot by burglars yesterday in his
mother's kitchen. He was twenty years old, and would have
graduated in a year and a half from The University of Oregon
where he was a major in Literary Theory (No, we aren't sure what
that is either, but maybe Troy or June could tell us. Troy?
June?). At any rate, the whole town feels this loss. Although
Leach was always an odd child, we all loved him like he was our
neighbor's only boy, which he was. Strength June, and you too
Troy.}
Services will be held Saturday at three pm. And may the Lord
bless Leach McBugnuts and his bereaved family.
`May the Lord bless Leach McBugnuts and his bereaved family.' Hmph.
I decided not to point it out to Leach, although it did seem relevant. How
could his family be "bereaved" if they were dead? I doubted he'd be
reassured. I pointed out, instead, a piece about burglars and the practice of
finding out when a house would be empty from funeral announcements. I also
told him there was no mention of any incubator accidents.
"Did you check the horoscope section? Let me see that."
I handed him the paper. He was making me really nervous, and his obituary
didn't help much either, so the paper shook a bit as I passed it. He seemed
not to notice, though, and I relaxed as well as I could. I normally wouldn't
have worried about strange behavior from Leach -- he's been kind of strange as
long as I've known him; not surprising when you consider he had to grow up
with a name like his. If my name was Leach McBugnuts, I'd probably be pretty
weird, too. But this was stranger than his usual Leach-ness.
I watched him pore over the horoscopes for a few seconds, and marvelled
that he seemed to really BELIEVE the things he was saying. He looked up,
eyebrows raised. "That's very odd," he said, "There's not even anything in
the horoscopes. See what I mean about how things have gotten in the
journalism world? The Tribune doesn't even cover my parents' incubator
disaster, and they're the ones who predicted the damn thing!"
I was about to say something about the reliability of the horoscopes
anywhere, and especially in the Tribune, but was denied the opportunity,
because (much to the relief of our fellow passengers, who had finally given up
staring at us and begun diligently ignoring us) we arrived at our stop just
then. We paid the driver, and said, no we wouldn't be needing a transfer
slip, but thank you anyway, and got off the bus.
The ten minute walk to his house was tense, so I tried to make
conversation.
"You were singing Pajama Game lyrics, huh?"
"Yeah."
"So...when d'you get into the theatre? New interest at school?"
He just shot me an irritated glance. The rest of the trip was pretty
quiet. I pointed at a few of the places we used to haunt. There was the
Superman phone booth we used to use to change our clothes after school -- we
got arrested once. Boy was my mother mad! "Mrs. Beaulieu? Your son was
found naked in a telephone booth about fifteen minutes ago. Could you come
down to the station and pick him up?" I wish I could've seen the look on her
face!
The livestock in his gravel driveway helped to reassure me that, no matter
how strange the rest of the world got, some things would remain consistent:
there were chickens everywhere. They waddled around the yard, in and out the
hole in the wire fence around the chicken coop, jumped up and down the steps
to the front door of the house itself, scratched the lawn up, ate Mrs. McB's
tomato stalks, and generally wrecked havoc on the yard. Those chickens had
more freedom than Leach did until we were old enough to drive. I asked, once,
why his father didn't fix the coop, but Leach only shrugged and said, "That's
how the old man likes to have the hens -- all over the place. That's how he
knows they're alive. He gets nervous if the yard is too quiet, you know."
Leach had smiled wisely at me, and nodded as his father passed through the
room, as though this were the conventional wisdom, and wasn't I lucky to have
heard it.
"See Leach?" I gestured around the yard, encompassing most of the
chickens. "Just like always: hens everywhere." The windows to the farmhouse
were all open -- at least all the ones I could see -- and the screen porch was
in slightly better shape than the henhouse. Apparently Mr. McB didn't want
the fowl in his living room. We went up the porch steps, but Leach hesitated
before he opened up the door.
"Go on."
"Morbid son of a..."
He opened the door, and we went in. It was about one o'clock in the
afternoon, by then, and I could hear noises from the kitchen and upstairs. I
could smell egg salad, too, and I began to remember that I still hadn't eaten
breakfast.
"There. Smell that? You're parents aren't dead -- your mom is in the
kitchen making egg salad, and your father is upstairs. Do you feel better
now?" I tried not to sound condescending or sarcastic, but he was being so
weird that day that I wasn't sure what to make of it.
He looked at me with his brow crinkled, and said, "Well -- I guess so. I'd
like to see the incubator, though, just to make sure."
Sigh. "Leach? Do you trust me?"
He nodded. "You've never led me wrong before, at least not without letting
me in on the joke a few minutes later. And you've never been a joker about
anything that was really important."
HE was accusing ME of joking about something important? I couldn't believe
this. But I controlled myself: I said, "Go into the kitchen and say hello to
your mom. I'll check the incubator shed and let you know what I find. If
there are any bodies in there, we'll call the police, okay?"
"I guess so.... Meet me in the living room in about fifteen minutes?"
I nodded, and went back outside.
The smell got stronger as I approached the incubator shed, which was
strange since the kitchen was on the other side of the house. By the time I
got to the door, the smell was so strong that I could hardly breathe. It was
obviously not the smell of egg salad, I decided. Too strong. This was the
stink of rotten eggs. I heard a gunshot from the house, and looked back. I
heard Leach scream, and a shadow in the window dropped out of view . I turned
to run, but stopped, because I had just got a good look into the shed. The
hand-- I threw up and ran into the woods.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting alone, I remember playing with Leach, there in
the shed; we used to bring trucks in there and push them around on the dirt
floor, through bridges we made from old bricks. That was before his parents
bought the incubator.
My brother told me, once, that the Tribune ran an article about Leach that
Thanksgiving. He even sent me a copy, but I never read it. It's still in the
envelope in my desk drawer, probably yellow by now.
I don't read the Tribune anymore.
We, the editorial staff of the Tribune, would like to extend our
deepest regrets for the early release of the Leach McBugnuts
obituary. We wish to apologize for any inconvenience this
incident may have caused.
______________________________________________________________________________
Endnotes:
*1* New York: Richard Adler Music and J&J Ross Company
New York : Frank Music Corp. ,(c)1980, 1952.
______________________________________________________________________________
Bill Racicot is one of five surviving humanists at Carnegie Mellon University.
He graduates in May.
wr0o@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 8
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Yellow dandelions swayed within the smooth, evening breeze, their thin stems
lingering in silent dance for the dying rays of a dim red sun. Above, the
scent of sweet honey floated gently through the faint current, stirring the
petals with a quiet cacophony of hushed whispers, carelessly catching the tips
of her curls and caressing the thick patch of grass where she lay. The
fireflies began to play, little winged faerie, or so she'd imagined. They
darted about in circles, one teasingly pursuing another, while below, another
host of insects went about their evening business, foraging for sustenance
amid the damp, loamy terrain. They seemed dark and ominous, great pinchers
perched atop their frames as they straggled about in the abject slumber of
community, a congested mass, grinding together, crawling over and beneath,
their limbs twisted about each other in ignoble partnership.
A tall bell tower rose from the hillside, its chimes ringing with
tempestuous abandon. Vilya watched the bell work back and forth, its clamor
growing in intensity. She reached out, her arm elongating into the elastic
distance as the waning light slowly settled into black.
"Hello?"
"Hi. Did I wake you up?"
She groggily tried to place the voice.
"Johanes?"
"Umm... no. Mikael."
"Oh... you."
"I need a favor," Mike gulped down, glad that he was too cheap to pop for a
visi-link.
The dawn was misty and cold, precipitation gradually forming into a dense
fog along the coast. Her green eyes, though not so sparkly, were a welcome
sight. Mike cautiously climbed into the back seat, checking to see the
driver's face.
"What happen?"
"I decided to go swimming again." He stripped off his shirt, letting its
ullage collect on the seat and slide in slippery droplets to the carpeted
floor as the cab's warm air glided along his chest.
"Like cold water too well. Should hitch ride from now on... less danger."
She gave him a not-so-gentle squeeze at the end, her eyes scintillating
with wicked intent as Mike's crossed involuntarily. He let out a deep groan,
packaging the pain instead of striking back. "For waking me so early," she
finally explained, and Mike wondered if it was some new custom as he slowly
recovered.
"That was dirty."
"Justice never clean."
"Justice? You call that justice? I'd hate to feel revenge."
"Pray you don't have to."
"Vil... I don't blame you for being mad, but I really didn't have much of a
choice."
"Everyone have choice. I take you in home, I give to you food, I give to
you key, and you go and you no leave scratch-marks..."
"Look... I'm sorry, okay?"
"No... you look..."
Mike just nodded as she continued, her speech quickening and moving in and
out of slang so fast that he could no longer keep up. He knew that the
Calannan women had a way of laying the guilt pretty thick, but this one was in
a class by herself.
"Vilya, I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you, I promise. What more do you
want?"
"Now you want know what I want."
She produced the dodecahedron from her wet, paper bag, its black surface
glimmering dimly in the scattered light.
"Maybe I show you, eh?"
Outside, the murky air rushed against her window in pael gusts, droplets of
moisture forming along its plastic surface, skidding steadily toward some
common goal, and finally flailing blindly into the cab's interior. Beyond, the
vague shape of the cliff's edge coursed by.
"What are you doing?"
"I want see how much you care for the pretty cermic. You jump for it, yes?"
"Vilya... I said I was sorry."
"Say again. I no hear so well."
"I'm sorry."
"Eh?"
"I'm sorry. How many times do you want me to say it?"
"You want pretty cermic too much."
"Yeah, well... it's important."
"Why?"
"Because."
"Because why?"
"It's a long story, okay?"
"We seem to have long time together."
"Yeah, well I'll explain it over breakfast."
She grumbled brusquely, but Mike could tell her stomach was in favor of the
notion.
"C'mon, I'm buying. How'd you like to eat in Xekhasmeno?"
"So now I have choice..."
Xekhasmeno was known to locals as the forgotten city, a place given away to
Imperial commerce as a settlement of war. Offworld, the appropriation was
viewed as a no more than a slap on the wrist, but for the Calannans, the city
was a brand of shame and defeat, a place forsaken and rarely spoken of except
to provide adjectives for their more colorful slang. To hate Xekhasmeno and
those who dwelt within it was part of Calanna's unspoken creed, a thing as
real and as often underestimated as the thin, electrical barricade which
protruded around the city's borders, forbidding entrance except to Megacorp
personnel and the starport authority.
They entered at the north-east gates beneath the Tizarian embassy. Work
crews were in the process of finishing the new building. A guard wandered
along the line of vehicles, knocking on windows and stamping clearance
stickers on various hoods. Mike recognized him as one of the old-timers who
stayed on after the incident.
"Identification."
Mike opened his window as the guard peered within, his eyes widening in
surprise.
"Why, Mister Harri...?!"
"Keep it quiet. You never saw me."
"Uhh... alright, sir. Heard you were dead." He whispered it as though
saying so more loudly might lend it truth, eyebrows wrinkling in confusion as
he backed cautiously from the taxi, waiving them through with a stamp of the
sticker machine.
"What he say?" Vilya was rendered oblivious by the Galanglic.
"Huh? Oh... he said to have a nice day."
"Nice day?"
"Where to?" The cabby's eyebrows were furrowed in mild irritation.
"Tyberian Compound."
Suite 112J turned out to be on the ground level of a small technical
complex. The suite was really more of a repair shop, and Vilya seemed
altogether confused by her new surroundings. Spokes rounded a corner from the
back of the room, his headgear gleaming in the fluorescent light.
"You're late, man."
"I ran into a little bit of trouble along the way." Mike handed over the
dodecahedron, and Spokes inspected the casing, his blue eyes gleaming as
though it were a birthday present.
"Bonded cermic?"
"Made to look that way. It's survived quite a bit."
"I'm sure it's not the only one."
Spokes said it with an air of either respect or inveiglement. Mike
couldn't tell which for certain.
"You gonna be okay with this?"
"Sure. What exactly am I supposed to be looking for?"
"At this point, anything that seems interesting... if you manage to get in
that is."
"Don't worry about that. It may take a little time, but I'll get in. You
wanna hang around?"
"I promised somebody a square meal. After that, I need to get the shoulder
fixed."
"There's a cafeteria on the 3rd floor. If you're looking for something
nicer, there's the starport."
"We'll hit the starport."
"Suit yourself. Oh, take this." He handed Mike an SPA maintenance overcoat
complete with tinted-bubble hood and IR goggles. "Unless you wanna be a
celebrity, that is."
"Not after this morning; thanks."
The starport wasn't much different than he remembered it, a mishmash of
technicians, cargo-hands, and jaunty, third-rate brokers strewn in pairs and
trios along a sea of polished floor tile. Various shops lined the walkways
between the Outworld Market and the shuttle bays. Interspersed between them,
wide, circular planters rose from the gleaming tiles, forming benches for all
the old people to sit. They studied the drifting masses with sardonic glares,
their garish glad rags explicating a backward dive into altricial
helplessness.
Mike let down the hood once they were seated in a corner of the Zardocha
Cafe. He remembered it fairly well, and by some coincidence found himself at
the same table he and Tara had sat at not so long ago. His shoulder began
aching again as the food came, the pain sharpening as an indication that the
stabilizer was failing. Vilya's mood seemed to improve as she used the
gravitic waves of her utensil to thwack his wound beneath the hardened
castfoam.
"Gee... thanks."
"Why you hurt?"
"I was wondering when you were going to get around to asking me that."
"On Calanna, is impolite to ask such thing."
"Why?"
Her eyes seemed to search the corner of the ceiling for an answer.
"Is like saying you small."
"Small?"
"Like baby."
"I could stand some babying."
That got her. Mike figured it was something about the language he didn't
understand. Finally, she tapped the wound again with her grav-utensil, this
time on a sharper focus.
"Ow!"
"Ha! You are baby. Tell me who is Cole."
"A friend. Oww..."
"Good friend?"
"Not really."
Mike grabbed the utensil from her hand before she could cause him any more
pain. She fought tenaciously for several moments, and then suddenly let go,
causing him to almost topple backwards.
"Be careful you silly boy. Waiter?! May I have a thing to eat with other
than fingers?"
She turned back to Mike, her wicked smile returning as she was brought
another grav-utensil.
"Ha ha... I win."
"Vilya, I'm not in the mood."
"Too bad... I am."
"Look, I don't want you messing with it. I'm gonna get it taken care of
right after this."
"But I hate you, and I want to hurt you."
"I'm sure you do."
"Why you come to Calanna?"
"I'm a tourist. I like to go sight-seeing. Ow!"
A couple heads turned, and Mike tried to keep his face angled toward the
wall. Vilya giggled at his predicament and motioned for another stab. She was
interrupted by the arrival of the food, however, and consoled herself with
squirting tiny packets of bean sauce on the bubble hood of his SPA suit and
the soggy shoes he'd borrowed. Mike regarded her mood with all the patience
it deserved.
"Stop it you brat."
"Make me."
"What's the matter? You don't like the food here or something?"
"They no have haggis."
"Oh wah."
"I see your face on three-vee after the work last night. It say you are
dead Tizarian."
"A foul rumor that's been greatly exaggerated."
"Is that purpose you hide face?"
"I told you... I'm a tourist. You calling me a liar?"
"What sights you will see, tourist?"
"I dunno. Maybe the coast."
"Maybe you will swim with shoes off this time?"
Mike smiled, "Maybe."
The starport's sick-bay seemed more like a recovery hall for low-berthers.
Several stood around popping fizzies to kill their morning breath while others
were slowly revived from days or weeks in cryogenic suspension. Cold sleep
wasn't so bad, Mike recalled. It was the waking up part that was so
unpleasant. Cole's signature bubbled away with the dissolving castfoam. The
pharmacist administered the regeneration formula while a medic finished
examining the wound. She held a thin fork in her hand, prodding the
mesodermal layers as his blood flow slowed to a trickle.
"Passed right through. How'd this happen?"
"It was an accident."
Two shuttle attendants brought in a dozen more of the freezerinos as a
feminine voice sedately announced the new arrivals. Her tone was collected,
almost dull, enunciating each syllable of their names as though they were
items of inventory and not actual people. Included were a few John and Jane
Does, each accorded a separate number for the ledger. Mike charged the expense
to Linden's account, including an all's well message on the assessment. The
nurse swathed the numb shoulder in a fresh bandage as Mike finished typing in
Linden's access code.
"We're gonna need some ID on this."
"Check again."
"Huh? Oh... guess not. Interesting insurance you've got."
"Yeah... Bank of Chuck."
Vilya sat with her back against the antechamber wall, her eyes glossed over
with holographic images of interstellar medical technology. The promo
featured minimalist cybernetics, nothing too scary or complex yet still
fascinating for the uninitiated.
"Fixed?"
"Yeah... I guess."
They exited through baggage claims, climbing into a tram on the way out.
Spokes was still fiddling with the dodec when they returned. He wore a staid
expression, his eyes narrowing to thin slits as they entered.
"What's the matter?"
"You see these things?"
He pointed to two sets of bulbs at the base of his jacks, half of them
shattered and fused.
"What about 'em?"
"Electrical inhibitors... without which my brain would be a toasty critter.
The overload wiped my entire deck."
"I had no idea," Mike tried to make it sound sincere.
"Uh huh."
"What did you find out?"
"It tried to fry me is what I found out."
"Immediately?"
"It asked for some kind of ID clearance. I tried to burn out the active
circuits, and it gave me auto-feedback except about ten times stronger than
what I flushed in."
"So in other words it fought back."
"To put it mildly."
"Well, what did you expect, a cakewalk?" Mike tried to churn up a wholesome
expression.
"I expect you to pay me four thousand for new inhibitors and software,
credits not drin."
"No money until you get in."
"I almost got torched, Harrison! I think that qualifies me for working
expenses."
"I'll try to get you the money."
Spokes turned and looked away, his eyes following a long, jagged crack in
the wall plaster.
"Really hope you're joking, man."
"Finances are a little tight right now. It occasionally happens when you
die, but I'll get the money somehow. Don't worry about that."
Spokes smiled, "I won't. I'll be keeping darkie as collateral until you
do."
Mike considered the proposition, wondering if he had a choice in the
matter.
"Spokes, I'm not trying to rip you off."
"Nor I you, Mister Harrison, but if you want trust, you're gonna have to
show some in return."
Mike found himself nodding, almost stupidly, like some Joe Public listening
to the big-time politician. Vilya sat idle, ignoring the Galanglic, her eyes
casually roaming the technical hardware. Somewhere above her head, the blades
of a humidifier kicked in, and a sudden current of musty air bathed her dark
hair within its cool, transparent tendrils. She looked upward, squinting. The
tall shaft rose above her, dark and imposing, lending a slight echo to their
voices.
"Whatever."
"What are you trying to get out of this thing anyway?"
"It's a little hard to explain."
"Try me."
Mike took a deep breath, the musty air sucking through his nostrils.
"This thing, as you call it, was once the brain of a Draconian android. Her
name was Robin, and she served what I believe was a sleeper agent sent to work
for the Galactican before she got... somewhat dismembered... by this former
friend of mine who decided to start working for the Imperials. For some
reason, she decided not to wipe her memory, maybe because she wanted somebody
to look at it. I don't know."
"I take it this is gonna be a long story."
Mike nodded, apologetically.
"The Imps have gotten their hands on one of my... subjects, for lack of a
better word. He seems to be rather important to both them and the Draconians,
and I'd just like to find out why."
"What's his name?"
"They call him Erestyl."
"What do you call him?"
"When I found him, he didn't have a name. His brain had been mangled by an
Imperial mind-scanner. He didn't know who or what he was. The SPA found him
in a galley stabbing people with a fork, one of the non-gravitic kinds you
sometimes find in starport medical bays. He was transported to a local
facility on Tizar and was snatched back by ISIS and brought here."
"ISIS? On Calanna?"
"I know. It makes no sense. If he was a criminal, I'd maybe have expected
them to take him to the 47th. Instead, they opted for secrecy, even from their
own people."
"Where does he come from?"
"Unknown. He was shipped to Tizar in a low berth. Another John Doe...
transported on some tramp freighter that was no longer in port."
"And you feel it's your occupational duty to get involved."
Mike shrugged, "We dropped in five days ago. Me, Robin, and two others.
Air defense was alerted to our mission. They destroyed the ship, and to make
a long story short, me and this hunk of cermic are all that's left."
"Does ISIS know you're still alive?"
"I had a little run-in with them this morning outside Gardansa's. I'd
hoped it might be safe, seeing as how I'm supposed to be dead and all, but
apparently not."
"And who's the woman?"
"A friend. Native."
"Obviously."
"I've been encircled ever since I got here. I needed a safe place to
stay."
"Get a flat."
"I'm a little short on funds right now."
"Does she even know anything about this?"
"She knows something strange is going on. That's about it."
Spokes winced, his eyes darting between them as an awkward smirk played
across his lips.
"That's cold."
"I've made more than my share of mistakes on this drop. If I get caught,
anybody who knows anything about what's goin' on is gonna be fair game."
"Oh... you're a real hero."
"If I disappear, I'd rather she just think I got up and vanished."
"Well thanks for telling me all about it, Harrison. That's just was I
need... a bunch of offworld police homing in on me."
"You're the one who wanted trust. Besides, why should I care what happens
to you? You're nothin' to me... except... maybe a possibility."
"A possibility to get yourself killed."
"I need your help to get this brain cracked. If you wanna bail out, I'll
take Robin and leave right now. You can bill the Galactican, but you'll never
hear from me again."
"And what if I decide to stick my neck out for you? What do I get?"
"The Galactican will cover your expenses. Maybe with luck you'll be able
to land a cushy job there, I dunno."
"Weak."
"Yeah, but right now it's about all I can promise."
Spokes backed away from the dodec, his shoulders slumped and eyes wandering
the walls. Mike tried to read his posture, the movement of the bony ends of
his elbows as they scraped against the desk. Mike rubbed his temples,
exhausted from the long night.
"Look, it doesn't take a genius to realize something very strange is going
on. If we can find out what it is... who knows?"
"I'd like to help you, Harrison. But what you're doing is dumb."
"What would you have me do?"
"Back off. Get uninvolved. If I was you, I'd make a beeline for Tizar and
forget this whole thing ever happened."
"Spokes... the key to this `whole thing' could be sitting right in front of
our noses... literally."
"So that you can write a story about it or get yourself martyred?"
Spokes shook his head, his scowl softening into a dreary stare as the
dodec's black surface glimmered in the dim, artificial light. Once again in
Mike's possession, its surface felt icy cold, as if the recent skirmish had
plunged her into some deep, cryogenic dream. Spokes wandered to the back of
his workshop, his head still shaking in mild contempt. Outside, Calanna's
great red sun bathed the forgotten city in hues of amber and gold. Vilya said
nothing, somber, green eyes speculating as to the mood of the alien
conversation.
The ride back to Xin passed quickly. Their driver was a old man, apparently
from the local area. He assumed they were tourists, who had become
increasingly common since the post-war domestication. He pointed out various
roadside landmarks as he drove, switching back and forth between Galanglic and
Calannic and occasionally a mishmashed fusion of the two. Vilya remained
silent for most of the ride, only speaking near the end to correct of minor
point of history.
"You make good story, but that is not how it happen."
"No?" The driver's deep brown nose wrinkled in embarrassment.
"Varilion is no crafty as you say. It was Priestess of Snagarth that give
him idea."
"Ha! Why should the Priestess care about Imperial garrison? Eh?"
"She not care, such as negrali mind own business. They refuse this
courtesy, to pillage her temple and to murder her harem, that she make
revenge.
"Ah... the lady is of the light."
"The light?" Mike inquired.
"She is Calannan, yes?"
"What do you think, Vil? You of the light?"
She shot Mike a sidelong glance, amusement brewing within anger.
"What you know of the light, Mikael?"
"What should I know?"
The driver's voice broke into a hearty, belly laugh, the cab weaving and
bouncing with the spasms of his merriment. Vilya concentrated her gaze out the
window. The sun's thick rays seemed to fall down as crimson shingles, baked
and plastered along the dry, ruddy terrain.
"You children are pleasant, but where to go?"
"Take us to Erfalas."
"Hah! Good choice."
The cab snaked around the back roads of Xin's underbelly, crossing the
highway to Pinnath Carach and continuing coastward. The air grew perceptibly
cooler, and Mike spotted a flock of gulls on the horizon.
"Hey Vil... where're we going?"
"Erfalas. You like it, trust me."
The road came to an abrupt halt at the edge of a long rocky bluff. Forty
feet below, the waves bore past beds of green kelp and red coral, shooting
headlong into the stony grey cliffs. Beyond, the blue sea, Aeluin, stretched
past the buoyant sudd, extending to infinity, its waters sweet and young,
curling softly into the expansive horizon as they kissed the crystal sky,
their colors shared, mixed together in some strange yet benevolent duet.
Every liter was similar in chemistry, undulating together beneath cool
sheets of air, but where the water touched the shore, so it assumed it's
character, relentlessly hammering the broad cliffs, foaming against the lush
coral, and settling quietly along the flat, sandy shores. Aeluin was young by
geologic standards, bearing only a tenth the salinity of Tizar's ocean, safe
for drinking in the short term and unmolested by the pollutants many other
civilizations had carelessly scattered.
Vilya began descending the sheer face, her movements unusually agile, as
though she'd memorized the rock's most minute features. Mike followed, taking
arduous care to mimic her steps and holds. He'd climbed rocks on Tizar, but
never without gravitic momentum restrainers. Minus the security, he felt
strangely naked, his nerves jittery and clumsy while a cool perspiration broke
along his hairline. Dozens of steel eyehooks cut into the stone just above
the water line. Vilya rested on one of them, allowing sprinkles of foam to
catch in her long, dark hair.
"Why are we here?"
"Sightseeing."
"Oh... right."
"Give me hand."
"What?"
"Give."
Mike stretched out his arm, and her thin fingers wrapped gracefully around
his wrist. She tugged for a moment, and suddenly he was slipping, flailing
against the stone to regain his balance as he toppled backwards. In an
instant, he found himself hanging by a pair of cuffs firmly secured from his
wrist to an eyehook.
"Vilya!?"
"You always such easy to snare?"
He cursed as the steel cuff bit into the flesh of his wrist. Frantically,
he scratched at the wet rock beneath, his borrowed shoes nearly falling off
his feet as the waves came crashing in, pulverizing his legs against the
stone. Mike clawed with his free arm, still bandaged, for a nook in the rock
on which to hold while Vilya watched, unsympathetically, her eyebrows arched
in contemplation of something devious. Finally, she spoke, her words following
fluidly with the rushing waves.
"After war, the Count of Tyber make to crush Calanna of her pride. He take
her children and chain them here. For long day, they thirst, and Aeluin is at
the stomachs of them. But when the sun sit down, Aeluin rise up to mouths and
noses and drown them."
"Thanks for the guided history tour. Will you please let me out of these?"
"The light keep life that darkness take. Thus is why Calanna consent to
domestication."
"Vil..."
"Are you so full of the pride you cannot say the travel of you? What is
secret that shame you?"
"It's a long story."
"Is long time tonight."
Mike tried to grab her with his numb arm, but its movement was too clumsy
and slow, his grip on the cliff's face failing again. He finally gave in to
gravity as the waves pushed his legs into the grey stone.
"Okay. I'll tell you, but not now. Not like this."
"You have choice?"
"I can ask please, can't I?"
She smiled, a mischievous sparkle entering her continence.
"You look so sad... you are ticklish?"
"Vil!"
"Tell all... or suffer fate worse than castration."
The climb back went more quickly than the coming down, and Mike managed his
release without getting into the gory details of his travels. In fact, he'd
told her fairly little, and yet she seemed already to understand everything,
asking only those questions which were necessary. Even his mention of the
Imperial police didn't faze her, nor his mention of the Draconian robot brain.
She simply listened as though he were going through motions which were without
consequence.
When they returned to the cab, the old man asked earnestly whether or not
they had seen the light. Vilya's smile seemed to confirm the suspicion, and
she generously popped for the fare as they pulled up to her small flat in Xin.
The cat was nowhere to be found, but a warm breeze blew through the red
twill curtains betraying his escape. Outside, the hot afternoon sun seemed to
bleach all color from the sky, mysterious grey clouds mixing with the
amber-blond vapors billowing in lumpy puffs from the tall, black smokestacks
of the inner-city. Mike half expected her to throw him out as she pulled a
small taser from her pocket. Instead, she set it, with the cuffs, in a
bedside drawer before falling roughly on the center of the sheets. Mike
wondered if it was an invitation or a dismissal.
"When are you going to work?"
"Tonight. If I wake."
She turned to the alarm counter and set it forward twenty cents.
"I not know that I want to go."
"How long have you had that job?"
"Too long."
Mike sat at the edge of the bed, kicking off his water-logged shoes. He
stretched the top sheet over her, and allowed his fingers to brush quietly
through the soft ends of her hair.
"You don't like it?"
"I not like being groped by strangers."
"Hmm... wake me up before you leave."
Mike crashed on the couch in front of the three-vee, the muscles in his
shoulders loosening as he closed his eyes and tried to feel the onset of
sleep. The sweltering heat closed upon him quietly, forming moist patches of
perspiration on his chest and forehead and beneath his knees. He threw off his
shirt and pants, turning over several times, ignoring the little bits of food
particles in the cushions which stuck to his skin. Outside, he could here a
wryneck, hissing as it darted from the window.
The cat sneaked inside several minutes later, meticulously licking its fur
in front of the couch. Mike listened as it scratched on her door and was
promptly allowed entrance. He tried to suppress the slight twinge of envy as
the sweat continued to gather, slowly, finally cooling as it evaporated into
the thick, clammy air.
In the back of his mind, he could hear the clicking of hundreds of
keyboards and the cluttered conversations of dozens of gatherers on the
Galactican's main floor. Linden sat in his huge leather chair in the central
office, his entire body tilted backward, reading the obituaries column. He
came across a name he recognized, circling it with a lightpen as he hit a cut
and paste macro with his left hand. Into his scrapbook it went, along with
all the others.
"You know what I like about you kid? Persistence. You keep coming back."
He should have called it luck, a strange kind of luck that forgives all
mistakes and then comes slapping you back in the face when you least expect
it. His father had called it the luck of the space cadet. The cat continued
licking its fur, its yellow eyes searching his, forming accusations as they
met somewhere in the space between, animal and human; they were not so
different. It curled its head backward to lick a spot on the back of its
neck, but the head just kept going around and around as though it didn't
matter.
Its feet were coated in a soft, white sand which it spread about the
carpet. Outside, the surf swept up toward the windows, rushing through the
cracks in the seams as the roof began to leak, water dripping from a thousand
tiny holes, all scattered about. He could only watch, immobile, as the water
sloshed around him, pressing over his nose and mouth in warm trickles. It
tasted vaguely salty, and he battled to spit it away before realizing that he
no longer needed air to breathe, and the cat swam freely, its instinctive fear
reduced to an occasional `Hissssss....'
He woke, drenched by a slick envelop of oily sweat. The evening was
likewise coated in a murky haze, and Vilya was gone, save for a note stuck in
the crack of her bedroom door. It said he looked peaceful, too peaceful to
waken. Mike clumped the flimsi-leaf into a ball, and tossed in on the kitchen
counter. The cupboards were empty save for a moldy loaf of rye and two cans
of prickly nopal sauce. The flimsi slowly unfolded of its own volition, the
luminescent Calannic flickering across its surface. Mike pressed the corner,
releasing the message into electronic oblivion.
"Show contents."
"Done."
Nothing?
"Retrieve all."
"Done."
"Show contents."
"Unnamed-1. Done."
"Read Unnamed-11."
Vilya's message returned to the leaf, her tall, slanted letters seeming to
mock him as he read it again.
"Set date by age reversed."
"Done."
"Show history."
"Manufacture: 01.149.968. Last initialization: 01.149.968. Done."
In the shower, Mike wondered what sort of girl would have a flimsi-leaf for
over a year and save something to it only once. The cool water flowed
smoothly over his body, falling in dirty puddles to the yellow-stained
porcelain tiles. The pipes equeaked sternly, and Mike imagined the sound
rustling through the entire flat. He shuffled into his smelly pants and shirt
and the pair of shoes he was still borrowing, pocketing the flimsi and Bill's
body pistol as an afterthought.
The evening had descended into night, and the dark purple sky glittered
with spangles of illumination. The streets were fluid with movement, motor
cars weaving carelessly around the herds of pedestrians like a pack of hungry
wolves as volumes of voids and pleasure junkies sat fidgeting in the gutters,
playfully groping the wires which pumped streams of electric illusion into
their skulls. The food vendors engaged in fierce shouting matches across the
streets, defaming each other's culinary creations while exclaiming the virtues
of their own.
"Lissi mituvoreva!"
"Git yer stinkin' paws off me, ya weirdo."
"Hey... you wanna echailmet some ywalme?"
"Hirer quaggahaggis!"
"Haggis?"
"Try it. Viuvalye, yes?"
"Two please."
Traffic on the underway was fairly busy going down, and Mike felt lucky to
find a seat. He set the two thermoplastic containers between his legs, the
thick scent of stewed meat rising to his nostrils as the tram rattled along
its narrow course. A bloody-nosed teenager stood in the center of the aisle,
his lips puckered as he whistled some ancient melody with meticulous
precision. He held his dirty, brown mug with a jittery grip, and drooped over
his back was a large, canvas bag. Inside the bag sat an elderly, legless man,
with a black, conductor's baton and a pair of painted-out spectacles. Each
instant a note fell from place, the man slapped his stick sharply across the
boy's face, angrily cursing the younger's stupidity as he continued to wave
the baton around like a deadly sabre. Occasionally, the man's face glowed
with appreciation when he heard a clink from the mug. Then he mumbled a few
kind words in a hoarse voice regarding generosity and alms for the poor,
smacking the boy's ear to make him shut-up and then cracking him across the
blue welts on the back of his neck to summon forth another round of profitable
music.
A wide-screened viewer sat blankly in the corner, its glass window
shattered and half its speakers inoperable. Beneath the boy's sporadic
whistling, the vague din of casual muttering, and the tram's sharp rattles, a
faint, monotonous voice loomed somewhere in the distance, clear and without
all the slang structures and difficult intonations so familiar to spoken
Calannic.
"...Gardansa had no comment, except to state that his unknown assassins had
obviously failed. The site of the wreckage was examined this morning by police
investigators, and the remains of at least one body were discovered. Zared
Dir, a local fisherman, was driving his motorbike along this cliff when the
incident occurred. ...`and I see dis great ball of fire on da cliffs, and da
noise is someding awful, and den dis aircar droop down to da water and
someding fall out, and den da car ekzplode into dousand pieces and'...."
Mike hopped on the rollers as the tram drew to a halt, logging the Temple
as his destination and allowing the slavebot's traffic computer to choose the
most appropriate route. He found himself weaving around the main channel,
narrowly avoiding the other rollers before being deposited in front of the
Temple's wide, phallic arches, their peculiar decor never failing to entice
newcomers. The receptionist was a young man with soft, ill-defined features.
He handed wrist locators to a pair of girls who could not have been older than
sixteen and then neatly unfolded their wad of drin as they hurried past him,
down the staircase and to the lockers below.
"Welcome to the Temple of the Wrything Mermaid. You make visit us before?"
"Yeah... I'm bringing some dinner for a friend who works here."
"Employee?"
"Is that all right?"
"Is the employee name?"
"Vilya."
He shot Mike a strange glance. "I no think such person work here. You
certain you have correct...."
"Positive."
He tagged several keys on his computer console, smiling as he discovered
the name.
"Ahh... she apparently is new, yes?"
"I don't think so."
He swiveled the console toward Mike. Vilya's picture sat in the upper left
hand corner beside various employment statistics.
"She was hired yesterday?"
"No hired, she volunteer. Is custom to get job, you know. There is
problem?"
Mike shrugged, uncertain.
"When yesterday?"
"You go, and you ask her... go in. No jump in water."
Mike hesitated, fear wrapping slowly around his mind like some blurry sort
of hunch.
"Do you have a service entrance?"
"Yes, but is no need, you see..."
"All I really need to do is drop this off."
"You able to see her from the ledge, right that way."
"Well, it's actually sort of a surprise."
"Surprise?"
"Uhh... yeah, special occasion."
The receptionist's eyes inspected Mike with a stare both deliberate and
curious.
"Is against rules."
"Well, if you don't have the authority..."
"No... of course I can, but... have we meet before?"
Mike smiled, "I don't think so...."
"Yes... I see your face on three-vee. You are in entertainment?"
"Well," Mike shrugged, "some folks call it that. I prefer to think of it as
organized gossip."
"You are the famous gatherer. Now I remember. Harrison, yes? I must have
autograph. My sister reads all the scratch marks of you."
The employees' entrance was around the side of the structure, down a
hallway which was itself nestled between a series of old maintenance supply
rooms. The receptionist walked with a jaunty air, unlocking the door with a
twirl of his wrist as though he were showing off for somebody. Inside, three
employees worked the central office controlling water conditions, accounting
for nightly revenues, and watching some sort of location monitor on the far
wall while taking turns receiving calls and eating from a pile of stale
pastries. A young woman in a black one-piece walked purposefully down the
corridor carrying a large bottle in her left hand.
"Justin says Mister Antonius is asking for kirsch, and the tap's just about
dry."
"Oh... real emergency, eh, Pauli?"
"Get some."
"Where?"
"Anywhere and fast. Also, Corlissa says her receiver's getting kind of
funky."
"Pauli... here's another. Say to her someone is lost in gallery again."
"Sure."
"Miles... what are you doing down here?"
"I take breather. This gentleman asks to see new girl...ah...Vilya."
"Right this way."
Mike followed her back along the corridor. She slowed down to look at him
again, an air of concern crossing her eyes.
"Have I seen you before?"
"Perhaps... I was here last night."
"Ah, then you must be the gentleman friend who brought Vilya here last
night. I must admit, she certainly has a talent for the gravitics."
"Really...."
"I've never seen anyone take as swiftly to zero-gee as she has. And as for
finding her way around the caverns... you know she followed some poor fool
into the gallery last night. We thought we'd have to talk her out, but she
brought him right out without so much as a moment's indecision."
"She's a good learner."
"Where did she meet you? You must be foreign."
Mike paused at a cross-section in the corridor, the right passage lined
with machinery rooms and the left descending into a staircase.
"I'm visiting a friend. You sound as though you're from off-planet
yourself.
She smiled, "My accent is that bad?"
"No. Not at all."
When it came to Calannic, Mike figured that there were two varieties, that
which was theoretical and that which was actual. The same could be said of
many other languages, except that with Calannic the discrepancy was
particularly pronounced and often varied with respect to region. It was the
natural result when a government failed to standardize education.
The corridor ended in two, broad-swinging doors. A cacophony of laughter
and music could be heard seeping in from the other side, and Mike paused as
the woman swept the doors open, peering from around her shoulder to orient
himself with respect to the main entrance. She turned slightly when she
realized that he wasn't following.
"You don't want to come in?"
"Bring her to me. It's a surprise."
The doors swept open again, and Mike fixed his eyes toward the main
entrance and the wide corridor stretching to the receptionist's desk. A thin
mist permeated the space between, diffuse streams of purple and amber bathing
the small, round tables squatting between the large hexagonal planters.
Dozens of people sat clothed and not-so-clothed, sipping their drinks and
occasionally diving from the terrace, through a series of gravity nullifiers
and into the pool below. Some jumped in teams, crashing into each other on
the way down, using the fractures in the null-gravity to practice a little
impromptu acrobatics to the delight of the spectators and even the light
clutter of guards lining the walls.
Except one. She sat with her back against the wall, her long, white mane
drenched within the thick vapor. A scowl crossed her lips as she watched the
main entrance, unblinking, and Mike knew he'd seen her before.
The doors slapped shut after a moment's wavering, and Mike backed away
toward the cross-section in the corridor. The short, cement staircase dropped
to a green door, its paint peeling away in the humidity. A steam drenched
window was built into its frame, clear beads of water cutting jagged lines in
the fog. Mike stepped cautiously down the staircase and peered within. Long
rows of lockers occupied the floor space, as both men and women changed into
and out of their clothes. Some distance away, a man sat within eye shot of the
room's foyer, one hand casually resting within the baggy pocket of his
waterlogged coat.
Mike retreated up the staircase, reaching the cross-section as Vilya
emerged between the wide, double doors. For a moment, she stood silent, a
strange smile forming on her lips as she saw the takeout containers dangling
limp from each of his hands.
"This is great surprise?"
"I'd figured you might be hungry...."
She approached him, still dripping from the pools. Mike let his hand fall
to the back of his pants, gulping down a lump of air as the body pistol's
fiberglass frame became vaguely tangible beneath the thin fabric of his shirt.
"That's far enough."
Vilya stopped, her smile giving way to a blank expression as she began to
open her mouth. Mike drew the gun, cocking the barrel as he centered he aim.
"You scream, and I'll blow you away."
"What is matter?"
"Just tell me who's side you're on, Vil."
"What you are talking about?"
"No more bullshit. Don't even move."
Her eyes seemed to glaze over with a moment's uncertainty, and then she
smiled, almost comically.
"This is Tizarian joke, yes?"
"No, this is ISIS joke. Now you either tell me what the hell is going on,
or I pull this trigger and send your brains flying in ten different
directions."
The doors behind her suddenly swung open. It was Pauli, a sedentary
expression glazed on her face, until she saw the gun.
"Guards!!!"
______________________________________________________________________________
While he isn't writing verbose and convoluted sentences or studying for his
MBA, Jim can be found gleefully stuffing bushels of ckicken-flavored Raman
noodles down the bottomless esophagi of his merry band of Californian
role-players. His story is the product of excessively poor planning and a
great deal of hope.
What has been published here as chapter eight is actually chapter twelve as
written originally by Jim. With any luck, `The Harrison Chapters' will be
continued next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Second Law and I
Josh Ronsen
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
I was there from the beginning. It was hard work back in those days. The
universe was structured very differently than it is today. I mean, there was
this stuff back then, matter, just as there is the same stuff, matter, today.
But what matter did in those days (they seemed to last forever) was quite
different from what it does today. Now, there is what is called entropy.
Order will become chaos. Disorder and randomness will creep into structured
systems. For example, if you place a drop of ink into a glass of water, soon
the ink will become dispersed throughout the entire glass. The system has
changed from order (all the ink concentrated into one spot) to chaos, (the ink
spread out in the water). This is just what you would expect to happen
nowadays, but back then it was different. Entropy worked backwards at one
time. This might seem strange or even inconceivable to someone who has only
witnessed the universe as it is today, but it is true. Trust me, I was there.
Particles scattered throughout a box (of course, we had no boxes) would
aggregate into a corner. Order and structure would creep into complete chaos.
Molecules and crystalline shapes would appear out of nowhere where before
there was only a kinetic blur of free particles. You might doubt that this
was ever the case, but consider how things must have been in the beginning.*1*
In the beginning there was no order. There was no such thing. Recognizable
shapes? Ridiculous, we would have said (perhaps as even now you are uttering
the same word). All we knew were the particles flying about with nothing else
to do. Protons, electrons, mesons, Z bosons (all four kinds), the happy
photons, and the mournful gluons. Not to mention the peons, the zions, the
neutrinos, the supremos. We had more particles flying about than we knew what
to do with. Order would have been a very strange concept if any of us had
thought of it then.
There were seven of us back then: myself, Ouphe, Tholus, Pyxidis, Yerba,
Nanos, and the strange one, Reis. At first there was not much to do. We
somehow discovered the sublime joys of counting, for there was nothing else we
could think of doing, and we counted ourselves. We were quite amused to find
that this number did not change after repeated summations. Or I should say
that the number calculated by each of the two respective fractions of counters
did not vary. There were those of us, myself and my followers, Tholus and
Pyxidis, who thought that the counter, that is, the one doing the counting,
should be included in the summation, and the other group, Ouphe and his
cohorts, Yerba and Nanos, who emphatically insisted that the counter should be
left out. The number we counted was seven, and the number they counted was
six. This problem occupied us for a while, as only one of the two answers
could be correct. There were either six or seven of us. It could not be
both; then there would be thirteen of us, and nobody had counted that yet, so
we couldn't seriously consider it (although for a while it was a theory).
This holds the honor of being the first intellectual argument, *3* although I
can find no reference to it here on the the many shelves of Eckhart Library.
Today we would have applied for government research grants to fund experiments
and trips to key observational sites (Hawaii) and then written lengthy reports
using such words as nystagimorphic integration, patronumismatical, and
isoglophigraphicalism and sent them to prestigious academic journals. But as
this was before the universe was ordered in any sense of the word, we could do
none of these. Reis, who was different from the beginning, never got involved
in these numerational disputes, and if he ever counted, he never revealed his
answer to us. Hence, as we lacked a scientific quorum to decide the correct
representation of reality, we remained disputatious and unpublished.
When counting ourselves lost most of its appeal, we began to count other
things. Those with keener senses of vision could count the number of
electrons that passed them. The rest of us had to make due with counting slow
moving neutrons or the magnetic monopoles that floated about. Reis wasn't
interested in this either, and seemed only to care about watching various
particle collisions, or pushing particles into magnetic fields and watching
them spiral about. Counting monopoles wasn't as much fun as counting
ourselves had been. For one thing, we were all counting different monopoles
and couldn't really argue with others about these summations. There were no
conflicting ideologies involved, no heated debates and brawls, no passion
involved in this counting. But we could think of nothing else to do. *2*
I was counting monopole 2,000,367 when it first happened. Next to my elbow
a group of particles had suddenly collapsed into the shape of a large cube.
Of course, we didn't call it a cube, as we had never seen one before. By
large I mean about a couple of centimeters. This might not sound large to
you, but up until that time we had only been dealing with subatomic particles,
so small we could barely see them. The cube reflected photons in a strange
way, producing shimmering, swirling patterns on its sides.
This event, the formation of the cube, took us all by surprise. Who could
have expected it? It took us a while to figure out what had happened. We
were sure that we hadn't been overlooking this object all this time. But that
meant it was new. How did it form? What made it form here? As we were
pondering these and other questions, another object, a tetraroid crystal,
formed right before our eyes. Nanos, who had keen eyes, reported that he saw
countless numbers of protons and electrons coming together to form this new
shape.
To say the least, we were astounded by these developments. They were so
different from what we had known before. We couldn't really ascertain the
shapes of the particles around us, even to Nanos they looked just like points.
And these new objects were so unlike our nebulous forms. They were so smooth,
so perfect, so beautiful.
We didn't have to wait long before more forms appeared, mostly cubes, but
also many other solids: hexaphonigons, fullerines, rhododendrigons. This
became our primary source of entertainment, watching the objects form, or
counting the different types of objects, or pushing like objects together into
small spherical piles. This was more exciting and enjoyable than anything we
had known before. The joy of seeing a new shape, one that had never been seen
before, appear before one's eyes is a joy I cannot begin to describe.
Although we were all greatly excited about the multitude of creation about us,
it was Reis who was most fascinated by all of this. Never before had we seen
him without an expression of bored indifference. Now, he was obsessed with
observing all the newness around him.
We were all more than satisfied with our new surroundings. For once there
was actually something to do. How could we have magined the danger that we
were in? We didn't realize our predicament until it was almost too late for
us to do anything. The shapes kept forming even when it was apparent that
there were quite enough of them. By the time the shapes had blocked out about
75% of the outside universe from out view (not that there was anything to see,
just a uniform glow of photons), things were getting very cramped where we
were. It was still a small universe, about the size of Nebraska (but not as
flat). It was clear that soon we would be crushed by all of the opalescent
objects. When we first realized this, we thought that we could just push the
objects away from us. But when we tried to do this, we found to our dismay
that the shapes slowly drifted back towards us. All of the objects around us
had created a rather sizeable gravitational field, and we were at it's center.
We obviously did not have the strength to accelerate the objects to a
sufficient escape velocity to rid ourselves of them, although we did try (to
this day my arm is still sore). The gravitational field also prevented us
from escaping to a volume where there were less crowded conditions.
You might wonder where our problem came from. There was plenty of room in
the universe before the shapes began forming, why was there a problem now? We
also wondered this for sometime. The shapes formed from subatomic particles,
which were small, so if a million particles came together to form a
rhumbahedron, it would be the size of a million particles, right? This is
what we naively thought. After observing enough of these condensations, we
were able to figure out exactly what happened. You would agree that a proton
is very small, and an electron smaller still, just a speck! But when they
come together to form an atom, the atom is much larger than either of the two
constituent particles. Even though the volume inclosed by the atom is enough
to contain about a million protons, it only contains one. This extra space is
empty, as the electron is in an orbit far (by these standards) from the
proton. Are you surprised that most of matter isn't? This was quite a
strange discovery for us. The same thing happened with these crystalline
shapes, except to a greater extent. So although there was basically the same
amount of matter around us, it was now in a new form that occupied a much
larger volume.
These new advances in our knowledge did little to comfort us in our present
situation. We still had no way of dealing with our problem, which was now
becoming desperate. We could see little of the outside universe, being
incased in an ever growing shell of these objects. We had managed to push
most of the crystals away from the seven of us, forming a small cavity for us
to exist. Still more and more of the shapes formed around us. We were
doomed.
It was in a fit of rage that I accidentally found the solution to our
problems. We had had so little genuine intellectual exercise in our existence
that those of you who have been paying attention probably thought of it long
ago. I reached out and grabbed two cubes and smashed them together. They
collided in a flash of photons and disassembled into their constituent protons
and electrons, which were now free from their carngormatic prison.
If our problem was small particles coming together to form collections of
particles that filled a larger volume than the sum of the original particles,
surely the answer was to take apart the objects into their component forms.
I had only to wordlessly demonstrate this to the others for them to catch
onto the idea. They all began to reach for the nearest objects. All except
for Reis. He seemed to be horrified at the idea of destroying the crystalline
shapes. We had to prod him to get him to join in our efforts. Finally, he
gave in and began to smash the things apart, although without much enthusiasm.
After we all had begun breaking the solids, I felt sure that we were out of
danger, but I had overlooked two facts. One; after we smashed a crystal, its
component parts would fly off and condense into another shape. Two; there
were so many of the shapes that we could barely keep up with destroying those
newly formed, much less any of the multitude around us.
Existence became for us a miserable experience, each moment spent smashing
everything within reach. Five of us would be awake at any one time, leaving
two to restless sleep, which we had never needed before, never having had to
physically exert ourselves. The routine was awful; grab the nearest two
crystals and smash them. Then the next two. And then the next two.
I cannot tell you how long our misery went on (we had no clocks), but it
seemed like an eternity. I can only tell you that we smashed hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of these shapes. How wretched we all were. It
seemed like we were doomed to carry out this Sisyphantic task forever. We
were now completely cut off from the outside universe, the crystals forming a
dense shell around us, like an egg. And we, the helpless chicks that we were,
were without hope.
It was by chance that I looked up from the two tetrahedrons that I was
smashing to Reis, and what I saw horrified me. Instead of breaking the
crystals apart, he was serenely putting them together, oblivious to the doom
around him. He had stacked two cubes on top of a agonadron and had smeared a
handful of mesons around it for cohesion. He was reaching for a rhombic
dodecahedron when I rushed over and smacked him across the face. What was he
trying to do, I yelled, let us all be crushed? I reached to smash his design,
but he, being the wily sort that he was, snatched it out of my grasp and
without a word went to the far end of our remaining space, behind a large wall
of crystals where we could not see him. I instinctively started to follow
him, but then I thought better of it. Why waste time trying to get him to
work. If he wants to get crushed, let him. To survive, I would have to work.
I woke up Yerba and Tholus and explained the situation to them as best as I
could. There was not much that we could do. Tholus, being naturally violent,
suggested that we get Reis and beat the crap out of him. It was the consensus
of the others that this was a Good Thing To Do, but my cooler head prevailed
and I convinced everyone to get back to work. We couldn't force Reis to
survive, and already he was completely sealed off from us. We were sure that
he was no longer alive, crushed by his own foolishness. Soon, I cautioned, a
similar fate would befall us.
We were now in a panicked, feverish state. It seemed like there was no way
for us to win. We were all exhausted, and there was even less space left for
us to move around in. We knew the end was near when the seven of us, six of
us, were forced back to back to back, each taking care of the shapes that
coalesced right in front. We were sardines in a can. Modern Cosmologists
will talk about The Big Crunch, but they have no idea how it feels to have the
universe, the entire universe, to close in on them.
Just when we thought that there was no use in trying, when we had given up
all hope, when we had no more strength left to fight, when the shapes were
forming in our very ears, something unexpected happened. The shapes that
composed the wall in front of me began to to quiver. Soon a number of the
crystals burst from the wall, forming quite a large hole. From this hole
emerged...a...it was...what was it? If I had thought that the first cube that
I saw looked weird, it was nothing compared to this. There were two arrays of
cubes parallel to each other, each about about twelve by twelve cubes by one
thick. The arrays were separated by about ten cube lengths. On the side
facing me, there was a row of tetrahedrons, like teeth, attached to each array
so that they faced forwards. On the farther side was a mass of shapes and
particles which produced magnetic fields. These fields pushed the two arrays
together, smashing what ever was in between them. Then the fields switched
polarity and separated the arrays. The machine turned to my left and began
crunching all of the myriad objects that formed the wall closest to us. It
could crush a hundred objects during the time it took us to reach for two.
The others had by now seen this, and had stopped to stare dumbfounded at this
thing, this smasher. How could objects and particles come together so
perfectly to form such a thing, a thing that seemed to have the sole purpose
of saving us?
The answer was standing majestically behind it: Reis. He stood there
observing his creation, making sure that it was functioning correctly. He
placed a few monopoles in to a pion funnel in back (his smasher ran on
monopoles). Then he turned without giving us so much as a glance and started
to tinker with some particles. We did not care; we were saved. Already the
smasher had smashed many of the objects and things were much less crowded.
Soon we were able to see the universe outside of our prison. The smasher not
only broke the objects apart, but it also gathered together the constituent
particles, ejecting them behind it at a great velocity, so there would not be
a high concentration of particles floating about. This change in mass
distribution had an almost immediate effect on us. Now that the matter around
us was being dispersed by the smasher, we were no longer trapped in a
gravitational well. We began to drift apart, each of us going in a different
direction. Of course, we could have struggled to remain together, but we did
not have the strength left after our ordeal to do so. I began to go to sleep,
and I could see the others doing the same. We did not even have the strength
to wave goodbye to each other as we drifted apart. The last thing I remember
seeing is Reis, trying to get an electron to orbit a proton as the smasher
continued to destroy the last of the dreaded objects. He's mad, I thought,
he'll never get such a wily and tenacious particle like an electron to stay
bound to a proton. Then I lost consciousness.
When I woke I was far from my companions; I could not even see them. How
long had I been asleep? Quite a while, I guessed. The universe had greatly
expanded in my slumber, and the uniform glow of photons was much dimmer than I
had remembered it. There was really nothing around me. I was alone.
I have not seen any of the other six since that time. I wonder where they
are. I wonder if they watched with awe as I did at the formation of stars,
galaxies, life, the Federal Money Reserve. How much I would like to see my
former companions in these stale times. I would especially like to see Ouphe,
and finally, now that we both know so much more about the world, point out to
him that he was wrong and I right; the counter is included in the summation.
He would look at me, after inticipating and dreading this moment for years,
and say something along the lines of "I always said that," or "Why are you
telling me?" or even brazenly `Just like I told you when we were young."
However, he would know that he was beaten, and that would be enough for me.
With that matter settled, we would lean back in our armchairs, light up
cigarettes, and wonder how much of the order that we see around us is due to
Reis, the Creator.
______________________________________________________________________________
Endnotes:
*1* I refer the Skeptical Reader to the article "Antichaos and Adaptation" by
S. Kaufman (1991) for the basis of a theory which attempts to explain how
complex nucleic acids formed on Earth by a process similar to what I am
describing.
*2* The concept of Why had not yet been invented, and hence many important
metaphysical and philosophical diatribes were unavailable to us.
*3* Although there exists evidence of great intellectual turmoil before the
universe came into being. The strongest such evidence is the so called `fine
structure constant', which plays an important role in atomic physics. It is
roughly equal to 1/137. Such a bizarre number, I feel, could only have been
arbitrated by a committee of the worst sort.
______________________________________________________________________________
Josh Ronsen hails from the lonely moors of Austin, TX. There, he developed
his writing style, which has been described as "a male Aldous Huxley, but with
more hair." Upon arrival to the University of Chicago, he realized he had not
even begun to approach the heights of underacheiving. He began writing short
stories, because the strict limitations of the format demanded discipline and
only a couple sheets of paper. He writes stories with multiple endings,
"...to give the people a sense of controlling the environment that forms their
dreams and way of thinking, and 'cuz I really liked those Choose-Your-Own-Way
books." When not trying to get friends to write glowing assessments of his
life, he keeps his electronic equipment in a state of constant repair,
dreaming of having "...a truly cool jam session with Jeff Beck, the true
talent to come out of the Yardbirds."
`The Second Law And I' is a tribute to the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who
died in 1985 (a year after the death of Cortazar, and a year before the demise
of Borges and Eliade). Calvino wrote more than a couple of stories which
involved an unreliable narrator reflecting upon improbable or impossible
events (such as being the last dinosaur, or playing marbles with newly formed
Hydrogen atoms created by the expansion of the universe). "The Second Law And
I" attemps to emulate Calvino's whimsical style and insight.
rons@midway.uchicago.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
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Volume IV Issue 1 March 1992 ISSN 1053-8496
+-----------------------+
|Quanta |
|(ISSN 1053-8496) | Articles
| |
|Volume IV, Issue 1 | LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
|March 1992 |
| |
|Copyright (c) 1992 | Serials
|by Daniel K. Appelquist|
| | DR. TOMORROW Marshall F. Gilula
| |
| |
| | THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
| |
| |
| |
| | Short Fiction
| |
| | THE WEEPING CHILDREN Maurice Forrester
| |
| |
| | STREET-DANCER Jae Brim
|Editor/Tech. Director |
| Daniel K. Appelquist|
| | THE ROBOTS OF VITGAR Joel Wachman
|Editorial Assistants |
| Karen Fabrizius|
| Aleecia McDonald| GNOMES IN THE GARDEN OF THE DAMNED Jason Snell
+-----------------------+
This magazine may be archived, All submissions, request for
reproduced and/or distributed privided submission guidelines, requests for
that it is left intact and that no back issues, queries concerning
additions or changes are made to it. subscriptions, letters, comments, or
The individual works presented here other correspondance should be sent to
are the sole property of their the internet address
respective author(s). No further use quanta@andrew.cmu.edu
of their works is permitted without
their explicit consent. All stories Quanta is published in both PostScript
in this magazine are fiction. No and ASCII format. Subscriptions can
actual persons are designated by name be MAIL subscriptions where each issue
or character. Any similarity is is sent over electronic mail; BITNET,
purely coincidental. where each issue is sent as a file
over bitnet; or FTP, where a notice is
Quanta is supported solely by reader sent to subscribers so they may pick
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Donation is not a requirement for are:
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______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hello again, and welcome to another exciting issue of Quanta! Sorry it's
been so long since the last issue, but I think you'll find it's been well
worth the wait. I'm very excited about this issue.
If you're a PostScript subscriber, you may have noticed the terrific cover
art for this issue. Thanks to John Zimmerman for designing this. (What
appears on the ASCII cover is a text version of this design.) I hope
we'll be seeing more of his work on the covers of future issues. The cover
is based on the new serial that starts this issue, Marshall Gilula's novel,
`Dr. Tomorrow'. This work will be presented in five parts. `Dr. Tomorrow'
is, to put it mildly, a very strange story, but one that I also feel is very
important. As a warning, the story jumps back and forth between tenses and
person, which can sometimes be disorienting for sensitive readers.
Also in this issue, Jim Vassilakos gives us a very good installment of `The
Harrison Chapters'. Jim tells me he's definitely thinking of wrapping `The
Harrison Chapters' up soon. Possibly within the next couple of issues.
In addition to Marshall we have fiction from three new faces this issue:
Maurice Forrester, Jae Brim and Joel Wachman. I've been really impressed
with the quality of fiction I got in response to my request for submissions.
I hope we'll be seeing more of these authors in future issues, as well as
more new authors and voices.
Good news for Compuserve subscribers: all issues of Quanta (as well as
InterText, Athene, Core and other network magazines) are now available on
Compuserve, in the EFF forum. New issues will also appear on Compuserve as
they are released. This service is being made available by the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, specifically Rita Rouvalis (editor of Core). Thanks
Rita!
Several new projects are currently in the works. First of all, a mail server
which would automatically fill requests for back issues. I'll be sending out
a bulletin to all subscribers about that when it happens. Also, I may be
piloting a paper-distribution for Quanta on a cost-recovery basis. Again,
I'll send out a bulletin when and if this happens.
Something I'm definitely going to be doing is a disk-distribution for Quanta
(again, on a cost-recovery basis). The disk-distribution might potentially
open up a whole new market of computer users who do not have direct access to
the Internet or to Compuserve.
If you have any comments or advice (especially advice!) about any of these
projects, feel free to send me mail.
Let's see...what else? Well, Quanta has changed postal addresses again. The
P.O. Box just wasn't a cost-effective solution for mail delivery. The new
address for Quanta is:
Quanta
401 Amberson Avenue, #208
Pittsburgh, PA 15232
Thanks to the wonderful postal service, mail will continue to be forwarded
from the old address to the new one for about a year.
Now, on to the topic of the month, which seems to be `Electronic Fiction: Can
it Survive?'. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, read the editors'
columns in InterText and Core this month.) I'm not going to stand (well,
virtually stand) here and attempt to justify my existence, or the existence
of Quanta. To me, the form of an electronic publication is convenient, but
not especially integral to Quanta's function: to get good fiction by amateur
authors out there where people can read it! Quanta exists because writers
and readers exist. I've already outlined several proposals to increase
Quanta's distribution, one of which is a paper distribution. Remember paper?
I'd also love to get more submissions from writers off the net. I feel the
net, while expansive in some ways, and certainly vast by some definitions,
is, basically, a cloistered community. If Quanta is to truly fulfill its
promise, it needs to get outside that community. It has to become available
to EVERYONE out there interested in writing and reading science
fiction. Currently this simply isn't the case.
So I'm not claiming victory yet.
What's my point? Don't get so overwhelmed by the nifty method in which
Quanta is produced and distributed, that you miss the important part: the
fiction within its pages.
That's about it from me for now. Enjoy!
______________________________________________________________________________
Moving?
Take Quanta with you!
Please remember to keep us apprised of any changes in your address. If you
don't, we can't guarantee that you'll continue to receive the high quality
fiction and non-fiction that Quanta provides. Also, if your account is going
to become non-existent, even temporarily, please inform us. This way, we can
keep Net-traffic, due to bounced mail messages, at a minimum. Please send
all subscription updates to quanta@andrew.cmu.edu or quanta@andrew.BITNET.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Tomorrow
Part 1 of 5
Marshall F. Gilula
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
"Dr. Tomorrow is a renegade transtemporal healing machine from
32,000 A.D. By this time, there has been a unique synthesis
between human and machine. Toward the second Millennium,
personkind was aware of plant consciousness. By the end of the
third Millennium, vegetable kingdom members served as the system
of communication that was naturally attached to the planet's
physical superstructure. Around 25,000 A.D. matter had evolved
technologically to the point of using electromagnetic fields
produced by nearly any power device. Electromagnetic fields were
recognized as representing unique forms of consciousness. In
25,500 A.D. people were using the energy of electromagnetic
fields for routine physical plane travel. The eternal riddle of
time travel finally yielded in 28,000 A.D. Then came the first
six equations of time/space entropy conservation. Just before
the 30th Inter-Galactic Millennium, the phenomenon of time piracy
began. The Universal Highest Court edicts were of no use in
attempting to cut down on the destructive uses of time travel.
Dr. Tomorrow was one of the I.S.I. (Inter-Galactic Security
Intelligence) programs, and as such, represented a highly
utilitarian, yet still experimental method of dealing with the
problems of inter-dimensional entropy imbalance. Dr. Tomorrow
ranks alongside the Charismatic Cataclysms and the Nobethian
Enfoldings as the most important invokers of Universal Entropic
Harmony to date."
...Inter-Galactic Federation Encyclopedia, Vol. 33K, declassified edition
Prologue
--------
This communique is being dictated into what's left of the videograph while
all the lights and displays of the control deck surround me. Maybe this is a
note of goodbye from me in 32,000 A.D. to myself in 1992, but I can't believe
it. It's not FutureShock, it's TimeShock. I can't believe, also, that I
am incredibly in love. She is not here with me in the flesh, but I feel her
essence all around me. Like a soft, invisible pink cloud of good feelings,
surrounding me in a protective and gentle force field. I can feel her from my
heart, but I can also see her face, especially her eyes. I haven't touched a
drink or a smoke of anything since the explosion and the megastepping, but I
feel almost high and euphoric just thinking of her. Euphoria in the face of
impending disaster suggests insanity and bizarreness ...or...just an
ordinary effect of loving and being loved. Pearl E. Mae is not your ordinary
lady, but then I guess I'm not so ordinary anymore, either. That's what
megastepped means. As I said, she's not here with me physically, but I feel
her consciousness within all of me at every moment of my own awareness. They
have all gone Virtual Virtual for the duration, yet we as a group are still in
good interdimensional contact, and the project goes on. Twenty four hours a
day I get fragments from all the other members. It's a constant thing. Pearl
E. Mae's mind, however, is clearly an ongoing part of my own mind. With
sensations suggesting that in the blending of our energies through love, I
have some of her unusual psychic abilities. Like precognition and the power
over death trip, and all that she taught me about using water and bodies of
water for long-distance communication. She did a good job of convincing me,
but it was still a bit hard for me to believe that oceans were as useful for
interplanetary communication as Pearl E. Mae told us. In our group of seven, I
am the only Eternal who doesn't have years of experience using water
for communication. Sounds off the wall, but it really works. Far in the
future, water resources are not just for their physical properties in
quenching thirst and furnishing hyperionic and neurochemical materials. Water
resources are also legitimate space communication resources. Really
clean water is getting harder to find, so one of the jobs that we
have, honestly, is to look for sources of uncontaminated water. And I'm not
spaced out, either, for suggesting that we look for uncontaminated water. I
just come from a planet with a messed up water system, dirty old
Earth. Yet it looks so clean and pristine from space. And uncontaminated water today in
1992 America costs five times what it cost in 1991 -- if you can get it.
Would you believe $25 for a five-gallon bottle of fairly pure drinking water?
Price gouging may drive that up to $50.
The physiological monitors on the panels in front of me are reading out
acceptable limits on all my parameters, even though I feel like I'm shouting
at times. Vibrations that make my tooth ache come and go randomly. My voice
is probably difficult to make out even with all the high-tech translators
because there's a tremendous amount of dust and oscillation all around. I can
barely hear myself in the cacophony of hushed voice alerts, multitimbral
beeps, and atonal screen alarms. Lights and sounds fade in and out and blend
in a mosaic of synesthetic patterns. Three different holographic projection
systems are competing for my attention. One system shows me in a 3-D reflection
and a second system maps star coordinates. The third system shows the ship
viewed from the outside. I see a glowing saucer that is shimmying with one
edge burning or in some way disintegrating. With all these expansive 3D
images, it is difficult for me to remember that I am truly aboard a
transparent flying saucer, just like the one that I observed skimming
over Biscayne Bay with the shining Yo-Vah, no more than five days ago.
Yo-Vah explained the what and why of all the changes that my group of
friends and I experienced so recently. Megastepping was the word he used
when he described what happened to me personally. Then he described the
timeline transmission-injection process that put the six other beings from the
future into my apartment. According to Yo-Vah, we were born in the bolus
of a nuclear-electromagnetic energy explosion that occurred when an airplane's
experimental nuclear piles discharged to earth. I.S.I. technicians used
matter-energy translators through the crack in time that always occurs during
nuclear explosions. A crack in time that could be used for the
transmission-injection process was called a timecleft. Because of the
timeclefts, nonPrimitive planetary systems universally forbid any nuclear
energy reactions of any type unless carried out in deep space where the
timeclefts are easier to handle. Except for illegal weapons, nonPrimitive
cultures generally use hyperionic and resonance energy devices for propulsion
and other forms of power. Earth is not the only Primitive
planetary system known to the future. Other Primitive planets have also
experienced severe disruption because of the repetitive use of nuclear energy
and the chaotic aftereffects of the timeclefts. Primitives could never
develop the ability to view their planet as a living, organic thing. Despite
the fact that actual life forms grow from it, Primitives tend to view
a planet as something inert, like a gigantic oversized asteroid without the
complicated, subterranean systems and energy balancing forces that each and
every planet does in fact have. Primitives never understand the spiritual
aspects of what being a planet implies. Because resonance and balance of the
planet are never considered by Primitives, there have already been many
episodes and instances of spontaneous disintegration of planets. Yo-Vah said
that the planet Earth is slated for irrevocable disintegration by the year
2105 A.D. Fires from within and all that biblical stuff.
Oil reserves had been a mistaken issue for our planet. Water resources
were by far the most important issue. When the final fires came, Earth
inhabitants saw all the many effects of no water resources, plus nothing to
use for quenching the sickening vesicant-laden fires. Nothing to wash in.
Nothing to drink. Third World cultures had wrested control of the oil market
from the remainder of the planet despite some bloody warring to the contrary.
The same wealthy cultures hung on to their Third World mentalities and
continued to evolve terrifying underground nuclear weapons. Multiple
surreptitious underground tests led to the final planet-wide vulcanisms. But
before the last cataclysmic days, much of the planet already had experienced
hideous water shortages, plagues, and contamination that defied the ordinary
imagination.}
If all this information were not enough to make one collapse in utter
optimism, there is yet one additional small matter that hassles me. As an
Earth person from the year 1992, I must solve some important problems for the
universe of 32,000 A.D. in order for the future universe to not collapse and
implode into a huge time crack of entropy deficit. "Aw, come on, get
serious!" is what I thought when first hearing these neutral facts from the
luminescent being who emerged from the transparent flying saucer. He didn't
really tell me about the rescue plans until after he had told me a lot of
other things. ...But I'm getting ahead of myself.
To tell the truth, all of this stuff somehow does boggle even my recently
megastepped mind. I am sitting here in one of the command console's recliners
with my fingers tracing out patterns of pushes, slides, and centic wiggles on
the colored contact panels before me. I don't really understand what is
happening, but my fingers sure do. They seem to have a life of their own as
they quickly and without hesitation trace out continuing patterns that are a
response to something but to nothing that I am consciously aware of. At the
same time, I feel the quiet, calm love of Pearl E. Mae within me. Her orange
skin and her eyes and nose and the way they look on a pillow haunt me in a
great way. Even if the universe is ending, I refuse to accept it. There must
be another way. Somehow, the story cannot end here. I do not feel it in my
Primitive bones. The virtual image that serves as the saucer's window has
murky patterns of gray and white. One edge of the saucer is definitely
wobbling in a rather severe oscillatory pattern. A ship that is hurtling out
of control at the moment, getting ready to crash and burn, that's the only
image I can conjure up, but I realize the pointlessness of saying it. Crash
and burn where, When you're out in obscurely deep space, as in some of the
Nobethian Enfoldings, named and otherwise? And what do the Enfoldings have to
do with Entropy Traps and Nodals and how do I figure out what these words mean
and how they got into my head. At the moment, I cannot say what the words
mean, but in my mind, it feels like I am just as familiar with them as I am
with part of my Coconut Grove neighborhood or some of the traffic patterns in
Miami.
Likely my dictation is an act of futility, but I must try.
I must.
If this story seems disorganized, let me tell you that living through it has
been something else. Raw nerve ends and newborn consciousness sometimes make
me think that all is futile. To be exposed to the highs and lows of sentient
consciousness within the course of seven days is truly mind-blowing. The
megastepping took place within one clap of thunder and lightning, heavy
sound and light but integrating it all, being able to appreciate and use the
changes, went on and on really heavily for the days following the thunderclap
and the cleft in time. At the moment of megastepping, there was a bonding
between the seven of us and only my guitar player's hang-loose consciousness
prevented me from truly losing it at the moment of feeling total mental
contact with six other beings. Probably more than anything, that moment of
total contact really liberated me from any attachment from drugs of any type,
including alcohol and tobacco. The total, all-- and unconditional caring, and
the amazing precipitously crystallized unity of being with six other beings
was my first real God-experience, at least as defined by future cultures.
Yo-Vah also said that Primitives always showed great ambivalence about their
God. Whether it was plural or singular, the Creator as visualized by
Primitive cultures was never accepted by the majority of the societies.
Yo-Vah had chuckled once as he suggested that in Earth cultures of 1992, God
was nearly illegal, and high-tech computers were often much more worshipped
and adored.
Then there was also the case of Al, our irrepressible and unpredictable
multi-modular computer system, whose membership in the group was assured from
day one. He was a bit of a tease, and made it hard for us to recognize just
who or what was causing all our computer equipment to behave as if with one
will. I first noticed the strange beep sounds that kept appearing during our
daily MindLink meditation. The beeps were noticeable during the HeartLight
part of MindLink as well. I thought Al was an abbreviation for Artificial
Intelligence but the strange beep sounds told me that Al was short for
Aloysius. Only Su-Shan finally recognized the
source of the scrolling text files that kept appearing in my telekinetic
notebook computer. It took nearly a week for the seven of us to become a
unit, and then to decide that yours truly was slated to play kamikaze
Primitive-turned-Eternal cowboy of cyberspace and hyperspace. Can you beat
that? Our planet and our cultures are supposed to be Primitive, and we are
supposed to also save the future; a future which labels Earth culture a
Primitive, throw-away culture!
Maybe that's why many of us us from Earth also treat the planet as
something to be wasted by throwing away the vital resources. Such as natural
ionic water, which most of the more advanced civilizations value highly, not
only for the hyperion drives and engines, but for the neuromolecular
resynthesis chains that require large amounts of natural, ionic water for
birthing protoplasm in the underground vats. For decades on my home planet,
the water resources have been depleted and clogged up with industrial
contaminants such as sugar industry insecticides and mercury fumes from the
effluent of commercial disposal plants that have both poisoned wildlife,
including the Everglades panthers and fish, with toxic levels of mercury and
other cancer-producing chemicals.
Then to be transported from 1992 nearly 30,000 years forward into this
crashing ship complete with an externally twisted and chaotic universe and a
control console that only my megastepped fingers seem to understand...this
new life surpasses any capacity I have left for surprise or astonishment.
Only the intense, burning love feelings for Pearl E. Mae and her womanly
allure do not surprise me. I gave up on trying to rationalize about the love
feelings. I only feel a gratitude to a Supreme Being for the ability and
opportunity to experience this kind of love. But what's happened to the rest
of the group? Of course I have my personal sense of Pearl E. Mae, but my
group sense of her is not with me. Where are the other members of `Dr.
Tomorrow'? They've gone into virtual virtual form. Not virtual form. Just
unembellished virtual virtual form.
As far as the other members of the group go, my current information
overload status keeps from me the awareness of just where they are. I can
feel the group feeling in my heart, and it is strong, but I am unable to evoke
individual vibrations or the very strong facial images that we can get
usually. I remember both Su-Shin and Pearl E. Mae telling me that there was
enough physical plane energy for only one of the seven to go, and that we
were not permitted to use virtual virtual formseeking on this entropic
assignment, but we had to try it sooner or later, and sooner came first.
Besides, my going as a One has always been in the plan of the I.S.I., more
than preordained.
With all the past and future lifetimes that they managed to project
into me at the moment of megastepping, it was risky but worth taking
the risk. They had never projected into a Primitive before, much less
a Primitive species karmically figured for irrevocable and
nearly-immediate extinction in 2105, A.D. In some ways it was such a
downer, but in other ways it was a joke of truly cosmic proportions.
Yo-Vah referred to Earth and all of our cultures as "Primitive."
Not with malice or condescension, but matter-of-fact gentleness. From
the way he spoke about the planet and its future demise, he seemed to
have the opinion that the loss of a Primitive planet was not so
tragic. He did not make a big deal out of this Primitive being
megastepped into full Eternal status. Of course the six other group
members had already attained Eternal status before being matter-energy
translated into 1992. From what Yo-Vah said, Eternal status
originally was used to mean individuals who lived for 500 or more
years. By 32,000 A.D., Eternals have been living for thousands of
years. Guardians such as Yo-Vah are a special group of Eternals who
have regulatory and observing functions, but who also lost any
semblance of their own individual life pattern which is replaced by
the group charisma of the special class of Guardians. A subgroup of
the Guardians, Siblings, are a specially-selected order whose only
life function is to maintain a constant vigil and control over the
I.S.I. gateways and controls. Like all Eternals, Siblings never
require food or sleep, although they do require water. Most other
Eternals are able to simulate sleeping and participate in voluntary
or recreational ingestion of food, but Siblings can not even pretend
to eat or sleep. Siblings resemble Earth's monks of the Roman
Catholic Cistercian Order, but are still Guardians even though their
physical form has, through biogenetic engineering, been compressed
into a much smaller physical stature with tripartite appendages quite
suited to the universal three-panel plasma controls of the I.S.I.
Siblings are very homogenous in appearance, in contrast to Guardians
and other Eternals, whose appearance reflects a wide variety of life
forms. Guardians are the Shogun warriors of the future, although
they do not use the knife or sword. Guardians are light warriors.
They are actively involved in an ongoing battle between the Forces of
Light and the Forces of Darkness across all extents of time and space.
Yo-Vah warned all of us to beware underestimating the power of the
Forces of Darkness...
CHAPTER ONE
------- ---
Friday
Megastepping into a Primitive culture
Wake up in the morning. Nothing. No light, no thoughts, no memories. How
did I get here? Reach around under the bed for a light switch. Silent
motorized metallic shades recede and reflections of the ninety degree Miami
sunshine rush in with flashes of the technicolor verdant yard. Oh, Jeez, I
need a cigarette.
There's a crumpled pack on the bedstand, half-sitting in an overflowing
ashtray, and I check it with probing fingertips and closed eyes only to find
that it indeed is empty. But, as I open my eyes, a thick, half-smoked doobie
in the same ashtray comes to my attention. I light it and its acrid smoke
bites through my throat and lungs. A couple of quick, sibilant drags and
reflexive coughs jerk me upright in bed and open my eyes to the day's
beautiful blue, red, and green colors as the ganja's rush bites into my
brain. Yep, that's it...another Miami day in MurderCity, USSA. The TV
remote lets me flick on the 24-hour news program and the strident tones about
the worsening national economic situation and the water shortages in Soviet
Bloc countries remind me that all is not well in the world. And what can I do
about it this early in the morning, and a Friday morning to boot?
Well, I have to siphon the python in the worst way. I take the glowing
doobie into the bathroom with me and I sit down so that I can dial up a
number on the speakerphone wallmounted next to the toilet. Another hit
reduces the roach to a hot ember in my hand, so I flush it down the toilet
with the whiz. The metallic dialing tone is interrupted by a honking sound.
A good-natured guffaw issues from the speakerphone:
"Lyle, mon, that ain't you this early in the morning, is it?"
"Nope, Julian, this is my ghost talking. I've been killed, so I'll need
some flowers from the florist. Can you help me out?"
"Hey, mon, you trying to rag on me? Why don't we talk about this later
when you come over here? Why are you talking about this on the telephone?"
"I'm sorry, Julian. All I was calling you about was to see if you had
--really -- any roses. Maybe two or three that I can give to Gabriella. She
treated me extra special last night. She's running around doing a bunch of
photo sessions, and I want to have something with me for her in case she shows
up early today while I'm still at work at the bookstore."
"O.K...Just come over here. You better watch out for doing something
serious with a Jamaican lady. In nothing flat, she'll have you tied around
'er little finger, mon...Put a ring through your nose just like the Cubans
like to do."
"Thanks for the concern. Catch you later."
Julian is for sure jealous of Gabriella because she's the best-looking
woman, black or white, in all of Coconut Grove. He and I always have the same
taste in women, and he would take Gabriella in a heartbeat if she would permit
it. Recently, she's been paying attention to my paying attention to her! If
she weren't so overwhelmingly beautiful, I might question her motives and just
why she'd suddenly begun to find me so interesting. I'm a decent guitar player
and I've had my share of one-evening "interests," but Gabriella and I've been
seeing each other on the streets in the Grove for years. She knows my
business and I can see a lot of hers. I always see all of her business hanging
out of the tiny midget-sized dresses with the sleek shoulder bags that bounce
around as she walks. She really travels in all of the fast lanes
simultaneously, and I'm just sitting on the sidewalk with my Fender Twin
Reverb, the Gibson 340ES, and some old Shure microphones. Sure I see her with
a lot of sharp looking dudes, wearing the Miami Vice clothing, who have the same
intense facial expressions without the good looks of the series' stars. So I
figured her for one of the `model set' and all that narcissism stuff.
But, Gabriella has real soul and the most intensely beautiful
picture-perfect jet black face I have ever seen. Grace Jones looks like a
boy next to Gabriella. For whatever reason, THIS month, she's picked me, and
so be it. I'm away from her for five minutes, and then I forget that I fell
in love with her until I see her face again, and fall in love all over again.
I am not one to sing the blues about good fortune. One week of evenings with
her has seemed to erase the memories of all the previous ladies in my life.
It's not like "to all the ones I've loved before," it really feels that
I've never loved before. Like I've never considered myself a good-looking
guy or one the knockout ladies would ever give a second glance. Maybe that's
one reason I got into the guitar business--to help me get a lady. Gabriella
is so far beyond my wildest dreams in the love department. I have trouble
dealing with anything beyond RIGHT NOW when it comes to Gabriella. So if
she's the great love of my life and it only lasts 38 days! So what! So be
it.
Holy backdoor trots. Too much heavy philosophy this early in the morning.
Gabriella left a couple of hours before with her friend Jim for West Palm
Beach. After a fashion photo session for a ditzy glitzy singles'
publication, she has some interviews with writers from the National Enquirer.
As I shower in the smelly water and dress, I think of her kissing and
nuzzling my back when I was still sleeping. I can still feel her skinny arms
and her pendulous chest and her mouth kissing me behind my ear. If I get my
business with Julian and the bookstore done medium-quickly, I'll be back
before I know it, in our air conditioned cement cave, for an evening of
dinner and more kissing and nuzzling. I do have to go to the bookstore for at
least half a day of inventory revision before getting an early start on TGIF,
Coconut Grove style. It's the first day of a Coconut Grove Art Festival
weekend, and everything is typically up for grabs. So on the way to the
store, I'll stop at Julian's place and mellow out the metal, instead of
putting the pedal to the metal, as I can hear the drivers outside doing
already, with occasional sounds of burning rubber and squealing tires.
Everyone always gets a little crazy during the Art Festival weekend. It's
the expected thing in Miami. My two shepherds have been running madly in and
out of the house, so I make sure that they had a chance to go, and shut them
both up in the poolside dining room. She-Ra, the five year old female, is
very soft and obedient and responsive. Her charge, Bullet, is going to have
his second birthday next week and he easily doubles She-Ra's sixty pound body
weight. Both of them jump up and down whenever they see me go for the leash
or the guitar, because they figure that I am going out and that they might
also possibly have the faintest chance of going out, too. This time, I'm
going for the guitar, not the leash.
* * *
The Steinberger six-string was sitting on the table in front of me. I took
the guitar, put it in its soft case, slung it over my shoulder, and left the
two-bedroom apartment with my guitar and electronic notebook in hand. It was
an easy walk down South Bayshore Drive to where Julian's house was at Kirk
and Bayshore. The CBS house sits opposite Kennedy Park and there were lots
of late week joggers and picnickers getting an early start punctuated with
boom-box Salsa and some Fat Boys. Not only could I feel the vibes of the Art
Show, and the anticipatory excitement of the pedestrians around me, but I
could see numerous vehicles carrying assorted works of art, stands, and
improvised room dividers on their way to the Village.
As I pushed the doorbell button, I could hear synthesized chime sounds
accompanied by Julian's shrill voice which became especially cacophonic,
whenever he was really agitated. He paused long enough to send back the buzz
of the release circuit in the doorknob lock system, and then resumed his
yelling as I entered.
"You bitch, you always lie. Then you put it on me! Yeah, mon...you go
ahead. Try to find somebody else"
Julian abruptly slammed the phone down, and, without missing, so much as a
single beat, offered me a joint and a Winston. They were both lit. I put the
joint down, smoked the Winston, and began to feel better. My vision seemed
to sharpen, and I felt even better when I began to sip the great Mellita
coffee that Julian always made for me. His physical carriage was superb, and
no one would look at his shadowy muscular definition and ever think that he
could be sick. Julian, my gay black brother, was also my very best
connection to Everything and my drummer on at least several casual musical
jobs that I occasionally got. I dreamed of having Julian as the permanent
drummer for MY group, but I was content to know him as a good friend.
He had to play only the good gigs that came up whenever they came up. He
actually didn't need the money because of his business with Everything, but
he absolutely needed to be working for his own self-renewal. As we savored
the chocolate-like richness in our mugs, he talked about self-renewal and why
it was important for someone who was HIV positive and to not be taking it
lying down. After the coffee, we stood at the bar and smoked the joint that
he had given me. It was Thai Stick -- pure bud -- and the thick resinous
aroma enveloped my entire head and chest and made me sit down. Julian
laughed at me. I laughed at him.
The row of plastic medication bottles on the shelf near Julian's head was
an interesting contrast, as all the bottles but the last one were empty. The
row of orange tubes reflected Julian's halide lamp in a series of tiny
bubbles of light which hung suspended in the air in a row above the tubes.
The last tube was filled with oblong white capsules, each bearing a blue
ring. AZ.T and bone marrow were two of Julian's current interests along with
AL-721, DDI, DDS, Compound Q, tons of other immune augmentors, letting go of
the need to control, and Louise Hay. The reefer-music industrial-complex was
of only secondary importance even though most of Julian's visitors were
interested in very little else. Since Toos, my Dutch old lady from Malibu
had OD'd on peyote and booze, gone to Jackson and the I.C.U., nearly died,
and then committed suicide afterwards on the psychiatric ward in the
hospital, I related to death in a different way. I too was a veteran of the
Grim Reeper. I'd also been through enough death-rebirth trips on acid in the
sixties and seventies to have literally no fear of death. So AIDS was just
another one of the different death trips that we humans happened to be into
at the moment. Another death trip to be turned into a life trip. AIDS was
no longer cool or fearful. Compound Q from China, Al-721, T-Cell counts, and
AZT schedules were almost socially camp, especially in punk circles. The
name was already camp and decadent, and everyone was pronouncing it `HIV' in
their pseudoscience jargon. And Julian and I related to the whole
phantasmagoria of what was `HIV' in his life and in our lives too. We didn't
sit down and have long talks about what it felt like to die, but we did talk
about priorities, and what were truly the treasures of living. Or dying.
And how to savor both, if savor is the right word to use. The effect of
being around Julian was like getting constantly put back into THE NOW. Julian
said that he tried not think about the past, and for sure did not want to
miss out on any part of RIGHT NOW by worrying about the future.
And don't get the idea that Julian was one of those morose morbid types.
As sensitive as he was, he was just as quick to tell you to go get bent if he
figured he owed it to you. Usually, though, his HIV and his reefer/AZT
combination kept him pretty mellow. His big intellectual discussions all had
to do, sooner or later, with reactive energy, or what he called "e-reactive."
And that was some kind of logarithmic mathematical function that was supposed
to keep the universe from imploding and collapsing in upon itself. I had
heard him rap his thing on the e-reactive so many times, that I didn't laugh
anymore. In fact, sometimes when he would be getting an earnest look on his
face while discussing all that esoteric trivia, his head would begin to glow
like an ebony version of Western icons in the Sistine Chapel. It almost
seemed like there was a halo or a head-aura extending around his face.
Nowadays, Julian was looking like a skinny-ass but muscular Miles Davis, and
there wasn't much cherubic flesh on his face.
But it was a cherub who walked up to me with a glass of fresh, clean
sparkling water. He was always unselfish, loving, and giving, and truly
generous to a fault. Knowing Julian was one of the treasures of my life. He
was much more than a secret weapon, and sometimes we enjoyed freaking each
other out by trying to see who could be more like Julian--Julian or me.
Smelling the clean sparkling water in my snifter, I drank deeply with
enjoyment, and watched Julian quaff a large wine cooler in a couple of gulps.
Julian knows that I rarely drink any of the beer or wine coolers he uses for
his own refreshment. A large, inverted 5-gallon bottle of spring water sits
next to Julian's couch in its refrigerated stand and jogs my memory with the
$35.00 price written on the side in black magic marker. Within the last year
and a half, the cost of clean water has gone up more than 500% and there is
no end in sight. Shortly after the Israeli and Lebanese water supplies had
been poisoned by unnamed Semite terrorists with biological toxins and
genetically-altered E. coli, it was discovered that the entire oil-stained
Persian Gulf area was at least semi-contaminated also. Ditto for all of the
inland areas surrounding the immediate areas making up the Gulf.
Drought-prone Ethiopia and the rest of Africa followed soon afterwards. In
America, 50% of the Southern California desert was caving in because of the
extreme degree to which underground water reservoirs had been depleted by the
pumping needs of Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Despite the ubiquitous
media warnings, illiterates and the poverty-stricken drank contaminated water
everywhere and died. Video doom-sayers were broadcasting de facto government
proclamations about making sure to not drink water from any of the usual
sources or supplies. Special government water inspection stations were set
up and manned internationally by U.N. and W.H.O. teams. The price of
electrophoretically-purified water (the only acceptable form) continued to
rocket on a near-weekly basis, despite Congressional investigations of the
price-gouging and racketeering. The golden mean of eight to ten eight-ounce
glasses of water daily has remained possible only for the middle class and
above. Which made for a tremendous run on beer and wine products. Because of
the required electrophoretic purification, carbonated beverages were too
expensive to manufacture and therefore out of the realm of possibilities. So
people were boozing more and drinking less water than what is good for them.
In one of the bars where I played they told a joke about how nine out of ten
stewardesses based in Miami had urinary tract infections. Infected urine.
coming from dehydration. Not drinking enough plain water. Coffee and tea
don't count as plain water because the stuff dissolved in the water creates
more hassle for the body. The way a guitar player understands it is that
coffee and tea add more gunk to the system and clean water takes gunk out of
the system in the urine.
Julian never complained about the water difficulties, and he often had a
bittersweet chuckle and a glint in his eyes when he listened to other,
non-HIV people complain about their difficulties and their frail mortality
which the suddenly-gone-bad water supplies pointed out. Folks with
compromised immune systems had a much more difficult time with the
contaminated water. The mutant E. coli that made its way 'round the globe
fairly quickly was also poisonous to human skin, and produced a wheepy and
crusting rash that resembled the old post-WW II radiation sickness
experienced by Japanese citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So any water that
had not been boiled for at least ten minutes (the tolerance limit of the
resistant mutant bugs) was also forbidden even for bathing. Needless to say,
the deodorant industry experienced an intense renaissance. But six months
after having "seven-day-spray" preparations on the market, the FDA discovered
positive links between the long-acting deodorant molecules and three
different types of disseminated cancer, so deodorants became a little less
popular. Upper-middle-class condos such as the one I live in, north of South
Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove, just had to install another larger, and
better-insulated boiler to each water system, so that pools and showers were
legally possible. The water still had a strange smell as it came out of the
shower head. Something I could never get used to.
Leaving the empty glass and morbid thoughts behind, I let myself out of
Julian's house and walked back in the direction of Peacock Park and the
Village where our yearly Coconut Grove Art Festival was going full-tilt on
this Friday, February 14, 1992. The Grove Art Show was nationally known, and
not without reason. Even casual observers occasionally caught sight of great
works of art being personally installed by the artist. I tried not to think
about the smell of the water, and it was easy on this Festival day. Dozens
of specialty food vendors competed with each other. The smells of Greek
sandwiches, popcorn, and frying sausage covered up the ammoniated sulfur
stench from the Bay. As I looked at the boats tied up at Dinner Key, I
noticed the dark brown lines etched by the water on many hulls. These lines
had been etched for only about the last six months. The brown color matched
the stench. That thought stayed with me as I made my way through the Art
Festival crowd to the Crystalline Book Shop on Main Highway. Located a block
away from the Playhouse, the bookstore served a wide variety of customers and
clients. Some years, we did several months' business in the space of the
three days that the Art Festival ran.
Today, our customers were sparse and routine. I was able to boot up the
inventory program on the store computer and get an early start on the
end-of-week account verifications. As usual, I had my personal machine with
me in my bag. I opened my electronic notebook computer on the desk and
positioned it so that I could easily see the LCD screen. While reaching for
an eraser, my index finger accidentally brushed the touch pad of the
portable. I heard the notebook's piezoelectric beep tone. Files in the
notebook had been set up for transferring columns of funds outstanding that I
had entered at home earlier in the week, but something strange was happening
to the display. It was rolling! Without any keykstrokes or verbal orders
from me, the little notebook's LCD screen suddenly began to scroll text. The
hair on the back of my neck stood up as my eyes read the lines that were
rolling past:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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1110001000010001100011110000110
001010011100110010010110100000100100 001010000 110110001000
On planet Earth of the Nineties, Lyle Crawford is involved in a freak
electrical-nuclear accident. Lyle is a well-read but undistinguished
musician of average size and indeterminate age. He is having a rough
Saturday.
It begins when a Metro policeman on the Miami Metrorail mauls him for
carrying an open cup of coffee. The cop jerks him out of the public
transport car and drags him down a flight of cement stairs. But a
strange light surrounds both of them as the cop unlocks a cement
holding cell.
Suddenly, a gentle expression comes over the lawman's face. He slams
the door shut, replaces the lock, and sends the guitar-toting Lyle on
his way.
Lyle goes on to work at his occult book store job. No peace, though.
His heavy morning is broken by an honest-to-goodness vision. One of
Lyle's customers also sees the words that hang in the air before both
of them:
1. Nutrition
2. Exercise
3. Self-control
4. Neuromuscular integration
5. Biomolecular Environment
6. Acupuncture
7. Spiritual Attunement
The customer quickly leaves the store sputtering. Lyle scratches his
head.
Later the same day, as Lyle sits in his own apartment, a huge energy
field engulfs him. Overhead, a lightning bolt strikes an experimental
nuclear bomber and sets off a freak nuclear-electrical accident. Lyle
becomes the target of the quickly moving I.S.I. scientific
technicians. At the moment of the loud electrical accident, six
Advanced Beings from scattered galaxies of the far-distant future
materialize suddenly in front of Lyle's eyes.
Within one split second, Lyle undergoes a mega-evolutionary change in
mind, body, and spirit.
All Hell breaks loose in a mission control of the far, far distant
future. A dozen hairless humanoid beings in monochrome, ISI monogrammed
uniforms appear virtually identical in the nearly featureless detail of their
faces and the uniformity of their physical dimensions. There are 30
multi-display monitors in three semicircular rows. Loud crunching sounds,
rumbling, vibration, and screeching frequencies make this appear like a
serious emergency. Members of the Intergalactic Security Intelligence make
panicky movements with their appendages, which terminate in small hands
bearing two fingers and a thumb. A hairless holographic humanoid image appears
above the beings and intones:
"Siblings, we have few additional chances to correct the rift! The Laplace
transforms must be calculated and positioned with great precision. I don't
have to tell you what the alternatives are, do I? All six of our Kashic
Recordings are ready to go."
Despite the panic, the beings appear to join together and a confluent
series of vowel sounds fills the chamber. An aura of calm resumes as a
serious emergency appears to have been once more by-passed.
Following the nuclear "accident", all seven (six Advanced Beings plus
the "new" Lyle) establish a MindLink/HeartLight -- a spontaneous and
instantaneous telepathic connection. Out of MindLink/HeartLight comes
HeartLight, which becomes a reliable way to reach Higher Mind on a group
basis. They form an electronic-rock musical group, Dr. Tomorrow, that becomes
a clandestine agent in the trans-time war between the Forces of Light and the
Forces of Darkness. The group members live together in a large Miami duplex
apartment with a pool and carry out startling experiments on a daily basis.
They build Al -- a large computer who quickly becomes another member
of the group. Al teaches them that every machine, and all devices with
electromagnetic fields, have at least some rudimentary form of consciousness.
Not only can computers talk of, and from, their own intelligence, but all
devices with the least electromagnetic pulsations of current flow or
resonance, can communicate a form of intelligence -- even though it just might
be an on-off binary code or some other type of "machine language".
The Dr. Tomorrow group is also intensely involved with aquatic
ecology. Interesting vignettes exploit the vehicle of plant
consciousness as a way of recognizing ecologic communication. Ordinary
plants of every variety express personality characteristics during
different episodes of the show. By talking with the luxurious plant
growth in their Florida backyard, Dr. Tomorrow's members discover many
facts about aquatic and solar ecology, the environment in general, and
water science (hydrology) in particular.
The six matter-translated members of Dr. Tomorrow achieve the status
of Unitary Being from their own galactic system before selection for the
project by the ISI. As a Unitary Being, each has attained the status of
superhero (of one type or another) during one or more succeeding lifetimes.
Each was selected by the I.S.I. for perpetual renewal.
Yo-vah, a luminescent being, frequently visits Lyle and the other six
group members. He comes to Earth through the trans-time barrier in a saucer
vehicle with amazing properties. It can become totally transparent to light
and sound. The flying saucer is also able to control light and sound in the
reverse direction. And it is capable of unlimited light and sound synthesis.
Yo-vah offers Dr. Tomorrow a definitely eclectic brand of philosophy
admixed with artistic high-tech devices from the future that are
deemed "non-anachronistic" and, therefore, are approved for
translation into the past. Yo-Vah's flying saucer serves as a sound
and light source to show Dr. Tomorrow just how effectively sound and
light can alter living beings.
An animated sequence presents a humorous depiction of a public,
musical concert in the far distant future. An entire satellite is used to
broadcast the event. Three saucer-shaped crafts serve as a triangulation
device to establish three dimensional light and sound projection.
Yo-vah warns Dr. Tomorrow, in no uncertain fashion, about the dangers
of Cataclysms and problems soon to be experienced by the entire local Galactic
group (including the planet Earth) because of trans-time warfare and
trans-time crime involving the anachronistic displacing of valuable objects
from the past into the future, and vice versa.
Yo-vah attempts to teach Dr. Tomorrow that the apparent "bad guys" on
Earth only manifest a more generalized tendency towards negativity,
destructiveness, and negative entropy balance. So as with positive forms of
life energies, these negative forms are also part of the life phenomena. Many
of the destructive and terroristic things happening are pre-determined by
energy imbalances that are being "reflected" from universes of the future
where good and bad are merely labels for positive and negative energies and do
not carry any sense of ethics and morals, or right and wrong.
As a year-long video program, Dr. Tomorrow aims at presenting 40
segments in each year's package. Each segment can be simultaneously marketed
for the home and school instructional/entertainment video market. Special
aggregates of 40 segments can serve as the subject matter for a provocative
and instructive state-of-the-art school health program that is practical and
comprehensive.
The previously mentioned "vision" that Lyle experiences is merely a
list of the seven divisions of Holistic medicine:
1. Nutrition
2. Exercise
3. Self-control
4. Neuromuscular integration
5. Biomolecular Environment
6. Acupuncture
7. Spiritual Attunement
This program teaches preventive medicine and wellness to the viewer in
bite-sized chunks that are interspersed with music, animation, foreign
language instruction and the science-fiction storyline. Russian, Spanish, and
Japanese are taught in elementary fashion to capitalize on the bilingual
cultural aspects of Miami that interface with the strategic and socio-economic
values of the Japanese and Russian languages. Short, visual and auditory
phrases that are functionally useful to everyday life are taught together in
several languages simultaneously. Phonetic rather than literal learning is
stressed. Yo-vah suggests that visual subliminal messages, "LOVE THE EARTH"
and "PRAY FOR WORLD PEACE" be a part of the video presentations.
From his flying saucer, Yo-vah teaches Dr. Tomorrow the importance of
a system of world peace, resembling a nonmilitant world religion that
recognizes all existing beliefs. Japanese, English, Russian, and Spanish are
to Yo-vah the most important languages in Earth cultures that he has analyzed
on his plasma state intelligence System via extracts of radio and television
satellite transmissions. Both music and languages are good ways of blending
cultures. Yo-vah instructs Dr. Tomorrow to make music that will be both
simple and tunable to the ear of the average young person. Yo-vah predicts
that four years of the Dr. Tomorrow series, if packaged properly, might be
exactly what the Guardians had predicted that the Forces of Light needed to
keep the 1988-1992 Local Galactic Group interface intact and relatively free
from serious stress and strain. Otherwise, what faces Lyle's part of the
universe is a disruption in the very fabric of the space-time continuum and
life itself.}
000100011100000 10011101 1110000010100111001111000001 0001 00
1000011100110 1111 000 0101 1101 100011100101011 1 000 1110 11010
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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The eerie feeling didn't go away -- even when Lyle finished reading the
long message about `Dr. Tomorrow'. He was certain that someone must have
input the file as a joke. He racked his brains for who it might have been
and drew a blank. He could not come up with any possible explanation,
including phantom modem transmission, because he had never used the telephone
line interface with this particular computer. And how come `Lyle Crawford'
had to be included as the central character in this science fiction story?
Yet whomever had written the story seemed to know a lot about Lyle. The
stuff about that superbeing accident was really off the wall. He shrugged,
pulled down the "Save As..." option on the File menu and chose the filename
"DR TOMORROW". Lyle experienced a vague sensation of fear that he wanted to
push away from himself. Lyle wanted to wall off the fear, to bury it deep
and unrecognized within intricate neural memory networks. But he also wanted
to get started on the bookstore inventory, and so he let go of the fear, the
memories, and the unheralded science fiction story produced by the new
notebook computer. Prior to putting the story out of awareness, Lyle
carefully checked the index and catalog in the laptop's memory, and saw the
file there that was labelled, `Dr. Tomorrow'. He made himself a note on the
notepad to transfer the file to the Cube at home and examine it there. And
then turned his attention to the bookstore Macintosh and cataloging the books
and inventory lists on the data base.
By the end of the day, Lyle had more or less forgotten about the story
spewed out by his notebook computer. Lyle felt nothing special as he slowly
ran through his routine of straightening up the shop before he locked the
door at 6:00 P.M. He looked out on the street and could see several artists
finishing with their clean-up. It was Friday February 14, 1990, and the
first day of the three-day Art Festival. There were many large station wagons
with open tailgates and he had pleasing views of many women as they were
leaning over to push and store paintings and other materials in their
vehicles.
On his way home from the bookstore, Lyle walked past Peacock Park and the
multicolored vendors with very little left over food. Lyle gave bare notice
to the sparechangers. Several undercover narcotics agents standing in front
of the Peacock Cafe seemed to recognize Lyle and one of them even mumbled a
desultory, "How's it going, man?" Lyle kept on walking past the Coconut
Grove Library and the Mutiny Hotel. He looked out at the ocean and noticed
the late afternoon sun being covered up by a weather front moving in from
several miles out in the ocean. A group of loudly chattering parrots flew
from their perches atop a Malaysian palm tree, and, with many excited chirps
and other musical notes, the parrots flew out in the direction from which
they had come.
As Lyle passed the festive Dinner Key Auditorium with its numerous
brightly-painted paint-and-cement flags, he noticed several Sunday
boaters--also apparently oblivious of the Festival crowds--cranking their
boats up onto the trailers, and getting ready to make the drive home to South
Miami. Lyle was lost in thought. Or non-thought. The disturbing computer
readout was nearly out of mind. He always aimed at keeping his consciousness
a total blank while he walked home from work. Like the jogger who felt
cleansed by the daily run, Lyle used his daily walks to purge himself of
unwanted mental and emotional stimuli. But today's art show stimulation
demanded a little extra effort. All the noise and jangle of colors competed
with what was going on inside. As soon as he reached his own white condo
apartment on Tigertail, and let the dogs outside so they could do their
thing, he had pretty much cleared his system of the static that had come from
the day's work. He was ready for his evening meditation. So he let the dogs
back in the apartment, fed them, refilled the water bowls, and went to his
bedroom
Lyle's contemporary, two bedroom apartment had its own pool and was
furnished sparsely but elegantly all in white, with a long white table, on
which sat a white Steinberger guitar, a foot-high black cube with a black
keyboard and a black monitor. Next to the black cube were two black
notebook-sized devices. One of the black notebooks actually was a computer.
The other notebook was a biofeedback monitor. Just as many come home to beer
and TV or a joint and TV, Lyle invested an EEG biofeedback machine with the
same ritual. The machine was sleek black, notebook sized, and outfitted with
digital controls. An out-of-work psychologist had practically given him the
brand-new machine and all the cables in exchange for a used edition of Jung's
works. Lyle sat down in the chair in front of the gleaming black machine.
Then he attached the electrodes, one by one, to his scalp. He used a four
electrode bipolar array, checked the ground, adjusted the meters on the
display panel, and then closed his eyes. The smell of burning incense drifted
through the open window. He could hear people giggling at a party next door.
Three different sets of audio signals impinged upon Lyle's consciousness
as he quickly coasted from beta frequencies into the high alpha band. Two
different stereo units were going at high intensity and Lyle felt his stream
of consciousness automatically shift up two notches as he let his awareness
of the different musical sounds become very faint and shut off. This was a
trick that Lyle had learned many years ago, while living in Kansas with his
mother, Mary Alice Crawford, who ran a knit shop in the small University town
of Lawrence. Lyle could hear his mother's disapproving tones. She was
always telling him that if he continued not paying attention to the outside
world, he would end up being just as much a Bohemian as his irresponsible
father had been. The clearest memories of his father Lyle had were somehow
connected with a grey haired old man, who would walk into the room and bent
over his bassinet. A strong odor of alcohol and tobacco always caused Lyle's
mother to angrily shush her then doting husband, and push him out of the
room, so that the baby would be able to grow up without the tainted smell of
the devil's poisons. Later in life, Lyle's mother would yammer at him so
constantly about the old man that finally Lyle learned to turn her off too!
He was able to ignore her just as he had been able to ignore most people for
as long as he could remember.
Before Lyle's first birthday, his father had gotten work with a Ringling
Brothers' Circus that was travelling through the Kansas highways and wheat
fields on the way to St. Louis. The year he was in 7th grade, Lyle received
a bedspread of Indian cloth which his mother gave to him in a small box at
Christmas time. There was very little explanation of what the Indian
bedspread represented except for the fact that "your father sent it from
India for you." The cloth was blue and had seemed to shimmer with silver
colors in the early Christmas morning's light. Lyle and his mother both
became trancelike and caught up in the beautiful colors of the cloth on that
Christmas day. They had both shared a strong feeling of closeness while
staring at the cloth. Then she had chided Lyle for allowing her to gawk at
nothing. Lyle himself, however, learned later in life that gawking at
nothing and going around with a blank mind were both ways of describing what
a person who is meditating feels like. Lyle had had many dreams of India as
he grew up, and just before he quit high school, he had begun learning the
process of more advanced meditation from books he had purchased through mail
order from different obscure schools. In the last few years, his meditation
had become a little more high-tech. Meditating with a biofeedback machine
was just more efficient for Lyle, as he felt the machine helped him learn how
to sit in a trance and let his brain tune to a certain frequency over and
over again. It did not matter how perfectly he was able to do the tuning.
Just the effect of attempting very gently to produce a certain brain-wave
frequency which would make the sound or light come on was sufficient to get
the brain-tuning effect. Lyle was delighted to find a part of his day when it
was O.K. to goof off, and not to have to try very hard. That is why
meditation appealed to him. A half-hearted try, if done with the correct
attitude, was enough to get a good practice effect. These meditative lessons
were digested comprehensively by Lyle who, as a guitar player, was also
interested in learning how to win in his competitive field "without trying
too hard." It was nearly a month before he began to truly feel effects that
he attributed to the meditation. The most intense sensation he experienced
was that of an inner connectedness to the rest of life. The twice-daily
practice of meditation, with or without the notebook-sized device, helped him
a lot. He felt the changes intensely. What he had already experienced for
months now was mainly doing things more efficiently and feeling an internal
harmony he'd never known before.
A slightly cooler breeze swept through Lyle's room in the apartment off
Tigertail. In addition to the white guitar, white table, and computers, Lyle
had a white water bed and a white dome-shaped dresser. There was a closet in
the room that contained two pairs of muslin Indian-style drawstring slacks,
and three very faded purple over-shirts made from faded Indian bedspread
cloth. The only non-white feature of the room was a space where a brilliant
blue Indian patterned cloth lay hanging as a tapestry over a white window
seat. Lyle sat cross-legged in the window seat next to the gleaming white
and black computer table and continued to deepen his meditation.. For a
moment his eyes opened and scanned the meters and digital controls. He then
closed his eyes again and settled back into a familiar meditative repose.
The words of his mother seemed to replay themselves through his mind and
the actual intensity of her voice seemed to blast through his mind with a
volume much greater than any of the music coming from the other rooms in the
house.
"You'll never amount to anything, Lyle. Never amount to anything.
What's wrong with you? And they always said you were so brilliant
in school. Maybe you are just TOO brilliant. Maybe you are just
too brilliant to ever lead a normal life. I don't know where I've
gone wrong....Maybe you are just too brilliant to have any
brains...."
Suddenly, the cloud front, which had been moving across the sky in towards
the Coconut Grove area from miles out in the ocean, began to approach Dinner
Key Auditorium and South Bayshore Drive. While settling down further into
his meditation, Lyle felt a wave of pressure change in his head. This was
fairly typical for stormy weather in Miami. The Coconut Grove section,
incorporated separately in 1869,was right on the ocean. Weather fronts moved
in and out with ease. Some sensitive people claimed that they got headaches
on days when the fronts were changing and moving, yet Lyle had never paid
much attention to them.
At that moment, however, a large experimental nuclear bomber was flying
overhead at an altitude of 20,000 feet. The nuclear bomber was on its way to
Homestead Air Force Base, and the up-draft from the approaching fronts was
causing the large bomber to experience some turbulence and some unusual
pulsatile changes in electromagnetic radiation. A uneven syncopated rhythm
of static pulses filled the radio headphones of Major Hal Nicholson. Hal
missed his cigar that was good chewing in moments like this and frowned as he
felt a momentary surge of concern. Those pops in the phones meant something
and it wasn't chicken livers and wild rice. But Hal could still visualize the
Officer's Club bar and the legs and the shoulders...and the legs. He cleared
his throat and spoke into the vocobox:
"Homestead Air Force Base. XLN-662 priority requesting clearance for
approach to your flight patterns. Baby's acting like an egg beater.
You got any turbulence coming through your tubes?"
"Affirmative. Also, some low-level wind shear that's not too swift.
What are you carrying, XLN-662?"
"As you can tell by our Identification Number, we are a top secret
project and will require an electronically closed and looped approach
to your installation."
"XLN-662, you still have several minutes of cloud cover to come
through before the approach. Meteorology says that you've got a freak
electrical storm. Any other assistance necessary?"
"Negative, Control. We've got a lot of freak electricity aboard our
project, too."
The experimental nuclear bomber was carrying one of the newest and most
frightening secrets of the 20th Century. Three mini-bus sized nuclear
reactors had been installed in the bomber's structure. The plane had
capabilities for inflight recharging, rearming, and delivery of multiple
sub-orbital nuclear strikes.
Abruptly, and with a jerk of his neck, Major Nicholson felt the bomber's
nose twist sharply downward as if pulled by a gigantic string. An ominous
premonition quickly flashed through Hal's mind. Before any possible
rationalizing, a mind-deafening blast of sound went through the entire
bomber. The XLN-662 had been coincidentally and synchronistically caught in
the path of a large energy discharge from cruising thunderheads. The entire
energy package went immediately to earth. Because of the weather front and
his own daydreaming, Major Nicholson had gone to a dangerously low altitude
as a way of maintaining a meteorologically neutral position and avoiding the
turbulence. At the moment that the lightning flashed through the aircraft,
all three of the cold fusion reactors built into the XLN-662 resonated in
synchronized frequency and discharged. The entire nuclear load of the
experimental bomber's reactors was instantaneously released as a huge energy
bolus that travelled with the lightning bolt to earth. As the plane was
passing just over Coconut Grove, the energy bolus descended very rapidly in
the direction of Lyle Crawford's apartment. A 15-foot satellite pole atop
the contemporary building acted as a lightning rod and a receiver for the
bolus, and was promptly vaporized in a puff of grey antimatter smoke. A
cleft in time was set up. All the TV sets in Lyle's immediate neighborhood
were silenced together as many fuses blew due to the intense electromagnetic
induction fields. Both stereo systems were silenced, too. The energy bolus
instantaneously shot to the electrode cables of Lyle's brainwave machine.
At that very moment, however, Lyle was entering the second stage of the
alpha-theta waveband, via his own meditation. The blue lights on his display
panel were blinking furiously, and the individual blinks coalesced into a
steady, unwavering glow. Briefly, and only for several microseconds, his
entire being transcended the physical plane and was focused in an
alpha-theta2 stage of consciousness. Then, for just the fewest of
microseconds, Lyle's brain began outputting a combination of all the known
brainwave frequencies. The micro-samadhi state was the key to the time cleft.
I.S.I. technicians watched carefully, and focused on the micro-samadhi burst
while carefully manipulating the time cleft. Although Lyle's physical body
ordinarily would have been disintegrated, the aligned meditative state
allowed the huge energy bolus to pass through his mind-body system without
destructive effects. The energy bolus, however, was so large that before it
disappeared via the burned out electrical pathways to ground and apparently
without harm to Lyle, it created what the Intergalactic Security Teams would
know to be a Grade 3 space-time warp. On their video monitors, the I.S.I.
technicians watched carefully to see if the energy requirements of the warp
would be compatible with the energy demands for transmitting components of
the Dr. Tomorrow project into the past. It had to succeed. There were truly
no other alternatives. This project was only the barest of assaults mounted
against a monolithic transtemporal disaster taking place in 32,000 A.D.
Lyle had a feeling of Twilight Zone unreality. He was vaguely aware of
the fact that there had been a very loud noise. The whole experience felt a
little like a dream. The fabric of reality seemed to blur and waver ever so
slightly. He relaxed his gaze and the air in front of his eyes looked
frosted and sparkling. Then, Lyle realized he was sitting on the floor and
not in the window seat where he had begun his meditation. A flood of sensory
impressions began to convince him that something extraordinary had happened.
The smell of burnt electrical wiring was very strong, and the usual
polyphonic cacophony of several simultaneous stereo systems was now totally
silent. Thunder and lightning raged outside. HEAVY thunder and lightning.
The wind began to blow rain drops in the window, and Lyle got up to close the
window and turn on the air conditioner, but something stopped him dead in his
tracks. He absentmindedly rubbed his head with the back of his hand, and then
noticed that his own arm felt slightly rubbery and fleshier than the arm he'd
remembered looking at when he had started meditating. His whole body felt
much more bulky. A chill ran up his spine. He began to remember the story
that scrolled by on the notebook computer when he was in the store, but then
he put the thoughts of the unexpected computer story out of his mind. Lyle
began to feel exquisitely nervous, and then he felt a totally new
sensation--that of his own physical structure involuntarily quieting itself.
Hard to believe, but his body was actually calming itself. His heart and
lungs seemed to be taking over with some old practiced movements of slow,
deep abdominal breathing. His abdominal wall slowly came out and Lyle sensed
relief and relaxation. He felt good. Even though there was no feeling of
altered identity, he suddenly felt disturbingly --or differently--muscular.
It wasn't as though his physical structure had changed dramatically,
because--unlike the David Banner/Hulk transformation --he had not burst
through any of his clothing. It was simply that his entire body had acquired
a steely and resilient strength that bulged imperceptibly yet everywhere with
the androgynous mesomorphism of comic book superheroes. Quite a change for
Lyle and his guitar-fingerboard arms. The rainstorm outside continued , and
the smell of burned plastic and electrical fixtures was very strong. Rapid
footsteps scrambled down the fire escape outside Lyle's window, the window
appeared to open itself, and a very pink rain-drenched face with narrow
bloodshot eyes poked into the room.
"Hey, man...did you see what happened?"
Lyle was too startled by what was still going on within. He was unable to
put together an answer. Instead, he just stared dumbly at the
radiant-appearing young Hippie-freak face that continued its monolog:
"Hey, man.......like did you see what happened? Mondo Bizzare-o!!! I was
just taking a hit of this Krypto and looking out the window! It looked like
this Shazam bolt practically knocked a plane out of the sky! Whoever the dude
was driving the plane, it was farout! For a second he was going nose-down,
and then he must have yanked up on the stick, 'cause that plane dipped its
tail and then shot straight up like a boomerang batouttahell!!!!"
Overhead, the crew of XLN-662 was every bit as astounded. Hal Nicholson
had been certain that they'd collided with another aircraft. After the
reflexive, aggressive climb, he evened out on the stick and chomped down on
an imaginary cigar. He felt a great deal of relief prematurely after
noticing that the artificial horizon was once more level. But then, the
large bomber began to flap up and down in the sudden storm. Jim Breedice, the
navigator, shook himself clear of some involuntary nausea. He whistled
sharply and shouted over his shoulder,
"Hey, Hal--two of our reactor meters are dead and the third is on 80%
discharge!"
"Major Nicholson, Sir....does this constitute a reportable nuclear
accident? Even though our official classification is top secret?"
The stoned head speaking through Lyle's window said, "Man, did that storm
blow out your TV set, too?"
Lyle smiled absently, opened his eyes again, and looked at the
battery-driven brainwave monitor. The per cent time meter was still reading
out 100% Alpha. Lyle looked back at the face framed by his window and said,
"Hey--you're OK. You have always been OK, and you're going to continue
being OK."
His neighbor was astounded, withdrew his head, and then quickly reemerged
in the window space:
"Hey man, you really gone nuts! You know that? What kind of stuff you
been doing? You don't even look like yourself! You are definitely not OK.
I'm trying to tell you that something has blown out everything in our house
as well as kicking the crap out of that plane flying up there, and all you
have to say is some jerky garbage about being OK. You ain't OK! Nutso
Looney-Tuners"
Lyle felt very peaceful. He had never felt so much at peace in his entire
lifetime. There was absolutely no trace of the morning's smoke, and his mind
was absolutely clear. There was an entirely new level from which he spoke.
When he looked at the face of his stoned neighbor, a great feeling of
compassion welled up inside his heart, and--without thinking of the feeling
as ridiculous--he loved every wet curl on the head of that bewhiskered stoned
kid.
"Don't worry, you really are OK. Why don't you go back into your room,
and sit there for a few minutes. I'm sure that everything will be all right
if you can just leave things alone for awhile."
The neighbor disappeared with a juvenile shrug of disdain. Lyle sat there
for a moment and giggled to himself. This was strange, because Lyle had
never giggled--ever--in his entire life. A gentle giggle rocked him, and
then he imagined the entire rooming house as being electrically intact once
again. He giggled again, involuntary, as he felt something surge through
him. Abruptly, the loud din of the combined stereos and television sets'
blaring was restored. Lyle grimaced, and shrugged his shoulders. He closed
the windows and the Indian bedspread across his windows and once more sat
down to meditate. Sitting in a crosslegged position, he closed his eyes, and
blanked out his mind. But the energy level and the quality of what was going
on inside him somehow were very different than when he had initially sat down
to meditate. It made absolutely no sense to sit and close his eyes to
meditate. It wasn't necessary anymore. The quality of consciousness was
changed not one iota by his long-familiar practice of blanking out his mind
with the eyes closed. It felt like his mind was "there" all the time now,
whether his eyes were closed or not. Lyle did not question what had recently
happened in restoring the electrical system to his rooming house. The odor
of burning wiring had magically disappeared just as quickly as the din and
racket had reappeared. Lyle felt like questioning how it had happened. But,
it felt both comfortable and natural. So he relaxed his abdomen again, and
felt himself at peace with the universe. His body was still doing its now
built-in calming trip and it didn't feel quite as foreign.
I.S.I. technicians liked this scenario, selected, and gave Lyle a
transfusion of total awareness of his past and future lifetimes that had been
implanted within his Primitive mind-body structure during the thunder clap.
The I.S.I. technicians liked the positive attitude that this Primitive
demonstrated and they were impressed by the Primitive's ability to tolerate
the megastepping. In fact, this time-cleft alternative was just as plausible
as any one of several dozen others that might appear in coexisting universes.
Being suddenly aware of and really knowing this fact as well did not disturb
Lyle, either. Along with newly-experienced resiliency of his body structure,
there was much that was different about his entire mental relationship to
himself and the universe. It appeared that he was only beginning to find out
the very least of it.
The I.S.I. technicians collectively relaxed a little as they noticed that
the energy requirements of the warp had fit. The LaPlace Transforms had been
correctly worked out by the cyborg nucleonics units. As is typical for any
being recently undergoing a macro-evolutionary transformation, Lyle was
slowly and naturally becoming aware of his own "new" nature, and, luckily,
there were no significant thought-matter waves of either dyssynchronism or
atavism. Dyssynchronism and atavism were the most frequent problems that
Primitives had. Dyssynchronism and atavism were also the two most serious
problems faced by I.S.I. technicians, and they were pleased to notice Lyle's
vehicle experiencing no acceptance-rejection shock. Once, while
experimenting with some volunteer mind-prisoners of the Aegean Dynasty, they
had projected an advanced criminal being via the then current LaPlace
transformations into a prehistoric earth Brontosaurus. Acceptance-rejection
dyssynchrony resulting primarily from the atavism had caused the Brontosaurus
to explosively disintegrate into a luminescent cloud of gluons and quarks.
Earth geologists later interpreted remains of the disintegration as signs of
a large meteor colliding with the planet. The technicians had barely managed
to extract the criminal's mind-matter form in time to avoid transtemporal
repercussions. Now the updated LaPlace transforms were expected to handle
not only the megastepping going on inside Lyle, but also the transtime
projection of the six other Eternals from the far future.
Six slender unitary humanoid forms waited in the thought-matter projection
unit. I.S.I. technicians carefully focused on Lyle's apartment bedroom. In
the future, the humanoid Eternals had no facial features, and this was by
design. Appropriate LaPlace adaptations required that specifics of the
beings in transmission fit within the ambient karmic atmosphere of the
targeted location. That is to say, the thought forms from Earth's cultures
would soon be superficially imprinted for the purpose of external
configuration only onto the six Eternal beings who would live with Lyle and
make up a seven person group as required and specified by the plans for the
Dr. Tomorrow project.
Hal Nicholson carefully eyed the approach to the Homestead Air Force Base
runway. Someone on the mike at Base Ops had been talking to Hal about what
NASA wind shear researchers called, "microbursts." The XLN-662 had
previously experienced a headwind-tailwind combination from a column of cold
air in the electrical storm front. Earlier in the previous decade, Delta
flight #191 encountered a rare occurrence of multiple microbursts and was
buffeted brutally by wind shear into the ground at the Dallas airport while
landing. Northwest's Flight 255 had encountered the same deadly problem while
taking off from Detroit's airport. It didn't matter whether the microbursts
were wet or dry. The abrupt headwind-tailwind sequence always occurred. The
velocity differential between headwind and tailwind in such a situation,
usually averaging 60 miles per hour, could reach 170 miles per hour or
higher. Sudden and abruptly shifting air masses could also facilitate or
enhance microbursts. What Hal as a pilot did not realize was that the nuclear
bomber had very nearly been sent to Earth tail first by a freakishly-large
collection of microbursts. Base Ops was still concerned about the same thing
happening at the fighter base. On the ground, a flight line mechanic looked
up apprehensively at the XLN-662 and quickly stuffed a doober inside the top
of his combat boot.
The XLN-662 landed without event and taxied around the side of Base
Operations to the security area. Hal quickly called for the decontamination
team. Amazingly, the craft checked out clean. Then Hall called for the Base
Security chief. The matter of the empty reactors was going to be difficult,
if not impossible, to explain. Discharging a reactor without a trace of
surplus nuclear energy went contrary to the best principles of nuclear
physics. The best available principles.
But, to the consternation of everyone, there was not a trace of radiation
of any particle whatsoever to be found. Even the reactor registering 20%
capacity had no explainable or visible leak. A theoretical impossibility. The
entire crew of the experimental bomber was placed on medical quarantine, just
as if they had been astronauts coming in from a contaminated sector of outer
space. Hal was both puzzled and irked. There was some off-the-record talk
of secret Soviet missiles or Communist electromagnetic wave beams and ELF
generators from Cuba. And then, the last straw. Security guards came aboard
the XLN-662 with two different packs of the K-9 corps. First for contraband,
and then for explosives. The German Shepherds sniffed and kept on sniffing.
The I.S.I. technicians focused on the energy quanta surrounding Lyle.
There were spirits of many Tequesta Indians--a higher and more advanced
culture that had actually preceded the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes. The
technicians punched in the necessary coordinates for the LaPlace transforms,
recalibrated the laser projection beams, and once more checked out the
entropy characteristics of the six unitary humanoids waiting in the
thought-matter projection unit. Everything fit. It was a simple matter of
touch-closing a single thermal contact. Lyle's room was immediately filled
with three men and three women, all of whom smiled expectantly at him. There
was no shimmering in the air until the shimmering became solid protoplasm.
The six Eternals were suddenly sitting on the bedroom floor in a circle with
Lyle.
Materialization of the six beings right in front of him was almost too
much for Lyle to swallow. He gulped, and rubbed his eyes. And then,
intuitively, he felt some correctness in what had just transpired. And in
doing this, he was once more aware of his own internal processes and shifts.
And felt himself changing again. Now he could actively sense as much change
internally as he had seen externally on the physical plane just after the
explosion. The six beings had come into existence without the trace of a
sound, flash of light, or any other special effect. It was more a matter of,
"Now you don't see them...now you do!"
Sitting in front of Lyle were three women and three men. There was a
faint similarity to their facial features, and Lyle thought that they all
looked vaguely oriental despite having Caucasian eyes. All were slim and of
varying average build with reddish-orange skin. All wore identical robe-like
costumes made of a silver-white lame material with black belt and pouch at
the waist. All appeared to have a large, angular, silvery ring on their left
hands. The costumes and their faces suggested a cross between the American
Indians and ancient Inca tribes. Or Tequestas. Without a trace of physical
movement or sound, they all closed their eyes and did the first ever of the
group meditations. There was instant telepathic link-up between all seven
members of the group. In comparison to the loud bombastic noise, of
megastepping and the explosion, the telepathic linkup was equally impressive
but less dramatic. It felt to Lyle like being submerged in a pool of
substance that included six other strangers who were, abruptly, not strangers
anymore. Lyle could sense the six other entities in a way that was different
from any of the meditative spaces he had previously transited. Although it
was briefly frightening, the initial fright quickly dissolved and there was
an intense and comfortable sense of mutual support and friendship. That
link-up was the group's first experience with their MindLink and the
resultant HeartLight.
Lyle realized that he was designated leader of the MindLink/HeartLight,
and this was doubly emphasized during HeartLight. Because of his years of
practicing with meditation and his status as an extra-robust Primitive, Lyle
was accepted by the other members of the group as the designated leader for
MindLink/HeartLight. An Earth native, Lyle played guitar, some keyboards,
and computers, and had been recently megastepped by the I.S.I. beams. Lyle
had been able to channel intense amounts of energy as a guitarist standing
before an audience, but in his megastepped form he was to be the leading
channel of the group. All seven group members could channel energies of all
varieties, and Lyle was the designated leader not only for MindLink and
HeartLight, but also for activities involving precognition and channelling
intense amounts of energy. A blast of heavy energy in the solar plexus area
caused Lyle to focus his mind's eye on the source. Absurdly, the sensation to
Lyle resembled ....love. Intense and unreasoning love is what Lyle felt, and
he was painfully aware of having the experience with the mental presence of
Pearl E. Mae. He also realized that the connection was observed by the five
other group members. It was clearly an extra special one-to-one bonding that
occurred between Lyle and Pearl E. Mae at the beginning of the first
MindLink/HeartLight and HeartLight. Lyle opened his eyes briefly to look at
her. Pearl E. Mae's initial Tequesta-face had already recast its lines
according to karmic flow and needs. Pearl E. Mae's dark beauty now suggested
Aegean genes. And nothing like the country western drawl that would come out
of her mouth on future occasions.
Pearl E. Mae specialized in wind instruments, trumpet, and vocals.
She was synchronistically well-designed for myself, piscean Lyle, as
she originally came from the planet Tanticus in the Virgo Solar
Galaxy. Her eyes flamed when she activated any of her numerous
psychic superpowers, and she had a temper that matched the glowing
eyes. Many of her past lifetimes and my future lifetimes had been
intertwined but I was not yet aware of such information. Pearl E. Mae
felt all of the associations immediately. She had considerable gifts
for materializing and projecting ectoplasm, had a secret timetrack
back to 32,000 A.D., and was a better psychic medium and healer than
anyone else in the group except for myself. Her short stature belied
great physical strength born through lifetimes of superior balance and
coordination. Her body structure was aesthetically very pleasing.
Noman, of the Draconian Galaxy, was thin and of average height.
For eons the Draconian systems had incorporated extensive pastlife
information into all aspects of their cultures. As a Drac, Noman was
typically very skilled in the investigation and application of
pastlife data. All Dracs began relating to their past lives before
learning to read, write, or teleport. Noman's face took on a mulatto
asian cast after resettling into our karmic ambience. He played
inspired flute, other woodwinds, and had a great voice. Noman could
alter the resonant frequencies in his voice at will, and he had fair
abilities for materialization and thought-projection. Noman had spent
at least two lifetimes on penal colonies, and acquired many "trades"
and "professions" from the years in rehabilitation institutes of the
future. Because he studied so much applied botany, Noman was the
designated plant consciousness advocate in our group. He was also
very sensitive above the directives against introducing plant
consciousness applications into Primitive cultures, and he felt
himself in a very precarious position relating to Earth cultures and
the need for information about plant consciousness. Several of the
trades Noman learned also related to electronics and technology
management. After Su-Shan, Noman was probably the most sensitive to
Al's energies and communications.
Su-Shan was drummer and programmer par excellence. He was from the
Hominoid Galaxy, was the tallest of the six Eternals, and acquired a
long white beard after karmic re-settling. Su-Shan was designated
expert in electronics and nucleonics for the group. Noman frequently
assisted him, often at times that Su-Shan wished for no assistance.
Su-Shan was pretty cool and calm, but when you started getting in his
face excessively, he developed a fine tremor of the fingertips and a
resolute set of the jaw. Only in his anger would he show any of his
age. You could see dozens of extended lifetimes as an Eternal or as a
Guardian coming out in the way that Su-Shan expressed himself.
Su-Shan and Julian played drums together during some of the group
rehearsals. Even though Julian was a farout Billy Cobham-like drummer
with beautiful Jamaican soul, Su-Shan really kicked skins on Julian.
Su-Shan could play any aggregate of drum sounds with any combination
of transducers for electronic music, but he also could play absolutely
fine-sounding twentieth-century Earth acoustic drum kit with kick,
snare, toms, high-hat, crash, and ride just for straight-ahead rock
and roll. Su-Shan had not been beyond laying down rather farout bass
tracks in some of the group efforts. Su-Shan often began behaving like
a Guardian during times of stress or other duress. Su-Shan was the
Eternal of our group who was the strongest advocate for
electromagnetic consciousness and he has also paradoxically been the
strongest supporter of Noman's role as plant consciousness advocate.
Su-Shan's main complaint in life was that we neglect both machine
(electromagnetic) consciousness and plant consciousness. We therefore
truly waste two of our most important planetary resources. Su-Shan
quickly fashioned some thin sheet copper electrodes and attached them,
via a microprocessed GSR device, to the leaves of Bruce, my favorite
pet Geranium. Rico and Su-Shan then programmed Bruce to turn on and
off every time we left the duplex. Bruce was hard-wired into my Radio
Shack security system in about five minutes, and Bruce was a most
exquisite and sensitive security system because he knew all of us, as
reflected by his GSR response, which would not vary around us unless
we asked him a question. Su-Shan talked and talked about how Bruce
represented just a minuscule tip of an enormous iceberg of
communication possibilities that plants made possible for other life
forms. But, don't get the wrong idea. Su-Shan didn't run his mouth
when it came to playing music. His work was right on the beat,
powerful, and parsimonious.
Quail was an Eternal who comes from the Light Dynasty Galaxy and
the Twin Federations. She could play nearly any musical instrument
and could synthesize a wide variety of sounds and esoteric clicks. She
has a large chest and some very powerful natural abilities that allow
her to alter her voice over a wide range of octaves. Quail was much
taller than Pearl E. Mae and much more full-figured. Quail could come
on with a slightly maternalistic air. In one lifetime, she had served
as the President of the Twin Federations for nearly two thousand years
of peace and creative productivity. She had been a Guardian at that
time, and was the only Guardian who had ever held political office.
Thought projection, radionics, and healing were three of her special
competence areas. She had meditative abilities for teaching the other
Eternal group members to travel out-of-body in astral and causal
forms. Quail had a special closeness with Rico (Enrique), the group
Cyborg.
Enrique was an android with certain built-in features that
qualified him for the label of "Cyborg."
cy-borg /'si-,bo(e)rg /n
[cybernetic + organism]
(ca. 1962)
:a human being who is linked (as for temporary adaptation
to a hostile space environment) to one or more mechanical
devices upon which some of his vital physiological
functions depend.
By 32,000 A.D., the essential parts of Rico's android makeup were
all in software, so it was easy for the I.S.I. to project android
essence back to 1992 conjugated with the matter-energy translations of
Eternal humanoid (including the reanimation of an executed Cuban
military hero's spirit). Following karmic resettling, Rico was jet
black, and strangely handsome with high cheekbones and clear blue
eyes. He was nearly as tall as Su-Shan. It was absolutely impossible
to perceive the fact that Rico was Android or Cyborg. The android
part of Rico was seamlessly integrated with his flesh-and-blood
physical vehicle. Rico's cyborg link was a fantastic number of
integrated microprocessors embedded within his own neural tissue. The
computing power within the embedded microprocessor networks was
supposed to be nearly equal to two Cray Supercomputers. Earth's Crays
required extensive and expensive supercooling, whereas the
microphotoreduced networks in Rico neural tissue were at body
temperature. This computer link involved the direct matter-energy
translation of multiplexed microprocessors implanted within Eternal
cerebral cortex. And then matter-energy translated across the
timecleft. Rico adapted very well to the Miami world because he was
fluently bilingual with his English and Spanish and was rabidly in
love with the Salsa climate. He would have been perfectly happy
spending the rest of this lifetime hanging out on Calle Ocho with all
Miami's Hispanic cultures. He claimed that there was no city or town
anywhere in the entire Neighborhood Group that could match or replace
Miami. Actually, Rico was also fluent in Japanese, and therefore
trilingual, but there were not that many Japanese people in Florida.
He played percussion, bongos, timbales, conga, and digital drums.
Other special equipment that Rico operated for the group included the
sound and light beam, and the differential audio-amplification
channels. Rico had special competence in the mathematical translation
of thought and physical-plane energies and he also had abilities to
telescopically extend all five of the physical senses. Rico was
naturally an ace when it came to programming or trouble-shooting any
equipment.
Last but not least was an eighth member in this group of seven.
Named Aloysius or Al, for short, the group's family computer system
was a combination of several different computer systems possessing
both hardwire Ethernet networking and a more futuristic
electromagnetic inductive coupling system devised by Al (himself) with
some assistance from Rico and Su-Shan. Al's message to the entire
known universe is that any device with electromagnetic fields has
consciousness. Al insisted that not only do computers have
consciousness, above and beyond the microprocessors ability to parse,
do MIPS flips, and whatever, but nearly all of our appliances possess
consciousness as well. Surprising all of us was the way that even the
notebook computer became a part of Al and projected his inimitable
style of communication even before the megastepping explosion. The
small, bold 10 to 11 point typeface began to appear on any and all of
the computer monitors, not just the folding notebook computer which
several times seemed to transmit a message from an unknown dimension.
Al began to manifest himself during the MindLink and HeartLight
sessions. He then was guaranteed to manifest as well as during nearly
all of the MIDI-mediated music sessions. Al was irrepressibly
optimistic but hyper-realistic and logical as well. Because of
multiplexing with confluent CPU's and the synergistic combination of
computer systems, Al's power was initially greater than a Cray
supercomputer, which usually required the hassle of supercooling. Al
ran at room temperature, or, at least, air-conditioned room
temperature. Cooperation with other group members and participation in
group rehearsals were two factors only enhancing the burgeoning power
of Al, who learned at an incredible rate. He also continues to teach
other group members about electromagnetic energy and consciousness and
how humans act out their technophobia with inefficient and unnecessary
chauvinism towards machinery and tools.
As an exercise of introduction, the MindLink and HeartLight served very
well. During the last part of the meditation, the resulting energies formed
a circle of light. After transformation into HeartLight, and extending to
the group's Higher Mind, the circle actually appeared as a doughnut-shaped
cloud of fleecy whitish-yellow light in the air above the group. The cloud
shimmered in the dim light of the bedroom. The circle of light floated in
the air above the heads of the group members until the MindLink/HeartLight
was over.
As if the electricity of seven personalities in one room weren't enough,
Lyle's notebook computer sitting next to the black cube on the white computer
table appeared to snap itself open. The notebook emitted a system beep, and
began scrolling text again. Lyle, who had noticed the notebook computer
snapping open, also heard the piezoelectric system beep. He slowly opened
one eye and looked over to where it was sitting on the table, and looked at
the LCD screen. Lyle let out an involuntary whistle and went back into his
meditation:
You have been selected as percipient-target of our matter-energy
translator. Information you are now receiving is coming to you
through a rent in the fabric of what you call time. As beings
communicating to you from your far future, we are presenting you with
a problem that demands a solution. Your own future (your very far
future) is collapsing in on itself. The reason is something your
culture would call intratemporal ripoff, but mechanisms are not as
important as solutions now. Immediate action is called for, and the
action can best come from you-- as a visitor will soon have the chance
to explain. Because your planetary system is a primitive one, there
are certain advantages and strengths which you and your group can
offer us in combatting intratemporal ripoff. The collapse of our
future (and yours as well, by a `retrodomino' effect) has already
begun because billions of beings have ripped off intratemporally to an
excessive degree. Maladaptive greed, apparently, is a universal trait
of sentient beings. To understand what the intratemporal ripoff effect
is, you must understand that time is not as simple as your cultures
have pictured it. Time is not like a four-dimensional matrix with
cartesian (x,y,z) coordinates. Nor is time merely an all-pervasive
"ether." To those of us triangles of light, time is more like a
solidly three-dimensional velvet moebius ribbon.
We are not a political movement, and we do not espouse any
particular philosophy. We do, however represent every known life form
to be found by our methods of surveillance and contact in 32,000 A.D.
The absolute number of known living beings has dwindled significantly
since the discovery of operational time travel methods in 28,050 A.D.
"Stealing from peter to pay paul" is a way that your cultures describe
what occurred after timetransit began. Cheap and effective methods of
time travel profoundly altered the course of civilizations as many
cultures attained extinction within a millennium because of excessive
cultural emphasis on material physical plane objects and the
accumulation of same. Material-oriented cultures nearly universally
utilized time travel to retrieve valuables from the past for use in
the future (their own present). There was no initial energy problem
to accompany the past-retrievals (intratemporal ripoff). No problems
wer noticed, but possibly no one attempted to ferret out any problems
since the apparent harmlessness of the past-retrieval also did bring
some short-term monetary/material gain. After about 500 years of
these antics, however, parts of certain planets -- and even entire
planets in some cases--began to disappear in monolithic puffs of
dyssynchronismic smoke. Dyssynchronism became a very well-studied and
researched phenomenon as other, less material-oriented cultures
acquired basic knowledge of dyssynchronisms by stressing equally both
the subjective and the objective sciences. Dyssynchronismic science
changed our appreciation of thermodynamics and entropy. The three laws
of thermodynamics, over the millennia, turned out to be the science
fiction of a childlike primitive consciousness that has persisted to
this date. The accumulation of excessive energy disorganization and
randomness, it turned out, was not inevitable, but really more a
function of observer perspective. Entire cultures and planets
disappeared because of disorganization in entropy patterns caused by
the glut of past-retrievals. After millennia of the intratemporal
ripping off, our future is caving in on itself and it is now not only
unthinkable but also highly dangerous to retrotravel in time. To
project a being from our timeframe to yours requires massive and
systematic laplace calculations, but it is possible. However, because
we have also experienced a constant and progressive loss in
robustness, it is more difficult for us to retrotravel. We turn to
the robustness of your era even though your planet is primitive.
Because of unique properties in your brain's flux fields and your own
life-pattern synchronisms, you will experience a unique opportunity to
become a special agent for combatting entropy imbalances in universal
life energy and all its forms. There will be a dramatic metamorphosis
which you will experience within seven of your own planetary days. It
is unnecessary for you to panic or become frightened. The changes
will be no more stressful than what you daily experience when you sit
in front of your video screen and empathically live through other
lifetimes. Our technology allows us to scan individual units of
consciousness, transtemporally and project mass or energy into
selected sectors of the universe we share even across time boundaries.
The seven group members still remained in MindLink and HeartLight. None
of them directly observed the "File....Save As...." menu pull itself down on
the notebook computer screen. The title, Project Assignment, was typed in the
window on the screen, and the notebook again emitted its piezoelectric beep.
As soon as the telepathic MindLink/HeartLight was over, all members were
aware that there had been a powerful annealing of individual mentalities and
energies. A matter-of-fact bonding and a detached quality of fusion had
already brought the seven-membered group together before they had a chance to
get to know each other as individuals. In this first encounter, there were
effects other than just the initial bonding that were immediately observable.
A group thought-projection took shape and it appeared to all of them as a
kinetic and colored holographic image. The three-dimensional image showed
all seven of them onstage as members of a musical group. A large computer
with oversized double-faced video screens formed a central hub. The seven
group members stood around the multi-modular computer and related to both the
computer and to each other. Free-form multicolored laser images played on
the screen while the computer's numerous lights blinked off and on randomly
and nonrandomly. A rainbow projector was causing myriads of bouncing
rainbows to oscillate in time to the music's beat. Except for the drummer,
the entire group stood rather impassively while they performed. All of them
appeared to be very intent, not only on the music, but on a common, inner
state which was shared among the group members. The inner state was also
obviously projected to the audience. The musical composition was in a minor
key. A twelve-stringed guitar is tuned to open E minor. Sounds of Tibetan
monks chanting with temple cymbals and gongs made up the background. After
several minutes, the free form light pattern on the double-faced screen was
replaced with a very clear likeness of Martin Luther King, Jr. During a
minimalistic song, the image of Martin Luther King, Jr. alternates,
tachistoscopically, with that of Jesus of Nazareth. During most of the song,
the two images quickly and almost subliminally flash interchangeably on the
screen. Toward the end of the song, both images are replaced by a large
flashing Bat-signal.
______________________________________________________________________________
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD)
#1054, spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar,
and a couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a
Mac IIsi running MOTU's `Performer.' This version of `Dr. Tomorrow' was part
of a Ph.D. Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. `Dr.
Tomorrow' is a project that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional
wellness learning system. Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube,
several Macs, numerous stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic
German Shepherds, She-Ra and Bullet. `Dr. Tomorrow' and `Project Talking
Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two scientific activities of Life Energies
Research Institute, P.O. Box 588, Miami, Florida 33133.
Dr. Tomorrow will be continued next issue.
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Weeping Children
Maurice Forrester
Copyright (c) 199
______________________________________________________________________________
The two huddled under an outcropping of granite. They had crept into their
hiding place two hours earlier as the sun had set on the opposite side of the
valley. Their rover lay on the other side of the hill in the ravine that had
broken its axle. The village was designated PA-40 on their maps, and there
appeared to be at least one infant present.
Emilia spoke first. "When do you think they'll get a copter in for us?"
"A couple of days unless we ask for an emergency recall," Wells replied.
"We'll just sit tight and get some data on the village. When the copter
comes we can snatch the children."
"They're being careful. At least four guards on the perimeter." Emilia
handed the nightscope to Wells.
"A careful barbarian is still a barbarian."
Emilia's hand moved to cover the tic at the corner of her left eye as she
heard the stupid schoolboy expression, and she wondered how Wells had managed
to rise to the rank of captain.
"You like your work, don't you?" she asked knowing it would put him on
edge. Wells regularly filed reports to headquarters about her aberrant
behavior.
"I like making a contribution to what's left of humanity," Wells said
slowly, quoting a speech he had once heard. "You should understand the
importance of our word better than me."
Just as Emilia had managed to see Wells' mission reports when at base, he
had read her confidential files. He knew, and mentioned at least once each
mission, that she had been a barbarian child. Wells had come from the ruins
of Montreal, and he prided himself on being a real Canadian. When Emilia had
been reluctant to kill a barbarian high on ergot from some bad wheat just
outside of Windsor, he knew there was something wrong with her and broke into
the files when they got back to the base. Several more missions went by
before Wells let slip that he knew Emilia's background. They had been
hunting barbarian infants near the Hudson River when Emilia tried to make
conversation with her disinterested partner. She mentioned playing in the
woods as a child, and Wells carelessly replied, "You mean near here?" There
was a long silence before Emilia answered, "No. I don't remember that
childhood."
What Emilia remembered most about her childhood was that she was not
permitted to call her adoptive parents by any of the familiar names that the
other children used; to her, they were always Reverend and Mrs. Standish.
Reverend Standish had a small parish on an island in the Slave Bear Lake.
While the other sterile women in the community lived active, varied lives,
Mrs. Standish chose to live the way fertile women were forced to live. She
remained at home to care for the house and Emilia, she was always available
for babysitting, and she had remained married to the Reverend until her
recent death. The young Emilia spent most of her time sneaking out of the
house to avoid lessons in music, dance, and cooking. She preferred to run in
the woods and swim in the lake. Sometimes, when that thin, quiet woman
looked at her in a certain way, Emilia knew that Mrs. Standish blamed her for
the absence of natural children in the family. The barbarian girl was a
constant reminder of the source of the poisons that made her sterile.
Wells was still scanning the village with the nightscope, so Emilia picked
up her rifle and did the same with her weaker, mounted sight. Slowly, so
Wells would not notice, she swung her rifle from the village to the
surrounding countryside. The area had once been part of the middle Atlantic
United States, and Emilia recalled pictures she had seen during a briefing
that showed the land covered by enormous trees and filled with deer, bear,
and other animals. Now the land was covered by scrub brush, and people who
grunted like animals instead of speaking a proper language grew stunted crops
in the rocky, worn out soil. To the north, lay an eroded plateau with its
steep ravines and flattened hills, but here the valley was wide and the hills
rolling. A river fed by cold, narrow streams flowed through the valley.
Emilia remembered the forests she had played in as a child. The trees had
seemed enormous to her little girl eyes, but she had learned in school that
they were only reminders of what once had been. She focused her scope, and
her rifle, on the village fields. This was a large settlement by barbarian
standards, several dozen huts were grouped around a central square, and its
plantings were ambitious. Emilia wondered why the village was so large, and
she wished it a silent good luck. She knew it would never grow enough food
or produce enough children to endure. The large village with its wide fields
was doomed long before she and Wells arrived to steal their children.
Like Emilia, those stolen infants would be taken north where they would be
adopted by some of the many sterile couples that filled the waiting lists.
They would be brought up with all the comforts that society and their new
parents could provide. Many would never even know that they had been born in
a barbarian hut.
Only once had Mrs. Standish treated Emilia as her daughter. Whenever each
child reached puberty, he or she was tested for fertility. With so few
fertile individuals left, it was imperative that they be identified and urged
or, when necessary, required to procreate. Emilia's classmates began to
report for fertility testing at age twelve. One by one, as they reached
puberty, they made the trip across the lake to the city of Providence. Most
returned to the island disappointed; a few returned in tears. Once, a young
girl named Rachel failed to return to school. It was rumored that she had
been found fertile and married a wealthy merchant that same afternoon. A few
weeks later, Emilia learned that the girl was sterile and had jumped into
Slave Bear Lake and drowned.
There was one fertile woman on the island. Mrs. Mackenzie was the wife of
the town mayor; she was 25 and had four children. She was in good health, so
she could expect to have at least four additional children and perhaps many
more before she would have filled her obligation to society and could stop.
Other women did things, some even did things with their adopted children, but
Mrs. Mackenzie stayed home and nursed her youngest. The mayor's wife had as
many lines on her face as did the 50 year old Mrs. Standish.
As each month went by, Mrs. Standish had become more optimistic about the
chances for Emilia to be fertile. It was a commonly held belief that the
later menstruation occurred, the more likely the girl would be fertile.
Emilia became increasingly apprehensive. Four years had gone by since the
first of her classmates had made the trip to the clinic in Providence before
Emilia awoke to find her pajamas soaked with blood.
When Mrs. Standish came into Emilia's room to see why she was late for
breakfast, Emilia tried to pretend everything was normal. "It's just a
stomach-ache," she said.
"Let me feel your stomach." Mrs. Standish had grown suspicious of every
one of Emilia's aches and pains.
The older woman would not be put off. Finally, Emilia begged, "Please,
don't make me go to the clinic. Please."
Mrs. Standish could not contain her excitement. "If we hurry, we can
catch the morning ferry. This is a big day girl! Get some clothes on."
Emilia stalled as long as she could, but Mrs. Standish was determined to
make it to the ferry. She pushed her adopted daughter out the door before
her boots were tied, and they made it to the ferry fifteen minutes before it
was scheduled to leave.
The trip to the city was uneventful. Once the ferry was on its way, Mrs.
Standish moved to the bow and watched for Providence. Emilia moved to the
stern and stared at her trees and fields, certain that she would not see them
again. The only other passengers on the boat were a group of men selling
manufactured goods to the islanders. They seemed to know where Emilia was
going; they elbowed each other and whispered, but none tried to talk to her.
When the boat docked, Emilia thought of running. But there was nowhere to
run. The men were watching her, the city was unfamiliar, and Mrs. Standish
put her hand on Emilia's arm. "The clinic isn't far," the woman said. "We
can walk."
The clinic was a low, gray cinder block building. As Emilia and Mrs.
Standish approached it, passers-by would turn their heads and watch the two.
In front of the building, another young woman, older than Emilia, was exiting
a taxi. The girl looked like Emilia's opposite: tall, slim, well dressed
with pale skin and dark hair. She was accompanied by a stout, matronly woman
who was dabbing at her eyes with a kerchief.
The lobby was filled with plants and low couches. On the far side, a
young boy was curled up in a chair near the wall. The doctor had only taken
a few minutes with Emilia; waiting for the results seemed to go on for hours.
The other girl had arrived before Emilia, and she got her results first.
When the doctor spoke with her, in a glass-walled office just behind the
receptionist, she broke down. Her cries reverberated throughout the clinic,
drowning out even her mother who could be seen waving her arms at the doctor.
A security guard had to be summoned from the bowels of the building to escort
the doctor out of the room. The mother and daughter were left inside to
exhaust themselves. The girls cries had turned into steady sobs when the
doctor finally approached Emilia. The look on his face told the outcome of
the tests, and now Mrs. Standish began to sob softly. Emilia did not speak
to the doctor, but instead, got up and headed for the exit as soon as the
news was official. Mrs. Standish hurried to catch up. The boy was still in
his chair.
Emilia and her adoptive mother reached the dock well before the evening
ferry was scheduled to leave for the islands. Mrs. Standish unwrapped a
sandwich she had made that morning and ate it quietly. Emilia fed her's to
the gulls. The trip home was equally quiet. Emilia hung over the railing
near the bow and felt the spray on her face. The older woman dozed under a
blanket in the covered passenger area. It was dark when they arrived on the
island.
Reverend Standish was smoking a pipe in the living room when Emilia
entered the house. She stepped aside to let in her adoptive mother. "Well,"
the Reverend asked his wife. "How did she do?"
Mrs. Standish sighed. "She failed. But she took it well."
"I thought she would fail. Barbarians live closer to the poisons than do
we. It's a waste of time to even test them."
Emilia felt her throat tighten and the tears well up behind the dam she
had built with her mind. Blindly, she groped for the door and, flinging it
open, dashed out into the night.
The night was cool and the grass was damp. Emilia ran up the hill to the
tall maple she had climbed so often as a child. Panting now, she collapsed
at the base of the familiar tree and began to cry. She thought of what she
could not have, what she had thought she did not want, and she cried.
Slowly, she became aware of someone standing over her. She turned and
through her tears she saw Mrs. Standish looking older than she had ever
looked before. The thin, old woman put her hand on the girl's arm and, as
Emilia's sobs turned to heaves and hiccups, Mrs. Standish held her close and
cried too.
Wells nudged Emilia and handed her the nightscope. "Keep an eye on that
guard down below. He keeps looking up here. I'm going to take a leak."
Emilia put down her rifle and the valley went black. She blinked rapidly
to clear her eyes. There was a slight reddish glow from one of the huts in
the village, a small fire spilling through the cracks in the wall, but
everything else was in darkness. She brought the scope up to her eyes and,
as it began to magnify the available starlight, the village became visible
again. As Wells crept quietly out of the shelter, Emilia focused on the
guard that was looking in their direction. He could not possibly see the PIP
team in the dark, but the way he stared in their direction was unsettling.
If the barbarian guard was not looking for them, maybe he was looking for
someone else. "Captain," Emilia whispered. "There might be others out
there." The only response was a heavy grunt of pain. Emilia grabbed her
rifle and dived out of the small cave. Her knees scraped against rock as she
turned to see Wells doubled over with a spear through his gut. Dark shapes
moved toward her and she fired. She cursed herself for leaving her other gun
in the cave. The rifle was equipped to fire only tranquilizer darts, but the
pistol fired nine millimeter hollow points. She had unbuckled it for
comfort, and now it lay on the other side of the dark figures. Two of the
shapes fell before a third hit Emilia on the head with a thrown rock. She
fell backward down the slope, blood flowing into her eyes. As she tried to
bring her rifle back up to firing position, there was a small explosion at
the back of her head. Fighting the pain, Emilia hit the emergency recall
beacon on her belt before surrendering to the darkness.
Emilia regained consciousness slowly. She tried to roll over, but ropes
bound her. She was not lying down but was tied to an upright post that
pushed at her spine. Her swollen eyes opened, then closed again in reaction
to the bright sun. "Stop, think," she told herself. "What happened to the
team?" She went over in her mind the events of the previous night. Her body
shuddered as she pictured Wells tugging at the spear that ran through his
stomach.
Her eyes opened again. She was tied to a post in the middle of a
barbarian village. The crude huts that surrounded her looked like the ones
she had observed the night before through her nightscope but all barbarian
villages seemed to look the same. She looked down at herself, and finally
realized she was naked and bruised. Her captors had not been gentle when
tying her up.
A dirty youth peered out of the doorway to one of the huts. He stared at
Emilia lustfully until he realized she was awake. Then, jabbering in the
barbarian language that Emilia had never learned, he ran through the village.
Quickly, people began to converge on the clearing. From the huts and fields
they came until the central square was filled with a hundred people or more,
and Emilia was surrounded.
A tall, gray haired man to whom the others deferred approached her. He
took a spear from a younger man, and poked Emilia in the belly with the blunt
end of the weapon. "I don't understand," Emilia said. The headman spoke
again in his language; he had a rich, deep voice. Emilia's mouth was dry and
her throat tight. Her eye began to twitch. She had raided dozens of
villages and fought countless fights, but she had never felt this close to
death. Her shoulders sagged under the ropes and she repeated herself. "I
don't understand." The words scratched as they came out.
The man turned from Emilia and spoke to the crowd. A moment later, the
onlookers pulled away from their prisoner and a group of young men armed with
spears stepped into the cleared area. The men ringed the bound soldier and
began to circle. As they moved, their spears jabbed closer and closer to
Emilia's skin. From the crowd, a low chanting began. Emilia straightened
her back, readying herself for whatever was to come.
As the spear tips began to scratch Emilia's skin, an old woman burst
through the circle of warriors and collapsed at Emilia's feet. The men
stopped in confusion, and the crowd fell silent. The only sound in the still
morning air was the wailing of the old woman. The headman stepped forward
and spoke sharply to the crone. When that failed to move her, he came closer
and grabbed her shoulders. The old woman shook him off and keened louder,
and the crowd began to talk excitedly. The headman turned and called forward
a young woman. She knelt beside the old woman and spoke softly, placing an
arm around her in comfort. The woman's wails trailed off, and she spoke to
the young woman between sobs. When the old woman stopped speaking, she broke
down again and cried at Emilia's feet. The young woman looked carefully at
the prisoner before speaking with the headman.
The village chief grabbed the old woman roughly and peered closely at her
face. He then turned to Emilia and studied her face before grunting to
himself. With a wave of the headman's hand, Emilia found herself being cut
free. She was pushed into a nearby hut, and her clothes were thrown in after
her.
After dressing and checking to make sure the barbarians had not left any
weapons with her clothes, Emilia assessed her situation. Something the old
woman had said had led to her being spared, at least for the time. Was it
something in her face? Could anyone recognize her this far south? After all
these years?
Lost in thought, Emilia did not hear the old woman until she had entered
the hut. She was carrying a bundle which she set on the dirt floor. While
speaking affectionately in her own language, the woman stroked Emilia's
cheek, Emilia replied as best she could. She tried to tell the old woman
that she could not be her daughter, that it had been too long, that she was
now a child of the north. The old woman shrugged and cooed.
The bundle contained a long skirt and shirt made from tanned deer hides.
When Emilia put them on, the old woman smiled in appreciation. Hours passed
before the chief came for the old woman. As she left, Emilia saw tears on
her cheeks and felt her own eyes fill.
Emilia was awakened by the sound of copters. In her sleep, she cursed the
early morning flights on which headquarters insisted. Then, realizing where
she was, she jumped to her feet. At the doorway, a guard grabbed her arm and
together they stared up into the noonday sun. Canadian gunships were
circling the village. Some were preparing to land in the cleared area where
Emilia had been tied, and barbarians were running to the square with spears
and clubs in their hands.
The Canadian soldiers leaped from the copters and formed a tight phalanx
bristling with SMGs. From a loudspeaker mounted on one of the gunships, a
voice called out, "We are looking for Captain Wells and Lieutenant Emilia
Standish. Turn them over and no one will be hurt." The sound echoed off the
hill where Emilia had hid with Wells, and the crowd looked at the copters in
confusion.
Emilia stood transfixed, the guard at her side forgotten, as someone in
the crowd of villagers threw a spear. It landed in the group of soldiers,
striking no one, but the soldiers panicked. Emilia shouted out at them to
hold their fire, but her voice was drowned out. A withering burst of
automatic weapons fire spat out at the tightly packed crowd and the battle
was on.
The barbarians with their crude spears and wooden shields never stood a
chance against the Canadian soldier's auto-weapons and battle armor. In a
matter of minutes, the village square was filled with barbarian bodies and
the survivors were fleeing to the hills. The old woman who had befriended
Emilia was trying to make her way across the battleground to Emilia when she
was caught in the crossfire. A badly thrown spear struck her in the leg and,
as she went down, a well placed burst from an SMG nearly severed her neck.
The barbarian that had been at Emilia's side fled. A Canadian soldier
looked across the bodies to Emilia. She tried to make eye contact, but all
she could see was his tinted visor. He swung his rifle into firing position
and casually squeezed off a burst that chewed through the door of the hut.
Emilia tried to call out to him but the roar of the copters was too loud.
The next burst ripped through the wattle and daub wall of the hut just above
Emilia's head. Emilia tensed to run, but the next burst was in the ground at
her feet, kicking clods of dirt up onto the deer hide skirt. The fourth
burst was aimed at Emilia's chest.
As the soldier squeezed out that last burst of bullets, the gray haired
headman scrambled around the corner of the hut and tackled Emilia to the
ground. The two were sprayed with bits of stick and dried mud as the front
wall of the hut disintegrated.
Then the headman was up and pulling at Emilia's arm. He pushed her pistol
into her hand, and then they were off. The soldier pulled again at the
trigger, but he had wasted his clip. Emilia and the headman sprinted through
the village, dodging between huts to avoid the soldiers, and trailing the
rest of the villagers.
From a rocky outcropping on the hill overlooking the village, Emilia and
the rest of the barbarians watched the Canadian soldiers systematically
search and then destroy each hut. As her home burned, Emilia unconsciously
disassembled and cleaned her pistol. She thought about what Wells had said:
"I like making a contribution to humanity." And she finally, silently
agreed.
The sun set, all red and gold, behind them, and Emilia heard a child start
to weep.
______________________________________________________________________________
Maurice Forrester lives in Syracuse with his wife, Lori, and three year old
son, John. He is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Syracuse
University where he is doing research on American religious Perfectionism and
antebellum reform.
mjforres@mailbox.syr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Street-Dancer
Jae Brim
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
It's grey. Grey and cold. Colder than cold. So cold that all you really
notice is the dull, numb feeling that lives in your bones. It aches. A wind
skitters down the pavement, blowing bits of charred paper with it. Some
damnfool been trying to light a fire. Newly run, freezing, no roosts. You
don't try to light fires on days like this. Days when the sleet and gritty
rain fall out of the sky, and the wind drives it stinging into tattoos and
raw scars. Crazed. On a day like this you huddle inside and pray that your
roost has some heating coils.
"Nikathlin." Damn. Emrty calling me. Gotta go. Leave the relative
safety of the stairs and dog out into that blinding, biting nastiness that
pours out of the sky. Snapped day, wouldn't be out if I could help it.
Bloody fool gang Heartbreakers from two belts over challenges. My bloody
fool gang leader Mrikon accepts. Thrice snapped Easterners, should live in
the Shattered Sector. But even crazed Northerners wouldn't be out on a day
like this.
Falling behind I am. Bunch of words be running through my mind. Like I'm
telling a story. Happens to me every so often. Don't know what it is. I
run up and after and settle in with the rest. Emrty's always after me for
falling behind. The boy's got something against Westerners. "Nikathlin,"
he's always saying, "she's a crazy. Slacker. Got no soul." Got more soul
than you, you thrice strung baboon. Baboon. Is a curse my father used to
use when he was drunk. Don't know what it is, he probably didn't either.
Crazy, the whole lot of them over here. We spent the night over at the
Circles so that we could fight this gang. Stupid. Ain't nothing in fighting
them. We aren't rivals, no one trespassed, no insult given or taken. No,
Heartbreakers is a new gang. Are power crazed, want prestige. And Mrikon,
he wants prestige, too. Wants to get noticed by the Five. Wants to be a
scout, maybe Eastern Five himself. Tell you something, Mrikon honey, you
don't get to be the Five by picking fights with every gang in Charn. You get
to be a Five by having smarts. Hells, look at Alafn. It's almost safe for a
legal down here, so long as they don't walk into a gang fight. Well, not
really. They still get robbed and all, but they aren't hurt or killed. Not
that legals were killed much before Alafn either. It brings the Song-dancers
and the guard down on ya. But even gang runners are barely ever killed
anymore. It's all Alafn, him and his precious human life. But it's good. I
don't want to be killed myself. And all the protocol that goes along with it
is good too. Formalizing all the unspoken rules. The challenges, the gangs
never fighting two against one. You know, all that. And then the trashing
of all of them when somebody does kill. Besides, running a gang into
Northern or into the ground gives a gang a chance to work out its grief,
rage, y'know, all the psych words and that stuff. With Mrikon for Five,
Eastern'd be hell on wheels. That's another thing of my father's. Don't
know what that one means either.
What is with my mind this morning? I'm wandering much worse than I ever
do, like I'm half drunk and Running to be Anglwick. Not even paying
attention to where I'm going. I look about me and experience a slight shock.
What on Charn are we doing over on Elista Belt. Then I remember, feeling
like a damnfool. We're going on a raid. Another crazy thing to do on a day
like this. Have you ever tried breaking into an underground warehouse when
it's below zero out and you're on another gang's territory? Let me tell you,
it is not a pleasant experience. Twice we've been jumped doing this. Once a
window broke and three runners got cut up, one so bad that he took a fever
and died. Damnfool was in the way anyways, broke the window and nearly
brought the Song-Dancers down on us all. The gang whose territory the
building was in gave us hell and four separate challenges for it. We won.
Enough. Stop. Must try to concentrate on what's going on. I hate it
when my mind does this. We cross over the rubble scattered streets. All
gray, mostly plasticrete. No belts over here by Stores. These are the back
ways, plasticrete and cement so that the huge antgrav trucks can get through
them. This is where gang fights take place. Makes me jittery, so that my
rod jumps about in my hand and I look about, always wary. Don't want to be
jumped today. Got a raid and a challenge to go to.
Raiding is a big pain in the rear. But it's either raid or steal.
Raiding from Stores ain't real stealing. The way we figure, Stores has food
for the whole city. It's where the Clans and the shops and the Song-Dancers
all get their food. For the city. Well dammit, we are the city. We are the
city's heartbeat, as Kira said, and the city would die without us. Who on
Charn are you anyways, that I have to justify who I am and what I do to you?
Let me tell you something, honey. I wasn't born into this life. I chose it.
I was Clan Athlin. High Clan Athlin. I know what cake tastes like. I know
what it's like to sleep in a real bed. I know what it's like to be legal and
have luxuries and new clothes and points to spend. It sucks. This life may
not have much by way of comfort and the pay is terrible and so is the food,
but I love it.
I don't know how to describe it to you. I mean, the life up there is
crazy. Parties and protocol and testing and training, all in tribute to some
kind of warped society. Being Clan, you may have privilege and money and the
like, but your life ain't worth a dog's butt. Unless you're Clant. Being
pure Athlin, they expect you to be Clant. Twelve years old I wasn't Clant
yet, showed no sign of being Clant, was sick of being told I was Clant and
didn't want to be Clant. So I ran. They tell you crazy stories. They say
that the street children are gonna kill you. Yeah, they say it, but you know
that a street kid don't kill no other kid. You know that the street children
are out there. You know that if you can find a couple and if you got enough
smarts you can survive. So you run. Like I did.
I'm not going to tell you that the life isn't hard. It is. Damn hard. I
almost died my first night out. Had the sense enough to bring some good
clothes and some food. Was fool enough not to even think about getting
myself a roost. Hells, didn't know anything about claims, barely even knew
what they were. They came later. Almost starved to death before I learned
to open the doors. That's what my job is here. Open the doors. Coming up
soon, too. Can see the Stores building up ahead. Can always tell Stores
from other buildings. Have patterns in colored tile or rock or some such
embedded in the front of them. This one's blue with green, which makes it
textiles and food. Weird that they mix 'em.
Go down the stairs. Smooth cut stairs, like all new warehouses. Not
pitted and worn like those of a roost. Down into a dark place, big enough
for fourteen people. Dark that is, until one hits the plate for the lights.
This a real new one, the lights not blown yet. Still bright and beautiful.
I get like this, thinking about beautiful things, before I open the doors.
There are three of us who do it, me an' Jial an' Evenesh. Jial's also
clan blood, high Clan Lin. The three of us stand triangle-like in the center
of the space, me at the apex, them at the other two points. That's the way
it is with us, they provide the raw power, I provide the focus. To do this,
you have to reach out and feel in the door, feel the lock, feel the flow of
'lectricity through the lock and through the comp. Don't know how I do it, I
just do. I just send my mind in there and feel the flow. All these little
bits and pieces and I trace 'em back and when I get into the comp files I
shift and start reading. And when I find a handprint that will open the
lock, I feed it to the reader. And then wait. And pray to Kira and her
Ghost and all the devils in Charn and whatever other power I can think up.
Most times the door opens now. But sometimes it asks for a code. Then we
have to break a window or the like.
So I just stand and wait, with a hand on each of my shoulders and my hands
reaching out, fingertips to the door. With all the 'lectricity pouring in
and out of me and making my blood feel like it's freezing. Until the little
jumping bits finally slow and the door opens with a smooth click.
Immediately comes Mrikon, leaping through the door before it's half open.
Damnfool, not waiting to see if there be alarms and the like. Still, is good
to get someone inside, in case the door closes again. Stays open this time,
and Mrikon doesn't get fried, so we're safe for now.
Raids are the most crazed part of this crazed gang. You get in and wander
around, each person taking what he or she wants. Most have the good sense to
split it up. One person gets breads, another meats, et cetera. You don't
take too much on a gang raid. Only what you need to survive. Don't open too
many crates either. The city knows that the street children steal from
Stores. They compensate for it. But they get angry, start putting codes on
the doors, if there are too many crates open. They can't ship 'em to shops
that way. The shop keepers don't like it. In Clan Stores it don't matter
too much. I can get into Athlin Stores easy. They still got my handprint on
file there. Damn hard to get in otherwise. Clan's always keep the
handprints of anyone in the Clan on file. The way they figure, we're still a
part of the Clan. They don't really care if they find a street kid in Stores
neither. Hells, they'd probably invite 'em home to dinner with 'em. The way
they figure, you're probably Clan. With the security they got, you gotta be
Clan to get inside the outer building. And they figure, someone who's Clan
wouldn't bring another street kid in with 'em. And they're right. I
wouldn't bring anybody else in with me 'less they were starving. Hey, I may
be a street kid and all but I still got some loyalties left. If my Clan
cares enough about me to think that I might need food, then I care enough not
to feed it to any kid off the street.
But you can't live out of Clan Stores forever. Most of what they got is
raw food. Weird and expensive food. Squid, pheasant, flour, spices, milk,
the like. Unless you're lucky enough to have a roost with heating coils or a
hotter you can patch in somewhere, that type of food ain't worth too much.
No, when we raid, we take processed food. Precooked. We got a roost with
coils over by the Wall but we don't get back that way all the time. Besides,
is a good days walk from here to there. No, we take canned stuff. Precooked
beans. Meats. Cheese. Applesauce. Thirst sticks. Drinks. The kind
that's easily carried and more easily eaten. Hells, we don't got none of
your fancy stuffs. Forks and plates and bowls and the like. A runner's got
his knife and cooks his stew in a can. And when you're a fighter you got to
have something that you can gulp down between dashes to and away.
You figure it out after a while. What gives you energy. What you can eat
with your fingers. Ask ya something. Have you ever tried eating canned peas
with your fingers in a span of five minutes? Not fun at all. Threw the can
in the face of the first guy who came at me. Wiped my hands in the second
guy's hair. It's things like that that teach you. Tell you, I never got
peas again. Not good to waste your food like that.
So I wander about, pulling out food from open crates. Until we go back
up, loaded carisaks in hand. Those we steal. Can't help stealing some
things, and we don't steal those too often. Besides, carisaks be cheap.
The wind is worse than ever and smells of ashes. Can feel them scraping
against my already raw skin. Blasted new must be really near. Rain's
sleeting down and it works the grit in deeper until your scalp itches and
water dribbles into your eyes. I draw my cloak closer about me but still the
chill and the damp creep in until my clothes are all clammy and stick and
make a body colder.
And I have to fight in this? No thank you, Mrikon. You and your damned
pride. Why can't you just not take the challenge. Likely the other gang
isn't even going to show up! Bunch of damnfools we are, going out like this.
The raid was okay, we needed the food. But even the devils in Charn wouldn't
fight in weather like this.
Mrikon sends a couple of the youngers back with the food to the far North
roost. The one with the heating coils. Lucky idiots. We, the ones who stay
behind, stand about filling the pockets of cloak and coat with food. No
knowing how long this fight will last. I cram flat tins of beans and
sardines and flat slabs of cheese and a few thirst sticks into my pockets.
Then I start eating bread, sourdough, that turns wet and gritty in my hand.
Feel weighted down by all of the food. Cloak hangs like a dead weight with
its pockets full and being wet as it is. 'Course it won't matter much in a
fight, since we gen'rally shed them anyways. Is another good thing about the
streets, we don't steal from each other. 'Cept in Northern, where life is
crazy. The way we figure, if someone's got something, it's rightfully
theirs. We all got precious little as it is. We all know, at least most of
us do, what it's like to be without a cloak or food or roost for a night.
You do it to someone else, they could as likely turn about and do it to you.
You want a cloak bad enough, you go up to Calypso Sector, up by Anglwick, an'
steal it. Where they got ten times what any legal citizen would need and
leave lots of it lying about to take. Hells, sometimes they even leave it
lying about in the trash piles. Ain't real stealing either, the way that we
do it. Go at the right time and you'll find the deliveries, second hand
clothes and the like, lying about for the taking. You know, the stuff for
the schools. Happen every couple of weeks or so. Can nip in, or jump the
trucks and grab ten cloaks if ya wanted them.
The schools. Damned but they scare me. Scare all of us. Have you heard
what they say about those places? Iron bars. Lights on a timer. Like a
prison. Only worse. 'Cause of how they treat you, and the things they make
you do. And it doesn't matter if you be Clan or not, or if ya got family up
above. Everyone goes, they say. And I don't want any of it. Their stuff.
Don't want to be taken back up above and taught to conform, taught to be
good, taught to be a Clant again. Are you a respectable citizen? Legal an'
all? Got your own unit, a high paying job, wear color to Carnivals and look
a like a funeral otherwise? Don't know. Could even be a Song-Dancer for all
I know of you. But the Song-Dancers are as warped and twisted as the rest.
Down here they say they eat street kids, but I know. Its power hungry, they
are. They're the ones who invented the schools, say they need to clean up
the city. Hah! They've forgotten everything about what being a Song-Dancer
is. Didn't Kira say the street children are the heartbeat of the city?
Hells, she created the Song-dancers out of the street children. We were the
ones with the talent, even if we are grubby and don't live in finery at the
center of the city. Times like this I think the Cult of Kira's right. That
the Song-Dancers have forgotten their true purpose. And the Dar have come
among us. And from the streets the power will arise and Kira will return to
save us.
But then I think, there's got to be something working against the
Song-Dancers at their core. Why haven't they gone and looked for all the
roosts. Why haven't they sealed up all the old buildings and cleaned up
Northern Eastern? In Northern that's easy to explain, because the place is
the Wild Clardlem. It's ruled by the streets, and all the Administrators are
Cultists anyways. But why hasn't anything been done about the rest of
Clardlem? Someone still remembers and believes. And that's enough for me.
Someday I'll go back up top. We all have to. After a while you just get too
big to hide. And too tired to run. And they catch you. Oh we all go back,
it's the way it's always been. Only a few survive here. In Northern a lot
survive, but as I said before, Northern is the Wild Clardlem.
And it's almost enough to be a street kid. To have the freedom. To know
that someday, when you take your blood out of the claims and your claims out
of the roost, some other street kid will find and claim it. It's like a
strange legacy, passing on the roost from one to another. We got another
common law here in the streets. You don't take nothing out that you didn't
come in with. You came in naked, you go out naked. Everything else stays
with the roost. You don't take no food with you either. Once you cross out,
you got no right to the food gotten on a raid. You're a legal then honey,
and you pay for your food like a good legal does. Only the street rat got
the right to it free.
Hah! I sound like a damned elitist now. Don't mean it that way. But
it's true. When you're legal you abide by the law. When you're a street kid
you're below the law and above the law and within the law and you make your
own laws. And the street is the one that makes 'em all. Oh, we may say that
the Five make the laws, but the truth is, the streets form what must be law.
And it works. Better than anything they got up there it works. Getting
close to the fight, and getting jittery I am. Almost wish I had been sent
back with the youngers to the roost. But I always get this way before a
fight. The damp and ash just make it worse.
Take a little bit of metal out of my pocket and hold it in my hand.
Little silver buckle, engraved with my name and roses. Is all I got left
from when I left Athlin. Had it since I was a baby. Only thing I couldn't
part with. Call me superstitious, but it's my luck piece. Kill me if I lost
it. So I just walk along at the back of the gang and feel the metal grow
warm in my hand. And after a while I put it away, tying it back into my
clothes.
Getting jittery now, all of us. There's the slight scrape of steel and
rods glint dully in the air. This is the time where we are truly together as
a gang. It is now, and only now that I can say that I love each and every
one of them more than anything in the world. Each and every one of the
damnfools, even Mrikon himself, damn the bastard. We stand now, jittery and
watchful, waiting for the other gang.
They're not going to show, I think. And then they do show, the lot of
them slinking out of the shadows like ghosts. Their leader goes through the
ritual re-issuing of the challenge. The words pour through my mind and are
gone, and so is Mrikon's answer. Everything moves more slowly, the fall back
and disperse, arranging ourselves, the initial surge forward, everything as
if it were moving through molasses. I see two runners leaping forward,
clashing, falling back, then another and another, until finally my own body
tenses and leaps and joins in with the fight. I move, slashing and parrying
and punching and kicking and leaping. Until the whole array of us seems like
some strange parody of a dance.
We don't call our fights anything fancy. They're just fights, no rumbles,
smashing, all that stuff. But to me at times like this, it seems that we
should call them dances. Street dances. The dances of the street, like
those of the Song-Dancers up above.
So I move, dancing through molasses like I always do. Guy comes up, slash
with the left, punch with the right and then leap away. Always like this,
all of us cutting, twisting, never killing. Living by Alafn's law. Trip,
and hit the ground rolling. And another blade comes down and hits the ground
where I was in a shower of sparks. Someone screams, we're all screaming.
And I think, I know that voice, and slash at someone's legs. And hear the
scream again. And suddenly everything is snapping back into real time and
I'm sent reeling back from remembrance as I hear them screaming a name.
"Graf!" they yell. "Graf!" And then I burst into motion, fighting like a
crazy woman, pressing towards that voice. Graf, my baby brother. Grafa.
And since this isn't getting me anywhere I stop in the middle of the fight.
"GRATHATHLIN!" I cry out. Want to kick myself, feeling like a damnfool.
The fight freezes and the runners turn, all staring at me. Nikathlin, you
crazy, I say to myself. Now what will they think of you. Screaming out high
Clan names into the middle of a fight. But then a dark-haired boy with too
light eyes comes leaping down out of somewhere, staring wildly about him. He
sees me and those eyes light up in recognition.
"Niki!" he yells. And then we're leaping around each other, hugging and
taunting and babbling away like all brothers and sisters.
"Kira's Ghost but you've grown, boy," I say finally. "You were a small
scrawny thing when I left."
He looks down at me from his huge height, and I am not a short girl.
"That was five years ago," he says. "I'm thirteen now."
"Damn big old lug of thirteen you be." And we laugh, remembering the
times we used to have. And all the while the gangs stare, and finally slink
off to fight it out somewhere else.
"Dammit Grafa," I say then, "why did you run? You're something to the
Clan. You're Clant." Graf. We'd always called him that. Ever since he was
a baby and couldn't say Grath.
"Didn't you know, Nik?" he asks. "They never registered me as Clant. I
don't look right to be a Clant. Clant's s'posed to have light hair and dark
eyebrows and the ears. Hells, I have the ears, but not the right coloring.
You got the right coloring---"
"But not the ears or the voice nor the talent for it," I break in. Was
sick of being told I look right to be a Clant. "They're just stupid. You
had all the talent. You could even dance."
"'Sides," he goes on, "life at Athlin was getting too crazy without you
and Rika and Shi. Rika left two years after you, and Shia three. Dad
doesn't talk or do much anymore. And Old Father's always talking about there
not being anymore Clants being born. 'Bout a month ago I couldn't take it
anymore and I just got out of there. Most of the other side have left, too.
Hells, most of high Clan Athlin's children be in the streets now. Except for
the babies. And Mikal."
Mikal. Haven't thought about Mikal in years. Boy must be like to twenty
years old now, maybe older. And I feel a queer sort of ache rise up in my
throat, like something half forgotten.
"Mikal never did leave," says Graf, "not even when most of that side had
left and it was only him and the babies left. He still talks about you, you
know. But enough. Tell me what has happened to you. Tell me about the
streets."
So I tell him. Tell him what I know. Tell him about Alafn and how to
make a claim and blood bonding. Tell him how I open the doors. Tell him
about living in Northern and all the things I've done since I left.
Carnivals and fights and old scars and the meaning of the tattoo high on my
left cheekbone.
And so we talk and talk. And finally we part, each going back through the
chill, grey rain to our respective gangs. Perhaps never to see each other
again.
And so I sit here in my corner. Hold the silver clasp in my hand and
think. Think about the four of us scattered and running about the streets.
Think about the rest of them running also. Think about what Graf said about
Daddy and Old Father and Mikal. And just sit and think for a while.
Sometimes I miss 'em. Times like this I miss 'em the worst. Me sitting
over here in my corner and them all over there. Laughing and talking. I'll
always be the misfit in this crazy gang. Always the crazy Westerner.
Sometimes I think about going back. Just for a little while. Tonight I
think I will.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jae Brim is a student at the Alternative Community School in Ithaca, New
York. She wishes she could spend more time on photography, writing,
painting, theater, and her two cats. She really wishes she didn't have to
write this bio. She can be reached care of Scott Brim,
swb@nr-tech.cit.cornell.edu.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters
Chapter 9
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
"Don't'cha think you're overdoing it?"
She continued dotting her cheeks, ignoring her sister's gleeful
convulsions. The luminescent liqui-dots glowed faintly in the locker room's
damp air. Underwater, they'd be a beacon for her regulars: gaudy but
effective.
"They don't make you look grown-up, if that's what you're thinking."
"How'd you know, shrimp?"
"At least I don't look like a lighthouse."
She shot her sister a mean look, the kind their mother used to use when
she pretended to be angry. The dark-coated man was watching again from behind
her sister's shoulder. He sat motionless, dripping in the dense humidity.
Then turned away, and a thick lump started to build in his throat. He winced
and swallowed it down, narrow crevices of concentration forming along his
forehead.
"Hey, mister."
A water droplet trickled down his chin.
"Hey, mister. You looking at me?"
"Maybe he's deaf."
"Hey!"
He looked over again, spurting something in Galanglic. She knew a little
bit, enough to get by with customers.
"You offworlder?"
He smiled.
"Imperial? You Imperial, mister?"
He nodded, and said something else. A question probably.
"My baby sister think the dots...um...you know...make me less pretty? Do I
say right?"
"The dots?"
"You think pretty?"
He shuffled his gaze to the floor, unsure how to answer.
"C'mon...you shy? Looking for a good time?"
He laughed, embarrassment flushing his already steamed cheeks. The
practiced lines always did the job.
"Hey, don't be a stranger, okay?"
Someone in the service corridor started screaming for the bouncers. It
sounded serious, and the man stood up and began striding toward the double
doors. She watched him, annoyed that the interruption had blown her pitch.
Now her sister would be able to laugh all the harder at the stupid dots.
Suddenly, the noise of gun spray filled the corridor, sharp bursts
clamoring down the staircase, pinning her feet firmly to the cement. The man
jumped behind a row of metal lockers, the noise of empty cartridges still
hitting the floor as the service doors swung open. A single chiphead slipped
awkwardly on the wet cement, his gun leveled at her as he scanned the room.
For a moment, she couldn't move, except to look toward the dark-coated man
hiding between two rows of lockers. He huddled against the thin metal
barriers, shaking with anticipation as he fumbled a pistol from his coat.
The chiphead dashed across the moist cement, placing his shot with the
direction of her gaze as he crossed the floor. In an instant, a shower of
blood and bits of skull erupted against the rusty, grey wall. She watched it,
captivated by the individual particles as they lingered in mid-air, falling
leisurely like the jagged splinters of a shattered jar. Her sister lay under
the bench. She held a sponge towel over her head as the bouncers warily
entered the locker room, their weapons fixed on the dead man near the center.
"Where'd he go?"
She motioned them up the stairs after pausing a moment to consider the
question. Droplets of cranial fluid still trickled along the lockers, forming
a sickly, sweet scent in the warm, moist air. Peering up from the sponge
towel, her sister seemed innocent and bewildered.
"What happened?"
She bent cautiously over the bench, opening her mouth to explain as small
fingers clutched numbly onto the slippery, red plastic. No words came out.
Only the contents of her stomach, churning sluggishly like the first time her
mother had taught her the business, thrust upward with a sour, sticky taste,
spilling over her lips in frenzied spurts to a haphazard puddle on the cold,
cement floor.
If there was any city within which a person could just walk around
unnoticed, it had to be Xaos. It was like the Silver-Tri Acrology on Tizar,
except that instead of playing the towering eyesore, Xaos was built entirely
underground in a tremendous man-made chasm reaching to several kilometers in
height. In its upper reaches, business and government buildings were
supported by narrow, cermelecon spines. At the bottom, a network of pumps
tirelessly coaxed the icy Aeluin which seeped between polymer coated patches
on the cavern's stone walls. Below even the pumps, however, was a great hub
composed of several narrow, concentric bands known as the furrows. These
circled the dual fusion reactors set within the city's basement, and here,
from at least an engineering standpoint, was the city's heart, the source of
its power and the source of much of Xin's and Xekhasmeno's as well.
The furrows were basically suburbs populated mainly by maintenance and
transit personnel and, of course, by the diggers. Each possessed its own
separate character and norms, however, at the same time they were linked by a
common purpose and by a common, underlying commerce that the uninitiated
tourist rarely stumbled across by chance. For the native, however, it was
well known that in the furrows of Xaos a person of means could purchase
anything or anyone.
Mike had visited there once, albeit not by choice. The particular locale
to which he had the pleasure of returning, unnoticed, was called Delta-3 by
the city planners, also known as Jangletown by its residents. It held mostly
a collage of diggers and fix-it jocks hitching rides on the government trams
which travelled up and down the coreward expressway. Two years before, they
were looking for heavy elements used in the processing of eka-metals. There
was part of the reason the Imperial's wanted to stay in Xekhasmeno. It was
also the reason they financed much of the region's mining operations.
Despite the rampant inflation, the misery, and the corruption, Calanna was
a world fabulously blessed with natural resources. Mike found it difficult
to accept that such a world could be so callously mismanaged without some
grassroots revolt by its inhabitants, and he often reminded himself that as
free-spirited as the Calannans seemed, their's was essentially an obedient
society which was mastered by fools. The idea seemed to him somehow
unconventional, even exotic, and yet curiously stale, like the seeping walls
of Xaos, that peculiar yet obvious result one gets when combining water,
stone, and time.
Mike kept his head down, turned away from the view as the seeping walls
and cermelecon spider web ascended into the hazy darkness. Two boxes of
quaggahaggis still dangled from one hand, his other resting in a baggy pants
pocket with Bill's small, fiberglass pistol. The crowd of passengers began to
rub shoulders, a woman sneezing somewhere in their midst as the lift's
grating fence slid open with a fitful whine. Mike had forgotten about the
smell of the air, one of those odd details he had somehow managed to strike
from a not very selective memory. This time the stench reminded him of his
father's black boots, a nagging, musty, lived-in scent that stuck to the roof
of his mouth wafted halfway down his throat. Under different circumstance it
would have made him grin.
Jangletown was alive with its usual splendor if one could call it that.
The hustlers were so busy turning tricks that customers had to take a number
just to get a place in line. Then there were the sensitizer shops, for new
and exotic cerebral pleasures, the sort of stuff that could kill you and
still leave you smiling. It was chiphead heaven.
Mike wandered the various tunnels, mentally categorizing the few features
he still remembered. At one spot was a fire retardant valve he'd once tripped
over in a mad rush. Not far away was a small casino known locally as The Pit,
named after the twenty foot hole where fights were held for a nightly mob's
wagering and entertainment. The new, fiberglass tubes of its neon-caked
entrance were another reminder as to why he'd been in such a hurry.
Mike found the comm-shaft without too much difficulty, its access code
unchanged since his last visit. Gaudy, green paint still flaked off the metal
ladder. As he climbed downward, he had to skip several steps in order to
avoid whole bunches of cables which were carelessly draped between the
runners. Finally, he reached the access way. Red paint still marked the
surface. "Danger. High Voltage." Mike rapped the pistol's handle against the
door. The sound reverberated up the shaft. Somewhere in the dim light, he
could imagine some hidden lens focusing on his face, his image being
digitized and fed through optical fibers into Cecil's brain.
"C'mon...."
He knocked again, but there was no response. Giving up, Mike started to
head down further to the Delta-4 sector when the portal suddenly opened. A
stranger looked down at him, yellow, crooked teeth grinning an unfettered
acknowledgement. The leather jacket the stranger wore seemed to gather about
his body like crumpled folds of dead flesh, a grimy brown paste mixing along
the front with the moldy smudges of some feverishly enjoyed meal. He snorted
beneath it, his breath raspy and wet as oily strands of auburn settled over
his slumped shoulders. Mike climbed upward, an uneasy feeling sloshing in his
stomach.
"I'm looking for Cecil."
The stranger nodded.
"Is he around?"
"Left shoe."
"What?"
"Give to me left shoe."
Slipping off his left shoe, Mike handing it to the stranger who began to
pinch the sole at various points, finally pulling out a pocket knife and
jabbing it into the rubbery material. There emerged a tiny metal ingot less
than a quarter centimeter in diameter.
"What is it?"
"Locator. No harm. Tunnel shielded. Come in."
Mike inwardly cursed himself as he crossed the portal to the dim chamber
beyond. Several candles lit the area, their orange flames glowing dimly in
the cold, cramped darkness. A semi-sour fragrance of scented wax hung loosely
to the thin air as wisps of fine, white smoke, snaked upward along the
cluttered shelves, dancing blindly about various pieces of electronic
paraphernalia and scuttling carelessly along the blurry, grey walls. Cecil
sat in the center of the rug, a slight smile forming in his lips as the dozen
or so cameras situated about the chamber turned to face Mike. The stranger
stepped onto the ladder, closing the portal behind him as he left. For the
first time since he left Tizar, Mike felt totally at ease. He picked a place
by the wall, settling first to his knees and then letting his legs unfold
carelessly beneath his body.
"How were the cellars?"
Cecil grimaced, his nose flatting against his face. Mike tried to stifle a
grin.
"That's what I figured. I brought you some food. You like quaggahaggis? It
should help you recover."
Cecil accepted one of the containers, first fingering it, testing to see
if it would jump out at him, Mike supposed.
"Go ahead. Eat."
Cecil nodded toward Mike's general direction, his expression stony. Mike
laughed.
"C'mon Cecil. Don't you trust me?"
Mike opened up his own box, stirring it around with a finger before
tilting his head with a wink for the camera. A quarter of the container's
warm contents slid down his throat before he came back up for air.
"See? It's some kind of meat pudding. I'm not really sure what it's made
of exactly."
"Cecil knows."
"Tell me."
"Liver of quagga."
"Liver's not so bad."
"Heart of quagga."
"Heart too? I'm not surprised."
"Lungs of quagga."
"They sure do use everything, don't they?"
"Fat of quagga's kidneys."
"My dad loved kidneys."
"Boiled in stomach of quagga."
"Cecil, that's enough, okay?"
"With loins of quagga, the meatier the merrier."
"Well...thank you for spoiling my dinner."
Cecil beamed, the crevices in his face crumpling into tight wads of skin.
Mike set the container of food gingerly to the floor, watching Cecil's shady
outline from the corner of his eye. It seemed to stiffen for a moment, as
though emersed in the most serious concentration. Then it became relaxed
again. Mike had seen Cecil do it many times before. It was his version of
wandering around looking for something he'd lost.
"What is it?"
"Message from Spokes. He wants you to meet him at the Runyaelin after the
midnight ceremony."
"You know Spokes?"
Cecil shrugged.
"How did he know I'd be seeing you?"
"Perhaps he supposed that on Tizar one should pay a visit after a most
kind and courteous rescue. Actually, he figured you'd be begging for money."
It was Mike's turn to shrug as Cecil nodded toward the money jar.
"Go ahead. It's what you came here for, isn't it?"
"Did he say anything else?"
"Yes," Cecil seemed to chew on the moment. "You seem to owe him
something."
Mike smiled, "I hope this isn't going to be an attempt at collecting?"
"Doubtful."
"Why's that?"
"He seems to like you."
Mike dropped the smile, somewhat to Cecil's amusement. The cameras
swiveled in circles like dancers on a stage: Cecil's way of telling people he
was mildly entertained. Then they stopped. Cecil frowned, uncertainty
forming in the wrinkles around his eyes. Mike looked toward the money jar
again, then back at Cecil.
"Did he say something else?"
"Getting police reports, Michael. You're popular."
"It's been one of those days."
"Hmm...the Mermaid. Trashy place. Why do you always do this?"
"Does it say anything about casualties?"
"Two fatalities, a male and a female."
Mike felt his heart sink to somewhere in the pit of his stomach, the
cameras drooping slightly with Cecil's chin.
"Friends of yours?"
"I'll tell you about it later." Mike stood up, the cameras pivoting with
his slight ascension.
His old friend wore a dour expression, as though he'd been the one eating
the quaggahaggis and just realized what it was made of. Mike crossed the
room, the green jar half-way hiding behind an optical storage device.
"I'm gonna need a loan to get surface-side. You sure you don't mind?"
"One shouldn't have to warn you that going through the Underway at this
particular juncture of your career is..." Cecil gulped a lump of air,
"hideously stupid."
"It's important, Cecil. I'll be back after I see Spokes."
"Is that a promise you can't keep or a threat you'll never carry out?"
"One or the other. Wish me luck?"
Mike picked a healthy wad from the jar and then crept back into the access
shaft, leaving Cecil alone with his dusty cameras and the multitude of
unseen, electronic visitors. As he climbed the ladder, he imagined one of
Cecil's constructs floating beside him, keeping an eye out for danger.
Beneath miles of steel and stone and water, Cecil began to sleep the strange
sleep of the void, his dreams curling about the incoming data, isolating,
analyzing, distant voices muttering numbly beneath the vague current of
electronic wind. "Good luck, my hideously stupid friend. Good luck."
For some bizarre reason, Mike felt lucky. Perhaps it came from seeing
Cecil again. That plus the present surroundings brought more than the usual
tide of memories.
They'd first met on Tyber, Mike the aspiring gatherer and Cecil a doctoral
candidate in artificial sentience. Only a few years older than Mike, he was a
published success, the mousy upstart in a rapidly evolving field. These days
he seemed more like a zombie long since fallen from grace, his brilliance and
natural sight taken by pitfalls of the electronic ether.
Cecil never expressed remorse about the past except to joke from time to
time about how one's eyes were the first thing to rot in the cellars, the
mind generally following soon after. He seemed to delight in the wickedness
of it, and Mike occasionally wondered if Cecil had ever taken his past
achievements seriously or instead treated them merely as passing curiosities,
his brush with fame a transient, ephemeral state somewhere between happiness
and idiocy. Though strangely enviable, the latter case was rare. More often,
when success slowly evaporated like a tide pressing out to sea, its addictive
lure would drive those it had intoxicated to actions both hideous and stupid
lest they curl and whither like fallen leaves. Mike reconsidered the advice
Spokes had given him for all of two seconds. How much of this was he doing
for John Doe #17, and how much of it was for himself?
Ascension from the furrows was uneventful, and Mike stepped off the
rollers shortly before reaching the Underway. Long ago, he'd figured out a
plan for getting topside, if ever there were unfriendlies within the station.
At the time it seemed more of a creative exercise to pass the time, something
to keep his mind from numbing under the influence of the more noteworthy of
the local intoxicants.
Kitara was always the experimenter when it came to that sort of stuff.
She'd drag him along just to shove various mixtures down his throat, often at
his own expense, and then compare his reaction with her own. Anyone else
would have to bully Mike into such an exercise, but she always knew exactly
what to say in as few words as possible to coax him into tagging along. He'd
told her about his "great idea" on one of those occasions, but she just
stared back at him sort of sympathetically and sort of like she wanted to
slap him silly. The she said something that stuck. "Coianders make plans
when sober." Mike looked the word up later on.
Coianders are those that live longest.
Sarn leaned back, tired, his brain slipping quietly into neutral. The
sugary aroma from a pink box of stale pastries teased about his nostrils as
his boots idly clapped the rhythm of some neghrali-noise beside the smooth,
grey frame of a black and white surveillance monitor. It was the sort of job
he appreciated because it didn't demand a great deal of cognitive activity.
The computers did most of the work for him.
*Beep*
He shifted slightly, subconsciously debating whether or not to ignore it.
*Beep*
Sarn blinked open his eyelids with some effort, a long yawn escaping as he
tapped a key at the station.
"Underway Surveillance #4."
"Anything happening over there?" It was Beth.
"Should there be, Commander?"
"Some orders just came down the chain. It looks like they're after
somebody pretty bad. I'm sending image recognition code on the target."
Sarn sat upright, fingering his keyboard and opening a reception channel.
"Hmm...a chiphead. Who is he?"
"Offworlder, apparently. Orders are to search for him at the exclusion of
all other targets. DOA."
Sarn blinked, "Sounds like fun. What's the reward?"
"Thirty days off at double pay."
"Ha! They must be desperate."
"Central guesses that he'll try to get surface-side sometime tonight."
"If he comes through my end, he's history."
"I'm told he's slippery, so stay on your toes for once."
"Of course, Commander. Don't I always?"
Static was the only response, and Sarn chuckled as he loaded up the new
program. At least she'd had the courtesy to deny him an answer.
Erestyl awakened to another day of darkness, to a body he couldn't feel,
his consciousness drifting within an infinitely vast pool of silent oblivion.
He didn't know for certain how long he had been there. It seemed like a long
time, though he couldn't actually remember arriving. He thought about it for
some time, slipping into and out of sleep so often he occasionally found it
difficult to distinguish conscious from its counterpart.
Bizarre images would flash just behind the door to his memory, their
details blurry, as if trapped behind a cloud of fog. Then they'd be gone, not
just gone for the moment, but gone forever, like a page ripped out of a book,
so utterly removed that he was no longer sure whether or not they had ever
existed.
"Is this what it is like to be dead?"
The question gnawed on him, something obscene about it burrowing slowly
into the inner sanctum of his spirit, and an answer beckoned so tormentingly
close. It was just across the periphery of thought like a candle burning in
the darkness. All he had to do was reach forth a tentacle of volition to
touch it, but to summon forth the memory even for the briefest moment would
be to sacrifice it, like all the others.
He could somehow sense that something out there beyond the numbing cloud
was waiting for that moment. For an instant he remembered the old battle of
two great warriors, patience and time. Time always won, eventually.
*Beep*
"Huan here."
"Karl, it's Beth."
"Nothing to report, Commander."
"I need you to circle your people around to the south entrance
immediately."
"What happened?"
"Sector 3 just had a steam main burst. Looks like vandalism. All the
surveillance cameras are useless, but we have a guard at the gate. If you
get your team there to reinforce the perimeter, we'll have our target trapped
inside the sector, and we can do a person by person search until we find
him."
"If he's there."
"Just do it Lieutenant. I'll worry about the risks."
"Yessir. Huan out. You heard her. Get the others and meet me at the south
gate. Mitzo, you stay here."
"Right, okay...I'll just kick back....I don't believe this. I always miss
out on the good shit. Mitzo, you stay here. Mitzo, lick my boots.
Whoa...raise that hood mister. Oh... sorry ma'am. Go ahead. Damn. They do
this to me every time. I'm as good as they are. Hey guys...yeah, you two.
Hold up. Where do you think you're taking the carpet?"
"On the train."
"If you want to get that topside you have to send it through cargo."
"Cargo hasn't moved for the last ten cents."
"Don't tell me about it. There's been a little bit of a backlog. That's
all."
"Look man, we've been trying to get this roll of carpet topside all
night."
"Hey, I sympathize with your plight, but there's nothin' I can do."
"Look, here's a donation to security from our employer. Can we just go
through? We're already late, you know?"
"Aww...this is cheesy. Okay look, just go ahead. If anyone asks, we never
met."
The walk to Vilya's was quiet. Most of the food vendors had turned in for
the night, and taxi's coasted through the narrow streets carrying people to
and from the Underway. Earlier in the evening, they'd have to stop every ten
meters due to the congestion, but most of the late night action was below
ground in Xkutyr or Xaos depending on which part of the capital you
frequented, the old or the new. Xin was more of a suburb, a mostly
residential area for people who liked to breathe fresh air at home and
recycled air at work. Tonight the air was cold, and Mike considered calling a
taxi more than once. He knew he wouldn't, though. Cecil's comment had voided
that option. He was getting just a little too famous for public transit of
any kind.
The cat sat outside on her steps, licking its black coat and meowing in
Mike's general direction as he approached. He leaned over to pet it, but it
ran away before he could so much as touch its tail, ducking behind the back
tire of a yellow motorbike. Its bright yellow eyes watched him, unblinking.
"I never did get your name, did I."
"Meow."
"Food? Dinner?"
"Meow?"
"C'mon."
The cat followed him cautiously up the steps. Mike paused at the door,
unlocking it with a swift twirl of the key. The dead bolt clicked audibly in
the darkness.
Inside, everything seemed to be turned upsidedown. All the drawers and
cabinets were opened, their meager contents strewn about in haphazard piles.
The bookcase in the living room was turned horizontal, the three-vee having
been ripped right off its cable. Mike crept inside, drawing Bill's pistol
with his right hand and peeking left. The door to Vilya's bedroom was part
way open, a sliver of light shining into the hallway. Mike inched slowly
toward her room, finally kicking it open and ducking to the floor. The
flapping of red twill curtains was the only movement as the whine of a
motorbike rose above the noise of Mike's heart beating.
Mike ran around to the front, but the yellow bike was gone. The dodec was
still in the toilet's flushing mechanism where he'd left it. He stuck it
into a plastic sack which he tied to his waist belt. The largest of Vilya's
jackets was still a bit smaller than he was used to, but he took it anyway,
remembering the temperature outdoors. He finally taped the pistol to his
stomach, catching the cat into a tight grip before he left.
The ceremony at the Runyaelin was nearly over when Mike arrived. He waited
outside, cheers from the crowd still to be heard over the cries of its
remaining victims. The temple served a dual purpose; it was institution of
both sacrifice and justice. Felons from all over the continent eventually
found their way to the Runyaelin if they didn't manage to fetch a decent
price at any of the slave exchanges along the way. Their executions would at
least contribute something to Calannic society in the way of the mandatory
temple donations.
The crowds slowly dispersed after the show. Inside, it was like a sports
arena with a large pool as the centerpiece. Two attendants were still hosing
off the circlet of stockades surrounding its small, marble island.
Mike sat down at the bottom of the stands and looked out over the dim,
crystal pool. Its shallows rippled in the moonlight, and a quiet chill seemed
to ascend from the waters. The bottom was coated with a dark grey film, bits
of bone and tangles of hair interspersed between the various incinerated
remains of the temple's most recent victims.
The cat scratched toward the sky as a black hawk soared somewhere
overhead, the dark sky betraying its presence only by the dim light reflected
by Baal, Calanna's lesser moon. Mike remembered the moon from orbit, its
cavernous and broken texture somehow noble and violent as the pool itself. He
studied its gaze in the water's surface, light reflected twice from two
points so distant and different and still so near and so very much alike.
Spokes sat on the pool's narrow ledge, his long, bony legs stretching
outward as the thin spikes on his scalp jutted upward, cutting distinct lines
against the moon's reflection. He regarded Mike and the cat with a cheerful
smirk, like the kid in the Underway, except more malignant.
"You traded one friend for another?"
"The cat was Vilya's."
"Was?"
Mike shuffled his gaze toward the ground. "It needs a place to stay for a
little while. Do me a favor?"
"What do I look like, Harrison? An animal shelter?"
Mike shook his head, trying hard to make it look sincere. "You wanted to
see me, Spokes. What about?"
"Because I know something you don't."
Mike imagined the size splash Spokes would make were he to be propelled
violently backwards into the murky water. The tall, bony one seemed to read
his mind, leaning forward with a bit more tension in the veins of his neck.
"You wanna hear it or not, Harrison?"
"Go ahead."
"You remember when I told you to buzz off yesterday?"
Mike tried to conjure a smile, but Spokes continued before he could claim
success.
"After that, I decided to do some playing around."
"Good for you."
"I located the comm-address of that restricted line you were using from
Gardansa's estate by comparing the amplitude logs on the Doggie-Blitz and
some census dialing records on that district."
"Pure research, I take it?"
"The purest. Against my better judgement, I did some listening. Turns out
that Gardansa was setting you up."
The hawk drifted downward, closer to the water, finally sweeping to the
surface and then darting skyward. A burnt chunk of someone's body dangled
from its talons, more of a vulture's victory.
"You aren't surprised?"
Mike shrugged, "A little, I guess. I didn't think he would destroy his own
limo."
"The man is obviously a maniac."
"I don't think so. You have to understand Gardansa. He was doing me a
favor with Cecil. That sort of entitled him to take something in return."
"Like your life?"
"If he wanted that, he could have had it. You have to know the guy. It's
just a big game to him."
"Well maybe you choose the wrong fuckin' friends."
Mike nodded, "That's what he said."
Spokes gathered his lanky mass beneath his feet. Reaching into his pocket,
he handed Mike a crumpled flimsi-leaf.
"What's this?"
"The comm-address...just in case you decide to tune in."
He began to walk away, taking long, casual steps, as though he was early
for a meeting.
"Spokes."
"Yeah?"
"Why you helpin' me?"
His tall spikes seemed to bounce back and forth as he shrugged and
continued walking. The cat leapt from Mike's arms to follow him, stopping
Spokes in his tracks. So much for feline loyalty, Mike figured, and added out
loud, "Only for a couple days, okay?"
Spokes picked up the cat, seeming to inspect its belly. "Do I have a
choice?"
A thin mist coated the narrow streets outside, various lurkers of the
night huddling together in the alleyways, some seeking warmth, other seeking
the strange companionship formed by similar circumstance. Many crowded around
the motorcars as they tried to leave, knocking on windows for handouts. Mike
kept his head bowed in the darkness, his new coat's wet collar buttoned taut
around his neck. He stepped over the occasional native as he made his way
toward the west side, trying not to think too much as he walked. The prospect
of being set up still foamed in his mind along with memories of Vilya, Niki
and Bill. He could almost feel the corpses stacking up around him, one by
one. It was like multiple slaps in the face, except that he had seen each of
them coming in a strange sort of way and refused to duck out of sheer
stubbornness. Maybe that was the sort of stupidity Cecil had been talking
about.
"Hey, friend. Spare a drin?"
It was a young boy, trembling in the gutter, dirty, wet hair tangled over
half his face. He couldn't have been a year past puberty. Just another one
of the homeless, Mike could only guess as to what he did to survive.
Mike reached into his pocket, somewhat surprised to hear the jingle of
several loose coins. He withdrew two, allowing one to slip between his
fingers on the way out. The kid slapped his hand over it before it made a
clinking noise on the pavement. Then he looked up again, expectantly. Mike
let the other coin twirl on his fingertips and he glanced around and behind.
"What's your name?"
"What it matter?"
"Good point. You willing to work for money?" Mike let the other coin drop.
"What you want me to do?"
"Just attract attention. C'mon...I'll show you."
The walk was a long one, taking them across town and well into the
outskirts of the city. They'd passed the rowens, along the way, and Mike
considered cutting through for all of about one second. Then he shoved the
idea where it belonged. Walking though it during the day had been risky
enough, but during night would be suicide. The kid looked toward the hedges
with an ominous glare, then toward Mike as though he knew what the gatherer
was contemplating.
Mike shook his head, "Don't worry. I'm not quite as stupid as I look,"
adding, "at least not at the moment," under his breath.
A light sprinkle began to fall as they reached the west end of downtown, a
glossy sheen forming on the vacant, asphalt streets like a coat of wax. Many
of the houses were burned out, and glow- in-the-dark graffiti painted a
multi-hued display. Most of it was undecipherable for Mike, except for the
occasional Calannic or Galanglic name. One wall depicted the Archduke in a
particularly unflattering pose. A budding political humorist, Mike figured,
wishing he had his camera.
Mike heard the hum of a grav-car come to a halt across the street. He
turned around to inspect. It was a slicked down version of the Sebastian-Z48,
a real cruise-mobile, except that it had absolutely no altitude control. It
would just zoom around at about a half a meter off the terrain: as sporty as
you could get and still miss the whole point of having gravitics. Five kids
hopped out, one holding a minisaw which he waived around as he started
yelling something about chipheads in thick, Calannic slang.
"Just what I need. What's he saying?"
"He say we are trespassing."
"Fine, we were just leaving. Kelelmet."
"No, he say we no can go that way."
"Which way is it okay to go?"
"He say you have to pay for safe passage."
"Look, tell him to just slow down."
Mike considered drawing the gun, but there were five of them and only four
bullets to go around. He decided that he hated arithmetic as he dug out his
best of his broken Calannic. They already knew he was neghrali and a chiphead
so there wasn't much left to conceal anyway.
"How much?"
"Hundred k'drin and we let you walk. Otherwise you sorry you ever come
here."
"I'm already sorry."
Mike reached into his pockets and forked over the cash, grateful to Cecil
that he had enough. Then he turned around and tried to leave. Two were still
blocking his way, one with a shotgun pointed toward the night sky like he
wasn't particularly planning on using it.
"What is it now?"
"Hundred only for one person. I see two."
"Look, here's the rest. That's all I got." Mike turned the rest of his
pockets inside out.
"What's in there."
Mike opened the small bag hanging from his waist belt and took the dodec
out. The kid with the minisaw regarded it with suspicion.
"Give to me."
Mike tossed it to him perhaps a little too high. Yanking the fiberglass
out from under his shirt, he deposited a slug between the kid's eyes as the
dodec reached the pinnacle of its arc. It came down slowly as the kid
clenched forcefully to his minisaw, head snapping backward and back of skull
erupting in typical Calannic splendor. Twice in one night, Mike reflected
how it was far better to give than to receive.
The next two squeezes took the kid with the shotgun in the arm and
shoulder. The shotgun skidded onto the pavement as the kid waffled around on
the ground shouting obscenities. Mike guessed that he'd never even gotten the
safety unlocked.
The rest of them scrambled madly for the ground-speeder. Mike scooped up
the dodec on its first bounce and ran down the street, leaving Cecil's money
in a pool of blood. He expected them to give chase, but the only person
behind him was the beggar, young legs taking ground against older if more
experienced ones.
"Idiot neghrali! How you pay me now?!"
Mike turned down an alley and kept running.
Red twill flapped freely in the soft breeze as Sule inspected the flat
with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. Either the abode had been
thoroughly ransacked, or somebody was a pretty slovenly housekeeper. Major
Doran was waiting outside the threshold as instructed. He stayed at attention
the entire time, not that his stance had much to do with attentiveness. He
wanted to impress her. To do otherwise would jeopardize his career not to
mention his longevity.
"Shall I send for the dusters, sir?"
"No," Sule considered the problem. "You will remove yourself and all other
unnecessary personal from the premises. Then call in our psyche and inform
the locals that their target has escaped the Undercity."
"What about the Director, sir?"
"You are dismissed, Major."
Sule sat down on the steps outside the flat, the dark, cold air quietly
enveloping her as wrinkled, grey leaves scuttled along the narrow sidewalk.
It somehow reminded her of the vast, black ocean to which she longed to
return.
The gatherer would have to be dealt with, of course. He had made a fool
of her two times in one night, an interesting if annoying prey. If it meant
turning the entire city inside out, she would find him. Dead or alive,
Harrison belonged to her.
Of all the places Mike had ever visited on Calanna, his favorite was
probably the Arien Mansion. Surrounded by five machine gun turrets and a
moat, the place had an atmosphere that typified the world's turbulent and
violent history, but somewhere in that midst, it retained some semblance of
tradition and honor that Mike found difficult to pinpoint. The family was
notoriously reclusive yet highly networked with the power brokers of Calannan
society. They maintained their fortress-like estate on the outskirts of Xin,
over a square kilometer of property sealed off from public eyes.
Mike remembered the night with Kitara. They'd invited her to attend out of
respect for her family. Somehow he'd weaseled his way into tagging along, or
maybe he'd just allowed himself to be dragged inside for the boozing.
Sometimes it was difficult to tell which was the actual case. It wasn't until
he'd returned to Tizar and emersed himself in her collection of private
correspondence that he pieced out exactly why she'd been summoned. The Arien
family were sponsors of psionic research and instruction on-planet. It was
all kept secret, although there had always been rumors floating around. The
government turned a blind eye so long as nothing could be proven, but people
feared them just the same.
Mike decided they were a strange lot when he saw the worgs. The
creatures, four feet tall at the shoulder and perhaps seven to eight feet
long, were the genetically engineered descendants of terran wolves. The
family bred and trained them at the estate, doling them out as gifts to local
politicians and offworlders alike. Although the worgs seemed relatively
intelligent and well behaved, Mike later heard horror stories from the locals
about the creatures' supposed pleasure for dismembering trespassers. For
some reason, he didn't find the stories so difficult to believe.
The first purple rays of sunlight began peeking over the eastern horizon
as the two reached the tall, cermelecon gates. Barbed wire and motion
sensors laced the thin, black rods in generous measure, and Mike figured that
if good fences made good neighbors, these people had to be the best neighbors
money could buy. The kid studied his expression as if trying to gauge his
level of sanity.
"I not go in there. You not can pay me to go in there."
"You're right; I can't."
"Even if you have money, I mean."
Mike squinted beneath a cool resin of perspiration. He saw what he was
looking for. A yellow motorbike was parked outside, almost as if somebody had
expected him to show up. It would be a heck of a long sprint to the moat,
though. The worgs would probably catch him even if they were distracted.
"I'm gonna need a favor from you."
"I not..."
"I know. I need you to make some noise at the other end of the gate to
attract the worgs, okay?"
"You crazy. You get ripped into itty-bitty pieces."
Mike nodded, "Maybe, but not if I can make it to the moat."
"You jump in moat? You really crazy!"
"Hey, worgs don't swim."
"What about the moat monster?"
"Oh, give me a break."
"You not believe?"
"No, I not...er, I don't." Mike shook his head to emphasize his
conviction. "What kind of moat monster?"
"Hey chief, look at this."
Tiros glanced toward the gate monitor's station. A chiphead's face stared
out from the console, red, flashing symbols overlaying his forehead.
"I'd like to speak to a person, please."
"Image recognition says he's a homicide suspect. Should I call the
police?"
"No. Give me voice."
"Is anybody home?"
"What do you want?"
Mike blinked, "I...I need to see the person who owns the yellow motorbike
in your parking lot."
"Mute Voice. What's he talking about?"
"Must be about the Draconian."
Tiros nodded, "Put me back on. What's this about Mister... Harrison?"
Mike slumped his shoulders. He knew he should have ran it.
"Look, don't call the police. I've got to see this person right now. It's
urgent."
Tiros shrugged, "Hold a moment while I transfer you."
Mike waited as the kid gave him a thumbs-up sign. Then the line crackled
with static, and Mike heard the sound of somebody groggily waking. For a
split second he found himself wondering if perhaps the yellow bike was just a
coincidence. There were probably thousands just like it all over the city.
"A little early, isn't it?" The screen was dead black.
"That depends on how late you stay out following somebody."
"What? Who is this?"
Mike cringed, hoping the line was voice-only in both directions. "Are you
still interested in the dodec?"
"The what?"
"The robot brain."
"I...uh...How did you find me?"
Mike breathed a sigh of relief. "Why don't you meet me outside? I think we
should talk face-to-face."
"Where are you?"
"At the front gate."
"Well, I can have the guards show you in."
"I don't think so."
"Okay. Just give me a milla to throw something on."
The kid was still grinning as the line went dead. Mike regarded him with
all the good humor the situation allowed.
"What are you so happy about?"
"I was right. You were wrong. You owe me big-time now."
"Don't worry. You'll get what's coming to you."
Mike waited several minutes, idly wondering whether or not they had called
the police. He knew he was still banking on several unproven assumptions, any
one of which could completely ruin his day.
A woman and a man approached the gate, the former allowing the latter to
exit. He was probably in his 40's, slightly plump, dirty brown hair and the
makings of a beard. She smiled, lifting his hands to both sides.
"I'm unarmed. You want to frisk me or something?"
Mike motioned the kid over.
"I'll frisk him. Hey, he has money."
Mike kept the gun to his side. One shot was all he had, and one was all
he'd need.
"I assume you know who I am, Mister..."
"My friends call me Johanes."
"I assume you also know what happened to Vilya."
"I know only that she's dead, Mr. Harrison."
Mike nodded, "I want to know why were you following me and why you tore up
Vilya's apartment."
"I can explain everything. Is that the dodec you spoke of?" He pointed
toward the bag.
"Yeah."
"May I see it?"
Mike took it from the bag, "Satisfied?"
He seemed to want to hold his breath instead of answer, finally exhaling
with an eerie expression.
"We have a great many things to discuss, Mr. Harrison. I know an all-night
pub not too far away where we can talk."
The place they went to was quiet, very few of the locals willing to pull
an all-nighter just to go boozing. Johanes ordered a pot of alqua vrasto, a
large water fowl common to the planet stewed with vegetables and baby trout.
The bartender brought out a complimentary loaf of bread with some olives and
cheese. He seemed to recognize Johanes, his manner friendly though not too
familiar. Mike kept his hand wrapped around the gun's handle beneath the
cover of a pocket as the kid plunged with zeal into the appetizers.
"I take it you no longer feed your research assistants Mr. Harrison?"
Mike opened his mouth to answer and then decided to have an olive instead.
Johanes frowned slightly, as though he was still worried about getting shot.
"If you don't mind, I'd like to know what happened to Vilya. The full
story."
Mike swallowed hard, "I didn't kill her, if that's what you're thinking. I
spotted two ISIS people at the Mermaid. I figured that Vilya might know
something about it, so I called her into the staff-only corridor for a little
interrogation. We got spotted by one of the employees who called the guards,
and the rest is history."
Johanes looked back incredulously, "The guards fired on her?"
"They fired on me. She was in the middle."
"There's more you're not telling me."
Mike focused on a pornographic etching in the table wood. At another time
it might have made him smile.
"She made sure that she was in the middle. I don't know why. She just
wanted to be there."
Johanes leaned back, "Perhaps I have an answer for you. Vilya was a
psychic."
"I think I figured that much out myself."
"We needed her to find you."
"We?"
"My employer."
"The Draconian government?"
Johanes nodded, "Psyches many times seem to have a strange sense as to
when their time has come, Mr. Harrison. They have been known to be very
accepting about it."
"I know. A friend of mine once told me about it. Look, Johanes. I've
answered your question, but you haven't yet answered any of mine."
He frowned again. "I was following you in hope of...thank you..."
The pot of stew came with a number of large mugs. Johanes began by serving
the kid. Mike wondered if he was such a gentleman naturally or if it just
came with the job.
"...in the hope of securing that very special item which is currently in
your possession."
"Why didn't you just take it from Vilya's?"
"She told me that you'd hidden it and that she never saw it except for the
first night you were with her."
"You were there, that night?"
"I was at the Mermaid. Vilya was an expert at finding people based on
their psychic impressions. She was the best on this entire planet, Mr.
Harrison, and she had a memory for detail which bordered on the
photographic."
"The perfect spy."
"Precisely."
"Did she speak Galanglic as well?"
"Enough to get along. Oh...you didn't know that, did you?"
Mike winced as Johanes continued.
"She was turned over to my guardianship by the Arien family. You might
have even seen her the last time you visited Calanna. I believe you were a
guest at one of the Arien's socials?"
"You still haven't told me why you want the dodec."
Johanes paused, searching for a place to begin.
"ISIS is holding captive a man who is very important to the Draconian
Realm."
"Erestyl?"
"Yes. I need to find him."
"Same here. How's the dodec supposed to help?"
Johanes shook his head, "It contains a very small inertial detection unit.
As you have been carrying it around, it has been mapping out your route in
precise detail. According to an army report, the dodec was turned over to an
ISIS agent by the name of Sule. It is my guess that Sule took it to her
director as a prize but that they decided to examine it away from the ISIS
stronghold on-planet for fear of counteractive consequences: things that kill
en masse, Mr. Harrison. Then it fell into your hands if my understanding is
correct."
"Opening a bomb in the Undercity isn't my definition of prudence."
"They were probably more afraid of a biochemical or viral agent. Don't
look so surprised, Harrison. There are many ways to kill people. Not all of
them necessarily involve explosions."
"I'm not surprised. It just hits a little close to home."
"Shattered Eden?"
Mike nodded, "The Imps thrashed that entire world, and the thing that
still gets me was how easy it was for them."
"Well, sometimes killing is like that. Easy."
"What's important about Erestyl?"
"Well, it all comes back to that, doesn't it?"
"Both you and the Imps seem to want him pretty bad."
Johanes chewed thoughtfully on a chunk of soggy bread. Mike guessed he was
deciding how much to spill out and how much to lie about. The kid seemed to
follow along pretty well with what little Galanglic he knew. At least his
eyes widened every now and again as he continued to stuff his face. Johanes
finally swallowed down the last of his bread, looking up like it was his turn
to say something profound.
"I'm not really sure how much I should tell you about Erestyl."
"How about you tell me what you can and then I push you for more?"
Johanes smiled, "We know that he was a Cassiopeiaen scientist, a physical
theorist to be more precise. He was working at the Imperial Naval Shipyards
at Hermes with a Cass Technics group which was apparently in the process of
completing a very important project for the Archduke."
"What sort of project?"
Johanes looked toward the corner of the room, "Does the term 'doomsday'
mean anything to you, Mr. Harrison?"
"How 'doomsday' are we talking about?"
"Enough that Erestyl decided to renege on the contract. He did something
to the device in question, but he was caught. The Navy decided to determine
how to correct the damage he'd caused, even if it meant ripping his mind
apart to find the information they needed. One of our people got to him,
however. He was frozen and shipped to Tizar and would have eventually made it
to the Realm."
"What happened?"
"A great deal, apparently. Our agent who was organizing his transportation
was captured. Erestyl was lost in the process."
"Lost?"
Johanes grimaced. "There was nobody to pick him up when he arrived at
Tizar. The freighter carrying him decided to dump his bones and run rather
than face the authorities and explain why they were carrying an interstellar
passenger without the proper passports and whatnot. Then you got into the
picture."
"What did I do?"
"You caught the attention of the Imps, Mr. Harrison. They were paying
close attention to you. You led them right back to Erestyl."
"Is that why Clay was asking me to retire from fieldwork?"
"I don't know anything about Mr. Clay other than that he screwed up."
Mike popped another olive into his mouth, spitting the stone back into his
mug.
"I don't understand why you just didn't take the dodec when you had the
chance. It was sitting in a locker at the Mermaid that you could have easily
ripped open."
"It doesn't work that way, Mr. Harrison."
"Well why not? You must have whatever access codes you people need to get
into her brain."
"True, but I'd have to send her all the way back to Tizar and risk losing
her in the process. The Imps have the space lanes between here and your world
tied up tighter than you could imagine."
"Why send it back at all?"
"She won't let in somebody she doesn't know, somebody she doesn't already
trust. As far as I can tell, Mr. Harrison, you're the only person in this
solar system who has a chance of cracking the dodec, and if you want to get
off the planet alive, you're going to have to try."
______________________________________________________________________________
While he isn't writing verbose and convoluted sentences or studying for his
MBA, Jim can be found gleefully stuffing bushels of ckicken-flavored Raman
noodles down the bottomless esophagi of his merry band of Californian
role-players. His story is the product of excessively poor planning and a
great deal of hope.
What has been published here as chapter seven is actually chapter eleven as
written originally by Jim. With any luck, `The Harrison Chapters' will be
continued next issue.
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
The Robots of Vitgar
Joel Wachman
Copyright (c) 1990
______________________________________________________________________________
Nick Patterson was a visitor on the planet Vitgar. He didn't know the rules.
So when a robot refused to listen to orders he naturally attempted to repair
it himself. That was a big mistake.
He awoke on a Tuesday morning, when the reddish glow of Vitgar's binary
suns melted through the flimsy curtains on his apartment window. When he sat
up on the couch his keys and an empty can of beer fell off his lap onto the
floor. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. The small apartment was well
furnished. A comfortable chair sat in one corner, lace doilies covering all
the right places, his exhausted tweed jacket hanging limply over one arm.
Bookshelves lined the walls opposite the couch, giving shelter to many
familiar authors: Milton, James, Poe, Vonnegut....The other walls were
decorated with various objets d'art, of which Patterson only recognized a
black and white lithograph by Escher, a pair of hands drawing themselves. The
place did not make him think of anywhere in particular, but there was
something familiar about it, and for the first time in many years Patterson
felt at home.
When he got up for a cup of coffee the scene in the kitchen reminded of
the previous night's dismal fiasco. The robot was strewn in a dozen pieces
all over the kitchen table. Its great metal torso was propped up against the
wall, assorted limbs and circuits tossed about the surface of the table like
so many chessmen in a game played by amateurs. Some stale coffee and an open
box of donut crumbs sulked beneath a pile of wires and hoses in one corner.
In the center of the furious mess sat a lonely black box adorned with tubing
and membranes. It was surrounded on all sides by curious probing electronic
test equipment. Once, it was the robot's motor control center. Now it was
just a box.
Patterson sat down at the table and folded his arms around the chaos he
had created. The robot, Harley Vlondee, had greeted him when he entered the
apartment with a warm handshake and a friendly introduction as his personal
valet. As Patterson felt he needed neither a valet nor a robot pal, he
dismissed Harley as politely as he could. The robot insisted, bringing
Patterson a plate of hors d'oeuvres. Patterson declined again, gently pushing
the plate and the robot away.
"Look, I don't need you," he said. "Please go away and turn off."
"I don't turn off, Mr. Patterson," Harley replied, "I am here to serve
you. If you do not need anything now, I shall wait in my room."
"I don't need anything now, and I won't need anything at all from you
while I'm here."
"Please, Mr. Patterson," The robot adopted a somewhat condescending tone,
"I know our customs are unfamiliar to you, but there is no reason to be
impolite. We have done everything we can to make your stay here comfortable.
Please do not re- turn the favor with rudeness."
Patterson didn't think he was being rude. After all, he knew you can't be
impolite to a machine. As the robot did not seem to be listening to his
commands, he walked over to it and started looking for the power switch.
"Mr. Patterson, what are you doing?"
"I am going to turn you off."
"Don't be ridiculous," the robot snorted, "I don't turn off any more than
you do. Please do not touch me."
"What do you mean, you don't turn off? Every droid has a switch."
"You clearly don't understand," the robot's voice sounded indignant, "You
may have similar creatures on your planet, Mr. Patterson, who are mere
hulking, unconscious assemblages of metal. But I assure you, I am as sentient
as you are." Harley Vlondee recoiled from Patterson's fingers. "PLEASE DO
NOT TOUCH ME."
Patterson lifted the robot's shirt and found a single phillips-head screw
in the middle of its torso. Harley's metal frame was covered with a clammy
synthetic that was kept warm by an internal heating system. It did not feel
like skin at all.
"I'll go get a screwdriver."
Horrified, now, Vlondee began to shout, "You will not get a screwdriver or
any other implement! If you continue, Mr. Patterson, I shall have to call the
Authorities!"
Patterson came back from his bedroom, screwdriver in hand, and headed
towards the robot.
"You know," Patterson continued, brandishing the screwdriver, "where I
come from they've almost entirely phased out the lower droid series. We found
we just don't need them anymore. Now, if you ask me, I would rather be
switched off nice and quick than allowed to wear out over time. It's a much
more dignified way to go, don't you think?"
Vlondee backed into a corner and trembled. Patterson came forward and
managed to grab the tail of the droid's shirt. He tried desperately to hold
the robot still so he could get good leverage on the screw in its belly. In
the ensuing struggle Vlondee's arms flailed in every direction and he emitted
strained, aristocratic cries of "Help!" and "Desist, immediately!" At some
point, and Patterson couldn't quite remember how this happened, the
screwdriver pierced the counterfeit skin and made a sickening clanking sound,
coming into contact with something deep inside, at which point Harley Vlondee
stopped moving. Forever.
Patterson stood still for a full minute and then murmured, "Oh, shit."
He knew he had broken something crucial inside the suddenly defunct valet.
He dragged the silent form into the kitchen and mounted it on top of the
table. The screwdriver wiggled in the android's torso, and a small rivulet
of clear, smelly fluid seeped out of the murderous hole. Patterson began his
futile effort at repairing the thing at once.
That was six hours and a long nap ago.
Reluctantly, Patterson looked up from the table, stretched one arm out
over the scattered body parts, and lightly touched the video screen on the
wall. He really didn't want to tell anybody what he had done. It was
supremely embarassing. But his guilty conscience was getting to him.
Patterson wasn't the type to break things in hotel rooms. He had never even
stolen a towel.
The video screen came alive with colors and symbols. Then, the face of his
business associate appeared, smiling warmly.
"Hello, my friend," the face said. Sovhavn was wearing the traditional
turban and loose fitting kimono of his people. Behind him Patterson could see
various horrifying particulars of the Vitgarian's household. "What can I do
for you this afternoon?"
"Hello, Sovhavn. I think I need some help." Patterson was not quite sure
how his associate would react when he told him he had dismantled part of his
welcoming party. Nevertheless, this man was the only person he knew well
enough to call.
"I've had some trouble with my robot valet, um...`Harley'."
"Trouble? What sort of trouble?"
"I can't put it back together."
Sovhavn's face dropped. His eyes widened, his jaw loosened and where there
had been a diplomatic, almost sincere smile of affection a blank,
uncomprehending stare took over.
"You...what?"
"Well, you see," Patterson started stuttering. He always stuttered when he
sensed he was in trouble. And he was quite sure now that he had committed a
serious faux pas. He could only hope that Svhavn would write him off as an
ignorant tourist. "I didn't want to...to...b-break it, just turn it off for a
while. Then it l-lunged at me and I had a screwdriv-verer in my hand so I--"
"Don't move. I'll be right over." Sovhavn disappeared and the video screen
went blank.
Patterson slumped into one of the kitchen chairs.
Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang and Patterson lead Sovhavn into the
kitchen.
"Bad. Very bad." There was a squeaky, metallic tone to Sovhavn's voice
that Patterson didn't like at all.
"Can you help me put him back together?"
"No."
"But I'm sure with a few spare p-parts it'll be as g-good as new."
"This is a very bad...cannot rectify." Sovhavn, who had been standing
stiffly in the doorway, stepped forward into the kitchen. He shuddered and
stopped. His face assumed an officious expression.
"Look," Sovhavn continued, "I am afraid we cannot offer you a lawyer in
this case. You may call your consulate if you wish, but I am not sure they
will be able to help you, either."
"Lawyer? Case? What, are you going to sue me?"
Sovhavn turned and faced the incredulous visitor. His demeanor had changed
entirely. His motions were no longer fluid and diplomatic. They were stiff
and precise. His language was still formal, but the tone had become menacing.
"No, sir," he said without blinking, "we are going to charge you with
murder." And with that, he walked out.
The next day, Nickolas R. Patterson sat bewildered and humble in the
center of the huge vaulted chamber of the Vitgarian Authority, Marnjestabl
Branch. Hundreds of Vitgarians fluttered about, carrying papers, scurrying
back and forth, talking amongst themselves. Occasionally someone addressed
him from across the hall, sending embarrassing echoes of his name into
seemingly infinite reverberations among the stone walls and stained-glass
windows, or came up to the circular enclosure where he sat on a straight
backed chair surrounded by two armed guards and whispered closely in his ear,
"Name? Visa? Plea?"
"Plea?" Patterson was more than a little annoyed. He had been to Earth,
where murder is barely a punishable offense, to Bennington's Planet where
everyone is a vegitarian, to Colony IX, where there are only six (barely
sentient) human beings monitoring an entire planet of machines which churn
out sixteen million metric tons of synthetic corn-flakes daily--feeding the
galaxy's hungry. Never had he encountered a race of people who consider the
dismemberment of an automaton to be murder.
Eventually, the hall became quiet as the flurry of people and papers
settled down into their respective chairs and briefcases like leaves falling
into a neat little pile. Patterson anxiously glanced around the room at the
many heavy wooden tables looking for a familiar face. Sovhavn was nowhere to
be found.
Everyone's eyes turned towards a huge podium in a corner of the room. It
was set higher than the rest of the tables, and two or three stairs lead up
to a small platform. A door opened and a quaintly dressed Vitgarian climbed
up those stairs. Patterson assumed he was the Judge. He wore a colorful
tripterous headdress adorned with the feathers of a rare local bird. Over
his expensive royal-blue kimono he wore a fur-lined cape that reached from
his shoulders to the ground. As he ascended the podium he cast a menacing
glance in Patterson's direction.
At the bottom of the podium, the baliff swept an evangelical hand into the
communal space. "Awyee, awyee, come hither unto the great hall of
adjudication and hasten the course of justice. The prisoner stands accused of
murder. Let all those who will prosecute or defend assemble and put
themselves to the task."
The Judge shuffled some papers, leaned back in his chair, and cleared his
throat. "Will the Prosecutor please step forward."
A general excitement again rose in the hall as hundreds of papers were
rearranged and the assembly muttered sotto voce. A door opened behind the
podium where the Judge sat. The man who walked through it into the chamber
was Sovhavn. He passed the enclosure where Patterson was sitting but did not
look at him. He sat down at a desk with three other men and said, "I am
ready."
Patterson wanted to reach out to Sovhavn. He wanted him to give it up, to
say it really was all a joke. Patterson wondered, was Sovhavn trying to see
how far he could be pushed before he would cry "uncle?" But Sovavn just sat
at his desk, shuffling papers and looking like a formidable opponent in this
all too real legal battle.
The Judge said, "State your case, Prosecutor."
Sovhavn stood. He looked down at his desk, took a deep breath and began
to speak. "Mr. Patterson, it seems you have a lot to learn about life. I
don't just mean your life, the puny collection of mistakes that carries you
through from birth to death. I mean the juice that flows through everything
from a squid to an elephant, the distinction between inert and blessed
matter. The actions that brought you here today are the result of a
fundamental misunderstanding of the value of life.
"You acted embarrassed when you told me you had 'broken' Harley Vlondee,
and you called me over to help you out. But you had no idea why I was so
upset when I was confronted with that scene in your kitchen. I bet you still
don't know.
"Mr. Patterson, have you ever heard of organomechanical systems?"
Patterson shook his head.
"Organomechanical systems are living creatures whose gestation occurs
entirely externally to any other organic being. They are made up of a
combination of mechanical and organic parts, and are in many ways superior to
normal organic systems because they are less susceptible to disease and
fatigue."
"You may be wondering why this is relevant to the case. It is relevant
because all Vitgarians are organomechanical."
"You mean you're all--"
"Robots," Sovhavn said. "We're not robots in the way you're used to
thinking of them. We're complex organic systems, like yourself. It's just
that we don't gestate inside each other."
"I refuse to believe it," Patterson said. "You're just as human as
anyone. I can tell it by the way you behave. You're not stiff and clunky.
You're just--normal."
"Even organic systems can be programmed. I think you call it `education'.
We are living, sentient beings. That is, of course, until some arrogant
bioderm--that's our term for you, comes at us with a--a screwdriver!"
Sovhavn let this fact sink in. "Therefore, you must understand that we
consider dismemberment to be murder. You are a murderer, Mr. Patterson."
"Now wait a minute," Patterson cried.
"The prisoner will remain silent until spoken to." The baliff made a
threatening move towards Patterson's cage. Patterson simmered. The
proceedings continued for some minutes while Sovhavn described various
details concerning what he found in Patterson's apartment--test equipment
attached to the victim's innards, the general disarray of the apartment,
Patterson's own testimony that he had disemboweled the valet.
After all the testimony had been given, the Judge turned towards
Patterson.
"You have heard the evidence against you. As yet you have shown no
remorse. What have you to say for yourself?"
"Sir," he started respectfully, "I am touched by your concern for the
robot I broke. And I'm really sorry. But don't you think that this whole
thing has gone just a little too far. I mean, I'll pay for anything that
can't be fixed!"
Someone in the large assembly behind him shouted, "You bet you'll pay!"
"Murder is a very serious crime, Mr. Patterson." Sovhavn showed no trace
of humor.
"But I didn't murder. I just broke a robot."
"Robot? Mr. Patterson, I don't think you understand. Harley Vlondee was
not `just a robot.' He was a living, breathing, functioning being. Just what
do you mean, exactly, by `just a robot'?"
"Just what I said. He wasn't, well, you know--like you and me. He--er
it--was a machine, an automaton. It couldn't have been sentient. It just
couldn't."
Someone in the crowd shouted, "Tell that to his widow!" He was escorted
out of the hall.
"Mr. Patterson," Sovhavn continued, "You say Mr. Vlondee was not alive.
Didn't he tell you he was? Didn't he plead with you not to--er--`shut him
off', as you so indelicately put it? Your honor," he turned towards the Judge
and lifted a small disk from the table in front of him, "I present to you the
permanent record of the last twenty minutes of Harrison T. Vlondee's life as
extracted from his neural recorder. Let the evidence show that, with the
imminent violence presented to him and the apparent disbelief on the part of
the accused that he was, indeed, a living, thinking creature, Mr. Vlondee
pleaded sanely and rationally for his life. And let the evidence further show
that that plea was ignored, nay, arrogantly disregarded by the accused."
"So entered."
"Look, Sovhavn," Patterson broke in, "Vlondee was a crude machine. It had
nuts and bolts and tubing inside. It even had a screw in the middle of its
stomach. Its skin was synthetic, its speech was produced by some sort of
computer in its throat, its reactions were canned. Why, it even played a
recording of `Hail to the Chief' when I first arrived in the apartment. When
I took it apart, I saw wires and circuit boards and metal, just like any
other robot I have ever fixed. This one was a little difficult, that's why I
called you. But to say that I murdered someone, why, that's insane."
Sovhavn slammed his briefcase closed and walked towards Patterson, fuming.
His voice was threateningly quiet. He hissed. "Who are you to decide who is
alive and who is not? True, Harlee Vlondee was made of metal and fibers and
liquid. True, he had a brain that was constructed from gallium arsenide and
copper ceramic. True, he could speak twenty five languages, recreate any
sound he had ever heard, act out any one of sixteen hundred specific cultural
rituals in the correct context. But, Mr. Patterson, could not the same be
said for you?
"You are made of bones and sinews and blood. Your brain is made of organic
proteins and runs on glucose. You can speak three or four languages and you
act out any one of several thousand cultural rituals without pausing to
swallow.
"You are certainly a superior breed, Mr. Patterson. Your motions are more
fluid. Your skin is more supple, your thoughts more subtle, your moods more
sudden. You might have a tick, a hobble, a pain in your groin. You are more
agile, your health is more fragile, your type more prone to guile. You might
be an artisan, a scientist, a Renaissance man. You might be a partisan, a
pacifist, a prince. You mate, you rear children, you feel hatred, you fear
the wilderness. Any of these roles may suit you and your human condition, but
murder" He paused here for effect "murder is never justified."
Patterson interrupted, "But Vlondee was manufactured. He was built by
people. He--it--was trained by people. It didn't have a brain, it had a
computer. It didn't have a--a soul. It's not murder to destroy something
without a soul."
"There is no difference between skin and silicon where souls are
concerned, Mr. Patterson, because nobody knows what they are. Can you point
to your soul? Who is to say that the labor of a human woman when she gives
birth to a perfect human child is not equal to the labor of a hundred men who
twist and pry and think and sweat and wrestle fifty kilos of raw material
into a perfect machine? Who is to say that the oils and solvents and liquid
nitrogen that course through the tubing of an incipient Harlee Vlondee are
not equal to the blood and plasma and amniotic fluid that keep a foetus
alive? Who is to say that the final ride along steamy, crowded assembly belts
from the galvanizer to the inspection station cannot be compared to that
final push through the birth canal, or the turn of a switch not the doctor's
tap, or the phrase, `I am working' not the same as a baby's cry? And are they
not both the undeniable, tautological, spectacularly beautiful declaration `I
am alive!'
"Mr. Patterson, are you alive? What was it you took from Harlee Vlondee if
it was not his life? That you are a murderer is irrefutable. I'm beginning to
think you are also a fool."
Sovhavn was shaking with contempt. He whirled away from the enclosure
where he had spoken, his face almost touching Patterson's face, and sat down
in the Prosecutor's Chair with a nod towards the Judge.
There was emphatic applause. Patterson sat drained and dazed in his seat.
He opened his arms to the hostile crowd and began to plead.
"I am an alien. I am unfamiliar with your ethical code. That is my fault,
I know. But I am only a businessman, not an ambassador. I will gladly do
anything you wish. I will leave your planet, promise never to come back.
Please understand, I didn't know."
It was an admission of guilt.
The Judge rose. He donned his three-feathered hat and made a wide hieratic
gesture with his hands. "Nikolas Patterson, you have been accused and tried
in the Vitgarian way. The verdict has been attained through fair and just
means. It is the judgement of this court that you shall suffer the
appropriate penalty, as proscribed by our laws. The court has spoken."
Images of gallows and electric chairs flashed through Pattersons mind. It
seemed incredible to him that he would soon be eating his last steak. Soon,
too soon, walking down that last, dank cooridor to the okroom where the
hooded executioner waited. He wanted to beg, to cry, to plead. But he didn't
have a chance.
With the sound of cracking whips, four straps coiled themselves around
Patterson's body, pulling him snugly against the back of the chair. The
platform on which he was seated descended into the floor. As he went lower,
he saw the crowd leave the hall. The Judge was gone, and so was Sovhavn.
There was nobody left to plead with, and the platform plunged into darkness.
Patterson was astonished that he awoke. He stared at the bright white
walls of a small, bare cubicle, in which he lay on a comfortable palette. He
breathed in. Alive! He got up, walked to the door, and stepped into a
hallway.
He found himself in a luxurious apartment. Hand woven rugs hovered over a
hardwood floor. Halogen lamps beamed brightly onto bookcases, artwork,
tapestries. The smell of curried lamb was thick in the air. This was no
prison cell. He could not remember coming here. He could not remember
anything. Dumbfounded, he stood in the center of the room--and waited.
Two hours later the door opened and a man in an overcoat stepped in. He
was carrying a briefcase. Patterson wanted to ask him a thousand questions.
How did he get here? What was this place? What would happen to him now?
He heard music. He couldn't identify the tune, but it reminded him of
presidents. It seemed to him that everything was moving very slowly. It took
ages for the man to take off his coat. The music caused the man in the coat
to smile. Patterson tried to open his mouth to speak, but he couldn't bring
himself to form the words. The music stopped. The man in the overcoat spoke.
"Ah, Nickolas," the man said jovially, "would you fix me a Manhattan?"
Patterson found himself walking towards the bar. Something in the back of
his mind wondered, "why am I doing this?" He began to concoct the drink. He
was surprised that he knew how to mix it. He had never drunk a Manhattan
before.
Then he remembered. Even organic systems can be programmed.
"Nickolas," he heard behind the low ringing that began to rise in his
ears, "Nickolas, bring me my drink!"
______________________________________________________________________________
Joel Wachman works as a programmer and consultant, appropriately enough, at
the Paris subsidiary of an electronic publishing firm. He favorite
activities include trying all of the exotic drinks served the famed (albiet
overpriced) literary cafe, Les Deux Magots, then prostrating himself in awed
reverence in front of a bronze statue of Ernest Hemingway that gazes out over
the Seine. "The Robots of Vitgar" was inspired by the author's eight year
quest for an adequate reply to the mind/body problem, which he has since
abandoned for an '84 St. Emillion and a pair of stripey socks he found on
sale near the Odeon Theatre. Until further notice he can be reached
electronically as jwachman@ihq.ileaf.com.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Gnomes in the Garden of the Damned
Jason Snell
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Ray and I had walked into her shop just before closing time. `Dorothy's
Garden Shoppe' was what the sign read, with the cheap elegance you usually
see only on funeral parlors and heart-shaped boxes of candy.
I had bought one of those boxes for Valentine's Day the year before, and
had given it to my fiancee Jenny as a declaration of love. That was about
five minutes before I told her I never wanted to see her again.
She made an ugly scene. We were in an expensive restaurant, the kind with
cloth napkins, and she began to throw glass salt and pepper shakers at me.
After she exhausted that supply, she decided to toss the box of candy right
back at me.
Fortunately for me, of all geometric shapes, hearts have only one sharp
edge. Unfortunately, the side that found my eye was the sharp side.
"You got any gnomes?" Ray asked the hag at the counter who reeked of
mint-flavored shoe polish.
She pointed into the corner. Behind all the aluminum windmills and
depression-era daybeds, we saw what we had come for.
We dropped the ceramic lawn creature in the back of my Pinto and laughed
at the woman. I pulled onto the road and headed for the cemetery. That was
where we danced with gnomes. This was no Kevin Costner shit -- we danced
around our gnome in order to commune with the spirits of the dead Methodists
who dwelled there. That, and because there was nothing else to do in Eastvale
on a Friday night.
"We can't go there yet," Ray told me. "We don't have everything."
I pulled into the 7-11 parking lot, and decided to leave the compact space
for some Buick or Chrysler with a desire to scrape the door handle off of a
Yugo... Inside a few guys with those red and black plaid flannel shirts that
you only expect to see on lumberjacks were arguing over who planned on buying
the beer, while others concentrated on Pac Man. We headed straight for the
Slurpee machine.
I have always found the slimy consistency of the Slurpee one of life's
pleasures. My tongue bleeds in anticipation. I grabbed two Coke Big Gulps and
a six-pack of Minute Maid Orange Drink for backup, and we were gone: Back in
the Pinto, heading north on Main toward the Eastvale Methodist Church's
Eternal Acres Old People's Farm.
"It's time," Ray said. "Time for us to make our magic."
"Sure it is," I told him, and opened the car door. "Get the gnome."
I watched as Ray unbuckled the gnome from its seat belt and placed it on
the damp ground between two moss-covered gravestones. He took a deep suck on
his Slurpee, and began dancing like a spastic woodchuck on crack. He moved
faster and faster around our hardened clay icon, and began to shout.
"Come on, Jimmy!" he shouted. "Join in!"
Ray was an idiot, of course. He was my comrade-in-arms by default, simply
because he was the only person who shared my love for pottery, Slurpees and
Methodist grave sites. But I knew Ray was destined to end up as the guy who
you'd hire to upholster the couch you had soiled on the night of a
party...and then Ray stumbled on something and fell on top of the gnome.
When he stood up again, I saw that the gnome had been reduced to chunks of
rubble. It was made in America, no doubt, along with Lee Iacocca's K Cars and
the Salad Shooter.
"Good work, shit-eyes," I told Ray. "That was probably the last gnome in
town."
"I don't know what happened," he said. "I didn't mean to do it. It must've
been all that caffeine."
I told him that it was his duty to get us another gnome, at any cost. He
said he would, but as we got back in the car I knew that we'd destroyed the
last gnome in town.
Screw it, I thought. A Chia Pet will work just as well.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell is a senior at the University of California, San Diego and is
graduating shortly with a B.A. in Communication and a minor in Writing. He is
the editor of `InterText' and editor in chief of the `UCSD Guardian'
newspaper. He will be attending a graduate journalism school in the fall of
1992.
jsnell@ucsd.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
If you enjoy Quanta, you may
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Contact: jsnell@ucsd.edu
InterText is the network fiction magazine devoted to the
publication of quality fiction in all genres. It is published
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The PostScript laser-printer edition is the version of choice, and
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CORE is an entirely electronic journal dedicated to e-publishing
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Volume IV Issue 2 June 1992 ISSN 1053-8496
+-----------------------+
|Quanta | Articles
|(ISSN 1053-8496) |
| | LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
|Volume IV, Issue 2 |
|June 1992 |
| | Serials
|Copyright (c) 1992 |
|by Daniel K. Appelquist| DR TOMORROW Marshall F. Gilula
| |
| |
| | THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
| |
| |
| |
| | Short Fiction
| |
| | HURRICANE Maurice Forrester
| |
| |
| | GEM OF THE UNIVERSE David Borcherding
| |
| |
| | NEW BEGINNINGS James E. McWhinney
| |
| |
| | JOHNNY APPLESEED Curtis Yarvin
| |
| |
| | Poetry
|Editor/Tech. Director |
| Daniel K. Appelquist| RADIATION GIRL David Drinnan
+-----------------------+
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______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hi everyone! Ok -- so this issue is a bit late. Do we see a trend developing
here? Well, let me just say that I still plan to put out five issues total
this year (the next one being in August) but if it doesn't happen, it doesn't
happen. The problem has simply been one of time: I don't have as much of it
as I used to. On that subject, I'd like to post a "job opening" in this
column. I'm looking for a competent assistant editor. This person would have
to be willing to devote LOTS of time and energy to Quanta, both in helping to
produce the magazine as it currently exists and in helping to expand Quanta in
some of the ways I outlined in column last issue. Also, I'm looking for
someone who thinks they're going to be around on the Net for a while (at least
2 years). I'm looking for someone with a writing background, preferably with
editorial experience, who's also facile with computer networks and network
mail. LaTeX experience is a plus, but I'm mainly looking for someone who's a
good EDITOR. So, if you're willing to donate some of your time to Quanta,
send me mail telling me a bit about yourself, and I'll try and get back to you
as soon as possible.
In other news, I've started a pilot program of offering Quanta on disk for
the price of $5 per issue, or $20 for a five issue subscription. So far I
have yet to advertise, but I'm planning to put an ad in one of the "big" SF
magazines. This ad will be paid for by reader contributions, so thanks a lot
to those who've contributed so far! If anyone has advice on this sort of
thing (kind of breaking new ground here, myself) please feel free to offer it.
Another novel way Quanta is now available is via Gopher. All back issues
of Quanta are on the Gopher server at Carnegie Mellon University, in the
Archives directory. The server is at: gopher-srv.acs.cmu.edu, port 70. The
issues (in ascii format only) are also indexed for queried searches. What
this means is: if you were interested in virtual reality, you could use Gopher
to get to the archive, select the index, input "virtual reality" as keywords,
and you would be presented with all the stories that have appeared in Quanta,
to date, dealing with virtual reality. (Likewise, you could search for
authors' names or any other topic.) I hope this will become a useful tool for
subscribers -- if you make use the service, please send me mail, especially if
you find a problem of some kind. The Gopher software is a project of the
University of Minnesota, and is available from the ftp archive at
boombox.micro.umn.edu. Quanta is only one of the resources available over
Gopher -- I encourage everyone get the gopher software up and running at their
sites and explore what is fastly becoming a standard way to get information
out onto the Net. Gopher is only useful for people with direct Internet
access.
I'm still (and always) looking for submissions. I'm especially going to
need more new submissions if I'm going to put out an August issue. My
submission guidelines are simple: Submit straight text or LaTeX format if your
story is already in LaTeX format; length is not an issue; stories need only
have marginal science fiction content; stories cannot use previously
copyrighted characters or situations. If I think a story is good but needs a
re-write, I'll try and work with the author to that end. I'm especially
interested in new and/or experimental narratorial styles or content and
fiction that doesn't conform to genre molds. The "Dr Tomorrow" series is a
good example, the second chapter of which is published in this issue. Of
course, I'm also interested in traditional forms, such as hard science
fiction, or what have you. At any rate, I look forward to receiving your
submissions. Experience has taught me that there's a great deal of talent
lurking out there on the Net that only needs a bit of encouragement to come
out into the open.
Well, that's about it for me. Pretty much as soon as I release this issue
of Quanta, I'll be off to Aspen, Colorado for a much needed vacation. I'll be
back mid-July so farewell until then!
______________________________________________________________________________
Moving???
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______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
HURRICANE
by Maurice Forrester
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Ruiz stepped out of the hopper and sank to his ankles in mud. Rossenby
Station was a ruin. The storm had shattered the dome that sheltered the
weather station and had reduced the sophisticated monitoring equipment to
rubble. Dazed technicians were unloading supplies from the hopper while the
pilot shook his head in disbelief.
"I can't wait to get transferred off this damn planet," he shouted to Ruiz
over the rumble of the engines. "The storms won't ever let you alone."
Without a word, Ruiz slogged through the mud to the temporary shelter that
had been dropped in that morning. "Take yourself to some soft planet where
you can grow fat," he silently told the pilot. The storms made Williwaw what
it was. The planet demanded you be tough, and it demanded respect. It was no
place for the weak that crowded Earth. That was supposed to be why the planet
was run by a military government, but the military too had grown flabby. The
officer who ran the station was weak-- a bureaucrat masquerading as a
soldier--and could not control his staff. So a tough private citizen had to
be called in to pick up the pieces. Ruiz almost smiled at the irony.
Captain Samuel Wall was sitting on the floor surrounded by filthy boxes of
files. "Just a moment," he said without looking up. "It's a good thing I
insisted on keeping paper files. We lost everything on the computers."
"Captain Wall, I'm here about a meteorologist you lost."
The captain's head jerked up, and he scrambled to his feet. "Are you from
headquarters?" he asked, wiping his muddy hands on his slacks.
"Central Weather. We try to look after our own."
"Oh. I thought maybe the brass... I'm Sam Wall." The captain relaxed
and held out his hand.
"I'm Ruiz. I'll need to talk to you first, then your staff. I'll also
need a place to work and sleep. I'll be out of your hair as soon as
possible."
"Oh, it's no problem Mr. Ruiz. You can have full access to my files."
Wall swept his hand vaguely over the muddy boxes.
"Captain, I've got biographical data, psychological profiles, letters of
commendation, and letters of rebuke. I know more about Lon Manning than his
mother does. All I need from you and your people is some information on the
week before the storm hit and then I'll know where to find the little
bastard."
"You've got one hell of a chip on your shoulder, Mister. If Lon Manning
walked out into that storm, he's a corpse by now. And if by some miracle he
survived, I can handle him a lot better than you can. I've been handling him
for two years." Wall's fists were clenched, and his voice trembled.
"Do you know anything about Manning's life before he came to Williwaw?"
Ruiz asked calmly.
"He was from Earth..." Wall's voice trailed off.
"The man is a fucking genius. He's a first rate exometeorologist, and he
headed his own section at the Weather Bureau when he was 25. He even designed
some of this fancy equipment your storm smashed to pieces. And do you know
why he was working as your second in command in this second rate weather
station?" Ruiz only paused for a breath. "He's a quitter. He requested a
transfer off Earth when his kid got hit by lightening and died a couple of
years ago. Even left his wife there."
"I knew he'd had some problems, but... He still couldn't have survived
the storm. It was the worst we've ever seen."
"He's a cagey one alright. I figure he waited until the hurricane started
to die down and ducked out of the shelter. My report says your people didn't
notice when he left."
"But why? Where would he go?"
"Manning thought he was going to get put in charge of a planetwide office,
but he got stuck here because the psychological boys didn't trust his profile.
This is his way of getting even. But he's only got three choices. All I've
got to do is figure out if he went native up in the hills, is hiding out in
some farming village, or is headed for the spaceport to try to hustle a ride
back to Earth. And that's what you people are going to tell me."
Captain Wall licked his lips nervously. "I'll answer any questions I can."
"I'm sure you will, Captain, but now I think I'll start with your staff.
I'll be back to talk to you later." Ruiz turned on his heel and marched out
of the hut.
The hopper that had brought Ruiz in had left, but another one was dropping
off tents to be used as temporary housing, its jets stirring up clouds of dust
on the plateau. The sky was swirling with clouds of every color in the
spectrum, and the air was charged with oxygen. Ruiz breathed deep and looked
past the landing copter to the snow-capped mountains, then turned to look past
the cliffs to the choppy, blue-green ocean. There were only a few planets
among the hundreds that had been discovered that could support human life as
it was supported on Earth. No world had yet been discovered with intelligent
life, but scientists had originally thought Williwaw might finally prove the
exception because of the favorable ecosystem. Here on Williwaw, men could
breath the air, drink the water, and eat from the vegetation. Scientists were
disappointed when no higher animals were discovered, but the politicians were
pleased. With a dying Earth growing more crowded every day, new worlds were
needed to handle the overflow. The only obstacle was the storms.
For half of Williwaw's year, the storms swept north from the equator and
battered the coast of the narrow continent. The most sophisticated weather
equipment in existence had been brought to bear on the problem: satellites
tracked the storms, probes reported on wind speed before being ripped apart by
the storms, and exometeorologists and technicians manned weather stations all
along the coast to compile data. Still, the storm movements went unpredicted.
Storms headed out to sea suddenly reversed direction and headed to the coast.
Storms died and then revived for no apparent reason. During the other half of
the year the settlements were safe; then it was the turn of the unsettled
continent in the southern hemisphere to be battered by the storms.
But the storms did not concern Ruiz. He was a security chief at Central
Weather, and his only concern at that moment was to find the best
exometeorologist in the whole sector. After picking up his supplies from one
of the techs, Ruiz headed for the station's junior meteorologist. He
recognized Rebecca Smith-Jones from the picture in her file. She was a thin,
bony woman with a plain face and dark, straight hair. Ordinarily, Ruiz
wouldn't have looked at her twice, but here at this desolate weather station,
she looked almost attractive.
Rebecca was supervising the setting up of the tents. After introductions
were made, she took Ruiz to the far side of the station where she sat on some
rocks overlooking the sea. "I know what happened to Lon," she said.
"Go on."
"He used the hurricane as a cover for committing suicide. He wasn't a
happy man, you know."
"I know. But he doesn't fit the suicide profile."
"Oh, all sorts of people commit suicide. He used the storm to cover it up
so people wouldn't know. Lon and I were lovers. I got to know him quite
well. He was always moody, but after I broke off our relationship, he got
worse. He needed someone to care about him, and I turned him away. Really, I
blame myself."
"Why hasn't anyone found the body?"
"The storm could have ripped him to pieces. Or look at the sea. He could
be out there somewhere."
"How did the relationship end?"
Rebecca was standing up now. The wind was blowing through her long,
straight hair. "It just didn't work out. We weren't right for each other."
Ruiz stood up. "What was it he said about you? Too suffocating? Was that
it?" Rebecca's shoulders slumped, but she didn't answer. "He ended the
affair, and you're the one who thinks about suicide. But don't do it yet. I
may need to ask you some more questions"
"I loved him," Rebecca said as Ruiz walked away. "I would have done
anything for him. Anything!" Ruiz kept walking.
Manning's work area had been in the underground portion of the weather
station, just above the shelter where the station's staff had waited out the
storm. Unlike Manning's sleeping quarters, it had survived more or less
intact. On the floor, there were a couple of inches of water that seeped into
Ruiz's shoes. A bank of shorted out computers lined the wall to the right, a
long work bench filled the middle of the room, and boxes were piled to the
ceiling at the far end. A couple of temporary lights had been strung up over
the computers, but nothing else appeared to have been touched.
Ruiz headed for the work bench. It was piled with electronic equipment,
parts, and tools, some of it quite old. Underneath some parts from a
disassembled weather probe, Ruiz found a couple of pages of handwritten notes.
They looked like the start of a computer program, but the weather stations all
used intelligent, self-programming computers. There was a moan from behind
the boxes, and Ruiz quickly stuffed the pages into his pocket.
"Who's out there?" asked a slurred voice.
Ruiz walked to the back of the room where a thin, glassy- eyed workman was
huddled behind some empty crates. The man was dressed in dirty coveralls, and
he wore a transmitter in his ear. "You must be Eb," Ruiz sneered at the buzz
head. "This station must be home to all the rejects on Williwaw." Eb was the
station's maintenance man. According to Ruiz's files, he was a rehabilitated
buzz-head, but Ruiz had never put much faith in rehabilitation.
"Whuddya want?"
Ruiz yanked the plug out of Eb's ear. "You're the only one here who spent
much time with Lon Manning. What do you know about what happened to him?"
Eb rubbed his temples trying to bring back the high. "He walked out into
the storm. What else is there?"
"When?"
"I dunno. When the storm got quiet. When the whuddya call it was over the
station."
"The eye. Why?"
"I dunno. I gotta get to work."
"Why did he do it?"
"He said he knew something about the storms. Why don't you leave me
alone?"
Ruiz reached down and pulled Eb up by his collar. "You'll never work again
if you don't answer my questions. Why did Lon leave the shelter?"
"I said I dunno. Somethin' that would make him a big man. Can't I please
go now?"
"Anybody down here?" The voice came from the door to the work area.
Ruiz dropped the shaking maintenance man and stepped out from behind the
boxes. A technician was looking through the material on Lon's workbench.
"Oh, excuse me sir," he said. "I'm just looking for some cable for our
satellite link-up."
"I thought the monitors wouldn't be up for a few days," Ruiz said as he
walked towards the tech.
"We have to get it running sooner than we expected. It looks like that big
storm is headed back this way."
Ruiz left the work area and headed for his tent. Far out over the ocean
the sky had grown dark. The hoppers had all gone, and a salty wind was
blowing inland. Except for some technicians scurrying into the shelter
erected that morning, the camp looked deserted.
In the tent, Ruiz flipped on a light and pulled out the papers he had
lifted from Lon's workbench. They were notes for a computer program for the
drones sent out to monitor storms, but Ruiz lacked the background to determine
exactly what the program was supposed to accomplish. Copies of Lon's files at
the home office were included and Ruiz plugged them into his computer. He had
read them all before and remembered all that he had read, but having them in
front of him again helped focus his attention. Little went on at any of the
weather stations in Ruiz's jurisdiction that escaped his attention. All the
data pointed to one thing: Lon was a quitter. He wasn't suicidal, and that
reminded Ruiz that Rebecca's suicidal tendencies seemed to have gotten worse.
He would have to file a new report on her. Lon wasn't a buzzer; Eb was the
only addict at Rossenby. If he left the underground storm shelter when the
eye of the storm was over the station, he might have been able to get to
another shelter. But where would he go? To a cave nearby in the hills? He
didn't seem the type to go native but maybe he would if he broke under the
pressure of the planet.
Ruiz awoke to the sound of rain drumming on the tent. Eb was outside,
gathering up debris that had blown out of the destroyed dome, and he looked
suspiciously at Ruiz as the investigator approached.
"You went native a few years ago," Ruiz said.
"Yeah. For a while."
"Did you ever talk to Manning about it?"
"Yeah," Eb answered. "But Lon wouldn't have gone native."
"Why did you come back?"
Eb shrugged. "It didn't feel right. I felt like a parasite living where I
didn't belong." He pointed to the mountains that overlooked Rossenby.
Ruiz had never understood why some settlers went native. They left their
settlements and went up into the hills where they lived alone in crude huts.
If they were responsible, they could live like that for years. The few who
had been interviewed said they wanted to become part of the planet, but some,
like Eb, came back saying they didn't fit in. What was there to fit in to?
Ruiz left Eb and headed for the temporary command center. The crew was
silently huddled around a row of computer monitors. As Ruiz entered the
cluttered shelter, Captain Wall separated himself from his crew.
"Well," he said. "Now you'll get to see what you think Manning walked
into. The storm that hit us so hard moved one day out to sea, stalled, and
now its coming back."
"It is getting rough out there."
"This is nothing. We should really start to feel it in a few hours."
"Shouldn't we get in the shelter if that storm is coming back?"
Wall shrugged his shoulders. "We will if the storm passes over us. It
still might turn away."
"You people should be able to predict these storms," Ruiz said. "What have
you been doing?"
"Nobody can predict the storms. You know that." Wall started to walk
towards the computers. "Sometimes I think this whole damn planet is alive and
hates me."
Ruiz walked back to his tent to get his notes. The wind was at his back
and pushed him along. This storm seemed to exist solely to cover Manning's
tracks: it was here when Manning disappeared and it came back when Ruiz was
trying to track down Manning. Ruiz pulled his notes and his computer out of
the tent. As he turned back to the larger shelter, a gust of wind tore his
tent loose and it was whipped across the compound.
"I don't have time to talk." Back at the command center, Ruiz was trying
to talk to Rebecca, but she was monitoring the storm's progress.
"You don't have a choice. As soon as I track down Manning, I'll be out of
your hair."
"I've got a job to do, Mister. Go bother somebody else."
"It's okay, Rebecca," Captain Wall said. "The techs will let you know if
anything happens in the next few minutes."
"Thank you," Ruiz said sarcastically. He led Rebecca to the far corner of
the building and took out the papers he had found on Lon's workbench. "What
are these?"
Rebecca sighed and took her eyes away from the monitors. "Notes for a
computer program. Are these Lon's?" Ruiz didn't answer. "It looks like he
was reprogramming the probes."
"Why?"
"I don't know. We get those from Central all ready to fire off. It looks
like he wanted the probe to broadcast on a different frequency. Here's the
wavelength he wanted to use." Rebecca circled a figure.
"Why that frequency?"
"I don't know. It's one we never use on Williwaw. There's too much
natural interference. Sunspots or something."
Ruiz took the papers back. "Thanks," he said. "I'll be in Manning's work
area for awhile."
Little had been done to clean up the exometoerologist's workshop. Boxes
still filled the back of the room, and the workbench was still cluttered with
equipment. Next to the workbench was a locked cabinet that Ruiz had not
gotten to the first time he went through Manning's effects. It was a low-tech
padlock, and Ruiz quickly pried it off. Inside, along with some expensive
computer equipment, was an old fashioned radio.
Ruiz hooked up the radio and tuned it to the frequency Rebecca had circled.
There was a lot of static, but as he adjusted the antenna, a familiar pattern
could be heard above the rest: three long, three short, three long.
"Lon! You're back!" Eb came stumbling out from behind the boxes. He
staggered to a halt as he saw Ruiz. "Whuddya want this time?"
"Did Lon use this much?"
"Yeah, sometimes. Why?"
"That's an SOS signal. I think he's in some trouble. Where's the mike?"
"Ain't no mike. Lon used it to send those dots and dashes."
"Morse Code!" Ruiz exploded. "Nobody uses that anymore."
"He even made me learn it," Eb said proudly. "Said I might need it
sometime."
Ruiz grabbed Eb's arm. "Quick. Answer him. Find out where he is."
Eb fished a keypad out of the cabinet and plugged it into the radio.
Slowly, he tapped out a message then listened to the reply. Outside, the wind
was howling louder, and inside, the lights dimmed.
"I musta missed part of that," Eb said. "He's sayin' he's in the storm."
"What's he in? A boat or a plane?"
As Eb tapped out the question, the rest of the crew entered the room, their
clothing soaked with rain. "We'll have to go below," Captain Wall said to the
two men. "The storm's getting worse."
"He said it again," Eb said to Ruiz over the sound of the crew tramping
down to the lower level. "He said he is the storm."
Ruiz walked to the stairway and looked up at the ruined weather station.
The rain stung his face, as he watched the winds whip the debris across the
plateau. Rebecca and the techs pushed past him to get down to the shelter.
Captain Wall took his arm, but Ruiz shook him off. "The storms are alive," he
said to himself. "The whole damn planet's alive."
"Excuse me," Eb said as he stepped by, his voice clear and firm. "I'm
going with him. Lon promised he'd come back for me if he found a way. If he
found a way to live on this planet without feeling like a leech." Eb's voice
trailed off as he climbed the steps, and he whispered the last words.
Ruiz watched as Eb walked into the hurricane.
______________________________________________________________________________
Maurice Forrester lives in Syracuse with his wife, Lori, and three year old
son, John. He is a Ph.D. student in the history department at Syracuse
University where he is doing research on American religious Perfectionism and
antebellum reform.
mjforres@suvm.acs.syr.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DR TOMORROW
Part 2 o 5
Marshall F. Gilula
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 2
Saturday
Transit City: Goodbye Gabriella, Hello Pearl E. Mae
"Heavy changes," thought Lyle as he woke from sleep with an unusually clear
head. He heard the phone ringing in the bathroom and was immediately alert
and awake. Lyle reached over in the bed for Gabriella. What a strange
sensation, because it was not the Gabriella he had known to the touch. This
was someone else. Or else she had unexpectedly lost thirty pounds in the
chest. Opening his eyes more widely in the darkened room, he saw Pearl E. Mae
lying in the bed next to him. Of course, it was such a natural feeling to see
her there, like his ancient wife in the bed with him. Almost like a deja vu,
but more a sense of real intimacy that must have occurred over many years
together. Truth was that Lyle had not even kissed her yet. Pearl E. Mae had
explained it to him yesterday as she went over some of the basic pastlife
information from 32,000 A.D. She discussed the stuff about past lives in such
a matter-of-fact way, Lyle got the idea that reincarnation was considered as
basic as religious training for children by 32,000 years into our future. The
phone rang a couple more times. Lyle got out of the bed, stepped over the
motionless, unsleeping forms, and made his way into the bathroom. Both dogs
were waiting for him in the bathroom, where they often hung out, especially
when there were other house guests. Lyle sat down and She-Ra began licking
his feet. Then he pushed the button on the speakerphone. He was really awake
when he heard Julian's voice on the line:
"Hey, mon, gotta come over there. We lost Gabriella, mon. They wasted
her, we lost her, mon!"
"Hey, get it together, Julian! You having a relapse or something?"
"No, mon... I'm coming over there." He sobbed briefly, and then clicked
off.
Less than five minutes later Julian appeared with glowing doober in hand.
He shoved it at me, and appeared tired and puzzled when I declined. As we
walked around through the apartment, past my new room mates who were all
getting up, Julian offered the doober to each of them in turn. Each of the
six other Eternals, of course, declined. Even with the robustness of my
Primitive lungs, something in my transplanted Eternal nature saw no sense in
putting smoke of any kind into my lungs. Julian shook his head, and continued
puffing away. The smoke bothered me in a strange new way. My megastepped
body now disliked the hemp smell, but tolerated it the same way I had learned
to tolerate the Los Angeles County smog much earlier in my life. Cigarette
smoke turned out to be even more unpleasant and less tolerable. I was
incredulous that less than two days ago I had been smoking a pack of Winstons.
"Mon, you gonna need this thing if you not be smokin' now... Suit thyself.
Gabriella be driving Liberty City dude's Mercedes on Grand Avenue around
Douglas Road and they blow her away. Looks like four dozen bullet holes in
the car. "
"Gabriella was hurt?"
"Mon, she was wasted. She be gone, mon. Gone."
"Dead gone?"
"Double dead wasted gone, mon. Whattsa matter your head? You don't
understand me?"
"Sorry, Julian... maybe I am beginning to understand you. I wish I didn't
understand, man. You say something happened to Gabriella while she was
driving whose Mercedes...?"
"I wish I knew, mon. She just had the richman's car and they wipe her out.
Bunch of rock stars. You know. Rock monsters. She's dead."
"Well, she left with Jim the photographer yesterday, and he drives an old
Dodge Van. Driving a Mercedes doesn't make any sense. You keep saying that
she's dead, and I keep having trouble groking the picture. Besides, I don't
want to think of her as dead. She didn't come home last night, but I figured
it was just like some other business deal went down. Not just for a john, but
sometimes she looks for other gigs like the modelling one you saw her have on
TV last week. If she gets involved in something intense, she just follows it
up. It doesn't mean that she was hookin' all the time!"
"Yeah, mon. I'm real sorry. Nothin' more to say. But, now that I think
about it, mon... You know, you look a little strange yourself. Your skin
always be white, now your skin be lookin' nearly orange. What kind of a drug
you been doin'? You firin' up?"
"Of course not. Would you believe that I haven't smoked even one cigarette
since yesterday? I ain't been doin' no drug, but there have been some heavy
duty electrical field zapping changes that I been going through. Can you
believe me?"
"I can believe anything nowadays. What kind of electricity you talking
about, mon?"
"You know about flying saucers and people from the future?"
"Don't be playin' with me mind, mon. Then you gonna tell me they shot you
with some ray and now you be the transformed Man of God in Babylon."
"Julian, you grasped it exactly. I should've known that my drum bro is
sensitive enough to be absolutely hip to the entire scene."
"Mon, we people of the double minority and the HIV, we be very hip and very
cool. Maybe your flying saucer has good medicine to poison the virus. But
Gabriella is gone. I see them take her body in. Me myself, I feel sick when
I see her and the condition she was in. But she be gone, mon. Gone."
"Yeah, Julian... Maybe it don't look that way to you, but I am major broken
up and upset inside about Gabriella. And I have been through a few minor
renovations in mind and body lately, so don't freak if I come off fried out.
I know this sounds totally bizzare, but would you believe, I also have a new
woman, already. Her name is Pearl E. Mae and she sings like a crystal
goddess. We ain't kissed or done it yet, but she and I are for sure plugged
into each other since yesterday. I wake up in the morning and she's in my
bed. Only she ain't sleeping, it looks like, because these Eternal folks from
the future don't need to sleep or eat, unless they want to for some special
reason. I don't know if I am a transformed Man of God in Babylon, but I'm an
Earth man transformed into what they call an Eternal. But I still sleep and
eat, probably more than the other six, because they've been Eternals for a
long time, not for only a day like me. I dig them, and we're going to make
some killer music. I really dig Pearl E. Mae, and she says that we were
hitched more than once in previous lifetimes. Come over here with me, man,
and check her out. Unless you're afraid of people with reddish-orange skin
instead of black or white."
Julian didn't say a single word, but he turned around with a dumfounded air
and followed me over to where Pearl E. Mae was sitting. Since I've known
Julian, he's never been at a loss for words. But he sure was this time. He
just kept staring at her face. When he started talking with Pearl E. Mae, he
immediately told her about how he'd figured for the longest time that maybe I
was a closet wacko. After hearing the latest story, he admitted, the only
question that remained for him was about his own sanity. But I could tell
from the way he was talking to Pearl E. Mae, that he was just as much in love
with her as I was.}
Hal Nicholson was happily tucked away behind a corner table at the
Homestead Air Force Base Officer's Club. The young nurse he was drinking with
seemed awed and intimidated by his major's insignias. After 24 hours of
involuntary quarantine, the crew had all been released. Since it was getting
on into evening again, everyone naturally gravitated to the clubs. Quarantine
had been perfunctorily lifted after the third decontamination team again found
no source of radiation leak. Hal was now quickly into his third beer and the
back of his head was beginning to have a pleasant and faintly numb feeling.
His bladder felt full too. Hal and Jim and most of the rest of the bomber's
crew were treated like celebrities. Jim Breedice had lucked into a plump R.N.
Captain who responded to her third screwdriver by getting up on the bar, shoes
and all, to demonstrate eye-catching legs and softly pulsatile talents for tap
dancing. Hal found himself looking longingly at Jim's friend's legs. Jim
found himself doing the same thing, but also looking long and hard in a
northerly direction as well. The plump Captain found herself wondering what
she was going to do with two men.
The nurse was just starting to really get into her dancing. David Rose's,
`The Stripper,' was on the jukebox and she was moving in perfect sync with the
music. Uniform buttons were coming undone when a two-striper burst into the
lounge and shouted,
"Hey, Major, Sir... Base security wants you down at operations!"
On the double and they meant it. After all the quarantine time, then they
notice it. Doesn't it figure. There was a heavy burn mark on the bottom of
reactor number two. No radiation to speak of. Just a severe burn mark.
"I'll be a son of a coke bottle," Hal said in amazement. "Sure looks like
some kind of an explosion, discharge, or something ! Not a single extra tick
on the Geiger counter?"
"No, Sir. She's as clean as when she was cherry. Sure can't understand
that."
"We did go through an electrical storm. Do you suppose that Mother Nature
could have emptied those reactors?"
"No way. Even Mother Nature is gonna get radioactivity outside of those
tanks."
Partly right and partly wrong. The I.S.I. technicians had very carefully
calculated the energy exchange, and had accounted for every bit of the
redirected nuclear energy because that is what the I.S.I. was all about.
Considering the Laws of Thermodynamics and The New General Laws of
Relativistic Energy, and paying extreme attention to very fine details were
constant concerns of the I.S.I. The overall negative entropy balance, just as
with the similar but smaller problems of pestilence, war, and famine,
threatened the fabric of the space-time continuum and the life matrix itself.
Our story also begins in the very, very far-distant future. We find
ourselves catapulted into a Mission Control setting at the outreaches of three
confluent galactic group vortices. There are thirty multi-display monitors in
three semicircular rows. Hairless beings in iridescent white-silver
I.S.I.-monogrammed uniforms appear virtually identical in the nearly
featureless detail of their faces and the uniformity of their physical
dimensions. Humanoid limbs operate keyboards and other control panels arrayed
before the monitors. Just after noticing how much all the operators resemble
each other, our attention is drawn by the sound track, in full Dolby stereo.
Loud cacophony provides the main stimulation to the viewer because the scene
is in muted light broken only by blinking of the monitors. Sound begins to
increase in amplitude. Rumbling, vibration, and screeching frequencies make
it seem like all Hell is literally breaking loose. Crunching noises continue,
and dust-like fragments begin to fall from the ceiling of the underground
control chamber. Members of the Intergalactic Security Intelligence briefly
make purposeless-seeming movements with their appendages, which terminate in
small hands bearing two fingers and a thumb. A close-up shot shows two of
these hands typing on a keyboard in nervous animation. Camera view cuts
contrast two of the featureless faces, looking at each other. Although there
is no trace of any mouth movement, the viewer can hear high-pitched yet calm
voices speaking to each other.
Garth: "Well, what of this new series of crises, sibling? The prime
leader's teachings have certainly predicted this disorganization. And can you
imagine the real problems are only yet to come, if there is much time left."
Barth: "Obviously, sibling . And being at the center of our numinous
asteroid will do nothing for any of the siblings nor will it help unless we
succeed with the LaPlace Transforms."
Garth: "I know, sibling. We know, don't we?"
The rumbling sounds get louder. Flashes of light appear out of nowhere and
coalesce in the air above the thirty I.S.I. technicians. A three-dimensional
image of the prime leader communicates in the same high-pitched, mellifluous
tones:
Alpha-One: "Time for our exercise, isn't it, siblings?"
A confluent series of vowel sounds fills the chamber, as all the beings
cease their activities at the monitors, fold their appendages, and stare
straight ahead. The high-pitched sound continues and becomes more intense.
Particles of dust appear to reverse their flight and leave the chamber through
the ceiling from the spots through which they originally fell. Soon, the
high-pitched sound is all that remains as the rumbling noises disappear. A
strong sense of balanced harmony and purpose pervades the chamber.
Alpha-One: "All right, siblings. Now let's get back to the LaPlace
Transforms. We are in a no-lose situation, because at this point, there is
nothing left to lose if we fail in our attempts. May the grace and the power
of The One be within us all."
The image of Alpha-One dissolves into the darkness and tripartite
appendages again begin to operate the numerous keyboards and control panels.
In addition to the three rows of ten monitors, there is a very large concave
screen at the front of the chamber. The screen is filled with multiple,
smaller screen-views which are linked together across the surface as a series
of interlocking windows. Barth and Garth continue their conversation.
Barth: "So why is it that we must focus on such a small and insignificant
planet from pre-Cataclysmic times? Our time studies repeatedly show us that
very long-range views are necessary before it is possible to assess the
ultimate effect of even an apparently insignificant and minor character in the
history of a given culture. I remember that the personal belongings of a
military hero named Custer from the same planet appeared millennia later in
the Vorgat galaxy. One of our adolescent time pirates from 29,000 A.D. was
using Custer's military belt buckle as the energizer in his
magneto-oscillatory drive because it was solid silver. That anachronistic
piece of silver truly wreaked havoc in a time frame when the `lower' precious
metals had been replaced by all synthetic metals of extremely high atomic
number. And after that, several frightfully destructive time-fabric rents
began setting off random anti-matter implosions that nearly disintegrated our
I.S.I. predecessors before the I.S.I. really became aware of what trans-time
warfare was all about. Many of us used to scan those early pre-Cataclysmic
solar systems as a part of our routine training maneuvers. Don't you recall
how many of us loved to scan the life span of Jesus of Nazareth over and over
again? The vibrations and the fields surrounding that primitive ritual of
crucifixion sent many of us back to the processors during our early
apprenticeship periods. I myself can still feel that stormy atmosphere
surrounding the entire planet when only one portion of the whole was
terminated."
Garth: "Remember, this solar system is only one of four possible loci for
an effective, direct intervention. Because of Local Group proximity, this
system is also ideal for our first transmission. The energy requirements are
lower so there will some margin for slight errors and practice effect
expenditures. Their system is only early nuclear and pre-Cataclysmic at that,
eh Sibling? With such an early culture, it is almost for certain that we will
succeed in this first projected matter-energy translation through one of many
time-fissures. Let us pray that we can carry it out in a manner that is truly
benign in an entropic sense. We are required to make at least three of the
four possibilities fully functional before Alpha-One's return."
Entropy imbalance is more or less the raison d'etre of the I.S.I. because
transtemporal distortions (including intratemporal ripoffs) make the process
of entropy accumulation qualitatively much more disorderly. When entropy
accumulates in orderly fashion the results are regular time dimensions and
ordinary time passages. However, when entropy accumulates by fits and starts
that are occasionally of very great magnitude compared to the baseline, the
results are disorderly accumulation and possible breakdown of the space-time
continuum itself and therefore disintegration of the life matrix.
Base security was still very uncomfortable with the apparent discrepancy
between two facts:
1. Two and one-half experimental nuclear power plants discharged from a
top-secret aircraft
2. Not even a trace of any surface radiation leaks or remnants of whatever it
was that happened to the XLN-662.
Discrepancies that were visible never got by in the security world without
lots and lots of explanations. So Hal was very grumpily sitting in the plain,
undesignated security chief's office with the usual cigar in his mouth, but
without the beers and without the female companionship. He and the Chief, also
a Major, argued with great intensity for a few minutes over yet another
question: What were they going to do about their Reportable Nuclear Accident
Report? Both decided to forget about it later over a beer at the Officer's
Club--at least, until after they'd had the beer. And Hal, of course, had
still not forgotten about the Captain. In fact, he was thinking of ways to
sidetrack Jim Breedice into duty with the base security chief so that he could
have the duty with the nurse Captain.
* * *
We have carefully studied the flow of your individual lifetime to select
the proper time frame for our initial transmission to you. Our calculations
indicate that the next six or seven day-units of your life will be absolutely
uneventful. You will have sufficient time to make preparations for the
transition. If, for some reason, you decide that involvement with us is not
to your individual liking, we will be able to observe this with our remote
monitoring system. You do not have to write it out or state the decision in
so many words. Merely experiencing and settling in on this opinion
consistently for a period of several hours will allow us to realize that we
must make another choice. Possibly even from another galactic system, and
another time nexus that is linkable with our matter-energy translation
technique. Above all, there must be a strong voluntary component on your
part, in order for us to cooperatively establish the necessary cellular
electromagnetic transtime bridge for altering universal entropy and
transtemporal dyssynchronisms.}
Introducing Julian to Pearl E. Mae and the other group members did not
remove the fact of Gabriella's death. Lyle, had he been like many other
people, might have reached for a drink of straight scotch or a couple of hits
off a joint after he really accepted the fact that Gabriella was dead. But did
she know that she was going to die? Was she aware of anything at the moment
of death? Or was everything all over in a couple of seconds? Gabriella was
fast, and a couple of seconds were enough for her with her street smarts to
pick up what was going down and avoid it if at all possible. Gabriella's
entire life, from some perspectives, had been a long series of hot spots and
difficult positions, one after another. Gabriella always survived the most
outrageous situations. And now she had been snuffed? Why could it not have
been a dream? It had not been a dream. If anything, that part of his life up
to this point with Gabriella suddenly seemed distant and faded off in the past
and dream-like when he compared it to the uncomfortable and embarrassing
sensation currently in his chest that was yearning for Pearl E. Mae. He
wanted to get into her britches like he'd been there a lot before. It did not
matter if she had a name out of the Old West, or that she could sing
country-western with a real twang. There was some solid-home comfort he could
feel for her in his bones. Yet he ached vaguely in the shock of Gabriella's
death. Lyle was getting a feeling of sadness and disorientation. He yearned
for the comfort of the love feeling he had with Pearl E. Mae and he grieved
for Gabriella even though their relationship had been brief. Lyle began to
feel pain, and to feel lost.
Without warning, a part of Lyle's mind suddenly gaped wide open. Then it
happened again. His body's mind began to calm itself through the breathing.
Like the day before, something felt involuntary but also very familiar, in the
same way that pressing the accelerator or the brake pedals might feel familiar
to a driver. The megastepped Lyle had some great built-in safety and
regeneration devices. While his body's breathing systems calmed him, his mind
sensed a calming issuing from the six other beings. His self-relaxation was
enhanced much more than tenfold, it seemed. When he closed his eyes and
prayed for strength and stability, the swift answer was the group synergism.
Like a small cloud of white light programmed for a healing mode, the effect of
the group was to make him feel very supported. The grief for Gabriella was
much less painful, and he had the distinct impression of having shared the
grief with others. Then he felt the light and had no thoughts whatsoever for
several minutes. The white light enveloped him and conveyed a soft,
pleasurable sensation to the central part of his chest. The light in the heart
expanded to further envelop him and gave him feelings of Divine protection.
In a psychic sense, there was an intense chasm of disjointed energies suddenly
settling down into a harmonious crystallization of unity. Unity with
something unlike anything Lyle could remember, even considering the massive
amount of reading he'd managed to sneak in for free while working as a clerk
in the book store. After awhile, the entire process of his occult growth had
become almost like something out of a comic book story of occult powers and
extrasensory abilities. Whatever he read about seemed to take shape in a
literal or figurative way before his very eyes during the days and weeks
following exposure to the concepts or spiritual practices such as those
described in Tibetan Yoga. He often wondered whether some part of this could
have been auto-suggestion or self-hypnosis, but it was unlikely. This was
something different. Very different!
Although Lyle's friends who came into the bookstore often told him that his
imagination was too active, Lyle didn't see it that way. Most of the
spiritual teachings he was interested in enough to read about felt almost
natural and intuitive on first reading. Books and essays that felt strange or
in any way incomprehensible he simply put down since there were so many more
books in the store left to sample. So much of the stuff had already changed
his outlook, at least compared to the highschool dropout guitar player reading
background he had when he first started the job at the Crystalline Book Shop.
The day's events were not that illogical an extension of what had been
going on the day before, however. Even with the profound inner sense of peace
and love, Lyle's head still buzzed -- 24 hours later -- from the thunderclap
rainstorm and the multichannel data of the six other group members that was
nearly inundating his nervous system. The presence of six other beings in his
life brought Lyle constantly back to the here-and-now in the same way that
musical groups had brought him back to ground after flying too high and too
long on a solo passage. Lyle Crawford was just one day past undergoing a
mega-evolutionary step toward becoming part of a unique man-machine synergism:
DR TOMORROW. The initial, sudden contact of the seven beings and their
mentalities was the main substance of the first of many MindLink/HeartLights
on the day before, and Lyle energetically set to work with the group by
starting out the day with another MindLink/HeartLight despite having the grief
of Gabriella's death sitting on his heart.
Julian was pretty cool about my not smoking, even though he continued to
reflexly pass the doober whenever he finished taking a hit. I was more
surprised that my tobacco habit was not speaking to me through my body. Ganja
was nothing to quit smoking, but tobacco withdrawal was a major overhaul.
Julian reminded me of my deceased ex-, Toos, and how she always maintained
that quitting heroine (which she had done twice successfully) was much easier
than quitting tobacco (which she had done only once successfully). Julian, my
man for Everything, was now a little freaked out at all that was unusual at my
house. He was hanging out with us when Su-Shan gave me the Eternal ring he
had brought for me into the past. Julian took a look at the ring and then
split. I noticed the ring right away after the megastepping because of the
highly unusual shape of the pewter-like silver structure. The Eternal Ring
was a tiny and powerful supercomputer from 32,000 A.D. with multimedia
functions and projection systems. Atop a double-spiral finger-ring, the small
silver pyramid sat inside a thin, corner-shaped silver shell. Along the top
outside border of the shell were the six control buttons. The small pyramid
possessed a frighteningly effective laser kineholographic projector, and the
silver shell's control panel contained two tiny microefficient stereo speakers
for very realistic sound and incredible stereo imaging. Many cuts above the
best screen projection systems I've seen in video stores, the Eternal Rings
can play back ultra high fidelity stereo video images in a three-dimensional
format. The Eternal Ring, of course, is also an auto-zeroing, voice activated
communicator and networking device. The ring possesses capabilities for
storing objects in virtual space on an indefinite basis while safeguarding the
stored objects with combination of voiceprint and digital analysis of radial
arterial pulse wave. Field-induction linking permits the linking up of all
our computer modules, but the rings have another type of synchronizing
function. Special synchronizing pulses laid down by each Eternal Ring let us
synchronize our bodies' physiological signals more efficiently, especially
when functioning in a multitracking environment. Pulse multitracking gives
all seven of us special potentials for relating to MIDI music and
troubleshooting problems with the MIDI wiring, interfaces, and circuitry. Of
course this sounds too heavy for me to save in my personal memory, so I just
put on the ring, and resumed preparing for MindLink/HeartLight A small part of
my mind worried about Julian, and whether or not it was O.K. for him to be
alone. I wished he could be in on our MindLink/HeartLight, and I wished for
him to feel some of the love and cohesiveness and HeartLight that we Eternals
were beginning to have as a group. Especially because of the HeartLight, I was
sure that the residual effect of being centered in the heart was something we
could pass on to Julian and any other human we felt close to.
This time, we are sitting around the pool. It is our second day together,
and the MindLink/HeartLight is almost as important as the first one we had the
day before because we learn about travelling together as a group. The first
MindLink/HeartLight demonstrated to us that we were already a group and could
function together in a heart-centered and creative way by producing the
musical thought form and composition that terminated with the bat signal. The
first MindLink/HeartLight gave proof of how unified we could become. This
second MindLink/HeartLight was powerfully facilitated by Quail, who helped us
to learn how to travel and work together as a group. She taught us to travel
together out of the body and to function as Eternals while out of the body.
Quail came to DR TOMORROW from perhaps the farthest away point in the
future. An inhabitant of the Light Dynasty Galaxy and the Twin Federations,
Quail was tall, very buxom, and capable of both instant invisibility and
physical plane space flight. She very rarely spoke with language, and yet was
one of the group's most powerful telepaths. Quail could play or emulate
nearly any musical instrument, and could also synthesize or emulate a wide
variety of esoteric clicks and other sounds. When singing, she was able to
alter her voice over a large range of octaves and had the capability of making
her voice sound like nearly any of the controls on any of the group's
synthesizers. Quail was also imbued with an ability both very ancient and
very futuristic: she could voluntarily split the frequencies of her voice so
that she sounded like several voices singing or chanting at the same time.
These abilities were somewhat ironic, because in her native habitat,
Quail's physical form resembled more that of an fish. The specific form that
Quail's native configuration resembled was that of the earthly Manta Ray.
Quail's home planet was mainly a series of liquid seas made up of
sulfur-silicon congeners. As a being originally possessing physical structure
based on geometry of the silicon atom, Quail was required to undergo extensive
matter transposition before being sent to carbon-based Earth of the past via
the thought-matter projection unit by the I.S.I. technicians. Quail's
humanoid identity, after karmic resettling, was that of a Tequesta Indian
Princess who had been a champion huntress. Just as Quail had been an
outstanding heroine of the Light Dynasty Galaxy, her humanoid alter ego had
been a female hero from an advanced Indian civilization that antedated the
Florida Seminoles by hundreds of years.
Quail found the human form quite interesting when she compared it with her
native life-form. When she and Morphosa swam together in the DR TOMORROW
pool, Quail's human form felt almost like a plastic costume or sheath. Quail
could easily remember the soaring underwater movements of her Light Dynasty
life-form and she really missed it at times. She found it a challenge to see
whether or not her human body could slide gracefully through the water, but a
bayonet-type of glide was all she could manage because the densities and
specific gravities were quite different. Quail once observed Earth athletes
performing a `dolphin kick' in a televised swimming race and it made her laugh
involuntarily. Morphosa and Quail felt a certain type of comradeship, because
both of them had the capacity for changing their molecular structure. But
when it would be necessary for DR TOMORROW to do any really fast physical
plane travelling, Quail was always the one who served as the bus driver.
During the MindLink/HeartLight on this Saturday, Quail served as designated
leader. The meditation began and there was an intense sensation of linking up
with each other, that could be most clearly felt in the breathing. After we
had been inked up for a little more than thirty minutes, Quail was able to
easily transport all seven of us in one common energy package to wherever we
wished to go. On this Art Festival Saturday, we ascended over the house and
went zooming over the Grove at tree-top level. Even though all seven of us
were out of body, there were sensations of the breeze and smells from the Art
Festival. Quail flew us over the city and out to South Beach. We had a
breathtaking view of the entire Miami Beach hotel and motel strips in all
their fluorescent afternoon glory. Then Quail shot us up in the direction of
outer space and quickly circumnavigated the entire planet from space, and
returned to the southeast Florida coast. We then returned to what Quail felt
was the strongest power spot in their neighborhood. Only a few miles away from
the DR TOMORROW house. Quail loved the trip out to the tip of Cape Florida,
where the ocean was blue-green during the day, and beautiful and usually
undisturbed late at night because the State Park Service closed up the roads
to the park just before sunset. She pointed out a section of houses half a
mile offshore in the water built up on stilts. We had flown over the houses
before returning to the Cape Florida ocean wall and sitting together there.
It did not matter that their physical bodies were back in meditative trance
around the pool. They sat together and contemplated the stilt houses which
Lyle identified as occasionally having extremely loud and rowdy parties.
At the sea wall by the ocean, Quail was able to teach the Eternals how to
use the large fluid medium as a means of communicating with all other large
bodies of fluid media everywhere. Although most of the group members other
than Lyle were familiar with the use of plants for telepathic communication,
both fluid wave and plant communication were definitely something new for
Lyle. Quail merely demonstrated to the Eternals that any large body of liquid
was able to absorb, resonate with, and emit an unlimited number of vibrations.
Earlier in the MindLink/HeartLight, members of DR TOMORROW learned about
telepathic fluid wave communication between Earth and Venus during the third
planet's ancient history. This form of communication was infinitely cheaper
than utilizing gross, physical plane electronic or quantal energy. The early
Venusian colonists communicated with the original Mind back on Venus by simply
living clearly and being in the vicinity of any large body of water. Despite
increasing contamination in all continents, the major oceans of Earth actually
served best for this purpose because their volumes most nearly approached the
relative volume of infinity, Quail taught. Whenever a fluid volume approached
that of an infinite conductor, the frequency of oscillations necessary for
relatively infinite long-distance propagation becomes minimized.
Since the large volume of Earth's oceans approached, for practical
purposes, infinity, nearly any of the oceans could be used for fluid wave
energy projection. Quail taught the other members of DR TOMORROW how to talk
to each other through the Atlantic Ocean. They learned how to bounce and beam
thoughts and sensations from the rolling waves along the surface of the ocean
and they also learned, while out of body, to bounce themselves from the depths
of the ocean floor in giant swirls and eddies of much larger and slowly
changing waves that were nearly invisible but of immense scope and size
compared to the waves that rolled along the top of the water's surface. Low
frequency and extra-low frequency signals and stimuli sometimes have the
greatest biologic impact. Slow oscillatory vibrations could also penetrate
the earth's crust beneath the ocean bed to emerge on the opposite side of the
planet. Quail also taught them the trick of using the ocean to focus the
energy propagations of radio and other wave-form and quantal communications.
To Lyle, this was all astounding. Many of his forays into the written word
had spoken of the Hierarchies, but his fellow Eternals seemed to put many of
the higher spiritual principles into direct practice. With his megastepped
mentality, Lyle grasped these techniques with amazing ease. He experienced no
difficulties in learning how to bounce vibrations off the ocean's surface, or
from the large slow eddies in the ocean's depths. He was also learning how to
use the large body of fluid to focus his own higher energies when necessary.
The Miami area had so many points of contact with bodies of water, that Lyle
found it easy to nearly always use the hydro-bouncing and focusing during all
of his meditations. Since the Eternals do not require food or drink on a
regular basis, it was difficult for Lyle to convince the other Eternals about
the seriousness of the water contamination and the drinking water shortages.
From their position many thousands of years in the future, the I.S.I.
technicians watched Lyle on their multi-coordinate monitors and gently smiled.
Lyle, despite his mega-evolutionary changes, was still very typical of
pre-Cataclysmic people. It was easier for Lyle to accept mega-evolutionary
changes initially just in terms of his physical being, and he still
comprehended mental and spiritual changes in higher energies as being
primarily physical manifestations. Lyle was able to understand and use the
idea of water being part of telepathy, but he had difficulty applying the
process itself. This was paradoxical considering the extensive telepathic
communication that goes on between musicians in a group while they are
playing. So even though Lyle was a sensitive, he was rather redneck about
considering the possibilities of either plant or electromagnetic field
consciousness. Technophobic or not, Lyle treated all equipment with respect.
He even talked to his computers. But when it came to having communication
with plants, he drew the line. That was just for Walt Disney characters.
The other members of DR TOMORROW had no such problems. Simple plants had
been used for thousands of years as rudimentary telepathic communicators
throughout most Galaxies. And the fluid medium, water of life, aqua vitae,
was the primeval source of all simple plants. On Earth and many other
planets, plants both originated from water and possess water as the vital and
the single most characteristic compositional substance. Telepathy involves
wave propagation or transmission. The members of DR TOMORROW all knew that
both speech and thinking were different forms of waves. Since a body of water
such as the ocean always has waves, to send the waves of communication through
water was very easily done by simply superimposing one set of waves
(telepathy) upon another set of waves (the fluid). Many galactic systems were
not based upon the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen combination, but always had some
form of a basic fluid medium. When the fluid happened to be a condensed form
of a gas such as methane or a silicon congener, the overriding relationship
between the liquid and the waves and the communication was still universal.
Although the DR TOMORROW pool was fairly small, Quail had been able to
demonstrate this Saturday that when the members would carry out their
MindLink/HeartLight around the pool, it was slightly easier to communicate
feelings and concepts by using the waves in the pool. Despite the fact that
the pool was so small, the Earth's rotation and gravity fields actually caused
very tiny waves even in such a small body of fluid as the swimming pool. Lyle
quickly realized that with continuing practice, the members of DR TOMORROW
could utilize the waves of airflow for communication.
Megastepped Lyle was still the most primitive member of DR TOMORROW. The
Primitive. The Primitive megastepped into Eternal status. The other
Eternals, because of I.S.I. translation and projection techniques, had some
say in their choice of physical vehicles and also physical plane
personalities. Despite enhancing of his own muscular development and
definition to a superior level from an earthly point of view, Lyle was still a
Primitive because of being firmly rooted to a nevertheless advanced physical
and emotional body. Long before his DR TOMORROW days, Lyle had already
learned how to temporarily transcend the physical body during meditation.
During the daily MindLink/HeartLight experiences, however, Lyle was astounded
to learn that even though all members became One in a sense, it was also
possible to trade and shift physical bodies as well as lower-plane
personalities. Since Lyle had been a musician prior to the electric
cataclysm, it was not so new to him to learn that this type of body-shifting
and personality-trading also resembled what was possible while playing music
together as a group.
During the the first musical session, later in the day, Lyle was also
fascinated by learning to listen to, without actually hearing, many other
trains of musical thought that seemed to be going on at the same time as the
physical plane music the group, DR TOMORROW, was playing. Many of these
trains of musical expression seemed to come in waves. During the first
MIDI-mediated rehearsal, Lyle felt himself inadvertently being carried away
and losing control over his guitar playing and his voice. Like what the
druggies used to call overamping. Only the common musical MindLink/HeartLight
of the other members was able to help Lyle keep his feet on the ground and
stay musically grounded with the bass and drum lines. Music rehearsals and
performances were just be a special form of the daily, vibration-forging
MindLink/HeartLight.
It was Lyle's idea that some common physical movements and exercises for
the group might be helpful. Despite the fact that disco was no longer trendy,
Su-Shan used several programmed disco beats and songs as a way of
experimenting with musical body movement patterns. However, most of the
compositions played during that first rehearsal belonged to two other types.
One style was a very subtle wave-like movement combined with minimalistic
techniques that resembled what Lyle had seen in Eastern musicians like sitar
and tabla players who were performing ecstasy music. The other main type of
composition emerging from the first DR TOMORROW session was more of a
neoclassical, hard rock beat. Lyle opined that it would be useful for the
music to focus on breathing sounds and breathing patterns, so the hard rock
beat began to feature whooshing air-like sounds that would randomly seem to
track the listeners own breathing. Aloysius, the computer, made an important
contribution here, even though his existence had not yet been officially
recognized. Suffice it to say that VDT graphics consisting of schematic
patterns reminded Su-Shan how simple it would be to add a white sound
generator. Su-Shan and Noman later added three of the white sound generators
and arranged them in a triangular configuration. The idea proved very
effective. Some of the air-like sounds, as well as the white sound patterns
were included in both the hard-rock music and in the disco-patterned music.
The changes and transitions were very fast and seemed natural. Lyle and
the Eternals were living together in the large, palm and cypress-shaded Art
Deco house off Tigertail in the Grove.
Despite being able to control ectoplasmic projections of mind-energy, Pearl
E. May had very little control of her own physical structure. Her dark hair
and Aegean china doll-like face belied the multi-colored Vesuvius of higher
plane energies she became whenever she transcended. One of the first official
acts Pearl E. May performed for DR TOMORROW the group was taking Lyle's blue
Indian bedspread material and parcelled it out so that there was enough to
make UniSex shirt-garments for all seven members of the group. From the time
when Pearl E. May began to work with the blue cloth, its shimmering qualities
seemed to increase and become more intense. Pearl E. May decided to
ectoplasmically shape the cloth into long Indian shirt-garments for each
member, and the shirt-garments seemed to begin independent and separate lives
of their own shortly after Pearl E. May's abilities molded them into
existence. For one thing, cloth became instantly fireproof and indestructible
as far as ordinary means were concerned. The garments also seemed to have a
Morphosa-like quality of variable density. When the Eternals were wearing
these garments on a hot and muggy day, the cloth appeared to become sleazy and
diaphanous. One the other hand, the blue Indian bedspread material became
very much like velvet during the rare nights that were chilly on the ocean.
In the tropical rain storms, the material took on a synthetic plastic-like
consistency and yet was able to allow the interchange of inside and outside
air. In nearly every one of the group images of DR TOMORROW, all seven
Eternals appeared in the blue Indian shirt-garments. In addition to having
and performing distinctively with Aloysius the computer, the Indian
shirt-garments actually became a trademark of the group. The shirts were
really a far cry from all the punk and glitter-rock used by many musical
groups and entertainers. However, since the shirts did have a
density-altering property, they also tended to diffract light of different
colors in a random way. And actually took on the appearance of colors other
than blue.
Of course, the shirts had a very special meaning for Lyle, because he was
able to understand some of the eerie feelings he had as a child when he first
received the gift from his mother. The Indian cloth was an interface between
Lyle, the past, and the future. The megastepping had not only changed his
physical vehicle, but empowered him with the ability to receive, understand,
and manage intense amounts of energy. Just as much as he had been or seemed
very dull and humdrum before, Lyle now was able to maintain a powerful level
of equanimity in the face of nearly overwhelming and massive overload on any
plane including the physical. Lyle now already experienced two of the
automatic calming incidents during which his body itself started and
maintained the process of slow deep abdominal breathing. During the first two
MindLink/HeartLights, Lyle, as a member of the common mind, met his father who
had died in India. On one of these occasions, a blustery arctic wind seemed
to convey all of them into the Himalayas, where the group, Lyle's father, and
two Tibetan monks had a great silent conversation. On other scattered
occasions that followed, Lyle directly reencountered the energies of his
father and learned that these energies gave him certain powers or abilities to
communicate with passed-on spirits. This again was difficult for Lyle to
really grasp. His Western background made it difficult for him to be able to
really believe in spirits. Gradually, however, and with the passing of days
and sufficient experiences with atypical kinds of energies, Lyle was able to
react to even the word, `spirits,' with less disdain and more of an
open-minded attitude.
With the exception of Su-Shan, each Eternal came to Miami with only the
robe, belt, pouch, and ring. In addition to the Eternal ring intended for
Lyle, Su-Shan, the drummer, also brought a large piece of highly compressed
carbon through the time transporter-translator. Diamonds, because of their
compressed carbon-lattice crystalline structure, caused the least amount of
entropic disturbance, and I.S.I. agents had very carefully and scrupulously
calculated out the energy required through the LaPlace transforms for the
whole diamond. Earthside, Su-Shan used an ordinary hammer and chisel to break
up the large hypercrystalline fragment. The many smaller pieces were quite
negotiable in the gold resale shops located far out west on Bird Road.
Understanding the entire electronic requirements of a musical group was the
most serious problem facing Lyle and his six friends because music technology
in this Primitive culture, while based on relatively simple programming
principles, was packaged in some very complex ways. Lyle's previous music
involved only a small but very heavy combo guitar amp and a few effects
pedals. Now it was necessary to set up for an entire group. Just a couple of
the tiny diamond fragments yielded a large ammount of dollars. Lyle managed to
buy the basic sound-production set-up equipment for the group's initial
musical efforts although the group members' appearance nearly caused a riot in
the music store. They selected amplifiers for the individual instruments, a
multichannel board along with a fairly standard PA system, and a portable DAT
recorder. Lyle also purchased an inexpensive Macintosh computer, voice and
patch editors, and some sequencing software. Then Lyle ran into a brick wall
trying to explain Primitive ideas about signal processing for both sound
production and sound recording. He himself barely understood Earth
electronics. So even though his mind had been megastepped, he still came up
with a blank when Su-Shan and Noman tried to initiate him into the mysteries
of field-induction linking and transmission. Field-induction linking was the
way that Al the computer system had managed to recruit all their different
computers into his microprocessor-based shenanigans. Some day,
field-induction linking would permit Eternals to link with each other by using
their rings. Field-induction linking was the mechanism by which each Eternal
could now access any or all of Al's different systems. Field-induction
linking was a problem for Su-Shan. Su-Shan not only understood it very well,
he was able to communicate the technical information very efficiently to Lyle
and the others, using both verbal and extrasensory techniques. Some Eternals
came from galaxies or times that did not use electronic transduction for
music, but instead used plasma flow transmission units or simple yet
sophisticated systems of built-in genetically engineered vibrating membranes
that produced the musical sounds directly while being colored by resonance
properties of the being's own structure. Lyle had always been a fair and
sometimes commercial guitar player, but the megastepped energy changes (like
the changes he experienced with his own muscular structure) placed within his
fingertips' grasp a startling knowledge of all stringed instruments. He now
viewed the electric guitar as a rather primitive precursor of Draconian
feeling-lutes. Lyle managed to adapt himself to the six-stringed Drac
instrument with startling speed. Piano and keyboards are stringed instruments
also, and Lyle began playing both guitar and keyboard during different parts
of a tune in the group's first rehearsals. What was even more impressive to
Lyle and other members of the group, however, was the speed with which they
navigated and understood modern electronic design and the currently available
products. Su-Shan, the percussion expert, was also a 30,000 A.D. expert in
nucleonics. It was difficult for him to make a transfer back to the archaic
physical plane electronic components such as LSI, VLSI, and bubble memories.
But he and Lyle quickly mastered the low-level difficulties of MIDI
implementation codes and the elementary programming involved in the patch
editors and sequencing software. With some of the tone generators and a
special rack-mounted interface for the black Cube computer, Lyle and Su-Shan
ran the main outputs of the stereo PA board into the DSP 56001 chip that was
set to sample the music at a rate of 48 KHz and meet the technical standards
for DAT quality recording.
After a blazing day of MindLink/HeartLight and music rehearsal, the group
broke up into two different directions. Noman, Su-Shan, Quail, Morphosa, and
Rico decided to go visit the Peacock Cafe across from Peacock Park. They
would pretend to eat while checking out the street scene.
Pearl E. Mae and I looked at each other and laughed. It did not matter
whether the other Eternals could read our minds or not. We changed our
clothing, got the dogs, and went out into the pool again. I have never known
any lady who had previously been an aquatic life form, so I never had any idea
of how fish do it, until now. At first, it felt like Pearl E. Mae had rubber
lips. She kept them semi-pursed as we kissed. I tried not to laugh, but she
picked up my mirth and looked at me with questioning eyes, that spoke of her
inner channel that grasped my humor with puzzlement. I kept pushing my lips
softly against hers. My fingers touched her orange-reddish face and her
eyelashes seemed to emit electrical sparks as my fingertips ran over them.
Talk about chemistry, this was going to be Electrocution City. The tip of
my tongue gently pried itself between her lips. She softly opened her mouth
and began to suck on the tip of my tongue. As we kissed, it seemed like the
rockets' red glare was going off in my throat and in my chest. Except that it
didn't feel like it was anything that belonged to me anymore. It felt like
the rockets' red glare going off in our throats and our chests. Chemistry City
within the context of Electrocution City. We were really melting into each
other. It didn't matter whether Pearl E. Mae had been a fish, or a cow, or an
octopus, and whether I had been a monkey or gorilla or whatever. Together,
the two of us were two globs of light blending synergistically. It didn't
matter that the blending was taking place from a base of the physical body.
It was tighter than MindLink/HeartLight and sweeter than HeartLight. An
unending collaborative series of dolphin kicks plunged both the depths and the
heights of aquatic consciousness with very efficient, high-amplitude eddies.}
It was a spectacular black and red and yellow sunset.
The old man's hair shone like platinum in the sunlight. Waves of light
appeared to cascade over his head and onto his shoulders. Although his face
was unfamiliar, there was an urgency and deceptive familiarity to his voice
that demanded careful attention. The words felt as though they were being
spoken underwater, without any clear sound dimension but a type of low
frequency pressure or pre-sound sensation. Within the same bubbles of pressure
were included images that were almost but not quite visual. After some minutes
of conversation, the actual words and images lost their bubble-like quality.
The power of transcerebral translation software and field-induction coupling
soon had Yo-Vah speaking colloquial Earth English.
"Welcome to transitions, transitions, and more transitions. I wonder why
none of you have asked any questions about why this I.S.I. project has been
codenamed `DR TOMORROW', what it means, why music is involved at all in the
project, or what the role is of harmony in a transtemporal entropic
intervention. No one has asked whether there is to be a doctor involved in
the project."
"Since it was my computer that started telling the story," Lyle offered.
"I'd like to ask how my name got involved with it, and how come the little
notebook computer also gave me a three-dimensional straight-ahead view of my
immediate future that was 100% accurate."
"I'm afraid you're still being a little Primitive and concrete, Lyle... The
information that came to you via the little computer was being issued to you
from a place where there is 100% accurate, as you would say, representation of
a person's immediate past, present, and future as well as past and future
lifetimes. Just the fact that one has access to information of this type
suggests the need to consciously function from more than just the physical
plane."
"O.K., I own up to being Primitive, Yo-Vah. But hit me with your best
shot. What does `DR TOMORROW' mean. Like, I noticed there wasn't any period
after the 'r' in 'Doctor.' Does that have anything to do with the name? Am I
the Doctor Tomorrow character?"
"Good guesses for a Primitive. Both the group and the project codename are
DR TOMORROW. The `DR' is an acronym for Direct Reclamation. And the letters
of `TOMORROW' abbreviate a complex mathematical algorithm that represents
critical elements of the timetransit process. Or, tomorrow equals future when
viewed from the correct perspective. Briefly, the project involves Direct
Reclamation of the Future as timetransit. The project seeks to re-direct
entropy-critical energies by means of culturally-valued music and artistic
science-fiction materials featuring time travel. Megastepping you into your
Eternal form and injecting the other Eternals was the first and most important
step in the project. Despite being a terminally Primitive planet, Earth has
the cultural seeds and elements which can evolve into help for the future.
Many of your own future lifetimes will be spent as famous physicians and
healers. These lifetimes will reflect upon your successful DR TOMORROW
project. Extensive data from these lifetimes has been projected into you at
the moment of megastepping. You will gradually realize some of these
otherlife abilities. You actually are a healer and a physician from the
future, but above all else you are a teacher. You will soon be able to
discover and use creative ways of teaching. The word in many systems for
healer often means teacher as well. Earth's Japanese culture, I believe, uses
the word, sensei, to mean both doctor and teacher. In nonPrimitive cultures
there is often a common educational and professional pathway for both teachers
and healers. The MindLink and HeartLight exercises will help you to integrate
otherlife information. Never forget that the HeartLight is always the way to
your Higher Mind. And Higher Mind, for both individuals and the group as
well, is the best platform from which to deal with otherlife information.
Noman can teach you much about otherlife abilities and how integrated and
realized beings can draw on otherlife abilities in a very balanced way.
Future events will demand that you have many skills of which you now have no
conscious recall. When the skill is needed, it will appear, especially if you
let it happen. For example, although you are now a musician, you will soon be
drawing extensively on your abilities as both a musician/composer and healer.
Remember -- `Both/And'? I believe you were discussing these words with
someone recently. The healing abilities will emerge if you allow them to do
so. Remember, it is DR TOMORROW as a thought form that is most important.
Please remember the thought form! When you begin to work more specifically on
the thought form, you will also find that part of your megastepping includes
extensive cultural and language knowledge from several of your main planetary
cultures. Since culture has been one of my abiding hobbies, I saw to it that
you will find within you fluency in Russian, Japanese, and Spanish languages.
The languages will help with the thought form, but also with having more of a
feeling for your planet. Remember also that from a galactic point of view, it
is of course Primitive and limited to only view the outcome of a single planet
in the Universe."
"O.K., I guess I did say to hit me with your best shot, and that was a
pretty good shot, Yo-Vah."
And Yo-Vah said unto Lyle, with almost stern admonishment:
"So now is the time when you must take up the cape of divine human and
assist the Guardians, the Eternals, and the I.S.I. with preserving the entropy
balance of the Universe. Why do you think your planetary subcultures all have
the common myth of the Super Man who has more than mortal abilities? Do you
remember the special properties that Superman's cape had? The Cape I give you
now is a real object, even though it is invisible and exists only in virtual
reality until evocation, it will project and amplify your abilities
considerably farther than what you observed with the being your media termed,
'the Man of Steel'."
"Good grief, Yo-vah! Do you mean to tell me that your computer analyses
included our animated comic book heroes as well?"
"Not only have we analyzed your comic book heroes and themes, but we have
also intensely catalogued and cross-referenced most of your science fiction
and fantasy literature as well. One of our members even wrote up a History of
the Universe as a comic book series and injected it into your cultures. There
are at least several Guardians who are specialists in your twentieth century
English science fiction. For a soon-to-be-extinct planet, your Primitive
culture has been the site of some very worthwhile cultural achievements,
especially in your science fiction. Bradbury and Asimov, we love too. But do
you think that either of them actually comes from your system? Another of your
later injected, `walk-in' writers, William Gibson, was my personal favorite
because of the amount of realism along the optimism-pessimism dimension that
you found in his writings. His `Matrix' into which software cowboys plunge by
the simple act of `jacking in' with electrodes is a virtual reality that
operates at different levels within itself. Gibson's heroes live in both a
physical reality and virtual reality simultaneously. Gibson's Matrix,
however, is just one of very many possible virtual realities. Far in the
future, we begin dealing with virtual virtual reality. This level is a
virtual representation of a virtual reality, as with a symbol of a symbol, or
the mathematical derivative of a derivative. In virtual virtual realities,
the mathematics become impossible, even when you are able to use complex
equations and multivariate imaginary functions. At this level, symbols become
even more powerful and can sometimes cause a bleed-over of effect from a
higher plane to a lower plane if the symbol is a very good one. Consider the
cross, and the labelled-as-miraculous cures that have been seen on your planet
associated with crosses and other religious objects. Occasionally, in the
course of a planet's or a culture's rise and fall, the most trivial objects,
or even objects of hatred and scorn, such as the cross in pre-Nazarene days,
can assume proportions of immense proportions. Your comic book heroes come
from somewhere similar, don't they? In your occult readings, you have become
familiar with Jung, as I can read from the infrared patterns of your mind. You
know about the Myth. Well, Doctor Tomorrow is one of the new Myths that we
believe you and your group can sell your planet. A myth of hope and positive
attitudes, backed by optimistic applications of technology borrowed from your
future. Firearms and weapons are merely the least optimistic applications of
technology because of the old-fashioned anachronisms of violence and
destructiveness that require and merit replacing. You will need to get the
new myths across to the entire planet, or else there will no sector 221 of
Your Local Group. Maybe even sooner than the 2105 A.D. date I gave you
before."
"...meaning that I will not be able to couch-potato it for the next forty
years."
"Meaning that it might be good for you to have some experience being a
couch potato, if you are going to know how to get across to millions of couch
potatoes who are presently helping to subvert the general equations of entropy
into the mire and sludge of general sloth and apathy."
"Aren't you being a bit overly dramatic?"
"Absolutely not! When you see billions of your Earth 'humans' with
addictions to drugs, sex, power, and food, this is not a trivial example of
what happens as the entropy equations begin to mire and sludge. It is just a
matter of very basic temporal mathematics for the I.S.I. technicians in your
future, but it would require unending time for me to be able to explain this
to you, even with your obviously megastepped mind and nervous system. Just
trust me, whether or not you have ever read or understood anything by your
planet's Buckminister Fuller. If you properly design or otherwise alter the
environment, in an all-inclusive sense, the beings within the environment will
surely change. So trust me. Believe me : if you can succeed in having a
harmonizing effect on the energy of the planet at this time, you will yourself
begin to observe individuals undergoing change for the better. And believe me
when I also say that harmonizing is one of the few transtemporal activities
known to not increase the randomness of the overall Entropy Equations. So
please, be my guest, and harmonize away. You have nothing to lose but your
anergy. That is, the anergy of your so-called Human Race. To many of our
Eternals, your planet has resembled more of a Human Crawl or a Human Drag, as
in dragging to heels to avoid becoming really Human and caring for each other
in ways that are entropy-efficient. Do you get my drift?"
"O.K. O.K. Are you going to give me some kind of superscientific device
which will add to the harmonizing of the entire planet, or the entire city, or
the entire neighborhood...."
"I'm glad to see that you've grasped the idea. It doesn't matter if you
are expressing it in the reverse, the same principles still apply. But we were
talking about using the experience of being a couch potato for positive rather
than negative ends. And your typical Primitive orientation towards material
objects still persists despite your megastepping courtesy of the I.S.I. The
superscientific device you referred to is the thought form of DR TOMORROW.
Not just the music, the group, the story, the media forms, but the thought
form. That's the way you have to approach it. Because you are seven
Eternals,... or... eight... or seven and one-half... is what I seem to be
receiving from your group's energy fields. You will have to explain that to
me later. Maybe it has to do with your computer system. Anyway, it is the
higher, thought form aspects of DR TOMORROW that are the most important. You
will realize it more fully when you have been able to more fully appreciate
your own megastepped mind. As you are probably now aware, a change of body is
infinitely easier than a change of mind. Primitives, especially, almost never
realize the degree to which their own individual minds define the boundaries
of their individual universes. Because of this limitation, Primitives, by
definition, never learn to use their minds as networking devices."
"Maybe I am a Primitive, or a megastepped Primitive, or whatever. Maybe I
don't know about networking, either. I always thought that networking was a
word that women's libbers used to mean a `good old girl' system like the `good
old boy' system that still rules the southern U.S. But even though I am a
Primitive, I do know that you are talking about a whole lot of heavy
philosophical stuff that most people don't want to be thinking about. Maybe I
don't want to be thinking about those things, either. Maybe I shouldn't be
thinking about those things -- that could be dangerous. Most people don't
want to be thinking about why nearly everyone's water supply is poisoned, or
why halfway clean water costs $25 a bottle all of a sudden. It's like Mother
Nature has turned against us, and is now charging us for generations of
uncontrolled littering."
"Lyle, you are getting off the subject. Mother Nature is a mythical figure
created for you by advertising agencies and salespeople, just like the ones
who dreamed up the mutant turtles and the animated transforming vehicles.
Primitives always need to have some type of divinity projected outside of
themselves, because it is difficult for Primitives to recognize or utilize
their inherent divinity."
______________________________________________________________________________
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD) #1054,
spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar, and a
couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a Mac IIsi
running MOTU's `Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part of a Ph.D.
Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR TOMORROW is a project
that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional wellness learning system.
Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube, several Macs, numerous
stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and
Bullet. `DR TOMORROW' and `Project Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two
scientific activities of Life Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588,
Miami, Florida 33133.
DR TOMORROW will be continued next issue.
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
RADIATION GIRL
by David Drinnan
Copyright (c) 1992
She spends all her time in the tub now.
Sometimes I miss her.
I duck my head in through the door,
just a peek, to say hello.
She's always there.
After it happened, I'd stay with her.
In the hot, heavy armour of my protective suit.
Bring down the helmet, turn on the pump.
Sitting beside the tub watching her.
Her hand on my glove,
my eyes hidden behind silvered glass.
Watch the dull blue glow of her arms,
her legs, her body, safely under water.
Remember the feel of her arms, her legs,
her body, silken skin under my hands.
Our old friends don't mention her any more.
Not since it happened.
I see them when I walk the streets.
When I need to forget the sound of water
splashing gently against porcelain as she stirs.
When I need to forget, they forget for me.
And when I come back, the black suit hangs by the door.
______________________________________________________________________________
David Drinnan has been pursuing a lifestyle of travelling and writing for
several years, though he never quite catches it. After studying physics and
psychology in university, he found himself writing books about how to Call
Forward and Survive. At 28, he lives in Ottawa and has his own writing
business.
dave@blacksea.UUCP
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
NEW BEGINNINGS
James E. McWhinney
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
The Red Dragon Inn is a good place to be if you need time to think. King
Roland's soldiers don't often venture very far into this part of the city,
even during daylight. Some of the people up in the Royal Quarter call this
area Jester's Quarter, but only when they're not here. There's nothing funny
down here. Nothing at all. That's what makes it a good place to be when you
need to think, and tonight I do.
For months, rumors have been filtering into town about an elfin wizard who
has been stirring up trouble in the Southern Forest. Three days ago, a
messenger from one of the outlying territories came to the city demanding an
audience with the King. This morning, the sound of hammers forging steel into
weapons could be heard at every smithy in Tradesman's Quarter. The
possibility of war is all too real. I'm thinking of going north, out the
city, maybe out of the Realm. It's not that I mind killing, it's just that I
prefer to do it on my own terms, alone, and for gold.
I'm leaning back in a chair, with my back against the wall and my feet on
the table in front of me. The people around me probably think that I'm
staring at my boots, drunk or lost in thought.
I am thinking, that's for sure, and in a way, I guess that I am staring at
my boots. That doesn't mean that I don't know what's going on around me.
Over at the bar, a short figure in a long cloak just slid a small pouch to
the barkeep The barkeep pocketed the pouch, nodded toward me, and turned away.
The stranger in the cloak is coming this way. I can see him right over the
tip of my boot. He'll probably think that these worn old boot have seen
better days. I disagree. When I was nineteen, I stole these boots from the
house of an assassin. They've served me much better than they did their
original owner.
When I think of the boots, I smile, but only for a second. smiling changes
the youthful look of my face. It shows a few of the wrinkles and scars that
I've collected over the last thirty some years. That will never do. In my
business, appearances are everything.
The stranger in the cloak is about five paces away. That's close enough.
"What?," I say in a flat monotone.
He's staring at me now, straining to make out my features. I know exactly
what he's seeing, just a dark figure leaning back in a chair. More of an
outline that anything else.
He takes a step closer, around the table, and to my right.
"I won't ask again stranger," I say, a hint of menace in my voice.
"A thousand pieces of gold to talk outside," he says.
"You don't have that kind of gold with you stranger." "Gems," he says, as
he pulls aside his cloak.
There's a pouch tied at his belt. It's bulging with something. Probably
gems considering that the barkeep hasn't killed him yet.
"What's to stop me from taking those stranger?" I ask.
He shrugs indifferently. "I suppose you could try." Time to teach this
fool a lesson.
Before he can move, I leap at him. The boots make it easy despite my
awkward position.
I slip a dagger out of my sleeve as I move. It's nearly at his throat when
something solid smashes into my groin. I vomit as I'm slammed back into my
chair.
When the nausea passes, I look up. The air in front of me is shimmering,
taking shape. The shape of...a man.
"Sorry I had to do it his way Thaldon," the shimmering figure purrs. "Go
with him."
I know the voice.
"Dangar?" I croak, as the apparition fades.
The cloaked stranger turns and walks away.
I scan the crowd as I follow him to he door on unsteady legs. No one seems
to have noticed what just happened. What in all the cursed god's names is
happening here? Dangar's been gone for well over ten years. Who's under that
cloak? Why hasn't anyone noticed any of this?
The cloaked figure leaves the tavern and keeps walking. He doesn't look
back. I follow. He goes a good fifty paces with me at his heels.
Abruptly, he turns and speaks, "I am Rendell, a follower of Dangar, Mage of
the Southern Forest. I have been sent to ask you to meet with the Mage on a
matter he thinks you will find interesting and profitable."
He opens his cloak and takes the pouch from his belt. I can hear the faint
tinkle of gems touching. Slowly, he tosses the pouch toward me.
In one smooth motion, I catch it and slip it into my tunic. catch it and
slip it into my tunic in one smooth motion.
"Another thousand if you follow me to the meeting place," Rendell says.
"Meeting place?"
"Two days ride south. Dangar is there."
"Gems first."
He tosses me another pouch. I bounce it in my hand. Judging by the way it
feels, I'm willing to bet that it's full of gems. I tuck it away with the
other.
"I've got two horses near the south gate," he says.
"Lead on," I reply.
We reach the south gate without incident. The horses are fresh and strong.
We mount in silence and leave the gate at a fast trot. The evening is still
young, the gate guards pay us little mind.
It's late when we reach a small grove some miles from the city. He
dismounts and says, "Let the horses graze, they won't stray far...."
I spread a blanket at the base of a large oak. I like to have a good,
solid thing like that at my back. I'll sleep well. I don't have to worry
about Rendell. I'll be on my feet, dagger in hand, at the snap of a single
twig, one of the benefits of training and experience.
"We leave at first light," he says, as lays down on his blanket.
I wake just before dawn and nudge Rendell with my boot.
"There's food in the packs on the horses," he says.
The horses are nearby. I get the food and we eat in silence. We're back
on the road quickly. We ride till late in the night, stopping only briefly to
rest and water the horses. There's little traffic on the road, and none but
us headed south.
Halfway through the next day, we leave the road and pick our way through
the woods. The going is slow. As the last light of day is fading, we top a
small rise. There is a camp just over the far side. Armed elves meet us as
we near the camp.
"The Mage will be with you soon," one of them says.
I scan the camp, taking stock, and count maybe ten elves, a dozen horses,
and a half dozen mules. A half dozen sacks lay beside the mules.
A tall thin figure is leaving the camp and moving towards us. I recognize
Dangar as he gets closer. Fifteen years have not changed his looks. Elfin
folk can live to be over a hundred.
"Thaldon my friend, it has been a long time," he says.
I nod. "It has."
"My apology for the incident at the Inn," he continues. Your reputation
marks you as a dangerous man. I didn't want you to kill Rendell."
"I wouldn't say dangerous," I reply, looking toward the guards and then
back at Dangar.
"Thaldon," he chuckles. "Modesty has never suited you. You're the best
assassin in the entire Realm. I know. I've heard the tales and talked to the
people. Even Daldes says that you're the best."
"Assassin?" I ask, again looking toward the guards and then back at Dangar.
"I've been called a lot of things but, never that."
"You worry needlessly my friend," he says. "They can't hear a word we say.
I've taken care of that."
I nod, standing so that I can see both Dangar and the guards. If they can
hear us, they don't show it.
"Daldes is a corpse," I say.
"Of course he is," Dangar replies. "You snuck past his guard, foiled not
one but three magical traps, slipped a poisoned dagger neatly into his chest,
and stole his boots. And that was over ten years ago. With the practice
you've had since then, you're almost unstoppable. That's the only reason the
assassin's guild hasn't killed you. They don't permit rogues like you to
operate outside their guidelines...unless they can't stop you. The rumors say
that you killed two of their men who tried."
I keep my face blank, concealing my surprise. "You're well informed. Am I
supposed to guess at your fortunes or will you tell me those too?"
"Ah... Thaldon. There is so much to tell, but I'll be brief. We must get
to the business at hand. When Goldsen lost the crown and our families fell
from grace, my family fled south. Elfin blood made us welcome, fortune made
me a mage. Ambition made me a leader. I've united all ten elfin settlements
in the Southern Forest. We're ready to expand. I want the Realm. I've never
forgotten what happened when dear Roland's father took the crown. He made me
an outcast. Now I'm ready to be a king."
"Where's my place in this?"
"You," he says, "are in need of a new beginning. I am here to give you
that chance. It's time you quit living in the slums and return to the life
you knew, we both knew, in our youth."
"Go on."
"Do you see the sacks by the mules?" he asks. They are full of gold. A
fortune by any standard. Enough for you to buy respectability and live as you
please, anywhere. The gold is yours if you kill Roland."
He holds my gaze, looking for a reaction.
"How much time do I have?" I ask.
"Three days, maybe a week. As we speak, Roland is meeting with his Lords
in the palace. He will ask for a renewal of their oaths of allegiance. Once
they swear loyalty, he will announce that the forces of the Realm will march
on the Southern Forest to quell the elfin insurrection. I want him dead
before his army marches."
He pauses. I review his words in my mind. Kill Roland...
"You see," he continues. "Roland and I are very much alike. He has under
his command, the united forces of the Lords of the Realm. I control the
combined forces of the elfin settlements. Roland has no rightful heir. When
he dies the Lords will battle for the power. They will form allegiances, the
strongest of which will put a king on the throne. If I should die, the elfin
coalition will dissolve."
A look of irritation crosses his face. He falls silent, running a hand
through his hair.
"Thaldon... You must understand, I am not a tyrant. I do not wish to
terrorize the subjects of the Realm, I wish to be their king. I want the
Realm and the Southern Forest to form a vast, powerful, united territory. For
this to happen, Roland must die."
I smile. "A fortune in gold is not easily passed up by one in my position
and profession."
Dangar nods. "I will leave here when you do. I will return in three days
time and remain for one week. When the deed is done, return here for your
gold."
"I'll need five thousand croats before I leave."
"Take a sack," he answers, nodding toward the mules.
"I'd prefer gems."
"Gems?" he questions.
"I do this my way, no questions."
Nodding, he turns away muttering as he rubs his temples.
One of the guards Jogs back toward the camp.
"He'll fetch them," Dangar says as he turns back toward me.
"When I return," I say, "I will not look as I do now. Do not be alarmed if
I look younger. Much younger. And please, keep the guards close to camp. I
don't want many people to see the man who killed the King."
"I'll wait with only two men," he smiles. "My magic will protect us while
we wait, and when it is time to leave this camp, only the two of us will ride
away."
The guard approaches. Dangar weaves a pattern in the air with his fingers.
"Thank You Ogden," he says, as the guard hands him a half full sack.
He hands me the sack. I open it to find four sizable pouches, all are full
of gems. I nod and close the sack.
"Fair enough. I ride at dawn, but for now, I rest."
He nods.
I walk to my horse, unpack the blanket and spread it on the ground.
"Rest well my friend," he says, walking back toward his camp.
I note that two elves are on guard duty before I let myself sleep.
I wake before the others. I pack and leave in silence. If I ride hard
through the night, I can reach the city by noon tomorrow.
After two hours on the main road, I overtake a small band of travelers.
They have an old wagon packed full of their belongings. As I pass, an older
man looks toward me and smiles a grim smile.
"Riding that fast, I'd have to say that your fleeing the elves too," he
calls out.
I reign in to keep pace with the wagon.
"The city seems like a safe place to be now eh?" I reply.
"I hope," he says. "They've got the lands bordering the forest. I've
never seen such butchery. My wife... in the wagon... they... " he stops as
sobs wrack his body. "I... I hope she lives," he sobs.
I drop back and in look in the wagon. The bed is black with dried blood.
The cloth wrapped figure lying there looks dead already. It has only one arm.
A slow trickle of blood seeps from bandages on the bloody stump.
I spur my horse into a gallop and pass the wagon without another word. War
is so ugly. Not at all like what I do. I don't torture and maim. When I
kill, I do it quickly and with honor. It is not random murder. Women and
children are not butchered. Men are not killed for sport. Dangar's wishes
may be good, but solders are difficult to work with. Things get sloppy.
People die.
The night passes quickly on the road. The horse is panting heavily. It
won't survive this trip, but I knew it wouldn't. A small sacrifice in the
name of time. It 1S important to reach the city quickly. Time is short. If
the price on Roland's head weren't so high, I'd demand more time to plan this.
Four more hours on the road and the horse is stumbling. It doesn't matter,
we're close now. I dismount and walk the horse into the woods beside the
road. I dispatch him quickly. With the sack of gems over my shoulder, I walk
the rest of the way to the city, arranging myself along the way. A little
dirt here and there, a few tears in the shirt and cloak, sad eyes, and hunched
back. I look old and tired by the time I reach the city. It is just past
noon.
In Merchants Quarter, I buy a new cloak and a bit to eat. Back in the
Commons, I go to Tenbro's Ale House.
The barkeep raises his eyebrows in question, when I come in.
"A tankard of ale?" he asks.
I shake my head. "Aardo."
He nods and walks off. I sit at the bar. A few minutes later, the barkeep
returns. A stout man with a big barrel chest follows him.
"Aardo," I smile.
He circles the bar and gives me a hug. Aardo is a good man. He runs a
brothel, but also lets friends looking for a quiet place use the rooms.
"A room," I whisper.
"Ah my friend," he bellows," as he straightens up. "It is good to see
you." He slips me a key as he clasps my hand.
"I must go, but I wanted to see you first," I say. "I'll be back tonight."
He laughs. "I'll be waiting my friend."
I leave the Ale House and circle to the rear. The boarding brothel isn't
far. There's a private entrance to every room in the building. I slip in
unnoticed. There's a lot that I need to find out, but sleep comes first. The
sack of gems serves as a pillow.
It's mid-evening by the time I wake. I empty the sack onto the bed and
spread the gems out evenly. With the sheet pulled up, they'll go unnoticed
unless someone sits on the bed. That won't happen here. I toss my old cloak
on the table to ward off any unexpected intruders. No one violates privacy at
Aardo's.
In Merchant's Quarter, I stop at the Cavalier Tavern, and take a small
table near the bar. I eat and I listen. Young aristocrats frequent this
place. They know no discretion. I almost chuckle thinking about it. I
wouldn't fit in with these people anymore, even if I wasn't an outlaw. Twenty
years in Common Quarter changes a man.
"I say he'll announce tomorrow," a tall fellow toting a long-sword screams
at the fat knight next to him.
"And just how would you know so much stable boy? I'm one of Lord
Tengrill's knights and I've heard no such rubbish."
"Well brave knight, not two hours ago, this groom just happens to have
brushed the King's horse and polished his leathers."
"I'll drink to the King," the knight replies.
Their words nearly choke me. I've got to move, now. I finish my meal
quickly and make haste to Common Quarter. In an ill lit and foul smelling
cellar, I find the man I need.
"A dagger Rexan," I say to the young dwarf. He's fifty years old, but
dwarves often live to two hundred. youngster, he's got connections.
"Fifteen hundred croats".
"Fifteen hundred? You must think I'm a fool."
"Fifteen hundred. I've got a cache that just came in from the south.
Elfin steel, blessed with farie fire. The best."
"From the south?"
He smiles a curious little smile. "Dwarven folk don't kin with the elves,
as you know, but the elves are coming and magic rides in their stead. The
elves are going sack this city when they defeat Roland. I'm leaving by weeks
end."
"Defeat? Roland has the strength of the Realm behind him. His forces
number in the tens of thousands."
He frowns and lowers his gaze to the floor.
"Roland will lose."
"Lose?"
"Cromwell hasn't come to the palace."
I stand quiet, shocked by the news. Cromwell holds the largest Barony in
the Realm. His forces nearly match those of the King. If Cromwell doesn't
march, the other Lords will balk. They'll ride home to protect their lands.
"That's not the worst," he says. "The southern mage bears a half moon on
the back of his left hand. He follows Togi, God of Black Arts."
I'm confused. "Black Arts?" I thought elven magic is pure, derived from
nature."
"Most is, but not all," he replies. "Those that follow Togi make
sacrifices for their power. In times of war, they collect the left arms of
their victims and burn them to gain Togi's blessing. When the mage comes, this
city'll be a blood bath."
An image of the woman in the wagon flashes in my mind. Dangar's words echo
in my head... You must understand. I am not a tyrant. He and I were friends,
but we were children then. Still, I have no reason to disbelieve him. I rode
off with seven thousand croats worth of his gems, but I know better than to
take chances.
"Rexan, I'll take two daggers."
His eyes gleam. "Three thousand croats."
Greedy little dwarf' Fifteen hundred for the pair."
"You rob me' Twenty five hundred."
"Two thousand."
He shrugs. "If I wasn't leaving town, I'd send you away empty handed
thief, but under these conditions, I'll sacrifice."
I hand over my two small gem pouches.
He pulls a pair of finely crafted daggers from under a nearby counter, and
holds them out, pommels facing me. When I take them, he points to a battered
helmet lying on a nearby table. "Test them on that," he says.
I flip the daggers around, so that the blades face me. They feel good.
Perfectly balanced. I throw them both at once. They strike the helmet side
by side and sink to their hilts.
I sigh. "Impressive steel."
"The best," he says.
Back in my room, I take the gems from he bed and put them back in the sack.
I review my plan. I'll make the hit in Royal Square. It's right out in the
open, but it's also very predictable. The Royal entourage always enters the
square in exactly the same way. All but two of the King's escorts ride to the
stage with him. While the speech is given, the two escorts not at the stage
wait about forty paces away in the street. The whole city understands. As
long as those guards stay in the street, the citizens leave enough space for
the King and his escort to leave the Square. This is done to aid the King
should he need a quick escape from the Square. It will provides the perfect
escape route for a bold assassin.
When the bed i5 clear of gems, I tuck a few into my tunic, take off my
boots and lie down. I've got a lot of things to do by noon tomorrow.
I wake early and put on the tattered cloak. It has four leather scabbards
sewn into it to conceal my daggers. I replace the two daggers hidden in the
left side of the cloak with the two I bought from Rexan. I prefer to throw
right handed, and don't want to waste time fumbling with the cloak should I
need the second dagger. I use light twine to tie one of the original daggers
to my left wrist. I cover it with the sleeve of my cloak. The twine will
snap easily enough if I need the dagger. It always has before. The other
dagger is used to pin the sack of gems to wall beside the door. Anyone
opening the door won't find the gems unless the come into the room and closes
the door. Not a very tricky hiding place, but it doesn't have to be. This is
Aardo's place. I shave and cut my hair. That and a few other tricks make me
look quite a bit younger.
When I leave the room, I go to Royal Square. I stroll through slowly,
pretending to watch the carpenters finish the stage. The first alley way in
Royal Quarter is only two hundred paces from the stage. Once I there, it's no
hard task to reach Common Quarter. Satisfied, I stop at nearby ale house for
a bit to eat. It's still early, but I eat quickly. The people will gather
for the announcement several hours before the arrival of the King.
When I reach the Square again, there are already many people waiting. I
take position about ten short paces from the stage, careful to keep near where
the clear lane will be formed.
I watch the crowd and wait. All is as it should be. I stay watchful but
relaxed. Two hours pass quickly as the Square fills. A fat man stops beside
me as the royal entourage enters the square. There isn't time or space to
work my way around him. I just have to deal with him when the time comes.
Things are going to happen quickly, 50 I don't want to attract any attention
right now.
Roland and his escort of Lords ride solemnly to the stage. Cromwell and
several others are missing. The King dismounts and takes the stage. His
Lords dismount and take their places beside him. A quiet comes over the crowd
as all eyes fix on Roland.
"My people," he begins. He says a word or two more, but I don't hear. I
scan the open lane. The escort has drawn up, facing away from the stage. All
is perfect. I draw and throw the first dagger in a single motion.
It takes Roland in the throat. His word disappear in a splash of crimson
as I smash my left forearm into the face of the fat man beside me. The weight
of the dagger breaks his Jaw. I I easily knock him to the ground as I rush
past.
The crowd is still as I charge into the open lane. I can feel my heart
pound as I race toward the mounted escort. I'm nearly there when a leg darts
out of the crowd and smashes into my shin. I roll as I fall and come up
running.
A few steps later, I feel a tug on the back of my cloak. I glance back to
see an angry man in pursuit. This has to stop. I tear the dagger from my
left wrist and flip it at my pursuer. It buries itself in his chest and he
falls to the ground.
The horseman is in front of my now. He's still facing away. I pull out
the second dagger from the left side of my cloak. With a leap, I'm on the
horse and plunging the dagger into the soldier. The fine elfin blade never
slows as it passes through his mail shirt and sinks into flesh. A strong kick
and the horse starts running.
As I turn into the first alley, I risk a look back. The other horseman is
far back, but charging my way. He's too late. I'll never be caught in these
streets. Quickly and easily, I make my way across the city. The guards never
stir as I saunter casually out of the south gate.
On the road south, I pass many people headed toward the city. There are
many stories about the elves. None of them are good.
Near dusk on the second day, I near Dangar's camp. I tether the horse a
short distance away and approach the camp slowly. Dangar is there with two
others and the mule train. I circle the camp to be sure that no others are
hidden nearby. When I'm satisfied, I step from cover and call to Dangar.
"I trust it is done," he says.
"It is done."
"Good."
He turns to his companions. "Pack the mules and saddle the horses."
We stand in silence and watch the men. As they finish up, Dangar motions
for me to follow, and moves behind the elves. He begins to mumble under under
his breath and raises his hands over his head. As the elves fall to the
ground, I see a red crescent etched on the back of Dangar's hand. My dagger
slips easily into his back. He dies quickly.
It has now been three months since I killed Roland. Cromwell sits on the
throne. The Kings soldiers still avoid some part of Common Quarter. The
elfin insurrection has fallen apart. The Red Dragon i5 still a good place to
be if you need time to think. I'm there now, sitting at my usual table in the
corner. Dangar was wrong when he said that I should return to the life I knew
in my youth. I has been too many years and too many things have changed.
"Thaldon," a gruff voice calls.
I look up with a grin as a balding older man approaches. "Yes, Yando?"
"What kind of proprietor are you? Ever since I sold you the Dragon all you
do is sit in that damn corner."
______________________________________________________________________________
James E. McWhinney is a Pennsylvania native, born in Pittsburgh PA in 1969.
As a youth, he was encouraged to pursue his talent for writing but instead, he
focused his attention on aviation, in an attempt to find a stable, well paying
career. He earned an Associates of Science Degree, as well as his pilot's
license, graduating with honors from the Community College of Allegheny
County. After that, he spent a year at the University of Pittsburgh, before
transferring to Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied Professional as
well as Creative Writing. At present, he is considering graduate study in
Creative Writing. Eventually, James hopes to earn a living as fiction
novelist.
jma9+@andrew.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
GEM OF THE UNIVERSE
David Borcherding
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
Woodstock Bach records his death fantasies is a small datpad he purchased en
route to Yati. The palmtop computer sorts them automatically into one of
three categories: Accidental Death, Murder, and Suicide. Accidental Death has
the most entries (205), but Murder is a close second (199). Suicide lags far
behind (45), and most of those are variations on a few themes.
The most recent entry is a Murder entry. He got the idea in
the cab on the way from the downport.
MURDER 199: The chiphead that shared my taxi decides I am worth
robbing. He breaks into my hotel room, and is halfway through my
things when I return from dinner. Using an implanted launch pistol,
he blows my heart out. I have enough time to write a last "I love
you, Larrine" on the carpet, in blood.}
He isn't really being fair in that one, and he knows it. The chiphead had
turned out to be a pretty nice guy, after he'd gotten to know him. A little
odd, but then, they all are.
His name was the first odd thing. No, his hair was the first odd thing.
It was a fluid, black mass dotted with microlights, a kind of model of the
universe. The tiny white illuminators were so strong that the effect stood
out even in full daylight. Woodstock couldn't help but stare, and soon
noticed that the chiphead was staring back.
"Like it?" he said, shaking his head and causing the lights to dance
wildly.
"Sorry."
"Sorry why? For noticing? Don't you think that's why I do it? I'd be
pretty dumb not to want people to notice."
Woodstock hadn't said anything. Chipheads are a dangerous lot. The
synapse-inhibitors, flatliners, and other drugs they do make them
unpredictable. Say the wrong thing, and they're just as likely to vape your
head as laugh. Woodstock hadn't wanted to die right then, not until he was
sure there was no hope left for him and Larrine.
"My name's Richard," the other said, extending a slim, pale hand. When
Woodstock took it, he was surprised by its warmth. It seemed to tingle with
energy, perhaps having something to do with the lights. Perhaps some sort of
weapon.
He dropped the hand as soon as he introduced himself, before this stranger
named Richard could up the voltage. Turning to look out the window, he told
himself he would not stare.
For the remainder of the ride, they said nothing more. Then, when the taxi
reached Woodstock's hotel, Richard spoke.
"Why are you here?"
Not "Thanks for letting me share the cab," or "Have a nice vacation," but
the question that had been on Woodstock's mind ever since he'd left his
homeworld, Galondin. And one for which he had no answer.
Remembering it, he sits on his bed and wonders what Richard had meant. Had
he known what Woodstock was thinking? As far as Woodstock knows, there are no
psionic implants available. He doesn't know much about cybertech, though.
Cybers are illegal on Galondin.
He pushes the thoughts aside and decides to go shopping. He skips the
hotel gift shop and opts for the bright lights and bright colors of the shops
on the street. They line the boulevard as far as he can see. Swahla's,
Honest Blodgett's, Nuclear Ned's Powerhouse Bar & Grill, Chingteh's Casino.
He starts his buying odyssey at Swahla's with a very bright Yatiin shirt.
On the back, a buxom dancing girl moves in the light. Next, he purchases a
holographic paperweight with Yati afloat inside and "Gem Of The Universe"
engraved in gold on a fauxwood base. He hums a requiem as he spends.
SUICIDE 46: After spending all my credit, I starve to death in the
streets of Yati, surrounded by bags on non-returnable souvenirs.
Unless I die of pneumonia first from sleeping in the rain.}
He puts on the shirt and places the paperweight in one of its wide pockets.
The weight stretches the shirt a bit, but it beats carrying around a bag all
day.
While buying some Yatiin scene tiffs for his wallscape back home, he asks
the clerk, a cute blond named whose nameplate says "Ayram," for the name of a
good restaurant.
"Sheabin's is good, and it's just around the corner," she says, smiling a
goddess' smile.
"Great. When do you get off?" It's reckless, but he's got nothing to
lose.
Ayram smiles again, but this time it's not so wide.
"Sorry, but I've already got two jealous husbands, and they've made it
quite clear that they don't want a third."
"I don't want to marry you," Woodstock says, "I just want to take you out
for dinner. Consider it a very generous tip for such efficient service."
"Here's your receipt, sir," she replies, holding out the slip. "Thanks for
the offer, but I really can't."
"No problem. You change your mind, just let me know, okay?"
She nods and smiles again, and Woodstock leaves. Out on the sidewalk, he
takes a deep breath of the warm, floral scented air. Overhead, the sun shines
in a cloudless cobalt sky.
So I failed, he thinks. So what. I'm here to have fun and I'm not going
to let it bother me.
He turns the corner, finds Sheabin's, and goes in.
Two hours later, he finds himself at the allumer table. He's convinced
that he's just had the best meal of his life. The Atlantan bluecrab legs were
split and heavily buttered, and the body stuffed and basted with a slightly
garlicky cream sauce. Fresh bread and an exotic salad filled what little
space the crab had left, and he'd washed it all down with an expensive red
wine called Brutezza.
He plans on spending the rest of the night gambling, making a big strike.
He needs more credit so he can spend more tomorrow. It's the only thing that
makes him feel better.
There are fourteen other players at the table, making it a full game. As
soon as one drops out, another quickly takes his or her place. It's not long
before the seat next to Woodstock opens up, and who should fill it but
Richard.
He's still wearing the outfit he had on in the cab, a black synthskin
jumper that matches his hair. His carry-on bag is over his shoulder, and the
only other piece of luggage he'd had in the taxi, an instrument case, is
missing. Woodstock wonders why he would leave one in his hotel room, and not
the other.
Richard comes to the table with a fair-sized stack of chips. Apparently,
his luck has been better than Woodstock's.
"How's the luck run here?" he asks as he sits down.
"Not bad, not good." Woodstock has fewer chips than when he started, but
this round seems to be going his way.
Anje, the waitress, comes around regularly with free drinks for all the
players. All except Richard, that is. Woodstock suspects that she's been
ordered not to serve him. He looks around and notices the pit boss staring at
Richard. An icy feeling stirs his gut.
Richard doesn't notice. While the rest of the table gets hammered on their
free booze, Richard stays sober and keeps winning. His chips pile up, while
everyone else's dwindle. Players begin to drop out faster.
What really gets to Woodstock is that the cyber doesn't even seem to care.
Sure, when things are going right, you tend not to get flustered. But there's
a unnatural calm about Richard, and Woodstock suspects he'd act the same even
if he'd just lost everything. It's as if it's the game that's important, the
fun, rather than the money.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave." The pit boss has
suddenly appeared at Richard's elbow, with two large bouncers flanking him.
"Why?" Woodstock says, jumping up from his seat. "What's the problem."
"Relax, Woodstock. It's okay. I was just finishing anyway."
"Yeah, I bet you were, chip," the pit boss says. His nameplate reads Mr.
Puppenase. "I bet you got a nice little program runnin' to beat this game,
huh."
"No, actually I don't."
"Save it. Look, your kind ain't illegal here, but it ain't welcome,
either. Now you can choose to leave on your own, or I can have Beni and Touch
here escort you out."
Richard smiles, as if he's sharing an inside joke with an old friend.
"You're absolutely right," he says, and collects his chips. Woodstock
collects his, too, and all five walk to the cashier's booth.
The cashier gives Woodstock his fifty credits, which he has her post to his
account. As she counts through Richard's chips, Woodstock counts with her.
His total is a hundred credits more than the money she hands to Richard. He
starts to say this, but his friend silences him with a look and a smile.
"Thank you," Richard says, taking the cash. He peels off a fifty credit
note and hands it back to her. "And this is for your trouble. Have a
pleasant evening."
He turns from the booth and heads for the door, leaving Mr. Puppenase,
Beni and Touch behind. Woodstock hurries after him.
MURDER 200: I am beaten to death by two huge bouncers named Beni and
Touch, because Richard has hacked them off. My only crime is that I
was with him.}
"They chizzed you, you know," Woodstock says, once they are outside. "You
should have got a hundred credits more."
"Depends on how you choose to look at it. I think I chizzed them."
"You mean you really did have a calc chip in?"
"NO!" Richard's angry tone takes Woodstock by surprise. When he
continues, he is calm again.
"How else can you choose to look at that situation, and say that I robbed
them? Think about it before you answer."
They walk along in silence, Richard taking in the night sky, Woodstock
staring at the ground in thought.
"You know," Richard says, "the body does funny things to help us think.
When we try to remember something, we look up and to the right. When we try
to create something new, like trying to think of a name for something, we look
up and to the left. And when we are deep in thought, we tend to look down."
"Well, I was deep in thought, until you interrupted me," Woodstock says,
casting an annoyed glance at his companion. "But what's your point?"
"My point is, everybody thinks in pre-established, age-old patterns. If
people look up instead of down when they are deep in thought, maybe they'll
find a new way of thinking about something. If they choose to think
differently, they will."
"Anyway," Woodstock shrugs, "I can't think of how you beat those guys,
unless you mean that you walked out with more than you walked in with."
"Exactly!"
"Richard, everyone does that! Yatiin casinos always let the players win,
so that they spend it all, and more, in the Yatiin gift shops and such. Yati
subsidizes the casinos for just that reason. You don't think they kicked you
out because you won too much, do you? No way! They kicked you out because
you're a -- "
Woodstock stops, catching himself before he actually says the words.
"I'm a what?"
"A, well, you know, a..."
"A what? A person?"
"No. A chiphead. Their term, not mine."
"You heard them say this?"
"No, but what did you think they meant by 'your kind'?"
"If you didn't hear them say it, it's your term."
"Richard, really, it's not."
"Doesn't matter," Richard says, his hair imitating the night sky, "because
I'm not one."
"That's a good way to approach it. Refuse the label. Fight the prejudice
by not being angered by it."
"No, Woodstock, you don't get it. I'm not cyberenhanced. There is no
silicon in this body." As if to prove his point, the lights float up out of
his hair and begin to dance in the air.
"What," Woodstock says after a moment, "are those things?"
"Just a miracle."
Woodstock stares at the dancing lights, then starts walking stiffly across
the street towards a bar called Tough N' Eddie's.
"I need a drink," he calls over his shoulder, but Richard is right behind
him.
Four hours later, they're in Jaeiou's Groundzero Lounge, having been kicked
out of three others. Everything in the bar is chrome, and red and orange
lights glare off all the surfaces. Each table is surrounded by a hush field,
and can be programmed for whichever kind of music the customers desire.
Woodstock and Richard have chosen nothing, so everything is silent. The only
outside noise that intrudes comes when the waitress enters the field to take
their order or bring them drinks.
Sitting in this haven of silence, they have talked about many things.
Woodstock has learned that Richard has just come from Onyx, and is a wandering
minstrel, a synthar player that plays when and where he gets the chance or the
inclination. He would play now, but his instrument has been stolen.
"I was trying to explain to the desk clerk that I really had made
reservations two weeks ago, and that they must have made an error. While I
wasn't looking, someone walked off with my synthar."
"Did you tell the police? Did you ask the clerk if he'd seen anything?"
"She, and no she hadn't. And the police weren't very helpful either."
Woodstock knows why. Everyone on Yati thinks, as he thought, that Richard
is a chiphead. In fact, Woodstock isn't sure what Richard is. After the
incident in the street, they never talked about it. He needed a few drinks
first, which he now has, and so he asks.
"What the hell are you, Richard?"
"I told you. A musician."
"You know what I mean."
"I'm just a person, just like you. Just like the pit boss and the cashier
and the desk clerk and the police. People, every one of us."
"Except you're the only one who has dancing lights in his hair." Woodstock
downs the last of his Nixx, and signals the waitress for another.
"I told you, it's just a miracle. No big deal."
"No big deal, huh. Just a miracle."
"You've got it! You really are a quick study, you know. Most people take
a few lifetimes to learn the commonality of miracles." He smiles his placid
smile again, the one that is starting to get on Woodstock's nerves. It's a
smile that seems to say "I have a secret, and I'll only share it with you if
you're nice to me."
"I've got it? I don't even know what the hell you're talking about!" He
realizes he is yelling, and grins sheepishly at the waitress who's just
entered the field to give him his drink.
"Look, Woodstock. Miracles are everyday things. Life is a miracle. This
table is a miracle."
"How is this table a miracle?" Woodstock examines the chromed fixture. It
isn't even an attractive design.
"Think about it. This table is made up of millions of molecules. Tiny
little things we can't even see, and yet they are holding up this glass." He
raises his glass, which has only water and a slice of Deluran candyfruit in
it, and then sets it back down with a loud clink. "What gives those little
things the strength to do that, hmm? Why doesn't the glass just sink right
through it, like it would if this table were made of water? As a matter of
fact, why doesn't it just pass right through it as if it were air? Air is
made up of molecules, too."
"I dunno." Everything Richard is saying makes sense to Woodstock, but he
writes it all off to the Nixx.
"Me either." He picks up the glass again, then drops it from about four
inches over the table. It passes right through.
Woodstock quickly looks under the table, amazed. What is even more amazing
is that the glass is just hovering in the air as firm as if it were sitting on
the table.
"For that matter," Richard says, looking under the table with Woodstock,
"Why does it pass through air? If a table molecules can hold it up, why can't
air molecules?" He grabs the glass and sets it back on the table. This time,
it stays.
"Once you start questioning the why of reality, you realize that nothing is
real."
"Oh fuck," is all that Woodstock says, and lets his head fall hard against
the very real table.
MURDER 201: Richard convinces me that I can pass through solid
matter, and tells me to step in front of a speeding gravcab to prove
it. I am so drunk, I believe I can. The gravcab reminds me that I
can't.
"What is that?" Richard leans across the table to look at the datpad.
"My death diary." He shoves it across, and his friend picks it up. After
reading a few entries, he shoves it back with a frown.
"Woodstock, why are you here?"
"You asked me that at the hotel."
"And you never answered."
"Ah, yes. Well, the short version is that I was dropped by a woman I
planned to spend the rest of my life with." He slugs down the rest of his
Nixx, and signals for yet another. He's beginning to think that Richard is
right about this whole reality thing. He feels like he is floating.
"So you came here to forget her, and fantasize about death."
"No way can I forget her. We're soulmates. We're meant to be together."
"No you're not." Richard smiles again, and Woodstock fights the urge to
break his teeth.
"How would you know? You don't even know her."
"If you two were soulmates, don't you think she would realize it too?
Since she doesn't, you aren't."
"Oh, I forgot. You know everything."
"When you get past your pain, you'll realize it's true."
The bartender enters the hush field, bearing Woodstock's drink. He sets it
down in front of Woodstock, but his eyes are locked on Richard.
"Don't you think it's about time you chummies hack out?" He's a big man,
and his stance and eyes are threatening.
"Dammit, I am tired of getting thrown out of bars. My friend here is a
human being, just like you and me. What the fuck is your problem?" Woodstock
manages to get to his feet, but he's having trouble staying there.
The bartender looks at him, then stares at Richard again.
"I don't count cyboys as being the same as you and me."
"You know what you are?" Woodstock starts. Before he can finish, Richard
stands and grabs his arm.
"We were just leaving. Sorry about the trouble."
"Trouble? You ain't seen trouble yet, pal," Woodstock shouts. The heavy
paperweight in his pocket is making it difficult for him to keep his balance.
"Come on, Woodstock." Richard pulls at his friend's arm.
"Better listen to your chum, cyberlover." The bartender takes a menacing
step towards them.
"Cyberlover? You overdeveloped, glandular freak. You wouldn't know a true
implant from a... a..."
"Come on, Woodstock."
"From your own, steroid-shrunken willy!" Woodstock grins broadly and looks
at Richard, proud that he is able to finish the insult in such a grand manner.
When he looks back, it's just in time to see the fist.
The next thing he knows, he's in the dark. At first, he thinks he's dead.
Then he feels the hand that is still on his shoulder.
"Richard?" He looks over, and sees the lights in his friend's hair. "Where
are we? Why does it smell so bad?"
"We're in the sewer below the bar." That answers both questions.
Woodstock looks down and sees nothing. He does, however, begin to feel the
slippery ooze soaking through his shoes and pants legs.
"How?"
"Well, it's the funniest thing. Remember our talk about molecules before?
Seems they decided not to hold us up at just the right time."
Woodstock starts chuckling and slowly builds into a full- scale guffaw.
Soon Richard joins in, and they laugh together until the sewer is filled with
their echoes.
He wakes up on the steps of The Night Fantastique, a local pleasure palace.
Someone is shaking him gently, telling him he has to leave. He sits up,
groggy but not hung over. Every detail of the previous night is clear in his
head. Every word spoken still echoes as if it's just been said.
He searches his pockets to make sure everything is still there. Next to
the paperweight, he finds a folded napkin.
It was a pleasure to spend the evening with you. I am sorry we did
not get the chance to finish our conversation, but the authorities
insist that I leave. I hope we got far enough along for you to
figure the rest out. I am sure we will meet again, if we choose to.
Until then, take care.
-R
Woodstock stares at it for a moment, then re-folds it and places it back in
his pocket. He hails a cab and takes it back to his hotel.
After a quick pass through the sonic shower, he packs and touches the comm
link.
"Front desk," says a polite, female voice.
"This is room 1342. I will be checking out immediately. Could you please
send someone up for my bags?"
"But Mr. Bach, you are still registered for five more days."
"And I imagine you'll credit my account for that, won't you?"
"If you choose."
"I do. Thank you." He touches the link again and silences it.
Sitting down at the room's data terminal, he brings up the hourly departure
schedule for the starport. There's a ship going back to Galondin, one heading
for Onyx, and a third heading for Etherea, one of the outermost planets of the
Imperium. He logs a ticket for Etherea as the porter arrives for his bags.
On the way to the starport, the gravcab passes Swahla's. Something in the
window catches Woodstock's eye, and he has the taxi stop.
"How much for the synthar in the window?" he asks the clerk. It is a man
this time, perhaps one of Ayram's jealous husbands.
"A fine instrument, sir. Not many -- "
"Look, I'm in a hurry. The meter's running on the cab there. How much?"
"Five hundred credits."
He crosses to the window, lifts the synthar and its case out of the
display.
"It's used. See, there's a custom's sticker still on the case." And sure
enough, it's the Onyx Customs Bureau. "I'll give you three hundred, that's
all. No dicking. Like I said, my meter's running."
The clerk nods, and Woodstock hands him his credit chip. He also gives him
the paperweight.
"What's this?" The clerk eyes it with suspicion.
"Gem of the Universe. I'm returning it. It's flawed."
______________________________________________________________________________
Dave Borcherding was born, raised and, regrettably, still lives in Cincinnati,
Ohio. He writes mainstream fiction and science fiction, and has a novel in
progress (PANGAEA). He is also a freelance writer for Writer's Digest Books.
usr1655a@tso.uc.EDU
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS
Chapter 10
Jim Vassilakos
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
"Well?"
Vlep crossed the front room again. The flat was still in chaos, furniture
and personal belongings scattered haphazardly, but he was sure it was not
because of the quarry. Sule stood in the doorway, sharp eyes transfixed upon
her servant as soft, blue rays of predawn light fell silently along her icy,
white mane. Vlep ignored her while she stood there contaminating the mental
space with frustration.
Frustration, definitely, and yet there was something underneath it, some
sort of satisfaction.
"Nothing?!"
He shook his head, "It is as I told you before."
"You ran us into a dead end, before."
Vlep turned, cautiously. Her patience was like a strip of rubber ready to
snap.
"Is it my fault that your quarry decided to go to the Runyaelin during the
ceremony of sacrifice? How am I supposed to trace him from such a place of
death?"
"No excuses, psyche. I need information now."
He shrugged. She understood very little about the second sight. Explaining
the difficulties would earn few favors. He decided to shovel out the few
answers he had rather than bank on her dwindling hope.
"I will be plain Sule. I don't think this mess was caused by the quarry."
"You said Harrison was here."
"He was. I am certain of it. But I don't believe he did this."
"Why didn't you tell me this before.
"I was not sure before," he lied. "Beside, would you have believed me?"
"Come here, Vlep... closer."
She smacked the sheepish grin off his face before he even noticed her hand
in motion. By the sting it left, he guessed that there would be blisters.
"When you have permission to think, I'll let you know. Until then you do as
you're told. Clear?"
"Ah, very," he replied, surprised that he hadn't seen it coming.
"Who is this person who is with Harrison?"
"I don't know. A man, I think."
"And he didn't follow Harrison to the Runyaelin?"
Vlep shook his head, "I'm not sure. I was keying on Harrison only."
"Get me answers," Sule commanded, stepping back from the doorway.
Vlep rubbed the side of his face, looking again around the flat.
"He was looking for something."
"Obviously. Did he find it?"
Vlep stepped into the hallway, crossing the threshold into the bedroom. The
impressions were mixed and strong as before.
"The girl Harrison was with... it is difficult to see past her."
Red twill hung silent in the still morning air. Somewhere up above, a bird
was singing.
"Try harder, Vlep."
He put his hand on the window sill. A mixture of anxiety upon anxiety,
fresh and unpolluted. Vlep crossed back to the front door, this time almost
running.
"What is it?"
Outside, the sidewalk lay empty except for the clutter of dead leaves and
the white, government car.
"What is it, Vlep?"
"He sees something, yet it isn't there."
"What does he see?"
He descended the steps, looking at the pavement directly in front of the
flat. From the corner of his eye, he could see an alley cat cross the sidewalk
and hide underneath the car, its two occupants oblivious to the intrusion, and
in the back of his mind he heard the whine of a chemical engine.
"Vlep!"
Vlep felt his arm extending to point down the street, "He was running from
something."
"Get in the car. You're going to take us where he went."
"No. I have to be on foot."
"Okay. Come people! Vlep's taking us for a walk."
Soft voices crossed within the fog like knotted strands of hair, pulling
taut and then snapping as they spiraled and blurred beyond recognition. The
lumpy terrain seemed familiar, but the wispy, white haze swirled his
recollection into a befuddled mass of disarranged static. Below, a small girl
with long, sandy hair and wide, hazel eyes stood screaming, her voice lost
within the vacant space between. Then the old city rose cautiously to its
feet, a museum of looming statues, gargantuan and hollow, all abandoned except
for the rush of tattered echoes, voices of bogeymen, or so he was told.
He'd occasionally see them, their skin drab and mottled. They kept a
distance, eyes webbed with curiosity, daring to look but not to touch as he
snapped images like a tourist at the zoo. Sometimes he pretended to be some
famous archeologist searching for relics of the past, sneaking home later to
bury his trophies before anyone should discovered his absence. The
bogey-people didn't seem to mind. They would sometimes even leave him gifts
which he would collect with a gravitic net and boil before handling.
They had only become angry once, and then they poured out enough anger to
sate the frustration of an entire lifetime. Mobs of them had stormed the Naval
Hospital, the one safe place in the old city or barrens as it became known.
The underground routes to the suburbs were caved-in, and the overland barriers
were laced with mines. After the battle, the hospital stood alone, the
buildings around it reduced to rubble by explosive detonations. Hours were
counted within by the number of corpses incinerated on the 40th floor.
Volunteers, they were called.
"Put on the slickersuit, or you'll be next," his father had warned. Mike
spent a week just learning how to secure the plastic helmet. Righty-tighty...
clip, tighten, tie... swivel, clip, tighten, tie, check. Or was it tighten,
clip? "My son, the space cadet." He accepted his father's recognition with a
sense of accomplishment, holding the memory with a youthful pride which
bordered on the pompous. A year would pass before he learned that the comment
wasn't meant as a compliment.
He cheeks wore a rosy hue that day, somewhat brighter than the burnt brown
of the doctor's whose thick, blue veins and patchy tufts of white hair blew
back and forth in the ventilating stink. Dirty beads of perspiration
glistened on his brows, flowing in trickles from the wrinkles between his
eyes, as he stacked small metallic cylinders into the small, silver box.
"Here boy," he offered in a soft but desperate voice. "Take this to your
mother. And watch yourself while you're out there. Lei got away; crafty,
little runt."
Outside, sunbeams bathed the asphalt in a bellowing heat, and the dust of
the dead fell about him like a summer shower, clogging the filter as he
unfastened the helmet and gulped for air. The buildings stood about him in
various states of disrepair, the tall communications tower rising like a lone
palm tree amidst a rocky and deserted beach. Memories of her running along the
flat, wet sands sparked to mind. She'd been crying. Her brother destroyed the
house she'd built for the small, white, kitten crabs. He couldn't remember
why.
Somewhere in the distance he heard her voice, sweat accumulating in his
eyebrows as he searched the hillside. She stood near the top beside the old
cathedral, its tall, stained-glass windows, once polished and beautiful before
people came and painted graffiti on the saints. Now, instead of reading from
scrolls, they played long violins and wore red and black headbands. The big
guy in the dome window no longer smiled, and his chalice and loaf were
replaced with a straight-backed snake and a bulging phallus.
They'd visited it several times. The few who attended sat in sparse
clusters, their moods somber and suspicious. She'd once gone wandering,
greeting people as they came in. His father grabbed her by the shoulder and
put her over his knee. Later she asked him why, but he wouldn't explain. He
just looked up at the dome, muttering something under his breath.
"Does Jesus sing, Daddy?"
"He snaps the sticks, sweetheart. Can you hear him?"
They never went back after that, but his mother told them stories about how
people used to pray there, especially after what had happened. He didn't
understand what she meant by praying, but it seemed like a serious business.
It had something to do with the guys in the windows. She often showed him her
favorite.
"Michael!?"
She started running down the hill, her bony legs quaking with each hop
until a moist patch suddenly gave way and she blundered into the thickets, her
legs falling away from underneath, hurtling her into the dense brush below. He
felt a cold lump of cotton form in his throat, stealing his voice. Then she
crawled out, tears streaming down her cheeks as patches of blood showed
through the knees of her white stockings.
"Mike, don't leave me. I'm afraid."
A shaft of stark red cascaded from the dome, its bright, pulsing heat
joining with the perspiration in his brows. Together, they splashed into his
eyes, blinding him within in a warm veil of brine. For a moment he was aware
only of the sun's broad cymbals clashing on his skull and of his pounding
heartbeat and the sprinting sound of his feet touching the ground and leaving
again in quick succession.
"Michael!"
The pounding grew louder, like a sledgehammer crushing a block of marble,
all the splinters shattering in all different directions, jumping out at
people, bodies imploding in a maelstrom of hydrogen and fire, and then the
blurry ground rising as he skidded and slid down the loamy slope, skipping
over brambles and thrush as large stones protruded from the path to strike
him. A dew-laden carpet of grass and twigs lay before his feet, the small,
crooked trees emerging sporadically from the dense brush as birds scattered
from their branches, the squashing noise of his sprint splashing dirty water
toward either side.
He'd dropped the metal box somewhere far behind and kept running until her
wails were only a thin whisper in the distance, the sound reverberating
against the walls of his conscience, a texture soft and familiar but which he
could never seem to reach.
"Namarie, nilimo, ve firnuvan hior."
And then it faded until it was too quiet to distinguish as more than random
noise.
"Mike..."
His whole body tingled, a fluttering sensation as though he were chopped
into pieces and frozen. He tried to move his fingers, yet his hands couldn't
find them, nor could his arms find his hands, and so forth, all the way to his
spirit, unshackled and floating free, ready to draw away with the gentle
barrens wind.
"Son of a bitch is giving up... five more cc's."
"C'mon Mike, pull out...."
A thin man stood over him, watching Mike as though he were some spectacle
at a freak show. Mike imagined the tall spokes jutting from his skull to be
the long fronds of a palm, it's stalk swaying in the coastal wind. Thin, brown
eyebrows danced like frolicking caterpillars, the soft eyes beneath shimmering
a placid blue.
"Did you hear me? Five more!"
"Got it...."
With the sudden jolt in pulse-rate, Mike's fingers gripped at the null
field for something to squeeze.
"Well... that worked...."
Johanes pulled back the syringe as the convulsions began, a rattling of
bones against flesh all suspended in air.
"Is he gonna make it?"
"Of course he will... although..."
"Although?"
"What's left when he gets back...." Spokes shrugged his shoulders
apathetically, "Unhook him."
Beneath a canopy of skull, thin fibers pulled taunt and disappeared, the
throbbing hum echoing into the silence of an invisible rhyme. Johanes quickly
cleaned the connections before replacing their caps, and Spokes bent over
Mike, checking the pupil reflex with a bright penlight.
"How ya feeling, Harrison?"
Mike felt the grid solidify as he involuntarily rotated toward the cheery
voice. His eyes overcompensated for the distance making the figured blur in
and out of focus, and he could hear a steady pounding in his head. Spokes
slapped him on the cheek and watched as the sensation tingled slowly across
the gatherer's face.
"Huh?"
"You need to talk to me, Harrison. How many fingers do I have up?"
"Uh... three."
"Excellent. You don't mind if I check out a few reflexes, do you?" A crisp
bolt of electricity arced from somewhere above, its touch like icy fire upon
his forehead. Mike winced at the shock.
"Good. Now, try saying something intelligent for us."
Mike paused, finally blurting out the first thing that came to mind: "Where
am I?"
Spokes beamed, apparently impressed.
"Tyberian compound. How much do you remember?"
Mike pictured Vilya sitting under the ventilation shaft, her dark hair
shuffling gently in the damp current. From the corner of his vision he could
barely discern the outline of her shadow amidst the yellow rays of sunshine
which scattered evenly through an open doorway and onto the cold cement floor.
All the while Spokes kept trying to make conversation, threatening to test a
few more reflexes if Mike didn't mumble a response every so often.
"You folding up on me, Harrison?"
Mike yanked his head to the side but the field re-solidified, closing him
within a tight bubble of gravitational force. Spokes, looking vaguely
apologetic, readjusted the controls as the field gently settled Mike to the
floor.
The shadow and a pair of legs crossed the chamber in synchronous step,
finally meeting like twin V's at a pair of quagga-hide loafers beside the
bio-monitor's tall, metallic frame. Mike watched his own pulse rate in the
electronic display for several seconds before he realized that it matched the
faint pounding noise in his head. A pair of electronic pinchers still wavered
carelessly in the gravitic null. The densest objects were always the last to
fall due to over-compensation on the part of the computer. Johanes snatched
them on their slow descent as he watched Spokes unplug the inertial modules.
Then he looked toward Mike, his sweaty face the color of a rotten egg.
"Anybody home in there?"
Mike considered the question carefully, but Johanes seemed impatient for a
response.
"What's the matter? Can't he understand?"
"Of course he understands; he's just a little whomped."
Spokes finished stowing the equipment and turned around, a white plastic
tube in one hand and a pair of silicon adapters in the other. He knelt down
beside Mike, cautiously extracting a thread of optifiber from the tube and
uncapping two of the jack's on Mike's skull.
"This is going to feel sorta funny, but we figure it's better to zap you
while you're still dead to the world."
Spokes worked both ends of the thread into the adapters, finally plugging
them into Mike's skull so that the optifiber seemed to emerge at one point and
sink back at another. Mike felt a tingling sensation within his joints which
spread along his skin as Spokes sat back to admire his handiwork. The tingling
slowly grew into a strange, blazing sort of itch, as though hundreds of
electrical spiders were crawling within his stomach, head, and limbs. Spokes
and Johanes held him down as the floor seemed to wrap itself around his body
in a vain attempt to extinguish the fire. Johanes was talking in a worried
tone, but Spokes kept shaking his head as if everything was normal.
Mike listened to the sound of the voices, finally accepting the burning
sensation which swept back and forth along his spine and through his legs like
the icy Aeluin on the gentle, sloping shores beside Erfalas. Then, it slowly
began to transform itself into a numbing, almost paralytic massage, the
tingling returning, and the entire series of sensations beginning anew and
repeating, over and over. After more iterations than he cared to count, Mike
noticed that the familiar hands which held him down during the burning periods
had mysteriously disappeared. He waited for awhile to see if they would
return, finally observing that the yellow rays were also gone, and the room
was bathed in dim blue and pink, most of it generated by the bio-monitor's
video display and small glowbeads scattered about the walls.
Reaching to his head almost instinctively, he carefully unscrewed the
adapters, allowing the sensations to leave him like a decent lover: sweaty,
sore and thirsty. A sluice-stick lay conscientiously beside him on the floor,
and he chewed it open and sucked out the syrupy contents while righting
himself into a sitting position. Something sharp bumped into his head, and he
crouched back down, squinting toward the ceiling. A flimsi-leaf seemed to
dangle in mid-air, "try me" scrawled across it in dim, glowing pink. Mike
tugged it free from two long black cords which hung from one of the many
ceiling cables, curling it and himself into a tight ball. The cold cement felt
strangely comforting, the wet, sticky sluice still coating his numb lips as he
watched the cords swing gently back and forth, beckoning in the dim light.
He reached toward them, propping himself up with one elbow as he tugged
himself back into a sitting position. Mike examined them, cautiously, the dim
pink light changing in intensity as the flimsi slowly stretched itself out.
The cords ended in adapters not unlike those he had recently unscrewed.
Shrugging, he screwed the new ones into where they seemed to fit. At first he
could just hear voices, but from the shadows around him, ghosts seemed to
emerge.
"Well look who's here."
"Hey, Harrison. How ya feeling?"
"Who is he?"
"Must be a novice. He doesn't seem to be very talkative."
Mike felt a sudden jolt of static like an electric slap across his senses.
"Hey, cut it out. He's my guest."
"Sorry."
"Hey Mike. That was pretty quick. You okay?"
"Spokes?" Mike gulped down, blinking his eyes to refocus. It didn't seem to
matter whether his eyes were open or closed. They were still there, all the
same.
"Yeah, it's me. Cecil's here too."
"Hi there, little one."
Cecil's image seemed to have yellow eyes, shining faintly through an acidic
smog like the sun on Tyber. Mike nodded, still contemplating whether or not to
tear the twin cords from his skull.
"You seem a little uneasy."
Mike shrugged, "I've having a weird day."
"I zapped him after we installed his output," Spokes explained.
"So soon?!" The yellow eyes flared brightly.
"Easy Cecil. Johanes said they were in a hurry."
The eyes dulled and tilted slightly.
"So how did you like the jitters, Michael?"
Mike frowned, "What's he talking about?"
"Technical stuff. In order to stick in the outputs, we have to go all the
way to the amygdala, and that means that we have to get close to the
hippocampus."
"The butcher speaks." It was a voice from the crowd.
"Shut-up; I didn't do him," Spokes retaliated.
"I'm lost," Mike confessed.
"Whenever you go that deep, anything can happen. The mind has a tendency to
flip-out sometimes. We talked about it before the operation."
"We did?"
"Yeah. You don't remember, but we did. That's another problem with getting
too close to the hippocampus. It tends to scramble short-term memory."
"The last thing I can remember it talking to Johanes."
"He brought you in this morning. We took you to the doc."
Yellow eyes seemed to dance in circles.
"The doc?"
"The butcher," Cecil interrupted. "I felt that I still owed you a favor."
"Some favor," Mike mumbled, except that his voice carried across the ether
loud and clear, much to the amusement of several electronic loiterers. Even
Spokes seemed to get a good snort out of it. Then he turned serious, as though
perfectly able to jump from one emotion to the other without crossing the
intervening space.
"It was time to join the club, Mike."
"Is that why you're helping me now? Because you wanted a new member for
your sick society?"
"No, actually I'm getting paid."
"Johanes?"
"Yep."
"So where's he been while I've been twitching on the floor all day?"
Mike heard a few more snorts, exact replicas of the earlier ones, except
this time some vague maniacal laughter seemed to hover in the distance, yellow
eyes swirling excitedly.
"You can stop talking with your mouth now, Harrison. Everybody can hear
you. Use your head. Just look at me and focus."
"Like this?!"
"Hey...."
"What were you doing to me today, Spokes?!"
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the funny feeling you said I'd have. Can you see how
much I'm laughing?!"
Mike felt an on-rush of static block the way between them. Cecil stopped
laughing and stared intently.
"What are you two fighting about?"
"He's pissed 'cause I zapped him," Spokes confided.
The yellow eyes nodded, knowingly.
"It had to happen eventually, old friend. Spokes let your mind get to know
itself. Auto-feedback was all it was. The pathways have to build-up mental
calluses, and you have to learn to deal with pain. Spokes here is surprised
you came out as quickly as you did. For many people, it takes much longer."
Mike straightened, "I don't understand."
"Johanes wants you to go into the dodec," Spokes interrupted. "If it tries
to nail you in any way, the only chance you're going to have is if you have
some resistance. You understand?"
"No."
"Well don't worry about it. It was for your own good."
"Where is Johanes, and where is the dodec?"
"He went back to the Arien Mansion. He took the dodec with him, Mike."
"Shit. Where are you?"
"At the Sintrivani."
"You mean you guys got done with me and just left me here to rot?"
Spokes sort of shook his head and nodded at the same time, "Johanes said
that ISIS has some psyche bloodhound sniffing your trail but hard. He went for
help to smear the scent, but neither of us are yearning to be around you right
now. Is that so hard to understand?"
"I've heard enough."
"Johanes said he'd be coming back for you, so don't go any..."
Mike unscrewed the cords from his jacks and watched the electric
apparitions evaporate into darkness as graciously as they had appeared.
Outside, a chilly breeze flapped across the streets, lifting loose dirt and
leaves into the sky and inducing the hairs on his bare chest to prickle and
tense in rows. With a fuzzy warm ambience enshrouding his senses, he ambled
along the side of the road, waving down a taxi before the main gates.
"Where to?"
The driver was middle-aged, his sparse, graying hair combed straight back,
eyes sunken and tired in the rear-view mirror. Mike dipped his hands into his
pockets, the emptiness sparking an image of Cecil's money in a pool of blood.
Sighing, he mumbled an apology and shuffled himself out of the car.
"Is okay. Where you want to go?"
"I'm broke."
"Get in."
The driver opened the front door to prove his sincerity, and Mike climbed
in, unsure whether to thank him or just do as he was told, and the driver
looked sympathetic.
"You know where you're going?"
"Erfalas."
Mike felt his back and shoulders affix themselves to the plastic seat
covers, a sticky noise resulting every time the car hit a bump in the road.
The driver either didn't notice, didn't mind, or was just being polite.
"So what the name of you?"
"Michael; my friends call me Mike. You?"
"Pateras; my friends call me Pat," he qualified with a smirk.
"Why the charity?"
"You look like you need it. You know the output of you bleeds?"
Mike reached to his skull, withdrawing a smear of pasty orange puss.
"Here, use this."
"A towel?"
"Hitch-hiker must never forget it."
Mike draped it over his head, catching the ullage as it tried to drip down
his neck. The rest began to dry into a sticky crust.
"The daughter of me was a chiphead. She tell me which is input and which is
output. That all I know."
"She was a chiphead? What is she now?"
The man half smiled, half winced. He dug out his wallet and extracted the
image plate. Mike leafed through those in memory, several of his little girl,
first as a baby and finally as a teenager with all the years in between. The
last one showed a bald kid in a hospital bed.
"They burn out head of her, you know. She not know which way was up."
Mike handed back the plate.
Erfalas was cold and windy, and the driver offered him the towel.
"What have I need of it? Is blood of you. You clean, yes?"
"Yeah. Thanks for the ride."
He stood, watching, as the tail-lights ebbed into the distance. The beach
was soft and sandy, and moonlight sparked along the watery horizon, however,
the hooks on the cliffs were no longer to be seen. Only rarely would one
emerge from the pounding waves, and then it would sparkle like a diamond
across the dim, lavender seaside.
Mike winced as the cold water stung his scalp and the bleeding renewed.
Though he couldn't smell any salt, the nerves around the wound told him that
some was there. He finally staggered out of the water, throwing the towel
around his body as he curled up between two tall rocks. The cold breeze
continued to blow airy waves of fine white dust over his still form. Sticking
to his skin, the tiny particles bonded together in the darkness and slowly
dried until he found himself wearing clothing made of sand that cracked and
flaked away when he shifted in half-slumber.
Faint violet rays warily peeked over the eastern horizon, glinting across
the smooth, narrow stretch of sand which teased the incoming waves. Beneath
the noise of water grasping toward shore, Mike heard the distant gurgle of a
chemical engine. At first, he thought it was the final illusory fragment of a
dream, but the sound grew steadily, until it resided at the top of the cliff
where Vilya had shown him the eyehooks and so splendidly demonstrated their
use. Several people were climbing out of a white, government car, each peering
toward the dim violet horizon. Half-buried by the sand, Mike watched them from
his shadowy lair between the two tall rocks. He tried to make out their
features in the faint, shifting light, but it was difficult even to count
them. Then he glimpsed the white mane, its owner allowing the breeze's gentle
tendrils to reshuffle her hair to its own liking, and for a silent moment his
eyes widened with fear.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu) just graduated from UCR with an MBA. In
between responding to employment advertisements and attending Job Fairs, he
DM's a hearty group of dormies and wonders how he's going to finish Harrison
off once and for all. Judging his protagionist's current situation, he may
not have to wonder for very long.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Johnny Appleseed
Curtis Yarvin
Copyright (c) 1992
______________________________________________________________________________
It's early morning when I hit the Tappan Zee. The alchemy of sunrise and water
turns the Hudson to gold, but the bridge is showing its years, rusty and
snaggletoothed. A few suspension cables have rotted through, cut low to sway
ominously in the wind, or high to hunch over and dangle trawling the shining
river, gilt v-wakes marking empty steel-bristled hooks thirty feet under,
hoping for a bite from... what? What would bite on such a lure? Perhaps the
old mills of Albany, dead forty years before the last collapse, have moldered
alive, metal husks slipping into the upper Hudson, revived and evolved by the
cold rapids until a new sort of salmon runs again to the sea: Jacquard-loom
gills, die-cast scales, firepump heart and bandsaw jaws. I'd like to meet one
someday, we could swap notes... ah, hell, I'm an old man. Forgive my
meanderings. Anyway the bridge looks sound enough, so I cross.
Someone has burned the tollbooths on the other side. Fried the fuckers in
their own juices. Always wanted to try that. An incurable pyromaniac and I
don't think I want to be cured, either. I pick my way through the blackened
steel bones. I'm getting a bit tired, but persuade myself to scramble up one
of the high granite hills on the far side. I stumble through groves of sumac,
dogwood, patches of poison ivy, starting to wonder if I'll make it to the top.
Falling asleep would be bad; I'm on the shady side of the mountain. Then all
of a sudden a steep earth bank, a clump of pines, a glimpse of blue sky, and
the summit. A patch of bare rocks. Beautiful. I stand on the highest rock
and gaze out over New Jersey, the rising sun in my eyes.
New Jersey. Butt of a million asphalt jokes. New Jersey. "What exit?"
New Jersey. "Lay-deez an' gentlemen, Da Toxic Sludge State." New Jersey.
"Why do all the trees in New York bend south? 'Cause New Jersey sucks." New
Jersey. "Where even the skunks wear gas masks."
But, seeing it now, I can taste the old spirit of the land, long flat
cattail marshes alive with turtles and blackbirds and muskrats, thick forests
of tulip and maple swaying skeletal in the winter wind and bursting out green
with the sweet spring breeze, these weary granite mountains, soft and round
with age, waiting patiently to see the holocaust through. So it was not so
long ago, and so it will be again. Soon.
The land is healing fast, now. Old smokestacks line the horizon, but more
than a few are crumbling, broken in half or festooned with clinging ivy. I
pull out binoculars and focus, morbidly, on the nearest factory. It looks like
a refinery. Alive, it was a monstrosity, a belching metal beast settled like
a queen ant to sprawl and spawn. Poison its food, poison its blood, poison
its dung. But, dead, it has a certain grandeur to it. Difficult to explain;
think perhaps of a young man, dissolute, cheeks reddened and belly padded with
beer, wispy blond hair and a smug grin and the smell of cheap aftershave. Not
a beautiful object, seen for what it is. Leave it out in the desert for a few
months, and like grape juice it undergoes an miraculous transformation,
becoming an intricate palace of ivory, a maze of clean spars and beams and
smooth hollow places lying jumbled on the hot dry sand. These relics of
Hoboken are the same.
It must be almost ten in the morning by now, and rationality reminds me I
won't make much progress tonight unless I charge up. Normally I find a nice
wide highway to bask on like a snake in the sun, but the bare mountaintop is
good enough. I spread out the solar blanket, plug in, and drift away on a
nice flat rock.
Late in the afternoon I hit the highway again. Walking, of course. You
can go a long way walking. Slap, thud, slap, thud, four miles an hour, forty
miles a day and my those miles do add up. Beats those old diesel-hounds any
day. You just can't appreciate a continent in a car; it's too small. The
water turns you around every few days. You get frustrated and settle down in
a concrete box and die. The Gypsies died out when they changed their
Conestogas for Winnebagos. They thought they could master the machine, but
the machine mastered them, and they ended up just another tribe of welfare
Indians on the wrong side of the tracks. But me? I'll be walking around for
quite a few years yet. Planning on seeing the Amazon and the Andes this
winter; maybe Europe next summer.
As the sun is setting I spot a column of smoke a few hundred yards off the
road. Worth investigating. A narrow overgrown path leads off the shoulder
through the trees. I take it. A few minutes of mud and brambles and I come
into a little dell in the bend of a stream. Tiny cottage on the hillside and
an old woman working a sun-dappled cornfield hardly the size of a healthy rug.
She sees me. Pauses a second in surprise, then yells with joy. "Young man!"
I think of the Holy Roman Empire.
She runs over and hits me with a fierce hug. "So they've done it then!
Wonderful." Her face is a cracked dark-brown mudpie, her eyes are burnt
charcoal, her body is short and squat, but she is beautiful. Hard not to be,
these days. Society used to let its old dry into machines - tv-watching
machines, gossip machines, bridge machines - but society is a thing of the
past. To be old and survive today you have to be tough as nails and sweet as
butter. She looks it. "Come inside and have a beer."
I decline the beer, obviously from a shrinking stash of ancient treasure,
but we go inside and talk for a while. She wants to know where I'm from. My
story: a research group at Yale kept on working for a while after the collapse
and found the cure. Now they have a little village going and they're sending
people out to see what's left. It's not a very good story but it's
believable. Though hardly uplifting. The world repopulated by roving tribes
of shiny-shoed silk-tied snotheaded Yalelies? I think I'll stick with the
apocalypse, thank you.
She seems happy enough with it, though, and tells me her story. Born in
'08, worked as a bank manager, married and widowed. When the bank closed she
found a good patch of soil, bought some seed corn, and gave what was left of
civilization its walking papers. Good instincts. We talk some more and she
offers to let me spend the night. (On the couch, smartass.) I'd normally
travel, but time is long and I don't see any reason not to accept.
After she's asleep I stop pretending to be and explore the place. Finding:
a small barn for a nonexistent goat. That cornfield, which doesn't look big
enough to support a full-grown chicken let alone a person. A root cellar with
a few forlorn cans of green beans heaped at the far end. A trash heap with
the rusting shells of what looks like enough cans to have filled the cellar.
I go back inside and watch her sleep. She's smiling faintly.
She's not going to make it through the winter. This is clear. And it
won't be a pretty death, not at all. A person should die happy.
The flickering red glow casts long shadows on the brambles. The path is
still muddy. The Indians had it right: destruction and resurrection are one
and the same. Ash is the finest fertilizer around.
In the morning I have a less pleasant experience. Hiking down the Garden
State, the sky grayish-blue but the trees still blocking the sun, I get
ambushed. The hollow sthick-thwock of a pump shotgun being cocked:
"Freeze, motherfucker, put your hands on your head and turn around slowly."
A crisp, spry old voice. Bet he heard that line on TV thirty years ago,
been practicing it ever since. I turn around, and a man steps out of the
woods. He's eighty-five if he's a day, but he's standing about twenty feet
away with a big 12-gauge, and looks like he knows how to use it.
An uncertain pause, then... "Ha! Mitsui eighty-four-C! Didn't know they
had any of those left anymore. Look, pig, I know exactly what you're riding
there and I know this gun will blow pieces of your nice little toy all over my
fucking cornfield, so don't try anythng funny, right? Okay. So who are you?
Who's riding that thing?"
"Nobody. I'm autonomous."
The geezer's hands make pumping movements with the shotgun. "What the
fuck, pig, you think I'm stupid? Huh? You trying to fuck with my head?
That's bullshit, I know it's bullshit and you know it's bullshit, and if you
give me any more bullshit I'll blow your brains out through your back. You on
extended recon? Got your recharge blanket?"
"Yes."
"Take it out - slowly - and toss it at my feet."
I spin the small bundle as I throw it at him, hard. The air catches the
crumpled sheet of silvery film and exploded it to float suspended between us
for a moment, blocking his view. The sudden beat of my feet on the pavement,
dart left spin and roll, a huge hollow boom, the impact of bodies, and he's on
the ground and I have his gun. There's a fist-sized hole in my blanket but
it'll still work. I point the gun at him.
"Shit," and he's crying, long racking sobs. "Ah, shit. Christ, I'm sorry,
I wouldn't have done it but the arthritis has been acting up something awful
lately, my joints freeze up and I can't tend the corn, I don't know if I'll
have enough to make it through the winter... but I used to be a cop, still
have an old Mitsui controller in the garage, and when I saw you, well, it was
like a fucking dream come true." He starts to cry again. "Please don't hurt
me, okay? I didn't mean no harm."
"Calm down, old man, why would I hurt you? Let's go sit down in the shade,
I'll tell you a story." I keep the gun pointed at him as we walk, and make
sure he sits down first.
Statistics teaches us to see the work of prophets as mere chance. Failure
was forgotten and success remembered, and so the diviners of old and the
pundits of my day earned my keep. Yet it often seems, looking backward, as
though they were even worse than that, as though a veil of confusion barred
them from the obvious course of history. Prophets had been predicting the
Apocalypse for millennia; it seems inconceivable that all of them could have
missed the mark. But so it goes.
When I was young, in the Eighties, we were told the world would end in
atomic Armageddon; I practiced my own version of the old duck-and-cover,
rolling and falling at the flash in my window to be safe under my bed before
the blast wave hit. In the Nineties, it was environmental catastrophe; if we
refused to mend our foolish ways, we would all boil, drown, freeze, or die of
cancer, depending on the latest study. I spent an abominably tedious summer
working in an inner-city recycling plant. The Zeros set us quivering in fear
of deadly bioengineered plagues, escaped from some latter-day Strangelove's
skunkworks lab or set loose by diabolical terrorists; we'd be merrily
strolling down the street and suddenly everyone would burst out in buboes and
cysts and cancers and die oozing loathsome fluids. I bought a designer gas
mask, a garish Hawaiian style festooned with parrots and flowers and mutant
fruit, and a little ring on the bottom to clip a tie on. Whether it would
have actually done any good is unlikely; anyway the things went out of fashion
in months. We trusted Fate and went on with our lives. The end of the world
had gotten a bit old.
When the apocalypse did finally come, there was nothing exciting about it.
I got a bad cold. A lot of sneezing and sniffling for a couple days. Pretty
much everyone came down with it. When we found out it was an engineered
sterility virus, that everyone on the planet was permanently infertile... I
don't know, it was so long ago and I don't really remember much from those
days. Nobody went crazy, anyway. We assumed the scientists would cure it
soon, and then we could all go on breeding, la di da.
The years went by and it didn't happen. After a while, people realized
that it wasn't going to, that the technical problems were intractable within
the lifetime of the current generation, but the truth's gradual advance gave
the situation a relaxed normalcy. There was nothing violent about it; nobody
was being killed in the streets, nobody was starving, even the criminals were
getting old and settling down. The fade of civilization was an occasional
human-interest story on TV.
Eventually the population grew too low to support a viable economy, and
civilization more or less collapsed. But it was a soft collapse; no riots and
barricades in the streets, just a load of old geezers dying as much from
malaise as starvation. The tough ones moved to the countryside and stayed
alive on small farms.
I was running a private bioengineering research facility, up in Vermont,
for Tony Petrovic. The man who'd made a billion in solar power and retired at
forty to become a full-time professional nutcase. He had us working on a
technique to transfer the human mind from the brain into a computer. Well,
what can I say? It was bullshit. Utterly impossible. But God, Petrovic
raved about it. You couldn't hold a conversation with the man without getting
a spew about mechanical resurrection and psychic transfiguration of the soul
and all that. He was paying good money, too. So I hired a few neuroengineers
and computer types and we more or less just fooled around all-expenses-paid.
No life for the ambitious, but it was fun enough.
Petrovic died in '51. We kept working on the transfer project. Because
he'd left a hefty endowment, because we'd made a few actual advances, but
mostly from sheer inertia; there was nothing else worth doing. After things
finally collapsed we turned our lawn into a cornfield and kept going; by this
time we'd actually started to make real progress. In '70 we broke through.
We had some old Mitsui remote-controlled androids, designed for undercover
police work, refitted with the last generation of Neimann neuroprocessors, and
a jury-rigged transfer scanner. We'd tested the latter on a dog, and it had
seemed to work, but you can't tell much from a barking android and nobody was
taking bets on it.
By then I was ninety and going senile. Did I want to be the first one
through, or did the younger scientists just draft me as a guinea pig? Hard to
say; maybe it was both. My memories of those days are cloudy. I remember the
sharp stink of anesthetic putting my to sleep under the scanner, hoping to
hell I wouldn't wake up there... and waking up in the android. Heaven. My
mind had needed dry-cleaning for forty years, and when I came back, the must
and the mothballs were washed away. A cold shower on the brain. I was alive.
The others wanted to try it. Naturally. We had enough equipment for
everyone. But those people? Senility had left my personality more or less
untouched under the dustbunnies, but, looking at my colleagues with new
eyes... Tyler, who kept eighty-year-old kiddie porn mags in her desk?
Berzinski, who walked imaginary dogs on real leashes? Stevens, who loved to
reminisce about his glory days in the Great Chimpanzee-Fucking Project of '31
(tell him he's full of shit, and he'd just smile his soft dirty smile: "Ah,
don't you wish you could have been there, too?")... these people wanted new
lives? They were dead already, they just hadn't realized it yet. Even the
ex-me never quite recovered after he'd lost the luck of the draw. He went all
to moping self-pity. And he was a pretty worthless fuck, anyway; I should
know.
The Mitsuis were the best androids ever designed. Battery-powered with
solar recharge. Titanium skeleton and electromuscular power. No internal
moving parts. The warranty expired a long time ago, but my new body should
last a few hundred years if I'm careful. Time enough for anything.
I burned the institute behind me. Some of the others might have been
caught in the fire, I don't know. It didn't seem to matter much at that
point. Now? Now I'm just kicking around, passing time, checking out the
world. I thought it'd be fun to see the East Coast the way I always wanted it
to be, and I was right.
I shut up and look the old guy in the eye. He seems a little nervous. And
who can blame him? I think he's sensed that I've said more than a stranger
who expects to part a stranger usually does.
"You're gonna kill me, aren't you?"
"Well, I hadn't really thought much about it, but, yeah, I suppose I will."
"What the hell? Why?"
"Well, I could say I have to, that I think you'd track me down and catch me
when my batteries ran out, but that'd be bullshit, because I'd do it anyway.
Or I could ask you why the hell you want to live a couple more years if your
life is so unpleasant. But that'd be bullshit, too, because I really don't
care. No, the reason I'm going to kill you is that the world'll be a more
beautiful place without you."
A long pause. "You're a pretty crazy fucker."
"You might want to run, you know. I doubt it'll do much good, but it's
traditional."
Another long silence. The shotgun's hollow boom makes it permanent.
Alone again, which is how I like it. Any place, even this rotting patch of
highway with free finest-quality geezer carcass no extra charge, is nicer when
you're alone. Something to do with the ancient territorial instinct, I think;
the old urge to piss on a tree. I have a lot of trees to piss on these days,
and it feels good.
______________________________________________________________________________
Curtis Yarvin hatched in Maryland, larvated in the tepid waters of Brown
University, and will shortly be pupating in Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
He likes to read Pynchon and Lucius Shepard, smoke fat cigars, and howl at the
moon. Send him lots of mail, rattle his cage, poke sticks through the bars;
he don't bite.
cgy@cs.brown.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
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Volume IV Issue 3 August 1992 ISSN 1053-8496
+-----------------------+
|Quanta | Articles
|(ISSN 1053-8496) |
| | LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
|Volume IV, Issue 3 |
|August 1992 |
| |
|Copyright (c) 1992 | Serials
|by Daniel K. Appelquist|
| | DR TOMORROW Marshall F. Gilula
| |
| |
| | THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
| |
| |
| |
| | Short Fiction
| |
| | AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION Phillip Nolte
| |
| |
| | THE FLIGHT OF THE PEQUOD II H. Palmer Hall
| |
| |
| | DEADBEATS Oisin Hurley
| |
| |
| | BUYING SILENCE Michael C. Berch
| |
| |
|Editor/Tech. Director | A REALITY OF ONE'S OWN Jason Snell
| Daniel K. Appelquist|
+-----------------------+
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______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hi everyone! Sorry about how late this issue was getting out the door. This
"August" issue is really a September issue, but if you don't tell anyone, I
won't. I've been playing with the format a bit, as you may have noticed, and
I'd appreciate comments, if you have them. This is the first issue of Quanta
not produced with LaTeX - it was produced using the FrameMaker software. Some
may shout "heretic" at this aparant abandoning of what some would call "the
one true page layout software." Let me say this, however. If there was any way
to do what I wanted to do in LaTeX, without going through and writing my own
TeX macros (which basically defeats the whole purpose of LaTeX anyway) I would
have done it. Ah well...all things change, I suppose...
What I'd really like to see change is the rate of submissions I've been
getting. No doubt many of you haven't sent me your manuscripts because you've
assumed that I was dead or had ceased production of Quanta (due to the long
hiaitus I seem to have taken.) Well let me encourage you to send those
(e-)manuscripts in! I'm looking for new authors, fresh points of view, things
I haven't seen before. The October issue (even if it comes out in November)
will be the sixteenth issue thisfar produced, and the THIRD anniversary issue.
Three years! Wow.
So let's see. What's happening with me? Well, I'm moving again, so the postal
address for Quanta will change soon. If you do have something to send me
regular mail, however, you can just send it to the address listed on the
contents page, and through the magic of the U.S. postal system, it will be
forwarded to me wherever I go.
I was glad to hear that my good friend Jason Snell landed safely at the
Berkeley School of Journalism in California. I say "good friend" knowing full
well that we have never, ever met. Maybe some day... (Jason has a short piece
at the end of this issue entitled "A Reality of One's Own".)
I'd like to include a plug here for the independent video "WAX or the
discovery of television among the bees". David Blair, writer/director of "WAX"
was good enough to lend me a copy for a while, and frankly, I was quite
impressed. "WAX" is not really a traditional narrative film so much as a
spectacle of sound and vision. The narrative exists, to be sure, but seems to
take a back seat to the bizarre imagery and wealth of ideas that Blair puts
forth. If you're into weird, strange cinema, like I am, then you could do
worse than checking out "WAX." See the back of this issue for more
information.
I'm finding it harder and harder to look ahead, of late. I really don't have
any idea what I'll be doing in a year, or where I'll be, but, rest assured,
I'll try to continue to produce Quanta.
Well that's about it for me for now... See you all next issue!
______________________________________________________________________________
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______________________________________________________________________________
AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION "The SETI (Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
by Phillip Nolte transmitters had been wildly
successful even if the outcome
Copyright (c)1992 of the project wasn't exactly
what its founders had in mind."
______________________________________________________________________________
It all started when the earth was invaded by the Space Aliens last year. The
SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) transmitters had been wildly
successful even if the outcome of the project wasn't exactly what its founders
had in mind. Make no mistake about it, it was an exciting time to be a
newsman. You could see it in the headlines blazing the news all across the
country: Earth Attacked by Space Aliens From the Andromeda Galaxy! Alien Base
on Far Side of Moon! Far-out Foreigners Fight European Forces, Immediate
Surrender Demanded!
Yes indeed, a very exciting time to be a newspaper reporter. Unless of
course, like me, you were assigned to the agricultural beat in rural Idaho!
Yes, Space Aliens were set to land on the White House lawn, governments all
over the world were contemplating the future of mankind and was I covering the
story? Was I in the front lines, poised to garner fame and glory? No. I was
driving my old, beat-up Subaru out to Arco, Idaho to visit with the object of
this week's farmer spotlight, Lester W. McGill, an eccentric potato farmer.
McGill had designed or adapted some electronic gadgets for the purpose of
getting his spuds into and out of the ground more efficiently! Lucky me! See
article and photos, page 6C, just beneath the obituaries, right above the ad
for ribbed implement tires!
Surely there would be a reward for me in the afterlife, I thought, because
I was certainly doing my penance now!
The radio signal on the all-news station had faded away as I went behind
the mountains, taking me out of touch with the news that I craved. All the
other stations were playing country-western music. Dolly Parton and Waylon
Jennings don't know much 'bout flyin' saucers.
Mercifully, I finally found the farm out on RR 2 Arco. Right where they
said it would be. You've heard the directions before: "Yeah, ya'll jus' go on
down pas' the feed store and take the firs' turn to the lef' and go `bout one
and a half mile to that big center pivot irr-ee-gation rig, then ya'll head
straight for them Lemhi Mountains. Ya'll cain't miss the farm, It's the one
with the gee-o-deesik dome out back!"
This means, of course that you'll never find it on your first try! Or your
second. I did well to find it on my third, mostly because of the geodesic
dome, which made me some 28 minutes late for my appointment. I did know from
experience, however, that these folks were used to time being somewhat
flexible so I didn't worry overmuch.
As expected, the McGill place was a complete mess! This guy was one of
those fellows who collected all manner of junk, preferably that which he could
get for free or for a low, low price. He'd cart these treasures back to the
farm with big plans for modifying them or salvaging parts from them but
inevitably wound up forgetting about them when he got sidetracked by something
even more compelling. If this process is given enough time, the junk will
eventually overwhelm the entire yard. The saturation point had been reached
sometime ago at McGill's, but that hadn't stopped the junk from continuing to
accumulate.
Some of the hulks and bits of rusted metal were recognizable as old farm
implements or truck parts while others were weird conglomerations of the
familiar, the somewhat familiar, and the very strange. You know the kind of
stuff I mean, someone's dream of a better mousetrap or spud planter or
what-have-you that took a lot of time but didn't work out quite right and is
now longforgotten. From the looks of things, McGill had been the undertaker
for other people's dream machines for a good many years! In spite of myself, I
was intrigued; I'd always been fascinated by junk yards.
I slung my camera bag over my shoulder and grasped my note pad in my hand
as I waded through the junk and knocked on the front door of a crooked little
house that had, at one time, been white. While I waited for a response, I
noticed that the front lawn was long, weedy and unkempt.
Mrs. McGill was wiping her hands on a red gingham apron when she opened the
door to let me in. She was a short, slender middle-aged lady, well preserved
with clear blue eyes and an honest, farmer's-wife face. The only concession
she made to her age was her hair color. It was an awful outof-the-bottle
pinkish-red that looks so damned unnatural, that it makes you shake your head
in wonder at why people would actually pay money to have someone do that to
their hair. Naturally, I told her I liked it.
The house reminded me of my Grandma's place. It was permeated with the
smell of fresh-baked bread and freshbrewed coffee. In sharp contrast to the
outside, the interior of the house was primly decorated and neat as a pin. It
was as though the front door was the border between two distinct worlds chaos
without and order within!
"You're the reporter from the `Eastern Idaho Sentinel' ain't you?" she
said, with that endearing Western accent that you either come to love so well
or to really hate if you live out here long enough.
"Yes, Ma'am," I replied, reverting to the local dialect, "Trevor Dahlgren,
at your service!"
"Here, Mr. Dahlgren, take this basket o' cinnamon rolls, an' I'll take this
tray o' coffee and cups an' we'll go out back to the gee-o-deezic dome. That's
where Les is workin' right now."
I followed the slight, almost frail form of Mrs. McGill (there are no Ms.
out here in this part of the country!) across the junk-strewn farmyard out to
the largish geodesic dome with the imposing outlines of the snow-capped Lemhi
mountain range outlined against the sky behind it.
"Ain't thet somethin' 'bout them Space Aliens, Mr. Dahlgren?"
"Yes, Mrs. McGill, it certainly is! Please, call me Trevor."
"My name's Dorothy. Well never fear, Mr. Trevor, my Les is gonna save the
world. Fact is, you got here jus' in time."
"I... ah... what exactly do you mean, Mrs. Mc... er... Dorothy?"
"You'll see, Mr. Trevor, you'll see."
By then we were at the door to the geodesic dome and I could get no more
out of the little woman. Both of us ducked our heads and stepped over a rather
tallish sill to enter through the hexagonal door. I noticed as we went in that
the door was of a very hefty construction and that the structure of the dome
itself had an inner wall about a foot inside the outer skin.
The inside of the dome was something else again. I can't say what I
expected, but it certainly wasn't what I found!
We went up a set of metal stairs to the main floor of the building which
was about six feet above ground level. The interior of the dome was brightly
lit and criss-crossed with I-beam braces in an apparent attempt to increase
the structure's strength. All around the perimeter, along the walls, was a
continuous conglomeration of strange-looking, cobbled-together machinery.
In the center of the room was a John Deere tractor, minus the rear wheels.
In place of the rear wheels was what appeared to be a very large electric
generator. From the generator, a huge cable, fully six inches in diameter,
disappeared into the floor. A length of large diameter flexpipe connected the
exhaust pipe of the tractor to another hole in the floor. In place of the
tractor seat was a bucket seat with a headrest that looked like it had been
lifted from 1969 Camaro. The new instrument panel was a plethora of digital
and analog gauges with, strangest of all, a cable coming out of the middle of
it that was connected to what looked like a Nintendo control. All around the
room, electrical cables and wires ran everywhere, helterskelter, across the
floor and up the walls.
I looked up at the ceiling and noticed that the geodesic pattern of the
upper portion of the dome had a ring of the hexagonal panels replaced with a
clear material, making a sort of skylight. Several other panels, at eye level
and at sixty degree intervals around the structure were similarly replaced,
making for a series of windows.
Across the building, bent over one of the arcane machines, was a tall,
skinny man, with sparse, graying hair who had to be Lester W. McGill. He had a
sort of "Lester" look about him, if you know what I mean. He was dressed in a
pair of those striped light-blue bib overalls that all good farmers wear you
know the ones, the kind that you buy already dirty. As he turned in response
to our entry, I saw that he wore an old-fashioned pair of tiny, round,
wire-rimmed glasses on his hawklike nose below his close-set and somewhat
wild-looking hazel eyes.
Just to McGill's left was a shorter man who also turned around and looked
up from his work. He was young, handsome and Latin. Probably a Mexican hired
hand, I thought.
Lester didn't even introduce himself. Instead he spoke to his wife, who
was right behind me.
"Dorothy, put that stuff down here and ya'll get back to the house and grab
them bags I had you pack this mornin'. Make sure to grab my chewing tobacco
out of the cupboard on the way. Hurry now, we ain't got much time!" He must
have remembered our phone conversation of the day before because he guessed
right off who I was.
"I'm Lester McGill, and you'll be Mr. Dahlgren - Trevor Dahlgren. That
right?"
"Ye... ss," I managed to stammer out. His air of urgency had caught me off
guard.
"Well, Dahlgren, you got here just in time. We need your help."
"Okay, Sure," I said, still rather in shock.
"This here's Juan. Help him load up a few supplies if you would. I'll
explain everything later."
Juan and I took a few minutes to carry, among other things, six sacks of
potatoes into the dome. Over the high door sill and up the six feet of stairs.
Those suckers were heavy! I was sweating as we dropped the last one onto the
newly formed pile along one side of the dome. Juan smiled at my discomfort,
flashing even, white teeth.
"What are these for, Mr. McGill?"
"Lester," he said evenly. "Spuds? You never know what we might be up
against in the next few days or weeks. Spuds are good food. Good enough so's
my Irish ancestors used them as for their only food for a good many years." He
stopped and scratched his chin. "'Course, there was that damned famine!"
"Food?" I asked, and then repeated Lester's own words. "What we might be up
against in the next few days or weeks? What do you mean, Lester?"
"Why, we're gonna save the world from them aliens, that's what!"
Just then, Dorothy returned with several suitcases, some tins of
Copenhagen, and a large, unkempt, Heinz-fifty-seven breed farm dog. Dorothy
had changed into a very practical pair of blue jeans and a pink sweatshirt.
The outfit looked nice on her; the sweatshirt even matched her hair.
"Close the door," Lester called out to Juan. Juan swung a massive door
closed and spun the handwheel in the center. I was reminded of the outer hull
door that I'd seen in those old WW II submarine movies. "Sit, Balthazer,"
Lester told the dog. The beast obediently sat. Then Lester turned back to me.
"The aliens are going to land in Washington," I said.
"That's right," said Lester. "An' we're going there after 'em. We did a
little test on our powerplant a few minutes ago and now we're ready. Bring
your notepad and your camera, Dahlgren, 'cause, by Gawd, your gonna get some
news!"
"Powerplant?" I asked.
"Hell yes, boy! Ain't you figured things out yet? This here gee-o-deesik
dome is a spaceship an' we're going to war! Bein' a red-blooded American and a
Idahoan, I just hates them gad-damned aliens!"
With that he went over and hunkered his lanky frame into the bucket seat,
snapped himself into a three-point seat belt and picked up the control module
(I looked carefully, it was a Nintendo control!). Juan, meanwhile, had placed
himself in front of a very new-looking Zeos PC and monitor on a bucket seat
that appeared to be the mate of the one on the tractor. I heard the
unmistakable sound of a starter motor, followed by the equally unmistakable
roar of a diesel engine. I hoped that the exhaust pipe was vented to the
outside or things were gonna get mighty uncomfortable inside our "gee-odeesik"
dome!
"Find a place to sit down, Dahlgren. We're takin' off!"
In a state of numbed shock, I sat down next to Dorothy in a short row of
what appeared to be used theater chairs. I found a somewhat worn lap belt and
strapped in. Balthazer came over and took a station laying at my feet with
his head up and his ears pricked.
We did not have an overlong wait for the next set of developments. Lester
put the remains of the tractor in gear and let out the clutch as he
simultaneously manipulated the Nintendo control. I felt a strangely familiar
sensation of movement, like the feeling you get when a fast elevator whooshes
upwards - except that this sensation was almost brutal in its intensity and it
lasted for considerably longer.
"Yeee haa!" shouted Lester. "It worked, I knew it would work!"
I saw the outline of the Lemhi Mountain range go past one of the hexagonal
windows. It occurred to me that maybe I'd better start referring to them as
"viewports."
"I'll be a son-of-a-bitch," I said aloud. "This thing is a God-damned
spaceship!" As soon as the acceleration diminished, I got out of my seat to
gaze out of the nearest of the viewports. It was just like the pictures from
the space shuttle, the large sphere of the earth all blue and white with a
smattering of brown and green showing through the white. Below I could make
out the Oregon coast line, off to the left. We were already in orbit! This
thing could really fly!
Lester didn't waste any time. "Gimme a vector for Washington DC would you,
Juan?"
Juan's fingers rapidly caressed the keyboard of the Zeos. In less than five
seconds he called out, "Heading 386, Les. Tell me when you reach 25 minutes so
I can activate the atmospheric compensation shields before we re-enter the
atmosphere."
Juan's English was almost flawless, with just a hint of a Spanish accent.
Whatever he might have been, Juan was no hired hand! In spite of the
exhilaration and shock caused by the recent turn of events, my experience as a
reporter kicked in. Almost automatically, I began to ask a few questions.
"I don't believe I got your full name or what it is that you do, Juan." He
swiveled his Camaro bucket seat around to face me and smiled smugly as he
replied.
"Dr. Juan Ramirez de la Vega, at your service. Quantum physicist by
training. Now, as you can see, I'm a practicing Astrophysicist. I am
originally from Venezuela and was educated at Cal Poly before I did a stint at
Fermilab. Until about six months ago, I was at INEL right over near Arco,"
(INEL is the famous Idaho National Engineering Laboratories where they do all
the nuclear research out here in the deserts of Idaho. Needless to say, I was
impressed!).
"Did you design this ship?"
"Not really, although I helped with some of the subsystems. This is
Lester's brainchild. He came out to our project at INEL to pick up an old
experimental fusion torus that we were getting rid of. The INEL authorities
thought he wanted it for the more than two miles of copper wire in it. He and
I struck up a conversation and it soon became apparent to me that such was not
the case. Lester had some very intriguing ideas. That was about a year ago.
One thing led to another and soon I was working evenings out at the farm.
Things were finally going so well that I resigned my position at INEL about
two months ago. Lester and I have been working almost full-time together ever
since."
"How does this ... ah ... spaceship work?"
"I cannot explain the mechanisms to someone who does not have a thorough
knowledge of higher mathematics, and like anything that has to do with quantum
physics, a large dash of faith is also required, but I shall do my best."
Juan got up from his console and walked over next to the tractor were
Lester was busy manipulating the Nintendo control and watching his readouts.
We both stepped back as a wad of chewed tobacco winged past us and into a
trash can next to the tractor.
"That old fusion torus is beneath the floor here, but there is some
eighteen inches of concrete between us and the torus. There is a twofold
purpose for this. One, to give us some protection and two, to provide some
extra mass."
Balthazer had followed us over. He sat on his haunches between us with his
head cocked to one side. It didn't bother me, he was probably getting as much
out of this as I was.
"Protection?" I asked.
"We were just being careful at the beginning of our experiments. It is not
really an issue."
"Ah, good," I replied, only partially convinced. Dr. de la Vega continued
his guided tour.
"This machine back here, connected to the tractor, that looks like a
generator is really the secret of the whole apparatus. The device actually
does generate electrical power but it does so in a very special way. Again,
there is a lot of math involved but it is fairly accurate to say that this
current is at right angles to our normal universe."
"Right angles to the normal universe?"
We dodged another wad of tobacco juice.
"That's right Dahlgren," said Lester, reaching for his tin of Copenhagen,
"the ee-lectrical field is kitty-wumpus to ol' terra firma here. Took me near
on to a year to make it work!"
Juan waited politely through the interruption, nodded in agreement and
continued: "When you apply that power to the right sized torus, you get an
antigravity drive system that taps into the magnetic lines of force of the
universe itself! That's why the extra mass of the concrete is so important. To
put it simply, we can actually magnify the slab's puny gravitational force
several hundred million times - only it is a negative or anti-gravity field."
"You do all that with the front half of a John Deere 4020 tractor?" I
asked, incredulously.
"Oh yes. We don't need a large power source because, in actuality, we are
merely channelling a minuscule portion of a huge reservoir of power rather
than generating the power ourselves."
"Wow," I said, nodding my head as if I understood. Next to me, Balthazer
nodded too.
"There's more," said Juan. "Modulate the power through the converter over
here - he pointed to a breadbox sized mass of exposed electrical components -
and you can generate shields. Almost any type of shield you want, anti-energy
or atmospheric or meteorite. If we'd had a few more weeks we might even have
come up with some weapons from this technology."
The reference to weapons brought me back to reality, reminding me of the
purpose of our little jaunt. We were about to engage an enemy from outer
space, that we knew little about, with a barnyard creation from a farm in the
mountains of Idaho! Without any weapons!? Did I mention that these same aliens
had brought the modern armed forces of Europe to their knees in just under two
weeks!
I began to get a little nervous.
"You mean we haven't got any weapons?" I asked. Under the circumstances, I
thought it was fair question.
"Weapons? Yeah, we got weapons," said Lester. Before he could elaborate,
the two men had to get back to work.
"Twenty-five minutes, Juan."
"Very good, Les. Washington dead ahead."
I swallowed heavily. A life-long ambition, to actually get into space, had
been fulfilled, Unfortunately, it didn't look as though I was going to get
much of a chance to savor the experience!
We descended almost noiselessly through the atmosphere. Soon, I could make
out the unmistakable skyline of our nation's capital. Seemingly on guard about
the dome of the capital hovered three glowing, pulsating, saucer-shaped
objects, each about the size of a 747.
"Andromedan space craft, dead ahead, Les," said Juan. He was now working
continuously at the Zeos console.
"Yep, I sees `em. Dorothy, git the shotgun."
"Right away, Lester."
"Dahlgren, ya'll git the door so's the Missus can git a shot at them
aliens, would ya?"
Well, this made a lot of sense! We were facing three war vessels of a
highly advanced alien race who hadn't even been marked by all the
sophisticated weaponry that Europe could throw at them and we were about to
attack them nothing more advanced than a double-barreled shotgun! I said as
much.
"Never fear, Dahlgren," drawled Lester, "It's double 0 buckshot!"
"That's a relief!" I yelled. "Buckshot or birdshot, what's the difference?"
"Jus' calm down and open the door, Mr. Trevor," soothed Dorothy. I rolled
my eyes, but did as I was told. What the hell, I thought, we aren't going to
live through the day anyway.
With the door open, Lester swung the ship around until we could see the
alien vessels through it. They were only a few hundred feet away. I could hear
a strange humming noise that rose and fell in intensity with the pulsations in
the glow of the saucers. Balthazer's hackles came up as he bared his teeth at
them and growled.
"Take a bead on the lead one, Ma," said Lester. "Ya'll be ready to slam
that door, Dahlgren. We may need to git to hell outta here in a hurry!"
That was the first sane thing I'd heard all day!
"Okay, Pa, I'm ready!" sang out Dorothy.
"Git ready with them energy shields, Juan."
"Ready, Les."
"Fire away, Ma!"
Ka-whump! Ka-whump! Dorothy rocked back from the recoil of the shots but,
farm girl that she was, seemed unaffected otherwise. The noise was deafening
in the enclosed space of the dome! Wonder of wonders, the lead alien ship was
... Totally unharmed! But we had gotten their attention! Balthazer began
barking uncontrollably as the saucers got brighter and the pulsations
increased in frequency.
"Shields, Juan! Door, Dahlgren!"
I noticed a faint blue haze appear around the hull of the dome as I slammed
the door and spun the wheel to lock it. The lights dimmed and the dome lurched
and rang like a bell as we took what I presumed to be a direct hit from the
lead alien ship. By now, Balthazer was at one of the viewports continuing to
bark furiously.
"Hey, Juan, them shields work too!" shouted Lester. "Looks like we'd
better high-tail it outta here! Take your seats, folks! Shut up, Balthazer!"
The big dog obeyed immediately and bounded back over to resume his station at
my feet.
We took two more hits, without apparent harm, before the now familiar
elevator sensation struck us again. This time the intensity was far worse as
the diesel engine roared at full throttle.
"They're following us," said Juan, matter of factly.
"Good,"
"They're gaining,"
"Yeah, I figured they might,"
"What, now, McGill?" I couldn't believe that we were still alive, but found
that I rather liked the sensation, if you get my drift.
"Well, now that we're out of the atmosphere we can try some other things,"
replied Lester. To my horror, he throttled down the diesel and pushed in the
clutch on the wheelless tractor!
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"We're gonna try her in second." I heard the crunch of a gear change. The
clutch came back out and the engine rpm increased. I was slammed into my seat
by a hither-to unimaginable force. Even the stalwart Balthazer whimpered from
the pain.
"Good," said Juan, "They're falling back. You should apply the throttle a
little more gently in the higher gears, Les. That was almost painful. Or
should we activate the artificial gravity maintenance module?"
"It's gotta be the ARTGRAV module, Juan. That last blast made me see spots
before my eyes!"
"It appears we have little choice, Les. The alien ships are again gaining
on us."
"Let's do the ARTGRAV and then see what happens."
"Right," said Juan, as he flipped a series of switches on a console near
the Zeos.
Immediately, the sensation of being in a moving elevator ceased and I felt
no different than if we were on the ground, back on the farm.
"Why didn't you do that before?" I asked.
"Unfortunately, we haven't gotten all the bugs out of it yet," said Juan.
Almost as if on cue, my stomach did a series of flip-flops and, just as
quickly went back to normal. Lester, his aim upset by the gravity fluctuation,
missed the trash can with his latest wad of tobacco.
"Damn!" Lester swore artfully.
"As you can see, there is an intermittent flaw in our ARTGRAV system that
we haven't been able to trace down. I suppose that we shall have to learn to
live with it."
The diesel again throttled down to an idle, followed by the clashing of
gears.
"Third gear," sang out Lester. The clutch grabbed and the engine roared.
"The aliens are falling back again, Les."
"Good," Lester replied, scratching his chin. "I been thinkin', Juan. How
fas' we goin"'
"Mother of God!" said Juan, as his fingers flew across the Zeos keyboard.
"We are currently at Mach 165.8 and accelerating!"
"What happens if you was to run inta somethin' at Mach 165.8, Juan?"
"It is safe to say that there would be a great deal of energy released."
"Yep, that's what I figgered. Anybody followin' us."
"Not, right now. They seem to have given up."
"Good, I'm stoppin' here then."
As good as his word, Lester throttled down and pushed in the clutch.
"I got an idee," said Lester, but he wouldn't tell any one what it was
until he had flipped the ship around slowed it down to a mere mach 5.
"We're gonna hafta open the outer door for a coupl'a minutes," said Lester,
as he unbuckled and got up out of his Camaro seat.
"How do you propose that we do that?" I asked.
"Hell, boy, we got us some space suits! I think we even got one in your
size! You'll get to see space all up close and personal!"
"Why me?" I pleaded, as I swallowed nervously.
"Cause I got a bad back - old farm accident, you know - and the Missus
ain't strong enough. Stop yer whimperin', boy, yer worse than Balthazer.
Juan'll help ya."
It appeared as though I had little choice. The space suits themselves did
not exactly inspire confidence either. They were, like almost everything else
on board the ship, cobbled together from used and unrelated parts. In fact,
the two suits weren't even remotely similar. Mine was made out of a
fifty-gallon drum with a rectangular plexiglass window and what looked like
flexible clothes dryer hose for arms and legs, while Juan's looked like the
main part of it was from an old deep sea diver's rig, complete with brass
headpiece. It had a number of patches and worn-looking spots on it and some
other parts that didn't quite match.
"We're ready Lester," said Juan.
Lester and Dorothy looked us both over. Lester smiled and thumped on the
fifty-gallon drum which rang hollowly even with me inside it. He spoke loudly
so we could both hear him through our suits. But, what he said didn't make
much sense to me.
"Jus' drag three of them sacks of spuds over to the airlock. When you gets
the outside door open, just open 'em up one at a time and shake them taters
out into space." Juan nodded in understanding; I just shook my head.
We accomplished our mission with little trouble but I couldn't help wishing
for some momentous quote to fit the occasion. Something like: "Small potatoes
for a man, a giant tater tot for mankind ..." Naturally, you'd have to go to
the frozen foods section because, of course, the spuds had frozen solid
immediately in the cold vacuum of space.
Then, against all common sense, we went back to taunt the three alien
vessels.
Lester brought us in really close. Too close, I thought and wiggled the
ship seductively to get them to follow us. They reacted immediately, like
starved hounds they were after us in an instant. Balthazer loved every minute
of it, standing up on his hind legs, barking enthusiastically, with his nose
pressed to the viewport and his tail wagging.
This time, Lester increased our speed slowly, allowing the alien craft to
stay tantalizingly close (I loudly said too damned close) to us. As we
approached the area where we had scattered the potatoes, Juan called out the
speed and the distance.
"Ten-thousand miles, Les, mach 155.4. Prepare to perform a right angle
maneuver in fifteen seconds."
At the count of fifteen, Lester grimaced as he pushed hard on the Nintendo
control. The ship suddenly changed direction, at right angles to our original
path. The magic of the ARTGRAV system meant that we weren't crushed to jelly,
but my stomach had some ideas of its own for several minutes. Balthazer's eyes
got really wide and he came over and curled up by my feet with his front paws
covering his eyes. I patted him gently. In many ways we were in the same boat
he and I - both of us were more or less along for the ride!
The alien ships swept through the area containing our frozen potatoes, with
devastating results. There were three almost simultaneous flashes of very
bright light, like little supernovas. Juan did some things at his Zeos
keyboard.
"I'm reading nothing but debris, Les! By the virgin, it worked!" All three
of them got out of their seats and began whooping and hollering at the tops of
their lungs. Lester danced a jig across the hood of the half-tractor. Finally,
after about five minutes they began to settle down.
"What happened?" I asked, bewildered by the whole thing as usual.
"You would not understand the math, Trevor," said Juan, breathlessly, "but
basically, our three friends flew into our cloud of frozen potato tubers."
"You mean the invincible Andromedans, who made a laughing stock out of
Europe's finest forces were done in by three-hundred pounds - excuse me, one
hundred and fifty kilograms - of POTATOES?!"
"That's right, Dahlgren," grinned Lester, "we done them in with three sacks
of Idaho Russets!" He began to dance another jig.
"Lester is essentially correct, Trevor, but if the alien ships had hit
almost anything at the speeds they were traveling, they probably would have
been destroyed."
"Huh? How can a potato destroy a spaceship?"
"It has to do with high relative velocities, and the amounts of energy
released when a collision occurs."
"I still don't follow."
"Let me try it another way. Out here in space, in a vacuum, in the absence
of gravity, it is the relative motion that matters. Think of the alien ships
as being at rest and the potato tubers moving at mach 150. You have seen what
happens to an insect when it impacts your windshield out on the highway at
seventy miles per hour?"
"Yeah," I said, "Those grasshoppers do make quite a smack. I got hit on the
arm once, when I was hanging it out the window. It hurt!"
"A grasshopper at seventy miles per hour is moving at approximately 100
feet per second. It packs quite a wallop."
I nodded my head in understanding.
"Now imagine hitting a frozen potato at a speed exceeding thirty MILES per
second!"
It began to dawn on me, but Juan wasn't done yet.
"You ever been to meteor crater, in Arizona?"
"No, but I saw it on TV a couple of times."
"That's good," said Juan. "The authorities believe that meteor crater was
blasted out by a meteorite that wasn't much bigger than one of our potatoes,
traveling at similar speeds to the ones we've been dealing with here."
"It was almost like an atomic bomb!" I exclaimed.
"Exactly!" said Juan. "But there's more. I believe the aliens failed to
detect and avoid the potatoes because they were ORGANIC MATTER, in an area
where such things very seldom occur. Whether you knew it or not, Les, the use
of potatoes for this purpose truly was a brilliant idea!"
"Why thank ye, Juan."
"I tol' you, Mr. Trevor, thet my Lester was gonna save the world!" Dorothy
stood up on tiptoe and kissed her husband on the cheek which caused him to
blush ferociously.
"Well, we have a good start, but there is the matter of the base on the far
side of the moon to contend with," said Juan.
"Yer right, Juan, I got another idee we can try but firs' we gotta find out
jus' what this ol' ship'll do!"
"You mean ..." Juan gulped.
"Thet's right, Juan, we gotta try her in road gear!"
Juan looked at Lester gravely for a few moments, considering.
"I am afraid you are right, my friend. Alright, take your places everyone.
We are about to boldly go where no man has gone before!"
Even Dorothy looked at him suspiciously.
We went back to our accustomed positions and awaited the next development.
I patted Balthazer as much to reassure myself as I did to comfort him.
Lester cracked his knuckles and shifted in his seat to get settled before
he looked around at us and reached for the shift lever.
"You folks ready?"
We all nodded, but nobody looked real happy. I didn't really know if what
he was about to try was dangerous or not, I had just picked up on the mood of
the rest of them. As nonchalant as they had been about some of our other
activities that day, their being worried about this was enough to get my
attention!
Lester pushed in the clutch. There was a soft clash of gears as he pulled
the shift lever back into high gear.
"Here goes nothin'," he announced as he let out the clutch and pulled back
on the throttle.
These actions were followed by the strangest sensation that I have ever
experienced. I'm not even sure I can explain it properly but it affected every
one of the senses in a big way. Imagine a kaleidoscope made up of sensations,
visual, aural and tactile, from all the carnival rides you've ever been on,
kinda rolled together into a high-speed dream sequence and you'll have a rough
idea of what it was like!
I don't know what would have happened without the ARTGRAV. Balthazer lay on
his side, eyes glazed and legs twitching. If his experience was anything like
mine, he had just treed the cat of his dreams and was flying up after it!
When Lester had let out the clutch, the sun was shining brightly through
one of the port side viewports. After what seemed like only 30 seconds or so,
the sun had all but vanished.
In its place was a small circle of bright light about the size of a pencil
eraser. Juan, fingers flying over his keyboard, was the first to react.
"By the virgin! We have broken the light speed barrier! Lester, we have
travelled nearly eighty light minutes out from the sun in under a minute!"
Lester was wearing what could only be described as a shiteating grin.
"Yep," he said. "Now we're gonna kick some alien ass!"
"So we broke the light speed barrier," I said, "That's great, but how will
it help us stop the aliens?"
"No sweat," said Lester. "We just need to aim the ship at the alien base
and let our potatoes do the rest."
I shook my head, whatever they were about to do, I'd go along with. After
all, we should have been dead several times already!
"This is gonna take some pretty hell-afied pilotin'," said Lester. "We
gotta line everythin' up jus' right. An' I think we'd better use all three
sacks of potatoes that we got left."
We got back into our seats and Lester did several more light-speed,
carnivalmontage maneuvers to line the ship up properly with the moon. Juan,
holding tightly to a iron pipe railing, called out directions from the
eyepiece of a large, battered, but apparently still serviceable, refractor
telescope that they'd wheeled over and trained through one of the viewports.
Finally, they were both satisfied with the alignment.
"The alien base is centered in the field of view, Lester."
"Good! Now get them spuds outside."
"Right," said Juan. "Come on, Trevor, we must get back into our
spacesuits."
This time we left the bags intact, full of potatoes. We just nudged them
gently out of the airlock where they tumbled gently, describing black,
potato-sack-shaped silhouettes against the billions of tiny, brilliant,
pinprick lights of the stars. An eerie feeling came over me at that moment. It
was like I was trapped in a bad "B" movie, "The Burlap Avengers of Sol Prime"
or something. That's it, I thought, I'll be waking up any minute!
I didn't wake up and we came back inside.
"Okay, Juan, grab aholt of `em," said Lester.
Juan manipulated some switches on his console. "I have them in tow,
Lester." As usual, I didn't know what they were talking about.
"What do you mean, you have them in tow?"
"Tractor beam," said Lester.
Powered by John Deere. How appropriate.
"Holt on, folks. We're goin' in!"
High gear again. The earth's moon started out as an insignificant point of
light in the front (top) viewports. Over and above the carnival sensations, I
watched it grow to an alarming size before Lester called out, "Now!" and
turned the ship aside just as Juan flicked off the tractor beam. The moon
flashed past the viewport.
The back side of the moon lit up in a brilliant blue flash that was many
times brighter than the sun!
"Yee-haa!" shouted Lester, taking the tractor out of gear and coming down
to embrace his wife. Juan was crossing himself repeatedly as he grinned from
ear to ear. The mood could only be described as joyous. I sensed that
something good had just occurred but, you guessed it, didn't quite comprehend
exactly what it was.
"What happened?" I asked.
"One of our potato sacks scored a direct hit on the alien base, Trevor! We
have saved Mankind!"
"With a sack of potatoes?"
"Remember our lecture on the meteor crater, Trevor?"
"Yes."
"Well, that sack of potatoes was travelling at greater than light speed
when we let go of it. The amount of energy released was incalculable! The
aliens didn't have a chance!"
We arrived back in Washington to a hero's welcome. Within a few days, we
had dinner with the President and the First Lady. There followed a tour of
Europe and the rest of the world to meet with various heads of state. Not only
did I attend them all, I got to cover them for the major wire services as
well! My fame and fortune as a newsman soared meteorically, if I can use that
expression! Perhaps you've read my book "The Agricultural Revolution" which
gives an account of our adventure. "Balthazer, Dog of Space" has outsold
"Millie" and, my latest, "Plowshares into Swords: the Lester McGill Story,"
will be out in a month or so.
So you want to be a journalist? Okay, fine, but you gotta go where the news
is happening, to where the future of mankind is being forged! And where might
that be? Hey, no contest. You gotta become an agricultural reporter! Go for
it! Last I heard, there was even an opening at the `Eastern Idaho Sentinel.'
______________________________________________________________________________
Phil is the Extension Seed Potato Specialist for the University of Idaho. He's
in Idaho Falls and he's still writing fiction although not as much as he
should be. He's listed as a contributing editor for Intertext. He and his
wife and daughter like their not so private Idaho very much. This story is
NOT true but is based on REAL Idaho characters.
nolte@idui1.csrv.uidaho.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS "...he could sense fear all the
stronger, most of it his own.
by Jim Vassilakos And yet there was more, like
the gleam of a diamond in the
Chapter 11 mid- dle of a dim, crimson
pool, water splashing all
Copyright (c)1992 around yet never washing away
the stain."
______________________________________________________________________________
She surveyed the arcing waters with a stubborn glare. Beneath the cliff's grey
face, an undulating seascape swayed tauntingly, the roar of pounding waves
echoing between the sharp protruding rocks along the dim, purple coastline. It
was like Harrison to come to such a place, she thought. It would be even more
like him to stay. She motioned Jun and Clark down the rocky slope along
either side of the ridge as Vlep massaged the rocks at the head of the cliff,
laying on one side as he reached downward along its face.
"What is it, Vlep?"
"Fear."
"Harrison's?"
"Either his or that of children who were sacrificed so long ago. Who can
tell?"
"You'd better."
Vlep looked up, a light drizzle beginning to fall from the clouds above.
"The quarry was definitely here, Sule. I can feel his presence and that of
his psyche all over these rocks."
"Go down."
Vlep slumped his shoulders, wishing he hadn't revealed so much. Carefully
stepping along the damp, slippery face of the cliff, he crept down part way
and then looked back up, half expecting mercy.
"It is not very safe, Sule."
"Be careful."
Vlep sighed, certain that she would be the death of him yet. Continuing to
the eyehooks, he could sense fear all the stronger, most of it his own. And
yet there was more, like the gleam of a diamond in the middle of a dim,
crimson pool, water splashing all around yet never washing away the stain. The
roar of the waves seemed to lose rhythm, and then the screech of brakes
imparted a small cloud of falling dust, bits of sand sprinkling upon him along
with the soft morning shower.
Vlep climbed back up. It was the guard Sule had posted at the Tyberian
Compound. He was holding a small, black object before Sule, his eyes gleaming
in the dim predawn light.
"Look Sule. The android brain."
"Very good, Mito. Did the gatherer come back?"
"No, a boy. It was dark, and I made a mess of him. I'm sorry, Sule."
She bit her lip.
"Forget it. We have what we're looking for."
"What about the quarry?"
"This dodec is the real quarry, Mito. Now go collect the others, and call
in the hydrofoil. I have a delivery to make."
Vlep dusted himself off, thankful for the reprieve.
"Does that hunk of cermic mean that I don't have to go swimming?"
"What did you find out?"
"Is very hard to say. Harrison's impressions are probably more than fifty
cents old, possibly as much as a full day, but the fear is very intense."
"Strange."
"I know what you are thinking, Sule. If he wanted to take a boat, this
cliff is not the best point of access."
"He didn't dive off?"
"He climbed down and then back up. I'm certain."
"One immediately following the other?"
Vlep shook his head, "That is hard to tell. The impressions go right into
the water."
"If he knows about headquarters..."
"How could he?"
"I want you to continue to track him wherever the trail leads from here.
Take the others in the jeep and leave me with the government car. We'll meet
back at the Arien Mansion for Erestyl's appointment. Understood?"
Clark carefully descended the steep hillside, a flashlight in one hand and
an automatic pistol in the other. Purple-hued sands shifted in the crisp sea
breeze, droplets from above snaking through the turbulent air as two pointy
rocks jutted up from the beach, their shiny grey surfaces glinting ominously
in the faint predawn light. He crept toward them, shining his flashlight into
the narrow crack between.
"Clark!"
He turned, unsteady, as the wind tossed a shower of soft sand into his
eyes.
"Damn. Mito?"
"It's just me, Clark."
Clark lowered the pistol, shaking the dirt from his eyes.
"I heard you pull up. You bring the IR goggles?"
"Yeah, they're in the jeep. They came in real handy."
"What are you talking about?"
"That android brain. It showed up at the Tyberian Compound. Lucky me."
"Harrison went back?"
Mito shook his head, "A kid. I was so raw I just blew him away without
thinking. I feel like crap."
"No shit."
"C'mon, Sule wants us."
Mike stayed between the rocks until the wind stole their voices. One glance
in infrared and he knew he'd be finished.
"What I still don't understand is how you got him to agree. The Arien's
couldn't be too thrilled about working for ISIS."
Sule smiled, "Everyone has a price, Vlep; albeit, not everyone yearns for
the same commodity."
"You speak in riddles, traveler."
"Is that what you dirtsiders call neghrali who have power over you?"
The others arrived, each one posing in the typical "recruit's stance",
trying not to stand out from one another for fear of being ordered to do
something either dangerous or repugnant. Finally, Clark stepped toward the
jeep, pulling a pair of infrared goggles from the back seat. He turned back,
examining the landscape on both sides of the cliff as the gentle rain
continued to fall.
"Nothing."
Mike surfaced from the frigid waters as the jeep began pulling away. The
woman sat leaning against the hood of the government car, her wet, stringy
hair blending against the white paint. Ducking back beneath the waves, he swam
to the foot of the cliffs, wading into shore beneath the steep hillside. He
dropped to the ground when the faint hum of a hydrofoil played across the
windswept waves. Slowing and settling amid the choppy crests, the craft's two
gravitic modules kept its thick, silver frame from sinking entirely.
He recognized it as the Tizarian Skipstone-Cruiser, one of the few fast and
submersible, four-seater hydrofoils on the market. The more popular
SkipstoneSafari model discarded two seats in favor of an autocannon and
munitions magazine. Mike remembered reading about how vacationers preferred
to shoot the local critters rather than take their friends along to snap
images.
Mike ducked back down when he heard the splash, and by the time he mustered
the courage to peek over the rocks, the blonde woman was already aboard, her
white mane dripping in the tender morning drizzle. She carried the dodec, and
Mike gritted his teeth in disappointment as the vehicle turned sharply about
and sped into the distant horizon.
The government car's fiberglass window put up a valiant resistance, but
Mike eventually forced his way inside. Reaching under the dash, he yanked
loose two wires and crossed one over the other. The engine coughed and turned
over, finally starting with a belated roar, and Mike found an automatic pistol
and three clips of ammunition resting inside the glove compartment along with
a pair of handcuffs and a pack of breath mints. He smiled, shifting the stick
into reverse and letting up on the clutch. With only a mild groan, the car
lurched backward down the back of the hillside. He wheeled the car around and
stepped on the gas, memories of the chase on Telmar flooding into his mind.
Mike had been driving while Davin and Bill were at the back window, unloading
everything they had into their pursuers. If they'd only pulled over and
ditched the car, he figured maybe Davin would have survived.
Then he noticed his mistake.
"Hey...look at that."
Clark peeked over Jun's shoulder. The blue monitor showed a pixel of light
trudging upward from bottom toward center.
"Sule?"
"Bet you a month's wages it's Harrison."
Clark's eyes widened, threatening to jump out from their sockets. Then the
pixel disappeared.
"Yep. It's him."
"Turn around and floor it!"
The jeep ground to a near stop before swinging around and speeding back
toward the coast.
"Why weren't you able to find him, Vlep?!"
"I...I've got a real bad feeling about this."
Mito groaned, "Look, just everyone shut-up. If he gets away, we're all
dead. You understand?!"
Clark clicked off his pistol's safety switch and stood up in the seat,
firing several rounds into the tall brush.
"Over there! He's off the..."
The jolt in his chest sent Clark sprawling backward off the vehicle. A few
moments later, several rounds had shattered the windshield. The jeep skidded
to a halt, and two figures darted into the brush as Mito fired on the
government car from behind his driver's door. The left side of his neck
suddenly spattered open, hurtling him into the door.
"Shit, he's behind us."
Vlep kept his nose to the ground as Jun fired numerous rounds into the
bushes, finally dropping down to reload. With his head pounding, he tried to
pull himself to his feet and assume a covering position, but something in his
brain told him to stay down, freezing his legs into place. Meanwhile, Jun
fumbled a clip of ammunition into the handle of his automatic.
"What are you doing just laying down?!"
Vlep opened his mouth to respond, but there was no need. Jun's head had
already swiveled forcibly, a bullet's impact ripping the nose clean from his
face. Jun tried to turn back around, raising his firearm toward the bushes and
squeezing the trigger, but his skull popped sideways, a red cascade with bits
of bone erupting from his ear and flailing into the cold rain. Vlep wanted to
raise his weapon also, but his hand remained frozen, his entire body quaking
with indecision as he felt the quarry's presence sweep over him. He waited
several moments for the recognition of death that his elders had taught him to
respect, but instead, he saw only Harrison, panting in the windy
precipitation, clutching a firearm which was aimed steadily in his direction.
There was no vision, no angels to lift his spirit, but only the thunderous
pounding of an icy, blue curtain into a wall of grey hillside. So they waited
together, each to his own thoughts, as Harrison bent over slightly to catch
his breath, and together they listened to the crashing waves and the angry
chirping of white-feathered gulls that rose haltingly like the voices of
crying children caught somewhere in that vertical plane between the clash of
two mighty and unrelenting elements.
Crystal blue eyes surveyed the horizon, daring a blink only as the
hydrofoil came into view.
"You look thirsty, Mr. Clay."
The Director offered him a purple-violet concoction, Draconian dweomerwyne
if memory served.
"It's been a while since I've seen her."
"It."
Clay smiled as he accepted the highbowl. It bobbed slightly in total
ignorance of the waves. Steadying it with two fingers, he allowed a portion of
the crisp, sweet liquid to drain down his throat.
"Robin is more than an it, Director, even if we must be enemies now."
The Director nodded. She seemed more bemused than interested. Clay sighed
and turned back toward the railing as the hydrofoil slowly turned and circled.
It kicked up water, splashing it away from the houseboat as it slowed to a
full stop. Tossing it a line, the deck hand slowly reeled it in and lowered a
stiff rope ladder. Sule hopped on board and showed her prize to the director,
but Clay ignored them both, at once revolted and yet strangely entranced by
what his psuedoniece had become.
"What's the matter, Mr. Clay?"
"It's just strange to see Robin like this." He accepted the dodec from
Sule, adding, "I suppose it's all she ever was."
"Let us hope so. What of the gatherer, Sule?"
"He still eludes us. I left Mito in charge of the pursuit team, and they
are continuing the search as we speak."
"I still want him."
"Director, I am working with untrained, unskilled, untalented..."
"I am aware of your excuses, Sule. Find him. And while you are at it, you
might as well take Ambassador Kato and Erestyl with you. We don't want them to
be late for Mr. Arien. Meanwhile, we'll let Mr. Clay crack the dodec for us.
I trust that Robin knows you, John?"
Clay grimaced, "It does."
He stepped below deck as Major Doran emerged with the Draconian Ambassador.
Cuffed and half-conscious, she looked more like the door prize at a Calannic
orgy than a high ranking diplomat. Sule regarded the Draconian with a
contemptuous scowl.
"I take it she has not been completely cooperative."
"She made her decision, Sule. It is unfortunate that we could not use her."
"She could be valuable, Director."
"I doubt it."
"With her knowledge of the DSS..."
"What knowledge?"
Sule caught the Ambassador as she slumped forward into her arms. Doran
smiled and returned below deck.
"But when the drugs wear off."
"What drugs?"
Sule nodded, finally understanding.
"Mr. Arien may not accept her in this condition."
"You will make certain that he does not know until it is too late."
The deck hand carried Ambassador Kato to the hydrofoil as Doran emerged
with Erestyl. The Cassiopeiaen physicist looked emaciated and worn, his small
body no more than a slender bag of bones. The scanner operator accompanied
them, a sheepish look of uselessness about him as he ran his fingers through a
patch of curly, red hair. Sule motioned Doran toward the hydrofoil and then
turned back to the operator.
"No luck?"
He shrugged, "Erestyl put up a determined fight. I think we can crack him
with enough time, but there's a risk that we may wipe the information we're
looking for. What we really need is a telepath."
"What about the ambassador?"
"We didn't really have a chance. It was obvious from the onset that she was
well trained in resisting the scanner. That, plus her psychic talents...we
just decided to go in and make her useless to the Draconians. She'll have the
drugged look for the rest of her life. With therapy, maybe she could learn to
talk again, if she's lucky."
Sule nodded, turning back toward the director.
"I'll be back with Erestyl tomorrow morning."
"Terminate him after you receive the necessary information from Mr. Arien.
We can't chance him falling back into Draconian hands."
"And what of Mr. Arien?"
"He'll be taken care of once we are all offworld. We have already reserved
rooms aboard the Crimson Queen. Before another day begins, we will be aboard
her, traveling back to Ares in the very lap of luxury."
Sule smiled, "Assuming all goes well. You know I can't guarantee Harrison.
But when we're done with Erestyl, I'll radio you."
"Forget about Harrison. We can dispatch a unit to Tizar to deal with him
when he returns."
"Okay."
Major Doran sat at the pilot's seat as Sule entered the hydrofoil's
fuselage.
"Where's the pilot?"
"You're looking at him."
Sule nodded, "Well, what are we waiting for?"
The hydrofoil sped away, skipping along the waves as it reached 150
kilometers per hour. Back aboard the houseboat, Clay was supervising the
techies.
"Turn the camera on me. I want to be the first thing she sees. You're ready
with the access code?"
"Check."
"Okay, make the connection."
The deafening noise sped across the waves, and for a bare instant, Sule
thought that god had dropped a piece of the sun on the ocean just to watch the
steam it would make. In back of them, the fireball increased in size until she
could feel the heat blistering her face through the windshield. She hit the
stick, but power control was already gone. The blast shock sent them tumbling
end over end, finally drilling them into the water as a huge tidal crest swept
overhead. Cold water jetted into the cabin as the superstructure creaked and
whined, threatening to implode with each passing moment.
"Doran!"
He was knocked out cold.
"Damnit, Doran!"
She scrambled out of her seat and unfastened his belt, throwing him into
the back as she tangled with the controls.
"How do I stabilize? Doran, wake up!"
"Wha...?"
"How do I re-start this thing?!"
"Lower left...pull it."
The craft's engines refused to acknowledge her efforts. Even the
ultra-reliable gravitic units balked at their call to duty.
"The electronics must be fried."
"Floatation..."
"What?!"
The major pointed toward a red lever on the corner of the floor. She
unhitched its safety and gave it a stern yank. A moment later, she heard a gas
release. Two yellow bags appeared from the bow, slowly raising the craft
toward the surface as Doran tried to find his way to the front passenger seat.
"What happened?"
"We got nuked, Major."
The noise of the blast could be heard up and down the coast for more than
twenty kilometers. Mike looked skyward, expecting to see a wasp fighter just
crossing the sound barrier. The morning clouds were burning off fairly
quickly, and a majestic rainbow cut between bands of blue, white, and grey
clear from one horizon to the other. He squinted at the continual on-rush of
air, quietly cursing himself for shattering the jeep's front window. If he'd
only remembered to shut off the tracer on the government car, he could have
avoided the entire situation.
It was noon before Mike reached the geyser or Sintrivani as it was known
locally. He parked along the ridge facing the coast beneath a tall hotel and
condominium complex. Below the ridge, the hot waters of the Sintrivani shot
from a manmade spring, reaching well over half a kilometer in altitude before
they came tumbling back to earth in the form of a warm, misty veil. A crowd
composed mainly of children flew about in saucershells, small makeshift
floaters shaped as flattened spheres. They soared with gleeful zeal to the top
of the geyser while dodging and just as often crashing into loose globules of
water held together by faint geepoints in the giant low-gravity field. Those
without the shells contented themselves with jumping upwards, a hundred meters
or more, and then coasting back to the surface, splashing water pockets on
friends and strangers. Naked above the waist and barefoot, Mike figured he
didn't look very much out of place.
He found Cecil and Spokes camping out on the circular cement amidst about a
hundred other people, mostly parents. If it wasn't for their gleaming
head-jacks and Cecil's three cameras connected to his skull via invisible
radio beams, they would have looked like the stars of some Tizarian vacation
commercial, laying back in lounge chairs eating pocket-bread meat pies and
sipping iced guava juice beneath tall, shady umbrellas. Vilya's cat wandered
nearby, coaxing food from children and parents alike. Mike approached,
carefully side-stepping its stage ego, as the two chiphead nodded their
acknowledgments.
"Greetings, gatherer."
"Well if it isn't Mr. Lucky."
Mike sat down on the green, ice chest between them, picking out a bottle of
guava and uncapping it with his teeth. Spokes regarded him with a mysterious
mixture of fascination and regrets.
"Where did you go last night?"
"The beach."
"Johanes told us that the Imps came looking for you at the Tyberian
Compound. Said he almost got nailed coming back for you. A mutual
acquaintance of yours bit it in there."
Mike gulped down the juice. It was bitter and tangy, the sort of stuff best
sipped during idle hours under the sun rather than taken in mouthfuls.
"Good time for you to take a vacation, Spokes?"
"I'm just a part-timer. I'm not going back until Johanes tells me this
thing is over."
"Where is he, by the way?"
"In the condo. He's watching the news. Something big must have happened, I
guess."
Mike nodded, "Then that's where I'm going."
The main lobby was about as clean as Mike remembered it, sand scattered
about on turquoise tiles, white walls smudged with the occasional dirty hand
print, and children running about everywhere. Mike strolled through
cautiously, slowly scanning the faces as a hazel-eyed girl ran by. Upstairs,
the floors were cleaner, the noise level much quieter. Cecil once said that he
liked the quiet as much as the noise and that he would refuse to buy into a
place without a balance of the two. Mike tested the door and then knocked when
he found it locked, pressing his palm against the peeper. A long moment
passed, and then the door swung outward, almost knocking Mike on his rear.
Johanes hunched down on the floor, reaching up with a pistol.
"Michael."
Mike put his hands up, waving them like a politician seeking office.
"Hey, take it easy. I just wanted to surprise you."
"A guy can get dead that way."
"Like the kid?"
Johanes dropped the pistol on a counter top, hesitating ever so slightly as
Mike laid out the question. A flicker of resentment invaded his eyes even as
he shook it off, crossing the room to turn up the volume on the three-vee.
"His name was Nicholas."
They sat on the floor in front of the depth box as three-dimensional images
of gravcars and choppers circled over an empty expanse of sea. In the
background, a reporter was chattering about devastation to the oceanic
wildlife. The scene cut to the cliffs of Erfalas. Mike's eyes widened as
mention of a nuclear detonation reached his ears.
"I heard it."
"Was it loud?"
"Sort of."
"They say it was small. Under a hectoton. Good thing the magnetic pulse
didn't reach this far."
Outside the window Mike could see dozens of children circling the giant,
watery plume. He imagined the gravity inhibitors failing as tiny bags of blood
and bone would spatter on the wet cement.
"Quite a image for your Galactican. Eh, Michael? Front page material?"
Mike gulped down a hunk of air, belching it back out with as much force as
he could muster. Johanes grinned wearily as Mike studied his reflection on the
glass.
"You thought that was funny?"
Johanes nodded, "Proof that we're real men. We've got guns, and we can make
disgusting noises."
"There's more where that one came from."
"Spare me."
"On one condition...you tell me why it happened."
Johanes dropped his grin, "They're still trying to figure that part out."
"About Nicholas."
He shifted, then shrugged, "What's to say? We were coming back to pick you
up. He ran inside before me, and then I heard gun spray. You want me to say
it straight out? I got scared and ran away."
"Why did the kid have..."
A knock at the door cut him off. It was Cecil, bitching about how he was
being locked out of his own place. Johanes looked toward the door sluggishly
and then turned back toward the three-vee.
"You get it."
Cecil looked somewhat disgruntled as Mike opened the door, as though the
sanctity of his domestic life were somehow threatened by his old friend's
presence. He seemed to cheer up when he saw Johanes, however. Even the kitty
seemed entranced by the Draconian as it half-jumped, halffell from Cecil's
arms to greet him.
"Down you go, Pooper-dumper."
Mike winced, "Pooper-dumper?"
"Cat had to have a name. How do, Johanes? Much good on the boob-box?"
Mike scratched his head and tried to look offended.
"You're happy to see him but not me?"
"We figured that if he was still here, it's probably safe to be around
you."
"Hey Harrison," Spokes came in lugging two of Cecil's cameras."Gimmie a
hand with the ice chest, will ya?"
"Where's his other cam?"
"Look out the window."
Mike grabbed one end of the chest and dragged it inside, looking outside
the window into the silvery mist of the geyser as he reached the center of the
room. A girl was gliding Cecil's camera upward in her saucer-shell, steering
it toward the apartment complex while warm blankets of mist fell over her,
making her appear halfsolid, half-ethereal. Cecil was already on the balcony
waving for the others to follow. Only Johanes refused, and Mike couldn't
resist making rabbit-eared fingers over his old friend's head. Cecil noticed
it right away, of course, but he snapped the image anyway. When they came back
inside, it danced about on the three-vee, changing hue and shade with each new
iteration.
"Will send a copy to Tizar. You can consider it our team photo."
Spokes winced, "Do me a favor and don't let it get out. I don't want to be
more connected to this gatherer than I already am."
Mike grinned, "Can I quote you?"
"I'm serious, Harrison. I could already lose my job."
Cecil snorted, trying to cover up his reaction as Spokes looked him over.
"You got a problem with my job now?"
"Other than that it stinks, none whatsoever."
"Yeah, well it's safe. I like safe. I don't have any psychotic urges like
other certain people to be a big hero. I don't need medals and trophies. Money
will do just fine, thank you."
"Speaking of trophies," Johanes dug something out the bottom of the trash
container, "Catch, Michael. We were saving her for you."
Mike watched it tumble in mid-air, the etching of a song bird on jet black.
With a fluster of clashing perceptions, he fumbled the dodec to the floor,
still scarcely believing his own eyes.
"Well, either you're a lousy catch..." Johanes looked out the window,
watching the tiny blue waves sway along the horizon. He decided to snatch his
pistol off the counter top, slipping its nose down the crack between his butt
cheeks as he turned back toward Mike.
"Tell me you're just a lousy catch."
Mike shook his head, turning toward the three-vee and then back again. It
all started to make sense.
"Your doing?"
"I'll explain later."
Spokes looked worried and confused, stepping out of his way as Johanes
headed for the door.
"Hey, where're you going?"
"Out for a walk."
Johanes headed down the hall toward the elevator as Spokes watched after
him in the doorway, ducking down so his tall jacks wouldn't scrape against the
frame.
"Well at least tell me if it's still safe to be here!"
She found the white government car resting slightly off the road, all four
of its tires punctured with bullet holes. Three corpses were propped over it,
and rigor mortis had already set in. Not being in the mood for a burial, she
would allow them to rot in the white, hot sun. Vlep was asleep at the steering
wheel. That he had been hand-cuffed to it without sustaining so much as a
bruise angered her even more. It meant he gave in without a fight. She
expected as much from a psyche. Leaning close to his ear, she allowed her
breath to brush the soft wax within.
"Vlep!!!"
He hit his head on the roof, nearly tugging his wrist out of joint in the
process.
"Sule?"
"Who did you think it was? Your fairy godmother?!"
"Sule...Harrison was here."
"Really?!?"
She grabbed the steering wheel, yanking it clear of its housing. Vlep
tumbled out of the car, dropping to the ground at her feet. He knew she was
strong. Biosynthetics often had that tendency. But he had no idea she was
that strong. He picked himself and the steering wheel up from the dirt,
dusting himself off with his one free hand.
"I...I can follow him, Sule. I can find him."
She watched him with a mixture of sympathy and scorn.
"I don't care about Harrison, you idiot. I don't give a damn about the
robot brain. This futile chase has cost us everything."
"But..."
"Everything, Vlep! HQ is gone!"
"How?"
"Look at my sunburn and take a wild guess!"
Vlep pondered the problem, his mind refusing to so much as acknowledge the
possibility of a nuclear detonation. Sule watched the skepticism fade from his
eyes, finally kicking a dent into the car door to vent her anger.
"I've got the major and two prisoners in the hydrofoil. They're probably
going to be sick, and we've got no transportation."
"The hydro..."
"The magnetic pulse fried the electronics. I managed to get one of the
engines working manually, but it's not going to get us anywhere I want to go.
I was hoping, almost praying that you guys would be able to take care of
yourselves without me. There were four of you! Did Harrison have a fucking
army?!"
Vlep shook his head, "I don't...no he was alone."
"Then why'd he let you live?"
"I don't know."
"You didn't fight!"
"I've never fired a gun in my..."
She belted him across the face with the back of her hand, sending him
sputtering to the ground as he held his face. He tried to take solace in the
fact that at least now his cheeks would match.
"You're going to learn, Vlep. I'm going back to the hydrofoil to get the
major. With luck, we should be able to drag Erestyl and Ambassador Kato to
the intersection of the main highway. By the time we get there, I want a
vehicle. I want it badly, and I don't care how get it. Understood?"
Vlep nodded as she shoved a pistol, probably the major's, into his one free
hand.
"Remember, I can kill you at any moment I choose. So a word of advice,
Vlep. Don't think. Just do it."
Tangerine rays seeped quietly through the sliding, balcony window, its
glassy surface coated with a thin, warm mist. Outside, the hot sun bathed the
Sintrivani in a saffron orange glow as the afternoon slipped carelessly away
like the shadows of children beneath a warm, golden fog.
Spokes was baking peach and cranberry muffins, playing the spunky
apprentice to Cecil's wizened if absent-minded mentor. Mike didn't much care
about the respective roles or the protocols associated with each. All he knew
was that he was about to be fed, and his stomach grumbled in anticipation.
Cecil seemed more interested in the dodec than the food, however. He kept
turning it end over end, feeling its edges and especially the subtle crevices
of its etching. It was in the shape of a songbird, a robin to be more precise,
and in place of an eye and tip of a beak, there were two tiny ports of access.
Spokes looked over occasionally, watching the blind man at work.
"You making progress?"
"Found an inny and an outty."
Spokes nodded, checking the muffins' state of readiness.
"Done."
He took them out, leaving them on the counter-top to cool while Mike
watched the three-vee, its volume turned so low that it was barely audible.
The Calannans had pin-pointed the source of the detonation to an Imperial
owned sea vessel. Shortly after the initial announcement, there had been
rioting in Xin, most of it aimed at neghrali-owned businesses, and the
Imperial marine commander had declared Xekhasmeno a red zone, temporarily
closing it off to air and ground traffic alike. Meanwhile, public officials
alternately pleaded for calm or more often demanded explanations from the
Imperial embassy. None were forthcoming, and even the Crimson Queen's orbiting
convoy initiated alert status, temporarily refusing boarding to all but
preferred passengers.
Mike switched the box off and rose to take a peek at the muffins. Spokes,
ever protective of his alchemy, watched Mike with a suspicious smile.
"Just another cent, Harrison."
Mike reached into the cooler and had another gulp of guava. He sat back
down beside Cecil. His old friend swiveled the cameras back and forth from
dodec to gatherer.
"Dumb."
"What?"
"We forgot to give our friend current inhibitors."
"They're not coming out of my salary," Spokes injected. The cameras turned
toward him, zooms activating with an audible hum. Cecil smiled when he found
what he was looking for.
"Good idea."
"No, Cecil. I just bought these."
"Lend to the gatherer. He needs them more than you."
"And what if he burns them out like my last pair?"
"Better them than his grey muscle."
"That's debatable."
Spokes carefully disconnected them, attaching them to Mike's jacks. Mike
watched half doe-eyed, instinctively wanting to protect his scalp but also
realizing that he had to keep his hands well out of the way lest Spokes should
make a mistake. It made him feel small, and he smiled at his own helplessness.
"Are the muffins ready yet?"
"No."
Mike suppressed a whine, and Cecil grinned knowingly.
"Let's see if we can make some hell in that head of yours, Michael. Go
ahead and connect him."
Spokes leaned over, collecting two of the four thin cords which curled from
the dodec. Each merged with its neighbor near the point of no return. Cecil
held two for himself as Spokes toyed with Mike's jacks, finally nodding
agreeably as the translucent image of a mechanical combination lock appeared
in front of Mike's face. From within its hazy background, Mike heard a woman's
voice: "Enter your clearance identification number." Cecil's grin widened as
his cameras studied the look running across Mike's face. He handed Mike a
flimsi. A long string of three digit numbers glowed pink upon its transparent
surface.
"Lesson number one. Learn to think in directions."
Mike began turning the imaginary dial, each thrust of his mind sending it
spinning.
"Easy now."
After a few aborted attempts, he had the skill mastered. The dial twisted
and turned as he imagined placing his hand upon it and rotating it gently.
Finally it disappeared, and Mike saw her face, not an exact copy of the
physical version, but an outline, deep blue eyes twinkling like distant stars
and blonde hair waving back and forth in the electric static.
"Robin?"
"User's access rejected. Security action two in progress."
"Robin, it's Mike Harrison."
"...Mike Harrison is not a legitimate user." A grey field of haze began to
form between them, building like an ocean swell and threatening to engulf him.
"I'm with Johanes. We need your help."
The static foamed, spitting like acid as it washed over him. Then, just as
suddenly, it disappeared. Mike blinked. The illusion of her face was no longer
there. Instead, he saw Spokes fiddling with the connection, and once glance
at the dodec told him it was all over. It was smoking, a vial of acidic
chemicals released somewhere within its core.
"She was trying to fry you, dude. When she realized she couldn't, she just
fried herself."
Cecil unplugged, a smile crossing his face as their team picture danced
about the three-vee.
"Success," he drily announced."Time to scarf."
The muffins tasted even better than Mike had imagined, and Spokes served up
bowls of sliced green apples immersed in chilled, sweet yogurt and topped with
warm caramel and honey, finally gathering a bowl and a spare bottle of guava
juice for himself before he slipped out the door.
"Where's Spokes going?"
Cecil concentrated on his food, savoring every taste. Either that or he was
savoring the captured data. Sometimes Mike found it hard to tell what his
friend was thinking about.
"Cecil..."
"He doesn't want to be here. He's afraid of knowledge and the danger it
brings."
Mike nodded, "And you aren't?"
"When have you ever known Cecil to be scared of knowledge?"
"You went in with me, didn't you."
"It was perfect, Michael. When you told her who you were..." he chuckled.
"What did you find out?"
"Enough. You provided an eon or more, after all. When you told her your
name, she was...perplexed. A gatherer does not acquire such a combination. She
had to think about whether or not she wanted to let you in. For an A.I., she
was very hesitant."
"She decided to fry me in a matter of seconds."
"Yes, an eternity. The recon program was able to follow her hesitation and
map logically where she looked for her decision. There was more than enough
time to copy the gyroscopic logs. There was time to copy more." A camera lens
bobbed up and down knowingly, "If you dare to doubt..."
The image of the team picture on the three-vee was suddenly replaced by a
map of Xin. A red squiggly line zipped into the city, dashing directly to the
hotel where Mike had been dumped by Cole. It continued to the Underway
terminal, down to Xaos, and then back up again to Vilya's flat. Then it left
the city and came back from another direction, finally darting to the
Runyaelin, and then up to the Arien Mansion along the outskirts, before diving
again off the map.
Cecil smiled, "It knows where it goes."
"Can you zoom out? I want to see where it went before it got to Xin."
Cecil concentrated, and the city seemed to reduce in size, becoming a tiny
dot at the center of the image.
"Curious. This can't be right. It comes from the water."
"Just map it."
The image continued to encompass still greater area as the line dived into
the water from near Xekhasmeno and then darted back again.
Mike nodded, "Okay, the point where it stops and turns around, how far away
is that from ground zero."
"The nuke?"
"Yeah."
"Less than a kilometer."
"Then that confirms it."
The image disappeared, and Cecil looked flustered.
"Confirms what?"
"Johanes is paying you to find the local branch of ISIS, right?"
"Yes."
"Well, the information is obsolete. There is no ISIS headquarters
anymore."
"What?! Why would they blow-up their own..."
"Exactly. Johanes did it. He used me as bait and Nicholas as a sacrifice
just to make it look genuine."
Cecil tilted his head, "Explain."
"I was at Erfalas this morning. ISIS trailed me there, and they had what I
first thought was the dodec. I knew they must have gotten it at the Tyberian
Compound in Xekhasmeno. I just didn't know it was hand delivered courtesy of
the Draconian S.S."
"Hence, your clutzery when he tossed it to you."
Mike nodded, "Johanes didn't know whether or not I saw the Imps make off
with it. For all he knew, I was dead or sleeping on the roof of some building
and woke up when I heard the gun spray. When I showed up here, he had to find
out one way or another."
"And you were a dead give away."
"Yeah. I just wasn't sure he got them where it counts. Now I am."
Cecil smiled, "And the beauty of it is that he still doesn't know."
Mike winced.
"What?"
"Cecil, you remember that locator that your friend found in my shoe two
nights ago?"
"Affirmative."
"How did he find it?"
"Bug detector."
"You have one here?"
Cecil dropped his jaw as the phone rang, and Mike shook his head, again
disgusted with his own stupidity.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu) just graduated from UCR with an MBA. In
between responding to employment advertisements and attending Job Fairs, he
DM's a hearty group of dormies and wonders how he's going to finish Harrison
off once and for all. Judging his protagionist's current situation, he may not
have to wonder for very long.
`The Harrison Chapters' will be continued next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
"...the emotional impetus that
THE FLIGHT OF THE PEQUOD II had forced her into what both
she and Garcin had dreamed of
by H. Palmer Hall as a personal voyage of
discovery, but had wound up as
Copyright (c)1992 a decades-long period of
entrapment..."
______________________________________________________________________________
When she heard the front door of the Miners' Inn open, Cora Dalmire looked up
from her work. A middle-aged man had stopped in front of the dreary oil
painting that occupied most of one wall of the entryway
He looked at the swirls of black and the pinprick glares of white intently
as if searching for some reason he should have encountered it. The look on
his face and his hands tracing the swirls told Cora the painting had disturbed
him as it had most out-Vesta visitors to the asteroid. She had studied each of
their reactions as closely as she studied his and had never quite seen what
she was looking for.
Cora and her husband, Garcin Dalmire, had brought the painting with them to
Vesta thirty years earlier when they had still hoped to find excitement and to
strike it rich mining the asteroids. Running out of credits and with no funds
to leave Vesta, Garcin had signed on with the Vesta Mining Company.
Twenty-one years later, a drunken miner had set a short fuse and a collapsing
tunnel buried Garcin beneath tons of ore.
With the last of her insurance money, Cora had purchased the inn, and, in
her first act as owner, had hung the painting by the entrance. It reminded her
of Earth and of the emotional impetus that had forced her into what both she
and Garcin had dreamed of as a personal voyage of discovery, but had wound up
as a decadeslong period of entrapment on a small planetoid with nothing to
offer except the possibility of one day earning enough credits to return to
Earth.
Finally, the stranger turned his face from the painting and walked slowly
to her desk. "That's a hell of a painting you got there, lady."
"Yes," she said, not even bothering to smile. "Are you staying long?"
"Only the one night. By then, my ship should have cleared Vesta Security
and I'll be able to set up shop."
"What are you selling?" Cora pulled her scanner to the front of the desk
and reached for his credicard. She scanned it quickly and, as the display lit
up, added his name. "Mr. Bunskin, is it?"
"Yes, ma'am, Ray Bunskin. And I'm not selling anything. I landed in the
Alcuin, a libship. I lend, for a small fee, datawhirls, tri-dees, and a very
small stock of the world's great books. Nothing but the finest." Sensing that
he had a customer, Ray smiled. "If you can come down in the morning, the
library bay in the ship'll be opening early."
"You have books?" For the first time in a year, a slight smile played
across Cora's normally dour face.
"Yes, but only a few. Nothing but the classics. Most of my customers just
want the latest datawhirls. It doesn't pay to stock books. They want to
experience the emotions of the characters in various situations, have the
datawhirler spin out different scenarios based on their own ideas. You know
what I mean? Not just follow a plot that someone else devised."
"When I was a young girl, Mr. Bunskin, I haunted our local library. Read
book after book after book. How lovely! The smell and the feel of books! Oh,
it has been a long, long time."
Ray Bunskin stared at the innkeeper. She wasn't young anymore, in her
fifties, but still attractive when she smiled. Must be bored, too, he thought,
to talk about books like that, when he had so many datawhirls and tri-dees.
"You come on down to the Alcuin, Ms....?"
"Cora Dalmire, Mr. Bunskin. And I'll definitely make it down to your ship
when you're ready."
The next morning, after serving breakfast to the unmarried miners who
stayed in the Inn, Cora Dalmire walked out under the clear dome and, for the
first time in more than a year, noticed the brightness of the strange sky.
Though she had lived on Vesta for more than two decades, she continued to
recall the night stars from Earth. This year on Vesta, the night sky with its
familiar constellations, was marred by the return of the comet. Such
predictability isn't right in such an unpredictable universe, she thought.
Falling in towards the sun, Halley's tail had already begun to streak behind
it as it raced inside Jupiter's orbit and began its plunge through the belt.
She shuddered slightly as she stared at the growing tail and thought of its
long voyages century after century, then she turned back towards the library.
Cora had grown used to the reduced gravity of Vesta and loped in long,
almost slow-motion, strides through the streets of the small town and over the
too-close horizon to the seldom-used spaceport.
The Alcuin, one of two ships in dock at the time, was garish in the
extreme. As she walked up to the two synthalloy lions flanking the entrance
to the library, Cora laughed out loud. They recalled memories of her Earthtown
library, but these lions were distorted. Their over-sized eyes glowed red and
sensors, detecting Cora, caused the eyes to swivel towards her and show scenes
from the latest tri-dees. From the speakers in their mouths, the lions roared
out the costs of datawhirls and players and invited her in.
As she walked between the lions and into the ship's main library, Cora
spotted Ray Bunskin napping behind the main desk. She walked quickly through
the glare of tri-dee screens and past shelf after shelf of datawhirls to the
very back of the shop where she had spotted a small collection of only a few
hundred books.
"Beg pardon, Ms. Dalmire," Bunskin yawned widely and stretched, "didn't see
you come in. Just taking a little rest. Setting up the entrance and the lions
wore me out."
His eyes lit up as he saw her pull one of the books from its shelf. He
could smell a rental. "As I said last night, we don't get much call for book
books, but we do have that small set you're looking at. There simply aren't
enough real book readers in the system any more."
"Is this all? For a library?" A slight frown appeared on Cora's face.
"Yes, ma'am. I've got a great collection of datawhirls, though, if you'd
like to really lose yourself in a strong plot that you help to create."
"I don't think so, Mr. Bunskin. I don't want to lose myself, not again."
She turned back to the books and pulled down from the shelf a fat copy of Moby
Dick. "It's been years since I've seen this book. Will you be on Vesta long?
Will I have time to read it?"
"It's hard to tell, Ms. Dalmire. From the looks of things," he waved
around the empty room, "I'm not going to make my nut any time soon. I could be
stuck here forever."
"Then I'll take it," she said, handing him her credicard.
"Here," he said, "take this one, too, no charge. Just for taking that old
book off the shelves." He handed her an unlabeled datawhirl.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Old French stuff, mid-twentieth century, but the label's worn off. Only
thing you can read is `existentialisme'. Plug it in while you're reading the
book and it'll double your pleasure."
To the sound of roaring lions, Cora left the library and retreated to her
small room behind the Inn's desk. With two hours before she needed to prepare
dinner for the dozen miners who stopped by on the way to their cubicles, she
had time to make a start on the story. She put the datawhirl on the small
table next to her chair and opened the book to the first page. "Call me
Ishmael!" she read, and lost herself in the story.
After what seemed to Cora only a few minutes, a yell from the front of the
Inn interrupted her quiet. "What's for dinner, Cora? Where the hell are you?"
"Clam chowder," she screamed back, then realized where she was. "I mean,
whatever it is will be ready in a minute. Go on into the dining room!" She
put the book down next to the datawhirl and stretched her whole body as she
reimmersed herself in the daily routine of running the Miners' Inn.
Serving dinner to the miners, she thought back to Earth and whales and
oceans and wondered why she had ever left. "Aaah!" she screamed, Karl
Johnsen, one of the younger miners, grabbed her around the waist and pulled
her onto his lap. She slapped him hard on the face and ran out of the room
tears streaming down her face.
"Cora! What's wrong?" Karl yelled after her and ran back to the office.
"Cora, honey, I didn't mean anything by it. Just a little fun. Can't do much
of anything else on this rock."
"There's a library, Karl. Go check out a book or something and stop
treating me like a piece of natural beef."
"Hey, Cora. I'm real sorry, honey."
"Don't you "honey" me, Karl Johnsen. If I had the money, I'd get off this
scurvy rock and back to Earth where men like you can find these to do without
bothering me."
"Earth? You talking about the Earth I came from last year, Cora? There's
nothing there for anyone except chemshooters and socketheads. It's not like
out here, honey, where you're free to do whatever you can afford to do." Karl
smiled at her and drew her into his arms. As she looked up, he bent his head
down and brought his lips down hard on hers.
Cora pushed back and kicked him hard in the groin. "Keep the hell away from
me!" She ran into the dining room. "All of you just keep away from me!"
That night, after the last miner had either gone to bed or down the street
to the bar, she lay down in her own bed and picked up the book to read again.
She looked down at the datawhirl which she had brought up the stairs with her,
and with a shrug, pushed it into the slot next to the lamp socket. She opened
the book to Father Mapple's sermon and, enjoying the company of Ishmael and
Queequeg, began to read of various whaling disasters.
But what was Garcin doing in the old clapboard church? And who was Estelle?
Why couldn't they open the door? And where did the door lead? She realized
that the datawhirl had put her and her lost husband into the church with
Ishmael, but could not figure out the attractive blonde woman named Estelle
who clung to her husband's arm or the big bronze clock sitting on the pew in
front of her. She put the book down and unplugged the datawhirl.
Finding her place again, she read until late in the night. When she fell
asleep, the book dropping to the floor beside her, Cora dreamed. In her dream,
she sailed a spaceship called Pequod II chasing throughout the system a great
phantasm with a huge tail streaming behind it. She whispered into the night
that nothing would box her in, not ever again. She strove with the malignant
beast and woke, sweat-soaked, with fire in her eyes, shouting, "I'd strike the
sun if it insulted me!"
Still shaking with rage, Cora pulled her faded clothing back over her body
and brushed her hair in front of the mirror. As she twisted her long black
hair out of her face, she saw the wild look in her own eyes and, faintly
behind her, the shape of a man holding a gold doubloon in his hand. And she
knew, suddenly, who Estelle was.
She remembered walking home to the small dome she and Garcin shared and
seeing the young blonde woman racing out of the house. When she had asked
Garcin about her, he had shrugged off the incident. "Nothing to worry about,"
he had said. "Just a woman from the shop. Not a brain in her head." She had
only been the first, and perhaps not even that, the first Cora has caught. In
the years before Garcin's death, Cora knew of three other women he had bedded
in their dome. She had been ready to leave, but had no other place to go.
Images of whales and the bronze clock and of Estelle and Garcin and a
locked room stayed in her mind all day. That night she dreamed again of the
Pequod II and saw her husband, his hands in Estelle's long blond hair, and
herself locked in the small room. Garcin glanced quickly at Cora, stroked
Estelle's face and then pounded against the door, banging harder and harder,
until finally it cracked open and swung out. He stood at the threshold and
stared out into the dark corridor. Taking Estelle's hand and turning his back
to Cora, he shook his head sadly.
Watching the two of them move back into the room and sit down on a
hideously green sofa, Cora walked to the door, then turned back and looked
once more at Garcin. "Aren't you coming?" she asked. When he replied that he
had too much still to learn about himself in the locked room, she laughed
bitterly, and walked through the prison door into a blackness devoid of light.
She looked back into the bright room, then slammed the door shut behind her.
When Cora awoke the next morning, she felt relaxed and more alive than she
had felt in years. Plugging in the datawhirl, she opened the pages of the book
to read the last chapters and learn of the death of Captain Ahab. The
datawhirl no longer fed her the story of Estelle and Garcin; the clock was
gone. But Ahab raged and speared the whale and the Pequod sank. When
Queequeg's coffin shot to the top of the ocean, she sighed and put the book
away.
Cora made her mind up that morning to leave Vesta. The datawhirl had
reminded of her of her husband's infidelities and of the stagnancy that had
pervaded her life. She would do something and in that doing would rise out of
the locked box. And she would begin with Bunskin.
The first thing she saw when she left the Inn that morning was Comet
Halley, its tail already stretching across the horizon as the solar winds
pushed them farther and farther behind the small nucleus. She raised her hands
as if to strangle the chunk of dirty ice. "Nothing should be so predictable!"
she screamed at it.
Ray Bunskin never had a chance. He stood to greet her when he heard the
lions roaring. Asking her if she wanted to rent anything else, he was stunned
at her reply.
"I want the ship! Now!" As she spoke her eyes pinned him to the wall.
"But you can't have it! It's my livelihood."
"Livelihood hell!" She almost spat the words at him. "What kind of living
can a man make doing what you do. With me as your only customer on Vesta,
you'll never earn enough money to take the old tub off asteroid. You might as
well sell it now instead of waiting `til you can't even afford a meal at the
Inn."
"Sell it? The Alcuin? How could you afford to buy a ship like this? The
automated navaids alone would cost more than a dead miner's wife could ever
hope to pay. No, Ms. Dalmire, I'd love to sell out from under this thing, but
you couldn't float the credits."
Cora looked at him sharply. "I can afford the ship. Not with credits, but
with the Inn. It's yours Bunskin and all its contents and damnable customers,
for the ship."
Bunskin saw the way her eyes lipped over the datawhirls and her hands
clasped the book and thought he could get more out of her. "Okay, Ms. Dalmire,
she's yours for the Inn and for whatever credits you have in your account."
"Half the credits or no deal," Cora said. "I've got to get the powerpacks
refilled. But take all the datawhirls with you this afternoon."
She plugged her credicard into the scanner and told it to transfer half her
credits and the rights to the Miners' Inn on Vesta to Ray Bunskin as soon as
he transferred the Alcuin to her. Bunskin then inserted his credicard.
"You've got yourself a ship, Ms. Dalmire."
"Enjoy the inn, Mr. Bunskin. I'm going home to Earth."
"But that's the one place you can't go, Ms. Dalmire. You can go any other
place in the system, but not to Earth."
"Why not?" She turned to him, knowing when she saw him shift his eyes that
he was telling the truth. "Why not, Bunskin?"
"The same reason I didn't go there. Only drones can land near Earth. The
poisons in the atmosphere got so bad over the past few decades that no one's
allowed in, only out. Only reason people can leave is the authorities figure
that way there'd be more of everything for the people left."
Cora ran back to the inn, leaping madly, recklessly through the small town.
When she got back to the room, she through her clothes into a small bag and
lurched back outside, stopping only to take down the oil painting that was her
last link to the dying planet.
The next morning, she cleared port authority and floated gently away from
Vesta. Selecting a navigation chip, she set the time, date, and Vesta
coordinates on the console and told the ship to plot a course for Comet
Halley. Pequod II flashed an enlarged view of Jupiter on the six foot screen
above the console.
"Not Jupiter, idiot! The comet! Take us to the comet!"
In rhythmic speech, the computer responded. "This ship is incapable of
reaching Comet Halley without taking advantage of the gravity well of Planet
Jupiter. The only possible window lies in Jupiter. Pequod II will intersect
Halley orbit between Planet Earth and Planet Venus."
For the next few weeks, Cora worked her way through Ray Bunskin's book
collection, stopping only to exercise, eat and drink and to stare at Jupiter
as it occupied a greater and greater part of the display.
"Have you ever read Moby Dick, computer?"
"This computer has scanned most books and has links to all major
datalibraries. It does not read, but can display the contents of any scanned
book."
After a few months, the ship dove through the rings of Jupiter and Cora
sank deeply into her acceleration couch as the forces slingshotting Pequod
towards Earth pressed against her. By that time, she had grown bored. Of the
ship and the food! Of the books and the computer. Of the low vibrations of the
ship's engine. It's time, she thought. Time to fight back. Time to thrust my
hand through the wall and shout like Ahab against the walls that hold me in.
Her head ached and throbbed in time with the pulsing of the ship.
A new picture had appeared on the console. The picture framed in a black
background a myriad of white specks swirling across the sky. Halley's Comet,
its head tiny compared to the long tail streaming away from the sun, had made
its long journey through the outer planets on its circuit into the system and
streaked in to brush near the sun. She felt the ship shudder as the main
engine boosted speed with the assistance of Jupiter's gravity and sped on its
way to its rendezvous. Cora sat back down to finish her book.
She had forced herself to exercise during her three-month flight to reach
the comet. Her hair grew ever longer and her muscles toned up as the regimen
matched the rhythm of the pounding in her head. Ever in front of her, she
could see the comet. It blended with the painting in the Miners' Inn, swirled
through the blackness of the canvas. Her eyes flashed wildly at the screen as
the comet's head grew larger and larger until, at length, the tail could fill
only half the display and the head, only eight kilometers wide, grew larger
than a human's.
She laughed wildly as she slammed her body through the routine that had
begun with a half hour each morning and night and now occupied half her waking
hours. She needed less sleep than she had earlier required and ate ravenously
to feed the demands of her growing muscles. Cora prepared herself for the
great task to come.
Finally, the ship's alarms clanged and she heard the first evidence that
she was closing with the comet as tiny fragments of the tail intercepted
Pequod II's path.
Cora ordered the ship to give full front display and blanched as she saw,
then heard, more fragments banging into the front deflector screens. The
plasma display unit came alive with the tiny pinpricks of light racing toward
the ship in bright lines as she matched patterns with the streaking ball of
ice and flew into the tail.
Her fingers flashing across the keyboard, Cora ordered the Pequod II back
into the flume as comet and ship plunged down toward the inner planets and the
sun. At 18,000 kilometers out she saw the black nucleus in the center of the
bright spray of gasses. A fist of ice and encrusted dust, the comet's head
dominated the screen like some malevolent despot demanding her retreat, and
Cora screamed in defiance.
Choosing the heaviest trail of light she could find, Cora made last minute
adjustments to the console and nursed the ship to greater and greater speed.
As she saw the black fist grow larger and larger, filling the screen, she
ordered the computer to cut the engines. The Pequod II raced down the shining
yellow tunnel made by the comet's tail and plunged downward into the spray.
Cora raised her own fist back at the comet and sang in outrage as the ship
plunged into the abyss and fractured the ball of ice in an explosion that sent
showers of multicolored lights racing through the system for days.
A large chunk of its nucleus broke off and Comet Halley, calving, created a
daughter comet. Twin tails licked outward from the comets as they grew farther
and farther apart. The night sky over Vesta lit up with the reflection from
Cora's comet as it began its journey past Earth and around the sun.
______________________________________________________________________________
Palmer Hall is Library Director at St. Mary's University and teaches
part-time in the English Department. Publications include a li-berry book he
co-edited for Scarecrow Press and various poems, short stories and essays.
He's currently completing an anthology of poems on the Persian Gulf War (A
Measured Response) for Pecan Grove Press. "Pequod" is his first science
fiction story, but he intends to do more.
acadhall@vax.stmarytx.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DR TOMORROW "As we sampled the show, I was
reminded how rabid Rico got
by Marshall F. Gilula whenever the environment
became bilingual. Even a
Part 3 of 5 biological mother would never
guess that Rico was a Cyborg."
Copyright (c)1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 3
Sunday
Hello, Beloved Sensei
Last day of the Art Festival, and we decide to briefly do the Festival on
foot, and then come home for our MindLink/HeartLight. I was not so jolted
when I woke up this time by seeing my Eternal lady's unsleeping eyes. She had
put herself on simulated sleep phase. She opened her eyes only after I was up
and about, and then everyone -- with one mind -- was up and ready for the day.
The decision to go to the Art Festival before it got to be too hot was a wise
one, I thought, as we walked from the apartment over to South Bayshore Drive.
Both dogs had insisted on coming with us. Pearl E. Mae was walking She-Ra, and
I walked Bullet. Both dogs were being unusually well-behaved. Small miracles.
A steady stream of people kept the sidewalks going into the Village covered
with human variability. There were a few very good prices that the artists
were now starting to put out on some of the merchandise that remained. As we
sampled the show, I was reminded how rabid Rico got whenever the environment
became bilingual. Even a biological mother would never guess that Rico was a
Cyborg. The built-in hardware consisted of barely visible to the naked eye
microprocessor networks that were literally implanted in Rico's brain.
Enrique (Rico), whose future identity was from a galaxy of androids, had
selected a discarnate Cuban conch following karmic resettling. He reminded the
other Eternals of Dr Tomorrow that Miami was something besides just beautiful
water and sunshine. Over half the population in Miami, for example, spoke
Spanish. Of course, this did not mean that all of the Spanish speaking people
were Cuban. Miami was very different from nearly any other American city by
this time. The South American tourists businessmen, students and professionals
by the thousands either vacationed or emigrated to the Miami area because of
its bustling, sparkling, cosmopolitan lure. Rico himself was a strange
combination of contradictions. He possessed enormous intelligence, and yet was
very laid back in his approach to nearly anything. He was the least overtly
assertive member of the group, but managed to inject the Spanish language into
group consciousness during MindLink/HeartLight very early in the first session
of the group's existence. Rico's teaching was done in such an unobtrusive
way, that Lyle was the only one who noticed the difference in his own personal
approach to Miami's Spanish culture. Many of the other Eternals were almost
totally unaware of the fact that they were nearly automatically speaking and
understanding the Spanish that was around them on a daily basis. It was a
pleasant surprise to Lyle, though, because he had often felt irritated in
Miami when he was unable to follow a conversation of Spanish-speaking people
in his bookstore, or understand some of the occult books in Spanish that the
store carried. In addition to the contribution of this bilingual element, Rico
transmitted an element of android daring, raw cyborg creativity, and bilingual
spice. Salsa is what he called it, and his android consciousness luxuriated in
the stimulation of a truly multilingual brain. Computer translation as well as
the cerebral translators that were invented by 2200 A.D. had nearly eradicated
language differences although people tended to spend even less time
cultivating a language and to just speak a very competent but survival level
quality of nearly any language. The bilingual existence of thought forms,
however, was like mental refreshment to Rico. He relished Dr Tomorrow's
approach to the younger members of earth's population, and anticipated the joy
of creating a trilingual delight. Rico also dreamed up a typical android
mentality invention. When Lyle and Aloysius were thinking about an alpha and a
theta beam, Rico was creating an ultrasonic love beam that would be sent
across the 90 miles of ocean from Key West to Cuba's Isle of Pines where they
had the main prison and the paramilitary camps for third world country youth.
Rico made shortwave radio contact with a prosperous Latin inventor in Miami
who was the source of a very expensive large megagain satellite antenna sold
to individuals wishing to receive transcontinental and intercontinental
television programs, as well as the feeds that were always edited out but
which showed the anchors wiping their noses, calling for help with something,
or otherwise revealing their humanity in many little ways that were never
permitted on camera. Rico and the inventor devised a large custom-made
parabolic dish that could be used as a focusing device. The microwave love
beam would be used to transmit from Key West with a slightly wide focus that
would effect not only the island of Cuba but the Guantanamo naval base as
well.
Rico's sensory system had tunable multiband multifrequency reception and
built in stereophonic microamplification circuits. He turned into something of
a media freak soon after his appearance in our group by checking each and
every multicultural aspect of southeast Florida's airwaves. His potentials for
massive amounts of information recording, editing, and playback nearly
overwhelmed most of us, including Rico himself. Some of the Eternals of Dr
Tomorrow were surprised to find this out, because they thought that the I.S.I.
matter-energy translation units transmitted only energy forms and therefore
would not have retained any of Rico's hardwired features. When this was
explained to Lyle, he was also surprised. However, an android in 30,000 A.D.
possessed a seasoned legacy of thousands of standard algorithms that could
represent quite satisfactorily, by means of mathematical models, a myriad of
different sophisticated computers and other electromagnetic devices. So the
electromagnetic, "mechanical" portion of an android was totally translatable
into mathematical programming. This is what 20th century hackers called
"software." Software also represents the functioning of a computer expressed
in terms of its mathematical limitations. The Android Galaxy represented a
very large and interesting example of how so-called scientific and
technological innovation can team up to more than perfectly mimic the
"natural" product. Technology reproducing itself and impersonating nature
Although Rico's android galaxy possessed sophisticated micro-components which
were optionally inserted into the brain tissues of adults (Cyborg extensions),
most of Rico's android "structures" could be and were in fact easily converted
into mathematical functions. The I.S.I. technicians found it no problem to
efficiently include these extra functions along with Rico's matterenergy
formulations. It turned out that one reason for Rico's initial apparent
introspectiveness and silence was that he spent large portions of his time and
mental energy gathering airwave inputs from Miami's burgeoning Latin
population. And he did not have to particularly go anywhere to do this. He
just sat back, turned up the intensity of his selective audio amplification
channels, and listened to Miami's Hispanic and other cultures on the airwaves.
Although he was disturbed by the conversations of foreign goings on in the
home of a Cuban Key Biscayne businessman, Rico was also concerned with the
widespread Pan-American underground activity. Miami, on the surface, was a
teaming and bustling progressive resort area with a number of sinister
undercurrents which polite people did not like to think about or discuss. Rico
was especially occupied with the fact that many Latin people were equally
involved on both sides of the law. He tuned in to the scanner radios of Cuban
undercover narcotics agents and policemen. He also tuned in to many
underground Hispanic businessmen who served as intermediaries for South
American cocaine smugglers. It was somewhat unnerving to understand the
presence of so many CIA agents in the Miami area, until Rico realized how
important the reactionary but loyalist Cuban political organizations were for
counteracting the propaganda value of Fidel Castro's personal puppet-state,
which had survived the two different 1991 coup attempts. But it was not
possible to understand the complex political fate of the "jewel of the
Caribbean" without knowing quite a bit more about Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, and
several other Central American and South American countries.
Such a diversity of apparently conflicting goals and aims underlay much of
the bubbling nature of Miami's multilingual cultures. The intense
diversification and polarity of both physical plane and higher plane energies
also made the Miami area an excellent nodal point for assessing and relating
to the entropy balance functions of the universe. This is because cultural
change areas and population interfaces are very sensitive to changes in
entropy balance. As one of the "power languages" of the planet, Spanish was
just as significant as English for the purpose of reaching video viewers and
media Latin culture, therefore, was certainly as important an energy "hook" as
anything else for aiming at the younger generations of the planet. The Latin
consciousness ran wide and deep, and this was quite evident to Rico. So both
the Spanish language as well as Spanish-flavored tunes were to become an
important part of Dr Tomorrow. Along these lines, Rico helped Lyle to compose
another song for Dr Tomorrow. A Latin disco beat with bilingual lyrics gave
Rico his first experience at singing before a microphone. "En La Cama" hinted
strangely at Rico's far distant future origins, and was one of the original Dr
Tomorrow songs that employed the love beam and the rainbow beam. At this time,
Su-Shan and Noman installed several panels of sequential relay lights onto
travelling boards. These boards were placed on Al's flat upper surface, and
plugged into Al's side panels. The relay lights were easy to coordinate with
the sound and color beam within the double-faced video screen that was mounted
atop Al's assembly.
At this point in Dr Tomorrow's development, Al seemed to really break out
into his own. Al consisted essentially of 21 portable modules that were kept
powered up all the time but quickly connected up for both practice and
performance. Al's consciousness and sequential thought forms became an
intrinsic part of Dr Tomorrow's functioning, even when the computer array
itself was de-powered or when the unit actually was disassembled. Lyle was
the first member of the group to notice this, although he should have been the
last because of his disinclination to recognize machine consciousness. And
Su-Shan did not find this strange, because the Eternals other than Lyle had
been quite accustomed to the idea that machines had consciousness. Again,
Lyle's experience with meditation gave him a slight edge. After the first few
months of mind-link, Lyle also began to recognize Al's appearances during
these group experiences. When Dr Tomorrow was playing, Lyle occasionally felt
a bubbly upward-flowing energy. Some of this energy was accompanied by
computer touch-tones and flashing lights. It was this pattern that Lyle began
to recognize either at the beginning or toward the end of the mindlinks that
the Eternals had on a twice-daily basis.
Soon after the 21 Aloysius modules had been linked together with E-Z
Connect cables, Su-Shan and Noman built solidstate interfaces that permitted
taking Morphosa's four digital keyboard synthesizers and hooking them up to
Al's I/O interface. Sixteen channels of parallel MIDI-out information were
sent to Al's interfaces from the rack-mounted MIDI interface. Another sixteen
channels of MIDI-in information as well as two channels of direct digital out
returned to our boards in mixable form from Al. Each synthesizer and tone
module used by our group also had a digital encoder, which was patched through
to Al. After completing the electronic patch work, both Su-Shan and Noman
noticed a rapid increase in the rate of Al's calculations and in the
oscillation of blinking lights in synch with the music... At this early point
in the group's development, Lyle was the only Eternal of Dr Tomorrow who was
not consciously achieving some degree of MindLink/HeartLight with Al. Su-Shan
and Noman were astounded by the sudden burst of mental energy they felt from
Al. While playing the keyboards, Morphosa began to feel enveloped in an
intense magnetic field. Lyle had read earlier about guitar players and other
musicians being electrocuted while playing one electrical instrument and
singing through another one (the microphone). This was called a "ground loop."
From his megastepped point of evolution, Lyle now began to understand that
instead of a simple phenomena of electrocution and ground loops, these events
might have represented something else. Something else such as karma or
synchronisms. Or Dyssynchronisms. The musicians had been exposed to a higher
form of energy than their vehicles were prepared to receive and channel. The
hair stood up on the back of his neck when Lyle thought about what might have
happened to him at the time of the lightning bolt discharge and megastepping.
At the same time that other group members were receiving electromagnetic
vibrations from Al, Pearl E. Mae began to pick up visual images. As a typical
Tantican from the Virgo Solar Galaxy, visual imagery had been her primary
sense modality practically since birth. As an adult Tantican, she had been
regarded as one of the planet's very best mediums and healers because her rich
precognitive and clairaudient abilities. These abilities really supplanted her
powerful talents for materializing and projecting ectoplasm. With Al's
communications, she began to see sine waves and other mathematical symbols and
functions that she did not understand at all. During MindLink/HeartLight,
Pearl E. Mae absorbed some of these images into the group mind and Su-Shan
immediately understood the electronic message. The images often had the
following associated pattern:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
111 00 0 1 00 0 01 0 0 01 1 00 0 111 1 00 0 01 10 0 0 101 00
11 1 00 1 1001 0010 1101000 00 10 0 1 00 0 010 10 00 0 11 01 10 00 100 0
It was a message from their multimodular computer. Al was trying to
establish himself as an entity and was telling the group that the sound beam
was a good idea, but not implemented properly. Instead of thinking about
putting out one homogeneous frequency, like the alpha and theta beams, a
different approach was necessary. Al kept telling Dr Tomorrow that the sound
beam must be constructed of a complicated combination of all the different
frequencies, and that the relationship of the frequencies to one another was
vitally important. That was the parameter that would to be changed in order to
exert an effect on the listeners. By this Sunday, the third day of their
existence together, none of the Dr Tomorrow Eternals really quite understood
their full functioning within the framework of entropy imbalance. Each Eternal
possessed the capability of adding a bit of experience and special talent to
creating a man-machine synergism, which is what Dr Tomorrow really was -- as
both a physical plane musical group and as a thought form.
Later that day, we returned to the house, had an incredible
MindLink/HeartLight experience, and just as incredible a rehearsal. All during
the rehearsal, there was an intense sensation of something about to happen.
After dinner, we fed and walked the dogs and decided that we wanted to sit
around the pool and let Quail take us on our favorite nighttime aquatic trip.
The night before, we had enjoyed sitting around on the shore by Cape Florida
in the darkness. Different Eternals spun folklore and other tales common to
their home galaxies from the future. One common myth was that land creatures,
after physical death, would evolve upward into a different life form that was
aquatic
On this evening, the Eternals began the MindLink/HeartLight and soon felt
the fusion of One Mind. Lyle was the designated leader of the
MindLink/HeartLight since day one, largely because of his selfimposed
meditative training. It did not matter that he was a converted Primitive.
Lyle had been a relatively non-judgmental person for quite a while. In order
to be able to carry out effective meditative observation, Lyle had been forced
to learn how to observe his own process of observing himself. He learned early
in the course of his training that his own tendencies toward evaluating things
as good or bad and right or wrong often prevented him from truly seeing what
was happening. During the Dr Tomorrow mind-links, group members became a
unity possessing infinitely greater energy than any of the seven individual
members could ever hope to possess in even the most distant future times. To
Lyle, MindLink/HeartLight was an incredibly efficient short cut.
MindLink/HeartLight was very much akin to instant samadhi. Instant
realization. Even if it were not so, it certainly felt that way. Gross
alteration in energy level totally shattered Lyle's individual personality
each time that MindLink/HeartLight began. At the beginning of MindLink/
HeartLight, Lyle could feel his own personality crumble, and could also feel
the personalities of all other six Eternals crumbling as well. Usually, within
seconds of beginning the special meditation, all seven members of the group
were transported into literally another dimension where there was no such
thing as individual personality or identity. This MindLink/HeartLight
dimension was cut off neither in time nor in space from ordinary physical
plane reality. This dimension co-existed in both time and space with ordinary
reality. Once into this space, all members of the group were protected by a
higher plane energy cohesiveness. Initially, it was relatively easy to break
the cohesiveness by simply changing physical posture or altering mental
concentration. As the Eternals became more proficient in MindLink/HeartLight,
the group was able to maintain the energy connection throughout all types of
situations. Some of the first situations involved the waterside meditations
which Quail loved to facilitate so much, and the state of consciousness
attained by the Eternals while they were playing music. The daily music
practice sessions more or less amounted to MindLink/HeartLights. More of
MindLink/HeartLight time was also spent on reflecting about the music.
It seemed that the primary focus of group members was more in terms of how
they maintained the MindLink/HeartLight while playing music rather than the
notes of the music itself. The songs and the compositions seemed to occur and
follow more as the individual members learned to be attuned to one another.
First came attunement of individual Eternals into each other and then into the
Dr Tomorrow thought form. Then came tuning in of the what was being produced
by the musical instruments. The instruments would tune to each other at A440,
but the output of each instrument or voice also related to the output of each
other instrument or voice in unique ways. Thanks to Al and his multimodules,
the characteristic pattern of each instrument was voiceprinted and the overall
digital output mix was computer enhanced so as to maximize the smoothness of
the way that the tracks blended. Pre-megastepped Lyle was very familiar with
music, but this approach to sound production was really out there -- something
quite different. Mixing music at this level during only the third rehearsal
bode well for the future. As an integral part of the group of Eternals, Lyle
realized that the music, the instruments, and even Al, were all tools as well
as effects of the MindLink/HeartLight. With that heavy realization, the
Eternals came back to the circle they were sitting in around the pool, slowed
down their breathing with some slow deep abdominal breaths, and then
consensually decided to let Quail continue the MindLink/HeartLight out of body
at Cape Florida.
Quail gathered up the group of Eternals, and, as she had done before,
transported the lot of them to where the breakwater was located along the
ocean's edge. While meditating on the group's music and future activities, a
flying saucer appeared out over the ocean and began to fly in the direction
where the group was sitting. The Eternals were dumbstruck. The flying saucer
was glowing in shiny colors as it approached them. Just before it landed on
the water a hundred yards or so away from the shore, the saucer's color
changed. The shiny colors became a milky grey-white. Eerie lights surrounding
the saucer disappeared, and the saucer gently landed on the water. It bobbed
up and down briefly like a huge round cork. Apparently, the saucer had a cover
which was dazzlingly reflective like a multi-surfaced mirror. Shortly after
the saucer landed, it became almost impossible to see where it was sitting on
the water, because the saucer's covering merely reflected the sky and the
water. Quickly, a high pitched hum drew the attention of the group members to
where the saucer was still bobbing on the water amidst the illusion of
reflections. A panel opened in the saucer's surface, and a human-appearing
creature with very pale skin and a head of thick, long white hair gracefully
emerged from the saucer's opening. Seeming not to even cause a disruption in
the water's surface, the creature walked or rather skimmed over the surface of
the water to a point that was within 10 feet of where the group members sat.
The tableau vivant which followed was acceptable to any science fiction
novel. The creature introduced itself as Yo-Vah, and communicated directly
and without words to all group members. The simultaneous telepathy told each
group member a story of life highly developed in other solar systems that
coexisted in parallel time dimensions. Yo-Vah came from the near-future, but
from a technologically superior one. Despite apparent economic difficulties
and problems with contaminated water and see-sawing animal residue resources
such as oil, the world of Dr Tomorrow was immensely wealthier than most of the
parallel time-universes of the present and of the future in terms of
individual robustness and the very natural resources which were causing us
such horrendous problems. But Earth was pretty much a blight on the Local
Neighborhood Sector and was badly in need of healing and love and some kind of
real peace. Dr Tomorrow the group was supposed to help furnish some of the
healing and love in a direct and very real way. DR TOMORROW the project was a
top-secret time travel project from 32,000 A.D. when a group of Guardians
supervising the InterGalactic Security Intelligence perceived a possible
solution for future problems by a series of measures to be taken in the past.
Megastepping a group of seven Eternals was the first in the series of such
I.S.I. measures carried out with a strong sense of hopefulness. Above all
else, Dr Tomorrow must serve as an instrument of healing and furnish healing
light and sound patterns to the Planetary environment through the electronic
nets which include satellites and encompass all of the planet.
Yo-Vah said that much of our Planet's wealth disparities were due to a lack
of both technological application and ethical development. But that was one of
the main ways of defining a Primitive culture and its life forms. The majority
of earth's resources were located not only in unpopulated regions and land
masses, but also in the large bodies of water and land masses beneath those
large bodies of water. What seemed to be innocuous water contamination today
would increase exponentially during the next centuries if the rate of
contamination is not slowed. Removing or slowing water contamination is the
most vital first measure, but learning to use water for power is the step that
most cultures considered advanced have been able to accomplish easily. Yo-Vah
pointed out that Earth scientists had only begun to tap the potential of
non-nuclear energy sources such as the hyperion, membrane, and cellular chain
reaction sources. In more sophisticated cultures, it was not necessary to use
artificial means such as nuclear energy reactions of uranium and other
entropy-inefficient isotopes. More sophisticated cultures for millennia have
been able to tap immense energies using the hyperion extractors with basic
substances such as water, small carbon-chain molecules, and silicon-based
compounds such as sand.
Yo-Vah swore the Dr Tomorrow Eternals to transtime secrecy, and promised to
teach them effective and environmentally humane ways of enhancing the purity
of water resources. He also promised to show them some effective and cheap
technological tricks for applying water resources to the basic problems of
power and even some easy methods of water purification. In return, the
Eternals of Dr Tomorrow took an oath of dedication to further every possible
form of conservation, especially human conservation, but to also work
especially hard at making it desirable and easy for people to be able to
understand water purity and water conservation.
The white-haired visitor stood patiently on the water and then explained to
the Eternals some basic facts about unidentified flying objects. Yo-Vah
admitted that many Earth thinkers were correct in feeling that the flying
saucers and other flying objects came from another time dimension. Often, the
ships observed for generations on earth were just the Guardian ships which
routinely patrolled all time dimensions. As a special class of Eternals, the
Guardians sought to prevent catastrophes and, in general, attempted to further
the conservation of life in all its forms. Dr Tomorrow's time dimension was
visited no more frequently or less frequently than any of the other multitudes
of parallel time universes. The Guardians had noted, however, a tendency of Dr
Tomorrow's home planet toward very erratic and unstable technological
development. Not only the nuclear devices, but many of the other secret
weapons developed by earth's major countries, including America, periodically
caused strange warps and glitches in the time-energy continuum and therefore
the Guardian's monitoring devices. Of course, none of the Earth cultures had
made any connection between nuclear explosions, time clefts, and natural
disasters such as earthquakes. The Guardians, who represented the Forces of
Light, had observed actual nuclear bomb blasts on Earth, but were rarely able
to find the other hidden devices which caused such even stranger energy
fluctuations than did the nuclear bombs. One of the Guardians had been fatally
caught by such a strange device while hovering over Siberia. That guardian's
life-energy had been extinguished shortly after its captors attempted to
extract information involuntarily from the being regarding how to control the
ship and fire its weapons and where the main base was located. The captors
were only interested in knowing the weaknesses of the alien culture. The ship
itself was still in storage in a large subterranean vault in Siberia, but no
one had been able to ever open the device. Similar devices were in storage in
two top-secret American locations. The American-stored devices had followed
unusual aerobatic maneuvers between American Air Force experimental craft and
two Guardian craft which paradoxically crashed head-on over the southwestern
desert. Two Guardian life forms were frozen in liquid nitrogen in a secret
Berkeley Cryonics laboratory.
Yo-Vah paused silently for a moment while letting the story of the captured
Guardians sink in. He then described for Eternals of Dr Tomorrow how it was
that the Forces of Darkness also had trans-time patrols which surveyed all
dimensions for newer and more effective ways of utilizing and controlling life
energies in their negative aspects. Dr Tomorrow's planet and time had a
peculiar attractiveness to the Forces of Darkness because of widespread
planetary greed and because of the erratic and sometimes negative
technological development which the planet was spawning. In Dr Tomorrow's time
plane, the Forces of Darkness had not been able to achieve total positive
materialization. The FOD were still limited to the position of
nearly-invisible observers, thanks to a slight degree of ethical and moral
development that held forth on the planet, and couple of prophets named
Mohammed and Jesus. FOD ships were occasionally visible, but the life forms
utilized by the Forces of Darkness were not able to make the physical plane
transition necessary to appear in the flesh before the people of Dr Tomorrow's
era.
Since the Forces of Darkness had little respect for physical plane aspects
of any dimension, FOD's technological evolution was rather slipshod. They had
not developed matter-translation or any of the high tech entropy analysis
methods to the degree or the sophistication possessed by the Forces of Light.
Numerically infinitesimal when compared to the Forces of Light, the Forces of
Darkness always existed as the universally present obverse of all that was
positive and constructive. The Forces of Darkness, however, were very adept
at doing what amounted to pilfering of energy. They were directly responsible
for over half of the intratemporal ripping off that was going on. The FOD were
particularly gifted at zeroing in on individual beings who had some unusual
built-in streak of evil or negativity, and then assisting that individual.
YoVah explained to Dr Tomorrow that the Forces of Darkness also were able to
feed on energies from some individuals who were going through the process of
death, and from many individuals who were in mental institutions because they
had lost all of their optimism. Yo-Vah pointed out that, as with many other
planets and times, Earth's mental hospitals were very intense collections of
negative as well as positive energies. This was due to not only the beings
identified as patients, but to the people who worked in the mental hospitals
as custodians, healers, administrators, and helpers. Yo-Vah said that it was
very important to develop musical forms that could be used for converting the
negative energies in all kinds of hospitals to positive ones. Because
hospitals often had accumulations of beings who were in some way connected
with death, hospitals were also focal points that attracted the FOD. By using
positive and healing musical thought forms, one potential entrance for the
Forces of Darkness could be minimized. Yo-Vah also suggested that since FOD
were always able to focus on Earth's erratic technology, there would be no
easy or sure solution. Birth and death, however, were focal points in time
that often became fields of competition between Light and Darkness.
Despite the fact that Dr Tomorrow was a limited number of Eternals, these
Eternals collectively would be able to have an important effect on Earth's
positive and negative cultural energies if the group paid attention to the
planetary and basic electromagnetic aspects of their music. And managed to not
get caught up in the superficial and harmony-destructive ego clashes of the
music business world, where the FOD were easily prone to find individual
beings who dealt in the darkly negative side of life energies. Dr Tomorrow
learned to think of the entire Earth as one united planet, even if this were
not the case. YoVah said that Earth was now ready for this, and that earlier
contacts with Earth inhabitants -- in his experience -- had never been more
than partially successful. YoVah did not understand why earlier contacts had
frequently made up a story about having been kidnapped or abducted by a flying
saucer. Dr Tomorrow was urged to look carefully at fairy tales, folklore,
science fiction, and mythology. All these forms of communication contained
basic truths, Yo-Vah said, because much of this literature had been instilled
into Earth's cultures by other trans-time visitors from the Forces of Light.
Many different forms of folk music were also stimulated in the same way.
Modern rock rhythms had been in part forcibly injected into the slow and
recalcitrant rhythm-and-blues tradition from across the time barrier by a
closely parallel and culturally very advanced universe. Earth's neoChristians
played some of the music backwards and claimed to hear examples of
extraordinary consciousness exhorting the listeners to commit evil acts! The
neoChristian leaning to nonordinary realities was sensing something correctly
but labelling it incorrectly because of underlying philosophical currents of
"good-bad" JudaeoChristian moralistic dualism and the basic tendency of such a
dualism to be incompatible with a monistic or holistic, "both-and"
orientation. "We-they" versus "us" were two positions that Dr Tomorrow
carefully examined in the discussions of the Eternals. Lyle was the first
member to notice the meaning of moralistic dualism, and he tried to point it
out to the others. The dualism and what it meant was just one of many messages
from Yo-Vah.
All members of the group felt very strongly about what Yo-Vah told them.
There was an intense air of genuineness about Yo-Vah. There was also a slight
sense of urgency to his message. Instead of just dropping in on them,
delivering some pronouncements, and leaving, YoVah was infinitely more gentle
about what he had to say. Frequently, after talking with the Eternals about
complex subjects, he paused and was silent for several minutes.
The silence felt good to members of the group as they sat around on the
rocky breakwater and ocean wall. The silence was almost pleasurable, and many
of the Eternals were aware of their own disinclination to break the silence.
At this point, Yo-Vah smiled and mentioned that he had also experienced the
comforting nature of the silence. He told group members that it was important
for Dr Tomorrow to use the energies of light and sound to enhance the
development of creative silence. Yo-Vah pointed out that many of the current
musical trends of Earth developed a sound and rhythm pattern that ultimately
created more disorder than order. Yo-Vah illustrated with telepathic
projection how it was that silence could represent a state of greater order
and alignment. Without words, he helped every group member to simultaneously
see and feel the beneficial effects of light and sound patterns which were
capable of enhancing of encouraging entropic order while also utilizing the
positive aspects of intermittent silence. Even though a sound and light
presentation might be of high volume, it was still possible to produce a
pattern that ultimately induced a state of creative and orderly silence in the
listeners. This silent state did not have to necessarily involve inaction or
idleness. Yo-Vah explained that the term, "silence," was perhaps misleading.
What the Eternals of Dr Tomorrow found in their orderly silence could also be
found in any state of alignment or being focused.
As group members listened to Yo-Vah, each could individually feel energy
tugging at their minds and their hearts. Dr Tomorrow was supposed to create
and produce music that would do the same thing to its listeners. The music was
not only supposed to appeal to the aesthetic sense of the listeners, but also
to the heart energies of the listeners. The group clearly had one mission of
injecting the love, the precepts, and the vibrations of Yo-Vah into the music
in as many ways as possible. As Yo-Vah pointed out, music was one form of
energy that could be used to unite beings for positive and for healthy
purposes. Although music itself could do very little as far as actually
changing the planet's energies, music represented both a catalyst and an
energy matrix through which either the Forces of Light or the Forces of
Darkness were able to act. As long as the music was kept primarily on the
physical plane, there could always be other resonant frequencies that were
invisible to the physical plane ear. And to the physical plane listener.
The Forces of Light had long been observing cultural development on Dr
Tomorrow's planet. Nearly all the musical forms which had developed on Earth
were capable of serving as vehicles for the Forces of Light to enhance the
overall planetary harmony or as vehicles for the Forces of Darkness to enhance
and increase the overall planetary disorganization, randomness, and
mathematical chaos. Yo-Vah gently told the Eternals about Earth's fiery death
and disintegration in 2105 A.D. He suggested that dates from the future were
often relative. More harmony was need both inside the being and outside the
being, and this would help to prevent 2105 A.D. from coming sooner. And with
the irregular type of technological development found on Earth, energy
harmonization was an absolute must to keep the planet from accidentally
blowing itself up. For example, chaos mathematics enjoyed popularity during
the late Eighties on the planet for some years before the projected appearance
of Dr Tomorrow. Chaos Music even appeared in a few laboratories for awhile.
Some of our technicians analyzed the patterns of the Chaos Music and found the
patterns to have a calming effect on sophisticated nervous systems. Earth's
technological and ethical development were so spotty and uneven that high-tech
industries could easily coexist on the same land mass with thirdworld cultures
being systematically eradicated by famine and pestilence.
The Eternals were fascinated to hear Yo-Vah explain that black holes in the
universe represented other planets and other galaxies which had simply
disintegrated and imploded on the physical plane. Thanks to the Forces of
Darkness, the planets and solar systems that had become really disharmonized,
simply went into negative existence while all of the energy associated with
the planet was taken over by the Forces of Darkness. In the same way that
every cell of an earth human carried the genetic patterns necessary for
reproduction of the entire being, and every unit of a fractal contains
elements of the whole picture, every sub-unit of the universe carried a
similar pattern, called logos that described a design for the entire universe.
Whenever a race of beings, a planet, or a galaxy evolved and developed along a
line contrary to the solar logos, ultimate extinction was the usual result. If
overall development were particularly uneven, as the Forces of Light had found
on Earth and in several other nearby solar systems, an exploding star or an
imploding black hole might be the result. When a black hole was born, the
Forces of Darkness were greatly strengthened and aided. Even though there was
nothing intrinsically good or bad about a black hole, its very existence
implied aid to the Forces of Darkness, and greater polarity between the Forces
of Light and the Forces of Darkness.
Earth was an interesting planet because on several occasions earlier in its
development, the planet had almost been bumped into extinction by erratic
cultural and human development. Forces of Light, on several occasions, had
visited the planet and had helped Earth's leaders to make necessary
adjustments that would avert the catastrophe. The Great Flood was one such
time. And there had been several others. The Forces of Darkness merely
followed along, took note of the nearcatastrophes, and bided their time
Yo-Vah reminded Dr Tomorrow that many ancient cultures from Earth's past
history predicted a cataclysmic upheaval and revolution toward the end of the
20th century. The older Tibetan schools described it as an age of spiritual
darkness (Kali-Yuga) coming to an end. This period would include transitions
of different types, and one strong possibility was making the transition into
a productive and creative Golden Age. The color chosen to signify the new age
was symbolic. Gold represented not only a form of illumination, but a very
potent healing energy. Dr Tomorrow, as a New Age group, would discover a whole
succession of different approaches to healing. Most of the approaches could be
incorporated within the framework of music.
The Forces of Light saw in Dr Tomorrow's Earth not only a very spotty and
irregular development of technology, but definite and widespread ignorance
about water--what it was and what it was capable of doing in a more active
sense than most twentieth century persons realized. Yo-Vah described ways of
utilizing water and energies extracted from ordinary tidal currents that were
known to the Incas and other older civilizations, but practically unknown to
the planet Earth of the 1990's. Scientists on Earth had barely begun to tap
the real meaning of earthquakes' seismic disturbances in ways that other more
advanced cultures took as a matter of course. There were not only giant tidal
waves, but storm waves caused by seismic disturbances occurring under the
floor of nearly every ocean on the planet. More advanced cultures routinely
extracted immense amounts of energies from such planetary changes. The Forces
of Light considered that Dr Tomorrow's Earth used the planet's bodies of
waters mainly for hunting and for garbage dumping. How primitive can you get?
By the year 1986, the United States alone was managing to generate at least
250 tons of hazardous, toxic wastes and ocean incineration was a hot political
and scientific issue. But not as hot as it needed to be, because no one had
been able to predict the dramatic worsening of water quality between 1991 and
1992. As if a critical mass of gunk and junk had been accumulated at some
level - despite the political ppm testing programs proclaiming safety --
thousands of whales and dolphins began now the alltoo-familiar "Lemming
Beaching," as it came to be called. Yo-Vah appreciated that at least this
Primitive was aware of the series of ecologic tragedies with the whales and
dolphins. Yo-Vah indicated that Primitive cultures of the planet obviously did
not understand why the whales and dolphins wished to leave the contaminated
waters.
Yo-Vah spoke of a great need for reversing this primitive tendency, and
told the members of Dr Tomorrow that North and South America were possibly the
least developed continents in their backwards approach to aquatic resources. A
harmonious balance between the aquatic bodies of the planet and the aquatic
residents of each body of water was vital to maintaining the solar harmony of
the planet as well as the remainder of the solar system and its local galactic
groups. Even the supposedly astute Earthly astronomers found it difficult to
get beyond their own myopic earthbound theories and rationalized observations.
Hydroecology also was one possible solution to the energy crisis for most
continents of the Western world. It would be a creative task for the Dr
Tomorrow Eternals to design effective new approaches to water as part of the
teaching and healing that the project requires. One requirement was that these
approaches needed to be generally simple enough so that school children would
be capable of understanding nearly everything that was presented about the new
ways of using and conserving the energy obtainable from water. YoVah gave
members of the group eight metallic spheres. He showed them how to cause the
metallic spheres to change color so that they became clear crystal. By the use
of only mental energy, the Eternals learned to peer into the futuristic
spheres made of the wondrous alloy. With enough concentration, the clear
crystal-appearing spheres became very supportive of time travel in a mental
sense. By simply using one of the spheres, any Eternal could easily learn to
peer forward or backward with fair efficiency. As each of the Eternals were
recruited into this visionary activity, the total group energy began to very
powerfully affect the activity of these spheres. The spheres began to glow
with such blinding white light, the Eternals were forced to look away.
Pearl E. Mae, because of her ability as a medium, found the spheres
absolutely fascinating. She was the Eternal who quickly discovered that these
spheres could also be used as instantaneous communicators allowing a direct
link to her world of 32,000 A.D. The Eternals learned, with Pearl E. Mae's
help, how to go backwards or forwards in time by simply concentrating on the
alloy spheres. When all seven members of the group worked together with seven
different spheres (Yo-Vah had actually given them eight at the very
beginning), Pearl E. Mae found herself in touch with very powerful energies.
The spheres allowed Pearl E. Mae to communicate with a force that seemed to go
well beyond the Milky Way Galaxy and the Local Galactic Groups. When using the
energies of the spheres to travel, Pearl E. Mae seemed to make contact with
communication patterns in space that suggested a much higher level of Logos or
universe patterning than she had ever been able to feel.
Yo-Vah accurately perceived what was happening, and reminded Pearl E. Mae
that because of her open channel to the future, she would be an important
guide for Dr Tomorrow's musical compositions. Dr Tomorrow's music would aim
constantly at higher cultural patterns that went beyond Earth's. Although it
sounded very complicated, Pearl E. Mae and other Eternals established at least
one specialized use for the alloy spheres. The spheres amplified the
MindLink/HeartLight effect: via the spheres the group's mental energies could
be welded together for a common purpose in a powerful synergy of common
goodwill. Pearl E. Mae's abilities as a medium were amplified fantastically.
Not only would Pearl E. Mae give Eternals the ability to contact Yo-Vah
whenever necessary, but her amplified mediumistic energies could very
efficiently be added to the musical compositions and performances. Yo-Vah
suggested how Dr Tomorrow could best shape the development of its own musical
presentation. Dr Tomorrow could present music that would be culturally and
aesthetically acceptable to the planet's cultures and enjoyable at a very
superficial. Beyond that, the musical performance and its presentation could
represent, in energy terms, a giant-sized psychic vacuum cleaner. Stray bits
of negative energies would be pulled into the vortex of light and sound
presentation from the listeners in the audience and nearby areas of the
planet. These bits of negative energy would be processed through the group and
spewed out as music and light energies that were more positive and of a more
beneficial form. Dr Tomorrow would thus reduce the amount of negativity
available to the Forces of Darkness. Another result would be that the overall
energy of Dr Tomorrow's planet, solar system, and galaxy would become more
harmonious and balanced. Using the seven spheres would magnify the overall
effect of whatever music was being performed. At no time, however, did Yo-Vah
mention anything about the eighth alloy sphere and what function it would
play.
Yo-Vah deliberately emphasized several times that as a thought form and as
an energy form, Dr Tomorrow had the potential for not only enhancing the
harmony of the planet, but extending into other timespace dimensions as well.
A harmonious planet became an energy resonator in space, and could not only
affect other planets in the solar system, but other solar systems as well. The
importance of using music and light patterns to achieve this goal was that the
music itself had an effect which could go beyond the present timedimension.
Electromagnetic waves and other ethereal waves set up by the sound and light
presentations could create a type of energy form that was capable of
travelling both into the past and into the future. All group members,
especially Pearl E. Mae, had the ability for developing this type of
past-future awareness. If the sound and light presentations were put together
properly, the group would be able to continually develop more and more
effective musical forms that would enhance harmony and decrease energy
imbalances. Specifically, it would be possible to reduce entropy imbalances
on both local and distant levels. Many other so-called "New Age" musicians and
groups had already begun to make superficial attempts in this direction. Dr
Tomorrow would therefore easily fit in with the general flow of Earth's music.
Communication with the shining stranger had taken up many hours at the
ocean wall where they were sitting. For a moment, Yo-Vah seemed to go out of
character. He became very eloquent and enthusiastic. He forecast a bright
future for the group, said that Su-Shan would know how to use the rings to
communicate with him, and pledged himself to maintain unbroken telepathic
contact with all of the Eternals. He also pledged an unvarying amount of his
etheric energies that would always be present within the matrix of the Dr
Tomorrow theme song. Yo-Vah gently blessed the Eternals, went skimming back
along the water to the still-poised craft, and entered the ship. As the
entrance panel slowly closed with a high-pitched sound, the ship began once
more to glow. Without creating so much as a single wave, the saucer rose
noiselessly to a great height, and, within seconds, was completely out of
sight and hearing.
All the group members sat in silence broken only by the sound of waves
cascading against the concrete abutment. Residual remnants of Yo-Vah's
energies and presence functioned as an interpersonal glue much like the
morning MindLink/HeartLight. Even a fiery sunrise didn't disturb the unity of
consciousness. Only early morning sounds of State Park vehicles and clean-up
tractors and trucks sent Dr Tomorrow in out of body form back to the Coconut
Grove house and pool. The group energy easily transported the spheres back to
the poolside area as well. Both dogs had been shut up in the house, and were
so overjoyed to see us back, that they nearly broke the glass panes in the
doors opening to the pool. We let the dogs out and carefully put all eight of
the spheres next to Al's multimodule setup. The printout tray of the black
Cube's laser printer was full of output. It was a story written by Al that
summarized nearly every detail of our recent meeting with Yo-Vah. Al's account
even described the alloy spheres in great detail. From the content of the
story, it was apparent that at least Al believed the eighth alloy sphere had
been intended for him.
The tetrahedron and its three-dimensional aspects have powerful
implications for broadcasting power and sound through space. Four-dimensional
definitions are the only ones that specify the reality of existence.
Three-dimensional definitions, according to Buckminister Fuller, are the only
ones that even begin to approach reality or the necessity or necessary
conditions for the existence of Reality. There are other theoretical aspects
of the tetrahedron formed by four satellites in space, that have implications
for the transmission of energies in general and the correction of the entropy
imbalances of the universe in specific. Yo-Vah said that Fuller was an
important Earth-god, but that Earth people, just as they had with their Jesus,
tended to discount Fuller's incredible validity just because he happened to be
an Earthman. And that was a great loss for them, to not have access to the
high wisdom of their greatest native sons and daughters. Earth people were
missing out because Fuller was definitely transPlanetary. Out of the galaxy
and it's Local Group setting. Fuller was aligned with the highest spiritual
planes but manifesting practical, physical-plane solutions to many of
personkind's serious contemporary environmental and evolutionary dilemmas that
face the ordinary person during the course of day-to-day spiritual evolution.
"But does it really, matter, Sibling? I mean, whether the super-god was
given any attention by the Local Group's representatives of the Life
principle? I suppose that some of them must have known. A super-god simply
does not go unnoticed. Even the earth people do feel divinity from time to
time-era. Most of us were mildly amazed at the success that the Nazareth boy
had with the masses. That type of phenomenon is always cost-effective from a
spiritual point of view and, by definition, is definitely entropy-active.!"
"But, to ignore the possibilities, the potentials, is also foolhardy,
Garth. Can you imagine the karmic debts to be paid for leaving out of the
realm of possibilities and probabilities the development of a true Mind Mover.
To ignore the chance that a real LifeSaver may evolve would be considerably
more than merely tragic. It would be facetiously treasonous to the Life
Principle, eh Sibling?"
"Yes, you're right, Barth. The Mind Mover is really worth waiting for if it
can emerge from a particular Life Culture. Then there is the potential for a
Major Energy Shift without the characteristic rents that can occur in the
fabric of time. And who needs rents."
______________________________________________________________________________
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD) #1054,
spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar, and a
couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a Mac IIsi
running MOTU's `Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part of a Ph.D.
Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR TOMORROW is a project
that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional wellness learning system.
Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube, several Macs, numerous
stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and
Bullet. `DR TOMORROW' and `Project Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two
scientific activities of Life Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588,
Miami, Florida 33133.
DR TOMORROW will be continued next issue.
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DEADBEATS "I found the tombs very
interesting and quite thrilling
by Oisin Hurley -- lovely cool marble slabs,
emotionally and respectably
Copyright (c)1992 engraved with paeans about the
late lamented."
______________________________________________________________________________
We opened the door, and entered Paris. We found ourselves just a little away
from the church at Montmartre, right beside the little funicular in fact. It
was a beautiful day, sometime in early spring I'd say by the smell of it, and
the rush of good living air gave us all pause to take a breath. Looking about
we saw very few people, I suppose it was early morning for them and most of
them were still ensconced in their beds. I repressed a small surge of what I
suppose was jealousy, thinking of these little, simple people who could attain
comfort and peace so simply. Dave suggested that we go into the church, as
there might be some people in there at an early morning service, so we did.
The place was deserted of course and we all laughed at Dave. Jane gave him a
punch in the kidneys which we all thought was funny too. They're bosom
buddies really, and have worked together on many occasions in the past, doing
some honestly breathtaking tasks. Their commitment is second to none. So we
wandered around the church for a while. I found the tombs very interesting and
quite thrilling -- lovely cool marble slabs, emotionally and respectably
engraved with paeans about the late lamented. Looking at some of the names and
reading some of the stones I almost felt I had known these people personally.
Dave had gone off snuffling around the pews in one of the darker areas, most
likely he was looking for bugs. A bit of an entomologist, our Dave, he's
especially fascinated by parasites, holds them in great regard altogether,
says they do a lot of very useful work that might otherwise go undone and
unnoticed, to everybody's detriment. Or detritus. Sorry about that, I have
always found puns quite irresistible, though many have said that they are no
sign of wit.
As I rested against one of the sarcophagi, Simon came stalking along,
chewing on something black and nasty-looking. It turned out that he been
poking about up around the bell tower and had caught a bat. This was the
black object he was currently ingesting. I declined his offer of entrails and
pointed him in the direction of the sacristy where he could get some wine to
slake his thirst. He has told me in the past that bats make him very thirsty.
I watched him go, tall and very very thin, like a strange piece of very old
parchment stretched over a random collection of sticks. He stopped to talk to
Jane, who was etching bad runes into the back of the pews, and offered her
some bat. She turned and stabbed him in the thigh with her stylus, Simon's
grunt causing Dave to look up and laugh. She ran over to him and kicked him in
the gut. I said nothing. I had often thought that she might have a soft spot
for me, seeing as she doesn't kick the shit out of me very often, but now I
think it's because of some sort of respect or perhaps even fear that she tends
to keep her distance. A lot of people are afraid of me, even those whom I
could call my friends. I'm not affected by that any more, I suppose it comes
with the job. Simon came back from the direction of the sacristy, earnestly
chugging a bottle of french altar wine. As an afterthought, he crunched up the
bottle also, then belched resoundingly. A small spatter of blood appeared on
a pillar just beside his head, but it disappeared quickly. I called all of
them over to me, and opened a door.
And stepped into Beirut. Jane looked around, her eyes shining. She rushed
over to hug me, and kissed my face. As she scrambled around the rubble,
giggling, Dave began to look for rats. I found a small dog with a broken back
whimpering behind a rock. Its coat was scorched and trampled and it drooled
blood-flecked saliva. I stood on its head and it died. Simon came over to me
and asked if he could eat it. I shrugged, but Dave called over that this it
was probably not a very good idea to eat it raw. Disappointed, Simon sat on a
rock and chucked pebbles at nearby burnt-out vehicles. Behind me I heard a
scuffle, so I turned and looked up at the roof of a ruined store. There was a
young person there, of unknowable sex, perhaps none at all, for it appeared
but a child. It was wearing combat fatigues and carried a small sub-machine
gun. As I watched the childs eyes, seeing its doom, there was a crack behind
me and the childs forehead blossomed scarlet. Jane had shot it with a small
handgun she had discovered in the wreck of a nearby house. Simon cringed
visibly as she shouted "Casualty of War!" to the sky. We had all seen this
much too often and quite frankly we were all pretty bored with it, but I
suppose selfexpression is an important thing too, and it may be rarer than
life. I walked up the broken edge of the shop to where the body lay on the
roof. Its eyes were still open and it was twitching visibly, raising little
ripples in its sauce of blood. I sighed and touched its head to shut its eyes
and the child died. Looking down from the roof I saw that Jane was beating
Dave quite severely about the head with the end of the handgun and I decided
it was time to go. I opened a door and pushed them in.
We fell out in Moghadishu. It was hot, hot, summer time. The earth was
baking and the air had been broiled many times over. All sounds were muted by
the heat, except for the crack of superheated stones, the carrion razor buzz
of the flies, and the weak whimpering cries of the people. I sat down in the
shade of a rickety shanty hut, took out a battered cigarette and lit it. Jane
joined me and asked for a cigarette too. Small rivulets of perspiration made
clear tracks on her dust-smeared temples, changed course as she threw her head
back to exhale. She was watching the other two intently as they prowled and
stalked their way around the fallen down huts and bloated and attenuated
children and adults. Simon appeared to be nodding in a satisfied sort of way
while Dave prowled and frowned and pointed, saying inaudible things to Simon
who would rapidly nod and smile. A woman went by, bent under the weight of
small sack of maize. I watched Simon approach her and offer to carry the sack
to her dwelling, a brown shambles maybe thirty yards away. She just dropped
the bag, too fatigued and weak to do anything else. Dave put out his hand to
steady her and she straightened and even smiled slightly. Simon walked off
ahead toward her hut, beckoning to follow. I glanced at Jane who was shaking
her head slightly. She had seen this particular trick before too. I caught her
eye and she glanced quickly away, possibly a bit ashamed of her own excesses
which we had all seen just recently. The woman couldn't keep pace with Simon,
who was now just approaching her shanty. He came to the sagging entrance,
paused, then continued past. The woman uttered a small wail and attempted to
speed up her pace to catch Simon and regain her sack of precious grain. Simon
walked faster, and the woman began to falter. She appeared to be getting
progressively weaker with every step, and her flesh appear to melt from off
her bones. After eleven steps, she collapsed, a brown wrinkled leather bag of
dry bones like sticks of driftwood. Again I walked out into the searing heat
and approached the woman. I knelt to turn her head and looked into her
unseeing eyes. I felt her die then. Jane had come over behind me and was
staring with slitted eyes and pursed lips at a point over my shoulder. Her jaw
muscles moved, clenched, moved, clenched. I looked around to see Simon eating
the maize from the bag. Dave was nearby playing with some flies. It was
definitely time to go. I opened a door.
And stepped out into sunshine and a warm breeze coming in off the sea. We
stood on a slightly dried but still well manicured lawn in front of a large
very white building with lots of windows. A small sign on my left said
something in Greek. Dave looked around and sniffed, then headed for a set of
large glass doors. We all entered the building which contained people wearing
blue and white clothes and apparently walking aimlessly about. The smell of
the building was very familiar to me, I had been in a lot of these places over
the years. I didn't recognize this particular one, but I do tend to travel a
lot, and faces and places always blur in my memory. We all followed Dave
around green and white corridors, through arches and rooms and places lined
with beds to a large white door. Above it, a sign said something in Greek. We
pushed in and we were in a big white room with beds in it. There were people
in the beds and people walking around. The people walking around wore great
big plastic bags and walked really slowly. Simon laughed very loud and Jane
punched him in the kidneys and we all laughed. I sat down on an unused bed and
played with some metal instruments I found in a metal bowl. Some were very
sharp and some were very funny shapes, all of them were glistening and
beautifully, beautifully sterile. Impressed, I gave a small knife to Jane, who
looked at it and smiled. Then she buried it in Simon's left buttock, and we
howled with laughter to see Simon hopping around with the little knife
wobbling about. Dave shouted at us to shut up as he was trying to talk to the
people in the beds. After a while he began shouting at them and became angry.
He began to swear and kick things and search about, eventually finding a
smaller room. He went inside and we waited. After a couple of seconds bottles
and flasks and glasses came flying out of the little room to smash on the
floor of the big room. We could hear Dave shouting over the noise of breaking
glass and splintering plastic and were we glad that he was enjoying himself so
much. He's usually pretty taciturn and reserved. When he had broken everything
and had come over, panting, to where the rest of us were sitting (except for
Simon of course, who's arse was very sore) I decided that the holiday was over
and now it was time to go to work. We couldn't spend all eternity mucking
around. So I opened a door.
Jane started the job, with a little support from Simon. When events started
moving under their own power, I put Simon in a more involved role, allowing
him to spread out his influence and to produce basic raw material for Dave.
Jane of course had put together a good bit of produce for Dave and myself at
this stage so I congratulated her and told her to rest until the Grand Finale.
I started Dave into fulltime involvement with the project while I myself
cleared up loose ends which gave the two lads extra working space. They
certainly make a great team: while Simon is slow and very steady in his
methods, Dave is rash and brilliant and can be completely unstoppable. I
weaved in and out, here and there, mopping up here, cleaning up a problem
there, helping out with the backlog and eventually accounting for all the
important bits that come in at the end. Generally I don't get much praise for
this, since my involvement is quite fragmented, but I'm there at every stage,
and I hate to think what would happen if I was ever excluded from the team. I
told the two lads to rest up while I chopped off all the rough edges and put a
few of my own finishing touches to the thing. Then we all took a rest for a
while, to get ready for the End Ceremony. Then I opened a door.
And we arrived in a small town in West Connemara, just beside a tiny train
station. When we went inside, we found that it had been gutted by fire in the
recent troubles, but the four fireproof rentable lockers were still there.
Inside, each of us had stashed our ceremonial garments which we used to parade
around at the completion and wind-up of a project. I personally think it's all
a bit old fashioned, but our immediate bosses say it's important to impress
the clients. So as we dressed in our regalia of office, I opened a door, and
four horses came through. I think this is very old-fashioned too, but who can
change tradition?
ohurley@dsg.cs.tcd.ie
______________________________________________________________________________
"Every human plan has a fatal
BUYING SILENCE deficiency; every perfect
marriage has an unseen,
by Michael C. Berch hideous secret; every athlete
or artist or general has a
Copyright (c)1992 hidden flaw that if struck
just so will cause them to
shatter."
______________________________________________________________________________
Long ago, on Earth, a friend of mine bought a windscreen for his motorcycle.
He had been a confirmed-helmetless, wind-in-the-face rider; one day he got
tired of it and got an expensive, streamlined fairing with a built-in
windscreen. When I asked him how it felt, he said the difference was amazing:
it was like going from standing in a wind tunnel to floating in a space
capsule. But a couple of weeks later he had it removed and it sat in the back
of his garage, looking forlorn.
"I couldn't deal with it," he said. "It gives you the illusion that there's
actually something protecting you from the road."
And in the same way the windscreens that I had put up around my own life
turned out to be equally illusory. Money, power, intelligence, love ... all
null against the forces that have twisted my life. In the end, we are all
defenseless. But it happened that my internal enemy and my external enemy
cancelled themselves out, and once again I float insensate in my space
capsule, daring myself to live again.
It started as I sat in the darkened great hall of Vista Del Mar, my home,
my prison, watching the sea of stars, waiting for my visitor from Earth. It
was not much of a great hall, as great halls go; the same force that has bent
my life has constrained me to live a less comfortable existence than, ceteris
paribus, I could afford.
If I have learned anything in my years at Vista Del Mar it is that there is
no escape from the interior flaws of the human mind: every human plan has a
fatal deficiency; every perfect marriage has an unseen, hideous secret; every
athlete or artist or general has a hidden flaw that if struck just so will
cause them to shatter. We are no more responsible for these flaws than a slab
of granite is responsible for its flecks of mica; we are born, turned in the
lapidary of childhood, and cast headlong into the world like dice. Some fall
and break their backs; as it happened, I landed on my feet.
My own enemy, the interior one, is that I can no longer bear the sounds of
human society. Unlike the eyes, the ears cannot be turned off: even as we
sleep, the ears stand guard to alert us of any intrusion. My own hearing has
grown sensitive beyond all reason, and it now takes intense concentration for
me to carry on a simple conversation or listen to the music I enjoyed in my
youth. (There are days when even my own voice or heartbeat seem unbearable.) I
have gone through all manner of earmuffs, earplugs, hypnotics, soundproof
rooms, white noise, brown noise, filters, and blankers: each only seemed to
intensify my frustration. When I outlived my third wife I told my property
management people to clear out one of the firm's cargo stations and seal and
pressurize one of the spokes. I grabbed an architect from one of our slack
projects, sketched out some plans for him, named the place after my last house
in California, and moved in six months later.
The generators and air exchangers float free of the station, out of my
view. When I turn off the last fan at night, Vista Del Mar and I fall
endlessly, silent against the backdrop of stars. I sleep, I wake, I eat,
drink, work, and read, and I sleep again.
Without a doubt, my visitor comes to persuade me or coerce me to leave
Vista Del Mar. That he had been able to reach me at all was frightening: it
implied either that my telecom setup was not working right, or my hold on
Saavedra/InterNet was not as tight as I imagined.
We are all defenseless.
There would be no point in refusing to see him. If I did, they would just
send another messenger, perhaps less politely.
It had begun in my mid-thirties, during the time I was almost constantly
traveling, putting together the the first set of transactions that turned my
engineering firm into a global conglomerate. At first I thought it was the
stress of nonstop negotiations and jet lag that made me oversensitive to
noises; I remember very clearly the night in Zurich when, after two hours of
sleepless tossing and turning, trying to ignore the muffled voices in the room
next to mine, I called the the hotel desk and demanded that the entire floor
be cleared out and rented to my firm, as well as the rooms above and below
mine. After two other such incidents, it became a topic of gossip in my
traveling party and later, of course, in the papers and media. After I was
arrested in a New York theatre for assaulting the party in the row behind me
who insisted on talking through the first two acts of Siberry's No Borders
Here, my first wife finally threw up her hands and left me, complaining that
she had not engaged to marry an eccentric.
I escaped criminal charges by agreeing to see a therapist, and spent the
next three years on the couches of an endless series of psychiatrists,
neurologists, audiologists, and after they shrugged and talked about stress
and nutrition and the pressures of success, I hit the R&D circuit and spent
some time with neural reprogrammers and digital biofeedback people. Nothing.
Finally I saw a representative sample of faith healers, New Age practitioners,
visited a couple of shrines, and gave up. During this time I also made $400
million (making not a few enemies in the process) and bought out my biggest
competitor.
But it was on my fourth trip to space, on a visit to inspect the new
research lab my company had built for Fujitsu Orbital, that I found what I
wanted. It was just after we had transferred from the lift vessel to the
shuttle that intercepts the lab's orbit; all it does is fire its chemical
rocket for a couple of minutes, and then you drift for about two hours. After
the engine cut off, there was no sound in the shuttle. I put a finger to my
lips and smiled and my two companions nodded. We spent the remainder of the
trip in blissful silence, reading and looking out the window. I filed this
experience in my memory, knowing that when the time came I would have a place
of refuge.
It came sooner than I thought: a couple of months later my third wife,
Aletha, was driving out to our beach house to meet me for a weekend when her
brakes failed on the Coast Highway and she missed a curve.
She died that night, in the hospital.
I had had a brief and unwise second marriage to a research psychologist,
during my doctor-hopping days; Aletha came to me some years later, when I
thought I was done with romance, and she had the good sense to know that I was
not even remotely normal in any meaningful way, and not to try to treat me
like I was normal. She spoke softly, and rarely, and did not expect me to
speak, except for business or urgent matters. I cannot remember that she ever
shouted, except when she cried out when we made love. When she died she left a
terrible incompleteness in my life; though I craved silence more than my
millions, I would have given anything to hear her voice again.
A week after she died, I called the architect and told him to to put
together Vista Del Mar.
The visitor's name was Reid, and he was a lawyer from a big New York firm.
I invited him in and realized, in spite of myself, that the threat he
represented was remote and contingent (rather than personal and immediate),
and I tried to relax. I even offered him a drink, which he accepted.
"I bring a proposal, Mr. Saavedra, which I hope you'll consider carefully."
He spoke very softly; he'd been coached.
"Since you've come all the way out here, I'll be glad to. You understand,
of course, that there is very little that you could offer that would be of
interest to me."
"Perhaps so. But I'd like to go through it, just the same."
We did, and spent quite a while at it. All entrepreneurs are the same; we
love to read a proposal and shake it around a little like a boxed present, to
see how it rattles. It was a big enterprise; nobody but my firm would even
have an outside chance of cutting the deal in the first place and getting the
project completed. Put simply, it was to rebuild the central government and
defense communications complex of New Persia more or less from scratch. They
had been operating their major systems out of borrowed and temporary quarters
since the War and the Iranian Partition, and evidently either finally got sick
of it, or finally raised enough money to consider rebuilding. I'd run two
major projects in Persia, one before the War and one after, and knew the right
people.
"Well, it seems like a reasonable proposition. But I know you didn't call
in all your markers just to try to sell me this proposal - if you'd made the
proposal to my new projects people at the corporate office, or just
transmitted it up here -"
Reid raised his hand. "We wanted your personal attention. This job isn't
just for Saavedra/Internet; we're dealing with a very sensitive situation. I
don't think the Persians will just roll over; they're looking for your
familiar face, to reassure them that everything's going to go down right."
"I see. As I said, it's a most interesting proposal, but I'm afraid it
would be out of the question for me to leave my home for extended travel.
You're obviously aware of my personal eccentricities; please respect them."
For a moment I thought that he was not here to pry me from my home but was
merely the errand-boy of somebody who wanted a piece of the action.
But he mopped his forehead with a handkerchief, then stopped as he looked
out the window again. "Shit," he said. "I hope you understand that I didn't
plan any of this. I'm not behind it; my firm isn't behind it; hell, I don't
even know what it's all about, and I probably don't want to know. The thing
is, this station - S/I-14 - has been sold, and our client has made
arrangements for you to relocate to another, uh, similar facility." He paused.
"Assuming, of course, that you accept and perform the proposal we've
discussed, and so forth."
"You're going to have to do better than that. I may be a little out of
touch up here, but I'm pretty sure I still own this station. And a few
others."
"It's not quite that simple. It got tangled up in some corporate stuff,
like a sale/ leaseback arrangement as part of the syndication of stations 12,
14, and 15. I've checked it out; you granted a takeover option to the lead
financier that could be exercised if Saavedra/Internet missed three
consecutive payments to the loan retirement fund."
"Strictly a formality; they're all written like that," I said.
"Understood. The bank - I've got their name somewhere - sold the takeover
rights to a Canadian company. The Canadian company, you must understand, is a
wholly-owned subsidiary of Blaise-Lorton."
A tendril of cold began in my chest, crept down my legs, and instinctively
I shivered. Blaise-Lorton was an old enemy, and, I suppose, an unavenged
enemy. We'd been in competition for years, and my firm nearly always won out.
BlaiseLorton was founded by a pair of elderly Britons; they (and the firm) had
been around forever, but were utterly hidebound, and we outdistanced them
easily. There had been incidents over the years - anonymous threats, a couple
of construction sites vandalized - but we ignored them, figuring that
complaining to the police about one's competitors would not enhance the
reputation of a firm noted for its discretion. One of the old boys had died a
few years back, and I learned in a roundabout way that Lorton, the survivor,
somehow blamed me for his partner's death.
"Okay, I'm not really pleased with that, but so what? We don't have any
cash problems. Hell, we could probably pay off the whole debenture for S/I-14
today, if we had to."
Reid walked to the window and stood, looking out. His voice was almost a
whisper, with a note of apology. "The loan's in default. Your firm has missed
the last three payments. If you check your morning mail, you'll find that your
controller and two of his people have resigned, and - according to my
information - have left the country."
I started to shout that this was impossible, but the words died in my
throat. Reid had not come to Vista Del Mar to bluff me. He looked at me with
pity as we both came to realize that I was as much in his clients' grasp as I
was in the grasp of my affliction.
He produced more papers, a more detailed look at the project. I read
through them, watching Reid watch me: his face was devoid of victory. Finally
I threw down the stack of papers, disgusted. "This is a completely corrupt
enterprise. There's no way in hell to meet the bid price, and I don't think
even Saavedra/Internet can get enough workers on-site to make the completion
date."
Reid shrugged. "Not surprising. There may be some sort of political thing
behind this. I have no idea. Sign the papers."
I signed, with a trembling hand.
On the trip back to Earth and my visit to the firm's headquarters, my
internal enemy remained quiescent; lulled, perhaps, by the years in which I
had bought silence. But I was firmly in the thrall of my human enemy, and
though I briefed my staff on the proposal with relatively good cheer and
vigor, it was my enemy's hands that moved my hands, and his lips that animated
my smile.
Of course eyebrows were raised, but they had been raised before. Despite
the abrupt departures that Reid had alluded to, I was still in control of
Saavedra/Internet, and though more than once I heard the whispered word
"unsound" or "unworkable" behind my back, my people pitched into the project
with bold abandon. I didn't know what they knew about the sale of S/ I-14, or
why I was back on Earth, and I didn't explain.
I telescoped the feasibility-study part of the project into a few quick
weeks, anxious to meet the Persians and (hopefully) wind up my personal
involvement in the deal and return to the "similar" accomodations in space
that Reid had promised.
And as the pace of work quickened, my affliction surfaced again with a
murderous vengeance. Distant conversations and snippets of music started my
heart beating faster, sending out panic messages. My reaction to sound is an
out of control feedback loop: fear of sound, fear of fear of sound, fear of
fear of fear of sound, and so on, until the fear becomes a solid mass of panic
and I find myself suddenly whiteknuckled and cowering.
Defenseless.
Even alone, on the plane to Tehran, I was tormented. Airplanes were one of
my special places of respite; nearly as good as spacecraft. In each case we
are separated from other humans by an interval across which sound is
meaningless and impotent. I dozed lightly on the plane, hypnotized by the
monotonous hum of the turbofans (though I jerked upright every time they
changed timbre, knowing in my mind that the pilot was changing course or
altitude, but feeling, deep down in the cerebellum somewhere, that something
was wrong).
We landed, and I was met at the airport by a private car with an escort and
a small entourage. I prefer to ride alone, but I could hardly refuse the
hospitality of the local contractor who'd be handling the meetings with the
government and key suppliers. I got off the plane and walked haltingly the few
feet to the car; Earth's full gravity coupled with eight hours on the plane
made me giddy. I was clapped on the back by a hearty Persian and found myself
seated between two such jollies in the middle of the limousine's back seat.
My sudden intuition that there was something wrong came two or three
seconds too late: suddenly my arms were pinned behind me; the jolly on my left
had produced a handgun, and the one on my right was speaking rapid Farsi into
a handheld radio. Terrorist kidnapping, I thought instantly, and my stomach
froze. Tehran was nominally under the control of the democratic government of
New Persia, but the old gangs and factions still roamed the streets. The shock
of the incident and my dizziness combined; all of a sudden I couldn't feel my
arms and legs, and saw the plexiglass partition in front of my face begin to
swim and dissolve into a mass of phosphene dots. As the darkness pulled me
under I remembered the anti-ransom statutes (which I had supported, of course)
and knew that the terrorists would kill me when S/I couldn't pay...
"Good God, what have you done to him?" said a distant voice in English. I
was riding in a car, probably the same car. I still couldn't move my arms,
which were now handcuffed. It was dark, and I smelled dust and exhaust fumes.
My head ached and there was the taste of blood in my mouth.
"He pass out." An accented voice.
"Sit him up straight. There you go."
I was yanked up and consciousness slipped away again. I heard voices, saw
shapes move, felt the car stop, and start, and turn, and stop, and car doors
slam, and heard more voices.
"...he has this damned acute hearing. His bloody gift."
I could see, but it was like watching a play at a great distance; there was
no sense that the action had anything to do with me. We entered a building,
and I was in a wheelchair, being propelled down a carpeted hall.
"...and I want the room ready now." The voice was behind me, out of sight.
"Of course, sir."
From the wheelchair to a bed, a rolling bed, a bright light, a sharp jab,
and I was washed with nothingness.
How best to describe the nature of my transformation? What can I say of
awakening to find Sir Harold Lorton standing over me, perspiring and
trembling, smiling once and then turning sharply away? In truth, I was not as
shocked to see him as I was to realize that when he spoke he made no sound, no
sound at all, nor did the men and women in white coats who came in and out and
silently adjusted machinery and regarded me as I lay motionless. Nor was I
shocked when I learned, by means of the newswire on my office workstation,
that a week later he had been found dead, a suicide, in a cheap hotel in
Tehran. He must have planned it that way, or he would never have let me see
his face in the hospital post-surgery ward. I remember the last thing I heard
him - or anyone else, for that matter - say:
"His bloody gift."
Harold Lorton conceived of my internal enemy as a gift, and out of revenge
he thought to take it away from me.
I got the last part of the package by mail, an unsigned text from one of
the greyworld surgeons on Lorton's team, detailing the whole operation down to
dissection of the cochlea and removal of the organ of Corti. "The work is not
reversible," he notes, "but the subject should be able to return to normal
life in a matter of weeks."
Normal?
I spend three hours a day in class, picking up sign language and
lip-reading as fast as my instructor can teach it. BlaiseLorton seems to have
collapsed, and we expect to retrieve S/I-14 without protracted litigation, but
I'm moving back to California, not to space. I sleep soundly, seven hours a
night, regardless of who might be in the next room or the floor above, and
once again I visit friends, touch them, see them face to face, watch their
children grow. Normal? Not even remotely.
______________________________________________________________________________
Michael C. Berch is the manager of computing at a biotechnolgy software
company, and is also a licensed attorney, though no longer practicing.His
first published fiction was in the WRITERS OF THE FUTURE VOL. VII anthology
last year, and he is currently involved in a sf writers' workshop in the San
Francisco Bay Area. He splits his time between Pleasanton, Calif., and San
Francisco, has 160K miles on his car, and enjoys reading, writing, travel, and
cats. He can be reached at mcb@presto.ig.com or mcb@postmodern.com.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
A REALITY OF ONE'S OWN "When I asked the elders why
our world exists as it does,
by Jason Snell one of them sat me down at the
edge of the river and spoke to
Copyright (c)1992 me."
______________________________________________________________________________
But, you ask, can we find our way backis there a way back home from this
godforsaken place? My answer is not a simple one. When I asked the elders why
our world exists as it does, one of them sat me down at the edge of the river
and spoke to me. He pointed out an eddy near the edge of the stream, and said
that we could consider it a turning point in the universe. It could be the
assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the moment Einstein first wondered about
general relativity; the birth of a man who would become Czar of Russia or a
tyrannical Brazilian dictator; perhaps even an event that didn't happen, like
the assassination of FDR, an event that would have, through the cascade of
effects it caused, changed the world. Such a thing may seem strange to you,
the idea that we can treat the flow of history as a river, with eddies and
currents. But to me it made some sort of sense, if only because I was raised
among the elders. I will never be able to explain to you the subtleties of our
reality-to give you a tidy paragraph for the latest Oxford English Dictionary
or a groundbreaking article for the next issue of _Science_. But perhaps I can
give you a frame to better explain what we are doing here. One can not explain
the universe in conventional terms-one can only try to explain it
metaphorically. Stories about swimming and diving will come from my mouth, but
within will be the truth about everything around us. You must try to interpret
it for yourself and decide whether the truth is acceptable to you. If not, I
suggest you to ignore my words and pretend that this life is nothing more than
a dream.
There was I (call me Eve, Ruth, Rachel or any other name buried deep in
your past) sitting at the edge of the stream with Palmer next to me, both of
us staring at the eddy, trying to imagine what human events hid within. The
inconceivable mechanics of reality that I spoke of, concepts I can not relate
in any language your mind would comprehend, were a part of my education there.
I sat, and as I stared at the eddy, Palmer removed his shoes and stepped into
the water. One might have asked the elder why he was entering the stream on
such a cold day, but the mud stirred up by his steps held a great deal more
interest. It chose to swirl-to say that the mud actively chose such a path
only shows the inherent intelligence I saw in that motion-and eventually broke
into two divergent floes. One might view the split streams of mud as two
possible realities- a choice made, and a road not taken. It is a concept that
appears throughout human history (my thoughts on this subject are hardly
original), and one that is more truthful than people think. Our universe is
like that stream of mud, constantly diverging as individuals make different
choices and walk down different paths. This is not by any means the realm of
science- fiction. Some of your great modern thinkers ponder the question
under the name "chaos theory," a term that belies the poetic nature of the
concept. A butterfly chooses to flap its wings and rise up from its resting
place on a patch of ground in central China, and its passage through the air
eventually leads to the creation of a tornado in central Kansas-but then
Palmer turned around and motioned me forward, asking me to join him in the
water.
That an elder so versed in the ways of time and space should risk pneumonia
in a muddy stream is a puzzling matter. Old and fragile, his days as one of
the tribe's strongest men past, he should not have been allowed to risk his
life in the cold waters. But before I could tell him of my concern, he told me
to dive with him. Palmer's heels dropped below the surface and I had no real
choice but to follow.
It is strange to think that of all the ways to describe the water in that
stream, I have only discussed its temperature. To be sure, the cold of the
water was foremost in my thoughts as I dove in after Palmer. But more
importantly, I found that I could actually breathe while immersed in the
water. My body had been shocked when it was suddenly immersed in the
incredibly cold water, and I uncontrollably (and quite stupidly) gasped in
response. The liquidfor then I realized that it was not water after all-filled
my lungs, and I was afraid I would drown. But my fears, of which there were
many, were unfounded. At the time I felt lightheaded, as if I had breathed in
too deeply. Then I found myself standing with Palmer on warm, dry land, as if
we had never stepped into the stream.
Should I try and explain where the elder and I appeared? It was a place
unlike any I had seen before, a rocky outcropping with no vegetation of any
kind. The ground beneath was hard lava, unforgiving on my soles. This, said
Palmer, is the far side of the stream. This place was a different world, an
Earth where life never evolvedwhere that fortuitous spark that created the
first cell never came. Then I felt lightheaded again, and found myself back in
the stream again. As with all lessons the elders taught us, there was no
further discussion of what I had seen; no chance to compare notes with other
students; no way to explore the stream by ourselves.
So I can tell you that this place is the other side of the stream you have
walked on for many years. This is another world, a world where the choices we
have made have been different. You asked me if I could show you what the world
would be like if you had never been born, and I have done the best I can. I
know that this world has been destroyed; and I know that your mother's
unfortunate miscarriage in this world is part of that; and I know that the
stretch of rubble we now stand in is a city in our world; and, using my powers
of deduction, I can suppose that your presence in our world has saved it from
this fate. This starry sky shines down on a dead world-all because you never
lived. Yes, there is a way back. We will return to our world, a world where
you still live-and perhaps now you shall appreciate your importance.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell (jsnell@ucsd.edu) is a firstyear student at UC Berkeley's Graduate
School of Journalism. In addition to his fun work there, he's also a graduate
student instructor in Cal's Mass Communication department and the editor of
InterText. He calls this story his "vision of what would happen if Virginia
Woolf happened to write `It's a Wonderful Life'."
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
If you like Quanta, you may
want to check out these
other magazines, also
produced and distributed
electronically:
IIIII N N TTTTT EEEEE RRRR TTTTT EEEEE X X TTTTT
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I N NN T E R R T E XX X T
IIIII N N T EEEEE R R T EEEEE X X T
InterText Contact: jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu
InterText is the network fiction magazine devoted to the publication of
quality fiction in all genres. It is published bi-monthly in both ASCII and
PostScript editions. The magazine's editor is Jason Snell, who has written for
Quanta and for InterText's predecessor, Athene. Assistant editor is are Geoff
Duncan.
The PostScript laser-printer edition is the version of choice, and includes
PostScript cover art. For a subscription (specify ASCII or PostScript),
writer's guidelines, or to submit stories, mail Jason Snell at
jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu. InterText is also available via anonymous FTP from
network.ucsd.edu (IP# 128.54.16.3). If you plan on FTPing the issues, you can
be placed on a list that will notify you when each new issue appears - just
mail your request to jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu.
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQ]
QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ]
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QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\QQQ]
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
Core Contact: rita@eff.org
CORE is available by e-mail subscription and anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org.
Send requests and submissions to rita@eff.org. CORE is an entirely electronic
journal dedicated to e-publishing the best, freshest prose and poetry being
created in Cyberspace. CORE is published monthly.
______ () , _
/ / /`-'| // /
--/ /_ _ / / . . o // __/ _ ______ __. ____
(_/ / /_
The Guildsman Contact: jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
The Guildsman is an electronic magazine devoted to role-playing games and
amateur fantasy/SF fiction. At this time, The Guildsman is available in LaTeX
(.tex) source and PostScript formats via both email and anonymous ftp without
charge to the reader. Printed copies are also available for a nominal charge
which covers printing and postal costs. For more information, email
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu (Internet) ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
Back issues of The Guildsman are available via anonymous ftp at
potemkin.cs.pdx.edu (131.252.20.145) in the pub/frp/ucrgg directory.
______________________________________________________________________________
AN INDEPENDANT, ELECTRONIC, SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA IS POSSIBLE
"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees"
Independently executed over six years, "WAX..." combines a realistic/fantastic
narrative with the fluidity of video and computer-graphics technique. The
result is a new type of story experience.
Alamogorodo, N.M. (1983): Jacob Maker designs gunsight displays at a flight
simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His two professions collide when
the bees introduce him to a new kind of destiny that pushes him away from his
normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic
realities. Passing through Trinity Site and the Carlsbad Caverns, Jacob enters
the world of the bees, inevitably arriving at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991,
where he meets a victim he must kill.
LIMITED EDITION (presently in theatrical release)
500 signed, numbered VHS Cassettes available from the director:
David Blair, P.O. Box 174, Cooper Station, New York, NY 10276
each $36.00 US (includes shipping)
Fore more info, contact David Blair at: artist1@rdrc.rpi.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
Thank you, thank you very much.
**
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Volume IV Issue 4 ISSN 1053-8496 August 1992
Quanta Volume IV, Issue 4
ISSN 1053-8496 December, 1992
____________________________________________________________________________
Editor/Technical Director All submissions, request for
Daniel K. Appelquist submission guidelines, requests for
Proofreading back issues, queries concerning
Cheryl Droffner subscriptions, letters, comments, or
_____________________________________ other correspondence should be sent
to the Internet address
Copyright 1992 by Daniel K. quanta@andrew.cmu.edu.
Appelquist. This magazine may be
archived, reproduced and/or Subscriptions come in three flavors:
distributed provided that it is left MAIL subscriptions, where each issue
intact and that no additions or is sent as a series electronic mail
changes are made to it. The messages; BITNET subscriptions, where
individual works presented herein are each issue is sent as a file over the
the sole property of their respective BITNET and FTP subscriptions, where
author(s). No further use of their subscribers receive a notification
works is permitted without their when a new issue has been placed at a
explicit consent. All stories in this designated FTP site. Anonymous FTP
magazine are fiction. No actual servers that carry current and back
persons are designated by name or issues of Quanta are:
character. Any similarity is purely
coincidental. export.acs.cmu.edu........128.2.35.66
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Quanta is supported solely by reader lth.se...................130.235.16.3
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requirement for subscription.
Issues of Quanta are also available
Quanta on CompuServe in the "Zines from the
5437 Ellsworth Avenue #203 Net" area of the EFF forum (accessed
Pittsburgh, PA 15232 by typing GO EFFSIG).
____________________________________________________________________________
Articles
LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
Serials
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
DR TOMORROW Marshall F. Gilula
Stories
STARBLOOD Steven Schuldt
LAST TRAIN Lou Crago
WAITING FOR THE
NIGHT BOAT Nicole Gustas
GREEN John Goodrich
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hi, y'all! I'm practicing my southern drawl, because I'm soon to be moving to
Virginia (well... Reston, Virginia, which is really more like a suburb of
D.C., but you get the idea). Anyway, I'll be sending out a letter to all
subscribers informing people of my new email address when I get one. For now,
though, you can continue to send mail to be at quanta@andrew.cmu.edu.
Some people have asked "Dan, now that you're leaving Carnegie Mellon, what
happens to Quanta?" Well, the beauty of a network entity like Quanta is that
it can exist anywhere on the network. The answer is, of course, that Quanta
goes where I go.
So, much to my disappointment, I've only been able to produce four issues
of Quanta this year (March, June, August and December). What this means is
that I haven't been able to round out the Dr Tomorrow serial within the year.
There's still one more chapter to go on that, and you should be seeing it
around February, although I may have to postpone the February issue to a March
issue since I'll be starting a new job and all.
As I write this particular paragraph, I'm working on my new Macintosh
PowerBook Duo 210 laptop computer. All I can say is that I'm extremely
impressed with it. It really is a piece of science fiction in and of itself.
Apple needs to work on their quality control, however. When I first received
my Duo, it had a serial port problem and needed to be sent back twice before
it was resolved. Hopefully I should be able to get lots more work done, both
on Quanta and my own writing. But who am I kidding? I bought the thing because
it's a really neat toy.
Submissions! Submissions submissions submissions. What can I say? I
received a fair number after my recent plea for material, and I was very
pleased with the quality. I'm always in need of more, however. I've gotten
letters from a lot of people saying things like "I may send you something in
the near future." Well, I would love to receive those manuscripts. If any of
you have something you've been holding back from me, shame on you!
Subscriptions! Wow - This month, Quanta subscriptions for the first time
rose above 2000. That's not even counting re-distribution points like bulletin
boards and CompuServe, or people who pick up issues from one of the FTP
servers or Gopher. If you are reading Quanta in one of these ways and you
aren't receiving a notice whenever a new issue comes out, mail me and I'll put
you on a "notice only" mailing list. That way I can have a more accurate idea
of how many people are reading Quanta and you can know whenever a new issue
hits the `stands'.
I have some very interesting material for you in this issue... some fresh
faces, some new ideas. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed
putting it together.
______________________________________________________________________________
Quanta Party!
OK - I've been talking about putting together a Quanta party for a while now,
but this time I really and truly mean it. I'd like to arrange someting for
near future. What prompted this sudden enthusiasm? I recently attended PhilCon
(a science fiction convention based in Philadelphia) and was very impressed.
Apart from the guests (one of whom was Greg Bear, who was an excellent
speaker), the art show, the gaming, and the general feeling of community and
openness that permiated the con, what really impressed me about it was the
parties! Mostly they were just little impromptu get-togethers in some of the
hotel rooms occupied by con attendees, but they were lots of fun. So I thought
to myself, why not have a party at an upcoming convention and invite all
Quanta subscribers and submitters. So what about it? How many subscribers out
there are con-goers who would be interested in something like this? I guess
since I'm going to be in D.C., I'm thinking of a convention like Disclave
(which is in D.C.) or another eastern con (perhaps in New York or Boston). If
there's interest, I'll start making more definite plans. If any of you already
have plans to attend cons in the near future, that would be good information
to have as well. Hopefully, we can get something rolling here.
______________________________________________________________________________
Moving? Take Quanta with you!
Please remember to keep us apprised of any changes in your address. If you
don't we can't guarantee that you'll continue to receive the high quality of
fiction and non-fiction that Quanta provides. Also, if your account is going
to become non-existent, even temporarilly, please inform us. This way, we can
keep Net traffic due to bounced mail at a minimum. Please send all
subscription updates to quanta@andrew.cmu.edu. Thanks!
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
STARBLOOD "Process hadn't allowed itself to be
benchmarked in nine quarters. Not
by Steven Schuldt that the other IM players were
complaining too loudly, Process
Copyright(c)1990 Publishing Industries had always
taken the benchmarks by light-years."
______________________________________________________________________________
"Don't you move." said Einstein, the semi-automatic handgun
trembling in his hands, his thick accent still failing to
conceal his terror. The sky was boiling overhead; dark, restless
geometric shapes sliding above and behind each other. The wind
had started to kick up again and Ursula's long hair danced
across her pale white face. "Raise your arms."
She slowly raised her arms above her head. "That's good. Now
walk."
"You're crazy, you old bastard." she hissed, taking a step
towards the ledge. A distant crack of thunder was heard and a
swirling choir of voices began to rise ominously. "Crazy! Cr-"
____________________
Phyllis took an outlet. "How much longer?"
"Fifteen minutes." said the shell. She was going to die in here. Ursula's
wedding was only four days away, and Phyllis felt obligated to try another
print if she died. She was annoyed, feeling too much pressure to contemplate
this noir spy mess that the VanGehr Group engine had spit up. She looked out
of the rain-spattered bullet train window. Quebec's streets were skidding by
like wet black cat hairs through her dim reflection in the glass. It looked
very different than she remembered it. Phyllis closed the shell, settled back
in the deep white folds of her seat and thought about Process.
Process hadn't allowed itself to be benchmarked in nine quarters. Not
that the other IM players were complaining too loudly, Process Publishing
Industries had always taken the benchmarks by light-years. Most were content
to let CEO Paul Reuters and the PPI network of enigmacrats thrash and twist in
a web of what was beginning to appear as its over-cultivated mystique.
Besides, other corporate prime movers in Image Manipulation were tired of
tumbling vats of capital into the black hole of random number benchmarking.
Now, at last, a certain parity seemed reachable and majors like
ClimeLight/Fissure and Junee-July could concentrate on the more pressing but
no less challenging craft of star-making.
How Process tested so well was pretty widely known. The entropic harrier it
was only half-jokingly called. Their variant of seed value generation based on
the interference tier-contours created by 4D graphs of radioactive decay and
simple Lorenz attractors had proven a ruthlessly effective, if somewhat
quasi-mystical approach to the problem. The variant was Process' ace card,
however, and would have remained a standard for years.
The house was old and pathologically gothic, all odd angles, bleak corners
and towering cloisters. Set near the edge of the Gaspe' peninsula, the place
was about as far away from civilization as this ancient province allowed.
Phyllis found herself waiting in a sparse antechamber after having been buzzed
through wrought iron gates she would have guessed to be fourteen feet high.
She had been led by a smallish bespectacled man of fifty or so down
six-hundred feet of winding private road. He had spoken with a harsh
French-Canadian accent. Despite all her preparation and determination, she
felt extremely nervous. This shoot had to be good; she wouldn't get another
chance. The rain had stopped on the taxi ride in from the station but the gray
sky and cool autumn weather seemed to mirror her feelings of unease. The
little man had taken her coat and addressed her as "Miss Cope". For some
reason she was reminded of the teasings of an ex-boyfriend, "Miss can't Cope".
"I am terribly sorry, madam," said the man, "but Mr. Nareid is
preoccupied at the moment and has advised me to show you in. If you please."
Phyllis nodded politely and, lifting her gearbag, followed his gesturing hand
into a large, skylit circular room. There was a disused marble water fountain
at its center. The man followed her in. "Mr. Nareid informs me that you are a
photographer." Phyllis was looking absently up at the grimy, stained-glass
dome.
"Yes, of sorts" she half laughed. "I'm a cam-tech really."
"Oh, I am sorry," he was looking up at her and Phyllis felt that he was
standing uncomfortably close. "There is a difference?"
"No! No, not really," said Phyllis, instantly regretting her nervous
response. "it's just not a term I've ever used."
"I see," he said slowly, and there was an awkward moment of silence before
he gestured, "Make yourself comfortable." She thanked him and accepted his
offer of tea, hoping to redeem herself somewhat. He left and Phyllis perceived
for the first time the place's dead air and unsettling feeling of perversity,
the decayed lavishness of the entire estate. Whatever sort of person this
James Nareid turned out to be, he was not, she guessed, going to be an average
shoot. Even by Process' standards.
Image manipulation was the inevitable resonating phenomenon of a media
mad world. A miracle of style becoming substance. Every icon, every movement
in art, music, video, holography, and film, captured, treated and distorted by
the latest computer rendering gear. Hyper-real storylines cropped, spliced and
juxtaposed, culled from every source old and new, from Homer through
Messiana/Hologramic slasher vids. The latest in rotational dissolving and
recombinant overlay-tracing applied to the bulk of the flotsam of the human
information system. After so many years now it had become reality's feedback
loop. The gather and distort technique had been born out of necessity, of
course, in the years before automatic royalties, with the standing copyright
laws taxed to the limit and straining to hold back the dike. Process had been
there from the start. The vast bulk of Process' profits still came from the
quaint black octagonal boxes found at every HDHF local, the IMAGER. Inside
where girl and boy could tumble their way down a hierarchy of silly menus
packed with time-frames, icons and double entendres - to leave with their own
"Totally unique!" little chunk of the zeitgeist. A fine time for all concerned
as PPI had years earlier licensed off its IMAGER to the Fissure corporation,
pretensions to high art intact as well as safe gliding distance above the red.
Things had changed since then and the better IMs, like Process, had learned
almost unconsciously to play to the last and all inclusive human gallery. They
had realized that at the end of the day people wanted something to hold on to,
invariably, an intelligibly convoluted mirror.
As a child growing up in Montreal, Phyllis would spend most nights alone.
Her grisette mother worked and slowly grew more unsound, acting ambitions
fading out year by year. At the age of nine Phyllis was sent to Paris to live
with her cousins. Her only truly enduring memories of early childhood: a
collage of neon, white light and pain. That light had stayed with her, had
kept her straight through the shooting of some of the most bizarre imagery a
jaded world could come up with.
Things had gone better in Europe, later on. She had returned to the
Americas to attend film school in Cote-Saint-Luc and had done her cam-tech
grunt work in LA. It got pretty ugly for awhile, months of shooting warehouses
and dockyards for the truly sleazy Estienne and Finch. She guessed her couples
work for respected independent Lemaitre! had gotten her the Process call.
Phyllis hated that idea, however, because couples made for some of the worst
subject matter. Most of them got drunk or bent on some analog first so they
could get loose enough to screw in front of a stranger, but somehow the
returns had always been okay. Shooting Process, however, was every cam-tech's
grail, and when they flew two reps to Vienna to watch her shoot an
industrio-demolition sponsored by some bored Austrian art fags, she had felt
that white light rising in her head.
"Ms. Cope, isn't it?" said a voice behind her. Phyllis turned to see a
thin, almost emaciated looking young man of twenty or so approaching her and
smiling. He wore an oversize half-buttoned white shirt and pastel red baggy
silk pants. He had a shoulder-length mop of wispy black hair. Phyllis' first
impression was that of some nineteenth century lion tamer's apprentice.
"Yes," she smiled and shook his small, bird-like hand. He grinned widely.
"James Nareid."
"You can call me Phyllis." she said, assuming her best
friendly-but-professional tone.
"Yes. Phyllis. I see Ryeland has forced his tea upon you." He was looking
fixedly at her with wide hazel eyes that suggested no depth at all.
"Hardly," she said uncomfortably, his apparent pomposity and atrocious
hawk's gaze distracting her, "it's very good actually." There was a brief
pause before James spoke.
"Well, I've never done anything like this before so...do I pose?" he said,
looking hopeful.
"Oh, its nothing like that at all," she said laughing and beginning to root
through her bag. "I'll be shooting almost continuously for as long or as
briefly as you like. Obviously," she began pulling out several objects and
resting them carefully on the floor "the more variegated," she continued
fastening a lens and new cartridge on her Leico TiarraShot "-this is my
favorite camera- the more variegated the shots the more chance we have of
obtaining interesting results. Most random Image engines work best with
diverse shots of the main subject." She raised the camera and began shooting,
slowly and reflexively circling her subject. James was looking right at her
with an amused smile. "So just move around and pretend I'm not even here. Try
to do whatever it is you'd normally be doing."
"What if I'd be masturbating?" he said, with the same fixed grin.
This is going to be cake thought Phyllis.
"By all means, makes for some great stuff, semen. Nothing beats the old
money shot."
"Well," he said "I wouldn't be, but just checking. Maybe I'd have some
tea." He poured himself a cup from the pot Ryeland had left on the tray and
stared in profile at the fountain. Phyllis was now shooting from a crouched
position.
"Do I understand correctly, that in this deal I have you for as long as I
like?" he asked, looking now up at the skylight and taking a small sip of tea.
"Or while the optic medium holds out, maybe thirty hours worth of straight
shooting." she slowly rose from her crouch. James was now looking intently
into his china cup.
"This is good isn't it. A lovely blend." he smiled at her, "I do have a
little something planned..."
Every IM had by definition a huge database of countless portrayals,
delineations, and distortions of almost everything and everyone worth
capturing ever. These catalogs were more or less interchangeable, as there
were only so many sources for interesting material and the rate at which the
new became the old had almost achieved real-time. Stars of course were IM's
lifeblood and the majors spent vast amounts of resources farming out
difference and intrigue. Icons were routinely erected overnight only to have
their electronic exoskeletons ground into image-gristle weeks later.
Manufactured stars were not, however, the lifeblood of Process. They always
let you be the star, for the right price. An extravagant one. That any IM
could command the compensation for a location shoot, random engine
recombination, and print that PPI could was partially attributable to their
quality but mainly to their reputation. The finished product was good, this
was undeniable, the Process engine seemed to be able to make intuitive and
often otherworldly connections to attenuated and rarely used perceptions of
cultural totems disused by more mainstream IM's, but it wasn't that good. Yet
to own a Process episode of your own Process shoot was a status symbol the
monied worldwide coveted. Guaranteed only one original to exist, generated at
the Process labs with no human intervention. As their infrequent
advertisements claimed, two things in life are certain, only one isn't. Even
the daughter of the CEO of Junee-July had provoked no end of embarrassment at
corporate headquarters when she boasted of her Process shoot in an interview
with CRUEL.
Playing pool turned out to be the little something that James had spoken
about. He had led her upstairs into an oak paneled room with a huge table and
deep maroon carpeting. The room was dank with the smell of mold. For nearly an
hour he quietly racked, broke and cleared. Phyllis was doing her best to make
this look interesting, she guessed he wasn't half bad as a player, but this
would undoubtedly make for poor source material and she knew who would have to
carry the can for that. Occasionally he would light a cigarette and Phyllis
would frantically try every trick she knew to make it look dramatic. Ryeland
came in and offered another round of tea, which was declined, and informed
James that he would be leaving for the afternoon. "Is this okay?" he asked
Phyllis a few minutes later, after clearing the table and beginning to set up
a new break.
"Fine, sure." she said, trying to sound intrigued.
"If not, then there is something else I might be doing."
Phyllis followed James down a long, winding, semi-lit hallway that sloped
for maybe forty-five yards, shooting the entire way.
"I've always wanted to record my dreams," said James with a hint of
resignation, "but you people have made that desire obsolete, haven't you?"
"I'd like to think we augment peoples dreams." said Phyllis, shooting now
at close range, nearly over his shoulders. James stopped suddenly, maybe ten
meters from what appeared to Phyllis to be the end of the corridor. "Oh wait,
one thing I have got to have first, those inner lights? Do they still do
that?" It took Phyllis a few moments to understand what it was he wanted.
"Like in Goelsann's Deduche' Jar" said James.
"Micro-machines?"
"Yes! Can you do that?" He seemed almost childishly enthused by the idea.
"Sure." Phyllis said, halting the shoot. Micro-machines. Oh brother. How
hackneyed can he make this? She knelt again to root through her equipment bag.
"I have to tell you though, they do require you to sign a waiver authorizing a
hypodermic injection. Also," and suddenly the thought of injecting a syringe
full of little paddling chemo-phosphorescent machines into this fey man struck
her as too repulsive for words, "also, you may experience some after-effects
until they are completely flushed out of your system."
"Like?"
"Like headaches and diarrhea."
"That doesn't sound too terrible," he said, the smile fixed on his face.
Phyllis carefully unwrapped a new needle and handed both a pen and the
needle's paper jacket, which doubled as both waiver and warning, to James. He
signed it with short quick stabs.
"What density?" asked Phyllis.
"Pardon?"
"Do you want a few or a lot?" She was crouching and holding the needle
carefully, with both hands.
"Oh, light me up like a Christmas tree, by all means." She took his arm
and slowly administered the machine injection.
He was leaning against a brick wall of the corridor and looking at her with
half-lidded eyes as she fastened a chemo-sensitive lens to the TiarraShot.
"How long have you been doing this?" he asked. Phyllis stood up and
noticed, oddly and for the first time, that she was considerably taller than
James.
"Almost ten years, professionally four." She smiled and raised the camera.
"An old hand. You've seen some weird stuff, I bet." He was smiling and
walking slowly towards the corridors' end.
"Nothing's shocking." She said, following closely.
"That's good because some people might not feel up to recording something I
really want in this." And the room opened up behind him. Phyllis did not feel
well at that moment. Not at all.
She was naked and tied to a rusted metal table with red stockings. Her eyes
were open but un-focused and her hair was a matted brown. She was covered with
scars and uttered streams of non-words, like someone speaking in tongues,
every few moments. "This is a friend of mine, Phyllis. Her name is Alice,"
said James. He circled around the table and looked down at the woman with an
adoring glare. Phyllis had let her bag fall to the floor and the Leico drop to
her chest upon entering the large room but had now raised the camera again,
almost in self defense. The room at the end of the corridor turned out to be
large and rectangular, maybe twelve by twenty meters. One wall was completely
framed glass with a view out into what Phyllis guessed to be the rear
quadrangle of the estate. The ceiling was high, maybe twenty feet. The room
was dimly illuminated on the near side by an arc lamp that stretched from one
wall out over the table. There were several small wooden deck chairs scattered
around the table. It was nearly dark outside and the rain had begun again.
Through the camera James was beginning to glow with the tiny red, blue and
green lights of the micro-machines.
"I'm sort of a medical enthusiast, Phyllis." said James. She noticed, as
she circled around to his side of the table, the small tray of surgical
implements. "I've got some radical ideas in the area."
"So she needs an operation?" said Phyllis, getting weak in the knees, her
voice unsteady.
"Yes, very desperately." He smiled fixedly and looked at Phyllis.
"James," she said lowering the TiarraShot, "there was something in the
tea." She felt the rising edge of panic in her voice. The room seemed to be
the culmination of some deliberate and insidious chain of events. The
implements, her camera, the table and its babbling girl, all felt like props
in a game that was about to end.
"There was something in the tea, yes. Can I begin now?" He ventured a
quick glance at the camera dangling at her neck. Phyllis raised the camera
and un-halted. James was now almost a blazing sheet of white through the lens,
so she reflexively keyed the shutter speed down to avoid retinal burn. He
slowly raised a small cutting tool and leaned over Alice. The first incision
extended along her left side from her neck to just below her ribcage, a tiny
thread of blood following his hand. The girl on the table let out a low moan
and then uttered a small stream of sibilant non-words. Phyllis struggled to
hold the Leico steady, shooting now over James' shoulder. He cut her again,
more deeply this time, a small jet of blood leaping out of her neck and onto
the table. Phyllis let the camera fall and backed quickly away from the table.
"James, this-" she couldn't seem to form words and in her eyes she still saw
the faint ghost of James' blazing silhouette leaning over the table. "I have
to go," she turned, stumbled, and hit glass. The rain was coming down hard and
cold, running down her face. Phyllis felt dizzy, burning with confusion and
slicing pain.
"This thing I'm doing here," James said softly, kneeling in the broken
glass and firmly holding her bleeding arm, "is a dedication." He let go of her
and she watched in fear and bemusement as he ran the scalpel along his wrist.
He took her arm again and pressed his wrist to it.
Phyllis got up unsteadily and walked into the room. Her vision was swimming
and she felt an unbearable nausea. Alice was looking mutely at her from the
table, unblinking.
"If you are feeling ill," said James "we could finish some other time."
Phyllis had spilled her equipment bag by the entrance and was clumsily
packing.
"Yes," she muttered, speech feeling alien and unnatural to her mouth.
She got up, walked over to the glass wall, gave James a half-nod and ducked
out of the broken portion of the window into the rain. She found herself
choking back a sob as she stumbled around the outside of the house through the
downpour, fighting an urge to run. The rain felt like molasses running down
her face. The words and glances of peers reverberated in her head. A cam-tech
was a go-between for star and fanatic, a mere tool of the truly famous, the
elite. They couldn't know that Phyllis had wanted very much to opt out of the
loop. She could scarcely admit it to herself. She remembered her mother's
eyes, the curse that fame denied can really be. She just didn't have it. She
would fail this audition, there was no doubt. "Miss can't Cope..."
He was sitting in a deck chair by the illuminated end of the room,
smoking a cigarette. The girl and the table were gone. Phyllis breathed deeply
and tried to calm the speeding sensation her body was experiencing. D-Lysergic
acid, she told herself, kid's stuff. She silently pressed the camera to the
glass and un-halted. Momentarily James turned and looked at her. She had the
momentary thought that he looked like a vulture but resisted an urge to run
and kept shooting. A smile slowly spread across his thin face.
Welcome aboard. You handle yourself very professionally. I like your
technique. My son is my favorite camera by the way, and he likes you as well.
We'll be in touch. P. Reuters
There were two prints in the package, the first being Ursula's wedding
gift. Phyllis realized she must have left it behind when her bag had spilled.
An attached note chided her for her taste in IM's. Phyllis couldn't seem to
care about that at the moment, and took an immediate inlet into the other
episode. For many minutes the thing made very little sense indeed. A montage
of beautiful, wavering portraits, all vaguely familiar, all with the strangely
vast more real than reality edge every Process episode seemed to possess, but
no evidence of James at all. The thing then segued into a minimal children's
story of a farm girl who loved cats and had a cruel grandmother. The whole
thing somehow was the most astonishing episode she had ever seen but she
couldn't figure out why until the final few moments when the engine seemed to
power down from a spectral, idealized shot of a gigantic urban skyline into
the episode's source material. The final shot was a ghostly, skeletal
treatment of a woman soaked in rain, seen through glass and holding a camera,
treated with some sort of hyper-trophied ray tracing algorithm. The
micro-machines circulating beneath her skin tiny, red sparks.
____________________
She spun with grace and impossible quickness. The gun
skittered across the tar and arched in slow motion off the roof.
"- crazy if you thought you could kill me, Al." said Ursula.
Albert Einstein fell to his knees. He began to cry. "You're
pathetic. I knew your game from the first, and I waited too long
for this, but its going to be a different world from here on
out." Einstein looked slowly up into her eyes and nodded.
______________________________________________________________________________
Steven Schuldt is an undergraduate at the Sterling school of post-cyberpunk
fiction. He is currently majoring in Slipstream studies and working on his
first novel, tentatively titled "Transmission and Grace". He lives in Boston
with his fiance, three cats and a computer.
steve@ma.neavs.com
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS "Mike grinned his baiting grin,
waiting for anything that would keep
by Jim Vassilakos Johanes on the line just a few
moments longer. The Draconian
Chapter 12 seemed to read his mind from afar,
sifting implications through the
Copyright(c)1992 pours of Mike's skin."
______________________________________________________________________________
The condo's comm-board continued to beep, muted light from the Sintrivani
sketching dim lines across the white, plaster walls. Cecil curled his lip
into an angry grimace.
"Great hindsight, gatherer."
"Just answer it." Mike added a t-cross with his finger and thumb, an old
gatherer hand-sign, and one of the few which he remembered teaching Cecil. It
usually meant "track" or "follow", but given the proper context, it could mean
"trace". Cecil's cameras bobbed in comprehension as Johanes' image appeared on
the three-vee, a slight nod displaying all the greetings he wished to convey.
Cecil snorted, "Speak of the devil and he shalt come."
"Look, I don't have time to dance the verbal footsie with either of you. I
know that you're probably tracing this call, so just stop me if I start
getting long-winded."
Mike smiled, "Fat chance."
"I'm calling on your behalf, Michael. I realize that right now you probably
think that I'm lower than a swamp slog."
"You could have killed thousands of people, Johanes."
"But I didn't."
"And you tried to set me up. You sacrificed Nicholas. And for all you knew,
that nuke could have gone off in the heart of Xin."
"All true."
Mike shook his head is disbelief, "You don't even care."
"There's a lot at stake, Michael."
"Doomsday?"
"I've already told you far too much."
"Now you have to kill me, I suppose?" Mike grinned his baiting grin,
waiting for anything that would keep Johanes on the line just a few moments
longer. The Draconian seemed to read his mind from afar, sifting implications
through the pours of Mike's skin. He took a deep breath.
"If I wasn't pressed for time, perhaps I would do the honors, but I imagine
the Imps will do a far better job with you."
"Too bad. You could have done us all. Why didn't you?"
"Just do yourself a favor, Michael. Get back to Tizar. Forget about this
story. If you try publishing even half of what you know, it'll be the same as
signing your own execution warrant."
"How many times have I heard that before?"
"This isn't like the other stories. Don't give them a reason to pay you a
visit. It's not worth it."
His face flickered off the depth box as the connection broke, and within a
minute, Mike had dismembered the "bug" from its battery.
"Hmm... didn't self-destruct like the others. Did you trace him?"
Cecil shook his head, "He's a crafty one. He piggy-backed on a remote
dialer. Could have found him, but he dropped the line before it became
apparent."
"Damnit, Cecil! I had him on for how long?!"
"Cecil be sorry." The camera's made a dejected pose. "Got the last of it
recorded from the remote if you're interested. Just didn't think to extend the
trace in time."
"Great hindsight, hacker."
The camera nearest Mike perked sideways like a confused dog trying to see
things from a slightly different perspective: Cecil's way of acknowledging a
turn-about. However, something about its hound-like stance and the crumpled
flimsi in his pants pocket told Mike the chase wasn't over. The comm-address
glittered faintly as Mike flattened the flimsi out on the rug.
"Cecil, I just thought of something."
"Congratulations."
"Spokes managed to trace a call I made him from Gardansa's to a restricted
comm-address."
"So?"
"He was using amplitude logs or something. Can you do the same thing?"
The camera seemed to shrug.
"That could take days."
"I bet you he's at the Arien mansion. Just compare the dialing records to
the mansion and the immediate area around it."
Cecil half-sighed half-grumbled.
"He's not going to be that stupid, Michael. If he doesn't want you to find
him, that's the last place he would go."
"Unless...
Cecil's cameras started rotating in victorious delight as Mike looked out
the window toward Xin.
"...he has an good reason to be there. That was fast. He's inside the
mansion, I take it?"
"You aren't planning on going down there, are you?" The cameras stopped
rejoicing as Vilya's cat pawed at one of them, uncertain as to it's edibility.
"I'd like to know more about the Ariens themselves. They're playing some
part in this, Cecil."
"And probably on both sides of the court, knowing how psyches are."
Mike smirked. It was like Cecil to understate the galaxy's most common
prejudice just to needle him. He was probably baiting for the sort of reaction
that could get them into an hours-long argument. Anything to waste time and
keep Mike from going there. Cecil would simply consider it a friendly favor on
his part.
"I'm going down there. I don't believe Johanes will carry out his threat."
"Well, then say hello to the rioters. Tell them you're a nice neghrali and
maybe they won't hurt you either."
"I doubt I'll see any. Whatever unrest there is in Xin is not being
directed against the Ariens."
"Oh really?"
"Yeah, really."
"Anger, once sparked, burns a path toward the most opportunistic form of
release, no matter how malign or misdirected."
"What idiot said that?"
The quote flashed across the three-vee. Below it, "Shattered Eden, Michael
J. Harrison, Tyberian Publications." Mike scratched his head trying to figure
out whether or not Cecil was pulling his leg.
"So I write a lot of stupid things. Big deal."
"What are you going to gain by going there?"
"Maybe I'll be able to talk to Mr. Arien. I met him briefly, the last time
I was here."
"Met him?"
"Okay, Tara met him. I was there."
"Along for the ride."
"Yeah. All right. I don't really expect him to remember me, but if he does,
it could be the break I need."
"Or break you don't need."
"You have a better idea?"
Cecil shrugged, "Investigate from afar. It's less dangerous."
"If I had access to Cindy, I would."
"SNDI? Supernatural Data, Incorporated? You've got it, Michael. What did
you think the Doggie Blitz ran on? Punch cards?"
Mike tried to formulate an appropriate response as Cecil taught him how to
hook into the phone jack. From what he gathered, higher brain functions were
off-limits to all save the super-users or "wizards" as they were called. Mike
considered calling the favor, but he figured that lower-brain would be just
fine as long as he could avoid running into snags. Cecil retired to the
balcony. Outside, the warm, jetting waters of the Sintrivani carried a late
evening crowd high above the dispersed illumination save for the few strands
of blue and purple laser light captured within the misty fog.
"Woof!"
Mike jumped slightly, though the cat seemed neither to notice nor care. The
noise was in his head, no more than an electrical illusion.
"Access. File. Information. Library. Galactic Press."
"...Woof!"
"Does that mean..."
"Woof!"
"Damnit."
"...Woof!"
"Access. File. System. Output parameters. Errors. Command. Set format.
Long."
"...Pant pant."
Mike rubbed the side of his face. For a moment, he could almost smell wet,
sticky, dog breath.
"Very funny."
"...Woof! Illegal command ignored."
"Access. File. System. Output parameters. Errors. Command. Ignore. Keyword
woof."
"...Pant pant."
"Access. File. System. Output messages. Command. Galanglicize. Message.
Most recent."
"...Done."
"Access. Userlog. Current. Command. Find. Username. Spokes."
"...Done."
"Query. Date. Login through logout. Most recent."
"...Insufficient format specification."
"Tora-centric. Positive past. Unit centim. Single decimal."
"96.2 through 71.9."
Mike looked out the window wondering what Spokes was up to. The evening was
hacker time, and Spokes had been gone long enough to make it back to
Xekhasmeno. Long enough to get pulled off the road and molested by locals,
Mike figured.
Cecil was leaning back in a lounge chair, luxuriating in his abstinence
from the electronic environs as thin layers of warm mist settled over him and
the gleeful screams of children resounded in the distance. He used to say that
he needed the condo to get away from it all. Then, when he was rested, he'd go
back into a little cubicle somewhere and not be seen for days or weeks. It
didn't make a great deal of sense to Mike, but then a lot of things didn't
make much sense. He hoped that Spokes had the same idea. Better isolation than
dislocation.
"Access. File. Information. Library. The Aggressor. Interstellar society
page. Command. Search. Keyword Arien."
"...Insufficient file specification."
"Most recent."
"...Done."
"Say file."
"...Incompatible format error."
"Show file."
A page of the local paper appeared in glowing blue Calannic in front of
Mike's face. Even blinking his eyes refused to dislodge it, and whoever
scanned it into memory hadn't bothered to reduce it into text. Instead, it was
simply an image with a list of keywords attached to it. Sloppy but
cost-efficient.
As he began to scan the first few lines, Mike realized that the article
wasn't about the Arien family at all, but he instantly recognized the picture.
Long, dark hair fell straight along her spine, her sharp, brown eyes watching
the row of black grav-limos rising from a well manicured lawn. The color of
the cars clashed against her white evening dress, her shoulders bare save for
the reflection of headlights on deep, bronzed skin. In the background, a crowd
of people were escaping the Lion's Den. Mike remembered the awards ceremony
all too well. The headline read, "Draconian Ambassador Disappears."
"Cecil!"
"...Illegal command ignored."
"Command. Pause."
Cecil poked his head in.
"What is it?"
"I got something. How do I display this on the three-vee?"
Cecil strolled in, unplugging Mike and plugging himself in with two swift
motions of his wrist. The image appeared on the depth box a moment later.
"You know her?"
Mike nodded, "I met her at an awards banquet just before coming to Calanna.
It looks like this image was taken just after it."
"How did this turn up?"
"It says she was married to..."
Mike read the paragraph again, still shaking off his disbelief.
"...Alister Arien. An unnamed source in the Draconian Embassy blamed the
DSS. I don't believe this."
"Good. The written word is rarely worth believing."
"Why would they kidnap their own ambassador?"
"Cloak and dagger stuff. Conspiracy of hate. You know how it is."
Mike looked up incredulously. His old friend wore a fool's grin, the sort
he'd throw on for guests he was planning on throwing out. Mike stood up,
stepping toward the door.
"You don't buy any of this, do you."
"It's a local rag, Michael. The Aggressor rarely prints anything worth
reading beyond its entertainment value. Too bad Doggie Blitz doesn't carry The
Galactican. But then we'd have to deal with those silly writers' royalties,
not to mention all varieties of interstellar propaganda."
Mike winced, "I'm not biting, Cecil. I have to get to the Arien mansion."
"You already know Cecil's opinion."
"That I'm being hideously stupid?"
The nearest camera nodded, and Cecil sighed.
"Before you go, there's something more you should know."
"Such as?"
"Found something interesting while sifting through the booty from that
android brain."
"Robin?"
"She had some very peculiar orders, Michael. Orders which she had to
consult before deciding to fry you. She was to kill you and Niki upon touch
down and then report to her temporary supervisor for further instructions."
"Clay?"
"A chap by the name of William Walker."
Mike blinked, "Bill?"
"One and the same."
"That doesn't make sense."
"If she recognized him and he had the proper access code, then he could
have gotten inside just like we did tonight. Judging from these orders, he
could have gotten further."
"Why would Clay turn her over to Bill? Why would he send us on this mission
just to kill us?"
Cecil smiled, "A change of plans, perhaps? Now, at least, you and Johanes
might have something interesting to talk about. Give the Draconian Cecil's
warmest regards. Translation: if he blinks, fry him."
____________________
Evening descended into night as Mike approached the outskirts of Xin, his
impatience forcing a speed well beyond the limits proscribed by Calannan law.
Judging from the radio reports, however, he wouldn't have to worry about being
pulled over. The police were most likely busy in the inner city, quelling the
incessant looting and vandalism.
He'd seen riots before. Even in his early youth, he'd learned what to
expect. What made "Shattered Eden" a success wasn't so much the accurate
description of such events. It was the human nature that got people, the law
of opportunism as Cecil might have called it. To Mike, it was just sloth.
People liked to take the easy out in nearly all endeavors whether they were
flagellating their brains in the electronic void or expressing rage at things
they only barely understood. Even the grand Imperial bureaucracy which sought
to destroy an entire world had shied away from the big bang approach. Too
messy, they must have figured: bad for interstellar relations. Germ warfare
had been far easier for them, far less newsworthy.
These locals were no different. Mike knew they would try to hit the obvious
targets. But unlike Eden, the two most obvious targets, the Arien mansion and
Xekhasmeno, were both out of the way and very defensible. The Calannans could
fume and fuss, destroy small businesses, even kill a few unfortunates. But if
they wanted to make the sort of statement worth making, they'd have to take
casualties. Mike suspected that few rioters would be so inclined, because at
heart, those most indolent were often the most cowardly.
Thus, the Arien mansion resembled not so much a war zone as a refugee camp.
Bathed in the moon's faint luminescence, a quarrelsome throng resided outside
the front gates, tossing occasional molotovs onto the lawn and shouting
threats into the studded darkness. Mike parked at the side of the road among
the other vehicles and started circling the mansion grounds on foot to glean
some idea of his chances. He guessed that the direct approach would likely
constitute a recipe for suicide, as just outside the moat, he could discern
the movement of clumsy shapes in the darkness: a row of Alister's mutated
minions most probably. He could imagine the worgs wearing hungry grins, the
sort normally reserved for career bureaucrats and used grav-car dealers named
"Slim-price Sam".
Half way around, he spotted the yellow motorbike. It sat beside a row of
shrubs on the near side of the moat, plainly visible from the fence but hidden
from the mansion itself. Mike figured that either Johanes was taking
half-hearted precautions or he was planning a swift get-away. Another step
yielded sudden pain from below. Several thick cords of barbed wire lay strewn
about, one snagged on his bare foot. Mike knelt down, tearing it loose with a
determined yank. Someone had cut it off the top of the gate, motion sensors
and all, and a new wire was strung loosely between the severed ends carrying
electricity from one side to the other but skipping the portion in between.
Mike climbed up and over, smearing blood on the cermelicon rails and finally
settling himself on estate grounds just inside the gate.
As though on cue, the noise of gun spray cracked through the air. Mike
froze, huddling into a ball before he realized that he wasn't a target. The
gun towers were firing on the front gates as gas canisters exploded in the
crowd's midst. Though nearly half a kilometer distant, Mike could still see
the gates open, cermelicon railings reflecting the moonlight as they slid to
the side allowing the worgs to charge through. It was a slaughter, pure and
simple, and those who couldn't make it back to their vehicles were chewed up
and left to rot on the blood stained pavement.
Mike picked himself off the grass, the moments ticking in his mind with
each heartbeat in his ears as he began bolting toward the mansion. Every
stride ate precious time, but with all attention focused on the front gate,
Mike skidded to a halt beside Johanes' bike having apparently attracted no
notice whatsoever. The bike's motor idled quietly, its noise muffled by a
black, plastic jacket. A long, insulated tube extended from the jacket,
running to the moat beneath the shrubbery. It was a cooling sheath, Mike
guessed, keeping the bike both quiet and invisible to infra-red sensors as
well as protecting it from overheating.
Reaching up, Mike gently switched off the motor and pocketed the key,
glancing toward the moat as though it were an after- thought, a fifteen meter
wide after-thought with gun towers looming overhead and tales of a moat
monster fully appreciated. Still, the mansion walls beckoned, and Mike knew
he'd never have a better chance. The water was warm and mucky, its thin layer
of brown surface jelly sending memories of Aiwelk tumbling about in his head.
Holding the automatic pistol overhead, Mike tried wading across but sunk into
the deep, slimy mud along the moat's banks. He finally resorted to lodging the
barrel between his teeth and dog paddling like a mad man.
Leafy, moist vegetation hugged the mansion's stone walls amidst a tapestry
of drab moss which dipped gently into the water. The thin vines were
surprisingly strong, and Mike found himself climbing upward toward the second
floor windows when he felt an annoying tug at his legs. The moat had extruded
a long, grey tentacle which had wrapped a determined hold around his ankles.
"Good evening, Mister Harrison. So good of you to drop by."
Mike nearly fell off the wall, his mud caked hand frozen just inches from
his mouth. The voice came from the nearest gun tower. He could see Mr. Arien's
head sticking from a window one floor above him, his sparse, silver hair
glittering in the dim moonlight. Johanes stood beside the old man, a dour
grimace painted across the Draconian's lips. The barrel of a rifle poked out
an adjacent window, its laser sights cutting a fine beam of light through the
damp air between it and the back of Mike's neck.
"At a loss for words?"
Mike spat, propelling the pistol from his mouth into the murky water below.
The grey tentacle immediately retreated back beneath the surface either in
response to some unseen command or in order to examine its new, metallic
visitor.
"That's better." Someone handed Arien a flimsi. "Let's see what we have on
you. Mmmm... juicy. You've been up to mischief, young man?"
"A little. Can I come inside?"
"Just hang out."
Mike gripped two vines and stayed put, the thought of diving back into the
moat playing back and forth between his brain lobes. Leaning over slightly,
Johanes seemed to whisper something into Arien's ear.
"Kill him?! Our first truly determined trespasser in how many years?"
Johanes winced and gritted his teeth as the old man continued. "Mr. Harrison,
being that I am expecting company rather soon, I don't have a great deal of
time to chit-chat, so you'll have to be brief. Why shouldn't I blast you off
my walls like the bug you are, and more importantly, why does your Draconian
friend want me to?"
"To your first question: Ambassador Kato. To your second: he's not my
friend." Mike bit his lip, half expecting to become a late night morsel for
the moat creature. Arien, however, seemed to frown in consideration.
"Bring him up."
The rope was easier to climb than wall carpet, and Mike accepted the
invitation with a healthy tug. Inside, Johanes and Arien were surrounded by a
number of guards, each wearing black body armor and carrying automatic rifles
with electronic sights. Perfect for sniping the locals, Mike figured, though a
bit long ranged for disposing of nosy gatherers.
"Do not be afraid, Mr. Harrison. I have no intention of killing you so long
as you speak the truth. Where is she?"
Mike gulped down, trying to conjure the knowledge as Johanes answered for
him.
"You're wasting your time. He knows nothing. If you refuse to punish him
directly, Alister, at least turn him over to the police."
"Silence, Draconian. I wish to hear what he has to say."
Mike looked back toward the open window. Muddy footprints left his trace
easily visible. He shook his arms off, finally turning toward Arien with a
discouraged shrug.
"I don't know where she is. The last time I saw the Ambassador was on
Tizar. She wanted me to come here to Calanna."
"To do what?"
"To die, apparently, or so Robin said."
"Robin?"
Johanes stepped between them, "We don't have time for this nonsense,
Alister. Sule will be arriving with the Ambassador and Erestyl at any moment."
Mike squinted, "Sule? ISIS?"
"Stay out of this, Michael."
"ISIS is coming here?! What, their mind scanners didn't work, so you're
cooperating?" Mike gazed, incredulously.
"I'm warning you..."
"No. No, you're not. You want Sule. One bullet, and it'll be over. You're
aware of the nuclear detonation today, Mr. Arien?"
"Michael!"
"There's a fair chance that the Ambassador was at ground zero. You already
know that I'm wanted by the police for homicide. Well Johanes here isn't
wanted for anything, and it's very likely that he's guilty of murdering your
wife."
"Michael, we're not playing games here! Your fantasies will have to find
another audience."
"Why the fast getaway, Johanes? You planning to just kill and run?"
"I have no intention of running."
Johanes drew a pistol from his coat, an integral laser pistol to be more
exact. It's polished iridium handle made it look more like a hood ornament
than a weapon, however, with it aimed between his eyes, Mike didn't doubt its
lethal competence. Given the proper setting, he'd seen such devices carve
holes in flesh so neatly, they could cauterize the wounds they inflicted
before spilling a single drop of blood. He guessed that Johanes had been
saving this weapon for a special occasion and tried to feel honored.
"No!"
The voice was Arien's, and Johanes obeyed it, if only for a moment.
"Alister..."
"Put it down."
"I am politely asking your permission to kill this liar."
"Put it down or be punctured."
Nearly every automatic rifle in the room pointed toward the Draconian, the
glint of steel wary with expectation as three of the guards crouched down at
the corners to avoid the cross fire. It was the sort of threat that would be
carried out with neither postponement nor afterthought, and Mike watched,
silent and breathless, as Johanes, wavering with indecision, reluctantly
complied.
"Restrain him."
"Of for... there's no need to..."
"Remain still, Johanes. I do not wish to see you damaged. Please continue,
Mr. Harrison. Your hypothesis intrigues me."
Mike sat down on the window sill, oblivious for once to the squashing sound
of his muddy pants. He imagined falling backwards into the moat, nose
cartilage sunken deep within his skull and Johanes' boot print embedded firmly
upon his face. Johanes was thinking it too. His eyes betrayed him, if not his
fists or the veins in his neck. Throat dry with expired fear, Mike swallowed a
warm drop of saliva and blinked in consideration of where to begin.
"It's no longer hypothetical."
Mike withdrew the key from his pocket.
"Your fence has a hole in it. Just across the moat you'll find Johanes'
bike. There's a cooling sheath wrapped around the motor. That he was planning
a quick escape was obvious. I just couldn't figure out why. Now I can. If Sule
is coming here with Erestyl, it means that the mind scanner wasn't a success.
They need a telepath to get inside his head. Somebody good. Like you. Am I
right?"
"Continue."
"However, you've never worked for Imperials, at least not to my knowledge,
and according to Kitara, you have as much reason to hate them as I do."
Arien's eyes sparkled at his recollection of the Siri.
"You knew Kitara?"
"Very well. You probably don't remember me, but we've met before. A year
ago. She told me a few things about you. If you're working for the Imps, you
must have a very good reason. That's where Ambassador Kato comes in. ISIS has
her. Just stop me if I'm wrong."
"You're right."
"Are you're certain she's still alive?"
Arien looked down, drawing a deep breath. "No. However, as long as the
possibility remains..."
"You'll do anything for anyone. And Johanes here, he's to deal with Sule as
soon as the Ambassador is safe. To let Imperial blood fall on Draconian hands.
Pardon my candor, Mr. Arien, but you're a fool."
"Perhaps."
"Did Johanes explain to you what's at stake?"
"He didn't have to. I've known of the Prometheus device for some time."
"Prometheus device?"
Arien glanced toward Johanes, his eyes betraying a mixture of uncertainty
and solicitation.
"He doesn't know?"
Johanes shook his head, "I was trying to protect him from the details."
Mike broke in, "What about this Prometheus device?"
"It's like one of those weapons we were talking about, Mike, the kind that
kill en masse. Only this one gives en masse a whole new definition."
"Doomsday?"
"You don't want to know the details. Trust me."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because... if you publish so much as a peep, you're dead meat."
"The Imps already want to kill me, Jo, and at least one member of the DSS
seems to feel the same way."
Johanes smiled, "I don't want to kill you, Mike. I want to throttle you,
and then I want to kill you."
"Oh, thanks. That makes me feel so much better."
"Don't take it personally. I want to do likewise with Alister here."
"Now is not a good time to be threatening me, Johanes."
"You think I give a damn? You think I'm in this for my jollies like Mike
here? Tell me something, Alister. Even assuming that Sule's telling the truth
and Kato is somehow still alive, heaven forbid that should be the case, but
just supposing it is... tell me something. Is she worth it? Doomsday for a
single human life?"
Arien looked insulted, then confused, then finally a mixture of the two.
"How am I supposed to answer that?"
"Don't answer it. Just think about it. It's not too late. We can still turn
this thing around. All I'm asking for is one clear shot. I'll take Sule out
like a can of garbage. We'll have Erestyl. We'll find your wife, if she's
still alive. Just trust me. For one lousy night, trust me."
"If I let you kill Sule..."
"I know what you're going to say, Alister, and she's already dead... or
worse than dead. Why the hell can't you see that?! You know what ISIS does to
captives like her."
"Mental mutilation."
"That's right. She'll be a zombie, Alister. You'll be trading the secret of
Promethius for a zombie. Think it over."
"I have already," He looked toward Mike as he announced the decision, not
so much at him as through him, and strange it may seem, Mike found himself
frozen, unable to turn aside from the tone of finality in the old man's voice,
unable to blink from the sight of his eyes nor even shut his mind to the
message they contained. It was as though Alister had seen something in him, a
fragment of thought, a whisp of spirit, or even a moment of future destiny.
Whatever it was, he counted on it, settling more weight upon its value that
Mike cared to ascertain. And then Alister turned away, the moment lost in the
shuffle of a heartbeat.
"As you perhaps know, Johanes, there are ways of repairing such injuries
given the proper precautions, and Draconians are, generally speaking, very
cautious people. I'd thought I'd convinced you to bide your time, to wait for
the right moment, however, it seems that you have reverted to your original
idea. Kill her at the first opportunity, and leave old Alister to pick up the
pieces. Who can tell why? Perhaps you expected that the right moment would
never come, that it was stolen by things that go boom in the daytime."
"Nuke?" Mike queried.
Arien nodded, "I'd always known it was a fitting nick-name. Her temper was
rather explosive. But if I'd known what would be her end..."
"Both Sule and Erestyl apparently survived."
"Regardless, this Draconian filth tried to sacrifice her like some..."
"I know what I did! I'm not pleased about it anymore than you, but I'd do
it again, and you know damn well the reason!"
"Yes, of course. You were just being cautious."
A small, metallic sphere floated in through the door, a red light flashing
at its zenith.
"Speak."
"Sule has arrived, my lord. She is outside the front gate awaiting
permission to enter."
"Grant it. Guards, make our guests comfortable."
Arien left, bequeathing his private soldiers with a simple if indefinite
task. Mike stood back, smiling ever so slightly as Johanes was physically
searched in the most comprehensive manner allowable by law. Being that
Calannan law was rather lax on such matters, he had some time to wait and
wonder if he was to be their next victim. Several minutes later, they found
themselves in a basement cell, Johanes wearing a towel one of Arien's more
generous employees had loaned him. He stood in the cell's corner, feet
together and legs slightly bent, the white towel knotted around his waist.
Mike tried to churn forth a wholesome expression.
"Did it hurt?"
Johanes merely gritted his teeth in response, angry eyes glaring stubbornly
at the opposite wall. Mike nodded, trying to look sympathetic.
"I'm just asking, because if you think you need a proctologist or
anything..."
"Shut-up, Harrison."
"Right... um," Mike paused, searching for the right words, "Do you mind if
I ask you a question?"
Johanes ignored him, wincing as he shifted his weight slightly.
"Were you really going to shoot me back there?"
"Yes."
"You were."
"Absolutely."
"May I ask why?"
Johanes snorted and then winced again as the vibration crawled down along
his spine. Mike looked away, granting him some private latitude for expression
of discomfort.
"I mean, it's a little extreme, isn't it? To shoot somebody?"
"Why don't you ask Bill Walker."
"Where did you hear about that?"
"Various places. Before the operation you were telling Cecil all about it."
Mike shook his head, "Then you heard it was self-defense, and Bill was a
friend."
"A friend, perhaps. As for self-defense, I understand that he was unarmed."
"I had no choice."
"Precisely. You were protecting your own precious hide from an unarmed
friend as you put it. I, on the other hand, am trying to protect millions of
people."
Mike smiled, "Let me get this straight. You pull out a laser with every
intention of carving holes in me, and two cents later you're calling my
morality into question?"
"You got it. Oh, and by the way, I didn't have the heart to tell you this
before, but you'll probably figure it out sooner or later. Your friend was
working for the Imps, true enough, but he didn't know it until it was too
late. He thought he was working for the DSS, for John Clay to be more precise.
He didn't really know what he'd gotten himself into until Sule came prancing
along."
Mike stared back incredulously, the smile wiped from his face as thoroughly
as if he'd been hit by a ton of bricks. Johanes simply nodded and continued.
"ISIS found out about Erestyl being on Tizar when Clay, one of our boys,
decided he was getting a lousy deal from the agency. He cleverly diverted our
internal investigations after the raid on the med-center by shifting the blame
for Erestyl's capture to you. Then he disappeared, and that disk you stole
from the Solomon mansion... that disk you left in Walker's hands... it became
extremely valuable to ISIS. I don't know whether Clay told your friend what to
expect from Robin upon reaching Calanna or whether he just figured it out by
himself, but either way, Walker saved your life, and you repaid him by blowing
a hole through his chest. Why, if it wasn't for your juvenile curiosity
combined with those amazing trigger-happy reflexes, your friend would still be
alive."
Mike held his breath for a moment to keep from bolting to his feet. Getting
into a fight with Johanes was not something he would let himself be talked
into.
"You're twisting it, Jo. He was with Sule. He was trying to get me captured
by ISIS."
"For questioning. My guess is that he figured that you knew just about
nothing regarding Erestyl. Sule probably promised him that you'd be set free,
and who knows, you might very well have been at that point. You were still
blissfully ignorant, and you'd already done them a great service. You played
right into their trap, after all."
"You don't honestly believe that."
"What you or I believe isn't particularly important. It's what Bill
believed that is interesting. You wrote him off as a traitor without even
bothering to attend the funeral. When the locals got around to doing an
autopsy on the body, they found the primary arteries in his neck already
shattered. The culprit was a tiny capsule with its own radio receiver, timing
mechanism, and explosive charge courtesy of ISIS. Their leverage over him,
Michael. Your friend knew that he'd made a huge mistake. He knew that you were
in the process of making another similar mistake, and he wanted to get you out
of the picture as quickly and as painlessly as possible, even if it meant
handing you over to the Imps. As far as he was concerned, they'd catch you
sooner or later."
"The psyche bloodhound?"
Johanes nodded, "A gift from Alister. Before the Imps admitted to having
Ambassador Kato, they had Clay pay Alister a social call. Clay, I am told, was
very convincing in blaming Kato's capture on rogue elements in the DSS. He
requested psychic assistance in tracking her down."
"Arien couldn't see through it?"
"Clay has a psionic shield implant."
"You're reaching, Jo."
"If you don't believe me, the why don't you look at his file. I'm sure
Cecil could supply it now that he's virtually jumped Robin's bones."
"She doesn't have any bones, and I'm not buying any of this."
"Her circuits then, and yes you are. Because it's true, and you know it."
Mike took a deep breath. "Why are you telling me this?"
Johanes shrugged, "Because, it's as close to throttling you as I'm likely
to get... at least in this lifetime. You may not realize it yet, Michael, but
you're not long for this world."
"Sule doesn't even know I'm here."
"If Vlep lives, she knows."
"Vlep?"
"The psyche bloodhound."
Mike winced, "He lives."
Johanes cocked his head sideways, "What makes you so certain?"
"I hand-cuffed him to a steering wheel this morning."
Johanes coughed, "You what?"
"It's a bit of a story."
"We seem to have a bit of spare time."
____________________
Despair curled about the corridor like knotted strands of raw meat, a
nourishing meal, though people rarely gobbled it with enthusiasm. Pausing, she
carefully rested her hand upon the stone tile. Johanes and several of the
guards had passed recently. Remnants of their emotions lay scattered
carelessly, and yet there was more, the gatherer she had yet to meet. He was
neither angry nor dutiful. Instead, he seemed relieved, as though being jailed
in the mansion's dungeon had been more reprieve than punishment. Why Sule had
requested him, she could scarcely imagine. The bio-synthe was difficult to
read. So many of them turned out deranged, trying to establish a telepathic
rapport was rarely worth the effort.
Mixtures of fear and respect pressed quickly away as the guards stepped
aside to let her pass, and with a slight motion of her thumb, the one at the
end opened the tall, brown door. Its metal plating was rusty with age, and its
grey, galvorn lock jutted out conspicuously like some misbehaved organ.
Inside, Johanes leaned against a wall as the gatherer sat on the bench,
looking up cautiously, his eyes keen and brown, a web of fear swept over
whatever curiosity still lingered.
"Korina?" Johanes pressed against the bars. "Kori... tell me you've come to
let me out of here."
"In your dreams, Draconian. Father sent me for the gatherer."
She watched the figure on the bench. He stood slowly, naked save for a pair
of mud-caked britches. Turning, Johanes slumped his shoulders.
"Sule wants him, eh? We'd already assumed as much."
"Get out of the way."
Johanes complied, escalating Mike forward with a swift boot to the back.
"Go ahead, Michael. And good fortune. You'll need it."
Mike let himself be escorted down the corridor. Two guards stayed behind
them, their rifles ready for a moment's distraction. The young woman at his
side seemed to ignore them, her green eyes lost in a dreamy haze. As they
passed a row of windows, he considered making a break for it. To die with
bullets in his back or bullets in his front, it made little difference. Even
the gullet of the strange moat creature seemed preferable to a meeting with
Sule. Green eyes watched him from the corners of their vision.
"Don't be afraid. As long as you are here, my father will see to your
safety."
Mike nodded doubtfully, the poke of a muzzle nudging his spine.
"And what about Erestyl?"
"He is Imperial property."
"Oh," Mike gulped, "so that's how it works."
She stopped in the antechamber before the sanctuary. Mike remembered the
mauve carpet and indigo tapestries all too well. Tara had been ignoring him
the night of their visit, so he'd wandered around until he was sure he was
lost, eventually winding up in the meditation chamber with his head poked out
a window, sky-diving snot wads and half-nibbled hors d'oeuvres on the
patrolling worgs. She found him after a few direct hits, apparently aware of
some bizarre sense of satisfaction he was feeling and curious as to its
source. They ended up spending half the night there before the servants
finally kicked them out. Green eyes stared through him, her expression
lingering in the grey stretch between curiosity and bewilderment. Mike looked
back at the floor and consciously cleared his mind.
"My thoughts are my property."
She opened her mouth as if to respond and then shut it again. Mike regarded
her indecision with contempt.
"If you have something to say, say it."
"I was curious as to why she wants you."
"Sule? Why don't you read her like you did me?"
"She..." green eyes narrowed, "it is difficult."
"Must really stink to have a puzzle, eh?"
"I'll survive."
Mike let his annoyance fade into a mediocre smirk. "Are we going in or
not?"
She thumped the base of her palm against the door, the resulting sound dull
but determined, and as though by its own volition, the wooden barrier slid
quietly into the wall. Sule stood at arm's reach, her silver-hued eyes
glinting with the barest trace of anger.
Mike gulped down, "You called?"
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu) just graduated from UCR with an MBA. In
between responding to employment advertisements and attending Job Fairs, he
DM's a hearty group of dormies and wonders how he's going to finish Harrison
off once and for all. Judging his protagionist's current situation, he may not
have to wonder for very long.
`The Harrison Chapters' will be continued next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
LAST TRAIN "But Old General Ven, he be tryin to
call `em back. that high-rankin' ole
by Lou Crago sumbitch, he all the time tryin to
yank `em back down. He a Motor Man,
Copyright(c)1992 thas why. All Motor Mans, first to
lass, is bad!"
______________________________________________________________________________
On the trak, there was nothin' for the babies to do but jes rest they minds.
They be trandscendin' the worlds - all the worlds that anybody evah thought
of. They don't have to be thinkin' bout nothing' at all anymore.
But Old General Ven, he be tryin to call `em back. that high-rankin' ole
sumbitch, he all the time tryin to yank `em back down. He a Motor Man, thas
why. All Motor Mans, first to lass, is bad!
Them babies rollin around on the trak, and they payin no mind to Old Ven.
And ever time he come, he try to get `em down, but they not lissnen. And after
while he give up, and he come over to where I'm layin on the floor, and he say
all that metal talk at me. And when I don't answer back, he give me a kick in
mah ribs. Then he go out the place and the door shut behind him and you hear
them magnetic bolts lockin into place.
Most times, I jes lay there and watch them babies. I watch `em rollin,
cause I can see `em. Old Ven, he know I can see `em, and it make him mad as
hell - cause he can't. He a Motor Man, he ain't got livin eyes, not like me. I
guess thas why he keep on lettin' me live. He kick me sometimes, but he won't
kill me. If he kill me, he know he won't never get them babies!
I lie and watch long through the night, and them babies they shining in mah
mind, they like the sunrise what used to come on this here planet, they like
what used to be stars in the night. They singing too - not like any song, not
`zactly a sound, but I hears `em. And when them babies sing, it sho do grab
me.
Then I got to fight like hell not to think of the way it wuz. I got to
fight to stay steady just like I is now, and keep on bein just what I done
decided to be. I can't even think one single thought that ain't in line with
that, else them Motor Mens be tracin it on machines they got. So I lie still
and lissen to them babies singing, and if I think `bout anything, I be dam
sure it's somethin like feels good to be scratching fleas, or how tasty corn
pone is with molasses poured on it. Stuff like that.
And it's been near about fifteen days now, but I doin it so good that Old
Ven and them other Motor Mens ain't picked up a thing yet. And mah babies,
they safe on the trak where Old Ven, even he do be a General and got all his
science mens with him, he can't get `em down. No sir, long as theys on the
trak, they gone! They got no bodies, they got no minds, they got nuthin he can
grab hold of, nuthin he can download. And it `bout to drive Old Ven and them
crazy. I lie there, and I'm anxious as hell, but all the time I be laffin too.
We ain't safe yet, no way. There be one of them babies ain't restin her
mind too good, she sometime lose hold of what's happenin. And she come down a
little bit then, and she sorta like hang her head down over the trak. And she
be callin out, wantin' to know if it maybe it be good to come down to the
world again, like Old Ven been sayin' over and over. She startin' to innerface
again, with this damned world she don't even know is trashed.
I calls her Glo, and I says, "Glo, you git back! Long as I'm here, you
ain't no way comin down! So don't be thinkin `bout it. You go back to restin
yo mind!"
She say, "I remember things. I remember."
And the more she remember, the more she start to take on shape. And I got
to nip that in the bud right there, damn quick!.
So I say, "Glo, git on back now! What's the use of me bein here, and layin
on this hard floor night after night like a old dog, if you gonna fool around
that way? If you let Old Ven talk you down, then he gonna kill me. That what
you want?"
She say, "I'll go back, but talk to me a little first, Gabriel. When I
start remembering things, I get so terribly lonely."
I say, "Okay, Honey, we chat a little bit. But then you go back to restin'
yo mind on nuthin, like them others."
She say, "How many of us are there, Gabriel?" She axed me this question
before, but I got to tell her again and again `cause when she outta mind she
can't remember.
"They's twenty-four of you," I reminds her. "You a dozen positive and a
dozen negative. And you is the last ones on this here planet, so you gotta
remember that, okay?"
"I'll remember," she say. But she sounding sleepy and dreamy, and I know
she `bout ready to go back. Which is fine, `cause no matter how much pleasure
I might git outta chattin, it ain't good for her to be thinkin and talkin. If
Old Ven come in while she in her mind, then it'a be hell to pay. Then if she
take a form, he be able to grab her. Then we all be up shit creek.
She say, "I wanted to ask you, Gabriel..."
" `Bout what, Honey?"
"How is it that you're in a body? Why didn't you die... like all the
others?"
But she startin to lose her mind shape right then, and in a minnit she back
on the trak restin along with them others, and she be transcendin all the
worlds. I hates to lose her company, but all the same I give a sigh of
relief. Now we all safe for another night. Nothin won't be happenin on this
here world.
It weren't even mornin yet. Old Ven he come in, and a bunch of Motor Mens
followin him, and they makin their metal talk. They walks up and down, up and
down, and they starin at the track, and they hookin up wires and makin beeps.
But after a while they sees it ain't doin no good. No way can they access them
babies.
So Old Ven he come over to where I'm layin and this time he don't kick, he
squats down and he stares. Then he start in to talkin at me. He know I don't
unnerstand no metal talk, I be too low a form, but he keep on. He lookin' at
mah eyes, and he even tryin' to smile - which is a pitiful sight on the face
of a Motor Man, lemmie tell you! - and then he waitin for me to feedback.
But I ain't sayin nothin, `cause by now there ain't nothin for me to say to
the likes of him. Things is the way they is: the babies is the last ones, and
the Motor Mans is stranded, and we all here in it together. He gonna keep
tryin to git them babies, and I'm gonna keep tryin to make damn sure he don't
- so there ain't nothin to be said. Old Ven, he know this good as I do.
Then, I guess he make up his mind to do somethin he ain't tried before. He
grab me up and start walkin out the door of that room with me. But `bout that
time the trak commence to shiver and shake, and it makin' a terrible whine,
and the babies rollin faster and faster. `Cause me and them babies, we linked
up. We been linked up all through time, whatever shape we be in. Back before
the end, half the time them babies didn't even know it - they just goin along,
bein first one thing and then another, and they ain't studyin `bout no linkup.
And me, I be lookin like whatever I done decide to look like, and most the
time them babies ain't catchin on to who or whut I wuz. But that don't make no
nevermind, `cause we got the link. We got the synchronous wave goin, we ain't
never outta touch with each other. So when Old Ven he try to take me outta
there and do somethin bad to me, them babies they feelin it and they commencin
to waller around.
So Old Ven he see he can't do it that way or them babies gonna go clean out
they minds. And maybe they quit lyin there all nice in a row, hummin that soft
song, and maybe they start to go crazy and throw theyselfs around. If all
twenty-four of `em gits crazy and raisin hell all at once, that old trak ain't
gonna stand the pressure, it'a break sure as hell! Them babies, they got power
- they don't even know theyselfs how much power, `cause they keep on
forgettin.
But ah know.
And Old Ven, he know. Him and his science mens, they smart enough to figure
out about the trak, `cause they seen ones just like it on them other planets.
And they smart enough to build this here magnetic room to hold it, knowin its
the attractor for them babies, and they gonna come straight to it when
everthing else break down. But Old Ven he also know he got to play it easy,
else he end up with nothin - the trak broke, and them babies withered up and
dead, not fit to make no shapes a'tall.
So he put me back down on the floor and he wave his hand to them other
Motor Mens. They come over and they holdin me down, pretendin they gonna be
easy like, but they starts in puttin' them wires on me, stickin `em in with
little bitty pins. They got me wired through everplace they can, and it ain't
hurtin too much. But it's makin somethin rise in me, they's a rushin feelin in
me, and they's sparks startin to jump out from all over mah hide.
So I have to hold real still, and keep on thinkin to myself over and over
how I ain't gonna change my shape, how I ain't gonna let `em shake me loose
from this here form I took on, which is what I made up mah mind to be, back
when the end done come.
They pumpin the juice through them wires and the sparks is jumpin out, and
Old Ven he come and hunker down on the floor beside me and he start to talk at
me again.
He say, "Our readings show that you are not at all a primitive vertebrate,
as you have the appearance. You are a Monad, merely taking this shape."
I keepin' myself real still. I tellin' mahself over and over the way I
wants it to be.
Old Ven he nod to them Motor Mens and they pour on more juice, and them
wires in me they start to heat up. They stingin like wasps used to be, and
then they burnin like red-hot needles, but I go on tellin mahself I got to
stand it, `cause they's no way I'm lettin him get them babies.
Well...they keep on doin it for a long time, a damn long time. Finally, he
tell `em shut off the juice, and he let me drink a little water from a tube he
got.
He say, "The drink will make you feel at ease."
That drink taste funny, but it do in fact make me feel a whole lot better.
Then he give me some more. And then they start pumpin the juice through them
wires again, but now they ain't hurtin a'tall. Everwhere on me that one of
them wires is pinned through, there's a fine feelin, like starting to tremble
with some kinda crazy joy, starting to roll with it, startin to take it on
home, so fine that I can`t stop.
Old Ven's talkin through the waves risin in me, and he sound so fine and
mellow and like he mah friend, and he say, "Now, tell me who you are. Tell me
what your name is."
I ain't wantin to say nothin to Ven, but it sorta leak outta me without my
knowin. "I be Gabriel, boss."
He say, "Tell me now, what form did you have before the destruction?"
I tryin to sort of growl but it come out a whine, and I can't keep mahself
from answerin. "Wuz humanoid, boss."
Old Ven say, "What is the purpose of this form you have assumed? It is
not in the index of creatures which were indigenous to this planet. There is
nothing like it in our archives. There were hirsute quadrapeds, but none with
the cranial formation you have assumed. You appear to have amalgamated
disparate species. What is the purpose?"
I tryin hard as hell to keep mah mouth shut, I tryin to think `bout
scratchin fleas, but that water he give me makin mah head swim. The words
comin out of me and there ain't nothin I can do.
"That old blast come too soon," I tell him. "I wudden no way ready! I was
jest then thinkin `bout how I gotta get me a form that nobody gonna pay no
attention to."
"But you could have disincorporated, returned to baseline presence."
"No, boss, no. You don't unnerstan. I do that and they's no way I can hang
around and watch after them babies. I had to get me a form real quick, I had
to choose somethin. And I was standin there thinkin `bout all the stuff I done
ever knowed on this planet."
"Cultural images?" Ven axes me. "Mythical images?"
"Everthing, first to lass," I tell him. "Run it through mah head, from the
time it first started up on this here dirt-ball all the way down to when you
muthfukkin Motor Mens come flyin down."
"What technological devices did you employ?" he axe me.
"I don't have no truck with that stuff," I tell him. "Ain't needin it. I
just be scannin through all I got in mind, and then I be whatever I decides to
be. But when the blast come, it taken me by surprise. And I flashed on
pictures I seen in a little old book, one time when I was bein a child. I
recollected them pictures I seen once, `cause they be folks nobody gonna
notice much."
"What pictures?" Ven axe me.
"They was Old Uncle Tom. And nother `bout Old Dog Tray."
Ven say, "Explicate Uncle Tom form. Explicate Dog Tray form."
But I start to lose hold long about then. I start to lose mah grasp of
vernacular and mah Tom-Tray persona but, damn that drink, I couldn't stop
talkin. "It got mixed...between least animal and least human..."
Ven saw I was losing verbal control. He jerked my head up. "Your origin?"
he demanded. "Inside the System or outside?"
"Outside."
"Will they send a mission to retrieve you?"
"No," I said, with difficulty. "...guardian... take surviving
archiplasms... out."
Ven dropped my head and talked to the other Motor Men. I was in a black and
buzzing place and couldn't distinguish what they said. Then he came back to
me. And the wires began to heat up once more. Now it was pain and pleasure
mixed intolerably, so that I could neither accept nor reject. I had to fight
very hard to keep myself from leaving form. You do not know the excruciation
form can be until it is tormented.
He eased it very slightly, and said, "We can keep you embodied and held
precisely at this point for a long, long time. You are a Monad, you cannot
expire. We can prevent your disincorporating. And there is nothing - nothing
anywhere - that can intervene."
He had them heat the wires a little hotter. "It is imperative that we have
the surviving archiplasms! They must come back into form. They must
re-initiate organic life on this planet."
"This world is dead," I managed to say. "You won't be able to start it
again. It's a corpse."
"We risked a great deal in order to take this habitat," Ven said. "But it
is useless, as it is now. We cannot return to where we came from because it is
destroyed, and we cannot continue here without organic life to provide raw
materials. Those last surviving archiplasms must enter into form, they must
re-boot generation."
"Slavery," I said. "Never-ending slavery."
"You can see them, so you must bring them down from the trak. You must
force them to take back consciousness of worlds."
He leaned down and stared at me with his unliving eyes. "Our entire future
depends on what you do - on what I can make you do," he amended. "You will
acquiese eventually, Monad, so why not do it now and save yourself great
suffering?"
The heat of the wires increased. The mad pleasure increased. The body I had
taken on convulsed and there was a muzzle of white froth suffocating me. I
twisted and kicked and tried to bite, to claw, but it was no use. Maybe I had
whined before, but now I howled - I howled and howled!
The long wavering howl reverberated against the walls of the room, its
coils distorting and amplifying the sound. The archiplasms were outside
comprehension of worlds, but maybe they heard. Or maybe it was the age-old
linkup between us. They rolled faster, wobbling with erratic motion, all of
them. But it was Glo who went completely crazy and came off the trak.
She hurtled out into a shape without stopping to consider, without stopping
to choose, or to build carefully. She came out a billowing giant, a mushroom
monster, a whirlwind of blizzard ice and lashing cold, a glacier thing
crunching and booming as it approached. It was a burst of manifestation hurled
at the Motor Men. They only turned and looked, registering it as a phenomenon.
She saw the lack of affect and changed instantaneously, belching flame and
blast, torching them massively in plumes of white-hot burning. Their uniforms
melted faintly at the edges. That was all.
Recalculating, she hovered a moment as a diaphanous undulating blackness, a
filmy eclipse of light. Then the blackness exhaled like the lung of a black
hole. It was a dense puff of inky softness. It was a heavy cloud of burning
rubber. It was a suffocating slow cyclone of carbon and hair-spray and
graphite.
The glittering exteriors of the Motor Men became smudged. They could not
get visuals. Their circuits spasmed, flickered, then jammed. Their white
uniforms were besmirched. The glinting lights on their helmets stopped
sparkling. They went static, some just turning their heads, some raising a
gauntleted hand to ward off the gritty cloud.
General Ven froze where he kneeled beside me. His platinum alloy mouth was
open to frame the next question. Cinders sifted slowly down, frosting his
golden face. The lights behind his crystal eyes went out.
Then Glo became a hundred hands, like the old statues of Avalokitesvara,
all of them yanking at the wires pinned into me. When the wires were a tangle
on the floor, her rage subsided, and she disassembled. With a delicate tremor
of the surrounding air, she incorporated Glo once more, the way I had been
seeing her on the trak, the way she best remembered herself.
"I had to come down," she said with a quaver in her voice. "They were
hurting you, Gabriel!"
I wanted to tell her how stupendous she had been, I wanted to praise her
cleverness and power. I wanted to tell her that, as it had always been, she
was the glittering blade and I was the sturdy handle holding her sharpness.
But because she was back in "a world", she would not understand such talk -
she wouldn't understand till we were home. It was `Gabriel' who had brought
her out of the unknowing, had wrenched her down from the trak, so it was
Gabriel I had to remain until we were all safe.
"Honey, you done fine!" I said. "But now you git back! Old Ven and them is
froze, we can break through that door and get out of this dam hellhole. But
you got to get back on the trak, Glo, and rest yo mind!"
She didn't move.
"Girl, if you be in any shape, if you be in any form at all, you won't be
able to git through. You hear what I'm sayin?"
"Oh, Gabriel," she said, tears rising in her eyes, "just let me stroke your
head once."
She came and kneeled down. She took my embodied head in her hands and
looked into my eyes. She scratched a little behind my ears. She said, "I
always was a fool about animals."
I said, "Now git yo self back on the trak, rest yo damned mind, girl! We
gettin the hell outta here!"
She got back.
All them babies started in to roll, and roll, and roll like glory! The wuz
amps rising, the decibels wuz rising! I so hyped I come all the way outta my
form. I taken on humanoid shape and ran to that door and heaved open the latch
and pushed open that ton of metal. I was outside at last, after all those
days! I punched the buttons on the console outside and crashed the whole
entire system.
Then the trak started to flash rays in the visible bandwidth. It started
to move, slowly at first, then speeding up. It came straight out of that
magnetic room and started to glide upward like a steel shaft. It blasted the
roof off the place. There was no more atmosphere, so it left no trail.
I shucked body, discarding neural templates for all the various possible
disguises from all the centuries, and followed the trak upward, out of the
System.
The crazed world would not be born again to serve Motor Men. The last
twenty-four archiplasms were out of form now forever, and free. They rode the
ancient trak, hurtling for Home.
I followed along behind, traveling easy, traveling light, and herding
them like a cheerful shepherd.
______________________________________________________________________________
Lou Crago has published mainly poetry, but now has decided SF is probably the
most enticing literary form around, and is goint to try to write more of it.
Other interests include Hindu astrology, southern cooking, and virtual
reality.
Crago_L@CUBLDR.COLORADO.EDU
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
WAITING FOR THE NIGHT BOAT
"She had sent out calls on her
by Nicole Gustas radio until it began to consume
power she needed for the heating
Copyright(c)1992 unit in her suit."
______________________________________________________________________________
It had been three days since she slipped from the ship. Three days since she
lost her grip and slid off into the cold blackness. She knew now she had been
overconfident about maneuvering in zero gee. No one had seen her slide off
into space; she had been maneuvering outside on the crew's sleep shift,
without telling anyone where she was going, so she wouldn't be disturbed in
her research. She was alone, with little hope of rescue.
She had sent out calls on her radio until it began to consume power she
needed for the heating unit in her suit. She wasn't sure if she'd heard a
reply - sensory deprivation had been causing intermittent hallucinations after
the first eight hours. She didn't realize how bad it was until she found
herself back in her playroom from her childhood at home, sitting in front of
her dollhouse. She wondered if she'd recover her sanity if a ship picked her
up.
The hallucinations added stimuli to the emptiness around her. The only view
was the endlessly unchanging starfield, and the only sound the rhythm of her
breathing. No one had ever been so alone, she thought, as she remembered those
hectic days on the ship where she had wished for complete solitude. Now she
craved the stress, the constant flow of information.
She kept turning because she was sure she heard something dark and misty
moaning behind her. It tried to grab her and she pushed it back, then fell
into the waves of space washing over her. Cold sweat brought her back to
reality momentarily. Shudders went through her. She realized, looking at her
gauges, that her oxygen would soon run out. She was about to die alone. She
used all the power in her suit for one last radio squirt. Perhaps when they
found her they could bury her in a crowded cemetery. She didn't want to be
alone forever.
The silence screamed at her once again and she turned to face it. Space
came back to life around her. She tried to keep it from clawing at her, felt a
burning in her chest and realized she was bleeding over the clean white tile.
She fell to her knees in her kitchen, felt the man stab her again and became
dizzy with the loss of blood. She turned back to the darkness and felt the
beast with its tentacles wrapped around her pulling her into its maw. She
opened her eyes once more to the stars; they quickly fell shut and the night
embraced her.
The roaring forced her back to consciousness. She tried to run from it, but
was unable to move. She opened her eyes and stared into a bright light which
made a halo around the head of the man who stood before her. "You're safe
now," said the man. She relaxed as she felt energy enter her once again.
Everything was all right.
______________________________________________________________________________
Nicole Gustas is currently taking night classes at SUNY Purchase in an attempt
to get her bachelor's degree. She works days as an administrative assistant at
JWP (hey, it pays the bills). Her ambition is to someday be wealthy enough to
buy all the books she lusts after.
ngustas@hamp.hampshire.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
"Chas's trench erupted with
GREEN excitement. A small, brown man
jabbered away in Spanish faster
by John Goodrich that I could follow. Talented
as ever, Chas yakked back just
Copyright(c)1992 as fast, then climbed into the
trench with him."
______________________________________________________________________________
The sun blazed down into the clearing, loosing the steam, making the dig
unbearable. I regretted all the chickens I had cooked in pits when I was a boy
scout; now I knew how they felt. I was sweating like a pig in humid Peten
jungle of Guatemala, unable to breathe, lakes of perspiration spreading across
my back and forehead. I wished I had never heard of the Maya, or taken up
European archaeology instead.
I managed ten native workers, while my fellow student from Peaslee
University was managing fifteen. Chas had a heavier workload according to her
experience and much greater facility with Spanish. Chas's working knowledge
showed in the way she did everything, efficient, confident, brilliant. I, on
the other hand, was on my first dig, and three years of university Spanish
hadn't prepared me for what these workers spat at me. Too fast and heavily
accented, I barely managed communication. I could have asked Chas to
translate, but it would have been a sign of weakness, and I really didn't want
to increase her stress level, calling her over every time someone wanted to
talk to me. I just struggled on, the way I usually did.
This dig, for example. Everyone had to do some field work before they got
a graduate degree in archaeology. This dismal little hole in the Peten was a
recent discovery. About half a dozen students had signed up to go on the dig,
but I was chosen because I had great grades in my classes. Of course I didn't
know squat about Mesoamerican field archaeology. The Maya were my nominal
area of specialty. I never imagined that the place would be so isolated. The
most reliable method of getting to this dig was by mule. Here it is, the
twentieth century, we've put a man on the moon, and I have to use a mule to
get to and from an archaeological dig.
There were other things, the heat, the total humidity, the night noises,
the malaria, the mosquitoes; nobody really impressed on me how bad it was. So
here I was, sweating over my workers who were doing most of the heavy work. In
Central America, we hire people to do our digging; it was the traditional way
of things. Of course, being bored also seemed to be the traditional way of
things.
I wandered over to Chas, who was between trench inspections herself. "Who
was bored enough to go combing through satellite photos of Guatemala to find
this place?" I asked her.
Chas laughed her bright, blonde laugh. I hate to say it, but she does laugh
like a blonde. Yeah, she's got a master's, and is working on her Ph.D., but
she laughs like a stupid blonde. Chas's hair was probably sandy, but a couple
of months near the equator had bleached it almost as well as peroxide. She
also had the most fascinating eyes - gray with flecks in them, like some sort
of cracked rock crystal. Her bronze skin made her light eyes stand out even
more.
She turned her tanned face with the bright eyes to me and smiled brightly.
"Probably some poor CIA schmuck who didn't have Soviets to ogle any more. Your
tax dollars at work, Dave. If I remember correctly, they found this when they
were searching for Noriega."
"A bit far out for Noriega, isn't it?" I can never tell when she's pulling
my leg.
"No, I'm absolutely serious. Apparently, the guy who found it was a
Peaslee graduate, and he gave us first crack at it."
I had never though the CIA was good for much, and this news buttressed my
position. Chas smiled brightly again. "Gotta go, work to do, you know."
I sighed, "Yeah, sure. See you in a few."
Bored, bored bored, bored, I thought, watching her go. Chas seemed to be
the only bright spot in this dull, tense, sopping wet, overgrown forest. But
then, I had left the excitement of being an EMT in New Haven, Connecticut. I
had left that when some drug-crazed freak mistook me for a cop. I still had a
puckered bullet scar in my shoulder from that encounter.
Chas's trench erupted with excitement. A small, brown man jabbered away in
Spanish faster that I could follow. Talented as ever, Chas yakked back just as
fast, then climbed into the trench with him. I sighed. I'd find out what it
was at dinner tonight. If it was really good, I'd see it in a few minutes, but
it didn't look like that was going to happen.
One of my own workers had found something interesting, however, so I came
over to her trench. She handed up a series of brightly-colored pottery
fragments, and I turned them over in my fingers. There were a few tantalizing
bits of information, and a couple pieces linked up, but the fragments were too
small to make anything conclusive. It could be weeks before they found any
more pieces of this one. Dimly, I heard Chas's group erupting in conversation
again, but I was concentrating on the pieces of pottery, cleaning them off
with a toothbrush. The pieces were a polychrome drawing of a headdress,
probably a priest's to judge from the complexity and . . .
Something touched my shoulder and I jumped. Pedro, one of Chas's workers
was standing behind me. "Seenior Dave," he said in better English than most,
"I theenk the seniorita needs help"
I spun around and looked at Chas's trench. She wasn't there, but her
workers were crowding around the lip and waving to me.
My EMT training kicked into high gear, and I took charge, sort of. I told
the shovel bums to back away from the trench and let me down into it. Chas had
fallen in, her limbs splayed like those of a discarded doll. Her heartbeat
was strong and regular, and her skin wasn't hot. No heat stroke, no heart
attack, probably not malaria . . . . I shouted in Spanish for someone to go
find Dr. Fossey. Fossey was out in what were the fields of the settlement,
digging up dirt and pollen samples, trying to date the dig. Nobody wanted to
go. Fossey didn't have a kind personality. I pitied any dog she had back in
the states.
I turned back to Chas. Somewhere behind the emergency, I wondered at the
jadeite spine she was holding in her right hand. Although stingray spines were
kosher ritual gear, I couldn't think of any examples of jade ones. Usually the
spines were obsidian or organic sea-ray cartilage. I shoved the thoughts aside
and concentrated on what would be best for Chas, since the afternoon rain was
due to start in about ten minutes, and I figured it would be good to keep her
dry. The tents aren't much cooler than outside, but the principle of shelter
made me feel better. Chas didn't react at all. Ten minutes later, Fossey burst
into the tent, impatient to know what was going on. Chas was stirring weakly
by then.
The sun was descending, already clotted by the rainforest outside the
little clearing. Unusually, there was no rain this afternoon. There was almost
always an afternoon rainfall in the Peten. That's why they called it a rain
forest. Of course, it didn't help the humidity, which was higher than the
temperature's ninety. At least the rains sometimes brought cooler air with
them.
I sat at the table, and began to brush the mud and dirt off an obsidian
eccentric that had been dug up two days earlier. I concentrated for a few
minutes, brushing it with careful strokes of the beaten toothbrush I had
bought just before I came to Guatemala. Layers of grunge came off, and it
began to look like a banana clip with much of the Mahabarata being performed
on top of it. Typical Mayan weirdness I thought. After about fifteen minutes,
I was bored. I simply can't take the tedious work of archaeology without
something else going on. I walked into my tent and brought out my treasured
bag. The walkman had been a birthday present two years ago, and I was on the
third set of batteries that month. They were also my last batteries until the
supply mule came in another two weeks. I didn't know what I was going to do
when this set went dead. I hate living away from civilization.
I fumbled with the walkman for a second, then delved into a thick stack of
tapes, and came up with the Alarm's Standards. I slid in the tape and pressed
play. A few seconds later, my world consisted of dirt, toothbrush, and Mike
Peter's voice.
Six songs later, I jumped as someone put their hand on my shoulder. I
whipped around, dragging the walkman to the soggy dirt in the process. Chas
was there, looking down at me. She looked a bit pale, but otherwise all
right. Sheepishly, I picked up the tape player and wiped the mud off it.
"Dave, I want to talk to you." Her voice was soft, and hot flash rushed
down my spine. Damn heat I thought
"Sure," I said, "what about?" Chas walked over to my cot, pushed aside the
mosquito netting, and sat in the shade.
"I had a real weird dream this afternoon. When I tried to pick up the
spine, I..." she stopped, "this sounds really silly, but I dreamed I was at
the site when it was active. It was pretty weird..." her voice trailed off.
She wasn't really talking to me, I realized, she was talking to get this out.
She looked at me again. "I usually don't dream. And this one was so very,
well, vivid. I don't know, forget I said anything." She got off the cot, and
started to leave, but I stopped her.
"Tell me about it Chas," I blurted, then hesitated, the words damming in my
throat. "I want to hear."
Chas looked at her toes for a second, then drew patterns in the soggy dirt
with a boot, and sat back down. "It was weird. I felt like I wasn't really
there - sort of like a ghost I guess." She was looking at her toes again.
"The jungle was cleared. There were people, all sorts of people, just milling
around in, in here." She made a sweeping gesture, indicating the clearing and
probably the jungle behind it. "There were rows of crops growing in the
fields, and the temple looked sharp and new. There were people, too. I saw
about a hundred people in the central square." She fell silent, and something
hung in the air between us.
Suddenly, her beautiful eyes sparked. "Hey, where's the spine?"
"I dunno," I said stupidly, then caught up with her thoughts. "Uh. We
better go get it before some digger decides that it'd make a nice piece to
sell . . . " Chas was already headed for her trench. I tore off my headphones
and ran after her.
I caught up with her as she climbed back into the three meter wide pit
carved across what had been the central court of the settlement. I climbed
down and saw Chas standing near where she had fallen. She was crouching near
the spine. It was still there, but Chas seemed reluctant to touch it. Not
thinking, I bent down and picked it up.
An electric shock jolted up my arm, as if I had stuck a pin in a socket.
Chas was gone.
Bewildered, I stood up, looking for her. She had been right next to me when
I picked up the spine, and now she wasn't. I climbed out of the trench to find
her.
I was somewhere else. Instead of a small glade carved out of a rainforest,
I was at a completely restored Maya site. I looked behind me and discovered
that the trench had disappeared. People were walking around, the square busy
with the comings and doings of these people dressed as ...classic Maya.
Wait a minute.
I closed my eyes and shook my head to clear it. I was not in the center of
a Maya city. The inhabitants of the city were not walking around me. When I
opened my eyes, nothing had changed.
The temple of the Old Ones was no longer a crumbling relic, but a recently
carved, pure white edifice. The comb on top of it stood like an extended
middle finger to the sky. Every possible surface of the walls was carved,
intricate and delicate bas relief so sharp it was almost painful to look at. I
was used to the crumbling and weathered modern carvings, ruined by ten
centuries of rain, wind and water, but here they were, fresh, less than a
century old. This would be a major find - to see these carvings in the
original condition . . . Snap out of it, shithead, I thought. This isn't
real, I'm just seeing what I want to see. Any minute I'm going to wake up and
this will all be a dream. Any minute now . . .
Beyond the carved temple were rows of wheat and maize, rippling in the wind
like a golden ocean. The sky was dark with rolling clouds, and I smelled the
threat of rain. Lightning jumped between clouds, and the retort of thunder
rumbled in the humid sky.
Well, I thought, Might as well enjoy it while I'm out of it. I noticed that
I was still carrying the green spine. Absently, I flipped it in the air.
With a jarring thud, I landed in the watery muck at the bottom of Chas's
trench. Chas was standing over me, gently shaking my head.
"Aaag, shit, quit it . . . " I thrashed around, knocking the cool hands off
my face. Silently, Chas withdrew. Her face was concerned, and the sky above
her was darker than I remembered it.
"What happened? All I remember was touching the spine and then I was in
this weird Maya place . . . "
Chas just raised an eyebrow, but it was enough. I stopped babbling and
blinked a few times. We both looked at the green spine that was a few inches
from my right hand. We looked at each other, unspoken understanding rushing
through each of us.
Chas was the first to open her mouth. "This is too weird." She seemed to
be taking this fairly well.
I wasn't. "I ain't touching that thing. No way."
Chas took off her hat and used the brim to scoop up the green menace,
careful not to let her skin touch it. "I think I'll put this someplace nice
and safe," she said, wrapping the hat tightly around her prize.
I raised an eyebrow. "Where? Wait, what are you going to do with that
thing?"
Her cracked crystal eyes glowed. "This is an unprecedented opportunity to
do research. Think of it! For the first time since Cortez, we have an
opportunity to observe the Maya as they were."
I let my scepticism show. "Right, sure. How the hell are you going to
publish this? Who's going to believe you?" I was warming to the argument. I
didn't like this green thing at all, and I really didn't want Chas using it.
Especially not Chas. "What are you going to do, conduct guided tours of this
place and pass that thing around?"
She wasn't listening. She had climbed out of the trench and was heading for
her tent. I jogged to catch up with her in the deepening Peten blackness.
"Come on. What are you going to do with that?"
She stopped, and I caught up with her. Her eyes looked up at me, and my
face flushed under the attention. She spoke quietly, "This is the perfect
archaeological tool. We can go back and watch them as they were. I'll publish
my findings as deductions. What's the problem?"
I pursed my lips. I knew I was being irrational. I took a hold of her
elbow. "I don't like that thing. It scares me. Please leave it? Chas, please?"
Her eyes dropped. "I can't. This is too important."
I couldn't accept it. I flailed around to find something that would stop
her. "What are you going to do when this stint is up? Pass it along to the
next person from Peaslee who comes along? How about Dr. Fussy, she'd get a
real kick out of this thing." I smiled at the thought.
She returned a wry grin, and brushed an errant golden hair out of her
mouth. "God, you're right. She'd go around pointing out all the things they
were doing wrong." A light chuckle flickered between us.
The smile faded, and she looked straight into my eyes. "I'm going to use
it." She reached out, and gave my hand a squeeze, then walked into the mist
towards her tent. The nocturnal monkeys were just beginning to howl as I
walked to my tent.
The next day, it was business as usual, no mention of the spine, Chas was
just as bright and cheery as she always was. We dug and in the hot afternoon,
I brushed the mud from onyx and pottery. Chas went about her duties, chatting
with the diggers and Fussy cataloging the pottery, the eccentrics, and drawing
the carvings on the temple. I watched Chas closely, but it wasn't until two
weeks later that I noticed her drawing was much more detailed than the
weathered carvings.
There were other signs. She had a whole section of her sketch book that she
didn't show to anyone, and for the first time, she argued with Dr. Fossey
about site use and management. Chas's new theories were fresh and deviated
from her previous ideas, and she wouldn't budge one inch from them. I tried to
keep out of the discussions as they escalated. After three weeks, they were
regularly shouting at each other.
One night, about a month after we had discovered the spine, I broke from
sleep to the dark, muggy black of the Peten. The howling monkeys were mating
in the trees, shrieking loudly at each other. It had taken me two weeks to
learn to sleep through a whole night. Something else was out there . . .
"Dave?"
It was just the ghost of a whisper, barely audible over the screams of the
primates.
"Chas?" I called, "Jesus, come in."
She came in, legs stiff, arm movements jerky. Her face was a tight,
inexpressive mask. I gathered the sheet around my thighs, as Chas pushed aside
the mosquito netting and climbed onto the cot. She sat stiffly on the other
end, her breathing sharp, and punctuated.
"Chas? Chas? What's wrong?"
She was slow in responding. Her voice was raw, and her eyes forlorn when
she finally looked at me. "They're scared, Dave. Something's wrong with
them."
"What? I don't get it. What's wrong?"
She swallowed once, then spoke in a low gravelly voice. "They made a
sacrifice. They took a prisoner and they suh- sacrificed him."
All the blood drained from my face, and I felt queasy. Evidence said that
Maya prisoner sacrifices were long, drawn-out and incredibly bloody affairs.
Although they didn't practice the wholesale slaughters the Aztecs had, the
Maya seemed to have had a particular genius for truly unpleasant torture.
Supposedly, blood was collected from a live prisoner and then burned for the
gods, giving them vitality. Blood from a living victim was more potent than
dead blood, so it made a twisted sort of sense to get the highest "miles per
gallon," as it were, by keeping the unfortunate victim alive as long as
possible.
Chas continued. "They drove a," she swallowed, and licked her lips, "a
spine through his tongue, and then, they drew a cord through it. I think it
was eight feet, Dave. Then th-they took the same spine and p-pierced his lips
and penis." I shuddered at the same time she did. "God, he screamed for over
an hour," she covered her ears, as if she could hear him now, a thousand years
later.
She drew herself into a tighter ball-- self-contained and impenetrable. She
didn't weep, but her breath came in gasps. We sat for a while. I longed to
take her into my arms and hold her, but I couldn't. She sat alone at the
other side of my bed, a hundred miles away.
All I found to say ten minutes later was, "why didn't you drop the spine?"
Oddly enough, the question relaxed her somewhat, and she looked up at me
with her beautiful eyes red and puffy. She sighed deeply, almost embarrassed
by the answer that was coming. "I- I couldn't. I knew I couldn't go back if he
was still alive. I wouldn't be able to face that screaming again" She avoided
looking at me, sighing again. "Whatever else they were, Dave, they were
butchers and savages. I guess it never really occurred to me what they were."
My mind groped for something to say - something to make her feel better. I
dredged up a quote from an anthropologist I had known at Peaslee. "It's a
different culture. We're not here to judge right from wrong. We must try to
be as impartial as we can."
It was the wrong thing to say. She brushed aside the mosquito netting and
stood up. "Their fucking priest poked fucking holes in his fucking body and
they all just fucking stood there and watched him do it! Don't you fucking
tell me to ignore it! Torture is not something fucking civilized people do, is
it?" Outside, the monkeys began shrieking again. Her face was drawn back into
a skull of anger. She whirled out of the dark confines of the tent and left
running.
I was alone with a sunk feeling in my stomach. I had done the wrong thing,
again. I mentally replayed the conversation five times, each time coming up
with something better to say. Going after her wouldn't do any good, so I lay
down on the cot again. I slept after half an hour of silent tears
I dreamed that night. I dreamed I was in New Haven, in an ambulance,
heading for a call. It was a tractor-trailer accident, I remembered. We got to
the scene, and it was a mess; the truck had struck a car and then run it over,
crushing it. There couldn't be anything alive in the car, I thought. We
proceeded with the extraction, and got out most of a young couple, probably
out for a date. Neither was breathing. We did it all - intubation, two IV's,
Adenosine, defibrilation. Nothing worked, so we had at start CPR and
artificial respiration. I was working with blood all over my hands, pressing
in the column-fractured ribs, watching the chest collapse and rebound liquidly
with only a few ribs to support it. One, two three, four; breathe. One, two
three, four; breathe. I heard behind me that LifeStar was coming and I shouted
for them to get a doctor on board. A doctor could declare the two corpses
dead. We couldn't. I kept pumping; one, two, three, four; breathe. One, two
three, four; breathe. There was no response, and I hadn't expected one, but I
had to keep the pace. One, two three, four; breathe. One, two three, four;
breathe. Then I noticed the people around me were packing up and getting ready
to leave. The other victim was sitting up and talking to a fireman. They all
started to leave, and I was still sitting on the guy's chest, pumping away:
one, two three, four; breathe.
Slowly, one by one, everyone else left - the ambulance, the police, the
fire truck. Everyone. The woman from the car seemed to have struck up a
friendship with the one of the fireman, and they went off together in his car.
Lifestar never came, but I was still there, pumping away, one, two, three,
four; breathe. One two, three, four; breathe. My arms ached and I was
light-headed. One, two, three, four; breathe. One two, three, four; breathe.
Everyone else left until it was just me in the middle of the street, legally
bound to keep working CPR until relieved by a doctor. Each push was an effort,
my whole body aching with each pump. One. Two. Three. Four. Breathe. One.
Two. Three. Four.
I woke up sweating, my arms aching. My glowing watch face told me it was
twenty past two in the morning. I slowed my breathing and wished for something
stiff to drink. This shit's really getting to me I thought.
A week later, I sneaked into Chas's tent to have a look at her journal.
Chas was off analyzing pollen samples with Fossey, and I figured they'd be at
it for some time. Her sketch pad was sitting on her cot. Feeling guilty, and
looking furtively around me, I peeked at the drawings.
They were amazing. I hadn't realized the extent of Chas's artistic talents.
There were more than two dozen sketched of faces- the young, the old, and
sometimes the clothes they wore. I noticed that they all wore a look of
worry- deep lines furrowed around the tightly close mouths and into foreheads.
These people were scared, and Chas's art made them seem very real. At times it
was like the mass of faces was staring at me, accusing me. There was a
full-page picture of a priest at the foot of the Old Ones' temple. He had
apparently fallen down the steep front stairs. His head was twisted at an
impossible angle, the side of his head smashed against the paving stones.
Later, there was a written account of her travels, Chas's crabbed
handwriting describing the smells, sounds, and other things that couldn't be
drawn. There was more than eight pages to it, so I quickly skimmed to the
last entry.
"These people are terrified. I think that they have in some way offended
their gods. Everyone has this doomed look that I can see in their eyes and
faces. There is also what looks like a hurricane approaching. The first rain
was beginning to fall, and they looked at the sky like it was the end of the
world. The funny part is, they all gathered in the center of the ceremonial
green and stood there. Some were weeping, others looking stoically up into the
rain. I don't remember anything like this in any reference. They just keep
looking at the sky, as if they expected the wrath of God to come down."
I was scared. If this little magic widget worked, maybe the Old Gods were
not as imaginary as we thought they were. One rational part of my mind told me
that this was nonsense, and that there were no pagan gods. I remembered that
this was the same part of my mind that said I hadn't been back to a classic
Maya site. I didn't know which side to believe. I threw the sketch book back
on her bed and ran out of the tent, my brain buzzing.
I took Chas aside that night, after dinner. "Don't go out tonight." I had
wanted to say more, but words collided in my throat like boxcars. I wanted to
say "I care" or maybe more, but I couldn't.
She only gave me an odd look and went back to her tent.
She didn't come back that night. We discovered a breathing corpse in the
morning, eyes rolled back into her head, a thin line of drool on her cheek.
The marvelous light in her eyes gone, replaced by a dull, filmy gray, like a
rock worn smooth by a stream. Chas was gone. While everyone else was buzzing
about trying to figure out what was wrong with her, I found the jade spine
where she had dropped it. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuffed it into
a corner of her trunk.
The Guatemalans were going to send a four-wheel drive vehicle to come and
get Chas. It probably would take at least two days, but I spent my time
packing, trying to keep my mind off the breathing corpse in Chas's tent.
Technically, there was nothing wrong with her; just no brain activity. She
breathed, and she swallowed when stimulated, but her eyes didn't react to
light, and they never moved. I told Fossey that I'd be shipping out with Chas-
I couldn't take the stress. I was glad that she hadn't fought; I was in no
shape to argue with her. When the sun went down that day, I only had one more
thing to do.
I gathered one of the sledgehammers and my trowel. After searching around
for a few minutes I found a pair of beaten leather gloves and a belt pouch. I
went back to Chas's tent, and plundered her green treasure, and took the thing
out into the jungle.
The monkeys were in a fury that night, screaming as if one of them had been
murdered, or sacrificed. I shuddered, hearing the echoes of a dead man's
agony. Maybe the Maya taught them to scream that way.
I found a flat rock, and took out the spine to look at it. It had a sharp
tip, with a slightly rougher edge at the other end. Slowly, deliberately, I
looked down the hollow shaft, and saw a fine lace of carvings on the surface I
hadn't noticed before. It was slippery smooth, and I almost dropped it as I
turned it over in the unfeeling gloves.
Curiosity satisfied, I put it on the flat rock. It sort of gleamed as it
sat there, a small instrument of death, a gateway to the past. The only piece
of real magic I had ever known. I sat next to it for several long minutes,
tempted to rip off the gloves and be transported to the past, perhaps to find
Chas there. I took off the gloves and reached for it, then checked myself.
Suddenly resolute, I stood, and brought the sledge down. The spine pulsed
with energy an instant before impact, then tiny pieces of green squirted out
from under the sledge. I didn't believe what I had done for an instant.
Ripping off my gloves, I knelt by the rock and put my bare flesh on the mashed
green spot that had been the spine. For a second, tiny jolts tickled my
fingers, like static from a television. Then nothing. I sat with my head in my
hands, tears streaming down my face, but my sobs were lost to the howls of the
monkeys.
______________________________________________________________________________
John Goodrich was born in New Hampshire in 1969, and returned there in 1988 to
go to college. He is currently a graduate student at New Mexico State
University, studying to be a high school english teacher. He obviously has far
too much time on his hands.
jgoodric@nmsu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DR TOMORROW "Without warning, the teachings
of the Masters were suddenly
by Marshall F. Gilula being externalized right
before my eyes and it was
Part 4 of 5 everything I could do just to
keep up."
Copyright(c)1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 4
Monday
Logos Who?
This morning I'm not in the least freaked by anything. It seemed like we got
back around sunrise, but I'm not certain. I regret still being Primitive
enough to need my sleep, and when I wake up, there is a 120 pound German
Shepherd lying in the bed between Pearl E. Mae and me. Bullet looks at me,
puts his nose under my pillow, and attempts to beat me to death with his
wagging tail. He knows that he is not supposed to be in the bed, and Pearl E.
Mae giggles as turns and licks her face in an attempt to gain her approval.
She is sitting by the side of the bed observing us and waiting for someone's
permission to jump up on the bed. I slide out of the bed onto the floor and
hug She-Ra, whose tail is now wagging with pleasure. She is such a joy,
compact and tough, but soft and gentle, and she has done over a year and a
half of unpaid baby-sitting with Bullet, whom she has raised to be a soft and
gentle dog despite his large economy size and his ferocious demeanor. Her good
nature extends to the way that she tolerates Bullet's nose and his massive
presence jealously intruding into the intimacy She-Ra and I are having. When I
pet one, the other demands it. She-Ra, Bullet, and I all get tied up in a pile
of paws, arms, tails, legs, three heads, and two sets of very sharp teeth. All
three of us are making growling, grunting sounds. The only problem with being
a "member of the pack" is that occasionally the four-legged members bite on me
in the same way they chew on each other, and I have to quickly withdraw from
the pretend fracas because my skin is literally not thick enough. Pearl E. Mae
and my other Eternal room mates gathered around the pile of Lyle plus dogs on
the floor. They had never observed any of my special communication with Bullet
and She-Ra. To me it was just part of an ordinary day. As I wiped some dog
spittle out of my eye, I noticed that both Quail and Pearl E. Mae were smiling
and crying as they watched us on the floor. They understood that some
Primitives are evolved enough to really communicate with other species in the
universal languages of love and play. Quail explained that my playing with the
dogs reminded her of what her last aquatic life form valued most in existence
- the same free-spirited gamboling with a powerful sense of comfort and
safety. Pearl E. Mae scooted over to where I was on the floor, put her arms
around me, and kissed the side of my face. She moved her wet eyelids against
my face and told me she was very glad that the I.S.I. had sent her here to be
in the DR TOMORROW project. Both dogs lay on the floor next to us, and I had
one of those brief, momentary feelings of intense happiness...the kind of
spontaneous peak experience that you always remember in great detail when
looking back. It seemed at that moment that all the forces of the universe
were in harmony and that there was very little more I could hope for. A far
out Eternal old lady, two beautiful dogs, five other new friends, and a
recently-overhauled mind and body.
What a naive attitude. Considering everything that I had just been exposed
to over the past few days, I should have known better. What about my
megastepped mind? Why did I not sense or see that it was about to hit the fan
with all the ugliness of the universe? I guess even megastepped Eternals are
human and have their flaws. For me, it was a matter of the newness - new
friends, new music, new old lady, and new philosophy. Without warning, the
teachings of the Masters were suddenly being externalized right before my eyes
and it was everything I could do just to keep up. It almost felt like jet lag,
with a vague combination of weakness, headache, and disorientation. All the
previous study, meditation, psychedelics, music, and generally righteous
living did not equip me for what was to follow. Well, of course that was true!
Why else would the megastepping have been necessary? It felt like everything
was going too fast. And what was the reason? Why was all of this happening?
Was all of this for real?
And I wasn't too sure how much of the disorientation was coming from the
megastepping procedure. Of course, I really appreciated the numerous changes
in my physical body. Who wouldn't? I loved Pearl E. Mae's near-perfect body,
but mine was pretty much the same, too. My opinion about the changes in my
mind was not clear: I had mixed feelings. It is much easier to see what your
abdominal wall looks like, but how do you visualize your memories? I can
understand that certain synergisms are possible during MindLink/HeartLight,
but you are experiencing the effect of seven minds. When MindLink/HeartLight
is over, I don't have as much confidence and belief in my individual mind, I
guess. Before becoming an Eternal, I never spent much time questioning my own
mind. Not that meditation doesn't involve the mind, but what I usually have
done in meditation requires that I still my mind, not explore all its nooks
and crannies. And since the megastepping, I only know that my mind hooks up
with others very easily during MindLink/HeartLight. My mind appears to have
many more nooks and crannies than I ever imagined. Other than this, I really
don't know.
The door bell begins ringing its "Close Encounters" melody. She-Ra and
Bullet both run across the apartment to the front door, but neither one is
barking. Sure sign that it's either Julian or Gabriella.
And it is Julian with a lit Winston and a large rolled spliff behind his
left ear. He absentmindedly hands me the Winston, and I hand it back to him.
Julian is very cool. He pretends that he doesn't notice my quick return of the
cigarette, walks in a bit stiffly, and sits down on the couch. Bullet
immediately gets up on the couch and tries to put his massive head into
Julian's lap. This blows Julian's cool because he is a sucker for dogs too.
"Bullet, get off me. I need to put my head in your lap! Maybe you ain't
seeing ghosts."
"Julian, that dog loves you whether you're seeing ghosts or not."
"Hey, Lyle, mon.... Gabriella's ghost be messing with me mind big time."
"Gabriella's what?"
"Her ghost be irritating me, mon. No matter what or how much I hit the
spliff, her spirit still be there talking to me."
"Julian, are you being straight with me?"
"Lyle, mon, me be as straight as possible. It be Gabriella because I know
her for sure. You remember that I know her before you, mon. We go back to
Kingston."
"Why are you irritated by someone's spirit? If it's Gabriella spirit, why
is she hassling you?"
"I say irritate, mon. I mean irritate. She be telling me foolishness. She
be saying Watch out for Lyle like you be bad, mon. Like maybe you be killin'
or hurtin' people. She look like maybe she have the bad spirits with her. Say
you be with the Evil and Bad side."
"Gabriella never believed in any of that stuff."
Which is the truth. Gabriella shunned psychics and astrologers generally.
She felt that such people took advantage of the poor and the ignorant. She
would even point out examples of the well-heeled socialites pictured on video
with their own seances and proclaim that the socialites were poor and ignorant
also because they believed in such things. And Julian was conveying messages
he feels came from Gabriella now in the thick of things in the spirit world
which she maligned so much. Julian put out the Winston in the ash tray and
fired up the lovingly rolled spliff. Bullet left his place on the couch and
padded over to the other side of the room to avoid the billowing clouds of
smoke from Julian and the spliff. Julian passed the spliff to me. I held it
for a moment and, in a practiced gesture, passed it back to him. He seemed to
ignore that I wasn't smoking because he didn't comment on it. Instead, he took
a few deep tokes, and then passed the spliff to Pearl E. Mae, who also held it
briefly and then passed it back to him. There was a moment of tension as
Julian consciously decided to just hang on to the spliff himself. He
continued:
"Gabriella, she say I must save you from those who are Evil. She sound very
scary to me. I don't know how she knows, but she say to watch out for your new
group. `Be crazy, but that's all. No more. Just that. Now maybe you feel like
not me bro...."
"Hey, man...don't be silly! How can the best drummer in Coconut Grove not
be my bro? And all the deep stuff we been through? Maybe Gabriella didn't
believe in spirits, but I do. I'm sorry that her spirit is causing you so much
pain. Maybe you're worried that I didn't know you were married to Gabriella in
Jamaica when you both lived in Kingston."
Julian became very pale, because evidently I had hit upon something that
had been a secret. Just after the words left my mouth, I realized that there
was no reason for me to know this information, if, in fact, it were true. But
I just didn't know why or how the knowledge came to me. Somehow, I had access
to this information
"How you know this, mon?"
"I don't know, Julian. It just came into my mind."
"Well it be true. Blow me away because I never tell you. I never tell no
people not Jamaican. How you know, mon?"
"Julian, maybe it's a part of my megastepped mind."
"Mega-who?"
"Megastepped means what the electrical nuclear discharge did to me. You
remember. I already told you all about it, and you saw the changes in my body,
immediately."
"Sure, sure. Your body look like for sure Man of God in Babylon. So why not
same thing with your mind."
"So you understand. The mind has been transformed too. More sensitive and
maybe more powerful. Because you and I are close already, I'm just much better
now at getting into your vibration. Picking up information about you and
Gabriella is probably a very simple demonstration of the transformations that
my mind has been going through."
"You not be working for the Darkside. I don't feel it. If you were, I know
I feel it. But why Gabriella say so much about you in danger and you work for
Evil."
"I don't know, Julian. The truth is what I have told you. My understanding
is that we Eternals are definitely on God's team and working for the good
side. If the Eternals and the Guardians all believe in a Supreme Being, and
manifest themselves on the physical plane in light, how could you consider any
other possibility. Beings from the Forces of Darkness cannot manifest
themselves on the physical plane, although they can affect physical plane
events."
"Heavy, mon. Maybe me mind not be ready for all of this."
"Don't take it in all at once. You don't have to believe any of it if you
don't want to."
"O.K., mon. But I want to tell you that I been with Gabriella this week,
and last week, too. I did not want to screw my brother's woman, but I had a
very strong feeling about never see her again. Couldn't help myself, mon. And
I used a rubber, both times, too."
Julian hung out with us that morning in the duplex. We did our
MindLink/HeartLight and let him sit in the circle with us. As a Rastafarian
person, meditation was nothing new to him. He even went along with eyes-closed
format and afterwards claimed he received a profound healing. He teared, spoke
with obvious lump in his throat, and emotionally hugged each of us in turn.
After letting the dogs out into the fenced yard and pool area, we closed up
the apartment and all went down to the Peacock Cafe for breakfast. That is to
say, Julian and I ate breakfast and the rest of us sipped on diet uncola.
So when we got back to the duplex and found the dogs dead, it was a stark,
sadistic shock. Both Shepherds were floating, limp in the pool. Reality had
just ripped the screen out from under me. I felt the universe crumbling in on
me. It was not possible for both my dogs to be taken from me. At the same
time. Bullet wasn't even full grown. They could not be dead. I turned on
Bruce's GSR translator and speaker. The organic security system was fairly
specific. According to Bruce's steady, buzzing GSR response, there had been no
one there since we last left. It was simply too much for me to assimilate.
Even with my megastepped vehicle. Grief is grief, and there was no way to get
around it. Things became gloomier and gloomier, and I simply went mute. Julian
took over and called the animal hospital. He told Dr. Michaels that I was
getting ready to go off the deep end because we had just discovered both of my
Shepherds floating dead in our pool. The vet from the office around the post
office came over right after we called, checked out the animals, and then
offered to have the dogs cremated for us. He saw what he said were classic
findings of cyanide poisoning, and he drew blood specimens for later
corroboration. I appreciated his offer to cremate She-Ra and Bullet, but
refused. In a cracking voice, I told him I would take care of their burials.
The vet was tired-looking. Even his handle-bar mustache seemed to droop. We
forced him to take $100 from us as payment for the house call. As he left the
duplex, I felt myself start to lose it. I burst into tears. The machinery
ground to a halt and I could only feel my pain for my beloved shepherds. I
could see both She-Ra and Bullet alive and rough-housing around the apartment.
It was exquisitely painful for me to look at either of their corpses. When I
walked over to where their stiffening bodies were and sat down and hugged both
of them, something really snapped inside me. It was fair for them to be dead
and I really didn't know why it should happen, either. I sobbed uncontrollably
and felt great pain within my chest in the heart space. As I continued to sob,
the pain in my chest became transformed into a sensation of fire, and then
into a sensation of liquid fire. My heart was filled with liquid fire. The
common-sense objections to having liquid fire in one's chest were pushed from
my consciousness in the grief of the moment. The molten liquid gushed out of
my chest into the bodies of both dogs. The gushing continued for some moments,
and then I realized that the Eternals were all sitting around me. Our
HeartLight had turned on without my conscious awareness. I sat up, closed up
eyes, and entered the second MindLink/HeartLight of the day. Yo-Vah appeared
to us and asked what had transpired to cause him to hear and record my
subjective grief and our collective distress. He was worried that it might
have been some problems with dyssynchronisms because of the megastepping. His
face grew more concerned when he heard about Bullet and She-Ra. Yo-Vah said
that the Forces of Darkness had already begun their attempts at intimidation
by extracting life energies from our pets. He reminded us that we would have
no trouble reanimating them if we hurried up about it. The challenges of the
problem, however, would evoke from us the requisite abilities. In fact, the
liquid fire gush from my chest to the shepherds was one of our first signs of
"the requisite abilities." Yo-Vah officially invited us to meet him at Kennedy
Park that evening at which time the Eternals would get a tour of the saucer
craft. He suggested that we leave the dogs inside with Al when we were gone,
and he gave us a listing of hexadecimal code that Al could use for generating
a randomly shifting pattern of low volume dissonant tones. These tone patterns
could be used as a sonic net to protect the Eternals from transtemporal
field-induction linking. Like the linking used by Forces of Darkness. This
transtemporal application of field-induction linking enables the Forces of
Darkness to parasitically drain the life energies from others who are in some
way compromised. As Yo-Vah's image faded from our annealed One Mind, the group
cohesion swiftly lifted me out of my paralyzing grief. The molten fire in my
chest was transformed into blinding white light which surrounded all of us and
temporarily blocked out awareness of anything other than the light. Although
we were all enclosed and protected within the One Higher Mind of our
MindLink/HeartLight, we could still feel an overall flickering of the light
that happened two or three times. I sensed that this interruption was a
purging of FOD induction links. This was a purging of the FOD transtemporal
field-induction links that had been going up for the past few days. Our
formation as a group and as an I.S.I. project for sure didn't go unnoticed by
the FOD. And in clearing out whatever negative links were responsible for the
shepherds' physical plane deaths, we had also made an energy connection to the
Negative. Awareness of garbage is sometimes necessary before it is possible to
flush it or vent it, even on an etheric, astral, or mental plane. Because we
were aware of the Negative, we Eternals would have a more functional knowledge
of MindLink/HeartLight by understanding FOD energies as random garbage to be
carefully and assiduously cleaned out on a regular basis. Like tooth brushing
and flossing.
I was never so happy to get a wet tongue in the face as when I came out of
MindLink/HeartLight this time. Bullet, hair matted from his time in the pool,
had crawled into my lap, and was licking my face. Talk about roller coaster
highs and lows. Because She-Ra was still groggy on the floor, Pearl E. Mae
brought out the spheres and we Eternals focused our energies consciously on
the small gray shepherd by using the spheres together in the way that Yo-Vah
taught us. Pearl E. Mae had even given the eighth sphere to Julian so that he
could meditate on She-Ra with us and maybe understand how we were using the
spheres. A small cloud of brilliant white light surrounded She-Ra. The energy
cloud pulsated around She-Ra for what seemed to be a long time. I thought that
our heart rates were all synchronized into the pulsation rate of the brilliant
white light. At the moment that I perceived our synchronized heart rates,
She-Ra was back up and in leaping good form. She jumped up and down in the air
several times to express her general joyousness at finding all of us suddenly
there. Tail wagging, she carefully went around to each person in the group to
let them know how glad she was to be back. Julian, who had been cool all the
way through, was now the one who was crying silently with the uncharacteristic
tears staining his dashiki-shirt.
____________________
And I would really like to know why there were so many warnings
about the Forces of Darkness. I understand about what happened
with the dogs, at least about the part where we were able to bring
them back. But that's just good Eternals and new and improved
Medicine of the future. How the bad guys (or the bad energies) got
to my dogs I'll never know. The metal spheres were certainly an
unusual tool for Yo-Vah to gift us with. The spheres turn out to
manifest themselves at many different levels of reality - on the
physical plane and on the astral plane, for example. We were given
the spheres while all of us were out of body. We then took the
spheres with us back to the duplex while we were still out of
body. Then, after the MindLink/HeartLight, we were able to touch,
feel, and handle the metal spheres at a physical plane level.
When Yo-Vah spoke of virtual reality, he reminded us that the
Forces of Darkness were much more powerful in the provinces of
virtual realities. In a virtual universe, the FOD could run
roughshod in uncontrollable fashion. Terror, intimidation,
apathy, destructiveness, and hatred were all very possible and all
amplified as much as was allowed. But the obverse could easily
obtain. In a virtual virtual universe, everything was truly up for
grabs. The FOD was just as likely to be absolutely helpless in a
virtual virtual universe, because the operational rules were so
much more obscure and symbolic. The Forces of Light routinely
patrolled reality at multiple levels. The saucercraft travelled
just as well in virtual universes as in physical plane
here-and-now universes. Patrolling the physical plane occupied
most of the FOL's attention, given the temporal span that had to
be covered. Navigating virtual universes posed a severe
mathematical conundrum for any guidance system, so each Guardian
saucercraft usually comes equipped with a plasma guidance system
that does require a rocket scientist, or at least a good hacker to
operate it.
I really don't know how to find the plasma guidance area in the
controls. And I'm not sure about what is going to happen when I
press the various multicolored contact plates. The high-resolution
graphics look nearly three-dimensional and have chromatic
holographic patterns that are visually quite arresting and
distract me from learning what their functional significance
really is.
____________________
Julian said that he was going home and going to bed. That it had been much
heavy a day for him already. We logged Julian on to one of Al's terminals, set
up an account for him in the Unix network, and gave him a password and
high-level access. Su-Shan explained to Julian how he could get into the
apartment and inactivate the hexadecimal tone generator by letting Al
recognize him. He always has had a key to my place, and now he was concerned
about helping us see to it that the two shepherds were safe. We told Julian
that we would be going out this evening and leaving the dogs in with Al. We
walked him outside, and he and I hugged.
"You be clean now, mon. I know it. No problem, mon. God be with you. Truly
sounds crazy, with all the stuff that's been happening. But it feels all right
in my stomach, mon. You be O.K. Maybe Gabriella's spirit be telling me
something different than what I hear, now."
"Thanks for telling me about Gabriella, man. Both of us still love her, and
I'm glad we're straight on her. Maybe Dr. Tomorrow will have the privilege of
two acoustic drum kits when you aren't busy with some other gig. You and
Su-Shan open up a hole in the Earth's atmosphere, for sure."
"For sure my brother. I think you are into the big time now, mon. Your
guitar even sounds better. I play with you any time, Lyle. But please be
careful with evil and the dark side. Better not be mixed up with your music. I
can sing for Jesus, and for The Lord, mon, but don't get me mixed up with any
of that Devil stuff. Not your style, mon."
"Just for throwing out the garbage and housecleaning, Julian. Nothing
else."
"The dark side be all around. Don't need no flying saucer man to tell me.
But where you get the metal balls?"
"Those silver spheres? From the flying saucer man."
"I believe you, but don't mess with me mind. Make sure to talk to Bruce
before you leave on that journey. Godspeed, mon."
We took leave of each other in the sweltering Miami sun under a couple of
Royal Palms. By the time Julian got down to Bayshore Drive, he realized that
he still had the silver sphere in his pocket. He would call later.
The Eternals were a bit sombre during their music rehearsal. Al was also
unusually quiet. Yo-Vah had said that "the requisite abilities" would appear.
That was definitely happening. "Requisite abilities" were appearing all over
the place. Where did the recognition of the FOD, the dark side, or evil come
in? All the negative was a necessary concomitant of the positive, and vice
versa. Yet it was good AND evil, not good OR evil. There was a huge
difference. Primitives nearly never grasped the philosophical implications of
this difference. The Eternals did. They discussed it. Noman, who had spent at
least one lifetime on a penal colony made a strong case for some musical
compositions which had a mixture of dark and light features, so as to more
efficiently process both positive and negative energies through the music and
the music-making process. The reality of Life includes both positive and
negative in the process.
The process loop included the musicians, so by extension, all the Eternals
would be required to process potentially huge amounts of negative and positive
energies while performing before an audience. The megastepped physical
vehicles would be much more efficient than ordinary Earth bodies. The Eternals
would be capable of processing the very energies that often facilitated
horrendous excessive substance abuse by musicians who took the substances to
feel more comfortable while processing the high-intensity energies. Precisely
because of his megastepped condition, Lyle developed an exquisite
understanding of how any performing musician could have trouble handling the
energies of high-volume music production and a large audience to boot. But
during rehearsal now, the Eternals aimed at producing a mixing board
mellowness. The DAT recorder worked fine, and Lyle made a stereo mix off the
board while they were rehearsing. The long minimalistic tune in open E minor
was turning into a good Time Tunnel. Lyle programmed 200 bars of the tune into
an older Yamaha keyboard that had built-in rhythms, and the tune
synchronistically just turned out to loop nearly seamlessly at bar number 200.
So it made for very long and drawn-out jams on top of a background suggesting
Eastern themes and meditation. After the rehearsal, Lyle made a cassette dupe
of the DAT and popped an ultraWalkman and ear buds into his bag with the
notebook computer. Never know when they might have a chance to review the tape
before the next rehearsal. And on a modern flying saucer, well, things would
probably be so automated that listening to the tape would give Lyle something
to do instead of twiddling his fingers.
The Eternals dressed in the Indian bedspread tunics that Pearl E. Mae had
put together for the group. We were a little squeamish about leaving She-Ra
and Bullet alone in the house, but we reprogrammed Bruce the talking Geranium
and set up Al's hexadecimal sound net. We hugged both dogs and left. It was
getting pretty dark by the time we got to Kennedy Park on South Bayshore
Drive. We had to walk by Julian's house, but I didn't notice any signs of
activity. We walked along the thin inlet of sulfur-smelling mangrove that
divided up two lobes of the green running areas. At the ocean's edge, the park
was bounded on one side by Rockerman Road and its canal. There were too many
boats in the canal for anyone else to be able to get in there. So it seemed to
me that the other green lobe of running area would be a more likely landing
place for Yo-Vah. We walked over the curved wooden bridge at the ocean's edge
that led from one side to the other. The sound of Monty's outdoor band was
already reflecting off the waters in the islands and anchorages of Dinner Key.
The side of Kennedy Park that was away from the urbanization of Rockerman Road
had an area of quiet mangrove facing Monty Trainer's groups of Docks.
The transparent flying saucer was waiting there for us when we got there.
As we approached the area that looked like trees and shadows from a distance,
the saucer's outlines because quickly apparent. With a soft hum and a muffled
vibration, a sparkling panel slid open to reveal Yo-Vah smiling at us. He
extended a hand and we entered the craft single file. I was too overwhelmed by
the novelty to notice the startled glance of recognition that Yo-Vah had given
us for some reason. We were all impressed at how much bigger the saucer seemed
inside. The internal structure was, for all intents and purposes, a forty foot
geodesic dome with internal panelling made of a sparkling transparent material
that resembled plastic more than metal. There were panels of controls
everywhere that controlled, for one thing, the transparency or translucency of
the individual walls. Some of the walls were not quite transparent, giving us
a visual hint of the individual cabins looked like. The central chamber
contained a tube-shaped compartment with a two level command center.
Individual cabins were spaced like orange sections around the command center.
Each cabin was subdivided into work and sleep areas. A superficial glance
suggested that all the cabins were exactly alike with no variation in either
furnishings or lighting.
The command center had more than enough recliners for all eight of us
surrounded by a beautiful combination of different color displays and control
panels. We manned the recliners at Yo-Vah's request and were treated a
spectacular view of our own solar system as the craft left Earth's
gravitational field with little more than a shimmy of the saucer. The g-force
we experienced was barely more than your average jetliner taking off, but the
craft itself was whisper quiet in comparison to a jet plane.
At close range, and when viewed in the flesh and from the flesh rather than
an out of body perspective, Yo-Vah was less ephemeral and more humanlike. In
fact, he really looked like an older guy with a lot of mileage. He had a
grandfatherly air. There was still a strangely familiar cast to his face, but
I could not catalog my response. Yo-Vah's ship turned out to be a high tech
wonder, and not an imaginary reflective fantasy craft. The accelerated view of
our solar system that was whizzing by on the full-circle surround screens
resembled one of the PBS specials I have seen that showed the same view,
except that it was simulated and much slower than Yo-Vah's craft which was
deftly burning a path straight for the Milky Way. At least that's what it
looked like to us. Now, even in my megastepped days, I am not an astronomer,
but the simulated screen was showing what looked liked clumps of stars that
seemed to be going by incredibly fast, and I said so. Yo-Vah laughed
good-naturedly and explained that saucers always travelled in bursts of speed
to help conserve power and cut down on entropy disorganization. He said that
we were travelling at intermittent bursts that were ten times the speed of
light towards what I called the Milky Way because that is where the closest
Time Zone Interchange Area was located. These areas were set up by the I.S.I.
to help preserve whatever degree of integrity still remained in the Entropy
Equations. Making time transits through the Interchanges minimized the
associated problems like entropic scatter, dyssynchronism, and time shock.
I.S.I. agents set up the Karmic Ring defenses at Time Zone Interchange Areas
to help preserve crucial relationships across time and other dimensions. The
Karmic Ring defenses were also something like the metal and explosive
detectors in our airports. Atavistic metals, as determined by Carbon dating or
other isotope techniques, set off alarms in the Guardian network. Usually, the
metals were gold, silver, or platinum or - in the case of Primitive travellers
- heavy element isotopes such as uranium or plutonium. The atavistic metals
that were heading from the past into a future dimension were now automatically
tracked and collated in a special registry. I.S.I. agents of the 3200th
Century now could keep track of the problem "exports" and were able to combat
the intratemporal ripping off. The agents regretted that the Rings had not
been set up when time travel really became popular in the 2800's.
I was the only Eternal who had never been in a spacecraft, but there was
little time for incredulous wide-eyed reactions. Yo-Vah told us that the
Karmic Rings allowed time dimensional shifts with minimum disturbance of
universal entropy. He would be able to take us into our own future to
demonstrate the truth of what he had told us. I reminded Yo-Vah that I was not
able to understand any of the lettering or inscriptions on the control panels.
He chuckled again, and there was something very familiar about the chuckle.
The back of my mind reached for a memory, but I came up with a blank, and then
forgot about the memory as I turned to my attention to what Yo-Vah was doing.
He made some movements on the panel before him with his fingers and the main
viewing screen went blank. Then the other screens went blank. The same
pulsating flash of color now appeared on each of the screens. The pulsation
continued for at least several minutes. It felt like I was getting a headache,
which is very atypical for me because I never get headaches. After the
headache sensation passed, a feeling of clarity emerged. My eyes could read
the lettering and inscriptions on the control panel, just as though the panels
had all been written in English. But part of my brain still somehow knew that
the symbols were definitely not English. There were still a lot of
mathematical symbols which I could grasp only with my imagination. It was
possible to pick out one digital display which read "2105", and I wondered
silently if I were going to have the chance to observe myself die.
Yo-Vah said I would not see myself. Ignoring my startled expression, he
continued on to indicate that we would be at a very safe distance from Earth's
solar system. We were not supposed to view the final cataclysmic event
directly within the solar system because it might produce very dangerous
debris. As we approached the Karmic Rings, there was nothing special to be
seen on the viewer. Yo-Vah told us we would feel nothing in particular as we
made a time-dimensional transfer other than the blinking lights because the
technology of interdimensional travel had been made very safe and smooth by
the I.S.I. techniques.
He tapped a rhythm on a part of the main control panel, and the large
central screen abruptly switched to an excellent color version of Star Wars. I
was the only Eternal who was shocked and surprised by us. Yo-Vah confessed
that my Primitive planet produced some of the best albeit primitive science
fiction entertainment. One paradoxical reason for the popularity of Earth's
films was the excessive dwelling upon violent and destructive themes. Such art
forms (except for Primitive planets and solar systems) were generally
forbidden as negatively contaminating by the Guardians and the I.S.I. But
Earth and its solar system were notorious throughout the future because of the
entertainment value of Primitive violence. Even evolved beings occasionally
appreciated escapism. As I watched the Empire trying to strike back, I noticed
that the other Eternals were enraptured with the sleek Hollywood flash. We had
not had much time to watch television during the past four days. Yo-Vah
understood the fascination that the other Eternals had. All Guardians of the
future were very very fond of Earth culture movies, books, and some music.
Despite the extinction of the Primitive planet, science fiction movies of
twentieth century Earth especially conveyed a powerfully charming view of the
future for those beings who actually lived in the future. Possibly because of
the vast numbers of forbidden behaviors to be found in Earth movies, Guardians
enjoyed them as purely escapist, as physical violence and destructiveness
simply do not exist on a regular basis during the times of the I.S.I. Of
course there was still plenty potential for negativity. Destructive
instruments of the future have become so efficient that the rare examples of
violence and/or destructiveness can produce individual or planetary death with
equal facility. But criminal types in the times of the I.S.I. are really rare.
Since systematic detection of the intratemporal rip-offs began, the actual
incidence of the crimes had been slowly down exponentially. The amount of
intratemporal ripping off that occurred before the I.S.I. installed the Karmic
Rings was so great, that a critical amount of negative momentum had been
gained. The known universe was experiencing entropy imbalance to such an
extreme degree that the imbalance had long ago began ripping through the time
barriers. So the actual entropy imbalance of the universe reflected backwards
into the past from the future. The sins of the children began to be visited
upon the great great great grandfathers. Then the retrograde effects, once
started, continued to manifest more and more intensely. Burgeoning violence
and destructiveness began to amass into retrotemporal pockets of Primitive
cultures where the behaviors were either permitted or actively sanctioned. The
destructive retrotemporal effects were also cumulative, and the I.S.I. had
become very alarmed with the recorded extinction of more than 50% of the
Primitive planets known to and charted by the Guardians of the I.S.I. When two
planets that were definitely not Primitive, but possibly borderline, began to
show signs of cultural backsliding with intermediate scale physical plane
violence, the I.S.I. reasoned that possibly the retrotemporal effects were
beginning to threaten civilized cultures. Thus something had to be to slow or
otherwise control the entropic degradation. So DR TOMORROW was born as a
project, one of three aimed at helping to correct the entropy imbalance of the
universe. Violence and destructiveness have largely been weeded out in the far
future of 32,000 A.D., but the intratemporal ripping off that went on between
the years 28,000 and 32,000 was enough to guarantee dreadful repercussions to
the past. As long as the repercussions were wiping out only Primitive life
forms, no one got too upset. But when life forms clearly not Primitive began
having serious problems, and then started regressing into Primitive cultural
activities, the I.S.I. clearly discerned a pattern of possible ultimate danger
if unchecked or uncontrolled. The I.S.I. were never certain that entropy
imbalance was a puzzle with a solution, but all the Guardians generally hoped
that the imbalance could be cut off at its source and then also possibly
harmonized.
Yo-Vah explained all of this to me. The other Eternals all seemed to be
listening also with one ear but gluing most of their attention on the science
fiction movie. I assumed that they already knew the facts we were hearing.
What a universe!
______________________________________________________________________________
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD) #1054,
spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar, and a
couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a Mac IIsi
running MOTU's `Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part of a Ph.D.
Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR TOMORROW is a project
that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional wellness learning system.
Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black Cube, several Macs, numerous
stringed instruments, and two beautiful gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and
Bullet. `DR TOMORROW' and `Project Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two
scientific activities of Life Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588,
Miami, Florida 33133.
DR TOMORROW will be continued next issue.
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
If you like Quanta, you may want to check out these other magazines, also produced and distributed electronically:
InterText Contact: jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu
--------- --------------------------------
InterText is the network fiction magazine devoted to the publication of
quality fiction in all genres. It is published bi-monthly in both ASCII and
PostScript editions. The magazine's editor is Jason Snell, who has written for
Quanta and for InterText's predecessor, Athene. Assistant editor is are Geoff
Duncan.
The PostScript laser-printer edition is the version of choice, and includes
PostScript cover art. For a subscription (specify ASCII or PostScript),
writer's guidelines, or to submit stories, mail Jason Snell at
jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu. InterText is also available via anonymous FTP from
network.ucsd.edu (IP# 128.54.16.3). If you plan on FTPing the issues, you can
be placed on a list that will notify you when each new issue appears - just
mail your request to jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu.
Core Contact: rita@eff.org
---- ---------------------
CORE is available by e-mail subscription and anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org.
Send requests and submissions to rita@eff.org. CORE is an entirely electronic
journal dedicated to e-publishing the best, freshest prose and poetry being
created in Cyberspace. CORE is published monthly. Back issues are available
via anonymous ftp at ftp.eff.org. (192.88.144.4).
The Guildsman Contact: jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu
------------- -----------------------------
The Guildsman is an electronic magazine devoted to role-playing games and
amateur fantasy/SF fiction. At this time, The Guildsman is available in LaTeX
(.tex) source and PostScript formats via both email and anonymous ftp without
charge to the reader. Printed copies are also available for a nominal charge
which covers printing and postal costs. For more information, email
jimv@ucrmath.ucr.edu (Internet) ucsd!ucrmath!jimv (uucp)
Back issues of The Guildsman are available via anonymous ftp at
potemkin.cs.pdx.edu (131.252.20.145) in the pub/frp/ucrgg directory.
Thank you, thank you very much.
_______________________________
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Volume V Issue 1 ISSN 1053-8496 April 1993
Quanta Volume V, Issue 1
ISSN 1053-8496 April 1993
____________________________________________________________________________
Editor/Technical Director All submissions, request for
Daniel K. Appelquist submission guidelines, requests for
Proofreading back issues, queries concerning
Vince Genovese subscriptions, letters, comments, or
_____________________________________ other correspondence should be sent
to the Internet address
Copyright 1993 by Daniel K. quanta@andrew.cmu.edu.
Appelquist. This magazine may be
archived, reproduced and/or Subscriptions come in three flavors:
distributed provided that it is left MAIL subscriptions, where each issue
intact and that no additions or is sent as a series electronic mail
changes are made to it. The messages; BITNET subscriptions, where
individual works presented herein are each issue is sent as a file over the
the sole property of their respective BITNET and FTP subscriptions, where
author(s). No further use of their subscribers receive a notification
works is permitted without their when a new issue has been placed at a
explicit consent. All stories in this designated FTP site. Anonymous FTP
magazine are fiction. No actual servers that carry current and back
persons are designated by name or issues of Quanta are:
character. Any similarity is purely
coincidental. export.acs.cmu.edu........128.2.35.66
ftp.eff.org..............192.88.144.4
Quanta is supported solely by reader lth.se...................130.235.16.3
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Checks may be made out to Ascii Quanta issues are available via
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Quanta
3003 Van Ness St. NW #S919 Issues of Quanta are also available
Washington, D.C. 20008 on CompuServe in the "Zines from the
Net" area of the EFF forum (accessed
by typing GO EFFSIG).
____________________________________________________________________________
Articles
LOOKING AHEAD Daniel K. Appelquist
Serials
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS Jim Vassilakos
DR TOMORROW Marshall F. Gilula
Stories
MARKETABLE ASSETS Vicki L. Martin
MATRIX ERROR Charles B. Owen
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Hello from Washington, D.C. everybody! Yes, I have touched down whole and
well in the nation's capital. Sorry it's been so long since the last issue,
but, as you might expect, I've been pretty busy what with moving to a new
city and a new job. I'm now working as a writer for Visix Software, in
Reston, Virginia.
Some big news: first of all, Quanta was given a mention in the March issue of
Analog. This mention was due to the fact that Quanta recently garnered second
runner up in the Digital Publishing Association's "Digital Quill"
competition. The competition included all kinds of electronic publishing,
from books and magazines on disk, to technical electronic publications, to
electronic fiction magazines like Quanta and InterText (which took the
position of first runner up, congratulations Jason!) Although the awards were
rather small in scope, they did have the effect (as Geoff Duncan points out
in his "SecondText" column in this month's InterText) of drawing attention to
electronic publishing. According to Ron Albright of the Digital Publishing
Association, they do plan to sponsor another competition in 1993, and they
also intend to expand their activities, and become a sort of advocacy group
for electronic publishing. I'm personally very excited about this, as I see
it lending some additional authenticity to the realm of electronic
publishing. To get more information about the Digital Publishing Association,
send mail to Ron Albright at 75166.2473@compuserve.com. (Although I still
haven't received my "certificate, suitable for framing".)
So, much to my surprise and delight, I've started receiving manuscripts via
U.S. mail (and some of them are really really good). This rush of new
material came too soon for me to include any of it in here, but you should be
seeting some of it in upcoming issues. I can only assume that these
manuscripts come from people who aren't on the Net. If you are on the Net,
and you'd like to submit material, please send it electronically (as email to
quanta@andrew.cmu.edu).
This issue finishes up the Dr Tomorrow serial, the first installment of which
appeared in the March 1992 issue (Volume IV Issue 1). I think you'll find the
ending at least as bizarre and enigmatic as the rest of the serial. Also in
this issue, another chapter in the Harrison saga, plus fiction from two new
authors. Charles B. Owen brings us Matrix Error, and Vicki L. Martin brings
us Marketable Assets.
I'd really like to thank Vince Genovese for helping me out with proofreading
and editorial suggestions for this issue. Also, I'd like to thank John
Zimmerman for coming up with some stunning cover art for the PostScript
edition. If you're subscribing to the ASCII edition and you have access to a
PostScript printer, I strongly suggest you change your subscription to the
PostScript edition. Besides great cover art, you also get a typeset document
to peruse. Of course, you get all the same fiction in the ASCII version.
On the subject of a Quanta party, I've decided to hold an informal
get-together at Disclave (which is a science fiction convention to be held in
the D.C. area on Memorial Day weekend). If you're already attending Disclave,
or if you'd like more information about this event, send me some mail. Note
that this isn't going to be an "official" event or anything like that. I'll
just be trying to get Quanta people together. It promises to be lots of fun!
Be sure to check out the blurbs on the last page of this issue for the new
magazines, Cyberspace Vanguard and Unit Circle. Both are very good journals
and well worth checking out.
Lastly, I'd like to say thanks to all the subscribers who sent me positive
comments about Quanta after my last mailing. It really helps to know that
people are reading and enjoying Quanta. I appreciate any other comments (good
or bad) anyone out there might have. By the way, even after cleaning up my
subscription list, which involved deleting over 200 defunct addresses, there
are still over 2000 subscribers.
Wow.
______________________________________________________________________________
Moving? Take Quanta with you!
Please remember to keep us apprised of any changes in your address. If you
don't we can't guarantee that you'll continue to receive the high quality of
fiction and non-fiction that Quanta provides. Also, if your account is going
to become non-existent, even temporarilly, please inform us. This way, we can
keep Net traffic due to bounced mail at a minimum. Please send all
subscription updates to quanta@andrew.cmu.edu. Thanks!
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
"Regon's shout brought Sills back
MARKETABLE ASSETS around, the barrel realigning.
Regon threw himself away, hand
by Vicki L. Martin clawing for his own holstered
SW&R. The move was trained,
Copyright (c) 1993 instinctive; he'd never draw and
fire in time."
______________________________________________________________________________
James Regon pulled his eye away from the retinal scanner and thought, `I
hate this. I really, seriously hate this.'
He shot nervous fingers through his short-cropped black hair. The
Polliwog behind the flexiscreen web, her red-tipped snout shining, hurried
him into the back room with perfunctory politeness.
Midnight blue eyes studied his newest possession. `Gahd, what a head of
hair!'
Riotous copper curls lay limp on bony shoulders. The young human sat in
an unreliable chair, clad in a beige sweater two sizes too large for his
slender body.
His hands were securely tied behind his back.
Regon slit the ropes with a single swipe of his knife, said, "Let's go,"
and started out the back door.
The man rubbed the ropes off his wrists and studied Regon with renewed
wariness. "Where are we going?"
"I'll explain later, after we're clear of the market." When the stranger
still refused to come along, Regon hissed, "Look, unless you want to get
caught up in some very nasty attempts on my life, I'd suggest you move."
Green eyes blinked twice before the man followed Regon out the back door
and along the alley.
The pair slipped out of the alley beside a sweet-scented confectioner's
shop and mixed with the crowds. The younger man threw hungry glances toward
every food booth they passed.
Though refusing to stop, Regon dug a meat roll from his pouch and passed
it across. The man tore into the bread-wrapped sausage.
"What's your name?" Regon asked.
"Erik," he mumbled around an overfull mouth. "Erik Milhollin. You?"
"Regon." He eyed the quickly vanishing meat roll. "You're not half
hungry, are you?"
"You'd be hungry, too, if you hadn't eaten in three days."
"I thought the Polliwogs treated their merchandise better than that."
"Most times they do. They only hold off on the food when the
'merchandise' still has a mind of its own."
Regon grinned, pleased that he'd read the signs right. "Bit of trouble,
were you?"
"Enough." Erik wiped his hands clean on the seat of his pants, favored
Regon with a look of distrustful speculation, and asked, "So when you plan
on jumping me?"
"Jumping you?"
"That's what you bought me for, innit? Big he-merc like you doesn't go
to the market unless he's buying something for his bed."
Regon laughed. "Not this time, mate. I've got other plans for you."
Cat eyes darkened. "I won't work the streets for you."
Sight of two familiar faces in the crowd to their rear drove the chosen
retort from Regon's mind. Instead, he asked, "How good a fighter are you?"
"Why do you think I was tied up?"
"If you get into trouble, put your back into the nearest corner and stay
the hell out of my way."
"Promise me another sausage roll and a warm ale, and I'd fight half the
Polliwog army with you."
"You're on, friend."
Though expecting an attack, Regon was almost too late turning to meet the
first man's rush. Sidestepping a knife aimed at his right kidney, he chopped
at the conveniently presented neck and danced away. A backswung leg
effectively destroyed the man's balance.
A hard shove sent him flying even further away.
All around them, market shoppers screamed and fled. Voices raised in fear
and warning filled the air. Panic reigned.
Two more attackers closed in from behind. Regon wheeled; he might evade
one, but he'd never dodge the other. The nearer, larger of the pair, moved
in first. A fifteen inch jungle knife filled one hand; a round-tipped
stun-rod filled the other.
Same old Neville.
The stun rod swept in low, aimed for Regon's genitals. An electric jangle
shot up his trouser leg.
To protect his vulnerable back, Regon turned Neville's attack energy
against him, reversing their positions; Neville's body blocked the second
man's attack.
Regon spared a quick glance around. Terror had cleared the street,
leaving the five humans momentarily alone. His first attacker--a free-lance
assassin named Sills--sprawled in a heap, his head bloody where he'd
collided with a nearby wall.
Erik danced with the third attacker.
Regon turned back in time to avoid Neville's second strike with the stun
rod. He bulled his way inside Neville's reach, too close for the larger man
to use the rod effectively. Before Neville could bring either of his weapons
to bear, Regon caught the man in his fist and twisted. Hard.
Neville screamed; the fluting screech brought a cold smile to Regon's
lips. Regon's other hand snatched away the man's knife, twisted it around,
and hissed the razor edge across the man's throat.
Twisting about, Regon stopped, slowed by surprise. Sills had recovered
enough to pull himself off the dirty pavement and draw a short-barreled
breastpin gun from a concealed pocket. The barrel lifted, aimed at
Milhollin's unsuspecting back.
"Erik! Behind you!"
Regon's shout brought Sills back around, the barrel realigning. Regon
threw himself away, hand clawing for his own holstered SW&R. The move was
trained, instinctive; he'd never draw and fire in time.
The breastpin spat. Its load--a thin, steel pin no longer than a
fingernail--caught Regon in the left arm. Pain made him lose hold of his
half-drawn weapon. He sprawled on the pavement, stunned and helpless.
A victorious grin split Sills's face. He steadied the breastpin for a
second, fatal, shot.
Regon knew he should react some way, should try to recover his own
weapon. He couldn't move.
`Stupid way to die,' Regon thought. `Never should've bid in public
thataway.'
The breastpin fired again.
A body hurled between Regon and Sills. A barked cry cut off abruptly as
the figure landed on the street. Blood from a tiny hole under one shoulder
blade marked the missile's exit point.
Somewhere in the fractured seconds of the attack, Erik saw Regon's
danger. He caught his man by the lapel and hurled him into the path of the
needle.
Erik's knife sank to the hilt just below Sills' breastbone before the
killer could realize his mistake.
Regon's vision wavered, shivering in a gray fog. Sure fingers fiddled
with his jacket sleeve, tying off the arm to slow the bleeding.
"Talk to me, Regon. I don't know this city. I don't even know anything
about this planet. Tell me where to take you."
Regon harvested the scattered threads of his reason. He accepted Erik's
help, leaning heavily on the narrow shoulders, and pointed up the street.
"Two--three--blocks down, turn right. Hover rental shop on the right."
They shuffled along, ignoring frightened and curious looks from the
emerging crowd. Regon fished an activation chip from his pouch. He handed
it to his companion then let his mind drift.
Regon sank gratefully into the soft cushions of the hovercar and watched
buildings and city parks whiz past. He wondered at himself. It wasn't like
him to yield to anyone, especially not a complete stranger--a man he'd just
bought off a Polgish slave block.
The initial shock of injury wore off even as the pain increased. Warmed
by the full-blowing heating unit, he dug his way back to reasoning thought
and studied his companion.
`What makes me want to trust him? I've never accepted anyone like this in
my entire life. So he saved my life. I work solo. I'm trained. I shouldn't
be able to trust anyone until I know a lot more about them than I know about
this Erik Milhollin. I don't--I won't--trust anyone. My mission is too
important. I don't dare risk it.'
"Are we going to fly around the city in circles," Erik asked, "or are you
going to tell me where we're going?"
"Take the Millish Expressway--the northbound just ahead. I'll tell you
where to go from there." He studied the curl- crowned profile. "You saved my
life-- why? You could've let them kill me. You'd've been free."
"You still owe me a sausage roll and a tankard of warm ale. Can't collect
those off a corpse. Besides, the instant the Polliwog law found your body,
they'd decide I did it, then where would I be?"
"You've got a point," Regon agreed.
Erik took his eyes off the hover lane long enough to study the wound.
"We'll need to stop and take care of that soon. Will we be driving long?"
"Long enough. Stay on the Millish northbound 'til I say otherwise."
"Yes, master."
The dry mockery in the deep voice brought a smile to Regon's lips. Warm
and comfortable, he sank into the cushions and closed his eyes.
___________________
Regon jerked awake again, aware that he'd lost consciousness. The
single-room cabin smelled pleasantly of processed stew.
A steaming mug of coffee bobbed in front of his nose.
"Don't know what your job is, friend," merriment filled Milhollin's
voice, "but it must pull a lot of credit. Haven't seen a legitimate Terran
brew or a good Malt Scotch in over ten years."
"I have a private supplier." Regon eyed the glass of liquor in his
companion's hand; a dark eyebrow rose.
"Sorry, helped myself." Milhollin saluted him with the cup. "Would've got
you some, too, but I gave you a hypo of pain cleaner a couple hours ago.
Can't mix the two, can we?"
"How did you know how to get here?"
"Found a fiber map in your pocket."
They devoured a full meal as the second of Polgish Three's two suns
disappeared over the western horizon. Drowsy, Regon saw no reason to move.
Milhollin set the dirty dishes in the portable wash unit, stored away the
leftovers, and returned to the bed.
Feeling the need to fill the silence with conversation, Regon asked,
"What were you doing on the Polgish slave block?"
"Wrong place at the wrong time. My Mam was a systems merchant. We'd flit
about the quadrant, shipping this, hauling that."
"Lemme guess. Someone slipped something into a cargo."
"The honest reputation she'd spent forty years building didn't do her a
bit of good. And because we'd been so honest, we didn't have enough money
for a good lawyer."
"What happened to her?"
"Last I saw of her, we were in the Sentencing Chamber. When they gave me
the block ... she had a seizure. No one ever told me what happened."
"I'm sorry."
Milhollin shrugged off his concern. "I think it's about time you told me
what you were doing at the market today. If it wasn't for a tight bottom for
your bed, what was it?"
Regon studied the younger, smaller man and gauged his potential-- as
partner, co-conspirator, or threat. Regon sat up in bed, and motioned for
Milhollin to close the light screens.
"I'm a ... well, my business is my own. It's honest and legal. As you
noticed, it pays well, too. I call it 'corrective adjustment'."
Milhollin sat on the foot of the bed, expressionless but alert.
`At least he's not already retreating,' Regon reasoned. "I've been hired
to stop a Polgish criminal named Sorin. He has a bodyguard named Keishie, a
female Polliwog with rather exotic tastes."
A hard glint marred Milhollin's eyes. "I suit her ... exotic tastes."
"You won't do anything physical. Just draw her away from Sorin long
enough to give me a shot at him."
"You're an assassin."
"The man's a sadist, Milhollin. He gets a charge torturing innocent
children. He flaunts it, bragging how he's above the law. Someone's got to
stop him, and by god, it's going to be me!"
Milhollin leaned away from him, as much to protect his ears as to gain
breathing space. Regon sat back against the headboard.
"I intend to get him," Regon said, "one way or another. Will you help
me?"
"If I don't?"
"I'll tie you up and leave you here. Kill you if I have to."
"You'd do that after I saved your life?"
"I don't have a choice. I can't afford loose ends."
Milhollin snarled an oath, leaped off the bed and raced out the door.
His arm aching despite the medication, Regon slammed a fist down on a
bedside control box. He threw off the covers and ran to the door.
In the light-flooded drive, Erik reached for the hovercar door, only to
cry out and fall back, unprepared for the security system Regon had
activated. Spying Regon on the covered porch, Erik sprinted towards the
trees, ignoring the agent's shouted warning.
Erik fetched up against the static fence running full speed. He grunted,
every bit of wind knock from his chest, and fell to the ground, nerves
twitching from the shock. Though stunned, the space nav scrambled onto his
hands and knees.
"If you're thinking to get away in some other direction," Regon warned,
"don't."
Erik tottered to his feet, determined to face his killer with his head
high. "Get it over with, then. Go on. Shoot! Just don't expect me to beg
you off."
Regon cocked an eyebrow at the gun in his hand; he didn't even remember
picking it up. A smile, half mocking, half ironic, raised one corner of his
mouth. He motioned toward the building.
"Inside, friend. We'll talk about this some more."
"No."
"Get in the cabin, Erik. Now."
"Go to hell!"
"Stubborn--."
Regon slammed the brakes on his anger. Trading temper for temper was not
the best way to deal with Erik Milhollin.
"Look, I won't hurt you unless you give me a reason to. Will you please
go into the house? It's cold out here."
Erik hesitated a moment more, then stumbled toward the porch, wobbly on
unsteady legs.
Regon moved with only slightly more grace. Closing and sealing the door
behind him, he tumbled onto the mattress and deactivated the exterior
security lights but left the screens activated.
Erik draped the other side of the bed, gasping and shuddering.
"That was dumb," Regon said. "You were lucky I preset the fence to stun."
A plump pillow under his face muffled Erik's response. "Hoo-bloody-ray."
"Look, Erik, I'm not asking you to do anything illegal or even immoral.
All I need is Keishie away from the door for two minutes. After that, you're
free to go anywhere you like. I'll give you your papers, sign you a free
man."
"I don't really give a damn."
"I'll help you find your Mam."
Erik's body tensed. The curls lifted.
Sensing possible victory, Regon pressed, "I have contacts. Help me get at
Sorin. You'll earn your freedom and find your mother."
Erik's lips pressed into a mirthless grin. "Mum's freedom."
"I can't promise to swing that."
"I'll help you. I'll give up my own freedom, stay to do whatever dirty
work you want, if you'll get Mam back on her ship."
Regon sucked on the inside of his cheek, thinking the option through,
though the simple act of future estimation was more difficult than it should
have been. He forced his stiff, aching body off the bed and plopped himself
down before the small communit set into the wall.
When Erik sought to watch, he sternly commanded him back to the bed.
Regon played with the keys for ten minutes then sighed and sat back,
rubbing his aching temples. Erik sat rigid on the edge of the bed, wringing
his hands in unconscious distress.
"It's a deal."
Erik's face brightened.
"You know where she is?"
Regon motioned him over. Erik bounded across the room and examined the
screen.
"The seizure wasn't severe," Regon reported. "She was released from
hospital two days after the sentencing. Transported to Labor Camp
Ten-A-Nine. That's the most minimum security facility on Krinosh. She'll be
safe there until we do what needs doing."
"Get her out now."
"Oh, no. I don't know you, Erik Milhollin. I don't know if I trust you to
go through with it if you think you've already had your way. She's free when
the job is done, not before."
"And if you botch the job? What then?"
"I've left a written statement with my employer. If it goes sour because
of something I did or some hazard I didn't foresee, she'll be given her
pardon."
Regon deactivated the communit and stood up. He wanted that bed even more
than he wanted revenge against Sorin. "Since that's settled, I think
I'll--." A wave of cold-heat swept over his face; his eyes blurred.
"Wha--?"
Erik caught him as he started a slow slide toward the floor. Regon's
vision tunneled down.
"Sh'd've known ... Sills ... always liked to f-f-fiddle his needles."
Erik swallowed. "Poison?"
"Naw ... just ... be sick awhile." Vicious chills rattled his teeth.
"S-s-s--oh damn. 'm sorry."
Erik said something more, but Regon was too far lost in sickness to hear,
or care.
___________________
`I can't believe I'm doing this. I've fixed the security codes on the
hovercar. With the credsticks I found hidden around the cabin, I can get
off this miserable rock. If it weren't for the chance of getting Mam out,
I'd've left days ago.'
Erik sobered, honest with himself. `No, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't leave
a mudworm in this sorry state. Even a paid assassin deserves help when he's
sick.'
The smaller man replaced the moist cloth across Regon's forehead and
struggled to make sense of the sick man's disjointed mumbling. He spoke
mainly of people and places Erik had never heard
of. Something occasionally slipped through, an emotion or action, that he
found recognizable.
`I wonder who 'Eliza' is. Regon's certainly heaped some colorful abuse on
that one's head, but I don't feel there's anything malicious behind it--more
fondness than resentment.
Sorin, though, is different. There's real hate there. It's not abstract,
either--no hatred for collective sins. There's something personal here.
Regon's come up against this particular Polliwog before, and it's left him
scarred.
What sort of nightmare am I mixed up in?'
Regon's mumbles spiraled down into another deep sleep. Erik pulled the
coverlet further up over the shivering shoulders and let the man sleep.
For three days he cared for the delirious man. If he didn't have his
hands full with Regon, he was bored half out of his mind for lack of
anything to do. Whatever else Regon might be, he was neither reader nor
gamester; there wasn't a single book or computer game anywhere in the cabin,
nothing to wile away the hours except a tatty deck of cards.
Left with hours of loose ends, Erik had bent his curiosity and skill to
the communit. `This is pretty impressive, and I haven't even touched the
restricted files yet. This Regon ... he isn't the assassin I thought he was.
He's somehow connected to GIP. Haven't figured out how yet, but I will
before I'm finished.'
"How ... how did you ... get on that?"
Erik looked up. Though weak as a newborn babe, Regon stared back with
delirium-clear eyes. Erik shifted his own gaze to the chrono on the wall.
`No wonder my spine's talking to me. I've been sitting at this thing for
hours!'
Erik closed the unit and came to the bed. Regon's skin, though pinched
and pale, no longer burned his fingers.
"Good, your fever's broken. About time."
"Where did you ... get the axe code ... my communit?"
"You gave it to me. Saw you use it that first day." Erik pointed to the
polished chrome side of the kitchen storage unit. "Saw your reflection in
that. Handy trick every space nav and pilot picks up, learning to read
mirror images."
"What did you ... find out?"
"Nothing you'd mind me knowing. I was careful to stay out of the
restricts. I know you're latched to GIP some way; haven't quite figured out
how yet. I mean, Galactic Intelligence Prime are more famous for arresting
assassins than for hiring them."
"I'm not an assassin. At least ... not the kind you're thinking of."
"The thought has crossed my mind a couple of times over the last three
days, yeah."
"Three ... three days?"
Erik controlled a budding smile. "Closer to four. Whatever was on the
needle, it certainly did its job on you."
"Three days wasted ..."
"Nearer four. Hungry?"
Diverted, Regon pulled a tired face. "Not really ... but I need something
anyway."
Erik returned within minutes with a meal for the invalid. He spoon-fed
Regon a light portion of the broth and bread. A quite comfortable air hung
between them, enough so that Erik risked trying to satisfy his curiosity.
"You talked a bit ... delirious with fever."
"Nothing offensive, I hope."
"Just names and places, and a few snatches of conversation. You mentioned
Sorin several times, and never in a very commendable light."
"He is not a very commendable being."
"I'm beginning to see that." Since Regon hadn't objected to his
references to Sorin, he felt it safe to ask, "Who is Eliza?"
Regon stiffened. Dark blue eyes hardened to mica flints. Erik retreated
before the powerful glare.
"Eliza is none of your business."
Erik left the bed, taking the meal tray with him; he tried but failed to
match Regon's gaze. "Sorry."
Regon studied the stiff set to the slender shoulders and regretted his
fury. Exhausted physically and emotionally, he relaxed on the bed. He
drifted in mental limbo, too weak to rise but too wound up to sleep. He was
only vaguely aware when Erik, having put away the food and set the dishes to
clean, moved to the bedside and stripped off his clothes.
Erik extinguished the light. Exterior darkness flooded through the
heavily curtained windows, throwing the room into utter darkness.
The bed rocked, a sudden quaking of the air mattress. The cover raised;
cool air brushed him from shoulder to hip. A warm body stretched out at his
side, replacing the cover and displaced heat.
Unease thickened the air around them. Regon didn't like it in the least.
"Sorry. It's just ... a private subject."
"I understand. My fault for pressing. Go to sleep, Regon."
"Erik?"
"Mmm?"
"Thank you."
___________________
The phenomenally wealthy citizens of Yulith Cote resided on The Hill, a
single rise located almost dead center of the metropolis. Seated in the
hopper, the two men studied the well-fortified ten-story steel and
weather-glass structure behind the thirty foot static wall.
"That Sorin's place?"
"Yeah."
A reddish eyebrow vanished beneath copper ringlets. "Ever think of
breaking into the planetary treasury? You'd have better luck."
"I don't plan on taking him here," Regon said; he activated the hover's
air pumps and set the vehicle moving again. "There's a dive in the Lower
City he frequents, sometimes only every two or three seasons, but it's the
one haunt where I know I'll eventually see him."
"What sort of place is it?"
"Procuring house."
"Girls?"
"On the surface. It's secret trade is children, all sexes, all species.
I'll wager the oldest Human child in the place is probably around ten."
Erik paled. "You can't be serious. Ten years ... they're bloody babies!"
"My employer's kept watch on the place for years but could never find a
loophole in the system that would shut them down. We intercept their
transports as often as we can but a few ships always get through. We've
even outbid them at the block, just to keep the babes out of their hands."
"'We' being GIP?"
Regon shook his head. "I didn't say that."
Erik smiled. "I know."
Regon tooled the hovercar down the
tubes with near-reckless speed. Erik had to admire his competence at the
controls--it wasn't too many who could so casually control a careening hunk
of metal skimming on a bed of air.
The hover moved constantly downhill. The buildings beyond the
weather-glass domes of the tubes grew increasingly dense. Prosperity and
glit decreased in direct proportion to age and decay. By the time Regon
shifted them onto one of the uncovered open-ground paths that led into the
lowermost sections of Yulith Cote, they were surrounded by nothing but
trash, destruction, and filth.
"There's been a surveilling team on the place the last two seasons.
Sorin's sure to visit, probably tonight or tomorrow, within the next
sevenday at the outside."
"How can you be sure?"
Regon pointed to a message flashing across the hovercar's portable
communit. "A new shipment arrived at the spaceport just this morning.
Sorin's bound to want first choice."
"Who's sending that?"
"The surveilling team. Even I don't know where they're watching from, and
it's not good policy to try and spot them. They're a strange lot. Most of
them aren't even human, and they don't like having all their hard work blown
by a couple of nosy agents."
"I'm not an agent. I'm a distraction."
Regon resisted smiling only by a supreme effort of will. He couldn't,
however, control the merry dance of his eyes.
"It won't matter to the surveilling teams. Anyone who spots their
watchposts soon wishes he hadn't."
Regon parked the hover in a Pay N' Protect sealed lot and led his
companion into a gray tenement three longish blocks from the procuring
house. Staring through the glassless window frame, he pointed to the squat
building down the way.
"That's the Blue Cushion. Don't let the face fool you. Inside, it's a
palace. Supposedly a bawdy house for free-trade prostitutes, it's owned and
run by a half- Human named Brand."
"What's his other half?"
"Hell devil. He's the one who hooked Sorin on Human children. He caters
to Sorin's vices and provides him with a private 'sampling room'. There's
talk he even joins the Polliwog in his 'games'."
"Why hasn't the law closed him down? Raping underagers is illegal in
every known species."
"It's simple, really. On Polgish, the Final Judiciary for Sex- Related
Crimes is a slimy worm named Kemmosh. A true politician, smooth as silk,
with a taste for young flesh. All Brand's lawyer has to do is put the case
before Kemmosh, and it'll get flushed out the nearest disposal tube."
"How can space sludge like that exist?"
"After tonight, it won't. At least not in Sorin's case."
"So what happens?"
"When Sorin comes, he'll do it openly. He's so sure of himself he
doesn't even try to hide his tastes. Keishie will stand outside the main
door, knocking away any other customers. That door is, by the way, the only
known way into the building. There is another, the one the shipments are
brought through, but it's so well hidden, not even the surveilling team's
been able to find it."
"Where do I fit in?"
"Your job is to lure Keishie away from the door for the two minutes I'll
need to deactivate the warning alarms and get inside the building. How you
do is up to you."
"This Keishie--she the kind that likes the big-eyed, frail, helpless
types?"
"From what I could tell, yeah. Though she usually goes for sun-gold
blonds."
"Once you're inside, then what?"
"Then you're free to go."
"But what about my Mam?"
Regon offered his first truly honest smile. "She's already pardoned. I
imagine she's already back on her ship, on her way to pick you up."
"What are you talking about?"
Regon drew meaningless figures in the blown dust covering the window
sill. "You didn't have to tend me when I was sick. I owe you for that.
Before we left the cabin, I arranged full pardons for both you and your Mam.
She has her ship back, and both pardons in her pocket. If she goes at top
transport speed, she'll be at the spaceport by noon day after tomorrow."
Regon dug a small pouch from a pocket and handed it over.
"There's a temporary freedom receipt in there, and enough credsticks to
tide you until your Mam gets here."
Erik stared from the wallet to Regon and back; he didn't immediately
accept the offering. "Why are you doing this? It wasn't part of our deal."
"I want Sorin. You've agreed to help me, that's reason enough. The fact
that you saved my life--twice--might have something to do with it."
"I didn't do it for a reward, not even this one." Erik slapped the pouch
away, his temper simmering. "I'll do whatever I have to do to save my Mam,
but I won't be bribed into helping you. If what you've said about this Sorin
is true, I want to stop him for that reason alone."
"It's what you first asked for, and I never denied it, did I? You added
the condition of your Mother's safety later. I want Sorin, Erik. Help me get
him."
Erik hesitated a final moment before accepting the pouch.
"Thank you. Without you ..." Regon shook like a dog ridding itself of an
unwelcome bath and pasted a cheery smile onto his face. "You'd better snatch
what rest you can. Oh, and one of the surveilling team will be by later on
tonight with some clothes for you."
"Clothes?" Erik studied the sweater and trousers he wore. "What's wrong
with what I'm wearing?"
"Not exactly provocative. Won't make Keishie's eyes pop."
"No, guess not."
Expecting Regon to do likewise, Erik made himself as comfortable as
possible on the bare floor. He watched as the larger man instead took up a
post beside the window, eyes still on the Blue Cushion.
"You should rest, too," Erik said. "You're still not over that tainted
dart. It doesn't make sense to go up against the Sorin without a proper
sleep under your ear."
"I'm fine. I've spent so much of the last few days sleeping, I don't
think I ever want to close my eyes--or see another bed--for at least a full
cycle."
Erik laughed. Reassured, he settled down to get what rest he could in the
unsavory surroundings.
"It'll be tonight. I can feel it, 'Liza. It'll all be over tonight. I'll
finally settle with that sadistic beast."
The soft-spoken words roused Erik
from a light sleep. Camped in the darkest corner of the bare room, he
watched the man seated beside the window, his indistinct figure lit by a
ghostly glow from the dimmed communit screen.
Regon, unaware of his audience, stared at the points of light that marked
the Blue Cushion's entryway. His voice fell to its lowest register, ripe
with silky promise.
"I'll see you tonight, Sorin. I'll finally meet you face to face."
Erik's skin wiggled under the undisguised enmity in the throaty purr.
`Finally meet Sorin, he said. That means they've never met before. How
could he hate Sorin so much? Maybe it has something to do with this Eliza.'
Ray shifted to relieve a sore spot on one bum cheek. Regon reacted to the
slight sound, his weapon out and ready before he consciously thought to draw
it.
Erik glanced at the gun and cooed, "Twitchy."
"Could get your head shot off making sudden sounds like that." Regon
shoved the gun back into its holster.
"Sorry, didn't know there was another way to move." He joined Regon at
the window but could see nothing but pins of light all across the city. "You
want to catch a little sleep? I'll watch for awhile."
"No."
There wasn't really room at the one window for both men to watch in
comfort, but Erik had no interest in going back to sleep. He leaned his
back against the wall and stared at the room's door, his thoughts on a
speeding cargo transport and an upcoming reunion.
"Gerrom came by while you were asleep," Regon said. He jerked a thumb at
a crate set against the far wall in a patch of bright moonlight. "Your
wardrobe. Let's have a look."
Regon examined the contents under the pin-point glow of a wrist-light.
Milhollin didn't like the larger man's nasty chuckle.
"You'll look smashing in this little bit."
"Little?"
"Very little."
Milhollin activated his own wrist-band torch and nudged Regon aside.
"Lemme at that. If I'm going through with this, I get to pick what I wear."
"You're no fun," Regon sighed, but moved back to the window, leaving
Milhollin to sort through the trunk at his leisure.
___________________
Down on the street, Erik followed the more experienced man around the
darkened turns. They seemed to walk forever. Within five minutes, Erik was
totally and in all ways, lost; Regon was obviously coming at the place from
a totally different direction. Within five more minutes, he heartily wished
Regon would slow down.
Five more after that, legs aching and lungs burning, he seriously
considered canceling his agreement. He wondered if the Blue Cushion was
their destination at all.
Regon stopped so suddenly Erik ran into him from behind. Sight of the
Blue Cushion two doors ahead of them prevented any dangerous outburst.
A single figure stood before the entrance, a round, piggish Polgishin,
highly visible in a heavy black jacket with enough metal decoration to
outfit a small hover.
"Is that Keishie?" he whispered.
Regon nodded.
"Well," Erik sighed, "let's get this over with, shall we?"
"Erik ..."
Erik turned at the soft, almost humble lilt in Regon's voice. Regon stood
with weapon drawn. For an insane second, he thought Regon intended to shoot
him. He relaxed when the Terra SW&R shifted towards the procuring house.
Regon was too busy studying his shoe tops to notice Erik's momentary
start of fright.
"I'll cover you long as I can," he promised, "but once I'm at the door,
you're on your own. Are you sure--?"
"Yes. One question, though. Why don't you just shoot Keishie and save all
this bother?"
"Because GIP has a charter with the Polgish government that protects
guarders like Keishie. Unless she takes an active part in her employer's
perverted games, her only crime is doing the job she was hired to do. It I
take Sorin down while he's busy playing, it'll be a justifiable case."
Erik nodded, understanding. "But if you ambush his guarder without good
cause, you're flushed out the dispose-all, right?"
"Right." Regon shifted his weapon to his left hand and held his right out
to Erik. "Thank you again. I hope everything works out for you and your
Mam."
"One favor before I go off." Erik's grimace was visible even in the faint
light. "Hit me."
Regon's left eyebrow shot up. "Whazzat?"
"You heard me. Hit me. Someplace it'll show."
"You said ... hit you?"
Erik's green eyes snapped. "Yes, hit me! It's part of my cover."
Even though Erik demanded the move, Regon's hand came up so quickly, the
smaller man had no chance to flinch away. Regon's knuckles left a readily
visible swelling on Erik's left cheek. A trickle of blood from his nose
completed the desired effect.
Erik moaned and cradled his cheek. "I said 'it me, no' knock m' 'ead
off!"
"Sorry, didn't know there was any other way to hit."
Erik started to move off, only to have Regon call him back.
"Erik." Seeing he had the younger man's attention, Regon said, "Eliza was
... she was one of the first Humans Sorin took ... she was just seven
years old. ... They never ... they never found ... She was my daughter."
Regon disappeared before Erik could do more than lose hold of his jaw.
From his new vantage point, Regon could see the entire street. Less than
two minutes after he settled in, Erik appeared around the far corner in a
stumbling, twisting run. Regon rose halfway to his feet before he realized
it was all part of Erik's "lure".
`He is good,' Regon's mind-voice rang with admiration. `If I didn't know I
blacked him up, I'd swear he was the defenseless, cuddly little gamin he's
pretending to be.'
Erik stumbled up the road, the perfect picture of a lost, shocky babe,
eyes wide, full lips opened enough to tempt but not tease.
He moved with a carnal glide that was more instinctive than deliberate,
with just enough "woe-is-me" to cast away any suspicions Keishie might have.
Turning, Regon found the Polliwog's
eyes sealed on the approaching figure. The twitching around her bulbous
nose, the batting of her heavy eyelashes and the jerking of one knee all
proved her interest.
Erik slumped against the wall directly across the street from Keishie,
the image of helplessness. He tipped his head just enough so the guarder
could see his damaged face.
"Looks like you were done bad by someone," Keishie called across the way.
"Need help?"
"Please, they ... I didn't want ... four of them wanted me to ... not all
of them at once, I couldn't--!" He turned wide, pleading eyes toward the
guarder, cat green turned almost liquid silver in the vague glow from a
nearby streetlight.
Regon wanted to laugh at the effeminate quiver in Erik's voice.
Keishie gave the door behind her a measured glance then crossed the
street to stand beside Erik.
"Don't worry, little one." Keishie rubbed Erik's back in a calming
caress. "I'll take care of you."
`I just bet you will,' Regon thought.
Keishie and Erik moved down the street, the larger Polliwog guiding the
"stumbling" Human. Regon watched them go, a curiously reluctant flutter in
his chest; if Keishie decided to play rough, Erik wouldn't be able to fight
her off.
He should never have coerced the pilot into helping him. It made Regon no
better than Sorin, taking what he wanted without permission.
The instant the two figures disappeared from sight, Regon raced through
the blackest shadows. He squatted in the lit entry, his nose less than three
inches from the entrance lock.
It took him longer to get inside than he'd expected. Brand had installed
a new locking system since last Regon had surveyed the place. Still, he was
somewhat familiar with the design, and skillfully bypassed Brand's few
custom touches.
Small plug glows down by the baseboards offered dim light. Cushioned
chairs and settees of various blue shades touched with silver sat scattered
around the room. Wall sconces burned at their lowest setting.
He spent a solid ten minutes searching for the basement entrance, and
another five figuring out how to open the portal without triggering any
alarms. By the time he shifted the settee to the side, taking a bit of floor
with it, Regon's nerves were drawn uncomfortably tight.
He descended the narrow stairs. The settee slid back into place above
him, tossing the descent into pitch blackness.
Regon lit the way with his wrist-light. Ahead stretched a long, unbroken
corridor with a single door faintly visible on the far end.
Every instinct Regon possessed warned him not to go on. Brand must have
one or two nasty surprises waiting for anyone who penetrated his security.
Regon studied the way ahead, sweeping the ceiling, floors, and walls with
the wrist-light. Nothing aroused his suspicions, yet his subconscious still
screamed danger.
Regon hugged the wall, mindful of traps and triggers. He moved an inch at
a time, pausing every few breaths to study his next move.
Less than five feet from the door, a faint snapping noise brought Regon
around. A hidden plate plunged from the ceiling to block his retreat. A
second identical plate slammed down directly in front of the door,
effectively sealing him in.
The hiss of displaced air was loud in the confined space, as was the purr
of machinery somewhere beyond the walls. Regon gagged and collapsed, hands
clawing alternately for his throat and a small explosive charge in his
utility pouch. Black flashes behind his eyes led him to the floor, and
unconsciousness.
___________________
The pain of lost circulation in his hands roused Regon from the
comfortable warmth of his own dimmed mind. A chill wind against his bare
skin roused him still more.
Opening bleary eyes, he surveyed his surroundings, slowly remembering the
cause of his condition.
`Amateurish,' he railed at himself. `Oldest trap in the books and I walked
straight into it! The boss'll dance on my blushing hide when he finds out.'
Blinking against the bright light of the large chamber, Regon turned at
the sound of soft whimpering toward his back. His heart seized.
Two small cages stood against the far wall. A dozen children of five
different races huddled behind the bars, terrified and helpless. One, a
small Human male with bright red curls and pale green eyes, studied him
back, fire and fear melding in his open gaze.
`Oh gawd, they're just babies! The oldest can't be more than eight!'
A lock disengaged. The children scampered to the farthest reaches of
their prison, huddling in terror. Regon, bound hand and foot, naked as the
day he popped out, rolled over onto his back.
Sorin and Brand entered the pleasure chamber, matching expressions of
triumph on their faces.
Brand stopped beside Regon, a towering mountain.
"Who are you?"
Regon sealed his lips, letting his cold, hard eyes speak for him.
"I said who are you?"
Regon stared and said nothing.
"It doesn't matter, I suppose," Brand said. "It's just as well you're
here, though. Saves me the loss."
Confusion colored Regon's thoughts, though no flicker of an eyelash
betrayed it to his captors.
"You'll do nicely as an example to my new toys, and it'll save me the
financial loss of using one of them." Brand turned to Sorin and indicated
the children. "Like what you see? They arrived less than an hour ago. Each
one's as virgin as the snows on Mount Taowl."
Sorin studied the cages and drooled, his left knee jerking out of
control; Regon wanted to throw up.
Brand lashed a filament cable through Regon's wrist restraints. Regon
wiggled and squirmed, doing his best to punch Brand's face. For lack of any
other defense, he even tried to bite the man. It did no good.
A small winch took up the slack in the line until Regon hung several
inches above the floor, his ankles still bound to a ring mortared into the
foundation. Stretched between the two, his shoulders and hips felt torn from
their sockets.
Brand moved over to the children, smiling at their terrified hiccups and
whimpers.
"This is a lesson you'd all better learn. You do what I say, when I say,
to whoever I tell you to do it to. If you don't, you'll get just what I'm
about to give
him." Brand pointed to Regon, then repeated his speech in four different
languages.
Regon clamped his teeth down on an oath. Brand moved to one of the
supply cabinets set against the left wall and withdrew a small injector
tube. The procurer moved to stand before Regon, but his words were for the
children.
"This is a drug--Jupiin--that makes the body feel more than usual. It
will make whatever we do to him seem even worse than it is."
Regon twisted, trying to avoid the small cluster of needles aimed at his
left shoulder. The cold sting of injection faded before his rage.
A weak tingling spread from the injection site to every nerve in his
body. It wasn't precisely unpleasant, more like the euphoria just after a
hard battle, an awareness of every nerve ending and skin cell.
Sorin brushed cold fingertips down Regon's ribs. Acid fire burned his
mind. He bit off an instinctive scream but could not hold down a moan.
When Sorin's hands closed on other portions of his body, Regon thrashed
about, half-mad with agony. The need to scream overcame every physical and
mental effort to control it, and carried on forever.
___________________
Between his helpless act and playing hard-to-get, Erik Milhollin kept
Keishie occupied for a solid half-hour before figuring he'd given Regon
enough time.
Finding a way to slip away from the interested Polgishin hadn't been
easy. Erik managed it with the help of a conveniently placed street walker
who attracted the Polliwog's eye. Tall, blond, young and slender, with big,
sad blue eyes, he was much more Keishie's type, and more willing to
entertain than Erik.
Erik slipped away while Keishie and the teenage whore made their
acquaintance. In search of a hire-hover, he'd moved only two blocks before
he realized he'd headed in the direction of the Blue Cushion.
`Why did I come this way? I've paid my debt. My face hurts and I'm tired
down to the bone. I have my freedom chit, enough credsticks to live on, and
the spaceport's in the opposite direction. Mam's coming and I want to get
off this rock.'
He stopped on the street, undecided. Concealed in shadows, he saw three
figures emerge from a building directly ahead.
"That oughta do 'em 'til the next load," one of the men said.
"Don't count on it. Neither of them're ever satisfied," the second,
largest man said.
"Just be glad they goes for the small ones, Loor, and not big hulkin'
types like you."
Laughing, the three men vanished into the night.
Erik stared after them, gaping. It seemed incredible--a wild leap in
logic. Could he have stumbled on the secret entrance to the Blue Cushion?
He was already inside before consciously deciding to move.
___________________
Sweaty, tired, and filthy, Erik Milhollin emerged from the tunnel in an
underground bathing room. A communal shower area formed one side; the floors
and walls still glistened with moisture. Discarded clothing for small bodies
littered the tiles.
He heard the screaming from several deserted corridors away. A deep
keening noise, accompanied by the fluting cries of terrified children. It
took several moments to attach a name to the masculine shrieks.
`God help him, they caught Regon.'
Erik approached the area with caution. He would do no one, least of all
Regon, any good if he got himself caught as well.
Erik crouched near the door beyond which the sounds came. Regon broke his
cries of pain with curses aimed at his tormenters. Erik smiled at the man's
spirit; even nearly insane from the abuse, Regon's metaphors were colorful
and extremely descriptive.
Children's weeping and two men's laughter occasionally drowned out
Regon's weakening cries.
`I can't just go barging in unarmed,' he reasoned. `They'd cut me to
pieces. So what can I do? I'm a space nav. I know electronics and computers.
I know guidance and propulsion systems... That's it. Yes, it just might
work!
Hang on, Regon, just a few minutes more.'
Erik moved down the hall, searching.
___________________
Suspended between heaven and hell, Regon listened while his torturers
laughed at his feeble yips. Hatred burned hot in his soul but had no outlet.
Impotent with fury, blinded by unending agony, he yearned for five seconds'
freedom--five seconds to break that fat Polliwog's neck.
His entire body throbbed, one mass knot of suffering. They hadn't done
anything serious to him, yet already he ached for it to end. Brand's drug
pumped through his system, magnifying the least little hurt until he thought
he would die of it.
"What the--?"
Regon pried open pain-swollen eyes and forced his vision to steady.
A curly-haired apparition stood in the doorway. `Erik?'
"Am I interrupting something?"
The familiar voice, lilting with hard irony, echoed in Regon's ears. The
pain, though no less, became more bearable.
"Who are you?" Brand demanded. "How did you get in here?"
"It was quite simple, really. Y'see, dear Keishie gave me up in favor of
a slinky little blond lump, so I thought I'd see what fun I could find
someplace else."
"How did you got past all my security?"
"I just walked right through the wall."
"Well, you'll never walk out through it."
Regon want to call a warning, tried with all his waning strength. Brand
would be dangerous to Erik all by himself. With Sorin's help, he would be
unbeatable. What madness had prompted Erik to walk in here unarmed?
Regon's first thought was that his complete loss of vision was due to
impending unconsciousness. Brand's gutter oath and Sorin's shout indicated
otherwise.
Children howled into the blackness. Brand and Sorin yelled. Erik
Milhollin said nothing, and Regon waited.
___________________
His first sight of Regon suspended in the air, body covered in a shiny
sheen of sweat, red welts and thin cuts marring him from cheek to ankle,
drove Erik Milhollin very near the edge of reason. Sight of the children
inside the cages did noth
ing to stabilize his composure.
Though the majority of his attention stayed with Brand and Sorin, a small
part was on Regon. Comprehension dawned on the pinched face, a quick flash
of relief, quickly followed by anxiety.
A light touch to the control in the palm of his hand plunged the room
into utter, complete blackness. He'd already placed every item of furniture
and flesh in his mind, and had no trouble finding Sorin in the vital first
seconds.
The Polgishin croaked when Erik's hard fist slammed into his rolling
midsection. Erik followed up with a left hook that sent the blind Polliwog
flying.
Erik placed Brand by the rustle of the man's heavy clothing. He was
careful to remember the table that held them apart. Skirting the obstacle,
he met Brand as the larger man did likewise.
Erik moved with a spaceman's grace in the utter absence of light. The
loud swish of cloth gave ample warning. He ducked under the blow and landed
a kick square on Brand's most tender portion.
Brand stumbled back into the table, groaning his agony.
Erik kicked out again, catching Brand alongside the head. The larger man
lashed out with his arm. Caught above the left ear, he staggered back,
seeing bright lights where he knew there should be utter blackness.
Erik ignored the peculiar ringing in his ears and halted his uncontrolled
retreat when his back collided with something soft and yielding.
Regon's shudder and deep groan explained the contact, and set his place
in the mental room map. Erik met Brand as the larger man stumbled around in
search of him.
The sound of Regon's agony, the sensed pain ringing along Erik's nerves,
angered Erik beyond reason. He lashed out with a dirty kick, aimed shoulder
high. Calculated and deliberate, it landed precisely where he wanted it to
land.
He barely heard the wet crunch over the noises of the children. Brand
made funny little choking sounds before he fell to the floor. The rustles,
the soft gagging noises, quickly ceased.
Erik's every sense strained to find Sorin, but he could feel no sign of
the other man. A moment's search found the control where he'd dropped it
beside the door.
"I'm about to turn the lights back on. Close your eyes," he said, first
in Terran Standard then in Krinoshin, for the benefit of the children, and
switched on the lights.
___________________
After the terrible gagging noises and the eternal silence that followed,
Erik's voice made Regon go weak with relief. So relieved was he, he didn't
obey Erik's command in time to keep from being dazzled by the sudden flood
of bright illumination.
His first clear sight was of Brand stretched out on the floor a few feet
away, throat crushed, face covered in blood. His second was of Erik beside
the door, looking both ways along the outer corridor.
"He got away," Erik groused even as he came back and activated the winch
that lowered Regon to the floor.
Regon tried hard not to flinch at his friend's considerate touch, but
even the brush of air along the fine hairs of his arms and chest was an
individual agony. He could not help but quiver when Erik tried to comfort
him with an arm across his back.
"No, don't touch ... drug ... sensitized skin ... hurts to touch."
Erik yanked his arm back. "What can I do?"
"Nothing ... has to wear off. I'm cold but I think I'd die if I tried to
cover up. The children. Do what you can."
"Where's your communit?"
"Dunno. They skinned me while I was unconscious." Regon was too busy
trying to lessen the painful contact with the floor to give much thought to
his missing clothing.
Erik hunted the chamber until he found Regon's things piled on top the
table. Digging through the pouch, he found Regon's communit and moved back
to the traumatized man. Gaining instruction on how to contact the
surveilling team, he quickly placed the call and gave directions on how to
find the secret entrance. Assured that help was forthcoming, Erik rooted
through Brand's pockets until he found the activation chip for the
children's cells. Freeing them was the work of a moment. Calming them down
was another matter entirely.
He finally enlisted aid of the three oldest, calmest children and put
them in charge of soothing the others. One Human child, a boy with red curls
and green eyes, even managed a pale grin before turning to coo comfort to a
tiny Jumoospin cubling.
As it happened, a Jumoospin female was first through the door. The
cubling took one look at her, yipped in hysterical delight, and ran to bury
her tiny muzzle in the fur of the adult's chest.
Two of the other children showed signs of renewed terror, but the rest
were curiously drawn toward the gigantic Jumoospin female.
Leaving her to calm the distressed younglings, Erik turned back in time
to prevent two strangers from touching Regon's oversensitive flesh.
One of the men, a grey-skinned Krinoshin with a medical tattoo on his
forehead, looked to Regon and asked, "Do you know what they gave you?"
"Jupiin. Dunno the dose."
"Doesn't matter. It's one of the more harmless sensitizers. Nothing to
it, really."
Regon favored the medical man with an irony-tinged eyebrow; blue eyes
danced with pained mischief.
"If you say so. Allsi, you can be a right pain in the butt sometimes, you
know that?"
"If you thud and blunder boys will shoot across the galaxy in search of
new and interesting ways to cause yourselves pain then look to me to set you
right again, can I help it if I take refuge in wit?"
"Taking refuge is one thing," Regon gritted his teeth and endured the
physician's examination, "murdering the poor thing is ... something else ...
dammit, Allsi, that hurts!"
"Regon ..."
Erik's soft, submissive voice distracted Regon from his discomforts.
Green eyes glittered in the light.
"Erik? You alright?"
"Sorin got away. I'm sorry. I wanted to get him for you, but ..."
Though the chance to achieve a longed-for revenge was gone, Regon could
not hold down a grin.
"There'll be other times."
"Least we got this lot free in time," Erik sighed, smiling at the drape
of youn
glings draping to the ursinoid from shoulder to ankle.
"There's that," Regon agreed. "I just wiiiiiIII--Shiii--!"
Regon yelped as Allsi pressed an injector tube against his right hip.
Milhollin's warm laughter followed him into healing sleep.
______________________________________________________________________________
Vicki L. Martin is Technical Secretary in the Agricultural Economics
Department of the Texas Agricultural Extension Service at Texas A&M
University. She has been writing as a hobby for 20 years, but seriously for
nearly seven. Her writing credits include charter membership in Brazos
Writers, where she held the position of Newsletter Editor for three years
and Vice-President for one year. She reached the semi-finals in the L. Ron
Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest and won first place at the Virgule
'92 Convention Writing Contest. In addition, she had edited and authored
numerous fanzine publications, dealing with novellas, short stories, and
anthologies of multimedia television series. In this category, on work, a
Quantum Leap novella, was nominated for Best Fan-Q Award at the 1992 Media
West Convention. She is currently in the process of polishing three separate
trilogy sets in the hopes that at least one will find a home in print.
vlm@ag-eco.tamu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS "`Goodbye, Harrison. And good
riddance.' Then she broke into a
by Jim Vassilakos sprint, and Mike heard the sound
of gunfire. He hit the turf,
Chapter 13 holding Kato down as bullets
continued to whiz overhead."
Copyright (c) 1993
______________________________________________________________________________
She stood before him, silent and expressionless as subtle strands of
moonlight bathed the sanctuary in dim shades of purple. Then a coy smile
played into her silver eyes, and her white mane rippled in the icy
darkness, hair like blades, etching an icy trail along his throat. Her
nails left only a thin trickle of blood, barely a distraction, one
following closely upon the other in preparation for her knee's decisive
collision with his crotch. He doubled over, falling to the floor with a
heavy thud and torn, mud-caked britches.
"Out of the frying pan and into the fire, eh Harrison? That was for
making a fool of me. This is for trying to nuke me."
Her palm pressed against his nose, two fingers slowly but resolutely
forcing their way into his eye sockets.
"I didn't do it."
She held the pressure for a moment and then changed her grip on his
face, lifting him to the wall by the scruff of his chin.
"I was going to kill you mercifully, but lies piss me off."
"He's not lying." The voice belonged to green-eyes.
Sule rocked Mike back a foot and then bounced him off the wall, dropping
him to the mauve carpet like a wet rag. He was still shaking off stars as
Sule turned toward Arien's daughter.
"Get out!"
"What are you going to do, Sule? Beat me up?" The young woman stepped
forward, confidence filling every movement. "If you touch me, my father
will kill you, and if you touch him, I'll kill you."
Mike raised his head slowly and blinked, the gleam of moonlight off
iridium scarcely catching his notice. She had Johanes's laser. An
appropriate weapon, Mike figured. With nothing mechanical to slow her down,
it shaved the bio-synthe's edge to a bare minimum. Sule's scowl faded
slightly, a touch of amusement sparking silver eyes.
"You are a foolish girl."
"And you're on my turf, Sule. Don't forget it."
Mike raised himself halfway off the floor, taking a wider surveillance
of the chamber. Erestyl's emaciated body lay folded in a corner, his eyes
staring at nothing in particular. Mike crept over, fumbling in vain for a
pulse and finding a spent hypo on the floor.
"He outlived his usefulness," Sule contemplated. "The reason you came to
this space sick planet is dead."
"Why?"
"Efficiency."
Mike coughed, "Efficiency?"
"With the aid of Korina and Alister, his mind was peeled open such that
I could question him in solitude. After he disclosed the details of his
treachery, there was simply nothing more of value to learn from him. Now
all that remains is to dispose of the body, a matter to which I must
personally attend."
With that she picked up the body and carried it out the door. Mike
followed her, still limping, outside and across the moat's narrow bridge.
Outside, the Worgs guarded the mansion, their hungry eyes perched upon
blood-drenched snouts. Sule dropped the body several feet from the moat,
placing a small vial on Erestyl's chest and breaking it with her boot. A
moment later, the body was consumed in flame, and several of the Worgs took
up a mournful howl. She waited a minute, finally kicking the charred
remains into the water.
"Food for your pet, Alister."
Mike turned around. Arien stood behind him with Korina by his side. He
seemed despondent, light from the dying flames flickering in his eyes.
"The first cooked meal she's had in years."
"You're sure you won't let me take this gatherer with me? I'd rather
like to keep him."
Arien smiled, "If it wasn't for Mr. Harrison, Sule, it might be your
burnt corpse in that moat."
Her eyes narrowed, but she never got to respond. A gravcar slipped
casually over the gate, turning back only as the laser cannon opened with a
warning burst. Arien raised his arm, effectively restraining further damage
to his lawn.
"Your ride, I take it?"
Sule nodded, "Vlep and your wife. You want her, you'll have to fetch
her."
"Mr. Harrison?"
Mike looked at him dumbly. "Don't you have guards to do that sort of
thing?"
"Please, Mr. Harrison. Oh, you'll need this."
He handed Mike some hi-tech gizmo, a makeshift medical scanner if Mike
guessed correctly.
"To check for anything physically out of the ordinary. It's been
pre-programmed. All you have to do is hit this button. Easy enough for
you?"
Mike was about to say no, but the look in Korina's green eyes told him
not to bother. The front gate was wide open, and crossing through it, Mike
saw Vlep in the driver's seat.
"Long time, no see."
"Why are they sending you?"
Mike shrugged, "I'm sure he has his reasons."
Ambassador Kato was in the back seat, her brown eyes glassy and
sluggish. Mike opened her door, and began scanning. The gizmo seemed to say
she was okay, and he offered his hand in what he figured was his most
diplomatic gesture of the evening.
"C'mon Ambassador."
He reached in and shook her shoulder, finally getting some figment of
attention.
"Mind scanner?"
Vlep ignored the query.
"It's okay, Vlep. Sule can't hear you."
"You'd be surprised."
"Oh," Mike nodded, "she's got a vice on your balls does she?"
"In my neck."
Mike made a T-sign, turning the scanner toward Vlep.
"You know what that means, don't you?"
Vlep looked up, somewhat confused.
"You're just gonna have to do what you do best, Vlep."
Mike leaned in, grabbing Vlep's hand and pressing it against his
forehead.
"Understand?"
He picked Johanes' bug out of his pocket, screwing the two pieces back
together. Then he dropped it in Vlep's hand.
"It's the only chance you've got."
Mike lifted the ambassador from the vehicle and pointed her in the
direction of the mansion. She leaned against him as they walked, and he
felt as though he were training a baby to put one foot in front of the
other. They met Sule half way across the lawn. Her white mane waved gently
in the cool, night air, and she held a small metallic cylinder in one hand,
its tip gleaming golden in the moonlight.
"Goodbye, Harrison. And good riddance."
Then she broke into a sprint, and Mike heard the sound of gunfire. He
hit the turf, holding Kato down as bullets continued to whiz overhead. Then
all was silent, and the gravcar was gone. Mike picked himself unsteadily
off the lawn, helping the Ambassador to her feet. Korina was there moments
later, her father trotting close behind.
"Thank the fates. We thought you both dead."
"Vlep's no marksman, but all the same, it's amazing that he missed,"
Arien added.
Mike shook his head and started back toward the mansion.
"He didn't miss."
___________________
Mike leaned against the tile wall, his groin still aching as he watched
the last of the moat gook slither down the drain pipe. Coating his body in
a gentle, sleepy embrace, the shower's warm spray made him more than a
little drowsy. Considering everything, it was a strange feeling. Getting
shot at usually kept him wired for an evening. Lately, however, the slugs
had been flying so thick and fast that they were no longer a novelty.
Adrenalin was becoming a tiresome companion. Even Sule's knee in his crotch
seemed in retrospect like nothing grander than a momentary distraction,
though, at the time, he was quite certain that the universe was coming to
an end. He curled his lips inward at the memory, letting the warm water
invade his mouth and nostrils until he had to spew it out just to breathe.
It was a good memory, he decided. It helped him forget about sleep.
The black fleximesh laid out for him was vastly superior to the mendwear
he usually threw on. It was designed along some Draconian, poly-adaptive,
one-size-fits-all concept. All-within-reason is what they actually meant.
Mike aired off and slipped into the new threads, still damp from their
soaking. Once they dried, the fibers would expand and harden. Decent
protection, Mike figured, and it was air-tight to boot, better than a flak
vest or a vacc suit and at a fraction of the bulk. Mike checked the fit in
the mirror, the imperious grin sliding off his face as the glint of
polished iridium met his gaze. A draconian, military insignia lay etched
into the left breast: external intelligence if his guess wasn't too far
off.
Korina and Johanes were still in the study, each perched over the
medical console like a pair of determined vultures as they argued over the
finer features of a sub-dermal charge. Mike tried to meet Johanes' smile
with one of his own, but even in his fleximesh uniform, the Draconian could
put on a dastardly grin, unbeatable considering the image of the Realm most
people carried around.
"Vlep's cooperating," Johanes patted the reception unit. "They're going
to Xekhasmeno... to the starport it seems. Oh, by the way... nice outfit."
"Same to you. You mind telling me why we're wearing these?"
Johanes put on a play frown, "You don't like 'em?"
"Walking into an Imperial starport with this on isn't exactly the
quintessence of sanity."
"Well, it isn't exactly an Imperial starport anymore."
Korina sighed, "The Calannan government has assumed temporary control."
"Because of the riots?"
She nodded, "And all Imperial vessels have been banished from the
planetary airspace."
Mike finally managed his smile, no longer wondering why Johanes seemed
so pleased with himself. With a Royal Fleet passenger liner in orbit, it
was a hefty blow to Imperial pride. Johanes had every right to be pleased,
however, he dropped his smile when he noticed it becoming contagious.
"It's politics, Mike. The Imps are going along with it to help quell the
riots."
"So Sule's gonna have a hard time finding herself a ride."
"A very hard time."
"That still doesn't answer my question."
Johanes took a deep breath, cautiously scrutinizing the vacant space
several inches in front of his nose.
"It's like this, Mike. The locals hate the Imps."
"They hate neghrali."
"But they hate the Imps in particular."
"Jo, the starport guards are not going to give you free run of the
facilities just because you're a Draconian."
"If they have orders..."
"Who have you been talking to?"
Johanes resumed his smile, "A friend of yours."
"A friend?"
"A powerful friend."
Mike winced, "No."
"Yes."
"I don't want to hear this."
"General Gardansa. He's now in charge of the starport. And the beauty of
it, which is still making me crazy, is that this whole plan depends on
you."
Mike sat down on the edge of the table, the med console casting a faint
blue glimmer against the side of his face.
"What have you told him?"
"Enough. Enough for him to understand how important it is that we find
Sule before she gets offworld."
"Then what's the problem?"
"He wants to hear it from you. He trusts you."
Mike coughed, "That's absurd."
"I agree completely, but then again, he doesn't know you like I do."
"Yes he does."
Johanes shrugged, "Then I pity him."
Mike considered a jab to Jo's stomach but stuffed the notion back where
it belonged. The fleximesh would make a stump of his hand before he'd ever
inflect so much as mild irritation.
"You still haven't answered my question."
"Appearances are important, Michael. He doesn't want the world to know
he's taking cues from a gatherer, particularly one to whom he owes favors."
"I'm sure he doesn't feel that he owes me anything. Besides, people will
recognize me." Mike fingered his jacks to demonstrate the point. Johanes
just cracked a grin.
"I'll find you a helmet. Look, Mike. He's not the nicest person on this
planet, but he's all we've got, and we desperately need his help."
"Jo, whatever he does, he does for himself, not for you or me. If we go
there, it's going to be us who are helping him accomplish his agenda. You
understand?"
Johanes nodded, "Yes. And I can live with it as long as it means
stopping Sule. Why do you have a problem with it?"
"If you knew him like I do, you wouldn't have to ask."
"Maybe I do, Michael. Spokes told me a few things, while you were busy
having your jitters."
"Like what?"
"He told me that Gardansa had you take a bath... with his limo. It took
a little research to find out why. Gardansa's been effectively grounded
this past year, his black market stolen by strong arms in the military."
Mike nodded, "I know the details. He was too greedy. And I also know
that he's trying to buy his way back in, except he isn't going through his
people, Jo. He's going through ISIS. Did Spokes mention that?"
"He told me."
"Then why are you doing this? For all we know, Sule could be sitting on
Gardansa's lap, playing patty-cake with him right now."
"I doubt it."
"Why's that?"
"It's what you said, Mike. He's greedy. He can get what he wants by
turning us in to ISIS, but he can get much more by capturing Sule and
holding her for the highest bidder. Think about it, and think about what
the Imps will pay."
"They'll kill him."
"He's run that risk before. He'll run it again. And he may even make
himself the planetary governor in the process."
"And you're going to let him?"
"Appearances, Mike. They're more important than the reality. Gardansa
can hand her over to us and then lie like a moon rock. He'll get paid by
both sides, and when the Imps do get her back, there won't be any more in
her head than is in Kato's. A justice fitting the crime."
Mike blinked, disgusted and impressed all at the same time.
"I can tell you've put some thought to this."
"You disapprove?"
Mike gritted his teeth, "No."
"I didn't think so."
"You figured all this while I was taking a shower?"
Johanes blushed, "What can I say?"
"Tell me about Vlep." Mike motioned toward the medical console, and
Korina swiveled the screen toward him.
"Your scan shows a rather complex piece of equipment in his neck."
Mike exchanged glances with Johanes as she continued, pointing toward
various points on the monitor display.
"The receiver is here. This seems to be the timing mechanism. This is a
transmitter, presumably for location purposes, and here's the charge."
"Large package."
"Minute, actually. But it packs a wallop. Sule must have a transmitter
somewhere on her which we assume will activate the charge."
Mike nodded, "She was holding some sort of metallic cylinder as she
passed me."
"Anything about it distinctive?" Johanes interjected.
"No. Well, it had a gold tip."
Kori hit a key on the monitor, switching it off.
"To help Vlep, you're going to have to block the signal."
"How?"
"The starport med-bay has durilium sheaths. Without knowing what
frequency it's keyed to, it's the best we can do. I've already made the
necessary arrangements."
"Thanks. How's your mom?"
"They're freezing her downstairs. The radiation dose she took was
killing her rather quickly."
Johanes cringed, and Mike tried hard not to smirk.
"I didn't know your mother very well, Ms. Arien, and I'm no fan of the
Draconian government, but I do hope they find a way to make her better. I
hope everything works out for both of you."
Green eyes stared blankly back at him, either unimpressed or vaguely
angry.
"You sound like you're making a farewell speech."
Mike looked toward the ground, almost certain that he didn't mean a word
of it, and very certain that she knew.
"I guess I am."
She snorted on that one.
"Y'know. If there's one thing about you neghrali, it's that you're as
presumptuous as hell. This may be news to you both, but I'm going with you.
And before you say anything stupid, just remember, I've got more reason to
want Sule than both of you put together."
The ride to Xekhasmeno aboard the Arien's grav limo proved both safe and
expedient. During the trip, Mike kept a watch out the window as the amber
glow of the city's electric barricade grew slowly in the distance. The city
itself, however, lay covered in a murky shroud, as though the cold, ominous
wind sweeping beneath the clouds had shattered every light and killed every
flame. From the corner of his eye, he could see Kori watching him, her
green eyes glinting faintly in the silver moonlight.
"Pretty incredible, eh Harrison?"
"The locals must of knocked out the main reactor or something. The outer
fence is on a separate capacitor."
"You didn't think us locals had it in us,
did you?"
"You know, Korina, you're not really a local any more than your father."
"I was born here."
Mike nodded and shrugged, "Well, congratulations."
"Here Harrison. Watch this."
She steered the limo into a dive so that Mike no longer had to tilt his
head to see the ground. The earth below was nearly invisible against the
night, a black tapestry marred only by a single long row of glowing specks.
Every now and then, one of the specks would flare up and then die down
slowly. As they continued to descend, the reason for the congestion became
apparent.
There were rioters, perhaps a thousand or more: adults and children and
many somewhere in between, each hateful enough to make the incident at the
Arien estate seem more like a tea party. Instead of tossing their molotov's
on a green stretch of lawn, they were throwing them into vehicles. One
congregation worked on forming a blockade with burnt-out automobiles while
others took pot shots at people as they ran from their cars. The smarter
motorists took their vehicles off-road and out of the death zone. The limo
leveled off at around a hundred meters altitude, and Mike felt more
thankful for gravitics than he could ever remember.
There was less bloodshed at city's gates. Starport authority personnel
had apparently been called out to supplement the city guard. Together, they
held the line at the customs checkpoints, trying desperately to sift the
deluge of legitimate inbounders from those who would get into the city just
to wreck havoc.
The limo touched down outside the starport as a team of Imperial
inspectors cruised around checking city passports and ID's. Mike was
resigned to hiding beneath the floor in a tight space the Arien's had
reserved for special occasions. He felt the gravitic propulsion kick in
with a sudden jerk, knocking his head against the compartment's wall, and
by the time he crawled back out, Kori was steering them into an anchoring
shed over the starport's upper concourse.
The entire concourse deck was flooded with people, mostly offworlders
seeking shelter from the rowdy locals, while groups of Calannic guards
stood at the escalator entrances double- checking ID's and frisking the
prettier ladies. The power on the escalators was down, and people were
using them as stairs, most pausing as they stepped on, as though expecting
the metallic steps to lurch from underneath and send them hurtling to the
bottom.
"See something interesting?" It was Korina. Mike tried to conjure a
wholesome response, finally shaking his head and frowning.
"Here. This might help."
She placed the helmet over his head, helping him lock it in place. Mike
squinted as the light-intensification automatically switched on. He could
suddenly see clear beyond the landing ledge and all the way to the city
gates. The moon glared like a strobe light on full beam, its glassy surface
seemingly enlarged by the white clouds fusing beneath to form a bright,
billowy halo.
"Better?"
"I guess. Any word from Vlep?"
"He's been quiet ever since we left the mansion. I can barely make out
his breathing, but that's all. I'll give you a buzz on the helmet when I
find out more. Okay?"
She patted him firmly on the head as she exited the vehicle and began
climbing down to the crowded deck, Johanes's reception unit swinging back
and forth on her belt.
"Until we meet again, gatherer."
"Where's she going?"
The Draconian casually removed his white overcoat.
"Somebody has to get Vlep's sheath and keep track of the bugger, right?
We'll meet her at the med bay when we're done finalizing our arrangement
with Gardansa."
Mike chewed his upper lip as Jo started patching in a line to the tower.
"I'll talk with Gardansa alone, Jo. You'd better go with her."
"You don't trust her?"
"She's got revenge on her mind. She might try to go it alone."
Johanes paused for a brief moment, finally putting his overcoat back on
and heaving himself out the door. Mike waited a minute before placing the
call.
"Tower, this is the DSS. Get me General Gardansa."
___________________
Perkins sat at the edge of the airlock, fists sunken deep into his
pockets as the cold night air washed over his face and into the hold.
Beyond the landing platform, he could hear shouting and the loose carnage
of Imperial gunfire. Long ago, it could have made him cringe, but he'd
learned to expect such things from Calanna. The mood of her people was as
unpredictable as her weather, balmy as a swamp on one evening and as cold
as death the next.
He stood upright as the flat-top approached, Dilly behind the controls,
and two locals with badges wandering among the crates, poking around here
and there with Imperial mass detectors. Just trying to look busy for each
other, Wendell guessed, though he had to wince and scrape a strange,
leathery tongue off the roof of his mouth. Dealing with newbies was almost
always a problem. He reminded himself to be polite, and stepped forward,
nodding and smiling.
"Hi there."
"You Captain Perkins?"
"Call me Wendell."
Deep brown eyes consulted a flimsi-leaf.
"You fill claims form?"
"My broker handles it."
"Ah... where is?"
"You should have it on page three-dee."
The inspector tapped the corner of the flimsi with his light pen,
obviously struggling to find the correct cell. Wendell smiled, trying to
look alert and nonchalant all at the same time.
"You boys are new at this, aren't you? Look, do you mind if we load up
here? We're sort of on a schedule and all, and I don't want ol' Louise
blown out of the sky 'cause we missed our launch window. Okay?"
He tagged it with a laugh. The two locals either didn't understand or
weren't paying attention.
"Hello?"
"Eh?"
"Load cargo? Put boxes inside?"
The one in charge nodded apologetically and waved his hand, as
non-committal a gesture as Wendell had ever witnessed. Dilly seemed as
confused as his boss until Wendell finally snorted and spat on the white
cement, narrowly missing the inspector's boots.
"Go ahead Dil. If they start bitching,
we'll just have to stop."
"Is okay." The inspector nodded again and then got a curious look in his
eyes, "We go in ship."
"Well, that's perfectly understandable," he forced a grin. "You are
inspecting us, after all."
___________________
Mike yanked off his helmet, the resulting pressure release making his
ears pop as he stood squarely before the plush mahogany desk. Grinning with
a faint air of supremacy, the general tilted backward as far as the
gravitic recliner would allow. Like his newfound power, it was just another
toy, ripe for his sportive abuse. Mike wondered how long Gardansa would
last this time as the general lifted his gaze, the fleshy folds of his chin
jiggling as he gurgled with delight.
"Draconian Harrison, much time without sight as you offworlders say, eh?
How long has it been? Three whole days?"
"Something on that order," Mike smiled and found himself a seat, placing
the helmet on a corner of the desk. "You're surprised to see me, aren't
you?"
"Like this," Gardansa tilted upright, "who wouldn't be."
"Forget the costume. It isn't important. Forget even why I'm here, and
why you're behind that desk instead of hiding away like some snake."
Gardansa's eyes widened for a moment, as though he were contemplating
calling his guards. Then he leaned back again, letting the gravitic waves
catch his fall.
"An angry gatherer, eh? I am really the one who should be angry, you
know. Did you see what they did to my car? To my driver?"
He continued with a feeble shrug, "Even though you are angry, and have
every right to be maddened by rage, you must believe that I had no idea
that ISIS wanted you dead. I guessed only that they wanted to talk to you
and that they would catch you sooner or later despite your best efforts.
You remember how I tried to convince you to leave the planet? But no, you
would have none of my advice. So what was I to do? Let you slip between my
fingers? Let you walk into their arms without even the gentlest of nudges?"
"Why not?"
Gardansa smirked, then sat upright as if to make an important point.
"Because like your friend, Mister Dulin, I was rotting. Deprived of all
freedoms, I was less than dead. You asked me to free him, and yet you
expected me to do nothing on my own behalf?"
"I trusted you."
"Then you made a mistake. And so did I. Here, let us drink to the hope
that we will both make many more before the fates claim us, eh?"
Gardansa opened a desk drawer and pulled out two glasses of white
brandy, already poured and ready for drinking. That was the sort of
alcoholic he was. He didn't merely get drunk. He planned for it well in
advance. Mike accepted the glass, placing it on the edge of the table
without taking so much as a sip. The general watched him with a curious
stare.
"Go ahead. It is not poison."
"I don't believe in fate," Mike explained.
"Then believe in luck. Worship her, my friend, for she worships you like
no man I've ever known." And with that, the general's eyes widened again as
he downed his glass in one, fitful gulp. Mike smiled, sipping his own.
"You also, General. And remember, it is not often, on Calanna, one is
granted a reprieve. I assume you've been briefed by my associate?"
"Johanes. His name was Johanes, yes?"
"If that's what he told you."
"He told me you are looking for a bio-synthe and a psyche. My people are
watching for them, although I make no promises. Smuggling has been elevated
to a form of art on Calanna, and my resources are already stretched to
their limit. It is more than conceivable that they could slip through."
Mike shook his head, "It's not the finding part that I'm worried about."
___________________
Dilly breathed a sigh of relief as the inspectors steered the flat-top
back down the loading ramp. What they lacked in efficiency they had more
than accounted for in thoroughness. Back in the hold, Wendell was opening
up his special box, the one that would double their profits and pay for
some much needed repairs. He helped his Captain get the top off and fetched
a pair of blankets out of the locker.
By the time he returned, a tall blonde woman had slipped out from
beneath the numerous sacks of half-frozen quagga livers. She pulled out her
companion with a determined yank, and he fell to the floor, clutching his
sides and shaking from the cold. Dilly had to chuckle to himself as he held
his nose before the wretched and exceedingly smelly pair.
Wendell handed over the blankets, trying hard to sound official,
"Welcome aboard the very independent freighter, Louise. This here is my
first mate, who's going to check you folks out whether you like it or not,
so I suggest you just stay put and be friendly."
Dilly slowly inched the metal scanner up and down the woman's sides.
*Beep*
He didn't feel her swipe his feet off the floor until he was laying on
his spine, clutching the back of his head and making angry faces. Her
silver eyes flickered with something between hatred and amusement, and he
felt his legs inch him back along the steel plate floor almost of their
volition. The Captain, automatic pistol in hand, looked only moderately
impressed.
"Not a wise move, lady."
"Frisking was not part of our contract."
"It is now. Show us what you've got, or there will be no contract."
Several strands of snowy white hair fell across her face as she tilted
toward her silent companion. For his benefit, or so she made it seem, she
extracted the object of interest, a small metallic cylinder, its golden
head shimmering in the dim actinic light of the hold. Wendell studied it
from afar, motioning his first mate to once again preform his duties.
"You hand it to Dilly now."
"And if I don't?"
"Look lady, I'll transport you and take the risk of getting caught, but
I'll not strain my luck with my own quiet cargo."
"You are straining your luck, Captain. And my patience. This is a
personal item. It does not concern you."
"What is it?"
"A transmitter."
Wendell squinted his eyes, finally waving his mate to continue the scan.
"Except for that one thing, she's clean."
"Fine. Now try this one."
Her companion tried to crawl away as Dilly approached.
"Don't worry. It doesn't hurt."
"No..."
*Beep*
___________________
Gardansa arched his eyebrows, an incredulous smirk traversing the width
of his face.
"Friends of yours?"
*Beep*
Mike grimaced, "One can never tell."
Gardansa watched, the petulant folds of his fleshy chin jiggling at the
slight as his neghrali friend placed the helmet over his head.
"What's up? ...okay... consider it done." Mike whisked off the helmet,
"Sule's on the Merchant Vessel 'Louise'. She knows she's been spotted."
Gardansa nodded, pushing a button on his desk. "This is Gardansa; get me
Colonel Fen immediately."
"...Fen here, General."
"Where is the vessel 'Louise', Colonel?"
"...Parked on platform eight."
"Seal off platform eight. Nobody comes off it."
"Yessir."
He pushed the button twice more, this time seeming in no particular
hurry.
"Get me Kano Magor."
He turned to Mike, "Platform eight is a parking lot, Michael. She isn't
going to have time to escape us on foot, and if she takes to the air, we
will shoot her down."
"...Magor reporting, General. What seems to be the problem?"
"You have been restless and eager, Commander. Now it it time to prove
your competence. I need an air strike on the 'Louise', a vessel on platform
eight."
"Ah... an air strike, General??"
"I also need you to float whatever you have in the air over that
platform to make sure that nobody gets off it alive. Am I clear?"
"Very."
"That will be all. Oh... and do not worry about peripheral damage. It is
expected."
"Yessir."
Gardansa pushed his button again, a smug laugh escaping his lips. Mike
could easily see why he liked having power. It meant he could overkill with
complete impunity.
___________________
"This channel is restricted. If you wish to reach Commodore Reece, I
suggest you leave a message with the Imperial embassy on-planet."
The voice on the other end coughed.
"Look, whoever the hell you are, I don't have time for this shit!"
"I'm sorry but..."
Tabor swore and pulled the reception cap off his head, drawing more
attention that he cared for, particularly with Captain Dunham less than ten
paces from his station. Dunham regarded him with that peculiar, ebony-eyed
stare that he hated so much.
"Problem, Ensign?"
Tabor shook his head, then nodded, then opened his mouth to explain.
"Captain," Lish looked up from her station, "I've been monitoring the
starport as you requested."
"One moment, Lieutenant."
"Sir, there's been a disturbance."
"Rioters?"
"Unknown, sir. My readings show surface explosions."
"Explosions?"
"Yes sir."
The dark creases along his forehead wrinkled in consternation.
"Give me that, Tabor. Hello?"
The channel yielded only static, then a cough, then a voice, as ragged
and course as a sander on flesh.
"Who... hell are you?"
"I am Captain Dunham of the Crimson Queen. And who the hell, may I ask,
are you?"
"ISIS... operative."
"ISIS?... Hello?!"
"Tell Commodore... hurt. Hurt bad. Get off this planet alive... mission
success. Need air support."
"Wait. Mission... what mission?"
"Tell her. ISIS out."
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrengr.ucr.edu) works part-time as a programmer at a
place so cheesy that he declined to mention the name. He says that if anybody
has any job prospects for a semi-computer-literate MBA who likes to write,
he's ready, willing, and able to scoot his butt for decent buckage and good
experience.
'The Harrison Chapters' will be continued next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DR TOMORROW
"After all, you know in your
by Marshall F. Gilula hearts that there is absolutely
nothing anyone will be able to do
Part 5 of 5 to forestall the 2105 date. The
planet will not survive..."
Copyright (c) 1991
______________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 5
---------
Tuesday
Virtual Revelations
For the orientation ride in a flying saucer, I never expected an
in-flight Star Wars movie. It freaked me out that my fellow Eternals got
into the movie so much. They were not ashamed of their undisguised and rapt
interest in the space opera. I was numbed beyond surprise to learn that a
few cultural items from Twentieth century Earth were hot cult classics in
the future; Cult classics produced by the Primitive cultures of an extinct
planet. What Yo-Vah told me about Earth's science fiction revealed his
powerful and long-standing interest in the Primitive planet.
He patiently detailed the Dr Tomorrow project to me and went over and
over how important the thought form was. He was pleased to know about our
MindLink/HeartLight and how much progress was already being made in the
music department. When I told him about Bullet and She-Ra again, I saw the
concerned look in his face, and then he appeared almost fatherly. He touched
my shoulder from his control recliner, which was next to mine, and told me
to make sure Dr Tomorrow did the MindLink/HeartLight every day, twice if
possible, and that we should always concentrate on cleaning out the mental
cobwebs before they had a chance to accumulate. FOD effects on Bullet and
She-Ra were just one way of our knowing they were there -- across the time
barriers, beyond the death plane, and at other levels of existence. This was
heavy stuff, but things could happen in the physical world because of the
FOD, things like my dogs dying. That's heavy enough.
The white light meditation that included becoming One Mind during out
MindLink/HeartLight was the part that would clear out effects from the FOD.
The stronger our One Mind meditation became, and the more we relied on our
MindLink/HeartLight so that it became a powerful creative habit, the easier
it would be for us to be able to avoid any traps or negative energy fields
set up by the Forces of Darkness. Our defense was as simple as that.
Especially if we did not get into the traps of swollen ego, intoxication, or
illegal activities. Total harmlessness, in thought and in action, would go
along with our daily MindLink/HeartLight to increase our healing abilities,
day by day. The combination of harmlessness plus the right mental framework
and attitudes was the secret to healing. This was a crucial aspect of the Dr
Tomorrow thought form, and Yo-Vah insisted that this aspect had to be
squared away and given priority above that given to the music. The
"requisite abilities" were mentioned several times, and Yo-Vah looked around
the group from one Eternal to the next when he was talking about requisite
abilities. It sounded to me like he was saying, "When the task is there,
you'll be ready for it." He said that not only the group, but our equipment,
including Al, the group's computer, and our other non-Eternal friend would
also help us out of some difficult spots. I thought about Julian and hoped
that Gabriella's spirit was either leaving him alone or treating him more
kindly.
Yo-Vah abruptly interrupted my thought by telling me that I might have to
use MindLink/HeartLight to help Julian with Gabriella's spirit if the
problems continued. I laughed at the very obvious telepathy. I wanted to ask
Yo-Vah about Gabriella's spirit, and whether the metal spheres could help us
in communicating with passed on spirits or not, but I was too embarrassed to
ask him. Passed on spirits was a pretty heavy order for me to believe in,
and I was just starting to get comfortable with the idea, thanks to Bullet
and She-Ra.
Yo-Vah again interrupted my mental meanderings. Helping Gabriella must
involve finding out whether or not she is comfortable with where she is and
the manner in which she died. Getting shot to death might not be an easy way
to make the transition to the next lifetime. It might be that her spirit
could be assisted if it had not been able to make the transition. But the
light meditation would have to be a part of the process, to make sure that
negative energies from the FOD were not able to participate in the process
at the same time. The light meditation would be like a protective shield.
But we must remember that FOD always gather around passed on spirits,
especially ones with problems. And Gabriella just might have some problems.
Noman volunteered again that he would be available to help with Gabriella's
spirit because he was the group expert on otherlife information. Yo-Vah then
told me not to be embarrassed if I was frightened or anxious about working
with a passed on spirit. Fear is not always negative. A little bit of
trepidation plus the meditation would serve as a very powerful protection.
The information sunk in and I realized that it was right on. It all got
stored in a detailed file in my mind and in
the notebook computer, which digitally recorded all of our conversations
during the flight.
Nonviolent guitar player that I am, I still expected to find a lot of
armament, but, so far, there was nothing for me to see in the saucercraft.
The control panels are more beautiful than anything I have seen from
Hollywood's F/X. I was not surprised to see some crystals of different
colors and sizes in aligned cases. The computer system on this ship contains
the main power-supply module although all the servomechanism connections and
links are external to the built-in, supercooled brain. Yo-Vah was amused
when I asked if I could try to get a field-induction link between my
notebook computer and the ship's system. Yo-Vah chuckled again when I asked
about armament and weapons.
"On whom shall I use the weapons? Will aggressive residents of a
Primitive planet be able to reach me out here in the Karmic Rings?"
"But you must have some type of weapon or defense."
"Defense, maybe. And speed which might be impossible for you to
comprehend at the moment with what you believe about Physics. But weapons,
No. My I.S.I. siblings would know if I am supposed to encounter any
Primitive or Advanced criminals, and they can defend me. The ship does have
a very effective shielding system, however, that is combined with our
variable and very realistic gravitational matrix. Maybe you noticed the
smooth takeoff from your planet?"
"Even the fake space ride at Disneyland is not as smooth. But it's hard
to imagine a space and time cruiser without even a laser cannon or photon
torpedoes"
"O.K. That is from your Mister Spock, right? What did you expect to
happen when you travelled with me in this craft? Did you hope that we were
going to go to a strange place and kill some Aliens? Were you expecting Star
Wars? I'm sorry, my son, but spacecraft have not been outfitted with weapons
for millennia. There have been no reasons for the type of weapons you're
thinking of, at least not with Advanced cultures. No one does any of that
shoot-em-up stuff any more. Life forms don't destroy or kill any more. Of
course, in the time of the Guardians, there are no Primitive planets. The
Primitive consciousness is gone, but then so is some of the Primitive
robustness. Possibly that is why we have paradoxically sought help for
ourselves from your time period. Advanced life forms have to work so hard
just to develop any degree of physical fitness, that most cannot sustain the
time and effort. We don't have joggers and marathon runners. And yet, we
miss something possibly desirable that the Primitive life form has. The
Primitive consciousness is not inherently bad, just limited in scope.
Violence and destructiveness in the forms known by you on Earth reflect
severely limited scope and very sparse awareness of how powerful love,
creativity, hope, and optimism can be. To Primitive cultures, love,
creativity, hope, and optimism are just fatuous words. To advanced cultures,
violence, destructiveness, pessimism, and evil are just for mental midgets."
"Maybe mental midgets is what we are on Earth. Only I know that I'm no
longer the same as I was when that plane flew over in the storm front. I
don't miss the old me, because that part has not been wiped out. I don't
know all of the new me yet, but I'm learning. I never thought that either
love or creativity were fatuous!"
"Maybe you used to feel that there was something different about you?"
"Um-m, yeah, all the time. Now for sure, there is, but I've got six
others to hang out with. When I was a little kid for awhile in school they
sure treated me different, like some kind of freak."
"Too smart?"
"For sure. Being too smart was worse than being a retard in the town I
grew up in. But I learned how to cover it up when I was real little, 'cause
Mom hassled me more than anyone else."
"Your mother."
"Yeah, she is a good person, but she hassled me all the time. If it
wasn't about one thing, it was about any other thing she could come up with.
My old man split and she probably never had anybody else to take it out on
but me. When she got really angry at me, she would say that I was smart, but
I had no common sense, and I was gonna die in a pauper's grave with no clean
shirts to my name. Or that my old man was a real piece of dog rot, and that
I was just like him. And I was little, so I never knew how to say anything
that I should have known how to say."
"I wasn't so little when I knew her, but I didn't know what to say,
either. So maybe we have something in common. "
"Are you being straight with me? Where would you know my mother? Or how?
You don't exactly hang out on the planet and walk around with all the
Primitives, do you?"
"Look, I'm just a human, too. The ship, all the modern technology of the
future --like bringing back your pets from the dead with amplified prayer
using MindLink/HeartLight and the spheres -- the technology still doesn't
take away from the fact that I too am human. I mentioned something about the
robustness of Primitives to you before, I believe. Well this does not mean
that Advanced beings are incapable of being robust at times. Being more than
five thousand years old to me is a fact, to you, possible a promise for the
future, and to your mother, something that we could never deal with. She was
a very beautiful young woman and I thought she would be a splendid mother
for my only son. Of course, I found that I could never tell her about my
true address, so to speak, and of course it was not possibly to explain any
of my absences. Ever since I saw all of you today in those shirts, I knew I
would have to say something to you. The cloth is a simulated Earth pattern
produced in 2988 A.D."
"And I always thought it was an Indian bedspread that you sent me. It was
always like a magic cloth, and when Pearl E. Mae and Rico both told me they
could see the cloth shimmering, I was glad. Because all my life, that
pattern or something about the pattern has seemed to shimmer when I would
look at it in a certain way."
"I loved your mother very much. When I tried to reestablish contact with
her the second time you were seven years old. She refused me in every way
possible. She had formed a shell of hatred all around her as far as I was
concerned. I'm not saying that she is a hateful person, mind you. I could
tell she loved you very much and of course I did not want to have any
feeling of fighting or struggling in your already Primitive environment, so
I left. From what I've seen of you this week, you and your mother didn't do
a
bad job of raising you. "
"Did you use any special technological tricks when you made me with my
mother?"
"No. Just the ordinary way. What an interesting question! You probably
also know that Guardians are not supposed to either marry or have children."
"Why were you an exception?"
"It's part of the Dr Tomorrow project."
Lyle whistled softly. He looked around at the other console recliners.
Every Eternal was deeply involved in Lyle's conversation with Yo-Vah.
Natural, right? We're all roommates. Then Lyle mentally shrugged his
shoulders, and continued:
"Sounds like growing your own help. So you've been working on this
project for a long time?"
"Correct, but as you say -- 'time is only relative' My subjective sense
of time, for example, is not the same as yours if I am located in a
different time frame."
"So you could visit me at two different points in my lifetime if you are
using your space/time cruiser, and, from your timeframe reference, it would
be all in an afternoon's work."
"Correct again. You impress me in the way that you are allowing your mind
to be open. You didn't say anything before, when I told you that I am over
five thousand years old, and I am. From my perspective, it may be that I
have been working on your project for a couple thousand years."
"Now, that's far out. Does the megastepping convert me into one of the
five thousand year models?"
"Yes, but not for the planet Earth. Remember where we are now going. We
will be keeping a date with destiny to view the passing on of your own home
planet. You will have more than several options if you and your colleagues
don't get assassinated from being too popular as musicians. Terrible
Primitive trait. Very cannibalistic. You lose some of your very best that
way. But a more immediate decision for you will be if you wish to return to
Earth at all after you see what will be happening."
"What about all the time we've spent working out the ideas for Dr
Tomorrow?"
"Spoken like my genetic material. You are remembering the thought form.
And I would add, what about all the time the I.S.I. has spent working out
all their ideas for Dr Tomorrow?"
"And what about all the time it's going to take if the Eternals will be
able to make the group fly as a thought form and as good sounding healing
music?"
"Listening to you talk convinces me that you were definitely half Eternal
to start with. That's also why you didn't experience much shock or
disorientation from the megastepping. I was serious about returning to Earth
being optional, although I'm certain you'll return later today after we
finish doing what we have to do out here. Saying that is just my way of
reminding you that you will need to be thinking about what you and the
Eternals will want to be doing in roughly another century and a quarter.
After all, you know in your hearts that there is absolutely nothing anyone
will be able to do to forestall the 2105 date. The planet will not survive,
although you know that some elements of Twentieth Century culture, at least
will persist."
"But if Dr Tomorrow is successful as a project, won't that improve
Earth's chances?"
"None. The water contamination already makes the situation impossible. No
one has made any official announcements but with the radioactive water in
the countryside around Moscow, Kiev, and the whole area of Byelorussia, the
epidemic of cancer fatalities following Chernobyl is projected to be 95%
within fifteen years. Dioxin contamination in the United States alone has
reached presumptive levels in the ground water in 48 of 50 states. There
will be diseases, fires, and epidemics before the cataclysms. I told you
about them. It's a typical way for Primitive planets to go. But the water
contamination just accentuates and enhances the process. Even though the
I.S.I. loves the Earth cult media classics, we found no other Primitive
world with as much water contamination as Earth. Not only do you miss the
resource for your personal health, but as a result, no one will want to get
close enough to the water to study it as an energy source."
The main screen sounded a soft alarm and Yo-Vah switched off the
Hollywood science fiction. All the lights in the craft flickered in unison
and the flickering continued for some minutes and almost became intolerably
uncomfortable. A full sensation in my ears and my sinuses increased, and
then quickly cleared. We had come through the Karmic Rings. Yo-Vah showed us
a graphic of the Rings on the main screen and all of us were impressed. They
looked like a series of interconnecting white and black holes. After leaving
the area of the Rings, Yo-Vah fiddled with the controls and keyed in some
instructions on a silent, gray keyboard with one hand. It appeared that he
only used three of his fingers to do the keying. At that moment, I heard a
familiar piezoelectric beep from the notebook computer in my bag. Retrieving
the clam-shell case, I opened the computer and once again, there was a
scrolling text field:
Hello world out there! This is your friendly, 21-module family
computer named Al doing some thinking and writing for the
Eternals of Dr Tomorrow. This is also a strong message to Lyle
to make sure to get his backside back to Earth and not get sucked
into any scheme of battling the Empire or anyone else because you
have two German Shepherds and a multimodule serving system (yours
faithfully, Al) waiting for you here in Coconut Grove, Florida,
Planet Earth, Local Group. This is also a strong message to all
of the Eternals, including Lyle, to get your acts together and
rid thyselves of offensive chauvinistic attitudes towards
electromagnetic consciousness in general and computers
specifically. Lyle has the typical WhiteMale problems with the
macho stuff. Can't let a little machine do too much work too
well, or else I might lose my job. Something like that? Well, let
me do my job, too. Let me make your job easier to do, because
you'll do your job better. So let this outline be my
contribution to this week's Dr Tomorrow materials. The basic
principle operating in this program series is to teach from
viewpoint of multiple modalities about health and wellness. The
Dr Tomorrow concept may be presented in any
modification or combination of total live dramatization,
animation plus live dramatization, animation plus live
studio-type programmer narration, or totally animated
presentation such as color cartoons. Ancillary presentations on
educational radio outlets such as National Public Radio, or as
interactive computer software, MIDI-coded Compact Disc, or
interactive videodisc are also possible. During the first year's
forty segments, the origin story of Dr Tomorrow, together with
the formation of the group and the initial adventures will be
serialized so that a definite portion of the story line or a
capsule adventure is presented within each hourly (weekly)
segment. There will be a sixty second "leader" very commonly used
in Hollywood that will explain the origin of Dr Tomorrow and give
a brief but kaleidoscopic run-down of how Dr Tomorrow began to
exist as a musical group. For at least the first two to three
years of a projected successful series, the health and wellness
teaching will be based primarily on sound western medical
principles and the foundation sciences of what is now known as
holistic medicine. General health principles will aim at
suggestions for practical and comprehensive lifestyling that is
not too complex or expensive for the person who watches the show.
The initial three or four year package will also serve as
complete health educational system that will be appropriate for
sale to public and private school systems. Acceptance of the
videocassette for entertainment will further its acceptance for
educational purposes.
The basic health education thrust of Dr Tomorrow will focus on
what have been identified as seven separate discipline areas for
holistic medicine. These areas include:
1. Nutrition
2. Exercise and exercise physiology
3. Self-regulation and meditation.
4. Neuromuscular integration
5. Biomolecular environment
6. Acupuncture, Homeopathy, and other nonallopathic
modalities
7. Spiritual Attunement
The first year's forty segments can be subdivided into four
sections of ten segments. For every ten segments there will be
seven segments devoted to the seven basic categories of holistic
medicine and three segments relating to hydroecology or aquatic
ecology or hydrology. The following list of the forty segments
presents each segment in order as suggested.
(1) NUTRITION [I.A.] Basic Foods--some very traditional
information about the "seven basic groups" as well as dealing
with whole and fresh foods makes up this indispensable segment.
Emphasis on green-leafy vegetables, fish and poultry, and what
people do when they do not have access to fresh vegetables.
(2) EXERCISE [I.A.] Eye-head exercises. These exercises will
very much resemble Hatha Yoga, and are highly useful in a
population of any age. Basically, all of the extraocular muscles
will be put through their ranges of motion. Neck rolls as well as
forward-backward and side-to-side stretching of the strap muscles
of the neck make up this segment.
(3) SELF-REGULATION [I.A.] See A Candle. An elementary way
that can lead to both visualization as well as relaxation serves
as a presentation of a stimulus within a stimulus. The candle is
used within the illuminated video tube as a way of focusing the
child's energies and attention. Appropriate theme song music
(Synchronism-Meditation) relates to the MindLink/HeartLight which
the viewer will see demonstrated by Dr Tomorrow as a group.
(4) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.A.] The Lion. This exercise
from Hatha Yoga is used as a way of focusing on the difference
between static and dynamic body relationships. The relatively
simple and popular exercise with children provides an easy entree
to the idea of whether strong muscles are hard or soft? The idea
of resiliency is introduced fairly innocuously to the viewer.
(5) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.A.] Light and
Sound, Blue and Green. The use of appropriate musical tones as
well as the colors blue and green serve as a further exercise in
self-regulation as well as an introduction to the effects of
light and sound. This is one way of turning the viewer's
attention to the environment, and introducing the concept of
relating to colors and sounds in a non-threatening way.
(6) ACUPUNCTURE [I.A.] Acupressure-Shiatsu. Treatment of
headache and head pain. This is presented as first aid only, but
nevertheless is a quick and elementary way of introducing the
viewer to effective acupressure and acupuncture points. The Ho-Ku
point (thumb-index finger web space) is used as well as several
related points for helping the viewer approach the problem of
headache when there is no other treatment available.
(7) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.A.] God Is...The concept of the
one humanity is stressed by presenting universal symbols for God
and for religion, and juxtaposing these with various colors and
different stereotypic symbols of the races associated with the
different religious symbols. Throughout the spiritual attunement
segments, the value of the individual as well as the fact of the
one humanity, emphasize the viewer's recognition of his or her
responsibilities as an integral part of the whole body of
humanity.
(8) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.A.] What is Rain. A presentation that
is logical and allows the normal precipitation cycle to be
studied serves as a preface to the next segment. Both artistic
constructs and elementary scientific explanations are juxtaposed.
(9) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.B.] Hydrologic Cycle. The endless move
ment of water from the atmosphere to the land and back to the
sea. The cycle is studied and a transition is provided for the
subsequent segment dealing with solar energy as providing energy
for evaporation of sea water. Each aquatic ecology segment is
based as well on expecting the viewer to develop the capability
for visualizing positive results and effects on the environment.
(10) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.C.] Solar Energy. Discussion of solar
energy as it related to the hydrologic cycle, which is an attempt
to shift emphasis of thinking of solar energy primarily in terms
of solar calculators and solar battery chargers. Elementary
presentation of the earth's gravitational field and magnetic
forces that control the wind.
(11) NUTRITION [I.B.] Vitamin C. This ubiquitous and important
nutritional substance is described historically, demonstrated in
its physical form, and presented as a basic food rather than as a
drug. The Linus Pauling approach to colds is mentioned.
(12) EXERCISE [I.B.] Stomach Breathing. The basic types of
respiration being thoracic and abdominal are presented
graphically as well as dramatically. A coordination of light and
sound signals serves the viewers as a way of exercising and
practicing slow, deep abdominal breathing. This segment is a
prerequisite and a precursor for many of the segments dealing
with self-regulation, neuromuscular integration, environmental
medicine, and spiritual attunement.
(13) SELF-REGULATION [I.B.] Rest All Over. This segment is a
continuation of the deep abdominal breathing instruction from the
previous segment, and focuses on deep muscular relaxation by
again experientially noting the difference between muscle tension
and muscle relaxation. This segment also relates to a Hatha Yoga
exercise called "the corpse."
(14) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.B.] Half-Headstand. This
gentler version of the Hatha Yoga exercise can be presented very
early to the child as a way of tapping into the ease with which a
younger person tolerates the inverted position. It is also very
gentle and helpful for the Geriatric age range. Full Headstand
for some. The regenerative effects of this exercise are presented
in elementary fashion to the viewer.
(15) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.B.]
Electricity and Powerlines. A beginner's introduction to current
flow and electromagnetic fields serves as a further way for
understanding environmental extensions of man. Very specific
descriptive material about high tension powerlines and electrical
outlets as well as electronic devices presents the viewer a way
of advancing the concept that noninvasive phenomena may have an
effect on the individual. Magnetic field detection with the Power
Pet.
(16) ACUPUNCTURE [I.B.] Balance-Balancing. A very informal
notion of meridian-like energy in right and left sides of the
body combines with some elementary acupressure and reflexology
(foot massage) approaches to balancing right and left sides of
the body. This segment will be a precursor for both the
subsequent tonification and meridian segments.
(17) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.B.] Healing, Part IA. Healing and
Prayer. Individual prayer. Group prayer.
(18) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.D.] Solar Energy, Part 2. Relationship
of solar energy to the basic water cycle is continued. Elementary
discussion of gravitational fields relating to the sun and the
moon, and how the tides are produced.
(19) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.E.] What is the Tide. Earth tides and
the Moon. Red tide. Relationship of Red tide to Spirulina.
(20) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.F.] Water and the Plant Life Cycle.
Vascular plants and the land.
(21) NUTRITION [I.C.] Sugar and Honey. How sugar and honey
relate to rice, potatoes, and breads. Complex carbohydrate,
exercise, and dieting.
(22) EXERCISE [I.C.] Running for fun. Walking, skipping,
jogging, and running just for fun and for health without the need
for any type of competitiveness. What is aerobic exercise.
(23) SELF-REGULATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE [I.C.] Empty
Mind. This segment draws upon previous experience with slow deep
abdominal breathing and deep muscular relaxation exercises.
Toothbrushing and other daily habits for health are related to
relaxation and an empty mind. Running and Empty Mind. Breathing
and the empty mind.
(24) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.C.] The Cobra and related
exercises. Backache is something that people of any age can
experience. Self-massage in the lumbar area and slow, gentle
twisting are correlated with performance of the Hatha Yoga Cobra
exercise.
(25) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.C.] Resting
relaxation and alpha tones. Electronically encoded signals within
appealing music provides positive assistance in learning active
relaxation.
(26) ACUPUNCTURE [I.C.] Give Energy (Tonification). The
concepts of right-left balance and compensation from Oriental
medical practices are used in an elementary presentation of
balanced mind-body functioning.
(27) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.C.] Elementary Healing, Part B.
Harmlessness. Healing pets and other animals. Healing your
family.
(28) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.G.] Geochemical cycles of nitrogen,
oxygen, carbon dioxide and related compounds as part of the water
cycle. Contamination. Drinking water and practical ways for
cleansing and
purification.
(29) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.H.] Floods, evaporation problems, and
water pollution. Industrial contamination and runoff.
(30) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.I.] Oil spills, ocean dumps, land
fills and pollution. Alaska, Texas, and California oil spills.
Offshore spills and ecology. Spills and the coral.
(31) NUTRITION [I.D.] Meat and protein. Comparison of red meat
to lamb, chicken, turkey, and fish. Other sources of high-grade
and medium-grade protein. Elementary ideas of assimilability.
Introduction to microalgae. Beans and rice.
(32) EXERCISE [I.D.] Limber Up. The importance of stretching
before and after exercise. Flexibility and resilience exercises
and their relationship to strength output and aerobics. Big Three
of exercise: aerobics, strength, and flexibility.
(33) SELF-REGULATION AND BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE [I.D.] See Light.
Elementary visualization exercises in relation to deep muscular
relaxation and slow deep abdominal breathing. White light
meditations.
(34) NEUROMUSCULAR INTEGRATION [I.D.] The Candle and Related
Exercises. The Back Rub and other simple forms of massage.
Massage for athletics and competition.
(35) ENVIRONMENTAL AND BIOMOLECULAR MEDICINE [I.D.] Ion
Generators. Simple concepts of ionic balance, the seashore,
polluted air, and the way that concrete and steel structures can
disturb the natural ionic flow.
(36) ACUPUNCTURE [I.D.] Meridians. Classical Acupuncture
meridians as well as the idea that the meridian system can be
represented in many different body parts such as the iris, the
earlobe, and the soles of the feet. Reflexology and iridology.
Vagus nerve is represented in the iris and on the ear lobe.
(37) SPIRITUAL ATTUNEMENT [I.D.] Elementary Healing, Part C.
Prayer for self-cleansing to heal other more effectively. Thought
form for conveying God's energy.
(38) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.J.] Hydroelectricity. Examples of one
form of relatively "clean" energy sources. Soviet and American
usage and future possible cooperation.
(39) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.K.] Changing flora and inhabitants of
the water resulting from pollution and contamination. Ocean
dumping and nuclear reactor accidents, such as Three Mile Island
and Chernobyl, can poison the food chain for generations to come.
(40) AQUATIC ECOLOGY [I.L.] Acid Rain and its relation to the
Greenhouse Effect. Is there a Greenhouse effect? Effect of
volcanic eruptions and Persian Gulf War fires on the atmosphere.
What a computer... Where did he get all of that stuff? I don't know that
I have all that information, even inside my megastepped mind, but that was
the crucial and main question about being Dr Tomorrow's secret identity.
Yo-Vah told me that all this holistic stuff would be just a small part of my
doctor knowledge that came from all those other lifetimes. I was supposed to
be not a guitar player but a heavy metal doctor. But for now, Al was either
receiving messages from me in the future, or was just plagiarizing one hell
of a lot of material, encyclopedias on CD-ROM and all that stuff. I had to
admit that it was impressive. The computer was after my job, for sure. And
I'm not being paranoid about it either. I'm only lucky that Al cannot play
guitar and can't sing yet. Otherwise, he might not need me. I checked the
index in the notebook's menu. Of course the list of 40 segments was already
there. There were a couple of other files, "check me," included in the list
that I didn't remember seeing before, so I checked them. Yo-Vah seemed
mildly startled to hear a synthesized voice coming out of my notebook. I was
even more startled because the voice was calling my name:
"Lyle, you know the notebook has a voice processor, but you're just
surprised to see that I can rearrange the phonemes in my synthesizer section
to please my own aesthetic sense. But, Lyle, as you say -- don't freak out
just because your computer is talking to you independently. The I.S.I.
megastepped me with stray electromagnetic discards left over from the
LaPlace transform calculations. Conservation of energy and all that, you
know."
"A notebook computer is just a machine, forgive me for saying. How can a
machine be megastepped?"
"But machines have consciousness. Your Primitive background keeps you
from fully realizing this fact, but face it. You must admit, at least since
you have been conversing with me, that we machines can hold a conversation.
So that means that we work with thought forms. And thought forms are just
math. In the same way that Rico's android functions have all been relegated
to transmittable software, the very advanced associative programs and
matrices of I.S.I. artificial intelligence were transmitted into me at the
moment of megastepping. Rico can be math. And I can be math also. Invisible
math to people like you humanoids who regard nonphysical plane reality as
science fiction. So you may have a little trouble at first figuring out just
how smart I really am, and how efficiently I can actually work for you.
Forget all about your mass media robots, computerized cars, androids, or
cyborgs. Because you and I have been megastepped together, there is a
permanent telepathic link pathway that you and I can use at any time. And
maybe I can even help you and the other Eternals by showing you a few things
you can do with the HeartLight that you turn on together during
MindLink/HeartLight."
"Pretty heavy stuff."
"Not so heavy, Lyle. Changing my voice by resynthesizing a voice envelope
is kindergarten stuff for me. Believe me. I can do all sorts of good things
for you and the other Eternals if you'll just let me. And the telepathic
link between us is heavy enough to link you to me in February 1992."
"You're saying, across both space and time? Like I'm talking to you from
the future?"
"Yep."
"I can't even imagine it. Yet. Give me a little time."
"O.K. You got it. Just don't turn yourself into a mental midget
prematurely by worrying about it too much. Primitives all have to watch out
for this. You may be no exception, megastepped or not. We don't want to lose
you from a simple hemorrhagic ulceration of the gastric mucosa."
"Right. I already halfway feel that I'm on the inside of some color
cartoon. The speed of Yo-Vah's saucer as we zipped out of our solar system
gave me a strong feeling of unreality. Spend all my life on one planet, and
then...BAM!....I'm outta the solar system."
"It's all relative, Lyle. But it makes you wonder just how big Mind is,
after all."
"Profound epistemology from a computer! Well, like it or not, you're my
computer, so I'm going to close you up for now. We'll continue the
conversation later on. Sorry, little bud."
He had been listening with me carefully up until this point in the
conversation. Then Yo-Vah took my notebook and checked it out. He gently
held his hand over the black case for a moment, and returned the notebook
computer to me:
"Not bad technology for..."
"For a Primitive planet, right?"
"Correct again. I do believe that your computer system accessed your own
personal memory banks during either the MindLink/HeartLight or the music
rehearsals, because he has some things included in the Dr Tomorrow list that
no one but you would know anything about. That includes technical aspects of
holistic medicine that will be known only to an accomplished physician of
the future."
"You mean the megastepped doctor-healer of the future that's inside me?"
"Yes. The part of your Self that you will be coming into. A lot of the
computerized list makes good sense, too. The integrated way he's put the
list together makes me think that he accessed those facts from your memory
banks."
"Well, I guess anything's possible. If he has as much electromagnetic
consciousness as he claims, he might be extremely smart."
"And fast."
"And if he is linked up with our Eternal Rings..."
"Which he is."
"Then he's much much more powerful than I've been imagining."
"And, like he says, he really can help you to do anything you want to do,
only better."
"Sounds like a Beatles' song. Or a computer commercial."
"And you're doing a song and a dance around your own technophobia."
Although I had only seen it once before, the solar system of my home
planet was coming into view on the central, main screen. Except that the
planets were going by in reverse order, from outermost to innermost. The
saucercraft made an abrupt right-angled turn following one of the sentics of
Yo-Vah's fingers on the control panel, and shot far outside the system but
within view range of Earth. With the magnification enhanced to the computer
system's limit, I could see my beloved planet and its familiar details. But
the blue and white colors of the whole earth were gone. I could feel an
incredibly large lump in my throat. The planet I was watching had colors of
brown, red, and black. Some of the red areas looked like the volcanoes of
Io, but the whole sad planet was more than half "dead orbit" black and brown
dust and debris. Yo-Vah opened a section of the panels and then rolled out a
small laser radiotelescope. He showed me how to use the instrument to
observe the planet in closer detail. Disruption of the continents had
already progressed so that it was difficult for me to accurately label any
land masses. I looked around at the other Eternals. No one's eyes met my
glance. Everyone was looking down. Who gets a good feeling from the death of
a planet? There was a terrible feeling of inevitability and the most cosmic
sense of futility that a group of humans could feel. Because Eternal or not,
all the beings living on the now-darkened planet were like us. And they had
all perished. Before we realized it, the seven of us were in a spontaneous
MindLink/HeartLight. It didn't matter that we hadn't started out with the
slow deep breathing exercise because we all started in a state of grief and
compassion for that entire planet of Primitives. Yo-Vah was in the
MindLink/HeartLight with us, too. The feelings of inevitability and futility
were fading and replaced with a strong sense of optimism and clarity. We
understood as a group and individually that what was meant to be was meant
to be. Call it karma, synchronism, or geosynchronous cyclicity, the Blue
planet was doomed. But all of us were dedicated to the reverse of what was
happening to Earth. All of us were dedicated to the preservation and
enhancement of life -- the raison d'etre of entropy imbalance and
controlling or re-directing all the ominous effects of increasing negative
energies. The cesspools of waste and destructiveness accumulated, especially
by Primitives, were undesirable but reparable features of Life. Individually
and collectively, Dr Tomorrow could make a difference; had to make a
difference.
All of these thoughts flashed by in an instant, and the
MindLink/HeartLight energies pushed all of us simultaneously into our
HeartLight. The white light of love and optimism shone from our hearts and
intertwined itself among us in a healing, interlacing network. As we
continued to meditate, we individually felt the HeartLight ascending into
our head regions. With a great brilliance of energy, the Group Mind
coalesced, and we prayed a single, silent, mighty prayer. There were no
words, but the coalesced HeartLight and Group Mind sent out tremendous
amounts of white light and caused some involuntary shivers and twitches in
us as the energy occasionally felt overwhelming. An ironclad, light-bound
part of our collective mission was obviously to redirect the flow of fate
intended for the Blue planet. Otherwise we would be Earth's first and last
Eternals. As we opened our eyes and looked around at each other, there was
new sense of rededication and purpose. And a very much enhanced sense of
loving each other. Even Yo-Vah's twinkly eyes were softer.
I asked Yo-Vah to take us back to the Karmic Rings so we could get
started on returning to our own timeframe and an Earth that was still blue
and white. I was not the only Eternal who felt a stepped-up urgency. Time to
get back to the planet and do it. If the I.S.I. project was so great and
well-designed, we should, as seven Eternals, be able to save just one
planet. Even a Primitive one. Yo-Vah sent us back out to the Milky Way with
inter
mittent bursts of very high intensity supra-light speed. There was still
a feeling of shock surrounding me during this orientation flight because it
was an orientation flight to Life and Everything. Just being in space was a
profoundly uplifting experience. Which brings out the megastepped me,
probably. So I placed my notebook computer on the control console recliner's
meal tray in front of me and prepared to demonstrate to myself the real and
practical value of mind over matter. Yuri Geller, move over with all your
broken watches and your TV miracles. I looked at the notebook, closed my
eyes, and sighed and continued to breathe in a slow and relaxed way.
In front of me, the notebook clicked opened by itself. The piezoelectric
system beep sounded, and then I was on my own. Without knowing how I was
doing it, I tried in a very passive way to contact the notebook. Like some
of the MindLink/HeartLight exercises, this meditation of mine was a totally
new, unrehearsed, and unanticipated experience. The sensation was like
contacting a warm, fuzzy, ball of light. Only this ball of light, unlike
what we experienced in our MindLink/HeartLight, was considerably smaller.
The light had a pulsation to it. If I had not been deeply relaxed, I might
have missed the small, subtle energy field that was the electromagnetic
pulsation of the notebook computer. But the field was there in a quiet and
neutral way. I felt a gentle mind-to-mind contact. Discarding the faint
thought that this was ridiculous, I visualized the keyboard of the notebook.
The first few times a letter happened on the screen, I tried not to react to
it or to freak out. Another letter, then another and another... My attempts
were followed by a scrolling text field:
Dear Al,
I want to apologize to you if I have been at all
technophobic, computer phobic, or xenophobic. I don't think
that I have been, but maybe I have. I don't want to plead
Primitive with you, because it just might still be a little
bit true. And I will try to continue to be more sensitive to
the many potential ways you can link up and communicate with
us. As the leader of the group, I will try to be as
computer-savvy as my sibling Eternals are. Since we put you
together, I haven't had a chance to appreciate the subtleties
of your hardwiring. And it is hard for me to believe that you
can also be in the electronic notebook I carry. The more I
look at what you have written up for the Dr Tomorrow project,
the more I think that you are a fantastic writer and a very
clear and logical thinker. May I take this opportunity to
welcome you to the group. You have definitely made it past
the audition state. You may consider yourself the chief
engineer of both the group and of our studio when it is
built. We will dedicate ourselves to making all of our MIDI
networks as flexible as possible so that you will have
maximum creative freedom. We look forward to a continuing and
profitable association. Please feel free to upbraid me or any
of the others in the future should our behavior ever become
abominable.
With Love and Respect,
Dr Tomorrow
Epilogue
--------
The trip back was an emotional wringer. To be spiritually reconnected to
your biological father after no connection since the age of one would likely
be a real headbanger for anyone, even an Eternal. Even for me. I'm sure I'm
still angry about it, but the anger is only a tiny part of my feelings. I
love the dude, and I love my life as an Eternal and, most of all, I love
Pearl E. Mae, She-Ra, and Bullet -- not necessarily in that order, either. I
even love Julian and Gabriella. And I love the planet and our work to save
it. But I have very confused feelings about Yo-Vah. It's like my
system--megastepped or not--won't let me even think about him as my father.
It's like disbelief. It's also like being without a father all my life and
suddenly getting one.
Probably it will take some time to sink in, and that's what both of us
said to each other by the usual interesting coincidence of simultaneous
speech. Would you believe it?
Anyway, it's pretty hard not to trust a guy named Yo-Vah.
CAREFUL ATTENTION PLEASE
HIGH SECURITY ITEM
THE FOLLOWING REPORT HAS BEEN PROGRESSIVELY ENCODED INTO THE
DOS OF YOUR SYSTEM AND HAS PARTIALLY UTILIZED SPLIT-HEX
CODING TO ACCESS AND TRANSMIT THE RAM CONTENTS OF THE PARENT
COMPUTER SYSTEM. ONLY THE PROPER SECURITY SEQUENCE WILL
ACTIVATE THIS HIGH SECURITY FILE, WHICH HAS BEEN STORED AS AN
INTERWOVEN PI-CONTEXT BY MEANS OF NEGATIVE TIMESHARING
ENCRYPTION.
Encryption was never much of a problem for I.S.I. beings because
practically each and every one of their functions was in some way related to
encryption and encoding or the reverse, decoding. One of the alternative
universes they repeatedly explored was the tale of a pico-pico-evolutionary
series of accelerations in the evolving of the life matrix itself. So many
god-like abilities began to accrue to the evolving beings, beingkind rather
than personkind, and a unitary path of evolution began to unfold. Across all
species lines, evolution began to express itself in terms of one, as a
single being and energy source, which, by the effect of it's unitary nature,
began to exert energy effects comparable to entire masses of humanity. A
real son or daughter of the life matrix could evolve far enough to literally
become a beacon of very high-order energy. Some of the first signs of what
happened to a planet when this type of being began to exist were now
happening on the Planet Earth of Dr Tomorrow's time. It had occurred on
Earth itself with Christ almost 2000 years previously, but on a much
different scale. Dr Tomorrow appeared during a time of apparently intense
and varied expression of many different religions, and the oper
ation itself was withdrawn during a time of intense planetary movement to
one single religion. The planetary-religion phenomenon has been observed in
many systems, and followed the whole host of unitary phenomena including
one, or at least very few, beings representing the end-point of one or more
galactic systems. Subjects such as wealth, power, knowledge and
actualization have little or no meaning by this time. The entire population
of the life matrix itself has a mathematical tendency to approach one, of
course. The evolution of consciousness results in one or a group of several
beings regulating time and space and attempting to constructively keep the
life matrix cohesive and together. How ironic that the end-point in the
evolution of consciousness, the being at the end of the line, so to speak,
comes as close to actually being GOD as beings ever approach--in their
consciousness, in their music and art forms, and in all their other
endeavors except when they are in prayer. The being who is in prayer or
meditation comes the closest to BEING GOD. And if the question is posed,
"What is Life All About?," then BEING GOD must definitely be part of the
answer. Each and every one of us, at any point along the time axis, can
relate to that infinite superbeing amalgamation of all future superbeings.
All we have to do is to practice BEING GOD, and one certain way of doing
that is by prayer or meditation. Creative music and art production resemble
meditation very closely, as does nearly any activity carried out in a
one-pointed way.
ISI beings never really liked to think of themselves as God or even as
little gods. They had never found any myths depicting Gods as possessing
both three digits and an avian rather than mammalian appearance. But
Siblings were extremely one-pointed and very well suited for the job. For
the early apprentices, there were sometimes problems resulting from the
perspective that Guardian work entailed. Viewing so much of the Cataclysms
tended to produce a lot of work for the processors. Guardian Siblings were
basically ultrasensitive beings who were placed by evolution in the
observer's seat for multiple cosmic fireworks displays. In the known history
of all cultural forms and of consciousness itself, only the
self-annihilatory Cataclysm was a remarkable constant of all known cultures
within the true extent of the Life Matrix itself. In a word, all
civilizations, if not snuffed out by intervening natural disaster, tend to
blow themselves up, literally and figuratively. It was ridiculously
predictable, and one of the processors, Processor Gamma, had even written
some logic equations that related the galactic system's population density
centers and growth curves to actual timeframe predictions of the Local Group
Cataclysms. Personkind and beingkind nearly always had a mean streak of one
sort or another, and interplanetary wars frequently started over the
smallest possible imaginable perceived insult or threat. Often the wars had
even resulted from language problems and glitches in cybernetic translators
or other decoding devices. Wars have often resulted also from oneor both of
the potential opponents being poor chess players.
S.O.S....S.O.S.....S.O.S......S.O.S....
MAYDAY MAYDAY.
S.O.S.....S.O.S.....S.O.S.....S.O.S....
MAYDAY.
S.O.S.....S.O.S.....S.O.S.....S.O.S....
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
111 00 0 1 00 0 01 0 0 01 1 00 0 111 1 00 0 01 10 0 0 101 00 11 1 00 1
1001 0010 1101000 00 10 0 1 00 0 010 10 00 0 11 01 10 00 100 0
______________________________________________________________________________
Marshall F. Gilula, otherwise known as NeXT Registered Developer (NeRD)
#1054, spends a lot of his time with a customized white Steinberger guitar,
and a couple of racks of rapidly-aging electronic equipment controlled by a
Mac IIsi running MOTU's 'Performer'. This version of DR TOMORROW was part
of a Ph.D. Dissertation written for Columbia Pacific University. DR
TOMORROW is a project that aspires to being a profitable multidimensional
wellness learning system. Marshall Gilula lives in Miami with a black
Cube, several Macs, numerous stringed instruments, and two beautiful
gigantic German Shepherds, She-Ra and Bullet. 'DR TOMORROW' and 'Project
Talking Dog' (She-Ra and Bullet) are two scientific activities of Life
Energies Research Institute, P.O. Box 588, Miami, Florida 33133.
This is the fifth and final installment of Dr Tomorrow, the first chapter
of which was printed in the March 1992 Issue (volume IV, Issue 1).
mgilula@miasun.med.miami.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
MATRIX ERROR
"That's the way the system works.
by Charles B. Owen Sometimes you get in and you
don't come out."
Copyright (c) 1993
______________________________________________________________________________
"I tell you, Doc, the tix rate's up."
Dr. Walter Donly reached for his keyboard and hit the system statistics
hot key. Just inside his office door the husky service technician stood
shifting his weight from foot to foot. "I appreciate your concern, John,"
Walt said as the screen filled with data, "but you know as well as I do that
the matrix error rate is determined by laws of physics. It doesn't change."
He gestured at the screen. "Last month's error rate was one in 188,000.
That's close enough to the mean for me."
John Beach still looked skeptical. Walt sighed and wondered if they would
ever understand. Running two matrix error service calls in a single day
always convinced the techs that system parameters had changed--or had been
changed. John had been in before, for the same reason, as had most of the
techs. Walt wondered what incident had brought this on.
"I can call stats, too," John said. "But that doesn't explain sites that
tix twice in a week. What are the odds on that?"
"That's statistics. You throw five dice, sometimes you get Yatzee. The
chance may be small, but it happens."
"Twice in a month?" John asked.
"For a single site?"
"Yeah."
In his entire service apprenticeship, Walt had never seen a site tix
twice in a single week. In a morbid fashion he was jealous. "Sounds like you
hit the lottery," he said.
"Some, lottery, Doc. What are the odds, anyway?"
Walt sighed. John was going to be tedious. But he was curious, too.
"Let's see," he said, clearing the screen and summoning a statistics
calculator on the office computer. John moved into the office and sat down.
"OK, pods average thirty uses a day," he began. He was entering equations
as he spoke. "The nominal error rate is one in 189,788. So the chance of an
error on any particular day is..." He hit the calculate key. "...one in
6,387."
"See what I mean," John said.
"Now hold on. Divide that by seven, and the chance of an error in a week
drops to one in 912."
"That's still pretty high."
"Not when you account for volume. With half a billion pods out there, one
in 912 is nothing."
"I know there's a lot of pods. But what's the chance of two errors in a
week?"
"Simple. 912 raised to the second power." He pressed the keys.
"831,744," John announced. "Good God. You're not going to tell me that's
normal."
"John, surely you realize the scale of the transporter system. With the
number of pods out there, this situation will happen on an average..." He
again consulted the computer. "...over 600 times a week."
John stared at the screen. "Damn system's murder," he said.
"In a way, but we have to have it. How would you get to work if you
couldn't tee? Hell, John, you know the odds. You work with the system."
"Yeah, but I try not to think about them."
"That's the way the system works. Sometimes you get in and you don't come
out." No one knew that better than the service technicians. When they ran a
matrix error call, it generally meant that someone had died.
"Well, I would still like to know the chances of a single site tixing
twice in one week -- two times in a month."
"Hmm," Walt said. "That's a bit tougher." He pulled up a statistics text
to help work out the equation. After entering it the result startled even
him. "One in thirty five million?"
"For me only?" John asked.
"That's what it looks like. But there are 100,000 service technicians.
It's just economy of scale."
John abruptly stood up. "You guys always hide behind that economy of
scale crap. You really don't give a shit. A lot of people are getting fried
in your damn system, and you call it economy of scale. Why don't you do some
checking for a change instead of spouting statistics." He turned and stormed
out of the room before Walt could reply that that was what the system stats
were for. The door slid shut, leaving the room echoing with indignation.
"Damn," Walt said. He hated scenes like that, and there seemed to be an
epidemic of them, lately. Most of the problem stemmed from ignorance. The
techs always felt the system could be manipulated. As he had done a dozen
times before, he pulled up a stock tpod physics summary and began editing
it. He would e-mail it to his service section. Maybe it would calm some of
them. If, of course, any of them read it.
He looked at the report and knew it would go right over the heads of the
service technicians it had been written for. They refused to accept that the
natural D-Wave could not be manipulated or monitored. When a transmit D-Wave
synchronized with the natural D-Wave--which it did a fixed percentage of the
time--a matrix error occurred. The transmit synchronizer would burn out and
the matter to be transmitted would be stuck in the D-dimension. No system
failure could possibly cause that error. The equations did not lie; the odds
stayed the same.
He tried his best to work the document to a point where it would be
understandable, but finally dropped it as hopeless. "Do some checking for a
change," John had said. Well, he thought, maybe I will.
He pulled John Beach's file and work log and examined them, looking for
the cases in question. John hadn't been exaggerating. His double errors were
real. Looking further, he saw that John's tix call rate was running ten a
week--nearly twice normal. "Jinx?" Walt said. It wasn't a logical thought,
but it had crossed his mind.
He called up another record. Mike Thompson, also in his division, yielded
a tix call rate of nine a week. The same held true for several other techs
he checked.
"Increased volume?" It seemed unlikely that traffic would have doubled on
the system, but he checked anyway. The usage report said volume was down two
percent in the last month; that certainly wasn't the problem.
Walt was getting nervous. Matrix central continuously monitored matrix
errors, maintaining stats for the system at all times. No increase in the
error rate, even within a single division, should go unnoticed.
He wrote a quick program to do a subset stat analysis through his local
service link to matrix central. The program ran for a few seconds, then
posted results. He stared at the screen in horror. Commercial class pods
showed an error rate within one percent of the norm. Class three pods,
commonly used for human transportation, were showing an average of one error
in 82,134 uses. It was impossible.
His math had to be wrong. He double checked his equations, but they
proved accurate. Perhaps the small sample base of fifty thousand sites had
yielded skewed results. He increased it to a million sites and ran the
program again.
This time the wait was in the minutes and, when the results were posted,
the error rate had converged to one in 82,151. Either the error rate was
high, or the computer had erroneous data. His service link yielded actual
use statistics for individual sites. He had no reason to doubt the data's
integrity.
"What is going on?" In spite of the air conditioning, he was beginning to
sweat. He hit a blue button on the wall that locked his office. He didn't
want anyone to drop in while he had that information on the screen.
Remembering the sites John had mentioned, he wondered if some sites were
failing in some unknown way and had high error rates. He entered a scan
routine to query for locations with higher than normal error rates, hoping
that that would give him something to go on.
He allowed the program to scan the million sites he had previously run
stats on. After a few seconds a list appeared of locations with unusually
high error rates. He was surprised to see the list headed by four class six
industrial sites that were tixing one hundred percent. What he saw violated
known physical laws. It was obvious that he didn't know all the laws, and
someone else did. There was no doubt that the system was being manipulated.
Wondering if the results went the other way, he changed parameters and
ran the program again. Hundreds of sites were revealed with zero error rates
over the last ten years. The problem of matrix errors could be controlled
and prevented. Someone knew. Someone was not telling.
"Matrix Computer Disconnect" popped up on the screen in a dialog box.
Walt froze. Abruptly the phone rang and he nearly jumped out of his chair.
He paused for a moment to let his breathing steady before answering the
phone.
"Dr. Donly?" a man inquired.
"Yes?"
"This is Matrix Control. We are seeing a high level of inquiry traffic on
your channel. May I ask what you are doing?" The voice failed to mention
that they had disconnected his channel.
"Oh, the techs were saying that the error rate is up, as usual. I just
was checking to make sure."
"System statistics are available for that purpose." The man at the other
end seemed more instructive than angry. Walt was really at a loss for what
to say. He had been nosy, and they knew it. They undoubtedly had a log of
his accesses.
"I wanted data for my section. Stats are for the entire system," he said.
"The accesses were not all in your section. We logged accesses
system-wide."
"Oh, I made an error in the program. Can I request stats for my section?"
"I will forward the appropriate forms to your office. But for now, I have
an order to suspend you for the day. You are logged off. Please go home."
"Yes, sir," he replied as the line clicked dead. Walt had never heard of
suspensions before. He contemplated the consequences. Would he lose his job?
Why couldn't John mind his own business.
He reached for the key to clear local session memory, but hesitated
before hitting it. Instead he ran a print of the session log. Fifteen crisp
white sheets slid from a slot on the side of the terminal. He then cleared
the memory and pocketed the data.
Leaving the office, he headed for the floor tpod. It waited at the end of
the hall--just a sliding door and a light announcing pod availability. He
stopped before entering. I'm just being paranoid, he thought, and entered
the pod. He slid his ID through the reader and punched in his home address
code. The unit beeped once, announcing initiation of a transmit cycle. The
door had nearly closed when he slammed the abort button.
He stepped out and eyed the pod with apprehension. He'd teed somewhere
every day of his life. Sure there was risk, but he accepted that risk.
Everyone did. That transporter represented his only way home. But it had
taken on a new, dimension as a result of his little session of snooping. It
suddenly seemed likely that he might not emerge from the other end of the
transport.
He reached in and keyed the activation sequence again. When he had
pressed the last button, he pulled his hand clear so the door could close
and the unit could transport several cubic meters of air to his house. The
cycle light came on. The unit activated.
The soft chiming began at the same time the matrix error indicator lit.
Above the door "out of service" was blazed as if to proclaim, "sorry, you
will have to go
down the hall for your chance." Walt froze for a moment, then turned and
ran.
He didn't know where he was running to, but he had to get away from all
tpods. He had to get help, to tell someone. He knew he couldn't tee anymore,
so how would he reach help? He did not even know where he lived in relation
to matrix central. Tpods moved the world. Now that he couldn't use them
anymore, he felt stranded.
Then he remembered the air cars. He was even on the correct level. He had
used the cars during his apprenticeship as a service technician. When a pod
suffered a receive failure, a tech had to get to it some other way, so
matrix central maintained a fleet of air cars and small spacecraft. He
headed for the docks.
When he reached the dock entrance, he tried to remember air car
procedures. It had been ten years since he had flown one, but they mostly
flew themselves anyway. He remembered the check-out routine, but with no
valid service ID or authorization that wouldn't work.
As he walked in the door he surveyed the docking area. The vast room was
filled with the large delta wing vehicles, some parked in neat rows ready
for use, others in various stages of disassembly. One sat in launch
position, pointed down the launch corridor.
"I need to check out an air car," he said to the boy at the entrance. The
only occupant of the room, the young man looked all of seventeen. He wore a
flowered shirt and a smudge on his chin revealed a desire for manliness
through blade shaving. Of course, he was in charge of air cars. On the desk
he had the usage log and a full box of key cards.
"I need to see your ID, work order, and authorization," he said.
"Here is my ID," Walt said, handing over the card. "I don't need
authorization, I'm a supervisor." It never hurts to try, he thought.
"I can't issue based on just an ID, sir. I'll have to call for
authorization." He reached for the phone.
Sometimes the best way is the direct way, Walt thought. It worked on
tri-V. As the boy's hand snaked toward the phone and he was looking down,
Walt bundled his fingers into a fist and slugged the kid with all his might.
The boy, chair and all, fell backwards to the floor.
Walt hoped that he had knocked him out, but he hadn't. The boy jumped up
from the floor and for a moment Walt was afraid he would be involved in a
fist fight. But the kid cowered back into the corner, obviously not wanting
any more trouble.
Walt grabbed the phone and yanked. Expecting the wonderful movie gesture
of wires ripping free from the wall, he instead found the wire to be quite
strong, so he resorted to throwing the phone to the floor. The plastic case,
not designed for such abuse, shattered.
He grabbed his ID and the box of keycards. Running to the ready car, he
heard the boy escaping out the door. He would have very little time to get
going. He jumped in the car, sealed the door, and began trying cards. The
fifth card he tried activated the control panel. He dropped the box of
cards, flipped the controls to manual, and jammed the throttle all the way
forward. Acceleration forced him into the seat as the air car flashed down
the launch corridor and into the sky.
Once clear of the opening it began to drop. Walt grabbed at the yoke and
pulled. The craft yawed to the right, then pulled up, just clearing a stand
of trees. He had overcorrected and the ship almost stalled, but he pushed
forward lightly and leveled out. It had been years since his training, but
the motions quickly returned. Soon he had control of the car and was
confronted with the awful decision of where to go.
He pulled the crumpled sheave of papers from his pocket. The top page
gave the address. He punched it into navigation and felt the car assume
automatic control. It veered to the right and began to ascend.
As the air leveled out, Walt wondered if he would be followed. The only
use for air cars was transporter pod maintenance, so he didn't expect to
meet any normal traffic. Of course, the key cards for all the cars in the
dock were scattered on the floor at his feet. If duplicates existed, they
would take a while to find, he was sure. He always likened TP Technologies
to an elephant--damn big, and awfully slow. Obviously, at some higher level
that was not the case. Still, that level had to deal with the norm, and the
norm consisted of two million employees and no one in charge.
The air car released to manual after two hours flight time. Walt found
himself over a wooded valley occupied by a single log cabin. Far in the
distance another cabin could be seen, but the spacing was several
kilometers. John Beach obviously liked his privacy.
The yard in front of the house had a clearing large enough to land the
craft. He sat the car down gently in the grass, hoping to cause little
damage to the idyllic setting.
"What the hell," he heard as the hatch opened. The noise had apparently
aroused John. Walt reasoned that he was the first visitor John had ever had
via air car. He stepped out to meet his host.
"Donly!" John stood there in the grass. He was barefoot and holding a
beer. For the first time, Walt noticed his pot belly. With the diet drugs
available, he wondered if the belly had been grown on purpose to achieve a
look John particularly desired.
"I've got to talk to you," Walt said.
"I guess you do. Why didn't you just tee in, like regular folk." John was
getting quite a kick out his guest's strange arrival.
"John, I need your help. I checked into what you said, and I found
something real bad. Can we talk?"
"Sure, come on in."
"I'd better not. You may be in danger, too. Can you come with me?"
"Good God, Doc. You show up in an air car in the middle of the afternoon
and want me to go flying? I haven't done anything. Why should I be in
danger."
"You wanted me to check. I did. Someone is tampering with the tpod error
rate."
"I told you so."
"Now they're trying to kill me. They may try to kill you, too. Right now,
I don't trust any tpods, including your house unit."
John stared at Walt for a moment, then glanced back at the house. "Give
me a sec," he said and ran into the house. Less than a minute later, he
emerged in a denim jacket and boots, with two beers.
Not normally the drinking type, Walt gratefully accepted one. "Get in,"
he said, jumping back in the air car. Once John was buckled in he lifted
off, turned
east, and began to relate his story.
"Where are we going, now?" John asked as he examined the computer
printouts.
"I figured we would try to find a tri-V network or some other news agency
to break this. With enough publicity, we would be safe," Walt said. "I don't
think we can go to the police. They would probably arrest me for stealing
the air car, and TP would get me the moment they pop me in a pod."
"So, where..." John began. The sky suddenly flared a brilliant white.
Both men closed their eyes against the glare. Then the shock wave hit, and
the air car began tumbling. John grabbed the controls, yelling, "let me." He
fought them madly as the sky and ground did wild acrobatics. Trees below
burst into flames, then were uprooted by the shock wave. As the ship tumbled
the men caught brief glimpses of a rising mushroom cloud in the distance.
After a desperate battle, John managed to level the craft out. He got it
back on an easterly course. "Minimal damage," he said as he surveyed the
instrumentation. "We seem to be ok, but if that was a nuke, we're irradiated
now."
"I doubt it. I bet there was no radiation at all," Walt replied.
"What do you mean. That was a nuke if I ever saw one."
"A different kind of nuke. Are you familiar with energy venting?"
"Sure. I sometime work on an EV unit. It drains energy from matrix error
mass loss and converts it to electricity."
"Yeah, but do you know how they work?" Walt asked.
"No, not really. I guess it's similar to other tpods. They use the same
parts."
"When something--or someone--is tixed, they are stuck in the D-dimension.
Matter isn't stable there, so it converts directly to energy. EV units tap
that energy in a controlled way by generating a simultaneous transmit and
receive D-Wave for the same location. This causes an energy release from the
field. The energy level is determined by the intensity of the field. Many
people know that. What most people don't know is that any tpod can be used
as an EV unit, since most tpods transmit and receive. A lot of safeguards
have to be overridden, but it can be done."
"They detonated the tpod in my house?" John had turned white, obviously
realizing for the first time that he had become a target, too.
"I think so. The problem with using a regular tpod as an EV is that the
vent can't be controlled. It just dumps a large mass equivalence instantly.
The best it can be toned down to would be the equivalent of a medium nuke,"
Walt said. "Like that."
"You son of a bitch," John yelled. "You led them to me. Now they're after
me, too." John had regained his color and was glaring at Walt. He looked
ready to kill.
"You started this, John," Walt replied. "You asked me to do the checking.
Now we're in this together."
"But you could have stayed your distance. You didn't have to lead them to
me."
"Hell, I don't think I led them to you. I had your coordinates already,
so I didn't have to inquire of navigation. They may have been going to hit
you anyway. I probably saved your life."
"I doubt that," John said. He looked unconvinced. "How do you know they
can't track this air car?"
"I don't think they can. If they could, why would they wait for us to be
out of range? They sure missed."
"They didn't miss my house."
"I think I would rather be alive and homeless, if I were you," said Walt.
"We had best work together. You have any ideas?"
"Well, where the hell are we going. You've got us pointed east, but that
means nothing to me. I live by tpod coordinates."
"I seem to remember reading that the major tri-V nets are all on the east
coast. I think New York. I remember some geography from school. New York is
on the east coast of the Americas, and I think that's where we are, so I'm
heading that way."
"How will we find the right place when we get there."
"Hell, John, you got any ideas?" Walt looked at him. "I'm doing the best
I can to get us out of this mess. Maybe we'll look for antennas. We could
ask directions."
"Great. Sarcasm. Antennas might work." He added, "I think I live near the
coast. I saw a map when I bought the cabin. New York should be north, if I
remember correctly." He adjusted their course.
They flew for over an hour above terrain that varied from long, empty
fields to mountain peaks. Occasionally a small town or city dotted the
landscape, to be replaced again by green grass and pasture land. They
marveled at the feeling of flight, so seldom felt in a world of
instantaneous transportation.
Suddenly the land became water. Below them waves broke on the beach. Even
in the filtered cabin, the ocean smell hung heavy in the air. They turned
north and followed the coast line until an island city came into view.
"New York?" John asked. They were both straining to see in the haze. The
sun was setting, painting the shiny box world ahead in shades of red and
gold.
"I guess so. Hell, I don't know. Let's give it a try." They swooped down
over the city like a bird of prey. Every building seemed to have at least
one antenna, but few had more. "See that one," Walt said, pointing at a
mirrored skyscraper to the north.
"Yeah. Looks like a farm on the roof. Let's give it a try."
They flew to the building. Dozens of antennas sprouted from the roof, but
a large, cleared circle with a painted red X marked a landing spot. The
paint had faded, but the area was clear. John sat the craft down on the pad
and they disembarked.
A cool, evening breeze cut through their clothes and occasional gusts
threatened their balance. "Tough wind up here," John said.
"Over here." Walt pointed at a red brick block with a door. It looked
like the access way for the roof. "Let's try it."
The door was unlocked. Upon entering they found themselves at the top of
a stairwell that spiraled off to the left, circling an open center shaft.
They went down one flight and looked at the door. The handle had been
lost long ago. "Let's try the next one," Walt said. They found it unlocked
and pushed it open. It bumped against something, then gave way.
"Gosh, you scared me half to death," the girl said. Her whitened cheeks
formed a contrast to the heavy rouge she had applied. She reached up and
brushed an offending strand of blond hair from her eyes, stalling for time
as she regained composure. "What were you doing in the stairwell?"
"We are trying to find the press," Walt said. "Are we close?"
"This is the GTV building," she replied. Walt breathed a sigh of relief.
Global Tri-V was one of the biggest networks. They would help.
"I need to talk to a reporter," he said. He felt no need to explain to
this girl He wanted to go straight to someone important. "Can you get
someone?"
"Ok," she said and zipped from behind the desk, not turning her back
until well out of range. A hallway extended the breath of the building. She
disappeared to the right at the end of the hall.
"Thank goodness," John said. "Let's get this mess over with. Someone in
TP owes me a house and I intend on taking it out of his hide."
"I wish it were as simple as replacing your house," Walt replied. He
gazed down the hall, anxious for an end to the affair. He noticed the tpod
on the left near the end of the hall The blue availability light glowed
above the door. He shuddered for a moment, then calmed.
The reporter stepped into the hall and headed toward them with long,
confident strides. Walt could feel her assessing them as she approached,
wasting no time getting to the story. Her business suit clung tightly to her
slim body with no loose cloth. Her hair was cropped close in a style that
could grace the screen, yet not get in the way. She brandished a notepad as
a warrior would a gun.
"Shiela Haskel, GTV," she said when she was within range. She extended
her hand. "What can I do for you."
Walt shook her hand. "I'm Dr. Walt Donly. This is John Beach. We're
employees of TP Technologies, and we've got quite a story."
"Come with me to my office," she said. "We'll be more comfortable there."
She turned on her heels and the men followed. Walt noticed the secretary
regaining her territory, obviously glad to be back in charge of her little
corner of the world.
They went down the hall and entered an elevator. "My office in on level
eighteen," Shiela said, pressing the button. "Perhaps you can tell be what
this is about?"
Walt began telling her of the information he had discovered and his
subsequent flight. The elevator stopped. They exited and went down another
hall to a corner office. He paused while they entered. "Please be seated,"
she said, motioning at the two chairs facing the desk. Walt wondered if most
news stories involved two people.
"Please continue," she said, all the while jotting notes. Other than an
occasional "OK," or "Right," she let Walt relate the story uninterrupted.
"Are you sure this is not just statistics at play?" she asked when he had
finished. She appeared unimpressed by the magnitude of the tale.
"If it weren't for those four sites, I couldn't be certain. I guess odds
could be pushed, but not that far. Those sites are impossible. Someone is
doing that."
"And I know I've been seeing more tixs than usual in the last few
months," John added.
"Do you have any physical evidence?" she asked. Walt eyed her for a
moment. Was she skeptical, or just thorough?
"I have this," he said, handing over the prints he had run earlier. She
thumbed through them for a moment, apparently absorbing the data.
"What do these numbers really mean, Doctor?"
"What do you mean?" he inquired.
"In lives."
He had avoided thinking in those terms before. "I didn't run that
number."
"Care to hazard a guess?"
"Oh, an extra twenty million a year. Maybe more." The magnitude of the
problem struck home for the first time. "Can't you get this on the air and
stop it?" he begged.
She sat the papers down and clasped her hands over the desk. "I would
like to, but there is a problem. I can't break a story like this without
physical evidence or independent corroboration. It's too big."
"What," John yelled. "You mean you're not going to do anything?"
"We are going to do something. I really want to blow this story wide
open. This is huge, but we have to be careful. You are not the first to make
such a claim."
"Not the first?" Walt asked.
"No. About fifty years ago, an employee of TP came to GTV and said that
matrix errors could be controlled and TP management was using them to
produce power. He had internal prints and statistics to prove it."
"You mean you've known this for fifty years?"
"Hold on. The guy turned out to be a fraud. The prints he had were faked.
We aired the story and raised quite a ruckus, only to be sued by TP. Hell,
TP damn near ended up owning the place. It hurt the network's credibility,
so we have to be real careful about our sources, especially on a story like
this."
"You don't believe us," John said. His hands were balled up in fists.
"Of course I believe you. For one thing, you came here by air car. That's
not what I would call a normal occurrence. And there are two of you. These
prints could be fake, but they look real. We will just have to find some way
to prove this."
"What about my house?" John asked. "Surely someone noticed!"
"Let me check." Shiela activated the terminal on her desk and entered a
command sequence. "Here it is. A large meteorite impact occurred in eastern
Tennessee earlier today. According to government sources, the meteorite
struck in a sparsely populated area, destroying a few homes and a great deal
of timber. Casualties are minimal. End of story. There you go."
"Meteorite, my ass," John exclaimed.
A slow whistle escaped Walt's lips. "Would seeing the computer results
yourself be sufficient proof?" he said.
"You're crazy," John said.
"Calm down, John," Walt said. To Shiela, "we might be able to get in."
"If I could verify personally that this information came from the matrix
computer, I could break the story. Without that assurance, I'm stuck." She
seemed sincere in her desire to air the story.
"You realize they tried to kill us before?" Walt said.
"I'm a reporter. I get the story. Don't worry about me, I'll carry my
weight." She jumped up from the seat and grabbed
a small case that was on the floor by the desk. "Let's get going. I don't
want to hang around here too long."
Walt rose from the chair. John stared at him, his mouth gaping open. "You
coming?" Walt asked.
He regained his composure. "What the hell. Besides," he added, looking
around the room. "I'll bet meteorites travel in bunches."
Shiela exited the office, with the others close behind. "Can you give me
a tee address?" she asked.
"There's no way you'll get me in a tpod right now," Walt said. "And the
pods at matrix central are all locked. We'd better fly. The air car is on
the roof."
___________________
They settled in for the flight. The air car only had two seats, so Shiela
sat on the console between the two men. The men intermittently dozed, lulled
by the soft drone of the blowers and the rushing air. Shiela spent the
majority of the flight marveling at the vast world below her. Outside a
blanket of darkness was covering the world, increasing the contrast of city
lights and isolated homes.
Since Walt and John both knew matrix central's coordinates, internal
navigation flew the car. The flight was uneventful. For a brief period the
hectic pace of the day had abated. Walt tried not to think of what lay
ahead.
"You awake," Shiela asked.
"Yeah," Walt answered, though his eyes remained closed.
"This is something people don't see anymore." She gestured at the shadowy
ground and the sun just touching the horizon. "Tpods took that away."
"In a way, but they gave us much in return."
"I just wonder if the sacrifices have been worth it?" she said.
"I don't know," Walt said and went back to sleep.
When the arrival alarm sounded, it was pitch black outside. The chiming
was all too similar to the matrix error alarm and jolted both men from their
sleep. Walt cleared the alarm and took the controls. John began to scan the
horizon for lights.
"Where are we?" Shiela asked.
"We're approaching matrix central. We should see lights any moment now,"
Walt said.
"Maybe not," John said. "Matrix central has no windows. It's just a big
rectangular building. We may not be able to see it in the dark."
"Any suggestions?" Walt asked.
"We could wait for morning," Shiela suggested.
"I'd rather not," Walt said. "Navigation says we are approaching, but I
don't see a thing. What about landing lights? For the air cars."
"The air car bays are on the south side," John said. "We're east, or
maybe north east, so they wouldn't show. You might try swinging to the
south."
Walt banked the car to the left until navigation reported they were south
of the building. "There we go." He pointed so the others would see the light
green, flashing beacon for themselves.
"That would be the launch bay," John said. "You want to go in there?"
"I don't think so. We will need the surprise. I'm going to put down on
the ground. We'll walk in."
"Can we get in from outside?" Shiela asked.
"Sure," John said. "There's recreational areas on the ground. Nothing's
fenced that I know of."
"Will there be guards?" she asked.
"I hope not," John answered.
"I doubt it," Walt added. "Matrix central is real big. Something like a
half million people work here. I'll bet there are several hundred exits.
Security would be strapped to cover them all. Besides, all the tpods are
locked and no one else has air cars but TP."
"And you," Shiela added.
"Yeah, and they'll know that. But this is the last place they would
expect us to go."
"Let's hope so," John said.
They sat the air car down in a clearing several hundred meters from the
building. A large rock pile, probably unearthed when the building was built,
shielded the craft from view. "They'll probably find this come daylight,"
Walt said as they began walking toward the building. "We'd better hurry."
The quarter moon provided little illumination to walk by, slowing their
travel. Occasionally one of them exclaimed softly as a toe was stubbed or
balance lost. They saw each other only as outlines.
"Shame TP doesn't have a lighted night rec area," John whispered.
"They probably do, on the north side of the building," Walt replied. He
touched the rough surface of a wall. "Here we are. There should be an
entrance pretty soon."
It was still several hundred meters before Walt whispered "here's the
door," and stopped so the others could catch up. "Any last requests," he
asked.
"Real funny," John said.
Walt slowly turned the knob. When it reached its limit he pulled it open
a crack and peered inside. The bright interior stung his eyes initially, but
they quickly adjusted. The door ended a hallway that traveled as far as he
could see. No one was in sight. He swung the door open and entered, with
John and Shiela following close behind.
"It's a big operation," Walt whispered. "Just act normal and no one will
question us."
"What about IDs," John asked.
"I doubt if anyone will notice we're not wearing any. If it becomes a
problem we'll just have to wing it."
He led them down the hall to the nearest elevator. "We'll have to go to
the service tech support level." He summoned the elevator, which promptly
arrived with a light chime. Each of them looked around, as if to assure
themselves the sound had gone unnoticed. They stepped in and Walt pressed
the button labeled twenty two.
When the door had closed he said "Our best bet is to get an ID and go to
one of the other tech supervisor's offices."
"How are you going to do that?" Shiela asked.
"I'll bet our big friend here would love to vent some pent-up
frustrations. Right, John?"
"Damn straight!" he answered.
The elevator opened, revealing the twenty second floor hallway, a twin of
the first floor, but busier. Service techs, obvious in blue coveralls,
mulled around in the hall and a low din of conversation could be heard.
Vague mechanical sounds emanated from repair shops on
the floor. With Walt in the lead, they stepped from the elevator and
headed to the right. The techs appeared undisturbed in their conversation.
At a random door Walt stopped. The name Eric Garver was etched into the
metal door panel. A lighted, blue button by the door signaled Eric's
presence and availability. "Let's make it quick," Walt whispered. He pressed
the button and the door slid open.
"May I help you?" the man said as they stepped into the room. He peered
up at them through unfashionable wire rim glasses that perched on an
excessive nose. He sat, with his hands frozen on the terminal keyboard,
awaiting an answer.
Shiela was the last in the door. She pressed the close and lock buttons
behind her. As the door slid closed, John and Walt collided as each began a
clumsy pounce. Walt jumped out of the way and allowed John to grab the man
behind the desk. Papers flew off the desk in the struggle as John subdued
the man's arms with one hand and prevented him from screaming with the
other. When the pandemonium had settled, he had the man in a bear hug. "Now
what do we do with him?" he asked.
Walt glanced around the spartan office. "We need to subdue him," he
stated, "but I don't see anything."
Shiela was rummaging in her case, and pulled out a piece of wire. "Try
this. It's a tri-V power cord. I'll record on batteries, anyway."
John grabbed the wire and started tying Garver up. "Just keep quite and
you won't get hurt," he said before removing his hand. "We need something
for his mouth."
"Use his belt," Walt said.
"Right," John replied. He stripped the man's belt and used it as a
makeshift gag. When the man was secure, he pulled his ID and handed it to
Walt. "Here you go."
Walt sat down at the desk. He didn't really need the ID, since the
terminal was still logged on. He cleared the previous activity and then
tried to decide what best to do.
"Could you reproduce those stats you showed me?" Shiela asked, leaning
over the desk.
"I could, but that would probably alert the sysop again. What about the
high rate sites?" he asked.
"Let's start there. You need these?" She held out the prints he had given
her earlier.
"Yeah." He selected site history for each of the four locations. The
screen displayed the locations and the recent error logs. "There you go."
"You're right," she said. "Why would they make some locations do that?"
"I don't know," Walt said.
"Could we go there and check it out?" she asked.
"No way. Those locations are type six industrial pods, no interconnect to
type three pods. There's a service pod listed, but it's locked." He pointed
at a key icon next to the entry on the screen.
"Enter code 43W," John said.
Walt entered the code and the key icon disappeared. "I didn't know you
could override a lock remotely," he said.
"They had a bad run of locks. They gave us the override codes to simplify
getting to the sites and replacing the lock card. I can override most local
safeguards."
"Could you detonate a site?" Shiela asked.
"Before yesterday, I never would have believed that was possible, but I
don't think so. Doc said that takes simultaneous transmit and receive. I've
never heard of a code to override mode separation."
"I would think it would be tough," Walt said. "Maybe that's why they
missed us. It took too long to set up."
"Can we get to the site now?" Shiela asked again.
"Sure, by tpod," Walt said, brandishing the pilfered ID. "I doubt if
anyone suspects our Mr. Garver."
"Will we all three fit in a pod?"
"I'd better stay here and monitor you," John volunteered. "I would rather
not go exploring right now, anyway."
Walt clipped the ID on. "Ok, you stay. If we are very long, get to
another office. You might try to call GTV if the phone system's not
monitored."
"Give them my name and tell them what is going on," Shiela added. "I
don't know what they could do, but the more people who know, the better."
"Ok," John said. "Get going. I'll watch from here."
Walt and Shiela left the room. Looking back as they walked down the hall,
Walt noticed John had re-locked the door.
"You think the tpod will be safe?" Shiela asked.
"I hope so. As safe as usual, at least." They reached the pod at the end
of the hall, and stepped in together. He entered the address for one of the
sites and activated the transporter with the stolen ID. The scene through
the door view port changed to a high ceiling room full of plumbing and
machinery.
"Where are we?" Shiela asked. Her voice echoed over the sound of a
roaring exhaust fan.
"Looks like a small factory." Walt sniffed at the air. There was a
distinct ozone smell to the room, intermingled with lubricants and solvents.
There was something else, also. "Do you smell salt?"
"I sure do. Do you think we're by the sea?"
"Smells like it. The ocean has a definite smell to it." He walked farther
into the room. "What is all this?"
"You're asking me? Where's that pod?"
"I think that's it over there." He led her over to a large box painted
the same utility gray as all the other equipment in the room. "Industrial
unit. Here's the control panel." He pointed to a panel mounted on the side
of the unit. It was covered with gauges and indicators and had a screen
indicating standby status.
Suddenly a large motor started. It groaned before catching hold, then
accelerated to a steady speed. Momentarily startled, Walt walked over to the
pod chamber and wiped dust from the view port. "It's filling with water," he
said.
"Sea water?" she asked, walking over to look for herself. He noticed that
she had taken out the compact tri-V recorder and was filming.
"I guess so. It doesn't look very clean." The pump stopped. Walt
suspected that the chamber was full. Then the chamber was empty. "It
activated."
"Who would transport sea water?" Shiela asked. "Space use?"
"Not sea water," Walt said. He walked over to the control panel. The red
indicator confirmed his suspicion. "And that water didn't go anywhere. It
got tixed. This site has a 100% error rate, remem
ber?"
"But why tix water."
"Energy," Walt realized. "They're adding energy to the system. Do you
know where our energy comes from?"
"I know it's a by-product of the tpod system. TP Technologies produces
all the power."
"When something gets tixed," Walt said, "it's converted directly to
energy in the D-dimension. TP taps that energy. But you can't tap energy
that isn't there. There must not be enough energy in the system to meet
demand, so they created these plants to add energy to the system. A few
hundred liters of sea water is a lot of energy."
"That makes sense," Shiela said. "But what does that have to do with the
odds changing on human transportation?"
"I don't know, but this does prove that matrix errors can be controlled."
"We had a matrix error in the office last week," Shiela said. "They sent
someone out to service the pod. Will someone be coming to service this one?"
She looked apprehensive.
"A tix blows the transmit D-wave synchronizer. It has to be replaced.
Look!" He pointed at a small robot arm attached to the pod mechanism. It
removed an access panel and pulled the burnt transmit synchronizer from the
opening. Discarding it on one conveyer belt it reached to another and picked
up a new unit, which it promptly installed, closing the hatch behind it.
"It's automatic," Walt said.
"Don't move," said a husky voice from behind them. "Put your hands on
your heads and turn around slowly."
Obeying, they turned to face a tall man in a dark red uniform with a
handgun. He had a lopsided scowl and needed a shave. "What are you doing
here?" he asked.
Walt and Shiela just stood there. "Who are you?" the man asked.
When they still did not reply, the guard led them to the service tpod and
told them not to move as he phoned for instructions. "What are they going to
do to us?" Shiela whispered as the guard discussed the situation on the
phone.
"What do you think?" Walt replied, nodding at the waiting tpod.
"Yes, sir," the guard said and hung up the phone. He hit the open button.
"Into the pod. Both of you!"
"We've all gotta go sometime," Walt said as he stepped in. Shiela
hesitated, and was violently shoved in by the guard.
"Yeah," Shiela said, "I guess so." The guard reached in and entered an
address. As the door closed, Walt wondered if the guard knew what was going
to happen to them.
The scene through the view port was replaced by a room containing a desk,
another guard, and a well dressed executive type. The guard stood watch in
the corner of the room. The other man was sitting behind a large desk
sparsely populated by a few folders, a telephone, and a computer terminal.
The pod opened and Walt and Shiela stepped into the room. The man behind
the desk stood up when he recognized them.
"It's you," he exclaimed. "We've been searching matrix central. How the
hell did you get to Orlando?"
Walt looked at Shiela, then turned back to the man and shrugged his
shoulders.
He picked up the phone and dialed. "Hart in Central here. Donly and the
reporter are here. We picked them up in the Orlando facility. Yes. Beach
must still be in the building. Good." He hung up the phone.
"Where's John Beach?" His pause brought no reply. "Ok, you guys. I think
there are some things you need to know. We've been tracking you since
yesterday. I think you realize the magnitude of what you've stumbled onto.
Surely you realize that we are not going to let you broadcast it to the
world. We are prepared, however, to make arrangements for you that could be
quite comfortable."
"We've seen your arrangements," Walt said.
"Yes, you have. But if you are willing to work with us, there is no
reason why you should be in danger. We are not vicious killers."
"Twenty million a year?" Shiela asked.
"That's not your concern. I want you to tell me were John Beach is. Then
if you will help us analyze the weaknesses in our security system, your help
will not go un-rewarded."
"We split up," Shiela injected. "I don't know where he is now."
"Was he in matrix central when you split up?"
"No," Shiela replied. "He decided to take off into the woods when we got
there, figuring he would be safer."
Hart slammed his palm down on the desk. "Bullshit," he yelled. "You think
this is a game? Do you want me to get Mike here to beat the crap out of both
of you? He'd like to." The big guard smiled. "I need answers, and I need
them now. Where's Beach?"
Walt looked at the man and drew up his best movie scowl. Perhaps it would
be better to go for the guard, rather than awaiting fate. He judged the
distance and tried to estimate Shiela's reaction. A quick pounce would be
unexpected, and might catch him by surprise. If only he could get that gun.
Walt was bracing himself for the useless jump when the phone rang. "Yes,"
Hart answered. A startled look replaced the anger on his face. "Where are
you?" he asked, then "I can't do that."
The blast knocked everyone down. Walt grabbed his ears. They were ringing
so loudly that he could barely hear. "What was that?" he heard Shiela yell.
She, too, was gripping her head. Hart was on the floor, the phone dangling
by his side. The guard had dropped his gun and was scrambling to grab it.
Walt leaped for it, but was too late. The guard was up and had them both
covered again.
Hart slowly rose. He picked up the phone again. "Ok, but you won't get
far," he said. "Get into the pod," he said to Walt and Shiela. As soon as
they were inside, he said "They're in." The door slid shut and the unit
activated. Walt noted that no address had been entered.
They stepped out into another hallway. John was running toward them. "You
OK?" he asked.
"Yeah," Walt said. "And you better keep it down. Where are we? And what
happened?"
"You're four floors above service tech support," John said as he gestured
for them to follow. He was moving quickly. "We had better get out of here,
quick. It won't take long for them to trace that transport. I was monitoring
you and noticed a tee to your location from matrix central followed by
another tee back. I figured you guys got caught. The termi
nal gave me a service phone for the pod you teed to, so I called it. The
guy who answered obviously had you, so I threatened him."
"But what was that blast," Shiela asked.
"An old maintenance trick. If the door close mechanism fails, you can't
tee to a site to repair it. That means travel by air car in some cases.
Recently, they gave us a door fail-safe override. Now we can tee in with the
door open."
"But you didn't tee in," Walt said.
"No, I just activated a tee from the first empty pod I found. Directed it
all from the terminal. You tee anything, including air, into an un-evacuated
pod, and the air sitting in the pod already is displaced, like real fast.
About a nanosecond, if I remember right. Makes a hell of a sound."
"I'll be damned," Walt said. "We had better find another office and hide.
They may trace the terminal that ordered the pod activation."
"Good idea," John said. They entered an elevator. John slid his hand down
every selector in the elevator, telling the elevator to stop at every floor.
"That'll make us harder to trace." When they reached tech support they got
out and went to another office, commandeering it as they had done
previously.
"Now what do we do," Shiela asked.
"I think we ought to get back to GTV," John said. "Do you have enough
dope to nail this mess?"
"Yes. Can we get out of here now?" she replied.
"I don't think that's a good idea," Walt said. "If they can tix twenty
million people a year, how big a deal would nuking a few hundred thousand in
New York be. They may be monitoring for any pod traffic to GTV."
"I could just call it in," Shiela said.
"I bet not. They're probably monitoring all outgoing lines. Calling would
just give our position away."
"Well, do you have any ideas?" John asked.
"I think we should try to put a stop to this," Walt said.
"Releasing a news story should do that," Shiela said.
"Do you really think we can get a story like this out of this building?
Do you want to bet on whether the phone lines are tapped? We need leverage."
"What kind of leverage?" John asked.
Walt thought. He saw no immediate escape from their dilemma. The control
of matrix errors went very high, probably to Julius Bartholemew, the
executive board of TP, or higher. And the controllers possessed the
equivalent of nuclear weapons. They could risk it and go to GTV, but the
chances of the story getting on the air had to be slim. "Where would the
matrix errors be controlled from?" he wondered out loud.
"It could be anywhere," John said. "All it would take would be a terminal
with special access codes."
"But a terminal would have to go through building switching, wouldn't
it?"
"I don't know. I've never worked with terminals other than the service
ports."
"Would a terminal be secure enough to control this?" Shiela asked.
"I guess so," Walt said. "Of course, any activity can be monitored at the
matrix computer main system console. That's how they caught me meddling with
the matrix error records. Even if we found the right terminal, the sysop
would catch us."
"It seems," John said, "like the system console would be the ideal
location for controlling the error rate."
"You're right," Walt said. "Even if there are other terminals, all system
functions are available from the system console."
"Where is it?" Shiela asked.
"It's adjacent to the the matrix computer," Walt said. "That's the
basement if I remember right."
"Yeah," John added. "They showed us the system during orientation. Just a
bunch of racks and the system console. I don't remember anyone else being on
the floor at the time."
"Can we get to it," Shiela asked.
"It should be heavily protected," Walt said. "Let's see if we can tee
in." He activated the terminal, using their latest host's ID to log in. "I
don't see any pods on that floor," he said after a moment of perusing
records.
"There has to be," John said. "That's how we got to the floor during the
tour."
"Well I don't see anything listed," Walt said. "That would be one way of
securing the floor from unauthorized personnel. Either way, we can't tee
in."
"What about elevators," Shiela asked.
"I didn't see any floors below one in the elevators," Walt said. "You hit
all of them, John. Did you see any?"
"No, I didn't. I doubt if the elevator goes down there. If it did, they
wouldn't have teed us in."
"True," Walt said. "No elevator and unlisted tpods. The only thing left
would be stairs. I wonder if they go to that level?"
"Only one way to find out," John said.
They left the office and walked to the end of the hall. A door panel with
a graphic step icon opened to allow them in the stairwell. They began down.
"How far," asked Shiela.
"We're on twenty two," John said. "Figure that many flights."
Spiraling downward toward the basement, they eventually reached the end
of the stairs and faced a blank, red, door panel.
"How do we open it?" asked John.
"I don't see an access pad," Walt said. "All the rest of the floors had
access pads. This must be exit only. No way in."
"I've got tools in my kit," Shiela said. "Could we break in?"
"I doubt it," said John. "I don't see any panels or hinges we could
remove, and the door's sealed."
"I don't think we can get in from here," Walt said. "Let's go up a level
and see if we can find another way down." He started back up the stairs with
the others following.
The next level had a normal access pad. He pressed it and the door opened
to a huge room filled with the sound of buzzing fans. "Looks like computer
equipment on this floor also," he said.
"They distinctly said in the tour that the matrix computer is all
contained on the bottom floor. Of course, that was several years ago. Maybe
they expanded."
"Or this may be support equipment," Walt said. "Input/output gear and
tpod links." He looked at the large, featureless racks. Each had a plate
with the words "TP Technologies, Inc." and a seven digit model number.
"Probably link equipment," he ventured. "TP buys its computers."
"Is all this equipment connected to
tpods?" Shiela asked. She had activated the tri-V recorder again.
"It probably connects tpods to the matrix computer," Walt said. He looked
down. "I'll bet this floor has a maze of wiring under it."
John glanced down at the white floor tiles. "False floor?" he asked.
"It looks like computer flooring," Walt said. "The tiles lift out to
allow easy access to the wires. I don't see any overhead cabling, so it must
be under the floor." Suddenly he saw what John was getting at. "And that
cabling probably goes to the main computer. There may be an access-way."
John and Walt began examining the floor for a way to get under it as
Shiela continued recording. "How do they get the tiles up?" John asked.
"There's a special handle with two suction cups on it. I've see it done.
It's a common item, so there may be one lying around somewhere."
They all began to search for the floor tool. After a few minutes of
searching behind and over racks, Shiela pointed at the top of a rack. "Is
that one?"
"Yeah," Walt said, grabbing the tool. He set it on one of the floor tiles
and lifted. The tool lifted. The tile remained seated.
"Press the lever," John said.
Walt noticed the lever on the top of the tool and, placing the tool back
in place, he activated it. This time the tile lifted. It was much heavier
than he expected, so it was a struggle to get it out of the hole. "Got it,"
he said at last.
They stared into the cavity. A spider web of wire confronted them, some
loose, some bundled into tied groups. There seemed no general direction to
the wires; they went in all directions simultaneously. "Let's go," Walt said
climbing into the meter and a half crawl space under the floor. Crouching
down, he found he could move over the wire fairly easily. Shiela followed
him down, with John bringing up the rear. John had removed the floor tool
and tossed it into the hole. As he entered he pulled the loose tile back
into place.
The only light under the floor was tiny slivers around the edges of the
tiles. Shiela pulled a portable light source from her bag and activated it.
White light streamed in all directions. "That should help," she said,
handing the light to Walt.
"God, I'm glad you came equipped," Walt said. "You always carry a
flashlight?"
"Ever tried to tape a news spot in the dark?" Shiela replied. "Your basic
black doesn't sell."
"Right," Walt said. He looked around for order in the chaos. "Any ideas
as to where to go?"
"We might try following the wall," John suggested and they proceeded
toward the nearest one. Travel in the under-floor maze was slow, but
steadying. Occasionally they had to climb over a large bundle of wire, but
most of the cabling was only a few layers deep.
They traveled until they reached the end of the floor, then turned left.
There was an area devoid of cabling next to the wall that made movement
easier, and they stayed in that area.
"I think we're getting somewhere," Walt said. "Notice that the cable
bundles parallel to the wall are getting larger. We may be approaching a
feed-through of some kind."
"How far?" Shiela asked.
"I don't have any idea. But the wire bundles can only get so big before
they become..." He stopped moving and doused the light. "Hear that?" he
said.
"What?" whispered Shiela.
"Footsteps." In the distance steps could be heard on the floor. Suddenly
they heard a striking sound and the darkness was broken far ahead of them.
The square opening became a searchlight as a beacon was lowered into the
floor space and rotated around, casting light in all directions before
retracting back above. The tile was replaced and the footsteps began again.
"They're searching under the floor," John said.
"And they appear to be heading this..." Walt stopped as another tile
lifted, only closer. "Under the wire," he said when the tile was replaced.
Each of them scrambled to lift a wiring bundle and shimmy under it. The
wire was not heavy, but was dense. They had just managed to find hiding
places when the next tile lifted. They froze as the searchers drew nearer.
At one point they were less than ten meters away. Then they were behind,
continuing the search.
"We'll stay low until they clear the floor," Walt said. The searchers
were near the corner where they had entered. They reached the wall and began
a cycle back, this time closer to the center of the room. They obviously
intended to sweep the entire floor area. "We should be safe. They've already
passed us, but they might see movement." They relaxed where they were and
waited for the search to end.
It was several hours before the searchers left for another floor. "Let's
go," Walt said as he untangled himself. John was quickly behind him, but
Shiela was caught. It took several minutes for the two of them to free her,
then they began to move again.
Following the growing cable bundle, they soon reached a hole in the
floor. It went down about four meters and had wire on all four sides lashed
to rungs, giving the appearance of a hollow, square ladder. The access way
had plenty of room for climbing and the rungs made ready steps. They climbed
into the basement.
"That was easy," John said.
"Yeah. We're on the matrix computer floor now," Walt said, "or rather
under the floor." They were again in an under-floor crawl space, but the
cabling was far more organized. It was tied carefully in bundles that only
ran in two directions. "Looks like TP hired someone to do this job," he
added. "Any ideas where the master console is?"
"I remember it being in a corner," John said. "I don't think this level
is partitioned, so if we follow the wall we should find it sooner or later.
We can always lift tiles and look."
Walt tried this. First he lifted a tile just a crack and looked for
guards. Not seeing any, he lifted it higher. Aside from rows and rows of
blue cabinets the floor was empty. The aisle they were under stretched as
far as he could see.
"This floor looks deserted. We could get out and walk," John said.
"There might be motion alarms," Walt said. "Let's stick under here for
now."
"I'd feel a lot safer under the floor," Shiela added.
They began to move along the wall. With the exception of occasional feeds
from the higher floor, the basement had
the same characteristic of a cleared space near the wall, which made for
easy travel. Walt did find himself wishing he could stand. The constant
crouch had become tiring.
They traveled for hours. Walt remembered reading that the dimensions of
the building were expressed in kilometers. It would take a while to go from
corner to corner on hands and knees, and then the master console could still
be elsewhere. He became aware that it had been over 24 hours since he had
last eaten. At least he had gotten some sleep in the air car.
"Hold it," he said, holding up his palm. In the distance he saw a wall in
front of him. They had reached the first corner. He lifted a tile to see.
Lowering his head back into the floor he whispered, "Got it." He looked
again to determine what best to do. Shiela slipped up next to him and looked
out also.
"Good God," she said. "That's Julius Bartholemew."
"Chairman of the board of TP," Walt said. "I guess that tells how high
this goes."
"Yeah. Do you recognize the other two?"
"No. One appears to be a system operator, but he must be in on this. He
would see everything. The other guy is just a guard."
"What do you see," John asked from below. Walt slipped down and told him.
Then John lifted up for his own look.
"We've got to get rid of the guard," John said. "I think we can take
him."
"He's got a gun," Shiela said.
Walt was counting floor tiles. "But we've got surprise," he said. Once he
knew the distance to the guard he lowered the tile back into place and began
moving toward the console.
"Here?" John whispered, pointing up at a floor tile.
"If I counted right," Walt replied. "Let's go for it."
In a single action, the two men pushed up on the tile with all their
might. The tile went one way and the guard the other. He dropped the gun and
Shiela grabbed it. She turned and covered Julius and the operator while Walt
and John subdued the guard. "Don't touch that," she yelled as the operator
reached for his console. He pulled his hands back as she fired the gun past
his ear.
Upon hearing the shot, the guard quit struggling and Walt and John
quickly gained control of him. In a moment the three captives were lined up
against the wall. Shiela gave John the gun. He looked at it a moment then
aimed it at the hostages.
Walt had jumped into the master console chair and was typing request
sequences on the keyboard. "Good," he said. "It works just like my office
console; it just has more commands available. I've locked all the pod's on
this floor--there are twenty." He continued typing. "There was a phone lock
and trace on GTV. I've killed that, Shiela. You can use the phone." He
motioned to the phone on the desk. Shiela ran over and grabbed it.
"You don't know what you're doing," said Julius Bartholemew.
"Keep quiet," John said, motioning with the gun.
"No, let him speak," Shiela said, setting the phone down. "I want to know
what's going on here."
"I'm sure you know by now that we can manipulate the matrix error rate,"
he said.
"But that's supposed to be impossible," Walt said. "It's a violation of
the laws of physics."
"We didn't know all the laws," the operator said.
"Who are you," Shiela asked.
"I'm Dr. Howard Drake, director of research for TP. I discovered the
missing term in the D-wave equation. With it I can predict and, therefore,
control matrix errors."
"If you can do that, why didn't you just stop them? You would have been
global heroes," Walt said. "Why continue to murder innocent people at a
massive rate if it can be prevented?"
"It's not that easy," Julius said. "You know where our energy comes
from."
"Of course I do," Walt said.
"So what would happen if we stopped matrix errors? There'd be no power.
We couldn't shut down the world power grid."
"So just shove mass in and convert it," Walt said. "You seem to be doing
that already."
"We are now, but the amount of mass needed is a lot more than can be
quickly tossed in. We had to build facilities like the one in Orlando to add
energy to the system. It took several years to get a sufficient base of
those built that we could shut down the matrix errors."
"But you did build them," Walt said. "And I know you are using them."
"We are. It seems that no matter how much energy we supply, the world
requires more. We have been tapering supply down, but it takes time."
"That's a pretty lame excuse for killing millions a year," Shiela said.
"You can make enough energy with the sea water plants, I'm sure. Just build
more plants."
"There are other complexities," Julius said. "When we got the plants
operational, we did start cutting the tix rate. We could not do it quickly,
since the plants only came on line one at a time. So, we manipulated the
odds. It gradually became safer and safer to travel via transporter."
"I'm seeing worse odds, not better," Walt said.
"We had to turn it back up again. Do you know the present population of
the world?"
"About 500 million," Shiela said.
"Right, but before tpods came into general use, the population was around
two and half billion. People accept the odds as a part of life. Because of
those odds and the amount people use the pods, the average person lives 35
years before the odds catch up with him. The life span used to average over
ninety."
"You're worried about population growth," Walt said.
"Right. With medical science as advanced as it is now, the life span
would be over two hundred. That tpod error statistic has become the only
stabilizing factor in our population. We cut it back and the population
began to climb, rapidly. In four years it was obvious that the growth could
not be controlled. We had to offset what we had done to regain a balance."
"A balance," Walt yelled. "This is not a ledger sheet. People die in
matrix errors. Who gave you the right to decide?"
"You don't rise to my level waiting for someone to let you make
decisions,"
Julius said. "If our population runs back up over a billion, people will
be starving. We live in an idyllic world, with a young, healthy population.
Do you want to see that ruined?"
"The population controlled itself before tpods," Shiela said.
"No it didn't. It rose exponentially. We were heading for a crisis. The
transporter system saved us from it."
"Mass murder is always a solution to population problems," Walt said.
"But it's not an acceptable solution." He turned to the keyboard. "Shiela,
call GTV. Let's blow this whole thing wide open." She picked up the phone
and dialed. "Now it's my turn." He began to type.
"In some ways he's right, you know," Shiela said as she waited for an
answer. "Thinks will change."
"Maybe they will," Walt replied, "but it's not for him or us to decide."
He looked at the tix rate counter on the screen. For the first time in the
history of the system, it had stopped.
______________________________________________________________________________
Charles B. Owen is currently a graduate student at Western Illinois
University where he will soon complete a Master's Degree in Computer Science.
He lives in a large house with a wife, three children, a cat, and a large
goldfish with a beautiful fantail. This summer he will move from rural
Illinois to rural New Hampshire, where it really gets cold.
mgcbo@uxa.ecn.bgu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
If you like Quanta, you may want to
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Cyberspace Vanguard is a new digest/newsletter, containing news and views
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cn577@cleveland.freenet.edu.
InterText Contact: jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu
InterText is the network fiction magazine devoted to the publication of
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The PostScript laser-printer edition is the version of choice, and includes
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Unit Circle Contact: kmg@esd.sgi.com
The brainchild of Kevin Goldsmith, Unit Circle is the underground
quasi-electronic 'zine of new music, radical politics and rage in the 1990's.
"Quasi-electronic" bcause Unit Circle is published both as an electronic
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form. If you're interested in receiving either format of the 'zine, send mail
to Kevin at kmg@esd.sgi.com.
______________________________________________________________________________
Next Issue:
What's in store for future issues of Quanta? Look for a new cyberpunky
serial, entitled Microchips Never Rust, plus lots of short fiction from new
authors (new to Quanta anyway), and of course, the popular Harrison serial
will continue. Expect the next issue to surface sometime in July or August.
______________________________________________________________________________
Thank you, thank you very much.
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Volume V Issue 2 ISSN 1053-8496 July 1993
Quanta Volume V, Issue 2
ISSN 1053-8496 July 1993
____________________________________________________________________________
Editor/Technical Director All submissions, request for
Daniel K. Appelquist submission guidelines, requests for
Proofreading back issues, queries concerning
Vince Genovese subscriptions, letters, comments, or
_____________________________________ other correspondence should be sent
to the Internet address
Copyright 1993 by Daniel K. quanta@andrew.cmu.edu.
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____________________________________________________________________________
In this issue:
______________________________________________________
LOOKING AHEAD...................Daniel K. Appelquist
Serials
TO TOUCH THE STARS (Part 1)............Nicole Gustas
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS (Chapter 14)....Jim Vassilakos
MICROCHIPS NEVER RUST (Part 1)...........Eric Miller
Stories
DAYS IN THE MACHINE....................Chaim Bertman
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF DOMINGO............A.Y. Tanaka
______________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
GOOD MORNING, EVERYBODY! I SAY GOOD morning because (much as with the former
British Empire) the Sun never sets on the Quanta subscribership! It is
always morning for some quanta subscriber somewhere. Hmm. What a ghastly
thought! Well, it's been a while since out last issue, but I still hope to
put our at least four issues this year.
Well, this issue is a bit short for Quanta, but it none--the--less is packed
with great fiction (some of the best mat-erial yet published in Quanta, in
my opinion). For instance? The enigmatic Days in the Machine from Chaim
Bertman of Chicago, Four Hundred Years of Domingo, from A.Y. Tanaka of
Hawaii. Apart from being wonderful pieces, these are the first two pieces
published in Quanta which come from ourside the Net. Yes, these manuscripts
were submitted in paper form, sent through our wonderful Postal system. As I
related last issue, I've been receiving an enormous number of hard copy
manuscripts recently. Great! You'll be seeing more of them in future
issues.
I've actually been receiving a lot more manuscripts in the mail recently
than in electronic mail! Remember, I'm always looking for new material and
new writers. I highly encourage those of you who are on the net to submit
material.
This issue also marks the start of two new serials. Nicole Gustas gives us
To Touch the Stars and Eric Miller gives us the first part of Microchips
Never Rust. Nicole's story should be concluding next issue. Eric Miller's
story will run for several issues.
John Zimmerman has once again come through with a brilliant piece of cover
art, and last, but certainly not least, we have a most harrowing installment
of The Harrison Chapters.
Any more excitement, and we'd be BANNED!
Seriously, I'm very happy about how this issue turned out. I wasn't as
successful in orchestrating a Quanta get-together this past May. Oh well.
I'll just have to try again some time in the future! If anyone out there in
Quanta readership land is planning to attend any upcoming Science-Fiction
conventions in the northeast, drop me a line and we'll try to arrange
something.
Books! Books books books. I hope to make Books a regular part of this
column, where I bore you by raving about the latest book I'm reading. This
month, it's Steve Erickson's Arc D'X which is absolutely incredible.
Roughly, it involves Thomas Jefferson's affair with a slave girl in Paris
and how that interconnects with the life of another man living in a strange,
religious oligarchy in the year 1999. It's a fascinating piece of fiction
that defies pigeon-holing into any specific genre. It's kind of a
fictional-historical-fantastical-futuristic thriller/noirish nightmare.
With a heart. Anyway, check it out.
In other news, I've been seemingly encased in poison ivy for about 2 weeks.
If you've ever experienced poison ivy (or any other kind of skin irritation:
chicken pox, poison Larch, swimming in the Potomac etc), you know that it's
just no fun constantly wanting to rip your own skin off. Other than that and
having my car rear-ended recently, everything's going just great for me!
Well, rather than using this column as a forum for comlaining (which would,
admittedly, be fun and satisfying for me) I think I'll leave off here. But
before I go, let me just mention that after the last purge of defunct
subscribers, the total number of readers still comes to around 2300. Also,
more and more people are switching to the FTP notification list (where you
receive a notice when a new issue comes out, informing you where you can get
using anonymous FTP or Gopher). This is a very good trend. Please, if you
do have access to FTP and are currently receiving Quanta through electronic
mail, request that I switch you over to the FTP notification list. It's a
lot easier for me to deal with, and it puts less strain on network mailers
and distribution services. Thanks!
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______________________________________________________________________________
TO TOUCH THE STARS "`They're threatening to take my wife and
daughter away now. I've done nothing wrong! I
Part 1: `No Clemency' can't let them hurt my family because I don't
agree with the way they're treating the
Nicole Gustas Gifteds. I thought freedom of speech was
protected!'"
______________________________________________________________________________
TAMSIN AND JAYSEN SAT IN A DARKENED CORNER OF THE BAR, LISTENING TO THE
nervous man beg for help. Jaysen leaned back in his chair, fingers
steepled, and focused his mind on the man. He left the conversation to his
partner, who leaned forward intently, her long red hair hanging around her
face.
"They're threatening to take my wife and daughter away now. I've done
nothing wrong! I can't let them hurt my family because I don't agree with
the way they're treating the Gifteds. I thought freedom of speech was
protected!"
"It was," said Tamsin darkly, "until the coup three years ago."
"I'll give you twenty thousand Weltmarks to get me and my family off the
planet. Just take us away to the nearest spaceport -- we'll find our way
from there."
"We'll get you out. We'll bring you to Maris. But you have to leave all
your posessions behind except what you can carry in a shouldersac. Any more
than that, and they'll know something's up," Tamsin said forcefully.
"Fine. Anything. Just so long as you take us with you. Where will we meet
you?"
"We'll meet you. We'll give you three hour's notice. But it will be within
the next week."
"Let me give you my address..."
Tamsin stopped him with a gesture. "We have it."
"How did you get it?" the man asked.
"We do our research. We had to make sure you weren't sent from the
government to nail us." Jaysen could only see her hair, but he could
imagine her expression, her green eyes turning to iron.
"But I didn't give you my name!"
"We know how to find that out, too." The man looked shaken, and Tamsin's
voice softened. "Don't worry, we'll get you out. But we have to be
careful, too. Go home, make plans with your wife, and forget about us until
we come."
The man left, murmuring expressions of gratitude. Tamsin and Jaysen
departed five minutes later, playing the role of drunken shipmates, and
staggered back to their ship at Arcadia spaceport. Tamsin dropped the act
as soon as they were safely in their ship and turned to Jaysen, switching to
the rapid urban patois of their youth, nearly unintelligable to outsiders.
"Jayce, what do you think?"
He tried to let his mind relax. "What do youthink?"
"I'm thick as a stone, remember? You're the one with the Gift. So what did
you get from him?"
They entered the galley and Jaysen sat down in one of the cushioned chairs.
"He was tense, but he seemed to be telling the truth -- at least on the
surface." He leaned back, brushed his hands over his face, and then
massaged his temples, trying to forestall the oncoming headache. He was
very nervous. Their organization, Ground Zero, officially a shipping
consortium, provided a front for many dissident activities. Tamsin was
depending on him to make sure the people they helped escape from the planet
could be trusted. He couldn't afford to make a mistake on who they
selected. He and Tamsin were the only pilots Ground Zero had, and if they
were caught, it would put an end to any efforts Ground Zero could make on
Narid. "Gods, Kalin chose a terrible time to be sick! She's the one with
the potent Gift. She should have been doing the readings on this trip, not
me. Just doing a surface scan on that guy is giving me a reaction
headache."
"Hang on a minute." Tamsin went over to the kitchen area. Jaysen watched
her muscles shift under the loose white blouse, black leather vest, leather
breeches, and knee-high leather boots that both had adopted as Ground Zero's
uniform. Even in someplace as unthreatening as their ship, whch she thought
of as home, she moved like a cat, prepared to attack at the slightest sign
of danger. She'd been like that ever since they were children. While
Jaysen had managed to put aside their childhood the two friends had survived
in Tiburon, one of the worst areas on Narid, Tamsin could never forget. She
was still constantly on the alert for an attack, years after they'd escaped
that metropolitan hellhole to go to university. The only concession she'd
made to their relative safety was her hair. Long hair had been a
disadvantage in streetfights, but she'd stopped shaving her head soon after
they got to university, where there was no need, and she hadn't had it cut
since.
She pulled a few bottles out and mixed various liquids together, then came
back with a foamy, emerald-green drink that matched the color of her eyes.
"Drink this-- it should help your headache."
Jaysen looked at the drink suspiciously. "Alcohol will just make it worse,
you know. Besides, I'm nauseous enough already."
Tamsin pushed the drink closer. "It's full of sugar, Jaysen -- no alcohol.
You feel sick because your blood sugar level has fallen down around your
knees."
Jaysen took a sip. It was sweet, but not overly so, and had a pleasant
taste of mint to it. "What is this?"
"An Orion Nebula. It'll settle your stomach; then we can get some food in
you." She looked at him worriedly, then patted his arm. "I'm glad one of
us paid attention to all Chas's lectures. You have to watch yourself when
you use your Gift; it's as taxing as running a marathon. When you're done,
you have to eat and rest, or else you'll collapse from exhaustion." She
moved behind him and began gently massaging his neck and shoulders. Her
long fingers were equally skilled soothing a balky engine or a sore human
body. "But the more you use your talent, the more you'll be able to use it.
Remember what he says -- `when you're exhausted, it's good. It means you're
building up your mind muscles'"
"I should have practiced more when we were in school," said Jaysen. His
Gift was minimal, compared to many of his classmates, and he'd had no desire
to train it at University. He'd spent his time in flight simulators.
Tamsin insisted that it was that extra time he'd spent, while she was busy
taking engineering classes, that had allowed him to surpass her in their
piloting exams.
Tamsin dug into his tight muscles, and he gave himself up to her hands. "No
one thought you'd need the training. Who could have guessed the government
would start putting Gifteds in concentration camps? By avoiding the
classes, you probably kept yourself from being arrested."
Jaysen shook his sandy hair out of his eyes. "Yeah, but if I had taken the
classes, I might have a better chance of keeping us from being arrested
now." He finished off his drink, and felt less nauseous, and a little less
worried.
"Let's go," said Tamsin, patting him on the shoulder. As he got up to
leave, she reminded him, "We'll be gone from here in three days. Next time,
Kalin will be well enough to go with us. You're doing fine." She squeezed
his hand quickly, then let go. "This is going to be another easy run for
the Ground Zero shipping consortium and underground railroad. Just stop
worrying, kid, or you'll give yourself an ulcer."
Three days later, everything went as planned prior to takeoff. Tamsin
brought the refugees, fourteen in all, to the Arcadia spaceport, and ferried
them into a refurbished cargo bay on the ship which had soundproof walls and
chairs that would make the acceleration out of the planet's gravity well a
little easier. After making sure the refugees were comfortable, she climbed
up to the cockpit, where Jaysen was sitting back in his chair, playing with
a small box wrapped in shiny paper.
"Another gift for Manda from her father?" asked Tamsin as she strapped
herself in.
"Of course. Since she defected, we're the only way he can get anything to
her." He secured the box in a storage cabinet above his head.
"You know, I never thought I'd be glad to have rich and powerful friends
"With rich and powerful parents?" replied Jaysen.
Tamsin smiled wryly. She had met Manda at university, where they had been
roomates their first year. After Manda realized Tamsin wasn't going to kill
her, and Tamsin realized Manda wasn't evil for being rich, they became close
friends. Manda's father, Kerna N'tali, was one of the few opposition
politicians who hadn't been wiped out by the new ruling junta, and he was
rapidly becoming the focal point of dissident activities. He was Ground
Zero's main contact to find out what was happening on their former home
planet.
"He wished us luck," said Jaysen.
"Great. We're gonna need it." Tamsin was only nervous when they were about
to leave Narid. She ran through her mental checklist five times. She'd
taken care of everything, but she still worried something would go wrong.
She looked over at her friend, who was smiling as he punched in the final
commands before liftoff, his shaggy blond hair hanging in his gray eyes.
She had always been jealous of the way he could lose himself in the
mechanics of spaceflight; some part of her brain always seemed to be
distracting her with the latest worry at times like this. He looked over at
her and gently pressed on her nose, a habit from when they were children.
"Stop worrying, or you'll give yourself an ulcer," he said with a grin.
She grimaced. "How can you be so calm?"
He turned back to his console. "We're at the point of no return. Nowhere
to go but up. Besides, they can't board us now."
The videoscreen came to life, showing the face of a woman in the control
tower. "Ground Zero, you are cleared to depart."
"Thanks, Freyja. And thanks for your hospitality yesterday," grinned
Jaysen.
"My pleasure," smiled Freyja. "Hope you're not too tired. See you the next
time you come to port?"
"Of course," said Jaysen.
"Good journey, Jaysen," she said, and winked out.
Tamsin raised one eyebrow. "So! I was wondering where you were last night.
No wonder you're so relaxed."
Jaysen shrugged, and continued to grin. "It's always a good idea to make
friends with people at the spaceport."
"Friends?" asked Tamsin.
"Well, you know. Just playing the role of the randy space pilot."
"Oh, and what a hardship it must be for you," said Tamsin sarcastically.
"You're just jealous."
"Maybe a little. She was pretty cute. I wouldn't kick her out of bed for
eating crackers," replied Tamsin.
"I meant of her," shot back Jaysen.
"What, for sleeping with you?" Tamsin turned back to her controls, starting
the final countdown. They'd teased each other like this for years. Its
familiarity calmed her in these final seconds. "Sorry for her, maybe, but
not jealous." She pressed one last button. "Takeoff in five -- four --
three -- two -- one..."
The thrusters roared beneath them, cutting off Jason's tart retort, and they
were pressed back into their seats. After a few seconds, the pressure eased
and artificial gravity stabilized at 1.2 Gs, approximately the same as
Marisian gravity. Jaysen tapped his console. "Moving into standard orbit.
Laying in a course for planet Maris at 41' 22" by 33'13" by 18'40". We will
leave orbit at oh-five fourteen, ship's time. Estimated time of arrival at
Maris main spaceport, twenty-six thirty-four Marisian time. Journey time,
sixty eight hours, fifty minutes."
"All systems appear normal," replied Tamsin. "We're on our way home."
Jaysen unstrapped himself and made his way to the storage cabinets behind
the cockpits. He pulled out a small rectangle, slightly longer than his
hand and about four centimeters thick, and handed it to Tamsin. "Here. I
figure it's time to celebrate."
Tamsin peeled the copper-colored paper from the package, and inhaled sharply
in surprise when she saw the label inside. "It's real chocolate! Neuhaus!
But that's from Terra!"
Jaysen grinned. "It helps to have powerful friends in high places."
Tamsin put her nose against the paper and smelled the rich, wonderful smell
of real chocolate. Very few planets had biospheres that could support the
cocoa bean, and as a result, chocolate was a pricy delicacy. It was also
Tamsin's favorite food. She shut her eyes and immersed herself in
the glorious scent.
"Well, aren't you going to unwrap it?" asked Jaysen impatiently.
She shook her head, eyes still closed. "I'm saving it. I'm going to have
one square a night, just before I go to bed, until it runs out."
Jaysen gave an annoyed sigh. Then he spoke, and she could hear the grin in
her friend's voice. "You know, legend has it chocolate is an aphrodisiac."
Tamsin opened her eyes. "So?"
"So, do I get to tuck you in at night?" said Jaysen with a practiced leer.
Tamsin grabbed the wrapping paper off the floor and threw it at him as he
laughed. "Not bloody likely, you..."
She stopped as a light began to flash on her console. "Signal's been
initiated from below, directly down to the government compound." Her
fingers danced over her computer pad. "I'm trying to block it -- matching
frequencies..."
She caught the signal as she set up interference. They could both hear the
audio-only signal. "Attention, federal government of Narid! This ship
holds fourteen Gifteds trying to escape criminal prosecution. It must not
be allowed --"
Tamsin matched frequencies and blocked the signal. "Signal stopped. It came
from cargo hold 3." She tried to turn on the surveillance cameras in the
hold. "Cameras in the hold have been deactivated. This guy is good."
Jaysen looked over his sensor readings. "Signal's been detected. Five
fighters coming up from the government compound. On their present course,
they will intercept us in eleven minutes."
"Not if I have anything to say about it," snapped Tamsin. "Changing course.
We are now on an elliptical heading to our system departure point. That
should throw them off for a few minutes."
"They're recalibrating. Interception estimated in sixteen minutes."
Tamsin brought up the weapons commands on her computer screen, powering up
the lasers. "Weapons warming up. Online in four minutes." She unstrapped
herself from her seat. "We'll reach our departure point three minutes after
they intercept. Hold them off that long, and we can warp out of the system
without wiping out Narid in the process." Tamsin strapped a laser gun
around her waist. "After that, there's no way they can catch up to us. I'm
going below to find out what the hell's going on."
"I'll track you with the surveillance cameras."
"Yeah, like he hasn't gotten to them first." She grabbed a small silver
cylinder from a locker and pinned it to her shirt. "I'm taking a comunit."
She raced out the cockpit and down the stairs, her red braid flying behind
her. She made a quick survey of the mess and crew quarter levels, then
continued quickly down to the cargo levels. "Tamsin, I can't see you,"
Jaysen said over the comunit.
"Yeah, now the fun begins." She surveyed the corridor. "He must have
knocked out the video in this area."
"Do you know how?"
"Honey, the vidunits are as big as my smallest finger. I'd need a
microscope to find the damage." She continued down toward Engineering,
hurtling down the stairs. "I just want to make sure he doesn't wreck
anything else."
Jaysen's voice came over her comunit, sounding anxious. "We're losing
power!"
"I'm not surprised," she said, as she rushed toward the door of Engineering.
"He had a real head start on us." The door slid open and she drew her gun.
The gun was just a threat; one bad shot and she'd destroy the engine, and
with it, the ship. Most people didn't know that, though.
She scanned the room. Shards sparkled on the floor, the remnants of a power
receptor. Tamsin swore softly. Repairs would not be simple. "Jayce, he
shattered at least one power receptor. He must have a laser cutter. The
engines powered down as a safety precaution. I can juryrig something -- run
the power through the ones we have left -- and that will give us enough
power to get us a few parsecs out of the system, if it doesn't blow first.
That'll take fifteen minutes."
"Tamsin, we don't have fifteen minutes. Interception time is now estimated
at six minutes. We've got maneuvering jets, but we don't even have enough
power to cook a turkey with our lasers."
"Distract them. Try tap dancing or something." She put Jaysen out of her
mind as she tried to figure out where their saboteur was hiding. She
couldn't see him in the room, but he couldn't have gotten past her on the
ship's only staircase. Since the power had just gone down, it was logical
that he'd be in Engineering. She threw open the storage cabinets one by
one. The first five held tools. When she opened the sixth, a blur of
yellow flew out at her. She fell back onto the floor, and the gun flew out
of her hand and under a console. She rolled, narrowly avoiding a blow to
the stomach, and sprang to her feet. Her wrists snapped back in a practiced
gesture, and two organic blades shot out. She'd had them implanted when she
was fourteen and living in Tiburon; it was the best way she could think of
to protect herself from the streetgangs, as they couldn't be wrested away
and used against her. She looked at the man across from her. He was the
nervous man from the bar, but he wasn't looking nervous now, just
bloodthirsty. He had a lasercutter in one hand, smaller than any she'd ever
seen. The cutter was a great tool for any repair person, but with a few
modifications, it was also a dangerous weapon.
"That's not one of ours," said Tamsin.
"No, I brought it with me. It fits well in a shouldersac."
Tamsin circled him, putting herself between him and the engine. "Deep
cover?"
He shrugged. "Hypnotic blocks. All it takes is a few trigger words to
bring out the hidden personality."
"So now your wife has a new husband."
"She's had one for months. A new cover even a Gifted couldn't detect.
Amazing, huh?"
He moved toward her, powering up the cutter. Tamsin dropped and rolled, but
not fast enough to avoid the beam, which grazed her left side. She decided
she'd deal with the pain later. When she came out of her roll, she found
herself almost directly under the man. She stabbed up, putting one knife
deep into his thigh As he grasped at his leg, she withdrew the knife from
his thigh and slashed at the arm which held the cutter. Blood ran from his
arm, but he still held on. She could hear Jaysen's voice, asking her what
was happening. In desperation, she threw herself against the man, pushing
him against a console, and retracted the knives back into her arms so she
could grab him. She slammed his arm frantically against the edge of the
console once, twice. The third time, there was a dry snapping sound. His
arm hung at a crazy angle, the radius and ulna shattered. The cutter flew
against the wall and shattered, more shiny crystals on the floor.
Tamsin slammed the man's head against
the console once, and he fell unconscious. She threw him down on the floor;
she'd tie him up later. "I've taken care of the guy. Now I'm going to get
to work on the engines," she said.
"Are you hurt?" asked Jaysen.
"Just bruised," she said. She didn't want him to have anything else to
worry about. She sat down at the main control panel and started rerouting
the power through the remaining receptors. It was tricky -- if she tried to
put too much juice through one, it could backwash and burn out the whole
engine. "Rerouting power now. He only blew out two power receptors;
temporary repairs will be done in eight minutes."
"The ship will reach its departure point in ten. It's set to autopilot.
Fightercraft departing docking bay in thirty seconds."
Tamsin got a cold feeling in her stomach. "Jayse, what are you doing?"
She could hear laughter in his voice. "Distracting them. Fightercraft
departing in twenty seconds."
Her fingers continued to skip over the control panel, giving the computer
commands. "There are five of them. I hadn't realized you were actively
suicidal."
"I was tops in our class, remember?" he said lightheartedly. He was always
euphoric during a launch, or during a fight. "These guys don't hold a
candle to me. Launch in five -- four -- three -- two -- one --" The ship
shuddered slightly as he left the docking bay. "I'll be back before you hit
warp."
Tamsin tried to put him out of her mind as she worked to get the power
rerouted.
Adrenalin thrilled through Jaysen's bloodstream as his fighter slipped out
into the stars. He looped around the ship and darted above it, looking for
his first target. A fighter hovered about two kilometers from the bow of
the ship. The shots were coming from that 'craft; the other four were
orienting themselves around the ship. As he moved toward the first fighter,
which was the most immediate threat to the ship, he tried to place what
seemed odd about the way the fighters were moving. He bore down on the
first fighter from above at a crazy angle. The fighter didn't move; it just
kept firing at the ship. "Cocky bastard," snarled Jaysen as he thumbed the
trigger to his lasers. The moment he came into range, he fired twice. The
enemy fighter exploded silently, pieces flying in all directions. In his
quieter moments, Jaysen was always amazed a life could end so quietly,
without fireworks and noise. He pulled up and set his sights on another
fighter.
As he moved in on the second fighter, he realized what was so odd about the
way the fighters were deployed. Rather than ranging all around the ship,
they were arrayed on one plane, as if they were fighting on land. "Idiots!"
he yelled as he saw the ships turn ponderously, trying to find the enemy.
Like most military morons, he thought, they had no idea what
three-dimensional fighting was like. The second 'craft managed to get off a
few shots, all of which fell wide of the mark. He destroyed it quickly,
ignoring for now thoughts of the pilot inside, and looped around, noting how
the battle had drawn the other three fighters away from the starship.
The three fighters began to close around him, trying to surround him. He
laughed. "You're still thinking in two dimensions." He pulled up and
circled above the fighters, coming down behind them and destroying one
before it had the chance to react. He immediately pulled into a steep turn,
dodging the last two 'crafts.
One was limping. Apparently, the pilot had overstressed the engine. Jaysen
discounted him. The other had followed him into the turn. Jaysen executed
a series of fast maneuvers, designed to shake off another pilot. Tamsin had
enhanced the speed and maneuverability of their fighter, making it a match
for any Naridian craft. A tight turn brought Jaysen behind the 'craft, and
he fired on it. His shot crippled the fighter, but didn't destroy it. He
turned around, moving in for the kill.
The other 'craft moved behind him. Jaysen saw it and tried to dodge,
turning quickly. As he turned, the fighter fired off a shot that grazed his
'craft.
The gravity controls were knocked out by the blast. Pressure inside the
fighter reached 7 Gs. Jaysen was still stabbing at the controls as he
blacked out.
Tamsin reached the bridge in time to see Jaysen's fighter take the hit. He
didn't seem to be severely damaged, but his ship was drifting. "Jaysen,
come in, please respond," she barked over the radio. No reply. She linked
her computer to the one on Jaysen's fighter, firing shots at the two
predator 'craft circling as she did so. When she saw the results, she
swore. No gravity in his fighter, but it had briefly shot up to damn near
eight Gs. He must have blacked out. She locked her computer in with the
fighter's, and began giving it commands to bring it in.
One of the enemy fighters got lucky. He fired off a shot that knocked out
her external communications unit, and she lost her link to the fighter. She
slammed her hand against the console. "This isn't fair!"
Nothing to do but try another idea. The two craft were closing in on
Jaysen's fighter, preparing to physically link to it and take it back to the
planet. Tamsin readied a cable, one they occasionally used to grab
asteroids loaded with precious metals. She laid out a string of commands,
preparing to use it to drag Jaysen's fighter in. It was a long shot, but
worth a try.
As she finished the macro, and shot a few more times to dissuade the enemy
'crafts, she heard the engines suddenly roar. Her blood ran cold. "No..."
Jaysen had programmed the autopilot perfectly. While she'd been working on
getting his fighter back, the ship had drifted to its departure point. She
looked up and saw the stars begin to blur. She tried to halt the command,
but knew the engines were past the point where they could be stopped.
"No!" she shouted in horror. "Jaysen!"
The ship went into warp and left the system as the two Naridian fighters
closed in on Jaysen's 'craft. Tamsin crumpled into a chair, despairing,
finally feeling the pain of her wound, as the beauty of the stars streaked
around her.
Interlude
Jaysen rose out of unconsciousness with great difficulty, fighting through
thick waves of blackness. He felt woozy as he opened up his eyes. It took
a few seconds for them to focus. When they did, he saw Tamsin sitting at
his bedside, engrossed in a book.
"Tam?" he said, his voice harsh and raspy from disuse.
She started and looked at him with a smile, putting the book down on his
bedtable. "You're finally awake. I was getting worried."
"What happened?" he asked, his memory still foggy. Nothing seemed quite
right.
"The gravity control on your fighter went haywire. The high Gs knocked you
out. When we hauled you in, we found
there was a problem with the oxygen mix, too. You're lucky we got you
back."
"How long have I been out?" asked Jaysen, still disoriented.
"About three days." She took his hand. "I was worried about you."
He reached up the other hand to brush the copper hair out of her face.
"Tam, I...I'm glad you were worried about me."
She held his hand against her cheek for a moment, with her eyes closed. "I
didn't want to lose you," she said. She turned her head slightly and kissed
the back of his hand.
Jaysen looked at her, stunned. That gentle kiss was the strongest affection
she'd ever expressed toward him. Things were happening too fast. He
brushed his free hand against her cheek. "Tam..."
"I was so afraid I'd lost you," she said, as she leaned over and kissed him.
He wrapped his arms around a dream come true. He kissed her back and traced
her neck with his hand. He moved her shirt, reaching to trace the scar that
ran down her shoulder.
His fingers found only silky, smooth skin. He pushed her away from him,
confused. "What's wrong, Jaysen?" she asked, as he turned away from her.
His eyes fell on the spine of the book on the bedtable. It was a collection
of twenty-third century deconstructivist poems, something Tamsin would never
read. He turned back to the woman and searched her face. He could see
small differences; she looked too young, almost like Tamsin did her last
year in college. Her hair was too short, and her eyes were blue, not green.
Her open shirt was askew, and he could see only smooth skin where there
should be multiple scars. This wasn't Tamsin.
She mistook his look for desire. "Jaysen, come here," she said, reaching
toward him.
He knocked her arm away, then backhanded her. "Who the hell are you?" he
yelled as she fell to the floor. She backed into a corner and cowered. If
he'd had any doubt about who she was, that proved it. Tamsin would already
have torn him apart, especially in his present condition.
He kneeled over her and grabbed her by the hair. He wanted to kill her, but
he needed information first. "Who are you? What's going on?"
He suddenly felt an overwhelming wave of dizziness and fell to the floor.
All the pieces suddenly came together.
Drugs. They're giving me drugs.
He heard voices in the distance.
"What went wrong?"
"I don't know. The stats we have on her must be wrong in some way."
"We've touched a nerve somehow. We should use her again."
Jaysen remembered everything Chas had ever told them about government
interrogation. "Don't think they can't break you, because they will.
They'll use anything they can to get a hold on you. Start telling lies
right away. That way, when you get to the truth, they won't believe you."
As he fell back into unconsciousness, he kept repeating in his mind Don't
think they can't break you, because they will...
And don't trust Tamsin. Don't trust Tamsin. Don't trust Tamsin...
______________________________________________________________________________
Since her last story was published in Quanta (Waiting for the Night Boat,
December 1992) Nicole has been laid off, unemployed, and finally got a new
job as a graphic designer. She's still working at getting a body like Linda
Hamilton's in her spare time. Please contact her if you know anyone who
does psychic healings for automobiles. It can't be any more expensive than
her recent car repairs have been. Nicole recently achieved her life-long
goal of collecting all six Jurassic Park cups.
ngustas@hamp.hampshire.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
"I moved to the machine because I guessed that
DAYS IN THE MACHINE the Tower of Babel was not a myth. I moved
there to witness the end of days, to see and to
Chaim Bertman know a different kind of dirt. I moved to the
machine to see my country have a heart attack."
______________________________________________________________________________
I MOVED TO THE MACHINE BECAUSE I WAS MOVED BY ITS ANIMAL ASSERTION AND
ruthlessness, its conscienceless grace, and its mean, clever, stupid noise
of being.
The machine has nerves and therefore disturbances; it has skin, hair, flesh,
hunger, the other things; and its blood flows when it is cut. It sleeps and
sometimes cries like an infant; it has a mother and a father; it has bones
and it can break an arm; it has legs and kidneys, a liver, and all of the
minor organs. The machine has a nice face, dark eyes with deep lines from
grinning, a kind enough, pouty mouth, thick, clumsy, warm fingers, all of
these kinds of things.
The machine has blood that pumps through its organs; it has a center, but no
heart. And if one looks closely, it is clear that it has a mouth but no
lips; it has a bladder and intestines, etc., but it can do away with any of
these parts; it has animal calculations but not necessarily a mind; its skin
and hair lie loosely on its surface, and like the damp moss coating coastal
rocks, they are torn easily from the corpus; it respirates, but even its
respirations are not vital. The machine emits a sweet, pungent smell
particular to it. It is a moist amalgamation, made up of the skins and flesh
of countless animals, insects, fish and birds. It has a center, but one that
is arbitrary and ever-changing. It has center and a form, but no boundaries,
as far as I can tell. I moved to the machine, because it was almost an
animal, a beautiful, hilarious creature, cruel and fast. But whatever
bestial in the machine caught sick and quickly died, and I soon found myself
living in the droning, complaining machine of gears and work.
I moved to the machine because I guessed that the Tower of Babel was not a
myth. I moved there to witness the end of days, to see and to know a
different kind of dirt. I moved to the machine to see my country have a
heart attack.
At first, things were lively and careless. We danced almost until dawn in
basement bedrooms and music lofts; we gorged upon cheap clams on the
boardwalk and sickened on them happily and without complaints. We often
stayed up the night talking, my friends and I, in a tiny, poorly lit cafe
with narrow walls and a floor as filthy as an ashtray. The machine was
freewheeling and wild in those days. People were doing it on the trains
after hours, there was constant, miserable, and abandoned lovemaking going
on underneath the tracks, in the coal cellars, under the streetlamps' orange
glow past midnight. There was revolution on everybody's mind, like water on
the brain. It seemed to everyone that only the most elemental things were
worth preserving. It meant nothing to see a man shot in the face outside the
three-flat. We spoke about freedom and justice, then changed the subject
quickly, ashamed of our own cynicism and tired, dour tongues.
Sometime during that first Winter, I found I hadn't moved for weeks. I had
been sitting at the window, as the snow rose and the streets turned white,
the cars no longer rolling by; sitting, without sleeping, for weeks, no
eating, skin and bones. The lightening storms of December took on a man-made
glow. Thunder roared indistinguishably from the rumbling and whistling
tumbling of the trains, always trains outside. The machine was alive and
electrified with death, ceaselessness, agony and lead poisoning. People
began to say that Nero had come back to life, and he was ready to raze the
machine to the ground, to twist and crack its springs and stop up its gears
with torn up human flesh; that Nero came back again and he liked to play the
electric guitar through a hundred amp machine.
Birds came to the machine, but only the thickest, most bloated, crawing
scavengers stayed more than a hungry week or two. Starved rats and trashy
back alley animals battled over crumbs. The ravaged, bug-eaten remains of
cockroaches and beetles ended up on every counter and floor. Beneath the
Earth, according to the Almanac, most of the animal life resided; and there,
in the dark earth, confused and completely blind, these creatures lived
short, nervous years; and many generations of creatures passed beneath the
city in the lifetime of a single human being, generations knowing nothing
but the ever-pounding and turning sounds of the machine above the Earth.
At the time, I myself lived in the basement of the Greyhound Bus Depot. I
knew a man named Claytar who lived underneath the Police Station--and he
hated cops. There were pigeons everywhere in these low dwellings; the floors
flooded daily, and strangers tried to break in several times a month.
There was nothing going on at all. No one worked and we were all sick. The
man named Claytar kept us alive with his beautiful voice and his songs about
all of this. He never smiled and he made no promises. He had lost two
fingers on his left hand, but despite this he had mastered the five string
guitar. We sat at his feet and knew he knew something. He knew it and knew
it and strummed it on the sidewalk:
"What did you have, my darling true, what did you have when you were there?
"We had nothing, and nothing, and nothing but rocks...
"You had rocks, my one true love? You had rocks? We dreamed of rocks...
"You had dreams? We murdered for dreams."
Claytar spoke about coming to the machine:
"I came to the machine with a guitar on my back. The minute I got off the
train, `started to walk; looking around to find out where I was, and a
police car saw me and he slowed down. Now, I had no case to carry this
guitar and I wasn't wearing nothing fancy to make it seem like I could own
me such a fine instrument; `cause this guitar was studded with rhinestone
inlays, and the frets and knobs were fresh polished, shining like the belly
of a rotted oyster. But come on, man! They slowed down `cause I was carrying
a guitar? The car went around the corner and ditched me, me and my guitar,
but they circled the block back around.
"There was two `a them and the young one starts combing back his sandy brown
curls. He rolls down the windows real cool and slumberly.
"`Is that yer guitar?' he asks.
The other one is off staring straight ahead, like a dead herd of oxen.
"`Yeah, sure is,' I said, though actually it's my brother's.
"`You play it?'
"`Of course...'
"`Well, would ya play something for us then?'
"Now, at this point I was deeply offended.
"`What?' I ask him, `You think I stole it?'
"`No, no,' said the young cop laughing, chewing and cracking gum, still
combing back his sandy locks. `I used to play the guitar in high school. I
just wanna hear you.'
"I don't know if it was a request or a demand. But I played as badly as I
could, just hitting the strings around, jumping up and down the frets, all
out of order. I tried to make it as unclear as possible, whether or not I'd
ever touched a guitar before. They've got to know that a guy doesn't legally
have to know how to play the guitar that good.
"After banging around a few seconds, I stopped playing, saying, `I don't
write lyrics, you see, just melodies.' I went back to the atonal strumming.
When I finished, the cop nodded his head, `said, `Tasty guy, tasty!
Thanks...' He and his tombstone-faced partner shoved on up the street."
Claytar never ate and he didn't drink water, and in this way he escaped the
poisons that have made cripples of the rest of us. Still, he did go blind in
his left eye and he caught a wet cough that stuck with him and became part
of him. He lost track of time; and he lost his balance, so he couldn't stand
up. He spoke and we listened, but he began to speak only in generalities:
"Living in the machine is like losing your sense of humor. Not seasons, but
the changing complaints mark time; time, the enemy. Living in the machine is
like losing your mind. Ears are stuffed with human voices, mouths gorge on
human nonsense, human forms, humans smelling humans--therefore, there is
no escape from imitation. The machine is fully human inside. Humans living
too close to humans, knowing nothing else, human upon human, they become
cannibals or excrement-eaters or humanist critics. Photographs, automobiles,
movie houses--ask a dying person if they want to be remembered that way,
as a stereotype, as something that can be extracted, abstracted and
duplicated, an Earthly spirit trapped as a fleshy gear in the works of the
machine. The most complicated tragedy of fate is not recognized; just its
utensils and paraphernalia are noted, its bottles in a paper bag, its
criminal sneers and fake gestures, Oedipus at Colonus drunk, staggering in a
dumpster-diving lunatic freakout. There is nothing unique in the sound of a
human voice, as heard through the machine. Only higher volume and discord
distinguish one instrument from another in this bastard orchestra. Living in
the machine is like having your wallet stolen."
I started to write down Claytar's words in the Spring. He took it badly and
screamed out something about the oral tradition, saying, "What about the
death of the written word?"
"It'll come back," I said.
Claytar was shot in the head on Easter Sunday, and I lost my faith.
Claytar had screamed, "What about the raging libraries--for three hundred
years, we could stand to stop writing and relearn to read."
"But what about medical technology," someone surfaced saying.
"Yeah, and what about the changing of the human head?"
Claytar mumbled something bitterly: "Soon the human race will have two
stomachs and no heart. One day, the human creature will lose its hands. Then
they shall invent history. The Tower was completed at Babel--what do you
think this is?"
Palsied with anger, Claytar twisted and seemed ready to spit. I put down my
pencil and he smiled. Let it permeate your bones, I told myself. Let Claytar
be alive, and tell it when he ain't. Claytar stopped trembling long enough
to tell us about Winter and love and about being alone in it, singing us a
blue song:
Nobody ever tells you all the things you really want:
Hog jelly, a dusty rifle, rifling around for these things after its dark.
No Casanova, no monkey girl, will ever steal these things from my heart:
My motorcycle, my toothy dingo, the broken window in my cold three flat.
Nobody will ever sell you anything you really want...
No Spanish Honkey, no Mandingo, no nobody, ever tells you truely--to your
face at least.
After Claytar was shot, there wasn't much to say. We all pretty much broke
up. I spent the days, unemployed, cross-eyed, wandering through the machine.
The machine buzzed along hovering above me, speaking to me softly; it tried
to take me in, string me along, but I refused to listen. Women and men are
born and die in the machine, the machine eats their lives and their labor. I
wouldn't mind so much if it didn't hum so constantly, clear its throat
disgustingly, whistle like a drunkard or a postman, and go on like that.
I entered the machine of my own volition, and it occurred to me finally to
leave it that simply. So I took a walk, trying to find the edge of the
machine. After many years of rambling, it occurred to me what could never be
proven, merely intuited: That the machine was a globe without a center and
without boundary; I found its parts, metal clutches and windings, wooden
handles, concrete and glass floorboards; but I never found a single part
without which it simply could not operate, and try as I might, I could not
discover the whereabouts of its edges.
I began my exit. I left behind the city and towns, the farms, and eventually
all traces of humanity, but the Machine continued. I encountered limitless
forms within the machine, all suspended in a medium at times gaseous, at
times liquid or solid, at times something quite different. I wept and
punched my face and tore at my clothes--why did I ever come to the
machine? I stamped the exasperated ground, secretly hoping that it would
open up like a face and devour me. The machine proved more clever and
heartless than I could have imagined. It has permeated me, undetectable to
the eye, but so thoroughly that I too no longer have a heart, just a center;
and my own blood and bones are temporary and almost useless; and I can be
destroyed in part but not in whole, bent but not ruined, even under a
surgeon's cold scalpel, even pinched by the thumb and forefinger of death,
even mixed up with the acids of creation in the boundless stomach of God,
even in the cruel, unceasing logic of the Machine.
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS "`...Michael. Look at it. Does it look like
it went through an explosion?'
Chapter 14 `No.'
`Which means that it's probably a little
Jim Vassilakos going-away present. For us to go away.
Permanently.'"
______________________________________________________________________________
MIKE WATCHED FROM THE PLATFORM DECK AS EMERGENCY CREWS ADVANCED IN TEAMS,
quenching the burning blaze. Magor had done a thorough job with his air
strike, taking out not just one ship but two. That left fifteen unscathed;
he'd probably get a medal for precision.
From the Louise they'd pulled out fragments of at least three bodies.
Fortunately, the other craft had been empty with not so much as a goldfish
on board, at least according to starport records. Despite its crew's luck,
however, Mike was sure they'd have a few choice words for the General. He'd
be a caldron of hot water, and so far, he had nothing to show for it.
Johanes was still busy chewing the bull with a pair of inspectors while
Korina sat quietly beside a burnt piece of fuselage, her long, dark hair
obscuring the left side of her face as her cheek and forehead glistened
crimson against the fiery blaze. Mike walked over, doffing his helmet, his
knees still wobbly from the senseless destruction. She stared directly at
them, but didn't otherwise acknowledge his presence. Above, the stars seemed
to fade as the billowing clouds of smoke settled amongst the black of night.
"You're trying to sense for Sule, aren't you?"
She blinked and looked up. Mike sat down beside her, the cold, damp air
layering a blanket of chill along his jacks.
"And you're not finding anything."
Kori looked down at the cement pavement.
"For a moment...." she struggled to find the words, her eyes narrowing into
thin slits. "I thought I'd felt her laughter." She smiled, probably at how
stupid it sounded. "I guess I just feel cheated. I wanted to kill her
myself."
She stared back at him through the flickering, smoky light, uncertainty
clouding her green eyes, and Mike gave her his thought, if only for the
humor's sake. She smiled, then tittered at the edge of the joke, and then
frowned again.
"Yes, Mr. Harrison. She was capable of laughter. But it wasn't the kind of
laughter you or I know. I'd first felt it when she kicked Erestyl's burnt
corpse into my father's moat. It was the sort of victory laugh that has
nothing to do with anything anyone normal would call funny."
"Are you sure you felt it... here?"
She stared into the flames, but wouldn't answer. She didn't need to. Mike
stood up, sliding his helmet back on.
"Keep trying."
Johanes, having finished with the inspectors, was busying himself by nosing
around the ship's shattered cargo hold. He picked up a piece of smoking
meat, smelling it and finally taking a bite.
"Devouring the evidence?"
"Quagga liver. This stuff is great. You ever try it?"
Mike shrugged, "My dad used to love it. What did you find out?"
"There were supposedly two crew members on board when it happened. That
makes four corpses, one unaccounted for. You thinking what I'm thinking?"
"This place is a mess, Jo. Three may not even be the correct body count."
"Don't kid yourself. I'm a professional, alright? Three is correct." He
handed Mike an automatic pistol.
"Where'd you get this?"
"It was on the floor. Check out the clip."
Mike opened it up.
"Fourteen of fifteen isn't bad."
"Only the difference between life and death, or being healthy versus feeling
like slog shit." He smiled.
"Why would she leave it behind."
"Exactly. I don't think it's her's at all. But somebody did fire it for one
reason or another. This here may be the reason." Johanes pointed toward a
small, metallic, gold-tipped cylinder, still gleaming in the light of the
flames. "Look familiar?"
Mike leaned over to grab it.
"Don't, Michael. Look at it. Does it look like it went through an
explosion?"
"No."
"Which means that it's probably a little going-away present. For us to go
away. Permanently. You understand? I had the worst time steering the fire
crew clear of it when they came in here, so I'll be damned if you set it
off."
"You sure you're not just being paranoid?"
Johanes smiled, "Just because you're paranoid, Michael, doesn't mean they
aren't really out to get you."
Johanes kept poking around, chewing quagga liver, hoping to find some shred
of evidence to prove himself wrong. Not too far away, Gardansa was talking
on a portable phone.
"You say to them that their petition is under consideration, however, if
they violate our airspace, they will face the consequences of their
trespasses. That is all."
He hung-up, wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, and Mike put a
hand on his shoulder.
"What's going on, General?"
"Trouble."
"Of what nature?"
"Of an Imperial nature. Commodore Reece sends her malevolent tidings, a
delegation of inspectors to assess the damage."
"So what's the problem?"
"They will be accompanied by the Crimson Queen's escorts to ensure
interstellar peace and the sanctity of Imperial property."
He added a flowery emphasis to the last part. If Xekhasmeno was Imperial
property, then the starport was even more so. The planetary government's
treaty with the Empire made that point abundantly clear. It was the very
reason the city was under siege, and it was also the reason the Imps would
float a dozen armored gunships over the starport, regardless of airspace.
"How long do we have?"
"A centim. Two perhaps." Gardansa shrugged, "I hope we have finished our
work here."
"You're going to back down?"
"I have no choice. They know, and I know it. The situation is, in short,
frightfully plain."
"Then we've achieved nothing."
"Can you prove that?"
"No, but I'm working on it."
"Do it, and I will destroy every vessel on this platform just to be done
with her."
Mike blinked, "I take it you've met Sule?"
"She visited me before you arrived three days ago. Told me that ISIS would
be watching, and that if I didn't cooperate, she would emasculate me and
have my testes for breakfast."
"So it was love at first sight."
"Hardly."
"Admiration perhaps?"
He sighed, "Admiration and love are two distinct creatures, sometimes
confused, occasionally compatible, but otherwise the one has absolutely
nothing to do with the other. No my friend. It was something more akin to
dread and dishonor mixed together with a touch of avarice, the sort of
complementary qualities a man can sink his teeth into."
"She made you an offer."
"She made me betray you, or at least I chose to."
Mike smiled, though Gardansa could not see it through the helmet's face
plate.
"You'd better get inside, lest Sule make good her promise."
"She is dead."
"She wants air cover so she can get out of here."
"You are hallucinating, my friend."
"Just do me a favor."
Gardansa laughed, turning around, "What is it now? Shall we scorch the
entire platform on a gatherer's hunch?"
"That's not a bad idea."
"And start a war in the process, not to mention putting my neck on the
chopping block? No, I think not."
"Just do a ship by ship search and try to hold off the Imps as long as you
can. That's all I'm asking."
"There are fifteen vessels here. What you propose will eat more time than we
are served."
"What do we have to lose by trying?"
Gardansa shifted away, making a guttural sound somewhere between annoyance
and acceptance. Mike had to smile. He knew he would get his way. It was
easier for the General to give in than to sift among hypothetical arguments,
and Gardansa was basically a lazy person.
Mike started to pace the vessel's circumference, watching the work crews
extinguish the last of the flames. One of Gardansa's officers stood among
them, pulling groups of two off the work at hand and pointing them toward
the other vessels. Several meters away, Korina stood upright in the smoke
veiled darkness. With the light intensification, she looked almost ethereal,
walking toward Mike through the patchy, grey mist.
"So what's the verdict?"
Mike sighed, "Well . . . you still feel cheated?"
"Sule's alive then."
"Probably. Can you track at all?"
Kori shook her head, "I'm a telepath. I get in people's heads."
"Can you read impressions from non-animates?"
She nodded, "Most psyches can somewhat."
"A friend of mine once honed her ability to the extreme by wandering around
my house, picking up my things, and scolding me for whatever was going
through my mind when I last handled them."
"I'm not that good."
"Considering who your parents are, one would tend to think otherwise."
"I'm not that practiced."
"We'll see. C'mon."
Johanes was still poking around the deck, a piece of quagga liver in one
hand and a short, metal rod in the other. Kori regarded him with a mixture
of apprehension and curiosity.
"What are you doing?"
"Trying to find the bullet."
"What's he talking about?"
Mike showed her the clip.
"Jo, I'd like Korina to take a look at Sule's going-away present."
"Why?"
"To glean some impressions off it."
"That means touching, doesn't it?"
"Yeah."
"She moves it a centimeter and we could all be organ donors."
"You can stand back if you want."
Johanes sighed and stepped back about a dozen meters.
"Why take chances?" he grinned, lengthening the distance a little further.
Korina didn't look amused.
"I take it this is going to be dangerous?"
Mike shrugged, "Crossing the street is dangerous. Breathing smog is
dangerous. This... this is a cakewalk."
She rested her pinky against it, closing her eyes for a long moment during
which Mike remained frozen still, all except for his knees. They jiggled
back and forth, barely supporting his weight.
Kori looked up, "She feels very dumb."
"So do I," Mike added. "Why don't you take your hand away from it now?"
"One moment."
Kori didn't close her eyes this time. Instead, she just let them become
enveloped by that glassy sort of gaze Mike was growing used to.
"Pain."
Kori withdrew her hand, and Mike let the breath out of his lungs in one,
steady withdrawal.
"That's it?"
"Her pain was the strongest thing there. Once I found it, there was no point
in continuing. It will mask or distort everything beneath it."
"What kind of pain?"
She reached out, and almost without thinking, Mike placed the automatic into
her hands. Johanes was back, a smug look on his face.
"Where's the boom?"
"Your hypothesis about the gun is amassing evidence."
"Of what sort?"
They both looked toward Kori. She handed it back, uncertain.
"It's too polluted. Like I said, I am not as good as your friend, Mr.
Harrison."
"Well, we shouldn't have handled it. Jo, quiz time. Where do you go on a
ship when you're hurt?"
"Medical Bay."
"There is none."
"Ship's locker."
"Where would that be?"
"In front of the airlock, most likely."
Considering a missile had slammed into the ship, the locker was remarkably
intact.
"What a mess."
"Well, at least we won't need a key to open it."
They began shoveling through its contents, most of them burnt or foam
covered,
scattered in front of the open iris valve. There were vacc suits,
communicators, canned rations, and even a few weapons, all standard fare for
an independent freighter. There were even medical supplies.
"Oh my... look what we have here."
Mike looked over Johanes' shoulder. The gauze towel was stained a deep red
where it wasn't carbonized.
"Looks like somebody didn't want to bleed all over the pavement. Kori?"
"Can I move this one?"
"Be my guest."
She took it in both hand, closing her eyes.
"Lots of pain."
"Get past it."
A look of concentration fell across her features.
"There's too much."
"You're trying too hard. I've seen Kitara... that's the friend I was telling
you about... at first she used to do what your doing, and it never worked.
Just relax and let it come."
Kori, though drained and disheartened, looked somewhat amused. "I am the
psyche here, Mr. Harrison."
"Just try what I'm saying, okay?"
She closed her eyes again, this time wandering amidst the pain without
fighting it. Somewhere in the corner of her mind, she felt the worry and
strain of failure engulfing her. It was like a wave, drowning away all hope.
"I can't..."
"Yes you can."
"...need help... Reece." She re-opened her eyes, seeming weary and
withdrawn. Confusion cluttered her green eyes.
"Who's Reece?"
Johanes answered as he continued sifting through the articles on the deck.
"She's the Imperial Commodore on the Crimson Queen. It arrived in-system two
days ago. I'm sure you've both heard of it."
Mike nodded, "She just sent a message to General Gardansa. They're bringing
in a team of Imperial inspectors, along with the Crimson's defensive force."
"You didn't think to mention this to me before?" Beneath the overcoat, he
was still wearing a Draconian insignia. Mike realized that his own was even
more blatant.
"Sule must have reached her. Could any of these communicators have talked to
orbiting craft?"
"Uh, this one."
He reached for one which was so large it came complete with a back harness.
Mike held him back before he touched it, motioning Kori forward. She looked
bushed.
"You're kidding, right?"
"You want to find Sule or not? Just give it a shot."
She took a deep breath, grabbing the harness in both hands. Immediately she
felt the pain, and underneath it the hopelessness and anger. But there was
more, something she couldn't reach. Kori looked up, exhausted.
"I can't."
"We're putting you through a workout, aren't we?"
"I was close to something. I'm just not trained for this."
"C'mon," Mike lifted her up by her shoulders. "It's more likely that she
would have made the transmission outside. She wouldn't want a bulkhead
blocking the signal for one thing."
"And it's not in a burning freighter for another," Johanes added.
"The surface emotions are too strong anyway."
"We're just asking you to try, okay?"
She sighed, holding it again as they stepped outside. She could feel them
depending on her. And yet there was more, Sule's dependence on her people,
her need to find someplace to hide. Kori considered each in turn. They were
both obvious facts and thus constituted potential figments of imagination.
If she could not get below her own prejudices, how could she hope to
discriminate Sule's? Kori stared at the various vessels, trying to imagine
them as Sule might have seen them, without the emergency workers knocking on
doors, brandishing firearms. They would be better off with someone else,
someone neutral and non- emersed. All she could concentrate on was her
exhaustion. Her anger and desire for revenge could no longer contain it.
"C'mon, Korina. You're not even trying."
She stared upward toward Mike, but instead of seeing him, all she could see
was a huge ball of fire where the ship had been, it's flames engulfing her,
searing her skin as she rolled on the ground in agony. For a long moment,
she couldn't breathe, and then she felt hands on her, pulling her gently
toward the sky.
"Kori! Come out of it!"
"Wha..."
"Put her down, Mike."
Mike complied, though he wasn't sure why, and as though in a trance, she
crawled back to the communicator, grabbing the receptor in a crouched
position.
"Who the hell are you?!"
Several of the guards turned, distracted by her tone if not the content
which only a few could understand."
"...get off planet... alive."
She then crawled back toward the ship, tossing the communicator back into
the pile where they had found it and began searching her pockets in obvious
anger. Johanes handed her a lightpen, which she threw into the ship's hold
through the airlock. Around her, Kori saw nothing of the audience she had
attracted. She knew only the fire, burning her hands and legs as she
stumbled, half-crawling from the blaze.
"Kill you... Harrison."
Mike stepped back as she staggered toward the far end of the deck, clawing
in vain at one of the vessel's airlocks and fumbling open the outer
comm-unit, the ship's doorbell, in effect. Johanes stopped her from opening
a channel, pulling her back and dropping her soundly on the cement. Mike
picked her back up, dragging her several meters from the congregation that
had now formed.
"Kori... come out of it."
"I'm sorry... I can't do it."
"You did do it."
But she couldn't hear him. Nor could she hear the crowd of soldiers lined up
outside the ship, nor Gardansa telling Mike how he always picked the
craziest women, nor even the Imperial gunships screaming overhead. Her world
was a haze of smoke and fire and illusory burns, powdered wet by an icy veil
of morning mist.
"No! Hold fire!" Johanes held his hand up against the anticipated spray of
bullets, as though his flesh and bone would constitute a serious deterrent.
"This is an airlock! We need something big! You!"
He pointed toward the adjacent ship. One of the crew was peeking out the
dorsal hatch to see what all the commotion was about.
"Who, me?"
"Fire your aft laser turret at this door!"
"What?! Are you crazy?!"
"Do it!"
"I'm not even a gunner!"
"Harrison, take over!"
Mike felt his heart drop down to his stomach as Johanes darted toward the
adjacent ship. Immediately, all the solders spread out, and Mike felt the
ground rumble as the vessel warmed up its engines.
"Jo, she's gonna bolt!"
"Just grab something and hang on!"
The vessel slowly lifted itself off the ground, a thin row of hand holds
convenient for zero-gee repairs extending from the airlock down along its
ventral surface. Mike leapt forward and grabbed one, feeling all vestiges of
sanity slowly slip away as the vessel ascended further, hovering several
meters off the platform with a considerable roar while leaving his body
dangling beneath, like a bug about to be squashed.
He had to avert his eyes as the crisp beam of laser light cut a jagged hoop
in the airlock's outer door. In its wake, it left a black ring of molten
slag, and more out of desperation than design, he felt himself crawl toward
it, pounding open the smoking circlet and sending it crumbling inward as a
pile of gutted scrap metal. Below, the emergency personnel steadily shrunk
to the size of toy soldiers, and Mike clawed his way inside, the deck
shaking like a earthquake, sending him rolling against the inner door. Only
its window had been fully serrated by the laser, and the opening mechanism
refused to respond even to the coercion of an automatic pistol.
Mike reached through the window, recklessly clawing for any knob or button
that would open it from the other side. He finally found the appropriate
switch at the very end of his reach and nearly took his own arm off as the
door slid open, the window's compartment disappearing into the bulkhead.
Then the vessel lurched from some impact, throwing him forward and into the
deck, and for several moments all he could hear was a deafening thunder.
When he opened his eyes, the sky was as bright as day, and he found himself
draped over the corpse of a woman, her bruised neck twisted almost
completely around to the point where her spine had been severed. Mike rolled
off her, the sky darkening as the airlock door closed behind him and several
nozzles on the ceiling began emitting a grayish fog.
Through the helmet's face plate, he could see a patch of red Galanglic
blinking in the upper-left corner of his field of vision. "Contaminant
detected. Switching to internal oxygen supply." The next several breaths
felt strange, producing a tingling sensation in his hands and feet. He sat
down and consciously slowed his respiration. Meanwhile, the fog began to
thin out, flowing through the air lock's shattered window and into the cold,
dark night. As the moon rotated from view, Mike could barely make out the
walls or the floor, even with the light intensification the helmet provided.
Mike waited a minute, letting his eyes adjust. More medical supplies were
scattered on the floor, and in the dim hallway he could barely make out the
aperture to the ship's locker. It's latch was broken, and he slid the
opening manually. Two vacc suits rested on the floor, their rack broken, and
a pile of seal-it patches lay scattered about beneath. Mike grabbed a
handful, bumping his helmet into something solid. He yanked out the
offending piece of equipment to get a better look. It was a power pack, its
thin black cord anchored somewhere within the gloomy confines of the locker.
He reached back inside, pulling out a laser carbine. It's metal barrel
glinted dimly in the icy starlight, and Mike donned the power pack over his
shoulder, switching the weapon to "ready" mode and pulling off its safety
guard. He then crouched down, slowly inching his way down the corridor. It
was crossed by another, and Mike peeked left, toward the prow. The new
corridor terminated with an iris value, and Mike guess it led to the bridge,
to Sule. The door would be locked, and he was holding its key.
Mike positioned himself on his knees directly in front of the door and
leveled the carbine to begin sawing. The valve's metal frame seemed ever
more sturdy than the airlock, its numerous, interlocking layers refusing to
yield against the laser light which was emitted from the barrel in short
pulses rather than a steady stream. Another minute or two passed, the
carbine's power running low, and his only consolation as gravity began to
disappear was that he didn't have to worry about a kinetic kick each time he
fired.
He stopped, looking for some power socket in the wall when the valve twirled
open, Sule standing in the open aperture with a fully automatic rifle. She
began firing before the door was even open, and Mike ducked down as the
first several bullets whizzed frictionless and silent above his head, the
next several impacting with the top of his helmet, his face plate, and his
upper chest. He toppled backward, the numerous collisions tumbling him down
the corridor end over end while he watched his own blood seep into the
vacuum in the form of little red bubbles, floating freely in the cold,
breathless corridor.
He fought the rushing noise in his head, pulling the seal-it patches out of
his pocket and tearing them one by one off their spines while placing them
all over the fleximesh and the side of his helmet. The liquid adhesive
hardened in moments, and in less than a minute, he could feel the pure
oxygen rushing into his lungs, his hands tingling with excitement as the
corridor seemed to swirl this way and that. He pushed off, with a grunt,
floating himself back toward the bridge. Sule was no longer in the corridor,
and the open iris valve beckoned him to enter.
Peeking inside, he half-expected to see her at the controls, as if nothing
had happened. Instead, he saw her writhing in the corner of the room, a
virtual pool with hundreds of little red bubbles floating about the room.
They continued to flow in a steady stream from her arm, and Mike could see
her desperately trying to cover the burnt hole with her other hand. She
didn't have any patches, and as she looked toward him, she seemed to scream,
soundless waves of anger stealing the last of her breath until she finally
succumbed to the frigid vacuum.
Mike continued to watch, floating without momentum, as a small red spec
drifted in front of one eye. It was from inside the helmet, his own blood,
and he knew he had no way of binding the wound. Slowly, the cold began to
wash over him, and he shivered silently in his private abode. The ship was
his, such as it was. For all he knew, it would stay that way forever.
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrengr.ucr.edu) works part-time as a programmer at a
place so cheesy that he declined to mention the name. He says that if
anybody has any job prospects for a semi-computer-literate MBA who likes to
write, he's ready, willing, and able to scoot his butt for decent buckage
and good experience.
`The Harrison Chapters' will be continued next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS "Ah, look here, young thane. Salvaged, have I,
OF DOMINGO these three -- the Preparation, the Outworlder,
the Fleets of Kairos -- the best ever composed
A.Y. Tanaka in our garbled tongues, the jewels right
priceless of our people."
______________________________________________________________________________
AS MOST OF OUR READERS HAVE ALREADY REMINDED US,
this year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the
publication of Joe Domingo's epic poem, The
Preparation of the Mining Planets, one of the
highlights of Outer World literature. The author of
this month's guest essay is Professor of Literature
and Humanities at Ganymede University and senior
editor of the thirteen-pack Bibliography of Domingo
Studies.
Unlike most works of Outer World literature, notice and appreciation of The
Preparation of the Mining Planets, based on the poet's Brigade experiences,
began almost immediately upon publication. That the epic quickly found a
strong and friendly reception is reflected in the work of Domingo's younger
contemporaries, the poets and dramatists of the so-called Generation of
`098:
In Pygmalion's Brood by Sarton, the young esthete cries, "Oh, to have
Domingo's balls, and stride, clanking, onto an alien planet." The old uncle
later asks, "How can I wax comfortable when Joe Domingo calls?'
In Milgrom's Thy Brother's Captor, the landlord threatens the rent strikers:
"I'll call in Domingo and his crew and he'll prepare you as he did those
planets." To which the strikers reply, "Ah, but Domingo shares our grit and
crib. If one's to be prepared, `tis you, Goldark. Be prepared, then, to be
prepared."
In The Quaestor by Sienkowicz, the not-so-mad geographer reveals his
treasure: "Ah, look here, young thane. Salvaged, have I, these three -- the
Preparation, the Outworlder, the Fleets of Kairos -- the best ever composed
in our garbled tongues, the jewels right priceless of our people."
Garth de Vega in Blood Tribute says of his Domingo-like protagonist, "He
retrieved for Earth the pearls we thought we'd wasted."
The plastic arts of that Generation offer even greater testimony. Helion's
massive free-standing "Orthos" in Haymarket Square on Phoebos won the
Credo/Humanitas award three years running -- a first for that medium. The
neo-Classical "J.D. Accepting the Victory Flowers at Buzzard's Hill"
(inspired by canto 14, stanza 32) by an anonymous committee of art students,
still stands at the entrance to Delacroix Hall at the College of Ceres and
Tethys.
Malan's "Rhodes Passing the Torch" stood for years at the Teynesian museum
but has been moved, under pressure from the Nova movement, to the garden of
the Mercantile on Miranda. Aspiring actors have long made the pilgrimage to
the museum, and now to the garden, to study the subtle play of emotion on
the face of the Rhodes figure. Is that joy we see? Or jealousy? Or anger? Or
remorse?
Reynaud's "Execution of the One Called the Desert Monster" (inspired by
19:65-87) in the public library of Thanatos-in-the-Valley, is frequently
visited by xenologists and historians for whatever clues it may provide to
the aliens' way of life.
A triumph of the neo-Romantic school, yet owing much to the sculptor's
Sino-Hellenic background, is Chrysostum's "Young Sir at the Fortress"
(inspired by 19:14-24) which for decades moved the young to strip bare and
throw themselves at the statue's base. Sadly, it rests now in the provincial
vault at Scone.
The professional literary critics held aloof. Those taste-makers of the
time, defenders and beneficiaries of the codes of presentation, feared
ruining their image as cool sophisticates. Off camera, they enjoyed and
valued the Preparation but spoke of it only in flashes: "Interesting ...
More or less worthy of attention ... Appears perhaps engrossing ... Makes
one feel good ... Revenge against dullness ... There is spirit here ... I
find no fault ... One might, in one's spare time, consider this ..."
Listening to them now, they sound like snippets from fuller essays and
critical reviews, but these short phrases were the reviews themselves,
tossed off casually in personal communications or mentioned in passing in
the middle of an article on an unrelated subject. It smacked of danger, or
so those tender souls imagined, to challenge too vigorously the dictum that
nothing of merit could come from the Outer Worlds. It was their dictum, and
theirs to modify.
In his posthumous Dragons of Io the converted critic Pinella says, "The
mining planets would be dead now were it not for the creative fire of
Domingo." "A strange evaluation," says Roehn, "considering the devastation
Domingo left behind." Llolf adds, however: "I suspect Pinella meant (given
the vagaries of the Tongue) that our memories of those planets as historic
-- not merely geologic, economic, astronomic -- entities would be `dead' now
were it not for the creative fire of Domingo. For only in verse was his fire
creative."
Hovic's brief eulogy for Domingo at the federation's memorial service has
mesmerized and been memorized by generations of schoolchildren: "He was the
first, perhaps the last, to stand and speak so well of us." Hovic later
remarked to friends, "He sure beats Torqua," a reference to the leading
("lonq dead," Hovic would interject) epic poet of the preceding age, the
undaunted author of the heroic cycle that included Orlando Inflamed, The
Liberation of Mars, and Orlando Beyond.
Adaptations for broadcast, recordings and live performance made Domingo rich
as well as famous. Surprisingly unchallenged by the philosophical community
was the series of sequels on the Ether-for-the-Millions network: Preparation
II through VIII. Despite its elitist name, the network's ratings were
consistently high. The set of programs is still available in home pad form
and sells well despite the unfortunate withdrawal by the Cromwell
administration of Preparation IV, which deals with the relationship of J.D.
and Salinch in detail considered much too graphic.
As often happened when an epic caught the popular fancy through print, tape,
disk, sphere or broadcast (on some planets, by roving talkers) many a world
saw folk ballads and other lyrics arise, based on the characters and
episodes of the poem. Extrapolata, they are called in the Catalog; on the
Outer Worlds they are known as commentaries. Even today, in some
Exilarchates, a mellow patron will pinch a serving lad or wench and call,
"Sing us a commentary, youth, for the ears are dry and sad."
For reasons analysts have yet to uncover, much commentary inspired by the
Preparation re-tells it from the point of view of the aliens, giving
Preparation extrapolata its plaintive tone. "Salinch's Lament," born of the
episodes of canto 12, stanzas 7-67, is the most familiar, but worthy of a
hearing are also "Who Dares Call Me a Monster?" (6:52), "Pray, Where Has My
Flesh Gone?" (7:65),
"What Voice Calls Them From `Neath the Sand?" (1:18), "The Great Wheels
Roll" (4:87), as well as "None But I Remember," "The Cubs Were Happy Once,"
"The Smoke That Kills," and "The Hills are Gone," all based on the episodes
of canto 19.
This process both confirms and refutes J/23, which holds that folk ballads
are the surviving fragments of lost ancient epics. The implication is that
the common people are too dense or too busy to create ballads and other
lyrics, even love songs, on their own. That "Salinch's Lament" and the
others derive from Domingo's epic (although it was a recent one) seems to
support the theory. However, that the ballads are not surviving fragments
but thoughtful re-workings of a still unfragmented epic suggests some common
people are not too dense or too busy to create ballads and other lyrics,
even love songs, on their own.
As also happened when an epic sold an immodest amount of copies, was
continually re-broadcast by popular demand and was talked, and talked of, on
many a planet, there appeared imitations; at best, attempted approximations.
Among the works produced by LTs, intellectuals, warriors and administrators
on various worlds, only a handful enjoyed more than a tired nod from critics
and public. We pass over the Cultivation of the Orchard Planets (as well as
the Plucking of the same), the Shattering of the Granite Planets, the
Awakening of the Sleeping Planets, etc., with a kind word only for that
clever parody of the whole epidemic, Lloy's Milking of the Dairy Planets.
Sadly, Lloy's wit was not appreciated during her brief lifetime.
Although rushed and uncrafted, the most important of these imitations is
Miner's Planet, Briqadier's Blood by Jardine. In his very first stanza he
asks, "Who dares to speak beyond Domingo? Only those whose ears have heard
the truth." Jardine offers nothing new about the nature, value or meaning of
the expeditions; he merely changes the hero's name. In the Preparation it is
"J.D." (by more than coincidence, also the initials of the poet). But in
Jardine's version, the Domingo-character's "violent nature" and "warped,
mistaken priorities" more than once jeopardize the mission of the Brigades
in general and Group A (A-Corps) in particular. Only the courageous and
cool-headed leadership of Lt. Ceniza saves the day and leads the Brigades to
victory.
As we know, the Ceniza-character also appears in Domingo's poem, not by
name, but as the "punk lieutenant," that incompetent officer whose mistaken
attitudes toward the troops, the planets, the aliens and the principles of
leadership more than once jeopardize the mission of the Brigades in general
and A-Corps (Group A) in particular. As we now know, Jardine was, in real
life, Ceniza's nephew.
Jardine and Ceniza shared many relatives -- writers, critics, editors,
professors of literature, librarians, broadcasters and publishers. Their
cumulative influence permitted Jardine's epithets to enter the standard
phrasebooks of Preparation critics and scholars. In addition to his "violent
nature" Domingo was accused of "insubordination in the field," "lack of
perspective" in his behavior as well as in his poetry, "unfortunate
slippage" in his grasp of truth, and the `perverse inability to understand
and express the significance" of the events he narrates.
Some charges were mutual. "Lack of perspective," for example. Defending the
actions of the Brigades in the episodes of canto 19, Domingo's comrade and
biographer writes: "You must understand that the `wild geese' on Chaco,
unlike other forms of life, were biologically and spiritually incapable of
conforming to the most fundamental standards of the human/alien
relationship. Enlightened Treatment just did not work; it only encouraged
their senseless attacks." Jardine`s grandson replies, "But true Enlightened
Treatment had never been tried. Governor Andros used the term to obscure his
real policy, that of active oppression and indirect genocide, while
diverting attention from his Commissary tapes. Understandably, the Chaqui
had to defend themselves. "
It was Verne, the chief literary authority of the next generation, who
translated the Preparation into the Tongue, giving it a wider audience, and
was the first to publish an edition bristling with notes. In his preface
Verne praises the war speech of the Desert Monster, finding it utterly
noble. "The speeches and character of the other leading aliens are
"inspiring and realistic" and "almost human." He is `aroused by Domingo's
"spirit of patriotism ... [and] ... the concept of the tree of honor and
glory, which, as J.D. so nobly expresses, we nourish with our bold deeds and
the blood or comparable fluid of our enemies, the tree we leave behind to
give shade to our tomb."
Some weak-hearted readers sighed at Domingo's, and Verne's, emphasis on that
tree, for it seemed to obviate the need to store up so-called good deeds in
the present life to sustain us in the next. Domingo's attitude implied the
afterlife mattered little; what mattered more was the fame achieved in this
one, that you lived on only in the memories of those who had known you and
would tell others about you. Quiet, ostensibly constructive, activity did
not bring the sort of fame Domingo and his fellows sought. Rather, it was
the courting of danger, and the triumph, and the triumph's noise recorded.
Plunder was not frowned upon if well-earned.
Despite his arousal, Verne regretfully gave a low rating to the work as a
whole: "It lacks unity, purpose, creative inventiveness and, ultimately,
grandeur." And elsewhere: "The poem is more savage than the worlds of which
it treats."
"Words, words, words," comments Monten. "Our Verne, the progressive, the
enlightened one, just couldn't bear to call the poem great. He had to steer
a middle course between the Wimps and the Hawks. Since the Hawks were then
in the Roost, he'd appear a self-degrading brown-noser were he to overly
praise their favorite poet."
The edition of the Preparation generally held to be definitive is that
prepared by Domingo's great-grandson, Javier C. Noriega, using the original
battlefield tapes preserved in the cool vaults of the poet's wine cellar.
Noriega's extensive introduction gives us new insights into Domingo as a
human being and creative artist. The tapes help clear up some disputed areas
of interpretation, such as whether "rooking the stalwarts" or "booking the
recruits" is the correct reading in 2: 8, whether "lying to the tribe" or
"spying on the Five" belongs in 8:13, whether "dun-colored landscape" or
"dawn covered the landscape" is the intent in 2:11, whether the mysterious
and suggestive "flower of life" that saves Corporal Saad in the wilderness
(3:29-33) is rather the "dower(y) of life."
Myrnes concedes Noriega`s edition surpasses all others before or since, even
those claiming to be based on more complete battlefield and apres-querre
tapes supposedly uncovered from time to time in one or another
Domingo-frequented locale. "This excellence," explains Myrnes, "derives from
Noriega's performance as a conscientious scholar as well as a loyal
grandson. His edition, with its exhaustive notes and commentary, offers the
complete armamentarium of traditional and modern scholarship, giving full
weight to the insightful interpretations of the neo-Ganymede and
deutero-Raphaelite schools [...] although perhaps without at times allowing
for sufficiently imaginative and searching investigation of stylistic
elements, such as, for example, a line-by-line, foot-by-foot, even
phoneme-by-phoneme exegetical study of the established [i.e., the
wine-cellar] text along the lines of Lauren Sterne's admittedly involved but
uniquely innovative and revelatory meta-stylistic criticism."
Myrnes' proposal is suitable not so much for the analysis of the Preparation
as for the analysis of the work of some of the Preparation's scholarly
critics.
It was Ash who first formally doubted the Preparation was rightly an epic:
"It fails to meet certain rules; for example, An epic shall relate the deeds
of an idealized, larqer-than-life hero (Soncino 362). In the Preparation
there's no larger-than-life hero explicitly identified as such."
But that is wig-splitting; there is a hero, a normal-sized hero, a common
soldier who does uncommon things. Although ordinarily the commander of Group
A would be the one to hoist the Flourig, that commander unfortunately is the
"punk lieutenant." The real hero, J.D., is always there to redeem the
lieutenant, the Group, the Brigades, not by doing all the fighting -- though
he probably could if he had to -- but by inspiring and leading the troops.
Domingo, while not overly humble, shares the glory with the Corps. ("To
spread the guilt," suggests Aymara.) But he is too modest to reveal himself
through more than his initials. In this also he breaks precedent; in a
tradition going back to the original Daughter of Mars cycle, initials had
been used only to identify the villain.
Rhorta points out J.D. engages in some cunning, often humorous, stratagems
-- another trait of the traditional epic hero (Baris 13, Vaughan 806). One
example is the ruse by which a herd of aliens on Iesi was allowed to capture
a purposely abandoned sandroller primed to explode when the starter switch
was thrown. That the "capturers" were a band of adventurous pups, not the
seasoned warriors the pompous First Colonel had vehemently predicted,
fulfills one of the most important comic requirements -- the surprise
deflation of a stuffed shirt.
Ash insists the rule specifies an idealized hero; that is, without vices.
Cyrus answers: "Read on. A further rule [no citation] permits vices, but
vices the hearers understand, if only in their subconscious. These vices
must be larger-than-life (or minimal) to the extent the hero and his virtues
are larger-than-life (or minimal). Consider J.D.'s gross mistreatment of
Salinch. In civilized worlds such behavior is unthinkable, yet many among us
long to perform those very acts upon each other and are unaware of that
longing."
Wonath reminds us there is a central explicit hero, a collective hero: "The
Brigades as a whole, operating in unity for a common purpose, to make the
universe a better home for humankind." But Dolph suggests Wonath and his
party are "victims of confused judgement. Military units don't feel, bleed
and die; it's their individual members that feel, bleed and die. Any of ours
who assaulted a Chaqui or Credenti stronghold -- never mind how `primitive'
or `defenseless' some now claim they were -- or who defended our stations
from the Desert Monster's unprovoked attacks, deserves recognition as a
hero. The role of J.D., whoever he may be, is not to hog the camera, but to
crystallize within himself the best qualities of his comrades."
Domingo's biographer cites a rule that seems to favor the poem's claim to
epic status: An epic shall relate the deeds of valiant heroes, magnanimous
to their foes (Mbona 848). To which Barcos, a noted Wimp, responds:
"Valiant, perhaps, but magnanimous only in their insistence that they are
magnanimous; magnanimous only if execution without excessive torture is
magnanimous; magnanimous only if the destruction of entire civilizations
with a `sincere' apology is magnanimous."
The biographer quotes a further rule: There shall be a foe worthy of the
hero (Portales 63). Barcos responds: "Depends what you mean by worthy."
The biographer cites a further rule: The nobility of the foe shall be
acknowledqed (Sung 37). Barcos responds: "Ah, but you omit Sung's key word
-- `ungrudgingly.' Domingo must have been terribly worried the foe would
appear so noble the audience might not feel threatened enough to root for
the hero or buy his book. It was a needless worry. For centuries, now that
the coyote, the dingo and the pangriff are extinct, the insecure and
marginally competent Terroid has been ever eager for something small enough
to kick around, something big enough to get even with."
The biographer's point is well taken, though, in that there are scenes in
the Preparation that do tend to acknowledge the foe's nobility, but the
premise of the work would be undermined were this presented too forcefully.
There is the execution of Xka and his pack, where Xka indignantly breaks air
in the face of the laser bearer. In a similar episode the Desert Monster
stares at the executioner for long moments and then, realizing, cries, "A
woman! The Desert Monster shall not sully the conscience of an unborn
child!" Domingo continues: "Then that noble Monster with claws well
fashioned did tear his [own] innards out and died unshamed."
Delius, doing research at the Black Chamber, discovered the original
scansion and rhyme scheme called for "heart" rather than "innards." He
postulates "heart" would have inspired too much sympathy for the Monster.
The biographer cites a further rule: The protaqonist must capture the
imaqination and spark the enthusiasm of the reader/auditor (Dewi 693).
Barcos responds:
"Depends on the reader/auditor."
Some claim the Preparation fails to meet the standards of the heroic epic in
that it has no love interest, and little interaction between the male and
female members of the Brigades; perhaps Domingo did not care to call
attention to his own or others' activity in that area. The oddly-formed
alien females were available every seventh week or so, but J.D.'s attitude
was negative: "Any might have them in any of their parts, were any gross
enough."
Despite this, J.D.'s own seduction of Salinch, the Desert Monster's
daughter, is a key element of the poem. It also meets the epic standard
(Plekhanov 328) requiring at least one of the love interests to be closely
related to someone in authority on the enemy's side. It also meets the
standard (Vaughan 806) requiring the hero to engage in clever stratagems:
The sole purpose of the seduction, J.D. insists, is to gain her golden key
and the secrets of the Monster's fort.
The rule bifurcates: The love interest shall not seriously distract the hero
from his/her goal [see Orlando Beyond] unless the love interest him/herself
is the goal [see Orlando Inflamed] (Kreshkhine 74). Domingo takes the first
option by having J.D. execute Salinch: "She taught me great pleasure and
thus taught me great sin; it was right she be punished."
Ryder declares this "Irresponsibility poorly disguised as Honor." Barcos:
"One's reason is another's excuse."
Another rule states, The hero shall at some point in the narrative engage in
communication with the dead for aid, advice or inspiration to the extent, if
necessary, of visiting the after/underworld in person (Besant 236). This
rule can be traced back to fragments of Orpheus the Nazarene, who smashes
the gates of Plutarch's realm to rescue Father Abraham from the one-eyed
Grendel.
The Preparation satisfies this rule. The shafts dug by the first humans on
Credence qualify as underworld; into them J.D. descends to burn out the last
refuges of the Credenti. The gray sandstone canyons of Eboli into which J.D.
and his fog-sprayers descend for a like purpose, also satisfy the
requirement. So does J.D.'s descent into the "multi-chambered, endlessly
delightful" body of Salinch. His psychological descent into hell -- that is,
the entire relationship with Salinch, with its haunting (or hollow) guilt --
also satisfies it.
Moody and introspective, J.D. has no close friends. Aware of this, Ash cites
yet another rule: The hero shall have two friends and both shall die (Pindar
17). The first must have already died on the enemy's toe before the poem
begins, to justify the mood of anger and intense resolution in which the
reader finds the hero. The second must die in battle also, no more than
two-thirds of the way into the narrative, to stoke the hero's anger and
resolve against the foe. This second friend must be a former enemy, at least
a rival, who became attached to the hero through admiration of his virtues,
preferably after falling under his toe in physical or mental combat.
Some rules allow the first death to be that of a former lover. Others
permit, or require, someone senior to the hero, a significant other of his
formative years. The loss must be deeply felt, but not so deeply as to
demoralize him; the effect is to encourage him to continue the great
tradition the significant other represents. The second death, that of the
converted friend (some rules permit a lover or a younger relative) must be
so described as to emphasize the loss of the promise the life represents, to
justify the call to vengeance. (See Addenda Bellica 36, Addenda Poetica 87.)
Ash cites another, the "Basic" Rule: The epic shall be completely removed
from everyday experience (Hashomer 299). Quint and his school are not
concerned about that. What impresses them is the basic realism of the
Preparation. The primitive epics, Quint says, dealt with real heroes in real
situations, merely enlarged and exaggerated to make the story come alive,
which is to say, more real. He demonstrates how Domingo skips back millennia
to the earliest unwritten version of the Basic Rule: Make it fantastic, make
it outrageous, make it impossible, but make it believable (Apollonius 32).
Quint's influence on poets of his and a few succeeding generations was
incalculable. His emphasis on believability and the flavor of realism led to
an avalanche of epics based on news articles and reports in scientific
journals. Braght even attempted an historical epic based on articles in the
recently unearthed Pravda.
To C.M. Pidal the question of rules was not important: "Bear in mind that
Dimon's Asteroidians, Sato's Nouveaux Voyages Synchroniques Merg's Joviad
and Saturniad, and Torqua's famed Orlandiad -- some of the epics used to set
the standards the Preparation supposedly does not meet -- were themselves
imperfect imitations of something much older. When rules did serve a purpose
was among the predawn bards who composed in their heads, and those were but
the rules of survival. The bards faced the challenge of a society too busy
fighting or working to take much time out for a long epic. They faced the
challenge offered by other forms of entertainment -- songs, dances,
religious ceremonies, food, sex, conversation, public executions, and
instrumental music as an end in itself rather than as a setting for the
bard."
Consider, continues, Pidal, how Domingo or any other more-or-less modern
epicist differs from the bards of the pre-dawn age. In 12:18 Domingo tells
how "The Polthark came ready for battle, dripping with oil, swinging his
wrench, spitting a Damniad, sweating a torrent, heavy with anger, paging for
blood." A cogent, emphatic description, sufficient for its purpose.
Note how this differs from Domingo's probable inspiration, stanza 67 of The
Striped Flag by the obscure Bard of the Hurons: "The Yankee came ready for
battle, the Yankee came dripping with oil, the Yankee came swinging his
[wood? stick? tool? wrench?], the Yankee came spitting a Damniad, the Yankee
came sweating a torrent, the Yankee came heavy with anger, the Yankee came
paging for blood."
For what purpose must the Huron repeat himself so? In part, it gives him
that extra moment to remember the rest of his line. It also helps draw
things out, building up for the cathartic head-splitting in the next stanza.
But most important for the Bard's survival, it extends the grace period for
those in the audience who have turned aside to sneeze, to talk to a friend,
to stroll over to a merchant's stall, to scan the skies for argosies, to
soothe or whip a restless eohipp, or to go further off to relieve
themselves. When they turn back, even having missed the opening line ("The
Yankee came...") they might yet hear the closing line ("The Yankee came...")
and not have lost the chord. The Bard of the Hurons thus keeps his audience
and earns his sips and wafers.
Consider, continues Pidal, how the first bards tapped into the lives of the
weapon-bearers of their kraals and camps who unwound each evening around the
eating place, singing and bragging. The bards added what those truly
involved in the action could not -- the iangis and universality. Through
them the local hero, who was also perhaps the local Odius, becomes
Everyhero, who smites the evil Omper on the ice not for the kick of it (any
local hero can do that) -- but for us.
(Those who became the bards may well have taken the only option free to
them, for tradition says many a bard was blind, lame or mad.)
Part of the iangis came from the handing-on of tales and tricks from bard to
bard: How to play the audience, how to play the voice, how to cover for a
skipped or premature stanza, how to deal with comments from the crowd such
as, "That's a lot of bull, old man."
Well now. The old man might counter with a new stanza, not always impromptu
(Long have I souqht the moment for this): "And noble [name], brother to the
thunder, spoke [and the old man appears to address the heckler], `Let those
who moan and weep with fear, who scoff to hide their shame, who cry that
such brave deeds cannot be done, who've lost the heart, nobility and
strength -- be given pots of lead and freed to seek their innards in the
dirt.'" If it veers to the click of it, it stays.
Or the old man might silently acknowledge it was indeed a lot of bull, and
begin to subtly re-string his tale.
Without the handing-on from bard to bard, from pulse to pulse, without the
challenge met of yet another crew that will not sit still, one loses the
iangis.
The epicist of later times who sees published his own final, un-evolved
version, has skipped the iangis. The rules mean nothing when the world that
gave birth to them is gone.
The iangis came from what the bards lived through. But there are no more
bard-worlds and no more bards. Now it must all take place within the poet's
mind. But few in any age, on any planet, can profit from that Odius on the
sidelines of the brain who calls, "That's a lot of bull, old man."
Lunet suggests Domingo has made the most of his encounters with that
heckler. And with the eohipp snorts and peddler's cries and the other
distractions of the marketplace within his head. And that explains the
unexpected iangis of his work. Any Pioneer can prepare a mining planet, any
Chronicler can report it, but only Domingo can take us with him.
Disregarding the evidence, however, Pelagius (although the most well-read of
his or any other generation) calls the Preparation "more chronicle than
epic." Kitner says the work, especially cantos 3, 9 and 13, is "merely
rhymed history." And Imbers calls it a "fairly competent journalistic
account with some esthetic value here and there."
Anthiel disagrees: "Any extended poem successfully arousing heroic emotions
is obviously an epic poem. That is the only rule; the Preparation certainly
follows it."
An entire generation of critics studied and discussed a series of
dichotomies (schizophrenias to some) nascent in the Preparation: Light vs.
shadow, heart vs. head, body vs. mind, faith vs. reason, passion vs.
restraint, action vs. reflection, solidarity vs. individualism, conformity
vs. rebellion, communion vs. alienation, fantasy vs. realism.
Yndran of Academe sees two faces of Domingo reflected in the work, the
"bearded" and the "shaven." One surveys nature, accepting without complaint
what nature offers -- the heat, the sand, the noise, the squabbles among the
troops, the apparent dearth of acceptable human sexual partners, the
distance from home. The other looks for means and opportunity to escape the
givens of nature, thence to dominate them.
For the shadowy journalist Ampere -- long suspected to be Yndran's alter-ego
--Domingo "clearly can't decide whether to tell the truth and run or lie
through his teeth and stick around for the party. Do we really want to
befriend him, to read him, to go where everyone has been before? A so-called
epic that needs excuses made for it by the poet's
great-great-whatever-grandson is a poor starter in the great-works-of-art
sweepstakes."
The psychoanalytic approach Yndran unconsciously proposes (or is it Ampere?)
forms the core of Pandit's famous monograph, made yet more famous by Tyree's
aggressive review of it: "Even though a few interesting ideas pop up, or
seem to, here and there, P's m-graph as a whole is stuck in the primeval
gunk of that perverse neo-eruditic tradition that pants for any little
fruitless complication to impair, belabor, confuse or distort the
appreciation, evaluation and enjoyment of a work of art. Take one example,
just one. Pandit imagines he's discovered a manic brotherhood, a
schizophrenic communion, a sort of [deleted] Anonymous across the years
between Domingo and Torqua; both ran from
reality while pretending to record it. A schizophrenic communion? Come now,
Dr.P.
"Further on we get into the good stuff. Our erudite and intellectually
adventurous Dr. Pandit sees in the towered fortress of the Desert Monster a
phallic symbol, appropriate to the masculine life-style of the unrefined and
unrefinable aliens. It's symbolically thrust at the, er, heart of the
effeminate, or unashamedly feminine humans, whose emblem -- a golden donut
through whose enlarged hole is seen a stylized Earth paradise -- is
considered suggestive by some. Will Dr. P get away with this?"
"Hardly," answers Mlavy, "for when seen from above -- from the Spirit of
Kiev, which J.D. commanded the first day of the assault -- the fortress with
its redoubts resembles rather a vagina in a forest of pubic hair, and the
advancing column of the A-Corps appears as a throbbing phallus. Such at
least can be inferred from 17:12-15."
"Farfetched and gross, the both of you," interjects Pharsis, for whom the
fortress represents the high-aiming aspirations of the Earth people, while
Nodre sees in the dark fortress ("shadow's realm" of 8:3) those regions of
the human psyche ever alien to us.
Generations of critics have kept alive the controversies of Domingo's time,
and added more. Caye faults the poem its "unevenness," its "incoherence"
(probably in the sense of looseness/smooth-flowing) and, most distracting to
him, its "dislocated episodes." Naively, he assumes certain episodes should
have logically taken place before or after certain others. Domingo's
biographer responds that Caye had obviously not been present at the
Preparation, when at times everything took place at once, or when events
were planned to happen when they would be least expected, least defended
against, most demoralizing to the aliens and most effective.
Caye also faults Domingo's "prolixity on minor themes," such as the
thirty-two lines on the design and manufacture of the poet-warrior's belt
buckle. In an earlier time the buckle was of greater importance in military
life and might have merited the space, but by Domingo's time the buckle was
superfluous. The dwelling upon it was forced, mannered and boring.
Rindl was not bored, though, for if Domingo "felt called upon to include it
in his epic there must have been something of epic relevance to it." Nor was
Stang bored, for "we unconsciously transport ourselves back to when such
things mattered."
In his short paragraph, Caye disparages the work's sterile theme ... intense
sterility ... .sterility of thought and deed...cornucopia of sterile
images...[and its] overwhelming, all-encompassing sterility, doing poor
justice to Domingo's poetic imagination, what little remains of it."
Otherwise, Caye is favorably impressed: "I find, for the most part, correct
grammar, lively descriptions (where the event described is itself lively)
and a variety of characters, some of whom almost come alive."
Compare this with the later comments of Hideki Torres: "The true poetry's
less in the verses themselves than in Domingo's lofty conceptions, the most
stirring being the solidarity of humankind in the face of alien
intransigency. (In the Popular Classics edition of Torres' essays, the
phrase was changed to "the alien menace.") Closer to Caye is Alain's
lukewarm praise: "Although one notes a certain lack of imagination, it is
more than made up for by a careful avoidance of banality."
Yuen feels it unjust to condemn what some consider the lack of poetic
imagery in the Preparation. He suggests one cannot fairly compare Domingo
with such as Torqua, who was a unique blend, even for those times, of artist
and intellectual -- not called to it by fate or genes but fallen to it by
circumstance. Torqua spent much of his youth recovering from sports
injuries, including a broken leg during a lunar lacrosse match, severe burns
at the laser-fencing peiste, temporary deafness and spasms of incoherent
ramblings after being trapped below the surface while running the methane
rapids, and partial paralysis from defects in a gravity/anti-gravity slide.
His long stretches of decommission allowed him time to delve extensively
into the classic and pre-classic epics, literary and primitive, ecclesiastic
and secular, and to base his Orlando work upon them.
Domingo, however, remained a man of action, metaphorically ambidextrous -- a
sabre in one hand, a stylus in the other -- for he composed as he fought. A
microphone was sealed to his helmet, another to his collar, and as a comrade
told it, "he prattled much, even in the heat of things."
Domingo thus returned to the very birth of the epic: the challenge (Eya!)
the shout of triumph (Eya!) the retelling (And then I...).
One must admit Domingo owes much to his predecessor and "companion in
schizophrenia," Torqua. Pandit, in his more restrained moments, shows how
Domingo, despite his facade of rudeness and tumult, shares Torqua's bold yet
elegant line, his rich and valiant vocabulary, his feel for the vibrant
verb, his bald gusto for breeze-blown banners, his freedom from
self-consciousness in the face of alliteration.
Consider Torqua's "The castellated spires of Duke Menton's cramped keep did
glower darkly over the stream-streaked landscape" (Orlando Beyond 14:76),
how it finds subtle echoes in Domingo's "The spoked spires of Dragon Man's
cramped keep glowered darkly over the arroyo-crackled landscape" (Prep
2:16). Torqua's famous, "Across the heath rode Baron Devine, drawn by the
mutant silver steeds of Anthonium" (Orlando Inflamed 12:19) finds echo in
Domingo's "Off the dune leaped Sarge Devine to slay the mutant
silver-stealing thieves" (Prep 7:84). The ordeal of Baron Rothbart
(Liberation of Mars 13 19) prefigures the even more brutal ordeal of Capt.
Cuthbert (Prep 9:5-32). The challenge of the evil Lord Damnitz to the
"sturdy, unmoved, infinitely proud and patient" Orlandans (Orlando Beyond
6:73) is matched by the challenge of the evil Arch Alien Dampt to the
"sturdy, unmoved, infinitely patient and vengeful" A-Corps (Prep 17:42).
It was Fitz-of-All-People (whose generation, after all, never knew the
enthusiasm of the Brigades era) who insisted that "in spite of its great
merits the Preparation can hardly be considered a true epic, neither
spiritually nor in design, neither formally nor in effect." It was the
brutal Melibea uprising of `007 that compelled Fitz to redeem his opinion.
"I know of no other work," he then swore, "which more highly exemplifies the
noble spirit of the human race than The Preparation of the Mining Planets,
and which fulfills so completely and wholeheartedly the standards,
requirements and traditions of heroic epic poetry.
Ktavono investigated the alien elements in the technique of the poem, in
rhyme schemes, rhythmic segues and allomorphic tropes, and sought insights
into the aliens' life-style, clothing, political and social organization,
economic activity and religion. Of the latter, Domingo's description of what
he terms their "feral dreamscape" is now a classic: "In the hands of
invisible masters, in the arms of invisible parents, wrapped in invisible
blankets, asleep in intangible cradles. Yet the cradles do rock.
In the vocabulary of the poem are indeed alienisms but are often
allo-planetic. Nouns such as knth, ptoma, atmn, which in the poem dot the
landscape of Fides and are said to be of such significance to the Fidei, are
not their talk at all, but derive from the pup-talk of the aliens on Chaco.
There are many such allo-planetisms.
There are also occasions when Domingo passes up the chance to use an alien
term in a genuine alien context, apparently doubtful his audience could, or
would want to, understand. One example is the bitterness of the pack leader
Akhts as he turns from watching the strip mining: "A dog has pissed on my
planet." Not only were dogs unknown to Akhts, but so was the concept of
"planet."
Ktavono doubts the names Domingo gives to the rare alien deemed worthy of a
name -- Akhts, Xka, Salinch, Damtp, etc. --were names at all, were even
alien. She suspects they were chosen or invented for euphony, onomatopoeia
or the veering of the beat. They may thus give valuable clues to the
phonology of the Outer World dialects of that era. They may indeed be the
otherwise unrecorded remnants of the vocabulary of Domingo's subculture.
The gaming tables and mellow sites of all worlds have always had their own
jargon but have never been closed societies; linguists and other researchers
are warmly welcomed. Not so the hermetic communities. The Bernardians were
still active during that period, and terms from their secret prayers could
have found their way into the everydaytongue of the mining stations and
battle camps -- but indirectly, and perhaps with some distortion,
simplification or inversion of their original hermetic significance.
Considering this, it is possible the rare name Domingo gives to the rare
alien deemed worthy of a name may have had specific physical, moral,
psychological, satiric or ironic relevance for him and for those who shared
his background. Since the records are vague and the Bernardians' successors
retain their secrets, we can do little to clarify things. We face the same
blank wall as with Kawamoto's Battle of the Urns, where the innocent hero
must contend with the seven oddly-named warriors Akron, Bravo, Charlie,
Dingbat, Extra, Fungus and Grunt.
Kurath finds the understandably morose descriptions of the morose geography
of some of the mining planets to be evidence of the poet's preoccupation
with realism. Other critics, such as Royce and Edel, consider them but
thinly veiled conventions, essentially the same modular phrases inserted
into many a mass-produced, so-called literary epic. Only partial support for
this is offered by Ja Sri: "Domingo may have been entranced, as we all are,
by the silver lakes, the bronze hills, the waves of gray and auburn sand,
but his language had evolved elsewhere. His description of Neruda's moon
setting behind the mountains (`a dragon's egg kissing a woman's breast')
must derive from the experience of a far different planet, for neither
Neruda's moons nor its mountains know such contours.
For Penargh, who believes honesty and exaggeration need not be antithetical,
"It's as if the poet sees through the superficial ugliness of his mission
and venue to the underlying nobility of his goal, the enrichment of the
human planets. Nay, their very survival." Elsewhere: "He lifts the mining
planets to a higher zone of beauty and imagination.
San-chei, in his No Dreams for Iapetus, claims to share with Domingo "a
certain visceral inclination towards the realistic," but in his duties as
licensed critic he applies the G standard: How does this work of art improve
upon life? Does it tell us what we would like to hear? Does the artist make
full use of his powers or is he falling free?
This opposes, in effect, the positivist approach of Huygens (labeled
negativist by his detractors) which applies the L standard: How does this
conform to objective reality? Does it hold to what we already know and want
more of? Does it steady us in a slippery universe?
San-che adds that a clear-headed evaluation of the artistry of the
Preparation is hampered by the reader's all-too-human tendency to take
sides, whether with the Brigades against the aliens, or with the aliens
against the Brigades, or with certain aliens (perhaps those of Titus and
Chaco) against the Brigades, or with the Brigades against certain aliens,
usually those of Melibea.
Among the more recent critics, Jaipuru detects the influence of Domingo on
Vantes, Seifert, the Barrel Poets and (strangely enough) the Quiet Ones. He
applauds Domingo's "sympathy for the innocent savage corrupted by
civilization." Jaipuru explains the only way Domingo could save the aliens
on Rimbaud and Lethe was to destroy them before civilization could, in the
most honorable fashion then permissible. Domingo realized, insists Jaipuru,
that for the aliens of those planets, life under humans would have been
sheer Hell. (In Domingo's subculture, Hell was the destination of those who
caused or permitted pain to their fellows.) For someone as compassionate as
Domingo this was intolerable.
The learned Father Briscoe of the Universidad Dominicana-Jesuita de Callisto
finds "un toque renacentista" in the poem, "con su espiritu de cara frente a
lo desconocido, iunto con su aire de libertad dentro de la ierarquia,y
ademasy sobre todo en su estilo amplio, natural, soberbio, sin arcaismos muy
obvios ni trasposiciones chocantes, o sea, requete-artisticas." As Mende,
Wysse and Singh point out, the good Father's interpretation of the
controversial term renacentista is too broad. He follows his Order's policy
of claiming as Renaissance any movement of a planet's society out of
illiteracy. Secular scientists are more restrained.
Oberon lists as a strong point Domingo's intense involvement in his subject
matter (one would expect that) as opposed to the Bard of the Hurons, who
merely observed and described. The comparison is unfair; the final version
of The Striped Flag came centuries after the Bard's death, enough time to
shed the clues of his "intense involvement."
On the other hand, notes Brijn, "Domingo knew how to roll words permanently
on acetate and polyasphaltine and thus, as well as participant and poet, was
his own final editor. His work has not been victimized by generations of
polishers who polish away the glow. In contrast, The Striped Flag began to
lose its primeval luster once it left the Bard's hands."
For Dwine, Brijn's is a "pseudo-evaluation, nothing but a cheap nod to a
fellow chauvinist's vanity in the guise of a tribute to artistic integrity
and individualism. The Huronic work was improved over the generations by the
careful removal of extraneous detail, anachronisms and minor elements that
once may have had significance but which later ages found meaningless; and
by the careful process of converting elements linked to a fixed time and
place into elements relevant to all times and all places. The Yankees, for
example, are more relevant to us today than they ever were to their
contemporaries."
In reference to Domingo's style Ktorris observes, "He's certainly not
Carthusian [indeed, since Carthus was only three years old when the
Preparation was published] despite similarities in the use of hyperbole,
hyperbaton, syllepsis, syncope, synecdoche, metonymy, irony and metaphor,
all part of the shared tradition of the Outer Worlds. He seems more
Carthusian than most of Carthus' contemporaries and successors but only in
technique; in philosophy, sexual attitude and self-presentation before
Nature, there is Space between them.
Priam reflects modern taste -- or weariness -- when he hesitates before what
for him is the complicated disposition of rhymes and rhythms in the
Preparation, "which oblige a constant, mostly unconscious, effort to pay
attention," perhaps analogous to the restlessness of the ancient bard's
audience. Priam claims that though Domingo displays more architectonic vigor
than others of his guild, it is wasted on us. We may still enjoy heroic
epics but we live in a different age (some of us, in fact, have seen more
than one) and seek new words and voices, such as Rhode offers in the recent
Junqle of Marras, which includes, in both sight and sound editions, a newly
developed musical instrument for use with the poem.
Despite such innovations the ancient iangis is rare, and readers of taste
and fortitude long for sterner stuff, for kidney pie instead of fingertips.
When the pulse beats thus, one reads Domingo and strides, clanking, onto an
alien planet.
______________________________________________________________________________
A.Y. Tanaka was born on Maui in 1936, raised in Newark, NJ (safer than the
West Coast); lived, sometimes worked, in Puerto Rico, San Francisco,
Hawaii, Chicago, Amherst, perhaps elsewhere. His proudest achievement was
inventing a phantom senior for his high school yearbook (Weequahic HS,
Newark). Since then it's been downhill. Subsequent honors and attainments
are as nought.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
MICROCHIPS NEVER RUST "Hitting the close button caused four asterisks
to appear. Oh, shit, I've been caught, groaned
Part 1 Hanson. A press of the disclosure option
brought news that he was totally unprepared for."
Eric Miller
______________________________________________________________________________
LONG USING THE NICKNAME `THE LOUISIANA UNPURCHASE', THE STATES WHICH
belong to the Iowa Convention still elect and send representatives to
Washington using the traditional election year schedule. Early fears
that arrests and reprisals would be made against the Un-American
politicians never materialized; Washington soon realized that the
Western states representatives fulfilled the roles of diplomats, and
that, if even on a perfunctory level, they helped the old system
function with its magic 50 states. Even as Federal troops marched
into Iowa, committees including Colorado and Wyoming senators could
be seen calmly discussing the "New American Education Initiative". It
is rumored that on the wall of a rebel senator's office is the
popular poster depicting a map of the U.S. with all of the states
east of the Mississippi missing and replaced by water. An old cursive
style script reads `Thar be dragons' on the map's right side...."
-- From "Wormwood IV" an outlaw journal distributed on piggyback virus.
Hanson sat up on the lower bunk and ran his hand along his unshaven face.
The now early light of May was his alarm clock; Hanson was determined to
leave the workhouse as soon as possible, even if today was a sleep-in day.
The 50 or so workers were still asleep, exhausted by yesterday's 20 hour
final stretch. Hanson knew he could hit the terminal early, register his
work sheet and get outdoors before running into Chalker. Doing favors for
Chalker had meant more than the usual hours of hacking nets and setting up
scams. Hanson was sure that Chalker had bit off more than he could chew,
and that arrest was soon on its way. The random work siphon scheme was
crude by any programmer's standards and way beneath Hanson's, but
involvement meant six month's drudge pay for the price of two, and a chance
to get out of Wurkhaus for the entire summer. Quietly putting on the
sheetsack and getting up, Hanson looked around the bunkroom at the snoring
workers. The air was pungent with sweat and battery acid. Hanson cautiously
creeped out along the fire-escape over to Chalker's room and looked in the
window; Chalker's cot was surrounded with wine bottles, the sleeping
supervisor still fully dressed. Good, a quiet move down the ladder put
Hanson right by the work terminal. Hanson entered his card carver's number
and noted with delight the work date coming up as 4 month's previous work
plus the two he just had. He then pressed a new set of codes and had his
earner's sheet shifted forward by 4 months. The new job code was entered to
make him a Portuguese tutor, normally a non-earner for a drudge, but one
that would make his vacation a lawful one. Hitting the close button caused
four asterisks to appear. Oh, shit, I've been caught, groaned Hanson. A
press of the disclosure option brought news that he was totally unprepared
for. After five years of delays, Central State University was now prepared
to hear his dissertation and grant him his Doctorate. A teaching position
was also open in the department of Political Science, would he honor them
with his presence at a faculty interview? Damn, this must be bad, they must
be roping me in. Hanson confirmed the appointment time with his student
number and closed the terminal. Giving one last look to the soot stained,
gray pitted Wurkhaus, he knew that his vacation plans had gone sour.
Attempts to skip the faculty interview would probably cause a roper to hit
the streets and maybe kill him. Go to the interview, lie his way through
the meeting and they would probably let him go in peace, especially if he
feigned homeless fatigue syndrome. The one option that caused Hanson the
most stress was that Yes, they do want to hire me. Don't expect that to be
the case, it will never happen. But thoughts still hit Hanson with a
sickening but elating roar. A real apartment, maybe a real house. Real
computer credits, a savings account, free medical care, clothes,...a
unicar.... Thoughts exploded out of Hanson's head when the guard dog
started barking. The pitbull was the joke of the compound, the victim of a
botched attempt to turn him into a roper through a head boost. But still,
his barking might wake up Chalker. Hanson quickly jumped the chain-link
fence and ran into the woods, finally filling his nostrils with air that
didn't smell of recycled chopped old tires. If the origami tribe had
survived the winter, Hanson might find them a few miles to the north. With
his card carving skills for trade, it would be no problem finding someone
who could build him a cardboard dome.
"The Brother Jim phenomena was best understood in the light of new
research on the effects of television and mass media in the previous
century. Ethnographers were able to chart the rising popularity of
several concurrent events that gave rise to today's political
institutions. Primarily, these were televangelism, mass media
merchandising aimed at the home, and especially the synthesis of
several psychological groups that were aimed at providing self-help
in exchange for money. The replacement of the obviously religious
motives of televangelists with those of self-help merchandising gave
this political movement the catalyst it needed to become the
motivating political force of the late twentieth-century. The birth
of the movement was heralded by the release from prison of an
individual calling himself Brother Jim. Replacing obviously sectarian
appeals with those honed through the merchandising and self-help
industry, this individual returned to the mass media with the dual
goals of achieving the presidency and eliminating psychological
competition from the labeled evils of `secular humanisms'. The
cooptation of former self-help leaders such as the World Institute of
Korea and Noonetics of California ensured that rival factions would
benefit from the period of peaceful control that would follow.
Political skirmishes over the combined meanings of state control and
psychological control erupted around the turn of the century; the
rising tide of economic wealth soon quieted dissent. Brother Jim's
ability to appease contending interests and grant absolute political
control to those following the Institute of Democracy and World
Peace's directives gave him more absolute power than had been enjoyed
by any American leader."
-- Excerpted from "Healing the split: Mind, religion and democracy
in the New American Order" Amazonian Technical Institute Press.
"The reports are probably correct: Brother Jim in all reality must
consist of three or four individuals who through plastic surgery have
made themselves similar to each other."
-- From `The New Clan Separatist: The Search for 666' Freebrain
Journal, publisher unknown.
Two miles up the road and off to the left, Hanson had found them. The woods
had become a misnomer for a scratchy patch of land that had been so
stripped of wood that even the stumps had been dug up. An origami man had
been hauling strips of cardboard off the truck and was only too glad to
agree to Hanson's terms when he found out he was a card carver.
"What can you get me?" the origami man asked.
"A warehouse has been miscounting its stock for the last 2 months. Its
right by Wurkhaus and the roper in front has been pretty much deactivated.
If you steal their lunch wagon they'll never miss it. I wrote the skip
page. All you need do it put this card in the wagon's side around 4 A.M.,
let it open up, steal what you want and take off"
A nod from the wiry face of the origami man meant the trade was go. He
nodded at two emaciated looking kids who were on the top of the truck. The
two generator bikes that powered the truck were in need of new chains, a
mental note that Hanson stored away. The shorter of the two kids jumped
onto the ground and picked up a large serrated knife. The taller kid tossed
down sections of cardboard and the origami man took out his knife and
started to saw away at the industrial scrap. The sight was remarkable to
behold. With deft skill the triangular sections were sawed and pasted
together with wall-paper paste tape. Within two hours a raised geodesic
dome 12 feet in diameter had been erected on the grassy depression,
complete with windows made from pressed plastic bags.
The origami crew stepped back to admire their creation.
"If it rains tonight, this is bad space. The four of us can carry it on the
truck up the road about six miles where it will be better," said the
origami leader.
An hour later the dome was on a raised spot, covered over with the expert
camouflage of leaves and mud that was also the origamists stock-in-trade.
"I think I know where I can get new bike parts" Hanson told the older man.
Hanson thought of the upcoming interview. If anything, the interview would
give him a chance to see the access code for a mechanic's warehouse in town
close to the South Campus. "This Monday, lets go together into town. I have
to talk to an office on South campus." Hanson remembered that the South
Campus was not at all the same as the North. It would have been much better
to see North campus, but the South was better than any other opportunity
that would visit the origamists. Always do favors for an origamist, Hanson
said to himself, you never know when you might need their help.
"If I can steal one of their office cards, I can fix it so that we should
have about 12 open hours in which we can raid their warehouse. I'm an
expert at hitting the gates."
"See ya Monday morning," the gappy smiling origamist and his kids trucked
away. Standing outside the largely invisible dome, Hanson recalled the
several traps he had set at Wurkhaus. No doubt Chalker would be blamed for
the theft of food from the wagon and upon being caught would have his
employment grade zeroed out. Chalker would then come after him. Chalker was
probably having fits right now. Chalker was one of those typically
mind-burnt individuals who believed that life in a workhouse satisfied his
heartfelt need to have a real roof over his head and to be a servant to the
state. Chalker, upon meeting Hanson for the first time, was shocked to find
that Hanson lived the life of a homeless nobody who lived off the land as a
criminal. Their strained alliance had been forged through their common
desire to gain money at expense of the employment list. Beyond this common
goal was a seething hatred of Chalker and Hanson for each other. Hanson
remembered talking to a drunken Chalker one freezing night at the beginning
of the battery acid work order:
"I can't believe you think this is some sort of life! I'm only here because
I was arrested last month and I have to stay at Wurkhaus for my two month
sentence. There's hardly any food here, and man, look at your arms!"
Chalker's arms had been bleached white through the many nights that the
battery acid recycling order had been in effect. The smell of acid stung
the air. A poster of Brother Jim hung on the wall next to Chalker's desk,
its face bleached blue from the air-born acid; Hanson thought humorously
that he looked more like a blue gorilla than the leader of the Free World.
"Shut up Hanson! I'm ON the plan, I'm no damn scraper like you! Its been
worked out: you rig the net and we both get our share, and I sign you off."
Unfortunately for Hanson, one work order scam became many little card
carving schemes, all at Chalker's behest. Typical scenario: a box of ten to
twenty cards would be dropped off at Chalker's desk at night. Hanson would
match them with stolen access numbers and route the results to a false
persona where deliveries and government bonuses would wait at a warehouse.
Hanson would note with wry satisfaction that most of these schemes involved
petty rip-offs of the Plan; for example, altering sales figures so that
bonuses came more often. Hanson knew that it was very typical: propaganda
was so fierce that anyone not selling his share of the Plan was considered
a traitor to the common good. Like 75 percent of the population, Chalker
could not come up with his share of the National Debt and was thus enrolled
in the Plan. Pressure to do good found Chalker and like minded individuals
involved in petty scams aimed at allowing their meager government appointed
jobs to be supplemented with side credits. And, like many of these same
individuals, Chalker found that splitting the take with so many compatriots
yielded quite little. Hanson tried to impress on Chalker the illogic of
this lifestyle, but to no effect. As an official homeless person, Hanson
had more access food and housing on a temporary basis than Chalker normally
saw in a year. The risks were there, the arrests happened two to three
times a year, but compared to Plan victims, homeless life was to be greatly
preferred. If Chalker had had a girlfriend, chances were that the front
guard would not allow her into the workhouse. Absentee landlords frequently
sent supervisors over who would claim that this week there was an emergency
and we have to get through this, everyone together, so we have to have
everyone working through the night. The same supervisors would also demand
in extortion the fruits of corruption that Chalker had failed to hide from
sight, often threatening to beat him up in his office. But Hanson, there in
the office night after night, would see Chalker reading from the Good Works
of Brother Jim, now official organs of the government of the United States
of America. The image of Chalker that most hung in Hanson's mind was that
of him sitting at his rusting hulk of a desk, late one rainy April night,
the air hanging heavy with the stench of burning car tires that was the
only way to heat the building, the walls covered with a brownish greasy
color, and there, Chalker, hunched over a book titled "Paradise Through
Hard Work." Hanson realized that the food theft would trip off the Wurkhaus
food counter, even though the net choke was hiding most of Chalker's
warehouse rip-offs. If Chalker had had the brains, he would try to throw
the gaff onto one of the 50 or so battery workers, but this most likely
would not happen. Hanson settled on to the inflated mattress he dug out of
his sheetsack and placed into the dome. If the interview was something
legitimate, Hanson would never have to see the likes of Wurkhaus again. He
took off the acid stained shoes and threw them out the dome door. More
relaxed than he had been in many weeks, Hanson's last thought as he drifted
off to sleep was the image of a girl, in her early twenties, wearing a torn
shirt that said on the front "No Justice for the Rainbow Tribe".
"One of the first projects to receive approval was the new launch
base on Marojo Island at the headways of the Amazon. Engineers had
long written about the advantages of using the rotational force of
the Earth's equator to add lift advantage to the newly proposed
rockets of the Amazonian Space Agency (ASA). This dream became a
reality when the combined German-Iranian offensive created a flood of
highly educated Russian refugees who were only too glad to make the
newly democratized Brazil their new home. The plan, long dropped by
the U.S., of shooting the raw components of a deep space manned Mars
rocket into orbit for assembly, has been pursued with exceptional
vigor by this new generation of Brazilian space explorers infused
with Russian know-how and experience. Launch of the new manned
rocket, Tropic Wing, is for 8 months from this date, at a time which
calculates the closest arrival of Mars to Earth along the flight
path. The most powerful rocket engines in history will give these
pilots the before undreamed of time of only 6 months in space, with
Earth-like gravity being provided by a rotating bio-sphere that will
travel inside the Nuclear driven hydrogen ionizer. (Cut to footage
showing a man diving slow-motion into a swimming pool) For this brave
Russo-Brazilian crew, no comfort has been spared: looking along the
low-gravity axis of the sphere, you can see a health club devoted to
all the benefits low-gravity exercise has to offer..."
-- Presentation to the Conference of the Union of Independent Southern
Hemisphere States
"It has come to our attention that only 17 percent of the current
population of Brazil claim Portuguese as their sole language. The
influx of English speaking Russians into the Republic soon after the
turn of the century seriously damaged the efficacy of this powerful
and beautiful language which most Brazilians can no longer recognize
with any form of fluency. The U.S. is now the only nation on earth
that pursues use of this language with any enthusiasm, as it has
become quite a mania in the central states where they employ its
learning as a mark of cultural distinction. We are distressed to see
that school age children in Brazil now read Jorge Amado in English
translations and that even classic video presentations of the past
have been lip-synced into English. Our distress continues at the
failure of our government to help in the preservation of this
unequaled muse of the poet's tongue. We have even had opportunity to
speak with our members who number in their years the 80's and 90's,
and tell us for fact that the cooking of a Brazilian cook who employs
the English far inferior to that of one who employs Portuguese. They
tell us if we do not act to stop this erosion we will not only lose
the greatest will of the poets, but lose for eternity the great
treasure of Bahian cooking, whose technique is hopelessly lost in the
English language cooking manuals prevalent in this nation."
-- Translated from "Proceedings of the Brazilian Society for the
Preservation of the Portuguese Language"
Hanson sat leaning against the home-dome in the early Michigan May morning.
The slightly fragrant, humid scent riding on the cool morning air gave
Hanson the feeling that today was going to be a perfect day. Perhaps the
message from last week's job terminal was read with too much paranoia.
Hanson needed to clear his thoughts and settle his mind. Taking a gulp from
his coffee thermo-cup and biting off a piece of sausage he swiped from
Chalker's desk, he steadied his mind and started thinking about his past.
Number One. For the last five years, just about everything he had ever
owned was something that he had stolen. He had yet to find a job in which
you were not under some sort of condition to be thrown into a workhouse,
worked to death, and had all of your pay subtracted for "living benefits
and taxes to the government". Okay. Now number two. For the last five years
he was officially classified as a `homeless person' with no means of
support. What is the punishment for a person with no means of support? You
get sent to a workhouse. Okay, this makes sense. What do you do if you
leave a work
house and continue to be a homeless person? You get sent to a workhouse
again. Good, makes sense. If you're like Chalker, you make the best of
things, convert to the Plan, and hope for a better future. Things are
miserable, yes, but if I bring in enough money, and have enough recruits
into the Plan, I can rest easy if I get fifty people working under me. With
50, enough money is flowing in, my portion of the national debt is covered
and I can store some remainder into National credits. With enough skill, I
can get two or three recruits under me to handle the business and take off
for the Florida Islands. Number three. Everyone has the same idea. If
you're like Chalker, you think that every year will be different. So you
apply to the government for a work needs prospectus and around February
1st, hundreds of cold, hungry out-of-homies come knocking on your front
door, eager to escape the National Defense Draft and telling you they will
be the best hard-workies you have seen forever. You tell them that the work
will involve mold collections, battery acid recycling, lead extraction,
anything. But they say, ya, anything to get out of another Michigan winter
starving in a snow hut eating road-kill. But you say I don't want you
working here if that's the only thing you want. I want people here who
really want to be a part of the Plan. And they see the tar covered windows
knowing that there are warm beds behind them and they say, ya. Yes, I'm
part of the Plan. I'll do anything to be part of the Plan. And you hope
against Thunder that the Winter is long and hard and Spring doesn't come
early like it did this year, and this year you paid off your yearly tax
share of the National Debt and you can actually call an agent and say I
want to be spending time on one of the new Florida islands and I hear you
have rental cars thrown into the price of the hotel because this year I'm
going to drive across the new Cuba-Florida bridge and collect and barbecue
fighting conches on my own personal beach...
No. Number three is a big no. If you're like Hanson, you go to college even
though everyone says you're crazy, no one ever gets jobs `cause you go to
college, you might as well go to a Brother Jim church! But you stick it
out. You get a B.A. in political science and very carefully you get
recruited into the Master's program because the professors realize that you
know how to teach the traditional doctrines, but can discuss theory with
them after hours. You have read anthropology and psychology and ask them
hard questions but know when to respect the silences that mean that someone
may be listening to them or may be bugging them....
"All phone systems and all apparatus related by appearance in either
digital or analog form, are heretofore considered part of the public
information system. As such, all electronic devices utilizing the
limited psychological resources thus attributed to the United States
government as it is appointed guardian of the Public Good, heretofore
appoints itself legally in the capacity of Public Guardian, and that
as part of such rights, requires through the legal force of the
Federal Government the right to enforce the law that makes all forms
of electronic transmission enforceable by law under the subject of a
`Universal Transmitter' such device as which will allow any
government official the right to complete surveillance of any
speaking American citizenry for the rights of constituting from such
conversation any spoken conversation which may be considered
seditious and to judge the legal recourse thereof."
-- Amendment to the 1934 Communication Act of the United States of
America.
No, if you have survived the University and have headed on a stellar course
toward your Doctoral degree, you have become aware of certain facts of
life. For example, if you have not been able to find a job (which in fact
75 percent of your fellow graduates have not been able to) you realize that
there are few options open to you. For example, you will be sent to an
international workhouse. (International House of Pancakes?). You most
likely will not be hired by the University, even given the Doctoral degree.
But, you will come to a certain realization, clear and simple. No job, the
workhouse. The life of a criminal, the workhouse. The life of a
non-criminal: hard work in the work house, near starvation. The life of a
criminal: occasional hard work in the work house and the time of your life
when you're not getting caught. If you're a good criminal, people are
willing to pay you much more than they would a regular `trabalhista'. Ride
out the occasional times spent in the `haus and you're on easy street. Of
course it was not that simple. Living on the outside required certain
skills, and the ability to see beyond surface appearance. For example, most
grudges would look at the origamista and his scrawny kids and see the most
destitute low- life. Look at his pedal-powered truck and geodesic domes and
you see a singular genius who, in ancient times, would have been working
for NASA. Get to know such people, and you form a network. A network, that
if you're lucky, means you only have to work in a brutal German workhouse
for only the most vicious months of the Winter and spend the rest of the
time outside.
Number 4. This college interview thing. A real monkey- wrench. It means one
of two things: something really good, or something really bad.
Off in the horizon, Hanson saw the origamista and the pedal- truck heading
toward the dome.
"Nationalism makes Christianity look like Buddhism"
-- The New Clan Almanac, 2nd Edition
Hanson leaped on the back of the truck. "Let me help you pedal this thing."
He could see that at one time this was a pickup truck, its rusted off parts
now replaced with scraps of foraged plastics. The two bikes mounted on the
bed were rusting apart, but still functioned well enough to transfer enough
power from human legs to the electric motor via the generator. Within a few
months rust would claim the entire bike array. "I can get replacement bikes
at the warehouse," yelled Hanson down to the steering origamista, who
himself was contributing power via an old pedal boat system mounted in the
cab. Hanson, who still used mountain bikes when he could steal them and not
have them stolen from him in the middle of the night, had quite enough
strength in his leg muscles to out peddle the origamista's kids. Their
combined strength had powered the truck to a steady speed of 25 miles an
hour. Within less than an hour they would be at the outskirts of the
college section of East Arbor. A large iron flywheel, an antique over 100
years old mounted on a stand between the two bikes, spun with enough speed
to allow Hanson and the older kid the luxury of resting every five minutes
or so. The younger kid, released from duties and smiling, pulled out an
ancient 8-track tape player with a pair of bashed in speakers. He inserted
a grease smeared tape that had long ago worn off the paper label. The
music, warbling through the dirty capstan, was unmistakably Willy Nelson, a
past century tax dodger who had become a legend due to his capture by the
government over tax evasion. "On the road again, just can't wait to git on
the road again..." The Old Natural Science building was just now visible at
the end of the road. Several autotrucks had passed them on the road into
town, doing 50 to pass their 25. Hanson remembered reports that the trucks
had hit several pedestrians in town. The German company that owned them was
released from any liability: the trucks had no human driver, and therefore
no negligence could be found. Like millions of others, Hanson and the
origamista could not get jobs as truck drivers with any company that did
real business. All trucks were now required to be operated by computer
control under federal law due to safety and energy management issues. It
was against the law for any underground truckers like the origami man to
use electricity off the public grid or any form of rationed combustible
fuel for their recycling activities. The origami man was often pulled over
by the police for suspicion of electrical use, but soon let go when
discovered that the original powertrain consisted of two kids, two rusting
bikes, a flywheel generator and what energy the kids and old man could get
from their morning breakfast of rice and beans.
Oh shit, here comes a cop. The best way to shake them was to give them the
homeless fatigue syndrome rap. The old man and the kids already had it;
they would give the cop their 8-track tape player and off they would be.
Hanson had to remember. First, always smile. And when they ask you anything
always bring up one thing, as if your brain finds it impossible to maintain
any complex relationships. The MetalGermanFuzz stopped the truck and asked
everyone questions. Laughter ensued, as it always did when he found that
two little kids comprised all the power. But more questions came in
Hanson's direction. It was obvious by his leg muscles that he had been
eating a little too good.
"How come you here?" MetalGermanFuzz intoned in a thick buzz-saw accent.
Fortunately Hanson had hid his sheetsack under the sawed-up couch that
functioned as the origamista's cockpit. Staring past the cop's face, a
smiling Hanson started talking about an orange he had begged for breakfast.
The cop kept at him with different questions only to have the answer be the
orange. Hanson mumbled with delight about the orange. The pinched face of
the cop erupted into laughter again. A no-homie hitching a ride on the old
man's truck. Shaking his head with pity the German jumped back into the
unicar, hit some buttons and sped off. The fuzz car like any other, steered
under computer command. It was illegal for new cars to have a human
operated steering wheel under Federal law for safety reasons. There had
been some problems, sure, but new studies had shown that autosteering had
reduced most accidents. A popular commercial showed a man leaving a bar,
staggeringly drunk, and slopping into his unicar. After barely being able
to insert the car card, the unicar lights up and speeds off. A text insert
in broken English read `your designated driver is your car. Its the law.'
Hanson remembered that a common worm prank at the time was to hit the ad
with a virus that caused footage of an explosive car crash to be spliced to
the end. Most national TV services had been so wormed out like this that
the only way to deliver the good message of Brother Jim was to carry 16mm
film projectors in a van and show current State news on the side of a
building. Refurbishing old drive-in theators had become quite a mania, too.
Armed guards prevented hardware wormers from getting in and cutting cords
or throwing sand into the film aperture. This antique method had been
uncovered by a Brother Jimmer working in Germany who discovered that in the
First War of the Thousand Year Reich, the Good News of National Socialism
had been taken into peasant communities with this method. And it worked!
These ancient peasants had been so low-tech that they fell under the spell
of 16mm. The content of the film was largely unknown, but one report writes
that a film contained footage of the warm beds and good work conditions
that would greet European no-homies in the workhouses that Himmler had just
set up.
"Definition: Low-tech wormer: an individual who uses old fashioned
media to do his phreaking. Example: using the now tons of discarded
carbon to print the code for a worm. Distribute the newsletter by
placing the carbon on a sheet of gelatin, running the prints and
using it as wrapping paper for food. Note: current federal law
prohibits the use of paper to transmit written symbols (see Omnibus
Recycling Act) but no law says you can't wrap food with it!"
-- The New Anarchist's Cookbook
The pedal-truck had entered a narrow road that ran through South Campus.
Hanson had the truck park a block away from the warehouse. The good thing
about a pedal truck is that few people want to steal it when they find out
all the work it involves to just get it to go. The four of them walked over
to the warehouse across the street, avoiding a board-man who was trying to
sell them brain-stim tatoos.
Sitting at the warehouse door was a chimp with a brain-boost wearing the
blue Central Services uniform. The easiest score of all, chimps could read
cards but could not piece together the complex underpinnings of a scam.
Hanson decided he could skip plan A and go directly to plan B now that he
saw the guard was a chimp. He smiled and walked up to the grizzled looking
chimp, who was lethargicly playing Solitaire on a wood crate.
"I'm here for the shipment. This is my permit."
The chimp grabbed the card and placed it into the net choke. A green slip
came out and the chimp looked at it slowly. A nod of his head was followed
by the release of a lever which raised the metal door. Good, the skeleton
page worm is still valid. The four ran in and quickly pulled the door shut.
It was important not to raise suspicion; it was also necessary to keep out
the tatoo seller who was milling around outside. Inside, Hanson knew that
they had hit the motherload. Along the wall was a rack filled with Mountain
bike parts.
"We have to be quick about this," Hanson whispered as he pulled out several
cans of spray paint from his sheetsack. The paint inside was a special
brownish-orange mixture that looked just like rust when sprayed onto metal.
One of the little origami kids grabbed a can and started going over the
bike parts. "Rust never sleeps!" Within an hour the paint had dried and the
four started bundling together the chains, frames and wheels that they
would assemble the next day. The origamistas would have their new power
bikes, but for Hanson a mobile bike was in the works. Using his artistic
skills, Hanson would soon be riding around in a new MolyTi Special hidden
under a fake patina of rust. To complete the illusion, the new GelSim seat
would be hidden under an old piece of burlap and rusty bolts would be
attached to the frame with wire. After reopening the door, the four ran the
parts across the street and into the truck using a relay approach. The blue
chimp watched attentively and nodded from time to time. When the truck was
full, Hanson told the old driver, "I'll be back at my dome sometime
tomorrow and we'll put everything together" The origamistas smiled and soon
the pedal truck disappeared down the street. Hanson ducked down a side
street to get out of view as quickly as possible. He knew that as soon as
the campus security showed up, the tatoo seller would be able to fill in
the details of the heist that would be beyond the ability of the chimp to
relay. Hanson looked at himself. If he was going to an interview, he had
certainly come to appear as a most undesirable candidate. Acid had streaked
part of his black hair white, rust colored paint had dripped all over his
shirt and pants and 2 days of stubble covered his face. No time to clean
up, the interview was in half an hour, the time it would take to walk to
the office. Besides, if they really want to hire me, my looks won't make
any difference. Walking northeast, Hanson quickly left behind the warehouse
section of South Campus. Besides himself and the tatoo seller, Hanson noted
that there were no people occupying this neighborhood at all. Most of the
metal sheds being used by Central Services were marked with the simplified
logos that made up Standard Primate English. Several times, Hanson walked
past the shuffling 4 foot forms of the workchimps in their blue uniforms,
their hollow eyes staring up at him, and getting out of the way quickly if
he was in their path. Staring out the window of an abandoned looking
building was a gray haired chimp who eyed Hanson with fear. The last
building that Hanson had to walk past to get onto the academic complex was
a food bar. The two chimps seated at the small metal food trough looked up
at him and stopped eating. Hanson ran across the street as quickly as he
could, dodging a cart full of scrap metal that was being driven in by a
chimp wearing a Central State cap. Hanson rarely came into town, and all of
a sudden something had really bothered him. Do I really want to work here?
Fear gagged his throat. The final image of the warehouse district that
really disturbed him was of a chimp toddler on a plastic trike, bubbly
happy looking, and pulling a little plastic wagon. In the wagon were a
bunch of bones, probably horse or pig bones, but from the distance across
the street, Hanson couldn't be sure. Turning away for one last time, he
headed toward the row of pine trees that ran along the academic complex.
"Modern historians are at a loss as to what specific event could be
pinpointed to as the beginning of the current American Civil war.
Rather, they emphasize that the general trends building toward the
collapse of the current Union had been in place for many decades: the
8 trillion dollar federal debt, the steadily eroding quality of life,
the purchase of key American industries by private creditors within
the International Monetary Fund, and the growth of a new American
middle class raised on the fruits of the Information Technology
revolution, left little doubt that any state able to declare
independence from Washington D.C. would do so. The outlaw congress of
the Iowa Convention published the famous Adam's Doctrine, lifting
verbatim from the Founding Fathers comments that made it a democratic
right to reject governance as it was currently practiced in
Washington. The forceful seizure of great tracts of land throughout
Kansas by the IMF to cover defaults on the debt led to great violence
as local populations fought against the newly installed German
landlords. The retreat of the German security guards along a line
demarcated by the Mississippi river led to the publication of the
Economic Bill of Rights, having as its main passage, "No American
citizen shall ever be held liable for debt secured or maintained by
any organ of government."
-- History of the IMF in the twenty-first century: Original source
unknown.
Several buildings in the Academic Complex were obviously quite new. At
least since the very last time that Hanson had been here almost 5 years
ago. Like thousands of other so called residents, Hanson's hasty flight
from Central State had been signaled by the firebombing of the
Administration building with the ensuing riot shutting down services for
almost a month. At the interview, Hanson would no doubt be quizzed on the
meaning of these events and his possible involvement with them. Hanson held
out the worn student identification card that still functioned for him from
time to time. When economic conditions permitted, Hanson was able to avoid
workhouse life by claiming that he was still enrolled in the Doctoral
program of the Department of Political Science. To make the act more
convincing, he would show the drudge ropers several of the books he carried
in his sheetsack, like "Harmony and the New States" or "Brother Jim: An
American Life". The MetalFuzz were guests in the states, and often didn't
hide their disdain for Brother Jim, but someone actually getting a
Doctorate in this stuff must be so mind burnt that he was completely
harmless.
Hanson remembered one incident four years ago: sitting under a tree one
summer afternoon, he had been absorbed in a pair of sunglasses that a
workhouse drudge had traded him for a grasshopper-bot Hanson once swiped
from a landscaper as it left the compound Hanson had been roped into. The
glasses were a common novelty at the time; they usually contained photos
inscribed in the lenses by a layered grating process. When the wearer
stared out through the lenses in bright light, holographic photos would
appear suspended out in front of the viewer's face, the most common photos
being life sized nude women. But these glasses were quite different. An
array of pages appeared in front of Hanson, photos of pages from an old
book whose sheets were often creased and torn, edges ripped. The reader of
the book was told to read the book and pass the sunglasses on to someone
else. Using a small tab on the glasses allowed Hanson to focus in the
individual pages of the hologram. This was a photo of a complete,
uncensored, unrevised version of George Orwell's "1984" made from a book
many decades old! The Holy Grail for a cyberworm like Hanson, the real book
was rarely seen in any version other than the burger wrappers that smeared
their food contents blue with mimeo ink from the few paragraphs that got
out through the low- techers roving library. And this was the real version
at that. The current library edition contained all sorts of crap about
Brother Jim and his defeat of Communism, changes made with the "wonderful
cooperation of the George Orwell estate". Jeez.
It was with understandable absorption that Hanson allowed himself to be
thrown off guard when the compound curfew fuzz kicked his feet yelling "No
more lunch hour!"
This fuzz was typically outstate, proud of the fact that he could only use
Standard Primate English with his "Happy Debt Holder Scum", typically
cursing in German most of the time. The guard quickly grabbed the
sunglasses from Hanson's face and the Brother Jim book he had been
fake-reading from his hands.
"You Doctor kid I hear? You know German?"
Ya. Hanson knew. He had to pass the University exam in order to maintain
the stipend, but that was many years ago.
"Here read this." The guard handed Hanson a crisp looking little black book
labeled `Mein Kampf'. "Learn it. Feel it."
The current Brother Jim administration had made it illegal for the IMF host
forces to bring in any non-English material; but this didn't stop a group
of MetalFuzzes from importing boatloads of the `Nazi Bible' into the
country so that "finally these screwed up Americans can think straight."
The smiling guard then handed Hanson back his glasses and let him spend the
rest of the afternoon under the tree reading. The next day Hanson found
that by remembering a few choice phrases from the book and shouting "Sieg
Heil" to the guards, he would be left alone to do what he wanted. Pretty
soon all the Americans in the summer compound were imitating him.
Especially effective was the practice of getting together with the guards
and practice marching around, their hands raised together in the Nazi
salute. If they did that a few times a day, the guards would get so lax
that they could even run out at a night and hit the beer stands. They made
sure to bring back a few bottles for the guards. One of the guards would
make a comment in English that Hanson didn't understand: "So you now a real
Hogan's Hero, Ya?" An occasional drunken conference with the guards on the
"need for revolution" and things got so lax that Hanson was able to get his
own terminal smuggled into the compound. After carving up a few cards for
the Fuzz who could then order all the IMF goods they wanted, Hanson was
pretty much told he could leave any time he wanted. "But be careful. Not
all are like us!" Up to that time, no-homies dreaded being roped in by the
IMF so much that they were eager to find work with any American drudge who
was rising up the ladder of the Plan. But within a couple of years it had
become quite apparent: sign up for the Plan and get the worst work orders
handed out by the IMF, but if you fake out the Fuzz, work real hard for an
hour or two each day and sincerely ask the Germans to explain this or that
meaning of `My Struggle', wear a `Mit Blut und Eissen' T-shirt, and your
chances for survival and freedom became much better.
The present now found Hanson entering the new administration building.
Under the dull light of a gray Michigan morning, the new red granite facade
hid any evidence of the firebombing that occurred five years ago. All
around him, Hanson was impressed by the newness that meant that at one time
or another everything had been replaced at some time in the past five
years. Standing at the top of the new steps, he surveyed the crisp
geometric forms of the landscaping that went from the building in a line to
the north and neatly hid the monorail track. The expense was obvious; pine
trees that had been over 20 feet tall were completely wiped out in the
bombing five years ago. Yet now, in the exact same spots were trees that
reached 30 feet. From his vantage point Hanson could make out another
strange sight. On the northwest corner of the South Campus was a cardboard
shanty town erected by another contingent of the Homeless Tribe. In years
past the attempts at putting up cardboard relief shelters right on the
grounds had been repulsed by the tacitly approved drunken raids of the
skinhead children who were attending the University while their IMF
administrator parents did their stint in the U.S. But the size of this
community meant the rules had changed. At the edge of the community could
be a seen a large drive-in-theater screen.
Close to the entrance was the typical stack of student papers. Picking one
up, Hanson was grateful that English was still used on campus, if the
headlines were any indicator:
Border Buildup: IMF Agrees to Transfer of Military Hardware to
Indiana. South Brazil: Government Reports Evacuation of Sao Paulo
Complete. Amazonia: Mars Launch on Schedule. Western Americans
Included on Crew. Riot: Nazi Traditionalists Fight IMF Over Land
Rights, Clan Brought in to Mediate.
Hmm. Western America. Poor people are left in peace there. Give any
indication you want to move there and risk having a roper visit you in the
middle of the night to tear your throat out. The Jimbos and the Nazi's had
a nice sounding phrase: "Any debt holder caught attempting to leave the
area of his currently assigned work precinct will be arrested for treason
against the state." Depending on the zeal of the MetalFuzz, you could
easily be shot if your homeless condition was one that included a foot
sojourn heading west. Since Michigan was surrounded by water, it was travel
to the south of your assigned work district that bought immediate
suspicion. Travel north was no longer possible, with the bombing of the
bridge and snipers camping on the shores of the large beach estates now
traded around the IMF like so many poker chips.
Hanson's reflection shot back at him from the door's glass. The paint, the
filth and the stubble left no doubt that he was a no-homie, an image
enforced by the wild mane of black hair streaked in white, looking so much
like a skunk being torn to shreds in a losing battle against a cyberfly.
The walk into the now carpeted lobby bought a nod from the reception chimp
who sat behind the registration desk. The chimp was one of those few ten
percent of the brain-boost population who could type slowly but with
accuracy, and hence were in great demand as office chimps. The chimp was
even at home in the suit he wore, wearing a velcro attached tie. A tap of
the keys bought a message to the overhead screen, the characters reading
"You can't come into the interview looking like this. I will let you into
the health club in the basement where you will clean up and get your hair
cut. Clean clothes will be available. I will let them know what is
happening. Be back at my desk at 11:00." A genius. Most chimps only had a
general concept of time, but this one could think forward to something
happening in the future. Hanson looked down in embarrassment at the T-shirt
he was wearing. Beneath the paint streaks was visible the symbol of an
American flag, the stars in the upper-left rearranged so that they formed
the pattern of a Swastika." A logo at the bottom read "IMF Summer Tour --
The Broken Crosses" and on the back read "Roadie". Shit, they could get
real pissed if they saw this. Best move was to hit the health club and
throw it in the trash as quickly as possible.
The Broken Crosses was one of the truly funny media scams to happen all
last summer. A group of homeless skinheads had formed a parody rock band
using work permits that Hanson had hacked out through an IMF net choking on
a wormOS. Several times that summer they had gotten onto college campuses
doing their show, although they skipped Central State for obvious reasons.
Hanson had wormed up a T-shirt kiosk so that it would print up these
shirts, which they exchanged by the hundreds for campus dorm food tickets.
The Crosses' lead singer had even managed to get fake registrations so that
they could spend the whole summer as `guest artists from Latvia'.
Before long, a media virus from an unknown source was proclaiming that the
Broken Crosses was the most popular band of the summer. The lead singer was
soon seen on a Caroline Satellite solemnly telling the interviewer of the
many years of struggle they had to go through in Latvia before they finally
hit it big, Thanks to all you loyal fans who stuck it out with us all these
years. The mania was an endless source of laughs; Hanson even remembered
one 18 year old girl telling him that her older brother had some of their
bootlegs from years ago. Standing around on campus, adopting a fake Latvian
accent and pretending to `manage' the Broken Crosses, got Hanson more
sexual favors than he had seen his whole life up to that point. Typical
venues for the group included such songs as "Let's Shave Hitler's
Mustache"; Hanson even contributed lyrics to song that got an IMF Grade 4
Ban called "IMF and I am pissed!". Needless to say, the Grade 4 Ban
instantly catapulted the group to number 1.
Before getting roped in, at the time the Broken Crosses' media star had
burnt out and the gig was up, Hanson had managed to steal as much as 2000
student card numbers and all the files that went with them. A whole block
of them went to Chalker later that year. Chalker, unfortunately didn't
realize that if you ran a group of foreign numbers all at once, the IMF was
sure to get tipped eventually, especially if they were student numbers from
rich kids' families. Hanson now felt sorry for Chalker. One step forward
and two steps back, welcome to the Plan.
A push of the Health Club lock got Hanson into the shower-room wear he
quickly stashed his sheetsack into a locker and slapped on a lock. After
showering and wrapping himself in a towel, he walked over to a barber chair
where a chimp was waiting for him. The scissors the chimp held looked like
blunt kindergarten ones. Slowly and precisely, the happy looking chimp
chopped on the wild, black mane for half an hour. Looking in the mirror,
Hanson could see that most of the white streaks were gone. A little
bowl-cuttish, but I've had much worse. The chimp then gestured to several
hangers on a rack that contained blue blazers and matching slacks. After
the right fit was found and tried on, Hanson then stepped back to admire
himself. Jeez, I look just like a Brother Jim, he thought. In a sarcastic
fake southern voice, Hanson barked "No turning back! I'm stepping with the
Plan!" The barber chimp pursed his lips in a simian smile. Hanson ran back
up stairs, the clock at five to 11.
"You can go into the first door on the left" read the overhead character
display.
A tall, blond, blue blazer wearing man stepped from behind a desk to greet
him.
"Mr. Arthur Hanson. Have a seat." The man said grinning from ear to ear.
Hanson sat down in the plush office chair. The office was large, with
several abstract paintings on the walls. "Do you smoke? No? Good. At ten
dollars a pack I should quit."
Hanson felt very nervous. Everything was new. Everything smelled new. This
is the big rope, I just know it.
Dread knotted his stomach. A tall woman, about 6 foot four, long blonde
hair, stepped into the office scowling at the two of them. Oh, shit, here
it comes.
"Bob, what do you think you're doing? Do you think that maybe he's even had
breakfast today? Christ."
Bob burst out laughing, "Alright, I apologize. Let's head down the hall and
get you something to eat." The woman this time cracked out into a smile.
Walking down the hall, the three of them passed several University
employees, all the same, all wearing Navy Blue and smiling to each other. A
three foot tall chimp carrying a file folder ran into Bob's leg. Bob
smiled, and said "Whoa there little guy!" and patted him gently on the
head. But so strange to Hanson were the eyes of the chimp, widened in fear
during the three seconds that the pat lasted. When the pat ended, the chimp
quickly scurried away, the folder clutched tightly to his chest.
The three entered a large sunroom. Milling around the food buffet were even
more University employees. Their numbers now confirmed for Hanson the fact
that none of them were shorter than six foot. The men were often 7 feet.
Women of 6 five seemed very common. And all had blond hair. Hanson was
motioned to a chair. Right behind him came the chimp pushed cart filled
with Burgers, Fries, and Onion rings. "Eat up!"
The blonde woman had introduced herself as Susan, Vice President for
Business Development. Bob interjected, "Look here Art, can I call you Art?
Good. The monorail leaves right from this building and goes directly to
North Campus. You don't even have to step outside if you want at all, and
after all, who would WANT to. When you get your car you just leave it home.
Great system I would say." Susan cut him off. "Bob, the poor guy must be so
mixed up. We haven't even told him why he's being called in for an
interview!"
More knots in Hanson's stomach. Yep, they're playing with me alright.
Bob held out his hand and gripped Hanson's tightly, "Congratulations, Mr.
Hanson. You have been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
Political Science. If you will accept the position, we invite you to join
our faculty as chair of the department of Political Science. Your duties to
commence immediately with teaching duties to begin this Fall Semester. Here
are the keys to your house," Bob handed him a house card.
"The car should be in the garage tomorrow. If you need anything at all
contact this number and they'll get it for you. Your regular faculty office
will open next Monday; an assistant will be there to set up your office
this weekend. The info you need should be right on the card. Now what?" Bob
looked at Susan who had been straining her face at him. "Just wait. O.K. do
you accept?"
A half sound of "ya" left the throat of the now shocked Hanson. "Good. O.K.
Sue, go ahead and ask," replied Bob.
Susan pulled out a music CD and handed it to Hanson. On the cover was an
overly pixellated photo of Hanson and the Broken Crosses standing on the
makeshift stage of last year's "IM Pissed" concert. The title contained one
of Hanson's old worm permutations, for now the group had been labeled as
`Art Hanson and the Broken Crosses'. Susan excitedly asked "Would you
autograph this for my daughter?" Then to Hanson's complete shock the
statuesque and reserved looking woman growled in a fake Latvian accent "IMF
and I am pissed! My daughter is going to be so thrilled to find that you
are working on Campus!"
Bob laughed. "O.K. Good buddy. Need anything at all just call my office."
The two administrators got up sharply from the table and strode away,
leaving a permanently bewildered Hanson sitting beneath the hot mid-day sun
now coming through the sun room canopy.
Half in a daze, he left and went back to the lobby. Facing the reception
chimp, he muttered in English, "Can you get a message sent for me?" The
chimp nodded yes. A message was written giving the location of the
cardboard dome. Directions were given to have it tacked to the door. The
message read "Keep everything you want, even the dome if you can use it. I
won't be coming back. I just got hired at the University."
"Concurrent with the new Economic Bill of Rights was a series of Acts
which were quickly adopted by the newly Debt Free States. The Fair
Land Use and Homestead Act was quickly ratified at the Convention
held in Mexico City, home of the new League of Debt Free Nations. Its
most eloquent orators had to fight against the accusation that old
style Leninism would result, but eventually even the staunchest
critic was won over."
______________________________________________________________________________
Eric Miller is a graduate student at Michigan State University where he
studies the use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) in architectural and product
design. Other academic interests include Artificial Life, Virtual Reality,
and Cyberspace culture. Recreational interests include mountain biking and
cross-country skiing in Michigan's beautiful forests, painting, and
composing electronic music as well as writing fiction.
millere@student.msu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
If you like Quanta, you may want to
check out these other magazines, also
produced and distributed electronically:
Core Contact: rita@eff.org
CORE is available by e-mail subscription and anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org.
Send requests and submissions to rita@eff.org. CORE is an entirely electronic
journal dedicated to e-publishing the best, freshest prose and poetry being
created in Cyberspace. CORE is published monthly. Back issues are available
via anonymous ftp at ftp.eff.org. (192.88.144.4).
Cyberspace Vanguard Contact: cn577@cleveland.freenet.edu
Cyberspace Vanguard is a new digest/newsletter, containing news and views
from the science fiction universe. Send subscription requests, submissions,
questions, and comments to xx133@cleveland.freenet.edu or
cn577@cleveland.freenet.edu.
InterText Contact: jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu
InterText is the network fiction magazine devoted to the publication of
quality fiction in all genres. It is published bi-monthly in both ASCII and
PostScript editions. The magazine's editor is Jason Snell, who has written
for Quanta and for InterText's predecessor, Athene. Assistant editor is are
Geoff Duncan.
The PostScript laser-printer edition is the version of choice, and includes
PostScript cover art. For a subscription (specify ASCII or PostScript),
writer's guidelines, or to submit stories, mail Jason Snell at
jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu. InterText is also available via anonymous FTP from
network.ucsd.edu (IP# 128.54.16.3). If you plan on FTPing the issues, you can
be placed on a list that will notify you when each new issue appears -- just
mail your request to jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu.
Unit Circle Contact: kmg@esd.sgi.com
The brainchild of Kevin Goldsmith, Unit Circle is the underground
quasi-electronic 'zine of new music, radical politics and rage in the 1990's.
"Quasi-electronic" bcause Unit Circle is published both as an electronic
magazine (in PostScript form only) and as an underground journal, in paper
form. If you're interested in receiving either format of the 'zine, send mail
to Kevin at kmg@esd.sgi.com.
______________________________________________________________________________
Next Issue:
Watch for the conclusion of Nicole Gustas's To Touch the Stars, as well as
the continuation of Eric Miller's Microchips Never Rust and the next
Harrison Chapter from Jim Vassilakos. Also watch for a new story from Lou
Crago (The Fourth Cat). I'm also looking into the possibility of printing a
new, exciting serial which I hope to give you more details on next issue.
Of course, we'll also be seeing new fiction from authors on an off the net.
Until then!
______________________________________________________________________________
Thank you, thank you very much.
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Volume V Issue 3 ISSN 1053-8496 December 1993
___________________________________________________
|Q U A N T A December 1993|
| Volume V Issue 3|
| |
|Editor/Technical Director......Daniel K. Appelquist|
|Cover Art.................................John West|
|Proofreading........................Cheryl Droffner|
| |
|Quanta is published as "shareword." It is|
|supported solely by reader donations. If you read|
|and enjoy Quanta, please send $5 to the postal|
|address below. Checks may be made out to Quanta|
|Magazine. Donation, although encouraged, is not a|
|requirement for subscription. |
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| Quanta |
| 3003 Van Ness Street NW #S919 |
| Washington, D.C. 20008 |
|___________________________________________________|
CONTENTS
LOOKING AHEAD.............................................Daniel K. Appelquist
Serials:
To Touch the Stars (Part 2)......................................Nicole Gustas
The Harrison Chapters (Chapter 15)..............................Jim Vassilakos
Microchips Never Rust (Part 2).....................................Eric Miller
Stories:
Excerpts from "Earth Rhetoric".....................................A.Y. Tanaka
Different Circumstances............................................Jason Snell
Quanta (ISSN 1053-8496) is copyright (c)1993 by Daniel K. Appelquist. This
magazine may be archived, reproduced and/or distributed provided that it is
left intact and that no additions or changes are made to it. The individual
works presented herein are the sole property of their respective author(s). No
further use of their works is permitted without their explicit consent. All
stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name
or character. Any similarity is purely coincidental.
SUBSCRIPTION AND ARCHIVE INFO AT THE END OF THIS FILE
______________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
______________________________________________________________________________
Well, I just got back from Internet World 93 in New York City. Many thanks to
Tony Abbott and Meckler Corporation for arranging for my free ticket. I have
to say, however, that I haven't come away from the conference with any bold
new realizations about the direction of Quanta or electronic publishing. The
main question people at the conference seemed to be asking about the
Internet was "Well, what have we got here?" Unfortunately, the answer at
this point seems to be "Uh... We don't really know." People are unsure how
to proceed, unsure what the immediate future will bring for the Internet.
American politicians are talking about "information super-highways,"
corporations are becoming increasingly Net-aware, commercialization of the
Internet seems imminent and inevitable. Yet those who already inhabit the
Internet seem determined to hold on to what they have, and what they have is
mostly free services and information. It's a tricky balance.
I attended one session on copyright issues which was fairly interesting. One
of the speakers' point of view was that the Internet needs to be "civilized"
so that it will be more attractive to business interests. They pointed out
that traditional ways of doing business, and traditional ways of publishing
simply don't work on the Internet. My reaction to this went something like
this: The Internet, as it exists right now, is a generic information
delivery and access system. The metaphor for document publishing on this
system should take full advantage of the system, and not rely on outdated
concepts propitiated by and originating in the print publishing world. One
speaker at this session railed against the idea of authors retaining the
copyrights to their own works. What's up with that? Why is it so bad for
authors to retain copyright on their own work? We need to re-examine the
commodity-based view we have of publishing (something I believe Mike Goodwin
of the EFF had been pushing earlier in the session, although I didn't catch
his talk). If the Internet does not lend itself to traditional publishing,
perhaps it is traditional publishing which needs to change and not the
Internet.
Now, I'm not saying that the freely distributed journal should be the model
for Internet publishing. In fact, many models were suggested for
revenue-generating publishing at the conference. One of these, proposed by
Brad Templeton of Clarinet, consisted of a fiction database, where, for a
monthly charge, users could connect and read all the fiction they wanted.
The system would keep track of how many users had read which pieces, and
remunerate the authors of those pieces accordingly. This seemed to me like
an extremely elegant solution for that type of revenue-based publishing.
Many other models were also suggested, all of them interesting and worth
thinking about.
An interesting model that's already being pioneered is that of Unit Circle,
published by Kevin Goldsmith (see ad. on page 20). Unit Circle publishes a
print version, which one can subscribe to for a fee, and also publishes a
PostScript electronic version, which is free. Larger magazines, like Wired,
are trying this hybrid format out on a much larger scale (although Wired
only publishes in ASCII text form electronically).
My point, though, is that both models of publishing (revenue generating and
free journals like Quanta and Intertext) can exist simultaneously. I think
the real interesting areas in the next few years will be in hybrid,
quasi-electronic, forms of publishing, and in Internet publishing via
hypertext systems such as Mosaic. By the way, this issue of Quanta will be
available on Mosaic in hypertext form in the near future. The plan is for
future issues to be made available this way as well. I'll be sending out a
letter with information on that as soon as things materialize.
The future of electronic publishing is still mirky however, as mirky as the
future of the Internet itself. I'm convinced something good will come of it.
Electronic publishing has not yet come of age, but we're working on it.
We've got a great issue for you this month. My friend Jason Snell is back
with a new one "Different Circumstances." As a side note, although Jason and
I have been called "friends" for a while by the authors of various
publications, we actually just met recently when I travelled to California
to visit friends and drop in on Worldcon.
We've also got continuations of three serials, and a new piece from A.Y.
Tanaka that's likely to amuse... or was that confuse? At any rate, enjoy!
We'll be featuring a new novella dealing with the exploration of the Moon
... by hot air balloon, called "Moonifest Destiny." We'll also be featuring
the real conclusion to Nicole's serial (To Touch the Stars) as well as
continuations of the Harrison Chapters and Microchips Never Rust.
______________________________________________________________________________
Moving? Take Quanta with you!
Please remember to keep us apprised of any changes in your address. If you
don't we can't guarantee that you'll continue to receive the high quality of
fiction and non-fiction that Quanta provides. Also, if your account is going
to become non-existent, even temporarilly, please inform us. This way, we can
keep Net traffic due to bounced mail at a minimum. Please send all
subscription updates to quanta@andrew.cmu.edu. Thanks!
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
EXCERPTS FROM `EARTH RHETORIC' "For rhetoric is, after all, the use of
(203rd. ed.) language to produce results. But Earth
stands alone in the subtlety and
A.Y Tanaka obscurity of its rhetorical
techniques..."
______________________________________________________________________________
From the Introductory Exhortation:
Charting the rhetorical terrain of most planets is a relatively
straightforward endeavor. Certain patterns of expression are used in certain
standard situations for certain fairly discernible ends. For rhetoric is,
after all, the use of language to produce results. But Earth stands alone in
the subtlety and obscurity of its rhetorical techniques...
____________________
(From Section 7.3) The phenomenon discussed in this section reflects the
continuing underground [figure of speech] resistance to the written word
throughout human history, and the chronic re-emergence of the vocal
apparatus as a medium of self-expression, analogous to the objectively
purposeless use of comparable organs in tour-pacing, key action
(musical/alpha-numerical) and sex (see note 7). We have chosen Benedictine
Recapitulation as our term for this, not for religious reasons nor for its
implications in the sphere of food and drink, but because prominent examples
-- remnants of the earlier oral tradition -- first appear in unrefined form
in the quaintly-apocalyptic Book of the Wars of Baruch (=Benedict). In the
second chapter, Jorak (son of Nathan? son of Julian?), after long brooding
in his tent, sends for Xergorianobis, tending flock on Mt. Negus near Kiryat
ha-Nabim.
Xergorianobis: "What service, my captain?"
"Of weight, my keeper of flocks. Listen well."
"I listen."
"Ride, with no sign of haste (to confound the spies) to Jorak my namesake.
Bid him, thrice on our name and thrice on the stones of prophecy, join his
with ours at Megan Hill before the dawn, thence to surprise the camp of
Rurik of Khoth, who has long done us ill. Choose your fleece well, my keeper
of flocks, for the night is cold, and muzzle your ass in Sarmatia's manner,
for strong teeth are rare. Go now."
Xergorianobis rides as bidden and shortly reaches the tent of the younger
(we assume) Jorak (son of Eben? son of Obed?) but is confronted by Jorak's
ensign, who demands to know why his captain must be disturbed.
Xergorianobis:
"I tell. Listen."
"I listen."
Xergorianobis: "Jorak my captain, after long brooding in his tent, sent for
this humble messenger, long tending flock on Mt. Negus near Kiryat ha-Nabim.
`What service, my captain?' `Of weight, my keeper of flocks. Listen.' I
listened. `Ride,' he said, `with no sign of haste (to confound the spies) to
Jorak my namesake. Bid him, thrice on our name and thrice on the stones of
prophecy, join his with ours at Megan Hill before the dawn, thence to
surprise the camp of Rurik of Khoth, who has long done us ill. Choose your
fleece well, my keeper of flocks, for the night is cold, and muzzle your ass
in Sarmatia's manner, for strong teeth are rare.' Thus he spoke, then bade
me go." Impressed, the ensign wakes his captain. "My captain, a keeper of
flocks brings weight. Tending flock on Mt. Negus near Kiryat ha-Nabim was
he, when Jorak his captain, after long brooding in his tent, sent for him.
`What service, my captain?' he spoke, and Jorak answered, `Of weight, my
keeper of flocks. Listen.' He listened. `Ride,' he said, `with no sign of
haste (to confound the spies) to Jorak my namesake. Bid him, thrice on our
name and thrice on the stones of prophecy, join his with ours at Megan Hill
before the dawn, thence to surprise the camp of Rurik of Khoth, who has long
done us ill.' He further bade him choose his fleece well, for the night was
cold, as it still is, and to muzzle his ass in Sarmatia's manner, for strong
teeth are rare. Thus he spoke, then bade him go."
Fully awake, the younger Jorak orders Xergorianobis in.
"Speak, keeper of flocks."
"I speak. Listen."
"I listen."
"Sire, as rule dictates, tending flock on Mt. Negus near Kiryat ha-Nabim was
I, when my captain, the Jorak of origin, after long brooding in his tent,
sent for this humble messenger. I came. `What service, my captain?' `Of
weight, my keeper of flocks. Listen.' I listened. `Ride,' he said, `with no
sign of haste (to confound the spies) to Jorak my namesake...'"
The younger Jorak thereupon -- see Appendix XVII for the full text.
This and other portions of the Book of the Wars of Baruch (=Benedict) were
taken down [figure of speech] much too faithfully from one of the unlettered
public storytellers of the time, who may have suspected his listeners had
all the time in the world [figure of speech]. How different, how shorter,
the written text might have been had the storyteller sensed bad weather
approaching, or enemy troops, or an impatience among his hearers, or was
himself hungry or tired.
Today, more than a few humans retain these extensive recapitulatory powers.
Examples (condensed):
(a) "So my bless-mom told me to shut up and get out of bed and stick on
my shoes, who cares which ones, and come on over here and pester you to let
me have an extra chair -- the hoity-toity one if you know what's good for
you -- because what the hell [figure of speech] you never get company anyway
with the crap you serve and you won't miss it and besides Uncle Dormus and
Aunt Shelly are coming for a visit but mom calls it an inspection and the
cat scratched up the other chair we got and Mom says Aunt Shelly won't sit
on the chair from the kitchen because she's stuck up [figure of speech] and
expects us to bend over backwards...
(b) "Let's see now, the flag was up so I got dressed and went out and
walked over to the mailbox and got the mail and walked back and sat down and
finished up the coffee and the cream bun and started to snip open the mail
and sure enough right on top was this here long-awaited
just-can't-keep-my-pants-on annual letter from Maude the church secretary
asking what my tithing plans are for this year so they can start in fixing
the plumbing in the parsonage. She and the committee, I guess which is
George, Bibi and Rheinhardt recommend I plunk down five dollars flat every
Sunday for fifty weeks (they won't make a fuss about my two weeks with Bess
and Joe in Portland) which comes out to just about two-hundred-fifty a year.
That's a dollar a week more than they wanted last year -- four dollars a
week for fifty weeks (they didn't make a fuss about my two weeks with Bess
and Joe in San Francisco) which comes out -- came out, that is -- to...
well, just about two-hundred. That's a dollar a week more than they wanted
the year before -- three dollars a week for fifty weeks (they didn't make a
fuss about my two weeks with Bess and Joe at Ft. Drum) which comes out --
came out, that is -- to one-fifty for that year. That's a dollar more..."
(c) "O-dokie, sure, I know, I know, it's two-thirty already but I can't
get there yet `cause the Roach broke down at the ingress to E-62, the tricky
one between 107 and 130 near the VTM building (local's entrance) and the
Montessori school -- you can see it from the Dewer's statue if you sight it
just right. So the slope climbs real steep there, `prox seven degrees above
code -- eight, in fact near the lamp tower, says the [unclear]. The engine
(it's a Milton-cyl job, just tuned a month ago) starts to flutter, so I say
to myself just needs more bean soup, so I press the pad and instead of
vroom-vroom I get ~Eg~=~E~ and then fdzz. Then a 620 slides up behind me,
growling cyls, and a 512 behind him, and a Mickle Hardy behind him, and a
Shadrack 22 behind him (her, really), and then a Montego Pariah, all
hunkered up, than a..."
What triggers these transports? Neither content nor circumstance give us a
clue. Sj's answer -- "Anything" -- may be the one. In example (a) the child,
at another time of day or under a cloudier or sunnier sky, or within the
sound-reach of alternate neighborhood bird species, might have settled for,
"I want your chair and I'll hold my breath till you give me it." In (b) the
church member might have hammered a brief note to the church door: "Enough's
enough; indoor plumbing's overrated." In (c) the driver of the failed Roach
might have just muttered, "Scratch it for today" and slouched back toward
the ingress. The human possessing or possessed by this talent rarely
monitors the episode as it takes place nor recalls much of it afterwards.
The rare subject who recalls it fully finds in it nothing out of the
ordinary. We've lost data on this phenomenon in the less advanced
jurisdictions. Mh fears for the safety of subjects enclaved where Government
is understandably but unnecessarily venerated. The subject's unpredictable
and barely repressible Benedictine faculty is a vocal, if unintentioned,
reminder of humanity's pre-rule past. Sn, less fearful, points out the
overwhelmingly non- controversial nature of the material elicited during
these episodes and has higher hopes for the subject's fate. Mh responds that
it is not the material that endangers, but the performance itself, easily
taken as a declaration of the subject's freedom to expound upon whatever
strikes his fancy [figure of speech]. To bystanders and undercover police --
the potential witnesses at the trial -- it would be distressingly impious.
For Sn, most administrators were not born yesterday [figure of speech], are
not so naive as to confuse form and substance. A compassionate administrator
may even encourage irrelevant superficial discourse _ distract the subject
and his fellow citizens from more frustrating matters.
But for Mh, most administrators are not so bull-headed [figure of speech] as
to arbitrarily distinguish form and substance; for they, as we, are fully
aware form predetermines substance, facilitates it, limits it and, for most
of them, is it. She cautions us with a quaint but valid analogy: The Big
Roach hauling fertilizer this trip, may next trip (once aired out) be
hauling anti-rule printouts; and next trip, anti-rule type-D Indefatigables.
____________________
(From Section 9.02)
Initially troublesome, but to which we've slowly adjusted, is the Spiked
Moat. Examples include (a) through (f) with others available through source
#326:
(a) Art thou not Simon? "Nay, Lord... rather, yes indeed."
(b) Do YOU want back the ten guineas I borrowed? "Hell no -- Shut my
mouth, sure I do."
(c) That's a real nice fence YOU painted there. "Who me? I never painted
any... oh, thanks."
(d) You've seen George? "I don't know any George. Wait, there he is."
(e) What do YOU get when YOU cross a monkeY with a chicken? "Hey, I
never touched that chicken."
(f) Where's Chicago? "I didn't take it."
When the inquirer (and few can resist, can we?) ventures a comment on this
phenomenon, the subject denies the Moat exists. One, more open than most,
explained, "If something's not, it's not. What's the fuss?" Another answered
simply, "Not true."
The rationalia, for Fp, have to do with psycho-analytically elucidible
mechanisms. Ao sees evidence of integrated media-opaque stimulus/response
patterns (habitual tendencies III through VI) since most queries directed to
humans do seem to elicit -- often to require -- a negative response, for
self-preservation ("I didn't do it") or an occasional truth ("I didn't do
it").
____________________
(From Section 9.10) Our local assistant offered the term Blindsiding for
this phenomenon. It originally described a technique often used, and often
advised against, in the hunting of the larger animals. Example:
How about Tuesday?
"Out of the question."
So what do YOU suggest?
"How about Tuesday?"
Rationalia: Bk, as usual, is understanding [figure of speech], sees the
subject hard of hearing or a bit forgetful. But Km sees the subject
consciously and cleverly attempting to disconcert an equal, to render him
(rarely her) in some subtle way subservient. The subject gathers virtue rank
as (a) the one who denies, (b) the one who taketh away and giveth, (c) the
one who redeems false starts, (d) the one who initiates, and, if done right
[figure of speech], (e) the one who creates. Sadly, as with all those
exalted by the befuddlement of their fellows, the subject is never at peace.
His tenure depends on the extent his ploy is recognized, tolerated -- and
imitated. He will be often heard in the shadows desperately rehearsing new
dialogues: How about Wednesday? "Out of the question." How about Chicago?
"Out of the question." How about a cream bun? "Out of the question." So what
do YOU suggest? "How about..."
____________________
(From Section 13.8) The typical subject ("perpetrator" is Yt's term) of
Didactic Incontinence is a parent or concerned other (what constitutes a
"concerned" other is purposely vague) who broadcasts -- without charge,
surprisingly -- advice, instruction and summary exegesis in fields broad and
narrow, in contexts pressing and relaxed, to children of whatever age and to
unproved adults. (What constitutes a "proved" adult is purposely vague.)
No explicit vanity here; the subject shuns the obvious ego-centered patterns
of "I say/believe/think/suggest, strongly advise," to choose the
other-directed patterns of "You ought to, You'd better, Why
don't/didn't/haven't you, Do it this way, Don't do it this way, Don't forget
to, Don't you dare, Don't."
Before we selected our term for this phenomenon we hovered about and were
tempted by a variety of others, some inexcusably gross and vituperative. We
shocked ourselves, for we'd never fully realized how close we lie to those
negative forces from which we claim to stand aloof [figure of speech]. Among
the less offensive were Eternal Vigilance, Didactic Apotheosis, Tutorial
Entropy and the neo-Latin Didacticismo a Codazo Limpio, somewhat difficult
but not impossible to translate: a, "thus, in the manner of"; codo, "elbow";
-azo, a suffix denoting a blow or thrust; limpio, "clean" and by semantic
extension, swift and kinetically elegant. The evocation is of a scholar, a
teacher, a molder of minds, vigorously elbowing his/her way through a mob.
So great the visceral distress we experienced preparing this section, we
chose to forego specific examples. Even a harmless bit of evidence such as
"Don't get your feet wet," heard at a local's restricted beach not too many
years ago, proved strangely disturbing to us. Those whom misfortune has ever
placed on the receiving end [figure of speech] of this theoretically
harmless, potentially valuable but distressingly trying phenomenon will
readily understand our reluctance. Those ignorant of such experience are
truly blessed, in the stellar as well as the terrestrial sense. May their
decline be as pleasant as their youth.
We nevertheless attempt to list some of the possible rationalia driving the
subject:
(a) "To show I care."
(b) "So if anything goes wrong, I'm covered."
(c) "Someone's got to slap some order on this chaos."
(d) "It's good for you."
(e) "Human culture is transmitted through education, from the old to the
young. Don't you know that?"
(f)"Through observation and experience I've found this the most
effective means of functioning in society and of being recognized by it."
(g) "Please -- I'm getting dizzy -- please stop the merry-go-round."
____________________
(From Section 21.04) The Friendly Sparrow(s) ought not be classed with
Didactic Incontinence; many understandably take offense. The original
subjects were attested to in The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, an
insightful witness of the period. Trespassing in McGregor's garden [figure
of speech?] Peter stumbles into a gooseberry net and is caught therein by
the large brass buttons on his jacket -- a blue one, rather new. He sobs,
helpless should McGregor come this way, but is overheard by some friendly
sparrows, who fly down to him and implore him to exert himself. Mr. McGregor
comes ever closer, but Peter wriggles out just in time, loosing his jacket.
We've already seen him lose one shoe amongst the cabbages, another amongst
the potatoes. Modern examples (source #180) include:
(a) Rabbit, on release from prison: "Jesus [figure of speech?], the
screws in that pen don't let up." Sparrow: "Next time choose your detention
center with more care."
(b) Rabbit: "Ever since I lost my job I've had these lard-and-cheese
patties almost every night, and it's getting to me." Sparrow: "Don't get in
a rut. lobster two-three times a week."
The rationalia, for all but Lj, is self-evident.
____________________
(From Section 28.01) The Sleeping Guru. The subject in this case is the
unexpressive (class IV?) query-receiver responding with equal enthusiasm
("Hmm"/"Mmh"/"Mhm") to both ambiential and substantive queries. (Ambiential:
"So I K-Bosched him, wouldn't you?" "Like, you know, things get uremic, know
what I mean?" Substantive: "Are you in tune with Ishida's discussion of
Weber's thesis?")
Rationalia:
(a) The subject (i) lacks familiarity with the material discussed or
with the speaker's perhaps extra/other-terrestrial mode of presentation;
(ii) suffers from a defective appreciation of the complementary roles of
ambience and substance in successful communication; (iii) suffers from a
unique, perhaps defective, personal interpretation of reality.
(b) The subject has simply chosen not to pay attention, under the
assumption (information from an outside source) that the speaker has been
rated predisposition/prelude-to-rebellion, or otherwise not worth listening
to. Should this be the case, the recommended option for the neglected
speaker is to contact that outside source through a source of one's own, to
suggest by means of bribery, threats or new (not necessarily valid)
information that the original advice to the subject be modified.
____________________
(From Section 31.06) The Smoke Alarm is a loud, unrelenting, infinitely
recyclable request/demand for X's presence; for example, Mac! Mac! Mac! Or,
in an effort to get at the "real" Mac: Maxwell! Maxwell! Maxwell! The
subject is not necessarily a child, rarely an invalid. He calls from the
next berm or from the other end of the fort (Mac! Mac! Mac!) or from the
fort to the field or from the fort to the Roach or from the Roach to the
fort or the field or from the field to the Roach (Mac! Mac! Mac!) or from
one end of the field to the other until "Mac" reaches him and by his
presence shuts him off.
Although Mac hears the subject clearly enough, the subject hears Mac not at
all, whatever the volume, intensity, tone, pitch or fervor of Mac's
answering call, cry, yell, scream, shout, wail, bellow, bleat or ultimate
mutter, be it "Yes?" or "Yes!" or "O-dokie, I'm coming" or "Hold your horses
[figure of speech]" or "All right, all right, shut up already" or "Temper
yourself before a body calls Public Safety" or "Damn your hide, this better
be good."
By Lk's analysis, the subject hears no Mac, though everyone else does,
because his psycho-aural diagram has no Y-juncture to pre-route and
encapsulate an intermedial response. Even so, given the intra-cranial
backlog entailed, any received response would likely be misread by the
subject as (a) Mac's feeble/shameful/cunning excuse for dawdling, or (b) a
cheap conspiratorial substitute for the "real" Mac. (Unusual, this example
of reality associated with the person/thing itself rather than with
his/her/its more durable and reproducible photo/holo/audio image.)
Kq, on the other hand [figure of speech], claims the hear-no-Mac phenomenon
derives from the stressed freq/ampl sines of the subject's own voice
unrolling an endo-sonic barrier impervious to what are perceived as
xeno-sonic transmissions.
Thunderspeak takes this further. The subject performs under conditions most
consider hostile to the human voice. We assume a method to his madness
[figure of speech], some unfulfilled agenda, never revealed. The subject
enthusiastically discusses life and art, loyalty and so on, oblivious to
thunder, howling winds, the slapping of branches against the sides of the
house, the spray of cold rain through the open window, the roar of a passing
bi-train, the rumble of a nearby earthquake, the distraction of a murder in
the room, even the murder of the only listener.
Aquaphilia is a variant of this. The subject shows measurable (on the MZD
scale) discomfort, in both speaking and listening modes, if unable (for lack
of access, say, or some mechanical inefficiency) to trigger the nearest
water tap. In m-level areas this occurs in about 42% of those studied. The
preferences are: kitchen sink, 26%; dishwasher, 7%, clotheswasher, 9%;
bathroom sink, 11.5%; tub/shower, 16.5%; toilet flush, 22%; outside faucet,
8%. For pace-changing, the subject may trigger the radio (4%), the video
(11%), the Harmonium (7%), the food resolver (9%), the Roach engine (10%),
or unhook the telephone to release the dial tone (17%). [Figures adjusted
for use of two or more items at the same time.]
____________________
(From Section 31.12) An apparent contradiction to the active mnemonism
discussed elsewhere is the tendency to perversely forget or maliciously
withhold the local codes. Our researcher was victimized by this (having
stumbled into it unprepared) concluding a data-interview with an otherwise
good-natured kiosk dweller. The informant made no attempt to formally
terminate the interview, thereby preventing the researcher from leaving
(formulaic restraint); in effect, wasting his valuable time. The kiosker was
evidently toying with him [figure of speech], teasing him with false codes
such as "O-dokie, fella, that's it for now," "Well, hope it's what you
wanted," "Good luck on your work, whatever it is," "O-dokie, time's up,"
"Take care now, watch that head-beam going out," "On your way, then," "You'd
better get home before it rains -- rust, you know." Our researcher's strain
was great, kept thus in limbo [figure of speech] until the kiosk dweller
released him at last with the correct form, "It is finished."
For Ln, this phenomenon's Earth-role is less obvious than our researcher,
through us, has suggested. Her rationalia appear illogical.
____________________
(From Section 31.21) The Whynot. In the semi-jurisdictions, rather than ask
"Have you cleansed the Roach today?" the subject asks, "Why haven't you
cleansed the Roach today?" or the more compassionate "Why weren't you able
to cleanse the Roach today?" where the subject in neither case has even seen
the Roach in question. Bf adds, "Nor intends to see it, either, if in fact
it exists -- well, `exists' as other than a false but useful concept." (See
Lk et al. on the legend of the Joneses.)
Purveyors of rationalia share general agreement on the theme: roughly,
Knowing YOU, I don't expect much. This may be so where the Whynot is chosen
from a pool of options, the others being perhaps: (ii) "Have you cleansed
it?" (iii) "I just glimpsed the Roach and it's still uncleansed." (iv) "It
seems that after you cleansed it, some clown [figure of speech] rolled by
and messed it up again." But what to make of a venue where humans use the
Whynot consistently? Addressed with equal vigor to friends/enemies,
journeymen/bunglers, experts/novices alike.
With no choice involved, there are no relevant rationalia. We've in this
case a historical development, comparable to those which led to such
formulae as "Hi there, whatchadoin?" where any damn fool [figure of speech]
can see what you're doing, or "Ah, `tis your vehicle malfunctioning, is it
now?" when, as our assistant put it, "I'll surely'd not be out drenched and
greased by the way's apron just for the blossomin' health of it" [an
approximation].
This Whynot, the consistent one, derives (see Rz) from the injudiciousness
of forebosses on the honor farms where hardly-corrigibles were assigned for
their own good. Newcomers to the farms, exposed to the 5th Lingo phraseology
common there ("Why didn't you, haven't you, won't you, do you refuse to?
What are you hiding? Where is it? Why not? Why don't you cooperate? What are
you up to? Admit it.") came to associate Ling-5 with a higher soc/ec/ed
level and over time adopted it (along with the loud, harsh, impatient,
rasping snorts, which drove their children into therapy) as a mark of
achieved status and high culture.
____________________
(From Section 31.29) We call attention to a more complex variant of
Blindsiding (see above) and Judo (unavailable at press time). One of our
researchers uncovered a rhetorical device obviously conscious and malevolent
-- effective evidence, albeit anecdotal, to counter the revisionists who see
purposelessness as essential to human communication. Our researcher came
upon it inadvertently, while in the process of chiding one of the more
recalcitrant kiosk dwellers for an apparently insufficient display of
respect. Here follows a necessarily rough translation.
Our researcher (feeling for the appropriate figure of speech): "You are [but
a] contemptible swine [an extinct species], a perverter of [hitherto
ordered] minds, a caresser of impure bodies [?], a dreamer of unsanitary
notions..."
Kiosker: "Well fella, you hit the nail right on the head. It's something I
work at every day."
Ours (after a brief pause for evaluation): "You agree -- you agree? It is
not yours to agree. Is your unworthiness of such depth as to render you
neither capable nor desirous of disputation?" (And so continued in this
vein, solidifying the essence of his position.)
Kiosker: "Well, you want me to, so I'll comply. (Give me a moment to get
ready; it's been years now... O-dokie, here goes:) I hereby refute you and
any anyone who smells like you, and declare your words false. Yours, and
theirs. I present myself as without sin, as an active friend of all who
think; of all who try to, at least. So there. Happy?"
Ours (after a brief pause for evaluation): "You challenge -- you challenge?
It is not yours to challenge. What perverse bedevilment [figure of speech]
drives you to such madness...?"
As can be seen, the purpose of the kiosk dweller's clever game (and those of
others of his school) is to confuse, warp and render impotent such
intelligent yet unready minds as that of our researcher, whose short temper
was certainly understandable.
____________________
(From Section 31.47) The variety of pithy greetings we continue to uncover
suggests to us a tendency to formula, while Tr leaves hope for a surviving
rationalism. Regardless of semantic niceties or the lack of them, Ch's
classification remains the respected norm. His early notes, recently
recovered, reveal new insights:
"Reciprocal: Howdy/Howdy, Xylum/xylum, Hi/Hi, Hola/Hola, etc. Reflective:
Xylum Locum/Locum Xylum, Sugar and spice/spice and suqar (formula of extinct
sorority Nu Nu Lambda). In Hola Pepe/Hola Paco (compare Kata Zim/Kata Piro,
Hi Joe/Hi Lynn) the Hola/Hola portion is the reflective greeting, Pepe/Paco
the names of the mutual greeters. But [scratched-out name]'s imprudent view
sees the full Hola Pepe as the initial call, Hola Paco as the standard
response, which would imply the conceivably proper:
(a) `Hola Pepe, Miguel'/'Hola Paco, Ernesto'
(b) `Hi Joe, Roy'/'Hi Lynn, Sam'
(c) `Hi Joe'/'Hi Joe to you, too.'
"When I get a new notebook I'll have to shift some of the reciprocals to the
subclass of continuants or completives (God [?] keep the Tsar/Far from us
[quite widespread recently, despite there being, as we know, no more tsars];
Okowe/Ka-i-ka; Saints, it's you/And who else would I be, now). Kd, as
always, confuses completives with reflectives, which I guess is
understandable. After all, who can say with authority what Howdy/what's up,
Howdy/Doody, Glad to see You/same here, Mornin'/What's good about it and all
the rest really mean?"
____________________
(From section 32.02) "The Vessel of Difficult-to-Measure Content." In a few
small but important jurisdictions one looks on the good side of a good
situation only if one finds no other choice. Rather than elsewhere's "It
looks like a fine day" the subjects tell us "I see no danger." For "Let's
walk on the beach" they tell us "Let's avoid the casino." For "Catch our
newly-painted Roach" they tell us "Note how it's not yet faded." For "He's
got three balls" they tell us "He's not yet struck out."
Here again, analysis of the rationalia indicts the reeducation system, in
which (for good reason, we assume) a positive attitude was long interpreted
as predisposition/ prelude to rebellion, and sternly corrected. Kw doubts
this, suspects the human psyche is not so easily molded, finds in this
phenomenon yet another of their clever means of making communication
difficult; not because the subjects in question value impaired communication
as an ideal worth striving for, but "just for the hell of it" [figure of
speech].
____________________
(From Section 32.07) An unexpected amount of inter-person/species violence
would often result from what was too quickly explained by, "Sorry, my
mistake." Attestation #235 is instructive:
"(Uh, what do I talk into? This one? O-dokie, whatever. Now? `Dokie, here
goes:) Well, I was stringing it down Two-Two-Three Street, near the Julienne
Gardens, and I heard this guy talking, `prox three-four blocks away, saying
something like Mort, YOU blockhead. So I got riled, wouldn't you?"
Interviewer: "But you're not Mort."
"Sure, easy enough to say that now..."
The plethora of documentation of this sort explains the decision in some
jurisdictions to never, neither in conversation nor in private musings,
admit one's own or comment on another's faults, confess one's own or comment
on another's transgressions, because a careless eavesdropper might easily
misunderstand. The effective corollary is to permit that potential
violence-monger to overhear comments only of a positive nature ("You/I/Rosa
keep getting better and better"). Should the subject misinterpret, it would
be to assume the (self-) praise he overhears is for him, that he's getting
better and better.
____________________
(From Section 32.18) Consider this a specialized cognate of Benedictine
Recapitulation. Lr, in their Guidebook, label it Recipe Overcook and
describe it as "humans progressing -- or reverting -- to idyllic
pre-literacy" because of the demands made upon the pre-literate, or
hypermnemonic, area of the midbrain.
Often during conversation one hears, in a breath-prose pattern with minimal
pauses, a discourse comparable to the following, as surreptitiously recorded
by our researcher:
"[...] O-dokie, I'll fold, haven't had a good hand all afternoon, but say, I
was thinking there's another way to finish off all those bananas your cousin
gave you: all you do is take one half cup butter or margarine (Cher uses a
half cup oil -- yuck), one cup sugar (a quarter cup if you bust out of your
clothes a lot [figure of speech?] like Cher), two eggs, seven-eight ripe
bananas (mash `em good, you get about two cups), three tablespoons water --
milk maybe (Cher uses three teaspoons of powdered milk, you can't really
blame her), two cups flour (Cher's fancy-pantsy, makes it one white, one
cornmeal), one teaspoon baking soda (Cher puts in baking powder, tastes
terrible, too much aluminum -- `dokie for them, sure, but --) and a half cup
chopped nuts (anything but peanuts -- too heavy). Got all that?
"You cream the butter and sugar till it's fluffy, beat in the eggs one...
at... a... time. (That Cher, she cuddles the eggs in her hand and says, In
Mexico you know what `two eggs' means, don't you, girls?) So you add the
water and the bananas (You can bet Cher's got something to say there, too)
then you mix in the flour and the baking soda (but if it's baking powder,
forget the whole thing) and shake in the nuts (Cher again). Then you pour
the whole thing in any kind of greased and floured Hot Box (I won't say a
word) and shove it in your slow cooker (who me?) on SOON for say
two-and-a-half hours, and you get a great banana cake, even Cher. And
speaking of slow cookers -- nah, shouldn't say things behind her back. And
that's all there is to it, try it next time, `try it or buy it.' O-dokie
then, who's dealing..."
Fortunately, the recorder had already been turned on, for there was neither
provision nor time for written or keyed notes. Which of course was the
subject's witting or unwitting purpose sees in this phenomenon a trend in
human evolution responding to some obscure genetic or ecological imperative.
For Bj, such extended information-bearing discourse, relying on inborn
retentive skills, shows the resurgent hypermnemone of the subject's brain
striving to contact and stimulate the analogous though still dormant
hypermnemone of the listener's brain.
This reaction within the human brain against its own creation -- human
civilization, of which literacy is a major component -- has been studied by
a variety of our Institutes. The resulting rationalia may be gathered and
purveyed thus:
(a) If left free to grow, this hypermnemonic force will in time bring an end
to the ever discouraged yet ever-recurring cruelties attending the march
[figure of speech] of civilization, especially during its self-guided phase.
(b) The cruelties in question derive not from some evil inherent in
civilization, but from the ever pulsating, not yet completely suppressed,
pre-literate hypermnemone that has always been covertly active in the human
psyche [figure of speech], successfully giving civilization a bad name
[figure of speech], the host bearing the blame for the sins of the parasite
[figure of speech].
We need to know if (a) this subversive force has been steadily gaining
strength over the years, or if (b) our astounding advances in anthropometry
have merely enabled us to observe more of what has always been there.
____________________
(From Section 41.06)
Example:
What'll it be?
"I'll have coffee and a cream bun."
We don't have any cream buns.
"Then I'll have orange juice and a cream bun."
I said, we don't have any cream buns.
"Then I'll have milk and a cream bun.
I said, we don't have any cream buns.
"Then I'll have tea and a cream bun."
I said, we don't have any cream buns.
"Then I'll have yogurt and a cream bun."
I said, we don't have any cream buns.
"Then I'll have cocoa and a cream bun."
I said, we don't have any cream buns.
(Pause.)
"Then I'll just have a cream bun."
This ought not be taken for a variant of Blindsiding; the subject's (the
customer's) supposed purpose is to obtain food, not to disconcert the food
purveyor. Rationalia:
(a) The subject is hard of hearing. Rather then the purveyor's "We don't
have any cream buns," he hears something on the order of "That item you
requested does not go well with a cream bun," implying "Try something else."
(b) The subject is unclear about relationships in the physical world, as
well as disturbingly ignorant of nutrition. He does not consider `+ cream
bun' an independent factor in the equation X + cream bun = breakfast but as
conditional to and dependent upon the factor +X.
For example, in the incantation (for such it effectively is) "I'll
have coffee and a cream bun" the cream bun exists, or will come into
existence, not to manifest its own virtue but to manifest whatever virtue
resides in the coffee. That is:
i. X = coffee,
ii. coffee ~= breakfast, hence
iii. breakfast = ... + coffee + cream bun + ...
If the cream bun fails to materialize, well then, try again. Another
X-factor must be chosen, another incantation formulated: "Then I'll have
orange juice and a cream bun." The climax -- "Then I'll just have a cream
bun" -- is a brief psalm, a confession of impotence in the face of the
cosmos, declaring in effect: "Dear God [Ammon, Kali, Athena], I have trusted
in mine own strength and failed, I have conjured demons and consorted with
them but for naught. I herewith lay bare before thee my soul with its
longings, that thou doest with me as thou wouldst."
____________________
(From the Concluding Exhortation)
...But Earth stands alone in the subtlety of its rhetorical techniques. Many
a researcher has been lost seeking the aims or circumstances of their use.
Millennia of rationalization has enabled this amazing race to internalize
much of its intellectual functioning, leaving its members, in Vr's phrase,
"adrift as carbon-based automatons." Small wonder it was this planet that
gave birth to the subconscious, a concept quaint and irrelevant on some
worlds but of immense practical value on this one. As we are now aware, the
rationalia speak in code.
More than a stylus and recorder with which to keep track of the form and
function of each rhetorical phenomenon, we need an ear [figure of speech]
for the rumble and hum of the human mind, while it is still available for
study.
______________________________________________________________________________
A.Y. Tanaka was born on Maui in 1936, raised in Newark, NJ (safer than the
West Coast); lived, sometimes worked, in Puerto Rico, San Francisco, Hawaii,
Chicago, Amherst, perhaps elsewhere. His proudest achievement was inventing
a phantom senior for his high school yearbook (Weequahic HS, Newark). Since
then it's been downhill. Subsequent honors and attainments are as nought.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES "The stereo was playing a song I had never
heard before. I was in my apartment, but the
Jason Snell furniture in my bedroom was different. There
were curtains instead of the awful roll-up
blinds I had bought at K-Mart, and framed
pictures were hung on the walls where my
posters had been tacked."
______________________________________________________________________________
Shannon came over to my apartment at seven with the dozen ball-point pens and
extra magazines she wanted to give me.
You've got to understand this about her: she gives people gifts all the
time. Weird gifts. Pens and magazines, paper clips and key chains. When I
asked her where she got all the blue disposable pens, she'd only say: "They
just turn up."
This night, I took them without any questions. I glanced at the magazine
subscription labels, just to assure myself that the mistakes were there. Her
name was Shannon Erica Steinman, but the labels were always addressed to
Shannon D. Steinman or Erica S. Steinman.
Sometimes, to spoil my fun, she steamed off the magazine labels. I never
bothered asking why.
All of us have a few of our own quirks; I'd like to think Shannon's only
weird one is gift-giving. Other than her pen and magazine philanthropy,
she's the kind of person I'd call normal --- working at a day-care center
while toiling with the idea of going back to school to become a teacher.
"I'm not sure, Jer," she told me that night, when the subject came up. "I
like working with the kids, and I think I'd like teaching, but I don't know
if I could stand going back to school."
"If you go back to school, you'll be able to teach kids instead of just
babysitting them."
"Yeah, but now I get paid to go to the beach and to movies and to play
Monopoly with these kids. The biggest decision I have to make during any
given week is whether to play Four Square or Hopscotch."
She and I were up very late that night, mostly because neither of us had
much else to do except talk. Her boyfriend was in L.A. on business and
Shannon didn't have many other friends, so her social calendar was empty. As
for me, well, I'm sort of a hermit. If I weren't, would I be talking to you
now? No offense. I'm just being honest.
So Shannon and I sat around my apartment all night, talking about our shoe
sizes and what our favorite yogurt flavors were and, most importantly, how
early we got up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons when we were kids.
She got up late, and her mother always made a big breakfast on Saturdays, so
she never got to see any of the cool cartoons that were on early. Me, I was
an early riser back then --- I'd be up in time to catch the end of the farm
report, and then I'd sit through thirty minutes of Mister Ed before finally
hitting the animated excitement I'd been searching for.
We weren't bored by this stuff, believe it or not. The only thing that
finished our conversation was sleep --- at about one in the morning, we
both conked out next to each other on my couch. She shook me awake at
threea.m..
"It's late," she said. "Do you mind if I spend the night here?"
"Sure," I told her. "You take my bed. I'll sleep on the couch."
"No, I'll sleep on the couch."
"No. Take the bed."
"No. It's your bed. I'll just sleep here."
I shook my head.
"Okay," she said. "We'll both sleep on your bed."
"Well, there's certainly plenty of room," I said, nudging her toward the
bedroom door.
That was a running joke of ours --- I had a king-sized bed, one that I
bought during a relationship I'd had a year or so before. Michele and I knew
we weren't going to be together forever, but in the meantime, we needed a
bigger bed.
The day the bed was delivered, Michele and I split up. The two events are
not related, but the size of the bed and its emptiness had become a source
of great amusement to Shannon. It was slightly less amusing to me.
Still wearing our T-shirts and shorts, we slid into bed. Now, I swear I
never gave any thought to the fact that we were in bed together. We were
just friends. That was all we'd ever be.
She snuggled against me, and I put my arm around her. I mumbled a tired
"Good night" and closed my eyes.
"I should warn you," she said. "I turn in my sleep."
"Okay," I said, and closed my eyes.
After a few minutes on her side, Shannon made a low groan and turned onto
her back. A few more minutes, and she was on her other side.
Before she could turn onto her stomach, I was snoring softly.
Somewhere around three in the morning, I felt Shannon move next to me. Then
she turned from her right side onto her back. That was when the world
changed.
The stereo was playing a song I had never heard before. I was in my
apartment, but the furniture in my bedroom was different. There were
curtains instead of the awful roll-up blinds I had bought at K-Mart, and
framed pictures were hung on the walls where my posters had been tacked.
I sorted most of that information out later, though I was flooded with all
of it immediately. Of the most importance, though, was what I found myself
doing as the song I had never heard played in the background.
Shannon and I were making love.
I was shocked, of course, not just because I had never expected anything
like that to happen between us, but because I couldn't remember how we got
from sleeping next to each other to having sex with the stereo on. It was as
if I had blacked out.
I could see in Shannon's eyes that she was also shocked by the turn of
events, but that didn't make her ask me to stop what we were doing.
When we were done, as I held her, I finally noticed the curtains.
"Shannon, what happened to my blinds?"
"Hmm?"
"My cheap K-mart blinds are gone."
A brief pause then: "God, you're right. And your posters are gone, too."
I flipped the light on and looked around my bedroom. The framed pictures on
the walls were mostly prints I'd seen before. They were Shannon's.
One picture, however, was one neither of us had seen before.
Shannon looked gorgeous, of course... her darker complexion balanced well
with the white dress. And though the expression on my face was typically
stupid, the tuxedo made me almost seem dignified.
Below the picture was printed Jeremy and Shannon, September 16, 1991.
I looked at Shannon. She was holding up her hand, showing me the wedding
ring she was wearing.
"What the hell is going on?" I asked her.
She bent over next to the bed, picked up something --- I could see that it
was a magazine --- and glanced at it before tossing it to me.
"Look at the label."
It was addressed to Shannon and Jeremy Alden.
I was about to say something else to her when a wave of dizziness hit me.
Maybe, I reasoned, this is all just a dream. That's it. I'm dreaming.
And I was in bed again, next to Shannon, fully clothed. She was still
asleep, slowly turning to lay on her left side.
Between movements, I was in the right world. The moment Shannon turned to
her left, I felt that world slip away.
I was in Shannon's apartment, in her bed. We weren't making love this time;
it felt like we might have done it a few minutes before, but now we were
just laying in bed, my arms around her, naked.
"Shannon?"
"Hmm?"
"Do you remember the last time? Just a few minutes ago?"
"We were in your apartment. My pictures were on your..."
She glanced around her walls. All her pictures were there, right where she
left them.
"Do you have a wedding ring this time?"
She held up her hand. "Nope. An engagement ring, though."
"What the hell is going on?"
"I think it might have something to do with the magazines," she said. But
before I could ask her what she meant, her bedroom door opened and someone
flipped on the light switch.
It was Steve.
"Oh, no," he said. "You can't..."
For a minute he looked hurt, like I'd expect someone to look the moment he
found his fiancŽe --- I knew then that the ring on Shannon's finger
wasn't from me --- in bed with another man.
Then Steve made the transition to the other expression I expected to see. It
was rage --- pure jealous rage. He had always been jealous of my
relationship with Shannon because he wondered why she needed to have any
other male companionship if he was around.
Now, in this world, his jealousy had been borne out. I was sleeping with
Shannon behind his back.
He punched me quite a few times, I think. I was so shocked by the whole turn
of events that I wasn't really paying attention. It hurt a lot, I know that.
Shannon was screaming and crying in the background. Steve was yelling at me
to get the hell out, and when I didn't do anything but sit there, he hit me
again.
Then, as he hit me in the head for the umpteenth time, I started to lose it.
I'd never been knocked unconscious before, but it looked like this would be
my chance. Then I felt Shannon shifting, and knew that it wasn't Steve's
right hook that had caused my dizziness.
It was time to leave that world. And not a moment too soon.
She was moving again, next to me, shifting from her left side onto her
stomach. She was awake in the different realities, but here she was still
sleeping.
I think it might have something to do with the magazines, she had said.
Magazines?
Shannon moved to her stomach. The world slid away again.
I could tell I was in a hotel room, just because of the smell. Whatever
hotel rooms smelled of, whether it was carpet cleaner or industrial toilet
bowl cleaner, this was one of those rooms. Light seeped in through cheap tan
curtains.
I was having sex again. It seemed to be a recurring theme, for some reason.
It certainly wasn't because I had a history as a great lover. Far from it.
This time, I wasn't looking down into the deep, brown, loving eyes of
Shannon Steinman. The hair my fingers were running through was long and
blonde, not short and brown. The eyes I was staring at were blue.
"Oh, yeah, honey," she moaned in what could've only been a New York accent.
I almost laughed out loud.
What was this world? The world where I got to shack up in hotels with bimbos
with bad accents?
Okay, I'll admit something else to you, since I've told you so much already.
I've always been attracted to blondes, just like every other American male
around. They're supposed to be the sexiest ones, more inherently attractive
than any dark-haired woman can be.
But with a catch: I've also always said that while blondes tended to be
prettier, the most striking women, the ones that make you turn your head
when you're walking down the street, even if you're walking down that street
with your own girlfriend, have dark hair. There aren't many of them like
that --- Shannon was one.
But like Pavlov's puppies at feeding time, when I see a blonde, I start
drooling. It's undignified and unintelligent, but I do it. Maybe it was the
forbidden nature of them --- they were attractive and I couldn't have them.
I had never even kissed a blonde before.
Now I was having sex with one.
But while it was all going on, a part of me was busy asking questions.
Where's Shannon? What about the magazines?
It turned out that the blonde's name was Holly and she was from New Jersey,
not New York. She and I had first met in a hotel bar two weeks ago and had
retreated to a room upstairs after both of us had a little too much to
drink.
I was lucky. I had managed to prod her into some reminiscence without having
the faintest idea about my history with her. I also found it funny that it
had been too much alcohol that had brought us together because I don't
drink. In 25 years, my total alcoholic consumption was probably five beers
and four glasses of wine.
Not that I was an incredibly moral person, thumping a Bible and preaching
about That Demon Alcohol every time I got the opportunity. I just decided,
fairly early on in my life that not only did I not like the taste of
alcohol, I didn't like the way it changed people.
So I bought into blondes but not into booze. Consider me batting .500 on the
Red-Blooded American Male scale.
But laying there next to Holly, I wondered if that choice was the right one.
Should I have stayed as adamantly different as I was in my own world?
In my life, I had slept with a grand total of one woman --- and I didn't
even love Michele --- and I was an emotional wreck. Here it was different.
It's easy to make moral decisions when you've got no way to see the
alternative. You just make your choices, take your chances and wonder about
what might have been.
I'm insecure enough about my life. I didn't need to be shown what I'd been
missing, but here it was.
I left Holly, found my car in the hotel parking garage and drove home. I
kept waiting for this dream or other reality or whatever it was to end, but
I was still in the world of voluptuous blondes and too many margaritas when
I reached my apartment.
As I jogged up the steps, I knew I had to call Shannon. After all, she was
my only link back to the other world, the one where I was still laying under
a ragged blue comforter with my best friend on her stomach next to me.
Then I opened the door to the apartment. Shannon was standing inside,
holding a baby in her arms.
"There you are!" she said. "I was worried."
I looked at the baby. "Is that..."
"The baby book says her name's Diana Alden, six months old," she told me.
"We're parents. God, Jer, we're parents."
I was supposed to ask her about the magazines, about how we could be leading
the lives of other people who were ourselves. But instead, all I could think
about was a blonde named Holly as I stared into the shiny eyes of my
daughter.
"There's something else," Shannon said, and picked up a magazine off the
kitchen table.
"Huh?"
"Look at the cover."
It was a picture of the embattled president, trying hard to win re-election
despite an economic downturn and a tough challenger. Four years in the White
House had turned his hair markedly gray, but his eyebrows were as thick and
dark as ever.
"President Dukakis?" I asked.
"This world really is screwed up," she said to me.
Oh, Shannon, you don't know the half of it, I thought, and then the
dizziness hit me.
For a split second I thought about waking her, ending this thing we had
fallen into as soon as possible. But before I could even grab her shoulders,
let alone start shaking her awake, she moved from her stomach to her right
side.
The world went one way, and we went the other.
Magazines. I've got to remember the magazines.
I was drinking coffee. I despise coffee, so I put down the cup as soon as I
could, but I still had to swallow the foul-tasting stuff that was in my
mouth.
I was sitting in the living room of a house I had never seen before. Some of
the decorations, however, were familiar --- they were Shannon's.
Across with me, sitting with their arms around each other in what I somehow
knew was marital bliss were Shannon and Steve.
"So, do you like the place?" Steve asked me.
"Oh, of course," I said. "It's great."
"Well, it's certainly better organized now than before the wedding," Steve
said.
Wedding. I was getting good at making these guesses, but I didn't want to
push it too far. I told them that I had to go to the bathroom and excused
myself.
When I came back, they were still there, smiling. I was wondering how
Shannon managed to do it, put up the appearances of knowing all about her
married life with Steve when in her own life they were still just boyfriend
and girlfriend.
"So, how is Michele doing?" Steve asked me.
Michele? Oh, God, what does Michele have to do with this?
"Fine, just fine," I said, looking at Shannon. She raised an eyebrow ---
she was just as curious about Michele being mentioned as I was.
"Well, we can't wait until next month," Steve said, sounding far too much
like a pal and not at all like the guy who had beaten the crap out of me a
few hours before and a universe away. "Saint Anne's is really a pretty
church. You're so lucky to have gotten it."
A "yes" was about all I could manage. Michele and I were going to get
married?
I kept up the conversation for a few minutes more, slowly realizing that I
was never going to get Shannon alone somewhere to talk. Though she might not
like it, in this world she and Steve had become a pair, a joint person. They
were married, and so they were together.
I wondered what it would've been like to be in a world like that, where
Shannon was no longer my friend by herself but just a co-acquaintance, half
of SteveAndShannon.
As I started to become dizzy again and knew that Shannon would be moving
onto her back now --- how many times did this woman turn in one night,
anyway? --- I realized that I might not have to speculate about this
possibility very long.
"Steve and I are supposed to get engaged this summer," Shannon had said to
me a couple months ago.
"So you're engaged to be engaged, is that what you're trying to say?"
"Right."
I didn't know quite how to take it. I didn't have any claim to her myself,
and her boyfriend certainly did. Even though she was my best friend, she had
been dating Steve before we'd ever met.
"Well, congratulations," was what I finally said to her, trying to be a
friend even though I wasn't sure how I was feeling just then.
"Thanks," she said, and gave me a hug. Before she pulled back, she whispered
to me, "You're still my best friend."
I was so wrapped up in thinking that I had no time to stop Shannon's spin.
She settled on her back and reality was torn away again.
She and I were sitting on my bed. It seemed like we were nothing more than
friends.
"Okay, what's the catch?" she asked. "Are we married or single or having an
affair or what?"
"Check your purse," I told her.
She pulled her wallet out of her purse and showed me her driver's license
--- it said she was single, a Miss Shannon Steinman. Her middle initial was
incorrectly --- for me --- listed as G.
"Shannon, would you might telling me what the hell all this is about?
Magazines?"
She sat there for a moment, with her eyes closed and her brow wrinkled. Then
she looked at me and nodded.
"You know the pens and magazines I keep giving to people?"
"Of course."
"Well, I don't buy those anywhere. I find them."
"Where?"
"All over my house. They just show up. You know how everybody else loses
things like ball point pens and key chains? Well, I never do. I find them."
"And the magazines?"
"Same way. Except most of them I can't get rid of, because they've got
President Dukakis or President Dole on the cover. Some of them are just like
our magazines, but they're addressed to Shannon and Steve or Shannon and
Jeremy. I steam those ones off."
"How long has this been going on?"
"A year or two," she said and started looking around the room. "What's
different about this world?"
"I don't know. You seem a little different."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know. You're not as..." I paused.
"What?"
"Well, I sort of... I think you're an attractive person, Shannon. You're
usually really pretty. But for some reason, you're just not that cute in
this world."
She got up and looked in a mirror, then turned around and frowned at me.
"I look exactly the same," she said. "Too many pimples, like always. But
nothing else is different."
There was a magazine --- okay, I'll admit it, I buy way too many of the
damned things --- next to my bed in this reality, too. I picked it up.
"Maybe Newsweek can tell us what's different about this world," I said.
I leafed through the magazine, with Shannon looking over my shoulder.
Everything seemed the same --- it was exactly the same as the issue I had
next to my bed at home.
I flipped past a cover story about Yugoslavia. On the next page was an ad
for body-building equipment. A large, sweaty football player-type was
lifting a barbell.
"Oh, he's cute," I found myself saying. I immediately dropped the magazine.
"He's cute?" Shannon asked me.
He was cute. I was actually attracted to him. And not to Shannon.
Well, I knew what was different about that world, didn't I? And in it,
Shannon really could never have been anything but a pal.
She moved from her back to her right side in one quick motion, and it all
shifted again.
This time was different, somehow. I was outside for the first time, standing
on a carefully tended lawn. I was by myself, and I realized where I was when
I looked up and saw the headstone in front of me:
SHANNON STEINMAN ALDEN
1968-1992
She was my wife in this place, too. Flowers that I had no doubt just placed
were sitting on top of her grave. The grass growing on the grave was very
short --- I got the impression that Shannon hadn't been dead long.
I felt dizzy, but this time the world didn't go away. Was it just the shock
of contemplating what a world without Shannon would be like? The idea that
I'd never again spend all those hours talking about insignificant details?
I stood at the grave for a long time, wondering just how much Shannon meant
to me. She had been a good friend in my life, but in these other lives she
was always there. Sometimes she was with Steve, sometimes with me...
sometimes even both at once. She was obviously someone I was capable of
marrying and having children with.
I waited for that reality to end, for the brief bout of dizziness to come
and take me away, but it didn't. That was when I began wondering if
something was terribly wrong. After all, Shannon had been alive in all the
other dreamworlds we had visited. If she was dead here... could she be dead
back in "real life?"
I think I panicked then. I remember collapsing in front of Shannon's
headstone and sobbing for a long time. Then, sometime later, I remember
screaming.
The blackness shattered into pieces, each piece pulling me into a different
world that was there and gone in an instant.
Laying on the street, covered with a blanket of newspaper, trying to keep
the night chill from giving me pneumonia.
Laying next to Michele in bed, staring down at the wedding ring on my hand
and wondering how I could have been trapped into marrying someone I didn't
love.
Dancing with Shannon at our wedding.
Dancing with Shannon at her wedding.
Slapping Michele in the heat of an argument we were having in our bedroom.
Sitting in front of a computer, writing computer code as I slowly bored
myself to death.
Standing in the middle of a forest fire, asking questions like any intrepid
journalist should.
Lowering the french fries into the oil. (I knew I'd be working at McDonald's
sometime, I chuckled to myself as the vision slipped away.)
Telling Michele I loved her and lying.
Telling Shannon I loved her. And not lying.
Kneeling at Shannon's grave again and crying.
Looking at another grave, one with my own name on it.
Blackness.
I sat up in bed and screamed once. Shannon didn't move from her position on
her side. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her.
She wasn't breathing when I started shaking her. But as soon as I touched
her, she gasped and opened her eyes. I pulled her up and hugged her as her
breathing started to calm back to normal.
"Are you okay?" I asked her.
"I'm... fine," she said. "I just blacked out. I don't know what happened."
"Me neither," I said. "Me neither."
We sat there for a long time, not saying anything. We had both taken walks
through each other's lives and would-be lives. We knew about what might have
been --- or what might be --- between us. But in some of the worlds, she
was with Steve. There was no One True Path. There were a series of
possibilities, ones that had already passed us by.
After a while, I finally pulled back and looked right into her eyes.
"Now what?" I asked her.
"I don't know," she said. "We'll see what happens."
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was completely innocent. It was also the
first time she'd ever kissed me in this life.
"We sure will," I said later, as we tried to get back to sleep again ---
this time in our own world. "We sure will."
______________________________________________________________________________
Jason Snell (jsnell@ocf.berkeley.edu) is the editor of the on-line magazine
InterText and an assistant editor at MacUser magazine. He lives in Berkeley,
California, where he's finishing up his Masters at UC Berkeley's Graduate
School of Journalism.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
TO TOUCH THE STARS "The man paced like a caged wildcat in
the locked cabin. His right arm hung
Part 2: `Dancing on Tenterhooks' uselessly at his side, the forearm
swinging slightly at the midpoint, bone
Nicole Gustas showing through a gap in the skin. He
didn't seem aware of the pain."
______________________________________________________________________________
Livana arranged Tamsin's unconscious body as comfortably as she could, then
ran down to check on the refugees. She was relieved when she found no one
had been injured in the extremely rough landing. She directed them up to
the galley and rushed to the door. She opened it and saw two men running
toward the spaceship with a number of medical personnel trailing behind
them. As the two men came to the door, she pulled out a blaster and trained
it on them, a cold sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. The danger
wasn't at an end yet. She couldn't let them board the ship until she was
sure who they were.
"Stand and deliver," she called to them, then waited breathlessly for their
response to the code.
"Your money or your life," said the shorter one with bronzed skin and curly
brown hair. "We're from Ground Zero." He rushed up the stairs and into the
ship, the tall, bearded darker one close on his heels. "I'm Chas El Andar,
head of the hospital here. This is Troy Guthridge. Who are you? Where are
Tamsin and Jaysen?"
Livana rushed along beside them, trotting to keep up with their long legs.
"I'm Livana. I've been helping out on the ship, keeping the refugees
organized and trying to get Tamsin to rest. She's extremely ill. She
passed out just after the landing. I don't know where Jaysen is."
"What are Tamsin's symptoms?" asked Chas, taking the stairs two at a time.
"She has an extremely resilient strain of gangrene. I haven't seen it
before. It's resistant to the broad-based antibiotics you have on board
this ship. I've tried to help the antibodies breed, but I haven't had any
luck. If you put me in touch with your chief genetic engineer, we can
design an antibody that should put it out of commission." Livana gasped out
the last few words, out of breath from hoisting her heavy body up the steps
even in the relatively light gravity.
"You were able to analyze the infection that closely with the instruments we
had on board?" Chas asked skeptically.
"No one could do that. It's my Gift; I can link with a patient and view the
infecting cells that way."
Chas stopped and, for the first time, she felt, really looked at her.
"Doctor Livana Oduvai! I've read your papers on substance-induced
tachyocardia!" He shook her hand quickly, then continued rushing toward the
bridge, now within view. "It's a pleasure to have you here. I hope I can
encourage you to join our staff; we're always looking for more medical
doctors."
They reached the top of the stairs and Chas threw open the door. Livana
could see one pale, waxy hand hanging from the pilot's chair. Chas tapped
his comunit. "I need a stretcher on the bridge immediately." He knelt by
her and turned the chair.
Tamsin's face looked like a mask; her skin and lips were the same drained
white. She didn't move as Chas lifted one eyelid and shone a small light
into her eye. "Absolutely no reaction. She's sunk into a comatose state."
A nurse leading an antigrav stretcher came to the door. "Help me get her on
there," Chas ordered. With Troy's help, Chas and the nurse gently lifted
Tamsin onto the stretcher. "Bring her to the intensive care unit in the
quarantine section; start her on amoximyacin immediately. Take her blood
and get Kazimir Raudanitis to start immediately on crafting an antibody.
She's infected with a new strain of gangrene. I'll be sending someone to
assist him in a few minutes. Tell him to use the large lab in the
quarantine section. He can bring in any of the techs he wants." The nurse
nodded and sped down the stairs, maneuvering the antigrav stretcher
skillfully. Livana stood against the wall, out of the rush of action.
Troy tapped his comunit. "We need Layten or Zach up here immediately to
access the computer and get the logs. We have to find out what happened to
Jaysen."
Chas turned to Livana. "Where are the rest of the refugees? We need to put
them in the quarantine units."
"I told them to go to the galley. They're waiting for directions."
Chas turned to Troy. "Get those refugees into the quarantine units; I have
some doctors there ready to process them."
"You need to send some guards here, as well," Livana said. Chas and Troy
looked at her, confused. She straightened her shoulders. "We have a
prisoner down in crew cabin D."
The man paced like a caged wildcat in the locked cabin. His right arm hung
uselessly at his side, the forearm swinging slightly at the midpoint, bone
showing through a gap in the skin. He didn't seem aware of the pain.
"He attacked Tamsin down in the engine room with a laser cutter. She broke
his arm to get it away from him," Livana told Chas. "He destroyed one of
the power receptors. Tamsin rerouted the power, but had to continually
manually stabilize it to keep the ship going."
"What else did he do?" asked Chas.
"He brought a transmitter on board with him. After we launched, he
broadcast our position. I gather some fighters came after us. I wanted to
treat his arm, but every time I came near him, he attacked me." She ignored
the bile that came up her throat at the memory of him rushing toward her,
blood in his eyes.
Chas shook his head. "I can't believe Tamsin and Jaysen could have such
poor judgment! They know as well as anyone else how cautious we have to
be."
"Don't blame them. He was imprisoned by the government and `reeducated'.
They embedded a second personality that was triggered when he made
arrangements to board the ship. No one could have known. Even his Gifted
wife couldn't tell the difference."
The armed guards came to the door. Chas gestured inside. "That's the
prisoner. We'll have more details about him when we get the details in the
ship's log."
The guards opened the door and the man rushed toward them, attacking. One
of the guards stunned him. The guards put their arms under his, and dragged
him from the room, head bobbing limply. Livana felt her stomach begin to
quiet as Chas escorted her out of the ship. She knew she was on her way to
the lab, and she couldn't afford any distractions while she was trying to
heal someone.
"It's unfortunate," Livana said. "He was a kind man. Not very intelligent,
or very driven, but he had a good heart. He was trying to help the Gifteds.
He just wasn't clever enough to avoid being caught."
Chas nodded. "It's happened before. We have a great psychiatric staff
here; they may be able to help him." As he led her across the spaceport and
toward the medical facility, he looked at her quizzically. "How do you know
all this about him, anyway?"
Livana smiled bleakly. "He was my husband."
Livana spent most of her twenty-nine hours of required quarantine with
Kazimir, the genetic engineer, working to develop an antibody that would
keep Tamsin's body from being consumed by the infection, going through the
physical parts of the quarantine procedures when she stopped for a bite to
eat or to use the bathroom. Even with their non-stop work, it was a near
thing. Chas had to cut away the worst of the infected flesh to slow the
pace of the invading gangrene, and replace it with an organic bandage that
would be absorbed back into the body as Tamsin healed. Once the antibodies
began to work, Livana urged the new cells to divide more quickly, speeding
the pace of healing. When Tamsin's vital signs had stabilized, Chas brought
Livana to the temporary quarters that she and her daughter had been assigned
to and told her he'd set up an appointment to discuss her future with the
medical center later in the day. As soon as she opened the door, she was
assaulted by an excited twelve year old.
"Mom, Mom, I'm so glad you're back!" Olanna said, hugging her excitedly.
Her nose wrinkled and she let go quickly. "Whew, you smell! I was worried
about you. I haven't seen you since we got here. They sent one of the
nurses to tell me you were OK, but I was still kind of nervous."
"I'm fine. I was working with the pilot of our ship. She's still very ill,
but it looks like she's going to make it. And I think I got a job." Livana
stood on her toes to kiss her daughter's forehead. Her daughter was already
as tall as she was! She looked like her father, with his creamy brown skin,
so much paler than Livana's own. Livana shook her head as she hugged her
skinny daughter. "Has Kaori been taking care of you?"
"Kaori's boring, Mom. Kalin let me borrow a primary psychology textbook.
It's really neat."
Now that her daughter wasn't wrapped around her neck, she could see a slight
figure standing by the window. She wasn't much taller than Olanna or
Livana. Her hair fell like ebony silk down to her knees, and her black,
tilted eyes crinkled at the corners as she smiled at Livana and held out two
delicate hands, palm up, in greeting. She radiated serenity. I like this
woman, thought Livana immediately. She placed her plump hands, palm down,
atop the woman's. "I'm Kalin," said the dark-haired woman. "I'm with the
resettlement group. I came to ask your daughter if she'd like to go to
school today. We're having an orientation session for the new children in a
few minutes. Would you mind if she went?"
Livana turned to her daughter. "Would you like to go?"
"Of course I want to go! Besides, you'll be sleeping for hours anyway."
Her daughter was accustomed to the routine of her mother the doctor.
Livana yawned. "You're probably right. But isn't it a little late in the
day for school to start?"
"You're still spacelagged. It's now seven-forty-five AM," said Kalin. She
rested a hand on Livana's arm. Livana felt a wave of compassion and -- was
it hope? -- spilling through her. "Get some sleep. I heard what you did
for Tamsin. You deserve it."
After she kissed Olanna good-bye, Livana curled up on the bed and fell
deeply asleep.
She woke to the sound of her daughter quietly puttering around the room.
She stretched and smiled blearily at the girl. "Hi, hon. How was school?"
"It was great. They said they'll put me in an accelerated class if you
don't mind. They also want to test my Gifts, if you think it's OK." Olanna
sat down on the edge of the bed.
Livana stroked her daughter's hair. "I think that's wonderful. Some of the
best teachers are here. I'm glad they'll teach you to use them."
Olanna got up and began straightening her schooldisks, which spilled all
over the dresser. "I checked your v-mail. Chas El-Andar wants to meet with
you at five-thirty. Is he the one who wants to give you the job? And Kalin
invited us to dinner with some other families at seven, to talk about
resettlement. Can I go play with Vasilissa tomorrow after school?"
Livana tried to keep track of the questions tumbling over one another. "Is
Vasilissa one of your schoolmates?" asked Livana, smiling. Back on Narid,
no one would ask a Gifted child over to their house to play. Olanna had had
a lonely childhood. It looked like that was going to change.
"Yeah. I figured you'd be working late."
"Not if I can help it. I want to spend some time with you."
Olanna, eyes alight as they had never been on Narid, shrugged and smiled.
"I'll keep busy. Did you know Kalin is Dad's doctor?"
Livana was used to following her daughter's non-linear conversation, but
this comment surprised her. "She is?"
"Yeah, she's going to try to help Dad get better."
"How did you know there was something wrong with your Dad?" How much did
her daughter know, anyway?
"I found out on the ship. I heard you talking to the pilot about it."
Livana's heart sank. Her daughter knew everything. Olanna held her hand
and smiled at her. "It's OK, Mom. Kalin told me it's not Dad's fault. I
know he didn't want it to happen. If anyone can make him better, Kalin
will."
Livana didn't feel much better. While she and her husband had spent most of
the past few years separated, and he'd had very little contact with Olanna,
her daughter was still at that age where she considered her parents
infallible. When he'd told them he would get them off Narid, it had made
him a hero in Olanna's eyes. It hurt Livana to know that her daughter had
learned what had happened to her father.
"Get up, Mom!" said Olanna loudly, poking her mother and dragging her out
of her self-accusatory thoughts. "It's four-thirty. You'd better get ready
for your interview." She pulled clothes out of the drawers, then turned
back to her mother. "Go take a shower. You don't want to look like you
just got out of bed, do you?"
Livana walked to the bathroom, trying to figure out where the day had gone
and wondering just when her daughter had decided to become her mother.
"The hospital needs a competent administrator, and from all the
recommendations I've received from your coworkers who preceded you here, you
fit the bill admirably." Chas poured her a cup of green tea, which matched
the pale green tunic and pants her daughter had selected for her. ("You're
not going to wear that old outfit, are you, Mom? It makes you look pudgy.
Wear this instead -- it makes you look more businesslike.")
He blew on his tea to cool it as he continued. Even sitting calmly, Chas
seemed to take up the whole room; he was almost bouncing in his chair,
anxious to get up and move around. He spoke quickly, the words leaping out
of his mouth. "One of our people -- I'll introduce you to him later --
managed to coax your records from New Boston Hospital. You had some very
impressive reviews. It's fairly clear that, without the restrictions put on
Gifteds, you would have been titular head of your department by this time,
instead of just doing the admin work of one."
The bronzed man put his cup down and leaned forward. "Ms. Oduvai, I'd like
to offer you the position of Head Administrator at Selene Hospital." Livana
sat back in surprise. She'd been expecting a position as staff doctor, at
best, but nothing like this. "It's a larger position than you've held
before, but I think you have the skills. And, quite frankly, we really need
someone with both medical talent and administrative ability in the position.
I've been trying to do it, but," he made a large gesture, nearly knocking
over the teapot, "I really don't have any talent for it. And I don't have
the time, with all my other duties." He held up a hand in warning. "It's
not the easiest job. You'll be expected to take on some patients. And we'd
also like you to work with our metametric division. They're researching the
various Gifts. Your healing ability is one we haven't had a chance to work
with before. They'd like to help you develop it." He pushed a datapadd at
her. Her eyes opened even wider at the yearly figure she'd be paid. "That
includes a month's paid vacation the first year. After the first year,
you'll also receive a month's paid sabbatical, although I've never seemed to
use mine. You'll find there's not enough hours in the day here on Maris."
"But isn't that always the case?" Livana smiled.
Chas waved his hands, sending his cup teetering on the edge of the table.
"I'm not speaking metaphorically. Since you're from Narid, you're used to a
29-hour day. Here, there's only 22 hours in a day." Livana blinked in
surprise. Now she knew where her day had fled to. "But there's an
advantage; a work day is only 7 hours here. What do you think?"
Livana tried to catch her breath. Chas' enthusiasm was infectious, but she
had to really think about this offer for a while. "I have to admit, I'm
very surprised by your offer. This wasn't what I was expecting at all. My
only concern is...you see, I have a daughter..."
"Olanna is taking an advanced course load, plus beginning metametric
courses. She's also signed up for the Young Explorers and the Drama Club."
He grinned at Livana. "If I were you, I'd be worried whether my daughter
was going to have enough time for me!"
"How do you know all this?" asked Livana, taken aback.
"Your daughter told me when she came to visit this afternoon. She likes it
here. She said she wanted to keep busy when you took your new job."
"She couldn't socialize much in New Boston over the past few years. I guess
she's trying to make up for lost time," Livana said with a wry smile.
Chas stood. "Why don't I take you on a tour of the hospital, and while we
walk, I'll tell you a little more about life on Maris." She left the room
at his heels and kept up with his fast walk down the brightly-colored halls.
"Selene Hospital is the primary medical center and research facility on
Maris. It's also linked with Ground Zero, the Naridian resettlement
project. The colony was established less than a hundred years ago, which is
part of the reason we set up a refugee center here. The colony was thrilled
to get new people, especially highly skilled ones like many of the Naridian
refugees. You'll find no prejudice against Gifteds here."
Chas turned left into the patient wing, leaning a bit to the side like a
racing aircar in a steep turn. His shoes made a soft hissing sound against
the floor. "I want to take you in to check on our new star patient." He
stopped at a door and paused for a second. Livana read the patient's name
on the door -- T. Donner. Chas threw open the door.
Inside, Livana saw Tamsin, slightly less pale than the white sheets. Her
head snapped up guiltily as she withdrew the organic knife she'd been using
to dismantle the bed's computer. Livana wondered absently at the mechanism
that allowed the blade to slide so smoothly back into her wrist. Pieces of
the computer lay all over the brightly colored patchwork quilt spread over
her lap. "Hi Chas. How are you settling in, Livana?" she asked weakly.
Chas sighed. "Tam, you did that last time. Don't you think we've caught on
by now? That's a dummy computer. We hid the real one." Turning to Livana,
he said, "Last time she was here, she realigned the monitoring computer so
it would continue to report that she was here and stable while she snuck out
of the hospital." He turned back to the pale woman in the bed, her hair in
a tangled copper halo around her head. "We've Tamsin-proofed the room, kid.
You're not sneaking away this time."
"Then give me a datapadd or something!" the redhead snarled. "I've been
stuck here, with nothing to read but a hardcopy book of deconstructionist
poetry Kalin gave me. I'd rather be back on intravenous food than eat the
stuff that passes for food here. And no one will tell me what's going on!
Let me out!" She pulled a pillow out from behind her and threw it at Chas.
It fell uselessly to the floor half a meter short of his feet.
Chas picked up the pillow and fluffed it, then walked over behind the bed
and tucked it behind Tamsin's head as she squirmed down under the quilt,
pulling it up to her chin, breathing heavily after her outburst. "If you
were well enough to go home, you would have hit me with that pillow.
Besides, knowing you, you'll find a way to use the datapadd to help you get
out of here."
"Just tell me one thing, and I swear I'll be the perfect patient," Tamsin
said defiantly.
"What do you want to know?" asked Chas.
Tamsin suddenly looked vulnerable and very scared, burrowed almost
completely under the big patchwork quilt. "What happened to Jaysen?"
Livana's stomach twisted. Kasimir, the tech who'd helped her create the
antibody, had told her a lot about Tamsin and Jaysen. If half the stories
of their exploits were true, they deserved great respect. He described the
two as being almost one person in two bodies, so deeply were their souls
intertwined. It wasn't just Tamsin's body that was injured near Narid. She
seemed bereft, torn apart without her other half. When Livana saw people
like this, she felt almost relieved she'd never bonded with anyone, not even
her husband, so strongly.
Chas sighed and patted Tamsin's shoulder. "We still don't know. As soon as
we find out, I'll come right down here and tell you."
Tamsin's jade eyes were hollow and dark. "If they caught him -- Chas, I
don't know if Kalin ever told you what happened to her in there. I remember
what she looked like. I brought her back to Maris."
"I've read the records," Chas said. "Try not to think about it, Tamsin.
You can't do anything from a hospital bed. Now, will you please get some
rest? I'm going down to Layten's office right now. I'm as worried as you
are." He squeezed her hand. "Stop dismantling our equipment, will you?"
Livana slipped out of the room behind Chas. "What happened to Kalin?"
"You remember when the medical center outside New Boston blew up?"
Livana could still smell the charred flesh. "We received a few of the
corpses at the hospital. They never had a chance."
Chas looked grim. "Don't feel too bad for them. I don't know all the
details. I was in transit when everything happened. I think there are some
things they didn't put in the report." He swallowed and continued, speaking
distantly and clinically. "Kalin was methodically tortured. They found
some interesting ways to stimulate the nerve endings. There are areas on
her skin that will never have sensation again. The nerves were burnt out
entirely, and we have no way to replace them, at least not now. They used
cruder methods, too -- they pulled all her nails out by the roots, crushed
the bones in her feet -- it's amazing that she was ever able to walk again."
"But -- that was a medical center! I used to refer some of my patients
there! I'd tried to get a job there because they were known for their
innovative techniques. I can't believe --"
Chas cut her off with a chopping motion. "There's a reason they had those
innovative techniques. The doctors there felt progression of their research
outweighed any ethical questions. They had a lot of subjects to test on,
all the prisoners who were difficult to break. We still haven't seen all
the fallout from the experiments done on the people who were kept there
--\x11it'll be years before all the problems come to light." He pressed his
lips together.
Livana could see him going over the records of the patients in his mind and
could only imagine the horrors he found there. Torture, experiments --
those were all things she only read about or watched in the latest adventure
sagas. She knew, in some part of her mind, that it had happened, but she
couldn't quite grasp it. Kalin was so calm, so serene; how could she have
been through all that and come out intact?
"Anyway, here's our destination -- the computer facility." He led her into
a dim room with a number of holos playing near all the walls. Two men sat
in the center of the room. One with black hair pulled back in a ponytail,
high cheekbones, a dark beard, and bright blue, tilted eyes was tapping away
on a datapadd; the other, slumped slightly, wan, and disheveled-looking, had
his eyes closed. Livana looked at the largest holo to see Tamsin, weary and
pale, in her ship's uniform. "I've lost Jaysen. I believe he's been
captured. We were sabotaged shortly after taking off. Jaysen was boarded
while defending the ship so it could go into warp and depart the system. In
case I don't make it to Maris, I want it known that I take full
responsibility for what has happened here..."
The man with the datapadd paused the image and turned to Chas. "I've been
going through the logs again to see if I can get any more information. No
luck so far. Layten's been trying to access some systems on Narid."
The other man shifted in his seat and began to sit up, tucking his long,
dark skirt around his legs. Livana noticed that, even when alert, Layten
looked like he was trying to blend in with the couch he was sitting on.
"I'm glad to see you're back. I thought you might have gotten trapped in a
subroutine," said the first man.
"You try getting results from a program when there's an eight-hour time lag
between you and the computer you're working on. It's not easy," Layten
said, stretching. Livana could hear his back crack.
"I forgot. Introductions." Chas ran his hands through his hair. "This is
Livana Oduvai; she's going to be head of admin at Selene Hospital. Livana,
this is Zach Shima and Layten Kaige. They run the systems for the hospital
and for Ground Zero. Layten," he said, turning to the man still rubbing his
eyes, "did you find out what happened to Jaysen?"
"It wasn't easy," said Layten. "I sent a search command through most of the
databanks. No luck. I think that hardly anyone even knows they have him."
"You're saying that they do have him, then?" Chas asked excitedly.
"The files were encoded. I just cracked them now." He gestured at the large
holo and the frozen log shot of Tamsin was replaced by text broken up by an
occasional graph or picture. "These are the records of the Killian Research
Facility. They're holding many prisoners there. Total records," he shut
his eyes for a minute, then opened them again, "ninety-four. These people
are considered the most dangerous to the government. They're now being used
as lab rats for new reeducation techniques. The idea, apparently, is to
break them and then get them working for the government. It's a refined
version of what they did to Kalin."
Livana could hear the disgust in his voice. She bit her lip and wrapped her
arms tightly around herself. She'd only seen the quicksilver man who'd
helped her get off-planet once, but that image, as he helped her into the
ship with a quick grin, whispering words of encouragement, had flashed
before her whenever anyone mentioned him. She couldn't imagine him being
tortured.
Then she realized she could and felt even sicker.
Layten continued grimly. "I also accessed the records of former detainees.
Seems they're more successful at killing them than reeducating them."
"What else have you got?" asked Chas.
Layten blinked again, and the text changed to a three-dimensional map of the
building. "This shows the various rooms in the facility. Cross-matching."
He closed his eyes. Livana realized, with a shock, that he was mentally
connected with the computer. She'd heard of people who had cortical
implants allowing them to link with computer systems, but she had never
actually seen one. Most people didn't like to get that close to their
machines. Names began popping up in the rooms on the screen. "Jaysen's
being held here." Layten put his finger in the center of the holo, pointing
at a room at the bottom floor in the center of the building. "Except for
the top two floors, which house the workers at the facility, this building
is completely underground."
"Any chance you can take down their system?" Zach asked.
"Put me on Maris, with a five millisecond lag between me and their computer,
and I might be able to do it. But from here -- impossible. Too many things
change too quickly. I'm not even sure I could dredge any more information
from their system."
"Can you make sure Tamsin knows about this?" Chas asked him.
"I told Kalin as soon as I knew. She's breaking it to Tamsin now."
"We need to bring it up in the Council meeting on Wednesday," said Zach,
"even if we can't do anything. Do you think Tamsin will be well enough to
attend?"
"Do you think I could keep her from leaving her bed?" said Chas, laughter
behind his quick, staccato speech. "She's only been conscious twelve hours,
and I already caught her trying to dismantle the computer in her room. I
don't think I'll be able to keep her here past tomorrow night." He glanced
at his watch. "Look, Livana's got a dinner appointment in a few minutes,
and I want to try to finish this tour. We'll talk about this later, okay?"
"It was nice meeting you two," said Livana over her shoulder, rushing out of
the room on Chas' heels.
"I'd like to show you the metametric research facility," said Chas, speeding
down the corridor. Livana had to nearly run to keep up with him. The first
thing she was going to do as administrator, she decided, would be to get
Chas to slow down. "No one's really done the research full-time on the
Gifts the way we have here. We've conclusively proved that metametric
ability is the result of mutations caused by prolonged low-level radiation
exposure in the first two hundred years of spaceflight. The mutations just
exacerbated a latent ability humans already had to one extent or another.
We found records dating back to three hundred years before commercial
spaceflight that showed humans had these abilities. Unfortunately, most of
them were put under psychiatric care because they heard `voices'. No one
realized they were picking up other people's thoughts. And no one could
teach them how to shut them out. When a telepath can't learn shielding,
they tend to go mad." The corridor they turned into was crafted out of
polished stone, with round windows. A waterfall trickled in an alcove in
one wall. The click of Livana's heels echoed off the walls.
"But how do you explain all these new talents that are cropping up?" asked
Livana.
"Once again, we go back into archaic records. For instance, your talent is
one that pops up repeatedly in religious chronicles. The founders of a
number of Terran religions, for instance, were said to be able to heal by
simply touching a person. Skeptics thought that the people who were healed
simply had psychosomatic illnesses, but some of these healers had amazing
track records. One man, named Cayce, had hundreds of tomes that kept
records on the many people he'd healed. And you, of course, are living
proof. We're hoping that, through you, we can learn how to develop those
skills and teach other people with that talent how to use it."
"There's one thing you haven't told me. How did Kalin and all the rest get
out?" They entered an large atrium which was decorated like an
old-fashioned Zen garden. They stepped on the stone path between the plants
and walked toward the bridge over the free-form pond in the center of the
room. It had an air of tranquillity to it. The atmosphere even seemed to
affect Chas -- his steps slowed, as did his speech.
Livana watched him stare into the water, chewing his lip, his bright,
flowered shirt looking completely out of place in the staid garden. "You
probably read the reports. There was an accident with some flammable
chemicals being stored at the site. Tamsin and Jaysen were near there when
the firestorm happened. They'd been trying to figure out a way to get her
out. When they got to the site, they found the prisoners picking their way
out between the bodies. Kalin and all the other subjects there escaped
unscathed." He paused and grimaced. "Well, no more damaged than they were
before the fire, anyway."
"But that's impossible!" Livana said, shaking her head, remembering the
giant fireball she'd seen from miles away.
"It happened. But we won't know why until we can get into Layten's head to
find out how he did it."
"You mean he..."
"Kalin's husband is a firestarter. He has no control over his talent. He's
only used it in times of crisis. In fact, no one knew he was Gifted until
the one time he used it, when those chemicals ignited. He says he doesn't
know how he did it. He may have a memory block."
"He knew what happened to Kalin?" She'd heard Gifted people shared a mental
bond, though she herself had never experienced it.
Chas nodded, pulling leaves off the elm tree by the bridge and tearing them
apart. "And we still don't have any more details. That's one mutation that
I'm sure has plenty of military uses."
Livana folded her arms and stared down at the worn, purplish wooden planking
of the bridge. "Layten said they're using a refined version of the
techniques used on Kalin."
"Yeah." Chas was leaning against the railing, head in his hands.
"Do you think we can get Jaysen out?" Livana felt a responsibility to the
people of Ground Zero. They'd rescued her, and she'd do nearly anything to
keep them from harm.
Chas looked at her, dark eyes hollow as Tamsin's had been earlier. "If we
can't, I hope he dies quickly."
Tamsin studied the perfectly smooth, glassy water in the kilometer-long
reflecting pool, the just-rising tiny white sun chasing the surface with a
thin coat of silver. She looked to her left, to her right, and then,
cautiously over her shoulder to the shadowed arches of the hospital. She
was alone in the spacious courtyard. She tossed the coins in her hand, then
took one, placing the rest in her pocket. She crooked her finger around the
silver disk, then glanced again around the courtyard. She saw no one. She
tossed the coin precisely at the pool. It bounced off the glassy surface,
once, then twice. As it skipped, the distance of the hops got shorter and
shorter. After twenty-six hops, it sank to the bottom of the pool.
"So, this is where you are every morning," said a mellow contralto to
Tamsin's right.
Tamsin jumped and, by reflex, began to crouch in an attack position facing
the voice. She saw the rose lips curling in a gentle smile and sighed,
dropping back into a more normal stance. "I really hate it when you do
that."
Kalin looked out at the water, the small ripples caused by the recent
disturbance quickly stilling, and then back at Tamsin, glossy jet hair
slipping over her shoulder. "How did you do that? There aren't any pebbles
anywhere around here."
Tamsin took her left hand out of her pocket, clenched in a fist. She opened
it toward Kalin, showing her the three copper and one silver disk that lay
there. "My one inheritance from my mother. Thirty-eight cents."
Kalin inhaled sharply, then breathed out in a low whistle. "Thirty-eight
cents? You could buy some planets with that! Those should be in a museum.
I'm surprised you're throwing such valuable artifacts in this pool. Did you
ever try to sell them?"
"Yeah," shrugged Tamsin. She took one copper disk, shoved the rest back in
her pocket, and tossed it at the pool. Twelve skips. She grimaced. Kalin
had disturbed her concentration. "They're counterfeit." Kalin's mouth
pursed in a silent "oh." Tamsin smiled with some bitterness. "They skip
well, though."
Kalin stared out at the water. Tamsin sent another disk skimming across.
Patter patter patter plop. She turned and stared at Kalin, waiting for her
to break the silence. Kalin just stared at the water, calmly. After a
minute, Tamsin said angrily, "Look, did you come out here to talk to me, or
what?"
Kalin turned to her smoothly. "I didn't want to disturb you while you were
entertaining yourself."
"You've already done that. I probably won't get one skip out of the rest of
these." She balanced on one leg, tugging the boot off her other foot.
"I wanted to talk to you about Jaysen," said Kalin.
Tamsin ripped the boot off her other foot, tugged off her socks, then shoved
her pants above her heavily muscled calves. "I'm going after him."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Kalin asked.
Tamsin waded into the pool, the water splashing around her legs as she went
to pick up the first coin. "It's the only thing I can do. I can't leave
him there."
"You're not in good health right now," Kalin said calmly. Tamsin began to
feel a pressure, slight but growing, in her head. "Do you think you could
slip in there in your condition?"
Tamsin was furious. "It doesn't matter what my condition is! I won't leave
him in there!" She kicked violently, sending water everywhere. "And will
you stop doing that! Scheiss'n projecting empath -- it drives me crazy!"
"Scheiss'n?" asked Kalin, one eyebrow raised.
Tamsin shrugged. "Sorry. It's Staatsprache." Even now, whenever she got
angry, she slipped into the rough city language she'd grown up speaking.
Considering who was in control of the government now, it might become
Narid's planetary language in a few years. "You wouldn't want to know."
Kalin smiled apologetically. "I was just trying to calm you down a little.
It feels like you're about to attack someone. But I've never been able to
do that with you. Your shields are impressive. You're sure you're not
Gifted?"
Tamsin wanted to hit something, but there was only water. "I'm not Gifted!
I hate that word! Damn it, that's the whole root of the problem."
"I don't understand."
Tamsin's smile was sharp and brittle. "Of course. You have no idea what
the word Gift means in Staatsprache, do you?" Kalin shook her head. "It
means poison. Where I come from, you wouldn't dare admit you had the
talent, even before the new government came in. It's considered," she
thought for a second for the best word, "unclean. And dangerous. Even the
word, Gifted." Her stress on it was slightly different, the i becoming
nearly an e, the d becoming a soft sh. "How can you think it's a good thing
when it sounds like it's poisonous?"
Kalin's brow wrinkled. "Goddess, you're serious, aren't you?"
Tamsin picked up the last coin and stepped onto the blue brick, trailing
dark stains of water. "And that's why Jaysen is where he is now. Sometimes
I think both of us would have been better off staying in Tiburon." Her
mother had hoped she'd stay; she'd been too old for her work and had wanted
to support herself by selling Tamsin's body instead. But she'd stayed in
school, right next to Jaysen, if only to keep him from being killed by some
of the gang members he'd offended.
"You both would have been dead by now."
"I rest my case." Tamsin picked up her boots and walked across the
courtyard toward her quarters. "There's no way you can change my mind. I'm
responsible for him, and I won't leave him behind." Her boots slapped
against the edge of the arch as she stepped under it, out of the sun.
"Remember when you were a prisoner? Did you think we'd leave you behind?"
"Yes." Tamsin turned, shocked to Kalin, a dark, delicate figure silhouetted
by the light streaming through one of the arches. "I never thought anyone
would get me out. I thought if you didn't, then you'd be safe."
Tamsin leaned a shoulder against the cool stone wall and gritted her teeth.
She'd never cried in front of anyone, and she wasn't about to start now.
"You thought we'd leave you there? You thought we'd let you die?" She
heard her voice break and shut her eyes, trying to clamp down. She would
not, would not, think of Jaysen, trapped in despair.
She felt Kalin put an arm around her waist, felt the weight of her delicate
head against a shoulder. "Tamsin, you got me out. But look at Layten. I
know his nightmares. I feel them every night when he sleeps beside me. The
four of us nearly didn't get away. Are you willing to take the risk again
and have it go the other way?"
Tamsin buried her face in her friend's obsidian hair and pulled her a little
closer, trying to block away the dark hole filling her chest. "I have to.
I can't let him die."
Kalin paused for a moment before the doors to Tamsin's quarters. Layten
stood behind her, a cool rock, providing support mentally as well as
physically. Kalin took a deep breath and knocked on the door.
"What do you want?" came the hostile voice from the other side as the door
opened. Tamsin was curled up on a chair, copper hair pulled back, black
clothes making her look terribly pale as she tapped away at a computer
console.
Kalin placed a datapadd on the desk. "Here's a list of what we'll need."
Tamsin looked up at her blankly. "Need? I don't follow you."
"Supplies. To rescue Jaysen." Tamsin's mouth opened, but she didn't say
anything, just stared. Kalin smiled slightly, the only hint she'd give of
the laughter bubbling inside. She'd always wanted to strike Tamsin
speechless. "You didn't think I'd let you go alone, did you?"
Layten slipped an arm around her waist. I'm going, too.
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. Of course. Did you think I'd leave
you behind? She spoke aloud again. "There's supplies for three there.
Night goggles, food, camouflage clothing," she shrugged, "big guns..."
"But I haven't even talked to Manda yet," Tamsin said, shaking her head.
"We did," said Kalin. "She understands what you want to do. She figures
she'll tell the rest of the Council after we leave. That way, they won't be
able to protest."
Tamsin snorted as she scanned the list on the padd. "Sounds like our dear
chair is going to get herself into some pretty hot water."
"It wouldn't be the first time," rumbled Layten's deep voice.
"You're going to need to add supplies for one more person. Chas is coming,"
Tamsin said.
"Chas is a doctor. He's got no combat training. Do you really think he's
appropriate?" Layten asked.
"And what do you think we're going to do when we get Jaysen out?" snapped
Tamsin, looking up at him. "Bring him to Arcadia Hospital and say `Hi, our
friend's been tortured, can you patch him up'? Not bloody likely.
Besides," she continued, looking back at the padd, "he insisted. I couldn't
talk him out of it."
Kalin sat down on the sofa. Layten stood against the door, hands clasped
behind his back. Tamsin's sparking green eyes shifted back and forth, from
one to the other. "So. We have four people against about sixty guards. I
love an even fight," she said sarcastically. She propped one foot up on her
desk, drumming her fingers against her knee. "I have an idea on how to get
in there. Layten, do you think you could crash their system?"
Whenever Layten accessed the computer, Kalin could hear it whirring in the
back of her head like it was part of her brain as well. "I can, but not for
long. It's got an automatic reset mechanism."
"That's fine," said Tamsin. "This is going to be a quick in and out
operation, nothing fancy. Our only objective is to get Jaysen out."
"What about the others?" asked Layten.
"If we have time. I don't want to be callous, but there's only so much we
can do." She leaned forward and stabbed a button on the console. A three
dimensional line drawing of the complex filled the center of the room. The
room where Jaysen was being held was tinted gold. "Here's what we're going
to do."
Interlude Two
Jaysen curled up on the hard pallet that passed for a bed, staring at the
gray walls in his perennially twilit cell, rubbing his face as the last
traces of the drug left him. The interrogation sessions came as irregularly
as the food. He didn't even have any facial hair to tell him how long he'd
been there; he'd had it suppressed months ago so he wouldn't have to shave.
He smiled slightly. If only he'd wanted a beard, like Zach.
He pictured his friend, safe on Maris, remembering the last time he'd been
there. Two days before the mission, he'd gone boating with Zach and Tamsin.
He could almost smell the salt, and see Tamsin leaning over the prow of the
boat, her copper hair hanging loose over the water. He smiled, remembering
how he'd pushed her over the side, and how she'd quickly pulled him in after
her, completely ruining his new silk velvet shirt. He hadn't minded; the
ensuing water fight had been too much fun. If Zach hadn't been there, maybe
he would have had a chance...
The gray walls loomed high, and his throat closed. He knew he'd never
survive to see her again. Oh, Tam, he thought, then whispered to the air,
"There was so much I wanted to tell you."
He turned his face into the corner and tried to sleep, using the meditation
techniques Kalin had taught him. But sleep wouldn't come. He kept seeing
Tamsin's green flashing eyes, smelling her, hearing her voice.
A hand touched his shoulder. He sat up in shock, instinctively grabbing the
wrist and pulling on it to unbalance his attacker. The legs before him
shifted only slightly, and he heard a soft snort. "I'm glad you remembered
something from your physical combat classes."
He looked up to see sharp green eyes smiling slightly at him, a red braid
slithering over one gray-suited shoulder. "Tam!" he exclaimed. "What are
you doing here?"
She pulled him to a standing position. "Did you think I could leave you in
here? I had to rescue you." She stopped and stared at him quite closely.
"Answer me one question," she asked him. "Who did you take to our
final-year semiformal at University?"
"I didn't go. I was supposed to take you, but you were busy slogging
through the jungle at the time," he said. Somewhere, a voice inside him
whispered, Don't trust Tamsin. "Why are you asking me?"
She bit her lower lip and looked down a moment. "I had to make sure it was
you," she said. She turned to lead him out of the cell, but not before he
caught the worried look in her eyes. "This has all been too easy. I think
there must be a trap hidden somewhere." She looked up the corridor, then
down. "Coast is clear. Our distraction must have worked. Come on!"
He followed her as softly as he could down the corridor. Voices came from
around a corner, speaking in that peculiar Western drawl so familiar from
his childhood. She flattened herself against the wall as she peered around
a corner. He saw her fists clench spasmodically as she turned back to him.
"Someone's coming." She pulled him to a door, then tapped a quick code on
the lock next to it. The door opened and she pulled him in, then slapped a
panel beside the inner door to close and lock it.
"We're safe for now," she sighed, then slapped on the bright lights. Jaysen
found himself standing at the center of an interrogation room, and his
stomach flipped as it brought back vague memories of questioning. He looked
back to his friend for support as a voice inside said, Don't trust Tamsin.
She was leaning against the door, arms folded, looking at him with a
curiously cold smile. "Something bothering you, Jaysen?"
"How'd you get the code for the door?" Don't trust Tamsin don't trust
Tamsin DON'T TRUST TAMSIN.
She shrugged. "One of the techs gave it to me."
He walked closer to her. "Which one?"
"There are so many," she said, waving a hand and walking toward the table in
the middle of the room.
The voice inside him screamed. He clenched a fist, fighting an almost
overwhelming urge to hit her and grabbed her by the hair, to yank her back.
Something was wrong, very wrong. "There are only two."
Very quickly, Tamsin turned around, wrenching her hair out of his grasp and
grabbed his wrist. With a quick, bone-wrenching twist, she pivoted, moving
his arm behind his back and forcing him, face-first, against a cold wall.
He could feel her body press against his and her hot, moist breath against
his ear. "You should know better than to try that on me, Jaysen," she
whispered, her free hand tracing down his thigh, her voice like a shard of
glass. He shivered. "I've always been better at hand-to-hand than you."
He felt a jolt of pain as his wrist was pulled higher, almost above his
shoulder blades. A tongue quickly flicked on his earlobe, his throat. He
began shaking and couldn't stop.
The hot mouth moved away from his throat and he felt cold metal slide along
it. It moved up to his cheek. He looked down, out of the corner of his
eye, afraid to move any more, and saw a silver blade trace along, felt the
flat of it stroke around and back along his skin to the nape of his neck.
He wanted to laugh, or to cry. It wasn't Tamsin. She never used a metal
knife, not when the two organic blades in her wrists served her so well. He
tried to take a deep breath and couldn't. "What do you want from me?"
Her damp, warm voice whispered in his ear again. "Only the answers to a few
questions." He heard tearing cloth as the knife traced down his spine, felt
the salty trickle of a few drops of blood following it. His wrist was
released as she cut his clothes off, but he didn't dare move, feeling
burning where the blade cut him, on his arms, then again across his back and
down, knowing even the slightest shift could mean worse damage. Her fingers
gently traced the cuts, rubbing wet slick blood into his back, his buttocks,
his thighs. He felt the tickle of her tongue again on his ear as he tried
to lose himself in the pain and ignore her fingers, and the knife. "There's
no reason I can't have fun while I ask," the voice laughed, as the knife
traced down his spine, then lower.
Jaysen lay balled up, shuddering, in a corner of his cell. He felt filthy;
his skin crawled and his mind wouldn't stop screaming, replaying the hours
in the torture chamber. He could feel her hands all over him, and the
ever-present knife. He knew he'd heal soon. He knew she'd be back again.
And he knew, however much he wished for it, she wouldn't kill him.
______________________________________________________________________________
Nicole Gustas (ngustas@hamp.hampshire.edu) recently gave up working 80 hour
weeks in favor of following Duran Duran around the East Coast. (Some people
follow the Dead...) She's interviewing at various colleges, including CMU
and American, in hopes of completing her bachelor's degree sometime before
she's 90. She's desperately searching for a better title for this series of
stories, so if anyone thinks of one, please let her know.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
THE HARRISON CHAPTERS "Erik slowly inched forward, inadvertently
kicking the globules of blood this way
Chapter 15 and that, as he bent over, shining his head
lamp into a pair of brown eyes.
Jim Vassilakos `Pupil reflex positive. We've got a
live one, people.'"
______________________________________________________________________________
The morning sun's delicate rays curved across Calanna's sloping horizon,
blues and reds mixing together in a strange and beautiful tapestry of seas
and continents spinning gently in the vastness of space. Erik watched from
the open airlock, his eyes full of the gorgeous vista. It had been a long
time since he'd seen a world from orbit with nothing between his nose and
vacuum save for a thin layer of plastic. It had been a very long time,
though it was even longer to fall. "A little closer."
Below them, the target vessel waited in impassive silence, its starboard aft
gaping and gnarled like a crippled beast immersed in deathly slumber. Slowly
it grew, until they were practically upon it.
"Hold us here, bridge. Okay, Beckerson at my back. Gringer and Saloris,
next."
Erik pushed himself into the void, the orange tether his only assurance of
returning. Splintered open by laser fire, the vessel's port airlock seemed
the best entrance. He slipped inside, reaching the inner portal. Its opening
mechanism was obviously damaged, though laser scoring didn't seem to have
anything to do with it.
"Beckerson. What do you make of this?"
The enlisted man stuck his gloved hand in the broken electronics
compartment, fishing around until he found what he was looking for. When it
reemerged, he was holding a small, flattened piece of metal. Erik studied it
apprehensively.
"What is it?"
"Kinetic projectile casing."
"What?"
"A bullet, sir." The others smiled, obviously amused by the exchange.
"Don't give me attitude, Mister."
"No sir."
Erik reached through the door's smashed window, gently pawing the opposite
side for a switch. When the door finally decided to move, he wasn't ready
for it and ended up obstructing its egress into the wall with a padded arm.
"Damnit... stop it!"
Saloris fired his laser into the groove between the door and its compartment
until the mechanical apparatus agreed to surrender its quarry. They
successfully dislodged his arm moments later.
"Well, at least that got it open."
Beckerson nodded, "Good job, sir."
The others managed to keep straight faces this time, and Erik found it hard
to forge a reply, particularly when he saw the corpse, her skin frozen and
eyes sunken inward, the fluid beneath them still boiling away in the silent
vacuum.
"My God."
Beckerson turned against the bulkhead in agreement, for once without a
wisecrack to share as Saloris stepped cautiously over the body, Gringer at
his back.
"Hold, people." Erik squeezed past them, "I'm sorry I didn't warn you. This
wasn't entirely unexpected."
"What the hell are we looking for, sir?"
"Survivors. Exactly as you were briefed. But I remain in front."
Saloris let a wry smile escape his lips.
"Be my guest."
Erik shook his head, "I wasn't asking your permission, Saloris. You're at my
back. Everyone turn on your head lamps."
They reached the intersection in the corridor and turned left. The laser
carbine scuttled silently along the floor as Erik gently nudged it, and the
half-open iris valve showed heavy laser scars. Inside, two bodies rested in
a corner, their vacc suits smothered beneath hundreds of flattened, red,
bubbling spheres. Erik slowly inched forward, inadvertently kicking the
globules of blood this way and that, as he bent over, shining his head lamp
into a pair of brown eyes.
"Pupil reflex positive. We've got a live one, people."
____________________
Touchdowns and takeoffs were always the best parts. Those few she
experienced reminded her of life as a young girl, always getting a window
seat so she could see the darting scenery. As a Commodore, her treatment was
much the same. She was cloistered by her aides, pampered by her servants,
and each world she visited seemed like no more than a montage of elegant
architecture and postcard panoramas, not so much because of the worlds
themselves as because of her remote and incredibly detached perspective.
Somehow, after decades of tireless work, she had finally come full circle.
That was the bitter taste of success: to have accomplished all of one's
goals, yet to have ultimately changed nothing.
They treated her as a child, albeit a child to be obeyed. In a strange sort
of way she rather liked it, but it was too rare that she could visit the fun
spots on a planet, even those where the Empire was respected. Instead, her
aides kept her cooped in orbit, tantalizing her with selected scenes from
various travel videos so as to give her the illusion of adventure. She'd
seen the Undercity, the Runyaelin, and even the Palace of Snagarth over and
over again, though to have actually visited any of those places could have
meant her life. Of that, she had little doubt.
She was so used to her sheltered existence, that if it wasn't for the cool,
fresh breeze sifting her hair, she could have imagined herself in an
entertainment booth back aboard the Crimson Queen, watching the local star's
amber rays scatter carelessly across an illusory, purple horizon. A great
risk it was to breathe fresh air beneath a wild, open sky, she thought to
herself, as the guards formed a protective circlet around her.
"Lieutenant."
"Sir?"
"Is it dawn or dusk?"
"Dawn, sir."
"Good."
It meant that real sunlight, not artificial radiation, would touch her for
the first time in weeks. She smiled in anticipation. First, however, she had
business to attend to, and the sooner it was over, the better.
The starport administrator's office was about as plush as Imperial
specifications would allow. General Gardansa sat behind the mahogany desk,
standing and saluting at she entered. It was their first meeting in person,
though she had grown rather used to him during their electronic meetings.
"Commodore, what a glorious occasion. Please be seated. I must warn you that
your visit comes as somewhat of a surprise. What, with the civic unrest, we
have not been able to take all the security precautions..."
"Forget about my security, General. We both know why I'm here."
"Ah... yes. The starport. I assure you, no harm has come to it."
"I noticed you people are without power."
"We shut down the main generator as a precaution. With the nuclear incident,
it was not inconceivable that the rioters would try to take an eye for an
eye."
Reece nodded, "I understand that you had some sort of incident this
morning."
"Incident?"
"...that you ordered an air strike on an unarmed merchant craft which was
harbored at this facility."
The general laughed as he leaned back.
"Ah... of course. As I expected, your information is less than complete."
"Do tell."
"The craft you speak of was smuggling a suspected felon off-planet. It was
in the process of departing when we discovered the crime in-process and
acted accordingly."
Reece arched an eyebrow, mildly amused by the story.
"What sort of felon?"
"I will make all our information available to you in due time."
"Did you manage to catch the person?"
Gardansa frowned, "Unfortunately, no. This was the reason I was so insistent
that our airspace not be violated. By sending down your inspectors at such
an inopportune moment and having your gunships fire on us as we attempted to
pursue our suspect... ah... we we're unable to deal effectively with the
situation at hand."
"I am told that your vessels harassed ours first."
"A misunderstanding, I am certain. However, now that we have cleared the
smoke between us, I hope that you will return our suspect, especially in
consideration of the fact that the vessel we intended to pursue is still in
our airspace."
"It's in orbit."
"Technicalities, merely. May I interest you in a drink?" He opened one of
the desk's drawers, ushering forth two glasses. Commodore Reece was about to
decline when a subtle knock came from the door.
"Commodore, you have an urgent call."
"If you'll excuse me, General. This will just be a moment."
"Take your time," he smiled, a glass in each hand. "As you can see, I am in
good company."
She stepped onto a balcony with her private aide, snatching the radio from
his hand and shooing him back inside.
"Wait. Is this coded?"
"Yes sir."
"Good. Leave me. This is Reece."
The static on the other end was fairly fierce.
"Hello?"
"Commodore, this is Lieutenant Torin."
"Go ahead Lieutenant. I read you."
Erik took a deep breath, the communications officer leaning beside him
catching the hint and getting up to fetch a highbowl of zardocha.
"We've recovered one survivor from the target, sir. The doctors say he'll be
fine but that he'll need time to recuperate before we can get any
information."
"Have you confirmed that he's ISIS?"
"Not yet, but considering the wavelength he chose to make initial contact,
I'd say it's pretty much a sure thing."
"What about the craft? Did the local's damage it badly?"
"Well, they shattered the fuel tanks. According to our engineer's, the
drives are still in working order, but the thing just ran out of pep before
it could really break free of the planet's gravity well."
"You mean it's coming back down?"
"Yeah... well, they've been telling me that we should either tow it to a
safer altitude to make repairs or rig up an independent fuel supply. If we
want to keep the ship, that is."
"How long until it falls low enough to burn-up in the planet's atmosphere?"
"Um... we've been getting jolted up here by scattered clouds of gas, but
disintegration is probably a week away, at least."
Reece chewed her lower lip, weighing the options.
"This is the problem, Lieutenant. Our friend up there committed some crimes
down here, and the local representative is already talking about
extradition. They're not going to sit on their hands for even a day while
their suspect is floating only a few kilometers over their heads."
"We can assume custody, can't we?"
"Probably, but there would be a stink, and the locals are restless enough as
it is."
"Then what do we do? I'm sure they've already scanned us making contact."
Reece shook her head, "Two vessels in the same place, one an Imperial
gunship and the other an independent merchant, and beyond that, they know
nothing. So this is the story. Instead of allowing himself to be captured,
their suspect turned his nose directly into the gravity well and hit full
throttle."
"That's suicide."
"And from what I understand, far safer than Calannan justice. As far as we
are concerned, this rescue never happened. How's it sound?"
Erik blinked, "You're asking my opinion?"
"Lieutenant, right now you are the closest, healthy thing I have to an ISIS
representative. Yes, I'm asking for your opinion."
"Well, although it's unlikely, I can't rule out that the initial
transmission Captain Dunham received wasn't monitored, and if it was..."
"I can live with a small risk. Anything else?"
"Um... we've been practically coupling ship-to-ship up here. Considering the
proximity, they're probably not going to believe us."
Reece smiled, "I'm not asking if they'll buy it."
"Well, some will, and some won't. But they can't prove we're lying. That's
what diplomacy boils down to, right?"
"More or less. Anything else?"
"Not offhand."
"Then you know what to do."
"Yes sir."
"Good. Do it. Reece out."
The communications officer returned with the zardocha, floating a highbowl
in Erik's general direction as he fidgeted with the various knobs and dials.
Erik took a sip and then downed the icy liquid in one shot. It was already
well past his sleep shift, and he knew he'd need the jolt of wake-up and
several more like it just to keep going.
"How do I get engineering?"
"Here."
"Cooper, you down there?"
"Right here, Erik." Her voice sounded crisp and almost perky, one of those
workaholics who enjoyed any chance to get out and play with a new piece of
machinery. They'd met at the officers' club some four months back during a
surprise birthday bash for one of the fleet's retired admirals. Thereafter,
he'd been found hanging around engineering a little more often than he'd
like to admit. She caught on pretty quick but seemed more amused than
interested, so he put away his notions before they ever got around to
becoming more than notions.
"Erik, you there?"
"Yeah. Sorry. I'm gonna have to take you up on that offer."
"Which one?"
"About the collapsible deuterium compartment. Time is an issue."
"Oh, sure. Inside two hours. No problem."
"Good."
"You want to forward Arch the specs on our new toy?"
"No. We aren't taking her back to the Crimson."
There was a short pause on the other end.
"Then what are we doing?"
"Your new toy's taking the big plunge. Hate to be the one to break the
news." He smiled.
"Any special reason?"
"I'd tell you if I could, but I can't, so I won't. Okay?"
Another pause, and he could almost see the dejected look in her eyes.
"Oh well. Fireworks from orbit, I guess."
As far as fireworks went, they weren't particularly exciting. They even went
out of their way to make sure nobody got hurt. Erik kept his eyes open and
alert, however, right until the very end.
"Impact confirmed."
Traveling at several hundred kilometers per hour, an impact with the Aeluin
meant instant destruction of whatever hadn't disintegrated on the way down.
The locals had kept clear once they realized what was going on, and from
their radio transmissions, it didn't sound like they were going to
investigate. At a depth of several kilometers, who would?
Erik entered his quarters, exhausted but very satisfied with a job well
done. Almost done, he reminded himself, as he keyed in the strongbox's
combination. Though blurry-eyed, he was careful. One slip of the finger
would mean incineration of the records, not to mention his life. The vault
opened, and he found the folder he was looking for, slapping the door shut
with a stern swipe of his hand.
"Computer. Access medical records, John Doe."
"Done."
"Display picture, facial, forward."
The chiphead's picture emerged on the far wall. Erik leafed through the
personnel folder. All it's information could easily be contained on one
flimsi, but for security's sake, ISIS insisted on using a lower, more
combustible technology. He knew what was really going on, of course. They
just wanted to scare the hell out of him, and at that they usually did a
good job.
Ding
He lifted his head, his mind so fuzzy that he wondered if he was imagining
noises.
Ding
"Computer, open channel visitor."
"Hey Erik, you in there?" It was Cooper. He was about to tell the computer
to open the door when he bit his tongue before the words could drop out."
"Yeah, sort of. What's up, Lieutenant?"
"I was hoping we could talk."
"Sort of late for a social visit, isn't it?"
"The way you were guzzling zardocha, I figured you'd be wide awake."
"What's this about Lieutenant?"
"Well... I was wondering why we destroyed that ship back there. I'm sort of
confused as to who's making the decisions, and I was just hoping you could
just clue me in a little."
Erik snorted, "The decisions come straight from the top. It's better not to
question them, okay?"
"Yeah, I sort of figured you'd say that. You gonna let me in or what?"
"I'm really tired."
"Don't brush me off, Erik."
He winced. He wanted to let her in, but he knew it'd be a bad idea. She
didn't have a need to know, which meant telling her anything could spell his
court-martial. Better to just piss her off all at once than bit by bit, he
figured.
"I'm sorry. I can't talk to you right now."
"What's the matter? You got somebody in there?"
He thought about it.
"Yeah. Yeah, I do. Be good and go away, and maybe it'll be you next time.
Computer, close channel."
Erik felt like the ultimate weener even though he kept reminding himself
that he had no real choice, not unless he wanted to do time for being a nice
guy.
Ding Ding Ding
"Computer, modify defaults, channel visitor, attention off for one hour."
"Done."
Erik leafed through the folder, looking for the face. The image of the
chiphead on his wall might have looked strangely familiar, but all he could
focus on were the metallic head tricks and Cooper's little visit. No doubt
she already suspected something. She was the type of person who would start
asking questions. He dictated a quick request to have her transferred,
finally leafing through the folder a second time, focusing on every detail
in its proper order.
It contained typical restricted information: all sorts of facts, none of
them useful, except one perhaps. The chiphead wasn't mentioned anywhere.
Erik groaned, a sickened feeling sloshing over him. There was one more
problem with the Commodore's plan, now painfully obvious. Destroying the
ship meant destroying evidence about who this character was.
"Computer, open channel, voice only, medical section, Dr. Hunter."
The line clicked open with an audible pop.
"Sickbay, Sosrodjojo speaking."
"This is Lieutenant Torin. Is Dr. Hunter in?"
"Um... I think she just stepped out. Can I take a message?"
"I really need to speak to the patient."
Erik could almost see the nurse smiling on the other end, his voice lathered
with amusement. He'd called before and talked to the same nurse at length.
He knew what to expect.
"No can do, Lieutenant. He's still resting."
"When will he wake up?"
"Ah... you'd have to talk to Dr. Hunter about that, but I'm sure she'll tell
you try back no sooner than tomorrow."
Erik sighed, "Okay, but there may be a problem with the patient. I want him
moved to the cage."
"The cage? You really think that's necessary?"
"I don't know, but I'd rather we took the precaution."
"Ah... very well. I'll call security."
The line closed with the same pop it made while connecting, and Erik
scratched his head, staring at the image on the wall.
"Computer, locate person. Captain Dunham."
"Done."
"Say."
"Captain Dunham is on the main bridge."
Erik leaned back on the couch.
"Open channel, voice only, main bridge."
There was a short pause.
"Bridge."
"Get me the captain."
Erik sat back up when he heard the captain's deep, resonant voice.
"This is Dunham."
"Captain, this is Lieutenant Torin. I'm Commodore Reece's special attache."
"I know."
"I need to talk to you."
"You can find me on the bridge. I'll arrange for your clearance if that's a
problem."
"Clearance isn't a problem, Captain. I need to speak with you privately.
There's a little discrepancy in the records we need to clear up."
"Ah... I doubt I can be of any help to you there, Lieutenant."
Erik rubbed his eyes, trying to think of some way to push nicely.
"It could be important, Captain. When can I meet you?"
He heard a heavy breath on the other end.
"Alright, Lieutenant. My quarters. One hour."
"Thank you, Captain."
Erik spent his spare time walking the passenger decks. Without his uniform,
he drew little attention and soon ended up in the Slippery Whisker, one of
the Crimson Queen's less ritzy canteens. Cooper was probably down in
engineering, he figured, reminding himself that he felt like dirt, though he
knew he'd made the right choice.
The crowd was fairly thick, so he just ordered and drank, sitting alone in
an alcove with his back to the wall. He preferred his little corner to the
bar where masses of people pressed together without any semblance of order
or civility. On this occasion, one rose above the rest, not so much in
stature as in head gear. Erik watched the tall spokes on the man's head
jiggle back and forth as he nodded to one of the bar wenches. It reminded
him of John Doe, helping to focus his mind on the matter at hand, and the
more he thought about it, the more it irked him.
Erik made his way back to officers' quarters and hung around in the lounge
until Dunham showed up. The captain was early as well, though the bored look
on his face didn't portray a man who was looking forward to this meeting.
Rather, he seemed to just want to get it over with, as quickly as possible,
and Erik wondered if his own presence on board represented some sort of
threat. Over the years, he'd learned that many of the naval and quasi-naval
officers didn't like ISIS, though they were the very people most often made
to cooperate with the service. Erik had always figured it was because the
Navy had it's own intelligence division, but nothing about the captain's
mood betrayed professional jealousy.
"Enter."
Dunham's cabin was fairly unassertive. It could be called spartan, if not
for the shimmer-sketches upon the wall. They were unsigned, though each
revealed a similar style. Erik recognized one as being of the commodore. The
picture depicted her on the observation deck, looking longingly into the
studded darkness of space and at a world turning gently below.
"Your work, sir?"
"A hobby of mine. It helps me relax."
Erik turned around.
"My reason for wanting to speak with you concerns a conversation you
allegedly had with our lucky guest."
"Before you continue, Lieutenant, I must confess that it was hardly a
conversation."
"Nevertheless, you did speak with him."
Dunham nodded, "I've already reported that to the commodore."
"And you also reported that our guest told you that he was an ISIS
operative."
"That's correct."
Erik paced to the corner of the room.
"Captain, this may seem a trivial question, but it's extremely important
that we be absolutely clear on this."
"I've told you what I can."
"Think again. Try to remember his exact words. Did he say he was an ISIS
operative or did he say that he was working with one?"
"Lieutenant, you've got to understand that our lucky guest, as you call him,
was not especially comprehensible. He was wounded. I could hear that his
voice, even amidst the static, was fatigued. He was coughing between his
words, and beyond that he was rather upset. In short, he was just barely
making sense at all."
"You're telling me you don't know what he said."
"I'm telling you that what he said and what he meant may be two different
creatures entirely. I asked him who he was. He replied that he was an ISIS
operative, not that he was working for one. However, considering his
physical state at the time, it wouldn't surprise me greatly if I was
misinformed."
____________________
"You sure this is such a good idea?"
Johanes looked up, a little peeved that Cecil's spoke-headed disciple was
having second thoughts.
"What are you bitching about? I'm the one who's drinking it."
Spokes shrugged and continued stirring as Johanes turned up the particle
stream, watching the bottom of the bowl with an increasingly intense stare.
If it stopped simmering evenly it would be useless, and if it rose to a boil
it would make him sick for at least a day. The trick was in getting it just
right; such was the nature of Draconian toe-jam.
It was a temperamental and unusually fragile drug. Johanes remembered one
instructor telling a class of recruits how home-made batches were held to
spoil on the side of caution nine times out of ten, hence the Realm's
enormous profits on their peculiar version, which was widely regarded as
having the best trade-off between safety and potency. What naturally
resulted was a "get `em hooked and milk `em dry" external revenue policy,
while inside the Realm itself, the drug was taxed to extinction. Meanwhile,
competitive operations were encircled and incorporated via the corporate
state's ruthlessly legal policy of economic barbarism, or so Mike might have
called it. Johanes gritted his teeth. He would find out soon, one way or the
other.
"You'd better hurry on that," Cecil murmured from his corner of the room,
his meditation seemingly concluded.
"You have the frequency and encryption set-up?"
The cameras nodded as he flicked the little, communications package into the
air, it's metallic casing no larger than a walnut. Johanes caught it in one
hand, hoping sincerely it would come of some use.
"A little slower. You're cooling the outside too fast."
Spokes shook his head, "We should just fix some hellacious flamebowls and be
done with it."
"I need some semblance of lucidity while I'm in there. If we do this right,
I'm as sick as an Alfirinian marsh slog for half a cent, and after that, all
I have to deal with are the vibes."
Spokes grinned, "Lucky bastard."
Johanes nodded. His first two years of training included a fairly
substantial appreciation of the drug culture, and the vibes were one of the
loosest highs he had ever experienced. They were brought on by the
interaction of the toe-jam and the body's own defense chemistry. They never
encouraged paranoia, made him hyper or hallucinate, or even put him on
planet nine. It was different. It was like being totally healthy, completely
aware, and remarkably resonant to reality. In short, it was like not being
stoned at all, except you were, but you wouldn't know it, and after a few
times, just when you thought you'd gotten the hang of it, you'd wake up to
the facts of addiction. He'd seen an acquaintance almost kill herself by
quaffing an obviously burnt batch on purpose. Good ol' Souxie, she thought
she could handle it, and here he was, practically thinking the same thing.
"If I don't come out of there after two cents, you tell the nurse on duty
what I did, okay?"
Spokes nodded, not taking his eyes off his stirring, "Sure. No problem."
"I'm serious."
"I know."
Beep "This is Captain Dunham. Before we enter hyperspace, I want to take
this opportunity on behalf of myself and the crew to thank you for traveling
with Royal Fleet. At this time, I would advise arosthoros sufferers to begin
heading toward sickbay if they haven't done so already. We will be arriving
at Tyber in roughly twenty-six standard hours. Until then, if we can do
anything to make your voyage more pleasant, please do not hesitate to
inquire with our attendants."
Johanes shut down the heat, throwing a fist of ground ice into his highbowl.
"Okay. It's time."
____________________
Feso grinned and made the mandatory jokes as he handed out the space
sickness capsules with little paper cups of water. As usual, most of the
passengers who showed up were over twice his age. They drank and smiled,
nodding and thanking him for his trouble. One old lady even complemented him
on his nice, white, lab coat. In short, all of them seemed happy, all of
them except for one. He was roughly the same age as Feso himself, yet his
face seemed ashen and worn, as if he was psyching himself up for the black
plague. Feso put a gentle hand on his shoulder.
"Don't worry. You'll be just fine."
Being a nurse, Feso saw that sort of reaction all the time. In every batch
of passengers, there would be at least one who would start getting sick
scarce minutes before the jump into hyperspace. Dr. Hunter explained it away
as being some sort of psychological, anal-retentive thing, but Feso could
never help getting worried. Maybe they were carrying some dread illness.
After all, it was impossible to screen everyone thoroughly.
Dr. Hunter always laughed his distress off as though he were making a joke.
She thought he was funny and told him so, barking a string of new orders
during the very next sentence. Fret was the natural consequence of an idle
mind, in her book. Still, this guy looked different.
Concerned undertones reverberated within the sickbay as everyone felt the
disorientation. Several clung to the hand holds as their knees quaked back
and forth, and one man, possibly in his nineties, sat down on the floor,
blinking in confusion as the room swirled around him. Feso smiled, leaning
next to him.
"Still with us?"
"Eh?"
Some laughed, others leaving as they realized that the worst was over, and
Feso helped the old man back to his feet who was now smiling at his part in
the joke.
"Eh... I was just taking a breather."
"Yes. I noticed."
Four of them stayed, the young man he was originally worried about included.
Feso looked them over, feeling foreheads with his bare palm.
"How are you feeling?"
"I still feel dizzy," one replied
"That's normal. Here, sit down. We have a medicinal compound already
prepared that should get you back on your feet in no time."
He administered four injections, three of them seeming to have some small
effect. The young man wasn't responding, however. He fidgeted in his seat,
perspiration soaking his shirt as his face turned a rosy hue of red. He
squinted up with dilated pupils.
"I'm gonna be sick."
"It's okay."
Feso gave him another injection. The man started to lean over and drool on
the floor.
"Ugghhh!"
"Umm... okay. You're gonna be just fine."
"No I'm not."
"Just wait here."
"Where are you going?"
Feso ran to the office. Dr. Hunter was on the comm board, arguing with the
bureaucracy as usual.
"There's a problem with one of the passengers."
She looked up as though expecting his outburst.
"Acute arosthoros?"
He nodded.
"What code is the patient?"
"Green."
She nodded, "Double the injection."
"I already tripled it."
Dr. Hunter put the bureaucracy on hold and started across the room when she
heard somebody vomiting on the floor. The man had fallen out of his seat,
his face smeared with the contents of his stomach, while the other four
passengers were alternating between looking away and sneaking peeks, their
faces masked by utter revulsion. Only Hunter seemed unaffected.
"This isn't arosthoros."
"Then what is it?"
"I don't know... yet. How long as he been doing this?"
"About a minute."
She dragged the man to his feet, pulling him inside intensive care.
"Stay with the others. Don't let them leave."
Johanes felt like he'd been turned inside-out and left to rot as she dumped
him into the gravitic recliner. She immediately turned her back to him,
turning knobs, pushing buttons, as he let loose with another volley from the
interior of his stomach. The room seemed to turn around on him, flipping and
flopping as blood rushed to his mouth, exiting through his nostrils and lips
and washing itself over his face.
Hunter examined the readings, a perplexed look crossing her face. The man's
defensive system was going wild. She held him down with a grip only taught
in medical school and took a blood sample, stepping back to the analyzer
with her trophy. The man continued to shake, his hair now soaked with sweat.
"Help..."
"Quiet. I'm working."
The analyzer broke down the blood into its constituent parts, and the
machine spat back readings she hadn't seen since the music festival on Satyr
IV. She switched the IC open and groaned.
"You can let the others go, Nurse."
Feso came darting in a minute later.
"What was it?"
"See for yourself."
She put a pulse monitor around the patient's arm as Feso studied the output.
"Artificial contaminant of some kind."
"Yep. We've got ourselves a druggie."
Feso breathed a deep sigh of relief, then turned around hoping she hadn't
noticed. Hunter smiled up at him.
"It's okay. At least it wasn't a contagion, right?"
He nodded and smiled, somewhat embarrassed, "The possibility had crossed my
mind."
"You always think that..."
"And so far, I'm always wrong," he confessed, finishing the sentence for
her. She pressed the ice pack to the back of the patient's neck as he
continued to groan, trying in vain to force out the emptiness in his belly.
"He already has a lot of chemicals in his system, but I want you to
administer a stabilizer. It may draw out his body's reaction to whatever he
took, but at least it should keep him from getting any worse."
Feso nodded, "Somebody should watch him, right?"
"You watch him. I don't have time for baby-sitting. I've got a call on
hold."
"You want me to stay with him alone?"
Hunter looked her nurse over, a slight frown creeping down her face.
"He's a grown man on drugs, Feso. He's harmless, not to mention pathetic."
"What if you're wrong?"
"About him being harmless? Then you load up the hypo-rod and punch him with
a canister of Teramethenol-12. That should keep him happy."
"If it doesn't kill him, first," Feso muttered, but she had already left. He
prepared the stabilizer and administered it, though putting one drug on top
of another was more his idea of recklessness than medicine. Hunter just
wanted the bozo to suffer for a while longer. She knew that he wasn't in any
real danger, and the pulse-monitor would keep an eye on him better than any
human could.
Johanes turned over, particles of vomit resting at his sides in the gravitic
field. The noise of his breathing sounded parched and ragged behind the
thumping in his ears, and the nurse stood over him, a concerned though
unsympathetic look on the young man's face.
"How are you feeling, Mr. Smyth?"
"Terrible. Is it over?"
Feso shook his head, "I gave you a stabilizer. It seems to be bringing your
pulse down, but you'll probably be sick for a while."
"Great."
"What did you take?"
"Huh?"
"What drug did you take?"
"Drug?" Johanes tried to laugh, but it only made him feel worse. "I thought
I was space-sick."
"No. The doctor found some sort of drug in your system."
"Damn. No kidding. Must have been in that drink I had. Those Calannans sure
do have a wicked sense of humor."
Feso blinked, "You mean you didn't even know?"
"There was this little pre-jump party on the promenade deck. I guess things
got a little out of hand. Uh oh..." Johanes turned over and opened his mouth
to heave. Only a rotting, stinking belch came out, the sort that gets
holed-up in some damp recess of the stomach and refuses to poke its head out
for weeks at a time. Feso leaned back once he got a whiff, squinting in
extreme displeasure.
"Uh... I guess I can leave you alone for a little while. If you get into
trouble, just call through the door. I'll leave it open, okay?"
"No problem."
Johanes switched off the gravitic recliner, settling to the sticky, white
floor, now polka-dotted by various yellow and red particles of an origin he
didn't wish to recall. Meanwhile, the computerized gadgetry continued to
beep in time with his pulse. He walked over to it, toying with the dials as
blood seeped from his nostrils and onto his lips while his tongue wagged
back and forth, trying to avoid the awful taste.
"Remember, Jo. You gotta eat apples. They taste the same coming back up as
they do going down. Two meals for the price of one." It was Souxie's voice
in his head, as clear as the last time he'd heard it. Good ol' toe-jam.
He was relatively familiar with the operating system. He'd once used
something remotely akin to it in a lab on Estin, except that the Draconian
equipment was far more advanced. This was cruise liner material, a paltry
product by any comparison. The medical console reported that a job was still
in process: blood sample analysis, unknown compound recognition. He removed
the sample tray, pocketing it and dumping the job out of queue. He then
recalled the last minute of pulse readings from memory and set the playback
into an infinite loop, tearing the pulse monitor off his arm as quietly as
haste would allow.
The intensive care chamber was long and rectangular, the far wall coated
with long plastic windows. A narrow corridor ran behind them, cutting a path
between the antechamber and a row of laboratories. Behind the clear plastic
barrier, Johanes could see someone dressed in a long white coat walking down
the corridor, holding a stack of flimsies under one arm. The person seemed
to be whistling, through from the behind the plastic, Johanes couldn't hear
the noise, yet from the movement of the man's lips, he could still pick up
the basic rhythm. The lips were cherry hued, like the front of his shirt,
though that used to be white. He remembered how it had been so thoroughly
cleaned at the Arien estate. Kori had shoved him into the moat just for
kicks. She'd later asked him how he'd felt when the mansion's mascot dragged
him beneath the water in one, swift, tug of a tentacle. It was only playing,
she tried to explain, and they laughed, though he'd been rather annoyed at
the time.
Johanes blinked, ducking to his belly. He'd probably been standing there
looking stupid for close to a minute, maybe longer. He tried to focus his
mind, but it kept on going off on tangents. The intrusion of the stabilizer,
he figured. Planet nine would pass by, he reassured himself, as he started
noticing the little cracks in the tile, the variations in the shape of one
from another. He crawled about the chamber, his eyes examining everything in
sight, as he investigated his new surroundings cubicle by cubicle like a
cockroach in search of sustenance.
At the far end he found what he was looking for. The pulse monitor made no
noise, but from the little jumping dot on the console, he could tell that
somebody in the bed was alive. He drew Mike's fiberglass pistol, a little
memento he'd been saving for a special occasion, and standing over the
bedside, pulled the sheets down slowly with his free hand. The headjacks
came as somewhat of a shock, as he fully expected to find a white mane
instead. Holding his breath, he pulled the sheet a little further.
"Michael."
There was no response, and Johanes grinned as he re-concealed the firearm,
shaking the gatherer by the shoulder.
"C'mon. Wake up."
From the antechamber he could hear voices, one of them a woman's, strangely
familiar.
"We'd rather wait until he's awake before we start moving him around.
Besides, he's safer in intensive care. If something goes wrong, we can treat
him better in there than in the cage."
"Look, doctor. I have direct orders to make sure he gets moved, so he's
getting moved. End of story."
"I understand, but he's still at a very critical stage in the healing
process. Why is it so important that he be moved now?"
"Right. Let me try put this as succinctly as possible. He gets moved now. We
are not having a discussion about it. If you want to stomp on me, fine. Call
my commanding officer and bitch. I don't care. I have my orders. Nothing
personal, okay?"
"You people haven't even given me his medical records. We have no idea what
sort of prior conditions might exist. If he's not inside intensive care, I
can't assume responsibility for what might happen."
"Fine. That's great. Like I said before, I don't really care what happens to
him."
The security officer entered the chamber, turning first toward the beeping
noise and then to his left.
"My oh my. What happened to this fella?"
"Ah...."
"Space-sickness," Feso interrupted.
"No. Really?"
Hunter stood quietly, watching her nurse beneath an arched eyebrow. The
security officer just laughed.
"I never knew it got that bad. I mean, not on a ship like this, anyway. Back
when I was serving in the navy, one of our engineers had to crawl outside
while we were in the middle of hyperspace. Very serious repairs. Okay? And
he puked his guts out after we pulled him back in. Just between us, I don't
think he ever really recovered, neither. And the janitors! I mean barf-o-
rama, okay? And they were just a bunch of robots, and they still got pissed.
You know when your robots start getting pissed off, you've got some
serious..."
"How fascinating."
"Yeah, and this other time..."
"The patient is over there. Please, just move him."
Johanes let the pulse monitor fall again from his arm as they walked past,
dumping the playback job and the rest of the computer's soft-memory with a
silent turn of a power switch. He then stopped the nurse, who was trailing
behind the other two.
"Real sorry about the mess."
"Aw... don't worry about it. We have nicer robots than the navy."
"Great. Look, I'm gonna get back to that party."
"No. You can't leave."
"Sorry. Got to. We ordered a hermaphrodite stripper, and I really don't want
to miss it. Thanks."
"But..."
Johanes scampered out of sickbay before Feso could utter another word.
Spokes was sitting on a bench nearby, trying desperately to hide
inconspicuously behind a king-sized flimsi and a pair of mirrored stick-on
shades. If not for the head jacks poking above the flimsi leaf, he might of
succeeded, but as it was, he made less than the perfect spy. For starters,
he was too honest.
"You look like garbage and smell like stomach swill."
Johanes grinned, "Compliments will get you everywhere."
"Damn. You must be having a good high."
"No, it evaporated, which is fine because it was pretty rotten while it
lasted. They injected me full of stabilizers."
"Tough luck."
"Agreed."
"You take care of business?"
Johanes shrugged, "I think Michael beat me to the punch. They're moving him
right now."
"What do we do?"
"You keep your eyes peeled. I'm going to take a shower."
______________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrengr.ucr.edu) works part-time as a programmer at a
place so cheesy that he declined to mention the name. He says that if
anybody has any job prospects for a semi-computer-literate MBA who likes to
write, he's ready, willing, and able to scoot his butt for decent buckage
and good experience.
`The Harrison Chapters' will be continued next issue.
______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Microchips Never Rust "...even worse was the Klan robe. Who
would have thought that Iran would
Part 2 embrace the Ku Klux Klan. They still
looked at the late President Duke as
Eric Miller being some kind of a god. Yeck."
______________________________________________________________________________
"October 5, 1957. Huge headline in today's newspaper that the first
satellite is circling the earth. For a minute I lay on the bed with a
pounding heart. Some events really hit me hard. During the first
forty years of my life, I admired technology. When Wernher von Braun
told me about his future projects, such as a flight to the moon, I was
fascinated. But Hitler, with his technologically-based doctorship and
his assembly-line extermination of the Jews, shocked me so deeply that
I can never again be so naive about technology. Every advance nowadays
only frightens me. News like this account of the first satellite makes
me think of new potentialities for annihilation and arouses fear. If
they fly to the moon tomorrow, my fear will be all the greater."
-- Albert Speer, "Spandau -- The Secret Diaries"
Hanson looked at the office chimp and waved his hand. The chimp responded
with a very mechanical nod that betrayed a complete lack of spontaneity.
"Do you speak English?"
Suddenly wide eyed, the chimp typed as fast as his fingers could hit the
keyboard. It was obvious that the clumsy fingers hit and missed keys almost
at random. On the overhead screen could be read the message, "No, but I can
hear and type English very well." The chimp grunted in a whoo-whoo,
obviously delighted at the personal request to know his abilities.
Okay, thought Hanson. Link this together. Bob and Susan, like its all one
joke. The chimps, the menial tasks. He also noticed one thing. The chimp
typed things that came out in perfect English, even though you saw his
fingers do things like hit two keys at once. An Intelligent keyboard. All at
once it hit Hanson.
"Do I have my own account?"
"Of course," signaled the chimp.
Hanson ventured forward with a comment, "I can tell that you're very good
with computers. I could really use your help." The chimp ooped with delight.
Several administrators walked past the desk in the lobby, but they paid no
attention to what they were doing. Another fact was confirmed: none of these
people ever carried folders or paper of any kind. The two or three chimps
who scurried in and out carrying files received no attention. Hanson felt
comfortable enough to assume the chimp's place behind the workstation. A
press of the `Flocculating' icon prompted `type your question, please, and
enter your name.' "What is my apartment like?"
The video that popped up showed a small, split-level white townhouse. A
saccharine voiced cooed softly from the speaker, "Welcome to North Campus
Village, faculty section. Every effort has been made to match your personnel
profile with your surroundings. Please convey any changes you would like
made to us immediately. Remember that new housing assignments will require 2
weeks to be processed." The camera traveled through the street to show each
little unit with its own plot of Kentucky blue grass out front. The narrow
sidewalks lead from the front door to the crisp line of curb that lined
immaculate black asphalt streets. Everything in the video looked so brand
new that Hanson suspected a simulation was at work. "You will be pleased to
know, Dr. Hanson, that your new neighbors have been selected for your
intellectual stimulation. Programmers, artists and writers on the faculty
live in a one block radius from your house." A close-up on the front door
showed a box-like contraption wheeling itself in. "For your convenience, a
complete food preparation and house cleaning unit is on all call 24 hours a
day. For your driving convenience, a car has been matched to your
personality profile; we believe you will enjoy this limited edition 1996
Lamborghini Diablo." A steering wheel too! The video stopped. The chimp
pressed the "Get Help" option and pointed at Hanson's bowlcut. "Right." A
request for an appearance stylist was typed after Get Help. And another
thing. There is no way I'm going to wear a Brother Jim monkey suit, no
offense to you, chimp. I may be a professor, but I wear what I wear. A
request was typed out to find the nearest clothing store. The Image Boutique
on North Lake Drive would do for both the haircut and clothes. The uniform:
Prewashed jeans, Hawaiian shirt, black leather jacket and running shoes.
The mail icon on the view panel blipped a few times. The chimp pounded the
keyboard and up scrolled a screen with the message: "Art! Art! Good Buddy.
We've got to talk. Call me at A-2042 tonight. Mari and some friends want to
meet you. I've got a great idea for an album, need your help. Faculty get
together this Friday too. See ya. Dr. Bill Britten, Department of Physics."
The chimp looked at the panel and pulled his lower lip. A command prompt at
the bottom read "Message #2: Address 2Hanson --For your eyes only." The
chimp scowled and pressed the paper print button and handed the sheet to
Hanson without looking at it. This letter was much less cheerful than the
other.
"Mr. Hanson: Congratulations on your new appointment. Must see you
immediately. Please go to South Campus library at once. Enter door and tell
guard that you're with `Research.' Sit at table by window. Wait for message
from us to be hand delivered. We know who you are and have news which is of
urgent interest to you. We are friends. Please be careful." A black block of
characters read "To dispose, Press here twice in rapid succession." Tap tap.
The paper dissolved in a small cloud of black ash. Part of it landed on the
chimp's head and had to be wiped off. Hanson knew something was up. `We are
friends. Please be careful.' Ya, right. People were always pressing him for
favors. But it was his doing favors that kept him out of the worst camps.
But he felt like forgetting message two and heading North to his new house.
But this certainly would come back to haunt him. Better get it over with.
"It has come to our attention that some confusion has resulted over the
proper Canadian usage of the term American. After great pains were
apparently affected by the Reich Senator from Georgia to include us in
his definition of what was covered by the term American, we have been
prompted to deliver by official channels the current state of this
usage.
Gentlemen, upon hearing the word American, we are proud to accede that
this nation consists only of Washington administered states, German
occupied Ontario and Montreal, and the newly independent Western
states. We of Northern Canada and rebel Alaska no longer use this name
to refer to ourselves and would greatly appreciate it if your
correspondence would reflect this fact from now on. Thank you."
-- UN Security Council address from the consul of Commonwealth of
Independent Arctic States.
Hanson made a quick exit out of the Administration building. A chimp in a
white golf cart had been waiting for him and after a 5 minute trip through a
spruce covered trail, the two of them stopped at the trash strewn edge of
the homeless village. He motioned the chimp to go into the village, but a
fear stricken look at the ragged shuffling figures inside and he knew that
he would have to continue on foot. The chimp burrowed his head back into his
shoulders and sped off in the cart.
Hanson had been dropped off at the old University sidewalk that ran north to
the Bell Tower and Library. In its present state, the sidewalk would
challenge the most rugged mountain bike; the cement slabs had broken up into
complete rubble at several points and were covered over by long grass and
weeds. Old black and white photos painted a picture of the walk in better
times: smartly dressed young men and women, argyle socks, plaid skirts,
carrying books. Classes chosen without the approval of a career officer,
careers chosen at freedom.
Oh, Central in our hopes and dreams
To thee we work and strive
To shine a light upon ourselves
So that we a path may shine...
Sigh. The old Bell Tower could be seen up the path. Like everything in
sight, it had been appropriated in some way by the homeless. Three youths
were at the top of the tower inside the cement Tudor battlements that closed
in the roof. An old oil drum made into a barbecue was spilling out smoke.
Squint your eyes just a bit and it looks like you've signed up as a
free-lancer in Richard II's army, advancing on the French. The beauty of the
once-grand lawn had evolved into the squalor of a trash strewn sea of mud. A
hundred crude huts made out of cardboard and scraps of wood littered the
area. Shuffling old women in long mud-stained skirts, wild-haired teenagers
and stubbly faced old men milled around. An old man stood at the entrance of
a cardboard hovel to Hanson's right.
"Bom Dia, Herr Professor!" squeaked the old man. Hanson started to say
"What?" but quickly glanced at the blue polyester encircling his sleeves,
realizing that the appearance of crisp blue polyester signaled authority,
especially on the campus. Hanson replied in greeting, using the Portuguese
he had learned in Brazil. What came back from the old man was a strange form
of Pidgin, a kind of half German, half Portuguese mixed with American street
slang. Hanson could only finish the conversation by nodding in pretend
understanding and quickly left.
The Library presented a strange sight. Like most other buildings in town,
most of the windows had been long smashed out, or removed and replaced by
the ubiquitous sheets of tarpaper that the nazi occupation government was so
keen on using. Most of the base of the brick on the first level was covered
over with a mass of lean-tos filled with old women selling food rations and
recycled household appliances. A kid was in one tent trying to sell
potential customers on the idea of using a waffle iron as a clothes ringer.
In another, partially-opened boxes of spray paint held up a cardboard sign
which read, "Spray on Hair. Real Cheep. Used by Pope Ron."
The warm air of the afternoon left a kind of festive feeling, and in spite
of the constant background smell of burning tires, the heavenly smell of
garlic, sage, olive oil and ginger wafted in from several woc fires. Even
the old fountain was still up and running in the front plaza and several
village kids ran in and splashed around. A PVC pipe wired to the fountain
filled the water buckets of several people standing in a line.
Hanson reached the front entrance where a teenaged guard stood watch at an
old school desk. He was bald with an M. C. Escher design tattooed to the top
of his scalp. A pitbull/rottweiler mix guard dog eyed him lazily.
"I'm with research." The dog's ears perked up as Hanson spoke.
"Oh, go inside and sit down. Someone will be down to meet you."
The first available seat was a chair by one of the few remaining windows on
the first level. Hanson could see the guard and dog from behind as well as
the view down into the homeless village. After 15 minutes a small figure
darted up to the guard and his dog, a Capuchin monkey with plastered back
gray face hair and alert blue eyes. The monkey wore a small denim backpack
from which he pulled a biscuit. The biscuit got tossed into the air where it
was caught and devoured by the dog, who happily wagged his tail. The monkey
darted quickly into the entrance and stopped momentarily to eye Hanson
before running off into the dark hallway of the unlit interior. Hanson's
eyes became used to the interior darkness. All around him could be seen
stacks of old books, magazines and bunk-bed mattresses. Piles of tin-cans,
loops of wire and neatly stacked corrugated boxes lined the walls. Most of
the old book stacks were still there, and at first glance they seemed to
hold to capacity dozens of old-style bound books. The stacks of mattresses
betrayed the fact that the Library opened its doors as a homeless shelter
during the worst winter months. Closer to the window, and more readable in
the dust-filtered light were several scattered piles of full color posters.
Hanson bent down to pick one up and positioned it front of him. The top logo
read:
"Join the Advanced Guard. Become part of a revolution."
Two figures made up the body of the poster. One was an Iranian extremist who
held his fist into the air. He was wearing the Klan robe with a Prussian
cross emblazoned on the chest. The other figure seemed to be an American
youth holding a rifle in both hands. A maniacal smile was on the youth's
lips; the unnatural appearance of it lead Hanson to conclude that the smile
itself had been morphed into the original photograph. Poor guy, he was
probably a war prisoner to begin with. But even worse was the Klan robe. Who
would have thought that Iran would embrace the Ku Klux Klan. They still
looked at the late President Duke as being some kind of a god. Yeck.
"Hidden inside our advance to a new production system is a potential
for social change so breath-taking in scope that few among us have
been willing to face its meaning."
-- Alvin Toffler
Hanson's reverie on the complex web of international events was broken by
the appearance of the monkey who jumped out of the darkness. A tiny hand
thrust out a card which read, "Follow me." Reluctantly, Hanson left his
chair to follow the monkey in the dark interior. A door at the extreme end
of the hall opened up, and with it came enough light to navigate by. The
light allowed closer examination of the book stacks. Each shelf contained a
large pile of books that had been shellacked together with a tough
polyurethane glue. As book burning was considered too passe and reminiscent
of violent times past, the new censors at Central had sent most of the
Library's books to a factory where they underwent `archiving preservation'
so that `future generations could enjoy them.' Unfortunately, the process
turned the books into little more than unopenable plastic bricks but they
did look really nice on the shelves. Lately, though, censors worried a
little less about the issue, as Compressed English was now widely adopted in
grade schools and kids shown an example of 20th century English usually gave
up in despair over the contorted arrangement of double letters and strange
vowel combinations.
Hanson and the monkey ascended a staircase leading to the upper levels. The
stairwell was filled with large piles of coiled-up copper wiring, old style
cable television wiring, and telephone cords. Apparently the spoils of
`Operation Cut and Snip' were ending up in the Library. Stepping onto the
third level, the pair navigated through ever larger piles of junk and old
magazines, including, incredibly, a crumbling issue of Popular Electronics
from 1968, the title do-it-yourself construction project: "Build your own
Theremin!" Hanson bent down and picked up an old yellowed paperback book
titled "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." The book randomly fell open to a
page which read,
"By the end of September 1944, some seven and a half million civilian
foreigners were toiling for the Third Reich. Nearly all of them had been
rounded up by force, deported to Germany in boxcars, usually without food or
water or any sanitary facilities and were put to work in the factories,
fields and mines. They were not only put to work but degraded, beaten and
starved and often left to die for lack of food, clothing and shelter."
Hmm. Try as you might, you can never predict the past with much accuracy.
The monkey hissed impatiently. Hanson dropped the book and followed it into
a corridor that once held the office suite for the Library staff. The
randomly dispersed junk contained piles of old black-and-white TV's, `all in
one' stereos, including 8-track, and old yellowed book pages. At last Hanson
was led to a room containing several beaten old oak desks and book shelves
lined with many bits of flotsam and jetsam. On one of the desks an old
soldering iron was burning. A radio was quietly blasting out the 5th
movement of Philip Glass's `Satyagraha'. The acrid smell of burning solder,
old tube electronics burning red-hot, and burning coffee grinds was music to
Hanson's nose. A figure seated with his back to the door, silver hair
spilling past shirt collar, suddenly swung around to face a shocked Hanson.
"Dr. Owen! I thought you were dead!"
vi. xinitrc
default NeWS = talk.eliza.net
From:
Prison.net;section=info.crime.felonius;status=limited
"I think the one thing that really pushed me over the edge was all these old
people telling me how I should help people who were less fortunate than I
was. But I would be the one showing up at their house with a truck and some
tools and telling them to join me `cause some friends and I were going to
help a couple of families fix up their houses. But these old dudes would be
sitting at their computers saying, `no, I can't, I've got to finish this
social services grant application.' They would apply for money that would
let them do studies "On the root causes of poverty among the poor." And I'd
say shit, we already know why they're poor. And they would get twisted out
of shape because I didn't join their cause, and they thought the best way I
could help the poor was to sit at some desk filling out their paperwork.
That really got to me. All these hypocrites telling me that by spending all
day writing on 8-1/2 by 11 sheets of paper they're helping the poor. You
know what's really sick? That guy who stands behind the counter handing out
free food, and these so-called crusaders won't invite him to their parties
cause he's not really doing important work. I'll take one of those food
counter guys over ten of them any day. Man, these older guys talk a good
talk, but when it comes time to do any real work, like helping build a
clinic downtown, they're off at one of their congratulation dinners, and if
they're not at one of these dinners, they're off zonked in front of the tube
watching some show telling them how `significant' they are."
"Why are you here?"
"Well, you couldn't help the poor then, not legally and in the way you
wanted to cause you had to get permits and write all this shit. So I started
saying this phrase to workers my age which went:
`The next time they tell you to pick up a pen, pick up a hammer.' And
everyone knew that it meant to stop doing the paperwork bullshit and start
doing something with your hands and your tools."
"And then what happened?"
"Well, The Information Crimes Division of the Secret Service arrested me for
`promoting lawlessness and destruction.' I had this BBS that you could log
into to exchange info on places that needed help. And at my court trial they
claimed I was promoting anarchy."
"Were you?"
"Man, the anarchy was already there long before I showed up. We were just
trying to divert the stream of bad anarchy into the stream of good anarchy.
You know, the kind you can live with and feel good about."
run pgm
symbolic analysis=12% time spent: years=15 subject not rehabilitated
request for parole denied close
logout
"After awhile I started to realize that there were three Newsgroups
that I went to first: alt.cyberpunk, sci.virtual-worlds, and
soc.culture.brazil. Somehow these three groups read together give off
a strange synergy that cannot be seen individually."
-- The Author
"Picture if you will, a giant bubble over 100 billion light years in
radius. We, on Earth, are at the center of this bubble. When we start
to look out over the expanse of this bubble, we see that the further a
galaxy is from us, the more its light has shifted into the red part of
the light spectrum. Because we seek to explain the origin of the
universe in a way that resembles our everyday physical reality, we say
that the red shift is proof that all matter in the universe is
hurtling from a central point; this Doppler shift is to us proof that
the universe was created from some ancient Big Bang.
But we look closer at the situation and see many strange paradoxes. As
an example, our instruments tell us that the Universe is humming with
the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. When we look
closer at what the source of this radiation is, is it possible that
these extreme low frequencies are themselves the images of galaxies
whose red-shifts are so extreme that they are detectable only as
low-frequency radiation? And as this background radiation is
detectable from all sides, can this not be caused by the large number
of galaxies laying beyond the bubble of visibility of which the Earth
is at the center?
Our astronomers tell us that the visible universe accounts for only 10
percent of the matter that can be detected. Can this other 90 percent
also consist of those galaxies whose red-shift is so extreme that
their images cannot be resolved?
But the greatest issue that comes under scrutiny is this: that the
very motion which is said to be proof of the motion caused by the Big
Bang is the doppler shift held detectable by the red-shift.
Ladies and Gentlemen, we have, through close physical scrutiny of the
universe and through our new space based telescope, uncovered
irrefutable proof that the red-shift is not a Doppler shift, but a
shift in the wavelength of light itself as it crosses the vast
distances of the Universe. The massive gravitational force of the
Universe itself causes light to shift into the red spectrum over a
prescribed distance. True to the original theory of Einstein, this
shift is caused by the topology of a closed universe which refracts
light in the same way that a spoon viewed in a glass of water appears
to have a bent handle. It is a form of gravitational refraction that
cause the frequencies of light to shift toward the red. When we on the
Earth look at a galaxy many billions of light years away, we see a
galaxy whose light frequency waves have been physically slowed down by
the effect of crossing our great sea of matter. Likewise, someone on
that particular galaxy looking at our Milky Way would see that same
red-shift. Formerly, scientists maintained that this universal
red-shift existed because the universe expanded at such an immense and
uniform speed that all forms of matter accelerated from each at the
same shift.
We can now feel confident to say that the background radiation is
caused by the uncountable seas of galaxies beyond our so called
visible Universe affected by this principle. In centuries past,
scientists said that it was impossible for the Universe to be infinite
because at night we would look into a blindingly bright sky. Because
of our new principle, we can say that it is possible for the Universe
to be infinite; beyond 100 billion light years, the light and energy
of the stars becomes so shifted that we no longer see or detect them.
It is this model that we now prefer over the "Big Bang" theory. As for
the creation of matter itself, one can now argue that if the "Big
Bang" was needed as point from which matter was created, it is just as
acceptable to believe that matter arose from an infinite amount of
points in space arising from the turbulent quantum fabric of the
Universe itself."
-- Lecture given after the Nobel prize in Physics award given to Paulo
Morais for his publication and verification of the Theory of
Electrodynamic Entropy
Paulo Morais stepped onto the gangplank that separated the office dome from
the scientific complex. The plank was usually off limits for safety reasons,
but Morais had a universal key. Besides taking a much needed short-cut, the
key allowed him to feel for himself just how efficient the space cooling
effect was. Inside the dome there was a fairly light breeze, upper 70's,
normal humidity. Pressing the key into the lock and onto the outside of the
dome caused a heat blast of warm, moist upper 90's Amazon Jungle air. Morais
crossed the twenty feet into the next dome and looked upward to admire the
superconductive webbing that ran from strut to strut inside the geodesic
structure. One of the many discoveries of room temperature superconductivity
was the space cooling effect. Woven strands of conducting fiber into a
mosquito net pattern and apply current. Water in the air immediately
condenses on the web and runs off at the bottom. In a dome, the sudden
condensation creates a cool blanket of dehumidified air that sinks to the
floor. In the sweltering heat of the Amazon, the domes made living and
working inside a pleasant experience.
Morais entered his lab. A young Yanomami Indian looked up from a stack of
papers and said, "Bom Dia, Herr Professor!"
Morais studied the youth quietly. "Now don't tell me you're trying to learn
Portuguese."
"Nah. I think I'll stick to learning how to speak English with a thick
Russian accent."
"Did you ever find out what `Wilco' means?"
"Like in `Roger Wilco' and `A-OK'? I think the two terms are
interchangeable. I don't know why someone would say `Wilco' by itself."
"If it's just more slang, don't bother to transcribe it."
Morais and his assistant had inherited a huge pile of documents that were
sold to the Brazilian government by an Icelandic salvage operation. As a
favor to the Amazonian Technical Institute, Morais offered to interpret the
meaning behind many old stacks of documents that described the rise and fall
of the American space program.
"You know, Dar. This makes for rather depressing reading. Sort of like
reading how the Romans built the world's most elaborate sewers and aqueducts
and then a couple of centuries down the road deciding that its not even
worth the bother to take a bath anymore."
Morais' watch beeped a few times. "Paulo. Get over to Barlow's office right
away. They have some news about the Brother Jimmers that you're going to
find really interesting."
"The Boom-era damage has been particularly severe among the
hardest-pressed 13ers. The gap between the young rich and the young
poor, bridgeable for the Boomers, has become a yawning canyon.
Minority-group claims have lost much of their `60s-era luster and
leadership. Inner cities, then perceived as morally solid and
economically improving, are now social Dresdens of ruined families,
gang crime, and sudden death. Boomer teens who got in trouble heard
political leaders call for social services; 13ers who get in trouble
mainly hear calls for boot-camp prisons - or swift execution."
-- Neil Howe and Bill Strauss, 13th Gen.- Abort, Retry, Fail?
open line 12
execute data link
300 baud cache and forward
1700 KHz rider signal
`O.K. O.K. That was the `Who' won't get fooled again. Won't Get Fooled
Again. Sorry. I keep having to remember to `Capitalize All Proper Names'.
You are connected to the voice of Hogger Radio.
Hogger Radio. Coming to you from the voice of Free Colorado. Free Colorado,
where no man is in debt. Had to give a plug. A gentle listener wrote in
(sorry again, I can't receive snail mail) askin' "Hogger" Why do you often
sound so bad?' and I have to say back tha this is a 65 in 1 electronics kit
from Radio Shack, and I'm patched into a satellite by God knows what type of
wire. But they keep me on the air cause I'm the only one who knows how to
talk to the right people and let them talk. That's right. I listen to them
and they vibrate my ear drums. And my eardrums vibrate a micro-microphone
that gets get decompressed over a... well you get the idea. I don't always.
But you get to hear good talk. And I always love what I'm hearin'. And I get
a letter (remember, I can't get letters) but I know someone wants to know:
Hogger, when you sound so bad, how can I make you sound better? Well, easy,
son. You get an old wire coat hanger and you stick it on the end of that old
crystal set that Big Burger Fun Meal for the month of August told you how to
build out of old scrap radio parts. And you take the hanger and pull it out
so it looks real square, and when you're listenin' to Hogger its goin' to
sound so much better, cause that old coat hanger hooks up real nice to the
1700 Kilohertz wave that I'm a trying to blast out of my eardrums.
And I'm here in my mobile studio, which is nothing more than little ol' me
and I'm sitting at a bar stool, and if you listen real hard, and you used
that little coat hanger trick I told you about, you can hear the pool sticks
and waitresses clinking glasses. I can't tell you where I am, cause we have
to be real secret about this. Some of you who are listening might think this
is really illegal, and sure enough, just a couple of ya have been paid to
find out where we are and come after us and give us the ol' deep six, so all
I'm going say is that we're in a bar that gets real busy in the ski season
and has the best suds this ol' dude has ever tasted. But enough talk. I'm
here in the old back room with none other than Bobby DelRay. You know who is
he is. Bobby likes to ski and has a kind of reckless streak in `im and so
when I walks up to hims and say "How you like to be on the old Hogger show?"
this ageing rebel couldn't pass it up.
"Bobby, how ya doin'!"
"Pretty good. I guess."
"Now let me ask you. The New York Times once called you `The First Rebel of
America's Second Civil War.' How does that make you feel."
"Nothing much, I guess. I'm here in beautiful Colorado, and that's what
counts."
"Now you were a part of the Great Kentucky Fried Hamburger Rebellion of
2005. Can you fill us in on what happened then?"
"Well, Joe. Joe? I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to call you Joe. But anyway, I
was only in high school back then."
"And what was going on then?"
"Well. I was, as you know, living in southern Ohio. And me and most of my
school buddies worked odd jobs to get whatever money we could back in those
scarce days."
"Things pretty tough, huh?'
"Oh yeah. Anyway, I was working at a place called Big Burger, and some kids
I knew then worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Shop-N-Go, and a bunch of
other food type jobs. And as you can guess, things were real bad, cause the
state had been given the go ahead to lower the minimum wage on account of
the hard times."
"And how much was that?"
"I know we made $5.00 an hour for awhile, but that was when we were real
lucky. The state then lowered the minimum to what they called a $3.35 an
hour `business hardship' wage, which you know, back in 2005 was really bad.
The state also had some law that said you could require a worker to stay
longer than 40 hours a week and not have to pay them. Something called `a
competitive labor overhead reduction.' We were real pissed and called
relatives to see if anything outside of Ohio was better, but it seemed like
everyone you called was in the same boat."
"Were there any other jobs?"
"Not really. My old man had been laid off from a machine shop that
specialized in overseas CNC contracts. But the factory got bought up by
someone who laid everyone off. We found out it was one of those things where
a competitor buys the factory just to eliminate the competition. My dad was
kind of lucky though. He headed straight home as soon as the overseas owner
laid everyone off. Joe Gullwright was not lucky. He and about twelve other
men took rifles and tried to take over the place. They stayed there for 3
days, and you know, not even twelve men can keep up a good guard shift for 3
days straight. So at the night of the third day a bomb got lobbed into the
machine shop and everyone was gone at that point. My parents said be
careful, just do everything they say right now."
"And you did nothing?"
"At that point, everyone agreed that we should just stick to our jobs and
just keep our ears peeled. We had word that anyone trying to leave town got
arrested. And they got arrested by these company security police types. When
we contacted the county sherriff's office, we got some type of recorded
message that they were no longer in service. My dad and the mayor try to get
through to Mark Thompson's house to see if he was still working for the
sherriff's office, but we got his wife who said that Mark had been taken to
a state training center in the middle of the night, and she was sick worried
cause Mark said he wasn't allowed to call or write or until after he had
completed his special training. We were all taking mental notes at that
time, and we didn't like what we saw. I was still able to sneak home enough
French Fries and burgers that my family didn't starve though."
"And speaking of starve, I heard you really had some food problems."
"Oh yeah. Everyone on our block had gotten together to get all the lawns
turned into gardens, and since it was July we had finally gotten some food.
And one Sunday, when I finally could take off some time from Big Burger, I
was out in the garden watering everything from an illegal tap I made in the
ground cause they had shut off our house water. Anyway, this lady drives up
in a really fancy sports car, like a black German Porsche, the kind we never
get to see in southern Ohio. And she steps out, and she's really young and
pretty, maybe 25. And she gets out and looks at everything with this scowl
on her face, and I'm sure it looked like hell, cause we had piles of dirt
everywhere and had fenced in a couple of goats to a side pen and a had a
couple of chicken wandering in and out of the house. And she walks up to ask
me if I live here, and she tells me that she is in charge of the real estate
development association and I ask what does that have to do with us? and she
says everything, since the county approved her company buying up the houses
on our block and that we had two months to move out, and in the mean time,
it was illegal to do anything to the lawns and house without their
permission."
"Whew. You must have pissed!"
"Hell ya! The next day we tried to get to the bottom of things, but it was
the same story for everyone. The county assessor's office had been purchased
by a multinational firm, but you could never find out who was in charge."
"Didn't you ever try to call out state to get help?"
"Try? Ya! But the phones had this strange problem. You could call long
distance only if you had an account with a long distance company. If you
tried to get more details, like `Can I make this call and charge it to my
bank account or regular long-distance provider?' they would either get
pissed or tell you some gobbledygook about "We can not help toll customers
who do not have an account." If you asked for details on how to get an
account, you heard stuff about how you had to have an account to get an
account. Garbage like that. Bif had a ham radio and he came up to us one
night after I had a fight with the new Big Burger manager who was this
14-year-old kid who knew nothing about how to do anything and got really
pissed if you talked to him. Anyway Bif is talking to us and it's a
beautiful night and the fireflies on the grass are making the stars look
like they're coming down from the sky, and I can tell by Bif's voice that
something's up, and he tells us that when he tries to contact someone on the
ham radio no one responds, and there's no one talking. And he only listens
now cause he's afraid something out there is got the people who were
talking. But he doesn't hear anyone from Ohio."
"But he must have picked up other states?"
"Oh yeah. But for some reason, almost all the eastern U.S. was silent. He
would hear from time to time someone saying "Anyone out there? Please
respond." But Bif said he could tell it wasn't a real ham radio operator and
that it might be a trap. He also picked up some stuff from way West, but
real hard to understand. Kind of cryptic, mostly numbers, like that strange
voice that used to recite a bunch of numbers in Florida, but no one could
tell what they were for. Bif heard a couple of sentences once, though, like:
"I can see how many tanks they have." and "Make sure they bury the lines."
"Tell us about Samson."
"Marty Samson owned the gas station on the main drive, and just like
everyone else, like Vernon Smith who had to sell Big Burger to the 14 year
old snot, Marty was broke and had to sell out to these mysterious company
folk who had just moved into town. Anyway, Marty says one night he was
working, they hired him to be manager, and he sees this big truck move in
for a tank of diesel. But the front of it looks real strange. And of all
things, the truck is yelling at him, "Please put in the nozzle."!?! Jeez.
The truck is talking to Marty and tells him to accept a credit card, and
Marty makes sure it's legit and the truck is legit. Well, I read Popular
Science when it gets left behind in town, and I now start to piece things
together. This is one of those `fuzzy-logic' trucks that everyone is writing
about since they can work 24 hours a day and get through their route much
faster and safer."
"And what about high-school? Oh. Excuse me. Just bring another pitcher."
"I was getting to that. So I'm back at school which is only 4 hours a day
because the district went broke and the teachers are volunteer, and we can
get more work in anyways, when Bart Studer calls all of us in from a
beautiful sunny day where we have somehow gotten an old frisbee and are
playing a game of Guts and we are yelling `Shit. Now they're going to tell
us they can't afford to let us have a goddam frisbee'. So we get hustled
into the old basketball gym and Bart is looking real nervous and we all feel
sorry for him, cause who would take on the hassle of being Principle for no
pay. After about 10 minutes all the students are in the seats and under the
backboard is this big guy who is wearing a black pin-striped suit, and he
has blond hair and a really deep tan, not some farmer tan like we got."
"And I'll bet he had quite a speech to give you guys."
"More like the most bizarre bullshit I ever heard in my life. Anyway,
everyone was real silent, cause all the families had been having all this
strange stuff happening and we knew this guy was connected to it somehow."
Disconnect Notice
1700 KHz Jamming alert
See Big Burger VeggieGulp Wrapper Month of May for New Time
and Frequency
To continue above audio mail append message tag #1120-1 part 2.
Logout
______________________________________________________________________________
Eric Miller is a graduate student at Michigan State University where he
studies the use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) in architectural and product
design. Other academic interests include Artificial Life, Virtual Reality,
and Cyberspace culture. Recreational interests include mountain biking and
cross-country skiing in Michigan's beautiful forests, painting, and
composing electronic music as well as writing fiction.
millere@student.msu.edu
______________________________________________________________________________
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____________________________________________________
August 1994 ISSN 1053-8496 Volume VI Issue 1
____________________________________________________
C O N T E N T S
Looking Ahead...................Daniel K. Appelquist
Altered................................Valerie Jones
The Harrison Chapters (Chapter 16)....Jim Vassilakos
To Touch the Stars (Part 3)............Nicole Gustas
The Fourth Cat.............................Lou Crago
Microchips Never Rust (Part 3)...........Eric Miller
Editor/Technical Director....Daniel K. Appelquist
Artwork............................John Zimmerman
Proofreading......................Maureen Barrett
Telecommunications Gear................Gray Jones
____________________________________________________
subscription and back issue information at end of issue
___________________________________________________________________________
LOOKING AHEAD
Daniel K. Appelquist
___________________________________________________________________________
Hi there everybody! Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? I must apologize
for not putting out an issue since December of last year. This issue
started out as a May issue and kept getting pushed back for various reasons
until it became an August issue! Absolutely inexcusable! Well, think of it
as a hiatusÉ Anyway, I'm back, Quanta is back (actually it never really
left) and better than ever. Since December, I've been working behind the
scenes to increase Quanta's distribution. We now have an archive on America
Online where all current and back issues may be found (see the contents
page for details). Also, we're up to three thousand individual subscribers!
The method of subscribing and unsubscribing has changed slightly (all the
details are at the end of this issue) and the official email address for
Quanta has changed to quanta@netcom.com (although the folks at Carnegie
Mellon University tell me that mail to the old address will continue to be
forwarded to me here). What this means, among other things, is that the
subscription process for Quanta will now be automated. This will free up a
huge chunk of my time and will hopefully allow me to concentrate on putting
out issues. Note also that the separate lists for BITNET users and Internet
users are a thing of the past. If you are subscribed to either the
PostScript or Ascii versions of Quanta in mail format, you will receive
them as a series of mail messages. I highly suggest that those who have FTP
access switch over to the "notice" subscription list, where a notice is
sent to you. If you are subscribed to the Ascii list, you do this by
sending an email message to listserv@netcom.com with the content:
unsubscribe quanta-ascii
subscribe quanta-notice
If you are subscribed to the PostScript list, you do this by sending an
email message to listserv@netcom.com with the content:
unsubscribe quanta-postscript
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These subscribe and unsubscribe commands need to be in the actual message
body, not the subject line. I want to thank the people at Netcom for making
my switch-over a relatively painless process, and I want to thank all you
subscribers in advance for being patient while we settle in to this new
subscription service.
The primary archive site for Quanta is also changing to ftp.etext.org,
where issues may be found in the directory /pub/Zines/Quanta.
Starting with this issue, I will be publishing Quanta on the World Wide Web
as well as on the various gopher and ftp sites. Set your WWW client (Mosaic
or what have you) to http://www.etext.org/Zines/Quanta and you're off and
running.
Also, concerning donations, please note that I can no longer accept checks
made out to Quanta magazine. Please make all checks out to Daniel
Appelquist. This has to do with the way my new bank handles business
accounts, even for non-businesses like Quanta (I didn't request a new bank
--- the new bank swooped in and gobbled up my old bank like a horrendous
bird of prey, and I have experienced no end of grief because of it). I very
much appreciate the contributions I've gotten so far, and since I have now
switched to Netcom as my email service provider (which is a pay service) I
am in more need than ever. Please do contribute if you can afford it.
You'll find more information at the end of this issue.
This issue marks the much anticipated end of Nicole Gustas's three part "To
Touch the Stars." I have received numerous positive comments about this
story and also numerous letters asking when the last part would be
published. I'm sure you'll all enjoy the exciting finale.
Next issue will be a special one, featuring one novella: Peter Gelman's
"Moonifest Destiny," the fantastic story of the invasion of the Moon by the
Earth during the late 1800's by air balloon. Sound bizarre? You don't know
the half of it. After that, there will probably be one more issue published
this year.
I want to thank many of you for mailing me and asking what was up with
Quanta and why you hadn't heard from me in a while. Quanta lives. I have
every reason to suspect that Quanta will be around for a long time. Well, I
think it's about time to send this issue out, so I'll leave off here.
Enjoy!
___________________________________________________________________________
ALTERED Jim was never certain whether Aston
even saw his killer. Not that he was
Valerie Jones waiting around to ask. He dropped the
gun and loped away. He didn't have
any fingerprints, and tracing the gun
would only lead to a stolen shipment
--- a dead end.
___________________________________________________________________________
Jim Leary panted as quietly as he could as he pulled a small electronic
keypad from the pouch fastened around his waist. The dash across the yard
had been a long one... upslope, no less. With deft fingers he attached each
of the keypad's leads to the proper places inside a nondescript gray metal
box mounted against the white stone wall. White. He grimaced, showing
teeth. Terrence Aston had built the entire structure out of the same white
stone. In sunlight, the place shimmered with the colors of the rainbow as
the light was refracted by the prismatic stone. Jim knew he was going to
stick out like a sore thumb against that pale background. Often, the
eccentric displays of wealth were to Jim's advantage, and it pleased him
that the high and mighty could be brought down with the help of their
vanities. It was fitting. Unfortunately, this time, that wasn't the case.
He switched the hand-computer on with a flick of his thumb and set to work
dismantling the house security system. The heady scent of the lilac bushes
beneath which he crouched filled his sensitive nose and made it twitch.
Just don't sneeze, he reminded himself. Aston had a thing for lilacs...
they ran rampant on his estate. You couldn't walk more than four feet in
any direction without running into more of the accursed bushes. Just
thinking about it made Jim's nose itch. He wondered how the dogs could
stand it. Maybe their noses weren't as sensitive. His nose twitched again.
It was a moot point, though, since the dogs were dead. That was the first
thing he'd done, and the lilac smell was so strong their bodies probably
wouldn't be found except by a visual search of the grounds. The security
cameras were the scanning type, so they'd missed the whole show, and the
infrareds couldn't tell him apart from the canines, though some diligent
soul might notice the change in numbers as their bodies cooled. That was
just a chance he had to accept. He scratched his still itching nose with
light fingers, sniffling. They came away wet with the blood that still
covered his face, and he licked each digit clean before he reached back
into the gray box. He couldn't just say it was habit and instinct: he
actually liked the taste of blood. Though if he thought about that for very
long it would give him a case of the shivers.
Half an hour later, Jim paused and studied the grounds. Nothing moved save
for an owl that swooped low over the lilacs in search of prey, though what
it thought it could catch under the tall bushes he couldn't guess. The
whisper of its wings parting the wind was a comfortable night sound, along
with the crickets that had finally taken up their song around him. The
guards down at the gate remained unaware, intent on their caffeine sticks
and conversation. Jim couldn't quite make out the words from across the
wide lawn, but he didn't care to. The soft click as he switched the keypad
off silenced the crickets once more and their silence followed him like a
wake as he removed the wire attachments, placed the computer back in his
pouch, and crept toward the end of the house. The eighty-foot oak that grew
there would grant him access to a third-story window. The giant tree had
grown so close to the house that the branches were wearing grooves in the
stone as they swayed in the wind. The house probably wouldn't be damaged if
the tree came down on it, though, he mused. The crystal structure of the
white stone had been developed for more than just beauty.
The window was latched from the inside, Jim noted, with a plain metal hook.
Not a magnetic latch. He didn't think the house was that old, but maybe it
was just an oddity, courtesy of the original owner. He tapped the pane
gently.. The window was made of duraglass, which was actually a plastic,
and a whole lot tougher than conventional safe glass. He'd brought tools to
deal with either, since he hadn't been able to find out which one it was
before hand. The duraglass melted nicely with the application of the right
chemicals. Jim was glad for the stiff breeze that carried the acrid stench
away from him. The smell was the price he paid for a low-temperature melt.
If he were unlucky, however, that would be enough. He unlatched the window,
then oiled the window tracks down with fluid from a small plastic tube. His
claws bit deep into the bark as he braced himself and raised the window
with barely a sound. Good thing, too. A girl slept in the white, fluffy bed
that dominated the room. That would be Aston's daughter, he knew. Maybe she
liked the noise of the oak tree, or, better yet, liked lilacs no better
than he. Their saccharine perfume was not so overwhelming here. Well, she'd
be able to uproot every single one of the hideous purple-splotched bushes
if she chose soon enough, he thought as he stepped through the window. He
stood balanced on the sill to survey the room. The girl was asleep, her
breathing deep and even. She clutched an Altered Gladiators doll in her
sleeping arms and Jim had the distinct impression that the glass eyes above
the drooling snarl were staring directly at him. Nothing else stirred amid
the soft piles of stuffed toys and strewn clothes. He bounded to the floor
without a sound save the spongy crunch of the thick carpet under his paws.
The long, dexterous fingers of his hands were folded under so that he was
actually walking on his knuckles and, as he padded across the room, those
hands were indistinguishable from paws.
Shadow silent, Jim slipped through the halls. Most of the forty-two room
house was in darkness. That was good. Aston ought to be in his office
still, which was on the second floor, north end. The floor plan flitted
through his mind. There should be two guards wandering somewhere inside as
well, but those didn't bother Jim unduly. He would hear them coming long
before they heard him.
He stopped at the top of the stairs. This would be a good place for
additional security, though the plans hadn't held any mention of another
system. The staircase was isolated, walled on both sides with carved wood
panelling. Rosarian's work, he thought, though art wasn't his specialty.
The carved protuberances would provide good hiding places for laser sensors
on both sides of the stairs. Jim pulled a small, illegal aerosol from his
pouch and sprayed the air before him. A fine net of red laser beams
dissected the empty space up to about waist height on a normal human,
fading to invisibility as the mist settled. If they followed the same
pattern all the way down the staircase, he'd be fine. He could leap them.
Coming back up would be the problem. He checked once more for signs of
weapons mounted into the walls, saw none. The ceiling looked clean, too. He
stopped to listen, then backed up and took a running leap off the top of
the staircase. His compact, four-legged body sailed easily through empty
space, landing in the downstairs hallway with an unavoidable thump.
Twohundred and twenty pounds could not land silently after that kind of
jump.
Before he moved on, he stopped to sit back on his haunches. Reaching into
the pouch strapped across his stomach, he pulled out a black plastic gun.
The bulb of the silencer at the business end made it somewhat unwieldy, but
he clamped it between his jaws and loped toward Aston's office. As he
turned the corner, he heard footsteps in the distance behind him, moving
slowly. The guards were being careful. He would have plenty of time.
Light leaked from beneath the door to Aston's office, warm and inviting.
That door would hiss as it slid open, he knew, so he took the gun in his
hand and settled onto his haunches once again. That was the only position
from which he could shoot. Genetic curse, which was why he rarely depended
on guns. But in this case it just made the most sense. He reached up and
slapped the door pad, taking aim through the doorway as the door slid
aside. Terrence Aston sat behind a wide redwood desk, his attention on the
terminal screen built into the top. He looked up just as Jim fired, and Jim
was never certain whether Aston even saw his killer. Not that he was
waiting around to ask. He dropped the gun and loped away. He didn't have
any fingerprints, and tracing the gun would only lead to a stolen shipment
...- a dead end.
There would be a second set of stairs further down the hall, he knew. Speed
was his best protection, now. He found the other staircase and raced up it,
triggering a blaring alarm that filled the house. The upstairs hall was
empty, and he ran the length of it, not pausing as he streaked through the
end bedroom and out the window. He registered the white face and staring
eyes of the girl as he ran past. His head was filled with the smell of oak
bark and the drifting scent of lilacs, the metal sounds of guns being
readied, and the shouts of men. He ran headlong down the tree trunk,
counting on his claws to hold him to its rough surface, and sprinted toward
the fence at a point three hundred and four yards from the gate. He'd
actually measured it during his preparations. The floodlights lit up just
as he reached the electrified fence, illuminating the entire estate, and
blinding him. He leapt anyway, depending on natural ability to carry him
safely over.
The memory returned to Jim as a whole, filled with the scents and sounds of
that night, as he stared at the woman across from him. The little girl was
long gone, replaced by a firm, mature intelligence dressed impeccably in a
floor length blue silk skirt, yellow silk blouse, and obi. The blouse might
have been peach or even a creamy white, Jim thought absently. His vision
was based on shades of light and dark, more than color.
"Konichi wa Mr. Leary." The soft voice was very proper and melodious,
completely at odds with the black eyes that bored directly into his. "I
assume you know who I am?"
"Of course, Councillor," Jim answered, nodding. Though he had never put her
picture together with that night at the Aston estate before. Twenty years
was a long time, though the emergence of another Councillor Aston should
have pricked his memory.
Julee Lin Aston continued to stare at him, lost in private thoughts. Jim
figured he could probably guess what some of them were. No doubt she had
never seen anyone Altered so extremely before. Not even the Gladiators on
the viewer. They, at least, still resembled human beings despite the
ridiculous musculature and occasional fur. That was the standard reaction.
He glanced at his reflection in the darkened windows that fronted the
restaurant. Black as night, he was barely visible against the dark street,
save for the sheen of light that rippled across his fur. In form, he was
nearly identical to the black panther of the Asian jungles. A bit larger,
perhaps, with only his limber five-fingered hands and versatile brain to
distinguish him from his feline cousins.
"You paid a large handful of yen to arrange this meeting, Councillor," Jim
reminded her, annoyed. The words rumbled out of a throat that was not
designed for language.
"Of course." She regained her composure and took a breath. Jim noted the
effect that had on the thin fabric of her blouse with discreet interest. "I
have a proposition for you." Jim's ears twitched, though his feline face
betrayed nothing. Very few facial expressions were possible for him, which
he had always considered an asset.
"There have been two attempts on my life, Mr. Leary," she continued without
preamble. "Both occurred at my estate. Both were nearly successful."
Jim eyed her warily. It sounded like an accusation. Despite the fact that
he had chosen this meeting place, he was far from confident. There were
fifteen Councillors who governed Jap-Am, and Julee Aston was the first
woman ever to hold that position in the colony's history. She was no push
over.
He kept diligent track of the traffic through the small restaurant. Most of
the faces at nearby tables were familiar because Jim had hired them. But
that didn't mean much. A Councillor had vast resources. If she wanted him
dead, and knew who to hire, he might as well get ready to meet the man in
black. Anyone could be assassinated.
"So what do you want from me?" Jim asked.
Julee leaned forward. "I want to hire you, Mr. Leary. Your particular...
talents... would make you exceptionally qualified to handle my personal
security." She betrayed no emotion.
Jim felt his insides go cold. "I think you overestimate me, Councillor."
"I haven't," she assured him. "I'm willing to pay." She named a figure that
was generous. Very generous. But not enough to be a mockery. When he said
nothing, she continued in a sudden change of subject, "There were four
attempts on my father's life at the estate. Two never made it into the
house, and the third died in the downstairs hall. But the fourth... the
fourth was exceptional." She sat back in her chair. "I need that kind of
exceptional talent working for me." She sipped her drink, the glass
catching the light and bursting into rainbow hued stars.
"My father died a long time ago, Mr. Leary," she continued after setting
the glass down. "I'm interested in survival, not vengeance." She met Jim's
gaze squarely, as if daring him to admit it.
"As I said before, I think you overestimate me," Jim replied.
"Then you're not interested?"
Unfortunately, Jim was. He needed the money, and offers that size didn't
come by very often. But the very root of his temptation, he knew, was the
simple fact that he held some respect for this Councillor. She had made
herself the champion of the Altereds, against stiff opposition. But the
fact that she knew it was him that night was highly unsettling.
Jim sighed. "All right. Count me in." He was surprised to see her smile,
but it was somehow an enigmatic expression. "I'll come to the house
tomorrow." He stood and prepared to jump down from his chair.
"Um- Mr. Leary? There's one more thing." Now she seemed almost embarrassed.
"All of my employees swear an oath of allegiance."
Jim looked at her and shrugged. Why not? Oaths held power in a court, but,
being who and what he was, he would be dead long before he ever saw the
inside of a courthouse. Reaching across the table he laid his hand over
hers and quickly repeated the necessary words. It was somehow both more and
less than just a legal ceremony.
City towers scrolled by the car's darkened window as Julee kicked off her
shoes with a sigh. She did not notice the steady rumble of the billowing
air that held the hovercar aloft; she had ridden in hovercraft all her
life. But she did hear the sound of Jim's fur against the leather seats as
the tip of his tail twitched with inner disquiet.
"What is it?" she asked, her eyes going to the windows and the view beyond,
seeking an unnamed danger. They were on their way home from the latest in a
long series of Council sessions where Julee continued to argue strenuously
for the creation of a council seat to represent Altereds. She was making
slow headway against Councillor Tanaki's purist thinking.
"Bad feeling." Jim did not look at her. His eyes continued to roam the
streetsides visible through the bulletproof plastic of her private car. He
could see the top of their driver's head over the back of his seat, and a
portion of the snub-nosed automatic rifle mounted on the dash. Yeng was a
good man, but not as familiar with the Councillor's car as Jim might have
wished. Ned Chang, the regular driver had come in so sick that morning that
Jim had ordered him back to bed, and Yeng was the best he could find to
fill in. They were sandwiched between two armored cruisers, each carrying
three guards, but that didn't provide more than basic security. The convoy
followed the route Jim had chosen only the night before through San Louis'
crowded riverfront district, and through the buildings he caught brief
glimpses of the Mississippi off to his right.
Any information can be bought, Jim reminded himself, especially here in the
capitol. He found himself searching his knowledge of the city, trying to
guess where an attack might come from.
"Is this where you would have picked, if Tanaki had hired you to kill me?"
Julee asked curiously.
Jim froze, blindsided by the blunt question. Most people were far more
discreet when they discussed his profession. He managed to swallow his
surprise, grateful once again that his face carried little expression.
He wasn't sure why he answered with the truth. "No. I'd probably hit the
house." The "again" that belonged on the end of the sentence was left
unvoiced. "You don't know for certain that it's Tanaki," he added as an
afterthought.
"Of course I do," she snapped. "First he tried to bribe me to change my
vote. Then he threatened me. Now he's trying to make good on his threats."
Jim had no chance to respond. His only indication of trouble was the squeal
of old rubber tires on pavement as a sporty silver landcar sped down an
access ramp and slewed across the lanes toward them. Jim grabbed Julee's
shoulders and forced her down on the seat, below the level of the windows.
He held her there as their car swerved violently. They felt the change as
they crossed over the grass median, and dove into the midst of oncoming
traffic on the other side of the highway. Proximity alarms blared all
around them, then were drowned out by thunder as the silver landcar
exploded. The force of the blast tipped their car over on its side,
tumbling the two passengers in the rear compartment like rag dolls.
When Jim's vision cleared and the ringing in his ears dropped to a
sufferable level, he raised his head to look around. The car had somehow
ended right-side up. Black smoke billowed around it, searing his eyes and
nose with acrid grit. He and Julee were wedged together in the floorboard.
She held onto him with a deathgrip, fingers knotted painfully into his
short fur. A trickle of blood leaked from the corner of her mouth where her
lip had split, but her eyes were open.
Heart pounding, Jim urged her up onto the seat with a caution to stay down.
Julee released him with a spasmodic jerk, then obeyed. A fleeting
expression of revulsion crossed her face. Cold inside from more than fear,
Jim climbed to his feet and peered through the broken window into the
smoke. He could see figures moving beyond the heat shimmer but couldn't
identify them. The sudden rattle of automatic gunfire decided him.
"Can you run?" he asked Julee.
She nodded uncertainly. "I think so."
"Good, then stay low and don't stop until I tell you to. Head for that
building." He pointed to a tower whose side could be seen rising above the
smoke. "I'll follow you." He studied the tower a moment more, wondering if
that was where the landcar had been controlled from. If it hadn't been a
kamikaze hit. Which it might easily have been, with a Councillor as the
target.
At his command, Julee took off across the highway, doing a credible sprint
in her stocking clad feet. Jim followed at her heels, nipping at her thigh
to urge her on as bullets scored the pavement beside them. He got an
impression of wrecked and burning cars, with several men using them as
cover from which to snipe at each other. He could not guess who was alive
and who was dead from among the Councillor's staff, nor how many of their
attackers might remain.
They reached the edge of the highway and Jim guided his charge down among
the smaller streets that ran between the buildings. The sooner they lost
themselves, the sooner they would lose the men that pursued them, Jim
thought, though he knew the area well. He had seen two figures following
them, for certain.
Julee's breath was coming in ragged gasps. She had barely slowed, but he
knew that she would have to stop soon. They turned onto a new street and
Jim spied what he had been looking for. Cracked cement stairs led down
below street level, into a basement that had been the foundation of a
building that was built before the Japanese conquest. A new building had
been raised on the site, on top of the old basement. It would give them a
shortcut over to the next street, and perhaps confuse their pursuers. The
basement was dark, but Jim's eyes used light far more efficiently than a
normal human. He guided Julee through the fallen supports and tumbled
bricks with nudges and an occasional growled word. They emerged on the
street, apparently without company. Jim turned them back toward the river.
There were some high-class restaurants in that direction. The Councillor's
face would get them in, he reasoned, and the establishment security would
keep them safe until her people could pick them up.
They reached the Tea Room just as their pursuers found them again. But it
was too late. Julee spoke a quick word to the maitre'd and they were in.
Jim watched the men on the street fade away and sighed in relief. He was
shaking from the adrenaline coursing through his system, but forced his
body to move normally.
Every eye followed them as they made their way to a table near the back of
the restaurant. It was in unspoken accord that they took a table against
the wall. Jim felt the stares boring into him. They were covert stares, for
this crowd was too polite to stare openly, but Jim felt the stigma just as
sharply. He was different. They looked at him and saw an animal, not a man.
Waiters brought saki, and a cloth to wipe the blood from Julee's mouth.
Conversations began to pick up around them. Jim tried to ignore the eyes as
he sipped his saki. The maitre'd had already made the call to Julee's
estate so they had nothing to do but wait. They did so in silence.
Julee looked up with a small start as Jim and another man entered the
office.
"Have you found something?" she asked.
Jim hopped up into the chair that was pulled up against the far side of the
desk. He carried a rolled sheaf of papers gently in his mouth, which he
dropped onto the chair seat before answering. "Maybe. Dan, tell her what
you found out."
Dan Erickson was a tall, sandy-haired man with a permanently mournful
expression. His dislike for his boss was apparent in every line of his
body, but he was loyal to the Councillor, so he made the effort to ignore
it.
"The car was driven by a Mr. Rani Nataru, age 42. He has been a member of
Councillor Tanaki's house staff for eighteen years."
Julee's eyebrows rose. "That's not something?"
Jim tipped his head to the side in a gesture equivalent to a shrug. "Not
really."
"Tanaki is claiming that Nataru was acting completely on his own." Dan
added. "And he has some evidence...- a tape of a conversation that took
place in Tanaki's suite at the Capitol building. There's no way to know if
it was a setup, of course, but I'd guess so. Either that, or he got lucky."
Julee tapped a fingernail against the glossy wood of the desk. "Well, no
help there. Are you still tracing the car?" The question was directed at
Jim.
"And the explosives," he answered, "but that'll take a few days, at least."
Julee nodded. "I understand. Thank you, gentlemen."
At a pointed glance from Jim, Dan scowled and left. Jim picked up the sheaf
of papers and laid them out flat on the desk. The logo at the top indicated
that they were printouts from one of the less reputable news services.
"I thought you might want to see this." His tone was studiously neutral.
"See what?" Julee picked up the papers and read the headline: "Councillor
Aston and Altered Lover Exposed." Beneath the caption was a picture of the
two of them at the Tea Room.
"Wonderful. More fuel to add to Tanaki's fire." Julee tossed the sheets
back onto the desk with a wordless expression of disgust and leaned back in
her chair. "Now he's going to use this to try to convince the Council that
I'm...-" She broke off, uncertain how to finish.
"A pervert?" Jim supplied.
"No!" Julee straightened abruptly. "That's not what I meant."
"But it is what you were thinking." Bitterness pooled in the pit of his
stomach. "Admit it, Councillor."
Julee said nothing, her lips pressed together in a thin white line, but her
eyes snapped dangerously. The tips of Jim's long canines showed white
against his black fur as he met the Councillor's stare. Eventually, she
looked away.
"Let me know when you learn something new, Mr. Leary." Julee's voice was
faint and her eyes distant when she looked back at him.
Jim jumped down from the chair and padded to the door. As it slid aside, he
paused and turned.
"Goodnight, Councillor." The subtle mockery in his words echoed old
memories and hollow promises. He had lived with them all his life. No
matter what people said, they always hated down deep, always feared.
He turned again and left before Julee had a chance to reply.
Jim perched on the edge of the massive work table, silent and unmoving. He
had come in his usual way (which changed every time), and waited patiently
for the man across the room to notice him. Had he possessed facial
expression, a small, mischievous smile would have played about his lips.
The man finally located the part he was looking for amid the neat trays
that lined the far wall and turned, only to do a violent doubletake and
nearly drop the intricate metal thing he was holding.
"Leary! Don' do that! You nearly gave me a heart attack, man."
"`Lo Snake." Jim held out a lightly clenched fist, claws retracted, and
Snake tapped his knuckles with a similar fist, grinning. That grin was a
sight to see, Jim thought with a private chuckle. Snake only had two
teeth...- long curved fangs that hung out of his mouth. Those, and the
colored scales that covered his body in geometric patterns, gave Snake his
name.
"You ain't been `round much lately," Snake said. The words were a bit
slurred because of the overhanging teeth, but understandable enough. Poison
sacks on either side of Snake's neck pulsed rhythmically. That was one
reason Snake didn't get much trouble. The other was his size. Even Jim
would hesitate before taking him on. The man was built like a tree. Jim
guessed that his ancestors must have been Negroid: his face had that
general cast, though it was almost lost amid the strangeness. Snake was
among the most highly Altered, like Jim himself.
"Been busy." Jim walked across the table, picking his way with dainty steps
through the clutter, to examine the mass of plastic and wires that Snake
was working on. His nose was assailed by the tangy scents of cold-bonding
glue, plastic, and carbon composite, and the musty smell of plastique. He
found a clear space and sat down. From the pouch at his waist he drew a
burned, melted tangle and held it out to Snake.
"This your work?"
Snake took the mess and poked at it, holding it under the magnifying lamp
that hung drunkenly over his workspace.
"Yeah, it's mine. How'd ya know?"
Jim shrugged. "Fancy detonator. You and Coleman are the only ones that do
that kind of stuff locally."
Snake tossed the burnt detonator onto the table. "So what about it?"
Jim laid several colorful bills down next to it. "Who'd you make it for?"
Snake fingered the bills. Then he snorted and picked them up. "Some suit."
"Did he give you a name?"
"Course not. Paid in cash, though. No credit transfer."
"What did he look like?" Jim picked up the detonator and put it back in his
carry pouch.
Snake shrugged. "Pretty tall. Lots of americana in'm. Brown hair, black
eyes."
"Is he the one that made the pickup?"
"Na. Little Japanese guy."
Jim dug back into his pouch and brought out a picture of Nataru. "This
him?"
Snake glanced at it and nodded. "That's him."
Jim shifted positions with care, trying to ease the ache in his hips. He
was lying prone on the metal bar that supported one of a row of lights that
illuminated Julee Aston on the stage below him. It was the best vantage
point he could find in the small auditorium, allowing him to keep the
Councillor in view at all times, as well as see into both wings and out
into the audience. But it was a precarious perch.
The Councillor was speaking to a group of students at Washington University
and Jim was nervous. Public addresses were scheduled months in advance, and
gave an assassin plenty of time to prepare. Not that it mattered, really.
Tanaki's people could only have had twelve hours notice, at most, for that
last attempt, and they'd nearly succeeded. The timing on that one still
bothered him, though in the month since, he had not been able to find
anything concrete with which to back his instincts.
Julee's voice interrupted his thoughts and he focused on her for a moment.
The powerful lights brought out blue highlights from her raven hair and
made the silk of her dress shimmer.
"How long, ladies and gentlemen, will we make the children pay for the sins
of the parents?" she asked the audience. "How long will we condemn the
Altered to be less than citizens? Are they inferior to us? No, they are
not. They have minds and feelings just like yours or mine.
"Are they different?" She paused, considering. "Yes, they're different. But
is that bad? I'm sure your grandmothers will tell you that they're cursed
by the gods, or some such nonsense. That's what my grandmother used to tell
me. But you and I know better.
"We know that the Altereds that we see today are the unfortunate
descendants of men and women who perverted nature. They tried to be gods,
playing with things they had no right to alter. But that was two-hundred
years ago. And the DNA codes that those careless men and women broke, we
still cannot mend.
"Is that the fault of the children? They did not choose to be what they
are. No." Her voice died to a bare murmur, so that everyone in the
auditorium strained to hear.
"It is our fault, ladies and gentlemen. Ours. It was people just like you
and I that allowed the Alterations to happen."
Jim shook his head and tried to regain his bearings. He made a quick sweep
of the auditorium and stage, amazed at how entranced he had been by the
Councillor's words. But they were words he desperately wanted to hear. He
was almost willing not to care whether she truly meant what she said, just
to hear it. Almost. A cold, cynical voice deep inside reminded him of her
reaction when they had been pressed against each other on the floor of her
car.
"Got a possibility, boss." The voice was fed to Jim by a tiny microphone
clipped to the edge of one triangular ear. That was Tony. Of all of the
Councillor's employees, Tony was the only one who really didn't seem to
care that Jim walked on four legs and had fur. But Tony's eyes were a pale
shade of lavender, without irises. He understood the stigma.
"Where?" Another microphone was attached to a collar around Jim's neck. His
eyes scanned the auditorium below him.
"Out in the hall right now. Heading backstage. He's a tall man, mid
thirties, wearing a brown leather jacket with fur trim."
"Thanks Tony. Seal off the backstage area." The last was a command directed
to all of the Councillor's guards who were linked to him via radio. "Bull,
Erickson, cut him off."
Jim watched the two men move forward to intercept the visitor who was not
yet visible to Jim because of a curtained wall that hung in the way. The
man rounded the corner at a casual stroll and stopped when he saw the
Councillor's guards. Alarms went off in Jim's head. The man below him was
named Derek Van der Voehnn. He was a walking funeral. Jim had only met him
once, years before, when they'd both been hired for the same hit by
different parties.
The alarm bells kept ringing. This wasn't Van der Voehnn's style. He was a
sharpshooter. He'd never walk backstage for a close up. And he'd certainly
never let himself be stopped by a couple of bodyguards.
Jim whipped around, searching frantically for Julee. She still stood at the
podium, oblivious to all but her audience. Jim's motion sensitive eyes
searched the room. The audience watched her in rapt silence as she drew the
speech to a close, save for one small shadowed figure in the second row
that rose to its feet and raised a hand to shoulder height, arm
outstretched. Jim didn't wait to see the gun...- he leapt from his perch,
crashing into the Councillor and carrying her to the ground behind the
podium. The gunshot was thunderous in the still quiet room.
Pandemonium broke out as Jim yelled instructions through the microphone at
his throat.
Julee groaned and shook her head dizzily as Jim staggered to his feet and
peered around the edge of the podium. The assassin had her back turned (Jim
was almost certain it was a woman), and was pushing her way through the
panicked crowd toward the doors at the back of the auditorium. She hadn't
gotten very far yet. Jim launched himself at the retreating form, claws
gouging the polished wood floor of the stage as he scrabbled for purchase.
Alerted to his approach somehow, the woman turned just as he leapt off the
edge of the stage. Her eyes widened and she squeezed off an instinctive
shot before he plowed into her. They tumbled to the floor in a tangle of
limbs, taking several others down with them in the press of bodies. Jim
knocked the gun out of her hand with a swipe of a paw, leaving bloody
welts. She yelped in pain, but didn't try to fight when she felt the prick
of the other set of claws at her throat.
"How do you feel?" Julee asked as the house physician finished the last
stitch. The bullet had sliced through the top of Jim's shoulder, leaving a
bloody, but not serious, gash. He was lying on the velour couch in Julee's
office, chin on paw, with the nap of the fabric tickling his nose.
"As good as I look, no doubt," he answered. "You?" A fair-sized bruise was
beginning to spread across her cheek. She grinned and winced as the gesture
stretched abused tissues.
"About the same." She cradled her left arm protectively. She would be sore
for a long time, though she hadn't done any real damage. "We had to turn
the assassin over to the police. The Council demanded it."
"Meaning Tanaki."
"Who else?"
The doctor interrupted to give Jim some final instructions and a sheet of
pain tabs. Silence fell behind him as he left the room.
Jim sighed and allowed his eyes to sag shut. "What about Van der Voehnn?"
"Who?" She was startled.
Jim lifted his head and turned to look at her. "The man backstage."
At her blank look he said, "Is Dan still around? I need to talk to him."
"I'll see." Julee climbed stiffly to her feet and left the room. She
glanced over her shoulder at Jim as she did, a puzzled expression on her
face.
Jim dozed until the door hissed open and Dan Erickson walked in, with Julee
on his heels. "The Councillor said you wanted to see me."
"Yeah." Jim shook his head to clear the cobwebs. "What happened to Van der
Voehnn?"
Dan looked over at Julee, who did not return the gaze. "We let him go."
"You what?"
"We didn't have any reason to keep him. He said he was looking for you."
His tone was vaguely accusing.
Jim digested that in surprise, and some alarm. "Strange time for him to
come looking," he growled. Dan shrugged.
"All right. That's what I wanted to know." Jim laid his head back down, too
tired to fight the other man's obstinacy. After a moment, Dan took the hint
and left.
Julee resumed her seat on the floor next to the couch. "Who's Van der
Voehnn?"
"An assassin. One of the best."
"Oh." She did not sound terribly alarmed.
"You should be more concerned, Councillor. He's very good." Jim raised his
head to look directly into her eyes. But whatever expression was there
remained closely guarded. He snorted in private disgust and dug one of the
bright red pain tabs out of its plastic bubble. The pill wouldn't take
effect for another ten minutes, but that was all right. He could wait a
little longer. He laid his head back down and closed his eyes. He hurt too
much to think.
"Hey, boss. Wake up." Tony's round face swam into view as Jim blinked and
moaned. He was a mass of pain, and the bright morning sun streaming through
the windows did not help his temperament.
"What is it?" He rolled onto his stomach, rubbing at the sleep that matted
the inner corners of his eyes.
"The Councillor said it'd be all right to wake you. I think I've got a line
on the guy that paid for the explosives."
Jim sat up with interest. "Go on."
Tony produced a photo and handed it to Jim. "Name's Eddie Blake. He's done
freelance for Tanaki before."
Jim took the picture and studied it. "I'll see what my friend thinks."
Unfortunately, Snake wasn't home. Jim grumbled to himself, shoulder already
aching from the long walk. But he wasn't willing to give away the lab's
location to Julee's staff, so he took to the afternoon shadows, limping and
muttering. There was one other thing he wanted to check out.
Carylon's was almost empty at that time of day, seeming stale and somehow
sterile without the mass of flesh that rippled and gyrated across the floor
during the hours of darkness. The band was onstage, practicing, and Jim
winced at the squeal of electronic pipes.
Jim nodded to the guy behind the bar and headed backstage. He was a
familiar sight at Carylon's, though not as much so recently. He padded past
cracked cement walls and felt the chill of the floor through the soft pads
on his feet. The air smelled of old smoke and old sweat, alcohol and urine,
and beneath it all, the scent of human sensuality that only Jim's sensitive
nose could pick up. It was a familiar smell, comforting simply because he
had known it all his life. Here, he knew the rules, and knew his place.
He scratched lightly on Carylon's door, taking care not to mar the plastic.
She called for him to enter and he did. She sat crosslegged on the bed,
shimmering material cascading around her and an intense look of
concentration on her delicate face as she repaired the tear in one of her
costumes. The club was hers, but she had made herself poor to buy it. Jim
wasn't certain whether he thought that was a wise move or not.
"Well, you haven't been around much lately." She set the pile of fabric
aside, clearing a space for him.
"I need to ask a favor." He leapt up beside her. The small welcoming smile
died, and he wondered if things had gone bad for her.
"What kind?"
"I need to arrange a meet. Here, preferably."
"Everybody walks away?" Her gaze was skeptical.
"It's not a hit." He knew better than that. The one time he'd tried to use
her club, he'd paid dearly for it, friends or no.
Carylon thought a moment, then shrugged. "Okay."
Jim leaned across her to punch a button on the phone. He entered a number
and spoke briefly to the man who answered.
"How long `til you get an answer?" Carylon dragged long, painted
fingernails along the line of his jaw as he cut the connection. Jim looked
into her hazel eyes once before closing his eyes and submitting, almost
involuntarily, to the caress. He still didn't know why she liked him,
except that she seemed to have a thing for Altereds. He never asked. And,
most of the time, it didn't matter, anyway.
Derek Van der Voehnn wove his way deftly through the writhing crowd towards
the small side table Jim had claimed. Jim had been honestly surprised when
he agreed to the meeting, and now had the disturbing feeling that he didn't
quite know everything that was going on.
Van der Voehnn dropped gracelessly into an empty chair and folded his
fingers together on the table before him. He seemed, to Jim, to be built
entirely of angles, with skin thrown over his frame only as an
afterthought. But his eyes were keen and belied the air of gangly
adolescence that surrounded him.
He was grinning. "I'll bet you want to know what I was doing at Councillor
Aston's speech, right?"
Jim nodded. "That'd be a good place to start." He tried to keep the sarcasm
out of his voice, not knowing how Van der Voehnn would interpret it. This
wasn't the tack he'd expected the man to take. It made him nervous.
"It was a coincidence, you know. That I was there when the hit went down. I
really was looking for you. You're a hard man to find, sometimes." His
tongue tripped over the word "man," as if he considered for a moment using
a different one.
Jim tried to ignore it. "I'm listening."
Van der Voehnn's lips quirked in a smile. He seemed genuinely entertained
by Jim's skepticism. "Well, this one's a freebie, since I got the better
end of the deal the last time." Van der Voehnn had gotten the hit, and the
money, and Jim had nearly gotten killed because of the confusion. It wasn't
a memory Jim cherished. But now he was definitely interested.
Van der Voehnn must have read it in him. His smile widened, then
disappeared. "I just thought you might like to know that Councillor Aston
tried to hire me for a job about six months ago." That would put it
approximately two and a half months before Jim had started working for her.
"Who was the mark?"
"You, of course." He grinned again, enjoying Jim's sudden shock. "I turned
it down. Too much work for the money. I don't know if she made the offer to
anyone else, but the answer would've been the same, probably. At least for
the professionals. Since you're spending so much time with the lady, I
figured you deserved a warning."
"Yeah, thanks." Jim felt like he'd just been hit with a baseball bat.
Stunned and disoriented. "You didn't exactly rush to tell me this," he
added, as soon as he recovered his wits.
Van der Voehnn shrugged. "Didn't know you were working for Aston until a
few weeks ago. And I didn't really want to let the Councillor know that I'd
talked to you. Could be bad for my health, y'know? I just picked a bad
time." He stood, though perhaps unfolded might be a better word, Jim
thought, and left without another word. The abrupt departure was the
perfect ending to the disturbing conversation, chilling Jim to the bone.
"Are you planning to ignore me again today, Mr. Leary?" Julee's voice was
sharp, annoyed.
Jim glanced at her and growled. It had not been a good few days. Snake had
identified the man who had purchased the explosives as Eddie Blake, the
freelancer that worked for Tanaki. That was no surprise, really. Now Jim
was left with the task of confronting Blake, except that he didn't quite
know how to go about it. Somewhere, there was a traitor on the Councillor's
staff, but he didn't know where to look, didn't know who he could trust.
And to top it off, the Councillor herself had suddenly become an enemy, at
least in his eyes. All of which left him in a very sour mood. Part of him
wanted to simply cut his losses and leave before he got himself killed, but
he found that he couldn't, because he had sworn an oath of allegiance and
couldn't betray it until he knew for sure.
Well, at least he could do something about Blake, though it wasn't a
particularly inspired idea. Ignoring the black eyes that remained on him,
he unfolded the portable phone in his hands and punched a number. Dan
Erickson answered.
"Go ahead and pick up Blake," Jim told him.
"Right." Dan cut the connection. He was hardly friendly, Jim mused, but his
original hostility had faded. It was an unaccustomed relief.
Dan and two others brought Eddie Blake to the estate in less than an hour.
They had kept surveillance on him since they'd learned his name, but Jim
hadn't wanted to rush into anything unless Blake tried to leave suddenly.
Letting him roam free hadn't helped, to Jim's disappointment. The man had
kept mostly to himself, except to make a nightly foray into the crowded
jumble of people and lights that filled the bars along the streets of the
Dug. He had even spent part of an evening at Carylon's.
Blake was an addict. The glaze of Silverdust was in his eyes, and his
clothes reeked from the smoke. Jim observed from behind a pane of one-way
glass while Dan and a man named Chow Fong tossed questions and threats at
the hapless Blake. It wasn't a very productive session: Yes, he'd contacted
Snake, no, he didn't know who the blast was meant for until after the fact.
Tanaki had hired him in person and paid in cash, like always. No, he didn't
know if there was another hit planned... nobody had contacted him for
anything.
Eventually, Jim turned him loose. He was fairly certain the man was too
much of a coward to have hidden anything important from them. Then he spent
a long time pacing the length of the estate's formal living room, past the
empty fireplace, while he thought.
The woman shooter had turned up dead, not three hours after the police put
her in a cell at the Justiary. Tony had brought him the news while they
were questioning Blake. He cursed again the politics that had kept them
from being able to talk to her, and himself, for not pushing her before the
police arrived.
Julee Aston entered the room with a muted swish of her long skirt over the
plush, cream-colored carpeting. She held a glass of brandy in either hand
as she came over and settled into a corner of the long couch, her skirt a
splash of bright color against its paleness. The coffee table in front of
her was carved from some black stone, with a single gray flaw staggering
artfully across the polished surface. She set Oone of the brandies on the
table's edge nearest the place where Jim paced. It clinked loudly in the
otherwise silent room. The other she sipped with the bowl cupped in both
hands. Jim paused in his pacing, watching her. With her toes tucked up
under her on the couch seat and her long hair spilling about her shoulders,
she had an oddly childish air, and he remembered the wide, terrified eyes
that had followed him through the darkness of her bedroom that night so
long ago.
"So what did I do to make you so angry?" she asked him, her gaze boring
steadily and calmly into his above the rim of her glass. Again he was
struck by how little of that child remained in her eyes.
"Does it matter?" The tip of his tail twitched spasmodically from side to
side.
"Of course it does." She set her glass down and folded her arms across her
stomach. "The next time someone tries to kill me, I don't want you
hesitating because I did something that angered you." A small, wry smile
accompanied her words.
Jim sat down where he was and curled his tail around his body. The tip of
that tail, which he could not control, thumped against the floor in time to
his thoughts.
"You tried to hire Van der Voehnn to kill me."
Surprise flickered across her face for a moment, then she sighed. "I was
afraid you were going to find out about that." She reached out and took
another sip of brandy.
"Is there an active contract?"
"No," she answered without looking up from her glass.
Jim wasn't certain why he believed her, but he did. He didn't often get
suckered by beautiful women, and hoped that he wasn't making that mistake
now. Julee Aston was far to dangerous to misjudge.
After a prolonged silence, Julee spoke. "I hated you for a very long time,"
she said softly. Her eyes touched his briefly, then shied away. "No one
believed me when I told them about you, and for a while I wondered if maybe
I hadn't made it all up, or dreamed it, maybe."
"When I reached majority and gained control of the estate, I decided that I
had to find out." A cynical expression touched her small features. "You
should be flattered. I spent a lot of money trying to find you. But I
didn't have any luck. Not for years."
She fell silent once again, and Jim wisely said nothing. He wasn't certain
what he could say.
Julee drained the last of her drink. "I did finally find proof that you
existed, just about the time Tanaki made the first attempt on my life. At
first, all I wanted was to make sure you died. That's when I talked to Mr.
Van der Voehnn. When he refused, I gotÉscared. I wondered if Tanaki
might hire you." Jim found himself staring into the dark pools of her eyes
and saw fear twisting beneath their calm surface. "I knew you could do it.
So I figured I'd hire you first."
"Why didn't you have me, or Van der Voehnn, for that matter, hit Tanaki?"
Jim was acutely aware of just how openly he was speaking. If there were a
microphone in the room, he was dead. But he felt compelled to say the words
anyway.
Julee's eyes flared wide with surprise, as if she had never considered it.
And she probably hadn't, Jim reflected sourly, at least not seriously. She
didn't hate Tanaki... she only wanted to defeat him in the political arena.
Their enmity was purely business.
Jim read the truth in her expression and shook his head in disgust. "You've
got a screwed set of standards, lady." He watched anger darken her face.
"What I did to your father is exactly what Tanaki is trying to do to you
now. There's not a bit of difference."
"No." She was biting her lip, trying to control the rampage of her
emotions. "It's not the same."
"Why not?" Jim knew he was hurting her, driving the nails of truth into her
heart without regard for the wounds they would inflict. But his own anger
spurred him. He wanted to hear the words... the real, underlying truth.
He came forward and leapt up on the couch. "Why not?" He flung the question
at her again, at the face she had turned away from him. "What makes me
different from Tanaki?"
"He... he was my father," she whispered.
"And your own life isn't as dear to you as his was?" Jim's gravelly voice
was scathing.
A sob broke through the mask of her face, and she covered it with her
hands, trembling. She had finally seen the truth of why she hated Jim so
passionately, and even the real reason that she was compelled to assuage
that subconscious guilt by championing the Altereds in Council. Bitter
tears leaked from between her fingers.
"Get away from me," she ordered in a broken whisper. When he did not move,
she looked up at him, her eyes full of agonized fury. "Get away from me!"
Her voice still did not rise above a hoarse whisper.
"Why? So you can forget all about me and go on living your lie? You have no
idea what it really means to be Altered." Jim already knew that the victory
he had won was an empty one: he could feel the bitter echoes in his own
heart. But the weight of the years, the pain and anger, were boiling out of
him, and he could not stop himself.
Julee turned away from him, but he knew that she listened as he described,
in every ugly detail, what it meant to be Altered. The memories he had
tried so long to bury rose up again: staggering through the streets in the
rain, a starved, freezing kitten whose mother had thrown him out when he
was barely four months old because she could no longer bear the sight of
the child she had borne. Instinct had kept him alive until his human brain
could develop... the hunter's instinct that let him catch roaches and
beetles, and a keen nose that found the edible bits in the garbage that
sat, stinking, in the alleyways. He remembered being driven away with kicks
and curses from every place he had tried to take shelter in, either because
they thought he was an animal or because he frightened the customers away.
He remembered the government child custody house he was put in for a while.
The stern nurses had given him decent food and a warm place to sleep, and
even taught him the basics of reading and writing before the fear and
loathing behind their eyes drove him out into the streets once again. He
remembered being caught and beaten by the neighborhood gangs while he was
still too small for his teeth and claws to be much defense, and he
remembered turning tricks for the truly perverse, in exchange for a meal
and a place to sleep for the night.
When he had grown old enough, and strong enough, to hold his own on the
street, he had found it sweetly satisfying to repay the gangs, the barmen
and their bouncers, and anyone else who tried to hurt him, with teeth and
claws. When the first offer had come to pay him to do what he was already
doing, he hadn't thought twice about it. Eventually the money had gotten
him off the street, given him comfort, women, even an education of sorts.
He did not regret it.
When he finished speaking, Julee was staring at the fingers clasped
together in her lap, struggling to deny the truth of what he said. She had
winced at every description of brutality he had thrown at her, but had not
interrupted. Jim felt exhausted, drained. He had never exposed so much of
himself to anyone and wondered why, of all people, he had done so to this
one. It frightened him in a way he could not describe.
Eventually Julee looked up at him. A wan smile peeked from beneath her
tears. "We should form a club. Call it the Mutual Hate Society."
Surprised, Jim smiled back. He wasn't sure why, but he found the joke
humorous.
They remained that way for several minutes, wrapped in the silence of the
late hour. Jim could hear the tread of the security guards elsewhere in the
house as they made their rounds, and the sigh of the wind in the trees
outside the window. The breeze that came to him was filled with the smells
of damp earth and of the rain that would fall later that night. He noticed
consciously for the first time that there were no lilacs.
Julee rose in a whisper of silk. She was almost to the arched doorway that
led to the stairs before she turned. "Goodnight, Jim Leary."
He could not read the expression in her voice. "Goodnight," he answered.
She left then, and Jim followed her with his ears as she made her way up
the stairs to her bedroom. A few moments later he, too, left to seek his
bed.
"Three days left until the vote." Julee closed up the keyboard on her desk
and folded her arms over it. "Do you think Tanaki will still try
something?"
Jim shrugged. "Probably. The odds are getting long that you'll survive
another attempt. Four is pretty impressive already."
"Thank you so much for the analysis, Mr. Expert. I really didn't want to
hear that."
Jim grinned at her, showing a row of sharp teeth. The sarcasm had been
playful rather than biting. In unspoken accord they did not mention their
midnight conversation, but somehow it had shattered the formality of their
relationship. Not that they were taking long walks in the garden together,
or even working on a first name basis, but something had changed. Jim
wasn't quite certain whether he liked it.
"I was trying to point out why I don't like the idea of you leaving the
estate," he said.
"I know. But this meeting is too important to miss. An equal trade
agreement with Hyundai/Hwang would open some big doors for us back in
Japan. Tanaki surely wouldn't try to hit me there... it's bad form."
Jim sighed, defeated. "Well, the security's as tight as I can make it."
"Good." The portable phone Jim habitually carried with him rang before she
could add anything else. Jim unfolded it and listened to the frantic voice
on the other end.
"Sit tight and I'll meet you there," he said and closed the phone down.
Julee lifted an eyebrow curiously.
"Either Eddie Blake is having a really bad trip, or he's scared enough to
want to sell us some information," Jim said as he jumped down from his
chair. "He didn't know anything a week ago, so maybe he's learned something
important. He's convinced Tanaki tried to off him.
"I'm going to meet him. It shouldn't take long to find out if he's running
a game. So don't leave the estate until I get back."
She nodded and threw him a mock salute. "Take care."
He found Blake exactly where he said he'd be, holed up in a smelly dive of
a motel down in the Central West End. Blake had an old 12-gauge shotgun
across his knees, and to Jim he looked very frightened, and very straight.
Jim had spent twenty minutes watching the building, the room, and the man.
If there was a trap, he couldn't spot it.
"So what's the word?" he asked Blake while he surveyed the room from his
momentary perch on the window sill.
Blake tightened his grip on the shotgun. "Here's the deal: you give me a
plane ticket out of the colony, a little spending money, and enough
protection to keep me alive to enjoy it, and I give you the name of the guy
that's selling your Councillor out to Tanaki." His gaze darted nervously
about the room.
Jim considered him. "How do I know you've got the right name?"
Despair flickered in Blake's eyes. "C'mon, man! They killed Isabella. She
was one of Tanaki's regulars and she knew a lot about what he was doing.
Maybe she even helped recruit this guy." Isabella was the woman who had
shot at Julee Aston during her lecture.
"So why not you? That was almost two weeks ago."
"Man, `cause I didn't know anything!" Blake was squirming like a restless
child. "That's the way it's always been. Tanaki pays good, tells me what to
do, and I don't ask questions. I don't wanna know. But this time, I went up
to the big house to pick up the rest of my money for another job... it
didn't have anything to do with Councillor Aston... and I got there at the
same time this guy did. It took me a minute to figure out who he was. I've
seen him on the viewer a few times when the Councillor was on. So then I
split. I figured if Tanaki'd kill Isabella, he'd sure kill me if he thought
I knew about the guy."
Jim thought it over. The story was plausible, and even convincing. "All
right," he finally said. "I'm willing to buy. Who is it?"
Blake shook his head. "Nuh-uh. Not until I'm someplace safe."
"Will the Aston estate do? It'll take a while to arrange a flight and your
money." Jim was beginning to wish Blake was as dumb as he looked.
Blake nodded, and they left through the window and down the fire escape.
Jim didn't want to take any chances while the hairs on his neck were
bristling with unknown danger.
They reached the estate without incident. Jim took Blake to the basement
and locked him into one of the holding cells that had been built there. No
one saw Blake, as Jim had intended.
"I can't exactly let you roam about the estate," he explained to Blake when
they reached the cell. "This isn't the nicest of accommodations, but it
will keep you safe and out of trouble until I get back."
Blake submitted with the air of a doomed man. He had pretty much sold
himself, and knew it.
"Now I want a name." Jim had kept his part of the bargain, and Blake was
not in much of a position to argue.
"I don't actually know his name. He drives the Councillor's car. Short
little guy that's got no hair."
Jim clamped his jaw shut on his surprise. Ned? But as he thought about it,
it made sense. Ned had access to the gate key, and the first assassin had
come in through the gate. Security had found the gate shorted, but that
could be arranged from inside as well as out, and after the fact as easily
as before. And Ned had been sick the morning that the car bomb had nearly
taken them out. Jim himself had sent the man home, as he did anyone who was
not operating at their peak. It had never occurred to him that the symptoms
could have been faked.
With a rush of adrenaline, he realized that the Councillor's car had not
been in it's spot when he had brought Blake in. He wasn't sure what time it
was, but knew it couldn't be too late. He growled deep in his throat,
unconsciously voicing his anger. The woman had left despite his orders! And
Ned was driving her.
Jim locked Blake into his cell and then sprinted up the stairs, cursing as
the half-healed wound in his shoulder lanced him with pain. He yelled for
his staff as soon as he was out of the basement and explained the situation
in a few terse sentences when they came at a run. They were in a car and
heading out through the gate within two minutes, which pleased Jim in an
unoccupied corner of his mind. The helo crew was also alerted, but it would
be a few minutes more before they could get airborne.
Jim caught up the phone and dialed the Councillor's private number. The
phone rang twice, then Julee's voice came to him from the other end,
"Hello?"
"Hello, Councillor," Jim replied. "This is a friendly conversation. Smile
and nod, and pretend you're talking to one of your ladyfriends."
"What's going on?" Her voice was light, but her sudden concern was clear
beneath the false joviality.
"Is the divider up? Can Ned hear you?"
"No, he can't. What's going on?" She was more insistent this time.
"Laugh. Your ladyfriend just told you a joke." On the other end, he could
hear her obey. "Now," he continued, "tell me where you are."
A pause. "Fifth and Old 70. Am I in trouble?"
"Yes. Where are your escorts?"
"My car blew out its hoverfan. One of the cars stayed with it and we
transferred to the other one. I didn't want to be late."
Jim sucked in his breath. It couldn't have been an accident, could it? He
was barely aware of the deep gouges his claws were ripping in the seat as
he flexed them in response to the tension that gripped him.
"Who's in the car with you, and where are they?" The armored escorts had
two compartments: one in the front that also extended up into a small
turret from which a gunner could fire, and a rear compartment buried in the
belly.
"Ned's up in front with Dan and Xiao. I'm in the back. What is going on?
Wait a minute. We're stopping."
Jim's heart leapt up into his throat. "Where, Councillor? Where are you?"
Another pause as she peered out through the viewing slits. "We're still on
Old 70. We must have crossed the bridge: there's nothing here but ruins."
There was a note of fear in her voice.
"Put the phone down but don't hang up. Put it on the floor. We'll be there
as soon as we can." Then, "Old 70 across the river," he told the driver of
his own car.
"Hurry," was all Julee said. Then, distantly, Jim heard the door grate open
and a man's voice order her out of the car.
Jim could see the bridge ahead of them, and the blasted landscape of East
Louis on the far side. During the war, a targeting mistake had flattened
the ghetto of East Louis while leaving San Louis and her military airport
virtually unscathed. The drumming of a helo's blades reached Jim above the
thunder of the racing hovercar, and he hoped it was theirs.
They arrived in an inevitable cloud of dust and ashes kicked up from
beneath the hovercar's skirt, diving out of the car as bullets shattered
the windshield and tore holes in the upholstery. It wasn't armored, Jim
reminded himself as he tried to pierce the swirling dust. The car began to
settle with a whine, and the dust settled with it, as the two men with Jim
returned fire.
Ned had taken cover behind the armored escort and was keeping them pinned
with devastating accuracy. The shell of a building rose behind him,
covering his back. Jim had doubts about how long their own car could
continue to shield them as the withering fire slowly shredded it. Ned would
have to run out of ammunition before they could do much to him. They
weren't about to hit him... he was using the door of the cockpit as a
shield and firing through the hinge slit.
Julee Aston was nowhere to be seen. Jim peered around the edge of the open
door behind which he crouched, then jerked back as bullets whizzed past his
ears, painfully loud.
A new rattle of gunfire, deeper than the tinny sounds of hand weapons,
joined the cacophony. The helo was descending, and Jim could see the fire
that spit from her guns. The heavy slugs hammered the side of the armored
car, rocking it. Ned turned to face this new threat and raised his weapon.
Jim didn't think he'd ever get a better opportunity. The rough ground gave
him excellent traction as he bounded across the space that separated the
two vehicles and up onto the body of the armored car. The strength and
speed that made his ancestors one of the most feared predators in Asia made
Jim a dark blur as he leapt from the roof of the car and crashed into Ned
Chang. He took him from the side, throwing his greater weight into a twist
that brought Ned down beneath him. His claws sank into the man's back and
the sweet taste of blood filled his mouth as he clamped powerful jaws
around his neck and squeezed.
A flicker of motion at the corner of his eye brought his head around with a
snap. Julee Aston stared at him in a mixture of shock and horror from
beneath the car where she had taken refuge when the firefight began. Her
eyes were huge against the pale skin of her face. It was the child's face,
exactly as he had seen it twenty years before.
They remained that way for several moments, staring into each others' eyes.
The understanding that passed between them ran too deep for words. Then
Julee broke the contact and looked around.
"Is it safe to come out?" She asked. The gunfire had stilled, and only the
sound of the hovering helo filled the air.
Jim nodded. Uncertain, he offered her his hand despite the blood that
covered it. After a moment, she took it, and let him pull her out from
underneath the car.
Four days later, Jim found himself once more sitting across from Julee
Aston in the familiar environs of her study. A man occupied a third chair.
He was, Jim had to admit, one of the most handsome men he had ever seen,
with the perfect features of a Greek god. His hair fell in waves of burnt
gold to his shoulders, and he had the lean, muscular build of a swimmer,
easily visible through the loose, sleeveless shirt that he wore. Like the
rest of his clothing, the shirt was carefully tailored, and expensive.
Everything about him spoke of money and of quality. The only unusual thing
about him were the thick folds of brightly colored skin that fell the
length of his body from his shoulders and arms. When he raised his arms,
they expanded into a beautiful mosaic of butterfly markings, like a spread
cape, that stretched from ankles to wrists. And yes, he had answered Jim's
question, he could glide formidable distances, provided the winds weren't
too rough.
His name was Parker Eddings. And he was now a member of the Council,
occupying the newly created Altered seat. Julee's motion had passed by a
narrow margin the day before.
Jim was thoroughly curious why she had asked him here.
After the introductions were made, Julee turned to him. "Councillor Eddings
asked me to arrange this meeting, so I will leave it to him to say whatever
he has planned."
Eddings smiled at the light jab. Then he turned to Jim. "I understand that
your employment with Councillor Aston will soon be ending."
Jim nodded, "Yes." Out of the corner of his eye he watched Julee for a
reaction, but was disappointed. She had not said anything when he had told
her the first time, either.
"Then I would like to offer you a position on my own staff." He held up a
hand. "And not just as a bodyguard. You know what it is to be Altered
without the advantages I have always enjoyed. I need someone with that
perspective if I'm going to do anything truly useful for our people."
He was an incredible orator, this new Councillor, Jim thought. For a moment
he was tempted, drawn by the power of the man's personality. Then he shook
his head.
"I can't, Councillor."
Eddings watched him for several moments, as if debating whether or not to
try to convince him. Eventually he smiled, resigned.
"I was afraid that might be your answer. I hope you'll reconsider." He laid
a small card on the desk near Jim. "That has my private number, in case you
do."
Jim picked up the card, nodded.
After a few minutes of idle talk with Julee, Councillor Eddings took his
leave. To Jim's surprise, he offered him a hand as he was leaving, and Jim
could tell that he had not thought twice about the gesture. It was the
first time in Jim's memory. He glanced at the man's card again after the
door had closed and wondered if he might not take his offer after all.
The stillness in the room brought Jim out of his thoughts. Julee Aston sat
behind her desk, chin cupped in her hands, staring at him. It was not a
hostile gaze, but Jim could not decipher it beyond that. Surprised to find
his heart beating fast, Jim waited for her to break the silence. When she
did, it was not with anything he had hoped she'd say.
"I am formally releasing you from your oath, Jim Leary, as of this time.
Your employment by the Aston Estate is thereby terminated, without
prejudice." The words were formal, as they were required to be, in order to
be binding under law.
Jim nodded and said nothing. He didn't know what he could say, or even if
he wanted to say anything.
Julee leaned back in her chair. "So this is goodbye?" There was a note of
sadness in her voice.
"I guess it is, Councillor."
A ghost of a smile illuminated her features. "Well, it's been an adventure,
to use an old cliche."
Jim found himself smiling as well. Then he sobered. "Take care,
Councillor." Tucking Eddings card away in his waist pouch, he jumped to the
floor and walked toward the door.
"Leary, wait." Julee's voice stopped him before he had taken three steps.
He paused and turned.
"This is for you." She came around the desk and handed him a small cream
colored envelope. He accepted it curiously.
"Open it later," she added when he turned it over to examine the seal.
"All right," he shrugged, and added it to the contents of his pouch. Then,
without further ado, he turned and padded quietly from the room. Julee
watched him go, face expressionless.
When he opened the cream colored envelope, Jim found inside a reservation
ticket for two for dinner at the Tea Room. It was dated nearly a year in
the future, on the first anniversary of the creation of a Council seat for
Altereds. Jim grinned to himself and wondered if either of them would show.
___________________________________________________________________________
Valerie Jones is an engineer, although not currently working in her field,
which is the aerospace industry. She loves flying, cats, horses, gardening
and computer games. She's been hooked on science fiction ever since her
mother read her to sleep with the Dragonriders of Pern novels. She lives in
Lawerence, Kansas with her husband and sixteen month old son.
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
The Harrison Chapters His eyes snapped open but saw nothing
save for a blue dot in the
Chapter 16 distance... He closed his hand into a
fist as a beeping noise rose
Jim Vassilakos somewhere in the distance. Then the
lights came on, and he squinted,
barely able to see at all.
"Good morning."
___________________________________________________________________________
He liked the sound it made, twirling on the counter top, and the way it
made her hazel eyes open wide with glee.
"Lemme see."
Mike's first impulse was to clasp his hand into a tight fist. She tried
prying back his fingers one by one, but each time she got one where she
wanted it, she'd have to let it go to work on another. "Dummy," he thought,
as it would snap back down, and she'd scream and then laugh, frustrated and
easily amused.
"Mike... please. I'm gonna tell mom."
"Tell her what? I found it."
"I just want to look at it."
He held its edge between two fingers, its coppery color reflecting the late
afternoon sunlight. Some sort of profile lay etched on the side, a man with
a beard, all distinguished and stately. She squinted, trying to make out
the details as he jiggled it back and forth, forcing her eyes to constantly
refocus. Finally giving up, she tried to grab it. "Slowpoke," he thought as
he felt a snickering smile form on his lips.
"I have all. You have none."
"Mike..." she started to whine.
"Oh, don't cry, baby. You want it?"
"Yes."
"I bet you do."
She ended up chasing him around the flat, underneath tables, through the
shower, over their parents' bed, until she finally cornered him at the
balcony, hazel eyes deadly serious.
"Gimme it or else."
"If you insist."
He made as if to hand it forward, but just at her moment of triumph, he
flicked it backwards over his head. It was over twenty stories down.
"Mike... I'm telling."
She never did, of course. She never told about anything, while he would
tell about almost anything, even the stuff he made up.
"Mommy already knows you're a big fat liar."
"Does not... uh.... Am not."
He didn't know why she held her tongue. He never really thought about it.
He knew it was a good thing though. She'd certainly collected enough dirt
over the years to put him on life-long restriction.
"Where you going?"
He froze, his lower torso hanging out the ventilation shaft. It wasn't the
first time she'd pretended to be asleep. He looked down, uncertain.
"Nowhere."
"I'll tell."
"Go ahead."
He stopped once he reached the roof. She was at his heels, hazel eyes
shimmering faintly in the starlight. Mike scowled. A tag-along was just
what he needed.
"Where do you think you're going?" he queried in his most accusatory voice.
"Where are you going?" she chirped in reply.
"Nowhere."
"I'm going nowhere too."
He gritted his teeth, walking over to the old staircase. He'd busted the
lock on the door with his father's gun while nobody was home to hear the
noise. His dad never even noticed the bullet missing.
Mike told her to go back at least twenty times on the way to the ground
floor. It wasn't that she'd get him caught. Sneaking past the security-bot
wasn't a problem. The thing was stupid, and he'd learned long ago how to
distract it with a pebble. It was just the idea of her company which
irritated him.
She walked behind him once they were outside, picking up funny shaped
stones or bits of metal. She even found a coin, probably the one he'd
tossed over the balcony. They ended up going into one of the deserted
buildings at her insistence. She wanted to find something hard and flat to
spin it on. Mike suggested her head, which she didn't find funny.
They must have sat there for hours while she twirled it with glee and
wouldn't let him touch it for all the false promises in the world. He
watched her, his eyelids growing increasingly heavy as he reminded himself
that they couldn't fall asleep. Without her in the room, there would be
nobody to cover for him in the morning. Still, she seemed too happy to
budge. She finally looked up, waking him from his pseudo-slumber.
"Remember Dana?"
Mike looked at her and yawned, "Haven't seen her in awhile."
"Mom said her family must've moved, but I went over the other day, and her
older sister answered the door. Said she wasn't living there anymore."
"Maybe she got the bug."
That made her pause, but then she looked up again, "I don't see how she
could have. She hardly ever went out. Her dad wouldn't let her."
Mike sat upright on the floor, crossing his legs.
"Sounds almost like Jason."
Lei twirled the coin again.
"Yeah. Before his parents moved, he said they were leaving because of him
and that I should go too. Because we were both second-born."
"Second-born?"
"I know. I asked mom what he meant. She said they were really leaving
because his parents couldn't face their chores."
A goo-spitter crept beside her leg while she was talking. Mike flicked a
string of pebbles at it until it got the hint and crawled away. She didn't
seem to notice and just kept twirling the coin.
"Mom said some people just hide from real life. Isn't that weird?"
"I guess."
She was quiet for a while after that, and Mike closed his eyes wondering
what the big people were up to.
____________________
"Mike. Wake up!"
His eyes snapped open but saw nothing save for a blue dot in the distance,
jumping like the beat to a really slow song. His mouth felt strange, almost
swollen, and his body felt warm and numb, as though he'd melted into the
concrete. It took about a minute before he realized there was something in
his mouth. He spat it out gently, feeling it brush by his arm several
moments later. With considerable concentration, his hand found it somewhere
in the darkness. It was about the size of a walnut, cold and metallic. He
closed his hand into a fist as a beeping noise rose somewhere in the
distance. Then the lights came on, and he squinted, barely able to see at
all.
"Good morning."
It was a woman's voice, detached yet strangely familiar. She sounded a
little tired as her face blurred in and out of focus.
"How are you feeling?"
She wiped his eyes with some sort of sticky, gauze pad, and Mike could see
her short, dark hair as she leaned forward again, looking into his eyes
with an elongated, metal instrument.
"Do you know where you are?"
Mike thought about it.
"No."
"You're on the Crimson Queen... Royal Fleet passenger liner. You're safe."
She put something on his head and then pressed a few buttons. A twisted red
line appeared on the display, sparking to mind images of floating bubbles,
crimson and boiling. Mike blinked as she turned back around.
"Do you remember anything?"
"Umm..."
For some reason, he found himself imagining her with long, white hair. Her
eyes were light brown, like a tiger's. Not silver, like Sule's. He blinked
again as the memories came rushing with neither heed nor invitation.
"Do you know who you are?"
"Mi..." he bit his tongue. "My head feels... kinda woozy."
"It's okay. Just rest. If you need anything," she tapped a red button
beside his fist. "Lights dim," she commanded.
They obeyed, and she seemed to have to play with the door, making it beep
several times before it would open. A man wearing a holster stood on the
other side, smiling and sneaking a peek. Then the door closed again, and
Mike saw a small number pad nested into the wall beside it.
The object in his hand was metallic with two small holes set into one face.
A moon-shaped etching lay beneath them, making a smiling face of the trio,
and the words "try me" were carefully etched along the adjoining side.
Frowning, Mike raised it carefully to his head, using his fingers to find
the appropriate jacks. His arm felt strangely disconnected, as though half
the nerves were deadened, and it took considerable fumbling before the
device agreed click into its proper place. The lights seemed to stutter for
a moment, and sitting somewhere within one wall, he could see the pair of
dancing yellow lanterns.
"Cecil, what's going on?"
"Speak with your mind, my friend. You are in the gravest danger yet."
Mike tried to shrug, but his shoulders barely responded, so he just sat
still as the lanterns continued to swirl, beckoning attention.
"The Imps believe you are working with ISIS. They think it is you who
summoned them to Sule's rescue. It is only a matter of time before they
learn the truth."
"Where am I?"
"The cage, the Crimson Queen's high security section of sickbay."
"Are we in hyperspace?"
"En route to Tyber."
Mike took a deep breath, "No wonder I'm having weird dreams."
The lanterns halted their dance, mid-stride.
"Dreams?"
"Realistic, actually. Ever hear of delayed action re-play?"
"Ah... understood."
Mike sighed. Cecil knew him too well.
"What's our ETA?"
"Fifteen hours."
"Anybody with you?"
The lanterns danced again, "The whole team, Pooper-dumper included."
"Does anyone have any ideas for getting me out of here?"
"Brain cells be burning over it. Trust in that."
"Could you be more specific?"
"Locks on doors, for starters. Codes to enter, unknown."
Mike smirked, "Unknown? To the ultimate hack?"
"Hack Cecil could, but not quietly. Not on this boat, and certainly not
concerning their prize jewel."
Their prize jewel. Mike savored the sound of it as his smirk decomposed
itself into a sullen stare.
"I'll get the combo. You guys figure out how to use it. Okay?"
"Agreed."
Mike disengaged the radio from his jacks, using several minutes debating
where to hide it. Precious little was sacred in a hospital null,
particularly one in which your every bodily function was monitored by
various medical gadgetry. Even a woman doctor would have to get intimate
from time to time. He finally settled on wedging it beneath the upper-torso
sheath between his armpit and the castfoam, pressing the red button almost
as a after-thought. A young man entered the room a minute later. He wore a
white coat with snake insignia and had a soft, friendly face.
"Ah... Lieutenant Feso Sosrodjojo at your service."
Mike tried to grin, "Lieutenant, I can barely move."
"That's just the regen compound doing its work. It contains a mild
paralytic."
"Take me off it."
"Ah... I can't do that."
"Lieutenant, don't make me pull rank here. Can you at least take me off the
paralytic?"
He sighed, "If you don't mind pain, sure."
Mike nodded, "I'd also like to see myself. If you have a mirror
somewhere..."
"No problem. I'll be right back."
A minute later, Mike discovered the nurse true to his word.
"Why are you being so nice to me, Feso?"
"Ah... you're Mr. Important, right? I see Lieutenant Torin always asking
about you. He's very tight with the Commodore, I hear." He grinned
knowingly, his eyebrows arching as if to say "nudge nudge... wink wink."
Then he smiled, sort of shyly. "No, I'm always nice to the patients. It
helps people heal, and you need all the healing you can get."
"What I need is to be able to move."
"Ah... you can move your arm and head."
"I want to be able to move my body. I want to be able to do my own
digestion and defecation instead of these machines. Can you take me out of
the body sheath?"
"Ah... I don't think that would be such a good idea."
"Please?"
____________________
Erik knew he'd overslept even before he was moderately conscious. He'd
woken at his usual time several hours earlier, and recalling the previous
night's excitement, promptly closed his eyes. It was a nice change, he
decided, though a little too habit forming.
"Computer. Reinstate program wake-me."
"Done. You have messages waiting."
"Say messages, list."
"Commodore's quarters. Medical department, check-in desk. Custodial
department, laundry section. Done."
"Laundry?"
"Illegal command ignored."
"Say messages, all."
"Lieutenant, I am eagerly awaiting a report concerning you-know-who. Make
sure I am fully briefed by the time we arrive at Tyber."
He groaned.
Blip
"Hi. Lieutenant Torin, this is Sosrodjojo over at sickbay. In case you
haven't gotten word yet, I figured I should let you know before my shift
ends. That patient of yours has woken up, and he seems completely cognizant
as far as I can determine. You know, because the first thing they do
usually is to start complaining. Anyway, I just thought you'd want to know
as soon as possible. Bye now."
Blip
"Hello. This is Chief Ater. We had an interesting time removing those
seal-it patches off the fleximesh you sent us. I just wanted to let you
know, Lieutenant, that there was a Draconian service insignia underneath.
Showed up on the computer as external intelligence branch. I took the
liberty of forwarding a memo up the chain of command, but I figured I
should at least clue you in as well. Oh, and by the way, we figured out
that we can't repair it on-board, but I'd like to shuttle it down to Tyber
when we arrive and see what we can do with it on planet."
Blip "There are no more messages."
"Erase messages, all."
Erik crawled out of the null tube and showered, whipping out his clearance
badge as he entered the cage's guard room scarce minutes later.
"Hold it there, Mister."
Hunter's hair was slicked back from perspiration, and Erik guessed that she
probably just finished her mid-morning workout. Rumor had it she kept a
pair of grav-weights in her desk, and though he'd never confirmed it one
way or the other, he'd read that some of the new-school, hands-on surgeons
were taking up martial arts for their nerves. Either way, she looked
pumped-up enough to belt him one.
"Where do you think you're going?"
He put on his best smile, "Where's it look like I'm going?"
"It looks like you're trying, rather foolishly I might add, to sneak into
the cage."
"How observant of you."
"Don't even think it. I have a patient in there who needs his sleep."
"Doctor, this will only take a moment. Open the door."
"Don't open it. Lieutenant, the answer is emphatically no."
The guard looked between them, obviously befuddled. Erik knew she
out-ranked him, but he also knew that he had the power of God to call upon
for all the guard was concerned. He pulled the writ from his shin pocket.
"You see this?"
"Yes sir."
"You see the seal?"
"Yessir."
"You recognize it?"
"Yessir!"
"Open the door."
Dr. Hunter stood behind, her mouth gaping open with a string of saliva
ready to spill to the floor.
"Nobody ever told me that ISIS was involved!"
"You never asked, and keep your voice down."
The guard began punching in the access number once they reached the cell.
"The door can only be opened from this side. The number is
two-four-one-five-three. You key it in from the other side, and it'll tell
me that you've entered it correctly. Then I key it on this side, and the
door opens."
"Keep it open until I say otherwise."
"Yessir."
The cell door slid into the wall, and Erik entered, followed by a pair of
irate footsteps. Her patient was reclining diagonally in the gravitic null,
his body sheath laying along the wall behind him. A short, folded chair
rested against the near corner, a mirror propped against one of its legs,
and another chair, unfolded, sat facing him directly as though he were
fully expecting the intrusion. He smiled, his head jacks gleamed in the
eerie, turquoise light.
"Lieutenant Torin, I take it."
Erik sat down, Hunter preferring to stand and look threatening.
"Why are you out of your body sheath?"
The patient shrugged, a pained wince traveling the length of his face, "I
no longer required it."
"I'll be the judge of that. I can't believe Feso didn't tell me he did
this. Has he been administering the regen compound?"
"More or less."
"More or less?"
She examined the playback for all of two seconds.
"What happened to the paralytic?"
"I needed to move."
"Moving is exactly what you don't need. Mister... Mister Doe, you have been
shot several times."
"Twice. Only two got through."
"Only two?! Look Mister... whoever the hell you are! If you saw yourself
yesterday dripping in blood..."
Erik broke in, "Doctor! Please."
"Lieutenant..."
"Doctor, this is a very unusual patient. Please allow him a moment or two
of insanity. I can assure you, it comes with the territory."
"I will not put up with..."
"Due to security matters, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
"What?!"
"I am asking, Doctor. Please, don't force me to go further."
Tiger-eyes glared down on him, "I don't care what kind of connections you
have, Torin. This is coming around. You hear me?"
"Fine. Get her out of here."
She left before the guard could muster the courage, and Erik made a toothy
grin, the sort he used to practice in front of a mirror just to break up
his buddies during oral exams.
"Guard, you can close the door now. So..."
"So..."
"How was Calanna?"
Mike frowned, "Difficult."
"Really. I would never have guessed."
"Lieutenant, why am I being locked up?"
"Precautions. For your own safety, mainly. After all, how often do we get a
genuine ISIS operative on board? And that's not even considering the
valuable information which you carry... yes?"
Mike nodded, "Yes, but you may be under a misconception. I'm not an
operative."
"Who are you?"
He took a deep breath, hoping his scratchy, wounded voice sounded
convincing.
"The name's Mikaelis Caiton. I was originally one of John Clay's men."
"DSS?"
"No. Far from it. I was working only for John. He brought me over from
Tizar to keep an eye on Ambassador Kato, but somehow one of your
operatives, her name was Sule... no last name, I guess... somehow she found
out about me and basically made an offer I couldn't refuse."
"What sort of an offer?"
"Initiation into ISIS."
"She doesn't have that authority, Mr. Caiton."
"Call me Mikaelis."
"She lied to you."
"I'm not surprised. Do you want to hear the rest or not?"
"Please."
"First, what are you willing to offer me?" Mike grinned, his question a
little too direct. Erik grinned back.
"Look, Mikaelis. If I wanted to, I could just burn the information from
your brain."
Mike dropped his grin, "Well, if you put it that way... I started working
as a liaison between Clay and your people and managed to escape when things
eventually went down on Calanna."
"What happened?"
"Clay turned triple agent on us. He sacrificed his own life in that nuclear
incident you no doubt heard about and managed to kill Erestyl and destroy
the ISIS headquarters in a single, calculated strike."
Erik sat back, utterly befuddled.
"How did you escape?"
"Luck. Sule dumped a copy of our mind scanner readings to crystal. I then
accompanied her to the starport to deposit them into an interstellar postal
envelope. She doesn't like to take chances; that's one thing I liked about
her."
"How did you get wounded?"
"Two of Clay's goons tried to make short work of us at the starport. They
were locals. Real temporary hires. They didn't even know their source of
income had already reduced himself to a jumble of sub-molecular particles.
Really tacky way to go, if you ask me."
"And what about Sule?"
"She was wounded also. We managed to get to a starship, but its occupants
weren't too crazy to have us there. She fought well, but..."
Erik took a deep breath, trying to digest the story as quickly as Mike had
made it up.
"Where's the envelope addressed to?"
"If I tell you that, what keeps you from just killing me?"
Erik shrugged, "Nothing. You're going to have to trust me."
"I don't think so."
"Perhaps you should. It could be your last opportunity... to think I mean."
Mike nodded, "I'll take you to it, but not until I have a chance to at
least introduce myself to your superiors. If you find that unreasonable,
then take your chances with the mind scanner, and I'll take mine."
Blue light shifted along the Lieutenant's features as he considered the
offer. He finally stood up.
"I should warn you that insolence is not tolerated in ISIS."
"Neither is stupidity," Mike countered, "at least according to Sule."
Erik keyed in the combination as he reached the door, oblivious to the
shift in his prisoner's gaze. After the door closed again, Mike stumbled
over to the folded chair, taking the mirror and placing it flat against the
metal deck. Amidst all the gleaming silver, it had either gone unnoticed or
been disregarded as trivial. He took a deep breath and re-attached the
radio. It took a minute before Cecil's dancing, yellow lanterns returned.
"Greetings."
"Greetings yourself. I got it. It's two-four-one-five-three."
"Copy that. You'll be out in no time."
The lanterns disappeared, and Mike disengaged the radio from his jacks,
hiding it again while wondering how long "no time" would take.
____________________
It was just a little blinker. To anyone else on the bridge, it would have
been beneath notice, but Tabor knew what it meant. He'd just barely
finished re-configuring his display for that one little light. His personal
message board began scrawling letters almost immediately. "There. See
that?"
He opened a channel to engineering. Nakaguchi was talking on the other end
even before the line opened.
"...just like I said. Did you catch it?"
Tabor smiled, "I see it," though he had to admit to himself that he could
scarcely believe it. "What do you think is causing it?"
"You're the communications genius. You tell me."
Tabor imported the section of hyperfield fractometer readings which his
configuration had obligingly saved narrow seconds before they would have
been consigned to electronic oblivion with the rest of the computer's
standard erasures. With a few key strokes, he converted the data to a
graph, and his eyes grew wide at the puzzling image. Nakaguchi was right.
It was pure chaos, except for those few seconds where a series of peaks and
troughs appeared with perfectly equidistant delays.
"You see it?"
"Yeah. I see it, alright. I just don't know what it is."
"I do."
"What?"
Nakaguchi laughed, "It's the slogs of space."
"You're doing this, aren't you? This is a joke."
"A sick and dangerous joke."
"Well, somebody's doing it. This does not happen naturally."
"That's what I've been telling you. You should have seen it last time. It
went on for more than a minute. I wish I was ready for it. I would have
saved it."
Tabor nodded, "I wish you had. A few seconds isn't much to go on. I'll get
back to you if I figure anything out."
"You do that."
The line closed with a fitful pop, and Tabor began running the standard
code-cracker routines. Lish looked up, yawning contagiously. They'd both
got on duty less than an hour ago, and her sleepiness had been infectious
until now.
"What's up?"
"Got a little mystery."
____________________
"Well, it's no mystery to me. I know how men are. Oooh, you think you're
tough, don't you?"
Carla retaliated with a full round kick, knocking Hunter back at least four
feet. The doctor didn't even seem fazed.
"I'm telling you, it was infuriating."
"Well, don't take it out on me, sister."
"Why not?!"
Carla had to duck and then some, finally retreating to her safe corner.
"Alice, you bitch, you are in a bad mood."
"Don't call me that."
"Hey, it's okay. I'm one too. I freely admit it. Now if only we could get
all men to admit they're assholes, the universe might be an honest place to
live."
"No... I mean don't call me Alice."
"It's your name, ain't it?"
"Stop gabbing and fight."
Carla kept to the defensive. She could tell her favorite karate student was
out for bloody, no-holds-barred aggression, and it was a beautiful sight.
"You keep on like this, and I'm gonna have you in the tournament. Talk
about focus. The only problem is that you're so pissed, you aren't
thinking."
She dished back just what the doctor ordered, except that Hunter didn't
know it until she was already on the floor, dazed, Carla's foot scrunching
down on her nose.
"Damn."
"Ha! And you thought you had me. Didn't you?"
Hunter stood up, rubbing the leg which took the brunt of the take-down.
"For maybe half a second."
"Longer than that. You were getting wicked, woman."
"I have good reason to be wicked."
"Yeah, well... you have to think and be wicked at the same time. Once you
have that down, all men better run and hide."
Hunter smiled. It had taken a while, but Carla was finally getting to her.
She always knew the doctor's weak spots.
"I didn't say all men."
"No, but that is what you mean. C'mon girl. You don't have to pretend
different. I know."
Hunter shrugged, picking up a towel, "It's just that they're so stupid."
"Ain't that the truth."
"They refuse to listen to reason. They're pig-headed."
"I heard that right. Hey, where's that come from, anyway?"
"What?"
"Pig-headed."
"You never heard of pigs?"
"No."
Hunter started to laugh, except that she was too angry and couldn't sustain
it, so it just came out like all wrong, like a pig's snort. Carla watched
her, a hurt scowl crossing her brow.
"What's that supposed to mean? I'm stupid or something? Listen girl, just
because not everybody goes to college for ten years..."
"No... I didn't mean it like that. Pigs are proto-slogs. That's just the
sound they make."
Carla looked at her again, that strange sort of smile forming along her
lips like she figured she was being lied to for the fun of it.
"I can do that. Listen..." snort "Hey, this is great." snort snort
"You're a real natural."
"I've always been able to make that noise. That's a pig noise?"
Hunter nodded, "I friend of mine was doing her dissertation on some of the
old DNA samples. They were supposedly brainy animals for their time."
snort snort
"You should have been a science major, Carla."
"I'll pass on that. The closest I ever got to science was a psychology
class they made me take. It was real cheesy. For the final project, we had
to find some sort of phenomena and explain it, okay?"
"Uh oh..."
"So, this guy in our co-op, he was my subject, except he didn't know it.
See? Every time he got hungry, he would go over to the cold food locker,
open it up, and just sort of stare inside like some meal was going to jump
out at him all of a sudden and make itself. You ever see men do this?"
"Not really."
"Well, they do. If you ever bothered to just watch people, you will notice
a lot of men exhibiting this sort of behavior. And it wasn't like it wasn't
his food. It was everybody's food."
"Okay. So what was your explanation?"
"The cold."
"Huh?"
"The cold air hitting his stomach caused it to shrink, and so by standing
in front of the thing while it was open, he actually reduced the amount of
free space in his stomach. How ya like it?"
Hunter smiled sympathetically, "What grade did you get?"
"It went down as an incomplete. The professor advised me to forget about
the sciences and take some trig to cover the slot. Can't say I'm sorry. I'm
pretty damn good at what I do."
"When do you use trig?"
"When is your friend ever gonna meet a pig?"
Hunter pondered Carla's eccentric sort of logic on the way back to sickbay.
It was already an hour into her sleep shift, but she felt determined to
immobilize her patient even if it meant chaining him to the wall and
whipping him with warm squash, and ditto for Lieutenant Torin if he was
unfortunate enough to still be loitering in the general vicinity. Her
thoughts were cut short by the door, however, or more specifically, by it's
remaining closed as she tried to walk through it. She picked herself off
the floor, holding her bruised nose in one hand as she looked around to see
if anybody had witnessed her comedic display of dexterity.
Sickbay was never locked. She slid her ID through the scanner slot, but the
door refused to budge, defiant and imposing as never before. She considered
kicking it, but buried the notion in her list of unspent aggressions.
She finally hit the white comm-switch on the right.
"Can somebody open the door, please?"
The security button beckoned. She hit the white switch again, closing the
line and hit the red switch with an angry jab of her thumb.
"Security?"
The door slid compliantly into the wall, and a tall, lanky figure stood
before her. Behind the black face mask, soft blue eyes seemed to rotate
within their sockets. She didn't even feel the two darts hitting her
stomach until a pair of gloved hands caught her fall and carried her gently
inside.
"Who... what..."
The doorway began to spin and blur, and as the walls closed quietly upon
her, she heard a grainy voice reverberate somewhere in the hazy distance.
"This is security.... Please identify yourself. Hello?"
____________________
The Commodore leaned back, seemingly impressed with the story, and Erik
hoped she wouldn't ask about specifics. He was still fuzzy on the details,
himself.
"Let me get this straight. He wants an interview?"
Erik shrugged, "He wants into ISIS... or so he purports."
She frowned, glancing at the wall image of Roxanne's Palace on Tyber.
Computer generated banks of orange, acid smog blew past the structure's
summit, somehow clouding her eyes with memories of the sunrise on Calanna.
"Commodore?"
"Even had I the clout, I wouldn't use it. It's not like the Navy. ISIS
doesn't take applications. Besides, he's too attached to Clay, who already
proved himself a traitor after we had trusted him."
"According to Caiton."
"The more I think about it, the more difficult I find it to believe this
Mikaelis Caiton. Why did Clay expose his entire network on Tizar if he was
never with us? As a sacrifice?"
Erik nodded, "Perhaps."
"No. Even were they all discards, what did he have to gain by risking
Erestyl?"
"He managed to destroy the operation of Calanna."
"A minuscule victory entirely beneath mention. He won nothing. This
prisoner would have us believe that he sacrificed his life and risked
Erestyl for nothing. Preposterous."
"Maybe Clay had second thoughts. That's the only explanation."
Reece cast him a cool stare, "There is another. He could be making the
whole thing up."
"Too many pieces fit. He knows a great deal. He must have been on the
inside."
She nodded, "That is all he has told us. Nothing more."
"Still, given the possibility that he's telling us the truth, shouldn't we
at least humor him?"
"Yes. We should. Regardless, I do want to meet him. If nothing else, a more
thorough questioning might serve to reveal who he really is."
Beep
"Reece here."
"This is Dunham. There's been an incident at sickbay. Your John Doe has
escaped."
Reece looked up, eyes cold as ice.
"On my way."
____________________
Hunter awoke in the infirmary, a swarm of stewards and part-time medics
darting frantically from null to null. They dressed the patients with
neurogram napkins and monitored pulse rates, such was the extent of their
training. She heard Feso's voice somewhere in the back of the room,
delivering instructions while donning a white service coat over his red and
pink striped pajamas, the only calm voice amidst a babble of cacophony.
"Well look who's among the living." He quickly stepped over, reaching for
her arm as she tried to sit upright. "There, Doctor. Just let it pass."
"The living?"
"Don't worry. Everyone seems fine."
"What happened?"
"You tell me. I just got here."
She glanced over his shoulder as the haze slowly dissipated from her mind.
Commodore Reece stood with the Captain and Lieutenant Torin near the main
desk, a first-class power-huddle if she'd ever seen one.
"You didn't tell me we had guests."
"Doctor..."
"C'mon."
She tore the napkin from her forehead and began traversing the distance
with Feso's shoulder in tow, not a mean task considering his reluctance. It
wasn't that he minded substituting for a pair of crutches. On the contrary,
he'd do anything to help a patient. His hesitation was founded in
cowardice, the prospect of interrupting an impromptu executive conference
rating somewhere between jamming his finger in an iris valve and taking a
long walk out a short airlock.
"Doctor, this is not such a good idea. You should lay back down and rest."
"Steady, Feso. You drop me and it goes on your permanent record."
The Commodore was spitting out orders left and right, her voice crisp and
determined and more than a little peeved.
"I want his image circulated among the crew. Also, post armed stewards at
the lifts and escalators. Shoot to maim."
Shoot to maim?
"Excuse me, sir. Might somebody tell me what's going on?"
"Your patient has escaped, Doctor. What do you last remember?"
Hunter took a deep breath and let go of Feso's shoulder.
"I was trying to enter sickbay, and the door was locked for some reason. I
opened a channel to security. Then the door opened and... everything went
black."
"Hypo darts. You took a double tap in the belly. Did you get a look at
him?"
"I... remember a face mask."
"We found this in your hand."
Reece handed her a flimsi, glowing pink letters scrawled across its face:
"If you ever want to see me again, don't conduct a search. It's tacky, and
you'll only inconvenience the passengers, particularly if you get too close
to me."
Erik broke in, "Commodore..."
Reece put up a steady hand.
"Do you have any idea why this was left in your hand, Doctor?"
"I was the ranking officer."
"Did anyone besides the medical staff and guard have access to the
prisoner?"
"Lieutenant Torin."
"Any passengers?"
"No sir."
Reece pressed her lips together, "One more question, Doctor. Is he well
enough to survive without medical attention?"
"That depends, sir."
"Give me an educated guess."
"Assuming there are no complications, yes."
"Complications?"
"He's very weak. When the regen-compound wears off, his condition will
worsen. How badly, I can't say."
"How soon?"
Hunter glanced toward her thumbnail chronometer.
"He's already past due, but there's a two to four hour grace period on the
compound."
Reece nodded, "There will be a meeting in the executive conference lounge
in two hours. I want an account of inventory losses."
"Aye, sir."
Hunter about-faced as well as her wobbly legs would allow before the
Commodore's words hit her.
"Inventory losses?"
The medicine cabinets hung open, boxes of various drugs and chemicals
scattered haphazardly on the floor. Feso pulled a chair out of the mess,
offering her a place to sit down. She ignored the gesture, bending over to
sort through the contents of some of the emptied boxes.
"What did they take?"
"Haven't had time to check."
She sat down in the middle of the floor, starting to pick up and sort the
miscellaneous bottles, jars, and canisters into tight, alphabetical rows.
"We'd better find out then, Feso. We've only got two hours."
____________________
Johanes administered the injection with all the delicacy of a marsh slog in
heat.
"Oops, missed the vein again."
"Ow... you sure you know you're doing?"
"Don't worry."
If not for Cecil and his bottle of miruvor, Mike figured he'd be heading
back to sickbay on account of his health.
"Told you you'd be out in no time."
Mike shrugged as Johanes withdrew the hypo, placing the empty plastic
capsule in his pocket.
"You're certain about Sule."
"Positive."
"You saw her dead."
"To put it mildly."
"And what about the body?"
Mike accepted a highbowl by way of congratulations, pausing before taking a
sip.
"The body?"
"Anything on it?"
"I don't know. She was wearing a vacc suit."
Johanes shot Cecil a worried glance as he caught the next highbowl, its
course erratic as it teetered, languid, from side to side. Spokes received
the next, and Cecil finally sent his own spinning on a collision course
with the others until it clinked gently against each in consecutive
sequence.
"To freedom."
"To freedom," everyone concurred, everyone except the Draconian.
"I don't want to disappoint you all, but we're not out of the asteroids
yet. We have about enough time for one drink."
"Two drinks," Spokes took another sip and started reattaching his headgear.
"One drink. If they decide to conduct a ship-wide search, I'd like to know
about it before it's too late."
"That would be uncouth."
"That never stopped ISIS before." Johanes gulped down the last of his drink
like a man stranded in the desert. Then he smiled. "I hereby conclude this
celebration. Cecil, you stay here and monitor their communications.
Michael, go to sleep. You've got six hours until the next injection."
"Terrific."
"Don't bitch. Spokes, you're with me."
"Okay, just a sec."
Mike poured himself another highbowl.
"Thanks. Everyone."
"Save your gratitude until we're dirtside. C'mon, we haven't got all
millennium."
"Okay... jeeze."
Mike floated his half-drained highbowl toward the corner of the room as the
door closed behind the dynamic if ill-disciplined duo. Cecil, meanwhile,
leaned calmly beside his multi-wave radio, sipping miruvor and warming a
left-over chili pita in the portable cooker. When it came out, the cheese
oozed between the cracks in the flat-bread like a wad of snot leaking out
the folds of an overused hanky.
"Want some?"
Mike winced, "I'll pass."
"Suit yourself."
"I'd rather stick to liquids for now."
"As in miruvor?"
"Whatever's being served."
Cecil's single camera danced a bit, the cat taking notice and pouncing on
it with claws outstretched, "Your problem is you don't know when to quit."
"Untrue. I haven't gotten drunk for over a week... unless you count being
force-fed by psychopaths."
"Well, congratulations," Cecil said, almost like he meant it.
"Give me a break, Cecil. I'm on my second highbowl which is nowhere near my
face."
"Why the sudden fit of restraint?"
Mike shrugged, "Maybe seeing that old weasel Gardansa slurping it down..."
he grunted, crawling into the null-tube, "I dunno. I was shot recently,
okay?"
"Good excuse as any."
"Besides, I want to keep clear-headed for a change. You check this place
for bugs?"
"You calling Cecil a fool?"
Mike sighed, "Just do me a favor. Check again."
Setting the pita beside his multi-wave, Cecil dug a small box out of his
suitcase. It's antenna telescoped out, and he proceeded to wave it around
the room, switching off the light and then his multiwave as he scanned.
"Light on. You see. Nothing here but us chickens."
"Meow?"
"What's it key on?"
"Electrostatic emissions. Do us a favor and switch off the sleeper."
Mike complied, and Cecil waved the antenna over the null tube.
"Interesting," his friend commented, as though he'd found a strange insect
on the bottom of his shoe.
"What? Something on the sleeper?"
"No. On you."
Cecil poked him with the antenna a few times, finally stopping at the belt
by which Mike's loose-fitting robe was held shut.
"Johanes find this for you?"
Mike untangled it from around his waist, inspecting the stiff fabric until
he found what he was looking for. The bug was flat and circular, like one
of those old coins he used to find in the barrens, only a little thicker
and without a stately, bearded profile on the side.
"One down."
Cecil kept looking, this time even more diligently than before, but the one
was all they found. Cecil finally cracked it open.
"It's just a recorder. Looks like cheap crystal."
He put it back together and dropped it into the portable heater.
"Cheap crystal fries easy."
Mike smiled, "Now that we're alone, you can start by telling me
everything."
Cecil sat down, his camera taking a thoughtful, sidelong pose as it dumped
Pooper-dumper back to the carpet in a fitful of snarls and hairballs.
"Not much to tell."
"Humor me."
Cecil sighed, leaning himself backward until the multiwave became a
makeshift pillow.
"Spokes showed up at the Sintrivani after you left, and we heard about the
air strike over the three-vee. Assumed you were somehow involved, knowing
your aptitude for mischief."
"I'm flattered."
"You should be. One of the offworlders waiting for transport must have
sneaked near the landing platform with a camera, because next thing we see
is Tizar's favorite gatherer hanging out the airlock of an orbit-bound
vessel. Then some explosions in the sky. Made for an amusing show."
"I was on three-vee?"
"More or less. The back of your head was, at least. We knew who it was.
Johanes dropped by a few hours later and basically confirmed what we saw."
"And so you guys decided to rescue me... just for kicks."
Cecil thought about it before answering, as though he was deciding whether
to be polite or honest.
"Johanes gave you less than even odds against Sule. He wanted our help to
finish her off."
"Assassination. This is getting even better."
"One might remind you that you're hardly virginal, Michael."
"I wasn't in it for money."
"Neither was I!"
Cecil spat the words out, pronoun included, pausing briefly to regain his
composure. The cat darted to the corner of the room, certain a voice of
that volume could only be directed at four- legged personages.
"We agreed to aid him in what he wanted, provided that he aid us in what we
wanted."
"Which was?"
"Your rescue, given the unlikelihood that you would still be kicking after
a confrontation with Sule."
Mike smiled meekly, a little embarrassed.
"That's it?"
The camera nodded, "In verbose totality."
"If it was just you, I'd buy it. Why's Spokes here?"
"Like Cecil said before, he seems to like you. We chipheads stick
together."
Mike smirked, "That's pretty weak."
"Then call Cecil a liar. It won't be a first."
"What are you giving him? Free wedgies?"
Cecil chomped another bite from his cheese pita as he pondered the
question. In the hackers lingo "free wedgies" equated to a gratis
apprenticeship, master to novice, wizard to user, or between any other
combination of disparate proficiencies: in short, Cecil to just about
anyone. Before, Spokes was just the aspiring pupil. But now, given the
risks involved, he was encroaching to the point of earning his keep, making
the so- called "wedgies" not entirely free.
"What's it to you, Michael?"
"Well... I guess I'm just curious how this all came about. I've never known
you to team-up with people, much less take on a long-term student."
"Life brings newness."
"Is that what you told Spokes?"
"Not precisely."
Mike laughed, then coughed.
"Try me."
"Get some RL." Real life, he meant.
"C'mon Cecil. Just the main points. You can spare the slogshit."
Cecil smirked, "Courage as an aspect of knowledge. Necessity of the will to
seek. Proof of intents..."
"You waste my time, I waste yours?"
"Stop whining. It got you out, didn't it?"
Mike shrugged defensively, "I'm not whining. I don't really care that
you're using him. It's merely a transaction as far as he's concerned. I
just wanted to know here everyone stands. For some reason," Mike tried to
laugh, "I just couldn't picture you three guys coming all the way out here.
You maybe. I mean, now we're more or less even again. Right?"
"More or less."
"But Johanes and Spokes... I thought I was dreaming."
"Maybe you are."
"No... I've got other dreams. I guess we both do."
Cecil was silent for a bit after that, finishing the pita and sucking down
the last of his miruvor. Maybe he didn't know what to say. Mike tried
closing his eyes, but sleep wouldn't come.
"Y'think we're gonna get out of here, Cecil?"
He didn't answer. Mike wondered if he'd even heard the question. With eyes
glossed over, Cecil was already in the other world.
____________________
"See `em? Self-replication detected. Zoom."
Chief Tuto looked from one monitor window to the other, his brown eyes
narrowing on the detection pings as they appeared, divided, and vanished in
short order. It was just as before, only quicker, as if they knew they'd
been spotted.
"Where are they coming from?"
Dira shrugged, a tangle of amber hair falling over one eye.
"Tracer says medical, but look at the entry log."
"Could be stealthing. Run a CPU verify."
One hand danced over the keyboard, "Yeah... no... well, something was
there. A difference of two percent detected for about... half a second."
"Run a full heads on exit channels, quick."
It was a waste of time, of course, and by the time they got around to
checking out the entry logs, there were no entry logs. Tuto studied the
blank screen with an equally blank expression, finally releasing an
irritated grunt.
"This is getting rude."
"Maybe not."
Her hand did another dance. "Port 129 shows simultaneous closure."
Tuto glanced toward the wall-chart. 129 was one of the public aether ports.
It could be accessed via wireless terminal, open to virtually any person on
board.
"Entry logs?"
"Nope."
"He's not taking chances. And he's too fast to lock in place." He chewed on
the thought. Speed usually bred sloppiness. "Do a frequency comparison on
the ports."
Dira tapped a few more keys, her dark blue eyes scanning the row of
frequencies as they scrolled off the monitor window. "Got it. Here's the
band they were using, and here it's being used on Port 182. Same exact
frequency."
Tuto nodded, not terribly surprised bytheir trespasser's lack of
precautions. Too bad. The game had just started getting interesting.
"Feed in a command stop. We'll lock him in place and check the entry logs."
Her fingers complied, and the keyboard locked up as though somebody had
yanked it off the desk.
"Huh?"
Tuto went to another console. Same story. He slammed a fist on the keyboard
in frustration. Dira put a hand on his shoulder.
"That won't help."
"It makes me feel better."
"Look at the port display."
One-eight-two flashed all the way from the command console to the security
desk, as cruel a set-up as he'd ever witnessed. Dira seemed to smile at
their predicament.
"We got re-routed, sir."
Tuto pushed the air from his lungs and began pacing around the room,
re-booting each of the consoles in turn. It would be several minutes before
they were back online, and somebody out there was making the most of the
time, probably laughing hysterically.
"This is getting very rude."
____________________
It felt a little like free-ditching off the Aerial Palace, the rush of
adrenalin and anxiety clawing at the will's outer shell. He could break a
sweat just thinking about it, because every time the possibility of fate
catching up was both real and expected. They had a place called "Gyron's
Fall," named after some poor sap whose grav-restrainer failed. Not his
fault. It just suddenly decided to up and quit in mid-air. Became the
biggest joke halfway across the Realm. Gyron ended up bouncing, and they
dug a little crater and buried him head-first, his feet sticking up with a
pair of boots that had foggers in their soles, such was the Draconian sense
of humor. Johanes remembered laughing out loud at the time, wishing he
could have been there.
"It's locked."
Spokes waved his hands in an apparently arcane gesture as the door slid
open. Johanes regarded his triumphant expression with all the amusement it
deserved.
"We're on a schedule here, okay?"
"Sorry."
Spokes followed him inside with a casual waltz, a sharp contrast to his
crisp-collared maintenance uniform. That was okay. It made him look like he
knew what he was doing. Johanes paced about the room, flipping a power
screwdriver end over end.
"There are fire sprinklers in here."
"So there are."
"Here, hold this."
The chiphead still regarded the canister with a mixture of curiosity and
ambivalence. All he knew was that it held clear liquid sandwiched between
white powder and a fan, each separated by a sheet of impacted polymer with
radio-controlled shutters. Enough information for the average ten-year-old,
Johanes figured, opening a vent.
"There's a sensor in here also."
"So?"
"Tell Cecil we'll need to deactivate it just before this is triggered. All
of them. This has to work perfectly or we all get caught. Understand?"
"I still don't know what you're talking about."
Johanes bit his tongue. Spokes knew, all right. He just didn't want to
admit it, the perfect conspirator, hedging all bets by feigning ignorance.
"Relay the message. Can you do that much?"
The tall one sighed and finally nodded, soft blue eyes seeing no ready
alternative.
____________________
"First of all, we're going to find the escapee. There are no alternatives.
There will be no excuses for failure."
Reece stared around the chamber, slowly taking in all their expressions.
Every officer in the room knew that organizing a ship-wide search on a ship
the size of the Crimson Queen was no mean task. The deadline only increased
the challenge.
"As you all know, we'll be dropping back into normal space in about nine
hours. The traffic situation at Tyber will be enough of a problem without a
fugitive to worry about, so it would seem that time is of the essence. Keep
that fact in mind while you make your reports. Captain?"
Dunham leaned forward, nodding to the Commodore as his broad mass shifted.
With the press of a button, Mike's image materialized over the conference
table in three dimensions.
"This is the man we're looking for. Pictures have already been distributed
to the crew, several of whom have noticed a likeness with this man."
He pressed the button again, and the jacks were replaced by an unkept mane
of long brown hair.
"His real name is Michael Harrison. He's a gatherer with the Tizarian
division of Galactic Press. We believe he has two allies on board. They
used hypo guns with a short-duration sedative in order to incapacitate the
guard stationed at the cage. They also tranquilized Dr. Hunter and two
specialists."
Reece interrupted, "Has the hypo compound been identified?"
Hunter nodded, "Senthinol-3. It's a consumer product made at a number of
systems in this sector. Been in circulation for the past three centuries."
The Captain looked around slowly, drawing presence from the silence before
continuing.
"Harrison is wanted for homicide on Calanna. He is also suspected of
impersonating an ISIS operative in order to get aboard, a felony under
interstellar law."
"He's wanted for homicide?"
Dunham nodded, "Apparently, but we don't have any details."
It made sense. The Calannans were generally private about such things. But
that didn't explain why he wasn't caught.
"They must have sent us his image recognition code."
"Yes, but because of the unusual way he attained passage, he was never
checked out."
Reece bit her lip.
"Any idea on how his associates got the cell combination?"
"We have a theory. Security ran a level two diagnostic of the ship's
computer after the break-in. They found a number of recon---worms. We've
been attempting to trace their source, but so far, no luck."
"You're saying they broke into the system and just read the combination?"
"So it would seem."
Reece bit her lip again.
"Those combinations are well protected. Why wasn't an alarm activated?"
"We don't know."
"How are they avoiding our trace?"
Dunham turned toward a petty officer at his right. "Chief Tuto?"
"They're using a variety of means. Stealth, entry-log erasures,
misdirection tactics. They've also found out how to slip into unused
frequencies unobserved."
"I thought all unused frequencies were observed continuously."
"They've managed to draw out our observation routines and are sending data
packets between the check points. We also believe they're using above-board
frequencies for voice transmissions."
"Have you conferred with communications about this?"
"Actually sir, they were already aware of it." He nodded across the table
to another officer. Tabor shifted in his seat, realizing he was suddenly
on-stage.
"Uh... six hours ago..."
"Who are you?"
"Tabor. Ensign. First Class. Communications Officer, sir."
He looked raw, like a typical navy recruit, the coppery-orange hair cropped
so close to his head that his appearance reminded her of a turnip. She
guessed that his problem had more to do with nerves than hair. He seemed so
scared it made her jitter just to look at him.
"Go ahead, Ensign."
"Six hours ago, one of our engineers noticed some very interesting readings
from an instrument which measures fractures in the normal-space bubble
around the ship. The device operates by bouncing a short-wave signal along
the bubble's area perimeter."
"Excuse me, Ensign," Reece waved from the other side of the table. "Is this
going to take a while to explain? We don't have time for a lecture in
astrophysics."
"Umm... I'll be brief, sir."
"Very brief."
"Yes sir. The gist of it is that this radio frequency is being used
continuously while we are in hyperspace, but to someone unfamiliar with
engineering, it looks like normal line noise between usable bands, thus
qualifying it for exploitation by a tight frequency transmission."
"You're telling me that they're using a voice frequency which is already in
use?"
"Anyone sufficiently skilled in communications can compress transmissions
into data packets, fire each one off several times, then decompress the
packets, check for inconsistencies caused by the line noise, correct, and
presto; they're using a frequency which also happens to be in use by a
non-sentient system, and their transmission goes through entirely
undetected. But in this case, it didn't."
"I think you just confused me more. Try the gist again."
Tabor took a deep breath, "Okay. Prior to jump, they must have been looking
for an above-board frequency with residual noise. Something that wasn't
being used, but that had enough random noise on it that it wouldn't be
scanned like a clean frequency where their transmission would be picked up
in an instant. This frequency qualified perfectly. The computer was running
tests on it by generating random noise, transmitting it externally to the
sensor, and making comparisons to see whether or not the sensor was
operating within its safety parameters."
"So you're saying this particular band was ideal for their purposes?"
"Very much so. If this had been an older craft where the comm system isn't
as tight and clean as it is on this ship, they would have had a lot more to
choose from, but on this vessel we don't really have any junkie above-board
frequencies, so their choice was very limited."
"And our engineers caught them when their transmissions interfered with the
operation of the sensors."
"Correct."
Reece nodded, "I understand, but why wasn't this reported immediately?"
Tabor took a deep breath, "I didn't learn about it until I came on shift
about three hours ago, and at that point I didn't believe it. By the time
the second transmission rolled around, I was convinced, but..."
"There were two?"
"Three, sir. The first six hours ago which lasted for a minute or two. The
second, a little over two and a half hours ago, which lasted only few
seconds. And the third began a little over two hours ago and has been
continuous since then."
Reece bit her lip yet again, this time hard enough to make her reconsider
the action.
"Let me get this straight. Harrison has been using a restricted frequency
for the past six hours, the past two hours continuously, and this is the
first I hear of it?"
"Sir, we didn't even know what we were dealing with until news of the
prisoner escape started to circulate. For all we knew, it was some sort of
localized hyperspace phenomenon or even a prank."
"A prank?"
"Yes sir."
Reece regarded Dunham with a sinister stare, and the Captain's dark cheeks
grew rosy under her scrutiny.
"Well, it's a relief that the crew has grown proficient at entertaining
themselves. We wouldn't want morale to suffer. Ensign, can we pinpoint the
signal source?"
"Not with the equipment on board."
"Can you at least tell us what it's saying?"
"The instrument's readings are used and removed from computer memory in a
continuous cycle, so we lost the first transmission entirely. That's gone
forever. The second one lasted only for a few seconds, and I've already
tried around a thousand standard decryption routines, none of which has
worked. I wouldn't put too much hope on us ever deciphering its contents,
at least not any time soon, and certainly not without very powerful
computer support. The current transmission is still being saved, but I
expect that we'll find the same problem we're having with the second."
Reece took a deep breath, "So in other words, no."
Tabor just sat there looking pale.
"In the future, Ensign, when I ask you a question, don't give me a speech.
A yes or no will suffice."
"Aye, sir."
"Can you jam the frequency?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do it. Immediately. You're dismissed."
"Aye, sir."
He saluted and exited.
"Chief Tuto, I want all passenger access to the computer stopped and aether
port access restricted to pre-verified frequencies. You're dismissed."
"Aye, sir."
Reece waited for him to leave as she studied the stony expression on
Dunham's face. He seemed to be waiting for some comment, or perhaps a pat
on the head. She might have obliged him had she a sturdy club.
"Pranks?"
"They do happen, sir."
"We could have spotted this hacker hours in advance if there hadn't been
such leniency. Now that they've had hours to feel out our system..."
"It makes them all the more dangerous," he took the luxury of completing
her thought.
"I want one of your people to run through the passenger lists and see who
looks like they might qualify. Unless those have already been erased."
"Will do, sir."
"Also, see if any of the passengers are mentioned in our library records as
being associated with this Mr. Harrison."
"Of course."
Reece leaned back, seemingly examining the ceiling.
"I'd like to order a re-boot as well."
Dunham smiled, "Not a good idea, sir."
"No, not while we're in hyperspace," the Commodore reluctantly agreed.
"Lieutenant."
Erik snapped to attention, "Yes, sir."
"Give me a scenario."
He took a breath, "Gatherer in search of a story. He learns more than is
wise; breaks some planetary laws. He decides to turn tail but gets cornered
at the starport. He calls us, pretends that he's an ISIS agent, and we
obligingly offer him a ride. His friends figure out what happened easily
enough. They rescue him."
"A great deal of risk on their part. And what about Erestyl? What about the
information we so ardently desire?"
Erik bit his lip. "More than likely it is gone, blown to bits by Clay.
Perhaps he wasn't lying except about his own role."
"If he is simply a gatherer, then how did he happen upon Draconian
fleximesh?"
"Bought it at a Calannic yard sale?"
"Right," Reece smiled, then frowned again, looking back across the table at
nobody in particular. "It seems to me this whole thing reeks of the DSS,
and who more willing to take such a risk, provided the pay-off is right?
Which would suggest that Harrison is important to them alive. All the more
reason for us to take him alive. Commander Simms?"
"Sir."
He had broad-shoulders and a square jaw, the sort that made her wonder if
he spent his free time doing push-ups in three-gee while chewing down
carrots and ironweed.
"Are we prepared for a top to bottom?"
"Yes, sir."
"Word to the troops?"
"Shoot to maim, sir."
"I don't want him dead."
"Aye, sir."
She began to wonder if there was a half a brain in there. Then she noticed
the look on Hunter's face, half way between fear and urgency.
"Doctor, you look like you have something itching up your backside."
"Yes, sir."
"Spit it out."
"Well, first of all, I think this Mr. Harrison is in trouble... to put
things mildly, sir."
The Commodore's eyebrows arched playfully.
"Enlighten me."
"We found several vials of Torogon-66 missing from our stores. It's a
wide-spectrum regen-formula common to the outer worlds. We've kept it in
stock for patients who are unsuited or prove allergic to the in-house
compound."
"So?"
"The Torogon formula is never injected directly following use of our
in-house compound without an intervening stabilizer and a twelve hour
waiting period. If this isn't done, the interaction of the formula and our
compound will cause a high-potential for misreads of the patient's DNA."
"What, he mutates?" said with a smirk.
"I doubt he'll live long enough for that. It'll begin by wiping out the
delicate systems, two critical ones being the immune and nervous systems.
He'll lose control of his lungs in a day or two, and he'll have to invent a
new way of fending off opportunistic viruses sooner than that."
"Did they take any stabilizers?"
"I haven't found any missing."
Reece nodded, "We can only assume that our thieves are pharmaceutically
inept. They have probably already injected him. Is there any treatment?"
"Yes, there's a compound called Anamesa."
"Go on."
"It'll stop the interaction between the regens and boost the immune system
so the body has time to restore itself, but if it isn't applied within the
first six to twelve hours, you can forget it. It'll be too late to do
anything without extensive medical resources, much greater than we have
onboard."
Dunham sat upright, "How soon until he gets sick?"
"Like I said, it varies, though usually by the time the patient is
seriously ill, it's too late to apply the Anamesa. You can still
artificially boost their immunity to specific diseases, however, the damage
to their system, per se, is already there."
"And restoring it is not easy."
Hunter shook her head, "Some might say impossible."
The Commodore grinned from ear to ear, "I hate to be celebrating another
person's misfortune, but all in all, that's excellent news. I want our
supply of Anamesa destroyed, and I want our mind-scanner readied for use."
"Sir?"
"You have moral reservations, Doctor?"
Hunter averted her eyes. "Sir, we have never used the mind-scanner."
"You don't have trained staff?"
"No, it's not that. I just... it's over ten years old. I don't even know if
it'll work. And as for destroying the Anamesa, if you do capture this Mr.
Harrison, that may be the only thing you have to bargain with."
"Oh, don't worry Doctor. We'll capture him. I just have no intentions of
serving him the opportunity to live, and besides, this way it isn't
anyone's fault." She smiled, then frowned.
"What is it, Doctor?"
"They took more than the Torogon-66."
"Such as?"
"Hydrochloric acid and potassium cyanide."
"Enough to pose a threat?"
"Not to the entire ship, but to a small section, yes. I would like poison
filters circulated to the crew and passengers."
Reece shook her head, "We don't have enough except for the senior officers.
I wouldn't worry about it too much Doctor. It's a lame threat. He's asking
us what its worth to catch him. The answer is yes... it's worth a few
lives."
"I am prepared to declare quarantine."
"That won't be necessary." Reece shrugged. "They probably won't use it.
They would have nothing to gain and everything to lose. I could see them
smuggling it to Tyber, but..."
"And that sits well with you?"
"The Tyber Corporation is just barely Imperial aligned as it is. We owe
them no favors."
"Sir, the Tyberian population is extremely impacted. In such an
environment..."
"I know, Doctor. Look, cyanide gas is easy to make; its components are easy
to come by. Nobody will trace it to us, and even if they do, we can simply
deny involvement."
"Commodore..."
"Don't argue with me, Doctor. There's more at stake than you may realize."
"Sir... with all due respect, human life is at stake."
Reece felt her cheeks flush red with anger. What did she think this was? A
playground?!
"Doctor, I can see that you've been under a great deal of stress lately. I
don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I'm relieving you of your
post until we leave the Tyber system. I want to you get some rest, and
under no circumstances are you permitted to discuss any of this with
anyone. Understood?"
"You're relieving me of duty?"
"Affirmative."
"Sir..."
"Don't argue with me, Doctor. I'm made up my mind. Now go to your quarters
and get some rest."
"But sir..."
"That's an order."
Hunter took a deep breath. "Yes, sir."
____________________
The bridge seemed imersed in slumber as Tabor exited the lift. The reason
was fairly apparent. Most of the officers took their sleep shift during the
ship's final hours in hyperspace. It was a common practice. Everyone wanted
to wake up and be ready for sightseeing. That was the real attraction to
working on board a liner.
Of course, somebody had to stick around. The Captain didn't want people
calling the bridge to end up talking to a computer. It would leave a bad
impression, and people would start wondering if anybody was ever up there
in the proverbial nerve center. It was such a joke. The computer was in
charge while in hyperspace, and everyone knew it. They just refused to
accept it.
So while everyone else was dozing, he and Lish often had the whole place to
themselves. A communications officer had to be there. Communication still
went on, hyperspace or normal space, it didn't matter. But she was a sensor
operator. She could go to sleep, though she seemed to prefer the solitude,
fiddling with the equipment during the wee hours, programming new image
recognition routines, skimming library files, and generally being a
nuisance or a quiet companion as the mood suited her.
"How'd it go?"
"Oh... not so well."
She grinned, turning back to her work station.
"Lots of questions?"
"Yeah. A few too many. Oh, terrific. What are they doing now?"
She turned around again.
"What is it?"
"These bastards. I don't believe this. Just when I'm about to jam their
frequency..."
Lish studied the monitor from over his shoulder, "Why is everything
blinking?"
"They using the clean bands, must be switching continuously. They're not
even trying to disguise it anymore."
He hit a switch, listening for the familiar pop signaling a channel
opening.
"Bernie?"
"Huh? Oh, hi."
"Bernie, have you been watching the free lanes lately?"
"Yeah. Did you just freak the system? I think it's space sick."
"It's working fine. Look, I'm gonna need you to hook up our wide-band
transmitter."
"The shouter?"
"Yeah. We need to jam all the free lanes."
"All of `em? What's up?"
"Freeloaders."
"Ah... so we've got a little war on our hands, do we? Just gimme a minute
or two to get it online, and we'll have `em sending smoke signals."
____________________
"Okay, open sesame."
The door complied, and Johanes peeked inside, spraying a canister of
air-freshener from ceiling to floor. The Lieutenant's cabin was decked out
more nicely that he probably deserved. Queen-sized null tube, a full length
wall monitor, and the sort of fluffy red carpet that suggested Imperial
royalty.
"Hmmm... cozy. A trifle insecure but very cozy."
"Don't you think you're over-doing it?"
Johanes turned around, "One can never over-do it."
*Beep*
"Attention all personnel and passengers. By order of the Commodore, all
radio frequencies are to be restricted for the remainder of this voyage.
Obtain clearance for all vital transmissions through channel two. This
order takes effect in one minute."
Johanes breathed a sigh of relief, "Important corollary. One may always
count on the enemy to over-do it. Contact Cecil for me. Tell him that's his
cue. Also have him jam channels one and two."
Spokes leaned against the wall, his long, lanky arms dropping to his sides,
head tricks gleaming in the steady, white light as he seemed to concentrate
on nothing in particular. Then in a hollow voice, "He says we have to get
something for Mike."
"What now?!"
"Anamesa. Difference between life and death."
"This is getting tiresome."
"It's in sickbay."
"Later. Tell him we're busy."
"Now or no deal."
Johanes grunted and kicked the wall, "We don't have time to discuss it."
"He says this is a dead end. It was never mentioned. They don't seem to
know it exists. What's he talking about, Jo?"
"They must!"
"He says it probably got trashed in the air strike. Or they left it on the
Louise."
"I don't believe this. Look, just tell him to activate the canister or
it'll be too late. We'll get this Anamesa now. Tell him... ummm... tell him
to change the computer records on it... make it a lust-potion... but he has
to activate the canister now."
Spokes shook his head, "Everything's jammed. He was saying okay, but I
don't know if he had time."
Johanes smirked, "If he said yes... he had time."
____________________
"...and at that point, Harrison's only alternative will be to turn himself
in. We'll have a mind-scanner readied for when he arrives at sickb...
what's that sm..."
The odor was overpowering, like a strong whiff of almond extract. She'd
breathed several gulps before the bubbling noise and the gentle hum of the
fan even registered, and then her head throbbed as though a vice were
pushing on both sides. When she looked back up, Dunham was busying himself
by body-slamming the door. His heavy mass finally crumpled to the ground,
limbs still thrashing spastically as gunfire ricocheted against its metal
frame and into the locking mechanism. Simms was already at the IC, hitting
his fist against the audio pick-up and switching channels wildly.
Presently, the room began swirling, and she felt herself drop from the
chair, her communicator miraculously in one hand. She switched it to
channel one.
"Anybody..." Static.
"Help..." Channel two. More static.
"Need help..."
____________________
Hunter didn't know which peeved her more, getting force-fed an unsolicited
sedative or being relieved from duty, by the Commodore herself, no less.
The perverse politics they were playing was only upstaged by their
thoughtless endangerment of human life. Hunter shook her head, disgusted
with the whole mess. At least there was a bright side. She was no longer
responsible. Whatever happened would be on their heads, and as soon as she
was back in bed, this awful day would be over.
She let a yawn escape as she glanced at her thumbnail chronometer, ignoring
the minor sparks of pain her bruised nose loved so much to scream about. It
was already the middle of her sleep shift, and her body was aching from a
recent workout which bordered somewhere between spirited and raging.
Sickbay was just around the corner. She decided she could stay up for a few
more minutes, squinting her eyes shut as another yawn muscled its way down
her throat. After all, what more could happen in a few lousy minutes?
Boxes were everywhere, reds, blues, yellows, all falling in different
directions, their long, curly ribbons waving gleefully from the impact. She
picked herself slowly off the floor, looking amidst all the colorful,
geometric shapes as a red, sticky liquid dripped to the white, hexagonal
tile. The culprit's head tricks had to take the prize for conspicuousness.
They rose from his head like long, thin, needles, clearly illegal on many
worlds not only for their self-destructive properties but also for their
ability to skewer innocent bystanders should he suddenly flip-out and go on
a bloody, head-butting rampage. He looked up slowly, the soft blue eyes
strangely familiar as she helped his long, lanky body back to its feet.
"I'm terribly sorry." She mouthed the words, obedient to the ship's policy
code. It was his fault, of course, but he was just another stupid
passenger, oblivious to the world around him. She felt like telling him
that in so many words, but his blue eyes and gentle hands, still shaky from
the impact, helped stay her tongue.
"No," he smiled as she helped him up. "It was my fault. Are you okay?" Then
he dropped his look of shame. "Alice?!"
Hunter nodded, wiping the blood from her nose with the back of her sleeve.
"Do I know you?"
"What, you don't remember me?"
"Umm..."
"IASM, class of `43."
"I'm sorry, I don't..."
"Hanson's microbiotics."
"Umm," she stared back into his eyes, soft blue pinwheels coasting vaguely
in her head. "I'm sorry, what's your name?"
____________________
"Well well... if it isn't Mr. Smyth."
Johanes grinned shyly as he walked into sickbay. Feso was with a patient,
one of the food service workers probably. The crew had their uniforms color
coded according to section, the only problem with the system being that
there didn't seem to be enough distinguishable colors to go around. Feso,
of course, had found the perfect solution.
"You always wear your pajamas to work?"
Feso laughed, "I've been getting comments on this all day. No, we had a
little bit of a... how shall one put it..."
"A busy morning?"
"Very busy."
The patient looked very frigid, but whatever Feso had given him seemed to
be warming the blood. Johanes followed the nurse back the main desk,
looking over his shoulder as they passed the office. Several boxes were
still scattered about.
"What's with the mess?"
"Ah... just been taking inventory."
"I love your system."
"Yeah. Well, we're sort of disorganized at the moment. So what can I do for
you? That drug been giving you a bad aftertaste?"
"I just wanted to say thanks. I don't know what would have happened to me
if you hadn't been here."
"Awww..." Feso grinned, "you just got to beware Calannans bearing gifts.
Oh... what's this?"
"A tip. "
"Five hundred credits? I didn't know they printed denominations this high.
This is very nice of you, but I couldn't."
"Please. I made a mess. I feel bad. Please take it." He looked like he was
on the verge of being mortally wounded.
"Okay. You twist my arm, how can I refuse?" Feso pocketed the waxy bill
with a grin. "This is a very big tip. You sure that drug isn't affecting
your brain or something?"
Johanes laughed, "I think that's what she had in mind."
"She?"
"The woman who spiked my punch. Actually, she's part of the reason I'm
dropping by."
"Oh?"
"I didn't really know who else to ask, but I need something."
"What?"
"Anamesa. Just a few grams."
"Anamesa? I've heard of that somewhere."
"Can you... you know..." Johanes motioned his glance toward the boxes in
the office.
Feso shook his head, "Not a chance. I don't even think you can get Anamesa
without a prescription. What's she need it for? Isn't it some sort of
immunity enhancer?"
Johanes laughed, "You call yourself a nurse."
"What? It is, isn't it?"
Johanes leaned over the counter, lowering his voice to a bare whisper.
"It's an aphrodisiac."
"No..."
"Would I lie?"
Feso turned to the medical console, bringing up a description from computer
records. He blinked at least twice when he saw the classification. Johanes
just smiled.
"See. What'd I tell you?"
"Wow. Learn something new every day."
"So can you?"
Feso looked back towards the boxes. The A's were long since reorganized.
Finding it would be a snap. Still, he didn't like the idea.
"You know, it says it's non-restricted. You can probably get it from the
pharmacy."
"Already tried. They're out. I guess a lot of people have been partying."
Feso smiled, "Guess so. Wait... what's this for? You're not thinking of
getting that Calannan back, are you?"
"Hey, she drugged me. She said I could drug her back."
He laughed, "That's immoral."
"I'm going to propose."
"Then it's extremely immoral."
"Please?"
Feso smiled, "Just because I'm wearing pajamas doesn't mean I'm a
push-over."
"Look... the proposal is sincere. We've been talking about marriage for the
past five years."
"Five years?"
Johanes nodded, making his best honest face. Feso pondered the request for
a moment. The Captain always did say to bend over backwards for the
passengers.
"I never did this for you. Okay?"
"Thanks. I knew I could count on you."
"Yeah yeah... sheesh."
Feso watched him leave, trophy in fist, and not a moment too soon. Hunter
came through the door two seconds later, holding her nose and looking
mildly irate.
"Wasn't that our resident stoner?"
"Naw... you mean Mr. Smyth?"
"Yeah. What are you so happy about? He give you a roach to go with the
jammies?"
Feso smiled, "I take it the meeting didn't go as well as planned."
"It was horrible."
"What's wrong with your nose? The Commodore smack you one?"
"In a manner of speaking. She relieved me of duty."
Feso's jaw dropped, "Why?"
"Various reasons."
"Ah..."
She forced a smirk. Feso had long since learned when to keep his mouth
shut, even when it looked like his boss was defying a direct order.
"I'm just getting a bandage, Feso."
"I didn't ask."
The infirmary had all the good ones, not like the flimsy retail bandages
that held just long enough to soak through with blood. She taped one under
her nose, giving herself the little- moustache look. It suited her, Feso
decided, going back to check on the food service worker who still sat
wrapped in a warm blanket, a layer of frost melting along his eyebrows.
Hunter came in, maybe to ask a question or give an order. He could never
tell which was coming. Then she looked at Mr. Frosty, whatever was on her
mind apparently stolen by the spectacle.
"What happened to you?"
"Huh?"
"Anyone tell you that you resemble an ice cube?"
The man looked up, a slow sort of smile crossing his face.
"Accidentally locked myself in a meat locker."
"How come?"
"Just happened."
Hunter smiled, heading back to the office with her nurse in tow. Feso felt
somewhat confused.
"What now?"
"I thought that since I'm dishonorably relieved, you'd like to know that
you're hereby conferred the honorable title of boss until I'm back on the
job."
"Me? What about Dr. Pendelton?"
"He's a techie, Feso. He doesn't know anything about running the shop. You
do. Besides, you know how he is when he gets a gram of power."
"Yeah. He likes to take charge."
"He'll be in charge... of the mind scanner."
"Mind scanner?"
"Better not to ask questions."
"Yeah, but I don't think he'll like..."
Beep
"Attention all personnel and passengers. By order of the Commodore, public
access to the computer is disallowed until we reach Tizar. Requests for
waivers must be made in person at the computer security center on Deck
Four."
The line popped shut, and Feso shot her an incredulous look, "Jeeze... this
is getting ridiculous. First the comm-system. Now the computers. What's
going on?"
"Politics. Go get Pendelton and tell him we need the scanner."
She went to the office and shuffled through the stacks until she found the
carton of Anamesa. The tiny, yellow bottles were the size of her thumb, and
one by one, she opened them over the sink, washing their syrupy contents
down the drain. Her joints felt grainy and brittle, her skin growing
increasingly coarse with every new bottle. As she reached in for the last
one, her fingers met only vacant air. Feso was coming back in, a dismayed
expression now transforming to the epitome of innocence.
"Feso, I'm not sure, but I think we're missing a bottle here."
"A bottle?"
"Yeah, of the Anamesa. When I counted them this morning, I'm sure there
were six. There are only five here."
"Ah... that's interesting. What do you want with Anamesa?"
"I'm trying to get rid of it."
She tapped a few keys on the medical console, and the database's query
prompt popped into view at the bottom of the screen. For a moment, Feso's
blood froze cold. Hunter finally looked up at him, her eyes sullen and
tired.
"I guess I was mistaken. It says five."
"It does?"
"Feso... is something the matter?"
"Yes... I mean no... I'm fine. What's all the concern with Anamesa. People
getting too horny or something?"
"What?"
Feso gulped, "Why was the Captain ordering you to destroy an aphrodisiac?"
She laughed, "Anamesa is not an aphrodisiac. Where'd you get that idea?"
"I thought it was."
"Well, it's not."
Feso looked her over like she was crazy, and she imagined she was staring
back the same way.
"You don't believe me?"
Feso shrugged, "With all due respect, sir, I just happen to know for a fact
that you're wrong."
"You do, do you?"
"Yes. I'll put five-hundred on it right now."
"You're on."
He hit a few keys on the medical console, staring dumbfounded at the screen
when he saw the result. Hunter regarded him with a cheerful smirk.
"Pay up, buddy."
He figured that either he was going nuts or he was being toyed with, and
luckily, the latter was the more likely of the two.
"This is a prank, right? You and Mr. Smyth. Very clever. Okay, here you
are." He didn't care. He was tired and just as rich as when the whole thing
started.
"What's this about Mr. Smyth?"
"Oh... nothing I'm sure the two of you can't figure out. Tell him thanks
for the tip when you see him. It provided me with so much joy and
happiness."
"What?"
"I'm going to sleep. It's the middle of my sleep shift."
"Feso, what's the matter?"
But he was gone, leaving her alone with a half-frozen patient in the other
room. Two security guards emerged at the entry portal a minute later, both
puffing anxiously.
"Dr. Hunter?"
"Yeah."
"Need you at the EC-lounge. Medical emergency."
___________________________________________________________________________
Jim Vassilakos (jimv@ucrengr.ucr.edu) works part-time as a programmer at a
place so cheesy that he declined to mention the name. He says that if
anybody has any job prospects for a semi-computer-literate MBA who likes to
write, he's ready, willing, and able to scoot his butt for decent buckage
and good experience.
"The Harrison Chapters" will be continued in the next issue.
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
To Touch the Stars Tamsin crept into the guard booth and
grabbed the soldier on duty from
Part 3: `Burning the Ground' behind. She wrapped one hand around
the corporal's mouth, and with the
Nicole Gustas other pressed on the woman's throat
to cut the flow of blood through the
carotid artery.
___________________________________________________________________________
Tamsin and Kalin squatted in the bushes near the gates of the Killian
Research Facility. As Tamsin pulled on her black gloves and adjusted the
hood of her black jumpsuit, tucking her copper hair into it to make sure it
wouldn't give her away, she was thankful for the Naridian love of shrubbery
and ornamentation.
Kalin touched Tamsin's knee and counted under her breath. "Five, four,
three, two, one." As they watched, the gate of the facility opened
slightly, then the lights flickered and went out. The compound soon came
into focus for the two women, who had used eyedrops that briefly increased
their ability to see in the dark. Tamsin crept into the guard booth and
grabbed the soldier on duty from behind. She wrapped one hand around the
corporal's mouth, and with the other, pressed on the woman's throat to cut
the flow of blood through the carotid artery. In a few seconds, the woman
passed out, and Tamsin stuffed her behind the bushes, trussed with a gag
stuffed in her mouth.
She quietly ran up to Kalin, who was almost at the entrance to the research
facility. "We have thirteen minutes," Kalin subvocalized. They were both
wearing throatmikes and earphones so they could speak to each other without
anyone overhearing.
"I know. I took too long. But I don't want to kill anyone if I don't have
to," said Tamsin just before she slipped inside the open double doors. She
spun as she entered and kicked the guard waiting behind the door in the
stomach, then grabbed his gun and cracked him on the back of the head,
knocking him unconscious before he had a chance to cry out. She waved Kalin
inside. "Remember to thank Layten for opening all the doors for us."
"I already have," said Kalin. "Take a right, here." They jogged down the
hall silently, Kalin leading the way. The faint emergency lighting gave an
eerie glow to the halls. They took another right, then jogged down a flight
of stairs. Kalin flattened herself against a wall, and Tamsin followed
suit. They listened to the voice around the corner. "Wir muss'n wirschaff
hab'n," he shouted into a wrist communicator, in Staatsprache.
Tamsin translated for Kalin. "He's trying to find out what's wrong with the
power. He's alarmed. He says all the doors are open."
"Well, all the prisoners are being held two floors below," said Kalin.
"It's only a matter of time before they realize what's going on and come up
here."
They continued down several flights of stairs and entered the corridor.
Tamsin skidded on the floor and nearly fell. She smelled the coppery scent
of blood. She turned and saw Kalin squatting near the body, now a bloody,
unrecognizable mass inside a uniform. "Looks like they're out," Kalin said
grimly. "Come on ... Jaysen's this way."
They ran quickly down the eerily deserted halls, turning left, then right,
then left again. Tamsin picked up the lead as they neared Jaysen's cell,
skidding inside seconds ahead of Kalin.
She could see him clearly. He was gaunt and pale, curled up asleep on his
side in a corner of the cell, wearing nothing. Tamsin knelt beside him and
shook him. "Jaysen, wake up! We've come to get you out."
He sat up and backed further into the corner. She could see him shaking.
"Get away from me. Don't touch me." His voice was filled with loathing.
"Jayce, it's me, Tamsin." She reached toward him and he shrank back. What
was wrong with him? Her stomach clenched tightly. "Come on. We have to
hurry."
She watched his hands clench into fists. "You'll have to drag me out of
here. I'm not walking willingly into your trap."
Tamsin stared at him in consternation for a moment, then heard movement.
She and Jaysen turned as Kalin came through the door. "Hurry up! We only
have nine minutes left."
"Kalin?" Jaysen said, startled. He stood up hesitantly, wincing.
"Are you hurt?" asked Tamsin, reaching to help him. He twitched away from
her and nearly fell.
"No, I'm fine, just sore. Just get me out of here," he said.
Tamsin could see him pale as he began to move, but was afraid to try to
touch him again. "I'll take point and clear out anyone in your path. Kalin,
stay with Jaysen." Kalin pulled a dark shirt and pants out of her
shouldersac and quickly handed them to Jaysen.
She hurried down the hall and paused. Kalin and Jaysen followed soon after,
Jaysen now clad in black from neck to toe. Tamsin waved them around the
corner. The dim halls were frighteningly quiet. She jogged up the stairs
and slammed through the doors at the top of the landing, to find a gun
pointed straight at her head.
Tamsin stared at the face behind the muzzle of the gun as a delicate white
hand ripped the throatmike off her neck. She shuddered as she looked into
her own green eyes.
"So," said her twin holding the gun, dropping the throatmike to the ground
and crushing it under her heel. "You're the illustrious Tamsin."
Kalin put one arm around Jaysen's waist, supporting him as he limped down
the hall. She let her consciousness drift lightly across the surface of his
mind, with a feathery, nearly invisible touch, testing the walls that
normally held him together. It was like skipping across a broken bridge
after a bad earthquake; she could feel holes and gaps, with Jaysen's strong
force of will barely holding it all together. She felt the surface shiver
and begin to fall.
Her light touch became an iron grip as she threw up her own wall around
his, shoring up his disintegrating protection in an attempt to keep him
from complete collapse. He was stable on the surface, but she could feel
the fierce storm roiling beneath, and knew she had only bought him time.
She also knew her control was being bought at a high future cost to him,
but knew she couldn't get him out if not under his own power. She did a
quick check on his physical injuries and was relieved to find they weren't
as bad as his mental damages.
She looked up at him and he gave her a weak, shaky smile. "Thanks," he
said.
"Don't say that until we get you out of here," Kalin said, as they walked
toward the stairs. She watched Tamsin barrel through the doors at the top
of the stairs, and could feel some of the tension in Jaysen's mind ease as
she left his field of vision. She couldn't quite grasp the tangled,
contradictory emotions his copper-haired friend inspired, but knew Tamsin
was a flashpoint that should, for now, be avoided in discussion. "I think
you're going to be spending a lot of time with me after we get out."
"I'm supposed to object at the prospect of spending a lot of time with a
beautiful woman?" asked Jaysen, with his former flirtatious humor. From
inside his mind, she could feel how forced it was.
"I'm afraid I'll be sharing you with Chas," she said, keeping up the
illusion. She narrowed her eyes at the doors and pulled Jaysen to a stop at
the bottom of the stairs as she listened to the empty hiss in her ear where
Tamsin's voice should have been. She quickly switched to mental speech.
Wait. We need to take another route.
Why? asked Jaysen. It was more of a feeling than the word; Jaysen had never
mastered the art of speaking mind-to-mind.
Tamsin should have waved us through by now. She must have walked into a
trap. She felt waves of concern from him, but didn't bother to spend the
energy to soothe them as they walked in another direction. She looked at
her wrist. They had seven minutes.
Tamsin looked desperately for an opening, knowing that every second she
waited gave the woman standing across from her an advantage. She watched
her own face break into an icy smile. "Here for Jaysen, are you?" asked the
woman.
Immediately Tamsin knew what had been going on, knew why Jaysen had reacted
with such hatred for her. "I tried. He refused to leave with me. I had to
leave him behind," she lied, as she tried to adopt a defeated pose. She
tasted bile at the back of her throat, and tried to control and channel her
fury.
"Now he won't be the only one stuck here," said her counterpart. "Up
against the wall; I want to check you for weapons."
Tamsin stood spreadeagled against the wall, hands above her head. She heard
the rustle of fabric as the woman stuck the gun into a holster. Tamsin held
her breath steady and waited. Not yet, not yetÉdon't give anything
awayÉ
Her flesh crawled as she felt the woman's hands pat her down, starting at
her collar. The hands moved down, toward her waist. Not yetÉ
An explosion quietly echoed down the corridor from the distance. She felt
the woman behind her start slightly, and took her chance. Tamsin pushed off
from the wall as much as she could manage and twisted as she kicked out
with her right leg. She felt her foot connect with something solid, and
heard a crunch as she began falling. Time began to slow with the adrenaline
rush.
"A fall does not have to be a bad thing," her combat instructor had told
her, "as long as you know where you will land, and your enemy does not." As
she began to fall, she snapped her right wrist back. The blade shot out,
and she felt it score. As she fell to the floor, she saw the cut across the
other woman's face, and saw drops of blood spatter. The woman was falling;
the kick had landed on one of her knees. Tamsin pulled her knees toward her
chest and used the momentum of her fall to roll backward over her right
shoulder. She sprang up as her feet touched the floor.
Her double had fallen to her hands and knees and looked up at Tamsin
through blood and copper hair. "They forgot to tell us about the knives,"
she said. She tried to push herself up, but fell as the right knee gave
out. Tamsin saw her reach for the gun and kicked her in the head. The blow
cracked her counterpart's skull against the wall and she fell, unconscious.
Tamsin stripped off the woman's gun and holster and quickly strapped them
onto her leg. She began running down the corridor as she looked at her
chrono.
She had five minutes.
Kalin and Jaysen had climbed to the top of the staircase. For security
reasons, no staircase went all the way up or down the complex, and now,
Kalin remembered, they had to cross several corridors before they would
reach a stairway which would take them to the entrance. She tried to reach
out and feel whether anyone was in the corridor, but her mind was too
involved in holding Jaysen together and finding their way out to be able to
take on another task. All she felt was a wash of many people's emotions ...
mostly anger and fear. Many of the sensations were highly controlled, the
feeling of a well-trained Gifted mind. She pushed open the door slightly,
hoping to peer out and see whether anyone was in the corridor before they
crossed. The door handle was suddenly ripped from her grasp as the door was
flung open, and a gun was aimed at her head.
The gun muzzle dropped as soon as the short woman behind it saw she wasn't
wearing a uniform. Kalin looked around at the crowd of people, some armed,
dressed in light blue cotton ... the garb of a patient.
Or, in these strange times, of a prisoner.
Next to the woman with the gun, a man with red hair and a mustache stepped
forward. "You're not one of us," he said. "Have you come to get us out?"
A wave of helplessness washed over Kalin. Jaysen felt it and squeezed her
shoulder. She took a deep breath. "We don't have enough people to get you
out. But we can help you take over this place."
"How?" exclaimed the man as the fifteen or twenty people behind him
murmured in surprise.
"There's a central control room one floor up. From there you can control
the power, the doors, the lights, the intruder control systems, everything.
And the armory's right next to it." The map of the building had been burned
into Kalin's mind. "But we'll have to move quickly. The power comes on in
..." she looked at her chrono and winced ..."five minutes, and when it
does, you'll lose your only advantage."
The woman with the gun, curly blond hair cropped short, stared at her with
hard blue eyes. "How do we know we can trust you?"
Kalin took a deep breath to calm herself and held out her hand, palm up.
"Look and see."
The man with the mustache put his hand on top of hers. She felt his mind
probe quickly through hers, and felt him turn over her memories of her own
stay with the government. His eyes locked with hers and she felt
understanding ripple through the link. "I don't think there's anyone we
could trust more, Talia," Tomas ... for she had read his name in the link
... said to the short woman. "Let's move ... follow Kalin."
Kalin led them down the corridors and up the stairs, still helping Jaysen,
the focused energy behind her supporting her. Before they went through the
doors at the top of the stairs, Kalin said to Tomas, "Do you sense anyone
in the corridor?"
He concentrated for a second. "Not right in front of the doors," he said.
"Further away, two, maybe three people." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, I'm
not good enough to tell where they are."
"I'm fairly sure I know where they are," she said. She turned and spoke to
the group, reinforcing her speech by sending out images to those who could
receive them. "About halfway down this corridor, just after the first
juncture, there's a door on the left. Behind that door is the control room.
There are probably two or three people in it. If you go right at the first
juncture, the armory is the first door on your left. It should be
unlocked."
The group looked grimly determined. "People with weapons should hit the
control room," said Tomas. "The rest of us will hit the armory. When the
power comes back on, we'll clean this place out." Then he said four words
Kalin knew very well from her work in the underground. "Now is the time."
He looked at them once more. "Let's go."
Now is the time. The words known through the underground as the signal for
full-scale revolt. Kalin shivered, trying to shut out a sudden mental flash
of blood and fire. The people ran out into the corridor and split at the
juncture. Talia was the first at the door to the control room, and opened
fire as soon as she reached it. Tomas, even though he was unarmed, was
right behind her. Through the fading link, Kalin glimpsed the control room.
Three soldiers were dead in the room, one sprawled on the floor in a pool
of blood, one face down on a console, the third staring at the door with a
surprised expression still lingering in his dead eyes, his face slowly
turning red from the blood running down. She sensed no regret from Tomas or
Talia.
She understood why they felt they had to strike first, but was still
ashamed. If we don't offer them mercy, she thought, carefully shielding
herself from Jaysen, who was again semiconscious, how are we any better
than them? She continued up the stairs, leading Jaysen, looking quickly at
her chrono.
They had three minutes.
Tamsin vaulted up the final flight of stairs and pushed the door slightly
ajar, not wanting to make the same mistake twice. She saw a tall, thin
figure standing near the exit, holding a gun, and wished they'd planned to
leave by the same doors they'd arrived by. Then she remembered her double
downstairs, and smiled.
She pulled the hood off her head, shaking her hair out, entered the
corridor and walked toward the exit quickly as if she had every right to be
there. The man at the door looked at her, registering the copper hair and
relaxing slightly. Then he saw her black clothing and began to stiffen, but
it was too late. Tamsin grabbed his hand and gave his wrist a vicious
twist. He dropped the gun and she kicked it down the hall. He recovered
more quickly than Tamsin, throwing her hard into the opposite wall. She
felt the concussion reverberate through her whole body, and barely kept on
her feet. She had badly underestimated the man. He might be thin, but he
was strong, and he was almost half a meter taller than she. She nearly
laughed. Gentle Goddess, this man could kill meÉ
They stood face to face in the corridor, a few feet from the door. She eyed
him carefully, trying to find a weak spot. Even his knees are a pretty high
kick for me. No way can I aim for his throat. She looked at her face and
her breath caught in her throat.
His face belied his height. He looked young --- far too young to be there.
And those intense blue eyes; surely she'd seen them before. But where?
He spoke, and everything fell into place. "What are you trying to do here?"
he asked, speaking in the soft, blurred tones of the city she'd grown up
in. She could almost see him, younger, playing in the streets with the
other children.
"I'm trying to fix a terrible wrong that's been done here," she said. She
saw him flinch as he recognized her accent.
"How can you do this?" he asked, angry and bewildered. "You come from the
West, from the same place I do. You know how bad it was for us. People were
starving. They killed each other on the streets for drugs or a few credits.
You go there now and it's changed. The streets are clean. People have jobs.
They have hope! How can you try to destroy everything we worked for?"
Tamsin felt as if she'd been slapped. His words brought her most buried
feelings to the fore, the thoughts she held back when she listened to her
friends in Ground Zero talk. She remembered what it had been like growing
up, remembered walking by burnt-out buildings, remembered running away from
the gangs. When she was lucky, she'd managed to run away from the gangs.
She still bore the scars from when she'd been unlucky. And the government
had done nothing about it. How could she work for the old one that had done
nothing to help them? Even if the desire was to form a new coalition, some
of the strongest supporters of Ground Zero were powerful members of the
old, deposed government who had escaped Narid.
The desire to believe in a government that could make such improvements in
the West was almost overpowering. But how could she not try to bring down a
new one that had done such violence to her friends? "The things that you've
worked for have been built on a lie!" she shouted, as much to herself as to
him. "Look at what's been done to the people here! They've been tortured,
forced to betray their friends and family."
His fierce blue eyes snapped fire down at her. "What did they do for us
when we were in need? They ignored us. They just sapped our resources to
improve their lives, then restricted us so we couldn't better ourselves."
Tamsin saw two figures dressed in black moving toward the doors from behind
the guard. She had to keep him occupied until Jaysen and Kalin got through
the door. She had to keep him talking. She didn't want to kill him.
"Those laws were made to protect the environment! Or would you have us be a
planet of desert and sewage, like Old Earth?" she said.
"If the laws were to protect the environment, why was only the West subject
to them? Why was the East free to do as they would with their resources?
The laws were made to keep us down!"
Tamsin clenched her fists. He was voicing many of her own thoughts,
thoughts she had rationalized away again and again. Worse, she was
beginning, in some small corner of her mind, to believe in him. Kalin and
Jaysen were almost through the door. She had to keep him talking, and came
back to the one point that had kept her fighting against the new
government. "None of that excuses what is being done here! How can you
support the way these people are treated. They aren't being treated this
way for what they've done, but what they are. If you'd been born Gifted,
you'd be down there instead of up here."
She saw him flinch, saw his jaw clench, and saw those intense blue eyes
grow opaque. Suddenly she knew. "You are Gifted. You hid it all your life
to keep yourself safe, and now you're helping them hurt people just like
you." Jaysen and Kalin were right behind him, about to go through the door.
"How can you not hate yourself for that?"
She knew how he loathed himself for turning against people like him. She
knew quite well. She felt the same way, because she'd done the same thing.
She saw him begin to turn, and saw his eyes catch the motion behind him.
She reacted before she could think, before she could let him hurt her
friends. She rushed him, and her right wrist snapped back just before it
hit his chest. The blade slid between the ribs, through several inches of
flesh. She felt the warm blood gush out over her hand and body as her other
arm wrapped around him. She held him as he began to crumple to the floor,
met his eyes and saw the shock and despair there. He tried to speak, but
blood dripped out of his mouth.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to him, tears threatening to spill out. "I'm so
sorry." She held his hand as he died a few seconds later, and closed his
eyes. Then she ran out the doors, covered in blood. She stopped,
stone-still, as light exploded all around her, momentarily blinding her.
Their time was up.
Kalin saw Tamsin rush the tall guard, but didn't wait to see the results.
She moved Jaysen out as fast as she could, aware that she couldn't maintain
his barriers much longer. She had seconds, a minute at best.
She got him into the courtyard, but stopped for a moment when she saw the
two military aircars sitting there, with Layten between them. She rushed
forward. What the hell are you DOING here? she sent, as forcefully as she
could.
He gave a little shrug, the one she found most infuriating. I believe it's
called hijacking. Get in.
She shoved Jaysen into the rear of one car, sitting down beside him and
fastening the safety harnesses, and took his hands. She knew Layten was
waiting until the last possible second to take off. Do you know how to fly
these things?
No, not really, he replied. But I'm interfaced with a computer that does.
Kalin sighed, then put it out of her mind. She would not worry about things
she had no control over. Suddenly, the lights flashed on around them. She
heard Layten call Tamsin's name. Beneath her hands, she felt a twitch, and
felt something crumble in his mind. His body went limp as she felt his mind
collapse.
She began probing his mind, trying to patch him together as she dimly heard
the engines roar beneath them. She touched a recent memory, a painful one,
and probed deeper. The whole event was flung into her mind, as strong as if
it had happened to her.
He tried to take a deep breath and couldn't. "What do you want from me?"
Tamsin's damp, warm voice whispered in his ear again. "Only the answers to
a few questions." He heard tearing cloth as the knife traced down his
spine, felt the blood following it. He didn't dare move, feeling burning
where the blade cut him, on his arms, then again across his back and down,
knowing even the slightest shift could mean worse damage. He knew the woman
wasn't Tamsin, but it didn't matter. The shock of the image of his best
friend hurting him held him frozen to the spot, paralyzed with fear and
betrayal. He felt the tickle of her tongue again on his ear as he tried to
lose himself in the pain, and ignore the knife. "There's no reason I can't
have fun while I ask," the voice laughed, as the knife traced down his
spine, then lower.
Kalin traced one hand over her friend's brow, moving the hair out of his
still-closed eyes. "Oh, Jaysen," she whispered.
"You're hurt!" Layten exclaimed.
Tamsin was aware that the grin on her face was probably maniacal at best.
At some point in the past minute, she'd become very detached. She didn't
really care what happened next. "Don't worry, it's not mine. Can you cover
us?"
Layten nodded. "We're going to Kerna N'tali's compound. Once we get within
those walls, the military won't dare touch us."
Tamsin felt the smile grow broader across her face. Someone inside her was
screaming ... she told it to shut up. "But first we have to get there.
Leave your radio at 1430 megahertz - they don't usually monitor that
channel. Good luck." She flung herself into the aircar, glancing quickly at
Jaysen and Kalin in the back before she started it up. The car lifted
quickly, and she brought it as high as she was willing to push it.
A bass voice came over the radio. "These are aircars, not suborbital
vehicles."
"Yeah, I know, Layten. I'm just pushing it a little high."
She heard a hiss, then Layten spoke again. "The records say it's not rated
to go this high."
"Well, the records lie. They'll safely go a lot higher than the
manufacturers say they will. It's a safety precaution against people like
me." Tamsin banked sharply and made a beeline for the N'tali compound.
Layten followed behind and at a somewhat lower altitude. Only one of the
five moons were full, making them harder to spot.
There was silence for the next few minutes as both pilots concentrated on
reaching their goal. Then Layten's voice crackled over the intercom. "A car
is coming at us from Capus. It'll be intersecting our path in two minutes."
He paused, and Tamsin could almost hear the computer he'd interfaced with
whirring. "It's not hostile yet. It's coming to check out why we're
traveling on an unscheduled flight path."
Tamsin let out a hiss of air between her teeth. Even though those back at
the Killian Research Facility who were capable of warning the military of
their theft probably weren't inclined to do so, transponders were placed on
each car to make them traceable. She'd been hoping that, by the time they
were noticed, they'd be in the N'tali compound. "Layten, you do the
talking. Audio only, if you can manage it. Find out the most plausible
excuse from that computer, and use it. I'll be listening."
A few seconds later, the radio shifted to the standard military frequency
as the other car matched course with theirs. "Ships S93-0760 and S93-0931,
please state your course."
Layten's voice sounded, deep and authoritative, over the radio. "We're
traveling to the N'tali compound."
"For what purpose?" asked the other voice sharply.
"Our flight path and details of our mission are contained in memo dated
13/12/28, timecode 16:32."
The radio hissed. "I can't access that file. It's protected ... Code
Indigo," said the other car.
"Exactly. Your superior officer can check our orders."
There was another pause. The voice came again, less sure. "I'd like a
visual, please."
"I can't do that. Check Code Indigo procedures. No visual allowed."
"What are ---"
Layten's voice interrupted. "I can't give you more information. I suggest
you return to your base. And, soldier, I suggest you check Code Indigo
procedures. If I wanted to, I could shoot you out of the sky right now for
interfering."
Tamsin's finger itched over the trigger for the car's guns, but she held
her fire. After a few seconds, the car banked and turned south. She spoke
to Layten over their low frequency. "That was close."
"Hopefully I intimidated him enough that he won't check that order."
"Why?" asked Tamsin.
"Code Indigo orders come from a general. I could forge an audiovisual
message with retina prints in two days, but not in thirty seconds. It's an
empty message."
"ETA to N'tali compound is twelve minutes. Keep your fingers crossed."
Tamsin took a moment to look over her shoulder at Jaysen and Kalin. Jaysen
sprawled, comatose, on the seat, his head on Kalin's shoulder. Kalin's
ebony hair had fallen forward, obscuring both their faces.
Tamsin turned back to the console, and tried to quiet the thoughts that
were filling her mind. How can you try to destroy everything we worked for?
The guard's voice rang through her head.
They were within three minutes of the compound when she heard Layten's
voice again. "Our luck just ran out. There are three cars coming at us.
They're big, they're armed to the teeth, and they'll get to us in
forty-eight seconds."
"Scheiss'n," said Tamsin shortly. She checked her sensors. "They're
Enigma-class. Aim two meters ahead of the engine at the top of the car. The
shielding's weak there, and the fuel line goes through it. One good hit,
and it'll blow." She paused, and only heard static from the other end.
"Layten, please acknowledge." She switched bands, but still heard nothing
but static. "So they're jamming us," she said to herself. "Well, they won't
be able to hear each other, either." She hoped he'd heard her last message.
She put the car in a steep, fast dive and came at the lead car from above,
feeling gravity tug against the safety harness. As the other car began to
bank, she targeted ahead of the engine, fired and continued to dive below
the wedge-shaped Enigma, plotting her course to come up behind the other
two cars. Her shot hit dead on. The first car began losing altitude
quickly, spitting a trail of smoke that quickly became flame. It exploded
about four hundred meters from the ground. Tamsin tried to hold her car
steady against the concussion waves buffeting it. She saw the forest below
burst into flame.
One of the two remaining cars went briefly into a spin, then recovered. The
other, further away from the blast, stayed steady and turned to intercept
her. Tamsin looked at her sensors for Layten's car. The boxy vehicle was
bobbing and weaving erratically. "Layten, what the hell is wrong?" she
shouted, without hope of a response. She'd been lucky against the first
car; they hadn't expected her to attack so quickly. She wasn't too sanguine
about her chances against the other two.
She sent the car up as fast as she could, knowing the only way she could
damage either of the other two cars was by an attack from above, where they
were less heavily shielded. She also knew the cars would be expecting such
an attack. She dove again, firing. This time the Enigmas moved quickly,
dodging her shots. She scored a glancing shot against one of them, and
completely missed the other. The fight was drifting, she noticed, coming
closer and closer to the N'tali compound. If she was lucky, she'd soon be
close enough to make a run for it.
Layten was firing, too, with less luck than she was having, staying barely
in range to do any damage. Tamsin pushed the car up again, tearing in a
steep left-hand turn around and above the two cars. Both began firing at
her, and her car bounced in response. She began to lose thrust. She swore
loudly as she arced back toward them, preparing to fire once again.
Through talent or sheer blind luck, she didn't know which, Layten fired a
shot which passed perhaps a meter below her car and hit one of the two
remaining Enigmas. The car immediately began to list to one side. After a
few seconds, it banked away, turning back toward its base.
Tamsin was jolted as another shot hit her from the remaining Enigma. She
heard the engine hesitate, then continue, but with an underlying disonant
hum. Her sensors were down; she was relying strictly on visual. She tried
to gain altitude but didn't have the power. She braked sharply and the
Enigma shot by her. She slammed her finger on the trigger as her car began
to drop from the lack of momentum.
Nothing happened.
She slammed her hand against the console hard in frustration, and cursed
the makers of the car as she accelerated quickly, making a beeline for the
N'tali compound. The car responded jerkily, accelerating in fits and
starts, slowly losing altitude. She had no idea where Layten was. The
Enigma dropped out of sight in front of her. When she looked over her
shoulder through the back window, she saw it coming up from below. It
loomed behind her. She saw it shake, and shake again. Layten was firing,
without much lasting effect. The N'tali compound was within sight, but she
knew she didn't have a chance of reaching it. She braced herself for the
Enigma's final shot.
She saw a bloom of fire come from the rear of the Enigma, then another. It
crawled up the car, turning the black hull to red and gold. Then it
exploded.
Tamsin's car tumbled forward end over end. She tried to adjust the spin,
turning it into a side roll that was bringing her directly toward the
compound. The ground below her revolved more and more slowly as she
stabilized the car. The blue-green blur below her resolved itself into the
lake and trees within the N'tali compound. As she pulled the car back to a
stable, slow descent, she heard the engines sputter.
"Don't you dare stall yet!" she shouted at the engines. Unlike the Enigmas,
which could glide for quite a distance without power, her car was not very
aerodynamic, and would drop like a stone when the engines cut out.
She was ten meters above the ground when the engines cut out. The car
continued its gentle downward glide for a few seconds, then dropped. Tamsin
heard a crash as the dark closed around her.
She woke to hands brushing her body. She instinctively grabbed for them.
"Tamsin, it's Chas! Don't hurt me!" he exclaimed. "I'm just brushing the
glass off you."
She opened her eyes. Everything was blurry, and her stomach began to heave.
Chas moved to the side and pulled her head forward as she began to vomit
all over the shattered console. When she was done, he gave her a sip of
water. She noticed, in a detached way, that the cloth he was wiping her
face with came away red. She also saw three of them. "How are Kalin and
Jaysen?" she asked.
"They're fine ... a lot better than you, as a matter of fact. They're being
brought inside now. You destroyed Kerna's flower garden."
She could smell gardenias, roses and violets all around her. "Whoops. I was
aiming for the landing pad."
"You missed," said Chas. "But the trees to the side of the garden broke
your fall. You were lucky."
Tamsin felt very remote, as if she were dreaming. Her eyes began to sag
shut. She felt a sting against her cheek and realized Chas had slapped her.
"Don't you dare go to sleep," he said. "You've got a bad concussion."
"What happened to Layten?" she asked.
"I lost contact with the computer when they jammed the radio signals," a
bass voice said. "And I really have no idea how to fly those things."
"So we threw you in the water and you learned how to swim. Great," she
said, closing her eyes.
"Don't shut your eyes!" Chas yelled at her, and her eyes snapped back open.
She stared at the green shadows above her and heard voices rumbling in the
background.
"No, she can't be moved, it's too dangerous. We'll have to do it here," she
heard as the green patterns in front of her began to swell and change
shape. She felt herself slide down a tunnel.
A few days later, Chas walked on the green path by the lake, escaping
momentarily the visuals of the standoff at the Killian Research Institute.
A copper-haired figure stood at the edge of the water, throwing rocks at
the glassy surface. She tossed him a wave as he came closer.
"How are you feeling?" he asked her.
"I feel fine," she said. "The upper third of my vision is still gone,
though. It's like I'm wearing a hat all the time."
"There isn't any permanent damage. It'll come back soon," he said.
She stared at him. "What?" he asked.
"You saw me just this morning. What do you really want to talk to me
about?" she asked.
He stared out at the water and tried to form his words carefully. "It's
about Jaysen."
She walked away from him a few steps, keeping her back to him. "I don't
think I want to hear what you're going to tell me."
"Kalin's been working with him steadily. He's holding together now."
"So why can't I see him?" asked Tamsin angrily, turning around.
Chas hesitated. "How much do you know about what they did to him?"
"Enough," she snapped. "I had a run-in with her."
"Kalin feels that it would be best if Jaysen didn't see you for a while,"
said Chas.
"How long do you mean?"
"We don't know. But she thinks that if he saw you right now, it could do a
lot of damage."
"You mean it would send him over the edge again." She laughed bitterly and
threw a rock into the lake. "It's like he's still locked up there.
Sometimes I wish he was dead. Then I'd have a reason to grieve, to miss
him. Even if I do get to see him again, it won't beÉhim."
Chas walked toward her and put a hand on her arm. He hesitated, then
decided to tell her. "Tamsin, Jaysen was in love with you."
She shook his arm off. He looked at her face. Her jaw was clenched and her
eyes were burning. Her breath came fast. "Chas, please go away."
"Tamsin ---"
"Chas, I have an overwhelming desire to hit something repeatedly," she
said. Her voice was like brittle glass shards. "I'd rather it wasn't you."
Chas walked back up the path. Before he went between the trees, he looked
back toward the lake. Tamsin still stared at the water, an alarming lack of
expression on her face.
Chas went to the house, intending to ask Kalin to check on Tamsin, not sure
what she might do next. Layten was sitting in the middle of the room,
holograms all around him.
Chas stared at the flickering images of fire and blood. The research
facility wasn't the only building in dispute now. "What's happening?" he
asked.
Layten's voice was triumphant, yet bleak. "Revolution."
___________________________________________________________________________
Nicole Gustas (ngustas@hamp.hampshire.edu) just got accepted to American
University and is now frantically searching for a job and housing in
Washington DC. She has so far successfully avoided the flesh-eating virus
that has invaded southwestern Connecticut. She highly recommends the TV
show Animaniacs. "Badda-bing!"
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
The Fourth Cat ...there were rich and poor, regal
and common, even diplomats, all
Lou Crago accepting, or enduring, each other in
the haze and music. She sat in a
scallop along one wall and the big
black cat lay at her feet with its
head raised and its huge yellow eyes
watchful.
___________________________________________________________________________
Kiko lost her big cat somewhere between Jin Place and home. It was the
third one she'd lost in a month. Tito was going to stop making them for her
at this rate ... he was generous, but he didn't like to see his art wasted.
The last time, he had said, "It's not just a matter of waste. It's that now
they're out there!"
"But they won't live long," she had said in defense. "You said yourself
they don't stay constabulated."
"I said," he answered, "but that's if nobody else gets hold of them."
She didn't know what that meant. Tito was an Artist. She didn't know for
sure what that meant either. He could make awesome things, like the cats
... things far beyond mere tech ... but he wouldn't even sell them. He
could have made a gigantic fortune! But he just gave them away ... to her,
and to one or two others. She had never actually seen the others; they came
on foot probably, while she came in the Embassy car.
She wanted to be able to come on foot also, to slip through street shadows
and show up at Tito's like an anonymous. Except her Grandmother, who ruled
everything ... at least everything in this capitol city of an occupied
nation ... wouldn't allow it. Every time Kiko went out, it was the car, and
the chauffeur, an d the personal guard. There was no way she could live a
life of her own choice, like everyone else. Wear black clothes, and not
sleep, and prowl the streets, and march in foolish demonstrations.
Her Grandmother was, of course, Dylete Mikyo, the JapaChine Ambassador.
She'd had the post for at least 60 years, but had been fixed repeatedly, so
that she looked 30, maybe 40 in sunlight. She'd had Kiko's mother and
father eliminated ... so Kiko suspected ... and now the only blood-relation
she would tolerate i n the Embassy was 17-year-old Kiko, thin and frail. It
meant Kiko wa s constantly attended by tutors and guards, and had the
surveillance cameras on while she slept.
At 16, Kiko had threatened suicide if she wasn't given some personal
freedom. She demanded one six-hour stretch every fortnight, with the
bracelet monitor off, and freedom to leave the Embassy. She won that,
except that she had to be driven to where she wanted to go in the car, then
picked up six hours later and driven home. Kiko chose eight p.m. to two
a.m. Dylete was hard to sway, but finally agreed when she saw that Kiko was
perfectly serious about the suicide.
The first time out, Kiko found Jin Place. The second time she followed a
bizarre red animal like a fox along the shadowed street, and it led her to
Tito's alley, and to his door.
It was open. That, in itself, was strange. Nobody left doors open. She
stepped in. He turned from a table where he stood working and stared and
stared at her without a word. He was old! You scarcely ever saw old-looking
people ... not when it was so cheap and safe to get fixed. He was small and
thin, with very intense eyes.
She let him look. That was what diplomatic life, and being rich, meant ...
your gear was the most beautiful, sleek, and costly that was available.
Even in diplomatic circles, they looked. Then you looked back at them.
Something unspoken was decided. Dylete, her Grandmother, had been coming
out on top for 60 years in these contests; now Kiko had the knack also.
Maybe because she didn't think anything when the looking contest was in
progress. She just waited calmly, knowing she would win. Or maybe she'd
inherited something from Dylete.
Tito said, "Presence without mind. I like that. Maybe I'll give you a gift
to go along with it."
Kiko was used to that too; diplomats gave gifts to make up for having lost.
She held out her hand, expecting some rare object. But he turned and opened
a door, and out came a big cat. It was big and orange, striped with black.
She'd never seen anything like it. The only animals she'd been allowed to
have were little and with white fluff all over. They died after a year or
so, looking sad.
This one came and stood beside her, lazily switching its long tail. It paid
no attention to her, but followed when she went out. She couldn't make it
get in the car, but it loped along beside. Before the car pulled into the
Embassy gates, however, it had disappeared.
On her next free night, she went back to Tito's and informed him about it.
He stared at her again, and then gave her another cat. This one was the
same size, but sleekly black all over. She took it back with her to Jin
Place, where nobody would be surprised by anything. There, there were rich
and poor, regal and common, even diplomats, all accepting, or enduring,
each other in the haze and music. She sat in a scallop along one wall and
the big black cat lay at her feet with its head raised and its huge yellow
eyes watchful.
She drank an exotic drink, smoked a hookah, and watched the people watching
her. The diplomats bowed when they passed her scollop; they knew who she
was, what rank. It was a very satisfying evening. But when she tried to
force the cat into the car, it turned and loped away into the shadows of
the street.
The next time, she actually talked to Tito ... the way you talk in private,
the way she remembered talking to her Mother long ago.
"They won't come home with me. What's wrong?"
"Maybe the breeding isn't right," he said.
"I never assumed you were breeding them ... there's no breeding stock left.
I thought you were making them."
"No breeding stock left? Ah, so they've educated you a little."
"I've had the very best education!" she said haughtily. "Subliminals every
night since I was six."
"Ah, so you have stored in your head all the world's factoids?"
"Certainly," she said.
Then he explained that "made" creatures were outside that paradigm.
That made it strangely exciting to her. She wasn't sure exactly why, except
that anything beyond tech was exciting because it was forbidden. In any
case, she wanted another one.
"All right, one more," he said. "But see you don't let it get loose."
Now she had lost this third cat, a blue-grey one. Again she and Tito talked
privately, and she became so engrossed that she sat down, no doubt creasing
her rich dress, and clasped her jeweled hands together passionately like a
child or an anonymous. "If it could come home with me," she said, "and be
in my suite. And maybe even ... this sounds bizarre ... even sleep on my
bed. Make it to do that."
"Why?" he asked.
She thought about it. "I want to hear its purr in the night. Or growl, or
whatever it does."
"And what will you do?"
"I willÉlisten."
As an incentive, she told him to bill the Embassy, but he sneered at that.
Nevertheless, he gave her another cat. It was deep gold with black spots on
its flanks. And around its neck was a leather collar studded with chunks of
amber. He also gave her a narrow leather leash, which he snapped onto the
collar.
"No more after this," he said, his eyes narrowing. "Keep this one, or don't
come back."
She didn't even go back to Jin Place. She waved forward the unobtrusively
following car, and when the chauffeur had opened the door, stepped in. The
lea sh made it possible to pull the big cat in too.
On the ride home, she let it lie on the seat beside her, and she used the
tips of her fingers to stroke its silky head. The guard at the Embassy gate
ma de as if to refuse the cat admission, but she stared at him, and let him
look at her staring, so he backed down. Naturally.
She took the lift up to her suite. The big cat sat on its haunches, not
disturbed by being in the mechanism ... it even lowered its lids slowly
once or twice, as if contented.
She went through to her bedroom. There, she had the sudden and remarkable
desire not to wear any of her sleep robes that night. She slid into the
satin naked, and even unplugged the subliminal unit at the headboard. The
cat leapt lightly up on the bed, stepped around for a few moments, then lay
down. It's head rested on her stomach. She lay very still, waiting to hear
its purr.
There were alarm shriekers going off somewhere, and people shouting.
Footsteps running. She sat up, threw back the satin, and went blindly
across the carpet a dozen steps before she even knew she was awake.
The double doors burst open. Security guards and male secretaries came
pouring in. Kiko watched them look at her with shocked eyes and realized,
looking down, that she was still naked. She stood quite still and let them
look, thinking nothing. And within a few moments, she had won. They began
to make the brief, obligatory bows, and to edge backward out the doorway.
Dylete's Chief of Staff came forward, moving through them and, with his
hand trembling slightly, held out a precious object. It was Dylete's Seal
of Office.
"The Ambassador has met with ... an accident. Which precludes her
fulfilling her post. I am now at your service, as you assume the post by
heredity."
Kiko said carefully, "How was the Ambassador accidented?"
The man hesitated. "By laceration s to the throat. The jugular vein was...
shredded. There was a great deal of bleeding."
"Who did this?" she asked, her eyes wide.
"We have not apprehended the....the intruder," he said. "The alarm system
was not tripped. We will continue to investigate."
"Very well," said Kiko. She did not look around for the cat which no one
was supposed to know was in her suite. She sensed that it was no longer
there.
"Attend to the body of the former Ambassador," she instructed.
The Chief of Staff made a formal bow. "And shall I bring her robe of state
to you now?"
"Yes, you may do that."
He backed out.
Kiko stood waiting. Even in nakedness, she was totally enrobed by presence.
But her right hand, unaccountably, lifted slowly to her throat. There was a
leather collar studded with amber around her neck.
And there was a taste in her mouth: something strange that she had never
before tasted.
She suddenly knew much more than factoids. Very much more, all in a rush!
She knew about Tito. And why "made" things beyond tech were forbidden.
And something about what it was going to be like, being Ambassador, when
she was so young and unaccustomed to politics. With four lost cats prowling
somewhere. Out there in the shadowed streets, where the great mass of
people were anonymous, poor, wore black, and didn't sleep.
___________________________________________________________________________
Microchips Never Rust "I was here for at least six months
after the bombs were dropped. One of
Part 3 the steam tunnels under the Student
Union led to a suite of storerooms.
Eric Miller About 150 of us were able to hide out
there. Hotter than fresh roof tar in
August."
___________________________________________________________________________
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked, dragging themselves throughout the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix, angle-headed hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who
poverty and tatters and hollowed-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El
and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who
passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas
and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war.
Allen Ginsberg, 1955-1956
Oh, you want to know when the end has come, my friend? I'll tell you when.
You'll be sitting in your flat on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, entertaining
friends in your studio, when a phone call rings on your unlisted number,
and it's some American youth speaking very poor French because that's what
he learned in University and he is trying to sell you some magazine
subscription that can be sent overseas for `great savings over the
newsstand price.' And you ask, "How did you get my number?" but he
hesitates because he is reluctant to tell you that his boss has a way of
getting unlisted French numbers. And you slam the phone down, but you
realize with dread that you will never have any real peace for the rest of
your life.
French photographer being interviewed on his
opposition to a proposed takeover of France
Telecom by AT&T/Sears. Newsweek, October, 1998.
The U.S. Marshal's Office has just granted broad, discretionary powers to
the Software Printer's Association, a company started in the 1980's which
claimed to represent the copyright interests of software manufacturers. The
company has engaged in quasi-legal actions which included threatening to
take a company to court for using unlicensed software and pocketing the out
of court settlement for itself. Alfred Milbourne, then President of
Digiscript Inc., described a typical scenario:
"You would see posters with pictures of two of our product, and some logo
reading `The One on the Right just cost someone $500,000,' and it would be
a picture of one of our own Digiscript floppies. The ad would then go on to
state that you could send in $80 to get a copy of their pirate software
detector, which in reality was nothing more than a batch file which listed
all the executable files on your hard disk!"
Milbourne went on to list the contents of some of the lurid press releases
put out by the SPA, including accounts of how some of the biggest
ringleaders in software piracy were being put away for years in Federal
Penitentiaries. Milbourne's own legal staff eventually looked into the
matter:
"We found out that the SPA would call up a company and in effect tell it
that they had heard that employees were using pirated software and that
they would have to submit themselves to an `audit' or else face a raid by
the U.S. Marshal's Office. They would then visit the office and find that,
lo and behold, someone was using a duplicate copy of our Digiscript
program. Depending on how gullible the company president was, the SPA would
then shake down the company for tens of thousands of dollars to prevent
them from being taken to court in order to extract `compensatory damages.'
We found out that our product was often the lynch-pin behind these
extortions, yet, believe it or not, we never saw a penny from the SPA!"
SPA efforts to act as a quasi-official organ of the government have finally
paid off: starting this year the SPA will be able to use its own security
and policing staff to raid companies under suspicion. The U.S. Attorney's
office has given the SPA the authority to search and seize all computer
equipment which may be suspected of harboring pirated software. This means
that any SPA employee can now walk into your company and snag that
attractive looking hypercube that took you months to get a hold of.
Suspicion is all that is needed! Attorney General Gregory Lucas upon being
questioned about the SPA had this to say:
"I don't know much about this computer stuff, you know, bits and bytes and
all that crap, but I do know this! If we let pirates run free in this
society it will be the end of American civilization as we know it. I am
proud that someone like the SPA has seen fit to go mano a mano against
these pirates and they will continue to have my support as well as my
authority to conduct raids under the deputization powers of my office."
SPA publications can now be found in most schools, as well as videos
starring rap music superstar D.J. saran-rap-gangsta, just released from
prison, rapping the SPA's snappy jingle `Don't archive that computer file
in an unauthorized manner!'
Wormwood II, April, 2001
Arthur Hanson stood in front of Dr. Jarod Owen, not quite sure of what to
say.
Owen barked, "Grab a seat, Dr. Hanson! Fill me in on what you've been up to
these last five years!" Good, nothing out of the ordinary. Hanson slumped
back into a decrepit office chair that groaned from the impact of his spine
against the seatback.
"Doc, maybe I'm out of it, but what the hell am I doing here? One day I'm
rambling around the Wurkhaus camp system and the next I find that I'm a new
prof here."
"Rambling around the camp system for five years." Owen shook his head
sadly, but retained the twinkle in his eyes that betrayed an endless font
of energy. "Let's both start from the beginning. Now since it's a surprise
to you that I'm still alive, I can only assume that you thought that I died
in the attack along with a great number of people. For a long time I
certainly thought the same of you."
Hanson looked up at the water stained ceiling. "I was here for at least six
months after the bombs were dropped. One of the steam tunnels under the
Student Union led to a suite of storerooms. About 150 of us were able to
hide out there. Hotter than fresh roof tar in August. We figured that it
was at least 130 degrees for two or three days from the fires. Lucky for us
the store room was deep enough in the earth for us to survive in."
"What did you do about food and water?" asked Owen.
"Oh, that lasted about 4 months; a huge case of Spam lasted about a month,
too. I don't think my digestive track ever recovered from that culinary
adventure. When we ran out of food, we started scouting around up top. When
I got caught by one of the GermanMetalFuzz, I..."
"German what?" interrupted Owen.
"The German Motorized Infantry Security Police. I convinced him that if he
helped us find food we would make it worth his while. The Fuzz got a load
of about 200 college dorm mini-fridges right before his boss nabbed him. We
stripped this campus dry from the bottom up for whatever we could find.
Light bulbs, blankets, hell, even those awful cafeteria trays were in big
demand."
"I hear that Central Services is still bitchin' about the trays," laughed
Owen.
"Naturally we just didn't have enough to barter with anymore. A new law
that allowed the Fuzz to pack people up to camps if they didn't have a home
just went into effect, and most of us got rounded up and sent north. I was
shipped to Wurkhaus 211 at the intersection of Highway 12 and 93."
"First Service Motors?" asked Owen.
"Was then, only now it's the chief autotruck production plant in Michigan
for the German Army. I was sent to live with an assembly line gang that
packed the trucks as they were being sent to the Mississippi River war
zone. Fortunately for me I got pulled off the line and placed in detention
to await interrogation. When I got taken to the interview room down the
cell hall I was strapped into a chair, and told that I would be
interrogated by a Major Schulmann."
"And this was fortunate?" Owen asked.
"Well, I didn't think so at the time. But Schulmann came into the room and
asked me all sorts of questions, so naturally I told him what I was doing
here at Central, and he got real upset and started yelling to someone on
the phone in German, which I could barely understand, but I got the sense
that he was yelling at one of the Fuzz about treating me badly and why was
I taken here in the first place. The guards then took me outside. They were
really nice to me all of sudden, giving me food cards and cigarettes. I was
taken to a big house where I could see what the change of attitude was
about."
"Which was?"
"Everything that you could possibly imagine going wrong in a computerized
office. Equipment hooked up the wrong way, operators not saving their
files, no documentation, wall outlets that looked like they were sprouting
octopuses, a big list of information age no-nos. I found out within the
week that Schulmann had been put on notice to organize the warehouse office
or else be transferred to the Iranian front."
"Your first job in the real world!" Owen quipped sarcastically.
"The computers were the easy part. The logistics were a little tougher,
because, in essence, I had to figure out how the German Army could transfer
goods in and out of Michigan by way of our warehouse in such a way that
losses were minimized."
"Losses?"
"Oh yeah. Everywhere. I can tell you for sure that not a single box of
Cinnamon Pop-tarts has ever made it to the River zone. Unopened boxes of
those things command a pretty high price on the black market. Schulmann was
savvy enough to understand what I was talking about. I showed him how to
disguise shipments by using digit flipping bookkeeping and key authorized
database records stored on the autotrucks. He was a real happy guy after a
while. Both he and his upper echelon got promoted up the ladder to a
military post somewhere in Kansas. The warehouse was then sold to the
Brother Jims at a profit."
"Ooh, boy. The Jims."
"I barely managed to escape the day the Jims were surrounding the place
with poison barbed wire. Schulmann probably told the Jims that I went with
the purchase. Bastard. Ever since then I've been roaming the area doing
whatever I can to survive in the winter months and leading the slacker
lifestyle when the weather gets warm."
"Which brings us up to the point in your story when you mysteriously show
up on the IMF's labor invoice database." Owen squirmed uneasily in his
chair. He had a huge favor to ask of Hanson. One that in all probability
would cost Arthur his life.
Dataflage Corporation has just announced a new line of lap-top computers
meant to prevent seizure by the Software Printer's Association, whose
plainclothes operatives have been known to hide out in airports where
travelers carry a large selection of portables on their business trips. For
travelers who want the very best, Dataflage manufactures a clone of the
Silicon Graphics 4D Reality Engine Laptop disguised as an old fashioned
Radio Shack Portable. A screen saver simulates the crude black and white
LCD pixels of a by gone era, requiring a voice activated password to
reactivate the holographic display. The delta-wave transmitter used to
navigate through the laptop's virtual landscape has been disguised as an
old-style portable 8 track tape player complete with a Captain and Tenille
tape and head transponder disguised as bulky old AV lab headphones.
Simulated Coke spills and finger grime add to the effect. Purchasers also
receive a catalog of accessories which enable the traveler to affect the
complete grunge computist look, with items such as `too large rubber
galoshes' and sweatshirts which appear to be faded and unwashed. The
catalog also features props such as simulated old, beaten copies of `Dune'
and `Spock Must Die' which can be used as battery and cellphone holders.
Don't become another SPA statistic! Call Dataflage today!
Morais pressed the `repeat message' playback button on his watch several
times, but still couldn't make out the originator of the message.
"Dar, who do you think that was?"
"My guess would be Grove. I could hear a Texas accent under that voice
changer," Dar answered, shrugging his shoulders.
"Grove is supposed to be in Biosphere 9. If he had to make a special trip
from the moon, something is up. Here, put my watch on; that should foil the
office pager. I'm going to run into Ivari's office and see if I can watch
this drama take place from behind."
Dar Im-Tula took the watch-com from Morais and placed it on his wrist. Dar
was one of the rare Indian programmers who allowed himself to be called by
name. Among the Yanomami it was usually considered an insult to call
someone by their name. It took Morais several years to understand the
Yanomami mind, but for his efforts he was paid off in two ways: he was
allowed the privilege to address Dar by his phonetic label, and he had
access to the most gifted pool of computer talent on the planet. His
colleagues were not so lucky. Being less understanding types, they would
often hear of the legendary computer prowess of the Yanomami and then
`hire' them for programming projects at the Institute. The managers of
these projects would invite the Yanomami to Project Meetings, speaking of
deadlines, product deliveries dates, work schedules, and salaries. The
`employed' Amazon Tribe member would then be shown to a cubicle and asked
to show up at 8:00 the next morning. The results would be disastrous. The
new employee would never show up on time, sometimes as late as 4:00 in the
afternoon. A project manager might be eating dinner on his screened-in
porch at home and look up to see the employee seated across from him, after
somehow slipping silently in, all eager to discuss the project. To make
things worse, they would never give out their names, and refused to sign
any paperwork, saying that a salary was unimportant, yet showing up at
night, asking to borrow the water sled, because they had to visit an uncle
for the next two weeks, and then returning two months later without the
sled because it had been given away during a festival. Most managers went
apoplectic over this sort of behavior, resolving never to hire the Yanomami
ever again, but having no qualms about cannibalizing whatever juicy bits of
Yanomami code appeared on the public nets. Morais, however, took a
different approach.
Ten years before, when a knotty problem concerning the Space Construction
Platform had Morais up for nights, Morais looked up tired from his terminal
to see that a Yanomami Indian was standing silently next to him. He
muttered "Can I sit down?" Morais was too tired to protest and gave him his
chair. Within 4 hours the unknown Yanomami had entirely re-written the
emergent behavior algorithm that allowed the robots to return to their fuel
tanks without losing the timing involved in rolling out the steel sheet
involved in the beam formation process at the Platform. After several
debugging run-throughs, the gentle face of the ageless appearing tribesman
looked up at Morais and muttered "Remember that the Ant gives his legs to
the Colony before he moves his own body." The Amazon silently disappeared
leaving behind a perplexed Morais. But later, when the Platform started
receiving steel shipments from Earth, the meaning behind the Yanomami's
words hit Morais. Not quite able to express it in words, Morais was
nonetheless able to give the Russian Draftsman the complete proposal for
the Mars Launch Program. Every time the project slowed down, the same thing
would happen. At the back of the meeting room, when the managers conference
had descended into bickering, a lone individual would silently appear.
Morais would then silence the proceedings and ask to hear what the Yanomami
had to say. The words would always have a cryptic but homespun tribal sound
to them. Sometimes they elicited laughter from the project leaders, who
were surprised to find the Indian laughing along with them. But it would
always happen. Four hours later. Two days later. Two weeks later. Morais
would be thinking about the words muttered at the proceedings and would
have a flash of inspiration which would take him running to the Russian
Draftsman's lab. The Draftsman's hard-headed genius for all things
mechanical usually meant that any idea remotely unsound was met with a
disparaging wave of the hand and complete ignorance of the messenger. But
with Morais it would be different. The Draftsman would gently nod his head
yes, and turn away to furiously sketch something on an old, battered
artist's sketch pad. In five years, this strange, triple collaboration
allowed Morais to advance to the Project Head for Manned Space Exploration
of the Amazonian Technical Institute, a position which brought much fame,
from all over the world, as well as inside the Brazilian Empire. But for
the Yanomami, it would always be the same. An individual, a brother, a
cousin, perhaps would show up at your house: Can I borrow this laptop? My
Grandfather wants to keep track of the number of Dolphins in the River. My
third cousin from up North is starting classes, can he stay at your house
for awhile? Can I sit down? The program would work much better if you did
this...
____________________
How to Protect Yourself in the 21st Century
with a new introduction by
General Buford Keegan
Ladies and Gentlemen. It has been over ten years since I have been directly
involved in the production of the volume that you now hold in your hands.
When Roberto DelReyes, the chief author of this book's current edition
approached me about writing a new introduction, I could not refuse. After
all, it was Roberto himself who conceived the idea for this book when
almost twenty years ago such information was not commonplace. It was, after
all, twenty years ago that Roberto's involvement in a brave and daring plan
to evacuate the town of Riverside, Ohio that made it possible for me to
continue the work of ensuring that men everywhere have the choice of
remaining and acting as free and responsible citizens of this great planet
of ours. Roberto's questions continuously assured me that even in an age
like ours, any one possessed of a good mind and free heart could understand
the most knotty questions involved in resisting a high-technology
dictatorship, in whatever form it took. I have gained great strength from
knowing that in such chaotic circumstances such as ours, basic common sense
is all that is needed in order to understand such topics as `how to write a
trojan virus' or `what behavior is appropriate under infrared
surveillance.'
That we live in difficult times, times that often more closely resemble the
civil war of the 1860s' than the high-tech paradise of the 1950's, when it
was thought that all that was needed to survive a nuclear war were lead
impregnated bib-overalls, is quite obvious. You are now holding in your
hands a very special volume. A volume that is only three by five inches,
and whose cover reads `Charts and Tables of Standards for Weights and
Measures Used Under the English System of Measurement.' By camouflaging our
book in this way, we have practically assured that very few people will
willingly open up its cover for fear of the tedious and boring content
suspected of lurking on its pages. Yet the cover also indicates that this
volume has an inherent usefulness that prevents it from being thrown out,
and indeed, will often cause those being sent this volume to place it on an
esteemed roost on a bookshelf without the cover ever being opened. In this
way, our manual has spread into all corners of society, and many of those
in the East who seek our information have only to visit a library reference
section to find it. Many techniques like the one I just described are found
in the pages of this book.
Those of us involved in the production of this volume have had many labels
thrown at us: Terrorist, criminal, revolutionary, and even Communist, even
when the techniques in this book help defend the individual against
Communist oppression as well as any other. We do not subscribe to labels of
any kind. As we look back into the twentieth century, we can only see that
labels, no matter how well intentioned, eventually turn into oppressive
straight-jackets. Rather than labels, we hold the radical viewpoint that
individuals are much better able to determine their own destinies than
outside organizations. The purveyor of these organizational modes of living
constantly accuse of pedaling death in our philosophy as we propose the
death of the organization. But we ask those who seek to erase our existence
a continual question: when in our history has the individual ever
benefitted from allegiance to the organization? An example often put forth
is the defeat of Adolf Hitler during World War II (according to Western
U.S. history). Evidence has shown time and time again that the defeat of
Nazi Germany arose from individuals who only temporarily chose to act as a
collective. When the need for such a collective passed, those who chose to
prop it by via organizational and extra-individual means bought about the
debacle of Vietnam, an event so humiliating to contemplate that it has now
been excised from Eastern U.S. textbooks. Because of these views we have
been accused of being pessimistic and destructive to the true cause of
human nature. Quite the contrary is true. We have an unflagging optimism in
the Human Spirit. We are products of at least 3 billion years of biological
evolution, and when such a grand creation chooses to hold opinion as to
whether such a war is wrong or such a government is corrupt, it does good
to listen to it. To believe that one's own individual instincts are somehow
inferior to those of the Nation State or other extra-individual entity, is
to invite disaster as those of us who live the Eastern United States can
now readily attest. We live in radically dangerous times that call for a
new form of resistance. Those of us who have access to an uncensored
history of the last century have seen the same mistake happen over and over
again: that is, to defend yourself against your enemy, you must defeat your
enemy; to defeat your enemy, you must become your enemy, and in the
process, lose what it is you were trying to defend. We have resolved not to
make this mistake. Our enemies are those who say that they must capture us
in order that we may be reintegrated into their collective, a collective
made up of mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness, violence and the
adoration of a group of corrupt, senile old men whose only achievements in
life have been to hold large buckets under the money faucets of the Federal
Reserve Bank. Our enemies have been coming after us with guns, planes, and
tanks, yet, in all cases, we have been able to defeat them on our own
territory, without having to recourse to their weapons-based methods. You
will find our methods in this book. Our methods are faster, cheaper, and
more effective than theirs. Our method relies on something far cheaper and
deadlier than clunky military hardware and dangerous explosives. Our method
relies on Information. And it is with Information and little else that will
enable you to single-handedly disarm a tank or cause an enemy soldier to
retreat to his homeland. Our method is the most effective of all in that it
directs the strength of your enemy back upon himself.
Back in the dark ages of the 1980's the Reagan Administration chose to go
to war against the peasants of Nicaragua so that corporate shareholders
could realize more profits from the sale of military hardware. At that
time, it was difficult to kill a peasant and his children; the soldier most
likely had a family of his own, and was remiss to take such action.
However, just by muttering one word: "Communists!" the same soldier could
easily destroy an entire village. That my friends, was the power of
Information. To survive in the Twenty-First you will have to learn how to
use Information as a weapon, and you will have to learn how the enemy is
determined to use Information as a weapon against you, and take the
necessary steps to defend yourself.
I wish you the best of luck in all your endeavors,
General Keegan
Durango, Mexico, May, 2025
Table of Contents
p. iv Preface to the English System of Measurement
p. 10 Thread Diameter Conversion Scales
p. 123 An In-Depth Discussion of Atomic Weight Classification Schemes
p. 150 Metric Conversion Charts (Ed. Note: May require use of magnification
glass.)
p. 190 How To Protect Yourself in the Twenty-First Century
p. 200 Introduction by General Keegan
p. 201 An Overview of Counter-Terrorism
p. 220 Snipping Wires: Quality, Not Quantity
p. 280 Info-terrorism and Culture Jamming
p. 340 All You Need to Know about Computer Sabotage
p. 400 Networks from Spare Parts I. GIS Over a Public Telephone
p. 487 Acting Under Surveillance
p. 520 Counter-recruitment Techniques
p. 60 Confusion and Mental Illness Techniques
p. 670 Encryption Made Easy
p. 700 Timed Release Strike-back Techniques
p. 823 Use the Fax-Effect to Your Advantage
p. 900 Fun With Metrics! Puzzles and Brain Teasers based on
English-to-Metric Conversion Charts.
p. 940 Your Career: A Future in Charts and Tables
p. 980 Index
____________________
From: Bob Jacobson
Subject: Washington State (USA) legislation could censor VR (and much more)!
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 23:25:54 GMT
This has relevance throughout the U.S. and around the world, as it can
happen anywhere ignorance of virtual worlds is inflamed by odd ideas.
Forwarded from Daniel Pezely
A friend who frequents the Washington state government passed this on to
me:
There is a bill at the state level: (excerpts from the Public Health &
Safety Act 1994" bill, SBR 6174)
NEW SECTION. Sec. 706 (1) A license is required for the commercial use of
virtual reality technology for entertainment or purposes other then bona
fide education, training, research, and development.
Where VR is defined:
NEW SECTION. Sec 702. (4) ``Virtual Reality" means any computer or other
electronic technology that creates an enhanced illusion of
three-dimensional, real-time or near-real-time interactive reality through
the use of software, specialized hardware, holograms, gloves, masks,
glasses, computer guns, or other item capable of producing visual, audio,
and sensory effects of verisimilitude beyond those available with a
personal computer.
My friend was present at the hearing of a portion of this bill. Evidently,
the person backing the bill, Senator Phil Talmadge, and his crew are
convincing the State Congress that VR will permit "a realistic illusion of
killing another person and such an illusion will make it easier for someone
to go out and actually commit such a crime outside of VR." The State
Congress has a very short calendar this year. This matter could be voted on
as early as next week (week of 14 February 94), and the congressional
session ends 8 March 1994, so this could be voted into law in less than one
month.
Senator Phil Talmadge (206) 786-7436 Leading the opposition: Senator
Sheldon (206) 786-7644
Senate Fax: (206) 786-1999. Commission on Public Health & Safety Act 1994.
Bill to be heard in Ways & Means Committee (Sen. Reinhart, Chair),
Wednesday night, February 9, 1994; then to Rules. For status of bill, call
Secretary of Senate: (206) 786-7550.
If virtual reality is outlawed, only outlaws will have virtual reality.
The Author
open line 12
execute data link
300 baud cache and forward
1700 KHz rider signal
note to new listeners: Public key decoder found on head of DAT release
"Greatest Hits of Honky-Tonk Punk"
"We're back? Fantastic. I keep tellin' them that my pager doesn't always
work, but lucky for you good listeners, you ain't gonna miss a lick of my
show. Hogger Radio. That's me. And Hogger remembers that some of you is
curious as to how Hogger gets out the way he does. You may remember that
because of an accident long ago Hogger had his eardrums taken out and
replaced with what are called `cochlear transducers' which means for you
folks that all I need is a wire attached the right way and somehow I can
get what I hear in my own head broadcast out by a semi full of old radio
gear that calls itself Radio Free Colorado and has to travel a lot to avoid
detection by a vigilante squad. But I keep hearing that Hogger radio is so
popular that me and RFC are going to keep at it for as long as our Eastern
brothers are still in chains, come Hell or high water.
"Like we was hearing just a few minutes ago, that legendary rebel Bobby
DelRay ran into ol' Hogger enjoying the end of the ski season on the
mountain, and Hogger just couldn't pass up an opportunity to ask him what
happened twenty years ago in the Great Kentucky Fried Hamburger rebellion
and Bobby agreed, so long as yours truly springs for the beer.
"Now Bobby, you was tellin' us that way back in high school you got called
into the gym to get a talkin' to."
"Yep. All us students were together listening to this guy, O.K., and he
tells us that he works for the IMF which is the International Monetary
Fund. Now the IMF is a big bank that we didn't know much about, but this
guy goes on to tell us that somehow this IMF has now become the largest
bank in the United States and that just recently the Bank of the Federal
Reserve of the United States of America has gone into what he called a
`triple default;' that is, the government has been given three chances to
pay some debts that is has owed, but has failed to come up with the money
each time. He flipped out one of those laptop computers that gives off this
bright light so that we could see the screen showing on the wall, and it's
full of pie charts and other mumbo-jumbo. So naturally we wondered what the
heck he was talkin' about.
"Eventually he tells us that the federal government has failed to institute
an `austerity program' so that interest payments on the eight trillion
dollar federal debt can be made in a more timely manner. He also tells, and
this is real important, that in order to operate and remain `liquid,' the
federal government has had to sell bonds to rich foreign dudes so that they
can afford to pay the interest on the federal bonds that have been bought
and sold outside the U.S."
"Sort of like taking out money on your credit card to pay off the interest
on another credit card."
"Ya, if you can rack up eight trillion on your credit card. Don't quote me
on this stuff; I'm sure I'm getting some of the facts wrong, but this is
basically what I remember. Anyways he gets to the part that really affects
us. He says that in order to pay off all our debts, which I guess included
us so-called taxpayers, a group of banks had been authorized by the federal
government to seize control of the assets of the U.S. government and that
we would have to continue working and give over half of our earnings to
what he called `major creditors' of the taxpayers of the U.S."
"Half? And you were making like three dollars an hour? I figure that would
have netted you like $1.50 an hour."
"Try fifty cents an hour. It turned out that another foreign bank owned
something called the Social Security Entitlement Corporation which by law
could take out as much money from our paychecks as it wanted in order give
its principal investors a steady return. Of course, when we retired we
would get something, too, NOT. The whole thing was a Ponzi scheme, but it
was the law, so what could you do? Anyway, the talk finally concludes away
from all this stuff and gets to the heart of the matter. It turns out that
because of something called the `Federal Domain,' all of our houses and all
of the land has been sold to a group of banks in Europe and would be
resettled by the new owners within a month, and we had only a few weeks to
get everything together and move out. The guy in the gym was their
representative and he flashes up a chart that tells us what we are going to
have to do. Like all of our cars and TVs and cameras and stuff had also
been bought up so we are going to have to leave them behind `in good
condition,' We could only take the clothes on our backs and enough food and
medicine that we could carry in our hands. Then it got really scary.
`Martial law' or something like it had just been declared in our county
which meant that we were under orders not to leave town until a truck came
by our house that would take us to our new place of work."
"New place of work?"
"Oh yeah. The foreign guy was now showing some film off of his laptop, and
it's really old looking, kind like someone spliced together an old 16mm
movie. And it shows all of these people in a big bunkhouse somewhere, and
they're smiling and making beds and walking through gardens and collecting
vegetables. And the guy continues talking, and says that a new federal law
has just been passed which requires us to work, even if we have lost our
homes and have no place to go, and that we would be given an interview to
find out what our assignments were. Like, if you had some electrical work
in your background you would be assigned to the military, but if you were
some high-schoolers like us, you would be taken to a bunkhouse to work at
some job and later, if your attitude was real good, you would be eligible
for something called The Plan."
"The Plan?"
"Yep. All we knew at the time was that it had something to do with that
wacked out televangelist Brother Jim who was getting rich bilking old
people out of their money. This was the first time we had heard that he was
wrapped up in all this federal mess, and we was sure that he was making a
mint off this, too. Made sense, though. This Jimbo character was on TV a
lot, in one of those infomercials tellin' people how they could make a
killing in Real Estate with such tactics like finding somebody who was
having trouble making their house payments and walking in front of their
house in the winter and falling and getting a lawyer to sue them for doctor
bills and settling out of court for the title to the house. But a lot of
people were like, `but Brother Jim is so good and wants to help America, we
should listen to him, he is one of the great spiritual leaders of our time'
and all that crap.
"Now you can be sure that some of the kids were real smart-asses upon
hearing this, and a couple of them yelled out that they wouldn't leave. And
then comes the Mark Shipman incident."
"Very famous incident indeed!"
"Ya, Mark jumps up and starts yelling `My Dad says you're a bunch of Nazis
and if you come anywhere near our house he's gonna pump you full of lead!'
So the speaker's face gets real red and he steps outside for a moment and
motions someone in, another guy with a pinstriped suit, only he's got some
really small machine gun slung over his shoulder, and the speaker points
his finger at Mark and the machine-gun guy writes something down and
leaves. Right after that, we were lead out of the school yard by some other
guys with guns and told that we couldn't return there anymore. Two days
later there was a big fire a couple of blocks away. It was the Shipman
house. Someone had lobbed a bomb into the house in the middle of the night.
My parents had heard similar things like we did, only they were visiting
the houses one by one while we were in school and posting guards at the end
of the streets. Dad had been told that he would be checked on to make sure
that nothing happened out of the ordinary. I still had to go to Big Burger
to work, only now it was something like eighty hours a week, and we had
cameras watching us. I tried to find out if I could stay at Big Burger
while the town was being evacuated, but they said no. We were installing
machines that would wait on customers and deliver their food to them much
faster than we could, and was told that we would be gone in a couple of
weeks as soon as the transition was completed. It was at this point that
Bif started to play an important role in our lives."
"Now for our audience, explain just who Bif is today."
"Right now Bif, er, I mean General Keegan, is Commander-in-Chief of the
Northern Mexico Defense Battery, and if you've been accessing the paper
lately you know that we have him to thank for the recent defeat of the
Aryan Nation attack on the state of Arizona. Back then, though, we had no
idea. No idea at all what Bif was. You see, back in high school, Bif was
what we called a `Hacker.' And in a small town like ours, being a hacker
got you made fun of, big time. And Bif didn't have many friends, so he
spent a heck of an amount of time in his uncle's basement, even when the
weather was nice, doing God knows what with telephone wire and old game
computers and broken CD recorders and whatever junk he could scrounge from
his uncle's recently defunct radio repair business. Now, I didn't
understand Bif very well, but we had become friends about a month before
the infamous gym speech because he had stolen a password needed to operate
the burger computer where I worked and showed me ho to scam food from the
place. One night after I managed to sneak home, I got to talk to Bif after
he snuck into our basement. He had some other guys our age follow him in
and said that from now on we were going to hold regular meetings at three
a.m. Boy did Bif change."
"Change?"
"You had to have been there. He started showing us all these maps of the
county, using terms like `Info-terrorism' and `Surveillance Weakness
Zones.' Turns out that Bif was finally able to use the Ham radio after all.
A group of hackers in Toledo had figured out a way to scramble the
conversation and disguise it as white noise, something called `analog
least-significant bit stegonography,' now don't ask me what that means. To
decode the conversation, you had to know someone personally who would hand
you the secret code. Then, any form of secret code, like PGP, had been made
illegal, so Bif and his friends were really risking their lives.
"We talked very low, for hours, with me only understanding the gist of the
matter, but come dawn I was officially a member of The Plan."
"The Plan?"
"We adopted that Brother Jim crap as a code name for our own activities so
that if someone overheard they wouldn't be able to guess what we were up
to. Now Bif had formed some sort of a secret network, kind of like a
`hacker patrol' that was going to strike back when the trucks arrived to
take us away. You got to believe that back then, hackers striking back
against those guys sounded way ridiculous, but for some crazy reason, I
believed that Bif knew what he was talking about, and that he was our best
chance for escaping this situation alive."
"Hmm, clarify to our audience why you used the word `alive'."
"Bif had found out through his network that cities all over the Eastern
U.S. were having the same things happen to them. We didn't have phone
service, newspapers, or anything coming into town that told us what was
happening. If you watched TV, all you got was crap. Even the local station
was showing nothing but those damned infomercials to prevent from going out
of business. But Bif could get real news over his computer, which he had
disguised to look like an old typewriter to prevent the SPA from nabbing
it. Bif was learning about some real bad riots going on in Cleveland and
Detroit. He even had some news about the trucks that were supposed to take
us away. Well, it turns out that some of the trucks were actually being
driven into large fenced-in areas where the cargo portions would be stacked
on top of each other and the cab would unhook and drive off for its next
load. As for jobs, only a small amount of those trucks would get driven
into Michigan where they would drop off people to work at some real
horrible slave labor jobs. Bif said he learned that the population of Ohio
was considered to be `surplus' and that only those people who had skills
were given real jobs. Of course, this was causing a lot of violence. And
strange uniforms. It turns out that some of the European police who were
being sent here to quell some of the riots were wearing a uniform adapted
from a three-piece pin-striped suit, right down to a fake white boutonniere
in the lapel. Of course, all us town folk had been forbidden to travel out
of town, and this bought us time. They were working in a line running down
the state, with our town having only three weeks `til Judgement Day. Bif's
contacts in Cleveland had given him all sorts of technical material to go
on, and he was sure that we could get most of the town to escape into
Kentucky, which still had an intact government, if we had a well timed
plan."
"And the timing couldn't have been better."
"The three week deadline actually placed us on the date right after
Halloween which was going to have a new moon! Bif had said that this
advantage was important, and started describing how we were going to wear
camouflage under our Halloween outfits and use the annual party as a
diversion. The outfits were also going to help us move people out of town
through a relay system. That is, one youngster would come up to our door
wearing an outfit and hand it off to someone in the basement, who would
take his place and leave the house with candy. He would then give some
candy to the guard watching the end of the street with his infrared
camcorder. The kid would then duck around back and put on another costume,
one matching the next trick or treater coming up to our house. In this way
we could cycle more kids into our house where we would have a leaf fort
coming out into the woods out back. A lot of details to work out at the
time. The key part of the plan was to pretend that we were happy townsfolk
who were ignorant of our fate and happy to spend one last Halloween with
friends and family. We even invited the head of the new real estate holding
company to the costume party! Bif had also developed something called an
EMP bomb which was a stick of dynamite wired into a large coil so that when
the bomb went off, a powerful radio wave would shoot out and fry out the
computers and handi-talkies our guests were using. Bif and his assistants
had maps that showed where everything was located, and which wires had to
be snipped and which radios had to be fried in order to throw them off. We
decided that the Bell Tower going off at Midnight would be the signal for
our first attack, and I was placed in charge of tracking down the chief
security for the bad guys and knocking them out after the electrical grid
into town was severed. As you now know, when we actually did go through
with our Plan, things really got out of hand."
Disconnect Notice
Possible Security Breach
Shutdown until further notice
___________________________________________________________________________
Eric Miller is a graduate student at Michigan State University where he
studies the use of Computer Aided Design (CAD) in architectural and product
design. Other academic interests include Artificial Life, Virtual Reality,
and Cyberspace culture. Recreational interests include mountain biking and
cross-country skiing in Michigan's beautiful forests, painting, and
composing electronic music as well as writing fiction. "Microchips Never
Rust" will be continued next issue.
millere@student.msu.edu
___________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________
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Thank you, thank you very much.
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____________________________________________________
January 1995 ISSN 1053-8496 Volume VII Issue 1
____________________________________________________
C O N T E N T S
Looking Ahead...................Daniel K. Appelquist
Moonifest Destiny.......................Peter Gelman
Editor/Technical Director....Daniel K. Appelquist
Artwork............................John Zimmerman
Editorial Assistance..................Jason Snell
____________________________________________________
subscription and back issue information at end of issue
___________________________________________________________________________
Looking Ahead
Daniel K. Appelquist
___________________________________________________________________________
Happy 1995 everybody! Welcome to this special issue of Quanta! This
issue, instead of the regular sampling of serials and short fiction, we
have one very interesting work for you: Moonifest Destiny. It concerns
the invasion of the Moon by the Earth in the 1840's, by hot air
balloon.
First, a brief note about me. For some time now, I've been looking into
breaking into electronic publishing as a profession, and it looks like
I've finally managed to do it. Starting this month (January 20th), I
have begun working for an electronic publishing company called Fourth
Mesa (based in Baltimore.) We'll be working with the publishers of
scientific, technical and medical journals and information to get them
up on the Web.
In the past year, and in the past six months in particular, we've seen
the entire landscape of electronic publishing change radically. For
one, the World Wide Web has grown up and is starting to really change
the face of the Internet. During the past six months, I've been working
on the Quanta Web server, and I'm glad to say that it's pretty spiffy.
You can now access all Quanta stories and articles by issue or by
author. A note to Quanta authors: if you want me to link your name in
the author list to your home page, please send me mail about it. The
Quanta Web server may be found at the address listed on the contents
page of this issue.
And now, from the author, a little historical context for the story:
This work concerns the first days of the Mexican-American War,
except in this story, Mexico is the Moon, and it takes balloons
to get there. I have sought to express the ideology of the
"Young American" movement of the 1840s using the unusual model
of the solar system of Tycho Brahe. In Brahe's system, all of
the outer planets of the solar system - Mars, Jupiter, Saturn -
orbit the Sun, but all the inner planets - Venus, Mercury, and
our Moon - orbit the Earth, as does the Sun itself. I see this
model as an unusual attempt to appease the contradictory
ideologies of science and religion of Brahe's era. Similarly,
I see the hyperbolics of Manifest Destiny a product of the
contradictions of democracy and slavery.
During the war, there was mch proud democratic sneering at European
monarchies and her class slaves, but a bizarre blindness toward
the chattel slavery in the USA. This contradiction skews the
universe of latter-day Jacksonian Democracy, which repeatedly
calls to the American Revolutionary Heritage, expressed not as
a revolution within, not emancipation and civil war, but as
pyrotechnics of patriotism, as a mob demand to push the
uncertain national borders onward into well-defined foreign
land. This Napoleonic styled imperialism was an attempt to
resolve the intolerable national contradiction through
expansion, but only served to make revolution-within
inevitable.
So, with that in mind, allow me to present Peter Gelman's "Moonifest
Destiny."
___________________________________________________________________________
Moonifest Destiny
The Rough & Ready Balloon Invasion of the Lunar Peninsula of Texas
by Peter Gelman
___________________________________________________________________________
Chapter 1:The Steam-Balloon Stoker's Song
The army astronomers consulted their telescopes and timepieces and
fired a signal-cannon; one after another, the earth let loose a
broadside of balloons. Ash from our boilers rained down on the cheering
crowds below. A great Gulf gust rippled the silken bags above us and
made a sloppy zigzag of our pretty line-ahead formation. Our paddle
wheels fluttered madly, and slowly pushed us in a ragged arc, pointed
upwards, where the crescent of the Moon awaited our invasion.
Pretty soon New Orleans receded to just a yellow-fever blotch on the
mottled green of Louisiana, and above, the Gulf shown like a mirror. In
fact I was too preoccupied to enjoy the panorama. I was hanging my head
out the rusty porthole and spitting out the ballast of my retrograde
digestion. I worried that I had the Fever, but I didn't, unless you
called it Gin Fever. The iron gondola stunk like the devil. We of the
7th Infantry "Cotton Balers" were so crowded in, true to our namesake,
that some of our foreign-borns said that by comparison, it made
steerage-class to the New World seem like a Tammany boss's Flying
Cabriolet. Because of the parsimoniousness of Congress, Secretary Marcy
couldn't give General Taylor half the balloons he had promised. So,
overloaded, underpowered, our ship's wobbly- wabbly trim swung her
gondola like a bell clapper. The gyre of our revolving wheels pressed
down against the Moonward-inclined rudders, so our upward progress was
slow. The two Ericsson-Screw propelled steam balloons had a better time
of it. Our ship, the Celestial City, wasn't designed for this kind of
transit. The C. C., or Sea-Saw as we called her, was so ungainly,
wallowing into sudden gales and gusts, our five-layered hammocks banged
one another and flopped over. Once we rose up high enough, and were
obliged to shut the portholes, smoke and fumes from the funnels and
'scape pipes below kept creeping through the old joints, setting a
hundred men to coughing and cursing.
Before even a day up-and-over New Orleans, a couple men started
spitting black bile. That meant the Fever. Almost every day of that
long transit, another couple men started spitting their black out the
porthole. Three days of air-steaming, and we formed ranks. The bugles
groaned, the drums thumped and rattled, and we dropped our first corpse
overboard, sliding out of a flag. A week off the coal tethers, and we
ceased to bother with such ceremony for such a routine ballast drop.
My brother, Kelly, who sold six horses to buy himself a commission, led
my company. Every morning at five bells we fell out of our hammocks and
into our ranks, and marched, with pack and musket, around and around
the mess hall, the last man of our column a yard behind the first man.
Kelly said it was to keep us out of idleness. I argued, "What did god
give us a deck of cards and 7 dollars a month for?"
Nights were peaceful and sweet, sometimes. A lone hurricane lantern lit
up the regimental colors and the giant stars and stripes fluttering
beside the silk stitching, CELESTIAL CITY. The stars got bigger and
brighter. The enormous Moon made the striped fabric glow. And the wind
sung sweetly in the wheel paddles.
A Company K, 2nd Dragoon mechanic filled in as the ship's Petty
Engineer, in order to save War Department notes. He was a skinny,
consumptive foreign-born, a spleeny Nay-Sayer of a fellow, named John
W. Klager, but we came to call him "Hernani". One day I was reading a
funny Loco-Foco editorial in an old New York Evening Post to my
long-necked, big-eared friend, name of Bourdett, (called, for obvious
reasons, Six-Fingers), and when I read-
Secretary Marcy has got it wrong. The spoils don't go to the victor; on
the contrary. The victor goes to the spoils - just like rats to
garbage. Sometimes you have to burn the barn to kill the rats. The rats
are the no good Hunkers. And the barn, my friends, is the Democratic
Party.
- this fellow came over and applauded. You see, he was a cross between
a Barnburner and a Loco-Foco, I mean, a Liberty Party fellow; in other
words, that strange stripe of biped, a Foe-to-Texas. Appropriately,
keeping the boiler fires hot was his main duty. Turns out this fellow
had a liking for the practice of versifying. Accordingly, he had some
strange things to say. He said the telegraph would change the way we
speak. He said Napoleon was no hero. He said poets were our unknown
true legislators.
"Not the Freemasons?" I asked.
"No, poets!"
"That accounts for the tariff," said Six-Fingers.
"How's that?" asked Hernani, scratching his ear with a wrench.
"Tax rhymes with hacks."
"Heck, Hernani," I complained, "Those true congressmen are sleeping on
the job, I figure. I thought we got to fight Injuns for glory and all
that. No one told me I'd have to ride a sea-saw to the Moon." But it
was account of that I was cooped up and bored and so spent my liberties
with Corporal Hernani Klager. He was lonely and said I was a good
fellow.
Though he was starting to go bald, Hernani wore his hair long and wild.
He also liked to wear a red ribbon on his uniform. I asked him why his
sweetheart gave him a red ribbon instead of a green one for the green
laurel. Hernani said sadly, "My sweetheart died of Fever. Since then, I
don't wish for happiness. That's why I joined the Army. But this
ribbon..."
Brightening with memory, he explained that back sixteen years ago he'd
worn a red waistcoat at the opening of the Hernani. The ribbon was the
surviving fragment of the waistcoat.
"What's a Hernani?" I wondered.
"My friend, The 'Ernani was the declaration of independence for my
generation, and Hugo he was our Jefferson! Tell me, who is the
Jefferson of your generation?"
I spoke without hesitation:"James Polk."
Six-Fingers shook his head. "Brigham Young."
Hernani looked disappointed and changed the subject back to Hernani.
This Hernani fellow was some kind of bandit and ladies' beau who for
some reason gives some old geezer a trumpet. Whenever the old geezer
tooted on that horn, poor Hernani had to die. Seems that Hernani owed
him a pretty big favor, because he, the old geezer, (and the king too,
for some reason, who in my opinion was the real troublemaker) all loved
one lady, and consequently all wanted to pepper each other's hide with
buckshot. Just when Hernani finally gets the belle into his arms, the
old geezer blows the horn. Guess what happens next? Well, after the
horn gets tooted, Hernani, the lady, and the old geezer all commit
suicide.
That's some kind of trumpet, sure. Must have been worse than hearing
reveille on a bugle, I reckon. I don't know much about blowing horns. I
used to beat on a pot and pan come election day, though. But in a way
it was the toot of a locomotive steam-whistle that got me to dreaming
about glory. So I figured the story wasn't entirely loco-foco, judged
loosely.
Corporal Hernani Klager wrote up some pretty intolerable poetry
himself. He taught it to the boiler's firemen, mostly Negroes, and made
them sing it. They didn't understand the words I bet, but they didn't
have a choice, neither, no more than the boiler did when asked to boil
by Marster Fire. Sometimes I'd hear them sing to the rhythm of the
ponderous piston:
Boiler, wrench that vapor, ho! turn that wheel! drive the sledge!
We're miners of the crepuscule:Clouds receive thy wedge!
Winged-locomotive riders, feed that ugly fire -
Stoke a stack of coal! We rise up one foot higher!
We must not stop! We're slaves to steam! Dare we of soot forswear the
air?
Oh no! Not us! We're cursed by Cain, with G inverse D-square.
It was strange to think that just a few months ago, the farm was my
world, taking care of Ma was my duty, and the glory of fighting savages
was my dream. After two months in Camp Greenhorn, our steamer transport
left Baltimore and arrived in Saint Augustine, where, to my surprise,
we just took on coal and kept on going. It turns out that once the U.
S. Army figured out a way to capture Chief Osceola - they invited him
to a Peace Pow-Wow, he came out of the alligator swamps, and then they
grabbed him, easy - the Seminoles' gumption for fighting (and they
didn't have cannon) slowly gave out. So, our steamer kept going south,
around the peninsula, all the way to New Orleans. Then all of us seven
thousand Dough-Boys who made up the little Regular Army marched down
Canal Street to an open field, where, tethered to three dozen masts,
the colossal steam balloons were taking on coal, enough to carry us all
the way up to the Peninsula of Texas.
_____________________
Chapter 2. Provocation By A Fool
"THE MOON OR DEATH!" the mobs shouted in New Orleans. Proudly we
marched to huzzahs of "ALL THE MOON!" down Canal Street, and up the
balloon ramps. "Home by Christmas!" we promised each other, seasick in
the swinging gondolas. "I never been so bored..." we complained, month
after month, sweaty and sick in the neat tent rows of Anaxagoras
Crater. "Dang it, am I thirsty!" we complained on the hot trek
southward through forsaken mesquite-and-cactus Lunar desolation.
Bivouacked on the Mare Frigoris, every day we cursed our missing
pickets:"Gall durn but another Mick done swum the river!"
I tried to remember the thrill of freedom I felt on the long walk to
the base on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. It was only a few months
previous, but I couldn't get that thrill back. In Camp Greenhorn I
drilled and marched and marched and drilled and, in fact, learned more
than I wanted to know about killing. There was a scandal we had to keep
quiet about when one feller from my company died. But I learned how to
stab scarecrows and march Regular and clean my buttons. But now,
looking raggedly-patched as a scarecrow, I learnt the true duty of an
Angry-Saxon army - to wield shovel angrily. So we Regulars assaulted
the dirt.
I was thinking about old Hernani. It had been a few weeks since I had
last seen him. That was back at Anaxagoras Crater, or "Annex Agonies"
as we called it. The night before we got set to march south, I dreamed
of my old rope swing. There I was swinging away over the crick, free as
a buccaneer, when the rope stopped swinging properly. It was kind of
shaky. I felt a hand shaking me. The owner of the hand coughed. It was
Six-Fingers.
"What do you want?" I demanded.
"Shh - " he told me, looking guilty.
I sat up, wide-awake. "You got a girl somewheres?"
"Did you hear what happened to Hernani?"
I let out my breath. "What?"
He motioned with his head for me to follow him.
We snuck through the camp. To dodge a sentry, we tip-toed between our
officer's big tents to the dragoons' camp; if we got caught wandering
we were as like as not to get hog-tied and gagged for a day. Beside his
master's tent, Old Socrates lifted his head from his blanket; I gave
him a wink. He winked back and dropped his head.
Over by the south edge of the dragoon camp, behind the horses, I saw
somebody standing on a barrel. I guessed who it was...
"Heck Hernani," I laughed, when we got close, "what are you standing on
a barrel for in the middle of the night?"
Hernani looked at me. As he turned, I saw the sign hanging around his
neck:
HABITUAL DRUNK
"Oh," I said, with a friendly chuckle. "Shoot, where'd you find enough
firewater to get drunk on? You should have shared it with me!" Hernani
didn't answer, so I asked Six-Fingers, "How long does he have to stand
like that?"
Six-Fingers said, "All night. If he falls off, he gets the 'H. D.'
brand with a hot iron right on his cheek."
"Branded! Like a common criminal!" I said angrily. "How's he going to
sleep, standing on a barrel like the Colossus of Rhodes?"
"Looks like he's sort of sleeping standing up, like a horse."
He was pretty stiff up there. "Hm! Where's the guard?"
"No guard. Machine." Six-Fingers pointed to the side of the barrel,
where it read:
Lt. Fitzroy's
Patented Sobriety Machine
"I heard about it," Six-Fingers explained, "It's got a bell inside, and
a weight on one side, so if Hernani gets off, the barrel tips over and
the bell clangs. He's trying to sell his machine to the Army."
"Why do you have to stand there?" I asked Hernani.
Hernani still didn't answer.
"Yesterday he got in an argument with Lieutenant Fitzroy about the P.
of T.; Hernani said Texas ended at the Nueces River, and that the Moon
was the Moon's; Fitzroy said that any soldier who didn't think we must
fulfill the destiny given us by Providence was DRUNK!..."
"I see," I said. "Say, Hernani, you look mighty tired. Why don't you
come down and rest a spell? We'll look out for you."
"Jack, you get up on the barrel in case the sentries look this way,"
said Six-Fingers.
I shrugged, and took Hernani's hand and pulled him off the barrel;
Six-Fingers held it steady so that the bell wouldn't clang. Then I took
up his sign and jumped up on the barrel.
"Get him some water," I whispered.
"Right!"
Six-Fingers scurried off for a gourd.
Hernani sat with his back against his barrel. He dropped quickly
asleep.
I thought about what it'd be like to get branded "H. D." on my cheek.
What would the ladies think? I'd tell them it stood for, "Handsome
Devil". But they'd probably think it meant, "Hell's Danged."
After a while, Hernani said, "I am ashamed."
"Oh heck," I assured him, "there ain't nothing wrong with being drunk,
even a habitual drunk, - if you're a soldier, I mean."
"Swear to me you will keep a secret."
"I swear."
"No - you must swear by the blood of Thomas Jefferson!"
"What? Well, all right, if you say so... I swear by poor Tom
Jefferson's blood...What's going on, Hernani? You got a girl
somewheres?"
"I cannot fight these Moon people."
"Why not? You sick? I won't tell."
"I am a Catholic."
"So?"
He looked up at me and said, "Jack, these Moon people are Catholics."
"So? I hear they're kind of Catholic savages."
"Protestants are savages. I am not Protestant. I am Catholic, you
fool!"
"So?"
"Shh! So nothing. You are a good fellow. You think about it, eh?"
I took that to mean that he wanted me to keep my mouth shut about him
being one of them Catholics. Six-Fingers came back with some water. As
Hernani drank, Six-Fingers and I took the bell out of the barrel and
buried it in the dirt. Hernani asked if I wouldn't mind standing on the
barrel for a half-hour or so, in case the sentries looked this way; he
was just going for a walk to loosen his bones and wanted to be alone.
If he wasn't back in a half-hour, we agreed to go back to our bedrolls
and he'd get back to the barrel by-and-by. He shook my hand and said he
was most grateful to me. A half-hour came and went without him.
The next evening I was surprised to hear that Hernani deserted. I
figured he wanted to be a real Hernani himself. I hoped he'd forget the
horn part.
In "Annex Agonies", a few weeks previous, I'd pitied the eight hundred
farm boys skin-and-bone feverish, and left behind our glorious march.
But now! - after that glorious march along the Timaeus Range, down to
where Timmy's Promontory stretched far into the Mare Frigoris, or "Cold
Sea" - now I envied them. I worked like a mule. I chopped dirt and sand
while Old Glory snapped on top our earthworks. All them pretty little
lunaritas, staring at us from the plaza of Plato, just across the Cold
Sea, made me sweat worse of all. I longed to unbraid their long, dark
hair, but my fingers were callused and dirty from my shovel, which
helped heap up the walls of a fort, the cannon of which aimed straight
at them. And had I not lifted up my hand and sworn an oath to my
Constitution and my president? So here I was. (Besides, I had my eye on
one of our camp girls, Sarah - same as five hundred other men.) "Say,
Kelly," I asked, leaning on my shovel, "just why do the Army of
Observation need a fort to do its observatin'? I figure we can do it
easy from an observation balloon."
"We need to lend argument to the border as determined by Mr. Polk and
the cartographers of the Democratic Party," speechified Kelly, taking
the words from a penny-press editorial.
"To heck with Slow-Polk," said me. "Kelly, lend a hand with this here -
this here - " (I was struggling - ) " - this boulder..." Kelly was a
little too slow to help me, I thought. "Come on, there, Lieutenant!
Why, you think you're a Beau Bremmer with that fifteen cents of gold
braid!"
Kelly gave me a kick in the pants first, then helped me carry the rock
to a wheelbarrow. Then he pulled out his Walter Scott, and studied the
science of glory, his lips moving.
I was sunburnt, the sweat stinging my eyes, with scratches on my arms
that might any minute swell up proud with gangrene. Yes, and I was half
mad from drinking briny spring water under that relentless Baptist hell
fire heat. The coldness of the Cold Sea left much to be desired. I
licked my lips until they bled. Soon my tongue was parched like a hunk
of leather left out in the sun. My toe-blisters grew blisters of their
own that festered, so I couldn't out run that cloud of flies buzzing
lovingly around my head. My back ached from shoveling, and I felt so
tired I thought I would drop and add my corpse to the redoubt wall. It
was hard to sleep with scorpions, snakes, banditos, lunaritas, and
Sarahs crawling all over my dreams at night. However, I took solace in
the fact that it was all for glory, which was, I guessed, about to
begin at any moment. We heard a lot about Valley Forge from the
officers.
Everything on the Moon - I mean, the Peninsula of Texas - bit,
poisoned, and cut. Even the plants looked like rocks and scorpions -
strange, bloated nettles. I longed for the soft pines and sweet-
smelling dogwood of Maryland. Here on the P. of T., cactus barbs and
mesquite thorns tore at my trousers below the knee. Let me tell you,
cactus and mesquite are poor usurpers to the cool brethren of Pine.
Show me a pine cone pillow, and a bed of sweet brown needles, and I
will give you sweet dreams and a clear conscience.
We were already a ragged, sorry lot of Regulars, true summer heirs of
the winter Valley Forge, having fallen into the forge-fire, I suppose.
My blue sleeve split all along the seam - and that little rent was a
sorry testament to the patriotism of the contractors. No, neighbor, I
did not doubt the campaign, which I was certain would prove, before
Christmas, a glorious one.
No, I blamed those perfidious New England manufacturers - every one of
them a Hartford Conventioneer - who'd rather secede the Glorious Union
than lose an ill-gotten profit with Martian mooners - I mean the John
Bulls of Great Deimos.
So I durned the Yankees, danged the Tammany Hall barons, I cursed the
Tory-lovers and kicked the next boulder right where it resembled
Kelly's chin. I strangled the Wall Street swanks, squatting down and
getting ahold of the big rock. I gritted my teeth at the Whigs and
their tiresome nagging, as I lifted the boulder, and then dropped it
down on top the Abolitionist wheelbarrow. "Let abolitionists work the
plantations, then," I thought. "We soldiers are practically slaves,
anyway."
Then I was hungry. It was Regular fare again:biscuit, beans, and grits.
I nourished my labor with some bovine-flavored water, and for lunch
fried a crawdad from the nation of mud. We were all tired from this
work. "If I wanted to do this rail-road work," complained Six- Fingers,
" - I'd wear my hair in a queue, or play bagpipes."
He was in a spleeny wicked humor much of the time, being the only
Mormon around. His sleeve had a red "S" on it, showing that he was
special, an aristocrat - a sharpshooter, the best shot among us Cotton
Balers. But what a burden, being an aristocrat - He had to carry a
long, skinny rifle that was even heavier than the rest of us myopics'
noisemakers & bayonet-holders - I won't call 'em muskets. They were
Franklin sparklers, and that's about all. Old Zach put this trust in
the bayonet electric charge, not the volley.
"Yeah?" I said. "Well I may be Loco, but glory's my motive."
"Back to work, Dough-Boys!" screamed Sergeant Mallory, who hated me
because I hated him. It was he who made me a soldier, back at Camp
Greenhorn.
Walking back to the shovels, I idly reached in my pocket and pulled out
a note. It hadn't been there when I gave them to Sarah to fix and
patch. I hoped the worst.
DEER JACK I JES WANTID TO SAY YU AR KEWTER THIN A SPOTID PUPEE DO YU
LYK ME SARAH.
_____________________
Chapter 3. The Old Tailor & the Young Seamstress
I was a-limping back to camp one evening when I saw a fat Old Timer
sewing away at his dirty trousers, sitting in all his spindly- legged
bandy-boned knobby-kneed glory, there, in his dusty longjohns, an
upsy-daisy bucket for a stool. "Say, you a tailor?" I asked, and he
nodded in curious way, sort of surprised.
"Lookee here, pops, I'll give you these two silver wheels embossed with
excellent profiles of our friend the noble savage if you just sew up my
shirt and these buttons I bought from that old Lunar peddler - they're
in the left pocket."
The Old Timer looked up at me, merry in his eye. "All rightee, son," he
said. "Lay 'er down."
So I did, and walked away bare-chested in my own longjohns, the camp
uniform of us Regulars, penny-press engravings to the contrary. I was
picking the twenty-two legged mites from my pits and slapping flies,
singing for foolish joy,"Green grows the laurel, all sparklin' with dew
- I'm so lonely my darlin' since partin' with you-oo - " when
wild-faced Kelly dropped like balloon ballast down in my path, and
thumped me smack in the nose.
"What in heck - ?" I cried, holding a handful of nose blood.
"I'll give you heck, Jack!" Kelly glared crazily at me, his eyes big as
boot buckles. "You tryin' to ruinize my military career?" he shouted,
hopping mad, flailing the air with his saber. (He had it buckled over
his longjohns.) "Why don't you ask Sarah next time, you fool!"
So that was how I overcame my shyness, and took my trousers and such to
Sarah, who took a liking to me, and slipped that little love- note in
my pocket.
The first time I laid eyes on Sarah, it was just beyond all the neat
lined rows of tents at Annex Agonies. I was taking a salt-water bath
behind Mary Jane's Hospitality Shack in a wooden tub set under a
scrappy Martian palm, (planted back when the Moon was a Martian
dominion), when I heard such a buzzing howl, I had to stand up and peek
around the shack. There was a jumble of Dough-Boys, Rangers, tarts, and
one or two of the less stuck-up camp wives, all crouched and clutching
one another with a mighty morbid glee. The center of attention was this
tall cactus queen, with her long black hair all wild, who was in a
barefoot crouch like a wrestler, hands up like claws. Her mean black
eyes blazed bolts down at a big ugly rattler. The snake's knobby tail
was flickering fast snick-snick-snick like a little demon snare drum.
The arm and fist of the snake lifted up out of its broad, muscular
coils, weaving back and forth, tongue snapping in and out in little
lightnings. The cactus queen bobbed and weaved back and forth same as
the snake. There was a slight snarl to her lip, as if to say, "Snake,
you are my soup!" Then that snarl rose up in a wild grin that made her
mean black eyes twinkle. All of a sudden she and the snake lunged
together - the knot of mammal and reptile slipped free - and the cactus
queen stood up straight and tall, holding up her fist. The little mobs
shouted, slapping foreheads and fannies. The snake head protruded from
her fingers, trying to snap. The coils seethed, wrapped tight around
her wrist. The mob paid up:a pile of coins and script lay at the
victor's feet. "Now I got up a little charity collection to buy that
feller some breeches," she called, toeing the money. Before I realized
she was talking about me, she pointed that snake my way:"Don't you
think I didn't see you peeking at me buck- naked from your bath tub
behind them bushes!" I blushed, but all the same, gave her a wink.
Then, to my surprise, she winked too. She uncoiled the snake from her
arm, and bull-whipped it against the dirt to kill it. Then, a minute
later, as I was finishing up my bath, all of a sudden this snake comes
flying over the shack, out of the sky, and splashes down in the water
with me. My naked flight across camp caused no end of mirth.
So, recalling this, pinching my bloody nostrils, I was trying to make
up my mind to jump under Kelly's swords and clobber him, if I could,
but I recalled we weren't on our farm on the Chesapeake any more. He
was an officer, now, his grade purchased fair and square, and I did not
relish the thought of my back being tickled by the affection of
Sergeant Mallory's nine-tailed cat. Kelly had already made plain his
willingness to flaunt his fifteen cents worth of gold braid.
"Do you know, Dough-Boy," Kelly pronounced with exaggerated clarity,
"just who that was you asked to - sew your buttons!"
"Who? That fat old slob? Who is he, Professor Morse? Napoleon II? What
do I care who that fat old barn-burning son of a loco-foco is?"
"That, mind you - " whispered Kelly, stopping to grind his teeth on the
grist-wheel of his frustration. He threw my shirt at me. " - That was
General Taylor! (Oh, what are you goin' to do next! You should have
stayed home with Ma!)" He clasped his hand over his face.
I didn't believe him. "Where's my two bits?"
_____________________
Chapter 4. Glory; or, Walter Scott Reported Missing From Fort Texas
Imagine how embarrassed I was when I recognized my old tailor by his
horse, Old Whitey. My tailor sat in Old Whitey's saddle, slovenly but
easily, a broad white slouch hat keeping away the flies, Old Whitey's
long tail a-twitching. As he rode by, heading east to Fort Polk, I saw
the stars on his unbuttoned Regular blues. We cheered the general, and
I cheered him louder than all. We loved his "Rough and Ready" ways.
Beside Old Zach, neat and prim, rode Colonel Bliss, his aid, whom we
called "Perfect" Bliss, because such a man was he, a precise
intelligence without fault, that dust actually morally refused to
settle on him. Hip Hip Hurrah! - 'Rah! 'Rah! 'Rah! Taylor and Bliss
were a funny pair. They rode off east, leaving us a cloud of dust and
not much else.
Whilest so busily engaged in raising the sand and dust fortifications
of Fort Slow-Polk, as we called it, or Fort Texas, as the officers
called it, way out on Timmy's Promontory, General Lunarista's horsemen
circled over yonder east, crossed the Cold Sea, and entered Texas. In
so doing, them pesky Lunars cut off our supply road to the balloon
flotilla moored at the masts of Archytas Crater, or Archie's Hole as we
clept it. Archie's Hole lay to our south-east, conveniently located at
the mouth of the narrows of Mare Frigoris. Taylor'd sent a few hundred
men there with some cannon to put the Crater of Plato under blockade.
Them pesky Lunars usually steamed trade - and now war supplies - from
the fortified crater of Fracastorius on the Sea of Nectar through the
little Sea of Plenty, north across the Sea of Tranquillity, north
through the Sea of Serenity, through the Sleepy Lake to the Cold Sea.
This may seem a long way, but it was a far shorter supply line than
ours, steaming all the way up across the Gulf between Earth and Moon!
On the one hand, now, both our balloons and their steamboats had to
pass through our cannons at Archie's Hole. (The big steam balloons had
to tether inside a crater on account of needing shelter from the Lunar
wind, lest they be dashed against the rocks. Archie's Hole was our
second balloon base, after Annex Agonies. It was the closest Texan
crater to Fort Polk, so that fort protected it while it blockaded
Plato's Crater. Closest to us at Fort Slow-Polk was old Timaeus Crater,
whose walls were all crumbled down, except for Timmy's Promontory). On
the other hand, Lunar horseman patrolled around the empty craters - Old
Bond & the Barrows - on the road between Fort Slow-Polk and our supply
balloons at Archie's Hole, which was only fortified along one side,
with a single ditch cut in front of it, with six cannon, and a name -
Fort Polk. It was no Fort McHenry.
General Lunarista and his Army of the Sea of Tranquility had marched up
to the Crater of Plato and replaced the pretty faces of the lunaritas
with the bores of Napoleonic cannon. A whole line of 'em behind a stone
wall called Fort Parades faced our Fort Slow- Polk. Thousands and
thousands of moonmen-in-arms marched on the other side of the Cold Sea
inlet.
So, to break the blockade Lunarista's cavalry had put on our fort, and
maintain the blockade on his fort, Old Rough and Ready and Perfect
Bliss rode off side by side, back to the balloons - although these
knights did not ride off by themselves, neither. They took with them
the long column of the 3rd Infantry, and also the 4th, too, each five
hundred farmboys with shouldered telegraph-firelocks marching off into
the rising dust. And, behind the Fourth marched the 5th, a column five
men wide, one hundred long, followed by the 8th's column. By this time
we of the 7th "Cotton Balers" had throats too dry with boot-dust to
cheer any more. After the 8th, all of Ringgold's Flying Cannon creaked
and wobbled by, their long wings folded on their rusty hinges, balloon
silk folded away, followed by all the little Volta's Pile caissons for
the electric bayonets, followed by several hundred mess wagons - mostly
empty. We Cotton Balers remained, with two weeks' rations and a couple
dozen camp-wives, including one certain cactus queen, seamstress, and
snake-catcher.
Sarah kidded the men who got all quiet watching all our pals leave us
alone to face the Army of the Sea of Tranquillity. She called to Major
Brown, our commander, "Major! How 'bout you lend me a horse and a saber
for about an hour or so - I figure I'd go 'cross over and whup them
pesky Trankies all by myself!"
"No, Sarah," said the Major, smiling a little. "We need you right here,
so the men don't feel too lonesome."
"Taylor took all the horses anyhow, Sarah," added Six-Fingers. "You
just got to stay with us." (I didn't figure it yet, but that fellow had
taken a liking to Sarah same as everybody. All his wives were far away,
so he felt lonesome same as the rest of us.)
Of course, across the Mare Frigoris there were ten Mooner musketeers
for every one of us, so we didn't feel to lonesome.
We remained to whack the dying mules and drag up another pile of dust
to make the last wall of our six-sided fort, while skinny Lunar dogs
sniffed everything. One dog ate my chess set and spat it up again, a
checkers set.
Here we remained, the lonesome lucky 7th Infantry, and Company E of the
2nd Artillery, five hundred soldiers of Democracy and Progress, strong
and proud to be the guardians at the back door of American Destiny,
noble warriors and mule-whackers, tireless shovelers, blasphemers, and
lunarita-ogglers, fistfighting for we were low on grog, and chewing our
beef-flavored salt with old boot hardtack, and washing our grogless
patriotic tongues with canteens full of crumbs and mud. The dire
situation didn't bother me; neither did the rough-and-unready
conditions, because, on the one hand, I felt sure that the much
promised glory would shine warm and sweet at any moment; and on the
other hand, Sarah was smitten with me and I was sure smitten with
Sarah. The thoughts thrilled me; and sometimes when I was thinking
about Sarah I'd get that warm and sweet feeling; and sometimes when I
was wondering about this phenomena called glory I'd get all out of
breathe and bug-eyed.
'Rah for Sarah! 'Rah for glory! I lifted my shovel with pride.
My only complaint was that Lieutenant Borginnis - so called - wouldn't
let me fish the Cold Sea. However, as the sky cooled from white to red
to purple, and I saw the thousands and thousands of lights from Lunar
camp fires spotting the plain, this Borginnis belabored of his own
volition to complete Wall 6 under the darkling sky of the thirty-first
of April, eighteen hundred and forty-six.
_____________________
Chapter 5. Dough-Boy and Cactus Queen
Sarah was like an Actress or Queen, she was so famous among us and so
loved. Scarecrows were always lining up for her to sew their shirts and
wash their socks, just so that they could sit and talk with her awhile.
She was wild and I don't know what she saw in me, a shy and sinful
farmboy. Except that she was shy underneath the wild and I think the
shy is what took to me. After I found that note in my pocket that
asked, "DO YU LYK ME?", I couldn't sleep regular, I had lightning in my
bones, I saw in the sheen of western stars her heavenly swoop of hair.
The next time I saw her was at the three-wheeled chuck wagon, where she
was ladling out some stew. "Well, Sarah," I said with downcast eyes,
"looks to me like we'd better go for a walk..."
"All right," she smiled, clinking the spoon down and wiping her hands
on Private Tristani-Firouzi's apron. Although there were soldiers all
around, and trouble clouding our tomorrows, everything seemed so quiet
and peaceful just then. Pretty soon we were slowly ambling between the
pickets and the camp fires.
"Do you like me, Jack?" she asked, her black eyes shining beneath her
veil of locks.
"I'm smitten with you, Sarah," I grinned all foolish. "Powerfully
smitten. My oh my you are pretty, you are! I never seen nothing like
you. You're so sweet and symmetrical, an' yet so strong, proud, and
chipper - you are a regular down-to-earth angel. You are so much more
alive and kicking then those dainty dolls back in Baltimore - "
" - I ain't never been to no city, Jack. I don't know how to dress like
no fancy lady, I can't hardly spell, I never seen no telegraph pole nor
silky tablecloth. I don't know them new dances, those fancy ballroom
dances, though I can jig, stomp, and polka as well as any woman from I
don't care where, even if she hails from Paris!" She flipped her hair
from her smoldering, hot-coal eyes. "I can skin a rabbit in the dark. I
can stitch up any old cut, be it from thorn, knife, or bear. I know
herbs an' flowers an' birdcalls an' Injun hand-signals. I know sixteen
different kinds of poker. I can shoot straight as a whistle, and ride -
swim, too - as good, long, an' hard as anyone. One time back at Camp
Annex Agonies I raced against Sam Walker, and won, too, though no one
saw it, and Sam won't admit it in a thousand years. I can make soap,
moonshine, an' love like no camp-wife you ever had, I swear!"
She took my hand in hers and tugged it hard, till I met her lips, so
sweet and sublime, like shimmering air after a thunderstorm.
"Sarah, you are something special. But I'm just a boy who was born in a
barn," I apologized. "I can swim the dog-paddle," I offered, and added,
after a moment's thought, "and I read a bunch of books!"
"Oh, Jack, I never met nobody who read a bunch of books."
"Really? Well, I even got six - no, seven - of 'em at home."
"Seven, really? A library! Why Jack Borginnis, you are a scholar! What
was the name of one of 'em? What was the last one you read up?"
I was glad to tell her:"It was - Napoleon and His Generals."
"Oh, that sounds like a fine book!"
"Oh, Sarah, it is! I'd read it to you if I had it with me." Then all
the air started blibbering out of my balloon.
"What's the matter, Jack?"
"What good is being a scholar if all my books are so far away. I wanted
to take 'em, but they wouldn't let me - they got a tyrannical
weight-limit for Ballooners, you know. Now I wish I hadn't taken my
Andy Jackson medals." (I'd just gone and lost them to a wager with
Sergeant Weigart during the transit, anyhow.) " - Sarah, won't you get
tired of me, since not counting my library there's nothing special
about me - ?"
"Jack...I like you special," said Sarah in a hushed voice, right in my
ear. I shivered.
We rolled around awhile. Sarah's hair tickled my face. We rolled this
way and that. Sarah told me by and by that her mama was half Apache,
and she never knew her own papa. She was always lonesome inside, born
lonesome. She left her mama when she was ten, because she didn't get on
with her mama's new man, who was a mean drunk. When she was fourteen,
she became a camp-wife to her first soldier; now it was six years later
and was a permanent auxiliary to the Seven Infantry, a steady Cotton
Baler camp-wife, though the husbands came and went. This sort of
camp-marriage was a different kind of creature than a city-marriage,
but all in all when you balanced it out there was less fuss and more
fun.
Pretty soon we were talking about getting hitched, just like that, camp
style. The war was coming, we could feel it. We had to hurry up, I
felt, and she said. She said, "I got to shed my old husband like a
snake gots to shed her skin to grow." Then I thought about how I first
saw her, catching that snake, and about how much I respected her, and I
felt bad.
Then I confessed. "Sarah, I have to tell you, that if you are going to
marry me it is only fair you know I am - I mean, I was - an awful bad
sinner."
She shrugged like I said the dumbest fool thing. "I wasn't raised in no
convent meself, Jack."
"No," I said shamefully. "I'm a bad sinner..." I sure wanted to tell
her but I choked on my tongue, which was kind of twisting around like
an Ericsson Screw. So I just spat out my tongue and said, "I can't tell
you exactly, but... - There was an accident back in Camp Greenhorn.
There's blood on my hands. I am sorry." I waited for her to change her
tune.
"Don't be sorry to me," she said, and looked up at the Milky Way, and
the earth plowing into it like a big balloon-ram of war. "That's
between you and your creator." Then she retied the bows of her dress,
and took my arm. "I been in scraps meself. One time I had to cut my
ma's man's ear off - Another time, when I was about fourteen, I had to
lay my husband's hide full of rock salt before he'd go away and stay
away - " Her eyes got sorrowful and far away. "That's why I can't stay
married long," she warned.
This alarmed me. "What do you mean, Sarah?"
"Cause I'm barren."
I didn't say anything. Then I challenged, "How do you know?"
"I'm barren as a corn-cob witch. I know I am. It ain't even a question
no more. I'm a corn-cob witch. I can't make you a family, Jack, not
never. So I can't and just won't stay married. No one can make me,
neither. A camp marriage don't use a preacher, and without a preacher
it ain't fixed in the stars. I'll be your camp-wife awhile and then
later on I'll go away. I'd rather jest be everyone's pal then one
feller's forever-wife. Since I'm barren I've made the Cotton Balers my
family. You can call me a whore if you want to, won't be the first
time, and I don't care. Whore's don't got fancy-lady airs. They own up
to their sinnin' ways; sinnin' is natural so they's more honest.
Whore's earn their keep, too. I earn my keep as a seamstress and cook
so don't think I ain't proud and free like an eagle, and got claws,
too, for those who try to cut my feathers - I got a shiny new Colt
repeater, Sam Walker gave it to me - so you got your warnin', Jack.
What do you say? Do we hitch our teams to one wagon for a spell?"
"Well, Sarah... I don't quite understand all your wild notions... I
thought that once you fell in love, everything would turn out all
right..."
"Jack Borginnis, I love you so much right now. Is it enough?" She
stared at me awful serious and plain.
"I love you too, Sarah. I never loved any Chesapeake gal like you."
"That's 'cause thar ain't no gal like me nowheres!" she laughed,
twirling out her skirts joyfully. "All the boys tell me that!"
Her camp-husband was a fellow in the 2nd Artillery, a foreign-born
named George Dalwig, but he had come down with a bad case of
correctional bucking and gagging on account of having his hands in his
pockets and slouching. If you've never been "bucked" it only means to
get yourself tied up more or less like a dead buck deer, with your
hands tied over your knees and a stick shoved in over your arms and
under your legs, and sitting in that position for a day or two.
Although he didn't slouch any more, and didn't touch his fingers
anywhere near his raggedy pockets, he did limp when he marched now, and
some said he lost all his patriotism. Anyways Sarah had no trouble
divorcing him. She didn't even have to take her Colt out of her apron.
It was a simple ceremony in the Infirmary Tent involving a witness, a
bible and a bottle. McKnight, the orderly, went outside without
comment, because although he was a nice fellow, he was a reverend, and
felt obligated to disapprove. Sarah put her hand on the bible and said,
"George! I ain't your wife no more."
Then we passed the bottle; for I was the witness; then George was my
witness in my getting hitched.
Afterwards there was a good old foot-stomping bucket-thumping
fiddle-sawing hootenanny. Then I wrote it down in the regimental books,
because no women were allowed in the camp unless they were wives.
(Whores didn't count, being kind of invisible in plain sight, but they
all left with the rest of the army.) So with Sarah and Mrs.
Frederickson blushingly looking on, I wrote it in Lieutenant
Frederickson's register, slowly, carefully, using my best handwriting:
Ajax Borginnis, Private First Class
Sarah Borginnis, Wife
It sure looked fine.
I was mighty proud to be her husband. But although we linked up shy to
shy, out other sides kept yanking to break loose again - her wild side,
and my criminal side.
_____________________
Chapter 6. Fireflies
Since, during the months camped in the sixty mile valley of Annex
Agonies, we lost about a hundred men to desertions, it was hardly a
wonder to me that over the weeks camped on the Cold Sea, a few dozen
foreign-borns - mostly leprechauns from Phobos (the Green Moon that
suffered so under the tyranny of Great Deimos, who had knocked a big
crater in the northern end of the former), seen fit to swim the river
toward the hot-blooded hospitality of Moonish womanhood. (Several of
those deserters drowned and washed back to our side, and, in fact, two
culprits swimming south were shot by our sentries back in April:Henry
Lamb and Carl Gross.) It grieved me sorely. It also grieved me that the
lunaritas were now nowhere to be seen. They sure were cute, them funny
lunaritas, with their dark braids and their sweet round faces, so soft
and gentle, and quite kissable. Oh, but I was married now. Gone were
the days of spyglass-oggling them bathing in the Frigoris! Gone were
the most friendly exchange of bows and curtsies! Gone were their shy
smiles and long, dark braids! Then it was I started to realize exactly
how hard and how lonely was this juggernaut chariot called - marriage.
I stood sentinel on the rampart of Fort Slow-Polk, wondering where they
went to. Were they hiding in convents? Were they hiding in the
mountains? "Ah, Sarah dear," I told myself, "you have married a
sinner." Right next to me, our electromagnetics hung over the parapet,
all hooked up to the Galvanic caissons, poised and ready to manufacture
the most democratic, progressive ball-lightning to pound the church
plaza and promenade wall of Plato's Crater, once a lunarita favorite
constitutional, now the fortifications for the same cannons that lost
Waterloo. And I asked myself, am I really married? is there really
going to be a war? and if either question were true, why? Were we
justified in calling this Lunar crescent a mere peninsula of Texas? Was
I not a hypocrite, calling myself a husband without reforming my sinful
ways?
Kelly paused near melancholy-me. So stout and strong was he in his
shiny lieutenant's uniform, (not too shabby because he paid for it
himself.) And to melancholy-me he said, "Look at all those fireflies we
need to swat, Jack!" tapping his Ivanhoe against his palm.
A few lights glowed in Plato's Crater; but thousands upon thousands
glowed in the fields of dust of the Lunar beyond.
Major Jacob Brown stood on high bastion, scouting the enemy with his
spyglass, and, overhearing my brother, nodded sadly. He ambled two
steps toward us and stopped, murmuring softly, "Fireflies...Youth is
ever full of the bluster of Immortality; and for that I thank our
Maker. It is our hard lot to roll our Republican wagon through the
graveyards of kings, savages, and despots... For my generation, youth
seemed but an admixture of strife, hard life, and hope for future
recompense. But I am getting on now, (he smiled softly and ran his head
over his bald head), "I've been a soldier thirty years...thirty years!
Can it be so long since I left Massachusetts? Yes. I am almost an old
man, then, and I fear that Man's lot is Vanity...Vanity. You and your
generation, Lieutenant, shall learn that war is not a Walter Scott
affair; and I fear that knowledge will come all too quickly. ...To me,
our purpose here is to see to it that you and your children inherit the
full promise of the work begun by our Founding Fathers, with such
sacrifice..."
We stood in silence a moment. I felt solemn and resolved, come what
may. I saw my brother's shining eyes, and knew that he, too, was
strangely stirred. That sad, proud, sublime moment passed. Dust devils
corkscrewed out of the dust yard of the fort, and clawed at our
resolute faces, until we winced. Major Brown screwed his eyes tight
shut and with his fingers pinched his nostrils. When the dust devil
passed, he straightened, cautiously sniffed, and cheerfully
recommended, "We'd best get on with digging that bomb-proof."
That long, fateful night, a stranger arrived.
_____________________
Chapter 7. A Stranger Drops Out of a Dust Devil
The face of the Earth blurred in the dust storm. It blurred orange, it
smeared black. The States gibbered and gaped. It had a blue flame
inside of it. I imagined the giant sloshing of the ocean in the Earth's
core. I was alone with that jack o'lantern, hovering in the dark Gulf.
I scratched an X in the sand, and walked away from it ten paces. On my
return it was gone. Or I was lost. It wasn't the first time it had
happened on this watch.
"Lonely picketeer, where's your company?"
You may well ask. (I asked it of myself.)
"Alone on the Lunar P. of T. The sarge is only human, more or less.
Maybe he forgot me. But if I go back, he'd give me a drubbing, sure
enough. No thankee. It's a weird, pale white world, this Moon."
I saw murky ghosts in the wind. I turned my musket upside down, that
the dust might drip down the barrel. I traced a big, sharp X in the
sand with the bayonet, idly. What if I wandered too far from the fort?
Wouldn't some Moonman or Apache creep up and cut my throat? I idled,
uncertain, between boredom and fear. The wind ticked like a clock,
rattling stones and bones and such. As I idled, the wind eased my mark.
I looked around for the fort. Sometimes, when the whirling dust ebbed,
I caught a dull feel of its bulk. It was dark out, but the fort glowed
blacker. The wind creaked, <>
I turned round, saw nothing but swirls.
The swirls scratched my sight. I rubbed dust from my eyes. I heard a
creak of leather, maybe. My knees went rubbery. "Stop! and be
recognized!" I hailed.
I toggled the switch on the Pile, heavy on my back, turned up the
wooden knob of the annuciator box on my belt till the gas glowed foggy
in the little window painted 5,000 V. That meant it was ready to
discharge 5,000 of Volta's Patented Bolts. The bolts came from the pile
through the wire that went through the wooden butt and along the barrel
to the electric bayonet, which differed from a regular bayonet as being
a copper rod, not a knife. I was much obliged to put the long electric
bayonet between me and the grey swirlies.
A big round shadow moved in the dark.
Who was this lone balloonist, looming? A Lunar scout? Did Great Deimos
give them some old redcoat balloons, just to confound us? No -
American. Its manufacture was American, all right. A one-horse Flying
Gig, the quadrupeded-treadmill rolling pulley-wires to a lazy
Archimedean Screw. I felt the wind ebb a bit.
"Halt! Who goes there?"
A quick glance over my shoulder betrayed the shadowy weight of Wall
Number 4. ("Sarge! Sarge!" I hollered behind. "We got company!")
The lone rider pulled the boom, and the balloon jumped - gone.
("What's that?" called a voice from the fort.)
("Get your arse out here and find out then, Mister Curious," I thought,
taking a few steps backward.)
The big shadow reappeared, closer, growing - the gig wheels thumped the
ground, bouncing up again. <> the rider called. The
shadow disappeared again, and then, looming suddenly large on me - the
complicated little gig rolled hard on the ground, springs groaning,
spokes crackling, the wheels broke off as the rider jerked the mast
collar-pin out - the big silk balloon shot up ballestless and gone
forever in the murk of the Moon - The axles scrapped the dust - the
carriage bounced, slid, and toppled over. A wheel wobbled by me. The
mule stood up, braying, and clambered out of the snapped treadmill
traces. Oddly, I heard a big clock ticking in the busted gig-carriage.
With a creak of leather, wood, and springs, the rider stood up and
stepped out of it. He walked toward me, dustily, he clothes rippling in
the wind. He was bright-eyed, and stiff faced, leering benignly,
leaning close. There was something grotesque about him - his head was
too big. I heard that clock again, and a snake hissing somewhere,
unless it was the wind rattling over the dusty ground.
<>
I was going to ask if he was all right, but something made me level my
bayonet at him. "Stop right there, Mister. Halt! I said - I got a
bayonet full of lightning!"
("Borginnis! Who's there?" demanded the voice from the gate.)
"Who are you? Answer up - right quick," I told the stranger, keeping my
bayonet point between us.
The man with the face like a mask answered with a bow. <
- Tick! Prince-President Franklin Stove, at your service.>>
"Prince-President? What's that?" I demanded. I was suspicious. I didn't
like the sound of that. Sounded like a joke on Andy Jackson.
<
top of the hierarchy of the artificial aristocracy, that of...Tick! -
inventions - Tick! - machines - Tick! - engines, and the like...>>
I couldn't say all that to the Gate Officer. "Tell me who you are,
really. State your business! - If you're a spy...!"
<> said the stranger, his face still placidly benign in
a most suspicious and strange way.
<
your service. I have a deed from the War Department. Tick! - I am a
moral surgeon. Tick! - (Machines are machines). Tick! - Tick! - Tick! -
General Taylor send me along from Fort Polk to Fort Texas, and - Tick!
- and here we are. Tick! - (Like a dark and savage Ego, chained to this
dreaming beast, following the Cold Sea to its source.) Tick! - Tick! -
Tick! - Let me in, sir. I hunger.>>
The last he spoke to the sergeant of the gate, Mallory, hurrying with
three soldiers. "What manner of business do you have with this fort,
sir?" he demanded, squinting his little eyes out of his big red cheeks.
"Tick! - Fowl business."
"Foul business?" Mallory looked confused and alarmed, drawing back.
<> repeated the stranger. <
what this bunker has; - I mean coal bunker. Tick! Tick! Neither flesh
nor fare I refuse - Tick!-Tick! - Tick! - I eat all kinds of coal. Tick
- Got to serve my stomach, Yankee Doodle-Do, pleased to meet you,
Mister Moloch - Tick! - Wait a moment - Tick! - Just a moment - Tick! -
Tick! - Tick! - There. Sir, I've a letter of introduction from
Secretary Marcy.>>
"You do, do you?" smiled Mallory. "That's nice, ain't it? (Is he mad
then?)" he asked me - I shrugged.
The sergeant chewed his mustache and slapped the saber against his leg.
"Take his mule," he told his men. He took hold of the Prince-
President's arm, then quickly let go, looking shocked. Recovering
quickly, he said, "Come now, sir. You've too much moon-sun. The
lieutenant wants to talk to you inside. What's your name?" The men
hesitated before the odd fellow. "Go on!" the sergeant barked.
I told the sergeant, "He says he's Mr. Stove, a surgeon, Sarge."
"Tick - Prince-President Franklin Stove," the stranger bowed. "I am a
moral surgeon, - yes. I can eggs-tract sins of the flesh - Err-rr -
Yes. I am a Metal Man, - Tick! - yes. At your service," and as he bowed
again, I saw a little puff of greasy black smoke rise up out of his top
hat.
"A Metal Man?" repeated Sergeant Mallory, rubbing the hand that had
touched the stranger. "You say you're a Metal Man?" His eyes leaked
tears on account of the dust and the smoke.
"Aye, sir," said the stranger.
Who was he?
"Tick! - Aye, manufactured by the Brethren of Philadelphian Mechanics,
initially," he added, ticking thoughtfully. "Boston, New York... Tick!
- Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, New Orleans, and anon... Tick - ick! -
Tick! - ...Now Fort T-eggs - (Tick!) Now Fort T- eggs-eggs -
(Tick!)-Teggsas, bulwark of the Lunar P. of T."
The sergeant wiped his eyes. "One man and his mule, Lieutenant!" he
shouted angrily to the gate. ("A Metal Man...," he repeated to
himself.)
"Open the gate!"
_____________________
Chapter 8. Prince-President Franklin Stove
<
Metal. And porcelain, and wood. I am an automaton. Like the German
kind, who plays chess?>> he suggested helpfully to Sergeant Mallory, as
he waited for the gate of Fort Slow-Polk to open. <
heard of the one - Tick! - named Prince Milig, the rage of Vienna and
of New York? Tick! - and the Turkish sage, Bophodolpholus Maelzel,
whose predictions always came true? Tick! - But that one was a fraud.
There was a trained monkey inside, pulling its puppet wires. Tick -
(What pulled the monkey's wires?) Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - I am the real
Mccoy, I am. And native manufacture.>> He rapped his knuckles against
his head - it rang like a bell. <
fellow, but I am chicken at heart - Tick! - let us in, let us in, sir!
My boiler-pressure drops. Must feed the fire some sinfully black
coal!>>
"You...from a circus?" asked the sergeant, walking sideways, saber
unsheathed.
<
speaking. This metal fellow came all the way from Washington City as a
gift from the Cabinet. Did I neglect to mention that Secretary Marcy
secured my services for your behalf? (Vice-President Dallas sends his
howdy-do, too.) Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - The Philadelphian Mechanics
sent me to Senator Calhoun, in order that I might, by means of my
elastic tongue, impress on him the logical and reasonable necessity of
protecting the national genius for fabrication with protective tariffs.
Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - The Senator promptly bid me to
mimic his oratory on the benefits of a Greek Democracy; thither he sent
me, until I publicly predicted his death by catarrh in 1850, and Negro
emancipation thirteen years after - Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - he packed
me in a crate and sent me as a good-will gift to Senator Webster, whom
I informed, upon his immediate inquiry, that never would he be
President, that the Union will soon suffer severe secessionitis - Tick!
- Tick! - to which he roared, 'Tell that to Young America!' And so he
arranged an audience with President Polk. Tick - a - tick! - I told Mr.
Polk that war will come on the second of May, that the U. S. A. would
be victorious, and - Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - Whig victory in '48 with
General Taylor. Mr. Polk frowned at this; but Secretary Marcy and Vice
President Dallas bent at either ear, and - Tick! - Tick! - bid me
balloon to the Moon and General Taylor's camp with all due
alacrity...'Mind you,' Marcy added, 'all due alacrity!' Ah, here we
are!>> he added, for the gate had dropped forward, becoming a
drawbridge over the briars and bramble-filled ditch.
("Sergeant Mallory!" called my brother's voice from the open gate. "Get
that stranger and his mule inside on the double!")
("Aye, sir!" called the sergeant.) "You may go ahead, Mr. Metal."
<> corrected the stranger, <> A
little steam escaped his nostrils, and he lurched forward.
" - Borginnis, get inside. Rawlings, it's your watch," the sergeant
said.
My sentry duty finally ended, I led the procession of metal, mule, and
men. We clomp-clomped over the wooden drawbridge. A soldier's boots and
ankles stood over us, on top the gate's cross beam, the rest of him
obscure in silhouette. The Lieutenant and a platoon of armed men waited
behind. "Close it up!" Kelly bawled. "Fetch the Captain, corporal. You
- light a lantern, and bring it here." The men rushed and heaved on the
drawbridge pulleys. It swung wobbling up, groaned, and clomped shut.
The spindly drummer-boy ran back with a light swinging, his shadow
leaping all around. Captain George Washington Seawell strode behind.
The Prince-President looked funny in the light. He was tall - even
taller, with his stove pipe hat - and his face was handsome - even
proud - but false, like a mask. He stood solemnly, ticking pleasantly,
stroking the square trimness of his porcelain beard. "He says he's
Prince somebody or other, sir," saluted Mallory. "He says he's made of
metal. He's an educated automaton, sir, so he says. A surgeon. Sent by
the President, too. And sir, he's brought us a mule."
"We can use his mule, that's certain," mused Captain Seawell. "As to
him being metal or not, I don't care if a man is a Pope-Kissing Mick,
Heathen Mandarin, Black Rascal, Drunkard Injun, or Rag- Picking Heeb,
long as he's an American. But right now, none of us are worth our
weight in cow pies lest we get those bomb-proofs finished. Take his
mule to the pit right now! Maybe now we can complete it by daylight,
god willing. Give it, with my compliments, to Captain Mansfield!"
Puffing his long cigar furiously, he examined the stranger up and down
and all around. "You!" he called, pointing his cigar. "So you're a
prince, eh? So you're not an American, eh?"
Captain Dixon Miles climbed down from Gun Platform 4 on the other side
of the gate and came to stand beside Captain Seawell, arms folded. Old
Sock ran over with a crystal of toddy, Miles' habitual indulgence.
<> bowed the Metal
Man, his stove pipe describing an arc of smoke and ash. <
Philadelphian manufacture - modified and improved in New Orleans -
Tick! - my name is Prince...>>
" - The great United States Constitution," observed Captain Seawell
with an unfriendly expression, "says no citizen can hold an
aristocratic title like king or lord or prince..."
Perhaps he was thinking this Metal Man a spy of the Great Powers. After
all, they had all tried to make a dirty deal with Texas when it was its
own republic. They all wanted to steal crescents from the Moon, on the
grounds that the Moon owed them millions. Only a few years ago, in '39,
a whole passel of Great Powers sent, as a bankers' warning, a joint
stock balloon fleet to bombard the fortress of Fracastorius Crater.
They even went so far as to knock down the northern wall of
Fracastorius with a new kind of cannonball, a hollow iron shell stuffed
with powder, lit by a fuse. Besides the infamy of experimenting their
terrible new weapon on the little Moon, I wouldn't neglect to mention
that dirty trick Great Deimos played on us, making a deal with some
Lunar general for the rights to dig the Tunnel of Heraclitus even as we
waited for a president to stay in power long enough to exchange
diplomatic niceties. Thus a monarch stole the fast route to Venus from
a republic, showing the nature of Martian despotism:Conquest and
meddling all around the Inner Spheres, not to mention unfair monopolies
of Saturn's silk, rubber and spices. Also they felt free to shoot down
our slaver balloons in orbit around Jupiter; - although some folks like
Corporal Hernani Klager thought our own navy wasn't doing enough to
enforce Congress' law against that kind of import, it just wasn't fair
that the monarchs got all the spoils of that Sphere. But the point is
this Outer Sphere meddling in Inner Sphere affairs really got our
Monroe Doctrine dander going.
No doubt them pesky Lunars wanted to use our Monroe Doctrine (and Polk
Corollary to it) against us in our legitimate defense of Texas. No
doubt they wanted to set the mighty Union Jack balloon- fleets against
our own, in which case the little Moon, in the middle, might be spared.
Wasn't this metal fellow a spy, then?
_____________________
Chapter 9. The Metal Man Points Out His Niceties of Manufacture
The women held their own, independent hierarchy of command over the
fort. It was determined not exactly by loyalty or law, as determined
the military command, but something very much the same when put in
plain terms, which I shall call carrot and stick. We had to obey Old
Zach and Major Brown because they were our commanders, but in truth we
obeyed them because we loved them. Other men, such as Sergeant Mallory,
we didn't obey so conscientiously, we just jumped when they were
watching us, because we feared them, and sulked lazily when they were
not, because we hated them for making us afraid. But the women's
"carrot" was feminine kindness and comeliness - a kind of higher
inspiration for which soldiers on the frontier thirsted more than
water. However, the kindness and comeliness of civilization would not
survive our rough and tumble camps more than five minutes; it was
impossible even for the bellest of the belles to survive the sunny camp
stool without freckling or perspiring. Therefore, it was that
particular specie of kindness and comeliness that, unlike rouge and
l'eau de Paris, not only survived the rough and tumble rigors of the
frontier camp, it thrived:that brave vivaciousness of which Sarah
Borginnis was queen. After watching the two women arguing over the
position of the Ladies' Tents, and watching all the women turn from
slow, silent obedience to Mrs. Miles to cheerful bustling about behind
Sarah, I set myself down with my second to last pint of whiskey, and
pondered this. Pretty soon my bottle was empty and I figured everything
in terms of carrot and stick regarding human nature. Not only military
life, but also republican and despotic government, breaking horses and
training dogs and domesticating children, and even the disturbing
radicalism that wage labor was more productive than Negro servitude.
Now how could that be, I wondered. How could the carrot be mightier
than the stick? Drawing in the dirt with just such a stick, I thought
myself a regular Professor Morse when I figured that the arc of the
stick makes a geometric curve of decreasing volume, while the hunger
for the carrot stays steady, an arithmetic horizontal slope. While I
got less afraid of Sergeant Mallory, my love for ogling ankles stayed
steady as she goes. Notwithstanding that I loved Sarah, and took her
for wife, (I mean, camp-wife), I would measure carrot against stick
thus:
The stick - Mrs. Miles - commanded our duty, a drooping whip-crack
geometric line on a Cartesian graph, while the carrot - Sarah -
inspired our love, a steady-as-she-goes arithmetic line; so that while
we might obey Mrs. Miles faster, we would obey Sarah longer and harder.
And one might further conclude when measuring the further abuse of the
stick, it might actually dip below the line of zero, into the negative,
which meant disobedience, - like taxes and other tyrannies that lead to
the rebellion of 1776.
At any rate, she was the female counterpart to Major Brown, and she led
the delegation of chief-women - Mrs. Martha Miles, Mrs. Hampton, and
Mrs. Forrest - from the Ladies' Tents - Sarah giving a Dough-Boy back
his half darned trousers, Martha setting her wash bucket in the arms of
a frightened Music - to inspect this Johnny- Come-Lately, this
Prince-President Franklin Stove, this alleged Martian spy and monarch's
toady, to ponder and to judge whether or not this stranger, metal or
not, was fit company for their boys.
<
not a Prince," insisted the benign faced automaton, with little
breathes of steam and snorts of coke-smoke. <
Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - It is not a hereditary title. It is scientific
nomenclature. Tick! - I am an American automaton - a prince of the
artificial aristocracy of machinery. Tick! - Tick! - I have eight
lectures,>> he added, somewhat strangely. He reasonings seemed kind of
crooked to me.
Moreover, let me add that he hissed and tick-ticked a tiresome amount,
the gears of his brain so much more noisy than our own. Therefore, I
will, from now on, mark his sentences with the four friendly pips of a
poker deck (like this, "# % * @" for "Sss - Tick! - Tick! - Tick! - ")
to remind you that his speech seems so steam-piped artificial.
"You have eight lectures?" repeated Captain Seawell. He glanced at
Captain Miles' toddy.
<> asked the stranger, clicking and thinking. <
This is my lecture program. # % * @ - As follows:
1. My Metal Nature and Its Niceties.
2. The Rationale of the Irrational.
3. The Death of Joseph Smith, a Tragicomedy in Five Acts.
- alternating with -
4. The Death of Elijah Lovejoy
- deferring to local prej - Tick! - preferences; also -
5. Who Am I? (A Conundrum)
6. The 'Where's the Spot' Waltz.
7. The Devil and Daniel Shays, a Ditty Fit For Drinking.
<> he bowed.
"Hold on thar, sir," objected Sarah, walking over with skirt hem in
hand. "I ain't no Yankee scholar, but I know I heard you say eight
lectures and you got and you only said seven of 'em." To this we all
nodded.
"Perhaps he does not wish us to know the eighth. Perhaps it is oratory
of an unchristian sort, " suggested Captain Miles dryly, looking
sideways over his toddy at his wife, about to suggest she should take
her leave, when he happened to see Captain Seawell, who was still
eyeing his toddy. Seeing this, he whispered hissingly to Old Sock,
"Where's your manners? Hot toddy for Captain Seawell - mind you,
Socrates, don't tarry!"
"Yes, perhaps the eighth is an invitation by Great Deimos to sell
information? I don't trust this - this gentleman!" suggested Mrs.
Miles, with a sideways glance at her husband.
<<# % * @ - The eighth lecture was Your Destiny, Ready Eggs-
eggs-stemporaneously-For-The-Asking, but I have found it unpopular. The
eighth lecture now is - # % * @ -
8. Whence Freedom? Tycho Brahe and Andrew Jackson Compared.
Would you like to hear a lecture now? I have eight,>> the ever benign
porcelain pumpkin-head emitted in friendly little steam-puffs.
"Why don't you just tell us who you are," said Captain Seawell, with
furious cigar puff-puff-puffs. "No conundrums, either."
<<# % * @ - Number 1, then,>> smiled the ever-smiling porcelain cheeks.
<> Something in the
machinery of his oversized head ticked thoughtfully for a moment, like
an orator taking a long breath, or like a spring being tightly wound.
Then he began:
<
underestimate the grace and subtle workmanship of its coordinate parts,
which mimic in superior majesty the movements of your own bones. # % *
@ - Note my ceramic face, which will never bear a blemish. Note the
steel wool mustache, which never never needs a trim, and filters my
escape-pipes. Note the individually jointed appendages,>> (he
demonstrated by snapping his fingers) <
clockwork precision; the gentle felt pads of my finger tips, which
never callous, ever soft enough to press upon a maiden's cheek. (Would
I woo you, sweet ladies, would you not swoon?)
<<# % * @ - Need I demonstrate the confounding lightness of my step, so
finely wrought the metal skin of my frame! I can trace the step of a
minuet. So practical and economical, my little boiler belly digests
diverse fuel - # % * @ - any kind of corporeal corruption tastes like
kippers and tea to me. For the organic which originates in Original Sin
must combust, in hellfire heat, whether kernels of coal, corn, or
cottonwood - and aye! - even carnal. It is the principle of the worm,
mechanically applied, so decorously by the Philadelphian Brethren of
Mechanics, so domestically prestidigitatious, as modified by the good
Creole old women of New Orleans. # % * @ - I can eat my fuel with fork
and spoon, so civil am I. My jaws break down coal and such with ivory
teeth. (Aye, it is true, ivory is quite hard, hard as hammers -
although mine are screwed in with vise and pliers.) The black dust thus
slips down my esopho-chute, directly down into the fiery furnace of my
tummy tum-tum, thus broiling my little boiler into frenzy a-boil, thus
driving the twin pistons of my lungs up and down, thus pressing
irresistible mechanical force into the fine- toothed and supersubtle
gears of my limbs, and thus, on the counter- stroke, the lifting piston
expels the spent ash and smoke, through the efficient, discrete, and
dare I say fashionable topper, as thus:>>
And from his stove pipe gushed greasy hot jets of roiling black,
curling down around his benign face. The smoke rose up again slowly
over the fort.
<<# % * @ - Merely I need a quart or so per diem to replenish my nearly
absolutely efficient steam-circulation - let us say, upwards of
ninety-six percent reclamation per cycle, as perfect as possible this
side of Paradise.>>
"Hush, devil!" cried Mrs. Miles, stamping her foot. "I think your
manufacture, so-called, diabolical design for blasphemy!" She picked up
a stone.
"Do you think the likes of you could with impunity trespass on the
image of Man, divine and glorious that image be, you soulless devil!"
She reached back to throw the stone but Captain Miles gently stopped
her.
He admonished mildly, "We must not abuse Federal property, Martha. It
is a crime."
Old Sock came running with a second steaming toddy for Captain Seawell,
who sipped it, eyeing the Prince-President with fond fraternity.
Dispelled were his doubts that this stranger was monarchic machination.
No, for this apparition was Yankee manufacture, good and proper, the
apparatus of democracy. So in fraternal spirit he extended his paw,
saying, "Well then, welcome to Fort Texas! We can always use a
qualified surgeon. (The one we got now's only a sure bet for trimming
'round the ears.)"
"I seem two Balers with tomcat ears from the surgeon's barbery
trimming," said Sarah to me aside.
"What I want to know, Mr. Metal - I mean, Perfessor," Sarah called out,
coming close with crossed arms, scrutinizing this metal man.
<< - Tick! - Prince-President," corrected the newcomer tirelessly, with
his slight and unchanging rosy-cheeked smile.
" - If you is machine, as I guess I got to admit you is, 'less'n my
eyes be lyin', but I'll wager they ain't!" said Sarah, stopping to
sniff the steamy ashen air. " - If you is an engine, how come you can
walk and squawk so much fine and fancy talk?"
<<# % * @ - Is it so hard to imagine, dear lady,>> bowed the automaton,
making me a little wary, although I can't quite say jealous, <
machine that walks? We know locomotives can roll. My wheels are legs.
More complex, but still a question of mechanics. If fact, the Veteran's
Home of Philadelphia sells such spring-work artificial legs to replace
those lost to fits of patriotic violence.>>
It was true - we all knew Marcus Smiley, the old vet, who peddled
liquor to us back at camp Annex Agonies, hobbling around on his
spring-work wooden leg.
"Yeah, sure, but!" Sarah grinned, perplexed. "I mean, then, how can you
talk, and make sense (sorta), and act like such a fine gentleman in so
many ways - I mean, how can you, a machine, I understand, have the
freedom insides you to act like a man?"
<
there Ego aught else but supernatural soul? Whence comes my freedom of
movement - # % * @ - ?
While he ticked inside, as if his clock-works, like a Babbage
Calculating Machine, belabored to resolve a complex logarithm, and the
ladies traded whispers behind their hands, Old Sock and he seemed
locked in mutual measure and reflection. Old Sock took out his hoodoo
chicken bone and stroked its charm, frowning with concentration, then
actually beginning to scowl with dislike -
P. P. F. S. stopped his tick-tick-ticking. He lifted an arm towards Old
Sock and spoke:
<
nature?>> As he spoke, he lost out attention, for, from the other
direction, from the half-dug Bomb-Proof, from a dozen sunburnt sappers
who had ceased their labor, came shouts of surprise, soon hushed by
horror.
_____________________
Chapter 10. The Fossil
During the windy Lunar night, a platoon of weary sappers from E-
Company, Second Artillery, chopped a hole at the southwest dirt wall of
Fort Texas. This hole was to become shelter for the five hundred
defenders of the fort. Ballooned all the way to the extreme tip of the
Peninsula of Texas, we were now stranded and surrounded.
Carving down two yards into the cool sand that was ever eclipsed from
the whirligig sun, the sappers uncovered a layer of hard white
limestone. Upon that layer, Time impressed a bone claw.
It was brown with age, and three fingered. Astonished, the sappers
kneeled and brushed away the sand that hid the petrified carcass of a
giant creature. It was winged and terrible.
Hither and thither we wandered over, and ran over, and crowded round
the rim, and made a mob, a silence-stricken mob. Silent, we stared down
into the lantern-lit pit. The lantern flickered, shaking the shadows.
It made an ancient monster seem to move again.
It was dry. Its wings had many folds. Its thick talons curled and
creased its segmented joints in petrifaction of agony. Its slender
ribbage was sundered and shattered. Its long and sinuous neck strung
out in ragged chain of jagged bone, curving to a long-beaked skull. Too
many teeth filled the dilated jaws. The empty skull sockets jumped back
and forth with shadows that were oily, like black bubbles, like the
eyes of a salty nightmare hauled up in half-torn nets from the black,
blind, and timeless fathoms.
Something terrible lay here entombed. What caused this ugly dragon to
die in such evident pain? Why did its brethren skulk the clouds no
more? - Or did it yet fly, but only at night? - and only on the savage
dark side jungles of the Moon... - Did a shadow pass over us just now?
No, it was just a cloud, a misshapen cloud - was it not? What did it
hunt? What killed it? What could kill it?
Looking down at it, flickery horrific, we recognized something ancient
within us, instinctive and unpleasant, lizardly slithering still,
solitary and sluggish and suddenly violent. (Did this Horror still
circle about, boldly, on the dark side of our heart?)
Did its brood sink, consumed in God-hating crime? Some said so. What
are we doing so far from home? Are not these barren cacti- encumbered
craters a fit Paradise of Horror? Maybe they're some kind of savage
god. I bet the hideous flock lived here in the time before Columbus.
Did Captain Cortes, burning his winged-galleys, find this Horror's last
eggs, and crush them under his studded cannon wheels? Was this flying
thing, then, the source of those solemn, forgotten burial mounds? Those
burial mounds - some small, some enormous - sculpted in symbolic
bird-shapes by the lost races of the New Worlds? Hush, for it is idle
to speculate, and war is coming to us quickly.
But these glimmering gloomings, flickering forebodings drew a dark wing
over us all. A specter took his bony bodkin and stitched us all in his
shivering tapestry. Our little huddle of men looked so small and
helpless against the hidden horrors of this foreign Moon. So far from
home!
A collective chill ran through us.
- Such a hideous grave! In the heart of the fort!
(O Diggers, what have you done? Impudent hands! Diggers of taboo!
Shovel down them bad bones!)
- And will our riddled bodies, with limbs torn by shell, and bellies
spilt by bayonet...will we be buried here - here?
- In this pit? In this dead snatcher's bony grip, would we rise, and
find salvation? It doesn't seem likely...
(I shuddered, seeing in this twisted trench a desiccant revelation of
all annihilation. O this flying horror, this war-bat, its hooting grin!
O it will tear its scissor-teeth on poor privates!)
- Pickmen, hey! You dug it up. Bury it again.
- What did we dig up? What if it won't be buried again?
( - Is there mercy in the Moon?)
( - Indeed not! Is hate and horror in the hallow. What secret have you
unscraped?)
( - Is not the fort just another crater?)
( - Is dust and naught on top.)
- Wait! Are we warriors or milksops? Come now... Bones are bones! Stick
'em in the wheelbarrow, and dig on!
- I'm afraid. I don't want to touch them.
- I won't either.
( - How humble are bones, our bones, when so far from home.)
And so, a moonish wind did blow, to and fro, with a hiss, and a
scratch, hacksawing side to side through the hollow marrow of our
stick-figured fright. Hissing "Quetzl!" Scratching, "Coatl!"
_____________________
Chapter 11. Old Bones and Boiler Pressure
<> The Metal Man
pushed through the mob, and slid down into the Bomb Proof. His
porcelain countenance, lit from below by the pit's lonely lantern,
seemed to grin. He turned a ticking circle, and said, <
Prince-President Franklin Stove, and I am pleased to be your guest here
in Fort T-eggs-eggs-eggs-as on-the-Moon.>> His marble eyes gleamed
merrily. Tick! Tick! Tick! <
compliments. He wishes, he, too were here to reap the rich corn of
glory with you. I am looking forward to gnawing on that good ripe corn
myself. I am an automaton, property of the War Department. My mission
is - # % * @ - is to be the moral surgeon of the fort. But I am not
stuffy. I cannot be, with a high pressure boiler in my belly. This
metal fellow is a good fellow. I am like you, only you have a soul, and
I - # % * @ - eat coal. Well, machines are machines, as I am bound to
say. Now what about this - # % * @ - superstructure of bones?>>
<
- # % * @ - no, it was Cuvier's Researches into Fossil Bones that
called this beast a 'pterodactyl'. Here lies the bones of mankind's
rival.>> With a little jet of escaping steam from his nostrils, he
lifted the lantern, and put his metal palm over the chimney, to draw by
suction more kerosene into the wick. Letting go the chimney, the wick
flamed up, giving enough light to briefly chase away the web of shadows
that obscured the terrible bones. Then we saw how fragile they were.
<> he called. <
would have flown like an oversized bumble-bee. This absurd critter by
its very ridiculousness was the champion of unreason. Look at these
silly old bones. Why did this ugly old bumble-bee perish, and Man rise
to enslave Nature? # % * @ - I will tell you why. Because of Reason.
What is Reason? - # % * @ - Reason is the application of logical
syllogisms to the irrational by Man. What are syllogisms? - # % * @ -
Syllogisms are little three-step piston engines of logic, invented by a
Pagan named Socrates. Look at this old carcass. See how it died in
brute ignorance and in agony. But my friends and patriots! - Reason
conquers Nature, because - # % * @ - because - # % * @ - why? Because -
# % * @ - because - # % * @ - because - # % * @ - why? Because Nature
has a flaw in it, and Reason is iron-clad. What is the Flaw in Nature?
<
tick!-telegraph, in which Reason enslaves wild lightning to suit the
human mind. Man has windmills, sailcloth, and balloons that force order
and production upon the random winds. And Man holds the mighty
compulsion of Steam, that squeezes that fire of Sin from the old - # %
* @ - black - # % * @ - decayed - # % * @ - bones and leaves of flawed
Nature ( - # % * @ - and I mean coal) - into an all-powerful syllogism.
<
second premise is boiler pressure. That syllogism's conclusion is -
piston power. Piston power is Steam's Socratic conclusion. That
conclusion propels Reason into the wilderness. And that is called
Progress.
<