by submission | Jan 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Daniel M. Bensen
“Ta zemya.” The lookout cried from the crow’s-nest like a muezzin. “Ta zemya~a! Kapitane, eto ya~a.”
Hristo Galabov gripped the plastic gunwale of his ship and squinted over the heaving Atlantic. “Ta zemya,” the sailor said. Land. The last time, Hristo had leapt with joy at that cry. Now he only closed his eyes and gave a brief prayer to Ta Melarva Miriya. “Thank you. Thank you, Mother of God, for bringing us home. Some of us.”
Hristo stared out at the ocean until even he could see Africa bulking green and fertile on the horizon.
“Kapitane, you seem troubled.”
That was the voice of father Mehmet, with his beard and klobuk and crucifix.
“I am troubled, ebre,” said Hristo.
The priest stood beside him. “You are thinking about what to tell them in Gibraltar Palace.”
“I am thinking about what not to tell them.” Hristo rubbed his thumb against the place where his right pointer finger had been.
“Of course you must tell them the truth, ebane.”
“What truth? That we rediscovered Lost America? Or that it is more Lost than we ever guessed?”
“There are many ways to be Lost, and only one way to be Saved.”
Hristo snorted, “by which I take it you advocate going back to that blasted land and converting the heathen?” The Americans, Hristo meant, although they did not call themselves Americans.
“What else can I advocate?” Father Mahmet stroked his beard. “The truth is always best, ebane. But if we are to help those poor souls…perhaps the Glorious Princess does not need all the facts.”
“Such as the fact that Lost America was lost for a reason.” Hristo sighed, “and the old stories were lies.”
“They were stories, ebane, not lies.”
Hristo gestured at the sea, and his shoulder throbbed. “Streets of gold. Plains of fruit. Wise metal gods and maidens transformed into stars. I wish I could still believe.”
“Then believe, for we made those stories true by our faith and good work. The myth of Lost America was the rope we used to pull ourselves out of the darkness. And those still lost in that darkness…” Father Mehmet’s scarred hand went to the place where his left ear had been, “…Even they are children of God.”
So this was how the priest had made sense of the things they’d seen, convinced himself away from suicide. Hristo had wondered. “I am afraid the Princess has better ways to spend her money than to throw it at degenerate savages on the other side of the ocean.”
“So her advisors would surely say.”
And if they did, if the Princess withdrew her support, then Hristo could turn his thoughts to his own self-murder. Pain and broken promises, past sins and future redemption.
Hope, and in its absence, death.
“What was it the witch-doctor said?” Hristo asked, remembering the cannibal with his teeth filed and the lens-less glasses before his eyes.
“Go West,” said Father Mehmet.
“Go West,” the savage had said, blood on his lips, cold wind in his hair, “Lalaland, Kingdom of the Zombie God, the Gold Mountain.”
Hristo rapped his knuckles on the plastic hull of his ship and the ghosts of his eaten fingers ached. “I know what I will tell Her Majesty.”
“Yes?”
“I will say: ‘Our mission is a success. I will ask: ‘please furnish us with ships, that we may take the benefit of our civilization, our Holy Church to the new-old shores.’ I will say that we have rediscovered America,” Hristo Galabov nodded to himself. “And it is indeed a land of opportunity.'”
by submission | Jan 17, 2013 | Story |
Author : Meg Everingham
In the night Tom rolled over and opened his eyes. Through the dark like a ghost floated the low sound of his mother crying.
She had arrived home earlier, from the airport; she had stared past him like a blind person and disappeared into her bedroom.
Tom followed a light down the hallway. He found her bent into a chair in her office, lovely dark head in her hands, all sharp edges of grief. He stood in the doorway and whispered to her. She looked up and held her arms out to him, red eyes terrible. Tom moved to her obediently, in awe of her sadness.
She settled him on her knee and turned him, so they both faced her desk where she spent so much time working when she was home, away from the ocean. Lying on it was a photograph.
‘Look, Tom,’ his mother whispered, and she traced a finger along the blue lines of the image.
Tom recognized the picture of the humpback whale. He looked up to the empty space on the wall, where it usually hung alongside other luminous images of the deep.
‘The very last one died today,’ his mother said. ‘In a sanctuary up north, where I work.’
‘Why?’ Tom said. Her arms around his waist were hard, cold.
‘He was always going to,’ she replied, speaking into his hair. ‘But it was mainly because of people.’
She stopped working. She spent a lot of time curled on the floor of her study, hemmed in by the walls of photographs. She was silent and lost to the world. Deep underwater.
One morning, some men in suits knocked on the door, and asked Tom politely if they could see his mother. He showed them to her office, where they disappeared inside. Tom sat near the door, his cheek resting on the cold steel. There was the low murmur of questions and answers. They were there for several hours.
Soon after there came an afternoon when Tom got home from school, and his mother was gone. He searched the house, calling softly. He was hungry.
Something had happened in the office. Papers were littered across the room. Framed images from the walls lay crushed on the floor, fragments of afternoon sunlight caught in the splinters of glass. The chair was upside down.
Tom tried to ignore the cold feeling in his chest. He shut the office door and wandered around the house for a while before turning on the television.
She was on it.
Out the front of an important-looking building, the strange men in suits were holding her by the arms as she struggled like an animal. They were restraining her from a nearby knot of angry people, who were throwing objects at her and shrieking. They used the words monster, heartless, murderer.
Tom kept his stare on his mother’s face. Her hair was in her eyes. The camera zoomed drunkenly in on her as she said, over and over again, ‘He was lonely, he was lonely.’
Later that evening, Tom’s grandmother came and helped him pack his things into bags and boxes, and he went to stay with her.
by Patricia Stewart | Jan 16, 2013 | Story |
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer
Astronaut Lazo Hora drove his rover down the sloping interior walls of the 3.6 billion year old Shackleton Crater near the moon’s South Pole. As his headlights probed into the perpetual night of the crater floor, he spotted a saucer-like object in the distance. Hora raced toward the object and confirmed his wildest expectations, it was artificial. But it looked ancient; its surface eroded with millions of micrometeorite impacts. He climbed out of the rover and upholstered his isotope-ratio mass spectrometer and touched its sensor onto the surface of the object. The results had to be wrong. According to the readout, the object was more that 16.3 billion years old; billions of years older than the known universe.
Hora walked around the object and discovered an apparent hatch. When he pushed against it, it swung open. Cautiously, he entered. Seconds later, lights, with no apparent source, illuminated the interior. Across the room he saw four spacesuited humanoid bodies laying side-by-side on the floor. Each one was wearing a Goddard-class spacesuit exactly like his own, except they weren’t wearing helmets. Their desiccated faces were unrecognizable. As he took a few steps toward the bodies, he let go of the hatch, and it slammed closed. When he turned to look back, he noticed two things: There was no apparent way to open the hatch from the inside, and there was a fifth spacesuited individual sitting Indian style next to the hatch. This fifth dead individual, who was still wearing a helmet, was holding his suit’s recorder/transmitter in his lap. The transmitter was attached to wires emanating from an access panel along the floor. Hora picked up the transmitter and pressed the play button. He was shocked to hear his own voice speaking through his earpiece.
“Hello, Lazo Hora Number 6,” the voice announced. “I’m Lazo Hora Number 5. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but when you entered this damnable time machine, you signed your own death warrant. But don’t sulk too long, my brother, for we don’t have the luxury. Listen closely, for you only have a few hours of oxygen left, and there are things you need to do if Lazo Hora Number 7 is to survive. Let me explain. When Lazo Hora Number 1 first entered this death trap exactly as we all did, he was transported back in time three billion years. It happens automatically. It happened to all of us, and it just happened to you. Lazo Number 1 died of hypoxia trying to translate the alien controls in a futile attempt to return to our time. He failed. Three billion years later, Lazo Number 2 entered this sarcophagus, and was also sent back three billions years. He wasted his time beating on the hatch. Lazo Number 3 tried a new approach. He felt that if he could destroy the power source for the time saucer, the next Lazo Hora wouldn’t trigger the transport when he entered in another three billion years. He concluded the source was behind the port wall, but he couldn’t break through before he died. Three billion years later, Lazo Number 4 wasted too much time figuring out what was going on, so he decided to use his time to tap into this ship’s infinite power supply to leave the next us a recorded message on the plan. We don’t have any tools, so we’ve been using the helmets of the previous Lazos as hammers. I almost made it through this time. I’m really sorry that I couldn’t save your life, but it’s your job to save Lazo Number 7. Please, take my helmet and break through that damn bulkhead and short out the power supply, and put an end to this Godforsaken loop.”
by submission | Jan 15, 2013 | Story |
Author : Bob Newbell
The members of the Galactic Security Council watched on the viewscreen as the bipedal alien in its bulky, white spacesuit erected a rod with a rectangle of cloth into the regolith of its planet’s satellite. The starred and striped flag, the computer noted, represented the planet’s predominant nation-state. The council members exchanged concerned glances.
“Am I to understand,” asked the violet-colored gelatinous being representing the Upsilon Andromedae star system, “that this is the same species that just a few years ago had yet to discover electricity and employed animals for transportation?”
As soon as the Upsilon Andromedaen’s gutteral language was translated for the various other council members, an insect-like creature from the Mu Arae system responded. “That’s correct. These aliens went from agriculturalism to industrialism to the beginnings of interplanetary travel in the shortest span of time ever observed.” The insectoid’s antennae moved in a pattern indicating astonishment, the dance of the appendages stirred the green chlorine atmosphere inside the Mu Araen’s sealed chamber.
“But this is fantastic!” exclaimed an aquatic council member representing the Zeta Reticuli system, its carapace involuntarily opacifying due to the creature’s excitement. Somewhat embarrassed, the being quickly composed itself, returned its carapace to a more dignified translucency, and went on: “We must move to admit these — what are they called? ‘humans’? — into the Galactic Security Council. They’ll be a galactic power within a few centuries. Better to start grooming them into a decent and responsible galactic civilization now.”
“But look at their history!” said the cyborg council member from Psi Serpentis whose organic components consisted of plant tissue. “They recently developed nuclear fission and then adapted the technology into a weapon. Two cities on their planet were devastated by fission bombs.”
“They created nuclear weapons?” asked the Tau Ceti representative. No other intelligent species in the Milky Way had ever conceived of such a thing, let alone done it. The squid-like creature added, “They must be contained. Or, failing that…” He let the sentence trail off.
A silence fell over the chamber. What could be done with these humans? Brilliant, but savage. Enlightened, but violent. Not other civilization had ever demonstrated such a paradoxical combination.
“We could dumb them down,” came a voice across the translators. It was the oldest council member, a shapeless field of high energy plasma from the HE 1523-0901 star system, who had spoken.
“You mean, make them mindless primitives?” asked the Mu Araen.
“Nothing so gross,” responded the flickering particle field. “Just imagine if we used nanomachines introduced into their brains to subtly blunt the human intellect. For example, what if their politicians became gradually inept, their business leaders incompetent, their art and entertainment coarse and tawdry. Nothing dramatic at first, just a nudge here and there.”
The council members considered the suggestion. A silicate being from Beta Canum Venaticorum asked, “How would we know if such a plan worked?”
“Industry would deteriorate. Economies would stagnate. Over time, their governments would become increasingly inefficient and malignant. Culture would become vapid and moronic. Rational thinking and commonsense would be impaired. Human expansion into space, the odd robotic probe or tiny planetside space station aside, would stall,” replied the plasma being. “They wouldn’t expand out any further than their moon. It’s conceivable they might even lose that capability.”
Ultimately, the Galactic Security Council implemented the suggestion of the old plasmatic from HE 1523-0901. They monitored Earth’s television and radio signals. They soon learned they’d succeeded beyond their wildest expectations and that the galaxy was quite safe from mankind.
by Duncan Shields | Jan 14, 2013 | Story |
Author : Duncan Shields, Staff Writer
It started, as these things always do, with a kiss.
Advice is useless to the young. That is their curse and their strength. They have no idea that some of the things that they attempt are impossible. That’s why an alarmingly high percentage of them succeed.
Like Jonas Brigand, sitting in a cheap metal chair in a prison cube waiting room, starting at his watch, currently waiting for his girlfriend to get out of prison.
“Times are tough in the colonies” goes the song. Young men and women were subject to the same set of laws as the adults. With the ability to breed came responsibility. It was too harsh a world to even consider doing it otherwise.
Once society had been set up, once the terraforming tents were a memory and the world was green, the new generations would be fat and slow on the world that the hardpack settlers like Jonas Brigand and his girlfriend had made for them.
The scars on his hands stared mutely back at him. He was fourteen. His girl, Jayley Cordsmith, was sixteen. Her body was just as strong and scarred as his.
She was pulling six days for drunk and disorderly. Six days of pay gone. She have to work a month of doubles to get that back. She’d do it, too.
Jonas had the beginnings of a manbeard. His flat nose was the result of beatings from the ones that reared him and a life of never backing down.
Jayley had the short dreads of a hullpatcher and was missing a pinky on her left hand. Jonas thought of her working with her hammer belt in the hot sun. She’d be seventeen in Quadrember but he’d be sixteen two months earlier. For two months, they’d be the same age.
For two months, their drinking, mating, and eating privileges would be equal. They’d both have one ‘drop the charges’ card each to use as they saw fit. They could do anything that didn’t result in a loss of life or the damage of company property.
Jonas usually punched a supervisor. It was a popular choice.
Now Jonas wasn’t sure there would be any more cards or privileges for Jayley at all.
Jayley had decided that she was unhappy with the system and stopped going to work. They’d thrown her in the clink almost immediately.
Strike was a forbidden action. It couldn’t be tolerated. There were always one or two people that started the talk once the project neared completion but that was a decade off. Besides, Jayley loved to work.
The door at the end of the hall clicked and hissed. The hatchratchet spun and the door creaked open.
Jayley ran through. Jonas stood up and caught her in his arms.
She was missing a tooth and she had a black eye but her eyes shimmered with the usual angry light.
“We have to take them down, Jonas. We have to make this place ours.” She said.
They hadn’t even come close to breaking her.
Then she kissed him.
