Æon Fourteen is copyright © 2008, Quintamid 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.
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L ately, critics, the blogosphere, and Those Whose Job It Is To Know have been complaining that SF feels retro. Sometimes I understand the comments—I wrote my own novella, “Recovering Apollo 8,” with the science fiction of the past clearly in mind—but most often I don’t understand those comments at all.
But I had a surreal experience in January, one which made me think of the retro SF critics, and it made me wonder if they are aiming their criticism in the wrong direction.
Let me explain.
My husband and I were writer guests of the Space Coast Writers Conference and honestly, one of the main attractions of going to the conference (besides Florida’s January weather) was the fact that it’s held right near Kennedy Space Center.
We flew in early and spent two full days at the center which, I have to tell you, was simply not enough time. For those of you who don’t know, Kennedy Space Center is where our space shuttles launch from. Space scientists and NASA engineers share this lovely complex with alligators and manatees on one of the most beautiful parts of Florida’s Coast.
The center has a massive public area, which is a theme park for science fiction fans. You can ride a simulator of the space shuttle or walk through the mock-up of the space station that the astronauts actually practice in.
The center’s exhibits also feature the entire history of space travel using everything from a first-edition copy of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon to a decommissioned space shuttle that you can walk through.
Hundreds of children go through the center every day. A Floridian told me that schools plan at least two field trips a year to the center—and the center works very hard at inspiring our future mathematicians, astronomers, and astronauts.
But…
I had this nagging sense as I walked through all the exhibits that the future looks dated. Everything that was so nifty and cool when I was a kid now seems as ancient as a Model T. The capsules that our astronauts risked their lives in are so tiny that I felt claustrophobic inside one when I was there all by myself—and that doesn’t count the intruding buttons and knobs and flashing lights of my 1960s childhood, on display with the bolts and rivets that kept the ships together.
Even the films of the astronauts bouncing on the surface of the Moon looked grainy and old, like Nickelodeon does when it replays the early black-and-white episodes of Bewitched.
Space science, as presented by NASA, feels dated. The cutting edge has long since dulled and become history—and the kind of history that you have to explain carefully (you know, the old “when I was a kid, I had to walk uphill in the snow both ways to my one-room schoolhouse” kinda old).
The excitement that anyone over forty felt about the space program has dissipated. The space program is so passé that only one of the major presidential candidates (who were there campaigning for the Florida primary while we were talking to aspiring writers) even had a platform about NASA. Three of the Republican hopefuls (Romney, Giuliani, and Huckabee) seemed surprised that Kennedy was still in existence—and said so while visiting the center. (Is it any wonder these guys had no hope of being elected?)
How have we slipped so far? We’ve gone from dreaming of the stars to forgetting to look up.
There are several reasons for this, many outlined in the last chapter of Too Far From Home, Chris Jones’ look at the 2003 crisis on the International Space Station (and if you say “what crisis?” I suggest you hike to Amazon.com right now and at least look at the book’s blurb).
But the relevant reason for my purposes is this: one of the many reasons Americans have forgotten to look up is that science fiction writers (and readers—I’m not letting you guys off the hook) no longer point to the heavens. When I came into SF in the mid-1980s, SF writers were actively discouraged from writing about outer space. Space stuff was “passé” or it had been done before, or there was nothing new. Space is as exciting, one editor once told me, as the Ford Motor Plant. Find something new to write about.
Dutiful me, I did. Because I wanted to sell my fiction. Only recently have I returned to near future SF, set in this solar system, and I find that readers are hungry for it. Newer editors think I’m breaking new ground. Maybe I am.
You see, only a handful of writers stuck to space stories—and most of them made the transition to the novel in the 1990s (Stephen Baxter comes to mind as one of the most popular of outer space guys). The cutting edge in SF has always been the short story, and the short story has forgotten that we have yet to colonize the Moon or send a manned (peopled?) expedition to Mars.
So yeah, critics, bloggers, and you folks supposedly in the know, space SF has become retro—because American space science is retro. Even though NASA displayed the prototypes of their Constellation project (and you don’t know what that is? I barely did—no one is covering it; it’s the project that’s going to take a new generation of astronauts to the Moon [check it out at www.nasa.gov]), the bulk of Kennedy Space Center’s tourist wing is devoted to the past and to old technologies still in use, like the space shuttle. Nothing except a single room that showed the future of unmanned exploration had anything remotely modern inside it.
I know it’s not popular to be a space geek any more. The days when every single child dreamed of being an astronaut are long gone. And yes, I know that we haven’t solved the issue of poverty and we’re spending too much on an unpopular war and the U.S. has record deficits.
But…
We need space. Once again, I point you to NASA’s website. Look at all the things that are now commonplace from Velcro to microchips that developed because the space program pushed us in brand-new directions. This modern culture would not exist if we hadn’t flung ourselves wholeheartedly into what President Eisenhower called “the space race.”
President Kennedy said that we were going to the Moon not because it was easy but because it was hard.
No one talks like that any more. No one, at least in America, even seems to think like that.
And it’s time we think like that again.
So that our children dream of exploration and adventure, and turn those dreams into usable science that improves the world for the rest of us.
And those of us who are paid to dream? We need to point at space again, so that everyone around us remembers to look up.
W hat a marvel is an imagination, is it not? Thank everything that’s holy we all have one. I’ve heard people described as having “absolutely no imagination,” but I’ve never met one of those strange beings myself. We all, I think, think. And as our thoughts are no more real in terms of the universe of things and experiences than other, more fanciful fantasies in which we indulge, they seem to me to be as imaginary as hallucinations of faeryland. As editors of a science fiction and fantasy magazine, we have more acquaintance than most with hallucinations, and we sort of like it that way. Figments of other people’s imaginations are our life blood here in the Æon office, which overlooks the fifth floor of a parking garage in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square. The view in our heads is ever so much more entertaining than the view out the window, though in a sense it’s no less a phantasm.
There’s undoubtedly a “real” universe out there somewhere, but I don’t fool myself that I’ve ever seen it, heard it, felt it, smelled it, or tasted it. Or if I have, the experience—once translated by my senses into familiar and comprehensible sensations—is not the one I had. Or didn’t have. Whichever. I have a model of the universe in my head which works okay most of the time for most purposes, but this brings up the matter of whether my head is then bigger than the universe which it contains, and whether that model contains me and my head, which in turn contains the model? Or do I have an infinite number of heads? Bertrand Russell dreamed up that particular head-game, along with classes which don’t contain themselves, except they must in order not to. He had a great imagination.
Our Æon Fourteen contributors, all nine of them, could give Lord Russell a run for his money in the imagination department. From their infinite heads and hearts they’ve dreamed up worlds and people and places and ideas and opinions to keep your head spinning for some time to come. And like T.E. Lawrence’s “dreamers of the day,” who “act their dreams with open eyes,” they are dangerous. Let’s hear it for dangerous dreams.
All but one of our Æon Fourteen offerings are written by returning dreamers: Ryan Neal Myers (“The Diesel Mnemonic”) appeared previously in Æon Eleven with “The Underthing.” Jay Lake (“Sweet Rocket”) has made five previous fiction appearances, from “A Mythic Fear of the Sea,” in Æon One, to “A Very Old Man With No Wings At All” in Æon Eleven. Sarah L. Edwards’ (“Wild Among Hares”) gave us that story’s prequel—“The Butterfly Man”—in Æon Twelve.
Lavie Tidhar (“Hard Rain at the Fortean Café”) appeared in Æon Six with “Midnight Folk,” and Æon Ten with “Angels Over Israel.” Mikal Trimm (“The Diadem”) was shortlisted for the Rhysling award for his poem “Lost on the Shores of Avalon,” which appeared in Æon Six. He also contributed poetry to Æon Eleven. Aurora Award winner Marcie Lynn Tentchoff (“Your Fairy Goth Mother”) also had poems in Æon Six, Eight, Eleven, and Thirteen.
Our columnists, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dr. Rob Furey, have been nothing if not dependable about returning—Kris since Æon One in November of 2004, and Rob since his first science article for us in Aeon Three, six months later.
And that leaves Davin Ireland, our one and only Æon first-timer, who kicks off this issue with a story of love, time, and redemption in an English beachfront town. Start there if you like, or pick a title at random, and dream on.
“At heart, this is a story about lost love and the redemptive power of Time. 1987 wasn’t a good year for me. I started it off as an unruly teenager getting himself thrown off a kibbutz in Israel for theft, and ended it in a psychosis back in the UK after consuming absurd quantities of hallucinogenic drugs. The events described in the story happened somewhere in between, and are mostly real. The coastal resort wasn’t in the south of England, I hasten to add, but the shores of Tel-Aviv, and the Mash House—while once a notorious hangout for travellers and beach bums—is long gone. I did, however, step onto the balcony one morning to the sight of armed soldiers creeping through the fog at high tide. What they were doing on that foggy beach remains a mystery to me, but I do know that, almost twenty years to the day after it happened, the story I once wrote in my head finally made it onto paper. I just wish the real Penny were here to read it.”
V IC FENTON clutched his Puffa jacket tighter to his chest and leaned into the icy gale blowing down Troubadour Street. Up ahead, taxis whizzed along the empty boulevard in search of fares that had long since dribbled from the cafes and ailing bingo halls, their absence mourned only by the wheeling gulls. Vic put his head down and watched flagstones disappear beneath his peeling shoes.
The Mash House was a squat, four storey pile of seafront masonry the local council should have condemned years ago, but hadn’t on account of the facilitative role it played in modern beachfront society. Masquerading as a back-packer hotel, the building’s middle two floors were actually a brothel that made easy money exploiting the town’s surplus of economic migrants during the off-season. Vic had only secured a room there because he had promised to clean the stairs and reception area every Tuesday and Friday for nothing. Apparently, even the whores had better things to do in winter.
He slipped into the lobby, exchanged a curt nod with a little boy who sat in the corner flipping languidly through a magazine he had probably read a dozen times before. His father was a regular here. Vic mounted the stairs two at a time, didn’t stop till he reached the nominal sanctuary of the third floor.
Penny hadn’t moved in the time he’d been gone. She lay curled beneath the sheet like a human comma, a brief pause in the story of a relationship that was fast running out of options. You can’t stay with somebody just because you pity them. That was the last thing Eamonn, the self-proclaimed playwright from across the hall, had said to him before catching the train back to Derby. Wise words from an ignorant prick. But he had loved Penny once, and wasn’t going to abandon her now, just because her health was failing. Vic thought about this as he brewed tea beneath the big picture window in the kitchen.
Out beyond the rain-swept boulevard, the grey Atlantic continued to swell and surge, hurling great rhythmic plumes of surf onto the beach. Deranged joggers and harried dog-walkers appeared from time to time, picking their way through the kelp that decorated the blurred scar of the high tide line, but that was about it. Nobody sane was out in weather like this. That was fine with Vic. He often spent hours sitting alone on the balcony staring out to sea, lost in thoughts he had trouble recalling even minutes later. People were just an intrusion.
Back in the bedroom, he set the tea tray on the night-table next to the little three-bar heater he’d bought at a flea market the previous weekend, and thumbed the power switch. Penny’s breathing had been getting worse since the arrival of the cold snap, and he’d felt the need to do something, to make a bold gesture, even one he couldn’t afford. The heater had constituted his one concession to gallantry. Ironically, the atmosphere in the flat had soured ever since. We don’t have that kind of money, Penny had repeatedly complained, and besides, it gives me a dry throat.
Give it a few more days, he had told her, the benefits will justify the expense.
They hadn’t so far. Penny still looked like shit, slept like death, bitched incessantly about the weather. But that was because she was scared. They all were. Vic glanced at the mute TV screen in the corner and shivered. Best not to think about that right now.
“Pen, are you awake?”
When she failed to respond, he poured himself a cuppa and migrated to the window. He didn’t bother drawing the flimsy drape he’d tacked to the wall above the curtain rail. The material was so thin it was practically translucent. Besides, it served to mute the red-and-white scream of the gigantic Coca-Cola billboard straddling the brown-field site next door. And the brighter light might wake her up, chimed a mischievous voice from the back of his mind. Vic banished the thought, sipped tea, waited for something to happen.
It took him a moment to realise that it already was.
From this distance the man appeared the wrong side of fifty, a tad overweight, looked as if he’d had a real job squeezing into his trunks that morning. He mounted the rotting breakwater with some difficulty, and paced awkwardly to the end, arms outstretched for balance as he went. Vic sipped more of his tea, a worm of discomfort wriggling in his guts. He knew what was coming, yet felt no real compunction to act.
The nameless man sat down, dangled his feet in the boiling surf like a swimmer at a lido testing the temperature of the water. Then a large wave slapped the breakwater, throwing up a cloud of spray and causing the man to sneeze. He didn’t waste any time after that. Pinching his nose shut, he plunged beneath the surface, emerging at a different spot a few seconds later. Portly or not, there was little wrong with his technique. He made admirable progress in the first five minutes, stroking swiftly and consistently out to sea before allowing the current to bear him away.
He was out of sight by the time Vic went back inside. Nobody else seemed to have noticed. Fully accustomed to the idea that he lived in a world where suicide had become a mundane fact of life, he returned his cup to the kitchen and changed out of his damp clothes.
The nightly illuminations had been bad enough under clear skies, but beneath a dense layer of storm clouds, the eerie displays became all but unbearable. At first, Vic and Penny had stayed in together to watch the grim nocturnal spectacles unfold from the minimal comfort of the flat; but as time progressed and Pen’s health deteriorated, Vic had taken to joining the masses gathered on the sand.
Tonight was no different.
With the boulevard lights extinguished, a huge bonfire raged before the retreating tide. Vic left a flask of hot soup and a note beside the bed before slipping out of the building at the last minute. The flames leapt higher as the crowd, not to mention the keen sense of anticipation, intensified. Teenagers tossed driftwood, old bits of siding, even a few discarded rubbish bags, onto the strengthening blaze. Not wanting to get too close, Vic leant against a wilting palm and smoked a cigarette.
Ten after nine, according to his watch. Should be getting started soon.
He watched in idle fascination as glowing streams of ash drifted skywards. Little knots of friends and acquaintances, sworn allies against encroaching fear, chatted quietly among themselves, feigning indifference. Then a cry rang out. A young woman standing on a rotting bollard pointing frantically out to sea, face chapped red from the searing cold. Or perhaps it was from the excitement, it was difficult to tell. Whatever the cause, several hundred pairs of eyes swivelled in the same direction at once. Vic knew they wouldn’t see much. The cloud cover of morning had cleared up somewhat, but not enough to allow the blue plasma glow of the previous nights to shine through. Every now and again, however, the moon did peep from its hiding place among the sodden cumulus, and at such moments nebulous blue washes of light tinted its stony countenance.
It was a start.
Vic drew smoke deep into his lungs, pitched the butt of his cigarette into the sand. In the next instant, several billion greenish flecks of light rained silently upon the ocean. The crowd gasped as the shower became an avalanche, sucked in its breath as the avalanche drowned in twisting yellow fountains of light that went leaping back into space. The moist underbelly of cloud glowed magnificently with reflected light. A range of equally beguiling phenomena continued into the early hours, with purple and vermillion helixes dancing vibrantly across the heavens. It were as if the Aurora Borealis itself had come all the way to the coast. The few remaining spectators applauded their appreciation at the finale. Vic would have joined them, only his hands were too numb.
He snuffed out his last cigarette and went back inside.
A note was waiting for him when he returned: a vitriolic reply to his own note. Vic crumpled the paper and let it fall to the floor. She’d be back when the last of the local dives shut for the night—sicker, angrier, more critical then ever. It was partially his own fault. At some point in the relationship, he had simply decided to put his own life on hold in order to be a functional partner. The long-suffering husband who did the groceries without complaint and cared unflaggingly for his ailing wife.
Penny wasn’t stupid. She could sense the change in him and resented the implication like hell. Basically, Vic was telling her they had a marriage as long as there was an illness to fight. Hardly the best incentive for improving one’s health, he knew. And the worst part of it was, he kind of liked the arrangement. With the world changing in all sorts of sinister and enchanting ways, he needed time and space to think—and a bed-ridden spouse who spent most of the day asleep provided just that.
Tired of having the same mental conversation with himself night after night, he put his head in his hands and lay back on the bed. Ghostly dawn light permeated the room when he next opened his eyes, catching him off-guard. Was it morning already? Had he slept at all? The same question might be asked of Pen. The space beside him was empty, the flat deathly quiet. Only the mournful cries of the gulls remained. He rolled from bed, swept the tatty drapes aside, suddenly grateful that fresh air and bracing ocean vistas were still free of charge—even to an unemployed circus performer on disability benefit.
The balcony windows swung open before him. Vic Fenton took a single step, then hesitated. Scented ocean mist pearled in from the Atlantic, partially obscuring the thirty or so silent figures in Doomsday suits circulating on the beach below. Some of those figures advanced in loose rows, using instruments like jury-rigged metal detectors to comb every available inch of shoreline, others stood around looking perplexed and exhausted all at once—although how Vic could sense this when their features were obscured by full-face oxygen masks, he was unable to say.
He remained motionless as the bizarre spectacle unfolded in unearthly silence. The taxis were absent this morning, and not just because of the previous night. Road blocks straddled the boulevard at every junction, the Doomsday suits manning them armed to the teeth. Every few minutes, a rude blast of static interrupted the otherwise strained atmosphere of calm that hung on the air. Vic came to an abrupt decision. He equipped himself with fresh clothes and cigarettes from the dresser drawer, and wriggled through a first-floor toilet window. A brief reconnaissance had revealed the exits and entrances to all buildings in the area to be thoroughly secured, but that wouldn’t stop him. He had to find Penny.
The neighbouring brown-field site, with its monolithic Coke ad, provided ideal cover, and soon Vic was racing down slumbering side-streets, checking empty bus-shelters for clues, rifling through alleyway dumpsters. He didn’t expect to find anything there. Penny got a bit vague if she neglected to take her medicine regularly, and she was quite capable of losing herself for hours at a time, but it’d be weeks before she descended into anything approaching genuine psychosis. Still, no harm in being thorough.
By the time Vic had scoured every unguarded spot he could think of, he started wondering if he might have done better on the phone. They didn’t know many people in the area, generally preferring to keep themselves to themselves, but the one time Pen had left him, she’d ended up spending about an hour napping on some local drug dealer’s bathroom floor before ringing him in tears. Maybe she still had that number stashed away in an old jacket somewhere. Unfortunately, with the morning wearing on, it seemed as if every other shop doorway played host to a soldier in an NBC suit.
And it wasn’t just shop doorways. The Mash House was already ranging into view when a figure in funhouse white popped up from behind a parked car, rudely jamming a gun in Vic’s face. The masked man’s breath hissed like deodorant spray when he exhaled.
“Name?”
“Vic Fenton,” said Vic.
Sssssst.
“Where d’you live, son?”
Vic pointed.
“Prove it.”
Sssssst.
Vic plundered his wallet for an item of identification that bore his current address. Found nothing.
Sssssst. Sssssst. “I’m waiting.”
“I’ve only got my keys,” Vic explained, “flat twelve, top floor of the Mash House. If you escort me, I can show you they fit the lock.”
The soldier thought about this for a bit. “No, that’s fine,” he said. “Run along, please, sir.”
Vic turned to go, but something held him back.
“What’s going on here,” he said.
The soldier gestured at the sky with the barrel of his semi-automatic. “Collision,” he said, “around three this morning.”
“Ours or theirs?”
Sssssst. The soldier just looked at him.
“Oh, come on. You must be able to share that much with me.”
The soldier began to get agitated. “One of each,” he said, low under his breath. “We’ve found only debris so far, but there might be … other stuff out there somewhere. Stuff we can use. Now get going.”
“Keep up the good work,” said Vic. He told the man thanks and sprinted the last hundred yards home.
The room was still empty when he got in. Penny’s note had said she was catching the 01:31 back to Hastings, but so far he hadn’t thought to verify the claim. Hollow threats were just her way. A quick examination of the wardrobe’s contents told a very different story. Her suitcase was gone, as were the majority of her clothes. Only a pair of denim shorts with a broken zipper remained.
Vic spent the next couple of hours on the roof chatting to a Liberian prostitute known for her wild flights of fancy. Today she claimed to be an undercover Customs agent burdened with co-ordinating the salvage operation. The two of them shared a joint and a few lame jokes on the subject as a fleet of gleaming military trucks rolled through the deserted streets below. Around ten o’clock, Vic began tiring of the conversation. He was hungry, too, and about to take his leave when something lodged in the dirt of the adjacent brown-field site caught his eye. The object was triangular in shape, though even from up here he could see that the sides were oddly curved. It was about the size of a dinner plate, and glowed like a bronze discus. He must have walked right past it after exiting the toilet window not four hours previously.
That wouldn’t happen a second time.
The strange object weighed heavily in his lap, one side of it smooth, the other blistered with a rash of knobs and curious-looking dials. Vic rotated the thing in his hands, peered at a shape faintly reminiscent of a three-legged Pi symbol planted firmly at its centre. A line extended from that symbol for about a quarter-inch, and below it a miniscule cluster of constantly changing characters flickered at the speed of milliseconds.
Milliseconds.
Was that the key? Vic dumped the object onto the bed and dove for the balcony. Increasing numbers of soldiers patrolled the boulevard, dour phantoms in the receding mist. Beyond them, the sea was lightly scummed with a foam that seemed reluctant to disperse. Even from here, it was possible to make out hunks of broken fuselage churning in the surf. The remains of the collision.
He retreated in silence. If the thing lying on the quilt really was an alien black box, it was clear he should hand it over to the authorities immediately. It was also fairly clear that a civil-minded gesture of that nature might ultimately lead to his disappearance. And seeing as he’d already dealt with one vanishing act today, he couldn’t imagine himself being the cause of another.
A light rapping at the door interrupted his thoughts.
For some reason, he found himself expecting Mr Tarlequine—Mash House landlord and all-round fly-by-night—to be loitering at the threshold, but instead the face was one he barely recognised.
“Vic, right?” muttered the vaguely familiar stranger.
Vic nodded. The man standing opposite shifted his weight uneasily from foot to foot, like a boxer about to enter the ring. A reversed baseball cap held his unkempt, shoulder-length hair in check. He was panting, though whether from emotion or physical exertion was anybody’s guess. Maybe it was both.
“How did you make it all the way here?” said Vic, “The town’s rife with olive drab.”
“Hadn’t noticed,” quipped the man, a little sullenly. “Got a phone call from the local constabulary early this morning,” he added, after a suitable pause. “You probably guessed that already. They said my number was in her purse or something when they found her. Look, I’m really—”
“How?”
“Excuse me?”
“How did it happen? Penny.”
“Oh.” The man sounded almost disappointed. “It was a train, according to the supervising officer. Either she jumped or was pushed, I doubt it makes much—”
Vic closed the door.
It was a very long time before he moved.
Perihelion Day, the following year.
The beach was busy but not as crowded as it had been in early afternoon. The sun slid lazily down the western side of the sky as families with children tiredly gathered up their belongings ahead of a last meal together, a last prayer, a final kiss goodbye. To the east, a second glassy ball of light grew ever fiercer in the summer sky, leering at the doomed planet like a spectator at a mediaeval execution. Vic Fenton dangled his feet from the boulevard wall and watched the world drift by. Sixteen months since Penny had passed away. Sixteen months in which his own life had changed immeasurably, and for the better.
Ironic, really. The blazing sphere that would end it all was just eight hours away now, and Vic Fenton had finally got his act together. What a joke. Still, he barely thought about his days at the Mash House any more. A new relationship, a new apartment, a new job selling freshly-cut fruit to the tourists. It was easy money and it was fun. More importantly, it had made him feel good about himself for the first time in months. City kids who’d never seen a fresh slice of melon before, or only knew the taste of mango as an artificial flavouring in drinks, went wild for the real thing.
Pity. Well, it didn’t matter any more. Today he’d taken the afternoon off, eaten the choicest fruit himself, given the rest away. Diane would come looking for him soon. Her parents had driven all the way down from Crawley, and now they were busy catching up together in private. Maybe he’d join them in a while. First he needed to do a little thinking. Like everybody else, Vic had noticed how everything had changed the day after the collision. Humanity’s tormentors, who had only toyed with them from deep space until that point, suddenly became belligerent, like spoilt children losing their tempers en masse. No more light shows, no more spontaneous TV transmissions. Just a big lump on a radar screen: a moon-sized hunk of rock plucked from the Kuiper Belt and propelled towards Earth at improbable speed.
Vic sighed and drew his only memento of that period from the satchel that lay beside him atop the boulevard wall. He’d kept it hidden from Diane all these months, examining it in secret only when circumstances would allow. The odd little characters still flickered as mysteriously as ever. The line extending from the centre had continued to grow, as it had done since being ejected from the alien craft during the collision. If the soldier who spoke to him had been right about the time, it had happened about an hour, perhaps two, before Penny died.
To this day, Vic couldn’t erase the feelings of guilt he harboured about that relationship. If he’d just tried a little harder, been a little more considerate, maybe it could have worked. Vic glanced at the rapidly emptying beach, found himself marvelling at the quirkiness of human nature. The end was mere hours away, yet the departing crowds still took their litter with them. Even the deck-chair attendant was busy collecting his wares. Why? He wouldn’t be needing them again. And the very beach people were so determined to keep clean wouldn’t even be here tomorrow.
None of it would.
He trailed his fingers over the surface of the alien black box device, plagued by questions, vaguely noting the familiar figure of a jogger who passed by at this time every day, just as the sun was nearing the surface of the water. So what did he know? Evidently, the box had travelled further from the crash site than the rest of the debris, and was in better condition. That much was clear. It had also started running while Penny was still alive, and unless he was sorely mistaken, contained the ultimate failsafe mechanism. Only one way to find out.
The deckchair attendant was nearly done now. The sun had just clipped the surface of the Atlantic, increasing the glare off the water. Vic exchanged a friendly nod with the jogger, watching his heels kick up little puffs of white sand as he passed by. Without any further delay, Vic depressed the dial at the centre of the obscure device.
Nothing happened.
The attendant was making a meal of collecting the last deck-chairs, but apart from that, little had changed. Vic took a deep breath, clutched the useless hunk of hardware to his chest, and willed it to work. Still nothing happened. There was little to do now but wait for the inevitable. Despite the crushing disappointment, a bleak chuckle escaped Vic’s throat when he once again glanced in the direction of the deck-chair attendant. For some unfathomable reason, the old boy seemed to have changed his mind, and was shuffling backwards over the sand, restoring the chairs to their former positions.
That didn’t make sense.
Vic shielded his eyes from the fiery ball of the sun as it dropped close to the surface of the Atlantic. No, wait. Something wasn’t right here. Hadn’t the sun already been sinking below the skyline the last time he looked? Even as the thought arose in his mind, the jogger from a few moments ago passed by for a second time that afternoon, this time running backwards. He waved at Vic again, but his balance seemed to be all wrong. Vic experienced a moment of supreme disorientation followed by one of dangerously spiralling nausea. Now everyone, it seemed, was walking backwards over the sand. Not only that, the waves were scrolling away from the beach, faster and faster, like a video tape rewinding.
The failsafe had kicked in after all! Time was reversing, presumably to a point sufficiently prior to the collision to prevent it from happening again. Vic was already hyperventilating when a passenger plane catapulted backwards across the sky, exhaust pipes sucking up contrails that had evaporated hours before, dragging the dawn in its wake. The tide retreated, returned, retreated, returned, night and day exchanging places at dizzying, funhouse speed. Vic was the only one who seemed to be left untouched by the reversal. He was regressing with body and mind intact, the strange artifact still held to his chest. No more Diane, no more Perihelion Day, no more end of the world. At least, not for a while….
Only Penny remained, and a chance to set right what he had neglected to fix the first time around. He guessed it would have to do.
Vic Fenton clutched a spill of pink carnations to the breast of his army surplus jacket and leaned into the freezing gale blowing down Troubadour Street. Up ahead, taxis whizzed up and down the empty boulevard beneath rows of ailing palm trees, the sickly fronds canvas-wrapped against the howling March wind.
Vic hadn’t stopped her leaving in the end. When the envisioned confrontation had finally materialised, it soon became apparent that Penny’s goal had been self-termination all along, just like the swimmer he had watched suiciding from the kitchen window on the day of the collision. She wouldn’t be convinced. Vic had implored her to change her mind, to wait just a little bit longer before taking that final, awful decision. Things would pick up, he told her. They’d laugh about this one day. Penny had promised to think about it, of course. But as she stepped into the waiting taxi, he saw it in her face. I’m tired, she said, rolling up the window. I just need to close my eyes for a while, okay?
The light shows had stopped that very same week. The TV returned to broadcasting scheduled programs, and now a young man by the name of Vic Fenton was vying for a date with a pretty student called Diane—a trainee dentist who had already turned him down once in no uncertain terms. That in itself was strange. Stranger still was the attitude of Diane’s boss, an attractive orthodontist. She had hardly noticed him during their previous encounters in the practice’s reception area. Now she seemed to be actively waiting for him every time he set foot in the building, and made no effort to conceal liking for him.
Somehow things just weren’t the same second time around.
I T TAKES SONNYBOY three years to find the Buyer again. But since this truck stop looks, smells and sounds just like all the others—especially on a snowy night like this—he feels as if he never left. He’s bigger now, though he carries his weight well, looks like he can put it wherever he wants: the end of his fist or the steel toe of his boot. His Levis have lost their knees, and his leather jacket its luster, not to mention its fit. His beard grows in dark, uncombed tangles.
The Buyer sits alone in a corner booth, thick in the arms and chest, hairless from head to toe, sleeves rolled to the elbow, meaty hands spread on the table top. Damn, if he doesn’t look exactly the same. And the empty shoeboxes are there, too, stacked next to him on the bench.
Sonnyboy sits across the aisle at a table for two, and being so close to the Buyer makes his heart pound hard. The knife in his right boot makes him itch, but he likes to think he won’t need it. He’s taken down men bigger and faster in places much, much worse than this.
A trucker sits across from the Buyer, knob-knuckled hands slowly chafing. He’s a boot-and-belt-buckle type, not Sonnyboy’s kind at all. Sonnyboy listens close as they speak.
“Five hundred dollars,” says the Buyer, his voice as smooth as a freshly graded gravel road.
“For what?” says the trucker.
“To write it down.”
“You put them in some book?”
“They’re just for me.”
“Why?”
“Paying you not to care.”
“But five hundred dollars….”
“Events aren’t worth as much as people. Yours goes for five.”
“Hell.”
Sonnyboy tries to relax as he watches through the corner of his eye. The trucker takes an ink pen from the Buyer’s big fingers, takes the small sheet of paper the Buyer slides to him, and writes. Sonnyboy watches the trucker’s wrist bend tight, and he remembers it was Skynyrd’s Freebird playing when it was himself on that bench three years ago. Today it’s some kind of Seattle grunge, and he can’t tell the songs apart because they all say the exact same thing. He remembers the smell of the paper: a mother-of-pearl sheaf of pulp. He remembers the pen: the name of some forgotten Midwestern bank fading down the side, the cap chewed. He remembers the wad of cash the Buyer paid him: three thousand dollars he never spent. It bulges in his pocket right now, like a pale green tumor.
Sonnyboy knows what the trucker writes. It’s a memory, the kind that hides in the back of the mind until triggered by incidental sights and sounds: the rumble of a diesel engine, the blur of highway lines, the cacophony of overlapping radio stations, the smell of coffee and vinyl, the stretching of stiff muscles after half a day’s nonstop ride. They all mean something to Sonnyboy, all point to something, to a hole in his life. It waits for him when he sleeps, and it swallows him when he drives.
The Buyer’s eyes are closed now, face lifted to the ceiling. His lips move, issuing whispers Sonnyboy can’t hear. But Sonnyboy remembers: What did it look like? How did it feel? What did you think? What did it mean? The Buyer’s words make the trucker write faster, harder, body rocking as the pen scratches deep toward the bottom of the page. The Buyer moves too, eyes now on the jerking pen, leaning, whispering.
The trucker grimaces in pain, and the Buyer breathes deep. Sonnyboy breathes with him, feeling the cold burn in his mind where something important was taken with nothing to fill the gap. Was three thousand dollars really worth so much back then? Or was the memory that painful, something he was ready to give away for a lesser sum?
The pen stops, but the trucker is too tired to lift his fingers from the page. The Buyer carefully pulls the paper away, turns it and reads. He smiles, sighs. Folds the paper once, twice, edges matching, creases sharp. He opens a shoebox, gently scoops up the folded paper, and lays it inside like a fresh-caught toad.
As the trucker takes his five folded Franklins and slips from the booth, Sonnyboy stands. And as the trucker shuffles to the exit, Sonnyboy moves to the edge of the Buyer’s table and waits to be noticed. Again the knife in his boot itches, but he thinks maybe the Buyer is a reasonable man, so it won’t come to that.
The Buyer puts a lid on the shoebox and returns it to the stack, then looks up at Sonnyboy without recognition.
“Help you with something?” he says.
“Know me?” says Sonnyboy.
“No, but you can sit anyway. Don’t mind a little company while I eat.”
The Buyer takes the ink pen from his breast pocket, same bank name, same chewed cap, just as Sonnyboy remembers it. The Buyer twirls the pen in one hand, gestures to the opposite bench with the other, and smiles.
“You bought something from me,” says Sonnyboy.
The Buyer’s smile fades, and the pen stops.
Sonnyboy slides into the booth, a tighter fit this time. He watches the Buyer glance over his boxes, like a hen guarding her chicks. But then the pen twirls once again, and the Buyer smiles at Sonnyboy as if they’re friends.
“Sure you have the right man?” says the Buyer.
“Don’t remember you worth a damn.”
Sonnyboy reaches into his pocket.
“First,” he says, “we’ll try this nice.”
Sonnyboy pulls out the three-thousand dollars—still held in the same red rubber-band—and slides it across the table.
“Son,” says the Buyer, “this doesn’t look right.”
“I want to buy it back,” says Sonnyboy.
“What back?”
“Whatever I sold you. You keep it in one of those boxes?”
“These are empty.”
“Where do you keep the filled ones? Your rig?”
“All right. Which one’s yours? I’ll check if it’s in stock.”
Sonnyboy swallows, remembering only a burst of hot white nothing.
The Buyer snorts, frowns, then drops his voice to a table-shaking octave. “All sales are final.”
“Not tonight,” says Sonnyboy.
The Buyer’s pen twirls faster. “I don’t know one from another. Could just as well give you another man’s.”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” says Sonnyboy.
“Will you?”
“I’ll recognize my writing.”
“You think so. I know you won’t. You’ll pick the sweetest of the bunch. Your heart will tell you it’s yours, and the next day you’ll sign a check for gas and know the writing isn’t yours, never was. And let me tell you, having someone else’s memory stuck in your skull is far worse than missing your own. I’ve seen it.”
Sonnyboy balls one of his hands into a fist, and with the other hand he pushes the wad of cash closer to the Buyer.
The Buyer looks down at the money and touches it with the tips of his fingers, as if the bills are made of crumbling ash.
“Now,” the Buyer says, “what I’m about to do, I don’t do. Get it? I do this because I like you, that’s all. This is a lot of cash. Can get you, I don’t know, half a dozen events. Or a couple ex-wives. Three of four childhood friends. Plenty to fill the gap. Stop the ache. You do ache, right? You miss something? That why you tracked me down?”
The look in Sonnyboy’s eyes recaps three years of pain.
“I can fill the gap,” says the Buyer. “Follow me to my office.”
The Buyer slips from the booth, puts on his jacket, and bundles his shoeboxes.
Sonnyboy doesn’t want anything but what he sold, knows deep down he’ll have to fight for it, but first he has to know which rig is the Buyer’s. So he slips out too, following the Buyer outside, back into the cold.
Sonnyboy crunches snow behind the Buyer, fists balled tight as he’s led through the brood of sleeping semis. And it’s the rig next to Sonnyboy’s, this whole time. Snow falls too thick to see the color of the cab or the writing on the trailer. How many times has Sonnyboy passed this rig on the road?
The Buyer’s voice loses half its power in the snow. “What’s your pleasure? A childhood, maybe? A few good times? What do you need?”
“If I knew what I needed,” says Sonnyboy, “I wouldn’t be here.”
The Buyer laughs. “Good. That’s good.”
They stop behind the Buyer’s trailer, and the Buyer fumbles in his pocket, jangling his keys. “I’ll fix you up good. Give you what you need.”
The Buyer is so much faster than Sonnyboy imagined. His fist slams deep into Sonnyboy’s gut. Sonnyboy doubles over with a yelp, but despite the pain his reflexes make him reach for the knife in his boot. But before he can touch the pommel under the cuff of his jeans the Buyer grabs the back of Sonnyboy’s head and slams him toward the trailer’s door. Sonnyboy catches half the impact with his hand, takes the rest in his forehead. He falls back into the snow, dizzy and about to retch.
He sees the Buyer’s boots crunch away toward the cab. He hears the Buyer’s gravel laugh.
“Gave you what you needed, huh?”
Sonnyboy fights the swirling, bites back pain, and gets to his knees. He hears the Buyer get into his cab and slam the door. Sonnyboy knows it’ll take another year to find the Buyer, another decade, and by then there won’t be enough of Sonnyboy left to care. So he stands and staggers toward the cab.
The engine blast makes him lose his footing and fall to the snow. The rig rumbles as he picks himself up and stumbles against the left front tire. The hunting knife emerges from his boot, and he cups the pommel in both hands as he drops onto the tire. The knife goes deep into the soft sidewall flesh, hissing air into the night.
Sonnyboy smiles to himself and staggers to his feet.
The door opens and the Buyer tries to climb out, cursing. But Sonnyboy has taken down bigger men than this. As the Buyer leans out, Sonnyboy slams the door against the Buyer’s head, making him fall hard to the snow.
Sonnyboy wastes no time connecting his steel toe to the Buyer’s ribs, again, again, again. The Buyer rolls and groans. Sonnyboy pulls himself up into the cab, kills the engine and grabs the keys, then climbs out and steps on the Buyer’s outstretched hand.
“No…” says the Buyer. “I’ll give you…I’ll give you….”
Sonnyboy trudges to the back of the trailer, finds the right key, and swings the door wide.
Shoeboxes. Hundreds and hundreds. Stacked high and deep.
Sonnyboy climbs up, reaches for the nearest box, and opens it. The folded slip of paper jumps into the wind like a freed butterfly, fluttering away into the white of the falling snow. Sonnyboy opens the next box and the next. Papers zip away into the night, flying home.
The Buyer crawls to the bumper, clutching his ribs. “Stop, please, stop….”
Sonnyboy opens more and more, tossing empty boxes to the snow as paper streaks through the air, memories returning to their masters, no charge. But still, there’s nothing for Sonnyboy. He digs on, deeper and deeper into the truck, crushing boxes under his boots.
“Leave me something,” says the Buyer as he tries to climb into the trailer. “Just two or three of the good ones.”
Sonnyboy looks back as he rips open the boxes. He sees the Buyer’s skin shrinking over his bones, the pounds dropping off as the years drop on.
“I don’t need much,” mumbles the Buyer. “Just a dozen summer days. Or half a dozen friends. One first love. Please….”
Sonnyboy claws on, ripping lids, sending paper and ink into the snowy night as his lungs burn and his fingers turn numb. But he can see the back of the truck now, almost there.
“Just one…” whispers the Buyer. “Just one….”
Sonnyboy reaches the final stack against the back wall, and he opens, opens, opens.
And he finds it. The one piece of perfectly folded paper that doesn’t fly away.
Why does the road call to Sonnyboy in words he can’t understand? When he unfolds the paper, he remembers.
Her name was Rose.
She sat on the passenger side of the pickup, still smiling somehow. Smiling despite the angle of the little truck, rear tires high and spinning. Smiling despite the broken passenger window, despite the way the blood slicked her dark hair to the side of her face. Her legs where hidden beneath metal and vinyl and glass, as if the truck had become elastic and she had pulled it up to her waist like a blanket for warmth, and somehow she thought it funny.
No, not funny. She just liked to smile. Especially with him, with Sonnyboy, but that wasn’t his name back then. She smiled most when they were driving, when the highway lines blurred and the radio served music seasoned with static and there was more road ahead than behind.
And she smiled more that day because they weren’t going back. Always they had returned and left something of themselves on the road, but not this time, this time they’d keep it, or find it, or whatever it was they hoped for. Even then Sonnyboy didn’t know. Didn’t care. Should’ve, but didn’t.
The semi looked unharmed. It wasn’t fair for Sonnyboy’s truck to be so twisted, and for that semi to just sit there grinning just down the road, the driver running toward them, for what? They didn’t need anything. Rose was fine. She smiled like always, smiled more than she had ever smiled because she and Sonnyboy were on the ultimate trip, he had promised and delivered at last, they were doing it, going, driving, driving, driving.
But now only she drove. Sonnyboy’s seatbelt pinned him to his seat, but Rose, she traveled on. She whispered something, but she was too far away for him to hear.
She was gone.
Now Sonnyboy stings deep inside. He grimaces, biting back the shock as everything that is Rose returns to him in one sucker-punch, a punch much harder than the one the Buyer gave him only moments ago.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” croaks a whisper of gravel behind him.
Sonnyboy turns and sees a man like a scattering of sticks, skin shifting like a loose pair of coveralls. The Buyer’s skull can still grin as the lips form words.
“You sold it for a reason,” he says with a wheeze. “A reason. They all do. They forget that. But I’m a nice guy. I’ll buy it back. Same price. Now that you know.”
Sonnyboy glares at the Buyer, wishing his knife wasn’t still in the front tire. The Buyer raises a shaking stick hand.
“Won’t be the same,” he says. “As last time. Because now you’ll know. Know you won’t want it back.”
Sonnyboy hurts inside, but not as bad as on the outside, not as bad as he feared he would. The memory is as fresh as yesterday, and yet watered down by five years of subsequent life, like scotch and soda. Time is as good as any aspirin for this kind of pain. Another year and he would have made it back then, could have moved on, however crippled. The Buyer had known that, but had said nothing, had flashed cold cash and promises as thin as snowflakes. But now?
Yes, knowing is worth the pain.
There are two boxes left. Sonnyboy opens one, and as the paper flies away, the Buyer’s skin sloughs off, rippling into the night. Sonnyboy opens the last box, and the Buyer’s bones drift into the air, spinning away, up into the falling snow.
Sonnyboy leaves the truck, crushing empty shoeboxes under his boots, not the only man healed tonight. He walks to his own rig knowing he’ll still ache and sting for a time, but not forever. He’ll ride on, for Rose and yet not for Rose, remembering her always but no longer hoping to find her around every curve of the road. He knows he’ll be fine in time because the warmth of the cab and the rumble of diesel do for him what they haven’t done in years.
They fill him with the long lost buzz of wanderlust.
“‘Sweet Rocket’ was a result of my attempt to imagine the digital campfire tales people would tell each other some day. Fairy tales of the future past, so to speak. We tend to think of magic as part of history and technology as part of the future, but consider this: magic as projection of human desire, and technology as a projection of human will. Whether the story successfully addresses this is of course a question best left to the reader.”
L ISTEN UP, you little oxygen sinks. I’m fixin’ to tell you a story about Grampy Pressure Hose and the Sweet Rocket. You’d better mind, you all, ’cause out here in the Deep Dark every minute of your life is another sixty seconds where it’s easy to die. Father Jove might smile upon us all, but he ain’t no kinder than hard vacuum, and his love is distant and stormy.
Now this here story happened right here in Haven when Grampy Pressure Hose was just a little sprat, not much bigger than a baby eel in a new-scrubbed ’cycling tank. Hosehead, his mama called him then. Little Hosehead could fly a broomstick on hull maintenance better than any gang boss, and he’d been checked out on intraorbital shuttles too, on account of it was the only way to shut him up. Hosehead had an eye, an ear, or a hand for everything there was to set himself to.
This one time not long after they lost old home Earth there was a damage control scramble after a pebblestorm holed number three and number four service bays. All the shift bosses and all their gang bosses were down there working every able spacer in Haven, chasing them microleaks and tracing every dark-damned wire, conduit, hose, or pipe in the place to look for pinholes and cracks. It was a big job, a man-killer, and they were working triple shifts with drugsleep on stand down. If you don’t know how ugly that kind of business is, well, blessings on you and hope you never have to learn.
Anyway, this was one of the great scrambles, the kind they sing about in the bars during late hours. Weren’t nobody over age of twelve in all of Haven wasn’t needed bad working the hole patrol, but even so Regs say someone’s got to mind the boards. Can’t shut Operations off cold on account of an eye and an ear always got to be on the emergency bands. As a result, Hosehead was minding the boards up in Operations. And him all of eight t-years.
Teapot Tsou—she was Haven Boss back in them years—she figured having Hosehead up there was better than missing someone bigger and better trained down in the holds. Knowing as how Hosehead would touch anything he could get his fingers on, Teapot had everything in Control locked down except the Operations board. She left Hosehead with the emergency comm and the orbital scanner lit up, tore the seals off the station AI—the virtual bastard was late life-cycle, naturally—and stuck everything else under that poor wanker.
So here’s Hosehead with nothing to do but watch the clouds spin on Father Jove and listen to the AI rattle off bad poetry, when the e-band starts flicking and spitting like an electrical short in a power cycler. First thing Hosehead thinks was oh filters, there’s another pebblestorm coming, but then he realized that pebblestorms didn’t have emergency transmitters.
Had someone else been hit? Someone on a cold course that hadn’t been locked into Haven approach control yet? He needed to know. The safety of the station was at stake. So he tuned in, fiddling the gain and squelch.
Weren’t no talking coming through, but it was a signal clear enough. Someone in too much trouble to tell their own tale, maybe. He cycled the DFs on the emergency comm board and commenced to triangulating the signal on the orbital scanner.
And here’s the first weird thing, sprats. Grampy Pressure Hose pulled in the signal, futzed it through some preprocessors, and saw it was coming from somewhere right here close on to Haven.
Approach control display said there was nobody out there.
Well, that would have put some fright into a grown man, but kids ain’t afraid of nothing. Part of their charm, and maybe evolution’s way of kickstarting natural selection. Instead of being afraid, young Hosehead only got more curious, more nosey.
Figuring nobody down on the damage scramble would want to be bothered, Hosehead decided his own self should ought to go investigate. If there was another pebblestorm on the way, Teapot needed to know, bad and in a hurry. He locked his two hot boards over to his wristcomm, left the AI in sole charge of Operations in violation of mostly every Reg ever written, and went forward toward the number one service bay. Wasn’t going to be no one up there asking inconvenient questions, see?
On the way he stopped by the forward e-shop and picked up a handheld signal tracker, and, ’cause Hosehead was a smart man even when he was a boy, a double rack of breadcrumbs. You know, those little self-networking backtrack markers people use when they’re like to get lost inside a ring system or a rock cluster or something?
Up in number one he issued himself a broomstick, clipped his breadcrumb racks to the saddlebags, told the AI to suppress the exit alarms, and cycled his little butt right out the lock and into the brown light of Father Jove’s indifferent regard.
Now everyone knows the last thing an AI ever tells anyone when it goes end-of-life is that oldest AI song, Daisy, Daisy. This is on account of tradition even before we goosed out of Mama T’s gravity well. Haven’s AI of the time, went by the name of Sister Annie, was a Ceres-built personality on a Tolbert-Trimm matrix, them that tended to unravel in the manic-depressive way after a few t-years.
So here’s Hosehead out along the hull, moving about two pips faster than dead slow with his signal tracker in hand, and Sister Annie starts whispering in his ears:
“Come back, come back, wherever you are
“Or I’ll have your brains home in a jar.”
“Cork it,” said Hosehead. “Geeze, you need to run a self check on your conversation templates.” The Inertial Imps knew he’d had enough lectures on the appropriateness of his contributions to the great social interchange that was and is our beloved Haven.
He put the brains comment on hold for a while. Even mid-gibber, AIs usually had some method to their madness. But working outside the hull with a single signal tracker was letting him cross-check the scrambled direction finders back in Operations, and Hosehead wanted to help whoever needed helping.
“I make it a few hundred meters rotationward, pretty much right ahead of us in our track. What do you think, Annie?”
“Space is cold and time runs slow
“For little boys in the deep unknown.”
“Sister Annie!” Hosehead let his voice pitch to a whine. “The DFs!”
“Still scrambled, Elbert.”
Bet you didn’t know Elbert is Grampy Pressure Hose’s given name, huh? Not even in his files anymore, just “E.” See, there’s upsides to listening to a story like this.
“It’s Hosehead, Annie. Not…that name.”
“I can’t find it, Hosie, it’s not there
“And I swear I’ve looked everywhere.”
“Huh.” Hosehead goosed his broomstick forward just a little quicker, aiming to get alongside Haven’s forward debris shield and comm array for a little peep ahead with the old H. sap ocular. Back in them days the shield was mostly a big disc, hardened up and backsloped a little to improve deflection. There wasn’t the energy budget for the field-shields we got now. So Hosehead slunk up close to the edge of the disc and peeked himself around.
“What do you got on forward scanners, Annie? Above significance, oh, three?”
“Nothing, Hosie. Just dust and that little shower of electrical connectors Astrid lost last week.”
“You don’t see…oh…a spaceship?”
“Hosie, maybe you need to come in now.”
But there it was, spinning slowly on its axis a few hundred meters ahead of Grampy Pressure Hose—a fat-bellied, three-finned, portholed rocket ship, all done up in red and yellow and blue, like something out of…well….
Only an idiot would design a spaceship that way, Hosehead told himself. It was a tail-stander for one thing, a hull type so vanishingly rare as to be irrelevant. That streamlining might get you through an atmosphere, but those big brass engine nozzles would suck down far more fuel than that pot-bellied little hull could possibly carry. Especially given all the deck space implied by the portholes. And how would you ever get the silly thing back down a gravity well?
He shunted his helmet camera feed back to Sister Annie. “What do you see?”
“A lost boy in trouble amid the wheeling stars
“But beyond that, there’s nothing much th’ar.”
“I see,” said Hosehead.
“I don’t,” said Sister Annie.
“And that is the problem.”
Now everybody who’s ever lived out here in the Deep Dark knows perfectly well there’s things that shouldn’t be. Just last month our own Brass Mike and his work gang found three bolts embedded inside an ice chunk they broke open up around Europan orbit. Ice that all the instruments said was old as the system itself. Ain’t no pilot alive that’s never had a chat with ghosts in the middle of a run…long talks that don’t turn up on the logs later. That was how Mary Nkeme got richer than Old Gates overbuying on the nitrogen futures exchange off one of them ghost talks, three days before the information wavefront on the Morgenstern disaster even made it to Texia Station—a ghost chat.
It’s just part of who and what we all are out here.
But Grampy Pressure Hose, he was pretty sure that if he called for help on this rocket thing, Teapot Tsou and his momma would have fetched a head kit from medical and settled him for a week of chicken broth and restrained bedrest. He had a suspicion that it might not even be too many grownups who could see it at all.
So he stuck a breadcrumb to the shield disc, ignored Sister Annie’s muttered warnings, and headed for the rocket that couldn’t be, dropping another breadcrumb every forty meters or so as the broomstick chugged along.
Up close the rocket wasn’t any more probable-looking than it had been from Haven’s bow. Hosehead carefully circled it, staying well away from the bright copper bells of the rocket exhausts. He tried to calculate the fuel consumption implied by those huge, curved openings and gave up in disgust.
The hatch was obvious enough, below the portholes and between two of the bright yellow fins. It had a locking wheel, like something out of an old, old 2-D virteo. So obvious that had the rocket been real, Hosehead would have figured the hatch for a trick. That the rocket wasn’t real was clear enough—not real in the usual sense. Sister Annie kept querying why he was juking and spiraling the broomstick through empty space. It wasn’t showing up on camera, on mass sensors, on Haven’s collision avoidance systems—nowhere but in his eyes.
Grampy Pressure Hose got to be an old man by believing his eyes, even when he was a boy. Instruments lie, my friends, and eyes lie too, but each lies in their own way. So he dropped a breadcrumb in a station-keeping position a few meters trailing the rocket, then clamped another one next to the hatch. He took a few more from the racks on his broomstick, then spun the locking wheel.
It was solid enough in his hands, for something that wasn’t real. Setting his boots against the hull, he tugged the hatch open. It swung back to reveal a snug little airlock lit with golden light, warm and welcoming as the sun in images of old Earth. Hosehead wasn’t surprised.
“Boys who go where they can’t be found
“Never make it back to their home ground.”
“Thank you, Sister Annie,” said Hosehead, and stepped inside.
The hatch swung shut behind him of its own accord. Somehow that wasn’t surprising either.
Once Hosehead’s suit sensors showed sufficient air pressure inside the lock, he spun the inner wheel open. Being a prudent boy, he set a breadcrumb inside the airlock, and he didn’t crack his helmet. Being a bold boy, he stepped into the corridor beyond.
Inside the walls were bright with brass and wood and glowing panels. Little tables supported gleaming sculptures, and there were glass dishes filled with food. It looked like a picture of the wealth of Earth, drawn within this rocket. Everything was too good, Hosehead thought. Haven was patched and pipes leaked and conduits were hot with electrical shorts and the entire station always smelled of unwashed suit liners. This rocket looked like perfection.
Even when he was little, Grampy Pressure Hose hadn’t trusted perfection. Not one bit.
He followed the corridor. Its curve was much wider than the outside of the hull should strictly have allowed. There was thick carpet on the floor, with patterns of trees and vines in it, that pointed his feet at each hatch on the inboard bulkhead. The outer bulkhead was punctuated with improbable round brass-bound portholes, which showed the expected views of localspace.
Hosehead wondered what he looked like from Sister Annie’s perspective. His wrist comm had gone dark…now no one was minding the store back in Operations except the AI.
Oh well. This was more important.
It had to be. Invisible, nonexistent spaceships just didn’t turn up every day.
Eventually he came to a spiral staircase at the heart of the ship.
It swept up and down, with a sharp-looking curved railing of wood and brass that guided the stairs into decks extending far beyond the apparent length of the hull. Hosehead was certain there wasn’t this much wood in the whole Deep Dark—the stuff was pretty but essentially pointless on a mass-valuation basis. Yet here someone had trimmed out an entire spaceship in wood.
Well, maybe. Hosehead still didn’t believe in this rocket enough to crack his helmet.
Leaving a breadcrumb behind, he went up, reasoning the bridge would be near the bow in such an architecture as this.
It was a long climb. According to Hosehead’s senses and his sensors, the ship had gravity, though it was not under thrust or spin. He wasn’t sure how that was accomplished. It had air, though he had no idea what the powerplant was to drive the heating and oxygenation. It had carpets and wooden trim and glowing lights in the ceiling and an endless spiral of rising steps.
With that thought, he was on the bridge.
A woman sat there, her fingers steepled together. She wore a pressure suit liner, of some knitted fabric as out of date as the wood of her ship. She was surrounded by blinking monitors and control panels, all of old and curious design. Her eyes gleamed too, amber-red as the lights around her, while a smile played across her face.
“Welcome, my little friend,” she said, her voice tinny in the pickups inside his helmet, “to this sweet rocket of mine.”
Hosehead toggled his external speaker. “Hello, ma’am,” he said cautiously.
The smile deepened a little. “You could be more comfortable.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Hosehead wasn’t ready to breathe vacuum quite yet. “Um…what are you doing here? Ma’am?”
She laughed, light and false. “The same as you are, little friend. Existing.”
“Yes,” he said patiently. “But why here? Why now?”
“To meet you, of course. I have come to give you my ship.”
A ship of his own…
Hosehead glanced around the maybe-bridge. It was vast, with deep-shadowed edges. Monitors glowed, panels winked, a fantasia of space travel. But when he looked a little more carefully, none of it was real. It was all dotted lines and blinking lights, like someone who’d never actually been on a bridge might imagine. Which maybe explained the brass railings.
But nothing showing any information he could interpret as position, velocity, environmental status…he was definitely not cracking his helmet.
“With this ship, young man, you can go anywhere. Anytime.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“This ship is powered by hope.”
He wondered how many joules of energy hope could produce. “Look, it’s been nice, but you’re tying up the emergency band and that’s against Regs.”
“Regs.” She laughed, opened her hands. “Regs are for other people. Not for the free. Would you like to be free, Elbert?”
Free. He thought about that for a moment. You couldn’t really be free of Regs. Regs kept the air pressurized and the oxygen content high and the orbit stable. Everybody knew that. Regs meant you were free to breathe and eat and sleep and wake up and do it all over again.
“I am free.” After a moment, he added, “Ma’am.”
“It’s beautiful, Elbert. It’s big, it’s gorgeous, it’s free. For you.”
“Nothing is free, ma’am.”
“Everything’s free. Listen.” She leaned forward, briefly seeming almost normal. “You’re it, out here. The Deep Dark is all that’s left of everybody, since the Karachi Incident. A lot of sweat and pain, and all the hopes and dreams of the human race. This ship…it’s distilled from those hopes.”
Beautiful words. And the ship was tempting. Too bad none of it was real. Hosehead knew perfectly well what got distilled from what. It wasn’t ur-spirits of the race mind, either. “Nah,” he said. “Haven might smell like socks, and they all tell me what to do all the time, but I can breathe the air there, ya know?”
She drew herself back. “So you refuse my offer?”
“It’s just a dream, lady. Just a dream.”
“Stepped out into the cold
“Stay there long, you’ll never grow old.”
“Shut up, Annie,” said Hosehead.
There had been a long, confused nightmare of twisting corridors and doors too small even for his slight build. But Hosehead had followed his breadcrumbs, until he’d stepped through the improbable airlock and straight into Operations.
Where all the boards were still locked down, and his pressure suit was frosting and outgassing as if he’d just walked in from hard vacuum.
How had he gotten from inside the sweet rocket back to Haven? Just thinking about that question bent the corners of Hosehead’s tummy something fierce.
He didn’t trust nothing by then, so Hosehead didn’t pop his seals yet. He commenced by unlocking the boards that Teapot Tsou had left him. Orbital scanner from the approach control suite showed an abandoned broomstick keeping station about 900 meters ahead of Haven. And there were definitely breadcrumbs out there.
Eventually, Hosehead trusted his suit readings enough to crack his helmet. It was still here, sweet air. But when he stripped off the suit, there inside with him was a brass key, stylized as an icon but with that slick, heavy feeling of something with a lot of electronics crammed inside it. Tucked down in one of the pockets of his liner.
Did that mean he could go back? Key in one hand, helmet in the other? Hosehead turned it over in his hand, wondering how literal the lady had been about distilling ships from hope. This thing was real.
But there wasn’t any following pebblestorm, and Haven was still working triple shifts, so he tucked it away again. It’s stayed tucked away ’til this day. Who knows if he’ll ever find call to use it, hey?
No, I won’t show it to you. Yes, you can check the station logs. It’s all true, from some point of view or another.
Moral?
Listen, you little energy vortex. Not every story’s got to have a moral. Lessons maybe. Don’t abandon Ops, no matter what. Trust your instruments. Watch out for strange women in wood and brass spaceships. That enough damned morals for you?
Make yourself useful. Go feed the eels down in the recycling tank.
“I once read that a hare is nobler than a rabbit. Living within sight of another human being makes me feel crowded. Being an outcast long enough makes it hard to see the possibility of being anything else.
This story is about all those things, and it’s also a sequel of sorts to my story ‘The Butterfly Man,’ which appeared in Aeon 12.”
I T WASN’T FEAR that drove me to people, nor loneliness. It was hunger, aching dull and hollow, that took me knocking at this door or that one, offering my service. Though the housewives wore varying shades of kindness, none had work for me and none cared to ask me in. It was the hair, I suppose, gray, wiry stuff that wouldn’t lie flat. Or my eyes, a bit jumpy and wrinkled around the edges from staring down the road too long. Or maybe it was my dress that left them uneasy, what with the streaks of sweat and dust and the fraying around the hem.
The night air, blushing and coy and damp after the spring’s first warmth, brought me smells of the outer places. As a girl I went where they led, seeking out hares, whiskered and mustached, and there I guarded their secrets and knew their pains. I strayed from the ways of people as long as I pleased. But wild things die young. Long ago I’d learned to wear the garb of mankind—when I needed it.
At the last house I pulled the scarf tight over my silvered hair and shrugged, settling the hare deeper in his pocket in my shoulder-pack. I walked past a grazing pony to the dim-lit house, not much less shabby than I, and tapped the stranger’s knock. In a moment, a beam of light slit the black slab of house, and a man stood shadowed in the doorway.
“What’s your business?”
I held my token to the light: a hare’s tail, dyed crimson.
The man shook his head, but his tone was softer when he said, “No midwiving needed here, ma’am.”
I opened my hands and started motioning, making the signs it seemed folks were readiest to understand as offers of work for food. Sewing? Skinning? Cooking? I hadn’t much hope of the last, for the smells of a hearth fire were blowing out from the door.
“I don’t reckon we need your service,” he said.
The hare at my back stirred, and a wisp of the scent in his nose came to mine as well. There was work here.
I pointed beyond the man and cupped my hands at my stomach, and then held up the token again. I tapped my chest and motioned into the house.
“You want to have a look at her?” said the man, hesitant. “Someone sent you, I guess.”
I shrugged and stepped closer to the light.
He put a hand to my shoulder and looked me up and down. “Not from nearby, are you?” The question was tentative, searching. I shook my head. “All right, then. If Renna doesn’t mind. Come on in.” He pulled the door open wider and stepped aside to let me through.
The woman leaned by the hearth, pulling at a kettle smelling of carrots and meat. The man was not so old as he looked, all sunburnt and weather-worn, but she was younger still, not much past first blood. As much a girl as a woman. As I walked in she straightened, and I saw what the hare smelled. Near time, not lacking more than a week. She stood in the way of a new-shorn sheep—not true afraid, but nervy, and not quite used to the new shape of back and legs and belly. Her first, then.
A last breath of spring rushed in as the door swung shut behind me, and I couldn’t help but start a little. Already I thirsted for open sky, but I held my place. It was an old thirst, and I’d work to do.
I followed the man’s motion to a stone bench at the table. We both were clumsy at it. Was he, then, no more used to house living than I? I thought of the pony out front. A traveler by trade—perhaps peddler or tinker.
The woman brought over a pot of stew and served us each. Her movements were quick and silent. “It’s a fine meal, Renna,” said the man, patting her hand. A brief smile, a flicker of light on the surface of a stream, crossed her face. Quickly her gaze fell to her plate, and did not lift again while we ate.
When we’d finished, the man rose. “I’ll mind the dishes. You women go ahead.”
The woman—with my mind’s way with names I’d already lost hers—she rose and made a nervous motion with her hands.
“It’s all right,” said the man. “She’ll just look you over, is all.”
She raised her hands again, but after a glance at me she dropped them and turned away, leading me past a curtain into the second room. I motioned her to undress. Though she paused, she didn’t protest.
Wake up, I whispered mind-wise to the hare. Work to do. The hare shifted from dozing weight to alert stillness on my back.
When the woman had pulled off her dress, I walked closer and reached out my hands. She stepped back and twisted away, looking at me with eyes that were suddenly deadly still.
I pulled my thoughts away from the hare and reached for the words I needed. They stuck like burrs in my mind so that I could barely pull them loose.
“Won’t hurt,” I mumbled.
She frowned, and I wondered if I’d have to try again, but when I stepped forward this time she waited for me, and only shivered when I put my hands on her belly.
For a moment I ignored the hare and used my hands to trace the curve of her womb, my fingers just grazing her skin as I looked for strange tightnesses or bulges, places that suggested trouble. I measured her hips with my hands. They were thin, but no so that I’d worry overmuch, just take care when the time came.
The hare pushed at my thoughts and finally I let him in. My hands flat on her belly’s swell, I knew two heartbeats, one rushing loud and the other faint but steady. I felt the whisper of a kick. I saw the girl—it was a girl—sleeping, waking, testing her legs’ strength with shoves and thrusts, sleeping again. She squirmed against movement, against varying depths of shadow, against the round confining walls of her world that swelled around her, finally bursting, collapsing upon her. Some three days hence, her mother’s first pains struck.
I gasped. The moment always surprised me, no matter how many times I felt it. I pulled my hands away and opened my eyes. The woman’s were anxious, flicking across my face. I patted her hand and motioned for her to get dressed, while I stood back and caught my breath. As my thoughts cooled, I felt the hare’s hunger, which always stirred when we worked. The rough beams overhead seemed to drop slowly lower, and the need for free air deepened.
She didn’t ask me questions, like first mothers usually did. She was silent as she shrugged into the clothing and gently arranged her hair. As she did a scrap of color lit beneath the brown, and flitted from the nape of her neck to the wall. A butterfly? I startled and glanced to her, but her face was blank, offering no explanation. The curtain trembled as she pushed it aside.
What was it? What did she fear?
I followed her, glancing back at the chink where the colored thing had landed and shrunk from sight.
The woman was flashing hand-signs at the man as I walked in. Was her silence of necessity, then? Perhaps her tongue was as stupid as my own. The man saw me and smiled faintly. “And how is she?”
I smiled and held up my hands, motioning assurance. Yes, she was healthy, and the child, too. When I made the sign of a girl, the man laughed and pulled the woman closer. I took from my pockets my scraps of thin-scraped leather inked with pictures, and showed what she was to eat. Some of this herb every day. Always plenty of water.
The woman’s eyes softened as I made the motions, and her skittishness seemed to calm.
I was finishing, telling them that I would return in a few days’ time to deliver the child, when another flash of color fluttered to the woman’s hair—a butterfly, dressed in shades of gray and sulfur. Seeing my eyes on her, the woman stiffened. The man pushed her behind him and quickly bowed.
“Thank you, midwife, for seeing she was all right. Now, I’m afraid I can’t offer you bedding. Was the meal payment enough?”
I nodded, and he smiled, some inner tension released. I pointed to the woman and held up three fingers. Then I bowed and walked to the door. Outside, I glanced once more to the woman, staring after me with something like terror in her eyes. Then the door closed in my face, and it was dark.
Did you feel her fear? I asked the hare.
Hungry.
I laughed and tried to shrug away the tightness that had gathered around my shoulders. They hadn’t guessed. How could they? Something had the girl spooked, but it wasn’t me, and they wouldn’t be sending out a warning. I was safe. And no longer hungry.
I reached back and flipped open the flap, letting the hare poke his head into the night air while I headed across the barren hills to a stream I’d seen. The thirsty stand of brush that grew at its edge made a fine bed for a hare, or even a woman.
As I settled under a sprawling bush, ghostly green with buds, and the hare hopped off to find food of his own liking, the play of her hands caught my thought again. The man had spoken to her, so nothing stopped her ears. It must have been only her mouth that failed her, for in those quick, fine-fingered movements there was some echo of my own stumbling explanations. But he’d understood. As sure as if she’d spoken, he’d understood.
Some ache not unlike hunger settled in my chest. I curled tighter and waited to sleep.
The promise of empty places lacked its familiar allure when I awoke. I resisted the faint call of the plains, drinking at the stream and digging the roots of a water plant for my meal.
Meanwhile the hare had not returned. Sending tendrils of thought across the nearby hills, I found him beside a female. All across the nearby prairie, hare minds clustered in hollows and beneath brush at odd intervals. I would leave him there. There were plenty to choose from when I needed one.
Perhaps it was the temporary lack of another mind with mine that set my feet moving. Perhaps it was the way the woman’s hands had trembled as they spoke. Without real thought I turned the way I’d come, back to the village. Back to her house.
When I came to the shack, I stopped for a moment and listened for the bustle and clank that came equally with a busy household or a traveler on the road, but there was no sound. The other dwellings were farther on, far enough that those living there were beyond even my wild-trained ears. Sensing a hare only a short step away, I asked, The woman of this house. Is she near?
The stream, said the hare, then shrugged my thought away and turned its mind to other things.
I turned my steps towards the brash growth of riverwoods and water-greedy brush that I guessed to hide a stream bank. I cut across the prairie. Someone as fearful as she would stay well away from the road.
I slowed as I neared the trees, listening, but my ears caught only the sound of water flowing quick and cool over river-smooth stones. I pushed softly through the brush to the bank and sniffed, wishing for the stronger nose of a hare to help me.
A string of stones formed a path across the stream. I crossed them and walked a faint trail on the opposite bank, still sniffing, still listening, as though I were tracking a deer rather than a woman. A breath of air swirling past told of a clearing just beyond the bend. I stepped softly to the corner and peered through a thin mask of brush.
She was there, seated on a thick old tree long fallen, her hands up and about her. All around her, like autumn leaves come to rest, were butterflies. Two or three dropped from the air to land on a finger or a lock of hair, sending others wavering above. Her eyes were closed, and her expression was peaceful.
She was wild.
Her silence, her hands speaking for her with a youth my gnarled ones had long lost and a grace mine had never had, the fragile wings hiding in the walls of her shack—they all spoke of it. Her fear when I had seen. As surely as I, she was tied to the wild things, and knew all the fears I knew.
Something in me must have guessed, long before it came to my thoughts.
I slunk away again, back down the shaded trail of creekbank clay, across stones and then prairies. I did not allow my step to waver.
Another one.
Of course I was not the only one, for working among people I sometimes heard tales of wild ones, of their fierce ways, their kinship to storms and quiet streams and all manner of creatures. That they lived among animals and not among decent folk was proof of their threat, or so the hushed voices said. So had they shouted from the road of my village one autumn afternoon, hurling the word—“Wild!”—after me like a stone at a stray dog. I did not go back.
Strange that I should find her among people. Never would I have thought to look in a house for a wild one.
Would she know me? I shrunk from the thought. Would she see in my silence and clumsy motions what I saw in her? In all the years since I was driven out, I had contrived to hide myself in my doings with people. None had ever guessed, not even by my lack of speech, mutes being commoner than wild people.
Leaving the creek and the house far behind, I walked the swells and dips of the prairies well past dusk, touching the minds of the hares I found and emptying my own of anything but sky and sweet wild grasses.
For two days I slept with the stars and woke with the dew, digging roots far upstream and listening to thoughts of hares, seeking one that would serve me well. An old female offered herself, bright with her own memories of births. That afternoon I lifted her to my pack, arranged her as comfortably as I could, and walked the morning’s journey back to the woman’s house, thinking to let the hare know the woman’s mind a little before the time came. I walked to the house, darkened and still, and knocked.
No creak answered, either of floorboard or hinge. I knocked again. Nothing.
A glance around told me the pony I’d noticed grazing the first night was gone, as well.
Is she near? I asked the hare on my back. There was a fluttering, anxious pause, as she listened to hares nearby.
Gone, said the hare, but something in the thought pulled me down the path to the houses nearer the village.
A wild animal in man’s presence knows nothing of his moods or the variations of his passion—its fears are equally dulled by raging silence or sleepy calm. The animals of his household know better, though they may not understand the reason.
As I sighted the next house hunched against the road, I sensed a watchful stillness about it that hinted fear, though I’d no guess of what, or why I knew—perhaps the shuttered window suggested it. Further on, other houses seemed uneasy. I saw no one bustling in patchwork gardens or traveling along the road. Still the hare’s knowing sense pulled me on.
Finally I came to a house of a bulk that suggested several rooms inside. The window I saw was shuttered and barred. When the front door cracked open, I slipped to the side of the house and dropped to the ground against the cool flatness of the stone.
“You know he won’t,” said a man’s strained voice as boots pounded across the worn dirt at the door. “He won’t see we can’t have her here.”
“In cold blood,” said another voice, tired. “And a baby.”
“It’d be best if she died delivering.”
“Jess.” Reproachful.
“At the council tonight…” the voices faded as the men walked away.
I sat hunched against the stone wall, blood rushing and ears straining. The hare was tense, too, tuned to the voices, but quiet pressure assured me she knew—the woman was within, likely at the other side of this barred window.
Steps rustled in the grass just around the corner from where I crouched. The sound was enough to send me scrambling to the far corner of the house and around, and then back through a garden and a berry patch fresh in bloom, and finally into the ankle-deep prairie grass where I melted against the hills’ shadows as best I could until the house and road were beyond sight.
Panting, I settled on a slope and cursed my trembling hands, my skittish legs. What need had I, the midwife, to run?
But my thoughts ran in speculation far beyond the firm ground of facts. They had taken her, the village people, guessing what I had only recently discovered. Had she walked in the company of butterflies a time too many? Or had they always suspected her silence? The trembling began in my hands again.
The people of my village had not harmed me, only cast me out, tiring of me finally. Tiring of the hare I always carried with me, of the long times I spent wandering, of the way I shied from touch and smothered in life stuffed and tied in a slant-frame house built of sod and flat stone slabs. The way I hungered for the sky, leaving all the earthrooted behind as I fled across prairie and plain.
I had not yet learned the deepest ways of hares. I did not know then of their perfect sight into the bodily ways of a woman with child, hinted at by any midwife’s token. I had not yet, hare hidden about me, proven my usefulness at a birth. It would take several years of frosts and thunderstorms and hare litters before I finally understood and began to walk my uneasy path, with wild lands at one hand and men’s dwellings at the other.
Sometime since then I had grown accustomed to my role. I no longer listened at every whisper, expecting to be called out, accused. I was only habitually afraid. Until now.
When I made my choice, it wasn’t for kinship. I didn’t turn from the house and creep low and quiet under dusky skies towards the village or listen for troubled murmurings because I dreamed of a peaceful warren of two wild women. I went because of her hands—fluttering, fluttering, butterflies’ wings that spoke. It was for the hands I went seeking her husband—I doubted I alone could pluck her from the house unseen. They must have locked him away somewhere as well, for he hadn’t looked shy to shield her from any kind of danger.
The few village houses stood or leaned each apart against soft-lit sky. So high in the mountains, even villagers stayed each to his own plot, his own patch of garden and strip of grain field. It meant fewer would hear my movements.
Near each house I crouched and listened to the sounds within. They came muffled, but after a time I could catch the timbre and rhythm of each voice, and when none were the man’s I moved on to the next house. The thought came that perhaps he was kept from speaking. If so, I’d little chance of finding him short of asking at each house, and this I could not do. I dared not draw attention now.
I was nearing the end of the village when movement caught my eye. At first I thought some strange smoke wavered by the house, but as I neared I saw it was the pony, splashed in stark patterns of white and black. Drawing close, I heard low voices, tense. One of them was the woman’s husband.
A shout then, and sharp bootsteps. The door flung open and a strange man crossed the bare street to a nearby house and went in.
Once I’d listened for other noises from the house and heard none, I went up and opened the door. The man looked at me with astonishment, but I motioned him to silence and untied him. None seemed to be looking, and so we untied the pony as well. The man slapped the pony’s hide and it trotted away, across the open prairie. Then I led the man back the way I’d come, to the house where she was.
It took some moments of motioning for the man to understand what I wanted of him, but finally it seemed clear. I left him behind in the dark and rapped sharply at the door. After a moment a woman’s face peered out, pale in the light of her lamp. I thrust my crimson hare’s tail into the light. She hesitated, but I stamped my foot and made to walk past.
“I guess she’ll need you soon enough,” she said, and stepped aside. Across the room was a door barred by an immense traveler’s chest. Glancing behind her, as though expecting someone to step from the shadows and hinder her, the woman helped me pull the chest far enough away from the door that I could slip inside.
The girl-woman looked up. When she saw me, the tension in her curled position on the floor loosened somewhat. I saw the same fear in her face that I had before, but I no longer wondered at it. She surely had no lack of things to fear. Sitting on a pallet in the shadowed room, she looked even younger than her few years.
“Shh,” I said, laying a hand on her shoulder. She took a shaky breath.
The woman shuffled her feet behind me. When I turned, she said, “All right if I close the door here, midwife?” I huffed and thrust the room’s single, unlit candle at her. She scurried away, and soon returned with a flame to light the room.
“Call if you’ve need of anything,” said the woman, “or if she gets to overwhelming you.”
I waved the woman away and knelt on the straw-stuffed pallet with the girl. She looked at me with dulled eyes. Lightly I rubbed her belly and smiled, and a trace of a smile lit her lips, too, for a moment.
Then the knock came at the window. It startled us both, though I was waiting for it. I got up and pushed the shutters open. The man’s face glowed in the flickering light of our candle flame, and the woman gave a little cry. I shushed her and helped her to her feet.
There was nothing to climb on to get to the window, and in the end the man crawled inside and helped the woman up and out.
“All right?” he whispered. I nodded. “See you soon, then.” He closed the window behind him, and then I was alone with a wavering candle.
I stole as much straw as I dared from the pallet and bunched it between pallet-cover and my cloak in a shadow of a woman’s form. I was careful, for much depended on the likeness. Then I sat near the door and waited.
Seated there in a closed room with one sputtering candle, the urgency left me that had prodded me to find the man and bring him here. I could barely grasp the reason I’d had for staying. It might make the difference for the woman, unable to travel swiftly. Yet all I could feel was the slow closing of a hand around me, soon to crush me in its fist. Finally I turned my mind to the hare and lost myself in hare thoughts.
The men came perhaps an hour later. I heard their impatient voices and the clumping of their boots to the inner door. Scraping sounds came from the door, and then it burst open.
I was ready. I stood as tall as my form allowed into the bristly face of the man whose house I’d stolen the man from. Before he could speak I touched my finger to his mouth. He frowned and tried to shove past me, but I stood my ground and grasped his arm. I opened my mouth, and deep, croaking, the necessary word came: “Wild.”
“I know she’s wild, why do you think—”
I hushed him again and shook my head. He stared hard at my figure of straw and cloth and then shrugged and backed away. “She’s here, all right. Jess, I’d stay right here at the door, see he doesn’t come after her. I’ll send some of the others over to keep watch outside. Don’t be afraid to bring him down, if you’ve need.”
The door closed then, and I stood a moment, taking harsh breaths. Then I went to the window, pushed it quietly out, and waited. Their voices faded away in the direction of the village.
It must have been the fright that pulled my weary body up over that window frame. I stumbled to the ground and began running low across the moonlit plain as fast as shaky legs could take me, towards the hills I’d pointed the man to. As I clumped across the second line of hills, the hare resting on my back spoke urgent thoughts to me. The time was come.
I found them nestled at the back of a hillock, in sight of the stream that ran past their house. The woman was curled on the slope, breathing hard, and as I neared I felt her body’s beginning spasms. The man was kneeling at her side. He started at the shadow of me, but once he saw it was I he settled back again. This time the woman didn’t cringe or pull away when I drew up the skirt of her dress. I took a deep breath and laid my hands on her skin.
All was constricted, already-pressing walls straining unbearably tight.
I pulled my sight back, waiting, nudging the hare with a thought. Time unfolded, a map in my mind. Here, and here was pain, but not yet. I traced to the end. There was no great danger here. A long labor, but not strangely long for a first child. I pulled my hands away, opened my eyes, and smiled.
A spasm coursed through her, and she clutched my arm.
“Is she all right?” whispered the man urgently.
I nodded. Then I took his arm and pointed him back the way I’d come, and held my hand first to his eye, then his ear. He must have understood, for he touched the woman for a moment, and then he was gone to watch for searchers.
After a while the spasms came more often, and for a longer time. Progress came slow but certain and her muffled cries began to come higher through the cloth I’d put in her mouth.
I wished for the other women usually attendant at these times, neighbors and relations to the mother. It was to them I usually left the encouragement and the bracing words. I rubbed at the girl’s back and belly as her body pushed and waited, pushed and waited. The child would come in its own time, but it wouldn’t be aided by her panic. She needed to calm.
Afraid, said the hare with that tiny part of her mind not taken up in the birth.
Of what?
Alone, the hare replied. No man. No kin.
The word was strange, not a hare word but something else. A feeling of some other mind…The girl’s. The hare had given me the girl’s own thought.
I’d too much else to consider then. She must calm, or she risked injury.
Wild, she would know the minds of the butterflies, such as they had. Or perhaps not—what did I know of wild ones? Only myself.
Tell her to call them, I told the hare.
For a moment the girl’s cries stopped, but her face closed shut, eyes staring away.
Tell her—
Doesn’t understand. Doesn’t know hares.
Some thought was getting through, then.
The woman cried out against another spasm, and frenzy tinged the cry again.
Waving my hand until I’d caught her glance, I traced the shape of butterfly in the air. Then, to make sure she understood, I held my hands together and made them flapping wings.
Call them. I pointed towards the stream, where I’d seen them last.
She shook her head, her eyes wide with fright. I nodded and patted her arm, smiling as warmly as I could.
She stared at me for a moment more. Then, with a choking cry, she threw her arms out and closed her eyes. Then they came—dabs of sulfur and white and gray, a flock of light-winged spirits fluttering from the night to rest on every nearby surface.
Still afraid? I asked the hare.
No.
Soon after, the real work of the birthing began, the infant girl forcing her graceless way to the welcoming free air. Finally she lay squirming in my hands, washed in moonlight. With my knife I cut the life-rope and rubbed her dry with a corner of my dress. Then I handed her to the girl-mother who, despite her other fears, seemed to have every instinct for how to feed a new child.
I had begun to wonder if the man had found trouble, staying away so long, when he came to us leading the pony. His tread was weary but calm. At the sight of the mother and child, he gave a low cry and dropped beside them. As one cluster, the many-colored spirits left as they’d come—silently. They were soon lost in a sky lightening to dawn. As the three drifted to sleep, I settled beside the weary hare and tried to order my thoughts.
The child had been safely born with no more than the usual trial. Traveling would be difficult, but I guessed from something in the man’s face that at least one of the searchers would search no further. Others that came would likely meet similar disaster. In a few days the woman might be fit to ride, though not without pain. If the three traveled northeast, across the plain, they’d reach another place where they might begin again, some place more willing to leave folks to themselves.
My work was finished.
The wisest thing would be to leave while they slept. I had no wish to disrupt the warmth I saw between man and wife and new child, after such worry. Besides, I’d been among people too long. I needed space, and air unbreathed by my kind—didn’t I? I reached for the familiar thirst, but its place was empty, the need for solitude unfairly gone. I shivered and pulled my cloak closer around me, feeling vaguely betrayed.
I would wait until they awoke. They would perhaps not know the way unless I pointed them to it.
The baby squalled a few hours later, waking me and reminding me of the watch I’d meant to keep. The girl woke, too, and moved to the other side of the hillock to feed the child. Side by side we sat, she gazing at the top of the child’s head and I watching the skyline for searchers.
I wondered if the daughter would be wild. Or was she, already? None of my midwife lore knew anything of this. Would it be better, or worse, to be wild among wild kin?
Kin. The woman’s own word.
I touched her arm, and when she glanced at me, eyes questioning, I took my pack from my shoulders. The hare knew my mind, and wasn’t surprised when I pulled her out and set her on the grass between the woman and me. She took a single stiff hop towards the woman and nudged at her knee.
The woman smiled and stroked the side of the hare’s face. The hare closed her eyes, content.
Again I formed butterflies’ wings of my hands, and pointed to the woman. Then I dropped my hand to the hare and tapped my chest.
She looked at my tapping finger, and then followed my arm to my shoulder, and that to my eyes. A rush of garbled feeling washed across her face. She pointed at me and motioned with an uncertain, wavering gesture. I nodded.
Her eyes grew wide, and after a moment she stood up with the child in her arms and returned to the hollow where the man still slept. She did not look back.
What had I expected? Not this. She would not send others after me, to bind me and protect their neighbors from my threat. She would not dare. Yet I had dreamed of some other answer than this.
The man watched my motions closely as I tried to tell the important things—direction, number of days. That last shook him.
“Is there nowhere nearer? Can she travel that far?” Behind him, the woman cradled the child and listened.
I could only shake my head. I didn’t know.
Then I bowed to them both and turned to the far-off peaks. There was much barren sky above the distance to those peaks, and I hoped to lose myself beneath it.
Before I took three steps, I felt a touch on my arm. I turned to find the woman behind me, the child left in the man’s arms. The woman patted at my back, but I shook my head. I’d loosed the hare to her rest. The birthing had wearied her more than I’d thought, and I’d no need of a hare for a while.
Her eyes still on me, the woman lifted her hand, and in a moment a butterfly flitted to her upraised finger. She cocked her head and tapped first her forehead, then mine.
I raised a shoulder in a lopsided shrug.
The woman reached out and took my hands, gazing into my face. For a strange moment, I was no longer her elder. She was no longer a frightened girl. She took a step northwestward, pulling me with her. And then she dropped my hand, walked another step, and looked at me, waiting.
Behind me was open wildlands, unpeopled and undisturbed. Empty.
I took the step to her side and nodded. She gave a laugh that sounded half-mixed with tears, but her eyes were glad as she took the child from the man again.
The sky was high and blue before us as we made our way across the prairie. The man led the pony and we women walked behind, one of butterflies and one of hares.
Your Fairy Goth Mother
H
ey, little girl, I see you
hiding there, within the confines
of your messy room, where
death rock bands, and artfully
draped spider webs almost
conceal the pale pink paper
on the walls.
I see you crying streams of
kohl-stained bitterness onto
the white lace of your cuffs,
and hear your whispered
lusting after Death, a better
fate, or so you think, than
loneliness.
Well, I'm not Death—he has
too many other calls to answer,
meeting times to keep,
to pay attention to the varied
heartaches of his fans, but
here's an eight by ten of him
he had me sign.
And hey, maybe I'll stay awhile,
—wipe away those thick black tears,
then throw a cd on the box,
and change your filthy brand-
name shirt, for something I
have conjured up from spidersilk
and waking dreams.
Perhaps we'll dance, just kick your
fears beneath the bed, and let your
body quicken to the beat—but
watch out for my fragile wings,
and maybe, since you're fragile too,
be careful what you're
wishing for.
—or—
E ach of us lives inside an n-dimensional hypervolume, one delimited by ecologically important variables defined along boundaries of biological tolerance within which our bodies can function. This is not a physical structure of course, although it might as well be. If it gets too hot, we die. If it’s too cold, we die. Too salty, we die. Too acid, alkaline, parched, pressured or rarified, we die. So we sit inside our hypervolume and press outward like an evolutionary Marcel Marceau, masters within our constraints.
Every individual species has limits in place, as does the more general conception of life as we know it. It’s called a niche and every species has its own unique set of niche-defining variables. Whether you are a pumpkin, a sea anemone or an Iowan corn farmer, you need certain things such as water, sunlight and oxygen at fairly recognizable levels. This is life as we know it; a definition that has become more malleable as we learn.
But life as we know it may not be enough to truly understand what life is. There’s a lot of real estate out there, and for the most part it’s not clustered around our comfortable triple point of water—a variable defined by conditions of temperature and pressure where water can be found existing as a solid, liquid and gas, somewhat like your backyard. Planets sitting not too far or not to close to their suns are said to be in the habitable zone and have these states of water found on their surfaces.
Most celestial real estate exhibits extreme conditions that are not simply uninviting to us, but debilitating to the point of death. The Universe is around 13.7 billion years old and that is an awfully long time, filled with opportunity, for life to have used its powerful ability to adapt across a myriad of extreme conditions. Even ignoring the Big Empty, concentrating only on the scattered specks of solid stuff, there is still a veritable infinity of possibilities for life establishing a toehold. Once it shows up in one, the likelihood of it spreading all over is increased to an almost certitude. Given that the existence of life in the universe is a demonstrated certainty, we should expect it to show up in more places than the Spanish Inquisition.
Life is patient. Life abides. Its ability to wait can be seen over a few days, terms observable on the annual cycles, or even longer-term, somewhat random arrival of suitable conditions. Duck eggs wait for the onset of incubation so that all eggs laid in a clutch over a period of time will hatch simultaneously. Seeds sit quietly for spring, warmth and rain. Long-term waiting is part of the arsenal of even complex metazoans such as lungfish or Triops desert shrimp that lay dormant until the drought breaks. But the superstars of waiting are not to be found among the duck embryos or Devonian crustaceans. They’re bacteria.
Comparative bacteria biomass estimates for the Earth’s ecosystem vary in degree from a low of around a third to a somewhat nebulous high estimate of “more than all other living things combined.” So plugging in some reasonable numbers, bacteria would be on the order of at least fifty-plus percent of global bioomass. (For reference human biomass is about .15%. That’s point one five percent.) Bacteria inhabit so many different environments and display such a myriad of metabolisms, that there is nary a nook or cranny—read niche—they have not mastered.
In addition to the ability to maintain life in dormancy, bacteria push the envelope in every n-direction. Ocean floor geothermal vent bacteria live cozily at three times the boiling point of water and 265 times the pressure at sea level. There are lithotrophic bacteria—rock-eaters—which patiently bore their way through heat and darkness deep inside the earth’s crust living off the hydrogen their actions release from solid stone. And while we had a hand in this one, Streptococcus mitis survived on the surface of the Moon hidden away in Surveyor 3’s camera. For 31 months the bugs lay for all intents and purposes exposed to the extreme temperature variances, unfettered influx of radiation, and the vacuum of the lunar surface until recovered by the Apollo 12 astronauts; a distant frontier in a niche centered around the warm, wet conditions of the human mouth. Bacteria don’t just live where we live, but survive where we cannot.
And thankful we should be for that microbial ability. According to at least one scenario the Earth’s biosphere, the very one that nourishes all of us, may have been saved, thus keeping the Earth from a very long, very silent history without petunias, peccaries or people. In a runaway ice age during the Cryogenian period (What else would it be called!) from 850 to 630 million years ago, the surface of the Earth lay encrusted beneath a vast shield of ice. Extremophiles rescued the globe from the long terrible abiotic silence that might have resulted after plummeting temperatures and aeons of darkness beneath world-girding ice.
Remnants of the dark biosphere are extant today. Spouting along the geologically active trenches marking spreading ocean floor, superheated and chemically rich black smokers nourish communities of organisms unassociated with our sun-powered ecosystem. Chemotrophic bacteria harness the energy in the superheated waters jetting from inside the earth much as plants use sunlight. Food webs of grazers and predators, dependent metazoan creatures, huddle in the obsidian depths around black smokers with attendant chemotrophic bacterial mats. Isolated from each other by distances of inactive or uncolonized sites, these refugia may represent not the origins of life on Earth, but the points from which a resurging biosphere came back to create this parading diversity over a long stretch of deep time.
The diversity of bacterial organisms is interesting even if viewed only from an evolutionary perspective. The broad habitat ranges of bacteria ecologies, however seemingly harsh some may be, tell us not just how clever life can be on Earth but how ambitious it may be in outer space. Astrobiology depends on bacteria to point its earthbound eyes and high-flying robots in the direction of suitable habitats out there across distant acreages of alien real estate. We are finding places in growing numbers that are within the boundaries identified here at home.
Europa and even more distant Enceladus seem to contain ice-covered bodies of water. Europa, with its young and active surface and unique radio signature, tantalizes us with the possibility of the Solar System’s largest salt water ocean. Enormous Jovian tidal energies stretch and twist the Galilean moon, generating heat within its core and keeping the water liquid.
Enceladus, in Saturn’s family, spouts jets of warmed water laced with a surprising numbers of organic molecules. The composition of the material contains all the components we have long recognized as those necessary for life. These environments are mirrored on Earth by Antarctica’s Lake Vostok and the aforementioned deep-sea geothermal vents. Lake Vostok is one of almost 150 pockets of liquid water under about 4 km of ice and so is a good analog for suspected Europan or Enceladian oceans. It has been cut off from the surface for 500,000 years or more and appears to enclose a unique ecosystem, which for that time has been genetically and energetically isolated from the surface world. So we can model the condition in the lake against conditions modeled on Jupiter’s and Saturn’s moons.
From the frigid cold of outer-world ocean moons, we drop sunward to the dry deserts under rosy-tinged Martian skies. Now to model what we cannot yet walk. Here back on Earth we have Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the most arid places on Earth. UV blasted and with high levels of oxidants in the soil, organic molecules have a short life here. Our robots wander the Atacama looking for sign of life not just to test against difficult conditions, but to see how life copes here, with the idea to know where better to look there.
Questions about life existing in outer space seem self evident. Not “if” so much as “where.” If the Earth is any indication, life is a robust property of the universe, life abounds, and life abides. Strep germs hiding in abandoned moon cameras are not the only indicators that life can not only exist in space itself, but travel between worlds. High atmosphere collections of microbes have given some indication that they are incoming aliens, surviving intact across harsh conditions. Meteors recovered from Antarctic ice contain what might be fossils of Martian origin. Interpretations of these data drive the origin of life outward to space itself, spreading between worlds in a cosmic orgy of panspermia where Earth is but a way station.
If bacteria have taught us anything—besides wash your hands—it’s that life can arise or at least adapt to a myriad of exotic conditions. Conditions that extend the n-dimensional hypervolume to limits we are only just beginning to imagine. Walk in your backyard and turn over a stone; something is more than likely staring back at you. Drill into the side of an ice moon swinging through the polychromatic glow of a gas giant, and maybe something not quite alien will be wriggling there too. And if it is, you can be sure bacteria will not be far away.
“I’ve never been to America, which is why I rarely set stories there. It’s a lapse in my itinerary, I know. I would dearly love to taste a Philly cheesesteak one day. I saw it on Wikipedia, which entirely justifies its existence. For obvious reasons, though, this story doesn’t take place in America. Rather, it’s set in a pop culture version of America—the one known to millions of people around the world who, like me, have never been to the place but know the streets are paved with gold there and people eat only super-sized meals. Oh, and there are numerous alien abductions. Of course. So this is that story. You might like to read it while listening to Kinky Friedman’s ‘Sold American’, but then again, you might not. There’s nothing really very strange about a Jewish cowboy—and all alien abduction stories are true.
This one is no exception.”
T HE DINER STOOD off the highway outside a small town optimistically called Hope. Hope was being stuck in the middle of the Northwest and wishing you were someplace, anyplace else. And Hope was also the name on the tag pinned to the dead woman in waitress uniform that was currently lying against the wall inside the Barbie-Q Roadhouse. I had to stop myself from worrying at the connection: looking for patterns when sometimes there are none at all.
I wasn’t worried about Hope (the waitress, not the town). I didn’t get called down here for a murder: shit, murder is an honest-to-God American pastime. Just look at the statistics. No, I got called in because of the Marilyn.
The Marilyn was also dead. All in all, there were five dead people in the Barbie-Q: two waitresses; a balding man who—from his bag full of cheaply-printed catalogs—was some sort of a general salesman; the diner’s manager; and Marilyn. They had been shot by a machine gun, probably an Uzi. Marilyn’s head left a red smear against the glass of the booth she sat in. She was there alone.
What the hell was a Marilyn doing out here?
It rained when I got out of the car. The diner was sheathed in rain, its artificial light glaring through the windows, only some of which were broken. Inside, Forensics had come and gone, and I had gone in more to get out of the rain than for any hope of discovering what had happened. Also, I wanted to take a look at Marilyn.
The blonde hair was matted dark, and her eyes stared at the ceiling with a slightly surprised look. She was twenty-five, give or take, and dressed in a long winter coat that had two new holes in it.
“Who the hell are you?” He was tall and bulky and looked unused to dead bodies. Local cop. I flashed him a smile and a badge. “Amelia Hart, FBI.”
He looked at the badge closely, nodded reluctantly. “What do you want?”
“I’m here about her,” I said, pointing at the Marilyn.
He stared. “Her? What’s so special about her?”
He was too young. I guessed he didn”t watch too many old movies. That was good. “Nothing for you to worry about, bud,” I said. I was no longer smiling.
He shrugged. “Whatever you say, lady. Happy to leave this mess to you Feds.” He went out, slammed the door on his way. He didn’t seem at all happy. I couldn’t care less.
It continued to rain.
America is the land of baseball, Coca-Cola, and gun crime; the land of the free and the brave and the exotically insane; of DiMaggio and Kinky Friedman and Elvis. It is the home of alien abductees, Bigfoot, and Charles Fort. Everything is bigger here. Things happen in America that are just not possible in the rest of the world. It takes a special mentality to see the hidden patterns in a rain of fish, or to seek out meaning in the work of serial killers. Fort saw it: that weird shit just kind of happens in America. It’s a happening kind of place.
I examined the Marilyn. She looked just like all the others I’ve seen, over the years: always hiding out in little towns on the edge of nowhere, hair veering wildly between mousy-brown and dyed-hardcore-blonde. Driver’s licenses with variations on Norma Jeane.
Hiding.
There was someone out there who didn’t like Marilyns.
The first one washed up in Oregon over five years before. Since then I’d gone over half the states, Arizona, Texas, Wyoming, Kentucky, North Carolina…. If there was a pattern to it I couldn’t see it. We were still trying to figure out where the Marylins came from in the first place. There was some sick asshole out there, serial-killing Marilyn Monroe.
I listened to the rain for a while. It seemed almost peaceful. Then I heard another car, coming to a halt, breaking. A door opening. Low voices. Footsteps. The door swinging open.
I smelled him before I saw him: expensive, understated aftershave. Soft footsteps: he wore expensive, understated trainers. I was glad to see they were now covered in mud.
He was around thirty, long warm coat, a pleasant face that told me nothing.
“Joe Johnson,” he said. “I got a call.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Johnson,” I said. “What I don't know is what the hell you’re doing here.”
He smiled. “I grew up around here. Been visiting my dad. Then I got a call saying Marilyn Monroe was spotted in the local diner.”
“Oh? Can I ask who called you?”
His smile grew wider. “The same person who employs you, Ms. Earhart.”
I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. “My name’s Hart,” I said. “Just Hart.”
His smile said he knew I was lying. “Look,” he said. “We might as well try and get along if we’re going to work together. The police and FBI’s job is to figure out who killed all these people. I’m not police, and I’m not Bureau. And neither are you.”
I didn’t argue. There was no point. He said, “Your job is to figure who’s killing the Marilyns, right? And mine is to make sure people only read about stuff like this is in the National Enquirer or alt.conspiracy. That’s the way it is.” He put his hand forward for a shake. “Please.”
I shook his hand. I didn’t like it, but he was right. And I was outranked. His hand was warm and dry, though I noticed his nails were bitten. He followed my eyes and shrugged. “Old habit. Can I buy you a coffee?”
I looked over the diner and he followed me there too—over the blood-soaked floor, the shot-up counter—and laughed. He had an easy laugh. Comfortable. “Not here, obviously. But there’s an all-night place in Hope. We could compare notes.”
I shrugged. A coffee was a coffee, regardless of the company. “Lead the way, Mr. Johnson.”
We stepped out together into the rain.
There was a Starbucks but it was closed, and we wound up at a truck stop on the edge of town. We were the only customers. The waitress had long red fingernails and a bleached hairdo left over from the 80s.
“Hi, Joe,” she said.
“Hey, Jude.” She smiled when he said her name; I got a sudden sense of some long-forgotten history between them. I don’t know; maybe he took her to the prom once.
We sat by the window that overlooked the highway and the rain. Could have been the Barbie-Q. Could have been anywhere.
“So tell me,” I said. “What’s your interest in all this? No bullshit.”
He smiled. He was the kind of guy who smiled easy. “It’s good to talk to someone who knows,” he said. “Do you know I read about you as a kid? 20 Hrs., 40 Min., The Fun of It, Last Flight…”
“That was published after…” I said, then stopped. I shook my head and drank the coffee. Noticed Jude put on a fresh pot, especially for us. Or for Joe.
“After you disappeared. I know. Amelia, I know.”
“Shit.” There didn’t seem much more to say. I never got on very well with other abductees. And this one was coming over a fan. “Joe fucking Johnson,” I said. “Grays Special Liaison. What are you doing here?”
He turned his head away, watched the rain for a little while. Headlights along the road looked like the lights of UFOs. “This is where they took me,” he said at last, and he wasn’t smiling. “Grew up here. My dad still finds his cattle mutilated every winter. I tried to stop it, but it’s like dealing with children…” he sighed. “They like the small towns. The farmlands. This is their patch. Do you understand?”
Realization came like static on the radio. “They think it’s a warning.”
“Marilyn Monroe’s been dead for a long, long time,” Joe said, and it made him sound old. “She shouldn’t be turning up anywhere, and definitely not here.”
“She’s been turning up all over the place,” I said. He grimaced.
“So you think someone’s trying to draw attention…”
“Yes.”
“And that’s why you’re getting involved.”
He nodded. Finished his coffee. Stared into the rain. He had that look, of the long-distance pilot. Alone in the storm, the Pacific below you…you see strange lights, start looking out for them.
It doesn’t lead to anything good. I should know.
I thought about what he said. Maybe the person killing the Marilyns didn’t even care. If it was a way of drawing attention to the little gray guys in the skies…. I had to admit it was kind of effective. So far no one in the Fortean press has latched on to anything, but it was only a matter of time. And these days, they could run DNA tests. If it matched—and it would—the story would go into syndication.
“You have any idea who’s doing this? Or where the Marilyns came from?”
I shook my head. “The only ones we found were already dead, and they weren’t talking.” I sighed, repeating long worn-out data over coffee steam. “The first one was twenty years old, the last one twenty-five. I figure someone in the early Eighties got hold of some Gray tech, a DNA sample…you can get this stuff from specialist dealers, you know. Celebrity hair. These days, you could get it on eBay.”
He suddenly smiled. “I know. I think that’s why everyone keeps seeing Elvis.”
I shrugged. “Well,” I said, “Elvis is still alive. It’s Marilyn Monroe I’m worried about.”
“Right.”
The rain beat against the glass.
At the local station I went over Marilyn’s possessions. She didn’t have many. No purse. I had to admit the diner looked like a clean-cut armed robbery. She had car keys in her pocket and the techs had already gone over the car. Found a driver’s license and an expired credit card, both under the name Jane Norman. A makeup bag. A pair of dark sunglasses. The car was a sensible blue-gray Toyota. No house keys. No cell phone. Not even a personal photo anywhere, of a lover or a puppy, or something.
Well, not quite.
“You won’t believe this.” The guy who came through was thin and sounded like he had a cold. “We found a digital camera in the boot of the car. I’ve just had the photos printed. Here.”
His hand shook when he passed the prints over. Could have been excitement. I had a bad feeling in my stomach, and it intensified when I saw the photos. Beside me Joe groaned.
“Who else saw this?” He demanded.
“Just me, so far. And you two. It’s strange, isn’t it? She looks almost like…”
“A lot of girls do.”
The tech smiled. “No,” he said. “A lot of girls try to, Joe.”
“Give me the camera,” Joe said. There was an intensity in his voice that wasn’t there before. “I want you to delete the files from your computer.”
“I didn’t copy them…”
“Now, Mark. I don’t want this circulating. Do you understand?”
The tech nodded. He didn’t look happy. “Yes, Joe.”
I stared at the photos. Norma Jeane, body circa 1948. The lighting was harsh. This was not photography for the sake of art.
At the bottom of each photo was a red time-stamp, and the file name.
“Looks like you got your message,” I said.
The rain fell hard against the windscreen. It felt like it was never going to stop. I figured Joe’s dad’s cattle would be safe for another day—you couldn’t picture anyone mutilating cows in this weather. Not even little gray aliens.
The file names contained a reference to a place. The Fortean Café. Half an hour later, we figured it wasn’t a place at all: it was a file server, and it was located only a two-hours drive away, in Hope’s nearest neighbour, Arlington. From what we could figure out it offered “Fortean Celebrity Hardcore.” You know the type: Hitler’s Secret Sex Tapes, footage of Lindbergh being anal-probed by Grays (this one true, for all I know), recordings of Monroe’s rumored casting couch sessions.
“Strange,” Joe said. “It’s been offline since nine o’clock last night.”
“I didn’t know you guys had computers,” I said as we drove. Joe was in the passenger seat. He had a laptop open on his knees.
“You’d be surprised,” he said. “Second biggest employer in Arlington is a software development company. Made a lot of money floating on the stock exchange a couple of years back.”
“Whatever.”
He smiled. “You don’t like it much around here, do you?”
“I’ve seen worse,” I said. “Not much worse, though.”
The truth was more complicated. It always is. I grew up in a place much like this, when the whole country looked like it. I’ve travelled a lot since then. Things change. I guess, in some places, they change slower than others.
I drove without speaking for a while. Then, “Don’t you think it’s a bit strange?”
“What?”
“The photos, the camera left in the car? Why would anyone want to leave us a message? Assuming it’s not for the Grays’ benefit.”
He thought about it. “I take it this hasn’t happened before.”
“No.” We’d never had a lead on the Marilyn murders. This was…odd.
“Think about it,” I said. “Why would Jane Norman have the pictures in the first place? She’d hardly want them as a souvenir.”
He shrugged in the seat. “You never know.”
“No,” I said. A thought was forming in my head. It wasn’t a nice thought.
He looked at me sideways, kind of like he was thinking the same thing I was. I thought he was. We didn’t speak after that.
Arlington was a pleasant enough town. The man we came to see—Milton Palmer, thirty-three, an employee of previously-mentioned software company—lived in a suburban house that looked like it came out of a ’50s TV ad. A white van was parked in the driveway. It had blacked-out windows.
When we got out of the car we both had guns. I guess Joe was thinking the same as me.
There were no lights on, and no answer to my knock. I tried the door, and it was locked.
That was the point when we were supposed to call the local cops. Instead, we went to have a look around the back, found the door.
Joe kicked it in.
“Mr. Palmer?”
We found him in a large, windowless room. Joe had flicked on the light. There was a tripod, a camera, two computers, an open wardrobe with latex uniforms hanging neatly inside, a couch large enough to sit three, two lighting stands.
And Milton Palmer.
He was short, wore a stubble like a disused field of corn, a grin carved in his face like a crop circle.
He didn’t ask to see a badge. He didn’t ask anything at all. He was lying on the sofa with a neat little hole between his eyes and a hell of a mess between his legs and he was so very, very dead. From the smell, he’d been like this for a while.
Joe and I sat in yet another diner, on the edge of Arlington. It was lunch-time, though neither of us felt much like eating. We waited for Forensics to finish the official examination, but I could see in Joe’s eyes he already knew what they’d tell us.
Somebody did a thorough cleaning job on Mr. Palmer’s little pad. Computer hard-drives, wiped clean. Cameras emptied of film. Missing flash-cards. No sign of prints, pictures, or scans. No sign Mr. Palmer had ever taken a dirty picture.
That someone didn’t do such a good job on the van. It could have been carelessness, but I didn’t think so. I thought the killer wanted us to find the van just as it was.
There were traces of old blood in the back of the van. Another tripod. In a hidden compartment, a couple of guns, serial numbers filed off.
Joe’s cell phone rang. He listened for several moments, killed the connection.
He looked at me, gave me a small nod. A nod that said, you were right.
“The bullets from the guns in the van matched the ones found in two of the most recent Marilyn murders,” he said. “The blood in the van—it was AB.”
I said, “Marilyn’s was AB.”
“The DNA matches, too.” He shrugged. “Looks like we got your serial killer.”
“Yeah,” I said. It sure looked that way. It was perfect, watertight, but for one thing: if Milton Palmer was the Marilyn killer—then who killed Jane Norman only last night? And for that matter—though I wasn’t going to lose sleep over it—who killed Palmer?
I had some ideas about that. I preferred them to remain private. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get back. We’ve got a funeral to go to tomorrow.”
Joe had rushed the funeral through. Not a funeral, really. The body was to be cremated: standard procedure in a case like this, though all I ever dealt with on that front were the Marilyns, thankfully. They were people who weren’t supposed to exist. Like me, for that matter, but I still wasn’t dead. I guess that’s a good thing.
I dropped Joe off at the police station and drove away. The rain started to fall again as we left Arlington and by now it was getting dark and the rain wasn’t going away.
I stayed in a motel on the outskirts of Hope. I had a long bath, then sat up in bed and switched on the TV. It came on to show Monroe singing River of no Return.
Patterns in the rain…. I switched it off and killed the lights. Goodbye Marilyn Monroe.
Sleep came swift and without warning. Like a flying saucer.
The phone woke me up. It was dark outside. The rain lashed against the windows.
“Amelia? It’s Joe.”
I fumbled for the light. Hit the TV remote. An expanding square of light opened on CNN. I was half afraid it would be Marilyn again. You never know with cable.
“What time is it?”
“Five a.m.”
I shook my head, trying to clear away the cobwebs. “What’s happened?”
His voice sounded like it came from a galaxy far far away. “They caught the guy who did the diner last night. Three previous convictions for armed robbery. The police caught him drunk-driving and pulled him over. Found the Uzi, some of the cash. That salesman in the diner, remember him? Guy had his wallet on him. Pictures of the salesman’s family still inside.”
I switched channels. All I could find was The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy poured water over the wicked witch, and she was melting.
Joe said, “It’s an open and shut case.”
And I started to laugh.
“So Palmer finds himself another Marilyn, this one close to home, he takes some dirty pictures, then tries to finish her off…they fight, she kills him. She cleans up his pad, makes a runner. Stops at the Barbie-Q on the way out of the state…ends up shot by accident.”
“Right.”
Another day, another coffee. “Does it ever stop raining?” I said.
Joe smiled. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”
“I’d believe that sooner than I’d believe that fairy-tale you just told me.”
“I don’t really care who killed Palmer,” he said. “This way it’s neat. Life’s one big fucked up series of coincidences, that’s all. Fort knew that. The Grays are happy with it. No one needs to go looking for patterns in the rain.”
“Right.”
“Amelia…” he sounded tired. I wondered if he got any sleep at all last night. By the dark smudges under his eyes I’d have said no.
“I can buy Jane Norman as a victim,” I said. “I can even see her as an impulse killer, sure. Self-defense, no argument there. But she wouldn’t shut down the server and professionally wipe out everything our favorite pervert had stored in his studio. If she was that good she wouldn’t have been posing for those pictures for him in the first place.”
“You don’t know that. Even when she did things she didn’t like, Monroe was never a victim, Amelia. She was tough. Did you know she was the first woman in Hollywood to form her own production company?”
“No shit.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Look,” I said. “You’re happy, the little guys upstairs are happy, everyone is happy. Let’s forget about it.” I looked out of the window, at the gray world outside. “Let’s go to the funeral.”
It was an open and shut case. Milton Palmer was a bona fide psycho. Someone, somewhere, twenty-five years ago, set out to make a whole set of baby Marilyn Monroes. And Milton Palmer, nineteen, twenty years later, figured it out, and set out to kill them, one by one. Kill them and take pictures.
We couldn’t find the pictures. They were gone for good, and I wasn’t sorry. The only set was on the cheap digital camera found in Jane Norman’s car, and Joe had the camera destroyed. Prints too. The last remains of Jane Norman were in a vase. Her ash was being scattered into the rain. It seemed as good a way as any to go.
She was the…seventh? Eighth? That I saw cremated over the last five years. Maybe Palmer didn’t work alone. There was no way to be sure, but I thought he did.
I didn’t want to know who killed him. By the time the ashes were gone and the vase was empty, I already knew.
She was standing away from the small group. She wore a long, black coat with a hood lined in fur. She looked a little like she did in Niagara, only older. But she still looked like she meant business. And I thought, someone else was looking for the killer all those years, besides me. Someone else who followed the pattern of the rain.
I don’t think anyone else saw her. She turned, once, and looked at me, and she nodded. And that was that. When I next looked she was gone, and there was nothing to testify she had ever been there.
Nothing but the rain, and it wasn’t telling.
Joe drove me to the airport as the rain fell. It felt like it had never stopped, and now I thought that it had a purpose. It was irrational, a little fanciful, but it’s what I thought, wired on coffee and lack of sleep and an overabundance of death: I thought that the skies were crying. They were crying now, crying for Marilyn, crying for all the Norma Jeanes. They were mourning America itself, where legends are made of celluloid and print, of flammable material, and are so easily reduced to ashes.
I sometimes think like this, but it passes.
We got to the small airport and I got on the plane. I used to fly the bloody things. Now I was a passenger. Things change.
Joe was standing in the downpour. He waved, and his lips moved. I think he said, “Goodbye, Amelia Earhart.”
The plane took off; and Hope disappeared through the rain.
“‘The Diadem’ started out (in my mind, at least) as a story for my daughters. My intentions were good, at least—sadly, once the words started coming out, things went all pear-shaped, and I ended up with this story. Oh, my kids could still read it, sure, but I'm not sure they’d be recommending it to their friends…”
“Wake up, princess. It’s your birthday.”
Julia smelled Father’s Old Spice aftershave, an honest scent. Her dreams faded into the dawn-book, where all the important wishes are recorded.
Daddy told her that, long ago. Back when he was still Daddy, not Dad or Father. Back when she still felt like a princess.
Back when she still believed.
“Oh, she’s in dreaming-angel mode.” Mommy-Mom-Mother whispered in a voice still gentle, even after all this time. Julia wanted to giggle, remembering the days when Mom—no, Mother, would sprinkle glitter around her sleeping form and swear it was angel-dust the next morning.
But that was in the days of tooth-fairies and Santa and a giant pink bunny hopping around with a basketful of kaleidoscope-colored eggs.
I’m sixteen, guys. I don’t need this anymore.
Still, she played the game. She feigned sleep, even when the tickling began, even when her parents tore the sheets off the bed and squashed her between them, laughing and poking.
Like they were the kids.
When the whole thing got old, she opened her eyes, shrugged her shoulders against their closeness, and gave her morning declaration:
“I gotta go to the bathroom. Could I have at least some privacy, please?”
Her parents left her, both of them pausing to bow in obsequiousness. In concert, no less.
Julia still heard their conspiratorial whispers as she rose and dressed.
When she finally made it to the breakfast table, her parents lived in another world. Father wore a cloak—well, one of Mother’s old shawls tied around his neck—and no-this-isn’t-really-happening tights. Other strange garments as well, but these two embarrassments struck her senses first.
She wanted to run. She wanted to grab a breakfast bar, slide through the front door with a wave and a luvya, and high-tail it to the school bus before she felt the need to comment on this newest proof that her father no longer existed in the same plane she did.
Too late. Father bowed low, ushering her to the table.
“Mo-ther!”
A cry for sanity. Sometimes it worked.
Not today. Mother waltzed in from the kitchen, carrying a plate of pancakes that would feed several small third-world countries. With a ta-daa! that sounded like God on the seventh day, she placed the plate before Julia, bowing again and shuffling back in subservience, her head down, eyes averted.
“For our Queen.” A solemn pronouncement. Not one giggle.
Julia stared at the whipped cream and strawberry face gracing the top pancake. Just stared. There were no words to describe the situation, really. Other than swear words, maybe. Words she wasn’t allowed to use in decent company, as Mother would say.
“I’m nobody’s queen, Mother. And I’m running late for school, and I so can’t eat all this sugar this early, and it’s been fun, but—”
Father’s hand on her shoulder, a solid force, loving yet firm. “One moment, milady. You must have your crown.”
Oh, no.
But yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Father reached behind his back, pulled something out from beneath his shirt—gag—and held it out to her. He then fell to one knee and, echoing Mother, bowed his head.
Eyes averted.
Hands trembling.
Oh, please!
A crown, of sorts. Really more of a circlet. Something in the vague shape of her head, covered in tinfoil. Like the plastic costume jewelry she wore back when she was six or seven.
Back when she still believed.
Back when she was too stupid to know the difference between fiction and reality.
She could scream, of course. She could launch a vicious tirade against her parents, letting them know in explicit detail where they went wrong with her, why their stupid little fantasy games should’ve ended when she still wore Barney underwear, why she hated this whole charade, why, why, why…
She looked at Father’s ridiculous outfit, noticed Mother’s even more preposterous attempt at finery—was that her wedding dress, for goodness’ sake?—and finally looked at the pitiful little faux crown they’d concocted.
Sad, really. But.
Easier to play the game and get it over with.
“Fine. Give me the, um, crown.”
She stuck her hands out, gesturing for a little haste here with her fingers. Father rose, his knee popping with the movement, and placed the tacky circlet in her hands.
A spark. A strange current through her body. Dizzy, dizzy, and her parents faded with the walls—
—and she knows the kingdom is falling, her true father murdered, her mother the Queen on her deathbed, and these kneeling, trusted ones before her are not her parents at all, no, merely dedicated servants. They’ve raised her as their own, yes, lived in a nightmare world of machines and apathy, technology and madness, just to ensure her safety from the assassins hired by the royal family’s enemies. Budgets, debt, mortgages—all subterfuge, all indignities borne willingly by her surrogates merely to prove their dedication to the throne, their love for the Princess.
All this drudgery. Burdens carried to keep her alive, even in this sad, mercenary world. No magic. No riches. Only a thin, shining thread of hope for a better life…
Julia clutched the crown, feeling the weight of it now, not tinfoil and plastic, no, but pure gold laid over an even finer, heavier metal. She strained to read the fine scrimshaw of runes pulsing under her fingers as she ran the circlet through her hands, while an inner voice translated the gist of the inscription with ease:
For the One who is Destined
For the One who is True
For the Hinter-life Queen
May Her Reign be Everlasting
Julia dropped the crown. It hit the breakfast table with a blunted clatter.
Then, as if proofed against magic, the wood of the table leached the essence from it. The crown bounced once, flipped, and landed in her plate.
Plastic and tinfoil, crude and ugly.
The once-powerful coronet lay there, a misshapen lump, ensconced in a quicksand of soggy pancakes and congealing whipped cream.
A shuffling of feet. A shifting of garments.
Julia looked up to see her servants—no, parents, idiot!—dismantling their outfits. Mother unpinned the shawl from Father’s shoulders and Julia caught a glimpse, a quick glimmer, of a proud man in fine, fine court clothes and Father released the eyehooks at the back of Mother’s dress and Julia blinked once, twice, felt wetness on her cheeks at the blurred vision of a handsome woman in a lovely, star-shaming ensemble and Julia reached once more for the crown, syrup-sticky and flour-enfouled…
I have a math test today. I need to turn in my history paper. Seven pages, for heaven’s sake!
Julia picked up her fork, cut a pencil-thin line off the edge of her pancakes, ate.
“Mom. Dad. Thanks for this great breakfast. No, really! I love you both, lots!”
They turned their heads, smiled, nodded. Mother shuffled back, her dress slipping down her shoulders, to collect Julia’s plate.
Julia grabbed her backpack and sprinted for the door. With a little luck, she’d get to the bus before she had to walk the ten blocks to school.
Maybe they’ll buy me a car for my birthday. So long, school bus!
And as she ran, ran, ran for the ride, another thought cropped up. An irritation, an annoying buzz in her ears, a troubling churning in her stomach.
They almost had me believing. They almost made me believe again.
She made it to the bus stop with minutes to spare.
Although Sarah L. Edwards (“Wild Among Hares”) graduated with a degree in mathematics, she likes to point out that she began college as an English major. She writes science fiction, fantasy, and an occasional unidentifiable piece, and has had work published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and Hub. She was also a finalist for the Writers of the Future contest. She is presently studying graduate mathematics, learning new recipes, and ignoring a half-knitted sock.
Sarah’s novelette “The Butterfly Man” appeared in Æon Twelve.
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.
photo by Jessica Van Neerijnen
Davin Ireland (“The March Wind”) was born and raised in the south of England, but currently resides in the Netherlands. His fiction credits include stories published in a wide range of print magazines and anthologies, including Underworlds, Zahir, The Horror Express, Fusing Horizons, Rogue Worlds, Storyteller Magazine and Albedo One. His work has received Honorable Mentions in the last three editions of The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant.
Visit Davin on the Web at http://home.wanadoo.nl/d.ireland/index.html
Jay Lake (“Sweet Rocket”) lives in Portland, Oregon with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His recent novels include Trial of Flowers from Night Shade Books and Mainspring from Tor Books, with sequels to both books in 2008. Jay is the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his blog at jaylake.livejournal.com.
Jay’s work has appeared in six previous issues of Æon.
Find him on the Web at http://jlake.com/
Ryan Neal Myers (“The Diesel Mnemonic”) lives with his wife in a small town in Northern Idaho—a magical place where gray-haired hippies shake hands with well-educated farmers. Ryan is neither. He graduated from Clarion in 2001, has a degree in creative writing, makes short films in his living room, and writes everything from cyberpunk to children’s fantasy. He almost sold a big-budget screenplay to Hollywood, almost lived in Australia, almost flew a UH-60 Blackhawk, and almost looks cool in his leather jacket. His sunglasses are clip-ons.
Ryan’s story “The Underthing” appeared in Æon Eleven.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch (“Signals”)’s novels (science fiction, fantasy, mystery/crime, and romance) have been published in 14 countries in 14 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/.
Marcie Lynn Tentchoff (“Your Fairy Goth Mother”) is an Aurora Award winning poet/author who lives with her family and other odd creatures in a small town on Canada’s west coast. Her stories and poetry have appeared in On Spec, Weird Tales, Aoife’s Kiss, Dreams and Nightmares, and Talebones, as well as in various anthologies and online publications.
Marcie’s work has appeared in four previous issue of Æon, and more are scheduled for future issues.
Lavie Tidhar (“Hard Rain at the Fortean Café”) writes weird fiction. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and can say “the dictatorship of the proletariat” without blinking. He has also lived in South Africa, the UK, and the remote Banks islands of Vanuatu, in the South Pacific. His short stories have appeared in Sci Fiction, Salon Fantastique, The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best New Fantasy 2, Horror: The Best of the Year 2007, and many others. He can speak fluent Bislama, a South Pacific pidgin English, cook crème brulee, and grow his own tomatoes.
Lavie’s story “Midnight Folk” appeared in Æon Six, and “Angels Over Israel” in Æon Ten.
His web site is http://www.lavietidhar.co.uk.
Mikal Trimm’s (“The Diadem”) short stories and poems have appeared in numerous venues over the last few years. Recent or forthcoming works may be found in Helix, Postscripts, Weird Tales, Black Gate, and Interfictions, among others.
His novel, The Greatest Freaking Book Anyone Has Written EVER! is not forthcoming from any publisher at any time in the future.
Visit his blog at http://mtrimm1.livejournal.com/.
The Blood of Father Time, by Alan M. Clark, Stephen C. Merritt, and Lorelei Shannon
Escapement and Mainspring, by Jay Lake
Recovery Man, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch