by submission | Jun 15, 2008 | Story
Author : JT Heyman
Joe Zimmerman was walking down Main Street when the Cken Confederation teleported him aboard their ship. He found himself standing on a small dais in the ship’s central chamber, surrounded by the staring eyes of several dozen Cken council members.
A Cken arbitrator, atop a much higher dais, called for order in a singsong voice. Slowly the noise of the council subsided.
“Where am I?” Joe asked. Not the most clever words he could have said in his first contact with the Cken, but then not many humans had actually met Cken by that point.
A tall Cken , standing between Joe and the arbitrator, handed him a translation module and said, “You are here as part of a survey to confirm that Humans are complying with the Cken-Human Peace Treaty. I am the Cken Advocate.”
“I haven’t broken any laws,” Joe said.
“We’ll see,” the Advocate said. “State your name and place of residence, for the record.”
“Joe Zimmerman, Oldbridge, Massachusetts,” Joe said. “Earth,” he added after a moment’s thought.
“Are you familiar with the terms of the treaty?”
“I know some of it,” Joe said. “No military ships in orbit without announcement. You got some planets and we got others. I’m not a lawyer but it was in the news last week.”
“You know enough. You will be the Human Advocate.”
“What? Wait!” Joe turned to the arbitrator. “I’m not qualified.”
The arbitrator peered down at him and said, “Under the terms of the treaty, all Humans were to be made aware of its contents. You were made aware. You are the Human Advocate.”
“Where were you going when we subpoenaed you?” the Cken Advocate asked.
“What? Oh, the grocery store.”
“Do you have a list?”
“Yeah … I mean, yes, I do.”
“Present the list as evidence.”
Joe suspected he was being set up. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. The Cken Advocate took the list, read it quickly, then gave it back. Joe couldn’t read the Cken’s expressions. They were too … alien.
“What is the first item on your list?”
Joe looked at it. “Cake mix. My wife is baking a cake.”
“Baking. How … quaint,” the Cken said mockingly.
The Cken councillors whistled in derision. Joe recalled that Cken ate their food raw.
“The second item?”
“Milk.”
“Milk!” the Cken crowed. “A liquid produced by mammalian mothers for their young, taken by the Humans for their own consumption!”
The councillors called their disbelief in their singsong voices. Joe knew this was not going well.
“It’s soy milk!” he shouted.
“That may be,” the Cken Advocate said, “and we will certainly investigate your claims. Cooking food, though distasteful, is a Human fashion, and therefore irrelevant. Your consumption of milk does not violate the treaty, although it reveals Human willingness to use other species for your own benefit, which is troubling to anyone who signs a treaty with you.”
Joe began to relax.
“However, I dare you to explain the final item on your list, in direct defiance of the treaty! Read it!”
Joe looked at the list and his eyes widened. He read it softly.
The arbitrator said, “You will read it so we can all hear, Human.”
Joe Zimmerman never wanted to be famous He never wanted to have schoolchildren know his name and his place in history. Sometimes, you get what you don’t want.
He gulped and said, “A dozen eggs.”
The Cken councillors flapped their wings in horror amidst the calls for war.
by submission | Jun 14, 2008 | Story
Author : Aaron Springer
Papa said that they had to give us gifts. I like gifts.
The big dirty man gave Papa a basket of plants and Papa smiled.
Papa promised to go back to the sky and make it rain for them. I liked watching Papa make it rain. All the colors on the machine were pretty. Papa said rain is like water falling from the sky. I wanted to see it, and Papa said I could.
I looked up, dizzy because I couldn’t see the ceiling. Papa said there wasn’t a ceiling, only sky, but I didn’t believe him. There is always a ceiling, otherwise space gets in.
I looked at the kids in the group of dirty people that had come to meet our shuttle. How they could be so dirty I didn’t know, but the smell made my eyes hurt.
When I looked back down, one of the kids had gotten very close. He looked funny, with pieces of cloth on his arms and legs, and dirt all over him.
On our way, Papa explained that they worked dirt like he worked the sky, and, together, they made all of the food. He said sometimes the “Grounders” didn’t understand how important we were, and had to be taught a lesson. He said that sometimes they would stop sending food up the elevator, and he would turn off the rain, or worse.
Papa raised his arms, and a I felt a bit of water hit my face just below my eye. I looked up, and saw puffy white things. They were dropping water. That must be rain. I liked it.
On the way back, Papa explained that the people called us Rainmakers. He said that one day I would make rain, just like him. He handed me a yellow plant. He showed me how to split it open and eat the pale meat inside.
I was reading in school about something they had a long time ago.
I wonder what the Grounders would think of snow?
by submission | Jun 13, 2008 | Story
Author : Roi R. Czechvala
The orbiter hung inverted over the blue and white sphere of Earth. Three suited figures darted around her, checking for damage from the launch.
“How’s it looking Alexi,” came a disembodied voice over the suits com-link.
“There are a few small chips in the bay door, but nothing to worry about. I’ll take some photos and send them dirt side for the groundhogs opinions. Shouldn’t cause…what the hell?” As Major Alexander Pichushkin spoke, an inch wide crater appeared in the surface of the shuttle bay door.
“Hey guys, get over here now, we have a serious problem.” as he spoke, a second and third hole appeared. “Meteoroids… take cover in the bay…Move”
The men scrambled for the safety of the ships cargo bay. Commander Swarovsky’s voice boomed in their helmets. “What the hell’s going on out there? Report.”
“Sir, I observed what appeared to be three micro-meteor strikes in the starboard bay door. We have taken cover within the bay.” Pichushkin replied.
“Get back in here now. We’ll let this blow over, and continue our damage assessment…” The commanders’ words were cut of as the entire cabin section of the orbiter was neatly, almost surgically shorn off and sent plummeting to the Indian Ocean below. The men stared in stunned silence as they looked forward. Where once the hatch to the interior of the ship, not to mention four crewmates, had been, there was now only empty space and the gentle curve of the Earth.
“There goes our ride home comrades. Ever wanted to be a moon before?” Alexi inquired derisively.
“What are we going to do?” Piotr Wrezsien asked. He was the youngest of the crew, only twenty five, with a young wife and newborn boy waiting his return at Baikanour.
“I imagine we shall die, Comrade,” Anton Tsilokovsky answered calmly, always the stoic.
“Can’t we make it to the Katerina?” Piotr asked, the desperation evident in his voice.
“She’s too far away. We would never be able to match orbits with her. There isn’t enough propellant left in our suits to maneuver,” Alexi Answered.
“Can’t we contact them. They could rescue us.” Piotr’s voice was cracking.
“Calm yourself, young malchick,” Anton replied in a soothing voice. “Katerina isn’t a ship, she can’t maneuver to save us. Relax and enjoy the view.”
“It is beautiful,” said Alexi. “Pity I shall never see the green hills of Texas again.”
“They could rescue us in a re-entry vehicle. Couldn’t they?” Piotr’s voice was shrill. “That’s it, we’ll call them and have them send an REV. They can save us.”
“No Piotr. The REV cannot move like a true ship. You know that. Its thrusters are designed to check its attitude and slow descent on re-entry. It is not capable of the complex maneuvers to rescue those as unfortunate as us. Our destiny is God’s hands.” answered Tsilokovsky, always the unruffled realist. “Well, Comrades; it was always my dream to set sail for the stars. Das vidanya moiee druggies.”
Tsilokovsky rotated one hundred eighty degrees, and kept his finger on the thrusters until the fuel was completely expended.
With a sigh, Alexi silently turned his suit, and headed back for home. The last sounds he heard over the radio were Piotr’s tearful pleas not to leave him.
Outside of Winona Texas, a young boy and his mother gazed up at the night sky.
“Look moya matb, a shooting star.”
“Yes Greggori, that is very lucky. Make a wish son, make a wish.”
by submission | Jun 12, 2008 | Story
Author : Phillip English
Deep in the centre of the replanted and repopulated Amazon jungle, it was nearing midnight. Chieftan Sral Kunk was completing the final adjustments to his tribal attire, making sure that each bloody line he had painted on his body was curved just so, lest he face the wrath of the monkey God, Jabarr. The bones of his victims bounced against each other in a wave of clicks that rushed forth whenever he adjusted a leg, or waved his arms at a servant. He was a fearsome sight, made even more fearsome by the realisation that each bone that adorned him was a result of his impressive history of violence.
An attendant informed him that the time of the great sacrifice was at hand, so the chieftan made to walk out of his hut; shrunken skull bones clack-clacked around his neck, a cape of skin behind him, towed to the ground by hardened eyeballs. Before he did so, he ushered his servants out with a lazy command, and with a quick check out his woven-hair doorflap to make sure no-one was peeking, he ducked behind his throne of vertebrae. For a few minutes, a variety of strange beeping noises issued from where he squatted before, apparently satisfied, he clapped his hands together, stood up, and strode out to face his subjects. With a grand speech of the strength and viciousness of their tribe, he issued the command to his witch doctor to begin the ceremony.
Fires were lit, and a great cacophony rose from the tribe as they danced and prrayed in their violent, exhuberant way. Punch-ups were common during prayer, encouraged in fact, and spontaneous, energetic sex was carried out on the sweat-soaked mud, even as the flames licked the canopy far above. Finally, when all the whooping and hollering and grunting and yelling and screaming grew to its thunderous crescendo, the chieftan stood up, shook his femur mace above his head and cried out to the heavens the ancient words that had been passed onto him by his ancestors, and their ancestors before them.
The onboard voice-recognition software on the computer of the cloning chamber activated, and sent the message that another unit was required. Amongst the fire and blood, the front of the plastisteel casket steamed open, and a perfect, pale man emerged naked and frightened, searching around him for friends he had lost centuries earlier. The witch doctor’s spear was sharp; death, quick. Chieftan Sral Kunk sighed and leaned his head on his hands. It just isn’t the same these days, he thought.
by submission | Jun 11, 2008 | Story
Author : Andrew Segal
Brachyuran Shifter ships poured themselves though the Dreen wormhole; in seconds they would deliquesce to reform light years away. Then the skies above the bulbous undulating Freddyan busker hive would darken and collapse into a million blood red shards…
That was further than Carl thought he would reach tonight, he scratched his head. Eric’s email, in its insulting tone, had really annoyed him. Yes, Eric had been correct, he had been running out of ideas for describing inter-galactic space travel, craft stuttered, jumped, Flittered, FTL’d, gated, stardrived, vortexed, hyperspaced, particle crunched, teleported, warped, weaved, sieved, impulsed, bussarded, ramjeted and otherwise flung themselves across the universe. So what? So it sounded better than silver spaceships being fired across the galaxy, but he liked the silver spaceships, redolent of the rocket powered optimism of the fifties. He felt sick of the constraints of the logged on internet junkie tech savvy reader who bemoaned the very existence of gleaming rocket ships, of robots wired together with valves and transistors, of a.i.’s that burned out analysing jokes. Rocket ships should just land on alien worlds; Cosmonauts should fight it out amongst hordes of multi-armed barbaric mono-cultured insect men without the requirement of quantum mechanics or oxygen masks or thinly disguised contemporary political machinations.
Carl lazily dragged the ringing phone from its plastic nest,
“Hello”
“Swim!”
The phone rocked back in the cradle.
No star ship in a Carl Acumen novel was going to swim the cosmic ether, (one had once in ‘Water Planet; Wet Express’, but well, it was for kids), whatever Eric thought. Eric was a fossil; literally, a desiccated zombie of a man, according to the doodle Carl had sketched on the pad beside the phone, during the previous evening’s interminably long and wildly unnecessary discussion into the propulsion systems of non-existent plot devices. Carl had argued that all real star travel would have consequences; opening wormholes would be ridiculously dangerous, Eric just wanted a new word.
If Eric wanted his star ships to swim, he could correct the proofs himself. He never would, Elaine would, just as she always corrected Eric’s editorial flights of fancy before they reached the printers. Carl knew he was safe, he returned to the final chapter of ‘Dreen war; Plasma Suns’. The real sun projected an intense white moving line of early morning light across the desk, as he continued typing out to the beat of a high octane track crackling out of tinny computer speakers. The climatic ending, set high above the immense Freddyan busker hive, turned out fine, for the heroes. Admittedly, Carl had been saddened by the destruction of the millennia old hive, an ancient cultural artefact destroyed for story expediency, but the readers never gave a damn about it so why should he. The book was finished. Carl managed to save it just before the electrics went off. Just another East coast brown out.
He headed to the kitchen, past the small grouping of family photos, some faded by the bright sunlight. He ignored them; a habit which had began to form after Isabelle’s last phone conversation. He turned his head away, as he passed them.
This book would keep him above water for a little while if the car avoided its rust coronary.
He grinned and looked out of the kitchen window, across the bay.
There was another sun in the sky, smaller, but becoming increasingly brighter, growing in intensity and expanding across the horizon.
Standing in the kitchen, He watched the immense wave of light approaching.
Carl wished he could swim.
