Æon Nine is copyright © 2006, Scorpius Digital Publishing, all rights reserved. Individual columns, articles, and stories are copyright © the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, by any means electronic or mechanical, without prior permission of the publisher, with the exception of brief passages quoted in reviews.
Cover art (View From Castle Io) by Bridget McKenna
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S o I go out on a limb. I write an essay for a book called Star Wars on Trial, in which I discuss the influence of the media on science fiction and ask why science fiction literature sales are declining when science fiction media sales continue to grow. People who’ve read my work know I’ve been asking this question for a long time. That’s the tree. The limb I crawled out on was the answer I finally gave to that question:
I think most SF novels aren’t entertaining. Most of them are good-for-you stories that build on what’s come before. In other words, there’s a lot of broccoli out there when most readers want meat, potatoes, some fruit, some other veggies—and yes, cake.
People noticed I was on this limb when Asimov’s reprinted the essay in the September, 2006 issue. And in the discussions that followed, I got accused of…emotional manipulation.
I don’t get accused of being wrong. No one writes a rebuttal, filled with facts and figures. No one argues me point by point.
Instead, the critics lob “emotional manipulation” at me and leave it at that.
Which seemed odd to me until I Googled emotional manipulation and science fiction together, and got a series of reviews and essays by the “literary lights” of the SF field. In these vast pages of analysis about the science fiction genre, only one phrase emerges as a phrase of derision. You guessed it. “Emotional manipulation.”
A few years ago, a British interviewer accused New York Times bestselling mystery writer Jeffrey Deaver of emotional manipulation. Deaver answered calmly (and I’m paraphrasing here), “That’s what I get paid to do.”
He’s exactly right. Fiction is about emotion. Non-fiction, especially academic non-fiction, is about intellect. Now, you can have intelligent fiction, and fiction that explores intellectual themes, but you damn well better have some emotion to go with it, or your fiction becomes known as “dry,” “difficult to read,” or the dreaded “dull.”
Guess what’s happened to science fiction, folks. Writers like me, who value a good emotional read, get criticized for the very thing that makes fiction good.
And how do writers respond to that criticism? If the writer is only familiar with science fiction, she can soldier on and write her own stuff, and hope some creative editor will publish it, or she can start writing emotionless fiction that has an intellectual framework which belongs in a position paper, not in a novel.
If the writer is familiar with other genres, she can move away from science fiction. She can write “paranormal” romance (which embraces science fiction gladly—and sells at larger numbers than all of the science fiction genre put together) . Or she can write science-based mystery novels or technothrillers (which often use futuristic science to make their points) or, heaven forbid!, mainstream novels.
Writers in all other genres—and reviewers and literary critics and the editorial gatekeepers and readers—all practice emotional manipulation, happily, joyfully, and with great verve. These genres are alive. They aren’t on their last legs like the SF literary genre is. Heck, fantasy writers do too—and you know what some of these same SF “literary lights” call fantasy? “Elfy welfy crap.” As in, “why did you publish that elfy welfy crap? You’ll ruin your carefully built reputation.”
The response to my essay was, in other words, why should we listen to her? She practices emotional manipulation. Case closed. They act as if I’d kicked puppies or murdered children (oops! Am I manipulating you here?). The one science fiction novel that I mentioned in a footnote as showing hope for the genre, Jack McDevitt’s Polaris (not because the novel broke new ground, but because it told a good story), was also demeaned as being horribly emotionally manipulative.
Thank you, literary lights, for showing me exactly how you’re murdering my favorite genre. You don’t want it to make you feel anything except smart and superior. You want SF to engage your brain and not your heart.
Yet without heart, no story stands the test of time. Novels that are about scientific theories will be outdated within a few years. Novels about great characters whom we can all care about, novels with spectacular stories that take us on grand journeys and sweep us away with romance and adventure, novels that have a mystery at their core—not an intellectual one, but one that resonates emotionally, those are the novels that stand the test of time.
Those are the novels that sell. Those are the novels that get remembered.
Jeffrey Deaver and Nora Roberts and George R.R. Martin know that. That’s why their books sell millions of copies.
It’s time SF stops listening to the “literary lights,” people who are afraid of their own feelings, and start letting emotional manipulation back into the genre.
Editors: Buy SF novels that move you even if the idea has been done before. And readers, when you find an SF novel that has heart, tell your friends. Encourage them to read that author, those novels—and look at who is publishing the books. Buy more books from that publisher. Vote with your dollars.
Oh, wait. I forgot. You already are.
A paradigm is like an operating system: it uploads those details of basic operation that don’t need to be reinvented every time you reboot in the morning. Having a ready-made world in which to function is efficient and economical, and that’s the way your mind likes it. Your basic operating paradigm may be partly biological, passed down from the apes and alligators and amœbæ that toiled to produce you, but most of it is based upon assumptions you inherited by hearing them spoken and seeing them operate unspoken, as you grew from your larval stage into adulthood. By the time you reached puberty the envelope had become transparent, and the map had become the territory. If it had not, you would probably reside today in the sort of place where they hide the sharp objects and bring your meds in little paper cups.
New thoughts, and particularly new ways of viewing the world, are not economical, so once something has become part of the OS it’s very difficult to get it out of there, or even find it. That’s a paradigm. Assumptions need to become reality so that we can stop thinking about them. Imagine the chaos that would result if you were allowed to rethink the universe at will. How would anything else ever get done? How would you survive? While contemplating his revolutionary Para-Shift™ prototype during the early Pleistocene, Ogg MacFarlaine was mauled and eaten by a passing cave bear, and failed to pass along the genetic characters for new worldview creation on the fly. Tragic, but probably a good thing for the Big Picture.
We modify paradigms when we break through to a new way of thinking about something. Yesterday the world was a hostile place where every day was a fight to survive. Then you saw something, or heard something, or read something that got in under the operating system, and today the world is beautiful and full of opportunity. Those kinds of experiences are rare, and difficult, and often painful. “No, this way, stupid!” says the OS, or “that way lies madness!” Sometimes it’s right about that, because if the shift is abrupt enough or the angle acute enough, breakdowns do occur—the system crashes. You’re fighting for your new worldview with the economies of paradigm, and it has a billion-year head start on you.
It’s easier to accept a new idea if it can be demonstrated in a way you can comprehend. Eratosthenes proved the world was round around 200 BCE, but 1600 years later, world maps still reflected the nearly universal assumption on the ground that if you could see the edge of something, that was the edge. Of course you could walk five miles and see a completely different edge, and keep on doing that until you got back to where you started, but most people wouldn’t get five miles from where they were born for several more centuries, so let scholars say what they might, thousands of generations of common wisdom said that a thing with edges was flat, and there you are. Don’t fall off.
When Columbus and Co. sailed off the edge, putting a shaky sort of faith in Eratosthenes, and came back again with proof and booty, world map making became the sexy new thing. Armed with maps that were now the new territory, we incorporated round worlds into our model. But thinking this way required not only the mathematical demonstration of 200 BCE, but the practical one of 1492. After that, anyone could do it. Roger Bannister ran a mile in under 4 minutes in 1954, a feat many “experts” maintained was physically impossible. The next year 37 runners duplicated his performance, and the year after that the figure was around 300. Before Chuck Yeager showed otherwise in 1948, the speed of sound was an impassible barrier. Now the speed of light is. No, really. It is. Isn’t it? From in here it sure looks like it, but Einstein himself said that you can’t solve a problem from the same framework in which you created it.
Because we live inside a great nesting structure of paradigms, like an immense matrioshka doll, when we break out of one now-useless shell, we immediately find ourselves in another, and mistaking its boundaries for the edge of the world, we may stop there a while. If, however, we persist in defying our conservative consciousness and rewriting the OS, we may continue to break out all our lives. Creative people do it all the time, and one of their functions is to create the windows through which we can view new worlds.
You’ll find nine of these open windows in this issue of Æon, beginning with Marissa K. Lingen’s (“Things We Sell to Tourists,” Æon Six) story of innocence and hope lost and found: “Michael Banks, Home From the War.” Next, Ken Scholes (“East of Eden and Just a Bit South,” Æon Six) invites us to take “One Small Step” into a frightening and not entirely implausible near future; Robert J. Howe speculates on new and disturbing kinds of “Life Sentences;” Terry Hayman tells a tale of hope and horror in “The Girl Who Left;” Lisa Mantchev shows us our own reflection in “Mirror Bound”; Josh Rountree transports us to a much earlier war and invites us to “Remember;” and Daphne Charette exhorts us, from a view of civilization gone awry, to “Eat the Rich.” Two poets return to open other doors: Greg Beatty takes us to an “Unnatural Poetry Workshop,” and Jaime Lee Moyer reminds us “There is a Story.” We’d like to remind you that there are a lot of great ones waiting for you in Æon Nine. Get reading.
“If nature abhors a vacuum, history abhors an idyll even more. Nursery magic gives way to strafing runs and scrambling for the gas mask. What could even the most magical nanny in the world have to say about any of that?”
E LLEN, THE OLD HOUSEMAID, had left the tray as quickly as she could and retreated. It was Jane and Barbara’s evening with their do-gooders; Michael had not bothered to find out what or with whom his sisters were doing good, exactly. It didn’t seem to matter any more. His tea cooled while he stared into the fire.
“What’s the medicine going to taste like tonight, Michael?” asked a soft voice behind him.
Michael started. “Couldn’t be. Absolutely bloody couldn’t be.”
“But it is.” Mary Poppins stepped into the circle lit by the fire. “And you, young man, may kindly watch your language.”
“Mary Poppins. Jesus Christ, Mary Poppins, after all these years of—”
“Language, Michael!” snapped Mary Poppins. “You have not the excuse of some young men, who were not brought up by someone practically perfect in every way.”
“Practically perfect in—” Michael began to laugh. It was not a very pleasant laugh. “Wish we’d had your practical perfection in the trenches.”
“I was attending to all sorts of pressing matters.”
Michael’s unpleasant laugh sounded again. “None of which involved being mustard gassed, eh, Poppins?”
She gave him a haughty stare and pretended as if he hadn’t spoken. “I asked you a question, to start out with. Last I heard, you were brought up to give a civil answer to a civil question.”
“What did you—oh. The medicine.”
Mary Poppins produced a familiar large bottle, filled the spoon with an amber liquid and passed it to Michael, who drank it with a sigh. She raised an eyebrow.
“Scotch. Neat. And yours is rum punch, as always.”
She filled the teaspoon for herself and drank it, not deigning to notice him.
“Can’t stand rum any more,” said Michael, shaking his head. “We had a ration of it with our tea in the morning, and I never turned it down then, but the smell of it makes me think—” He shook all over, like a dog.
“Feeling better?” asked Mary Poppins.
“Not particularly. No.”
Mary Poppins’s expression betrayed uncertainty for the first time Michael could remember. “It used to work that way,” she said, almost to herself.
“I’m going to need a bit more than a teaspoon of Scotch to feel better, Poppins. I’ve been louse-bitten and gas-masked; I’ve been cold and wet and shot in the ass, and I’ll never walk the same way again and I’m not yet twenty-five—”
“Michael.”
“I watched my mate Oswald get his head blown off next to me!” shouted Michael. “Right clean off, his whole head…his blood hit me, good old Osser Bastable and no head on him—”
“Michael,” said Mary Poppins sharply. “You are overwrought.”
“You’re damn right I’m overwrought, Poppins. You’re damn right I am.”
Mary Poppins snapped a clean red-and-white bandanna handkerchief out of her carpetbag. “Here now. Blow.”
Michael did as he told. “It’s very nice of you to come to see the recluse in his hermitage, M.P., but I think you’ll find that a teaspoon of medicine and a clean handkerchief will not cure what ails me.”
“You know best,” said Mary Poppins. “As usual.” But she was somewhat less acerbic.
“When I was small, I believed that you had an uncle, your uncle Turvy it was, who could mend broken hearts,” said Michael. “I believed you could do anything. But you—didn’t. None of the magical folks you introduced us to did, but—”
He looked at her searchingly. “Mrs. Corry once told us that once one goes, all go. She meant you, I know it. We never ran into any of them without you. So it all comes down to you, Poppins. And you weren’t there.”
Mary Poppins’s cheeks were no redder than ever, but her eyes took on the Dutch-doll look of the rest of her, glassy and fixed. “You don’t think I—”
“Oh, stuff it, Poppins. You spent my whole childhood showing me the most outlandish stuff you could, the most fantastical things you could do, and then when I really could have used something fantastic, where were you?”
“I’m not God, Michael.”
“No, because God didn’t create a set of expectations, did he? He didn’t serve my tea in the nursery. He didn’t draw my bath and take me to a circus of constellations and give a jacket to a walking marble statue in the park. God never made me think He’d pop up if I was naughty and got myself in trouble or was nice and needed a piece of gingerbread. God never made me think He’d be there when I needed Him.”
“I left you children,” said Mary Poppins. “I let you know you could never count on me being there because any day—”
“And then you returned again when we did need you, so what was the good of that? We learned to be patient, was all. Well, I was patient up there on the front. And now here you are with me while John’s up in his aeroplane—” He turned his head away and wouldn’t look at her.
“What if I told you that it was all your dreams when you were children? That you and Jane made up stories about me and told each other they were true until you believed each other?”
Michael turned back to her then, with such a weary look that she flinched. The small boy in him delighted in his triumph, facing down the nanny, but the adult just waited.
“Yes, all right,” said Mary Poppins, “it was all real. It was all true. But—didn’t it mean anything to you?”
“What was it supposed to mean?”
Mary Poppins opened her carpet bag with a snap. “We’ll have to see, won’t we.”
“Oh, Poppins, no,” said Michael. “For God’s sake, I’m in no condition to go out there and—”
“Spit spot,” said Mary Poppins. She held out a great watch on a chain, almost as big as the palm of her hand. Michael stood up with a groan, and the room spun around them. He felt a breeze ruffling his hair even when the spinning had stopped. He looked around. They were on a hillside in broad daylight.
“Good God,” said Michael.
Mary Poppins said nothing at all; she merely stared off in the direction of the next hill. After waiting expectantly, Michael gave up and followed her gaze. Two little bands had clustered, shouting at each other and making hideous faces. Some of them were painted blue.
“Picts?” demanded Michael.
Mary Poppins nodded. “One of their first real conflicts, I think.”
“That’s a real conflict? There’s maybe twenty men on a side. A dozen, more like.”
“I didn’t realize a dozen men were unworthy of your consideration, Michael Banks.”
He flushed. “They’re not, but—what are they doing?”
They were banging their spear butts on the ground and yelling at each other. When the yelling reached a fever pitch, one of them chucked his spear at another. He missed. The man who had been nearly hit ran forward and stabbed with his spear. His opponent fell to his knees, blood leaking around the spear-point in his chest.
“Christ.”
“Not yet,” said Mary Poppins absently. “War, you see, Michael? It’s always hell.”
“Poor bugger. Reminds me of a Canadian I saw bayoneted. No help for that, either.”
Mary Poppins sighed and tapped the watch stem. The hands flew around the face, and the hill spun around them. The armies were bigger this time, dressed in tunics and kilts and bearing bows and arrows. They had formed ranks, of sorts.
“Oh, more of them?” said Michael. “Haven’t learnt any better than we, have they?”
Mary Poppins compressed her lips. “I am showing you how men have survived war.”
“And keep waging it anyway.”
“Well, yes.”
“Bravo, Poppins,” said Michael. “I’ll always know to have you cheer me up when I’m blue. Take a man home from the trenches and show him the horrors of war through the centuries. That’ll bring a smile to his lips. Better than a music hall, that!”
“For goodness’ sake!” snapped Mary Poppins. “You used to be able to learn a lesson.”
“You used to be able to give one. For God’s sake, Poppins, even Jane telling me to pull myself together was more effective than that, and she’s been saying it since I was seven.”
“All right, we won’t do the other wars,” she said. “I had intended an edifying journey through history, but since you are determined to take no thought from it—”
“I don’t find it cheering to think of blokes soaked in blood for centuries and millennia, thanks.”
Mary Poppins glared at him and shoved the watch into her pocket. She tapped her umbrella smartly against the hillside, and it spun again, resolving only slowly. Michael had to close his eyes to keep the spoonful of Scotch down. When the turning sensation stopped, he opened his eyes.
This time the people below them were unarmed. There was a string of them stretching out as far as Michael could see, old men, small children, and many, many women. They wore modern clothing, tattered and dirty from the road. They pushed small carts and wheelbarrows full of their belongings.
“This is why you fought,” said Mary Poppins.
Michael nodded. “Belgians. I know.”
“Their plight is—”
“Heartbreaking, yes,” he said wearily. “Miserable.”
“But seeing why you fight—”
“I saw miserable Belgians, I promise. We were told over and again.”
“Oh,” said Mary Poppins in a small voice.
“What next, Poppins?”
“You know best,” she said, still in a small voice, “as always….” She trailed off, staring at the Belgians.
“After the first attack,” said Michael meditatively, “I just laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. I kept thinking perhaps it was the right day and I’d get filled with Laughing Gas and float off. But it never happened.”
“And a good thing, too, without a ceiling to stop you. You’d have been a sitting duck for passing aeroplanes, I should think, and your own side wouldn’t have known to keep from shooting you.”
Michael shook his head. “Got an answer for everything, don’t you, M.P.?”
She tossed her head. “Naturally.”
“What’re you going to answer if they shoot John’s aeroplane down?”
Mary Poppins went still. “If they…shoot John’s aeroplane down?” she enunciated.
Michael looked at her. “I told you he was up in an aeroplane. I told you that. You knew.”
“I was—I beg your pardon, Michael, we have had a few things to think of in this discussion.”
“John is in the R.A.F.,” said Michael, as though he was speaking to a very small child. “He enlisted as early as they would let him, and he flies an aeroplane on a regular basis, and he may die at any moment. War is like that. Through the ages,” he added nastily. “You’ve seen that much.”
“John is just a baby,” said Mary Poppins. “He was talking to starlings still last week.”
“Aer-o-plane, Poppins.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “He’s up right now.”
Michael nodded grimly. “Might well be.”
“He is. We’ve got to stop it.”
“That’s the stuff, Poppins. Pull something out of your magic bag and save him.”
“Thank you, I will.”
He stared. “You really do mean it. Oh, I see—that umbrella. But what about me? I’m too big to trail along after you.”
“You do not presume to think that I would go without a spare umbrella,” said Mary Poppins.
“Oh, that’s the old spirit, Poppins,” said Michael nastily. She gave him a steady look until he flushed and grabbed the umbrella from her hand. It had not been there a moment before—he felt sure of it—but that had ceased to matter. He threw his leg over the umbrella, and it bucked to life like the flying candy cane had so many years ago.
“Follow me, and no dawdling,” said Mary Poppins. She angled her umbrella upwards and sailed into the air, seated neatly sidesaddle on it. Michael imitated her and flew too high, then bounced too low. The umbrella twitched sideways underneath him, and it took all the strength in his hands to hold it on a steady course for the first minute. After that, it seemed to settle down. They soared through the grey, soggy air above Belgium, faster than Michael was strictly comfortable flying. He clutched the umbrella a little tighter. He had to work to hang on in the wind, and he was afraid he’d slip around sideways at any second, or the umbrella would pop open and send him tumbling heels over head through the air. He could barely keep his eyes open against the wind—no wonder aeroplane pilots wore goggles—but if he closed his eyes, he was afraid he would crash.
“Poppins!” shouted Michael. “Do you know which way the front is?”
“Of course!” Mary Poppins shouted back, and Michael could almost hear her sniff over the whistling in his ears. They flew high enough that the individual Belgians in the refugee line were barely distinct. Soon Michael could see trenches, webbing dark below him.
They heard the intermittent rattling burst of guns, and Michael smelled something sharp, distant below them. In the failing evening light, he could see a yellow fog creeping over the trenches. He clutched the umbrella even tighter, wishing he had his gas mask with him.
“Poppins, the gas!”
“Too high!” she snapped back briefly. But she was staring down at the trenches with a curious expression. They were too high for her to smell the disease, the spoiled food, the rum, the blood, the human wastes that Michael knew were below. The squads of medics, moving forward in their masks, could only save the fortunate, and even Mary Poppins could not take care of all the rest. But when he saw her face, he lost the urge to tell her; he realized she had seen for herself.
“How will we find John?” he yelled instead.
Mary Poppins pulled herself together and cast him a withering glare, and soon he could see why: through the gloomy air, he could see dogfighters lighting the sky before them. “Which one is his?” The khaki biplane wings of the Sopwith Pups all looked similar to him, and he knew they would have concentric circles of blue, white, and red on the wings regardless of who was flying them. Even discounting the German Fokkers with their black and white crosses, that left about half the biplanes in the dogfight. Surely they couldn’t save all the pilots, he thought, and immediately felt guilty for thinking it.
Mary Poppins ignored him. She flew forward even faster, and Michael’s umbrella followed her without his instruction. All he could do was cling to it and keep his head down. He flattened his body against it as much as he could. Tears streamed down his face from the contradictory winds of the aeroplanes. They whipped past the last of the British formation, close enough that Michael could have touched a khaki wing. They flew past the next aeroplane. The pilot looked out to his side and saw them. Mary Poppins nodded politely. The pilot shouted something and swerved away from them, pulling himself back on course only just before he would have hit one of his fellows.
“What will we do?” shouted Michael. “Which is John?” But the noise of the engines and the guns had joined the whistling of the wind, much closer to hand, and Mary Poppins didn’t hear him. Michael could see nothing to do but follow her, and the umbrella, though it dipped a few times as if in suggestion, seemed content to do the same. He squinted down and could see no gas haze, but he took no comfort in that.
Mary Poppins leaned to the left, and her broom shot off that way. After a moment’s hesitation, Michael did the same: there was a British aeroplane that had just been shot in the tail. He could see the pilot leaning back, limp, though goggles and helmet obscured his head. He couldn’t tell if it was John.
For a moment it didn’t matter.
They hovered the umbrellas next to the plane as it fell, tugging and pulling at the straps until they got the young pilot free. “Go up!” yelled Mary Poppins. Taking the weight of the boy, Michael used his knees to direct his umbrella upwards, barely dodging a German plane. The sound of the guns had not sounded so loud even when he had been shot. He flinched, twisting and trying to put himself between the German plane and the pilot who might be his brother. The umbrella bucked and turned, unhappy with the steering or—Michael realized—shot in the handle.
Mary Poppins swerved around the falling plane and its German pursuant and managed to join Michael before he dropped the pilot. When she pulled him a little further away, Michael clutched the bucking umbrella, trying to steer it steady. The pilot’s face was obscured by helmet and goggles, but Michael knew his brother’s voice in the brief moan he heard before the pilot fainted.
They sank to the ground, bearing John’s limp body between them. Michael snatched off John’s goggles, and Mary Poppins undid the buckles and, more gently, pulled his leather flight helmet off. He was breathing a little quickly, but Mary Poppins’s face betrayed her relief as she examined John.
“It’s him,” said Michael, gulping down great gasps of air.
“Of course it is. Grazed in the shoulder,” she said. “Barely a scratch. The medics will patch him up.”
Michael drank in the sight of his younger brother’s face—unconscious, certainly, and worse than Poppins had said. The “scratch” had shattered his clavicle. But he was not fatally wounded. They had seen medics not too far away. John would be all right. He felt like dancing the Highland Fling his father had so often indulged in when he was little. But then he looked over his shoulder to where the aeroplanes and the parachutes were falling.
“Other people’s brothers,” he said softly. “Other mothers’ sons. Other nurses’ charges.”
And before the medics could reach them, Mary Poppins said, very quietly, “Home.” And Michael found himself standing before the hearth fire, holding a limp umbrella with a bullet in its handle.
He heard a noise he had never heard before. He looked over to find the Mary Poppins was crying. It was not the ladylike sniff he had heard so many times, but a full-throated wail. He looked around almost hopefully—surely someone else must be making the noise and not Mary Poppins—but there was no one, and the tears coursed down her face.
“There, there, Poppins,” he said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “There, there.”
“Age after age after age,” she said, and repeated it until Michael got her to sit down in one of the chairs. Then she gave a great snuffle and looked up at him, China-blue eyes brimming. “I have spent all my days raising other people’s children, and believe me, Michael Banks, I have had a great many days. And all of them—Greek godlets and fairy tale princes and little Edwardian lads, it’s all the same. You just get them out of the nursery and the first thing they want to do is smash each other to bits, inside and out.”
“I’m sorry, Mary Poppins,” said Michael, alarmed. “It’s not that we want to, we just know it’s the right—you saw the Belgians—”
“And then, after they’ve flung away all the nice manners you’ve taught them and all the magic you showed them on the sly, then they blame you for the smashing. Why I do it, I couldn’t tell you, for I’m sure I don’t know.”
“If you don’t—”
“Except that I keep hoping it’ll get better, and it keeps getting worse!” she wailed.
“Your handkerchief, Mary Poppins,” said Michael. “Oh, damn.” He knelt beside her and rummaged in the carpet bag. He handed Mary Poppins her red bandana handkerchief. “What about your relatives? Can’t they do anything? Uncle Albert or Nellie Rubina or any of them?”
Mary Poppins blew her nose into the bandana with a resounding honk. “Uncle Albert can’t do much except on his birthday, and even then—it’s hard to get soldiers to really laugh, Michael.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“And the others, like Nellie Rubina and Mrs. Corry—they all have their own jobs. It’s hard enough for Nellie and Uncle Dodger to get the seasons changed over without trying to stop war or the like.” She sighed heavily. “It’s just what we can throw together, the others in their spare time and—me. And I can’t even so much as cheer up one of my old charges.” Her tears flowed afresh.
Michael cleared his throat. “Buck up, Poppins. It’ll be all right.”
“It won’t! It won’t!” she sobbed. “John will go back up in that wretched aeroplane, or another like it.”
“He was shot down. Maybe he’ll get discharged.”
“Then someone else will!”
Michael looked away, at the same time ashamed and relieved to be so glad that his brother, at least, was safe. “Poppins, you did what you could. When John really needed you, you were there. You were there and no one else could have been. When I was wounded, the medics could patch me up, but there was no one else who could do what you did for John.”
She sniffed and peered at him uncertainly.
“That’s all we can do, is the best we can. And—and the things no one else can, the things that are ours alone, do you see?”
“I suppose,” she sniffled.
“It’ll be all right, Poppins, really it will,” said Michael. “Wars never last forever. There’s always an armistice.”
“There always has been,” said Mary Poppins. Michael couldn’t tell whether she meant to be hopeful or dubious, but he patted her shoulder.
“That’s the spirit, Poppins. It always comes to an end. And until it does, we all do what we can, right?”
“I suppose,” she said. “Yes. Yes, I do suppose.” She straightened up her shoulders and adjusted the angle of her hat.
“That’s a very becoming hat, Mary Poppins,” said Michael quietly.
She gave her nose a final blow and tucked her handkerchief into her pocket. “We only buy the very best,” she said.
“I know it.”
She nodded briskly. “Well, I can see that I’ve stayed my welcome, and my work is done.”
Michael smiled and did not contradict her about who had done what work. “Take care of yourself, Mary Poppins.”
“Wear your galoshes when you go out,” she snapped, “speak nicely when you’re spoken to, try to be a credit to your upbringing, and—oh, Michael, be good to your sisters.”
“I will,” he whispered. He blinked tears out of his eyes. When he could see clearly again, she was gone.
Michael groped for the arm of the chair and maneuvered himself into it. He stared into the fire in an entirely different mood than he had been doing, and when the door banged shut and his sisters’ voices sounded in the hall, he ran down to meet them as fast as his bad leg would take him. He gave each a squeeze.
“Hullo, Michael,” said Barbara, blinking at him in surprise.
Annabel pecked his cheek. “You’re awfully perky tonight.”
“I think I’ve turned a corner,” he said, reaching for Jane to hug last. He held her at arm’s length just to look at her. He had not notice how thin his sister’s face had gotten, nor how dark the circles under her eyes were. He had not noticed the way her shoulders slumped. He had not noticed anything at all.
“Barbie, won’t you get Mrs. Brill to make Jane some of those biscuits she scrapes together on rations? She’s dead tired.”
“Why, Michael!” said Jane.
“Scoot along, girls, I’ve something to tell Jane.”
Annabel made a face at him, and Barbara sniffed haughtily, but they went into the kitchen as they had been told.
“Jane,” he said, “Mary Poppins was here.”
Jane’s thin face lit. “Oh, Michael, really? And how do you feel?”
“Better,” said Michael. “A bit, at least. Like I could do something again. But Jane—Barbie and Annabel will have to hear it when the news comes, but I couldn’t explain it before. And everything is all right, Poppins fixed it, but—”
“On with it, Michael,” she said.
“John’s aeroplane was shot down.”
Jane went white and then rather grey. “But it’s all right?”
“Poppins and I flew on brollies and got him behind our lines and to a medic. He was hit in the shoulder, not even as bad off as I was. He’ll be all right.”
“Until next time,” whispered Jane.
Michael took his sister by the elbows. “I know it, but another time is one more than he’d have had without Mary Poppins. She’s doing all she can. And I know you girls are, too. I’m going to try to stop making it hard on you, Jane. I really am.”
She hugged him. “I’m just so glad you’re back with us,” she whispered. “That’s its own kind of magic.”
Unnatural Poetry Workshop
A
t close of day
after heartfelt yearnings,
quiet estuary walks, and time
spent crafting reflective stanzas,
I saw the flyer:
Unnatural Poetry Workshop,
it proclaimed. I laughed.
“What could that be?”
The rhetorical skeleton in my corner
spoke, brushing jet hair left
with trembling, erectile fingers.
“Imagine,” it wheezed wetly,
“the asymptomatic, fragmented, intrusion
of synthetic fibers, fetus proof
hats, conceptual shoes
pinching souls, binding soles,
and yanks insufficiently garbed
in wit and specious effects, tumbling
you offcenter, in to ugly
peersons walking past you
despite your every masked and
shrieking verbal machination
that you call poetry. Or,
as you call it, Tuesday.”
And then I was alone again,
the only man beside the bay
save oilclad mallards, five
limbed frogs, and a Times,
blown past and incorrectly read.
“I wrote ‘One Small Step’ after reading Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, just ahead of last year’s Talebones Live group reading at Norwescon. One of those Fabulous McKenna Girls happened to be attending, heard the story and loved it. Flash forward to Worldcon and I’m attending Aeon’s spectacular party. I tell Marti I’m overdue to send something to them and she says (nodding her head encouragingly) ‘Are you sending the chimp story?’
I sent it the next morning. They bought it that afternoon, making it the fastest sale I’ve ever made (Us too! –Eds).
Merriam-Webster defines a fable as ‘a narration intended to enforce a useful truth; especially: one in which animals speak and act like human beings.’ I hope you all enjoy my little fable. Here’s hoping we all sort out that useful truth.”
This story is dedicated to Charles Stores, my college science professor. You were right, Charles.
W e realized things had gone too far on the moon when Anderson’s chimps killed him, shaved themselves, and democratically elected one of their own to put on his lab-coat and demand a meeting with the rest of us.
Of course, Anderson started this whole goddamn mess, and he deserved what he got. Even Gable and Tennyson agreed on that point, and those two never agreed on anything.
I met Dr. Roger Anderson after a paper he delivered at the World Economic Development Conference in Thailand. Now everyone knows it as Tomorrow’s Labor Force: Inter-species Collaboration for a Better Future. It’s the paper that got him the funding to move his lab to the moon and start training his chimps to do their part in the New Economy.
Of course, the Bible people didn’t mind. The way they saw it, chimps were just dumb animals like oxen or horses; disbelieving evolution has advantages. The animal rights people got pretty uptight until the Helen Dialogue.
I got involved just after that. But I remember watching it on TV.
It’s a fixed camera in the corner of a room, focused on a small table and two chairs. There is a puzzle on the table. There are other toys strewn about.
Helen ambles in and sits at the table. Her chart says she’s been signing since infancy and has been on the treatments for nearly six months. She’s come the farthest of them all. Anderson enters and sits across from her, balancing his clipboard on his knees. “Make the puzzle for me, Helen,” he says while signing to her. The microphone is also on the wall so his voice is muffled.
“Cookie?” Helen signs.
“Puzzle first; cookie after,” Anderson signs back.
Helen sucks her thumb for a moment, grins, and puts the puzzle together quickly. She claps her paws and hoots. “Cookie,” she signs.
Anderson spills the puzzle pieces out. “Again.”
Helen shakes her head. “Cookie.” Then she makes a rude gesture.
Anderson points at the puzzle. His voice is shaking a little. “No.”
She howls, bounces from wall to wall, scattering the puzzle pieces. Then, she stops suddenly, stands up as tall as she can and pokes Anderson in the chest with a hairy knuckle before signing with jerky movements: “I’ll make the shitting puzzle if you give me a cookie. Puzzle for cookie, you shit.”
The rest you know. That incident started a six-hour dialogue. At one point, a psychologist was called in. The animal rights people had a hard time protesting from then on.
The chimps wanted it.
Later that year, funding came through for a new lab and training area to simulate conditions for their new line of work. That’s when I was recruited.
I was a high school English teacher.
But after meeting with Anderson and his research staff—and interviewing with Helen and her pack—I suddenly found myself teaching chimpanzees how to read and type.
Eventually, when the new facility was ready, my classroom moved to the moon.
Helen’s brother Chuckles was the fastest to pick up one-handed touch-typing. The U.S. military invested a large chunk of change in a keyboard that strapped to a forearm. They even designed a keyboard that would work over the top of a pressure suit.
We practiced, he in his suit and me behind a monitor. “Hi Chuckles,” I said into the microphone.
His fingers flew as the computer synthesized the characters in an electronic voice. “Hi Mike. How are you today?”
“Fine thanks. Are you ready to start?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Fine,” I said. “Let’s play twenty questions.”
He bounced a bit. All of them loved the game. They loved to talk about themselves. And they loved to know about us.
I settled into my chair. “I’ll start. What color are my eyes?”
Chuckles leaned forward. “Your eyes are blue.”
“Correct. Your turn.”
“Einstein has funny hair,” he typed, waving at the picture behind me.
“Yes, but that is not a question.”
“Why does Einstein have funny hair?”
Chuckles is the one they democratically elected a year later.
“We’ve killed and eaten Dr. Anderson,” Chuckles typed when we were all in the room. It sounded monotone as the computer pronounced the words—like a passionless act. He had scabs all over from cutting himself with the razor and the blood stained lab-coat hung to the floor. “I helped kill him and eat him.”
I knew the answer to my next question but I had to ask it anyway. “Why?”
His fingers started to fly then paused, tapped delete several times and continued. “Because of Helen.”
“Helen was in an accident, Chuckles. You know what. You were there.” We’d all watched the wall collapse. And while Anderson tried to talk them through the rescue, Tennyson and I had raced to the airlock, scrambled into our suits and gone into the mine. By the time we arrived, the chimps were hyperventilating in their suits. We pulled Helen’s broken body out of the debris and buried her outside the lab.
He howled, pounded the floor, and straightened upright. “Anderson—” he paused, looking for the vocabulary “—made it happen.”
I wanted to argue with him. I opened my mouth but closed it because I just wasn’t sure.
I’d seen the last tape Anderson made with Helen the night before her death.
I had to break into his desk to find it.
This is a better camera, sharper image, less warble. It is fixed in the corner of the room and it’s a better room. Cleaner. No toys or puzzles—Anderson’s apes had put away childish things. A porthole in the corner of the room offers a barren exterior view of the moon and the training site.
Helen waits at the table, her hands folded over her lap. She’s wearing the keyboard, but she only uses it half the time. Anderson walks in and sits across from her.
“Hello Helen,” he says while signing out the words.
“Hi Doctor Anderson.” She types the greeting, signing his name.
“Chuckles said you wanted to see me.”
Helen nods. “I want to play twenty questions.”
The back of Anderson’s head moves. “Okay. What color are my eyes?”
She shakes her head. “I want to ask the questions.”
Anderson leans forward. Anyone who knew him knows that this is Roger’s posture of intrigue. “What would you like to ask, Helen?”
“Are you—” she pauses, shakes her head a bit as if clearing it—“Are you the god?” She types the word because she doesn’t know the sign for it.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you...the god?”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“The one in the book. Do you make us like you?”
“Which book?”
“The black book.”
“Do you mean the Bible?” His voice sounds surprised now.
She nods.
“Where did you get a Bible?”
She makes a shrill noise, she clicks her tongue at him, she waves her hands. “We took it.”
Now he seems perplexed. “You took a book?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To be like you.”
Anderson pauses. He runs his hands through his hair and sighs. “How many books, Helen?”
“I’ll ask the shitting questions,” she signs.
He turns off the tape here. Whatever else was said is lost. But we know that after the tape, he made a note on his desk to have us inventory our books and determine what else was missing. Next to the note, he’d scribbled Morris, underlined, with a question mark.
I looked at his bookshelf when I saw that note. Of course I knew what book to look for. I looked for the gap where The Naked Ape might’ve been but they were too clever to leave gaps.
The next morning, after the corporate trainers left for a four day re-supply at Armstrong City, Anderson ordered Helen and the others into the mine, ordered her down to the deeper parts while the others stood by.
In the hours after our meeting, the chimps were quiet.
Locked in the control room, we tried to radio out. Twenty questions came back to haunt us:
“What is that?” Chuckles had signed three months ago.
“An antenna,” I had told him. “What color are my eyes?” Tennyson and Gable whispered behind me. They were talking about the tranquilizer rifle locked in the veterinary supply cabinet.
We’d let them run freely through most of the facility for most of a year. We’d wanted them to know how to work the hatches, the suits, the equipment. Affordable labor, acceptable risk, and adequate skills with appropriate supervision. That was the executive summary in a nutshell.
I wasn’t much of a biologist, I hadn’t followed much beyond basic science in college. But I remembered evolution’s full house slapped onto the table, all chips shoved recklessly in—the naked, hunting ape. The thinking monkey that went to the moon.
“What do you want?” I had asked Chuckles from the doorway, at the end of our meeting.
His eyes narrowed. He blew spittle at me. “We want clothing. We want all books. We want Helen back.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I told him.
Tennyson tried to get the rifle. There were only ten of them—nine with Helen gone. Plenty to post guards at the facility’s intersections.
They bludgeoned him to death with pipe wrenches and hammers and moon rocks we didn’t even know they’d smuggled in. This time they didn’t dismantle the camera first. Gable reached out to turn off the camera; for some reason, I grabbed his hand and stopped him. I don’t know why.
After that, Chuckles asked to meet with me again. The first time, he’d used his suit radio. This time, he used the intercom, holding the keyboard’s speaker close to the microphone.
“We don’t need to meet,” I told him. “Helen is gone. Help yourself to the books and clothing.”
They ransacked our quarters. I watched them on the cameras, though from time to time a chimp looked up and a camera went to static.
Locked in that crowded, cluttered room, lit by the light of a dozen monitors, we slipped into sleep.
When I woke up, there was a note from Gable.
I had to try, it said.
The movie was a bad joke. “Hey pops, I’m going to the moon to teach chimpanzees how to mine on Mars.” What else could a boy’s father do? He wrapped the movie up and presented it to me at my going away party.
“Get your paws off me,” he said when I tried to hug him goodbye. “You damned dirty English teacher.”
Everyone laughed at his bad Charlton Heston impersonation. I hadn’t even taken off the cellophane.
Chuckles didn’t struggle with it at all.
They were all in the lounge watching Planet of the Apes on our flat screen television. Gable was naked, bruised and bloody, stretched out on the floor like a scientist-skin rug. I think he was dead; I hope he was.
I don’t know if he had tried to escape, tried for the gun or tried to reason with them.
No answer would be the right one.
While they hooted and howled at the movie, I made my way to the airlock. I was suiting up when Chuckles and two of his thugs approached quietly.
He tilted his head to the side. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to get Helen for you,” I said, not bothering to sign.
“You said Helen is gone.”
“I lied.”
His fingers danced, clackety-clack. “What is lied?”
“I said something that was not true.”
“I’ll go, too.”
I shrugged, putting on the rest of my suit. “Fine by me, Chuckles.” I checked my straps, I checked my boots, I pulled on my helmet and tugged on the gloves.
He went to his locker and suited up.
Together, we went out into the light of the earth. He brought his pipe wrench for good measure.
It wasn’t hard at all. It’s easy to forget the one small step between us and them.
I jump-walked to Helen’s shallow grave. I fell onto it, crying out, careful to catch myself on my hands and ease myself slowly to the ground.
When Chuckles shook me, I moaned.
When he poked me with his wrench, I stirred.
When he rolled me over, I brought up a rock the size of a cantaloupe and smashed out his faceplate.
After that, it wasn’t hard to use his wrench to pop open the supply shed. We didn’t use much in the way of explosives when it came to training.
I didn’t need much.
After setting the charges and watching them go one by one by one, I sat on a ridge and watched to make sure no suited figures emerged. I watched the air vent out, white and cold, like the last sigh of a dangerous dream.
Then I watched my watch, watched my oxygen gauge, watched the horizon for the returning supply truck. Africa hung above me in the sky. That cradle of life tipped its face away from me, ashamed.
“Life Sentences” originally appeared in Salon in March 2004 as “Miscarriage of Justice.”
“This story is about how authoritarian regimes deform human relationships, even—especially—the most intimate ones. It is also a story about how people can’t be controlled, and the unintended consequences of trying to do so.”
S PRING AT THE PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY CORRECTIONAL FACILITY in Broward County. I’m here to visit my mother, who will be fifty-eight in a week. This is no kindness to her, or me. It is a state-mandated visit. I am a living reproach.
I have never seen my mother when she was not in one phase of pregnancy or another, and today is no exception. She looks tired and done to death. The lines around her mouth have solidified since my last visit; they are set in the stone of her face. She looks—she is—angry. She has been angry ever since I can remember.
“Hello, Bryan,” she says. Despite her angry expression, this comes out almost gently.
I have spent a lot of time in therapy, ostensibly coming to terms with the fact that my mother didn’t want me. I am still required to check my weapon at the prison’s armory, lest I take revenge on her. This is absurd: she could not have had any feelings on the matter one way or another, as she didn’t know me then. What she didn’t want was to raise any children for whom she couldn’t adequately provide. The alpha and omega of her life problems revolve around what she considers adequate.
She has a crooked smile, when she smiles, from where her jaw was broken. The arresting officer stepped on her face to keep her from swallowing evidence. If her dead bolt lock had held three more seconds, we would not be facing each-other across the scarred wooden table.
“Hello, Elena,” I say.
She eases herself into a chair, unnaturally skinny except where she is unnaturally round. Half a lifetime of bearing rich women’s children has left her calcium-depleted and stick fragile, and her pale, sweaty face is made more unattractive by the reflection of the green visiting room walls.
We don’t talk much during these visits; it hurts less that way. It is part, too, of my mother’s strange Bushido. What we can do, is look into one-another’s green eyes without flinching. My mother understands, as do I, that between us there can be no feelings of guilt or regret. At least, this is what I like to think. Almost everything I know about my mother, I know from reading the official reports. Prison has a way of making everyone’s life into roman à clef.
There are no guards in the room, a strong reminder that every word and gesture is being recorded. This is another reason for our sphinxlike communion. It is harder, though not impossible, to get blood from a stone. All this notwithstanding, there is something she wants to tell me.
My mother was almost as old as I am now when she had me; that pregnancy was no childish fling.
“You have got to be kidding,” was my father’s sole, and last comment to my mother. He never came home from work that day. The Legal Aid lawyer told my mother it would cost more money than it was worth to have him skip-traced, so that was the end of that.
Abortion was still legal in a few states then, but Florida wasn’t one of them. My mother regretted the necessity of an abortion, both because she had wanted what she thought was her “twilight baby,” and because she’d have to have it done illegally; New Jersey, the closest free state, was as financially inaccessible as the moon, what with residency requirements and medical records transfer fees. The day my father walked, money became the big issue. My older sister and brother were just six and seven, respectively, and no one else was going to pay to bring them up. My mother couldn’t work pregnant, and they couldn’t live on what the anemic AFDC provided.
There was a doctor who would do it at Misericordia, in Pompano, and list it as a Dilation and Curettage, and her health plan would have even paid the bill. But two days before the operation a couple of suits from the National Reproduction Administration took the doctor away in the middle of the night. It seems she’d established a questionable pattern of performing D&Cs on women with no significant medical history.
That’s when my mother started answering the classified ads in the back of women’s magazines. She was careful. She was patient. She almost got away with it.
My desk is always heaped with paperwork, and today is no exception. So many case folders cover the tabletop that I can’t find a place to set my coffee. In those folders, more often than not, is all the information I need to do my job. By the time I have finished my coffee, I’ll have closed three cases over the phone. Three more anonymous buff folders will then take their place. It is a rare day that I go into the field.
I have been asked, more than a few times, how I feel about my job. The unspoken subtext is always, Does it bother you?
There is, I’m afraid, not much to be bothered about. It isn’t a case of not seeing the forest for the trees; I am so mired in the minutiae of the profession, that it is more like not being able to see the tree for the bark. It is all statistics: looking for the deviations from the norm. I wouldn’t know half my clients if I saw them on the street. What I know are their telephone bills, mortgage payments, medical histories, grammar school grades, even preferences in movie rentals.
Some would argue that it is easier to do my job thus insulated. They are right, but not the way they mean it. It is simply that there is less to remember this way.
My mother’s wrists are chafed from the restraints. Two years ago she dove from her bed stomach-first onto the floor. The D.C. lawyer and his wife who were waiting for the baby got a million-five from the Broward Special Corrections Department for mental anguish. My mother got padded leather handcuffs.
When I look at the raw spots on her arms, I notice that she’s tensing her muscles so hard the veins stand out like the surface of a relief map. Her face is completely composed for the cameras, however. I don’t know what to make of this, but I am careful not to stare, nor look away too quickly. I’m rewarded with the ghost of a smile too quick to register until it’s passed. So, I was meant to notice the flexing.
A guard comes in, they call them matrons here. This is a deliberate choice with 1950’s connotations, I think. She stands next to the table, stolid and dumb in her blue blouse and skirt, and signals us that the visit is over. It is less than half the time normally allotted to mandated visits. This is my mother’s small victory: our silence makes them too uncomfortable to endure watching for long. I think my mother would like to say that she is proud of me today, but cannot. To say that would be a tacit confession of her guilt. Any approval of me would mean she was wrong thirty years ago when she tried to flush my fetus out of her body. Still, it is this tacit understanding that allows me to go on with my life and my job.
Our eyes do not meet while the matron is in the room, and my mother is led away without looking back.
My mother finally narrowed it down to three advertisements that looked amateurish enough not to have been planted by the NRA, and were ambiguous enough so as to draw minimal attention. All three were for Riviera Diet Supplements—bootleg Roussel Uclaf pills—black market abortions being too dangerous, too easy to track, or both. She went to the library then, and looked up back issues of the magazines. Two of the ads had run for several prior issues, so it was a good bet that they were already under surveillance. The third was brand new.
The next step was a driver’s license under the name of a cousin who’d died as a child, with an SRO address. The rooming house address served two purposes. First, when it was time to get a post office box, it was less likely that an SRO address would trip a flag in the postal computer; it was entirely reasonable for someone living in a rented room to get their mail at a p.o. box. Post office boxes in middle-class residential neighborhoods, which ours was, usually alerted the Postal Inspection Service to a violation of the mail obscenity laws. The second reason for the SRO address was that, in Florida, there were far too many to register their tenants weekly, or even monthly. The annual, retroactive registration would turn up my mother’s nom de guerre, but by then she’d be just another desperate, half-remembered face in the clerk’s mind.
All of this cost money—a mid-quality forged license, (ones that could pass at a DWI checkpoint cost much more than paper good enough to fool a bored postal clerk), p.o. box rental—and the pills. They came in lots of six, packaged like vitamins. Some unlucky women had gone through all this, in fact, and had gotten nothing but vitamins. There were six to make sure the job was done. The feminist underground calls them étui, French for “small purses.” The NRA agents call them six-guns.
In the long run, of course, it was still cheaper than having another baby and staying home for the prescribed two years. That same week she found work as a secretary in an insurance company.
I come back from lunch and find that the pattern section has left a list on my desk. Only two names are in my area of responsibility; Evans, Theresa J, and Frawley, Taneka (none). Evans can be put off; I request a background jacket and set her name aside until it comes through. The Frawley folder is on my desk, so I will start with that one.
It is, as I recall, a fairly obvious case. Multiple postal flags, feminist literature subscription—cancelled fairly recently, unmarried, works as a B-girl in a beach club on the strip. Associate’s degree in accounting. Dangerous because she is smart enough to know she’s got a high profile. If at all possible I will perform the search while she is at work.
I bring the folder to the Warrants window, where an NRA administrative justice signs, dates, and seals a premises/vehicle paper. I kill fifteen minutes waiting for the warrant to register by Teletype with the local police. I use the time to check my weapon: I don’t often go into the field, and I go to the shooting range even less frequently. My Glock automatic has a seventeen-round clip, and I carry a spare clip in my jacket pocket. If this is not overkill, I am in the wrong line of work.
The folder stays on my desk—too many classified sources to leave the building—but I slip Frawley’s photo I.D. out, an enlargement of her Florida Driver’s License, to take with me. She is a common looking Black woman, over thirty, with an old-style “natural” hairdo. In the picture she is smiling.
The light in the visiting room is always bad—the cameras can record in the infrared if need be—adding to my mother’s washed-out look. She has just delivered the thirty-fifth baby of her sentence. There is no telling how many more she will bear; she has, in the grim double entendre of Special Corrections, consecutive life sentences.
Since she did not try to throw herself on her stomach to crush the fetus, drink her own urine to poison the fetus, or commit any other act of fetal assault, my mother is entitled to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee during her seventy-day recovery period. Then it’s back to a strict pregnancy regimen as an incubator for some other privileged couple.
She draws hard on her Marlboro. In the silence of the visiting room the stale, dry commissary cigarette pops and crackles like a miniature forest fire. We stare at each other through the smoke. Her arms are no longer raw from the restraints, but she’s built up a pad of callus tissue on the inside of each wrist. There are other changes, as well.
I suddenly realize that she has a facial tic, even though she seems otherwise composed. I have never, in fact, seen her other than utterly composed, so this pad of flesh twitching under her right eye seems the equivalent of a scream. I almost comment, but then the tic stops, and reappears under the other eye.
Could she, I wonder, be doing this deliberately? If so it is a phenomenal display of fine muscle control.
The tic stops again, and for a few minutes we sit in companionable, if absolute, silence. She stubs the cigarette out and sits forward, her arms resting on the table. After a moment, I realize that the flesh on the inside of her forearm jumps every few seconds. This reminds me of the last visit, and her vein-popping muscle tensioning. That will have to be enough for today, whatever it means. The matron, battleship-like in her stiff blue uniform leads my mother back to her dormitory area.
One of the most common mistakes women in my mother’s position made was using the p.o. box solely for their illegal transactions. As camouflage, my mother used the p.o. box for all kinds of things under her assumed name: she sent away for free recipes, subscribed to inexpensive magazines, ordered little things from mail-order catalogs, and wrote herself long, innocuous letters on her word processor at work, signing them with one of three fictional childhood friends’ names that she’d picked at random from out-of-state telephone books.
She said at one point, that if nothing else, assuming her whitebread, straitlaced, alter ego’s mindset had replaced her contempt for women on the rolls with sympathy. It was always the good girls who got into trouble; too timid to go through the NRA’s red tape to apply for birth control, and too afraid to buy on the graymarket. As a result, they bred themselves deeper and deeper into poverty, using their own loneliness and the scant infant stipend as justification.
On the day the pills arrived, my mother was careful to not vary her routine. She checked her box at lunchtime, as usual, and put the pills in her purse, then went off to lunch with her friends. After work, she picked my brother and sister up at daycare, took them home, made dinner, did homework with them, and read them their bedtime stories. She put the pills in a waterproof container and hid them inside the toilet tank float, a place, in her limited experience, she thought startlingly novel.
Two days after the pills arrived, my mother was ready to go through with the abortion. She waited until a Friday night so that she would have the whole weekend for the pill to work. She called the three girlfriends most likely to phone her, and said she was taking my brother and sister upstate to an amusement park (one she’d taken them to before—no break in the pattern there), and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. She unplugged the phone and set the answering machine. Then she sat down at the kitchen table and tried to think of anything she might have missed.
All of this, she said later, made her feel as if she were planning her own suicide.
I swing by the bar where Frawley works, to make sure she’s there. There are enough businessmen in jackets drinking lunch so that I don’t stand out and spook her. It takes almost a quarter of an hour to find her, since she has changed her hairstyle and looks younger in person than she does in the picture. She is making change for a customer when I leave for her apartment.
I could just shatter the lock and walk in, but then, even if I find nothing, she will know her apartment’s been entered. Better, in all cases, to use finesse. It takes ten minutes of finesse to get the heavy tumbler to click over, during which time two neighbors have walked by. Each time I managed to slide out of their line of sight—not that they would interfere—but if Frawley discovers that there’s been a man in a jacket and tie at her door, it might spook her as much as finding the lock smashed.
Inside the house is neat and organized, but somewhat dirty. It is the house of someone who isn’t home a great deal. There are, however, clothes in the closets, half-used toiletries in the bathroom, and fresh food in the refrigerator, all indicating that this is her real address and not stage dressing.
The current telephone bill is on her desk, opened. I don’t need to look, however; I’ve seen it already. I look through the personal papers in her desk, then get down to searching the apartment. The key, more than cleverness or intuition, is method. In my mind, I divide the room into imaginary grids, and search each one minutely. This not only insures that no spot is overlooked, but that each square foot is seen with a fresh eye.
I turn up nothing. I resist the temptation to research the odd places first, and start at the beginning of my grid again. The first search was entirely non-destructive. I left everything the way I found it, and used only my fingers to probe soft objects like pillows and cushions. This time I cut open what cannot be easily palpitated, and I pry up any loose hardware, tilework, and woodwork I find.
Still nothing. I am about to start my third, deep search when I hear the door. As much as I dislike confrontation, this one seems unavoidable.
My mother’s recovery period has stretched to two months because there are currently no sponsors. Summer is always the slowest season for surrogate wombs, and increasing competition from the private sector has lessened the demand slightly in the Special Corrections system. Whatever the reason, my mother seems to be enjoying this period of relative freedom.
“Hello, Bryan. What’s it like in the real world, these days?”
This is more than she has said to me in twelve years of bi-monthly visits. I wonder if this hiatus in her sentence is wholly the cause of her good spirits.
“About the same,” I say. “You look well.”
The truth is, she looks better—she has put on some weight, and it makes her face look years younger. Anywhere but in here, though, she could pass for someone who has just overcome a serious illness.
She sits for a long time, studying me. It is not like our usual silent communication—it is as if she is seeing me for the first time. The scrutiny makes me uncomfortable. I feel it is somehow a violation of our tacit understanding.
It occurs to me, forced back on myself like this, that it is possible my mother has finally gone insane. I have always assumed she was harder than any person or institution she came in contact with, but insanity is the second most common cause for termination of sentence. Of course, the insane trade one kind of prison for another, and if they are cured, they are returned to Special Corrections. There are precedents, though few of them.
Her voice pulls me out of my reverie.
“I’m sorry,” I say, “I wasn’t paying attention.”
“I asked if you’ve ever seen your father.”
This, of all things, I am not prepared for. In the six months from her arrest to conviction, my mother never once uttered a word about my father, or at least none that were recorded.
“No,” I say. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
You were never curious before, I want to say, but I can’t bring myself to break our unspoken agreement, even if she has.
The silence grows again, and though she doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable, I am. I begin to wish for the matron to come, silent and implacable, and lead my mother away from me. Instead I stare at the wooden tabletop.
“I wish I had gotten to know you better, son.”
That admission is shocking, in front of God and the cameras, as it were, but no more shocking than her calling me son. It is a word that has not passed her lips in my presence in thirty years.
“Your brother and Vivian were here to see me last week. Ed apparently pulled some strings. Do you know they have three children now?”
“No,” I said, numbed by this spate of information. It is as if Reagan’s face, carved into the South Dakota hills, had suddenly come to life: the oracle of Rushmore.
“Do you ever see them, or your sister?” she asks.
“No. I know I should…” I cannot believe I am saying this.
“I don’t really think they want to see you, anyway.” She says this seemingly without a trace of spite or malice. “You would make them almost as uncomfortable as I do.”
I don’t know what to say about this. I have never been so acutely uncomfortable in my life. Mercifully, the matron enters the room then and stands next to my mother.
“Well, Bryan, goodbye,” she says, looking me directly in the eye.
I fumble for a response, but by the time I can force out the words, she has passed behind the gray steel door.
“Goodbye,” I say for the cameras.
It occurs to me, as I collect my weapon from the prison’s operations room, that none of my mother’s feats of muscle control were in evidence today. I suddenly wish I had asked her what it all meant.
The last thing my mother did, before she took out the pills, was to call her National Health Clinic branch and complain about abdominal pains. The triage nurse asked the usual questions, including whether or not my mother was pregnant. She said she didn’t know.
The nurse told her to call back if the pains got worse, or if there was any bleeding, and to stay off her feet. My mother hung up and went to get the pills from the toilet tank.
She was drying her hands when they knocked at the door. My mother started to hide the pills again, then she heard the ram against the door. She ripped open the foil package too quickly, sending the pills scattering across the floor. By the time she retrieved one, the police were through the front door and searching the apartment. There weren’t that many rooms to search.
The bathroom door exploded in just as she put the pill in her mouth. The next second her head was crushed against the tiles and something in her face snapped. She felt the officer’s blunt, bitter tasting fingers probing her mouth as she passed out.
She woke up in Broward Special Corrections’ hospital wing, and has been in one part of the compound or another since. I was born seven months later, in the prison Nursery.
I was placed in the same home as my brother and sister—though they were moved out within a year of my birth. I stayed until I was eleven, then I was sent to a military boarding school because I had become a disciplinary problem. The state paid my scholarship to the private school, with the understanding that I would enter government service as soon as I was eligible. That was pretty much what happened.
I really don’t regret it.
Frawley has just set her purse on a table in the foyer when I turn the corner. She looks at me for a split second, then snatches the purse up again and dives out the door. We burst out of the building’s lobby, she several yards ahead of me. She is wearing black tights and running shoes—her off duty clothes, I gather—and is opening up the distance between us rapidly. I have to make a split-second decision: do I continue to chase her, or do I draw my weapon now, while I am still close enough to steady myself for a shot?
Had I known I was going to arrest her today, I would have brought backup. I draw my weapon and pound to a stop in front of a parked car. She opens the distance even further while I get my sights steady. I hold my breath, using the car’s roof as a rest, and squeeze off three shots.
The last one drops her. I’m completely winded by the time I am standing over her.
She is shot through the backside and lower stomach. Blood is everywhere, and she is vomiting weakly. A woman is screaming as I go through Frawley’s purse—sure enough, the pills are there. Two packets of them, in fact.
The ambulance arrives after the local police, but before my colleagues: if they are going to save the fetus, they will have to get Frawley’s body to the operating room very quickly.
Far from being over, this incident is just starting for me. I will be held over the next two shifts writing reports, having the pills tested by the lab, being counseled by the service psychiatrist, and making my obligatory appearance before a grand jury.
At least I will get the next five working days off.
“I heard you got one,” my mother says before she’s even seated at the wooden table. “You must be proud.”
I realize that it is going to be as difficult a visit as the last one. I did only what was necessary. I don’t relish the grislier aspects of my job, as do some of my colleagues—I prefer to avoid conflict, where possible. I decide the best tack to take with my mother is silence, at least until I can puzzle out her mood.
“I heard she bled to death right there on the street.”
Where, suddenly, is all this antipathy coming from? Who knows how these rumors get started? The paramedic said Frawley died almost immediately—from shock.
“Are you embarrassed?” she asks. “That would be something, at least.”
I see that this line of questioning is not going to wither away in silence.
“I’d rather not talk about my work.”
“Not to me, at least,” she answers. “So, what would you like to talk about, son?”
That word again. Inexplicably, I feel my eyes prickle.
“How come you’re not smoking?” I ask. My voice sounds perfectly level.
“I’m back on the production line again,” she says, laughing. “You know, I was beginning to think you’d actually thrown your weight around a little to keep me off the breeding line.”
“I can’t do…”
“No, no. Don’t apologize,” she cuts me off. “I’m not blaming you. It was a crazy notion to begin with.” There really is no rancor in her voice.
For the first time ever, I am uncomfortable that the cameras are recording all this. I cast around for a safe topic, then something occurs to me.
“I noticed that you had a facial tic, last—no—the time before last. Is it some kind of medical condition?”
“Your concern is a bit belated, I think. But no, you know it wasn’t a medical condition, I think.”
“Then what?”
“I was doing it on purpose…”
“Nobody can control their muscles like that.”
“You can, if you practice. I have nothing to do here but practice. Did you know Indian holy men could stop their heartbeats?”
I look at her blankly.
“No, I don’t imagine that’s the kind of thing you know much about. Well, it’s true. If you practice enough, you can control all the muscles in your body.”
“Why?”
“So I can control my body.”
We have, it seems, skated back onto thin ice again. The radical feminists have always referred to women’s reproductive offenses as taking control of their bodies.
“It’s all right,” she says, “you don’t have to say anything. I just wanted you to be here.”
“You know I come whenever…”
“No, I mean for this.”
“For what?”
She smiles at me, then she closes her eyes. When she opens them again, they are unfocussed and her face assumes an expression of unconscious concentration, if there is such a thing.
I see, suddenly, that the muscles of her abdomen are tensing mightily under her prison smock. It takes another few seconds for me to realize what she’s doing.
I knock the table over trying to get around it, but it is already too late; blood gushes from underneath the smock, making a crimson blotch from waist to hemline.
Guards rush into the room, and less than a minute later, the medical team.
“Christ, she’s bleeding out,” the doctor in charge says.
“What’s going on?” the guard supervisor, a man, wants to know.
“She’s got a massive hemorrhage—looks like a bad miscarriage.”
My mother’s eyes focus again, and she looks into mine. I am unable to look back without flinching.
She coughs, spraying flecks of blood across my face.
“Oh, man,” the doctor groans, “She’s bleeding from everywhere.” He’s young, and sounds afraid.
She is loaded onto an aluminum stretcher. I think about taking her hand, but the moment passes in a blur, and she is being bustled out the steel door, presumably to the prison hospital.
There are, I notice, bloody footprints left everywhere by the medical team and the guards. I right the visitor’s table before I leave.
According to the trial transcript, the triage nurse at the National Health branch—a fifty-year-old widow with the improbable name of Meredith Sanction—called NRA to report a possible reproduction violation. NRA, of course, already had a folder on my mother. Since they could not get an agent there in time, however, they authorized the state police to make the arrest.
Meredith Sanction testified that my mother’s call fit the classic self-abortion pattern. Meredith Sanction’s own marriage had been barren. It is on the record that the magistrate admonished the defense lawyer for pursuing irrelevant testimony during Mrs. Sanction’s cross examination.
The magistrate took less than fifteen minutes to reach his decision. Sentencing was delayed until my birth—presumably so that my mother would not self-abort in the face of a life sentence.
The minister concludes his ceremony over my mother’s grave, then hurries in out of the rain. My brother and sister stand as close to the grave as they can without having to look at me. My brother cries openly, and my sister stares, dry-eyed, at the brown rectangle in the turf. Only I can see the casket.
I still have two days off before I go back to work.
“I was worrying about how space stations might service the travelers of the future. We’ve already got child trafficking and sex tourism flowing through our port cities. What happens when the ports are self-contained little worlds a kid can’t run away from? What would it take—what kind of soul, mind, choices—to get free?”
I N THE PITCH BLACK, the metal grate under Eduardo’s feet shuddered. Eduardo backed against the tube wall and heard the other kids do the same, their suits’ I.D. lights a ring of dancing fireflies.
The mucky platform shuddered a second time and the blades below it whirred to life.
“Oh, madre,” Eduardo choked, reaching blindly back for a handhold. How could he have trusted the story of the chica que partío, the girl who left? Trusted and risked all their lives.
With a thump, the grate began sliding back under his feet and a howling suction dragged him to his knees. The children near him screamed.
Then he was suddenly jerked back against the wall, stuck like a bulkhead magnet. A cascade of thuds told him the others were too. The vacuum whooshed garbage past them, fecal matter, metal discards, plastics. Then the only sounds were the suit-to-suit coms of frightened breathing, but you could still feel the blades whirring below them, humming through the walls.
Eduardo was about to speak, reassure his team, when a new voice sounded in his helmet.
“You hear this and you’re probably doomed, slagger. Bout to get chopped and popped, or diced and iced, as we used to say on 13. The other hand, you followed my directions and made it this far. You’re three-quarters down Station’s shitter in an EVA suit and it’s gripping the wall for you, right? That’s the only way you’d be hearing this little crawler I sent down to wait for you…hopefully for a group of you. So listen up, crusties, cause things get real interesting in a few minutes. Better prep your brain pans to take in how I made it out, you want to make it too.
“Ready?”
But Eduardo could only half listen to the directions which followed because her voice, the chica que partío’s voice, was so much a part of him. It had been so from the time he had stumbled back to his sleeper six days ago and triggered the crawler she’d left for him there.
Madre. Her impossible story. As he began groping along the wall to locate the chopper shut-off, the story rushed through him again.
Hey, Eduardo. My name’s Maggie. I’m from level 13 like your kid brother, and I’m thirteen years old. (Well, yuh-uh.) I’m a cleaner, not a sexkid, because I howled and scratched too much when they first brought me in. Lucked out that a Station cleaner had just turned sixteen and been moved out that week.
That’s background, okay? What I really want to tell you is what happened to your brother and why. What I know of it. My story and his… Well, you’ll see.
Station time 0235, a Saturday, all lights dim. I was creeping the side corridors of our level, looking for your brother, my lover—Squirrel.
The steam ropes stank, the blower. Air was thick. And I was so freaked I could hardly breathe.
Why? Cause the last three days of my gathered downtime I’d been on a secret mission through the downdecks. Damaged, right? But this uppie who called himself “Spartacus” had kind of saved me, then suckered me into it. Gave me stolen codes to access all the other downdecks. Even yours. Just to recon.
Freakin.
So my last trip was the 5-6 level. And like all the rest the kids came out and just stared at me when I showed, assuming I was just another lying perv, right? Down for private selection. But then one of the little girls walked right up to me and tugged on my pants and looked up at me with these big blue eyes. Five years old? I knelt down, tied back her hair, wiped her nose, and asked her name. Baby Anne. And suddenly she’s saying, “Are you my mommy? Please be my mommy?”
Then every—kid—there was on me, wailing. Grabbing me. Choking me. I got free and ran.
Now, back on 13, I was looking for Squirrel because I didn’t know if I could put on the face I had to for my job, to go meet Spartacus. I was raw.
The blower coughed and I jumped, throwing myself back against the passage wall, barely breathing.
Shit.
Breathe.
I almost started to cry, which shows you how freaked I was. I should have found Squirrel by now. Nervy and Blow, his usual male hangs, didn’t know where he was. He hadn’t been called updeck. Just…vanished. Sent to damaged?
I pushed off the wall and jogged faster, turned into the tailpipe where they used to keep overflow sexkids on our level. The ones they’d sell off at bargain rates. It was my last 13 hidey to check. If he wasn’t there…well, I’d just puke.
Then, shit and uni-praise, I found him.
He was nestled inside a chest-high cargo box that “went missing” last month. It was full of some foam and stuff that Squirrel and other kids of 13 had thrown in to make an uber-hidey-hole for the needy.
But Squirrel?
He lifted his bleached blond head and looked up at me. His beautiful dark eyes had gone all glassy, the pupils dilated. He stank of rancid-sweet smoke. On cue, he lifted his pipe up from his side and took a long drag. Coughed.
I almost barfed on him I was so furious. It was Squirrel who’d nursed me back to health after the beaters finally made me a cleaner and let me go. Squirrel who taught me to never ever let them get to me or I’d end up in damaged. And when I turned eleven, he showed me how to forget my past completely and have sex for fun. Quietly. So no one else knew, on 11 or anywhere, as we moved up the levels together.
How could he do this to himself? To me?
I hoisted myself over the edge to drop into the box with him. Two little bags of bones in there. We probably weighed less than forty kilos together.
I slapped his face. “Sup?” I demanded.
He blinked. “Hunh?”
“Why you popping?”
His head wobbled a bit. “Miles, Pax, and Trauma. They threw Paula down the shitter.”
“No.”
“Said she stole something from the uppies. They sent it out with her.”
“Oh no no no,” I moaned because I knew it was true. They’d really done it. Popped her down the Station waste disposal with the food, garbage, everything. You picture that? Someone you know getting sucked into that big central tube? Stopped at damaged level, of course, so the good stuff can get scavenged. But live shit like Paula won’t get scavenged, will it. No, because even the damaged know it’s toxic. Which means she gets finally flushed into the chopper for a second extraction of water and reusables, her remains powderized and blown spaceward each time we spin through the winds.
Bye, bye, girlfiend.
I tried to get Squirrel to hold me, but he just fumbled a dark hand up my shirt to rub my nips with his thumb and pinky. Made me want to cry. I think I did. I think I burbled about Spartacus too. But then, despite the hour and me being furious and scared and weird, slag me if it didn’t start getting me hot. Squirrel had this way. His long, gentle fingers massaged my heart as much as my skin.
“You want to?” he mumbled.
“Not with you popped.”
But then I pressed up against him and slipped him my tongue. Your brother, despite his shortcomings and the fuzz on his upper lip, was a high grade addiction.
Only he couldn’t be. Not tonight.
I yanked myself back and scrambled out of the box. They sniff and analyze anyone going updeck, right? If I joined with Squirrel now, they’d know. Spartacus might find out.
Which meant…?
Slag me. My bony little knees felt like pudding and I grabbed both hands onto the edge of Squirrel’s box. I realized I was covered in sweat. The fear hadn’t gone away once I’d found Squirrel; it had just changed to a sick lump in my stomach. Nothing resolved.
Squirrel looked up stupidly from inside his box. “Maggie?”
I shook my head and took a deep breath. “Squirrel…if I vanished, would you miss me?”
His glassy eyes blinked at me. For just a second, he seemed to actually process what I was saying enough to focus. “Whassa matter?”
“Nothing. I just want you to know…” But his eyes were drifting again. His head rolled down to his popper pipe. Sucking and making it pop.
I shut my mouth. What in the name of the unified holies had I been about to do? I mean, slag me. Right before work? Right before meeting a guy who could have me killed?
“S’okay,” Squirrel said and passed out.
“No it’s not,” I said and hurried away.
Fifteen minutes later I was full-suited and at the 13 Updeck access.
“That a new suit, Margaret 1315?” said the access guard. “Nice shape.”
Har-har. You know the suits? Ones that look like giant orange baggies. Bout all most of you know about cleaners, right? Joke on 13 was you could get two skinny kids humping inside a cleaner suit and from the outside they’d look like a single with spin sickness. Everyone thinks we’ve got it easy.
Like this…
“Go. No. Stop.”
The level locks stayed shut before me.
“1315, strip down.”
I looked at the guard. He was looking stupidly at the monitors to his right. Like there was really something there.
“Why?” I said.
His head jerked up, eyes mean. “You say something, slag?”
My whole body was hot. Too nervous. Too much. I forced some of it out through my pores, made myself shake my head, and stripped down to my singlet. The guard waited. I took the singlet off too. When I was naked, the guard pulled on his poly gloves and said, “Stay still.”
Two minutes later, he grunted, “Filthy. But nothing new.” He stuck his hands in the cleaners to burn off the gloves, then gave my ass a slap and told me to get dressed.
I hid my face as I did so he wouldn’t see the flush and misinterpret it. It wasn’t because of him or what he’d just done. It was because I was suddenly sure I wasn’t coming back. And I hadn’t told Squirrel I loved him.
Shit.
A minute later the level lock clicked shut behind me. I went up the lift, tugged my cleaning cart out of its locker, and clipped its cord to my suit so that it floated along beside me on little repellers like some kind of permanently-attached colon bag. I had a mini-version of the repellers on my own boots so I could move soundlessly. Some kind of smart-reversing-polymer-pad-somethings. My mask had low-light pick up. Even my clean-green sprayer was silenced to a hiss so we could clean the halls right outside sleep cabins and nobody would wake up.
Great snagger get-up, right? Except cleaners are tagged a hundred different ways coming up and electronically monitored the whole time they’re updeck. Suits are bugged. Every non-private room is watched. Cleaners are scanned and searched coming and going. A cleaner tries to destroy something or take a souvenir of the uppies and she’s off for a mine tour so fast…
How Paula managed to smuggle something down… Well, shit.
I checked the time on my cart. 0305. Fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Spartacus, one deck up.
If I went.
Blanking my mind, I rush-cleaned the Princess deck, mostly doing a quick pass of the halls with my clean-green hose. I slammed shut an entire row of EVA suit lockers. Weird they were open, right? Because every spacer brings their own suits onto Station, their own weapons, and all these suits were extras. Must have used these to take some sexkids outside.
Everything smelled cold and rank to me suddenly. Someone had been sloppy with the air locks!
I was just freaking, of course. I knew nothing about air locks because none of the downdecks have them; only updecks and engineering. Found that out on my little spy missions. The only way out of a sexkid downdeck is the shitter.
When I finished the sweep, I went up a level to the Prince deck where the main partying was supposed to happen. Sure enough, the movable furniture there was whacked about, the walls hangings ripped, food smeared around, light brackets smashed, sour puke everywhere, clothes, papers, blood.
Real fun, I guess.
0318.
I coded open the big vents around the edges of the room but had to get my tools from the cart to manually open one that had become stuck. Used a laser-saw to cut through the crud build up that had jammed it.
Then I put back my tools and swung out my clean-green hose for a full foam. It roared out in great, high-power blasts, slorping the clothing and other garbage in big foamy waves to the vents. Laser-sawed a shredded couch into pieces so it could follow the rest. Until finally the antiseptic smell of clean-green coming through my mask overpowered the vomit.
And still I kept on, trying to zone out but thinking how the ghouls on damaged would be stopping all this at their shitter sieve and using remote arms or wading suits to pick through for hard scrip or drugs or—
A hand clapped onto my shoulder and I spun with my sprayer, but Spartacus batted it aside and reached to my cart to turn off the foam. With his eyes, he gestured to the surveillance cams, then ripped off my cleaner hood to drag me in close and kiss me hard on the mouth. No tongue.
“Come to my room,” he said raggedly.
I nodded. I could hardly breathe, my heart was doing a terror high-step.
He pulled the plug to separate me from my cart and dragged me, floppy suit and all, out of the party room and down the corridor. He fingered open a room door that lay separate from all the others, different from the one he was in the last time, and dragged me inside.
Private quarters. No monitoring.
And freakin huge. A viewer desk showed a rotating field of space with two blazing suns. There were table and chairs, a food dispenser, a room with a personal shitter (okay, all the uppie rooms had those), a massage soaker, a huge double bed. Squirrel told me he’d been in one like this when he was five, when the Station Commander had requisitioned him. I didn’t believe him. Maybe you don’t believe me. But here it was.
Spartacus saw my wide eyes and laughed. Scary, because his eyes were so intense. His black hair was longer and messier than any other spacer’s I’d ever seen. His pasty white body had a hungry, wasted look. Which made his clean smell and raspy smooth accent that much more surprising.
“Station brass found out I am a reporter,” he said. “They are scared I will record something bad—these are Live-On filaments in my eyes—and they will be shut down. But nothing bad happens here, yes?”
I didn’t say anything. I rarely did when facing a new grown-up. I just listened, watched, ready to run. Of course it was better usually to just give in, since where could you go on Station anyway? Once you were in a private room, I’d heard you couldn’t even get out without the owner’s fingerprints.
“Take the cleaner suit off, Maggie. Make yourself comfortable. Have a drink.” He waved to the little dispenser unit in the wall. “They assume we fuck now. It gives us at least one hour, perhaps more if we look exhausted later.”
I hesitated, then slowly peeled off my outer suit and stood in just my singlet and bare feet. I knew he could see my hard nipples and fear pimples through the slick material, but I made myself not think of that.
“Good. Good.” He looked away from me. “Have a drink. Anything. Then we can talk for awhile. Finally you will tell me what you found. I will tell you what I am planning. You will decide to help me…or not.”
I hesitated again but I was finally drawn to the novelty of a dispenser that could do more than water and slop A or slop B. I stood in front of its little outlet, staring. Couldn’t figure it out. Started blushing from my heels on up.
“Take a cup from the cupboard on the right,” Spartacus said from behind me. “Hold it under the spout, and say what you would like. Try…ginger ale.”
I bit my lips, nodded, and did as he said. The resulting splash of liquid looked so bad that I wondered if maybe this was a kind of loyalty test. Or maybe he wanted to punish me because I hadn’t come directly to him?
“Sip,” he said, right behind me.
I did, coughed as the liquid tried to shoot up my nose, and dropped the cup so the “ginger ale” splashed all over the soft floor, wetting both his and my legs.
Spartacus laughed. “Don’t worry.” Then more gently, almost purring, “Sit down on the bed, Maggie. I will tell you a story.”
This was it, then. I was to be a sexkid, after all. And if I screamed here, he’d report me for going to the other downdecks. Make up some story.
I walked to the bed and sat. My whole body was vibrating. If I could just make myself vomit…
But he didn’t follow me to the bed. Instead he pulled out a chair from his viewer/sender and straddled it backwards, crossing his wiry arms on its back. His chin rested on the arms. His eyes burned into mine.
“Do you know how long Station’s been out here?” he said. “Eight years, your time. More than twelve by Earth world clocks. And you know that in all that time, no government has ever protested it?”
He waited for an answer and I all I could think about was how I’d first met him. It was like this:
I was cleaning the Prince deck. I came across this ring of boys and girls, sixes and sevens from the look of them, who’d been drugged and tied, arm to arm, around a donut seat. From the blood and muck, I guessed they’d been sexed repeatedly, hit and slagged, by a whole gang of spacers. Out in a public place too, not a private room. I scowled at the surveillance cameras, then jumped when a spacer, still popped and apparently not done, came stumbling back into the room wearing an EVA suit with the helmet hanging off his neck and the front middle of his suit unseamed and wide open, heading for the kid circle.
Without thinking, I raised my clean-green hose and sprayed him in the face, full force. He went screaming backwards and suddenly another long-haired skinny spacer jumped out of nowhere, grabbed my hose, and aimed it at the screaming man. “Thank you!” Spartacus had giggled at me like he’d asked me to do this. “I have him! Spray! Spray!”
Saved me. Dragged me back to his room. Told me he was here to change things and did I want to make a difference?
“Well?” he demanded now.
“No one’s protested what goes on here,” I said.
“What? What goes on here?”
“The…hitting?”
“Yes, the hitting. Also the rape. The imprisonment of minors. The sexual slavery. These things have been universally outlawed on Earth and its worlds for over fifty years. Yet out here, they persist unchecked. Do you think that no one back on Earth’s planets cares what happens this far out?”
I blinked back at him. Wasn’t that obvious?
As if he read my mind, he sprang from his chair so that it crashed to the floor in front of me. “It is not apathy, but blindness!” he shouted. “The elected officials, the human rights groups—they do not know what this station is! If we could get just one person…” He whirled back towards me and bore forwards so I shrank back on the bed.
“Or eighteen,” he said and pointed at me. “Two children from each level. Five years old to fifteen. This is why I sent you down there. I need someone they will all trust to make it work. Will they trust you?”
Please be my mommy!
“Some will.”
“Tell me.”
So I did, telling him how I’d used the memorized codes at each level door, surprised at how basic the security was compared to the lock between the updecks and the lowers. “It’s just repeating numbers shifted once for each lock going down.”
“Very good. You see? They think you are too stupid to figure it out. Unschooled and illiterate.”
“Well, yuh-uh.”
“Do not say that. Do not speak their lies with your mouth.”
I blinked at him again. It wasn’t a lie to say we were unschooled. Who among the sexkids could read or write? Other than Squirrel, of course, who said he learned it from you before you both lost your folks and got sent here. So what did Spartacus—
“Tell me about their social structure. Their leaders.”
I did. And this time he let me talk until my mouth was dry and he brought me some liquid that tasted suspiciously like the vitamin juice they put in our slop. He said it was the juice of an orange.
When I was done, Spartacus took over, pacing the room and describing his plan. It was full of overblown sidetracks but boiled down to this:
There were only two ways out of the downdecks. One was to get updeck, past all the security guards and locks—essentially impossible, even if the entire downdecks revolted.
The second way was out through the shitters. And once out, it was easy enough to get back in via an updeck airlock because each was fitted with lots of safeties for fool spacers who got themselves trapped outside. (Say, after a popper party like last night?)
The trick, of course, was to get out through the shitter choppers and grinders alive. But according to Spartacus, he’d seen the plans of Station and confirmed that it was like every other station he’d ever visited. Failsafes were built into every egress for people intelligent enough to use them. In this case, if a spacer somehow found himself going down the shitter with the muck, there was a stop button at sieve level that would shut down the grinders and either let the trapped human go out the bottom or take the much more embarrassing option of calling for retrieval help.
“Out the bottom?” I said. “Into space?”
Spartacus wrinkled back pale lips. “Some spacers are most comfortable there, especially if they are only stopping at a station for a short visit. They may remove their space suits to bathe, but some give up bathing altogether. Their suits are their second skins, their oxygen, their defense, their strength. It is not uncommon for a spacer to be crazy within his suit.”
“An EVA suit you’re talking about,” I said. “Like the ones in the lockers.” I’d touched them before, hung them up and been amazed at their light, filmy texture, impossibly thin for something that was supposed to guard against the frozen vacuum of space. To try to steal or wear one, Squirrel had told me, got you sent to damaged.
Spartacus studied me. “You have never tried one?”
I shook my head. He went to a panel in the wall, pressed something and had a compartment snap out with an EVA suit suspended from it, a pale, iridescent red. Spartacus scooped it off its rack and threw it to me. “Put it on.”
I found the front seam and slid my right foot into the oversized boot. I gasped as the boot shrank to fit my foot. The material thickened slightly to absorb the extra mass.
Spartacus laughed and urged me to try on the rest. I did and moments later looked like the skinniest, smallest spacer ever to walk free on Station. But the suit fit perfectly. I even pulled on the helmet and it blew to a perfectly clear sphere around my head.
“Press your fingers hard to the wall,” Spartacus said.
I did and found they stuck and I couldn’t release them until I’d given up and let my hand go slack.
“The entire suit is an intelligent multi-shift polymer,” Spartacus said. “The parent of your cleaner boots. It will adapt to the largest man or smallest child, self-sealing, automatic compensation for pressure. Various things trigger its attachment power. The ribs on its back synthesize enough heat and oxygen for up to thirty minutes. This will be enough time.”
“For what?” I said through my helmet.
He seemed not to hear as he answered a viewer call on audio only, turned away so I couldn’t hear. When he turned back, I repeated the question. “What is thirty minutes enough time for?”
He smiled. “For your eighteen children to exit the station and climb to my ship.”
Twenty minutes later I was checking back through the lock to the downdecks, ignoring the guard’s abuse because my head was spinning. Spartacus swore he could personally deliver eighteen space suits down the main shitter and wait with them at the sieve. If I could bundle or otherwise protect my eighteen sexkids to survive the drop to the sieve, he’d help them don the suits there, hit the failsafe on the grinders, and crawl out of Station and up to Spartacus’s ship.
Tomorrow night. Ship time zero hour. Nineteen hours away.
It wasn’t a lot of time, but I already knew how to get the kids down, like some part of me had been working this forever. It involved ropes all the way down the garbage chutes and you don’t even want to know the inspiration for that. I also planned to steal the few oxygen masks we had on each level cause I wasn’t sure how breathable the air was down the main shitter. It went out the center of the station, where Squirrel said the gravity was to be next to nil, so my illiterate and unschooled head told me that if all that gunk wasn’t getting pushed down by gravity, it had to be sucked by the air going out, right? Like the vacuum that pulled stuff down when I clean-greened them.
It bugged me that Spartacus hadn’t mentioned any of that.
It bugged me that I couldn’t get my head straight on how we’d manage to get past the damaged without alarms.
Or negotiate the suit change in a near-vacuum.
Until I finally admitted to myself that I was brain-buzzed from too little sleep. Might as well have been popped. So I stole off to the tailpipe to sleep with Squirrel in his box. Only he wasn’t there.
I crawled in anyway.
I woke up to Nervy shaking my scrawny body and shouting so that sweat and spit flew off him like a sprinkler.
“Wha—? What? What?”
I sprang out of the box, knocking him over backwards. Saw that Blow was there with Nervy. Blow was a big, blocky boy who probably would have been the 13 bully except that he had the heart of a mouse. He also worshiped Squirrel and, by extension, me. Both he and Nervy were honking like they’d just come off really bad poppers. Their eyes were red. Their hands and legs shook.
“Squirrel’s gone!” Nervy said. Blow nodded.
“What time is it?” I demanded and fumbled out my timer. 0800. I’d slept almost three hours. Shit. The countdown was on now. I had to get moving. I rubbed my face and slapped my cheeks. I could smell myself. “He’ll turn up,” I said.
“Uh-unh,” Nervy said.
“They came and told us,” Blow said.
“What?” This was just bad enough to jitter me fully awake.
“He came outta here awhile back, swearing and kicking stuff.”
“Kids,” Blow said. “Kicking kids and stuff.”
“Looking for you. Really scared looking. Then he took off for the updeck lock.”
“Hour goes by.”
“And they tell us he’s been sent to damaged.”
It hit me like a kick in the chest. A Station uppie did that to me once—kicked me in the chest when he caught me cleaning some of his personal stuff down the party vents. It felt like this. My wind left me in a rush, my stomach flipped over and sent bad stuff up my throat, and the pain spread up to clap around my head like a nutcracker, squeezing.
I slid back down in the box. “No.”
“Yeah!” said Nervy like he thought I didn’t get it.
Time. There was no time. No time to grieve. No time to back down. Still—
“Did they say why?” I whispered.
Both Nervy and Blow shook their heads in the top opening of my box and looking up at that made me want to be sick again. Instead I reached up my hands and grabbed the top edges of the box. Made myself climb out. “Oh, Unified Mother,” I prayed under my breath when my feet hit the deck.
“There was one thing,” said Nervy.
“Yeah,” said Blow. “Before he left.”
“He said he had to save you.”
I turned to face them. “Who from?”
They shrugged together. “Spartacus?”
I knew the moment Nervy and Blow had said the name Spartacus that I’d somehow been had. And maybe I should’ve just tried to back away. Hide? Go to the Station managers? Stay ignorant.
But all I could think was Why? Why did Squirrel even know the name? I mean, maybe I’d said it to him when he was popped, but it was just a name. Why’d he gone chasing after me updeck? And what had he done to get sent down to damaged?
That’s why I was keying my way down a level at a time, avoiding the elevator and its security, using the progressive number codes on the deck locks and tempted to jam them all open. Cause what did it matter if the big and little kids mixed, really? We were all screwed, literally, figuratively, every which way.
And when I reached 6, I stupidly wandered around until I found the self-possessed little girl I’d seen there yesterday, early this morning, whatever. She was sleeping in one of the exposed beds in a narrow sleepway. Baby Anne, that was what she’d called herself. Just lying there, all peaceful and happy, like I always imagined I had as a little girl before my parents vanished in a mine blow up. My daddy had been an engineer, my mom a doctor. Did Baby Anne know who her parents had been?
I reached down to touch her face and stopped myself cause other kids in the sleepway were already starting to stare. Any minute now one of them might remember me. I had to go.
I kissed my fingertips and blew it at Baby Anne, thinking that if Spartacus was on the level, she’d be one of the two from 6.
Then I ran through the back ways just like all the other decks above it, and found the door that went to damaged. Holding my breath, because Spartacus had never meant for me to go here and hadn’t given me the code, I dropped down the next number in the repeating code pattern and punched it in.
There was a gentle click, then a thunk, and I jerked the handled down hard, pulling back with all my strength. This back door hadn’t been used in a long time. No one went to damaged by choice.
Like the other levels, this one was dark immediately past the back door, but unlike the others, it wasn’t deserted. Shapes came shuffling towards me out of the gloom, curious. Dangerous? I’d never know because I ran from that tunnel tee so fast you’d think I’d overslept feeding time. I was heading for the sleeper rooms nearest damaged’s updeck lock. That’s where they would have brought Squirrel.
Except he wasn’t there. There were just a lot of vacant eyes, a few chatterers, a few hooting violents that were semi-restrained in private cells, and, most frightening of all, older kids who looked perfectly sane but simply too broken to respond to anything. The smell of waste was thick in the air. Some no doubt from malfunctioning shitters and residents who just didn’t bother. The rest from what, on every other level, would have been the sexkids’ “recreation” area.
6 or 7 had a place for kids to play tag and throw stuff. 8, 9, and 10 had that and wrestling mats. 11 and up was like a cheap lounge. Lots of hanging out, flirting, sex games.
Damaged had the sieve.
The entire area was taken over by the inward curve of the shitter tube and three wide display windows wrapping round it. Also monitoring equipment, mechanical controls. More technology and actual brainwork here than in any of the upper levels, and they’d assigned the work to damageds. As I walked around it hopefully, it made no sense to me until I saw a damaged scramble frantically through a narrow tube below one of the windows. Through the window I could see her emerge into an attached thick body suit that let her walk out into the muck of the sieve. The sleeve from the wall stretched behind her as she dropped to her hands and knees to go after something she’d seen.
Transfixed in front of the middle window, I watched her dig through clean-green garbage and shit until, with a groaning creak and a visible shake inside the tube, the entire lake seemed to suddenly split in two and go slurping down the divide, sucking everything after it—lake, wall shit, air, and the damaged in the retrieval suit.
For a second there was only blackness, then the sleeve holding the damaged’s suit sprang her back up—I heard her shriek and giggle—the sieve snapped closed, and the choppers and grinders below ground into a terrifying commotion.
I swallowed, picturing the little kids I’d been asked to send into there from above. Where was the failsafe switch in there? I couldn’t see it.
“S’over there, Mags,” slurred a voice by my ear and I spun around. Only one person had ever been able to read my mind like that. Your brother. Squirrel!
I grabbed the front of his suit and almost pulled him over as I half-scrambled up to kiss his face and grab his bleached blond hair and hit him on the shoulder as I choked over all the scrapes and bruises he’d let them give him.
“Hee-hee-ee-ee-hee!” shrieked the damaged girl who’d managed to climb back out of the sleeve down near our knees. “Got it! Got it!” And she crawled over to a complicated mini-airlock on the tube that must have been a cleaning conduit for stuff dragged out of the muck.
Squirrel tore his face away from my kisses and pointed again at the shitter observation window. “Just over the curving sieve lock.”
I looked, squinting. Even though they’d brought the lights on in there, streaks of crap and paper and…stuff that had withstood the suck smeared everything. But I finally saw it, right where he’d said, a distinctive button with all sorts of writing around it.
“What’s it say?” I asked, because, like I said before, Squirrel was the only 13’er I knew who was good at reading. He’d tried to teach me, but I’d never seen the point.
“Lights…and….” he began, but his voice and eyes had gone so hollow I figured they must have given him chems to get him down here.
The damaged girl cut him off by dancing up and waving the floral-patterned shirt she’d pulled from the muck, obviously three or more sizes too small for her. Ripped off a young sexkid? Maybe Paula? Had she stripped it off and hooked it over a jag in the wall somehow before she’d been sucked into the chopper? To remember her by.
“Go away,” I snarled at the damaged girl and she did.
When I turned back to Squirrel, he was pressed up against the shitter tube window, rubbing his nose against it, back and forth, like he didn’t understand why he couldn’t go through. “Clips of frozen kiddies,” he said. “Floating around. Ay madre.”
“Are you popped?” I said. Because shit and uni-praise I needed Squirrel’s good brain here, not his noodle head, tough times or not.
Then I saw the crusted blood at the back of his head, the side of his head, and the feeling I’d had when I’d first learned he was in damaged came back to me. I jumped forward behind him, pressing my body to his back, and felt all the bumps in his head, the places where his skull had been so badly fractured it was amazing he was even standing.
Then he wasn’t.
I half caught him as he fell and he dragged me down to the steel deck with him. The deck was wet. It smelled like shit. Had smears of shit all over here. Now all over Squirrel.
Sorry, Eduardo.
One last time Squirrel’s dark brown eyes seemed to focus on mine. Then he died.
Keep a cool shell. Never let them get to you.
That’s what Squirrel used to say. And he touched me with his long fingers. Tried to teach me things. Called me smarter than anyone.
Keep a cool shell.
“What?” The guard at updeck access 13, just starting his night shift, looked through his window at me like I’d just barfed on his shoes. I was glad I had on my cleaner suit and mask. Cool shell. Just get up there.
“I need to go up early. Forgot to put some tools back into my cart before I came down last time.”
“So?”
“The longer I leave them up there, the more chance someone else could find them. Take them.”
“Yeah.”
“My boss would hate that.”
The guard smiled. “Really.”
“Spartacus.”
“What?” He frowned through the window at me and I knew that while this was right, I couldn’t be too obvious either.
“Um…Spartacus wants to see me?”
The guard frowned deeper and checked something on his screen and it suddenly clicked it was a frown of not understanding.
“Maybe it’s…just the name he uses with me?” I said. “He’s a reporter. You know. In the big room with the view screen and massage soaker.”
Understanding dawned, then a sneer. “One of you kids talked your way up this morning, attacked the man, had to be put down. You really think he wants another of you just now?”
Attacked the man….
I took my cleaner hood and mask off so he could see how the blood had drained from my face. Vulnerability. He wouldn’t know why. “He’ll see me,” I said quietly. “He has before. Check your tapes. Ask him.”
The guard paused. He frowned uncertainly again, then turned back to his console. He scanned through his tapes and made a call. Spoke silently and intensely with whoever was on the other line. When he turned back to me, he shrugged like he’d meant to let me pass all along.
“Go. Margaret 1315.”
I went, stopping at my usual cupboard to drag out my clean-green cart. I clipped it on and pulled it with me across the Princess Deck. Then up to Prince. Down the corridor to Spartacus’s room. I knocked and he opened. I walked in with the cart and he barely looked at me. He was nursing a swollen eye, his other was bloodshot, and he limped as he returned to his viewer desk in a loose-hanging robe. I could see bruises across his pale, sunken chest.
The door closed behind me and I got out of my cleaner suit. I cleared my throat until he turned and looked at me. I was in just my singlet. Concealing nothing. His red eyes flicked over me without caring and he flicked back his long hair. “What is it? Are the children ready to go?”
“How are you going to be able to take the suits down to them with a bad leg?” I said.
“Ah. Perhaps it is you who must take them down.”
“Where are they? The suits.”
He waved his hand jerkily in the air. “Hidden. Ready. They take up no space, eighteen suits. I told you. They are special.”
“You mean they don’t exist.”
“I mean…” he snarled. Then he let go what little energy he had left and collapsed back in his chair. “They do not exist.”
Maybe it was because I was trying at last to understand other people, grownups, but when he collapsed, my own knees went weak too and I sank to the floor of his quarters. “And you’re a fake. A fake who tried to pretend that someone somewhere cares about us and how we live here. Stupid. I knew that. I just… I don’t understand why you did it.”
It took almost a minute for Spartacus to pull himself upright in his chair, and when he did, I saw that his eyes were not only red, with one swollen, but wet too. He had been crying like a child and still was.
“You do not understand, ma chère. People care. I care.” He took this deep, shuddering breath. “But there is no easy way out for you children. Much of what I told you is true—how the suit works, the failsafes, getting out. But my ship carries only two passengers—my pilot and me. It is like that for almost every ship that stops here. Unless…”
He leaned towards me in his chair, clearly wanting me to ask. “Unless what?”
“Unless we make the worlds care. You see, I am a reporter. I record things that are seen by all the worlds of Earth. And if I can shock them, make them realize what goes on here…”
Clips of frozen kiddies. Floating around. Ay madre.
Oh unified mother.
“You were going to have me send all those kids down the shitter, stop the choppers, and record them shooting out into space.”
“Yes.” The man’s pale lips were trembling now and point his finger at his temple. “With my Live-On filaments. I would go out the waste tube with them. Show the worlds what the little children will brave to escape their horrors here. This would change things. Vraiment.”
I fought down the sourness in my throat and held his eyes as I reached for my cart to help me stand. “You really believe that?”
“Yes.”
“You thought killing a bunch of kids…” Something clicked for me. “I bet you laid this out for Squirrel before you ever met me, didn’t you. He was so smart. You figured he’d see it just like you. But he didn’t. He walked away.”
“What?”
“Then he found out you’d gone from him to me.”
“I do not—”
“Daniel Ramírez. The blond sexkid you bashed up this morning. My love.”
Understanding dawned on the man’s face now, just like it had on the guard’s and on my own. Oh, goody. And what did all that get us?
“Maggie,” he said to me now with the old commanding rasp in his voice, holding out both hands with his palms down. “It all sounds cruel, yes. But it is the only way. Or else this station will keep on and on. There will be other stations like it. It must be stopped.”
“Not this way,” I said roughly and reached with my left hand into my clean-green cart for my laser-saw. “What’s your real name?”
He looked to the saw and smiled, knowing of course that the saw only worked on things that stayed still long enough for a laser to cut. “Auguste Lachance de la Fer. Why do you ask?”
“Fair trade for giving you the name Daniel.”
He must have sensed something because he was leaping even as I braced myself and, with my right hand, swung up my clean-green hose, turned on full bore.
It hit and drove him back, enough off-balance enough for me to jump forward and kick him in the balls, then smash the laser saw into his head to put him out cold. Once he was still, the laser saw worked just fine.
You really want to hear the rest, Eduardo? How I cut him up, then ripped the top off his personal shitter and stuffed pieces of him down the pipe to make sure I’d fit myself? How I took his spacesuit and gun, then went down his shitter, all off-camera? I hit the sieve and stuck to the wall while I hit the failsafe. Then I crawled out and up the side of Station, which looks like some great nubbly ball slowly turning round and round with its levels all cockeyed. It took me almost to the end of my suit’s air to locate the only docked spaceship that could have been Auguste’s, and I would have died for sure if the identifiers in his suit hadn’t gotten me access.
But they did. I surprised and got the drop on his pilot. Turns out he was no great fan of Auguste Lachance de la Fer, anyway, and he’s become a willing helper in my escape. I think.
Don’t know what my chances are from here, though. The chances are good that they’re onto me already, so I can’t go back. We might not even make it through the jump gates. Or we might make it, only to get taken out Earthside. Or just not get the grown-ups to listen. Or, even if I make it and get them to listen, they could still take months, years, before Earth does anything.
That’s no good. This stuff has to end now.
Which is partly why I sent this little crawler to your sleeper. Not just to tell you about your brother, but to tell you, by my example, by Squirrel’s, what you’ve got to do. At the end of this, I’m going to give you all the downdeck lock codes. And it’s going to be up to you to get to each level, pick the most together kids you can find (that’ll be Baby Anne on 6), tell them what’s what. The next big arrival of ships, you have to find a way to get your selections picked to go updeck at the same time. Coordinate. Hijack your patrons. Grab their guns and suits. Leave their rooms the same way I did.
The kicker? Even if you do that and get space-side, you can’t take the ships; you’d be split up and too weak and they’d stop you for sure.
You have to go to Queen Deck where Station’s command crew lives—only eight people, Auguste’s pilot says. They’re all “pansy officers” not soldiers. His words. Which means if you send in the little kids first—no codes needed on the airlock; more of this failsafe shit—they can distract them with a sob story while the rest of you get in and surround ’em with guns. Kill them if you have to.
From Queen Deck you lock every hatch and take over all the Station systems. Kid named Mule on fourteen knows tech. Make sure he’s on the team.
Then you hold it and all the docked ships for ransom. You’ll have major broadcast gear. Someone somewhere has to listen.
Always assuming, of course, that you all make it down the shitter in the first place. And manage to turn off the choppers.
I’m sending another proximity crawler down there with some last minute directions to find that failsafe, find the Queen deck entrance, and work as a team. Rah-rah stuff.
Eduardo yanked himself out of recall to hear the last words the chica que partío had left for them here. Now. Pasted to the shitter’s inner wall which still hummed with the action of the choppers blades under them. Eduardo had found nothing! Every child he’d chosen for this had come through, yet here they were stuck. The children’s air was running out.
“You find that failsafe,” Maggie’s voice commanded, “hit it, and it’s just a matter of guts and glory. Out like shit and back in like people.
“I’m praying for you.”
The humming stopped.
In the eerie silence, the lights flicked on around them. Eduardo could see the opaque rectangles that had to be the windows on damaged looking in at them. He thought the 13’er called Blow was supposed to have distracted them. Had he failed? Were the damaged about to restart the cutters or simply report what they now saw?
Suddenly Baby Anne squeaked from farther right than where she’d been, “Hey! Me! I did that! There’s buttons right here like she said.”
“Not bad,” said the 14’er called Mule. “Praise the madre,” Eduardo said. “Yay, Mommy!” said Baby Anne, with the echoes of twenty more children laughing with her where they stuck to the walls.
“Told ya!” shouted the one who called himself Nervy. He raised his fist. “My man Blow!”
“And my little brother, Squirrel,” Eduardo said quietly. “Him too!”
Giddy, laughing, all the children began to crawl across the shit-covered walls towards Eduardo. They met up and Eduardo gave them each a stern look. The stun drug he’d dipped their fingernails in to help them disable their patrons would be wearing off soon. Alarms would sound. They had to get moving.
He turned and led them down through the choppers and crushers and blast pads and exit doors to the sight of two suns sliding past…and their first outside look at a station waiting to be taken.
O ne pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the one that mother gives you should at least alleviate that headache you get from contemplating the flip side of scale. The Universe is a vast coalescence of mostly empty space. Structures and superstructures trace across the night sky in glowing tendrils of milk and lace. These effects left from the gravitational forces in place since the beginning of time are the fossil remains of the Big Bang seen through the enhancing eyes of our machines.
The vastness of the heavens is underscored by the space between “stuff.” We may be prejudiced to believe in the importance of stuff, due in part to our membership in the club of baryonic matter, but nevertheless the stufflessness is the ultimate governor of scale in the Universe.
As human beings we hold a privileged position as observers able to contemplate the creation. We are, after all, the Universe taking note of itself—Freudian autotherapists questioning our own existence awash in an infinity of donuts and cigars. We sit in the center of a logarithmic relationship of sorts, laid out by us for our own convenience along powers of ten.
Our view of creation is limited by the speed of light. The most distant objects detectable by our machines are therefore 13.7 billion light years from Main Street in every direction. For convenience we have measures of scale for understanding and none are any more correct than any other, but for the purposes of this discussion we will use metric; we exist locally on a scale described in meters. The farthest reaches of the cosmos are then measured in numbers of meters that have grown rapidly as we leap from our home to the edge of the known universe. We can spy through 12.9 x 1025 meters of expanding space.
But these empty spaces are not the only place we can find the stuff/stufflessness ratio. If we were to stick our heads into the rabbit hole looking inward, we can do the same scaling dance in reverse and find nested worlds within worlds all the way down. Strangely reminiscent of Zeno’s paradox of running ever smaller distances and never reaching our destination, smaller and smaller scales tumble inward. A sort of Russian Doll build, nested down to the limits of our ability to discern. Our extrapolation skills require things other than vision, but let me come back to that. We have a little way to go first.
Sequential inward reductions in size at orders of magnitude remind us of poor Achilles who could not walk to the other side of Zeno’s room even given infinite time. Once he walked half way across the room he would then have been required to walk half the following distance, then again, and once more, always tracking half way and never completing his trip to the far wall. If he had grown smaller with each of these steps he might have seen some strange things, possibly even making his reduction in size worth the trip.
The first few steps might have seemed odd, though no odder than Alice’s after she nibbled at the tea cakes. Furniture would grow larger as scale shifted from the familiar. Insects, even those too small to normally see, would swell to enormous size in his new world view. Eventually microbes, too, would show themselves: eukaryotic and eventually smaller prokaryotic. The far wall of the room would seem to rush from him as Achilles shrunk further, distant as when he took his first step.
As he shrinks down to nanometer sizes, 10-9 of our own scale, light fades to red before deliquescing to darkness, a darkness not defined by an absence of light but rather as a scale where its wave nature is too large to interact with the denizens there. Achilles has become smaller than the crests of visible light, a state where even Alice never ventured.
A short step farther inward brings Achilles to the orbits of electrons buzzing about his feet at 10-10 meters. Here, once again, the natural world dishes up the unexpected. The electrons in orbit around the atoms in the floor where Achilles began walking across the room have become ephemeral clouds of electron probabilities. Straddling the fence of particle/wave duality, electrons fill their quantum orbits with mathematical uncertainty.
The electron itself incidentally, is 10-18 times smaller than our scale, or an attometer across at the largest. Our machines can exploit the size of the electron and its wave nature to substitute for light and see things in this scaled world. With them we are able to see things larger than attometer size in spectacular detail. Bacteria or the bristle-covered heads of fleas reveal themselves as objects of alien beauty. Achilles will have little time to enjoy the sights, however, as his next step is imminent.
In fact, he must take several steps from the outer limits of the atoms’ electron clouds to the next landmark. From 10-10 meters he must take four steps across a void of intra-atomic space. At 10-14 meters his feet come to rest on the nucleus, a clustered assemblage of protons and neutrons encompassing the lion’s share of an atom’s mass. Fortunately for those of us following Achilles, his feet are made of something other than matter, allowing another step, and we vicariously spy the inside of the nucleus.
At one femtometer, 10-15 meters, our hero’s stride has encompassed the radius of a proton. Far above his head the electrons have been lost beyond emptiness 105 times taller than himself, or a distance above you now equal to 100 km or the edge of space.
To fall further into the rabbit hole Achilles can take three more steps to 10-18 meters (once again, an attometer) and reach the size of an electron. Somewhere nested before him lie quarks, smaller than electrons and the perfect excuse to use the ersatz preteralchemical prefixes of the very small, just because we can and they are cool.
Three more nested steps in looking for quarks; at zeptometer scales, or 10-21 meters, they are still undiscernable. At a yoctometer (10-24 meters), quarks are still nested and may or may not have any volume at all. Achilles might take a rest.
We have no benchmarks this deep. There are no standard candles to guide us, only our accelerators for crushing atoms and constituents to their component parts. Their tiny bursts of primordial destruction glow across screens for our analysis as to charge and mass and spin. Scattered traces of “parts” giving up the nature of their whole are all we have. And so Achilles walks unknown ground.
Meanwhile here at Yoctometer Junction, Alice catches up with Achilles and Zeno with a steaming pot of tea. How much farther can space itself be divided? Who knows? But so far Zeno has been correct, Achilles courageously led, and Alice has diligently nibbled her magic cakes and followed. If you are anything like me, the dreamer and writer in you stirs at the extremes presented by the clockwork cosmos and the stochastic cogs of its systems. So what’s outside the limits of our telescopes? I dunno. What’s nested inside the abilities of our particle accelerators? I dunno that either. And isn’t that cool?
“Some of the best stories start with a mirror. Alice had one. The Evil Queen did too. As an adolescent, I spent a lot of time looking into mine with an odd mixture of hope and despair.
Our reflections are mighty and mysterious things… and the idea that mine might have a life of its own sparked ‘Mirror Bound.’”
I T’S MORNING AGAIN. Ava is getting ready. I’m on call while the shower runs, even though the steam makes it hard to judge my cue. But when she wipes the silver surface, I’m there to mimic every movement.
She bends in closer to study the tiny pimple that surfaced in the night. I have a pimple too now. That’s just great. She thinks the same thing.
“Shit,” we say. “That’s just great.”
This wouldn’t happen if she washed her face before falling into bed, but there’s no telling her anything. We flounce out of the bathroom, naked and dripping water.
I flicker across the surface of her college diploma and beat her to the bedroom. The mirror only reaches up to our neck, so I stick my tongue out at her. We study our naked curves, suck in our stomachs, heave up our boobs and let them fall again. She slides the closet door out of the way and we switch into high gear, trying on everything she owns and some pieces twice.
It’s like this every morning.
It’s getting really old.
God, we need coffee. The sun isn’t even up yet.
Maybe after we blow our hair dry and slap on some make-up, I can crawl back into her bed and sleep.
So much for my nap. I get pulled into the restroom at work six times before lunch. She must have picked up a double latté on the way into the city.
The lights here are too bright. What’s more, they turn our skin green and bring out the circles under our eyes. The pimple looks worse than ever.
Michelle glides in. Her job is to sit behind the front desk and look pretty. She checks herself out. We check her out. We don’t like her and she definitely doesn’t like us. She’s the office man-eater, complete with sneaky eyes and big tits. That’s how she got her diamond stud earrings and top-of-the-line Lexus.
“Honey, you look tired,” she says with mock concern. “Watching late night TV again?”
We arch a brow.
“I’m too young to need beauty sleep.”
Unlike you.
Insincere smile.
We breeze past her; I scowl over my shoulder at her reflection. It gives us the perfectly French-manicured middle finger when Michelle disappears in to a stall to pee.
Long afternoon. We get invited to the new club downtown. I groan, thinking of all the costume changes we’ll have to make later.
I want to take the paint off Ava’s toenails; it makes me claustrophobic.
I pick at it with glee and wait for her to notice the chips.
She’s late getting home and slams the door. The dog barks and runs to greet her. I wait in the wings with the second dog, holding onto his collar. He’s a little stupid and would jump out early if I didn’t stop him.
She races through the bedroom. The dogs play, nose to nose with tails wagging. No time, no time, no time. We shed clothes like snakeskin. On goes a skirt, the one with the slit. She must be horny. No one would wear a skirt that short unless she was trolling for a piece.
“Damn it all to hell.”
She noticed the toenails. No time to redo and I indulge in a smirk. We quick-fix with dark pantyhose and high heels. We grab earrings and spray perfume. The dogs sneeze and smack their heads against the floor. She leans in and pouts, so I do the same. Crimson lipstick. She winks, and I wink back.Let’s go get ‘em.
She checks herself out in the rearview mirror twenty times on the way downtown.
Lipstick on the teeth, stupid!
No, she saw it. Tongues remove the whore-red smears.
Valet parking. The girls from the office are waiting behind the velvet rope for us. Including Michelle. Purring, perfect Michelle. Damn.
Ava agrees.
“Damn.”
One last look. We smooth the hair. Dig the black liner out of the corner of our eyes. I almost have butterflies as I chase her inside, dashing through car windows and rainbow-slicked puddles on the sidewalk.
I watch her from behind the bar, fragmented in the bottles. We do tequila shots and laugh with the girls from the office.
The music is loud, but our voice is louder. I cross my legs too and talk with all her friends. We shoot glances at the guys playing pool and smile that coy smile.
There’s a shy blond watching us. He’s nursing a Corona with a lime wedged in the neck, but she’s going after the consumptive poet with a deliberately messy hair-do. Her tragic taste in men drives me wild, but I can’t really say anything when I’m downing another mouthful of Cuervo. It goes straight to her head and mine.
There’s going to be trouble. Michelle is eyeing the same guy and we go to stake a claim before she can get her pretty paws down his pants.
It’s hard to keep up with her when the room tilts and my head floats miles above it all. I stumble after her, toss my hair and break into a thousand pieces against the disco ball on the ceiling. We dance, rock back and forth. I’m a shadow across the room, a flicker in a glass, twin reflections in his eyes. Oh yeah. The poet is there, all hands and heavy breathing.
Just when I start to enjoy it, she forgets herself. Closes her damn eyes and lets him hold her close. I go back to waiting in the wings, frustrated and impatient.
He stands next to me. We do not touch.
This guy is some kind of freaky. I watch them from the ceiling, trying to time pelvic thrusts and unexpected writhing. He’s on top of me then we’re on top of them. It’s trickier than I expected, but the novelty breaks the monotony. Music thumps in the background—
Twenty-three positions in a one-night stand…
—And I want to snicker but I can’t.
The bedsprings squeak in a furious rhythm. She must have closed her eyes again or maybe they decide to only look at each other. But there was a moment when his reflection paused, shook the hair out of his eyes and gave me a look like:
Whatcha gonna do?
Waiting again. I can’t believe she’s fallen asleep in a complete stranger’s bedroom. Probably the booze. I’m on call, in case she gets up to puke all over his bathroom floor tiles. My stomach twists but I’m still on duty.
This could get awkward.
He sits next to me, naked and smoking a cigarette. He offers me one. I shake my head, then reconsider. Why the hell not?
“I don’t think we ever got your name.” I inhale, and manage not to choke.
“No, you never did.”
“You screw a lot of strangers?”
“Yeah. You?”
“It’s been a while. This wasn’t bad though.”
“Thanks.” He rubbed a hand through the messy hairdo. “We need to get a haircut. You know how long he spends to look this scruffy?”
“When you have to spend twenty minutes waxing your bikini line, you’ll have my sympathy.”
He gave a short bark of laughter and then a singularly sweet smile. Right about then, I remembered I didn’t have any clothes on either. I studied the half moons in the winetinted polish on my toes.
“You’re cute when you blush.” He blows twin streams of smoke out his nose and stubs out his cigarette.
My cheeks are on fire, and it spreads down my chest. “Whatever.”
“No, really.” He pulls me to my feet and tows me into a little deeper darkness. His kisses are different. Soft and slow. Like he wants to take all the time in the world. Like they might not wake up any minute.
I go to sleep in his arms and get a wakeup call in the back of a taxi. She swipes at her face, and her wild eyes stare at me inside the compact. We sport raccoon circles and rampant bed head.
Did we get his number?
Did we get his fricking name?
I fume while Ava throws up on the side of the freeway.
We’re late, but it’s worth getting bawled out by the boss to see the look on Michelle’s face when we pass reception in the same outfit from yesterday. The black marble surface of the counter really needs to be cleaned….
“Up late?”
I hiss and spit at her reflection.
Ava steps away with a condescending grin and I have to follow. “Ladies never tell.”
“No, ladies don’t.”
“How would you know?” she calls over her shoulder. I laugh in the water cooler as she struts to her desk.
She dreams away the morning and doodles all over the desktop calendar. I hover between the computer monitor and her tiny window. I crane my neck until I get a cramp.
I’m not interfering. I’m just concerned.
Move your damn hand, woman!
Jarett.
We have a name. We have a number. And apparently we have another date tonight.
No wonder we glow.
We dress with more care tonight. Ava touches up the polish on her toes and I make no move to sabotage them. This date calls for killer strappy sandals and the perfect little black dress. We spend over an hour on our makeup; I steady her hand. She twists her hair up, but I convince her to let it tumble in loose curls over her shoulder.
The girls pick us up and there’s nothing but laughter and dirty jokes and elbows in the gut for Ava.
“He was really hot—”
“And you were really late this morning!”
“So how much sleep did you get last night?”
“A minute or three—” we say, and the girls shriek some more. We laugh and toss our curls.
There are no puddles tonight, no wait outside. We flash past the bar, circle the dance floor. Laser lights cast our shadow in twenty different directions and I get dizzy.
He’s there. Waiting for us in the corner. His smile is for us both. Ava waves to the girls and runs across the room to join him. I take the long way, past the bar, around the dance floor. A thousand little bits and pieces of me dance in the disco ball with him.
He holds me close and touches me in inappropriate places, but really it’s Jarett and Ava bumping and grinding. We’re just along for the roller coaster ride, and this time we don’t mind.
“Baby, you are so hot,” Jarett tells Ava.
I missed you he whispers to me.
“Shut up and dance,” she demands with a laugh.
You hardly know me.
When Ava and Jarett disappear into a secluded booth, they leave us alone in the wings.
He brushes a stray, sticky curl from my forehead. Shy, as if he hadn’t had his crotch pressed to mine for the last half an hour.
Screwing on the ceiling is way more fun the second time around. And the third.
While they snore and kick each other in their sleep, we sit together in the wings. His hand is large and warm.
Falling for him is definitely against the rules, but I do it anyway.
Jarett goes out of town for a meeting and doesn’t call Ava that week. Another week passes without a phone call and we both fret. She stomps around the house, glaring at me as though it was my fault.
I scowl right back at her.
“He’s going to call,” we tell each other, but neither of us believes it.
She throws herself on the bed and spends hours watching television infomercials.
I sit in the wings and pout. I pick at her toenails just to make her insane.
If you ruined this, so help me…!
And I won’t say we kicked the dog by the time another Friday night rolled around again. But we nudged him a good one.
We’re going out. Her hands shake and she jabs us in the eye with the mascara wand.
We’re back at the club. She must have concentrated on the road the entire drive here because I missed all of it. I have two seconds to get my bearings before—
Ava freezes.
My gaze is hers, and it’s on Jarett. And Jarett is plastered against Michelle. He catches sight of us and the eyes on Ava widen. The eyes on me are full of misery but their lips are on someone else and my hand is clenching.
Ava flees to the bar, but I stay quite still.
She orders a drink, but I circle the room.
Behind the bar, along the dance floor, over the disco ball.
This is against the rules.
To hell with the rules.
My fist plows into Michelle’s reflection and both of them double over. She vomits tequila and her double goes for my eyes. He tries to get between us even as Jarett backs away from the mess. The strobe lights and throbbing bass line cover the chaos.
He holds me around the waist and I’m a little conflicted. I want to kiss him, kick him in the nuts and run away all at the same time.
Michelle drags herself away, gagging and screaming. Her reflection hesitates. All around us, other mirror images notice the commotion and then join the fray. They howl and dance on tables, tear off their clothes and screw in corners. It’s a little scary, because someone is going to look in the mirrors and see us misbehaving.
Ava is at the bar, sobbing into her drink. I should go to her, but—
“There’s going to be hell to pay,” he says to me. Then his lips are on mine and I couldn’t care less if the world implodes and takes Ava with it.
The mirrors begin to splinter. Cracks run along every surface and break us into pieces.
“Hold on to me!” he yells as the lights flare and explode. Everyone in the bar is plunged into darkness. We’re all lost.
But he’s got me around the waist and I hold on to him. I think I can hear Ava calling, but she’s on her own.
“I’m a lifelong Texan, and my writing is heavily influenced by the state’s unique mythology. When I decided to write a story about how people might find hope in a hopeless situation, I knew I had to set it during the siege of the Alamo. The rest, of course, is history.”
“I SHALL HAVE TO FIGHT the enemy on his own terms, yet I am ready to do it, and if my countrymen do not rally to my relief, I am determined to perish in the defense of this place, and my bones shall reproach my country for her neglect.”
—Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis, March 3, 1836
A lone horse thundered across the plain, flanks lathered in sweat, a low-bent rider urging her toward the old mission. Lieutenant Colonel Travis tore his gaze away from the Mexican forces congregating near La Villita and followed the rider’s progress. He grew anxious when he realized it was Bonham returning. Possibilities battled in his heart; fear, hope, cynicism all firing volleys in the war for his soul. Whatever word Bonham carried would decide their fate. He was certain. They’d managed to hold the mission for over a week, but if the Mexican army decided to attack in earnest, the scattering of men at his command would fall in a matter of hours.
Travis ordered open the gate and climbed down from the wall, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that Bonham carried bad news. Yet, did it really matter? With or without reinforcements, he intended to lead his men in defense of this place. Bonham wouldn’t be the first courier to return with word that no help was coming.
Travis exercised every bit of restraint he possessed in allowing Bonham to dismount before asking his question. “What news, James?”
Chest heaving, riding coat layered with dirt, James Bonham shoved a letter into Travis’s hand. How long had Bonham ridden to bring this dispatch, and what caliber of man was he to return to near-certain death? “Three-Legged Williamson. He says he’s pulling men together to send this way.”
“How many?”
“Not sure. But he says to hold out. They’re coming.”
How many could Williamson muster? Two hundred, maybe three? Counting the enemy forces was difficult—reinforcements continued to arrive every day and they’d begun to fan out around the mission—but they numbered at least fifteen hundred. On his less optimistic days, Travis estimated closer to six thousand.
“Still no word from General Houston,” Travis said. “I’ll send out more pleas today. Though I can’t say what good it will do.”
“It depends on how long it takes for the Mexicans to work up the nerve to storm the walls.” Bonham flinched as a cannonball exploded near the chapel doors. Travis and the rest of the defenders were so accustomed to cannon fire that the impact hardly registered. Bonham would have to re-acclimate himself to the onslaught. He made his way to the well as bits of broken earth rained down around them.
“What’s he doing?” Bonham pointed to a bent old man, kneeling before a mostly-intact barracks wall that faced the mission’s main courtyard. He worked the tip of a horsehair paintbrush in neat, delicate strokes, and much of the wall had already been transformed into a breathtaking mural.
“Painting.” Travis said, retrieving a bucket of water for his friend. “He’s been at it for a few days now. Half the walls on the north end are covered, and so is the entire inside of the chapel. He works fast.”
Bonham drank his fill before responding. “Why is he doing that? Hasn’t anyone told him those walls are coming down soon?” Bonham attempted a grin, but another cannonball dissolved his gallows humor.
“As far as I can tell, he’s insane. Never talks, never eats, just paints all day and night. He’s not harming anyone, so I haven’t tried to stop him. The man’s not a bad artist. He painted a forest of pines on the north wall. They remind me of the ones that grow up around Mine Creek back in Carolina. Remember?”
Bonham nodded, the memory of pine cones and high summer mornings in his eyes.
“So real you’d swear you could walk right between the trunks and take a stroll. Although Crockett seems to think they’re mountains or something.”
“Well, crazy or not, I sure hope he can fire a gun.”
“Do me a favor and spread the word to Crockett and the volunteers. I’ll address the regulars. After that, try to get some sleep.”
“I will.” Bonham turned away and headed toward a gang of shabbily dressed men with mismatched rifles congregated near the stock pens. His pace was slow but deliberate. The man was bent by weariness but unwilling to show it in his stride.
“James?” Travis called out as gunfire cracked in the distance. Bonham rounded back to face him.
“Thank you,” Travis said.
Bonham nodded, then turned back to his task.
David Crockett held court near the chapel doors.
His Tennessee boys had heard all his stories a thousand times, but Kimbell’s men had arrived only two days ago, and they’d yet to hear the entirety of his legend. They clustered around him, leaning on rifles and clapping one another on the back when Crockett relayed a far-fetched tale about a Creek Indian, a grizzly bear, and the Vice-President’s daughter. It wasn’t that Crockett had a particularly high opinion of himself, but he understood men. Give them the idea that great things were possible, and they just might believe it.
“So when the idiots decided they didn’t want me any more, I told them ‘You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.’”
This drew a whoop of appreciation from the assembled soldiers. Crockett answered them with a crooked smile, grasped his long lapels with both hands and pushed out his chest. “And I’m still glad I came. Damn that army out there and damn their red flag.” He pointed out beyond the walls, in the direction of San Antonio de Béxar. The twin towers of the San Fernando cathedral reached heavenward, and a red flag billowed overhead. “Santa Anna ordered that flag flown. Do you know why?”
Many nodded their heads, but the newcomers simply stared expectantly.
“It signifies no quarter. He’s demanded unconditional surrender. There will be no survivors if we lose this battle. Any living men will be put to the sword. Incidentally, those of you who rode in with Captain Kimbell are to be commended. You’re either fools or patriots, and I love both.”
This drew a scattering of nervous laughter, but none could shake the specter of the red flag bleeding across the sky like Hell’s own standard.
“First thing you should learn is that Mr. Travis is the latter. And he will not fail in his command. When the Mexicans demanded our surrender, do you know how he answered them? With a cannonball. That’s the type of man Mr. Travis is, and that’s the type of men you must be.”
The men erupted, raising their rifles in the air and cheering an improbable victory. Crockett broke away from the group, his thinning face split with a grin, and he didn’t allow his smile to falter until he’d retired to the relative privacy of his sleeping chamber. Here he sat on his cot, head in hands, wishing he were half as confident as he led the men to believe. Cannons roared in the distance and Crockett wilted beneath the Mexican army’s incessant, mocking bugle music.
They blew El Degüello. And he knew what that meant.
Death was a foregone conclusion.
And yet, he still felt the need to lead these doomed men. Travis might be in charge of the soldiers, and Bowie had fancied himself in charge before taking ill, but Crockett knew he alone commanded the men’s fighting spirit, and without his constant reinforcement, morale would crumble. They would all die here, but they would do so standing tall.
Crockett sipped a cup of water and attempted to shake his melancholy. A cool breeze crept into the room, smelling of gunpowder, and it reminded him of his days in the Tennessee mountains with Jackson’s outfit. This in turn reminded him of the astonishing painting on the barracks wall—huge sloping hills, jagged with pines, wide blue skies with low-hanging clouds creeping in from beyond the horizon. For whatever reason, someone had been painting murals all over the place, but this particular one called to Crockett, and he found himself stopping to admire it on numerous occasions, even going so far as to take the roundabout route from one place to another so he might catch a passing glimpse. It was so lifelike, it seemed possible to step out onto that mountain ridge and take a deep breath of Tennessee air.
Part of him wished he could, wished he’d never come to this place. But he knew even if such an escape was possible, he’d never take it. Such a thing was outside the realm of his character.
Still, it was a lovely thought.
James Bowie lay on his cot, fearing his own delusions. He knew no other way to describe them. He shivered beneath a filthy wool blanket, coughing up blood, sticky with sweat. Alligators swam in the sky while gnarled tree limbs reached down from the ceiling and threatened to pull him into the swamp.
He closed his eyes, trying to convince himself it was just the sickness, a byproduct of his fever. What else could it be? Even in his compromised state, James Bowie was smart enough to realize he hadn’t really seen a feeble looking man take to the air and paint a living swamp on the ceiling. Yet when he opened his eyes, the flicker of the oil lamp burning at his bedside still breathed motion into the impossible scene. The odor of mud and mold was redolent in his death chamber.
It would be an inauspicious death for a man of his legend, but Bowie was certain the fever would take him before the Mexicans could. Every cough felt like a knife blade parting his throat, and the appearance of these delusions could not be a positive sign. He tried to sit up, but fell back against the cot, once again besieged by hacking coughs.
He didn’t understand what was happening, but when his coughing finally subsided and he resigned himself to the surreal circumstances, the swamp lost its sense of menace and provided an odd sort of comfort. Overhead, a fat water moccasin lounged in the crook of a cypress tree, peering out from a nest of Spanish moss. Silver light danced across the midnight waters and insects buzzed through wispy fog. The scene put Bowie in mind of his grandfather’s house outside Opelousas, the place where he’d spent much of his young life and a place he dearly loved. Somewhere logs popped in an old stone fireplace and he could smell the wood smoke drifting like memory through the stale room.
He recalled casting his line in murky waters, digging in the mud for crawfish, listening to the distant call of wolves late into the night. Finding himself once again surrounded by this world of permanent twilight, he wondered why he’d ever left someplace so flush with magic. He’d often considered abandoning his new life and returning to the place he’d been happiest. But there was always some cause to claim his whim; Louisiana would be there when he was ready. And so would all the ghosts of his past.
They watched him now, his grandfather a solemn figure in homespun clothes, his mother and father gathered beside him, welcoming their son him home with smiles that forgave his every sin, and best of all his Cecilia, walking toward him in the wedding dress she’d never had the opportunity to wear. His beautiful fiancé, gone these many years and never a day had passed that she hadn’t haunted his memory. She held her hand out to him, pale and delicate as a field of daisies.
Bowie reached toward the ceiling, desperate to feel her touch, but the coughing returned. He doubled over in pain and released a silent scream, unable to breath. Cecilia moved closer, stepping out of the swamp and reaching for him, so close he could smell the flowers in her hair. The coughing spell would not relent and tears welled in his eyes.
“Marry me?” asked Cecilia, her voice delicate as crystal.
Bowie nodded, unable to speak. He stretched both arms skyward, coughing, fighting his own mortality for one last second with his love. When her fingers found his at last, the coughing stopped. The death chamber was gone, and only swampland remained. Bowie clasped her in his arms, afraid he might lose her again, and together they returned to the realm of sweet memory.
“Bowie is dead. We found him in his cot this morning.” Travis delivered the news to Crockett, unsure what kind of reaction to expect. Crockett considered the matter for a few seconds in silence before nodding his head.
“Unfortunate, but not unexpected. I’m surprised he lasted this long. This is your command, but if you’d be willing to accept my advice—”
“I would.” Travis had never felt like less of a leader. Despair continued to build like ominous clouds overhead, and it was only a matter of time before the storm hit. Travis was more than willing to share his portion of responsibility.
“Don’t speak to the men about this.” Crockett wore a serious expression, quite the opposite of the laughing frontiersman persona he used to bolster the troops. His sideburns were ragged and unkempt, and the beginnings of a patchy beard shadowed his face. Crockett was letting himself go, and something that looked suspiciously like fear dwelled in his eyes.
“You think it will be bad for morale.”
“Yes I do. If a man like that dies before the battle even starts, what chance do the rest of us have against an unbeatable army?”
Travis and Crockett exchanged a silent stare, twin pillars of resignation with a single unspoken sentiment between them.
We are going to die.
There was little doubting it. Bonham had been back more than a day and still there was no sign of help coming. Santa Anna wouldn’t wait much longer. Sensing the storm’s approach, Travis had written one final letter making provisions for his son in the event of his death. This letter had been included with another batch of messages begging for aid, but any help they could summon would likely be too late in coming. He couldn’t imagine the Mexican army waiting longer than another few days before bringing the full weight of their forces to bear.
Travis broke eye contact, not wishing to find any more weakness in Crockett’s stare.
By late afternoon, Travis deduced that the attack was coming soon. The sounds of celebration and random gunfire had disappeared, replaced by an interminable silence that proved far worse than the constant bleating of El Degüello. The Mexican army seemed to have grown more serious, filing back and forth in the streets of San Antonio de Béxar to the West, tightening around the North, South and East sides of the mission, all escape and messenger routes effectively cut off. The men sensed it too. And despite Crockett’s constant efforts to keep them laughing and confident, a patina of dread dulled their features.
Those not staring at the Mexican forces, contemplating their end, studied the endless vista rendered in paint on the courtyard walls. It seemed impossible that one man had painted it in only a few days, and yet it must be the case. The old painter toiled on the last remaining bit of broken wall not yet covered with paint, and Crockett stood at his side, mouth in motion, hands emphasizing whatever point he was trying to make. Travis walked toward them, still awestruck by the lifelike quality of the man’s art. Sun poured from the sky, causing him to squint, and in that moment it seemed there were no walls remaining, just a never-ending forest of pine and spruce. A deer advanced cautiously toward a bubbling river, then bolted for thicker woods when it spotted Travis. He shook his head clear and the world returned to normal. He wondered for a second if his mind was cracking under the strain.
Crockett saw Travis approaching and waved him over. “Tell me what you see when you look at that painting.”
“A forest of pine trees. It actually looks a bit like the place where I was born.”
“Then you don’t see the horsemen?”
Travis studied the painting, but saw nothing more than trees split by a winding river. He shook his head.
“That’s what I thought!” Crockett returned his attention to the kneeling painter and tapped him on the shoulder. “Talk to me, sir! Why are you here? How are you doing that?”
The painter continued his work as if he didn’t notice the red-faced former congressman looming in his peripheral vision.
“What’s the matter?” Travis thought Crockett might be reaching his breaking point as well. He tended to be an amicable person, but he looked as if he’d like to murder the painter.
“There’s something wrong with these paintings, and he won’t acknowledge my attempts to learn what it is. You say you see a pine forest. Do you know what I see? A group of riders situated across a rocky ridge. The second regiment of the Tennessee Volunteer Mountain Riflemen, to be exact. I know those men; we rode together. Right there’s General Jackson in the lead, scanning that valley for signs of Indian activity. And in the back, a sorrel colt with an empty saddle. Like it’s my saddle, and they’re waiting for me. So you tell me why it is I see all that and all you see is trees.”
Travis saw none of these things. “No two people view a painting the same way.”
“I’m not talking about artistic interpretation,” Crockett said, unable to curb his frustration. “I’m talking about two people seeing something entirely different when staring at the same spot. I’m talking about the fact that this man might as well have pulled this mural out of my memory. And the fact that the damned thing is alive. Swear to God I saw it moving.” Crockett snapped his mouth shut, like he’d suddenly realized he might be better off keeping his ravings to himself.
“It’s not just me,” he said, lowering his voice and stepping toward Travis so no one would overhear. “I’ve been talking to the men and they all claim to see different things in these paintings. They say one of Kimbell’s men walked right through a wall and never came back. He said he was going home.”
The painter paused, as if eavesdropping on their conversation. Crockett watched Travis, waiting on a response, but the Lieutenant Colonel didn’t know what to say. Crockett was obviously farther gone than he’d believed. Yet, he couldn’t shake the memory of the deer bolting away in the blink of any eye. It wasn’t in the mural any longer, but it had been there moments ago. Hadn’t it? Travis moved toward the wall and he felt warm summer wind blowing from somewhere other than Texas.
“I’m not saying I believe them,” Crockett said. “I just want to know what this man has to say about his paintings.”
When Travis didn’t respond, Crockett stalked away, cursing. Travis stared into the brush, noticing for the first time the doe tracks left behind in river mud.
“What are you doing here?”
The painter’s brush stopped moving and he turned his eyes to Travis for the first time. The intensity of that stare halted any further advance, and Travis experienced the unsettling feeling that those eyes kept ancient secrets he couldn’t possibly comprehend.
“You are but the walking dead, and I am here to provide the path.”
The painter turned back to his work and he acknowledged no other attempts at conversation. Colonel Travis was left to wonder whether the old man’s words were a threat or a prophecy.
Death came for them just before dawn.
Four columns of Mexican solders assaulted the mission from different sides; pale golden light parted the horizon while choking black gunsmoke suffused the air. Bayonets separated men from their lives, and the defenders staggered beneath the horde of soldiers pouring over the walls, splintering the gates, driving them back with sheer numbers. In close quarters, the defenders fought for their lives with fists and knives; the blood of revolutionaries and Mexicans alike clotted in the dirt, mingled together in a harmony it could never have achieved in life, and as more souls fled their flesh, the walls became truly alive.
Travis had just finished disarming a Mexican solder and killing the man with his own bayonet when he noticed the walls had disappeared. The scene surrounding him seemed conjured from the bloodiest pit of hell, yet beyond the fray grew the majestic pines of South Carolina. Others noticed too, through Travis understood now they were witnessing their own version of Paradise. Fighters from both sides of the battle reacted in amazement, yet none could slow the struggle without achieving instant death. Several men at the edge of the conflict bolted for the place beyond the walls, and Travis recalled the old painter’s words.
You are but the walking dead, and I am here to provide the path.
Even as he engaged another soldier in hand-to-hand struggle, he realized they would all walk that path in the end. It was their destiny, for better or worse. Whether the painter was a god or a demon, he understood the workings of fate. Why show them the way to Paradise if there was still a chance they’d live? Yet he knew he would fight this certain outcome until the final moment. But when given the choice of instant Paradise versus the ugly battle to resist it, he doubted all his men would share his resolve.
Travis found the enemy soldier’s chin with the butt of his rifle, knocked the man to the ground and drove his bayonet into the man’s chest. He pulled it free and turned to another target, screaming in a ravaged voice. “Hold this place! Hold this place! Do not run. For your families and all you’ve built. Hold this place!”
Amazingly, they reacted with a burst of vigor, pressing back the rapidly closing circle of Mexicans. Several more fled in terror—and a number of Mexicans joined them—but for the most part, the defenders remembered why they were there. They may not have understood what was happening, but the possibility of flight was beyond consideration.
Travis killed another man. His mouth tasted of blood and he knew he was wounded, but there was no time to check. As he struggled to stay alive against the growing onslaught, he wondered if Paradise was indeed his childhood home. How long before he walked the painter’s path and what would he find at the end? Even amid the terrors of battle, the smell of pine breezes and tobacco rose above the blood and smoke. Travis couldn’t tell if any of it was real, but he seized on these sensations, using the longing they conjured to fuel his attack.
William Travis released one last rally cry to his troops before a bullet tore through his skull and answered his every question.
David Crockett had never been truly terrified before this moment. He had survived his share of skirmishes but this was a slaughter. If anyone was left standing in an hour’s time, it would be a miracle. Blood caked his clothes as he whirled through the battle, killing men with his knife and waiting for his luck to expire. All the while, he wore a red-toothed grin, screaming curses at the enemy and driving his men to greater heroics. Crockett might be terrified, but he would never allow anyone to know.
He was so embroiled in the battle, he didn’t notice the mission walls had been replaced by a Tennessee ridge until something hit him in the back and knocked him to the ground. As he scrambled to his hands and knees, he saw General Jackson and the others, waiting for him less than fifty yards away. The general beckoned with a gloved hand, and the sorrel colt trotted toward him as if the general was sending it to carry him home. For an instant, he considered climbing into the saddle and riding for someplace beyond the horror. He thought of his wife and children, wondered if there was a place for them in his delusions. But he intended to make a place for them here. In the realm of reality. And he would not be persuaded by dreams.
Crockett climbed to his feet and turned his back on temptation. A band of Mexicans surrounded him, yelling in Spanish. Crockett understood—they knew who he was and were debating whether or not Santa Anna’s demand for no quarter applied to American legends. Crockett decided to take the decision out of their hands. A wide-eyed solder half his age threatened him with his bayonet. Crockett grabbed the man’s rifle and pulled him forward, then slammed his knife into the Mexican’s stomach. He withdrew the blade and began to advance on another soldier when something heavy struck the back of his head and dropped him into darkness.
Crockett knelt in the grass outside the mission. His hands were bound behind his back and several soldiers stood nearby, their rifles pointed toward him as if he were a monster that might escape and tear them to pieces. He stared at the billowing smoke that rose above crumbling walls, far enough away to witness the entirely of his defeat, but close enough to hear the crackling flames and to smell the burning flesh.
He could not recall how he’d come to the Mexican camp, but he understood he’d been spared because he was Davy Crockett. He also understood the rapid-fire curses directed at the men who’d spared him and the death sentence that had followed from Santa Anna himself. No quarter meant no quarter, and that applied to common men and congressmen alike. Crockett watched the sky grow gray as he waited for the gunshot that would end his life.
And then he saw it—amid the smoke and flames there remained an unblemished section of the painter’s mural, and Crockett grinned, wondering how that stooped old man had managed to paint the outside of the mission walls too. General Jackson still waited for him, no doubt eager to pursue another band of renegade Creeks. The sorrel colt stamped the ground and whinnied, as if urging him to hurry. There were more adventures to be had, more legends to birth. Crockett nodded to Jackson, indicating he was ready to follow the general on one last ride across the fields of memory.
When the gun barrel touched the back of David Crockett’s head, he closed his eyes and waited for his captors to send him home.
“I won’t say the 2004 elections had nothing to do with it. I won’t say the hole in the ozone layer has nothing to do with it. I certainly won’t claim that being raised by an economist had nothing to do with it. Some problems are so large, so overwhelming, that issues of culpability and responsibility can seem impossibly convoluted. But I always find myself left with one simple question—who profits?”
“E VERYONE’S GOTTA HAVE A SPECIALITY,” Moof says. Like his is being good at getting the guys to do shit, and at keeping the boxtops around—that’s what he calls hos, cause they got a box and he likes ’em on top, he says. Me, I generally like ’em any way I can get ’em—which isn’t often.
“Now you, Raym, you don’t got no speciality.” Moof squats down next to Raym, shaking his head. Corton giggles—he’s the one staking Raym’s hands. I can hear the thud-thud of the mallet even over the screaming. Moof scowls at Cort, letting him know this isn’t fun time; he’s trying to make a point, here. Cort stops his giggling. Moof glances at the rest of us, making sure we get it.
We get it. Jonah, who’s been a real jag-off lately, pales and looks away as Cort gets back to business. Thud-thud-thud. Raym arches and screams while Moof looks on with this sorrowful expression, kind of serious and regretful. Looking like he’s done all he could but it came to this anyway. Which he did, pretty much. Raym just wasn’t good for anything.
I squat on my haunches, my arms wrapped around what’s left of my jeans, and look up at the sky. Snow spits out of it like flakes of dandruff, not very serious. Getting on toward spring, finally. My belly growls. I wish Cort’d hurry up.
Low on the horizon the clouds are smeared with the same grayish yellow as the skin of a fresh corpse—jaundice, Moof says. All the piss and shit backing up in your body, poisoning your blood. The old man laughed when I told him that, said that was close enough.
Cort moves down to the ankles, rips off the workboots that Raym found in a sub-basement in Levinsky’s, uppers all chewed to shit by the rats, but the soles’re still good. Cort looks ’em over, tosses ’em to Fiedel who’s what you might call our mechanical whiz, and goes back to pounding. Fiedel drops to the ground and tears off the rags and shit he’s had wrapped round his feet since Moof had to cut two toes off his left one. The stub’s still all black and oozing. I don’t like looking at it, so I look away.
Out toward Westbrook there’s still a mustard-colored streak where the sun’s going down behind the clouds. That’s where Raym’s from—or that’s what he told us, anyway. He told us a lot of shit till Moof cracked him one and told him to shove it. I don’t know that I half-believe any of it. I don’t know that I want to.
Thud-thud-thud. My belly growls. A dead leaf skitters along the cracked pavement. State Street, it used to be called. The old man told me that. I asked him what “state” meant, and he said it was like the Doaks, only bigger. A whole gang of people, thousands of them, more than you could ever imagine, he said. And there were lots of gangs—lots of states—and each state’d pick a couple of people to say for them, like Moof says for us, and send them all to a place called Deece to talk to each other. I asked him where Deece was, and he waved southward. Somewhere down there, he said, beyond Bosstown.
It’s hard to imagine, all those groups, all those people. But I can sort of see it, too. Like us and the Proms—that cracks Moof up, the Proms; ho skirts, he calls them. That’s what prom means, according to him. I meant to ask the old man about that too, but I keep forgetting.
Anyway, there’s us, the Doaks. That’s what our stake’s called—what used to be Deering Oaks Park, the old man says. When everything got all built up the Bosses left the park for show, and now it’s about the only farmable piece of land around till you’re out past Gorham. The Proms staked the eastern part of Portland, up along the headland, which is risky—the Bosses still come out there, sometimes, all bundled up with their breathing masks and shit to sail little boats on the choppy gray water, or at least the Proms say they do—but it means they’ve got access to the harbor and the salt flats and the old rotting piers.
So a couple of times a year we get together to trade. The Proms’ll all stand along one side of Congress Square, which is neutral territory, and their eyes’ll glitter at the sight of our radishes and early peas and tomatoes and shit. And then Andy, who says for the Proms like Moof does for us, will heft a sack and send its contents spilling over the worn red bricks. Fish, usually, or mussels, wet with seawater and mixed with deep-green kelp, making my mouth yearn for the taste of salt. Sometimes crabs. And both sides stand there, eyes devouring, licking their lips, while Andy subtracts a fish from their pile or Moof adds another ear of corn to ours until they both nod and step back.
Maybe Deece was something like that.
I hear the bones splinter in Raym’s left foot, and realize he’s not screaming anymore. He must’ve passed out. I’m glad, though I try not to show it—Moof teases me already about being soft and asking stupid questions and wanting to know to read like Fiedel. Though I think the whole thing might be bothering Moof some too, weird as that seems. As Cort finishes with the last post I hear him whisper, “Shoulda had a speciality, Raym.” His words go swirling away with the spits of snow.
I’m small, and quick, and good at worming into places. That’s my skill, my speciality. It’s why Moof and them let me hang around—I’m the one squirmy enough to go down manholes and wiggle through bars and shit. It’s nothing personal, what Moof’s doing, it’s just the way it is. You gotta have something to contribute.
But I think Raym’s stories had something to do with it, too.
I glance around at the others as Moof straightens and checks the light. Jonah, Fiedel, Scram and Deke are nearest to me. The rest are ranged on the far side of Moof. Twenty-eight of us—twenty-seven, now, all watching Raym, glad it’s him and not us (though Moof’s only staked two other guys I know of), but it’s more than that, it’s everything that’s different about Raym, the way his bones seem more solid than ours, his muscles firmer, his skin more pink. Even when he told us why that was and what it meant—or what he said it meant, anyway—we resented him. And none of us like thinking about the shit he told us either.
So that’s a part of it, too, I’m pretty sure. Making the stories go away. But mostly it’s just plain survival.
The shadows are deepening, now, and the breeze is picking up, pushing at the branches above us, making them creak. There aren’t many leaves left on them, not after all these years, and not many trees, either—most of ’em were cleared for growing space, and we still take down one or two a year for burning. But Deke says he can remember when they used to have leaves, green like the beans and corn and potatoes, and in the fall they’d turn orange and red and yellow like a fire flickering way up there above your head. Twenty years ago, he says. The old man says it’s longer ago than that, and that Deke’s older than he remembers. I tilt my head back and try to imagine all that color. I asked the old man once how old he was. Sixty-three is what he said but I don’t believe him. Nobody’s that old.
Somewhere in the distance, a dog yips. Moof says it’s time so we fade back, leaving Raym staked there as the sky goes from charcoal to black and the dogs start coming out. I sorta hope Raym doesn’t wake back up but he does when the first pack tears into him. I grip my knife hard—I’m not much use with a spear—and try to ignore the screams coming from under that pile of snarling, gnashing teeth. Then Cort spears a medium-sized one and chucks the body to me to bleed and skin, and I don’t have time anymore to picture Raym’s sandy hair sticking out in blood-matted spikes or his wide brown eyes watching the dogs eating his flesh….
He’s still screaming when the first pack’s wiped out, eight dogs in all, their carcasses packed away into the little stone building we use as a meat-locker. “That’s good,” Moof says, “the noise’ll bring another pack quicker, that way.”
We fade back again, and wait.
Later, we go see the old man. Stuffed with meat, we sprawl around his fire, talking but not saying much. A half-eaten dog hangs over the flames, which crackle and hiss each time a gob of juice drips down. Off in the shadows I hear grunts, squishy sounds—the hos showed up, of course, when they smelled the hot meat.
Way down beneath us is the pulse of the Bosses’ machines, the air-and-water scrubbers, the rumble of a tubie. The old man tilts his head, listens. “Supplies,” he says. I can never make out how he tells them from the passenger tubies, they sound the same to me. Every so often steam plumes up through a grate, heating the place even more. It’s one reason the old man lives here, deep under the wreckage of the old Civic Center. That, and he likes the cars.
They glitter outside the fire’s circle—a flash of rusty chrome here, a sparkle along a shattered windshield there. Fiedel got one going once, and we took turns squealing it around the upper level of the parking garage, smashing it into the other cars till the old man made us stop. That was fun. That was a good day.
One of the kiddies squats by the fire, gnawing on a piece of meat. He looks up at me with dark, untrusting eyes. He coughs thinly, spittle hanging from his mouth, then goes and climbs in the old man’s lap. The old man smiles down at him, wipes the spittle away, wraps an arm around him. The kid snuggles into it, his somber eyes watching the flames crackle and dance, crackle and dance…. I watch him watching the fire, tucked in the old man’s arm, and feel a hunger for something deeper than meat.
Moof comes out of the darkness behind me, buttoning his jeans. “Want a go?” he asks. I shake my head. “Suit yourself.” He tears another strip from the carcass and hunkers down. Beside me, Cort rises silently, heads into the shadows in the direction Moof came from.
“It’s a fine big dog,” the old man says. “Get many?”
“Three packs,” Moof replies.
“Four,” I say. “Only five dogs in the last one, though.”
The old man’s gaze flicks to me, back to Moof who eyes me darkly, but doesn’t chew me out for correcting him.
“Good,” the old man says, “that’s good. Damn dogs breed quicker’n you can kill ’em. How long’d it take Raym to die?”
His voice is neutral, deceptively casual, but the name rings overloud in the dark, empty space. The little conversations—the lazy, comfortable, meaningless ones—die away, and eyes glitter around the fire, alert now, listening. Moof scowls. “Two packs,” he says.
Three, I mouth, catching Fiedel’s eye. He nods. Beyond him, the old man watches us. So does Moof. I drop my gaze.
Deke sits up abruptly, jostling the ho curled up against him. The old man sets the kid down, swats him toward her and she takes the kid on her lap. Then the old man leans forward, cuts another chunk from the dog. “Damn fine eating,” he says, and the moment passes.
But something’s changed. We shift uneasily. We’re thinking about Raym now, about his stories. Firelight flickers over our faces as we look at each other, look away. There’s a question in our eyes, all of us, we’re all thinking it, nobody wants to ask. So I do.
“You think it’s true, the things Raym said? About Westbrook, and the compound, and—” Moof glares at me and I shut up. The question hangs in the silence, awkward but unignorable, like a fart no one wants to claim. I can hear Cort’s panting, the small mewling yips of the ho—I hate it when they’re noisy, it always feels like they’re telling me to hurry up, get it over with. I wish the old man would get it over with. He looks at our intent faces, and sighs.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says.
The air around us goes thick, heavy. Suddenly it’s hard to breathe. Deke leans forward, spits into the fire. Jonah looks like he’s been gut-punched. Scram gulps, then stutters, “But that’s…that’s…” He can’t get it out.
The old man looks at him with something like pity, then leans back, closes his eyes. “There’s so many things people never thought’d happen,” he says, and I know right away he’s going to tell us a story. I like his stories—not like Raym’s. The old man knows shit, and sometimes he’ll tell us. And if it’s disturbing, well, it all happened a long time ago. Not now. Not to us.
“There were so many of us once,” the old man says. “More’n the Bosses needed to run their factories, cook their dinners, create their profits…. Things started happening, bad things, diseases. Mad cow disease, that was one. Then another one—bird flu. Weird, isn’t it, how all these diseases just came out of nowhere?” His smile is sarcastic, but we can’t share it, we don’t have the references. “Well,” he continues, “turned out we didn’t have such a strong constitution after all.” And he laughs.
The sound echoes harshly in that big empty space, bounces around between the fat concrete pillars. I wonder suddenly what it’s like for him, day after day in this hole underground with the scraps and wreckage of a life that’s long gone. I wonder what it’s like to live with your bitterness bouncing back at you like a hard rubber ball.
“But then, what was left?” he finally asks. “No more cows, no more chickens… Something happened to the pigs, too, I think. And the fish!”
He sees Deke swallow, sees Fiedel’s eyes widen and me glance at Scram. “Well, never mind about the fish,” he says, “the point is what else were they gonna do? You saw Raym, with his pink firm flesh, his nice meaty bones…”
“Jesus,” Moof says. “That’s way fucked up.”
The old man smiles again, a hard, unhappy twist of his lips. It’s a smile sick with too many years, poisoned with more experience than any one man should have. Softly he asks Moof, “If you could keep dogs, keep ’em in a pen and feed ’em so they were nice and fat and tender—wouldn’t you do it?”
Moof scowls again and looks away. The old man nods, and the compassion in his eyes as he looks at Moof is almost more than I can bear. “It’s survival,” he says.
And then he looks at me.
The weather’s changed again; stars peek out between the scudding clouds and it’s bitching cold as we come up the ramp from the old man’s. No one complains, though. No one talks at all.
In the darkness I can barely make out the four massive buildings at the base of the hill. They straddle the waterfront like huge, featureless blocks. It occurs to me I’ve never really looked at them before; they were always just there, part of the landscape like the all the rest of the junk—the lightless, glassless streetlamps, the empty skyscrapers, the rusted cars. They’re like the old man’s stories—they’ve got nothing to do with us.
If you could keep dogs in a pen and feed ’em so they were nice and fat and tender…
Moof glances back and I realize no one’s moving. Deke stands, his bony shoulders slouched, his fists jammed into the pockets of his jeans as he studies the black metal buildings. Scram and the others pose like dogs before a fight—stiff-legged, hackles up, lips curling back to expose their teeth. Fiedel’s eyes are dark and haunted. I wonder if he’s feeling what I feel, like something’s been stolen from me, stolen so completely I never knew it was gone. The walls stare back at us, windowless, blind. All the windows are on the other side, facing the water. Looking out over the waves and the pretty little islands. Not at us. Never at us.
It’s hard to grasp that there’s people in there.
Moof jerks his head. “C’mon,” he says. He starts west, back to the Doaks. No one moves.
“Fuck me,” he says, “it’s cold out. C’mon!”
Cort wavers, slides toward Moof. I start down the hill.
“Where the fuck you going?” Moof says. I don’t bother replying. If he argues with his fists, I’m done for. He’s twice my size, easy. But he doesn’t. “We’re going back,” he says “Come now, or don’t come at all.”
I shrug. And I realize as I do that this is why no one lives long anymore—it’s not just the poisons in the air, or the shortage of food. It’s that there comes a point when surviving’s not enough.
I remember the way the old man looked at me, there at the end, intently, like there was something more he wanted to say. I try to figure out what it might have been while Moof tries to stare me down. Neither of us succeeds. He spins on his heel, stalks away.
Most of the others follow. I glance at who’s left. Deke. Jonah. Fiedel. Scram dithers, then turns abruptly, strides into the darkness with a jerky, lock-kneed stride. Deke shakes his head. I look at Jonah.
“You too,” I say. He looks at me, hurt. He’s already in too much trouble with Moof, though. Fiedel, Moof’ll have to take back. And Deke knows more about growing shit than the rest of us put together. But Jonah…
“Go on,” I say. “You wanted to come. That’s enough.”
He nods, straightens his shoulder, goes after the others. He glances back once. I’m glad he glances back.
Fiedel leans against one of the buildings, peering through the slats of a grate set four feet above the ground. “Three, two, one…” he counts, and behind the grate a massive fan squeals to a stop.
He’s been watching it for fifteen minutes now. Deke and I got bored after five. Now we hunker on a low, crumbling wall, breathing into our cupped hands.
“Forget it,” I call, and wing a pebble disgustedly across the broken pavement. The building looms above us as it has since we crept, awed and determined, into its shadow. No change, no response, not even when Deke beat on the grate trying to pry loose a slat. I’m no longer sure what we’re doing here, what I hoped to accomplish in the first place.
Deke shivers miserably, looks up at the towering building. “This is hopeless,” he says. He’s probably right.
Fiedel turns away from the grate. Behind him the fan squeals to life again, settles down to its steady whump-whump-whump. Fiedel’s eyes are unfocused, his mouth hanging open—when he’s thinking hard his face goes all slack like an idiot’s. It’s funny, but I don’t laugh—I’m too cold. He scans the side of the building, an uninterrupted flow of metal except for the slats at regular intervals. I’m pretty sure he’s forgotten we’re here.
We watch him wander off, head down, muttering to himself, hunting along the ground like he’s following a rat. “What about the windows?” I ask.
Deke shakes his head. “They’re twenty feet up.” I take his word for it—I’ve never seen the other side. “Why are we doing this?” he asks, more to himself than to me but I shrug anyway. The reasons are like raindrops—there’s thousands, but I can’t seem to catch even one and hold it long enough to explain, not even to myself.
I look up at Deke. “Do you want to go back?” He shakes his head, chucks a rock. It clangs off the slats and rolls away. “I’m sick of Moof,” he says.
Me too, but it’s more than just that. Moof’s not one of those thousands of reasons—he’s more like an excuse. We could always join the Proms, if it came to that—there’s been defections before, on both sides.
On the way down the hill Deke had whispered, “We’re going to get ourselves killed, you know. And nothing will change.” We’d looked at each other, knowing he was right, knowing there was, in fact, nothing we could do. We went on anyway.
Deke slumps beside me. “I’m tired,” he says. I can tell he doesn’t mean sleepy. His hair’s mostly gray, now, and I wonder again at the things in his head—the uncanny knack for when to sow stuff, what each plant needs; a memory of uncertain age, of oak leaves like a rustling fire, orange and yellow and red.
Suddenly Fiedel shouts and waves us over to a low metal casing, thirty yards away. “Where there’s a way out, there’s a way in,” he says, grinning, as we join him. Sure enough when we approach it we feel a tiny suck of air, hear a low, hollow moan somewhere underneath our feet. Fiedel squats, studying the casing. With a jagged chunk of asphalt he pounds on the metal, snaps it from its bolts. Deke lifts it free. Before us is the mouth of a pipe, its wavy metal sides bending down into earth. “In you go,” he says. I hesitate a moment.
“You know,” Deke says, looking at me, “it really doesn’t have anything to do with us.” Giving me permission to back out, turn away.
“Who’s us?” I ask, “the Doaks?” My voice cracks with bitterness. I climb through the hole.
The clanks of my passage scurry away before me, bouncing off the sides of the pipe. I hear something behind me, but there’s no room to turn. “Fie?” I whisper, and hear him pant, “Yeah. Deke can’t fit.”
It’s black in here, so black I can’t see anything, not my hand before my face, not the sides of the pipe, nothing. Every so often the pipe flexes below me, springs back with a hard metallic ping.
I fetch up against something. “Oh, fuck.”
“What?” Fiedel asks.
“A grate,” I whisper. It’s mesh, not slats. Probably to keep rats out. I try to figure if I can crawl backward. I’m not sure I can. And Fiedel’s bigger than me.
“Feel along the edges,” Fiedel says behind me. “You feel anything?”
I fumble around the rim of the grate, trying to ignore the way my breathing rasps, quick and shallow, in the darkness. I feel little ridges. Hooks, maybe? I wriggle my fingers through the mesh, explore the other side, find a flat metal bar. The wire digs into the webbing between my fingers as I strain, grasp it, pull. The hooks spring back. I take a breath, relieved.
“It’s open.”
“Good,” says Fiedel. “I can’t go backward.”
I swallow, continue on. The air ahead of me grows warm, then hot. “Shit,” Fiedel says.
“What?”
“Nothing. Keep going.”
I don’t know how long we crawl through the darkness. I think of Fiedel behind me, nose practically in my ass, wonder what he’d do if I farted right now. I choke back a horrified giggle.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I keep going.
A long time later, or maybe only a few minutes, light seeps around us—another grate, up ahead, set into the side of the pipe. I struggle on, sweat stinging in my eyes, peer through the grate and freeze. Fiedel whispers, “What is it?” I kick backward and he shuts up.
He’s not what I expected, the man below us, half-asleep in a chair before banks of lights and flickering pictures. Then again, I don’t know what I expected. Fangs, maybe. Tentacles for arms. But I know right away he’s one of them, one of the Bosses. For one thing, he’s fat. I’ve never seen anyone fat before. His belly curves before him like a pregnant ho’s. And his skin is smooth, white, untouched by the fierce sun outside. His clothes are gray, like the walls around him, the creases running down his pants as sharp and precise as the angles of his desk. The lights wink like stars but in all different colors, bright and unsullied.
Everything’s so clean.
I feel Fiedel nudge me, he knows something’s wrong. As I start to crawl forward he grabs at my ankle. I yank it away, jerk my head at the grate, crawl ahead enough for him to see the man below. When I start forward again, he doesn’t protest.
Cool air whistles by, sucked from outside, but the heat up ahead is growing more intense. The light from the grate fades behind us. I wonder if it’s dawn outside yet.
I go on.
More light up ahead. I hear Fiedel sigh in relief. I crawl to the grate, peer down into a vast subterranean room. There’s pipes running everywhere, cables, wires. Machines I can’t name clank and whir and hiss. Underneath it all is a low, steady hum.
“Open it,” Fiedel says.
I crane my neck, look down. “Fie, we’re eighteen feet up, maybe twenty.”
“Open it,” he repeats. “Feel the heat?” Of course I feel the heat. “Scrubber, I’m pretty sure. If we pass this grate and there aren’t any more… We can’t back up.”
I open the grate, squirm my way out.
I fall through space, let myself roll as I land. Fiedel shrieks as his mangled foot hits the concrete. I spring up, clap my hand over his mouth but it’s too late, a door clangs open somewhere behind us and a man shouts. I drag Fiedel behind one of the machines. His face is green, like he’s gonna puke, his mouth open, gasping. I peek out around the machine, see the man we passed earlier peering around suspiciously. I bend my head next to Fiedel’s. “I’m gonna try and lead him off. See if you can find a way out.” Fiedel nods, drops his head back against the machine. I doubt he can walk.
I duck into the light. The fat man shouts, “Hey!” I see him lunge for a button—I don’t wait to find out what it does. I launch myself at him, shoulders tucked down, hit him square in that bulging belly. He grabs my sweatshirt and I twist away, hearing it rip. Fuck. Sweatshirts are hard to find. He takes a step after me—I see his eyes flick back to the button—I fake a stumble. He springs at me, his pale face red now with rage and determination, sure he’s got me. He might. He’s quicker than I thought.
I leap up, feeling at my waist for my knife—it’s gone. Lost somewhere in the pipe, likely. I scan the room as I run but everything’s so alien, machines hulking everywhere. I weave between them, I’m fagging already after the dog hunt, the long crawl. His footfalls are right behind me, heavy, tireless. It’s not fair, I think, he’s bigger, stronger. Better fed.
That last gives me back some residue of anger, and I nurse it, remembering the old man’s words.
If you could keep dogs in a pen…
I twist around a corner, let my feet pick a path. In my head I see Raym. He was clueless, helpless. Didn’t know shit about how to survive. They did that, I think, and suddenly all the thousand raindrops of reasons crystallize like snow into one clear understanding—there is someone responsible. For Raym, and the wreckage, and what we do to survive. And that someone doesn’t live outside.
An opening, ahead, with a mesh gate across it. I fumble with the clasp, throw it open, run past into a tunnel. It’s square, all of metal that booms under my feet, hollowly, as if there’s nothing underneath it. It rises steadily. An ache burns in my side. I can hear him behind me, wheezing now as his fat and the incline begin to take their toll. From ahead comes a squeal, then a steady whump-whump-whump. Something about it pierces my haze, something familiar…
I stop. Look back. The man unbuckles something from his belt, something black and stubby with two metal prongs. He presses it. It makes a sizzling noise and blue sparks shoot out. I back away.
Whump-whump behind me. I turn. It’s the fan. The blades whir, enormous, filling the tunnel. Through their blur I can see the slats.
The man laughs breathlessly, bent over his knees. “Whaddya gonna do now, kid?” he asks. It shocks me that I understand him. Tentacles. Fangs. He shouldn’t be human. He presses the black thing again. I fade back, praying.
Three, two, one. The fan squeals to a stop. I slither between the massive blades, squeeze against the slats. The space I’m in is eight feet wide, three deep. “Deke!” I shout. “Deke!”
The man snarls on the other side of the fan, jabs the black thing between the blades. I flinch away. He laughs, tries again.
“Deke!”
Something scrapes behind me—it’s Deke, desperately levering something between the slats. He grunts, strains. One slat buckles. The man takes advantage of my quick glance over, shoves the black thing at my leg. I leap aside awkwardly, knock my head on the fan. A blade slices my forehead. I blink away blood and the white flare of pain, focus on the gaps between the blades. Nothing. He’s getting cautious. I stumble against the blades, as if by accident. His hand darts through, the metal prongs glowing. I seize his wrist, avoiding the black thing which buzzes and sparks with a scent like burnt wire. The man jerks against my grip, furious, then with quickly growing panic.
Three, two, one, I count. The fan squeals into motion, speeds up, spraying blood. The black thing drops to the floor, and I’m left holding a forearm. It’s heavy, fleshy, still warm in my hands. From the far side of the fan I hear the fat man’s shrieking. But the sound that makes me weep with relief is the one that comes behind me—the metallic clang of a slat popping loose.
Later, Deke worms painfully past the fan and we go back down to get Fiedel who’s crawled into the room with the lights and shit and is busily punching buttons, his lip pooched out in that village-idiot way. Going back through the machine room he makes us flip levers and turn cranks and yank a cable—spitting blue sparks like the black thing did—and shove it into a panel he’s managed to open, before he’ll let Deke carry him back to the fan.
The fat one’s collapsed against the wall of the tunnel, slumped dead in a sticky pool of red. Deke looks down at him. “We can’t just leave him here. What if someone finds him?”
It’s been quiet, there’s no one else down here, but I can feel the weight of the building above me, layer after layer of metal and wires—there’s people up there, lots of them, I can almost feel them.
Fiedel snorts. “Don’t worry about it.” He looks grimly pleased about something, probably to do with all those machines. He leans on my shoulder, and I realize what a weird little picture we make at that moment, the four us—me, Deke, Fiedel and the fat dead man sprawled at our feet.
“Still,” Deke says, “he tastes better than dog, I bet.”
We look at each other, a speculative light in our eyes. I remember the feel of that warm, meaty arm. The fan spins, just behind us. How easy it would be to drag him over, shove him through it….
“Probably does,” I reply, and move past the body.
As I wait for the fan to pause I see the broad light of morning through the gap in the slats.
Much later, now, and I sit, dazed and sleepy, in a pool of sunlight, feeling almost warm. We sit on the muddy ground at the base of the oaks around a large, crackling fire, with another dog roasting over the flames. Deke is grinning. Fiedel cracks a joke while one of the hos bandages his foot. Moof sulks to one side, watching the plumes of smoke rising down by the water with a brooding, sullen gaze. From the corner of my eye I see a flicker of movement—I’ve been expecting it. When Cort leaps up, shouting and brandishing his spear, I call him back sharply. He goes and sits by Moof as the Proms come slowly, hesitantly among us, their eyes also turned to that black, distant smoke. Scram reaches out, cuts a slice from the dog, hands it to a hovering Prom.
I smile, then remember Raym, lying staked right here where we’ve built this fire—spatters of his blood still streak the ground, bright against the dirty patches of snow. I think about Westbrook, and the compound, and how helpless Raym was. It’s going to be a problem, I know, taking care of them till they learn to survive. But that’s just the way it is.
Way down south, like a smudge against the horizon, are the fumes and smokes of Bosstown, a shadow against the gentle blue sky. There’s more of them, I know, many more—and they’ll be coming for us. I have no doubt of that.
But we won’t be here.
The tubies, I think, can only run so far. I’ll have to ask Fiedel about that, but I’m pretty sure of it. And once we get past them, we can think about what’s next.
But first, we’re going to Westbrook. I say now, and one thing sure, I’ll leave no dogs in their cages.
If they want us, they’re going to have to hunt us.
There is a Story
T
here are stories told of who we are.
The people of the lakes name us Lost Ones,
Their storytellers spinning firelight tales
Of empty shells that walk like a questing man,
Searching for a way home through a rip in the sky.
There is a story whispered in the pine bough
Huts sheltering a fierce and dying mountain clan
About those who hunt innocence through shadows,
Searching for faith to restore a shattered world.
On windswept plains Shaman gaze at crystal balls,
Storytellers of a different kind who use tales
Of tragedy to point fingers at the wandering ones,
Searching for a place to sink roots and call our own.
There is a story told of who we are in every land,
Tales told and spun anew in each great city,
Shepard's cottages, crude hamlets, the palaces of Kings,
Stories spun from fear and the need to understand.
Not one of them is true.
Greg Beatty (“Unnatural Poetry Workshop”) is recently married. He and his wife live in Bellingham Washington. Greg has a BA from University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Iowa, both in English, and attended Clarion West 2000. His work has appeared in 3SF, Absolute Magnitude, Abyss & Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Asimov’s, Fortean Bureau, HP Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror, the Internet Review of Science Fiction, Ideomancer, Oceans of the Mind, Paradox, SCI FICTION, Shadowed Realms Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and The New York Review of Science Fiction, among other venues. In 2005 Greg won the Rhysling Award in the short poem category.
Greg’s poem “Seeking the Lovetrino” appeared in Æon Six, and “The Dolls of Mother Ceres” in Æon Seven.
Visit Greg on the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~gbeatty/
Daphne Charette (“Eat the Rich”) has written poetry, magazine articles, plays, newspaper columns, short stories, song lyrics, screenplays, and smut. After four years spent pursuing Hollywood from Maine (thereby proving once again her insistence on doing things the hard way), she turned her attention back to writing prose fiction in 2005. Since then, her work has appeared in Byzarium, AlienSkin, and The Sword Review among others, and she has stories appearing in the upcoming Justice Wears a Dress anthologies from RageMachine Books.
Daphne can be found on the Web at http://www.geocities.com/daphnecharette/.
Dr. Rob Furey (“Parallax”) worked on his PhD in Gabon, West Africa, on social spiders. He has returned to his study site several times for his own research, with students and once as a forest guide for a natural history film crew from the UK. He has faced down cobras, retreated from army ants and slept on open wooden platforms in African swamps. Later he went to French Amazonia to work on another social spider species. Not only did he spend time with the spiders, but he watched a gunfight between gold prospectors and French army troops while he ate a meal of roasted tapir. Since then Rob has returned to the tropics several times, usually with students. He spent time as a student himself attending Clarion West. He has published a couple of stories in anthologies since then in addition to articles for dusty tomes on arcane spider behavior. He is currently part of the charter faculty at Harrisburg University, the first new private university in Pennsylvania in over 100 years.
Terry Hayman (“The Girl Who Left”) lives with his family in the Canadian wilds of North Vancouver, beating back beauty with his bare hands, soaking up the liquid sunshine. His short stories have appeared in magazines ranging from Woman’s World and Boys’ Life, to On Spec, Altair, and Dreams of Decadence. You can also find him in the recent anthology Hags, Sirens, & Other Bad Girls of Fantasy and the upcoming Mystery Date and From the Trenches.
Robert J. Howe (“Life Sentences”) has published short fiction in Salon.com, the Russian science fiction magazine Esli (If), the magazines Weird Tales, Pandora, Pulphouse, Tales of the Unanticipated, and the anthology Newer York. He has also published a handful of stories in Analog, most recently “From Wayfield, From Malagasy,” in the October 2006 issue. Howe, a native of Brooklyn, New York, is a former coastguardsman and merchant seaman. He is a graduate of the journalism program of Brooklyn College, of the City University of New York, and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop at Michigan State University. He is the editor, with John Ordover, of the Wildside anthology Coney Island Wonder Stories.
Bob’s website is http://www.rjhowe.net.
Marissa K. Lingen (“Michael Banks, Home From the War”) has been published in Baen’s Universe, Analog, Ideomancer, Oceans of the Mind, and other venues. “Michael Banks...” was her fiftieth short story sale. She has just finished writing a young adult novel that had an unplanned and unfortunate outbreak of accidentally magical puffins in the early chapters; she didn’t mean to. She lives in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog.
Marissa’s story “Things We Sell to Tourists” appeared in Aeon Six.
Visit Marissa on the Web at http://www.marissalingen.com/.
Lisa Mantchev (“Mirror Bound”) casts her spells from an ancient tree in the Pacific Northwest. When not scribbling, she is by turns an earth elemental, English professor, actress, artist, dog wrangler, mommy, and domestic goddess. Lisa’s stories have been published in places like Strange Horizons and the SFWA anthology New Voices in Science Fiction and she has just completed her first novel, entitled Scrimshaw.
You can Taste the Bad Candy at her website: http://www.lisamantchev.com.
Josh Rountree’s (“Remember”) short fiction can be found in the anthologies Polyphony 6, From the Trenches, and Book of Shadows, and in the pages of Realms of Fantasy. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two sons.
For more information, visit http://www.joshrountree.com/.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Signals”)’s novels (science fiction, fantasy, mystery/crime, and romance) have been published in 14 countries in 13 different languages. She is the only person in the history of the science fiction field to have won Hugo awards for both editing and fiction. Her short work has been reprinted in six Year’s Best collections. She has also been the recipient of the John W. Campbell Award, the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel, the Ellery Queen Reader’s Choice Award, the Science Fiction Age Reader’s Choice Award, and the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award, and been nominated for the Locus, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards, and the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award.
From 1991-1996 Kris was the editor of the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene, Oregon. She lives and works on the Oregon Coast.
Visit Kris’s website at http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com/.
Ken Scholes’ (“One Small Step”) quirky, offbeat fiction has been appearing in various magazines and anthologies for the last six years. He’s sold short stories to Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Aeon, Talebones, Wheatland Press’s Polyphony 6 and TEL : Stories anthologies and Suddenly Press’s Best of the Rest 3 and Best of the Rest 4. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future contest with a story appearing in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume XXI.
Ken’s first stand-alone project, the novella Last Flight of the Goddess, is available from Fairwood Press as a limited edition, signed and numbered hardcover — order your copy at www.fairwoodpress.com.
Ken lives in Gresham, Oregon, with his amazing wonder-wife Jen West Scholes, two utterly worthless cats and a whole lot of books. He invites readers to get in touch with him through his website: http://www.sff.net/people/kenscholes.
Ken’s story “East of Eden and Just a Bit South” appeared in Æon Six.
Blood, Blade, & Thruster — The Magazine of Speculative Fiction & Satire
Coney Island Wonder Stories, Edited by Robert J. Howe and John Ordover
Last Flight of the Goddess, by Ken Scholes
The Paint in my Blood, by Alan M. Clark
From the Trenches, featuring “Possibly Grief” by Josh Rountree
The Retrieval Artists series, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Steel Sky, by Andrew Murphy (Per Aspera Press)
