Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 5, August 2014
Author: R. Leigh Hennig,Clint Spivey, Emma Osborne, Mary Alexandra Agner, William Delman, J. Daniel Batt, Frank Smith, Jared W. Cooper, Garrick Fincham
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Bastion Publications

MASTHEAD

R. Leigh Hennig, Editor-in-Chief

Brooke Johnson, Senior Editor

Zod, Social

Nick Lazzaro, Slush Reader

Lauren Jane Shipley, Slush Reader

Madison Abshire, Slush Reader

Robert Davis, Slush Reader

Nancy Waldman, Slush Reader

Joseph J. Langan, Slush Reader

CONTRIBUTORS

“The Skip”, Copyright ©2014 by Clint Spivey

“Zip”, Copyright ©2014 by Emma Osborne

“Going Solo on a Goldilocks”, Copyright ©2014 by Mary Alexandra Agner

“The Cure”, Copyright ©2014 by William Delman

“That Place Between Déjà vu and a Memory”, Copyright ©2014 by J. Daniel Batt

“Mirror of Stars”, Copyright ©2014 by Frank Smith

“Nestmaker”, Copyright ©2014 by Jared W. Cooper

“Sanctuary Farm”, Copyright ©2014 by Garrick Fincham

Cover image courtesy Milan Jaram.

Bastion Publications

PO Box 605

Lynnwood, WA 98064-0605

Visit us at www.bastionmag.com , on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bastionmag, and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/bastionsf

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine publishes original short stories on the first of every month. As a new publication, we’re working hard to build up our readership. We’d appreciate it if you would help us out by letting your friends know about us. Thanks for your support and happy reading.

Contents

Editorial

R. Leigh Hennig

The Skip

Clint Spivey

Zip

Emma Osborne

Going Solo on a Goldilocks

Mary Alexandra Agner

The Cure

William Delman

That Place Between Déjà vu and a Memory

J. Daniel Batt

Mirror of Stars

Frank Smith

Nestmaker

Jared W. Cooper

Sanctuary Farm

Garrick Fincham

Editorial

R. Leigh Hennig

Slowly, steadily, Bastion marches toward wider recognition and a growing readership. May’s issue, our second, reached the #5 bestseller spot at Weightless Books. But you already knew that. What you might not have known was that the following issue (June) climbed up to the #4 bestseller spot. We have a long way still to go, however. I won’t rest until we can pay professional rates and qualify stories for SFWA membership. And even then, I probably still won’t rest. We’re making progress, and our continued, measurable, meaningful growth means that Bastion isn’t just a flash in the pan.

We have some very exciting developments in the pipeline for this month. I can’t give away too much right now, but let’s just say that we’re working on a secret project quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. It’s likely that if you follow us on Twitter/Facebook and send us a message/email/tweet with some kind of proof showing the purchase of any of our issues that we’ll share some details with you.

All that aside however, let’s talk about what’s happening right now, and that is, of course, August’s issue. Clint Spivey’s “The Skip” is a masterful character study in consequences and forgiveness in the face of unthinkable tragedy. Our first military scifi isn’t your typical military scifi. “Zip” by Emma Osborne delivers tense and vivid action but with characters more rich and unique than you’ve seen before, it has what most military scifi’s do not. Remember the fantastic sense of wonder that was instilled in you when you were a youth, reading science fiction for the first time? “Going Solo on a Goldilocks” by Mary Alexandra Agner is that, and more. “The Cure” by William Delman continues our theme of consequences for the stories in this issue and does a fantastic job of tying futuristic wonder and technologies into what makes us all human. J. Daniel Batt’s “That Place Between Déjà vu and a Memory” mixes second and even third chances in with first-time experiences and blurs the line between the two. This is just a charming story that you have to read, perfect for not just young summer love, but for partners who’ve already spent a lifetime together. “Mirror of Stars” by Frank Smith also deals with that sense of wonder I spoke about earlier, combined with a dose of the hard, cold realities of space. Sometimes though, it’s not enough to wonder. Sometimes you need to suffer to find out where you belong. In “Nestmaker” by Jared W. Cooper, you’ll see just what I mean. A mother’s love and a father’s gift might not be enough to survive in hard places that always find new ways to take. Finally, “Sanctuary Farm” by Garrick Fincham is everything good science fiction should be: robots, aliens, Mars, and thoughtful characters with meaningful development and a plot that asks questions.

Thanks again for your support, and I don’t think you’ll be terribly surprised when you read about our #3 spot in next month’s editorial. That’s enough for now.

The Skip

Clint Spivey

Lauren had been a proper skip jockey for little more than six minutes. She'd seized the controls, the bridge crew and captain dead at her feet, and guided the stricken ferry out of the near-light velocity transit corridor. She saved seventy-eight lives that day. In the following eight minutes, over 19,000 would die.

Ahead of the shock wave, thrown by the ferry upon departing the corridor, lights shimmered in their thousands, illuminating the vacuum from beneath the clear, nano-weave hemisphere atop Destino Station. Were those faces, watching their death approach through lighted windows? Frantic parents whispering their love to children, who implored with their eternal question of 'why?'

Destino's myriad lights, like its inhabitants, were soon to be snuffed by the ravenous shock wave blasting towards it. Unable to speak, Lauren reached toward the cockpit window with a trembling hand, and watched Destino die.

#

Blurry images fought through Lauren's narrowed eyes. The doorbell's piercing buzzer shrieked as late afternoon sunlight slanted through her blinds at a low angle. Lauren's glass, having fallen, lay unbroken on the floor. Tiny channels of vodka irrigated the gaps between the hardwood planks. The buzzer continued its insistence.

She rose to a sitting position and paused. Nobody visited Lauren. Her parents, already advanced in age when she began skip jockeying, hadn't lasted long following the disaster. A media frenzy coupled with death threats produced such effects. Her father passed first. Her mother mere weeks later.

The buzzer sounded a third time. Lauren recovered her glass and reached for a nearby bottle to refill it. Labeled with a bear and unknown Cyrillic script, it matched dozens of others strewn about her spacious living room. Spent shell casings from the slow suicide her cowardice allowed. Did Russia possess stills enough to accomplish that which she lacked the courage to do herself? Room temperature drink in hand, she answered the door.

He wore blue jeans and a white t-shirt. His dark hair was trimmed neat, with an approaching gray frost creeping from the roots. He stood a good head taller than Lauren. Nothing unusual there. Such short stature had served her well in the confines of space vessels. She waited in silence for him to speak.

"I moved in next door," he said. "We will be neighbors."

"That's great," Lauren said.

"I'm Martin," he repeated, his expression unchanged.

"Great, Martin. It's a nice area."

He looked past Lauren, into her apartment, making no effort to conceal his curiosity.

Whatever remained of her dignity was irritated at such blatant snooping. The scattering of empty bottles plain to see, she revealed her glass from behind the door and took a drink.

"Like what you see?" she asked. The emotion had passed. Genuine disinterest with this man's judgments took hold. She let the silence drag on, hoping his discomfort was worse.

"I'm Martin," he repeated. "Martin Reslin."

"Don't worry about mine," she said. "It's not worth knowing." Still looking him in the eye, she stepped back from the doorway, took a drink of her vodka, and closed the door.

#

Lauren stood on her tiny balcony. The lights of the city twinkled in the distance. Beyond, in the forested hills of the Pacific Northwest, there was only black. Her breath fogged in the cold, December air. Watching it wisp away, she was reminded of the last time she saw Captain Deleres. Her corpse had been stored in the ferry's galley freezer. Lauren's breath had fogged then, too. When she said goodbye to the captain after the accident. A fast friendship cut short.

"You'll make a fine skip pilot one day," Captain Deleres had told her, leaning over Lauren's shoulder on one of her qualifying shifts a few weeks before the accident. "Only three hundred more flight hours on the night watch and you're there," she laughed.

"I'll love every minute, Ma'am," Lauren said.

"Please. I left the military years ago. Call me Sasha. You're doing great, by the way."

"Thanks. You can almost feel the corridor thrumming beneath us. Feel it carrying us along." Lauren turned and looked at the woman standing behind her. "Sorry. It probably sounds silly, doesn't it?"

"Not at all. It took me months to accept there was a tangible sensation to skipping, no matter how many times they told me in flight school. If you're already day-dreaming about the skip, well, hell, you'll soon be after my job."

"Sorry, Sasha. No way I'm getting stuck puddle-skipping to Sirius. I mean...no offense."

Sasha laughed. "None taken. I used to skip missile-frigates so I can understand wanting something a little faster. But that's best left for kids like you. I'm fine out here in the burbs. Besides, my daughter moved to Destino. I've got grandkids barely three days out from Sirius."

A chill returned Lauren to the past. She was glad her first and only captain had died in the initial accident. It spared the woman the sight of her grandchildren's killer.

No stars shone from behind the cloudy skies. It was one reason Lauren had settled there. She no longer cared for their light. Pesky reminders of when she used to climb among them, she preferred the clouds.

#

"It's called quiche," Martin said the next day, standing in her doorway holding out a sealed tupper container. "It's like an egg pie."

Lauren didn't care much for clocks, but the horizontal sunlight piercing her blinds implied it was morning.

"I know what that is," she said, sipping breakfast from a smudged glass.

"I wasn't sure if you liked meat or not. So half is with chorizo—that's sausage. The other half is with potatoes and onions." His hands remained extended. Only the dish crossed her threshold.

Lauren placed a hand on her hip and finished her drink. "You'd have better luck trying some of this." She jingled the ice in her empty glass. He'd gotten the hints and turned away in defeat the few times previous she'd refused his food offerings. This day he seemed determined.

Perhaps it was pity that caused her to fold this time. Lauren didn't know. She jerked the tupper from him with a scowl, angry he'd finally overcome her obstinance. It was warm in her hand.

"It's fresh." He nodded and left.

Lauren supposed she was hungry and, moving to her long unused kitchen, cut a slice from the steaming yellow pie. She finished almost half of it in ten minutes. She looked toward the wall separating their apartments, and wondered, not for the first time, about the man on the other side.

#

"Three years house arrest," Lauren said. Martin was beside her on her sofa, sitting straight and proper. "I liked it so much I decided to stay." She raised her glass and smiled.

He'd come by, like clockwork, the day after the quiche. Perhaps the food had caused her to relent. She was unsure if the route to a female heart was similar to a man's, but his sitting beside her offered compelling evidence.

"What happened?" he asked.

She looked into her glass. "Something bad."

"Have you been out at all?"

Lauren shrugged. "A few times, sure. Doctor's visits. Went shopping once or twice." She looked towards the window. "Not much of a point these days. You can get anything brought to your front door."

Condensation sweated a ring on the table around his untouched drink. "I know a restaurant," he said. "The food is rumored to be excellent." He stood. "I'll come by tomorrow around six. If you want to join me for dinner, we can go then." He exited without another word.

She would like to think she'd become accustomed to her self-inflicted solitude. Yet, that day, she'd babbled on without even being prompted. Though she was careful not to mention Destino.

She refilled her glass and took a long pull. Some hermit she turned out to be. The first desperate, idiot neighbor comes around to chat and she can't shut up.

#

While it would be her first date in many years, it wasn't her first since the accident. There had been one other. After it, she'd abandoned the enterprise altogether.

At the time, dating seemed a good idea. Lauren hadn't achieved her status as a trainee skip pilot at 26 years old through idle hands. Following the accident, and after her house arrest, she'd been determined to rebuild something of a life.

"So you're a pilot," the man sitting across from Lauren said. He was younger than her by a few years, and despite his smooth cheeks, he'd managed a thin mustache.

"I used to be," she said, holding her coffee mug with both hands. The bistro was mostly empty. Only a few patrons sat at the tall, round tables.

"Sweet, sweet," he said. "I've got a pilot's license. I'm rated for air-cars all the way to turbo-props." He gave her a look, that, in a professional setting would qualify as leering.

She offered a little smile. "Turbo-props. That's great."

"Maybe we can go up together sometime." He winked. "Or down."

Lauren looked outside. She couldn't expect her first online dating excursion to be a success. She'd need to narrow the parameters of her profile beyond just pilot.

As if to ensure their time together was as horrid as possible, her date texted on his ring phone. The bottom of Lauren's coffee cup couldn't appear soon enough.

"Your profile," she said, attempting to fill the silence, "said you're from—"

Several young men burst through the door shouting. A camera drone buzzed behind them, recording.

"Lauren Oaks!" one shouted. "Destroyer of Destino! You're on Fireline Live!"

She stood and looked to her date, thinking perhaps they'd escape together, or that he'd offer assistance. Instead, he flipped his fingers into some devil horns, and stuck out his tongue.

"I got her," her date said. "I roped the destroyer."

Her slap sent him to the floor.

"Get a picture," another said, draping his arm over her shoulder. She laid him to the floor with a knee to the groin. It didn't matter. They laughed and hooted and the drone caught it all. She pushed past them and ran.

Later in her apartment, against all better judgment, she searched for the video. Trending on several of the shock-gawker sites, it wasn't hard to find. She hadn't noticed at the time, but the video revealed it. She'd been in tears when she fled.

#

Despite that last dating disaster, Lauren accepted Martin's invitation. By the time they arrived at the restaurant, she was a wreck.

She worried at the napkin with her trembling hand. Every patron suspected it was her. They hid it well, but she knew.

"The salmon is the recommended dish," Martin said behind his menu. "It's gotten the highest reviews."

Lauren barely heard him. Every couple hunched close in conversation were discussing her. Whispering about the injustice of her walking the streets free. Plotting their confrontation.

"Have you decided what you want?" Martin asked, lowering his menu.

"What?"

He looked at her without speaking. There was something about the way he watched her. Like he knew something about her that she'd herself not yet discovered.

"You can relax, you know," he said. "Look around. It's why I chose this restaurant. We're easily the oldest people in here."

Lauren took another look and saw he was right. Fresh faced twenty-somethings filled every table, absorbed in their own conversations.

Martin smiled. "If you want anonymity at our age, seek out youth. I doubt most of them even register our presence."

Lauren's menu shook less than the napkin. "Why don't you get the salmon, and I'll get the sole," she said. "We can try each other’s."

Martin nodded and smiled.

#

"Al-right," the cute sales attendant said, stressing the second part of the word with unnatural enthusiasm. Her young face beamed from Lauren's wall-screen. "I'm Kimber, your associate today. Let's get started, Ms. Oaks."

"I need a few new outfits," Lauren said. "I haven't been shopping in a while."

"Then you've come to the right place. La-la's has everything you need. How about this kickin sweater/skirt combo right here?"

With a wave of the girl's hand, a clip of a strutting model in a bright orange sweater with a silver skirt and black, knee-high boots appeared on the screen.

"I like the boots," Lauren said. "But the sweater and the skirt...do you have something less...bright?"

"Ms. Oaks, if you want to stand out, bright is in."

Lauren closed her eyes. She'd never much cared for shopping. Sure, she'd always liked to look nice, and kept herself in shape, but give her a flight suit and a knee-board and she stood out in the only way she cared to.

Unfortunately, her exile had left her in painful ignorance of the latest styles. Her recent outing for dinner had proved such. Her clothes had been just long enough out of fashion to stand out, yet not of significant duration to be retro. She had looked and felt quite out of place.

Lauren said, "Orange. Sure. Why not?"

"O-kay," the girl said, a dollop of market-research backed exuberance on the second syllable. "Here's another one that will have you stopping them on the street."

#

"Are...are those your kids?" Lauren's voice stuttered despite her weak efforts at nonchalance with the question.

"Yes," Martin said. His hard drive sat on her coffee table, piping the video to her wall-screen." That's Peter. And the girl is Maya."

The boy, who looked to be about six or seven, ran around a faux-grass covered yard. The girl, who was much younger, attempted to give chase on wobbly legs. Stars twinkled in the night sky above them.

Troubling scenarios raced through Lauren's thoughts. Beginning benign, each escalated as she considered. A divorcee. A still married man. A love nest beside her apartment. Its occupant looking for a simple fling. His bizarre behavior coupled with the gleeful children on the monitor struck panic in her thoughts.

She reached for a glass that wasn't there, an instinct that persisted despite her recent, baby-step vow of drinking only after dark.

Martin said, "The world doesn't long dwell upon calamity." He looked toward her blinds. "Those of us left behind are forced to remember when others forget."

With a wave of his hand he ended the video. He stood and pocketed the hard drive before extending his hand to Lauren. Her mind still reeling with possible explanations, she took his hand. He squeezed it for just a moment. "Whatever has shut you in this apartment, know you're not alone." He dropped her hand and made for the door. He opened it, and, as if just remembering something, turned and said, "I like your outfit."

She poured a drink despite the sunlight still glowing behind her blinds.

#

"No, the pink one," Lauren said.

"You're really after that pink, huh?" Kimber, the sales associate once again filled Lauren's wall screen. "Oh, well. Let's give it a try."

She had another date. Martin had finally invited her to his place. She would have been embarrassed at how giddy the invitation had made her, if she hadn't been so thrilled. Seven years of solitude will do that, she supposed.

The revelation about his family had sold her. He hadn't once pressed for details on what she'd done, nor swamped her with his own sorrows. They both knew the other had suffered, and that was enough.

"Hey," Kimber said, "that's not bad."

Lauren was sliding white, patterned sweaters over the pink shirt that was displayed on the screen.

"That one," Lauren said as a sleek, blue, argyle pattern on white landed on the model onscreen.

"Look at you go, Ms. Oaks."

"Never doubt the argyle," she said. "I want to try it on." With a few waves of Lauren's hand, a representation of herself replaced the model on the screen.

Something had brought Martin to her. It was time to stop being a child. The world had forgotten Destino. Had moved on. Lauren wasn't some spinster locked away in this apartment. She'd been a pilot once. One with promise before the accident. And even though she felt she might not deserve to, it was time to live again.

"I need shoes," Lauren said. "And a belt. I'm thinking black."

"I'm thinking you're right, Ms. Oaks."

#

Lauren entered Martin's apartment with a smile. A sofa sat beside a coffee table. A dining room set with chairs beneath the long window that looked out on the same view as Lauren's. But where her apartment lacked clutter, his teemed with it. Books, papers, hard drives; every surface boasted some pile or stack.

It took a moment to register through the disorder before her breath left her like she'd been punched. The door clicked shut behind before she understood what it was she was looking at.

Photos. Physical ones behind lighted frames. News stories printed and blown up to the size of posters. Archives of the event flipped and scrolled on numerous tiles on the wall-screen. A single theme permeating them all.

"I must apologize, Lauren," Martin said. "I haven't been completely honest with you."

Her voice had fled, and she could barely breathe. A thousand images from that day surrounded her. Bold headlines screamed condemnations in enormous fonts. The faces of victims, tucked away in various corners of newsprint, spat silent curses at her. She caught her own face amidst the detritus. The same photo that had peppered a hundred news feeds that day. Her young, smiling face after graduating flight school.

"I had to meet you first, you see," he said, looking out his window. The apartment was identical to hers, but in reverse. Every room and hall on the wrong side. The memories of that day surrounding her twisted the space into a nightmare image of what had been her own sanctuary for so many years.

"I know what it's like to lose everything," he said.

Lauren edged towards the door, her new shoes giving away her intention with every clacking footstep.

"Do you know what the odds of that happening were?" he said. "Literally in the millions. One second sooner or later and the shock-wave would have barely jostled Destino, or missed it altogether. It would be difficult to reproduce such a series of events if one were trying to do so."

He was still looking out the window. Lauren was almost at the door. She wasn't sure why she hadn't simply ran. Why she felt the need to sneak out. The door was close, the handle almost within reach.

"You saved us, you know."

She stopped. "Us?"

Now he looked at her. "Yes. Had you not skipped when you did, the shear would have snapped the keel, tearing the ferry in two."

She'd known that. Had always known how close they'd all come to dying.

"What do you mean, us?" she said.

"Destino was only a three day trip from the departure lanes at Sirius. My family was on the station. I was going to meet them."

The door was behind her. She could exit in seconds. Before he could act. But she lingered.

"You were on the ferry?"

He nodded.

Lauren said, "So now you've found me."

"I wish there were some other way. I've tried everything. This is all I have left." He stepped towards her.

"I had to meet you first," he said. "To make sure. I see now. They were right. There is no other way for me to be free."

The moment spread before her like a spilled drink, escaping from the broken shards of a dropped glass. She'd hoped for so much since meeting Martin. Dreamed. Wondered about this man who'd appeared in her life and ended her exile.

And she'd been right all along. Closing out a world that sought only vengeance against her for what she'd done. Vengeance flawlessly served by this man who had lulled her out only to strike when her hope reemerged.

A calm washed over her. Its source unknown, she relaxed against the door. Perhaps it was for the best. He'd come this far. Maybe it was time to let go. Time for him to do what she'd only tarried at doing herself through drink. Perhaps he'd end what she'd been too weak to do herself.

"I'm so sorry for all of this," he said, moving towards her.

"So am I," she said. She felt soft. Helpless. Her outfit, an object of such personal progress now seemed ridiculous, only adding to her vulnerability. Despite feeling so exposed, she was ready to submit. She hoped whatever he planned would be quick.

"I forgive you," Martin said.

Lauren waited.

"It was a terrible accident. Something unthinkable. I hated you for so many years. I resisted any thought of forgiving you my family's death. Until I saw there was no other way." He looked at her. "I swear, I forgive you, Lauren."

She was still. Unsure if this was simply prelude to whatever violence he had planned.

"You didn't look at me the day they removed you from the ship," he said. "I saw you. You didn't see me."

"There was nothing to see." Her voice was quiet. "You got the better bargain. A pittance of survivor's guilt your only fee. Not bad considering the deal I got. A world's worth of hate for saving my ship."

He took her limp hand in his.

"That's a really nice outfit."

"I know. I picked it out."

"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "I found you."

Did she share such feelings? An easy question only an hour prior. Now, what did she want?

"A rescue for a rescue, then?" she said. "I get you out of that corridor alive and you get me out of my apartment and the bottle?" She pulled her hand from his and looked at the floor. Saw her face reflected in her shiny shoes. "I don't know," she said. "I just don't know."

She left. Back in her own apartment, she didn't bother with any lights. She retrieved a full bottle from her kitchen. It thumped to the floor as she wedged open the front door with it.

She went to the closet of one of her unused rooms. In the dark, she rooted through first one, then a second box of clothes until she found what she wanted. She knew it by touch even without the lights. She returned to the living room, placed it on the coffee table, and sat on the sofa.

Martin joined her after only a few minutes. He slid his hand over the dimmer panel, bringing the lights to a glow no stronger than a single candle before sitting beside her.

"I never washed it," she said. "Just threw it in my duffel when I departed the ship."

Martin ran his hand over the bloodstained jump suit. "You were wearing this that day," he said.

She traced her hand over the stitching of her name on the left pocket. "It was easy for me to hide. Just lock myself away and never deal with anyone. It's not like people were beating down my door to offer assistance."

"I don't suppose they did." He took her hand. "I used to think I wanted to die," he said. "I didn't think there was any other way. I realized I wanted to live, but I didn't know how. In one of the many counselings I attended, someone mentioned a story from over a hundred years ago in South Africa."

Lauren looked at him and cocked her head. "What was it?"

He shook his head. "It's not important. Not now. But I learned that sometimes, forgiveness is the only way to truly move on." He moved closer to her. "I meant what I said, Lauren. And I hope you can believe this, but I truly feel like something has been lifted from me."

"Forgiveness," she said. "Maybe I'll try it sometime." She touched the bloodstained jumpsuit. "But it may be awhile."

Martin stood and picked up the flight suit. "I suppose there's no rush. We've both waited this long."

"Is that a souvenir?" she said, flicking the dangling leg of her old uniform.

"No. This is going in the garbage."

Lauren nodded. She wanted to sleep. "See you tomorrow, then?"

"Yeah," he said, "I think so."

###

Clint Spivey spent eight years as a meteorologist with the U.S. Navy. After finishing grad school he is currently teaching English part time at two Japanese universities. His work has appeared in The Lorelei Signal, Perihelion, and Liquid Imagination.

Zip

Emma Osborne

One hour and six minutes until his boots crunched into the soil of a disputed planet. Lieutenant James Kent sat on the floor of his bare room and field-stripped his blaster methodically, relying on his years of training to find the oxygen-boosting cartridge, to correctly grease the release points, to stay steady and not look up at the empty space above his rack where the photo of his former captain and lover had been.

The mission destination flashed up on his comms tablet: a deserted jungle planet with a low combat risk rating, but all the same, the Allied Planet Military was going in with fingers on triggers. Prudent. Nobody had forgotten the Ba’Tooth scandal: two full squads bleeding into black mud under the shadow of a traditionally woven peace tapestry.

Captain Simon Albright had been assigned to that ill-fated mission and Kent had wept with relief in his rack when the zip had come through from him. Before that final message, Kent had thought him dead, but Albright had been switched out from the squad at the last minute to make room for a linguistics expert. The news of the raid had been all over the base-wide feeds. Albright found out from the feeds that it had been his squad shredded planet-side, his brothers and sisters who caught the fallout from a generational hive-war. He took it hard. I should have been with them. The last line of the zip had been free from Albright’s usual sign-off, a coded blip of love that could wriggle around a censor’s scrutiny. It should have been me.

Kent figured that Albright had found someone else to numb the pain after receiving that last, lonely message. The silence had stretched and thinned until nothing remained but a wisp, coupled with the pervasive feeling that nobody would ever speak to him with love in his voice ever again.

The LT finished up with his blaster. Every piece of Kent’s equipment was maintained and prepped: steel-silk rope coiled in its pouch, boot-toes sharpened for kicking into rock, face-shield programmed with thousands of languages and ready to take on dust, ice or jungle-sweat. Kent carried everything he needed to command the base raid—everything except the certainty that he would be mourned by the one he loved if he spun out, ate dirt, was blown away, baby. It doesn’t matter, he thought, breathing deep. I gotta go. No matter what he’d lost, he always had his squad, and their mission. They were the only two things that could get him out of his rack.

A short melody bleeped through his tablet. Time to report to the transport. The commanding officer was always first aboard, last to depart. Kent locked his face-shield into place and tucked a dog tag into the pocket on the left side of his uniform. A blank zip-film poked out from under his thin pillow. He’d figure out what to write if he lived.

#

Everything felt wrong in a flash. It was a teeth-grating feeling, a shiver that didn’t stop or show in gloved fingertips that gripped the handrails tight. The scientists called it transport displacement and lectured them about the shifts that occurred at a sub-atomic level. But it was perfectly safe, they said, scrawling absently onto erasable clipboards. Perfectly safe.

It was best if you rode the flash with your eyes closed. He couldn’t see shit through the view-plate anyway, just grey half-space: the in-between of things. The screaming slip through space manifested in fireworks that sparked behind his eyelids. Kent always saw green-blue ripples that once reminded him of a show he’d seen about Aurora borealis. But that was before the mission that he and Albright had teamed up on, under the icy crust of the moon Europa. They’d been tired, cold and so far from home, in both time and space. Kent had been astounded when Albright had wrapped his hand around the back of Kent’s neck. He remembered the taste of that first kiss and the scrape of Albright’s stubble as they both gave into something that had been brewing for months. Now, every flickering light reminded him of the play of the waves above their heads and the close huddle of an anchored tent.

Flames silently bloomed around the view-plates as Kent and his squad descended through the atmosphere of the planet Kelvin. The twelve of them opened their eyes and watched the view-screens, watched one another, sending silent promises of solidarity around the interior of the shuttle. The tongues of fire were as chaotic and vibrant as the tropical flowers that had once grown around the windows of Kent’s parents’ house. Both the flowers and his parents were long dead and crumbled; they had both stubbornly clung to Earth as if it would somehow heal itself one day.

Dex, their droid, gazed at the display impassively. Corporal Sowell’s silver whiskers prickled out from the grim set of his jaw. The veteran knew better than to trust the official reports. He scowled as Malik and Hughes began to throw up roughly. Lombardi looked on, smug. The three of them, always mischievous, had been up all night drinking and playing cards. Lombardi always held her booze better than any of them. Goddamn genetics.

The squad shared a battleground comms matrix that worked like an extended warning system; a tremor of nerves that shot around emotional flashes. No secrets—nothing so well formed—but between them flooded a sense of danger or apprehension that twined around the regular comms. It could mean the difference between breathing and choking to death on your own blood.

Kent took a moment to once again mentally run through the mission stats. His orders were to land, trek to the base, and capture it. Each base, each planet was a crucial part of the Allied Planet network. Since the mass departure from a sun-blasted Earth, the military was constantly on the lookout for planets with terraforming potential. Regaining even one would be a coup.

The base on Kelvin was supposedly abandoned by the Kee, but Kent’s squad hummed with the caution of veterans. He checked the reads. The atmosphere would be negated by the bionics of their combat suits but the acidity in the air would wear them out in under twelve hours. Uncovered skin would melt down to muscle in minutes.

They landed in a patchy clearing. The automated hatch hissed open and the squad bounced out, Kent on point. He’d insisted. He barked out formations and as one, the team slipped through the black, sticky jungle that rotted around them. The planet had been torched in the Inferno Wars between the rock-like Kee and the delicate, merciless Alalani birds who were capable of flying between worlds on their smoking scarlet wings. Kent flipped himself sideways to avoid trampling a patch of green moss that marked the start of a grow-back. However hot the flames, something always grew back.

Even though they were on mission and even though he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t, Kent’s heart and head slipped back to his worries as his augmented knees flexed and propelled him over burnt and blackened trees.

Albright had slowly broken his heart, over a year or so. Each harsh word piled on top of the others until the stress was unbearable, heartbreaking. Kent didn’t know if Albright knew or cared. Try as he might, Kent couldn’t shake the memory of his eyes after that first rough kiss, nor could he forget the way that they fit together when they slept: his skin pale against Albright’s dark, muscles and angles matched and everything simply right.

But he was never coming back, and the empty space where he’d been was crushingly, unbearably large.

I would rather have every inch of my skin ripped off than feel like this. It was as if someone had shot fragments of hot metal into his chest. Something nameless squeezed him as he dashed through the jungle and dragged out tears that were whisked away by the moisture sensors in his helmet.

Even at first, Albright hadn’t been entirely sure. It had been too new, too fast. It was a game to him, an adventure into an experience. Kent had been in love with other boys since he was twelve years old, during the last math class of the rainy season when he’d noticed just how very blue Tim’s eyes were. Albright was different. He’d left a girl and their unfinished business back on his home colony, and although she was long gone, her memory kept tugging at him. Albright had broken it off with Kent after stammering out his reasons.

The separation had lasted as long as it took for the alcohol rations to come through from Command. Kent had taken his alone in his room in an effort to privately dull the sharpness of the break. Before long, the door had boomed under the weight of Albright’s drunken fist.

I should have turned him away, but how? He knew I couldn’t. His heart and his hope had overtaken any good sense.

After that, Albright drifted in and out, capricious with his heart and his collection of imagined futures. Sometimes he left with tears, sometimes with accusations, sometimes without saying a word. On the good days, they’d built imaginary houses, arguing over the window frames and planet quadrant. The bad days scrunched up Kent’s stomach with anxiety. The last Kent had heard was that Albright was messing around with a new guy: a loudmouth colt of a rookie, fresh out of basic.

Early on, Albright had promised that Kent was his great love, the one who belonged. And then it had faded out, until even the very briefest meetings had come no more. It was one thing to suspect that Albright didn’t want him and another thing entirely to know that he didn’t need him.

Lost in thought and with three kilometers of thick jungle terrain left to navigate, everything changed.

Kent missed the rumbles under his boots. His skin-suit took action where he could not and sprang him high into the air as the ground shook and split beneath him. The squad’s shared reflex boomed. Kent leapt high, up and away from the unreliable terrain. For a moment they were all floating in the air like great dark birds, their green sensor lights flicking down and over the earth to map out a safe landing place.

There was none. They tumbled down, as everything must.

Kent’s suit stiffened with the shock as his knees and shins smashed onto broken rock. He slipped into a dark chasm. For a moment he hung from the wrist-strap of his blaster after it jammed into a cleft, but then something snapped and he was falling again, weaponless, with the squad screaming at him from eleven different directions. They were all down. Lombardi and Callis blipped out, their login replaced with white noise for a second before switching off automatically.

Kent hit a jam of rocks and finally stopped falling. His knees were in agony.

“Lieutenant, sir. Kent? LT? LT! You hearing this?” Sowell cleared up his channel first. “My leg is broke, sir. I’ve got a clamp, but it’s bleeding real bad, and the air—” Sowell’s comms channel crackled and popped.

There was something pushing on Kent’s hip and the comms channels swam around his head. The login flooded with pain and confusion and fear. He should have been able to dull it so that he was simply aware of his men and women and their circumstances and able to think of a way out, a way up. That was his duty. He’d sworn it, palm on the Articles, the day he pulled on the uniform.

Kent switched off his comms, instead. He wasn’t in silence—the rocks around him groaned and shuddered, shifting into new positions. Pops echoed above him as his squad shot up distress flares. He rolled so that his torso was flat on a rock ledge and he braced his feet. The crag jutted above him, an impossible climb.

Maybe it was better this way: lost on mission. Dead, somewhere quiet. If he didn’t log back in again and they didn’t find him, it would all be over. It could all stop. The blank zip under his pillow would stay safely empty. Kent had written and sent and burned countless pleas, apologies for all manner of imagined slights. But the words couldn’t sink in the right way, even if Albright did actually read them.

Kent exhaled slowly.

It had been too painful to look at directly, back on the base. The pain was hot and bright and acknowledging it as fact was like looking right into the sun.

It was just that Albright wasn’t coming back. Not ever. He’d removed himself. First he’d killed the love. Then he’d crushed any hope of it ever blooming again. And so what was left?

Kent thumbed his helmet lock. His squad would survive without him. Just a few minutes of planet-side air savaging his lungs and it’d be done. No more remembered kisses. All of the tenderness erased, the invisible fingerprints scrubbed off.

Kent pressed down and his helmet hissed. He was so broken that he might as well be dead.

“LT? You got me? This coming through?” Sowell’s second-in-command clearance overrode Kent’s block. The reconnected comms channel was a whisper in the dark. “Sir. Are you there? We need you.”

His brothers. His sisters. They had sworn their oaths together.

Lieutenant James Kent of the United Allied Military had given up on love and happiness for himself. But he could not and would not give up on the uniform, and the squad who wore the same cloth.

Kent pushed his face-plate back into lock position and rolled over. Sowell was still breathing and Lombardi might still be out there. Her hanger-deck card game had been running a whole year. Sowell always carried a wrinkled envelope of photos with him when he was off duty. He’d cried when he’d gotten news of his Mars-born daughter.

If that was all there was, it was enough.

“Sowell? You getting me? You out there, buddy?” Kent’s throat was sore as he croaked to his squad. “I’m coming, Sowell. Just hang on.”

Kent got to his feet, shaking out his hands until the contact webbing came online. Automatically, the strip of boot under the balls of his feet turned tacky. A booster pill fell out the front of his helmet and into his mouth. He crunched down on it. Adrenalin buzzed through him and everything felt light and quick.

The squad network picked up his resolve and bounced around a signal to the dropped squad. They stirred then, all of them, slapping flesh-knits over their wounds and beaming back the message that they were OK, that they were coming if they could.

The cleft wall was at an angle that bent him backward to climb, but his hands and feet stuck, enclosed as they were in combat-ready boots and gloves. These are my people, and I’ll get them home. His shoulders burned as he clambered.

Lombardi was waiting at the top of the crag with an emergency patch wrapped around her middle, her usual grin missing. Dex was with her, hir cool smile illuminated by the blue lighting from within hir helmet. Dex’s hand had been ripped off in the fall, but ze would have a replacement screwed back on again in the lab. It was the android’s second mission with the squad, a second appendage lost.

“We mess you up every time, Dex.” Kent’s face shield did a quick scan of every torn wire and lost coupling while his eyes drank in the sight of his teammates.

“Pay it no mind, sir. The other works just as well.” The android flexed hir left hand, which was encased in living skin-metal.

“Ropes,” said Kent. Lombardi and the android nodded and unslung hir steel-silk. Kent expanded his login to pick up locations as his squad members began the slow and tricky process of hauling their wounded companions out of danger.

“Can’t get up, LT. I’m sorry.” Sowell’s beam was faint. “Just go. We need that base.”

“Don’t move. I’ll come to you.” Kent nodded to Dex, who dug through hir pack. The android hesitated before ze passed over the bulky enhancement tech.

“I could go, sir. I’m still functioning at 74 percent, and—”

“Absolutely not. You’re missing a hand. You’d never get back up if you were carrying him, too. Besides, Command would gut me if we broke you up any more. Stay here, hold my rope.”

Kent wriggled his feet into the joint-strengthening knee-braces. He turned his back on the droid and shrugged on the shoulder pack. It merged into his suit, seamlessly, and ran down the back of his arms to his elbows.

The green laser of his targeting computer flickered as it mapped out the cleft. Kent clipped on his rope and dropped down into the dark. The suit matched the directions of his targeting computer and bounced him down automatically until his feet stuck to a near-diagonal shelf of rock just above Sowell.

It was bad. Sowell was only semi-conscious, having bled through the flesh-knit that he’d somehow managed to wrap around his shattered thigh. Kent spread another layer of flesh-knit over the first. It hardened, holding the broken bones in place.

Kent used his command override to prompt a heavy-duty painkiller to release into Sowell’s mouthpiece.

“Come on buddy, take this. I’m going to get you outta here.” Kent waited as the soldier weakly bit down.

“You shouldn’t have... I’m okay, really.” Sowell’s jaw was loose.

“Take this one, too.” Kent silently blessed the medics who had invented battlefield plasma pills. Sowell would be weeks in recovery, but if they made it up to the surface, the artificial cells flocking through his bloodstream would keep him alive.

It was difficult to shift him into position without tugging at the flesh-knits, but Kent finally managed to get Sowell into a piggy-back position. Their suits merged as he wriggled into place.

The enhancement tech was the only thing that got them up the walls. Kent’s hands were stickier than usual to compensate for the extra weight and his wrists ached at the effort of yanking his gloves off the rock.

Kent and Sowell were nearly out of the hole when the login started to max out with surprise and shock.

The Alalani screamed as they dropped in from the black heights. Flames licked along their immense wings.

“Switch to freezers! Everyone, get down!” Kent hauled himself over the last lip and yanked Sowell under the shallow cover of a wet, rotting log. At least it wouldn’t catch. Kent’s blaster was buried deep underground by now, but Sowell’s still dangled off the fallen soldier’s shoulder. Kent overrode the ID lock on the blaster and crouched, flicking at the gun’s command pad to start shooting balls of chemical-laden spit.

The alien birds swooped, flicking their flaming wings at the soldiers and snapping with their iron-hard beaks. Freezer balls arced up, exploding onto burned out trees where they missed the Alalani. Lombardi got off a lucky shot and the largest of the birds fell, shattering to pieces after the freezer bullet encapsulated it with crunchy, quick-setting ice.

Dex was on fire. The android rolled around on the black dirt, venting chemical powder from hir wrists. Lombardi shouted, throwing panic through the login—her blaster was fixing its jam, but it would take a few seconds and the birds kept coming. Kent took a knee and shot up at the attackers, hitting one just above the wing-joint. It sailed to the ground and smashed on a rock. Oily blood spewed out, smoldering. His tracking computer confirmed its death but he shot methodically while he sent formation signals through his login.

“Sir! They’re jamming me!” Dex’s task was to report back to base in case of heavy fire or unexpected attack. Kent looked up and saw that one of the Alalani had a signal blocker looped around one spindly foot. It was tech stolen from the Kee and fitted by one of the Alalani’s humanoid allies.

“Defensive fire! Target the blocker!” Kent waved Lombardi and Hughes back to a covered position. They’d never make the base now, but command needed to know that the Alalani were still present as a force on this planet.

An Alalani drove its talons into Hughes’s chest and picked him up, clacking at his face-shield as the soldier burned and screamed. The bird screeched and shook him off, whirling up to join its flock-mates. Hughes tumbled to the ground, his suit punctured and melted.

“Lombardi, with me!” Kent ran forward with his squad-mate at his elbow. She flicked to him via the login that her blaster was fully functional, though Kent had already seen the stat glowing on the inside of his mask. Malik joined them, too, his long legs crossing the distance from his cover to their bulwark in seconds. The login synched them together and the three of them began to shoot in coordinated bursts. The Alalani wheeled and ducked through their fire. The targeting computers mapped the alien’s flight paths and adjusted the squad’s aim. It made all the difference as the freezers began to hit their targets. Lombardi’s slender fingers tapped out a manual field code on the side of her blaster and started following her freezer shots with a bullet. The Alalani exploded like chill fireworks. Among the first to fall was the bird carrying the signal blocker. Dex picked off the tech from a sprawled position, holding the blaster in hir burned but functional left hand.

“I’m through!” hir call flicked through the login. The data packet, filled with surface reads and combat reports, had been assembled at faster-than-human speeds, even in the middle of battlefield chaos.

With a precision shot, Lombardi dropped the last of the Alalani within range. Two of the great flaming birds arced up in a spiral to the upper atmosphere and vanished from view. Kent could only hope that they would retreat and leave them free to shuttle back to the command ship.

“Squad, check in.” Kent knelt beside Hughes and draped his last flesh-knit over the horrific wound in his chest. Perhaps it was futile, but the medics on ship had been known to work miracles before, and atmosphere-based infection would not help.

One by one the squad sent through their status and position. Despite burns and broken bones they were all alive—even Hughes, for now. Kent gave the all-clear to set up a temporary battlefield fortification as they dug in to wait for the rescue shuttle.

#

Kent took a moment to look around his room before he collapsed in a mess of medical tape and drug-dulled flesh. From his rack, he could see his personal zip-drop propped up against his lamp.

Empty.

It was all over the base that the Alalani were expanding their territory and that his unfortunate squad had been ambushed. Surely, Albright had heard. And yet there was nothing. No zip.

Kent curled into a ball, knees high, with a blank zip-film crumpled in his fist. His thumb stroked Albright’s old dog tag out of habit.

“Gotta save myself from now on. That’s how it is,” he whispered into his thin pillow. He wept then, great choking sobs, replaying all of the moments that he would remember forever, saying goodbye to each of them once and for all.

A fist crashed against his door. Kent’s stomach dropped and his heart pounded loudly in his ears.

“Hey, you in there?” It was not the voice that he was expecting. Kent levered himself up on his elbows, pushed off his narrow rack and limped to the door. He knuckled the tears from his eyes.

Lombardi and Malik were just as battered as he was, but their tired smiles still shone. Wordlessly, Malik held up a large metal flask. His spiced rum was barracks legend.

“I can’t believe you’re drinking again after last night.” Kent grinned a little, despite himself.

“After a day like that? Fuck, man. You kidding?” said Malik, pushing his way in.

The three of them eased themselves onto the floor of Kent’s room and passed the flask from hand to hand.

Kent felt the beginnings of a tiny glow flickering in his chest. Rum rolled through his blood and eased the stiffness of his shoulders. He found himself nursing the beginnings of a smile, of hope.

The zip-drop beeped and Kent looked at it reflexively.

Are you alright? Can I see you? - A.

For the first time in a long time, Kent did not leap to tear the zip from the drop.

“Who’s that?” Lombardi asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kent said, reaching up only to push the delete key. “It’s nobody important.”

She nodded and hoisted the flask up in a toast.

Kent took the rum and drank deep, safe amongst his family.

###

Emma Osborne is a fiction writer and poet from Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories and poetry can be found in Daily Science Fiction, Aurealis, Star#Line and Apex Magazine. Her fiction is forthcoming at Shock Totem. Emma comes from a long line of dance floor starters and was once engaged in a bear hug so epic in nature that both parties fell over. She can be found on Twitter as @redscribe.

Going Solo on a Goldilocks

Mary Alexandra Agner

I'm no mechanical engineer: I didn't build or discover a machine or drive that propelled us toward Tau Ceti. I was into this “whole Earth” perspective that they hated in grad school. Pick electricity and magnetism, pick the crust, the mantle, just physics or just geology–that almost led to fisticuffs. I wasn't trying to bring Lovelock and Margulis's hypothesis screaming into the rock and atmosphere world but I managed it anyway. They were happy when I left with a masters but the Rockefeller grant meant that my research was worth more funding–and probably my similarity to Carl Sagan helped–so I was off to the Space Agency which offered me an actual salary. See, I had not forgotten the goldilocks orbiting Tau Ceti.

It would have been easy to lose my planet at the SA because there were a hundred efforts each needing a bright person as a sounding board and my salary covered the weeks to read articles and books of background and ponder puzzles. I supported the biologists growing life in their sulfur terrariums, the SETI grad students stuck on k-means, the flaming cylinder folks that needed extra hands to test their rockets.

A lot of people told me this wasn't science, this careening between fields. Some of them said so loudly at the holiday bash. When the VP of research looked at the commotion and walked over, they quieted. And their faces burned when she asked, “You have familiarity with micro botany, propulsion, geophysics, and astrogation?” See, when they put it like that–better even than my multimedia resume–it sounds as good as it feels to be learning and integrating all this info. Because the passion that makes one high as a kite–studying thermal inversions in microclimates–is the same thrill as watching an engineered amoeboid put out its first pseudopodium.

But she didn't follow up. She looked me up and down: denim skirt to buzz cut to the name on my badge, and simply nodded. I wasn't at the press conference the next day–the low grav folks had invited me to try their newest chamber–but everyone else heard the president live, echoing Kennedy, and telling us that Mars was one great step and now it's time to leap to Tau Ceti.

#

I do not take the specialists for granted. I can see the shape of a problem, they know how to fill the shape. Better yet–best–I can see how the shapes of different problems fit up against each other so that one can solve the next, and so on. It was so obvious that the solution to our coolant leak was to synthesize more from the goldilock's crust; it was obvious that the location for our single mandated landing was a granite extrusion only a hundred klicks from what our anthropologist apologized for calling East Bay: a large string of lights lining the eastern side of an internal body of water. So I said it. I got the looks I always got because the arrogance assigned me by the research VP and assumed of me by the rest of the crew had lodged in my heart, just below the ache to stand on this most foreign of shores.

The readings were good, but cold. Temperature means something different here. We lacked those lovely scanners from the TV shows so we knew only the planet's larger weather patterns, its coastlines, that nighttime brought up lights in only a few places. And while I imagined walking their dirt paths at dusk looking for conversation and a drink, everyone else agreed to the lightless location of the granite: it was not our missions to make first contact. Perhaps it was not yet our mission. So far, they had not let me near the xenobiologists.

#

Rations these days are light. So are clothes, camping equipment, compasses, batteries. Light-fingered on the computer, I kept the quartermaster from wondering at my provisions. I plotted, took maps, ran through all the songs I could sing while I walked the klicks from our designated landing spot to East Bay. No one would miss me.

You're laughing, I know. How could my ego go unnoticed? How could I not have enumerated the hundreds of ways in which I would die going solo on a goldilocks? Desire helps you focus on the details–subtle rewrite of the take-off checklist, someplace sufficient to hide–but the ache still makes you too stupid for the bigger picture.

I hauled my share: red-eyed frenzy making sure it really was safe to step outside, volunteered (and was declined) to be first, shoveled dirt and picked rock to be restructured into coolant for their return journey. I dutifully entered my science logs and answered my SA fan mail for those homeward bound.

#

I wish I could have seen the captain when they docked. Or perhaps when they counted heads leaving the atmosphere and losing drag in the cold digits of space. We had been friends once, but she bought the ego bit even though she'd seen me without it. I sang ten rounds of “She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain when She Comes” just for her. And to while away some afternoon.

I'm sure it was a lovely argument–break out the IR gear and put all the pilots out in all three shuttles, chasing phantoms on some unknown prairie–or let me go. Perhaps a note would have been the better part of valor. But they didn't follow me. I listened and listened for fly-overs, found myself crying to know that even so many light years from Earth our culture keeps us all incurious about what battles beneath each other's bravado.

I gave it up to the blue sky, to the extra crimson sunsets thanks to volcanic dust in the atmosphere, to the constellations which were the only familiar thing left to me, keeping me awake night after night telling me all the old stories again.

I took pictures of the dog-sized fauna before they tried to eat me and I gratefully found they disliked fire. I ached to taste the most succulent leaves I passed, a dozen each day, the slightly different green twisting my palate with longing. I took up drawing instead, attempting to catch them with my stolen crayons until I learned that wax attracted creeping insects more interested in a morsel of my skin than showing off their apparently useless iridescent wings.

I talked to myself. Make the joke, I'll wait. But I had never spent so much time alone, so much time without another human being within hearing range. The goldilocks sang all right–and whined, purred, roared, called, coo-cooed, snapped, susurussed–and one day when I was nearly to East Bay: the sky opened with miles of thunder then lightning.

I was within a handful of klicks of those lights. I'd seen no roads, no foot paths, no buildings, no smog, no smoke, nothing that constituted the background of human life on Earth or Mars. I doubted that Manhattan would suddenly spring up on the horizon.

As the sun set and I built up my fire, I sat staring northeast. With more computing power, I could calculate just how lucky I was to have walked this far without breaking a limb or taking a bite with lasting effects. I hadn't once thought how odd that the trees were spaced far enough for me to walk between. Predators here were small–why? Not confined to an island or limited resources. I ruminated moodily on how nothing I'd seen had spoken to me, even in a language I didn't know and would probably be unable to produce.

The clouds cleared out, the sun set behind me, I squinted my eyes nearly out of my head staring up the coast to the coordinates of those lights. The scientist inside stepped down and I let her even if I wasn't going to let her go far. On the ship we'd had photos, models, analyses. And yet my heart was in my throat as twilight drifted in. Belief in the unseen is one of the miracles of science. But here I was only an ape, out of place, off-planet, spending all my energy on hoping I was not alone.

The horizon glowed. Even as pink tinged the land to my back, ahead of me something lit up the night.

#

Oh, the anticlimax of a failed hypothesis! Next morning, scientist in first place, I packed up, took readings of the weather, pictures of the landscape as I went. Ahead of me was a forest, although it lacked conifers as I know them. Like pines, the trees tapered off at their height. I imaged them. I climbed one–or tried–only to find that their leaves overlapped like the scutes of armadillos and I could not separate them. They filled the horizon to my right and left where the lake did not.

I hesitated to walk among them, so closed off, their tightness transferring to my own muscles. Myself-the-explorer sat down, half a klick away, and started a camp. The scientist drank data in droves, making and discarding bad theories about humidity and aerosols and airborne space cameras.

Mid-afternoon, tired, I sat and stared. My ears opened. Here only the insects intruded. I kept my crayons locked away and worried that I'd run out of storage for the images. What did those yapping schnauzer fauna know that I did not? I nearly laughed. So many things. How to live life on a goldilocks. I waited.

At dusk, the insect life increased. They swarmed and tasted.

The trees, now, they did another thing entirely.

Their leaves fell open, slowly unfurling as the darkness descended, top down, layer after layer unlifting, unloading their burdens.

And they glowed. Like the Eiffel tower, like the Great Wall, like cities on fire.

The frenzy of the insects grew palpable. I nearly stood myself, caught up in the chuttering, the buzzing, forgetting I lacked wings entirely. Mob by mob, they reached the light and sizzled, crisped, dead, their bodies cascading into the wide leaves, open to catch them.

And as night passed and their solar panel storage emptied out, I watched the leaves eclipse still-burning trees to close, to funnel the sugars shaped as insect lives into the maws of plants, most likely to be returned to carbon and hydrogen and built up again into different sugars structures.

I wept. For every mosquito I'd sworn at, fly I'd swatted, ant unloved and unnoticed I had trod to death. This goldilocks digest insects like I gulped air.

My lights, my signs of life, of speech, of space-faring intelligence, of a lifetime unraveling the secrets of a world, were death traps.

#

I have the rest of my life here to become a specialist: an entomologist edging the field forward, making up for terrestrial blunders. Survivalist might be a better focus: here and now, and making more here and now. In the burnt pink before dawn I wonder: did they argue about whether to leave me? One life, not too long or too short, too brilliant–bright–oh, for a lightless adjective! I'll eat both the hot and the cold porridge, I'm no longer picky.

###

Mary Alexandra Agner writes of dead women, telescopes, and secrets in poetry, prose, and Ada. Her latest short fiction is “Chilaquiles Con Code” in the Journal of Unlikely Cryptography; her latest book of poetry is The Scientific Method (Parallel Press). She makes her home halfway up Spring Hill; she can be found online at http://www.pantoum.org.

The Cure

William Delman

The taxi pulled off into the night behind me, and I walked the last two miles down Wildflower Drive. Behind a twelve-foot high, broad plank fence, the farmhouse radiated a halo of visible light. I passed a faded sign for Carver’s Farm. My rucksack sat on my back like a slab of iridium.

The spotlight caught me where I was on the path, and I heard the sound of an ancient shotgun being chambered to fire. I shaded my eyes with my hand and set my sack on the ground.

“Simon? Is that you?” my sister called out from the dark.

“Yeah Dee. It’s me. Could you kill the spotlight? It’s been a long trip.”

The darkness fell like a blanket while my scotopic vision recovered. Two blinks were all it took, but I was reminded again of how much I’d changed in twelve years.

A heavy latch clinked, and there was the creak of old timbers straining against poorly attended hinges. Dee pushed the gate open and stood back, holding the shotgun against her shoulder just like our father had taught us. After a five count, and a quick glance in both directions, she lowered the weapon but didn’t rush out to meet me.

I hefted my sack over one shoulder and walked toward her slowly, smiling, until I reached the gate.

“Get in here.” She hugged me with one arm and let me step over the threshold. With another glance behind me, she shut the door and pulled down the crossbar. There were holes in the gatehouse roof large enough to let me see the stars.

“You look good.”

“Thanks. Take your boots off,” she said, tugging down on her pull straps before scraping the soles against the bottom step. I took a seat next to her and did the same.

“I see you and Sean let the copse grow up a bit around the walls. I like it.”

Dee grunted. “Trees should have been pruned months ago, but I haven’t had time.”

“Still working at that bank outside Kingston?”

“Every little bit helps. Sean does what he can, but...”

“I’ll talk to him.”

We sat and looked at the sky like we’d done so often as kids. When Dee was born I was already six years old; we were close until I hit my teens and started making everyone’s life miserable. Those years had left a permanent distance between us, one that had scarred over into long periods of mostly comfortable silence.

Seven years after Dee, our parents had tempted fate again and had Sean. By then I’d mostly been through my rebelliousness, but Dee had taken up the cause with a quiet vengeance.

Maybe it was the extra years that made the difference, but where Dee and I had been siblings and friends, I took to Sean like he was my responsibility. For a while at least.

“I don’t know if it’ll do any good. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s sick. I’m worried it might be more than the bottle.”

“Could be. If he’s drinking the way I did then it’ll be tough to tell until we dry him out.”

When Sean turned seven I taught him to shoot, throw a punch, and hammer a nail so he wouldn’t have to learn from our father. Old Bill had mellowed by then; the years spent turning over the soil—while the broken climate heaved and bubbled around us—had taken a lot of the fight from him, but he was still an exacting, short-tempered taskmaster.

Then I turned twenty-one. I’d had enough of Shokan and the farm. Smart enough to want more, too poor for college, and desperate for new horizons, I took my agro experience and joined the MCP.

“If I kicked it anyone can. Sean included.”

Dee sighed. “We’ll see.”

The Martian Colonial Project was still in its infancy then. A public-private adventure, the MCP was putting together willing and mostly qualified crews for what they called “the next great human adventure.” They had plenty of advertisements featuring sparkling testimonials and beautiful photographs of healthy, smiling, rustic settlers.

In reality, they were launching groups left and right, in almost any can that passed a cursory inspection, with enthusiastic government support.

After three years working on agricultural projects for the MCP, I heard the colonial government was putting together an official police force. They were offering training and better pay, so I jumped.

“Did you tell Sean I was coming?”

“No.” It was hard to tell in the dark, but I thought Dee’s expression was somewhere between anger and exhaustion.

“Why would I, Simon? You haven’t been home in over a decade. You don’t call or write more than a couple times a year. You missed Dad’s funeral. And Mom’s...”

She turned away from me and choked something off. “If you couldn’t tell from looking, things haven’t been great since you left.”

“Is that why you’re standing guard with an antique?”

Dee sighed. “The sentries stopped working right about six months ago. They started taking shots at any mice or gophers that got within thirty feet of the walls. Bullets are expensive. Besides, I had to shut them down after Sean got hit.”

“What?”

“It was only a graze.” She shrugged. “He was stumbling home sometime around dawn. The system should have detected his pass-key and let him through, but,” she tapped the band on her right wrist “his doesn’t seem to be reliable anymore.

“I can’t count on him leaving or coming home at any particular hour, so it’s safer to leave them off.”

“What about the equipment barn?”

“Locked up tight, but that’s all. Hey, shooting star.” She pointed at a patch of sky, but by the time I looked up whatever she’d seen had burned up in the atmosphere.

“Make a wish,” she said. “Truth is, we don’t really need all these silly guns and walls anymore. Kingston is practically empty and most of the towns around here are just ruins with a couple of auto-plants nearby. Honestly, I’m more worried about coyotes these days.”

We sat for another second. Finally, Dee clapped her hands on her pants and stood. “Ready to head in?”

“Sure. I guess Sean’s not here?”

Dee shook her head. “Took off this morning with a couple bottles and his painting kit.”

I nodded. “Any chance I might get something to eat?”

Dee laughed as she opened the door. “Good to know some things never change.”

The living room was darker than I remembered: an empty fireplace, scarred wooden floors, and cheap, auto-built furniture that looked like it had been bought years ago gave the house an atmosphere of quiet failure.

Dee switched on a half-dozen lamps. Across the room, close to the fireplace and small open kitchen, was the dinner table I remembered. A big, ovular slab of deeply stained maple sat on a pair of ancient looking sawhorses. I still had a few memories of our mother’s father showing up with all the pieces in the back of his piecemeal truck that had always smelled like fried potatoes.

Dee pulled two plates of cheese from the cooler, along with some smoked sausage and bread. She set them out with a pair of forks and knives.

I sat down across from her and broke off a chunk of bread before slicing up one of the sausages. Dee didn’t say anything more. After a few mouthfuls, I stood to put the kettle on, and started looking through the thinly stocked cupboards. “Tea?”

Dee nodded. “Mugs are in the last one on the left.”

I came back with the mugs. After taking a sip I put my cup down, placed both hands flat on the table, lowered my head, and sighed. It had been a long trip.

In one quick motion, Dee took her knife and put its blade through the back of my left hand, withdrawing it almost as quickly. There was a tiny spurt of red; I cried out in surprise, but the damage had already been nearly repaired. I barely had time to feel the pain.

She pushed back from the table and stood, still clutching her knife. “So the rumors are true. You Martians really aren’t human anymore.”

“Dee! What the hell!” I jumped up and cradled my hand out of reflex. “Have you gone crazy?”

“I don’t know Simon. What the hell does crazy even mean these days? I’m spending my life split between a disintegrating farm and an empty bank. My brother, your brother, is a fall down drunk pretending to be a painter, and you’ve become some kind of robot-Martian hybrid.

“Every other news story these days is about how the Martians are getting ready to declare independence, how gangs of Martians are killing people in the streets, and you’d rather live in the middle of that than here. Not that I blame you for that last part.”

I looked down at my hand. There were a few dried flakes of blood. I brushed them off and sat back down, keeping an eye on Dee.

“First off: I’m human. Taking the cure didn’t make me an alien, a machine, or anything else you might have heard. Hell, all they do is stick a few needles in your arm. And once the laws on Earth finally catch up with what we’ve accomplished on Mars everyone else will get the chance to see that.”

“Whatever.”

“Second: Martian or Terran, we’re all human, at least as far as I’m concerned. And I’m your brother. Whatever the politics of the moment, and no matter how far we’ve drifted, that hasn’t changed. Doing what I do, working for the Arsia PD, is my way of helping. And that’s why I’m here. You called. I came. I’ll do what I can.”

“Guess it’s just too bad for Mom you didn’t feel that way when Dad died. Or when she got sick. Or when she died.” Dee put her hands on her hips and turned her back on me. After a second she went to the cabinet under the sink.

I listened while she rummaged around, trying to get a grip on my anger. It wouldn’t help anyone if I lost control and started shouting. The fact that she’d been right didn’t make things any easier.

When she stood back up she had an unlabeled bottle in her hand that was half full of moonshine. She found a glass, poured herself a belt, and took it down. Finally, she turned back to face me.

“And third,” I continued, “Sean isn’t pretending to be a painter. Just because he’s a drunk that barely paints, and just because no one actually buys paintings anymore, that doesn’t mean he’s not a painter.”

Dee smirked. “Sort of like how just because your body’s full of a billion little machines, and you’re a detective, that doesn’t mean you’re not an idiot.”

“Exactly.”

We both laughed. Dee glanced at the bottle and then at me. “So, with all those bugs running around inside you, does that mean you’re…” she finished the sentence by wagging her empty glass at me. I shook my head.

“Like I said Dee, taking the cure doesn’t mean a person isn’t a person, and just because that stuff can’t kill me that doesn’t mean I can pick it up. Once a drunk, always a drunk, at least as far as this one’s concerned.”

She frowned, but nodded and put her glass back on the table. “Do you mind?”

“Nope.”

She poured herself another before hiding the bottle back under the sink. When she was done she washed out the glass, put it back in the cabinet, and laughed.

“I don’t know why I bother. It’s not like he doesn’t know where the still is.”

“You and Sean kept the still running?”

“I think it might be the only thing on the farm he cares about.”

Silence fell between us, and it was as if all the travel fatigue I’d built up over the last three-plus months came crashing down at once. I could barely lift my head. Dee startled me by putting a hand on my shoulder.

“Sleeping in your chair,” she said, clearly a little amused. “Come on. You can fall down in your old room. I think the sheets are clean.”

I got up to follow her down the hall when we heard the sound of someone pounding on the gatehouse door. The micros in my cells went to work, and I felt my energy return. I’d pay for it later, I knew, but I was too apprehensive to care.

“Sean?” I asked, looking at Dee. She looked uncertain.

“Probably.”

Then we heard the voices. There were at least four of them. I half-recognized one as belonging to Sean, but not the others. They were a loud and messy chorus, halfway between joyous and angry. I took a quick look around the room.

“Dee, where’d you leave the shotgun?”

She looked at me blankly for a second, then toward the door. “Normally I keep it by the door. I must have left it in the gatehouse.”

“Maybe we should greet Sean and his friends. Even if that thing is ancient, drunkards and weapons are a bad combination.”

She sighed and tossed me a heavy flashlight from the kitchen drawer. “You go ahead. The other flashlight is in my room.”

I went outside and waited for her. When she came out, I noticed a slight bulge at the small of her back, where she’d hastily untucked her shirt.

Sean had barely managed to open the gate when we’d reached the gatehouse. He saw me, squinted, and shaded his eyes.

“Who’s that?” He slurred. “Dee? Who’s here?”

I turned my beam away from him and toward the other men stumbling through the door. I recognized Sean’s escorts; they were a rougher, more haggard bunch than I would have expected, but then Sean didn’t look much better.

I did a quick pass with the light at belt level to check that none of them had anything in their hands, or tucked away too obviously in their pants.

“Hello Sean.”

“Simon? Is that you?” He ran the words together into an almost incomprehensible mash, and smiled as he started stumbling toward me.

“Simon, that can’t be you. You’re a Martian now.” When he came within arm’s length he quirked his head to the side and lost his balance. I got a hand under one of his arms in time to keep him from falling.

“Whoa there, easy kid.”

“Simon! It is you. How’d you get here? Hey, guys, you remember my brother. He’s some kind of Martian robot cop now, or something.”

His face turned queasy. Sean pulled away, turning to look at the bunch that had come in with him. None of them had noticed the shotgun yet, resting against the wall behind them.

“Damn it Sean,” Dee bellowed. “What the hell were you thinking, bringing those three here?”

“Oh, hey Dee! Simon, didn’t you go to high school with Bill, Ted and John?” Sean pointed in the vague direction of each man, and turned his watery eyes back to our sister.

“I met them down at The Rusty Nail and thought they could help out with a few things tomorrow.”

Dee’s expression confirmed what my instincts were telling me: the situation was dangerous. “Get in the house Simon,” she said evenly, without taking her eyes off the strangers.

“Oh come on,” Sean pleaded, elongating the ‘o’ into a groan. “I was just going to unlock the barn so they could get some sleep.”

“You’re not going out there and cracking open more bottles. Now get inside.”

“What the hell, Dee! They were nice enough to make sure I got home okay, and you’re just going to toss them out? What kind of person—”

“Sean.” I put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “You should go inside and lie down. Let Dee and I take care of your friends. Okay?”

He squinted at me with suspicion, his eyes unfocused and swimming around in his skull. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d been where he was, with someone trying to help me land somewhere safe while I babbled and argued.

“You’re really going to take care of them, Simon?”

A nervous quiet fell over the yard while I tried my best to look Sean in the eye. It wasn’t easy with his head bobbing around. I was repeating a little mantra in my head, the same one I always fall back on when things seem like they’re about to go sideways: maha prajna paramita.

I looked at Dee.

“Yeah,” she said. “We’ll make sure they find someplace to sleep. Now get in the house.”

“Oh, okay.” He bowed his head.

After Sean trudged inside, he fell on the couch with an audible crash. Bill took a step forward, holding his hands open at his sides while his friends stayed where they were.

“Dee.”

“Billy.”

He spit on the ground in my direction. “Simon.”

“Hello Billy. Good to see you’re doing well. Out on parole?”

He spat again. “Screw that. Free man for three years now.”

“That means you only did, what, five years on an armed robbery, with another four on parole?”

“Yup. Early release for good behavior.” He smiled at me. I wished he hadn’t. On him, the expression looked like a prelude to bloodshed.

“I told you three not to come around here after last time.” Dee was keeping her beam in their eyes. “As far as I’m concerned, you idiots are trespassing.”

“So, you a Martian now, Simon? And a cop, too. What do you think boys? Does he look like an alien pig-boy?”

Ted took a smirking step forward, while John shifted back toward the antique shotgun. Dee turned her flashlight on John and put her right hand on her hip.

“Now I know you three are in a stupid mood tonight, but John looks like he’s getting ready to do something truly Darwin-worthy.”

With the same speed she’d shown in the kitchen Dee suddenly had a very modern looking pistol in her right hand. John froze.

I calmly walked around my old classmates and picked up the shotgun. No one else moved, or said anything. Most of the immediate danger seemed to bleed out of the air.

“Let’s all just take a breath,” I said. “No one wants to go to prison—or back to prison, right?”

“Come on Dee,” said Billy, “we just wanted to make sure Sean got home okay. And besides,” he pointed at me, “we were curious to see what a real, live Martian looked like.”

Dee’s expression hardened.

“Maybe you think I’ve forgotten that you three nearly got Sean killed last season, or that you never finished the work on the barn because you were too busy getting my brother hammered. Or maybe you forgot I said I’d shoot you the next time you set foot on my property?”

“Okay, okay.” Billy put his hands up. “Listen, we’ll just head back into town. Besides,” Billy looked at me, “I wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing that thing was under my roof.”

He started backing away, followed by John and Ted. I advanced, step-for-step, shotgun at the ready, and shut the door after them. Dee set the crossbar and double-checked the latch. Then she tucked the pistol back into her pants and put her face in her hands.

“I can’t believe he brought them here.”

“Drunks have been known to do some stupid things.”

“This was beyond stupid.” Dee started walking along the fence perimeter. “Billy and his friends are junior NA.”

“What’s that? Some kind of local gang?”

“Seriously, Simon? Don’t you pay any attention to the news? The Natives’ Alliance. They’re basically a bunch of right-wing thugs, criminals, cracks, and would-be revolutionary types that think everyone needs to go back to wherever the hell they’re from. They have chapters all over the planet, which is kind of ironic, since they’re supposed to be anti-global. The NA made a name for itself in the US by threatening to bomb a government building or two.”

“And let me guess: Martians are the only thing they like less than cops?” I shook my head.

“Exactly.” She stopped for a second. “Did you take a taxi to get here?”

“Well I thought about walking from Kingston, but I left my hiking boots about two hundred million clicks back thataway.” I jerked my head toward the stars.

“Did you tell him where you were coming from?”

“I wasn’t chatty, but yeah, I might have mentioned something.”

“Damn.” We started walking again. “Well, that explains it. Billy’s cousin must have been driving. I’m guessing every Nativist in forty miles knows there’s a Martian cop on the Carver farm.”

“Is that bad?”

“Only if enough of them get bored, angry, drunk, or feel like burning something to the ground.”

We didn’t say anything for a while. Dee occasionally stopped to shine her light on a rotting plank in the wall, or a piece of rusted rebar, before scowling and moving on.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” she finally said. “They’re a tough crowd to motivate. By now, I’m betting most of the ones around here can’t walk a straight line.”

“Still, maybe I should give the local chief a heads up, just to let them know I’m here.”

“Professional courtesy?” Dee looked at me with surprise. “Those little robots rewired your brain too, huh?”

I tried to smirk. “Something like that.”

By the time we made our way back to the front door Sean was banging around in the kitchen. The kettle was screaming, and the smell of burnt toast was wafting through the air. Dee walked in without taking off her boots and switched off the stove. Sean was rooting around under the sink.

“Did you want tea?” she asked. The tone of her voice could have frozen water.

He went still, then shakily managed to back out of cupboards. “Yeah. But I think maybe I should just go to bed.”

“I think that would be a good idea, Sean.”

I watched from the couch as he tried to stand, gave up, and crawled out of the room. Dee collapsed at the dinner table. I thought I could hear a few quiet sobs, but knew better than to acknowledge them. When she stood, her eyes were red but her face was determined.

“Do you want a blanket or anything? I’m going to set the alarms and collapse. I’m supposed to be at the bank tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be fine.” I tried to meet her gaze, but she looked away before I could.

“Dee,” I said, “what if I could fix this? All of it.”

“What are you talking about?”

I grabbed my rucksack from where I’d left it by the front door and started unpacking. At the bottom was the strongbox—a small, black carbon-fiber rectangle with an alphanumeric lock.

When I placed it on the dining room table Dee shuddered and sat back down.

“Is that what I think it is?”

Without a word I keyed in the code and opened the box. Six identical vials were resting in beds of dense smart-foam, along with a single hypo. When I looked at her face I could see a mixture of excitement and fear.

“Where did you get that stuff? How did you get it through customs?”

I tossed my wallet on the table, along with my shield. “Where doesn’t matter. As for customs, I just checked the bag with my shield. The transport company assumed it was official and let it through without a scan.”

“Can I...?” She reached out to pluck one of the vials from the tray, but drew her hand back. “What’s it really like?”

“If you and Sean do this, you’ll live longer, and heal faster.”

“A lot faster,” she said, glancing at my hand and then looking up at me.

I nodded. “Your body will become highly resistant to illness, and radiation. Your eyesight and night-vision will get better than they’ve ever been. So will your memory. You might also notice a few other physical improvements, increases in strength, speed, stamina, that sort of thing. You’ll sleep less. And you’ll never be able to get drunk or high ever again.”

She swallowed. “Sean would be cured.”

“Yes,” I lied. I didn’t want to get into the finer points, how addiction was a mental, as much as a physical disease, or how there had been cases of alcoholics taking the cure, only to kill themselves later.

“But we won’t be human anymore. Not really.”

“That’s a load of crap.” It came out louder than I’d intended, angrier. Dee startled back. “You’ll both still be as human as anyone else,” I said, lowering my voice, “but it is true that there’s no going back. The micros will work their way into every part of you, and there’s no getting rid of them.

“There are a few non-philosophical drawbacks, too.” I sat down across from her. “You and Sean won’t be able to stay on Earth. As Terran citizens, under current Terran law, having micros in your system would mean quarantine.”

“We could always hide out and apply for asylum if we’re discovered.”

I shook my head. “No way. If the authorities catch either of you here while you’re still citizens of Earth you won’t stand a chance. Not to mention the fact that I’d probably get named as a co-conspirator. The only way this works is if you’re willing to leave everything behind. Once the two of you are on Mars I can pull a few strings and get both of you fast-tracked.”

“What about Sean?” she asked. “What if he doesn’t want to go?”

I went back to my rucksack and pulled out three boarding passes. After sliding them across the table, I picked up one of vials, and took the hypo out of the case.

“We don’t give him a choice. I inject him in his sleep, tonight.”

“What about transit body scans? Or can you walk us by customs?”

I shook my head. “I’m just a Martian cop, so no breezing through security. But the micros take time to multiply. I’ve been told it can take a week before they’re detectible. And they don’t generally scan Terrans for micros on the way out.”

“A week isn’t much time.” Dee grew quiet. Her eyes surveyed the small living room and kitchen of the house we’d grown up in, and settled on the front door. “What about the farm...”

I shrugged. “My apartment isn’t huge, but I can still help both of you, let you find a fresh start in Arsia, if you’re willing.”

I placed the vial and hypo back in the box. After a second, Dee shut the lid. The security lock silently re-engaged. I reached out to gather it up so I could hide it back in my rucksack, but Dee stood and put her hand over mine.

We stood there, and I could see the struggle on her face. She’d been expecting me to come home and pitch in around the farm; maybe I’d help Sean realize he had a drinking problem, introduce him to some people that had quit, or at least get him thinking about asking for help.

Instead, I was offering to burn down their lives.

It was a lot to process.

“How long can you give us?” she asked.

I grimaced. “Not as long as I would have liked. I only got the sabbatical because I claimed a family emergency involving a life-or-death situation.”

“You used Sean,” Dee said. It wasn’t meant as an accusation, but it still made me feel guilty. I nodded.

“I also told my captain that my family was thinking about relocating to Mars to take advantage of our medical options. All in, she gave me six months, on top of my banked vacation. That means I need to be back in orbit within the next ten days.”

“Dammit Simon.” She got up. For a second I thought she was going back to the bottle under the sink, but she just stood there with her back to me.

When I’d walked out of the house twelve years ago, I’d done it without a second thought, without considering how my exodus would affect the people I’d be leaving behind.

At the time, I thought I was being brave, striking out on my own without hesitation. As the years had passed though, I’d finally been able to admit the truth to myself: I was afraid that if I thought too much about leaving, and everything that could go wrong, I’d never get out the door.

I had only been able to act because I’d chosen to ignore the consequences. Dee didn’t have that luxury. On top of that, I was saying we should make the decision for Sean.

But what I was really doing was asking her for permission. When the realization hit me I felt like a piece of dirt.

I should have been there when the world started falling apart. Instead, I’d been chasing my own freedom, first on another planet, then at the bottom of a bottle, and finally through sobriety and the cure. I’d been running from my family for too long.

I made a decision.

Dee must have heard me get up and key the strongbox lock. It’s possible she didn’t recognize the sound of a hypo being loaded. I put a hand on her shoulder and she turned around to face me.

“I can’t fix the past,” I said.

Then I took one of her hands in mine, pressed the hypo to her neck, and pulled the trigger.

###

William Delman’s poetry has appeared in many fine publications (Nimrod, The Literary Review, SHAMPOO, The Massachusetts Review), and his chapbook, The Possibility of Recovery was released by Cervena Barva Press in 2009 (available here: http://www.thelostbookshelf.com/d.html#William Delman). This is the first story he’s published in the SF genre. He lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with his beautiful wife Jessica, their surly Maine Coon, and a pair of well used kayaks. He’s on twitter @24_17_project.

That Place Between Déjà vu and a Memory

J. Daniel Batt

“Did you know taste in music is genetic? Play a few familiar chords on that guitar, and if she strolls by, even though it’s been three lives later, I can promise you’ll snag her attention.” The voice in my earpiece drones on. It’s my voice. Well, not exactly. It’s me from my last life. From what I can tell, I get “teachy” as I get older.

My voice continues, “You are you more because of what’s encoded in that helix called DNA than anything else. Did you know that they developed rejuve from watching a type of jellyfish? Supposedly, there’s some jellyfish deep in the Indian Ocean, or maybe the Pacific, that when they hit old age can reboot their cells down to fetus level and start their lifecycle again.” I did know that. The last me has told that story over and over in the recordings he left for me. The first me was 127 years old when he went through rejuve. The second me did it when he hit 58. And now there’s me. “If you’ve been watching these recordings in order, and not skipping ahead, you’re about twenty-two.” I’m listening, not watching. I can’t stand to see myself that old. And I’m about twenty-two. The last two me’s felt I should have some instructions to make it through life.

“So, get out your guitar and go sit on that bench and find her.”

The guitar is on my lap and I’m sitting on a bench overlooking Folsom Lake, the skyline of the cities around stabbing the sky, the clouds straining through their apexes. “Because she’s worth it,” the voice says. She is, supposedly, my wife. I’ve never seen her. In the recordings, they’ve described her to me, at length, from every freckle to that odd bang that twists and curls no matter how much she works to straighten it. “Don’t just listen to me. Listen to yourself.” The recording makes an odd click and a far older voice, my voice, crackles with a rasp hanging between each word. “She’s worth it, dumb ass.” That’s the very first me. 127-year old me. Apparently, I become a bit of a curmudgeon when I get real old.

The 58-year old me comes back in. “See. She was worth it the first time and she was worth it the second time and she’ll be worth it the third time. You don’t tend to get a lot right in life. Even having two goes at it, you tend towards some dumb choices. Lapses in judgment and a love of old folk songs are genetic. She’s worth it. In two lifetimes of dumb choices, she was one of the few right ones. Maybe the only right one.”

I strum through the half verse and chorus I’ve learned, looping through the song with a stutter. I never learned the full thing.

“The first time we saw her, you were sitting on this bench as the sky slowly turned russet, convinced you were going to become a rock star.” It’s odd hearing myself talk about my past and not get confused about my future. This isn’t time travel. It’s more like reincarnation with Cliff Notes. She fell in love with me twice but there’s no guarantee that on this go around it’ll work. I’m just dumb enough to follow the instructions. It’s worth a shot because as they keep telling me, “She’s worth it.”

So I sit here and listen to myself talk and watch the geese along the water. But I’ve still not found her. She’s not here. She wasn’t here last week. She wasn’t here the week before. A life of circumstance could’ve steered her far from here by now. They’re convinced this will work but all I have is a location for coincidence and a song.

“You won’t remember a thing. The rejuve process is a wonder but it rewrites everything, memory included.” It’s true. Mostly. Somehow, when I first came here, I knew this lake. I knew this bench. I knew the smells and the sounds. The scent of drying sand, the laughs of paddle-boaters, and the lapping of the small waves were all familiar to me. I’ve heard these notes somewhere between déjà vu and a memory.

“She’s not choosing to leave herself a record. She hates tokens. Always told me, ‘Live now.’ She’s not leaving herself these types of records. She’s captured by the idea of a fresh start. She keeps saying, ‘Love found us twice. Maybe it’ll do so again.’ She’s wrong. Love didn’t find us. I found her again. So find her. Find her because she won’t find you.”

And while I haven’t seen her in this life, a face with bright brown eyes floats in that place between déjà vu and memory. I’ve risen from sleep and that face has floated in fading dreams. Maybe she was so much apart of me that she’s become encoded into me, like music.

The last me continues to teach, “Make sure to learn that song...” I reach up and click him off. I’m done hearing myself.

The walkers on the paths wrapping around the curves of the lake are growing fewer. I’m alone as the sun drops and the sky turns copper. And I wait, strumming slower, letting the fading hours spread apart the notes.

From behind me, I hear a young voice. “You might want to consider taking lessons. That’s pretty bad.” I turn around, still playing the one chorus I’ve learned.

And there she is. The brown hair with a singular, resisting curl flopping above her brown eyes, a brush of freckles across her nose. It is the face that I’ve woken to in two lives and I’m seeing it for the first time.

She looks at her shoes then at the guitar. “I told myself you’d be here.”

I stutter, pulling my hand from the strings as the final note is lost, “But I thought...I was told that you didn’t do that. That you wanted a fresh start.”

She takes a step closer, standing a foot away, “Some things are worth remembering.”

###

J. Daniel Batt is a writer, designer, artist, teacher, listener, and creator of communities. He serves as the Creative and Editorial manager for 100 Year Starship, creating visual engagement for 100 Year Starship programs and activities. He serves on the Space Settlement Board for the Lifeboat Foundation and has been a panel speaker at the 2011 DARPA / NASA 100 Year Starship Symposium, a speaker at the 2012 and 2013 100 Year Starship Symposiums, and host for the Sci Fi Author Night at the 100YSS Symposia. He is the author of the children’s book series The Tales of Dreamside. He is currently working on an MFA in Creative Writing. He and his family make their home in Northern California where they are currently working through their 100 step plan to taking over the universe.  They are on step 19 and everything is going perfect! He can be found online at www.jdanielbatt.com and on Twitter at @jdanielbatt.

Mirror of Stars

Frank Smith

The signal thrashes like a kite through waves of interstellar clutter picked up by the comm system: explosions on the surface of suns, electromagnetic distortions, and radiation crashing against cosmic winds—the signal.

Mek was cruising through the main belt in his solar-glider, the Aurora, searching for a clear broadcast of the signal. For a kid who grew up under the crowded domes of Vuzz this was as close to heaven as he could get—no over-recycled air crapping up his lungs, no big brother cams ensuring he wasn’t taking more than his share of food or fuel. Just Mek, his solar-glider, and the vastness of the cosmos.

Overpopulation was the problem. Give up your place under the domed cities of Vuzz, said the Imperium, and we’ll give you an old solar-glider, some supplies, and a trade route to keep you busy. Best of all, you’ll have the stars.

“I’ll have the stars,” said Mek.

The Aurora banked left. Mek folded forward in his chair to adjust the navigation controls and avoid some rocks.

As the glider slowed to a cruising speed, Mek could move around the cabin. He needed to shake some of the junk out of his system. In the belt, he’d have to travel at a slower speed to avoid hitting any of the uncharted asteroids, while the glider’s solar batteries recharged. Raiders patrolled the belt, he’d heard, picking up slaves to run their ships. But his solar-glider was small, and Mek had never met a bad situation from which he couldn’t escape.

Mek unbuckled from his chair and stretched out. The initial journey from Vuzz to the belt took six days at high speed, full out. Mek was on his way to Urm, a poorly vegetated planet on the other side of the belt. Urm was one of the old worlds—the first worlds—that had been strip-mined and abandoned by the Imperium, creating opportunities for a canny businessman like Mek.

Bursts of radiation noise and waves of static blasted from the speakers. Mek cranked up the volume. To Mek, the signal was like a living thing—a phosphorescent creature, riding along cosmic waves alongside the Aurora. There were no decipherable phrases, no words that were familiar to him in the tinny signal, but the sound contained a pattern.

Mek heard something in the signal that existed nowhere else in the life that he knew. Music. Laughter. Things foreign to his culture. Things they’d left behind. His people had no time for creating music. Life was work and music was a luxury.

After sifting through static, Mek grabbed onto the deep basso tones of a male voice. The messages of the signal—alternating, repeating—were often similar in dialect, similar enough for Mek to note that all of the languages he had ever heard in the signal originated from the same planet.

Mek drifted in zero-g to his seat, his body now heavy with fatigue. To stay alert during the trip out with the glider at full acceleration, or “jump-space” as the pilots called it, Mek inhaled an aerosolized cocktail of amphetamines. Nausea reducers helped to avoid choking on his puke, zoledronate supported the growth of bone mass, and a muscle relaxer kept him from grinding his teeth into moon dust.

With the effects of the drugs sifted out of his system, Mek felt the minerals in his body rattling around. He needed sleep. The voice of the signal narrated his dreams.

#

The Corsair shuddered as it left jump-space acceleration and reduced speed to slow steaming. After a run-in with a flotilla of Imperium scout ships a few weeks back, the raiders were down a pilot and half the crew. The ship was cycling through the belt to retrieve emergency supplies they’d buried in one of the asteroids.

Interstellar fuzz blasted through the communication speakers, filling the cabin with white noise. Jehn chucked off his headset, watched it float in zero-g next to his head, and ordered a deck officer to cut the static chewing through the comm system.

The ship drifted in its familiar silence: the atmo system pushed white noise; the engines hummed; computers whirred and chirped.

Jehn eased back into the chair, winced as the bands strapped around his biceps injected him with a muscle relaxer to come down from the amphetamines. The sudden shift in Jehn’s body chemistry blasted him with nausea.

"There’s something unusual out there," said Druillet, the first mate. “I’m isolating the readings for you and porting them over to your station.”

“Unusual?” Jehn said, fighting a bout of the sweats as he squinted at the readout on his screen.

The data was a migraine-inducing blur to him. Jehn wanted to ignore it, life would probably be easier that way, but unusual can be good, Jehn thought, and good can be profit.

"Show me," said Jehn, joints popping as he unbuckled the straps that held him to his chair. He undid the bands that pumped the drugs into his arms and ejected the waste pod from around his undercarriage. Jumps made the captain realize how high-g forced the human body into a seat-shaped pile of burbling goo.

Sighing, Druillet dragged up the readings she’d sent to Jehn and pointed out how the little green dot in between all of the little red dots was a strange kind of ship and not part of a new asteroid family.

Druillet left Jehn to ponder the significance of the little green dot, while she worked out some ship issues with Oona, the chief technical officer. Oona had been monitoring the status of the wheezing jump-drive, which was nearly toasted.

“We can make it to our supply site and back out, but if we don’t replace the drive soon, we’re going to be dead in the water,” Oona said.

Druillet had begun taking a tally of the medical supplies, which consisted of a few emergency kits and a case of Ornonian brandy, while also trying to work out a deck officer schedule that might give the staff some downtime.

“Just keep the drive together as best you can,” she said to Oona. “Once we’re restocked on supplies, we can focus on the drive. It won’t matter if we’re all dead anyway.”

Oona grumbled as she kicked off the ceiling and floated in the direction of the engine room.

Jehn swam around the bridge, feeling at home amid the gloom. His ship was a relic of the border wars—a former transport unit that had been converted into a smuggling vessel. With its patched-together hull, the ship was a mish-mash of rusted steel and dull chrome that was powered by the most toxic, radioactive shit in the galaxy.

Though the Imperium could care less about the colonists in the backwater worlds of the outer-rim, it still cared quite a bit about smugglers—especially the ones that stole goods from Imperium-protected ships and diverted these goods to the colonists. Maybe his living wasn’t honest by the Imperium, but Jehn was at peace with his work.

"So, the energy signature," Druillet said. “It’s a small craft. Do you recognize what kind?”

"Huh," Jehn said. "Some fool brought a solar-glider to deep space."

“Is there a station out here?” Druillet said. “Or an asteroid colony?”

“The worlders give those away to idiots. Most just bop along the approved routes, running chores for the Imperium for less than what it costs to keep ‘em alive under a dome. Since this isn’t an Imperium route, the pilot must actually be making some profit,” Jehn said. “It’s bold, though. Not even the oldest of old-timers will pilot a solar-glider out this deep. You need a ship like the Corsair, with the fuel reserves, to keep up a steady burn through the nowhere lands.”

“His transponder is broadcasting that it’s a cargo hauler called the Aurora.”

Jehn listened to his ship as it creaked. Their recycled oxygen tasted of bad breath, the drinking water was brackish, and he couldn’t remember the last time he he’d eaten anything that wasn’t a puréed mycoprotein.

Through the cabin window, with its raised dead light, Jehn stared into the depths of the Eagle Nebula. He imagined its pillars to be the final remnants of a galactic civilization of impossible beings. His people had once believed in gods—in a mighty, omnipotent force. After centuries of war, bad terraforming, and tentative colonies, they'd lost their beliefs.

“A solar-glider in deep space. You don’t get to see that every day. I think I’d like to meet this pilot,” Jehn said. “Keep our transponder off. If we’re going to sneak up on him, though, we’ll need to bring up the cloak.”

“We have a functioning cloak?” Druillet said.

“This is a solar-glider we’re talking about. Old tech. We’ll raise the mirrors,” Jehn said. “And scare the shit out of him.”

#

The signal had returned to shattered noise, electric waves being pummeled together into squelching dissonance.

Closing the broadcast of the signal, Mek yawned and thought about what he might like to eat.

The radar system blooped, announcing that the Aurora was perilously close to smashing into something—a new asteroid family, an uncharted hunk of rock, a big ol’ question mark. A tube of meat-flavored protein drifted from his grasp, as Mek toggled up a feed of his current position on the monitor. He jabbed at the controls.

The stars were different. He double-checked the charts—and the stars were still different. The Aurora was somehow occupying a fold in space where the stars in front of the ship mirrored the stars behind. Mek’s chest felt tight, and he had the sudden urge to fire up the thrusters.

How long had he been adrift?

Sweat beading on his forehead, Mek went to check his current position against the point where he’d left jump-space.

The Aurora’s sensors screamed. Every light that could turn red was blazing. Mek swiveled in his chair, trying to absorb all of alerts that were going off at once.

He experienced a moment of unreality, where he felt like he could see what the back of his head looked like.

The proximity alerts said he was going to crash, that some fool ship was parked right on top of him. Mek scrambled at the controls, praying he had time to swerve clear before—

Before he looked like an even bigger fool.

A massive ship dropped out of cloak, pinning in the Aurora. The ship resembled a block of iron shattered in half. The dented chrome on the ship’s starboard side had been recently patched up from a firefight. Rail guns jutted out from the ship’s superstructure, their sights trained on the Aurora.

As the larger ship dropped its cloak, its sidelights bathed the Aurora in their glow.

The Aurora was not in position for a clean jump to Urm. Mek ran jump calculations through the navigation matrix anyway. He’d clear the belt, sure, but without time to shape a course and avoid running into an asteroid, Mek would be lucky to smash into some small, shitty moon on the outskirts of Nowheresville.

The radio transmitter kicked on as the raiders took over the Aurora’s comm system: “Prepare for boarding.”

Small dead moon.

Nowheresville.

Raiders slave ship.

Mek smashed his fists against the nav system and banged out a quick course correction. The Aurora swiveled so its nose was pointing away from the raiders’ ship while Mek jacked up the thrust. If he could outrun them long enough, he could calculate a jump. His ship was smaller, which gave him maneuverability. He’d slip away, while the raiders trudged behind. The glider’s exhaust ports scorched the side of the invading ship as it shot free.

A missile exploded against the glider’s stern. Mek eased off the thrust and reconsidered his options. The raiders lobbed a final missile near the Aurora’s aft and let it pop.

Mek killed the engines. Message received.

#

Jehn tromped the halls of the Corsair, flanked by a small compliment of security officers. Their boots magnet-locked their feet to the deck upon contact. Jehn’s body ached from the strain of each step. Without better drugs, his bone mass was deteriorating at a troubling rate. He had acquired the poor eyesight, brittle bones, and enlarged skull of a true raider. It had been years since he’d been planetside.

Jehn was of space now.

As a child on the desert-planet Orn, he’d met star-travelers that had to wear spacesuits with the arms and leg-joints reinforced by braces when they came planetside or else be smushed by the pull of gravity.

Jehn had traded the wastes of Orn for a chance at joining a raider crew. As part of his initiation, he’d spent a week, alone, on an asteroid. The raiders had left him with an atmo dome, a deep-space suit, some expired tubes of food protein, a pistol with one bullet in the chamber, and no clear promise they’d return.

Alone on that asteroid, Jehn had learned what made a person solid, how they could navigate through space and survive: you attacked life until your body quit or someone stronger ended you.

Jehn clomped to a halt outside the launch hangar and waited for the atmo to balance.

When a digital monitor pinged, the heavy blast doors shuddered open, revealing the Aurora moored to the flight deck.

Jehn sucked in a lungful of air.

The solar-glider looked like a fat pigeon, with a narrow beak and thick neck connected to a round belly. The ship’s wings were retracted against its hull, once painted a golden brown. Much of the paint had been scraped away to reveal gray chrome panels, scuffs from docking clamps, and pounded-out dents in the hull. Even though it looked rough, this relic hadn’t lived so long because it had been mistreated. Until some loon flew it into the belt, the glider had probably only been used to make a Sunday’s drive of a circuit between planet and space station.

Checking the action on his pistol, Jehn directed the security staff to stand watch at the glider’s aft hatch. They waited for the override codes on the ship’s locking mechanisms to be hacked. Though the Aurora’s pilot had surrendered and let them dock his ship, he hadn’t thrown open the cargo doors.

Jehn’s control of the situation was subjective.

#

Mek stashed a compact laser-welder in his boot. He had an assault rifle that he kept just for show, which he decided against loading. When the Aurora’s cargo-bay doors shuddered open, he pulled along a handrail that ran on ceiling of his ship’s cargo hold to meet the slavers. His magno-boots grabbed the floor. Mek’s body swayed as he adjusted to being rooted in one place.

The raiders who poured into the cargo hull were dirty and shaggy, but their guns were well-oiled, military-grade weapons. The rangy captain of the raiders entered last. Except for the knee-high magno-boots, he was outfitted in the simple colonists’ garb that Mek also preferred: jacket, bag, and leather belt. He had the craggy, weathered face of a man who’d spent his life in deep space, breathing recycled atmosphere.

“Permission to board,” said the captain.

When Mek didn’t respond, the captain rested his hand on the butt of a pistol strapped to his leg.

“I’m Jehn, captain of the Corsair.”

“Mek. I hail from Vuzz.”

“Pretty little place, I hear. From under the domes, anyway. Rest of it is the kind of bad terraforming that gives you blood disease.”

“My parents lived on Vuzz before the domes were built, when we thought the atmosphere was safe.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Jehn said.

Without acknowledging Mek, the raiders pawed through a motley cargo of herbal supplements, dried fruits, and reconditioned medical scanners: not quite junk, but far from a haul.

“It must make you sick to lose your goods,” said the captain. “Even if it is a cheap bunch of shit.”

Mek flushed. His shit was not cheap. He wouldn’t have risked a non-Imperium route to peddle garbage.

“Still,” said the captain, “any man who can find business is a man worth knowing.”

“I won’t have much business to scrounge up now,” Mek said.

“You had to know this was unfriendly space. What brought you out here?”

Mek shrugged.

“What else have you got on this boat?” said the captain. “Vitamins and busted medical scanners aren’t going to keep my ship afloat.”

The captain clomped through the empty hold with his back to Mek. He kicked at one of the metal plates that made up the floor. The sound it made was hollow.

“If you leave me be, I’ll give you a cut of the profit after my cargo’s been delivered,” Mek said.

“I don’t think you understand how this works,” said the captain. Jehn released the magnets on his boots and turned 180 degrees so he faced the floor. He pressed against the ceiling panel until he felt it pop, revealing a latch that opened a hidden compartment in the glider’s cargo hold.

“People need that,” Mek said.

“I’m sure they do,” Jehn said, turning to face Mek again. The captain held a container of anti-radiation drugs.

“There are a few mining operations left on Urm,” Mek said. “They need what I have to bring them, and they pay all right.”

“Well, now they have a new distributor.”

“I have work to do,” Mek said.

“You had work. What have you got now?”

Mek shifted his stance, feeling the weight of the laser blaster in the cuff of his boot. The captain was prodding at him. “You tell me,” he said.

“A solar-glider like this,” Jehn said, “can go places the Corsair can’t. A man who can pilot one of these is handy. My crew, you’ve seen ‘em, have strong backs. Piloting requires some intellect.”

“What are you offering me here?”

“Smart kid like you should be able to figure it out.”

Mek drew the laser-welder from his boot and leveled it at the captain.

“Get back on your ship and get out of here,” Mek said. “You’ve taken my cargo, that’s all you’ll get. I’ve heard about you raiders. I won’t be anyone’s slave—and I won’t give up my ship.”

“I’d hoped you were smarter,” Jehn said. He drew his pistol without letting his eyes leave Mek’s face.

The recoil of Jehn’s pistol made Mek’s ears pop.

Mek’s gun hand stung. The laser blaster skittered across the deck. Mek kicked off the magno-locks on his boots and went reeling in circles through the zero-g cargo hold. Reaching for the handrail, he had a vision of getting to the cockpit, igniting a quick burn, and punching a hole through the Corsair’s hull.

A scrum of raiders swarmed around Mek, punching and pushing and pulling until he collapsed against them and could fight no more.

As he was hauled from his ship, Mek kicked at one of the raiders, driving the tip of his boot into the man’s ribs. The raider cracked Mek in the knees as recompense. Had he been under full gravity, he’d have been crumpled on the ground like a beaten dog.

Mek put up no fight as he was manacled and tethered to a support beam. He dangled at a distance from useful surfaces.

Under the bright lights of the hangar, Mek watched as the raiders sifted through his goods, sorting his cargo into groups of what they could sell, what they could use, and what they would jettison.

Keeping his distance, Jehn clomped near Mek’s side.

They watched as a raider carried an assault rifle and an ammo belt from the Aurora. The captain whistled.

“Now, had you met me at the door with that, we could have had a different conversation. One that began on more equal terms—captain to captain,” he said.

“Captain to captain? But you’re slavers. The Imperium says—”

“They say a lot of things; like how a man given a solar-glider is free. Is this freedom to you?”

“Let me go back to my ship,” Mek said.

Jehn forced a laugh. “You drew a laser-welder on me. Might not have been a pistol, but you could have done the job,” he said. “There were a lot of things I could forgive. Can’t let that go easy.”

#

Mek’s breath fogged up his helmet’s visor. His bulky spacesuit limited his movements. Spare life-support tanks attached by hoses to his suit. His smallest movement propelled his body deeper into the void. The raiders had given him some hope of life, at least, before jettisoning him, protesting, through the airlock. The boxy life-support units were strung to each other like beads.

Four days. He had four days of breathable air. Four days of nothing but his thoughts rattling around the interior of his skull. He flexed the fingers on his wounded hand. Waved goodbye.

The Corsair accelerated. Small asteroids bounced off its hull as it lurched out of sight.

#

A low whistling of radiation noise crackled through the speakers of Mek’s communications rig. He breathed short breaths, savoring each small taste of oxygen.

He drifted, slept when it happened, stargazed the remainder of the time. In one moment, the awesome beauty of the infinite overcame him: the pinpricks of distant stars, the swirling fog of cosmic gases. In the next he was overcome by the eerie face of the infinite looking back at him.

The familiar repetition of the signal was being broadcast over his suit’s comm system. The broadcast of the signal was clearer than Mek could remember. In the face of the cold void, the sound offered comfort. The voice in the signal became a man’s voice, there were children, the raucous laughter of a crowd, and music—sweet bursts of foreign music.

Alone in interstellar space without the metal of cloaked raider ships or a solar-glider to interfere, the signal was clear, washing over him like rain.

Beautiful.

#

One of the life-support tanks kicked its last breath. Mek ejected it from the chain of air pods tethered to his suit. He watched the empty tank turn end-over-end as the force of its ejection carried it away.

Mek stretched to look past the asteroids and stars in every direction for a sign of a ship: the Corsair, his solar-glider, anything. He fooled himself into thinking the explosion of a star hundreds of millions of miles away was an Imperium scout breaking out of jump-space.

By the time anyone passed through here again he’d be long dead.

Someone else had to hear the signal. Someone else had to be foolish enough to fly through the belt.

Two days of life were left in the life-support units. Two days of air. Two days of drifting. Two days to consider how he wanted to die.

#

Orchestral music drew to a crescendo. Stringed instruments held onto the last note for a long desperate measure. The music clutched Mek by the throat, choking out his emotions, and let go. An audience erupted into applause.

The signal went dead. The static died out.

Mek hummed what he remembered of the song to fill the silence. Starved of any stimulation other than the signal, Mek continued to hum—confusing his voice for that of the signal. When he paused to take a deep breath, the absolute silence of space confronted him. He’d lost the signal.

“No!”

Gulping oxygen desperately, he clawed at his fogged visor with his heavy gloves. Like the raiders, Mek was burning up fuel for no reason other than to stay alive. Slavers. He’d been told they were slavers. And that he was free amongst the stars. He pressed his eyes shut, swallowed air, listened for the sound of blood pounding through his body. He relaxed.

Mek touched the sides of his helmet, feeling for where the glass dome met the braces that held the suit together. He had enough strength to pop the braces, break the latches, and let go.

The signal returned for a brief moment, filling Mek’s helmet with the sounds of a child. The voices of his father and mother. The sound absorbed him like a blanket. He understood their language, their words.

He understood.

The signal was clear.

Mek made a decision.

#

Jehn thought of Mek, wondering if the boy had passed the test. To have a man on his crew who could pilot a solar-glider would be a hopeful thing. Jehn wanted to see what the boy truly was inside, to see what kind of stupid he was, if he could learn to be the right kind of stupid. First, he needed to have his bad instincts burnt away.

As the ship slowed, the deck crew unbuckled from their chairs. “I’ve found the transponder on his suit,” Druillet said, her eyes skirting away from the captain. She isolated the dismal beeping of the transponder, joining it to the subspace chatter that crackled through the ship’s comm speakers—the signal, the siren song that had brought men better than Mek out to the depths of nowhere.

The suit’s life-support systems were flat. Jehn smacked the side of his monitor to see if he could jar the data into offering some life-sustaining chirrups. This was a boy who had flown a solar-glider into deep space. A boy who had left the safety of the Vuzz domes to risk wasting his body away in zero-g. He had seemed so strong.

Jehn unhooked from his chair and swam toward the bank of screens that monitored the exterior of the ship. The raiders had crawled near the origin of Mek's transponder signal. An empty life-support unit bounced off the hull of the Corsair—its echo drowned out by the hum of engines and the white noise of the atmo vents.

"His suit is broadcasting a message," Druillet said, opening a channel.

The speakers crackled with noise of music and laughter. The crew paused in their tasks and listened, for the first time, to the signal made clear. Instruments they didn't know—buzzing woodwinds, thundering brass, and sweeping strings—worked together, fluid like machinery.

A voice, one familiar to Jehn, said, “I am here. I’m here.”

As the suit’s life-support unit chirped, the broadcast shattered into static, and the signal bled into the ambient voice of the cosmos.

#

Jehn met Mek in the hanger.

The young man’s eyes were wider than before, unfocused. He shrugged out of his spacesuit, gulping air, his skin tight against his ribs. Mek bounced against support beams and the hull, without caring to correct his drift. He saw the Aurora still in its docking clamps and didn’t care. He’d thought the ship was freedom—the stars—but it was the same deal as what the captain got.

Mek allowed Jehn to grab him by the arms and hold him as still as the captain’s magno-boots would allow.

“You with me?” Jehn said. “You have a place on my crew, if you want it.”

“We can’t keep going like this,” Mek said.

“No,” Jehn said. “But we keep going until we don’t have anything left.”

###

Frank Smith is a Brooklyn, NY–based writer. His writing is forthcoming in Asimov's Science Fiction, and has appeared in The Morning News, McSweeneys.net, and Pindeldyboz. Read more at frank-smith.com and follow him on Twitter @frnksmth.

Nestmaker

Jared W. Cooper

Rhis,

When you were younger, you asked me what your name meant. I told you it’s short and rhymes with peace, and you got so frustrated, I had to laugh. It’s a name of the new world, like mine. Your father had an Old World name, and we wanted better for you. Like the villages around us, we believed that names could embody their meaning and bring it into the world. “Rhis” means enthusiasm, and I’ve never had reason to regret that.

I hear you’ve applied to Haven’s grad program, and I truly hope you get in. Imagine what Nest would be like with half the technology they have! We hear rumors, of course. That Haven’s brightest minds can regrow bones, make new livers, even detect aneurysms before they happen. The villagers don’t trust it. They say that kind of knowledge attracts the wrong sort of minds, but they’ll come around when the traders bring the tech to us. We all love the medbay; why should this be different?

I know you’ll get in. When you do, maybe you’ll come visit Nest before you’re whisked off to study? I know it’s not an easy trip, but you’re so lucky to have the gift of dunewalking at all. I’m still Nestmaker, so I can’t leave, otherwise I’d be on the next caravan to see you!

Sending love and good health. Don’t party too hard, and write back if you can!

- Mom

#

Rhis found Nest as she left it, in the cast-off edge of the desert. She found it because she needed it, not because it used to be home, or because she was Nestmaker’s daughter. She found it because she was just like the waves of people she’d seen in her childhood, bleeding and hurting where it couldn’t be seen.

And she found it empty, save for the sandstone tech embedded in the sloped crater walls. Desert machines could sense life, but the buildings had gone cold, inert. The oasis water lay still and clear like a dead, open eye.

A part of Rhis wanted to investigate, wanted to know if she had to mourn. She’d left Nest when it was a loud, busy village, the groans of the injured blending with the bustle of those working to mend them. She could still hear her mother’s voice, directing the flow of drugs and laundry, getting water here and there, negotiating with merchants. Nestmaker always got what she wanted.

Every time she’d thought of coming back, she remembered their fight. She’d rehearsed her apology for years, polishing it in her mind for the day she’d come back. She envisioned her homecoming, emotional and dramatic: the prodigal daughter returns, and both her and her backwater village have bloomed to their full potential.

But Nest was empty, and—like Rhis—was no better for the years she’d been gone.

The houses were the same ones she’d climbed on as a girl, with the same sandy corners and faded awnings. Some of the windows had the familiar vacancy that spoke of looting, but the tech was asleep so they had to be empty. Her mother’s house, Nestmaker’s famously humble cottage, had begun to collapse from disuse. Rhis felt naked when she saw the buildings so bare, as if she hadn’t left the desert at all.

A cough tore through her chest, then the searing pain in her throat. She spat blood on the sand but kept herself upright, and forced herself to stagger over the dusted cobbles. She had to wake the medbay.

Even for sick bodies, desert machinery was responsive, eager to help. The door should have slid open, followed by lights and scans and soothing artificial voices. But when she pressed her hands to the door, it only twitched, hesitant. Like it wasn’t sure she was alive. She could see the full-body scanners on the other side of the uncracked glass, could even see the drawers where the meds would be.

“Run curative response suite,” she said, her voice dry and thin.

“Quarantine passcode,” the wall said. The mechanical voice was new to her, the bay itself untouched by the sharp winds and sandstorms that had eroded most of Nest’s finer features.

“Override,” Rhis said. “This is an emergency. Eco deficiency, stage four. Full-body degen, neurological degradation.”

“Quarantine passcode,” the machine insisted, almost gently.

“Shit.”

“Incorrect.”

She swallowed. “Nestmaker: Ceraje.” Doors had always opened to her mother’s voice, so bright and clear.

The sandstone went silent, deliberating. After a moment, a low grinding sound filled her ears, as if the medbay were shaking its head.

“Incorrect vocal pattern.”

“No!” She pounded her fist on the glass. “Open up, you bitch! I’m dying.” She grit her teeth, forced herself to stay calm. She felt another cough coming up, felt like her lungs were unfolding. “Activate emergency protocol.”

“Quarantine passcode,” the medbay said again, and she could have sworn it sounded proud.

#

Rhis,

I just wanted to remind you that it’s okay to put dunewalking on your CV for postgrad jobs. Tell them it’s not magic at all: it’s folding your will over the desert to make travel easier, that’s it. It’s efficient, and it shows you have a strong mind. Employers will like that. Maybe don’t bother with Haven anyway—the merchants tell me it’s getting more violent. But they had great things to say about Grove, so maybe try there?

In your interviews, tell them you grew up in a new world environment. They won’t frown on that. Tell them you’ve been dunewalking since you were ten. Your father came to it naturally, even tried to teach me, but I think you need Old World blood (although I think ‘Eco’ is the “PC” term now).

It’s how we came to Nest. Did I ever tell you that? When he found me in Harbor, I knew so little of the world beyond that little crater. People came and left, and sometimes we traded with the caravans. That was the only life I knew, until I met him. He came out of the grey sand with a merchant group, sword on his back, grimy and bloody. He came to me with that easy smile he always had, and asked to use my hot water. I didn’t stand a chance.

One year later, I knew about Haven and Grove and Aegis. I knew how to barter with the caravans. And you were already on the way. I could dunewalk. Me, a new-worlder, because I had an Old World life inside me! I still shiver with glee when I think about it, gliding over the desert with just a single, focused thought. You brought me here as much as anyone else.

I know you’re busy with graduation and looking for a job, so don’t feel bad if you can’t write back! I know you’ll do great, whatever you put your mind to.

You should see Nest, now that we’ve started trading with the local villages. We have doctors from Haven, and the medbay has the expert diagnostic suite. It’s amazing how quickly it can identify and treat diseases. Some families are even settling down! I’m always busy, but if you come by, I promise I’ll have time for you. You’d love it.

Stay well,

- Mom

#

Dunewalking came to her like breathing. It was about stretching your days into weeks, spreading your body so thin that your shadow turned to mist. Rhis had crossed countless miles of dead sand to get home; she didn’t know how long it had taken. The thrill had worn off a long time ago.

The deficiency ate at her. Her father’s blood was thin and old. She had just enough Eco that it hungered for more, and ate what it could find when she didn’t have the right supplements. Supplements that were only just so far away.

She could never be Nestmaker. Nestmaker was a mother, a healer. Even in the cities, Rhis couldn’t outrun her mother’s reputation. She heard stories of the woman of the oasis at the edge of the desert. Nestmaker could heal anyone, could save them from the brink of breaking. Rhis couldn’t even stir the medbay.

But she could wake the village tech.

She lit the houses first. What little activity she could stir from their sensors, she nurtured. In her own room, she pressed her cold palm against the scanner on the wall, updating her bio-stats on the home interface. They woke, building by building, one protocol at a time. She spoke to them, even tried to sing, and they kindled in the presence of her voice. Maybe they thought she was Nestmaker, calling them back to life.

She wondered if she could imitate her mother’s voice to open the medbay, but when she thought back, she couldn’t envision the warm, soft tone of the woman who’d brought her into the world. She only heard Nestmaker, her gentle insistence, her inability to understand that anyone could refuse her.

“Haven is far,” she’d said, years ago.

Younger Rhis, fat-faced and too fond of sweatpants, could only roll her eyes. “We’re in the toe-end of nowhere, Mom. Everywhere’s far.”

Her arms were shaky from the work, and her legs ached. She warmed the water while Ceraje gathered towels. They both had blood up to their elbows, most of it dry.

“Sanctum is closer. They have a school, too, and you’d be closer to home.”

Rhis had wanted to say that that was the point. Why run away if you couldn’t run far? Distance was just an idea to a dunewalker. She could come back just as easily. As she set down the tub of water and plunged her hands in, she said, “This isn’t my place.”

Ceraje sighed. “Of course it is.” She reached for Rhis’ hands and washed them. Her grip was strong, rhythmic. “I want you to go where you’re happy, but it’s a mistake if you’re leaving just to leave.”

Rhis frowned. “Look at you, though. You came all the way out here and brought medicine to a lot of people. Nest is your creation, and you’ve nurtured it. I can’t nurture anything in here.”

“I built Nest,” Ceraje said, “but you’re my girl. And I won’t be able to do this forever.”

“They won’t call me Nestmaker,” Rhis said.

Her mother smiled at that. “I’ve always thought it was a terrible name.”

Rhis wanted to talk it out, to keep fighting, but Ceraje wanted peaceful silence. And Nestmaker always got what she wanted.

She lit the electric lamps on the crumbling roofs. She swept the red cobbled road that wove like waves between the buildings. She worked the oasis pumps like rubbing feeling into a deadened limb. She warmed each bed without sleeping so they’d remember what it was like to hold a life. She didn’t eat or rest or stop to let herself think. Like dunewalking, time was what she made it.

Looking out over the empty village, Rhis realized there were few ways someone like her mother could have died in a place like this. She didn’t want to think about any of them.

When all the homes of Nest hummed with soft, welcoming lights, she went to the medbay.

“Quarantine passcode,” it said, with eternal patience.

Rhis stared at it, motionless with disbelief. She wanted to be sad or angry enough to cry, but the pain took her. She bent double, gagged, like the sickness wanted to retch her heart from her chest.

It had never been so violent. With a pang of raw, animal fear, she realized she’d been dunewalking the whole time. Too much of her Eco had been spent. She couldn’t leave if she wanted, on foot or otherwise.

She half-crawled, half-limped home. She needed her mother’s voice. She needed Nestmaker.

#

Rhis,

I’m so sorry about how I acted. I finally get to see you and I go and do all the things that drove you away in the first place. I shouldn’t have pushed you. And I won’t, if you come back. Please, remember, I am always on your side.

Don’t listen to what they say. Barren is such a hideous word, and it’s nothing like what you are. You’re not Eco-deficient; you’re gifted. There’s a big difference. Some people in this world think having Old World blood makes you inferior or unnatural, and they’re wrong.

If they could only see what you were like as a child. You were such a handful, all smiles and questions and radiance. The people of the village told me, when they named me Nestmaker, how they owed their livelihood to me. How I mended their souls and made them forget the desert’s abuse. And every single time, I told them—I still tell them—it’s because of you.

When your father left, I almost broke. All those nights I spent with you, sick with worry and doubt, refusing to realize he was dead. They aged me before my time, and I’m sure I picked up a few things even the medbay couldn’t fix. For all the things we’ve cured, the desert finds new ways to take from us. But you are the fire that keeps me lit, and that will always be true.

I’d like to know that you’re okay, but I understand if you don’t want to write back. Nest is always here for you, if you need it. I hope you’ll come home if you need to.

- Mom

#

Proximity alarms ripped her from an empty sleep. She jerked up in her own bed. Blood and spit had dried on her shirt. Her teeth were loose, her gums hurt, her and her joints felt clogged with sand.

Outside were the first visitors to Nest, probably in years. Drawn like bugs to the signs of life within. Four men, armed, sand-stained and lean from hunger. One of them called to the others and pointed at the buildings, and they split up, but kept eyes on the oasis.

Rhis collapsed when she tried to stand, her legs thin and numb. She had to hold one hand with the other to tap the codes on the walls and shut out the lights. The engines whirred, as if the house didn’t want to power down so soon after waking up.

Nest was not a violent place. They’d never needed weapons, even when Rhis was a girl and they had few people to protect. This far in the desert, you only found villages one of two ways. The first, and most common, was by needing what it offered, being in sync with what the people there represented. Her mother had made Nest a place of life—power was how well you could set a bone or deliver a child. And while they were no strangers to removing bullets or treating burns, they’d never suffered a raid. Coming to Nest meant you would only leave alive if someone helped you.

The other way—the wrong way, depending who you asked—was dunewalking. Dunewalkers could go anywhere, take what they want and be gone before you knew they were there. But there weren’t so many that they stumbled into a place like Nest with the promise of violence.

Too bad for them, Rhis thought.

They heard her long before they saw her. Her breathing was ragged, her steps uneven, and the gun banged against her leg as she tried to hold it up. Every now and then she coughed, staining her shirt with blood. Her body and mind had surrendered the illusion of remaining whole.

She stumbled onto the red road, the gun dragging behind her. They all turned to stare, and she hated the pity in their eyes. When Haven’s students rioted, no one had pitied her. No one had put her first as the town was looted and the university burned with the faculty inside.

The men before her had been weakened by the desert, but they could have been dunewalkers for all that.

“You’re in the wrong place,” Rhis croaked.

The leader stepped toward her, then stopped when she lifted the gun. He put his hands up, trying not to sneer. “We know where we are, little one. This is where people come to die.”

“In such a hurry?” she asked with none of the confidence she felt.

He shrugged. “I’m saying we belong here. So do you, by the looks of it.”

“What’s wrong with you?” another called, his voice crisp like a soldier’s.

“Eco deficiency,” Rhis said. “Final stage.”

They frowned. Two exchanged glances, and the leader lowered his hands.

“You’re a good actress, honey, but we saw your medbay. No one able to fire a weapon would let themselves get to stage four without some kind of treatment.”

Rhis nodded down the road. “Go look for yourself. It’s closed, even to me. It only opens for the Nestmaker.”

The man laughed. “Sure, I’ll go take a look. And you’ll shoot me when my back is turned.”

“I’ll probably shoot you anyway.” She fought to keep standing. She didn’t want them to think she was faking, but it would be worse when they realized she wasn’t. “How did you get here?”

His nod was so slight, but Rhis had seen the gesture before. His men circled around her while he kept her attention, taking slow, obvious steps. He kept one hand up, as if in surrender, but the other hung close to the blade on his hip.

“Nest is for the dying who want to live. Way we figure it, that’s everyone. Once you get your head in the right place, you can go anywhere. No dunewalking required.”

"You've been here before," she said. "You killed her."

He nodded, looking guilty, if not sorry. He reached out, gaze drifting to the gun. “Easy, sweetheart. Just give it here…”

Rhis fell away into the world, into the soft, suffocating mist of the dunes.

At her best, she could have run literal circles around them. They should have been motionless as she wove the world to her will. As she was, she had to settle for the slow-dawning horror on their faces that, any other time, would have been funny.

She shot the back of his head, and his body fell at her own speed. She took the space of several meters with a light step and closed in on his friends. All of them too slow on the draw, all of them with just enough time to realize they were about to die before her gun’s shrapnel rounds opened them beyond repair.

It was the work of maybe five seconds, but she felt the stretched, disturbed fabric of time eat at her Eco. She forced herself out of it with a hard, ethereal step.

She dropped the gun, vomited. Bright sparks slashed across her vision and blood pounded in her head. The medbay seemed so impossibly far, but she walked, staggered, crawled.

She fell against the cold white door, calling out in what she hoped was close enough to her mother’s voice. The afterburn of dunewalking had never hit her at the same time as the pain, and it was enough to finally bring tears to her face. She reached up to the sealed handle, coughing a hot spray of blood onto the door, and fell into a warm, weightless dark.

#

Rhis,

A merchant came from Haven, wounded. News takes far too long to reach Nest, and he told me why—they’ve been burning all the mail to keep their riot secret.

I hope to God you weren’t there. I can’t stop thinking about it. People have been saying for a while that the world is changing, and they’re right. “Newbloods” are learning to travel, breaking the honor code of the villages. The merchant had stories I can’t bear to write down.

I’ve tried to stay strong for Nest, but it’s hard being alone in such a crowded place. Being Nestmaker isn’t enough anymore. They want to bring guns, or hire out to Aegis to set up a perimeter fence, but I refused. I told them this is a place of life, told them I’d die defending that. Oh God, listen to me, you’d think I’d given up. I won’t give up, Rhis, not until I see you again.

Thinking about you out there, following your dreams, always gave me hope. I can’t dunewalk, but maybe it’s true that blood really doesn’t matter. I’m going to find you, bring you home if I have to.

Putting Nest into stasis will take time, in case this reaches you and you reply before I set out. I know you’ve never written back, but if you can, please do. It will mean the world to me just to know you’re safe, even if I don’t see you.

I’m leaving the medbay running, as long as it can without someone here to wake it. I put it under quarantine lock so no one will come by and use its power while we’re out. I doubt they will, but really, I don’t want anyone to use it without me. I’ve set it so only my blood can open the doors. Mine, and yours.

If you get this, if you can, if you need, please come to Nest. I built it to keep you safe, and that will never change.

I love you. Always.

- Your Mother

#

The first time she’d dunewalked had been with her father. He took her hand and told her to think of a forest, a real one like in the vidspheres. With as many trees as there are stars in the sky, he said, green and lush and full of Eco.

The thought was so ridiculous, so fantastical, and yet ten-year-old Rhis could see the forest perfectly. Before that day, the world outside Nest had just been the boundless dunes under a brutal sky, broken and flat like something was missing.

He took her there and back, crossing the endless tracts of sand like they were nothing. His Old World body fed on the Eco, and he said it was still there for those who could feel it. Even the newbloods, if they tried.

But dunewalking was like dreaming, he’d warned her. A way to get wherever you’re going, but it had to end, or it would never be real. Even the dunes ended, and that, somehow, made them beautiful to him.

When Rhis ran away from Nest, the first thing she did was look for the forest again. She could never forgive her mother for not hating her father. The strongest, healthiest man she’d ever known, gone just like that. He said he went off to keep the world from getting worse, but it did anyway. Even Haven had collapsed in the end. Even Grove, even Aegis had been torn apart by newbloods. Even Nest.

She left thinking her father might be there, but really it was out of spite. Mostly, she wanted to prove she could find the forest again.

And she did. But it wasn’t a lush green field of endless trees. It wasn’t a flourishing font of life. It was just a copse, with barely any Eco at all.

It was dying.

#

The smell woke her, her own cocktail of bodily discharge. Her hand was numb from hanging off the edge of the exam table, and sweat stuck her hair to her face. The thin, mechanical arms of the medbay worked over her, smeared with blood from having dragged her in.

The door, she thought. Of course. That cough was all it had taken; her blood on the door, sealed now, with her on the other side.

She was too weak to sit up and look around, and fought just to move her limbs. But the pain was gone, and she recognized the painkiller that kept her head swimming. It was an effort to curl up and lay on her side, and even harder to speak, but she managed.

“Curative analysis.”

The medbay did not respond. It didn’t tell her she was cured, because there was no cure. The arm's needle fingers stitched her wounds and pumped Eco supplements into her blood. They worked with quiet, protective efficiency, but said nothing.

Rhis felt the village lights, the machine houses of Nest pulsing together. One person was enough, she thought. One person to bring it back to life. She thought of where she could go, once she could walk, and wondered who might follow her back. She would never hold a life within her, would never be free of her father’s blood.

But Nest, and now its maker, was alive.

###

Jared W. Cooper is a Jersey-born writer, editor, and short story aficionado. He loves the woods, the winter, and vision quests. His book reviews can be found at Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, and he can be found on Twitter (@jaredwcooper), or at jaredwcooper.org.

Sanctuary Farm

Garrick Fincham

Along a small back road from Somewhere to Somewhere-Else lies a farm that was clawed from red earth and ruins by my father when he came east, and he called it Sanctuary. The name was, as he always used to say, an aspiration, rather than a description, but much of what was terrible in those days missed our little corner of the world. I, at least, grew up believing everyone as happy as me, and I was in my man-ling years before I discovered that people often say less than they think.

#

On the first Tuesday of each month, the farm slave, my elder brother Vincent, and I would stand at the gate and look up at a place forbidden: the Red Mountains to the north. We would wait there for my uncle, who would drive past in his ancient vehicle, built before men could breathe the air. The battered sand-jalopy, with its chipped paint and bald balloon tyres that stood as high as my shoulder, would arrive in a kicked-up cloud of dust, and Father, a big and thoughtful man, would walk down from the house, muttering to himself. Then he would connect himself to the vehicle’s brain–a new one, freshly built by free machines–and access catalogues of agricultural supplies. Uncle understood my father, and never tried to trade things to him, just letting him look and choose.

“So, what’s new this time?” Father would ask, trying to sound world-weary, uninterested in all the new uses for old breeds. But he was interested–long ago, before he came east, he had discovered much of what we take for granted now. The old breeds had been new then, frightened and hiding in holes in the hills.

Uncle always smiled, a broad, genuine smile, and Father would always buy a little this, and a little that. “Just to see, you understand? I haven’t much faith in this new stuff, they interbreed things too much. God knows creatures mate enough with each other in this world, without encouraging things that oughtn’t to have a go.” Uncle would politely agree, even though the ‘interbreeds’ were his trade.

I knew what was coming next, and by now I would always be impatient, climbing up to peep in through the doors of the van. Father would stroke my smooth head with his clawed, work strengthened hand, and tell me that it was time to choose the seeds. Our farm grew mainly cows in those days, the seeds about a meter long, brown and leathery with a spike at one end. They sat in furrows in the red earth, moistened every week with precious water from the cistern, swelled, tightened, finally bursting. We dried the calves off once they’d hatched, and they soon ran out into the field to join the herd.

Father always said that seeds are all the same, or at least they had been when he’d first found them, long ago in his life before the farm. But they weren’t the same, and I always chose the best–we all knew I had a knack, and that was how we maintained the quality that kept our farm going.

#

Farming is a routine, day after day, year after year, and we follow the cycles of life as the world turns. Things carry on even when something different happens, like the time one of the calves was born with a massive, swollen head. We thought that it would die, but it lived, and the farm slave was given the job of tending it. The cow was a strange beast, and as it grew it got even stranger, its mouth like no animal mouth should ever be, and something very unsettling about its eyes. Then one day Father went to talk to the strange cow, and Vincent and I followed him.

“You can understand me when I talk, can’t you?” he said to the beast.

The cow regarded him, munching slowly, mouth moving up and down like ours do, rather than side to side like it should have.

“Nod if you understand what I’m saying–we won’t hurt you.”

The cow did not respond.

My father leaned casually against the field wall, taking up the story telling he struck when talking about the old days. “There was pig I found in the wild, once. It understood every word, and squealed like hell when The Guardians took it away. There was something about that sound that I could never get out of my mind, and I stopped hunting and finding then, and came away to farm. That’s why I only grow cows: they were pure, clean mutations. Now I’m not so sure, what with all the things that breed with each other…”

Vince looked at the cow. “What do we do with it, if it can talk? Kill it?”

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

It was the cow talking, of course. Vince fell over and I took a step back. Mother walked up from the house to see what was going on, and the cow introduced himself. Mother fainted, and I asked Father, who was still leaning against the wall, what we were going to do with the world’s only talking farm animal? He said that he didn’t know, and walked off to consult The Law, to see if there was anything to guide him. When he returned, he was shaking his head.

“The Laws are important,” he said, looking at the cow. “They protect us from Corruption. You might be Corruption, a mutation gone wrong, but I think someone bred you on purpose…am I right?”

The cow nodded quietly, sensing its fate in the balance. Father looked up at the pink sky, pondering. “There are no Laws to cover that,” he said at last. “I guess that means that you are free to go.”

I looked into the cow’s deep, man-like eyes, yellow and dust shielded, and asked: “Where will you go?”

“To the mountains, I think. I want to see what’s up there.”

Father snorted, and I said, “But the Law says that the Red Mountains are forbidden.”

“I am not covered by your Law. I am free.”

I watched the cow walk into the distance as Father stomped off, muttering.

#

The next season the farm slave left. It announced that it had served its legal time upon the farm, and it was time to go. Father consulted The Law, sitting at the kitchen table, and The Law was very clear on the point: even slaves had their rights. Then he dragged out an old and folded piece of paper, and read it through. “This,” he said to us all, waving the paper, “is the original warrantee for the slave. It’s functioned now for twenty years without cause for complaint. Slaves are devices of metal, sure enough, but they can think, and it would be cruel not to give them freedom in the end. Besides the free machines expect it when they hand over one of their own, and there’s enough war in the world without looking for more trouble.”

“Do we ever get a chance to be free?” Vince asked.

Father laughed, loud, hard and long. Finally he said: “Only when we die! That’s the price that we pay for owning the world.”

“That’s not fair”, Vince shouted, slamming the door and cracking one of the air seals as he left.

Father re-opened the door and watched Vince go. “No, I don’t suppose it is,” he said, “but it takes a very special man to be free when he’s alive.”

I looked at the slave, who had always worked well, had even been my friend, and asked: “Where will you go?”

“To the mountains. I’ve always wanted to know what’s up there. And after, who knows? I want to travel, and see this world that your kind own. I might even make my way down to Mons Town where the true humans still live. If I can get through their barrier, I’d like to have a look around.”

“I don’t know about Mons Town,” my father said, “but when you’ve seen what you want to see, don’t judge us too harshly.”

I didn’t bother to mention to anyone that the mountains were forbidden. That didn’t seem to matter if you were free.

#

I got up early the next morning to say good-bye to our slave, and to watch it go. It paused after crossing the road outside the farm, and waved at me. I waved back and stood at the gate for over an hour as the glittering metal figure walked away. Eventually, all I could see was sunlight glinting off its metal head, and then even that was gone. My father loped to the gate in the ground-covering stride that had once made him a great hunter. He stopped as he reached me.

“Coming?”

“Where?”

“To buy a new slave.”

#

About two months later The Guardians came, gliding in to land beyond the road, descending on their membrane wings. They were young, and later Father laughed about how old he must be, when even Guardians seem like children. He had ushered the rest of us out of the ancient room that, whatever else it had been in its long past, I had always known as the kitchen, and sat talking with them for hours behind a firmly closed door. Mother cried, Vince was very angry, and I was confused. Father was a good man, always sitting at the kitchen table consulting The Law. Why did The Guardians want him?

Eventually they left, flapping their wings in great swoops as they rose into the air. We rushed into the kitchen to find out what had happened, and Father, weary though he looked, smiled at us. “It’s been a long time since they wanted anything from me. I gave them everything I had years ago.”

“What do they want now?” Mother asked nervously.

“They had heard about our talking cow. They thought that I had bred it, but I told them how it grew. They were angry that we’d let it go, but there was nothing in The Law to say I should have done otherwise.”

“What did they want with the cow?” Vince asked. His voice was tight, sterner than I had ever heard before. My father looked at him for a long while before speaking.

“To know it, to understand it, so that they can write new Laws.”

Vince said nothing, just left the house for a walk. He didn’t even slam the door. I followed him, and found him standing at the farm gate staring up at the black bulk of the Red Mountains, outlined against the rich purple of the night sky with its small moon, and the long silver arc of the Phobos Ring. We stood together, silent for a while, and then he said: “Laws! Rules for everything. They control us, even though we wrote them. How can that be right?”

“They keep people happy. Father says that they protect us from Corruption, help us make sense of things as we change to suit the world.”

He walked away in silence, and I never saw him again.

The following morning there was a letter on the table. Vincent had gone to be free in the mountains, gone where it was forbidden to go. Mother cried all day and Father didn’t speak for a week. I taught the new slave how to plant cow seeds, and do the other tasks that my brother had done. After dark, every evening, I stood and smiled up at the Red Mountains, glad that Vincent was free. I was happy too, though, even with all the extra work, because I also knew that the world keeps turning and that we would manage. Oh, and there was a girl that I had met when we had gone to buy the new slave, her head smooth, her skin a gentle grey, and I was in love.

#

The next storm season was hard. The seeds failed, and we were forced to switch to sheep, which grow quicker but traded for less. The dust was heavy, we didn’t see Uncle for three months, and by the time he got to us we had run out of most of what we needed. Then Mother fell sick, and in less than a week she was dead. Father carried her out across the road to bury her facing the Red Mountains, to be with Vince now that she too was free. She was laid to rest clutching her old blue colander, so not free after all, I thought, but still cooking even in death. Still, she loved being in our kitchen, so I had to wonder if freedom mattered so very much?

I had lost my friend the slave, my brother, and my mother, but I knew that when the storms slackened I was to be married, and somehow the world didn’t stop. My father sat with me and showed me The Laws that, in his prime, he had helped to write. I would need to know, he said, when I was married, when I was a man. The Laws didn’t just exist for the sake of it, he said, they were instructions for living on the land, for growing things true, and avoiding terrible mistakes. When my father was young, men had built the road between Somewhere and Somewhere-Else, and life had been different, more dangerous.

This world, he said, is a place called Mars, and everyone on it was a true human, once, living in Down First if they were of Earth, or in the ruins if they were survivors of an even older colony here that had failed long ago. It was a time when everyone, even the survivors, needed Earth-air, and lived constrained by airlocks and surface suits. Then there came a time when the people of this world, or some of them at least, took fate into their own soft, pink hands, and changed themselves to suit the world. They lost their old selves, and gained a future for us all. They owned a world, then, a real world of change and life that grew from the once-sterile desert, but there was much to build. Life, even by the youth-time of my father, was harsh and often short. Many people died, but many more were saved by The Laws–they taught you to tell the difference between what looked right and what looked wrong, when everything around you is shifting.

As the storm-weeks passed Father grew distant. He was preparing for something, and I even thought that I knew what it was. When I was married, and he gave me the farm as my wedding present, I wasn’t surprised. I was even expecting it when he told me that he was leaving.

“I know,” I said, “you’re going to the mountains, to be free.”

He laughed. “The Red Mountains are forbidden, and I’m not breaking the law. Sometimes running is all wrong and being what you are is enough.” It was months before I found out what he meant, and where he went when he left.

#

I have two children of my own now, both good at picking out seeds, and we raise the best sheep in the district. Once in a while Father comes to visit us, to see how I run Sanctuary, and to talk late into the night over a cup of hot juice. We talked, once, about the days when this world was fresh with change, and he and my uncle had hunted for new animals that no one had seen before because they had only just started to exist. That was the time when the two of them attracted the attention of The Guardians, who were deciding which of the many mutants were right, and which were wrong. That was when The Laws were written, and when, finally, my father had sought Sanctuary.

“The animals are changing again,” he had said, once my wife and children were nesting for the night, “and it’s us driving the change this time. I said all along that they’re mating things that shouldn’t be mated, but I know why now. They are trying to make them cleverer–to replace the machine slaves. Pigs that can plant sheep seeds, sheep that can water the ground and dig furrows. That was where our cow came from.” He fell silent then, I remember, looking long and hard into his steaming cup before saying, “I don’t like it, but we must live with the world as we find it, not how we think it ought to be, and if The Guardians are content, who am I to argue? When they came to the house that time they were after the cow, but they were after me too, you know. Our cow isn’t the only new breed that got out before it should have, and strange things have been cropping up from Clear Water all the way round to Alpha Town. There’s going to be a new book of Laws, and they wanted people like me and your uncle searching farms and fields, hunting out the new, just like in the old days in the wild. I said no at the time, for your mother’s sake, but with her gone I said yes. I’ve been on the hunt again.”

“What about the pig you told me about?” I asked, “The pig that squealed when it had to die, the scream that stayed with you and made you come east?”

“Oh, I made that up to scare the cow–an old hunting trick. I never wanted to farm, that was your mother’s dream. I called this place Sanctuary to prove to her, to convince myself too, that I’d found a place to rest, but I was wrong. I was born a hunter, and I’ll stay one until I die.”

On other nights he talked of the places that he’d been, most of which I’d never heard of, but I was only really interested when he told me about Vince. There are many young people who live in the Red Mountains now, and Vince is their leader. There were many animals too for a while–mostly ones that could understand, but a few who could speak as well. Man and animal lived together for a while, but one bad storm season people were starving, and despite all that Vince could do to stop them, they survived by eating pork. After that, the cow that we had grown led the animals far to the east to hide, to avoid men. When the animals left, Vince made up The Rules so that people could be fed when they are hungry, and warm when they were cold.

One day I saw something glittering in the distance, and stood watching as my old friend the farm slave, battered and dented, walked up the road from Somewhere-Else. He told me about his adventures, about the abandoned towers of Big Junction, about the ruins of Mons Town, about things that would have to be seen to be believed. I patched three bullet holes in his casing as he talked, and thought to myself how much travel was overrated.

Once in a while people that I do not know knock on the farmhouse door. They come from Somewhere, or Somewhere-Else, and although they are new to me, they talk to me of my father, sometimes of Vince, and very occasionally of a cow that can talk. There was even a pig once that we found in the fields. It couldn’t speak, but it could understand, and every so often it would walk on its hind legs. I fed it, and pointed to the distant red cliffs and tumbled peaks, thinking of Father’s untrue story. The new Laws are still being written and when they have been I’ll do what a good farmer should, and call The Guardians when there is something strange at the field wall. Until then I’ll be kind to things that don’t yet have the security of being known about.

I inherited the best from each of my parents, I think. I take after my mother in that I am a farmer, and having heard about other people’s freedom I came to understand that everything I want is here, in Sanctuary, and so I carry on tilling her dream, my dream too, now. I take after my father, though, in that I work with what I find, not against it. I must obey The Law, but laws, and The Guardians that enforce them, are there to protect me, my sheep, and the family that I love. The world turns, whatever we do with our lives, and although I know that I’m not free in any sense that Vince, or the farm slave, or even our cow would recognise, being what I want to be means that I am free to be happy.

I find that suits me just fine.

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Garrick Fincham trained as an archaeologist, which gave him a profound interest in the way in which people interact with things, places and ideas, and how those things make people who they are. Amongst the things that make him who he is are the fact that he lives in one of the remotest parts of Norfolk, has two daughters, and keeps chickens and cats. He owns a small number of stuffed animals, likes growing apples of different varieties, and has a large collection of gramophones and old radios (working and non-working). He has written since he could hold a pen, and is currently working on charting the period 2000 to 3500 AD in story, history, images and (eventually) music. To follow the ‘Price of Starlight Project’ see his website: http://www.garrickfincham.com, or follow on Twitter @PofSL.

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine is an imprint of Bastion Press, releasing original works ranging in length from 1,000 to 5,000 words on the first of every month. As a new publication, our success rests on you, the reader. We do our part to put together the very best stories we can find, and continued growth and stability depends on the support of our readers. If you enjoyed this issue, please consider purchasing copies of additional issues. Word of mouth is also vital, so please tell your friends about us. Finally, donations are welcome as well and go directly to funding payments for our authors. You can read about all this and more at http://www.bastionmag.com.

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- Bastion Science Fiction Magazine

Table of Contents

- Editorial

- R. Leigh Hennig

- The Skip

- Clint Spivey

- Zip

- Emma Osborne

- Going Solo on a Goldilocks

- Mary Alexandra Agner

- The Cure

- William Delman

- That Place Between Déjà vu and a Memory

- J. Daniel Batt

- Mirror of Stars

- Frank Smith

- Nestmaker

- Jared W. Cooper

- Sanctuary Farm

- Garrick Fincham