by submission | Feb 14, 2009 | Story
Author : Benjamin Fischer
“You have a very pretty family,” said the offworlder.
Pulliam McDermott was a very powerful man, so it took him a moment to register that he’d actually been threatened. High over Lake Michigan in his Zepellin-borne corporate offices, the stranger he’d kept waiting for the last hour held in her hands a portrait of Maria and the kids from three years ago in Traverse City.
“Excuse me?” asked Pulliam, his wiry, tanned hand yanking the photo out away from the stranger.
“Oh, I was just thinking how your wife has such beautiful red hair,” the albino woman said.
“I’m sure you didn’t come here on account of that,” said Pulliam. “In fact,I’d be mortified if you had.”
“Of course not,” smiled the stranger, going from the Chairman’s bare and meticulous aluminum desk to the panorama of the cold, foaming waves a mile below.
“You were inquiring about the status of our agreement,” Pulliam said, setting down the portrait in the precise location it had always occupied.
“Yes, that.”
“I assure you,” he said, “that on our end we have been absolutely satisfied.”
The stranger was silent, her sharp pink eyes picking out the gray wakes of the patrol cutters.
“If there has been anything lacking in our services,” said Pulliam, and his gut tightened, “even your most recent communiqués have not given me that impression.”
The albino chuckled.
“No, no, you are quite right,” she said. “Your recruiting of skilled talent has been more than satisfactory. Of all the Americans that we’ve worked with, you are by far the most reliable.”
“Then I fail to see the purpose of your visit.”
Or, more crudely: What do you want?
“You’ve amassed quite the sphere of influence in our service,” the offworlder said, and then focussing keenly on a distant ship, “Is that a junk?”
Pulliam stepped to the great floor-to ceiling window that lined his cabin.
“No, that’s a waystation ship,” he said. “We keep the recruits under lock and key on those until we can arrange a shuttle flight up.”
“Ah. But that reminds me of something,” said the albino. “Do you know how the Chinese emperors rewarded their successful nobles?”
Pulliam’s pulse rose.
“No.”
“Ah, but your mind races with suspicions.”
Pulliam went back to his desk.
“Chinese culture doesn’t interest me,” he said.
“You should take a more global view,” said the stranger.
“I like the scenery here.”
The albino pointed a slim finger at the distant prison ship.
“I’m sure they do too,” she said.
Pulliam gritted his teeth.
“But I digress,” the albino continued. “In the Forbidden City of ancient China, the emperor surrounded himself with the families of his greatest nobles. There, they lived in idle pleasure, their continual safety assured.”
“I’ve moved many bodies for you,” Pulliam said. “But I won’t move mine.”
“This world is such a violent place,” said the offworlder. “And yet change for the better is so seldom welcomed.”
Pulliam squared himself to the stranger.
“What if I refuse?”
The albino tapped her fingers on the glass.
She smiled.
“Don’t think of it as a threat,” she said. “It’s more of an invitation–one you can discuss with your family.”
by submission | Feb 13, 2009 | Story
Author : Mark Mance
I’m in my old car again. These things happen. You’re wondering what’s for lunch, and then–Bam! You’re already under, and cruising about.
I’m gunning it down Sunset Boulevard, and doing fishtails. I sure miss that car. Cars aren’t made like this anymore. Now they’re faster, lighter, and stocked with all kinds of crazy accessories.
“Open sun roof.”
Nothing happens. Oh yeah. Stupid. I push the button to open the sun roof. Wind immediately whips around inside. I haven’t felt this elated for a long time.
I have to hurry before I lose control. Distractions are common and this is my last Session. I just have see her again. I drive up to the house I had in college thinking she’d be there. Once inside things change. The layout’s different. That’s also common.
Two women are watching television. I’d almost forgotten those things. I remember when, No. Keep moving. I found her in the next room. Well, not exactly. On the bed a lump of covers, some pillows, and pile of clothes begin morphing into a sleeping figure —
“Charlotte.”
“What is it?” she asks, yawning.
She props herself up. The blanket slides down a little and her features take time matching up. The eyes and hair color are the last to shift into recognition. A few auburn strands spill gracefully across her face. It’s her twenty years ago, sleepy and almost perfect. Her eyes are more vibrant, too silvery green. I sink slowly onto a couch across from her.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask too eagerly.
“You mean like the glass of water you said you’d have for me when I wake up?”
“Something like that. Hungry?”
“No. Again, what is it? Why are you staring like that?”
“Nothing. It’s just nice to see you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You wouldn’t, Charlotte. This is it, though. I can’t keep doing this.”
“…”
“You and me. Here. Like this. It’s wrong,” I said. “We end up meeting other people.”
“I still don’t understand. Robbie, who are the women in the next room?” She shouldn’t have been aware of them, and I feel the test ending.
“The women in the other room are my future wife and sister in law.”
She looked confused, and then smiled.
We’re interrupted by a loud beeping noise. I feel like I’m being dredged up from some deep sea, and fumble for the ‘off’ switch. I remove the Dream-Lucid Armet, and take a deep breath. Twenty minutes just isn’t enough time, but I can’t conduct these tests on myself anymore.
Her smile hangs there for a second before vanishing into a fog of laboratory lights.
“Dim lights.”
“Sorry about the lights, Dr. Soneiro,” Marcus says sheepishly, “So, where did you go this time, back to your son’s graduation, or last summer’s trip to the Sea of Tranquility?”
I don’t answer. Instead, I drag myself off the bed, and go looking for some coffee.
by submission | Feb 12, 2009 | Story
Author : Glenn Blakeslee
Outside Dad’s shop stood a steel one-hundred-twenty foot tall hyperboloid structure. My brother had his eye on it.
They say Delvin is a genius but he’s just my big brother. He’s weird, and skinny with piercings and tats. When he’s not making stuff he’s reading thick science books.
The structure was a water tank with ‘Arcada’ painted on the side in four-foot high letters. A slender column, fluted at the bottom, supported the tank. My brother had bartered for three hundred feet of superconducting tape, and it was his idea to wrap the water tank.
“This is just an experiment,” he said. “If we wrap the tank the steel should magnify the electromagnetic effect.”
“Why?” I asked as we cut the chain link fence surrounding the tank.
“We’re gonna get a meteorite,” he said, and grinned.
I pulled the backing off the tape as Delvin positioned it. I got a ladder from Dad’s shop and we wound the tape high around the column. The tank was illuminated, high above our heads, by spotlights pointed at the city’s name. By the time Delvin burnished the last of the tape and pulled the leads down the sun was rising. We grabbed the ladder, clipped the fence shut, and went home to sleep.
#
“Tonight’s the night, Punky,” Delvin said. It pissed me off when he called me Punky. “The Perseids will peak.”
After dark we pulled cable from Dad’s generator through the fence. “We can’t really grab a meteor,” Delvin said. “But we might deflect one outside of town.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“We find it, dig it up, and sell it for big bucks.”
We connected the tape to the cable’s terminal box, wrapped it with duct tape, and then sat outside the fence. At two in the morning the shower’s radiant was overhead, and I ran inside and fired up the generator. We waited, and then Delvin threw the switch.
Nothing happened at first. The generator labored and the tape hummed. The high sky overhead was streaked with meteors. Something nicked me, like a mosquito bite, and I heard a staccato sound, like hail on a cymbal.
“Nails!” Delvin said. He pushed me down, into the dirt.
I heard something like little thunder, and looked over to see the sheet metal on Dad’s shop flex and bow outwards. Metal screws popped out like rifle fire, and the cable began stretching toward the tank. I could hear thuds and screeches coming from all around us.
I was trying to crawl away when Delvin yelled over the din, “Look up!” I rolled over in time to see the top of the tank explode in a shower of sparks. Hot pieces of metal showered the ground, and I heard something explode in the sideyard of Dad’s shop. Delvin fumbled at the terminal, and a swash of cold water splashed over us, flooding the ground.
We recoiled as a shower of nails and screws and metal objects fell from the suddenly demagnetized structure of the tank.
“What now, Genius?” I asked Delvin.
“Grab the cable,” he said, “And run like hell.”
An hour later the sheriff was at our house.
#
The next morning, in the churned-up sideyard, Dad handed me a shovel. “Dig,” was all he said.
It was easy digging, but it still took me a few hours. By the end of the day I’d uncovered a twenty-four-pound meteorite. It was a beautiful iron-nickel specimen, its surface burnished and pitted by ablation, and run through with veins of what appeared to be gold.
We used the money to bail Delvin out of jail.
by submission | Feb 9, 2009 | Story
Author : Terri Monture
The funeral cortege rolled smoothly down the boulevard, the faces of the witnessing crowd somber and drawn in the grey light. It had stopped raining but was damp and cold. Amanda shivered and pulled Sylvia and Clarice closer into her body. “Mama, what is that?” asked Sylvia, her shrill little girl’s voice querulous as she pointed at the immense funeral bier, the sleek black coffin strewn with white flowers.
Amanda swallowed, licking her dry lips. “That’s your father,” she answered.
Sylvia, her youngest, looked up at her mother, uncomprehending. “What’s a father?” she asked, her huge blue eyes solemn.
Amanda looked at the massive coffin as it rolled on past. Women of all ages, all bearing the same stamp in their faces – the thin aquiline nose, the full lip, the elfin chin and black hair – all vaguely the same, all hunching their shoulders against the cold in the same fashion. Jacob Lastman – not so ironically named, as it turned out – had fathered them all. He had been the last fertile male left on the planet, his precious sperm the last viable option for the human race. And now he was dead.
There were only females left on the planet now, and their numbers were dwindling.
Amanda had born seven of his daughters in the age-old way, the lucky meeting of sperm to fertile egg, and provided countless ovum to the frantic attempts to preserve humanity. She was also probably one of the last women on the planet to have actually lain with a man, to know his weight upon her and feel the shuddering spasm that fathered her two eldest daughters until it was realized that he was becoming too old — and his heart too fragile — to withstand the rigours of normal fertilization. And after his final heart attack, all of their advanced technology unable to correct the last defects — they had wrung out every last precious drop of him and were even now impregnating the women who would carry the end of their species.
Amanda hugged her smallest child. “Do you remember the lesson yesterday, we watched the clips about how people are born.”
Sylvia looked confused but Clarice glanced up at her mother, her bright blue eyes narrowed in concentration. Amanda knew that glance — she had seen it in Jacob, seen it replicated a thousand, a hundred thousand times in the last twenty years. All that was left. “Oh yeah”, she chirped up. “I remember. It said that boys are extinct. Something about the fragile Y chromosome.”
Amanda nodded. “That’s right. Turns out the environment became too polluted for the Y chromosome to survive. The only male left could father children, but just girls.”
She glanced around the crowd, all of them related, all sisters. She remembered her own father only vaguely, and had never known any brothers. Her grandmother had told her stories of the old days, about inequality and domestic violence and something horrible called rape. All of that was over.
Women had decisively won the gender wars. But it was very lonely.
by submission | Feb 8, 2009 | Story
Author : Waldo van der Waal
The sound of an old-fashioned bugle in his aural signaled the start of the hunt. On cue, the chem depositors in his spine fired a burst of adrenaline. His face flushed from the drug and a mad grin spread across his features. He glanced across at the other skimmers lined up on the barren plain, then he smashed both throttle levers to the full-forward position. With the landscape blurring around his craft, he turned his attention to the sky. God, hunting Omnivians was fun!
He timed his first run perfectly. The giant avians’ massive shadows raced over the ground, and he used them to pace his charge. Then, just as it seemed as if he was racing too far ahead of the shadows, he leant back on the controls in a way that one really shouldn’t do in a craft designed to stay near the surface. The frame groaned as the skimmer bulleted into the sky, rapidly gaining altitude, shedding speed in the process. At the zenith, he let go of the controls completely, turned around smoothly and hoisted the gun to his shoulder. In that single, weightless moment, he aimed down the barrel, a mature Omnivian filling the sights. The sheer size of it stunned him for a heartbeat; but then he squeezed the trigger. Things seemed to slow down for a moment, and thinking back, he was sure he could see the projectile leaving the gun, flying true and hitting the bird in the middle of its flat forehead.
The leviathan’s scream jarred him back into action. He turned away from the mortally wounded beast and wrestled with the controls – the skimmer was in a dangerous tail-stall, and death was approaching at an alarming rate. But he might still survive. The Omnivian would never filter-feed through the skies again, nor would it give birth to live young while on the wing. Its constant migration would finally come to an end, and its shadow would no longer race over the barren plains and dunes below. Man had come to its world.
With the ground rushing in, he hauled backwards on the stick, and somehow managed to bring the skimmer under control just before impact. The other hunters had seen his shot, and made their way to the body of the beast. As his open craft settled, he stepped onto the dusty grey ground, and looked at the graceful, gentle giant he had slain.
Evolution had taken its legs, and what might’ve been a beak eons ago was now a gossamer web designed to catch insects in flight. The eyes looked forward, instead of to the sides, and the wings… The wings were truly astounding, not only for their shear size, but also for their vibrant colours. Omnivians never had anything to fear, since their natural habitat put them well out of harm’s way. That is, until the settlers arrived from the blue-and-green marble they called Earth.
He looked down at what remained of the animal. Then he glanced at the faces of the other hunters that had gathered around, and for a moment he saw in their eyes a mixture of shame and regret. No man can kill without regret. Then someone cheered, and they all raced back to their skimmers for the next run.
From far above came the cries from the rest of the flock. Their melancholy songs reverberated through the skies, but the echoes were growing dim. Soon they would become legend. Nothing more than memories. Memories in the minds of men who hunted, because it was fun.
