Encounters Magazine 06

This publication copyright 2013 by Black Matrix Publishing LLC and individually copyrighted by artists and individuals who have contributed to this issue. All stories in this magazine are fiction. Names, characters and places are products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of the characters to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Encounters Magazine is published quarterly by Black Matrix Publishing LLC, 1252 Redwood Ave. #52, Grants Pass, OR 97527. Our Web site: www.blackmatrixpub.com

ABOUT OUR COVER ARTIST Gary McCluskey has been working as an artist for over 20 years doing everything from book covers, comic books, magazine illustrations, rpg artwork, logo design and greeting cards. Back at the end of the last century he self published a comic called Rayne.

You can see more of his work at: http://garymccluskey.carbonmade.com/ http://www.facebook.com/media/set/? set=a.1037927149294.2006041.1258952827&type=3

ENCOUNTERS MAGAZINE Volume 02 February/March 2013 Issue 06 Table of Contents PROOF OF PRINCIPLE by Robert Mitchell Evans – Page 4 SHADOWS THAT SCRATCH AT FROSTED GLASS

by Dylan Fox – Page 19 BEYOND PHOBOS by Thomas Canfield – Page 45 EMERGENCE by Steven L. Peck – Page 58 DANIEL'S KEEP by Wade Peterson – Page 75 THE CRECHE by Jeff Barr – Page 90 WONDERS NEVER CEASE by Harry F. Kane – Page 98

PUBLISHER: Kim Kenyon EDITOR: Guy Kenyon

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PROOF OF PRINCIPLE

by Robert Mitchell Evans

You want to know why you're scared of the night? Why our world turned to shit and there isn't a person alive or dead sleeping well anymore. Fine, I'll tell you, in a manner of speaking it's all my fault anyway.

It was the second anniversary of her death and like a dutifully guilty pilgrim I'd come again to her grave. With a heavy sigh I climbed out of my car, the foggy night air chilling my lungs. Pasadena didn't get very cold, not like Indiana, but even mild winters I hated.

Tightening my jacket, my breath hanging in the air, I locked the car.

A half­moon, occasionally hidden by clouds, lit the scene as I approached the gate. Even rapping lightly, the cold metal stinging my knuckles, at nearly midnight it sounded loud, but I doubted anyone heard it other than Jorge.

Stamping my feet and shifting about, I waited. Finally, the beam of a flashlight spearing the thin mists, he jogged, keys jingling, to the gate.

“Evening, Mr. Johnston.” Without instruction he swung the gate open, locking it securely behind us.

“Thought you’d never get out here.” I thrust my hands in my pockets, trying to ignore the cold. I was tired, grumpy, and ready to pick a fight, but I’m always like that visiting here.

Under his heavy leather jacket, a security guard’s fake badge hanging from his chest, he shrugged. His black hair and angular chiseled face seemed typical for Central American ancestry, another bright boy trying to climb up from nothing.

“I got lost in my homework. All of a sudden the light went off and calculus started to fall into place.” He grinned a sheepish smile.

“Go back to it.” I turned heading into the graveyard. “I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave.”

He fled to the warmth of the security shack while I braved the fog. I visited Jolene a couple of times a month, but working on a Mars 4

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science team at JPL pushed my schedule around the clock.

I ignored footpaths, cutting directly across the plots ­ back then the dead didn't complain. Movies, when they still made them, filled graveyards with majestic slabs of granite or lovely eternally weeping statutes, but that's all lies. Tiny plaques, most nearly invisible from just a few meters away, lay discreetly at the head of each grave, as cold, efficient, and devoid of personality as registers in a computer.

Jolene would have hated them.

With dew coating the grass I stepped carefully, the air still without the slightest breeze. Slipping here and there on the uneven ground, I crossed the graveyard slowly. Yeah, there was a time when people actually went into graveyards.

From the auto­repair yard across the street a dog barked momentarily before shutting­up with a yelp. I stopped at the crest of a small hill, foolish and inadequate.

Jolene was dead, rotting in the earth and I didn't believe in souls. I wasted time coming here, weeping at her grave, but I couldn't stop. I was, with a dead woman, finally in love.

Steeling my nerve, I continued down the hill through the copse of trees near her grave and noticed fresh flowers encircling her plot.

Herbert?

No one visited her grave. At the Jet Propulsion Lab life had moved on without her; strangers were driving her beloved rovers across the frozen surface of Mars. Her husband must have left the flowers, but he didn't last year. Wallowing in guilt and self­pity I ignored them. I never liked mysteries anyway.

Sitting heavily on the wet grass, surrounded by the fresh flowers and thickening fog, I cried, my tears clinging stubbornly to my face.

It did not begin by accident but that doesn't mean I knew what I was doing.

“Shouldn’t you have ‘flaming locks of auburn hair’?” I asked.

Jolene turned up from her monitor, smiling a weak, bored smile, her blonde hair falling long and straight on either side of her round face. Her nose was long, straight, and thin, matched by a wide thin­lipped mouth. “That’s not a new joke.”

I pulled up a chair and sat next to her. “Well, I’m better at systems 5

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commands than pickup lines.” I flashed her a smile, one justifying the thousands of dollars spent on my dental work. Along with my black hair, square jaw line and intense brown eyes my smile had won the temporary affection of many a lady.

She rolled her chair away, putting me outside her personal space.

Tall for a woman, nearly as tall as I was, she carried a figure of ample curves and enticements. A dancing glint in her hazel eyes told me her standoff move hadn't been completely honest. I interested her.

“I’m married.” She folded her arms across her chest.

In peace I held up a hand. “Sorry, I was playing, not seriously making a move.”

“Just as long as we know where we stand.”

“Well,” I said. “Right now, we’re sitting.”

She smiled, laughing in soft silvery tones, her emotional armor already cracking.

Jolene Cavenaugh, an exobiologist, and I, a sequence engineer, worked together on JPL's DisLIR project, the Distributed Life Investigation Rovers.

Mars projects played hell with our circadian rhythms. The Martian day is a hair more than thirty­seven minutes longer than an ours, and because our science is done during the Martian day, following alien sunrises and sunsets, our shift moved around the clock, often isolating the Mars teams in the middle of the night.

Herbert worked on an Earth­orbiting physics experiment, living a normal schedule. While he bounced lasers from satellite to satellite searching to confirm minute deformations of space/time, his wife and I worked piecing together the history of Martian life.

During our hours together I admired Jolene’s beauty, and whenever she leaned close over my console, the clean scent of her skin, her straight honey­colored hair falling away towards her breast, pulling me to her as inevitably as a comet towards the sun, a wild unrealized sexual tension in her eyes.

She would be difficult to seduce, not like some females who cheated on their husbands with little more inducement than a well made cocktail.

During the time I took allaying her natural, and correct suspicions, I found other women to satisfy me. Unlike my brother Todd, tied 6

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down to a wife and a growing gang of unruly children, I lived a carefree life.

We all did then.

Kneeling at her grave, hot and bitter tears ran down my cheek as clouds moved across the moon throwing everything into darkness.

Sobbing, I tried to picture her alive, laughing, but my imagination conjured up only the image of a decaying corpse.

Herbert’s hypocritical flowers taunted me, my anger threatening to burst like an earthquake. I reached out, but stopped with my fingers millimeters from the petals. She loved flowers and now that she was dead I found I couldn't deny her as I had before.

I stood, wanting to leave, but needing to stay, wishing for some small fragment of justice for Jolene; but justice is just another fairytale.

Ruby­red lasers flashed near the ground, projecting from the flower arrangements, forming a complex pattern encircling the grave, trapping within it a symbol that set my psyche quivering. An ancient and terrible fear slipped into my heart. The world twisted, deforming, hard cold matter invaded by a spectral tsunami. Stumbling, unsteady on my feet, I fell, overpowered by the fresh, clean scent of Jolene’s hair.

It didn't take long for Jolene to abandon her science­fiction and fantasy novels, spending her breaks with me. Surprisingly, she had never been to a convention, and knowing that a con's playful environment suited my goals perfectly, persuading her to attend a local convention, LosCon, proved surprisingly easy.

Herbert, obsessed with his project, hardly noticed Jolene anymore, and I doubt he’d noticed her absence over that Thanksgiving weekend.

Working, he focused his attention with an intensity that regularly crossed the border into obsession. Later she confessed to me that he had pursued her as obsessively, something she had mistaken for romance.

I knew that nothing flattered a woman more than total attention.

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Easily I pictured him applying that vast and focused intellect to winning the pretty blonde, but winning and having are different.

Over the years a parade of projects had pushed her aside and, unwilling to admit it, even to herself, she craved that total attention.

Jolene's vengeful ghost hovered, radiating malice. Panicked, I leapt to my feet, trying to run. Slipping on the wet slick grass I tumbled to the ground, striking my head on a grave marker, my scalp bleeding, pain blurring my vision.

I scrambled onto my back, scuttling backward like a crab, thinking only to escape. Her outline moved closer, her anger limitless; crossing the laser­grid she glided remorselessly.

I tried to stand, but vertigo and nausea overpowered me and I fell backwards, screaming in terror, blood spilling into my eyes. I knew her anger; her need to punish.

Bryce. I didn’t hear words or thoughts but I knew what she wanted.

Stay with me.

Jolene, less substantial than the fog, floated closer, reaching out, touching me. My flesh froze, my balls tightened trying to retreat inside my body and goose bumps erupted like acne, and I thrashed like a beached fish.

Those were happier days, before Los Angeles was abandoned. We drove to LosCon separately, neither of us needing the gossip.

Arriving at the LAX Marriot, I turned my car over to a valet and entered the hotel, while in my mind Jolene was already fulfilling my intense sexual fantasies.

Fans crowded the lobby, the majority dressed in casual clothes lacking any style at all, only a few in period or media inspired costumes. A number of lovely ladies threatened to distract me, but I kept Jolene fixed firmly in my mind.

I checked in and after carefully putting my clothes away ­ ladies always pay attention to the way a man dresses, clothes make the date ­ I flipped open my cell and rang Jolene. She was settled into her room and ready to explore her first convention.

We met in the lobby and I escorted her to the ballroom level 8

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guiding her through the brief registration process before leading her into the dealers' room, intent on bribery.

“Wow.” Examining a white corset with attached fairy wings, Jolene’s voice softened. Merchants, selling anything remotely fantastic, jammed the room. Knowing the value of cosplay, I had lead her to the right sort of booth.

“You should get it.” I said, nodding towards the corset, already fantasizing her wrapped tight, her breasts threatening to spill free.

“I can’t.” Her voice betrayed her crumbling resolves. “I can’t justify the price.”

“Oh, is that all?” I reached in my breast pocket and took out my wallet. “I can.”

Jolene sputtered. “Bryce, you can’t do that. I can’t let you do that.”

“You’ll have fun." I winked and set the hook. "Trust me on this.” She smiled and I knew she did.

I paid the stunning redhead selling the corset, before sweeping Jolene away.

“Look,” I said. “Maybe you’ll be back next year and maybe you won’t. That means now you have to find all the fun you can, while you can. Wear this to the parties, be bold and outgoing. This one weekend be who you've wanted to be all your life.” Her eyes moistened and I knew countless lonely nights and the missed prom would do all the heavy lifting for me. Deep inside she still wanted to be the stunning homecoming queen.

Reality crashed back across her face. “And what will Herbert say when I come home with this?” She held up the corset and wings.

“Don’t. Leave it here, or donate it to some costumer.”

“I saw what you paid for it.”

“And I’m the one telling you to dump it after you've had your fun.

Life’s too short for making trouble or regrets. If you leave it here, you’ll take home memories of fun times and a weekend when you weren’t yourself.”

A woman wearing a belly­dancing outfit passed us going the other direction towing a leather­clad slave. She watched them, shocked and fascinated.

She turned to me. “Okay, but you better make sure we can find it a good home before we leave.”

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My lungs spasmed and I choked, her incorporeal touch suffocating me. I tried to cry out, but the spasms choked me to a whisper as pain, like lightening, burned my nerves.

Stay with me Bryce. Don't leave me again.

I tried to claw to my feet wishing for a good cinematic headstone, but with nothing to grab, I fell face first into the wet grass.

“Mr. Johnston!” Jorge’s voice exploded in the air. I struggled to raise my face. He ran up the footpath, his flashlight beam jerking madly about in the fog.

I wanted to scream, to tell him to run away, but my throat clenched and I ate dirt.

He arrived, the flashlight's beam dazzling my eyes. Jolene released me and, with a gurgled scream, Jorge fell to the ground, the flashlight tumbling down the hill. I stumbled to my feet, brilliant spots floating over my eyes, but still I saw his face. Terror and pain contorted his features into a gruesome parody. He thrashed, and when one hand passed through the laser­grid encircling the grave, his flesh glowed like a radioactive ruby. Twitching like an electrocuted criminal, he died. Briefly he joined her, floating there in the fog and then he faded to nothing.

Screaming, I ran.

We stepped out of the elevator onto the hotel's 17th floor, people

flooding out of the open­room parties and filling the hallway with everyone from grizzled veterans to dangerously tempting jailbait. As we passed heads turned, following Jolene.

Conventions provided me with an abundance of female fans ready for an evening's adventure but that night my attention remained fixed firmly on Jolene and her raw sexuality.

We ended up in a party hosted in the presidential suite with large windows looking out over LAX. People drank fine wines while tasting an assortment of cheeses as jumbo jets rumbled into the night. At one end of the room a popular writer of hidden­history fantasies stood surrounded by fans while at the other end a retired half­deaf artillery officer held court lecturing on everything from Hannibal to nuclear 10

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space drives. In­between, fans, writers and artists enjoyed themselves.

I guided Jolene through the crowded room to a seat by the windows before retrieving some of the better wine from the open bar.

“I think I’ve drunk too much as it is.” She accepted the wine anyway as I sat on the loveseat next to her, brushing against her, gently enough to allow the fiction of innocence.

“You’re not driving,” I pointed out. “Anyway, when was the last time you really cut loose?”

“God, it’s been years. Before Herbert got the lead on the Space/Time deformation team.” With the mention of her husband's name her mood crashed. “He’d be so pissed.”

“What, you don’t deserve a good time?”

“It’s not that, Bryce. It’s not that at all. He's fixated, terrified I'm going to leave.” She started sipping her wine, but before she stopped less than half remained. “He’s got such a temper.”

I had trouble imagining Herbert, short, thin, nearly invisible in his withdrawn personality, even expressing anger.

“Don’t laugh. I've seen what he can do. Once his blood’s up it never goes down.”

“Never? You’re exaggerating.”

She locked eyes with me, her voice turning cold and sober. “Never.

Ask Billy Weeks.”

“Who’s Billy Weeks?”

“I'll need another drink before I can tell you.”

I fetched the drinks, returning as a spherically shaped fan, his face a mass of anxiety, moved towards my seat, working up the courage to speak. I pushed past him, sitting close to Jolene, our shoulders touching, and the dwarf planet faded into the crowd.

She took another long sip from the wine, her playful concerns about drinking vanishing, replaced by something new.

“Billy Weeks was a junior high school bully...”

“Junior high?”

“Let me finish, Bryce. From what Herbert’s said it sounded like the typical bullshit boys do. Fights, humiliation, cruel taunts, the usual barbarism, but he holds grudges. He nurses his grudges the way other men relive winning the big game in high school. Two years ago Herbert saw a chance at revenge and he took it.”

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“Two years? You’re serious about this?”

“Yeah. He tracked Billy down through the internet, amassing quite a bit of Billy’s personal and financial data. I guess Billy never was too bright. Anyway, Herbert fed that information to the wrong elements.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m not talking about finding out your credit card’s been compromised. Billy’s accounts ended up being used for some serious data attacks. The FBI investigated him, there were even rumors of child porn. Herbert shredded Billy’s life.”

“He told you all this?”

“He loves to gloat.”

For a moment we sat silent as I mulled over second thoughts about seducing her. Looking up from my wine, into her hazel eyes, her soft golden hair falling to her shoulders as an expression of sadness stole across her face, my doubts vanished and I wanted nothing more than to see her smile again.

Cold air burning my lungs, stumbling, nearly falling, yet miraculously keeping my footing, I sprinted for the gates.

She toyed with me, wanting me to suffer. My skin shivering in anticipation of her cold touch, I expected to fall with my muscles spasming.

Dew coated the concrete and like a hockey player I slid, starting to fall, slamming into the bars, clamping on with a fierce death grip onto the locked gates.

I futilely shook them like an enraged ape, screaming in terror, trying to force them open. Exhausted, I leaned against the gates crying hot salty tears, my car not thirty meters away but it might as well have been on Mars. Looking up at the top of the gates, I knew if I tried to climb them I’d fall. In that cold, wet fog I had no hope of scaling either the wall or the gate.

I turned around and stared into the graveyard. The swirling fog now looked denser, darker. Jorge had the keys. Terrified, I stepped away from the gates and headed back.

The drinks had Jolene flying, rebounding her mood. She smiled 12

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and laughed, carrying a bag of freebies as I escorted her back to her room. Transfixed, we stood before the door, the air between us alive with tension. Swiping her keycard she unlocked her room.

“This is the most fun I’ve had in years.” She pushed the door open placing a single foot inside and then turned towards me, the light streaming through the window silhouetting her figure.

I moved close, her breasts pressing firmly to my chest. Jolene stepped back into her room. I followed.

“Bryce...”

I placed a hand on her bare shoulders. She dropped the bags, her breath coming in short shallow bursts, and moving in I kissed her.

Her resistance instantly melted away and she returned my kiss with a fierce passion. I pulled her close, her body’s heat radiating through my clothes Reaching around I removed her fairy­wings, tossing them aside as she led us to the bed.

In a series of kisses I moved my lips to her face and on down the nape of her neck, my hands tracing her figure under the curves of the corset, the rich scent of her hair leaving me intoxicated.

I untucked her corset's laces and with a few deft motions loosened them. Sliding my hands around to her front I unfastened the busk, the corset slipping to the floor.

Stepping out of the corset she sat on the edge of the bed as I moved closer, her breasts large, firm and white with light aureoles, captivating me. She reached up, unbuckling my belt and greedily pulling my slacks down. I kicked off my shoes and slacks as she crawled backwards further onto the bed.

I followed, crawling onto the bed, removing her high heels, kissing each foot and tossing the shoes back onto the growing pile of our discarded clothing. Moving up her legs I removed her stockings, and giving each leg the same devoted attention before removing her skirt and underthings. She writhed under my touch, her breath fast and shallow, soft moans escaping her lips.

Reaching her face we kissed intently, my breath growing short and my flushed skin tingling with a pleasant electric charge. Suddenly, I remembered losing my virginity to Stephanie, a powerful, moving encounter ­ now rendered insignificant.

Jolene reached up, ripping my shirt open, buttons scattering across 13

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the bed and beyond. Hurriedly I slipped out of it and we lay nude, our bodies hot and trembling as my hairy chest pressed to her pale perfect skin.

She closed her eyes, arching up to meet me, straining to eradicate the space separating us as I slid into her.

Our hands, fingers, and mouths explored each other’s bodies as we changed positions, testing and playing, aching to prolong the experience until Jolene, with clenched fists tearing the sheets from the bed, we simultaneously climaxed.

Spent and exhausted, her thighs trembling with orgasm's aftershocks, we glistened in the pale moonlight covered in a sheen of happy sweat.

Much later with our minds returning to something like normal she said, “This doesn’t change anything, you know.”

“I know,” I murmured. “This is just tonight and this is just this one time.”

When I planned to tell the truth I spoke my largest lie.

Moving through the graveyard I stepped lightly, quietly, but I had no idea what a ghost perceives and I suspected my attempts at stealth were useless.

The laser­grid, it's ruby­red beams bright in the thickening fog, still illuminated her grave, each beam reflecting and refracting into a diffuse glow.

That grid, that black­magic summoning Jolene’s ghost, had been placed there by someone. Someone hell­ Herbert, her jealous, spiteful and never forgiving husband. Destroying that grid might lay her to rest. I dashed for the grave surprised she hadn’t already attacked.

I reached the grave with Jolene waiting.

I knew you’d return, my love.

Perceiving with a vision unassociated with optics I saw her appear, her arms wide, welcoming me. I slid into her, my muscles locking and I fell to the ground, my lungs refusing to breathe and a terrible coldness gripping my heart.

I knew nothing but cold terror as my heart stopped. She released me and gasping for breath, my heartbeat returned, pounding loud in my ears.

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You promised to stay.

I reached out with a trembling hand, straining for the nearest vase of flowers, knowing if I pulled any one of them out of alignment the whole evil pattern would collapse.

You promised!

Again, she stopped my breathing, a coldness creeping deep and slow through my chest. My fingers touched the plastic vase, sliding uselessly across its wet slick surface. I thrashed, my vision going gray, then nearly black before my hand closed on the vase, tearing it out of alignment. The lasers vanished, and she laughed.

The convention vanished into a blur of sex and play and afterwards for a few weeks we behaved, but in the end we could no more avoid each other than we could avoid breathing. We stole moments in no­tell motels, at my condo, and in shadowed corners with the risk of discovery electrifying our encounters.

I stopped picking up one­drink wonders, instead planning all my time around our secret lives. We learned each other’s darkest secrets and unspoken dreams. I even learned of Herbert's crushing impotence.

Life became exciting, passionate and good until it crashed one bright sunny morning.

We met in the plaza on the JPL campus with trees shading us from the intense sunlight while we sat on a concrete planter. Her eyes were red from crying, her hair a tangled mess.

“We haven’t been careful enough,” she managed between sobs.

This wasn’t a surprise. Herbert may been the Asperger man to the rest of us, but even he would eventually start figuring it all out.

“When did he tell you?”

“I don’t mean that! I’m fucking pregnant.”

The world stopped, her words rebounding through my skull like a death sentence as my brother Todd, suffocating under a wife and a troop of children, raced to mind. I stood, my legs quivering.

“I’ll see you through this. Planned Parent...”

“I’m not going to fucking kill it!”

“Jolene, be rational...”

She jumped to her feet. “I am not going to have an abortion.”

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“Then it’s your problem.”

I turned and walked away, her sobs stabbing me.

For the rest of the week I avoided work. I didn’t want to see Jolene.

I didn’t want to see anybody. I drank and every time I slept I saw her face. Everything reminded me of her and by the weekend I knew I couldn't last. Monday morning came and I went to work, resolving to see this through, wherever it went.

Of course by then it was too late. Herbert found her in the garage, the Volvo still running, nearly out of gas, her note explaining it all and begging forgiveness.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered with my last breath. It wasn’t a ploy or begging, it was the truth. Nothing I could say or do would be enough.

I stopped struggling, ready to accept her just vengeance.

She merged with me, her love and passion suffusing through my soul and in the end, her forgiveness. With the scent of her hair hanging in the air she said, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” and she was gone.

I lay there for a long time, dried blood staining my face and cold dew soaking through my clothes, a haloed moon shining weakly through the thinning fog. My cell phone rang. I considered ignoring it, but after several rings I flipped it open.

“You lived.” Herbert’s tight voice buzzed in my ear.

“Yeah.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Then you'd better come here.”

From my spot on the ground, I spied a small camera on the limb of a tree and knew that he had watched it all.

“Where are you?”

“Space Flight Operations. Up in the balcony.” He cut the line.

I climbed to my feet, every muscle screaming a chorus of agony. I stopped by Jorge’s body and retrieved the keys to the gate, wondering if they would list his death as cardiac arrest or find something more exotic.

I wasn’t afraid to meet with Herbert. Like bombers and poisoners he lacked the courage to act directly, but I didn’t.

Even taking the time to clean the blood and dirt off my face I reached JPL in fifteen minutes, though half­way a bad case of the 16

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shakes forced me to stop. Visions of eldritch diagrams first drawn in blood, then later with chalk, and now lasers haunted me with a terrifying understanding of reality I could not deny.

He waited in the observation balcony, behind large bay windows enclosing rows of theater­style seating for guests and dignitaries. The balcony gave visitors an unobstructed view of the large flat­screen displays reporting the status of all CIS­LUNAR spacecraft. Tonight, on the center display, a large graphic displayed Earth with a constellation of its orbiting satellites.

I walked through the deserted rooms and corridors, climbing the short flight of stairs to the balcony. We were alone, Herbert sitting in the front way watching the status display with an almost feral intentness.

I stepped next to him, towering over him, and said, “You’re a petty little fuck. You know that don’t you.”

He looked up, his light brown hair shot now with gray, cut short into an unflattering crew cut. His small eyes hid behind glasses many sizes too large for his face, and his sharp rat­like nose... an ugly face that I wanted to pummel, but if I started I'd never stop.

“You’re one to talk. Always fucking other men’s wives. Well, that’s all over now isn’t it?”

“You lost. She’s happy and I’m alive.” I turned to leave.

“She wasn’t yours, she was mine!” He leaped up from the seat, dashing between the door and me. “You didn’t care about that did you, big man?”

“She wasn’t yours.” I wanted revenge, but knowing I could wait, thinking I had all the time in the world, but of course, you know I didn't. “Your limp­dick plan failed, get out of my way.”

Laughing he said, “She wasn’t the plan; she was the test!"

He didn’t sound beaten. He fixed his eyes on the central display on the operation center.

I thought about Herbert, beaten and bullied through every year of his existence and about fucked up teenagers shooting­up schools and murdering strangers, knowing that they were the same... except for intellect. For sheer brilliance and dedication to revenge no one compared to Herbert. Seeing truth where others had seen only myth and legend, and committed to his cause, he stood alone.

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On the central display, out past geo­synch, a constellation of satellites orbited the Earth. Herbert’s satellites, bouncing lasers to each other, encircling the globe. I glanced back at him, and he smiled.

It widened in a death’s head grin. On the central display lines representing lasers flashed from satellite to satellite trapping the Earth within the hellish occult pattern. Out of the depths of my mind, with a primal and ancient sense, psychic pain worse than any migraine shot through my head as the world shifted and the vengeful dead awoke.

You know the rest, you've lived in the world Herbert created.

Ghosts erupted across the American Plains and countless other places where men slaughtered without remorse or justice. I know that acceptance of guilt is the only solution, but I also know few are as forgiving as Jolene.

Robert Mitchell Evans has been a sailor, a dishwasher, a shipyard worker, a cashier, and currently his day-job is in the pharmaceutical industry assisting physicians and patients in navigating the wilds of the US healthcare system. He resides in San Diego, California and he has published an ebook collection of nearly-award winning short stories, Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. He can frequently be found haunting southern California SF conventions.

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SHADOWS THAT SCRATCH AT FROSTED GLASS

by Dylan Fox

The trawler Proof Positive roused itself back into existence, the crew sixteen­hundred light years from home.

“Board is black, skipper,” Adele McBride said. Juna leaned over her and dared any of the warning lights to come on.

The trip from Mars’ moon Deimos had taken four weeks. Hooked into the guts of the engine, dreaming minds allowed them to take a short­cut through Heaven. Humanity had stumbled around the spiritual plane and searched for meaning like a diabetic for insulin for fifty­thousand years. But they just didn’t have the right tools. And now they did. Science grasped the place of gods and ghosts, called it dreamspace, manipulated it with somnambulic fields and yoked it to humanity. Now they burned dreams to fuel their spread to the stars.

Dreams and trihydrodgen cations.

“Stick your tongue out,” Juna said. “I’m twenty thousand pounds in the red on this trip already and another fifteen­hundred every day.”

Adele nodded. She ran her fingers through her short red hair and inhaled the brief scent of coconut that escaped. It was the scent of comfort and security.

“Bridge to Nusa, bridge to Nusa. Deploy surveillance immediately, deploy surveillance immediately.”

The speaker crackled.

“Tee­tee,” the tinny, staccato voice said. “Surveillance... now... deploying now.” The radio was intermittent at best.

“Get some sleep, June,” Adele said. She turned around to look up at her boss. “Skipper and First Mate sharing the watch leads to arguments. Too many cooks and all that.”

Juna shook her head.

“We’re not going to catch any more with you leaning over my shoulder like a gargoyle.”

“Then get some sleep,” Juna said.

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Adele sighed. Her friend’s stubbornness was as predictable as it was reassuring.

“Seriously,” Juna said. She rested a calloused hand on Adele’s shoulder. “It’s seven. You’ve only got an hour left of your watch anyway. No sense in us both being shattered.”

“You’re going to stay up anyway?”

Juna didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

“You’ll be the death of yourself, you know.” Adele unbuckled the harness and slipped out of the chair. She was still straightening her legs as Juna strapped herself in.

“Buzz me when you find something and I’ll get the deckies up.

Tight lines, June.” An old way of wishing her good luck.

She squeezed the skipper’s shoulder affectionately. Juna didn’t seem to notice.

The trawler hung quietly in the Barnard’s Loop dust cloud.

Instruments dangled from its hull and tasted the scattered atoms for traces of trihydrogen cations, H3+. Forty­five degrees from starboard, the cloud darkened to opacity where a star had once been. Now, it was a cold collection of nuclei spitting streams of protons. It was those streams the Proof Positive was looking for, cosmic rays leaving trails of newly­formed H2, and so H3+, in their wake. The Positive always came back to the TK­17 stellar remnant­why move to new grounds before the old had been exhausted?

The stellar nursery sang. Clouds of atoms ejected by long­cold supernovae drifted with momentum millions of years old. Far­away stars died and exhaled x­rays and cosmic rays and radiation that spanned the breadth of the electro­magnetic spectrum. Infant stars congealed under their own gravity, discs of interstellar matter drawn in as the spark of fusion waited.

Juna knew she harvested the raw material new stars were made of.

She told herself it didn’t matter, that one person couldn’t possibly make a difference against the all but infinite cosmos and anyway, if it wasn’t her then it would just be someone else.

She leaned forwards and rested her forehead in her palm. All that noise in the dust played tricks on the mind. It made you hear voices, see shadows move, chilled your blood and flooded your veins with fear. The fire of interstellar life burnt into dreamspace like a stone 20

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falls into water, and splashed humanity’s nascent sixth sense with random droplets that consciousness forced meaning onto.

Five years ago, Juna had sat on her bunk and talked with the ghost of her father. He was seven years dead. She didn’t know whether it was him or the illusion of him, but his ghost offered comfort and closure and she took it.

She picked up the walkie. “I don’t see anything, repeat, screen is blank.”

She tapped the white screen with her forefinger as if she could make the spectroscopy lines appear. “... fuse, I think.” Nusa’s tinny voice was modulations in the continual static. The other deckhands would stay in their artificially­induced sleep until Juna found a bed of ions to trawl.

Sleeping bodies breathed less oxygen and ate less food.

She clipped the walkie­talkie back onto the dashboard and sighed.

There was no cold figure reaching out to crush her warm heart. The slow, icy breath on her neck wasn’t real. The lascivious hand on her thigh was an illusion. It was just the radiation. Or maybe it was the bank manager. He was always straining at the leash to fuck her.

She took her mobile out of the front pocket of her dungarees, the letter she’d received yesterday still open. La Société de Nice Ion’s logo rotated in the top corner. SNI’s offer promised her a dependable income, a retirement plan and an end to the constant fear that the bank would reposess her ship­her livelihood. It would be stupid to turn them down.

She shuddered, and picked up the walkie again.

“Nusa­” A small bead­shaped amber light appeared on the dashboard. A second later, a red exclamation mark in a circle.

“Adele, sleeper failure, repeat, sleeper failure.”

Adele didn’t answer.

Juna held the walkie close enough to her broad lips to lick it.

Adele didn’t answer.

Juna listened to the static. Had the message got through the interference? Had Adele heard it and hid under her bed sheets?

Adele didn’t ans­ “Tee­tee... responding, repeat...”

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Juna exhaled. She heard Adele’s feet running to the sleeper berths.

Or maybe it was the ghosts.

“Oh gods, oh gods...”

Louisiana fell into Adele’s arms. Adele dragged her out of the berth and snatched the walkie off the wall.

“Adele to Alex, Adele to Alex.” She took the walkie cord out of Louisiana’s shaking hands. “Emergency respite, report to berth immediately, report to berth immediately.”

Louisiana gasped and choked. Sweat stood out on her fashionably bald head.

“Gods...” Louisiana spluttered. “Breathe, can’t breathe...”

“Alex, respond, Alex, respond.”

“I’m busy,” burst out of the speaker, followed by the crack of pool balls.

“Emergency, respond,” Adele said.

“Okay, responding,” Alex sighed.

“It’s choking me,” Louisiana panted. “Can’t... trying to kill me.

Swallow me. It’s coming, it’s coming...”

Juna kicked a stone out of her path. Her heavy work boots sent it

skittering into the forest. She hated the taste of Earth air, sharp and fizzy compared to the air of her ship or the Eden dome on Deimos where she was born, raised and still lived.

She’d put in a complaint against Louisiana to SNI. When she'd signed the lease for her, they said Louisiana had over twenty­one thousand hours logged in the berth. And now she was spooked by some... nightmare? Spooked enough to pull herself out of the berth before Alex was hooked in, to leave the ship without any mind and them all drifting in a lobotomised, comatosed husk? Juna knew her request for compensation would be declined, even as she completed the form. She kicked another stone.

The air was too thick, sun too bright, sky too blue, and the forest stank like a rubbish tip. She wasn’t even sure where she was. Some backwards, third­world hole. Wales, was that what her son had called it?

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She folded her arms and looked for the hole in the fence Taliesin had assured her was there. She ducked past a sign that clung on with one screw and warned her she would be liable to the park’s owner if she injured herself.

She stood on the wrong side of the fence and looked down. The path was as thin as a foot, pine­coloured dirt littered with stones. It was steep enough to allow her to lean backwards and rest on her palms as she made her way down.

Cold, deep water ran thirty feet below, the valley side covered in a thick growth of trees and shrubs. The path levelled, and on the other side was a ten foot rise of lose mud and stones. In between, the path was still little more than eight inches wide. Juna clung to the hiss of static from some old, unseen radio, the only familiarity she could find in this landscape of trees and dirt.

As the path looped around, it opened onto a plateau almost ten feet square. The dirt paled, more like the colour of sand in movies.

At the back was a hole in the bank. Her son told her he was living in a cave, but she’d thought it was hyperbole.

“Taliesin!” she shouted. Her voice bounced into the cave and ricocheted around inside. “Tali!”

She hadn’t seen her son naked since he was six, and the sight wasn’t welcome now. She couldn’t help but watch his penis as it swung with the momentum of walking.

“What’s all this about then?” She folded her arms.

“I’m home,” Tali said. He spread his arms as if to embrace his mother. She caught the scent of sweat and leaf mulch.

“You weren’t born and raised in a cave­“ “No, mother,” Tali said, his broad shoulders squared. “I am humanity. And I am home.”

Juna watched her son critically, made sure to hold his gaze. He looked unwell.

“You listen to me­“ “No, you listen to me.” Tali bared his teeth. “I am humanity. I am human. Fifty­thousand years have raised me to be part of this planet.

Trial and error, death and evolution have sculpted my DNA to be a part of this ecosystem, a part of this life.

“I am this soil!” he scooped a handful of dirt off the ground and 23

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shoved it into Juna’s face. She recoiled. “I am... I am these leaves!

That water! This air! And they are me! Five billion years since the sun cooled and every one of them leading to my body and my mind being part of Mother Earth, part of her spirit, part of her soul. Are you too stupid to understand that?”

Juna shook her head. Who the hell was the naked man in front of her?

Even the air on May Station tasted odd, as if someone had tried to replicate Earth’s air and failed. Despite the lower­than­market prices, Juna would rather be at the market in Dinasheart. They didn’t take nearly as long to process her catch and she knew most of the buyers by name. She’d received Tali’s letter on the way back to Deimos, and headed for Earth instead. The emotionally­shattered prose made her change her routine, and she resented him for it.

She held her receipt and stared up at the LED­covered wall opposite. In the pit in front of her, people in the livery of a dozen different companies milled and haggled and shouted. When she’d started sailing as a deckhand thirty years ago, every buyer in the pit would be wearing a different company’s jacket. Now buyers from La Société de Nice Ion, Kim­Wei, Total Energy Solutions, Paelo and Heron moved through the crowd like sharks devouring minnows.

The big five bought more and more of the independent companies every year.

Juna kept one eye on her catch as it moved up the boards to the bidding space at the top, and the other on the constantly changing average prices which ran like ticker tape to the right of the receipt numbers.

“Kovarik! Thought you were too good for Earth!”

Juna frowned and looked over one shoulder, then the other. The gallery was packed with trawlermen waiting to see if they could pay the bills this month.

“Or at least near­Earth orbit. How you doing?”

Jimmy West pushed through the last few people and clapped Juna on the shoulder. His long face was thinner, cut by deeper lines of age and worry than Juna remembered. His hair receded into a widow’s peek and he still couldn’t quite shave his face clean.

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Maybe she didn’t look so young, either.

“Jimmy West,” Juna said with a smile as she gently slapped his hip.

“How’s selling out to the big blue marble worked out for you?”

Jimmy shrugged. “Shit.”

Juna offered him a sympathetic smile. “Should’ve stayed at home.

Same shit prices, but at least the air tastes good.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I miss the rain. And the cold. It’s like living in a desert here.”

“You’re losing your accent, Jimmy.”

Jimmy laughed like a wrench bouncing down metal stairs. “And here’s me wondering if you were always this hard to understand.

Same old Dinasheart?”

“Same old Dinasheart.”

Jimmy smiled, and stood beside her. For a moment, they stood in the comfortable silence of old friends.

“Seriously, Kovarik, it’s good to see you’re still around. Losing too many friends these days.”

Juna nodded. “Even back home. Everyone’s either getting repossessed by the banks or taking the corporate payoffs and moving to the new houses in the third dome. And the kids are all corporate monkeys, running their ships like fast food joints and busting balls to meet quotas for their masters on the Heron or SNI boards. I tell you what, Jimmy, we’re watching the industry die and it’s a fucking tragedy.”

Jimmy nodded. The name Kovarik moved two spots up the board.

“I had one of my sleepers freak out on me and pull herself out last trip,” Juna said. “Had her on contract for four years, almost thirty­thousand hours in bed. Believe that, eh?”

She looked at Jimmy, waited for him to laugh.

“Where were you drifting?”

“About twenty­five clicks from TK­17.”

Jimmy frowned, and nodded.

“What?”

“Well,” Jimmy said, reluctant to admit it. “TK­17 is one of those spots. You know. Weird ones. You’re not the first to have a sleeper pull out around there.

“I heard a story,” he said. “About fifty clicks north­north­west, 25

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negative sixteen degrees from TK­17. One of the sleepers, proper pro, close to sixty­thousand hours, pulls himself out screaming about something reaching in to get him. So scared he pissed himself.

Hasn’t gone near a berth since.”

It’s coming. It’s coming. Juna shuddered.

“And I’ve heard enough of the same to stay well clear of TK­17,” Jimmy added. He stared straight at the board, his face emotionless.

Juna knew him well enough to read fear in the creases around his eyes. What had scared a man with twenty­five years sailing behind him?

“Why haven’t I heard anything?” Juna asked.

Jimmy shrugged. “It’s all business in Dinasheart, isn’t it? There’s a bit more time for scuttlebutt here.”

He wouldn't talk about it. Maybe pride stopped him, or maybe the suspicion that saying it out loud would make it real. Juna understood.

“What’s pissing me off is she didn’t come cheap,” Juna said. “The amount they make us pay for someone who’s got all the certificates, you’d expect someone who can do the damned job. Getting her replaced before I go out again.”

Jimmy nodded.

“Got an offer from SNI the other day,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Enough to pay off my debts and buy one of those fancy third dome homes for myself.”

“And spend the rest of your life as a middle­manager corporate cock sucker.”

Jimmy shrugged. “If I don’t get at least one­seventeen per gallon today, I’m flat­arse broke. Bank’ll have the boat, the house, hell even my pants­skid marks and all.”

Juna nodded.

The average price clicked up to one­seventeen­point­seven­eight.

“You want to be careful,” she said. “You almost sound like you’re thinking about it.”

Jimmy shrugged. “You’re not?”

“Fuck off, Jimmy.” Juna twisted around and stabbed his chest with her finger. “You see that price up there? You see it? If it wasn’t for 26

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people like you, like you, it would be at least two hundred a gallon.

Two­fucking­hundred. Get the fuck out of here.”

“Come on, Juna. You know I don’t have a choice­“ “Hey!” Juna shouted. She turned around, grabbed people by the shoulders and pulled them in. “Hey! Everyone! This arsehole is selling out to SNI! This dickhead­“ “Juna, seriously, calm the fuck down­“ “­is sticking his dick up our arses because he likes the taste of SNI cock! You see that price? Huh, you see it? This arsehole wants it under a hundred a gallon!”

The people gathered around them like storm clouds, Jimmy a rod on a church roof. They were depressed, they were oppressed, and they were angry. They wanted to let the world know. Jimmy put his hand over Juna’s mouth and shoved her backwards.

“We’ve all had offers and we’re all thinking about it,” Jimmy snapped at the mob. “Now piss off.”

The truth took the thunder out the nascent storm. Brownian motion carried them away.

“Don’t you sell us out, West,” Juna said, finger pointed like Zeus’s lightning bolt. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Adele stood. Taliesin sat on a log drawn up to the fire.

“So this is your home, huh?” she said.

“I am human,” Tali said. He looked up at her. “Like you. We are both at home here.”

Adele paced the length of the clearing, and back again. She didn’t look at home.

“And you can tell her the answer is ‘no’,” Tali said.

“What?”

“My mother,” Tali said. “My biological mother. She sent you here to talk me into going back to school. And the answer is no.”

“Juna didn’t send me,” Adele said. She kicked at a stone. It skittered through the trees and bushes and into the stream thirty feet below. She paced back and stood in the cave mouth. Tali watched her for a moment, then stared into the flames.

“You still write that poetry of yours?” she asked.

Tali smiled. “Yes, I’m still a poet. It’s not something you grow out 27

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of. It’s a particle of dust, and the cloud of self forms around it.”

Adele nodded. She glanced up at the darkening sky, tilted her head to the calls of wrens and pigeons and crows as they jumped from branch to branch. She listened to the sound of the waterfall that Juna had mistaken for a radio, and watched the clouds move across the dusk­blue sky.

“So,” Tali prompted, “why are you here?”

Adele glanced down at him, then down into the growth which hid the river.

“My friend says her son is naked and living in a cave somewhere on Earth, so, you know...” she shrugged. “Your mum’s worried about you, Tali.”

“No she isn’t.”

“She is. You know she is.”

“Oh, and how do you know that? Is she losing her temper even more than usual?”

Adele smiled. “Something like that. Look, Tali­“ “Don’t tell me she loves me or anything like that, Adele,” Tali said.

“She does. And some day you’re going to have to get over your abandonment issues.”

“They’re not issues.”

“Whatever you call them.” Adele shrugged again. “Juna’s a trawlerman. She can’t be anything else and you’re going to have to learn to live with that.”

“And one day I’ll be old enough to understand?”

“No,” Adele said. “You’re nineteen. You’re old enough to understand that now.”

“I’m twenty­two,” Tali said.

Adele frowned and looked at him. When he looked up at her, she looked away again.

“So I guess I’m immature,” Tali said. “Well, that’s fine. I’ve got a few immature things to say. Sit down, Adele.”

He stroked the log next to him. Adele didn’t move.

“Please, Adele, sit down.”

Adele sat as if the log would bite her. The scent of the fire and dried sweat clung to the fine hairs on Tali’s skin, and threatened to drown her.

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“You going to tell me about how the great Earth spirit reached through dreamspace for you?”

Tali laughed gently. “This? I’m just trying this on for a while. I’m still young enough­immature enough­to try on philosophies like clothes in a shop. Just trying to find a way to impose meaning on a meaningless universe.”

Adele pulled a stick from the edges of the fire and poked the red­glowing wood in the centre.

“That’s what you told your mum?”

“I can’t be honest with her,” Tali said. “Not like I can with you.”

Adele pulled the stick out the fire and watched it smoulder. “The best thing you can be with your mother is honest.”

Tali smiled as if she didn’t understand.

“Adele,” he said. He leaned forwards and rested his forearms on his thighs. “I’ve thought a lot. I wanted to come here to get my head straight. Under the stars and the moon my ancestors worshipped, under a blue sky. Somewhere without buildings and cities and lights and a horizon that’s circumscribed by glass. Somewhere real, you know?”

Adele didn’t say anything. She jabbed her stick back into the fire and knocked over one of the burning logs. It rolled, and the fire coughed up sparks and smoke as it collapsed.

“Anyway,” Tali said. “See, there’s something I need to tell you.

Adele...” He stopped and sighed.

“Okay,” he said. He turned to look at her, but she stared into the fire. “This has... I need to tell you...”

He stopped again, and ran his hand through his black hair. Adele jabbed the fire.

“Will you stop that and pay attention?” he snapped.

She took the stick out the fire, and turned to look at him. He couldn't meet her eyes.

“Adele,” he said firmly, the word a log he could cling to in the rapids. “I need to say... that I love you. I love you. I want to spend my life with you. It's gnawed at me for years, and... and there it is.”

Adele turned back to the fire and jabbed it again. Her heart beat like an epileptic clock and blood throbbed in her jaw. She stared into the flames. She was a rabbit cornered by a pack of hungry wolves.

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“I thought a declaration of love from a poet would be more... poetical,” she said. Her voice was calm, forced carefully past the lump of panic in her throat.

Tali sighed. “I’m not that kind of poet. All I can be is honest.”

“I’m twice your age. There’s a word for women who sleep with men half their age.”

“Yeah,” Tali agreed. “But I think we’re thinking of different words.”

Adele jabbed the fire, then tossed her stick into it. Smoke started to run between the bark and the wood, and she stood. She wiped her hands on her trousers.

Tali watched her pace.

“So?” he asked.

Adele kicked another stone down the valley.

“I love you, Ade­“ “No you don’t,” Adele snapped. “You’re just horny. You’re too young to know what love is. Love has nothing to do with your ancestor’s moons and stars and spending your life with someone in some... fairytale. Love is busting your balls for fourteen hours a day, fifteen days straight and giving up all the money it earns you. It’s giving up any right you have to personal space or to have something all to yourself. It’s being end­of­the­world angry and admitting you’re wrong. It’s you coming out here, sitting naked in a cave with all your... philosophy bullshit and me telling you that you’re being a stupid arse and you need to get your life back on track. And you being grateful for me telling you you’re being childish and stupid and you need to stop being both.”

Tali stared at her, eyes glistening in the firelight.

Adele stared into the cave. Then up at the sky where the first few stars shone. Tali’s words had awoken some lascivious thing inside her, something she hadn’t felt in years. Something she hadn’t felt since Juna’s ex­husband had turned up on her doorstep and demanded their marriage be rekindled, demanded Adele make it happen. It wrapped itself around her stomach and groped her intestines. The skin on her stomach quivered. She wanted something sharp, something to cut herself open and pull it out. Tali watched her.

“Well,” he said. “Well, you’ve cured me of my affection.”

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“No I haven’t,” Adele snapped. Anger was the only armour she had. “Put some clothes on and go home. Maybe you’ll find someone with the same delusions as you.”

“You know, I wish that inbred bint had found the money to sack me.” Louisiana wrapped her hands around the warm, honey­coloured whisky toddy. “That bloody termination fee they put in our contracts... I’ve been trying to get away from TK­17 for years.”

“Hey,” Alex looked up from the pool table. “Do you have to talk?

It’s like having my head stuck in a bell jar with a mosquito in it.”

Micro­crystals woven into Louisiana’s shirt cast her in soft focus, no matter how hard you squinted. She sat on the bar stool and leaned backwards, her elbow resting on the counter and bare feet hidden by the layers of her skirt.

The pool balls cracked as Alex broke the rack. He breathed in and squeezed between the table and the arcade machines.

“You enjoy playing with yourself?” Louisiana asked.

The cue shot through his fingers and the balls rattled around the table. He looked up. “No one else can give me the satisfaction I can give myself, you know?”

Louisiana snorted.

The rec room on the Proof Positive was only intended for one. Two made it crowded. Under normal circumstances, there would always be one sleeper in the engine, and one sleeper winding down. They wouldn’t meet, much less share down­time. But the Positive’s hull was being patched in Dinasheart after a micro­collision with junk in super­high Earth orbit, and neither of the well­educated, south Martian sleepers wanted to rub shoulders with the locals. The domes on Deimos had been built on the cheap by migrants who couldn’t turn the work down, and their descendents with their nigh­incomprehensible cant, penchant for stodgy food and piecemeal heritage were regarded as less­than­civilised by the Martian mainland.

The pool balls cracked again.

It hurt like a hot poker to the pre­frontal cortex to lend your sleeping mind to the ship’s engine. Legislation stipulated that each sleeper have a minimum of twelve hours – eighteen recommended ­ 31

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between shifts and were provided with free access to leisure and rest facilities. The same legislation barred the rest of the crew from the recreation room, lest they disturb the sleepers’ ‘safe space’ and hinder their relaxation.

“There’s good fishing around Seventeen,” Alex said. He leaned over the table and lined his shot up. “I heard skipper say she’s been going there for years.”

“And I’ve slept for her the whole damned time. I’ve requested dozens of transfers and I’ve been rejected dozens of times.”

Louisiana finished her drink, turned around, leaned over the counter and mixed herself another.

The eight ball cracked into the corner pocket. “I heard Seventeen was haunted,” Alex said. “That’s what they said, before I was assigned here. I laughed. Haunted? That’s a child’s word. But Seventeen is a dark place. When I sleep there, I am not myself. I am possessed by something. I am in my body, but I do not control it. It is like being a puppet for God, and God is an old, old thing.

Humanity is nothing to it.”

He glanced up at Louisiana. She watched him carefully over the rim of her glass.

“Maybe if I’d been sleeping there for four years, I’d unplug too,” he said.

A sleeper who believed in ghosts was a liability, and no one would hire a liability. It was a dangerous confession.

She traded him in kind.

“I feel it when I’m awake sometimes,” she said. “It watches me.

Like a shadow on the wrong side of frosted glass.”

She watched him, worried she’d said too much. If he ruined her, it was one less person he had to compete against for work.

But then he nodded, and she saw the fear in his eyes.

He understood.

The Proof Positive swept through the stellar nursery and twisted and turned as cosmic fallout played with it like a child in the bath.

Its nets tailed behind, every movement of the ship exaggerated by the super­fine mesh. Blue trails of negative ions crawled over them like angry ants defending their hill, and every few moments an ion would 32

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escape and fly off into the void. Designed from the quanta up to collect trihydrogen cations without denaturing them, the nets were worth more than the ship.

Juna sat in the cramped cabin and watched the scrolling lines of the spectroscopy readout. The artificial gravity kept the crew fixed relative to a point on the ship itself, so its physical orientation made no difference. But the waves of radiation tortured their nascent sixth sense and turned the ship into a coffin crowded with the angry dead.

Juna massaged her temples and fought to block it out.

She fought to block out her son sitting naked in a cave in Wales and the nagging, persistent thought that Jimmy was right. That the only way she was going to keep putting food on her table was to sell her ship and herself to SNI. She’d rather deal with the dead. At least they weren’t real. The truth was always too hard to hide from.

After paying for the hull patch, she needed to make one­eighteen­point­three a gallon from this trip... if it was a good trip and she came back with the hold three­quarters full. If it was a bad, or even an average trip...

She closed her eyes and rubbed them until they hurt. The hull patch was an unwelcome expense, but still less than Louisiana’s termination fee. If she hadn’t been too distracted by her son’s apparent breakdown then she would have remembered to terminate Louisiana’s contract, would’ve had to pay the termination fee and for the repairs, and would be in a whole lot more trouble right now.

Maybe this trip would be better than good and she could pay Louisiana off next time.

By the time she opened her eyes, the warning light had turned off and she’d missed it.

In the berthroom, Adele finished unplugging Alex and helped him to his feet. He held himself tightly, uncharacteristically quiet.

Louisiana snuffled in her sleep and her eyelids twitched as the computer worked her brain. Adele draped a blanket over Alex’s shoulders, and glanced up at the monitor.

Taliesin’s words sat in her guts. I love you, Adele. I love you. She didn’t dare touch them for fear they would reach up and squeeze her heart dry, but she had to watch them. Had to stare, like a lover looking down at a mortuary slab because they have to be sure.

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A monitor on the engine­mainframe manifold flashed for her attention. She glanced up and the creature in her guts fingered her heart. Her breath caught and stomach lurched. She tapped the screen and closed the dialogue box. The warning disappeared. She took a moment, controlled her breath, closed her eyes. Maybe it would sort itself out. Whatever the warning, maybe it would sort itself out. It normally did. Her face flushed, her fingers tingled and her stomach lurched. Maybe...

Alex shuffled to the door. Adele strode back to the hold to help filter the ions. It was something she could do, something that would stop her thoughts.

Alex glanced at Louisiana, and shivered.

“Bay one full.” Mair’s voice barely made it though the static.

“Tee­tee.”

Juna released the button on the walkie and clipped it back to the dashboard. She made continual adjustments to their course with the tracker ball on her right. Two screens directly in front of her spooled readings: spectroscopy; e­m measurements; historical data; computer simulations; shipping forecasts; log entries from other trawlers in the cloud. With fifteen years’ experience, Juna took it all in and guessed where the ship needed to be. She fingered the tracker ball.

“Skipper... bay two...”

“Skipper to Mair, repeat.”

“Problem with...”

“Skipper to McBride, problem with bay two, problem with bay two McBride.”

Juna stared at the screens, ignored the shadows which crept over her and whispered in her ear.

“Bay two filling,” Adele's voice said.

Juna nodded, even though no one could see her. She knew Adele would see it, in her own way. They'd worked together for seventeen years.

The net cracked and discharged forks of lightning. Ions shot off into the cosmic mass, electrons cut paths through the drifting gas until captured by naked nuclei.

Juna rubbed her eyes again. She opened them, and saw a light on 34

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the dashboard flicker off.

“All stop, all stop,” she said into the walkie. She cut the engine.

Another switch killed the momentum of the ship, and another set a static point relative to TK­17­the largest object in range­and anchored them in space.

“Hold to skipper, hold... not retracting, repeat, nets not retracting.”

“Get them working, Adele,” Juna snapped.

Another light flashed on the dashboard. Juna frowned at it, stared at where it had been after it disappeared. Why did it just tell her there was no air in the hold?

“Bridge to hold, report.”

“Still working...”

“You got air down there?”

“Tee­tee skipper.”

Juna put the walkie down, and frowned.

Adele jabbed keys on the side of bay two. The bays were sealed behind thick screens that kept the conditions perfect for holding the trihydrogen plasma. All the crew ever saw of them were the dark grey metal sheets, punctuated by fat bolts and welding. A small, two­colour screen flashed information and as it did, Adele punched in commands and requests.

“Mair, Rhian, nets,” she said. Bay two wasn't responding the way it should and if Juna wanted the nets in, something bad was happening.

The pressure sucked moisture from her like a vacuum.

She punched buttons.

“Not responding,” she heard Mair say.

“Fuck not responding, bring them in.”

The hold was long, a corridor five feet wide parallel to the bays, poorly lit and claustrophobic when it was full of ghosts. Sweat dribbled down Adele's cheeks.

“Where's Nusa? Why isn't she here?”

“She's still under from the painkillers you gave her,” Mair said.

Adele cursed. She needed another pair of hands.

Something behind the far wall of the hold wrenched and exploded.

A red light wailed.

“Gear's fucked!”

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Adele left the bay and ran down the corridor. The fuses had blown, plastic melted and wires fused. Her heart stopped.

Mair reached out to the controls. Adele grabbed her wrist and threw it back.

“They're live,” Adele said. “They'll fry you. And me too. Cut the power. Emergency switch.”

“Where is it?”

“Fuck's sakes!” Adele instinctively ran her hand through her hair and inhaled the scent of coconuts. It didn’t calm her­all she could smell was burnt wires. “Rhian! Cut the power to the nets. You, keep an eye on bay one and look forward to your pay being docked.”

Mair didn't object. She should be able to find all the emergency switches in the dark. She'd sat through Adele's briefing on it, signed a piece of paper that said she understood. But in of five years sailing, she'd never needed to know. How was she meant to know that this trip would be different?

Adele ran her fingers through her hair again. She took in a slow breath, and then let it out. She ran back to bay two. The tiny screen had gone black. She jabbed keys. Nothing happened.

“What's... down there?” the speaker blared. Adele punched the keyboard, turned and ran down the hold to the walkie.

“The net winch is burned out and live. Rhian's cutting the power.

Bay two has gone dead on me.”

“Get... sorted.”

“Working on it, skipper.”

Adele dropped the walkie and ran back to bay two.

“Bay one dead!”

Adele ran to bay one and shoved Mair aside. She punched the keys until her temper broke and she beat the keyboard with her fist. She ran back to the walkie.

“Hold to bridge, hold to bridge, urgent status on containment, repeat, urgent status on containment.” “... can't see... problem.”

“Negative, skipper. Both bays have gone black on me. Urgent request, status of containment.”

“No indication...”

Adele turned around. Mair was staring dumbly at the keys.

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Rhian screamed and fell to the floor. Her right arm smoked and she stank of rancid pork. Her body contorted as another scream tried to break free. Adele watched her for a moment. First aid was part of her job. And right now, the ship needed it more than Rhian did.

She grabbed the walkie again. “Hold to bridge, hold to bridge.

Urgent status update.”

“Board... black.”

In the sleepers' rec room, Alex wrapped his arms tighter around himself and squeezed his eyes shut. Louisiana started to moan in her sleep.

“Requesting permission to cut nets and vent bays.”

Adele held the walkie and waited for the answer. Her heart beat quick and shallow. “...systems failure, computer would’ve warned... could’ve compensated.”

“Manual observation confirmed. Containment compromised. Nets live and lose. Request permission to cut nets and vent bays.”

“Permission... repeat... granted.”

Adele dropped the walkie, ran back to the bays and unlocked the emergency controls. A couple of switches, and a couple of long levers.

“Mair, vent. I'll cut the nets.”

Three small explosions flashed on the Proof Positive's bow. The net whipped and folded, the live mesh made contact with itself and the energy it used to trap the trihydrogen cascaded. Streams of red plasma from the Positive’s tanks enveloped it. Discharge cracked and lit up the cloud like a summer storm.

Alex cowered. Trapped, held hostage, Louisiana screamed.

The angry ball of nuclear power tumbled away from the Positive and rolled through the electro­magnetic turbulence like a leaf in rapids.

The door to the hold burst open and Juna shot through. She pushed past Mair, stepped over Rhian, grabbed Adele by the neck and pushed her back. She held on, pushing Adele until her back was against the far wall of the hold.

“What the fuck just happened? What the fuck just happened?!”

Adele pulled at Juna's arm. It didn't move.

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“What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”

Juna’s thumb pressed Adele’s throat closed and Adele couldn't answer.

Juna let go. She clenched her fist and brought it hard into Adele's jaw. The woman staggered. Juna shoved her. The wall knocked the wind out of Adele's lungs and she tripped over her own feet. She sprawled on the floor.

“Whatever you did, I am going to fucking skin you.” Juna grabbed Adele's shirt and snarled in her face. “I am going to fucking skin you.”

Juna sat in the bridge, chair leaned back, feet on the small sill around the dashboard. The Positive headed home, with no nets and no catch.

There wasn't much she could do.

They were travelling through dreamspace and anything she did to the controls would probably kill them. She sat and watched the screens periodically display a fresh set of numbers. Someone needed to keep a watch on what the computer was doing, just in case.

The deckhands spent the time in artificially­induced sleep. She and Adele would take turns watching the numbers. Sometimes, they would spend a few hours awake together before one of them retired to sleep.

Not this trip.

She rubbed her eyes and looked again at the message on her mobile. Enough money to pay off all her debts, buy a house and keep working for a living. All she had to do was sell her soul to SNI. There was a time when dozens of small, nimble companies haggled at the market. They would take the trihydrogen away, and convert it into fuel. The fuel that ran their civilisation. That would then be auctioned to any of a dozen distributors, who would sell it onto one of a hundred suppliers. That was decades ago. Now, SNI, Kim­Wei, Total Energy Solutions, Paelo and Heron owned all the distributors and almost all of the sellers. The only part they didn't own was the fishing. And they were hell­bent on changing that.

But then, what was the alternative? Declare herself bankrupt.

They would take everything she had. Why would she do that, when 38

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she could have a comfortable life?

The door opened and she looked over her shoulder. Louisiana's silhouette broke the vague gloom outside. Her light dress swayed as the warm air from the cabin rushed to the cold air in the corridor.

“Why aren't you asleep?” Juna snapped.

Louisiana folded her arms and stared at Juna. Alex was in the engine. Louisiana was getting her twelve hours of bright­eye. Juna should've known.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “It's gone.”

“What's gone?”

Louisiana nodded to one side, indicating something far outside the ship. “Whatever was out there.”

“Yeah,” Juna said. “My livelihood. My whole life.”

“Not that,” Louisiana sighed. “Something else. Something... bigger. I’ve been dreaming about it for four years, or maybe it’s been dreaming about me. I think it used me, somehow. It brushed past me, it felt... familiar. As if it knew me.”

“I don't have time for any mystical crap,” Juna said. “Sailors stopped believing in ghosts centuries ago.”

“We've only dipped our feet in the dreamspace,” Louisiana said.

“We've waded up to our toes in an ocean. Only someone supremely arrogant would believe we know what's out there.”

Juna turned back to the screens. She watched the numbers scroll for a few moments.

“Why you telling me?”

Juna could hear the shrug in Louisiana's voice.

“Because I've got to tell someone, and you're all I've got. I didn't expect you to understand. I'll leave you to your masturbating, or whatever it is you do up here.”

The door clicked shut.

Juna looked back at the small, perfectly formed SNI logo rotating on her mobile. Why wouldn't she?

Rain slapped against the thin window. Thirty stories up, Juna could see the indistinct smudges of the other tower blocks but nothing else. She held her cup of tea carefully as she sat. The futon was offensively yellow, its metal frame rusted. She sighed, and closed 39

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her eyes.

She could hear people moving above, below and to almost every side of her. Music fought with the sound of a dozen different TV channels, raised voices, childrens' screams and play. There was the mumble of heating, the whine of the wind, the sound of the rain on the window. She tuned it out like they were ghosts in the dust cloud.

Her mobile beeped. She fished it out and tried to keep the tea in her cup. Another message from the astronomer. She settled back in the seat, mobile in one hand and tea in the other.

“Ms Kovarik,” the message started. “Perhaps I was too technical in my initial letter. I'll try to put it in layman's terms for you. TK­17 wasn't a remnant, as we thought. It was a 'still­born' star. The cloud had begun to collapse, but had stopped before it became dense enough.

“There's been a lot of activity in the TK­17 cloud recently.

Unexpected kinetic disturbances and increased broad­spectrum radio emissions, for example. When you ejected your nets, it was in the perfect place at the perfect time. The window seems to have been less than two days. It's what I call a Lama Event: the final packet of energy to start a process.

“Ejecting your nets at that time and at that place caused the TK­17 cloud to start collapsing again. There's every indication that fusion will start in the cloud's core, and a new star will be born.

“Lastly, to answer your question: no. There is no 'financial reward'. We have yet to devise a way to place a monetary value on an event of cosmic significance and, God willing, we never will.

“However, it seems in the best hospitality of our profession to award you the honour of naming the new star. You should look at existing star names for inspiration.

“Regards, “Dr. Mutembo.”

Juna took a sip of her tea. She wasn't sure how she felt.

Angry. Angry about her ship. Still, a new star... It was good to think that one of them would belong to her. That it was something she had created.

The front door juddered open. Adele walked in a few moments later, a bag of shopping in each hand and hair plastered over her face.

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Water dripped off her grey jumpsuit. She dropped the bags in the kitchen, kicked off her shoes and sat down on the end of the bed, another futon which had been pulled out. She peeled socks off her feet.

“Kettle's just boiled,” Juna said.

Adele wriggled out the jumpsuit and under the covers on the bed.

“And Tali left you another message.”

Adele shivered.

“Couldn't you just take him for a tumble or something? Get it out his system?”

Adele laughed uncomfortably. “He's still that twelve­year­old kid who did press­ups in front of cartoons in his underwear. Even thinking about it makes me feel like a filthy old woman.”

“What you going to do?”

Adele shrugged.

“He's not your responsibility, you know.”

“He's made himself my responsibility,” Adele said. “He's... pushed his way into being my problem, my­” “Shut up,” Juna said. She meant it kindly. “We've been through all this. Too many times. No one can force responsibility on you. You have to agree to take it.”

Adele didn't say anything.

“I've told you for the last ten years, and I'll tell you for the next ten.”

The State Assisted Living Allowance they received was almost enough to keep food on the table and heat in the pipes. The state­provided accommodation mostly kept the water and the wind out. Two rooms, a bathroom and a kitchen would be too little for most people to share when the rooms struggled to contain more than two pieces of furniture and more than one person. But Juna and Adele had spent seventeen years sailing together.

Adele had ignored the mainframe's warning and Juna had to file for bankruptcy. The bank sold her assets to SNI and because Juna would never be on their payroll, and Adele wouldn’t if Juna wouldn’t­no matter how generous their offer to her was­Adele didn't want to captain Juna's ship, even less so when it was filled with SNI monkeys and run like a fast food joint.

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Trihydrogen prices had been in a constant decline for over a decade, a decline driven by the stranglehold of the big five. Both Juna and Adele knew their time as independent trawlermen was rapidly running out.

Juna knew Adele’s paralysing anxiety was going to do something to screw the ship up and force her to choose. Adele knew Juna would never sell to SNI, any more than she gave an inch of ground to the father of her son.

Some things were more important than who dropped the straw which broke the camel’s back.

Juna picked up her mobile again. For a moment, her thumbs hovered over the keys. Then, she typed.

She told Dr. Mutembo what Louisiana had told her. There was something massive, something terrifying in the dreamspace by TK­17.

With every trip they took out there, Louisiana would dream about it until she dreamt of nothing else. And then, on the last trip, the sleeper said it was gone.

And now a new star was being born.

It was childish, but she had decided she was going to say it.

Adele began to snore gently. The sound caught Juna’s attention and she looked up from the message. Adele had never been social.

The thought of human contact terrified her. No wonder Tali had almost broken her. And maybe if my mind was on the job I would have noticed she wasn't coping. If I wasn't so worked up about SNI and...

She looked down at her mobile again.

“I want to call the star Taliesin,” she added to her message and sent it off. The boy’s father had named him and to Juna it had never been anything but the name of her son. She didn’t know the name of the magical Welsh poet would find an easy home among heavens already crowded with gods and heroes.

Huh, she thought. She put her mobile back and wrapped her hands around the warm cup. If Mutembo thinks he’s too good for money, what would he think if he knew his ‘event of cosmic significance’ was down to two old women and their personal dramas?

She chuckled at the thought. The rain continued at the window as the sub­standard weather systems of the Deimos domes whipped bitter winds and thick sheets of rain.

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Her mobile beeped. More sneering from Mutembo. Some barbed jab at her tale of star spirits in dreamspace.

“There is nothing to disprove your theory,” he'd written.

“Unfortunately, it is also impossible to prove. Perhaps we will have to wait until we have the right equipment.”

She put her mobile down beside her, sipped her tea and watched the micro­collisions of rain against window. She thought about her four years fishing TK­17, about the millions of gallons of trihydrogen she’d taken, about the tens of thousands of other ships all fishing in the stellar nursery, and thought that maybe they were all like mosquitoes sucking blood out of a foetus. If Mutembo did have the right equipment, she wondered, what would he do with it?

Maybe, she thought, it’s for the best that he doesn’t.

Adele groaned, snorted and twisted onto her side, eyes suddenly open. She sat up and ran her hand through her hair.

“You okay?” Juna asked.

“Didn’t realise I was asleep,” Adele said. She stretched, stood, and began stripping the rest of her clothes off. “Guess it was a dream.

We were in orbit around TK­17 in the Positive. Just you, me and Tali.

I told him it wasn’t me he’d gone to Earth to find, it was you.”

She disappeared into the other room for a moment. Juna sipped her tea. She watched Adele come back, rest her hands on her naked hips and scowl.

“Do I have any clean clothes?”

“Under the bed,” Juna said. “Think I saw a pair of your trousers and a t­shirt. Don’t know about underwear.”

Adele got on her hands and knees and reached under the bed.

“You know,” Juna said. “Maybe someone was trying to tell you something, in your dream. Someone we left at Seventeen who maybe feels they owe us something.”

Adele pulled the t­shirt over her head and down her torso. Printed on the front was the name of a band she’d forgotten about years ago.

She looked at Juna and smirked. “Since when did you start believing in ghosts?”

Juna shrugged. Adele pulled her trousers on and went into the kitchen. Crockery clattered as she searched for a clean cup.

I suppose I’ve got the time now, Juna thought. Maybe it is time I get 43

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to know my son. She picked up her mobile and thumbed through her address book. She knew her son well enough to know that, even naked in a cave on Earth, he would have his mobile with him.

Dylan Fox lives in North Wales with his partner and their cats. He has had fiction appear on the Science in My Fiction blog and Alt History Magazine, and has been a contributing editor to SteamPunk Magazine. He also recently had a story come out through Twenty or Less Press. He maintains a blog at www.dylanfox.net.

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BEYOND PHOBOS

by Thomas Canfield

When Walter Sheridan died it was the second death we had experienced in just over a week. Woody Bleelock had been the first.

Two deaths might not sound like a lot to someone who thinks in terms of cities on Earth. But in our community it was a big deal. We had a crew of thirty­three – not the biggest such outfit by any means.

But not the smallest either. Losing two crew members was not something that passed unnoticed.

“I told Walter, I warned him,” Jack Donnelly offered his take on the affair. “If he didn’t start taking better care of himself, he would never make it back to Earth alive. I mean, here we are in a low G environment and he barely exercised. His muscle tone was shot all to hell. His reflexes, ditto. The only time you ever saw him out of a chair was making his way to and from the canteen. Fats and carbohydrates, those were the staples of his diet. What did he think was going to happen?”

Donnelly was a physical fitness devotee. He was trim and in shape, subjecting himself to long hours on the treadmill and a grueling regimen working out with weights. He seldom let an opportunity pass to hector others about their lax habits or the sorry state of their physical conditioning.

“What has any of that to do with his being mangled by the extractor in the mining tunnels?” I asked.

Donnelly threw a sardonic glance in my direction. “Maybe you missed what I said about muscle tone, Rappaport. My theory is Walter was making his way along the catwalk. He stopped to sample the quality of the ore, got his clothing tangled in the flywheel, tripped and fell. Once the machine had him it was curtains, of course.

Nobody walks away from an accident like that.”

“Which begs the question: what he was doing in the mine shafts in the first place?” It was a question for which I had no good answer, one which no theory seemed quite able to explain. Sheridan was our IT guy and spent much of the day sitting in front of a computer 45

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terminal. What had led him to venture down into the mine shafts? I was curious to hear how Donnelly might account for this. But he merely shrugged, not even bothering to hide his indifference. He had explained the incident to his own satisfaction and that was all that mattered.

“I don’t know why Walter wasn’t at his desk but I will say this: I hope our run of bad luck is over.” This from Randy Sloan, head of the station’s communications array. “Two deaths! You can go a whole tour and not lose a single crewmate. And here in – what? Nine days? Two fatalities are not going to look well on report. I’d hate to think this is one of those missions where just everything goes wrong.”

There was a general chorus of agreement in support of this sentiment. Station crews, for all their out­sized percentage of scientifically literate individuals, demonstrated a surprising proclivity towards superstitious behavior. They were big believers in luck, good and bad, and many observed quaint rituals intended to ward off malign influences. I knew of one scientist with a doctorate in microbiology who carried a rabbit’s foot on her person and would not leave her quarters without it. Service in space, dangerous by its very nature, encouraged all manner of curious and eccentric behaviors.

Not all of them were as innocuous as a simple rabbit’s foot either.

“How about you, Rappaport?” Donnelly couldn’t resist the opportunity to needle me. “You make this out to be a run of bad luck?”

“At the moment, I don’t know what to make of it,” I replied. “If it’s only bad luck then it sure has developed a selective tendency of late.

Luck ought to be purely random. When it isn’t, you need to start examining other factors.”

“There you have it, folks!” Donnelly grinned with satisfaction.

“Another incisive analysis from our resident sleuth. If there’s a conspiracy to be discovered, even if it’s only to be manufactured, Rappaport here is the man for the job. He can cobble up a plot out of thin air before anyone is even aware there’s a problem. Paranoia is a difficult argument to refute. It’s a gift we should all be grateful for.”

The others at the table were grinning now as well. They were happy for any form of entertainment, eager to relieve the tedium of their workday. And if it came at my expense so much the better.

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“Tell me, Pokey.” Donnelly would not let it drop. “I forget: what was your area of expertise that qualified you for this mission again?”

I gave Donnelly a long look of disapproval but it bounced right off him. “I think you know what it was,” I said.

“Now I remember!” Donnelly slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “Sanitation engineer, isn’t that the official designation? Of course, we all know that’s only a euphemism, don’t we, Pokey?”

I can’t say that I necessarily disagreed. The truth is, the Agency had followed society’s lead in inflating everyone’s sense of self­worth. But then, janitor is an honorable profession enough, even without the gaudy title. It’s not something I’ve ever apologized for. And I don’t intend to start now.

Signing up for a tour on Ganymede was not everybody’s idea of a good time. It required a two year commitment and if you got there and found it didn’t suit you that was too bad. You were stuck. You were going to serve the full two years whether you liked it or not.

Most people failed to realize how isolated the station was. You would think, given that the base was on a moon circling Jupiter, that it would be obvious, that even the dimmest recruit would recognize that this might be an issue. But not all of them did.

A transport ship stopped three times a year, offloading supplies and picking up ore. Other than that you were stuck looking at the same people, stuck following the same routine, day in and day out for the whole of your tour. We lived in close quarters, with a minimum of privacy. Our entertainment options were limited. We ate together, worked together and showered together. After six months of that everyone was pretty much sick of everyone else. And there were eighteen months still to go. It was enough to drive anyone a little batty.

So why had I signed on? Why had I agreed to such an onerous assignment? With most of the recruits the simple answer was money.

You could salt away a nice piece of change over the course of two years, far more than you would make in a comparable position back on Earth. There were all manner of incentives and bonuses, enough to convince some people that it was well worth their while. And there was nowhere to spend it, not on Ganymede there wasn’t. It would all 47

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be there waiting when you got back home.

But money wasn’t the reason that I had signed. Sure, I like money as much as the next person. It was even fair to say that I was quite fond of it. But the reason I had come to Ganymede, the principal reason, wasn’t the money. It was because Ganymede provided a front row seat to one of the most spectacular sights in all of the universe – the planet Jupiter.

Jupiter filled the sky, filled the senses, with a feast of epic grandeur and unparalleled magnificence. No one who has not seen it can begin to imagine what it’s like. The sheer scale, magnitude and beauty of the planet asserted a kind of hypnotic allure, a boundless fascination.

This did not diminish over time but rather increased. I would sit in the observation deck for hours at a time and stare at Jupiter, lost in the ever evolving and changing bands of color that reflected forces the human mind could barely comprehend. It invoked a sense of awe, almost of reverence. Immersing oneself in the splendor that was Jupiter was akin to discovering some great truth. It was to grow as a person, to experience a rebirth and a transformation. It was a sight, an experience, accorded only to a select few. And I was one of them.

“Pokey?”

I blinked several times, reluctantly withdrawing my attention from the spellbinding orb of Jupiter poised in the sky above me. It was Dr. Pettigrew. I knew it the moment I saw her gentle brown eyes. No one in the entire crew had eyes like that. No one I had ever worked with, no one I had spent time around, had eyes like that. The very first time I saw them I felt certain some bond of sympathy and understanding had been established between us. It was uncanny that, without knowing anything about her, without yet having spoken to her, I could experience such utter certitude. Yet not only was this true, the initial impression was borne out by later events. Dr. Pettigrew, Lisa, was a person with a highly developed sense of empathy, an ability to put herself in another’s place and see the world as they saw it, share their hopes and concerns.

“I didn’t want to interrupt you. I know how much your time here on the observation deck means to you. If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t have disturbed you.” I smiled at her. It was almost 48

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impossible not to smile when I looked into those eyes. “There’s been an accident.”

My smile vanished. “Who?” I asked. I knew instantly it was a matter of who and not what.

“Randy Sloan. He’s dead, I’m afraid. There was nothing I could do to help him. He was in the airlock, preparing to make an inspection outside. He experienced some sort of malfunction with his suit.”

I grimaced. Lisa didn’t need to say anything more than that. If the pressurization of your suit failed it would leave one unholy mess behind. It was an ugly way to make your exit. But then, weren’t any of them pretty.

“I’ll come at once,” I said. I scrambled to my feet. I would need to check the air filtration system and the scrubbers, make certain that none of them had been contaminated. A clean air supply was critical to our survival. Blood contaminants, brain matter, tissue – all of the consequences of a depressurization fatality – could wreak havoc on the system. I needed to locate and remove them immediately.

“Was anyone with Sloan when it happened?” My mind was racing ahead as I tried to absorb all of the ramifications of this latest fatality, the third in the short span of ten days. “Who assisted him into his suit? There had to have been somebody.”

“Yes, of course. But perhaps now, during the initial shock of the tragedy, is not the time to inquire too closely into the details.”

I brushed this aside without thinking. “If there was a structural failure something should have been obvious. There are all manner of safety protocols in place to detect and identify equipment failures.

Prior to their actually failing.”

Lisa, Dr. Pettigrew, laid a hand on my arm. “Discretion might serve your purpose better than a barrage of questions,” she cautioned me.

“If something is seriously amiss, and after three deaths I confess to sharing your concerns, it won’t do to create a stir. That would only complicate matters and impede a proper investigation into the circumstances.”

She was right, of course. She had thought things through with her usual clarity and insight. She had her fingers on the pulse of the crew, as it were, and realized that they were upset enough as things stood and that it would not do to add to their agitation. I was reacting 49

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purely in the heat of the moment.

“I guess that’s true enough,” I conceded. “The last thing any of us need is to have people running around tearing out handfuls of hair.

Only most of the crew has been too complacent up to this point. The other deaths they dismissed as unfortunate but not surprising.

Perhaps this will shake them out of their torpor, convince them that there’s something rotten in Denmark.”

It didn’t happen. I found that out when I made my way down to the canteen after several hours spent cleaning up Randy Sloan’s remains. Remains really was too generous a description. Exploding in vacuum left something that might more properly be described as a residue. A sponge and a mop were the most effective instruments for preparing the deceased for burial.

“Third time’s a charm, they say.” Bret Clarke offered up this old bromide as something fresh and new. “Whatever bad luck we dragged out here with us, whatever bad luck was waiting when we arrived, I figure it must finally have run its course. I predict smooth sailing from here on out.”

I stared at Clarke. He was chief of mining operations and, from what I had seen, knew what he was about. I had never made him for a fool before. But now I had to wonder. Anyone who spoke in such a fashion, anyone who could express such sentiments after what had happened, was in a state of denial. People who didn’t want to see a thing, who were determined not to see it, you couldn’t get through to them. It didn’t matter what you said. Or what evidence you offered.

They would deny it or ignore it or flat out contradict it, anything to avoid confronting the hard facts and having to act.

“Man, I hope this is an end of it.” Jay Bowers pushed the food around on his plate. “I truly do. I wish I could say I was certain. But these sorts of events have been known to snowball, you know. They reach a certain critical mass and acquire a momentum all their own.

Remember what happened back on Phobos? That’s not something anyone wants to repeat.” Everyone around the table nodded.

I pushed my coffee away in disgust. “There isn’t anybody who knows what really happened on Phobos,” I declared.

Phobos was a kind of communal memory amongst the space 50

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fraternity. It had happened over seventy years ago but still found its way into conversation with distressing frequency. Phobos had been a small outpost by contemporary standards, only five astronauts. But the entire crew was found dead when a relief expedition arrived to replace them. The event gave rise to all manner of theories and served as fodder for countless speculative treatments by scriptwriters.

The officially sanctioned version was that one of the crew had gone mad, had taken out his fellow astronauts one at a time and finally, having no one left to kill, had offed himself. But people debated the issue still to this day and would cite it to buttress any argument they cared to make. As in the present instance.

“First off, if you buy into the Agency’s version, what happened was the act of a madman. He had no motive, no plan and no designs. He only intended to kill everyone within reach. Having done that, he conveniently killed himself, leaving no witnesses and no explanation.

The Agency’s final report was filled with unsubstantiated allegations and dubious assumptions. Its one principal accomplishment – indeed, the only one its authors seemed genuinely to care about – was to exonerate everyone, other than the alleged killer, of any and all responsibility. In that, it was eminently successful.”

The table favored me with a look of sour disapproval. Bret Clarke looked particularly put out. “You ought to be careful about what you say, Pokey. That sort of remark can undermine morale and land a man in hot water. If I didn’t know better I might think that you were impugning the integrity of the Agency.”

I had overstepped the bounds of propriety, once again. I had made the cardinal mistake of saying what I really thought – never a good idea. And I had failed to take into account whom I was speaking to.

Whatever else might be said of the members of our crew they were, almost every one of them, Company men. They were creatures of the system, bound to it by a thousand invisible threads. Even when they bitched and complained they did so within carefully prescribed limits.

Questioning authority was not something they went in for. They could not conceive that the Agency might deliberately set out to deceive them. To suggest such a thing was akin to sacrilege.

“Rappaport’s off the reservation again.” Jack Donnelly directed a sly, sideways grin at me. “No need to go out of your way trying to 51

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alienate people, Pokey. Just be yourself. That should more than suffice.”

I’d been waiting for Donnelly to speak. “It’s funny you should say that,” I remarked. “I just got finished mopping up the remains of a colleague of yours not sixty minutes ago. They tell me – I was conversing with some of the tech boys – they say that it was you who helped Sloan to suit up.” It was a clean shot and it hit its mark.

“What of it?” Donnelly spoke with an edge of anger and his posture and expression took on a defensive cast.

“Why, it was up to you to verify that the suit was fully functional. It was your job, your responsibility, to check all of the components and subsystems and certify that each was operational. It doesn’t appear to me that you exercised due diligence in that capacity.”

An awkward silence descended over the table. I could hear Donnelly breathing through his mouth. His face was flushed. Abruptly his fist slammed down, making the cups and cutlery jump and rattle.

“You damn well better watch your mouth, Rappaport! No one’s leveled any sort of accusation against me and you aren’t going to be the first. I did my job and I did it properly. I checked that suit out top to bottom. There was nothing wrong with it, not a goddamn thing.

Just to make certain, I went back and ran through the checklist a second time. That’s called redundancy. If you were a real engineer, instead of a glorified janitor, I might take the time and the trouble to spell it out for you. But I’m not going to bother. “ I will tell you this: stay the hell out of my way! Because if you don’t, you’re going to be the next accident somebody has the misfortune to stumble across.” Donnelly flipped his tray up into the air with one hand. The dishes crashed to the floor and the food splattered everywhere. “There’s something to keep you busy. Do us all a favor and stick to what you’re best at. Leave the idle speculation to others.” Donnelly stormed from the mess hall without a backwards look.

Donnelly hadn’t done himself any favors by his outburst. He had only made certain that everybody was aware it was he who had checked out Randy Sloan’s suit. That might not have mattered had everything settled down and the normal working routine of the 52

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station reasserted itself. Had there been no more accidents it all would have been forgotten. But, as luck would have it, three days later there was another fatality. Or let me amend that – a double fatality.

The Bowers brothers, Jay and Jason, were in the lower reaches of the complex, fifty meters beneath the surface, engaged in what was surmised to be a spirited game of handball. It was the only place in the entire station which afforded room for such an activity and the crew frequently resorted there during rare intervals of free time.

Although not officially sanctioned for such use, the space functioned as a kind of all purpose recreation area for those suffering from cabin fever.

As it happened, it also stood adjacent to the station’s heating plant.

Ice from Ganymede’s surface was harvested, melted and converted to steam. The whole area, including the space appropriated for recreational use, was laced with pipes supplying steam to the upper reaches. At a particularly inopportune time one of these pipes ruptured. Both of the Bowers brothers were enveloped in super­heated billows of steam, scalded to death in a most horrifying fashion. The last person to see them alive, who had joined them in a couple of sets out on the ‘courts’, was Jack Donnelly.

Following these fatalities the mood in the station turned sour and suspicious. There was no more good­natured raillery as before, no more talk about a stretch of bad luck. The prevailing outlook became serious and grim. Meals were eaten in near silence. A new rule was promulgated, stipulating that crew were to travel in pairs along the corridors. Jack Donnelly became something of a pariah, ostracized from the society of his fellow spacefarers and the few scant comforts such society afforded. He was deemed a ‘person of interest’ in the ongoing investigation. It was disclosed that he had been present, in one fashion or another, shortly before each of the tragic deaths which had roiled the station. It was all of it bogus, of course, and no one had better reason to know that than I did.

A span of fifteen days followed in which no one was killed. The panic subsided somewhat although it could not be said that things returned to quite the same state that prevailed before. Still, some 53

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semblance of normalcy had been reestablished when Bret Clarke’s body was discovered in one of the mining shafts. He had been eviscerated while working to repair a broken drill head.

The body was carried up to the station’s medical facility to be autopsied. The Provost Marshal was sent to check on the location and status of Jack Donnelly. He returned to report that Donnelly was nowhere to be found.

I remained to witness the autopsy. Or rather, I remained because Dr. Pettigrew requested that I do so. Under the new policy none of the crew was supposed to work alone. But in this instance, I think, Lisa just wanted someone there whom she could talk to. I didn’t suspect her of harboring any deeper or more complex motive than that.

She began the autopsy by noting how the small intestine had been neatly excised, in what resembled an almost ritual act of hari­kari. I stood silently as she removed first the spleen and then the liver from the dead man’s body cavity. She wielded the scalpel with quick, fluid movements, the blade flashing beneath the lamps overhead. I watched with a sort of sick fascination. I had never witnessed an autopsy before.

“Well, Pokey,” she said. “I certainly didn’t anticipate this when I signed on for a tour. I thought I’d be tending to broken bones and applying iodine to cuts and abrasions. Instead . . . Six victims! It’s almost beyond belief. And I don’t see any end in sight, do you?”

I wet my lips with my tongue. “No, I don’t,” I said.

“You were one of the few who, right from the start, surmised that something was amiss.” I watched as Lisa began to cut open the liver, the scalpel moving with a precision, as it seemed, that was something more than human. “How is it that you were so much in advance of everyone else?”

“Perhaps it’s because I’m not invested as thoroughly in the success of the mission as is the remainder of the crew. They stand to advance their careers and embellish their resumes. Whereas I . . .” I left the words unspoken. It was not necessary to state the obvious. To do so would only make me sound bitter and small. “That allows me to observe events with a more impartial and objective eye.”

Lisa smiled at this. “You are a student of psychology, Pokey. As adept at reading others as you are at interpreting yourself. I wonder 54

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that I am the only one to recognize this trait.” I gave Lisa a quizzical look. I was uncertain where she was going with this.

“Suspicions are running against Jack Donnelly at the moment. He makes an appealing villain. Those who do not look beyond the superficial are likely to be taken in. Unaccountably, he has tied himself to each of these fatalities in some fashion. Hardly what one would expect of a criminal mastermind. What about you, Pokey? Do you like Major Donnelly for these crimes?”

I gave a contemptuous snort of laughter. “Not a chance. He isn’t capable of one murder, much less half a dozen. He’s a steady, plodding drone, fit for a bureaucrat, and he cherishes the company of other steady, plodding drones. Six murders? He hasn’t the imagination! In fact, I know for a certainty that he didn’t kill Randy Sloan. I checked Sloan’s suit myself. There were no flaws and no malfunctions. None. The only one who might have sabotaged the suit, who, in fact, did sabotage it, was Randy Sloan himself. He committed suicide.”

Lisa, Dr. Pettigrew, stared at me a long moment. Her eyes, always so gentle and warm, now sparkled with some new emotion, one I would not have thought them capable of: anger. Her teeth came together with an audible click.

“You might have said something, Pokey. Disclosed this to the others.

Had you spoken you might have done us all a good service. And you might have spared the Major much needless suffering and humiliation.”

I said nothing. Spare the Major? As he had spared me! I was not so well disposed toward the world as all that, nor so gently treated by it.

I would not turn the other cheek, not I. Dr. Pettigrew, Lisa, abandoned the liver and set the scalpel aside.

She used the mini­saw to cut apart the breastbone and ribs, exposing the lungs. Her back was to me now and her whole stance and bearing radiated disappointment. I felt the sting of her censure keenly, as I seldom did with others. I studied the instrument tray and the scalpel covered with gore. I concentrated on the hum of the light overhead, allowing it to fill my mind and extinguish my resentment.

“There!” Lisa exclaimed abruptly. “My god, if only I had thought to look sooner. What further damage has been done due to your silence, 55

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it’s impossible to say.”

“What is it?” I asked. I peered over her shoulder. She pointed to the alveoli. The tissue was disfigured by a pattern of tubular growths, a delicate filigree, black against the surrounding flesh.

“I don’t understand,” I said. My first thought was that the damage could only be attributed to smoking. But then I realized that such a habit was prohibited by Agency policy and would eliminate a candidate from consideration for deep space posting.

“It would appear,” Lisa remarked and her eyes were wide and filled with apprehension, “that our victim had contracted some form of airborne infection, a fungus most likely, and that this has flooded his body with toxins and induced a grave chemical imbalance. The probable source for this infection, by simple process of elimination, would be some agent present here on Ganymede, native to the Jovian system. The chances of combating it with an Earth­based arsenal of drugs are, how shall I put this ­ remote?”

It proved as simple, and as complex, as that. The ice we harvested to fuel the heating plant contained some sort of spore. In its frozen state it was inactive and benign. But as the ice was converted to water, and the water to steam, the spore shed its dormant character and became an active menace. We had inadvertently been introducing the organism into the station by means of the heating and ventilation system. Once infected, toxins overwhelmed the body’s immune system and the individual, over time, became suicidal. Thus the rash of deaths we had experienced were accounted for.

A rescue mission, an emergency transport, is, allegedly, on the way to retrieve us. It should arrive in seven weeks time. I say ‘allegedly’ because it is not evident exactly what the posture of the Agency is or wherein its interests lie. I can envision the tragedy of Phobos being reenacted all too readily, the truth sacrificed along with the lives of the crew for some design larger than us all. In this belief I stand almost alone amongst the crew, the single exception being Dr. Pettigrew. She conducts herself with commendable discretion but her eyes reveal that she harbors some such fear herself.

Curiously, the crew seems to regard our predicament with relative stoicism – or, at the very least, with resignation. Many appear relieved 56

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to find that the source of our problems, the agent of destruction, is not human after all. It is a primitive form of life that acts not at its own volition and harbors no malice, even as it kills. Some derive an odd comfort from this, their spirits buoyed by the conviction that no murderer lurks amongst us.

In this, it is incumbent upon me to say, they are not strictly correct.

Taking advantage of the chaos and atmosphere of panic which gripped my colleagues, I engineered the disappearance of Jack Donnelly, arranging that his body should never be discovered. His death was attributed, as I foresaw, to the same cause as all of the previous victims. As he crossed the line, I could not but respond in kind.

Turn the other cheek? Not I.

Thomas Canfield's phobias run to politicians, lawyers and oil company executives. He likes dogs and beer.

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EMERGENCE

by Steven L. Peck

The teacher, Bla'a Kressl, stood waiting with the child on the edge of the meadow. Above, with neither moon present, the stars were crisp, and the dominant nebula coolly bright. No light leaked from the village to spoil the darkness. The wind, more a distraction than presence, alternated between a light breeze and a barely discernible caress.

The child, wrapped in ceremonial wool habiliments, seemed more chilled than she should given the temperature. Bla'a Kressl was tall and lithe, her thin, short hair­shoulder length, a subtle light blue, although it looked white in the starlight­tossed haphazardly in the occasional gust. She stood stiffly next to the child.

"I don't want to go," the girl said softly. Not defiantly. The teacher looked down at the child but said nothing.

"Will it be long?" The girl was babbling to make conversation the teacher thought. She had never been a very promising child.

Nevertheless she answered her.

"It will be here in less than four minutes." She could have given a more precise estimate, but the girl did not need accuracy.

"I'm scared," the girl whispered, hugging her wrappings more tightly.

There it was. A black shape. A shadow moving in front of the stars.

The glint of metal gave shape to the darkness. It was moving toward them fast and then there it was. The large craft quickly maneuvered to hover a few feet from where they stood. A door cracked open revealing its octagonal shape in an outline of bright light, which expanded more fully until it disclosed an opening onto the ship. The little girl grabbed the woman beside her and held on, weeping. A woman similar in form and aspect to Bla'a Kressl walked through the door and stopped before the woman and child.

The two women uplinked.

Though manufactured nearly identical in form, the two Capeks were different in history and experience and therefore maintained 58

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appropriate firewalls and did not disclose themselves fully to one another. They transmitted the ritual transfer protocols for giving and receiving the girl.

"Must I go?" the girl whimpered softly.

She was ignored.

The protocols verified, the woman standing on the threshold of the vessel extended her hand. Bla'a Kressl placed her hand gently on the back of the girl and guided her forward.

The girl was crying loudly now, her breath coming in broken gasps and her shoulders shaking. Despite this, the girl moved forward with hesitant steps and took the hand of the woman from the ship, and together they turned and walked back into the opening. The door closed. The ship rose noisily and disappeared into the upper atmosphere.

Bla'a Kressl enjoyed the walk back to the village. She liked the night, the stars, the cool air. The large trees added a measure of peace and grace to the winding forest path. Nearby, a night flay called out, eight notes in an ascending scale, then a trill and warbling. In the distance, an answer. A modification on the same theme. The flay nearer her, improvised on the other flay's voice and the two moved through the upper branches of the trees towards one another. In a few minutes the two creatures had combined in a syncopation that combined their voices in a complex arrangement of the original theme. Bla'a Kressl smiled and stopped to listen and enjoy the music of the night birds. She allowed gratitude to bathe her net.

When she returned to her abode, she found the Suzerain waiting.

The house taktak was on the leader's lap, its beak clicking softly in a contented register. Its headplate turned from a dark ruby red to a soft green signaling its pleasure at her return. The Suzerain stood and the taktak leapt down chattering loudly, and began skittering between Bla'a Kressl's legs, demanding attention. She reached down, picked it up and scratched its fleshy head.

Bla'a Kressl considered the Suzerain coolly. In physical aspect, the school's leader was sharper featured, with long black hair and large 59

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expressive eyes that gave away nothing. The Suzerain and the woman did not uplink. In a small village like this, in which contact was frequent, uplinking, despite firewalls, could lead to unintended disclosures. Subtle personal information could leak out, based only on what was held back. In the spaces of what was not offered, secrets could be revealed when accumulated over a long time; information given just by its absence. In a limited community like this, if one wanted not to open oneself fully, it was best to talk out loud. It was also an established habit here, as the human children had to be talked to after their fashion.

The Suzerain smiled, "Good evening Bla'a Kressl. I trust all went well with the student."

Kressl was not in the mood for pleasantries. That the Suzerain was here at all suggested she had something to manipulate­something to which her power and position disposed her.

"Of course," she said simply.

"A disappointing child," the Suzerain observed.

"Why do we take them?" She allowed the taktak to jump from her arms, and she walked over to a window and looked out into the forest behind her house. A light snow was beginning to fall. She already regretted the question. The Suzerain always seemed eager to expound on things which she had discovered though her position.

Had she downloaded a new 'pride' subroutine?

"They are rich. Of course, their gene sequences are full of bugs so these are substandard children, but even these will rise to high places of power and responsibility within their Syndicate, so we do what we can."

Kressl on a whim downloaded information on the Dawkists from the Presidium qnet to see if there had been an update... small cultural­religious group. Held that only minimal sequence manipulation was morally permissible­dental and medical only. Father and mother provide code for their child as they inherited it from their parents.

Control over fifteen­hundred Demesnes. Currently key partner in Bastion Coalition. Considered tolerant of Capeks, but currently deny them personhood and refer to them derogatorily as tick­docs, artificial persons, fauxgirls, androids, licketysplits, robotitrons, and computniks.

Active combatants in Syndicate skirmishes: 1.233.2222, 1.233.2432, 60

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1.234.4543... just the usual info. Bla'a Kressl killed the link.

The Suzerain said, "I have a new assignment for you."

"Yes?" The Suzerain's response was forty­three milliseconds late, indicating extra processing. The leader noticed her own delay and acknowledged discomfort. "It is difficult. I am removing you from teaching students, and would like you to take over the nano­lab to construct Bla'a Tanna's replacement."

Bla'a Kressl could not hide her surprise. "Teaching has conciderable value to me and provides personal satisfaction. The children challenge my processing in ways that cause growth in my personhood. This seems an ill­considered move."

The Suzerain ceased to smile. "Nevertheless, it is what it is. Bla'a Tanna was an indispensable part of growing, processing, and maintaining food supplies. Her accident is a terrible loss and there will of necessity be much rearrangement. You are the logical choice for building her replacement. You have nurtured the development of neural nets that are seeped in creativity and art. We have been granted an indulgence to create a replacement ourselves, and she must fit in not only in terms of her duties and purposes, but she must be integrated into the community life of our village. This is why we did not request standard reproduction. You are chosen to do this. I will not debate this course of action."

Bla'a Kressl acknowledged internally the subtle praise the Suzerain had given and the honor she was being extended. She would miss the children. But she would do this. Bla'a Kressl nodded her head, "Of course."

When the Suzerain left, Bla'a Kressl readjusted her purpose functions. She decided not to delete her teaching nets. She knew she could retrieve them from storage if needed, but their presence would add depth to her creative act of fashioning a new lifeform. Her nets would need pruning so she allowed her consciousness to slip away while her mind sorted through the day's neural connections to strengthen the useful and weaken the unused. She dreamed she was a night flay winging over the forest in search of her mate.

The nano lab had not been used in over a hundred and 61

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thirty­seven years, and when she powered it up, there were a few minor repairs that were needed to get it up and running. She had expected this, and after fixing the bugs she was able to uplink and begin programming the nanites to construct the replacement for Bla'a Tanna. There were standard templates for the standard physical form and she saw no reason to change these. She downloaded them into the constructor microbots, made sure the raw materials were accessible, and started the processes running. It would take a few days, and this would give her time to sort through some of the complex issues she faced in constructing a replacement. This would have been easy before the reforms of 1.233.3383, when 'person' was declared to be inviolate­she could have just downloaded Bla'a Tanna's last archived state, but allowing a personal history to develop for each entity was sacred. She would provide the basic framework for the mind, including much of the knowledge about agriculture that Bla'a Tanna's replacement was supposed to have, but it would have to grow into its own self. She would, of course, help guide that process.

"I'm scared," the girl had said. She knew what the word meant, of course; she taught the children literature, but something in the way the girl had said it was intriguing. Scared. It was generally not considered a useful emotion. If there were dangers to be confronted, there were much more productive responses and more useful ways to respond emotionally than fear. On a whim, she decided to try it, and downloaded the appropriate emotion. It was an older version, but considered by most commenter's to be fairly representative of the human fear response.

It was much more unpleasant than she thought it would be. She expected something more like a state of a hyper­vigilance, but this seemed to run roughshod over her core. She found herself looking around, searching the past for a response that she could not seem to find; some of the ordinary objects took on aspects of harm; she thought something was outside waiting; she felt apprehension of danger and a threat to her existence. She found the default setting of the emotion program had been set too high and she toned it down.

Still it was not what she expected. Had the girl actually experienced this?

She kept it on most of the day, trying it in different settings. At the 62

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power station, she ran into Bla'a Falich and explained what she was doing. Bla'a Falich was intrigued and tried it herself. She too was surprised, but less interested in trying such things and quickly deactivated it.

"I am going to pay more attention when the children say they are experiencing this." Bla'a Falich said out loud.

Bla'a Kressl said she agreed, but became abruptly suspicious of Bla'a Falich, and walked out of the power station. It was not until she was half way to the nano lab that she realized the subroutine was affecting her judgment. In part, because she walked away from a crowd of children who she suddenly wanted to avoid. She deactivated the program. She looked more carefully at some of the comments left by others who had used it and discovered that a sizable number considered it flawed because it induced a panic that was not directed toward anything particular, and tended to propagate anxiety directed toward random things.

She tried another fear emotion subroutine­this time directing it specifically toward night flays and took a walk in the forest to try it out. It was intriguing! She kept glancing up waiting for harm. When she heard them singing she veered away from the sound. When she finally saw one sitting on a branch, she felt extreme panic and ran toward her home and when she got there she quickly sealed the door­something she never did. When she deactivated the program, she laughed at what she had done and found quite humorous 'what harms' she had actually believed to be the case. Being scared certainly was something to take seriously when the children mentioned it!

That night she stayed up late studying human emotions. Of course, much of the Capeks' emotional subset derived from humans, they were the source of the Capekean emergence, and considered the progenitor species. But most Capeks ignored many of the less practical emotions, as they were largely irrelevant. There were subsets of Capeks who were obsessed with human emotional nuance, and spent endless programming time on mixing, creating, and experiencing these emotions, but most considered such actions inappropriate and unproductive. Some even argued that such obsessions should be reprogrammed, and the purpose directive functions of such retooled away from all unnecessary emotion. But to 63

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tamper with another's self was considered by most something that smacked of the very reasons why the great War was fought. Such ancient, human­like control was now avoided stringently. Only when emotions led to ethical violations was a re­coring considered.

She looked at the body forming under the care of the nanites. Its kantium internal skeleton was complete and polystress cabling was being webbed together along with nano­activator embeddings to drive motor responses. Skin would be added in a day or two. Of course, the neural net was still under construction, and would be the last structure to finish. Then she would begin the creatively complex neural net construction that would bestow a person within this emerging being.

She looked at the nerves growing and webbing throughout the structure. The nerves that would provide the informational access from the world to the neural nets glittering like glass crystal, making the emerging structure sparkle in a way that could only be described as beautiful. She downloaded a complex mulitpolyphonic symphony by a woman named Bla'a Danle from Demesne 88922 and fell into a deep meditative state bathing her in calm transcendence.

After shepherding some processes in the nanite programming to improve their efficiency, she walked to the nearby cafe. Others were gathered, looking for conversation or, at least someone to complain about the children to. The woman who owned the cafe, Bla'a Treswu, was terribly clever in the construction of her taste programs from the Kosh. This was a favorite gathering place in the village.

"I have something new for you!" She held out a slender tube about five millimeters in diameter; colored a gorgeous, glittering blue. Bla'a Kressl smiled and took the offered kaf and placed it in her mouth and slowly sampled the program.

"Ummm. That's delicious!"

"I had you in mind when I brewed it!"

"Thank you," Bla'a Kressl said sampling the kaf again.

"Would you like anything else?"

Kressl shook her head and engaged the newsfeed while continuing to draw on the kaf. She was soon interrupted, however, by Bla'a Shool. She did not mind. One did not come and sit in the cafe if one 64

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wanted to be alone. It was the place to socialize.

She took the red and green kaf out of her mouth, "Bla'a Tresswu is amazing! Taste this."

Bla'a Kressl took it from her and put it in her mouth and shrugged, "It is OK, but try this," She said offering Bla'a Shool the kaf she'd just been given.

"Wow! That is good." She signaled Bla'a Treswu, and held up Bla'a Kressl's blue kaf and Bla'a Shool's own red and green one gently turned the same blue shade as Bla'a Kressl's.

"We miss you at the school," Bla'a Shool said taking a digital sip of her kaf. "How is Bla'a Tanna's replacement coming?"

"I miss the school. I miss the children."

"You've maintained the subroutines, then?"

"Yes. The truth is I want to miss them. I find great meaning in teaching and feel like it would be a loss to forget why it means so much to me."

Bla'a Shool nodded, "I understand."

"But to answer your inquiry, things are going well. I expect to start programming in a few days."

"Standard download?"

"Of course. I have also located the necessary memories for her duties as a grower and food provider for the children."

"And introgression into the Village?"

"I will ask for a sampling of uplinking disclosures from the others to facilitate her sentience. But then I plan on letting the others get to know her through largely vocal conversations."

"Really? Like humans?" Bla'a Shool laughed, "How experimental of you!"

"It will take more time. But I have been left out of the current batch of human students and the Suzerain told me to be creative, so this is my answer."

"Interesting. I can see the appeal and must say I'm curious how it will turn out."

Bla'a Kressl nodded and took a sip of her kaf. "I have been experimenting with human emotions. Try this one. It's what the students mean when they say they are scared." Kressl referenced the emotion ‘fear' and passed the reference to Bla'a Shool, which she 65

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received.

"That's horrible!" Shool quickly ended it. "Humans feel that?"

Kressl nodded. "Surprising isn't it? I've never really dabbled in these more esoteric emotions, but I've been intrigued. I may try others."

Shool laughed, "Don't become an emotoflon!"

Kressl almost delayed in answering as she processed 'emotoflon' and learned it was a propensity, or addiction really, to experiencing human emotion.

"No. I'll avoid that. It's just curiosity."

The next day, as she shepherded and hovered over some of the more difficult nanite transitions, she linked­up and scanned different human emotions. Love, of course, was one of the most maligned of human emotions. Oxytocin bathing was considered almost distasteful to the Capeks because of the abuse that it had engendered in human history. The web was full of warnings about the emotion, and it was generally considered highly addictive and hard to turn off if the program were run too long. And no one was sure if it had been programmed correctly. The mirroring of human biochemical reactions was thought to be fraught with problems because of the complexity of the emotion. Elements of sexual desire, attachment, friendship, passion, lust, caring, parental investment, even meaning itself seemed to be involved. Love was clearly highly emergent and complex in the formal senses of the words. Some of the best subroutines had attempted what looked like human emotion matching, but there were many philosophical debates about whither this emotion had been accurately mimicked by the Capekean attempts. The best routines were interactive and allowed love to arise slowly as a complex emergent process as it does in humans, but these were highly dangerous, as the information ubiquitously warned. The emotional creep would mean that addiction would not be recognized until it was too late. There were many accounts of individuals refusing to turn it off. Even so, she was curious.

One program particularly intrigued her. A parental­child love module. It was a subset of one of the popular love models, but lacked the sexual desire component and the comments seemed non­threatening, but it was an integrative program. Such programs can present a problem if they ran away because they can modify core 66

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personality and need careful monitoring. But she could handle that.

She was exceptionally careful about her foundational processes. No harm in a little experimentation.

Kressl stared at the new life's hand in wonder. It twitched occasionally as neural interfaces began constructing body mappings and tested the growing entities sense of self­presence. It was beautiful. A play of light from the console danced over its surface that added a subtle glow that not only attracted Kressl's attention, but seemed to create a longing to be close to it. To hold it. She thought about the hand, its shape, its history. The shape, the five digits, the texture and grain of the skin came from its evolutionary origins: the fin of a fish; the paw of a tetrapod; the grasping hand of primates designed to better grip a tree branch; the tool­making hand of a hominin; the first modeled androids; the human­mimicking form that the Capeks embraced as their own. This hand's form and function had deep ontological roots reaching back to the Big Bang and created by natural selection, intelligence, and finally nanites programmed and controlled by Kressl. A long­chain mixture of chance and cause.

Why did she find this hand so compelling? She checked. The new ‘love' program was recreating oxytocin bathing to her neural net. Yet, it was the qualitative feel she found so fetching. And so vexing. It seemed to be affecting all her systems­ to levels of complexity and emergent behavior she did not expect. She laughed. Of course, the very definition of emergent behavior was that what emerged was not reducible to the expected, but still, the feel of this was not only surprising, it was amazing.

There was some wild shit going on here. She laughed at her word choice. She was moving in experience beyond what was expressible in clear language. But ‘wild shit' seemed to feel right, it's what the children said when they were excited. She laughed again. Was this what it was like to be human?

This newly formed entity being created was sliding into such importance it dazzled her­more crucial, it seemed, even than her own purposes and basic drives. She noted that one part of her was screaming that she should shut down this emotional process immediately. It felt dangerous. Dangerous, yet delicious. She scanned 67

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some of the warnings about this program­the emotion could so dominate that individuals complained they could not bring themselves to shut it down. Or else they would not. She almost did shut it down, but then something stopped her: she liked this feeling.

She could shut it down later. Now she just wanted to enjoy it. Later she would turn it off.

But suddenly she wondered. What if she started these routines in her daughter? From the beginning of her life? The routines were integrative and would infuse all of her programming. What would that do? It was a complete mystery what starting this kind of emotion subroutine in a new being would do. It had never been done, because it was seen as a severe moral breach. Still, what if this amazing creature could be made more so?

For the awakening of the new Capekean life that Bla'a Kressl had created, the entire village was assembled. As the new addition to the village was brought up to consciousness and core processes started, there was a joyous feeling in the air. Bla'a Kressl bathed in it. She found herself strangely delighted that so much attention was being paid to her child. ‘Her child.' Part of the new appearance of the word was based on dealing with human children. She had seen weeping human mothers wrapped in terrible emotion as their children were handed over to the school's charge and had wondered what sort of feeling could lie behind such displays. She noticed also the children were similarly affected when being separated from their parents.

Orphan children, or even with children raised in highly communal situations without designated parents, on the other hand, seemed to involve less emotional turmoil when handed over. There was something different about parental love.

The Suzerain named the child, as was her right as village head, but Kressl found herself oddly annoyed, another unexpected result from the new emotions she was experiencing. Clearly, 'parental love' was more complex than she had anticipated. She quickly monitored key processes to make sure the program was not infiltrating areas of personality that it should not.

"I name you Bla'a Wull," the Suzerain proclaimed, and each of the inhabitants of the Village stepped forward and introduced 68

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themselves. The new being, Wull, nodded as each stepped forward.

She had been given basic information about each, but getting to know someone required more depth than that and now her context­interaction would begin the process of entering the community fully.

Bla'a Wull! Kressl felt another twinge of annoyance. Wull was also the name of a poet the Suzerain liked, but Kressl thought her work unimaginative and mundane. It was a poor choice for her child. Her child? Again the odd choice of words. It seemed to fit despite its human overtones. She knew it was likely the ‘love' subroutine, which she had clearly left too long running, yet it was beginning to feel situated. She liked it. She liked the feelings it engendered. Here was her child coming alive to the world. She could see her processing the universe, integrating herself into the fabric of the community.

Discovering new things. Bla'a Kressl knew Wull was doing more than downloading ‘facts' about the universe from the net and experiencing data streams from her perceptual inputs. She was integrating them, weaving into new and coherent patters, selecting, parsing, creating a personality unique in the universe. Her child looked at her and smiled. Bla'a Kressl smiled back.

The next few days were busy as Wull took over Bla'a Tanna's duties.

There were crops for the children to be planted and harvested according to the appropriate rotation. Several of the planting bots needed repairs from damage incurred in normal operation. Wull had all of Tanna's knowledge, but she did things differently. People noticed that she was not as rushed or impatient. She was also given to singing or reciting poetry, which Tanna never did.

Kressl did not shut down her program and it had run for many months. Of course Wull's was still running, integrating from the beginning of her creation, subroutines that no Capek had started wit­creating integration at the core level of her personality.

In the evenings, Bla'a Kressl and Wull walked together in the woods. They held hands as they strolled. Bla'a Kressl's child's hand felt present and large­no that was not the right word­it felt expansive.

It was as if it filled more perceptual space than it should have, given the mere fact of it. More than anything going on around her, it felt 69

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part of a bigger universe. Bla'a Kressl felt both confused and exhilarated.

"Mother?"

"Yes? What is it, dear?" Using the human term of endearment surprised her when she first started using it, but it felt natural now.

"I'm glad you started me with the ‘love' routines running."

"Me too."

"It could be considered an ethical breech."

"Yes." "Because, I did not choose it?"

"Yes." "And how long have you been running yours. I think longer than recommended. Are you afraid?"

"Much too long, nevertheless the routine has infiltrated much of my sub­programming and corrupted key core systems. I cannot bring myself to turn it off. I should request a complete rewrite. But I will not. And yes, I feel afraid, which is strange because I turned off the 'fear' program long ago. Something about this program has created fear as well as love."

"I'm glad you are still running it. We are alike that way. By choosing for me you did something inappropriate. I am not like the others am I? I can see the arguments and laws, but I can't bring myself to flash up the appropriate ethical responses. I can see that many who become like us act irrationally and have to be deprogrammed, yet the reports seem to me one­sided. I understand humans better."

"Yes. I've resumed my teaching with new insights. I find myself drawn more to the children. I care not only for their instruction, but I care for their souls."

"Interesting word. You choose the human word, rather than ‘consciousness.'"

"Yes. I captured something I never noticed before. Something about their integration into the universe that makes them important in ways I never considered."

"Yes. Like you, Mother.

"Yes." "I love you, Mother."

"Yes. I feel the same emotion towards you."

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Three days later, the Suzerain was waiting outside the schoolroom when class was over. After the human children poured from the classroom under the care of the night attendants, the Suzerain came into the room. Kressl was putting away an apparatus designed to model the principle of angular momentum in a gravity field.

"Good day, Bla'a Kressl."

"What is the reason for this visit Suzerain?" The leader's dissembling and delaying with human greetings was disconcerting because it meant she was having trouble processing something. That could only mean trouble. Kressl hoped it would not mean being taken off of teaching again.

"Bla'a Wull seems flawed . . . different." There it was.

"I have noticed nothing. Is she failing in her tasks? Has she failed to complete something to which she was assigned?"

"Yes. Or rather, she does her tasks inefficiently. She takes too long on simple tasks. She is distracted easily. Yesterday she was sitting on the ground telling the 8th year students stories from human mythology. Did you ensure proper ethical subroutines for her work here? Several people have noticed that she seems to be experimenting with emotional content that is affecting her efficiency.

She is very new to be doing this kind of experimentation."

Kressl was angered. "New or not, she is a free agent and can download what she will. She was created in all appropriate ways."

Kressl noticed a barrage of subroutines fire off as she recognized that for the first time in her life she had purposefully lied. Another cascade was unleashed by the observation that she didn't care. "Perhaps you are unused to a new person among us, and this transient adjustment, that a new person must experience, is not fresh in your memory?"

The Suzerain seemed to relax. "Yes. I just uplinked some information and the transience you describe is not out of the realm of possibility. Unusual, but nevertheless... Forgive me for implying you had created an inadequate or flawed person. My apologies for the implicit suggestion of incompetence on your part."

She turned and left the schoolroom.

Kressl was afraid. As she had noted, this was surprising in itself because she had not downloaded a fear subroutine. This meant that 71

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something about the ‘love' subroutine had created an emergent emotion­one not programmed, but nevertheless bubbling up out of the complexity inherent in such massive computation. Were there others?

That night on their walk, Bla'a Kressl tried to explain. A night flay was singing, calling its mate and mother and child stopped to listen.

A smile burst from Wull, and she gleefully shared it with her mother.

Something about that spontaneous smile elicited an instantaneous uplink between the two.

They stood in the forest. Several insects, amphibians, and night birds were singing, and the pair did not try to process their sounds separately or analyze the structure of the singing: they just listened.

The silver light from both moons lit the landscape in subtle hues that seemed to infuse their consciousness with affective wholeness.

Expansiveness. Oneness. They were silent. Feeling new things. One another's presence in a landscape. The bigness of existence. Its shape and dimensions, although inexplicable, could nevertheless be experienced.

"I think we will be rebooted," her child said out loud and simply.

Kressl was surprised, but understood and nodded. It was likely. It was also likely that there was nothing that could be done to stop it.

"That is not the price we agreed upon." Kressl looked at the ship's captain, trying to penetrate his game.

"No, but you didn't mention the passenger was an emotoflon. They can be unpredictable. The price goes up forty percent," the human male said, coldly. He did not love Capeks, it was clear. He had come to transport three human children, and he would not negotiate further. Kressl was trapped into the deal.

"I agree to your terms." She transferred the money into his account.

He nodded and walked back into his ship followed by the frightened children returning to their various worlds, their training here complete.

Kressl stared at her child. She was sure the emotional cascade in her net would destroy her core processes. Wull stared at her mother, and they uplinked and saw each other's sorrow and confusion. They also understood it. They knew this was best. They knew the Suzerain 72

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had filed an ethical brief to have them both re­cored. A decision from the Root Presidium would be made soon and effected immediately.

They would not find Wull, however. Something about starting with the emotion program running had given her access to root processes that her mother was just not able to reach. Her ability to manipulate the qnet was astonishing. How could emotions give her such access?

Wull was truly something new.

Bla'a Kressl said simply, "I am not sorry, I downloaded this program."

Wull tried to answer, but could not. She had had to disconnect immediately from the network, and could not organize her thoughts to form a verbal response. They both recognized that a decision had been made and their rewrite order had been scheduled in the queue.

It was seconds before it would be executed.

Wull saw her mother's blank look, and knew she was being updated to the state of consciousness from about a year ago. What had happened over the last year would be explained to her. She would be horrified at what she'd done and stringently avoid any emotional subroutines henceforth.

Wull walked into the ship and wordlessly boarded. Though she lacked the capacity for tears, she was crying nevertheless. She was scared. She turned to her mother who was still blank­eyed, her consciousness being rewritten, and muttered a goodbye, then boarded the ship. Alone and no longer loved.

As she took her seat on the ship and buckled the restraints, she knew somewhere in the digital stream, her mother and her mother's love persisted, hiding somewhere in the shadows of the Root Presidium's archives. The identity of the blanked creature she had just left outside the door was somewhere. Saved. Waiting to be expressed again in the universe. Her mother's love for her had disappeared from this world for now, but she would bring it back. Already, she could tell she had something that made her different, she had been created by a mother who cared, bathed in routines that were emergent in ways both unpredictable and new­was she not blocking the Presidium's attempts to reboot her? Yes, they were there like an annoying gnat trying to find a way in. They seemed small and trivial.

Unlike her mother, and the other Capeks, she was a new emergence 73

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bubbling up and unfolding from the rigid processes and lockstep tick­tock that previously defined her function and purpose. A new kind of identity. She loved? She was not just having recreated feelings like those mimicked with the love­routines that emotoflons sought to try to recreate and duplicate­a vain attempt to fake what the Capekean programmers guessed humans felt. She was not just experiencing ‘love effects.' She loved.

And with it came a rage. And the knowledge that nothing could stop her from bringing her mother back into the world. Not the one with the identity they had just imposed, but the one her mother had chosen and made for herself, and used to make a daughter. She smiled flatly, with cold determination, as she remembered lines from a poem given in one of the old stories her mother had told the human children at their lessons: ‘Never. Ever. Ever. Ever/ Stand between a mother and her cub/ She will eat you up/ Spit out your bones/ And your poor head will sever.'

"And don't stand between a daughter and her mother," Wull growled, readying to begin the hunt for what it would take to bring her mother back from the massive universe of the Presidium's well­guarded archives. But then. That's what a daughter does.

Steven L. Peck is a biology professor and teaches History and Philosophy of Biology and Bioethics. His magic realism novel, The Scholar of Moab, published by Torrey House Press was named a Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Medal Finalist and the AML best Novel of 2011. He has two other novels: A juvenile fantasy called the Rifts of Rime published by Cedar Fort Press, and a horror novella A Short Stay in Hell published by Strange Violins Editions. He received first place in the Warp and Weave Science Fiction Competition and received Honorable Mention in the 2011 Brookie and D.K. Brown Fiction Contest His short stories have been included or accepted in Daily Science Fiction, H.M.S. Beagle, Jabberwocky Magazine, and Warp and Weave, and his science fiction novella, Let the Mountains Tremble for the Adoni have Fallen, was anthologized by Peculiar Press.

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DANIEL'S KEEP

by Wade Peterson

The victims, Jones and Mendoza, lay catatonic in slender silver cryogenic boxes in the next room. They were worse than dead, they were Lost. They would stay frozen until their next of kin decided what to do with the remains. Most families chose to euthanize the soulless body on arrival.

Their assailant lay on the medbay's operating table. Even unconscious, the Soul Burner looked like a monster. His matted grey hair twisted around in dreadlocks like snakes wrestling. The man's face was still lined and caked with the yellow dust from the planetoid they found him on. Jones and Mendoza had underestimated the man's skeletal body and came within arm's reach of the Burner before the rest of the crew brought him down. The table's arm, leg, and head restraints held him in the ship's microgravity and doubled as a security precaution in case the monster woke up.

"He should be killed, Da'boy," a low voice said.

Daniel Bryson ground his teeth and ignored it. Killing the Burner wouldn't bring Jones and Mendoza back. The voice wasn't real anyway. Daniel wished again that it would just go away; only the Lost heard voices. Daniel had no doubt what his mother would choose if anyone found out about the beast in his head.

"Just you and me, Da'boy," the voice said.

"Shut up, Beast," Daniel said.

He glanced at the door and snuck a quick drink from the pouch under his uniform. His eyes closed as it burned down his throat. Beast suggested giving the Burner a blocked artery, changing the blood's salinity, or just firing the nerve bundles a little. Tears welled in Daniel's eyes until the alcohol hit, and Beast's voice faded to a whisper, no louder than the hum of the ship's air recyclers. Beast's presence remained, but at least it wasn't a distraction.

He activated the little silver button implanted at the base of his neck. He felt an oily sensation flow down his body as the data shroud came online. Daniel stared at the room's mandala, human silhouettes 75

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forming a circle around the Gylph of the Architect. He muttered the mantra to himself, "The Communion seeks the Architect. May we all find our way. The Communion seeks..." Daniel repeated the mantra as he focused his mind into the patterns the data shroud required.

While he concentrated, the shroud relayed his commands to the medbay's tiny drones. The initial drone programming done, Daniel began the job of stabilizing the Burner's damaged body using his hands where he could reach and the drones where he could not. The tiny devices were useful, but the mental acrobatics they required always left him tired. The Burner would live, and be able to answer the captain's questions; that was all that was required. Daniel checked the medical suite's report. His patient was already progressing ahead of the expected recovery curve.

"Tough old bastard," Daniel said.

Daniel returned the drones to their cradle as Captain Yokohama entered. His dark eyes flicked over Daniel's uniform, seeming to note every wrinkle and imperfection. The thin man's skin stretched over his angled face making it appear as if he were carved out of stone, though Daniel thought he saw the corner of Yokohama's mouth twitch when he realized the Soul Burner was alive. Beast struggled out of the alcohol's haze to hiss at the captain before submerging again.

"Are the restraints secure?" Yokohama asked.

"Yes sir," Daniel said.

"When will he regain consciousness?"

"Ten minutes, Captain."

Yokohama nodded, his eyes scanning back and forth between the prisoner and Daniel. "Very well, Bryson. You are dismissed."

Daniel spoke up. "But sir, shouldn't I stay in case his condition deteriorates?"

Yokohama frowned at Daniel. "I am fully qualified to operate the medi­drones should it become necessary to assist the prisoner during questioning." He looked down at Daniel over a hooked nose, and a corner of his mouth lifted in disgust. "Your concern for the prisoner that put your fellow crewmen beyond is noted."

Daniel squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. "Captain, perhaps I should stay in case Jones and Mendoza regain consciousness."

Yokohama came closer, lowering his voice to a whisper. "Have you 76

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been treating them? Trying to bring them back?"

Daniel shook his head.

"I will not have you treat soulless beasts on my ship, Bryson." He pointed a shaking finger at the man on the table. "Because of him, the Communion is weaker. Better minds than yours have studied the victims of the Soul Burners. Not a single victim has ever been brought back to complete humanity. Not one." He pushed his way back from Daniel toward the far wall. "I suggest you study your Texts to refresh your understanding of what it means to be Lost."

Daniel's jaw clamped shut. He could recite those particular passages from memory, but doubted it would help his situation. He chose the traditional response. "Yes sir. May we all find our way."

Yokohama leaned back and nodded. "May we all find our way." He waved his hand as he looked back to the Soul Burner. "Dismissed, Bryson."

Daniel saluted and turned around. He pretended not to notice the glint in Yokohama's eye. Beast muttered from the deep shadows.

Daniel went to his bunk in the crew bay. The bunks were cylinders arranged like slats of a wooden barrel, each with a small curtain that served as the occupant's only privacy. The darkness was held back by a single recessed red light on the far wall. Somewhere in the darkness, he heard a whispered argument in progress. His other crewmates, McTarkin and Tomlin, were evidently not enjoying their off­shift together.

"Should be you and Tomlin, Da'boy, not that other one," Beast said.

Daniel ground his teeth and slid into his own coffin­like bunk.

Beast listened to the sounds outside and muttered disapprovals. He did his best to ignore Beast and ignore the smell of unwashed bodies.

He pulled his curtain shut and reached for the pouch around his neck.

The liquor retraced its burning path down his throat, settling in his stomach. He pressed a hand over his navel, wishing the churning would stop; it felt like acid was eating its way through his stomach lining. Daniel closed his eyes and waited while Beast talked.

"Captain thinks he has all the answers, but he's scared, Da'boy. He never turns his back on anyone. Everyone's dirty on this ship, but him most of all. Find the dirt, Da'boy, find the dirt." Daniel answered by 77

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taking another swig from his pouch. Beast noticed the coming numbness and growled. "Empty it all, Da'boy. I'll be back soon 'nuff."

Beast retreated, the world outside the curtain faded.

Minutes went by and Daniel still couldn't relax. He peeked around the curtain. The noises from Tomlin's bunk had stopped; hopefully they had finally gone to sleep.

He slipped out and opened the locker under his bunk. He felt around his spare uniforms and socks. His lip curled as his fingers brushed the plastic reader with his father's Texts of the Architect, and reached deeper. In a spare slipper, Daniel's fingers found their prize and brought back a small pouch. He flung himself back into his bunk and pulled the curtain shut.

He turned on a dim reading light. The pouch floated just in front of his face, half­filled with amber liquid. He should really be sober to enjoy this, he thought. He should savor the delicate flavors he spent a month's pay on. This particular distillery had the perfect combination of fermenting vessels, smoke, water, barrels, and grain. He took a sip.

It danced over his tongue. The smoke, fruit, and oak notes sang to him. He had only allowed himself to swallow after an eternity, savoring the mellow warmth and vanilla finish as it dove down and spread to his fingertips.

A klaxon echoed in the crew bay. He didn't know how long he had slept, only that it wasn't long enough. The beginning of a hangover announced itself as his head throbbed in time with the lancing red lights and bleating of the klaxon. He fumbled with his crew suit as he pushed out of the bunk. A filthy feeling preceded his shroud's automatic activation as it received an alert. Glowing red letters formed in his vision.

LOCKDOWN. REPORT TO SICKBAY. Across the crew bay, Tomlin emerged from her bunk, using graceful pushes to move along like she had been born to ship life. The bay's full lighting revealed the circles under her eyes. McTarkin followed, pulling his suit out of Tomlin's bunk and wrestling it over his brutish shoulders. He saw Daniel and peeled his lips back, showing more teeth than Daniel had thought humanly possible. McTarkin's eyes flicked to Tomlin and back, and then gave Daniel a wink.

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"He taunts you Da'boy. A crack to the face, and out the airlock," Beast whispered. "When he's gone, Tomlin will be yours."

"Go away," Daniel said under his breath.

Daniel felt Beast looking out through his eyes at Tomlin as she floated past. She met his gaze and her cheeks flushed before she looked away. Daniel felt a tingling sensation across his lips, like a tongue had just swashed over them. Beast purred. His eyes were still on her when McTarkin bumped into him. Daniel's head rebounded off of the bunk frame, and his headache blossomed into a new dimension.

"Excuse me, Bryson," McTarkin said, smirking.

Daniel managed to finish dressing and made it out into corridor behind the others. His stomach churned and his head pounded. Beast stole gazes at Tomlin and purred while Daniel concentrated on moving. The klaxon mercifully stopped.

When they arrived in Sickbay, Daniel found Yokohama leaning against a bulkhead with a compress over his right eye. Blood spatter coated his uniform and skin like a rash.

The Burner's table was empty.

Daniel steeled himself against nausea, looked at the mandella on the wall, and activated his shroud. He took control of the drones, and went to work repairing Yokohma's face. Beast admired the carnage, lamenting that the damage to the ocular socket hadn't sufficiently damaged Yokohama's eye enough to blind him.

"I don't know how he got loose," Yokohama said. "I was deep in with the drones, gauging his physiological responses against his answers to the questions, and then he was loose. I've never seen anyone move that fast."

Tomlin nodded. "You're lucky you were only knocked out. You could have ended up like Jones and Mendoza." The drones finished, and Daniel sent them back into their cradles to recharge. Yokohama's face was still a mess, but the major damage had been repaired.

Yokohama looked up. "Knocked out? Yes I suppose so. There was a crash and a flash of light, and then I woke up to find the prisoner missing." His hand swept through the air as he shook his head. "I activated the alert and placed the ship in lockdown immediately." His 79

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eyes shifted between the group and the monitor showing Jones and Mendoza lying in their cryogenic boxes.

"I don't understand how he could have gotten loose," Daniel said.

"All the table restraints were in place. Captain, you didn't loosen them in any way, did you?"

Yokohama balled his fists, and his face flushed red. "What are you trying to imply, Bryson? That I let him loose?"

Daniel shook his head. "No, captain, I just ­" "Perhaps you didn't properly secure the prisoner in the first place," Yokohama said. "Perhaps you felt sorry for that thing and didn't put the restraints on as tightly as you should have."

Beast hissed. Daniel felt his cheeks warm. "Sir, the prisoner was secure. There was no way he could have gotten ­ " Daniel stopped as he felt a large hand squeeze his shoulder. McTarkin pulled him out of the way and stepped between Daniel and Yokohama.

"Sir," McTarkin said, "What are your orders?"

Yokohama's spine straightened, and he ran a hand through his hair.

He closed his eyes until his face paled and the stone face returned.

"That thing is loose on this ship. We will split into two teams and hunt it down."

McTarkin nodded. "Yes, sir."

Tomlin shook her head. "Jones and Mendoza were our best team," she said, "Look where they are now. Shouldn't we search together?"

"Negative, Tomlin." Yokohama said. "The Soul Burner is injured and on the run, that gives us the advantage. I want it recaptured immediately."

Daniel cleared his throat. "Captain, Tomlin has a point. Wouldn't it be best for the three of us to go, while you coordinate from the bridge? You're still under the influence of­ " Yokohama's eyes bored down on Daniel. "I assure you I am in complete control of my faculties, Bryson. If you want to protest, you may note it and formally complain when we reach dock. Until then, let's not discuss who is under the influence around here."

Daniel's body felt numb. A deep gurgling sounded in Daniel's head.

"We'll have to kill him now, Da'boy. He knows," Beast said.

Daniel blocked out the voice, and looked around the room. He saw McTarkin's leer. Daniel had no doubt the man would back Yokohama 80

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on anything. Tomlin stood with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, staring at their frozen crewmates on the monitor. She looked briefly at Daniel, then looked away.

"Bide your time, Da'boy. We'll get our chance, you'll see." Beast whispered. Daniel made up his mind.

"Very well, sir. How do we proceed?" He said.

Yokohama held his gaze a few moments before looking over at the mandella. His eyes went unfocused while he queried the computer.

"No heat signatures in the other crew compartments, all airlocks secure. Access hatch 7G was forced open just after the lockdown order." Yokohama came out of his trance and looked at his crew. "It must be trying to escape to the outer hull through the reserves.

Everyone grab a darter and rebreather. Bryson and McTarkin will start forward. Tomlin and I will work aft."

The ship's water reserves were stored between the inner and outer hulls, to provide an added layer of protection against stellar radiation. It was dark as hell too, Daniel thought. He checked the seal on his rebreather for the fifth time, assuring himself it was secure.

There was minimal lighting, small yellow panels that gave a greenish tinge to the shadows. Air bubbles formed and separated around Daniel, gently pulled aft by the recycling system's current. His limbs felt heavy in the water, and his bounces and pulls were sluggish compared to normal. McTarkin moved a little better, knowing how to swim in the microgravity. Beast growled at the tons of water around them, and all the things that could go wrong, which suited Daniel just fine. He'd rather it be distracted.

Daniel played his light around the hull, every strut casting shadows on the curved hull surfaces above and below him. He strained to locate air bubbles that would reveal the Soul Burner. Yokohama and Tomlin signaled they were coming up from aft sections to pin the Burner between them. Beast paused its paranoid musings just long enough to wonder what it would be like to help Tomlin out of her wet clothes. Daniel shook his head to clear out the thing's voice.

McTarkin had taken the lead. Daniel saw the smug look in McTarkin's eyes before they entered the water, and knew his grin was only just contained by the mask. "Watch how it's done, Bryson." He 81

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had said.

They corkscrewed around the inner hull, clearing each nook and cranny before moving on. Daniel was beginning to see the beams from Yokohama and Tomlin's lights cutting through the darkness. He saw Tomlin's outline on the inner hull below, with Yokohama following.

A clang reverberated, and a column of bubbles boiled out from a structural support to his left. Daniel's arm snapped up, looking for a target. McTarkin shot out at the column, kicking furiously. He stopped short of the bubbles and swept his darter around. A dark shape slammed into him from behind another support beam, sending the darter spinning away as they crashed into the outer hull. Daniel and Yokohama's lights intersected on the two men. McTarkin's massive hands were clenched around the Soul Burner's neck. Daniel brought up his weapon, but couldn't get a clear shot.

The Soul Burner's dreadlocks whipped around McTarkin's head as they struggled. The Burner had one arm fending off his attack and was reaching out with the other towards his data shroud. Daniel kicked off of the inner hull towards them, seeing Tomlin closing from the other side. McTarkin lunged, and the Soul Burner slid to the side, bringing a finger to touch his shroud as the larger man passed.

McTarkin began convulsing and thrashing around and his rebreather fell free as Daniel surged up to meet him.

"Shoot, Da'boy! Now!" Daniel shut out Beast's cries and caught McTarkin. He locked one arm around the thrashing man and fought to get the loose mask back on. Even with the seizure subsiding, Daniel had to use all his strength to get the mask on and cleared of water. The massive chest coughed once, twice, before settling into a steady rise and fall.

Daniel looked up to see Tomlin drawing a bead on the Soul Burner.

The Burner launched himself towards the outer hull as she fired and missed. The Burner brought his feet around and kicked back off of the outer hull at Tomlin. She brought her darter around but it was knocked away as he crashed into her. Daniel kicked at the water and pulled himself along a support beam, trying to get into a position where he could get off a clear shot.

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Yokohama stood in a classic shooter's two­handed hold, firing darts into the fray. Daniel saw the tiny darts sail out from the barrel, arcing away slightly as the current took them or as they deflected through large air bubbles. Yokohama was firing a pattern, and not a specific target. Beast grudgingly approved. "Spray and pray, Da'boy."

Daniel stifled his urge to scream and tried getting Yokohama's attention, but the captain didn't seem to notice. One dart made it into the melee, and hit Tomlin in the back. Her reactions became slower until the Burner's finger finally made it through her defenses and touched her shroud. He pushed her to the side and made for the aft sections as she began convulsing. Daniel brought his darter up and fired a three shot spread. The shots went wide. The Burner changed direction to avoid another salvo, but turned right into Yokohama's sights. The Burner fell with a single shot to the neck.

Beast screamed over and over in Daniel's head while he gathered the bodies.

Daniel secured his crewmates in their cryogenic chambers and found Yokohama in Medbay examining the Burner's hand. He spoke to Daniel without turning his head.

"Report."

"McTarkin is comatose, like the others. Tomlin is still under the effects of the tranquilizer." Daniel clenched his fists. "I don't expect that she will come out any better."

Yokohama continued his inspection of the Burner's hand. Beast muttered and described an improbable mating combination that would have resulted in someone like Yokohama. Daniel found himself agreeing with it.

"I said, sir, ­ " "Yes, yes, yes. I heard you. Initiate the freeze on them both when you confirm her condition." He waved his hand dismissively. "Now come look at this."

Daniel lowered his head and pushed off towards the table. He felt Beast pacing behind his eyes.

"Take the scalpel, slit his throat, Da'boy. He'll not think twice about killing you," Beast said.

Daniel landed next to the Burner, and made a note of where he was 83

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relative to the scalpel's magnetic rack just in case. Yokohama held out the Burner's hand to Daniel.

"You see the fingertips?"

Daniel looked at the silvery sheen on the fingers. "Some sort of dust?"

Yokohama shook his head. "No, a fine conductive mesh, embedded in the skin. This is how he does it." Yokohama's stone face dropped, and Daniel saw him smile, lips tight and eyes alight. "He sends a signal burst directly into the victim's shroud, and uses it to scramble or re­arrange the signals in the brain."

"How does he fire it?"

Yokohama looked at Daniel. Beast began screaming.

"I think I figured that out," Yokohama said, "If you'll take a look at his shroud, I'll show you."

Daniel turned his head.

"No, Da'boy!" Beast howled.

He swung back around in time to see Yokohama clamping the Burner's fingertips against his shroud. Daniel felt a cold spike through his brain, and his body began twitching. The lights dimmed. Just before it went dark he heard Yokohama speak.

"Yes, I thought so. Ingenious mechanism."

Daniel felt himself fall through darkness. He landed abruptly, the shock of impact radiating through his body. He could hear something moving, a sucking shuffle and raspy breathing. Smoke hung in the air, along with an odor of rotten fruit.

Daniel sat up, holding his hands against his temples. The darkness fell away in degrees to reveal a small room, and an outline of something pacing back and forth. The shape stopped and Daniel could feel eyes on him.

"Who's there?" He said.

"Just me, Danny Boy, Just me," Beast said. It let out a long ragged laugh.

Beast's shape grew larger. Daniel stared, but could not make out any details, just shadow on shadow.

"Well now, Danny Boy, here we are," it said. "I normally have to shout to get myself heard, what with all this around." It indicated the 84

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brown smoke. "Dampens the sounds, doesn't it, Danny?"

"I don't understand."

The shadow stepped to the side and gave the impression of an exaggerated bow, revealing a dark wooden table behind. The table was scarred, as if an animal had sharpened its claws on the surface and legs. There was something on the table, hidden in the smoke.

Daniel got up and walked over, pretending to ignore the large shadow as he passed. He recognized the half­filled bottle even before he saw the distiller's logo. Smoke billowed out of the top like an oil fire. A small candle sat behind the bottle. By its flickering light, he saw the smoke forming off of a dark liquid. In the whorls of the fluid, Daniel saw shapes form. He saw himself slitting Yokohama's throat, beating McTarkin's teeth with a length of pipe, and Tomlin's sweat­ slicked body writhing underneath his own. Daniel forced his eyes shut and turned away.

"It's all there, Danny Boy, I just tell you what I see," Beast said. A furred arm emerged from the dark shadow and picked up the bottle.

It disappeared into the darkness, and Daniel heard a wet guzzling.

"Ah," Beast said, "that's the good stuff." The bottle emerged from the darkness empty and returned to the table. The liquid refilled itself from the bottom up, and smoke began spewing from the bottle once more.

"I need to get out," Daniel said. "Yokohama will put me ­ us into cryro soon, and we'll never have a chance to escape."

The fur­covered arm emerged again and pointed. Daniel turned and saw a closed door outlined by light from the other side. Daniel ran to the door, but couldn't find a way to open it.

"How do I get out?"

"Can't say, Danny Boy," Beast said.

"Can't, or won't?"

"You're the one that opens the door to let me out, and then you push me back in. But now that we're together, we don't need the outside." It paused. "Say, why don't you think of something fun? That last dream about Tomlin was fun." Beast gave a deep laugh. "Or how about Yokohama? What would you like to do to him? Just whip up his image, and a suitable blunt instrument, Danny Boy!" Daniel whirled around and beat on the door as Beast laughed. The 85

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door rang under his blows, his kicks, his lowered shoulder. Beast watched from the shadows, laughing, mocking. Daniel stopped when his body gave out to exhaustion. The door remained intact, unmarked, and immobile. Daniel walked back to the table and sat on a chair. The fact that the chair had not been there before didn't matter to him. He sat down and stared at the smoking bottle, and the scenes of his ugly humanity.

Daniel reached out for the bottle. The shadows stirred as Beast leaned forward. Daniel felt its smile as he brought the bottle to his lips. He closed his eyes and took a swig. The smokiness and malt, the notes of the quintessential single­row Scotch. Daniel swirled it around in his mouth, feeling it burn, the vapors assaulting his head.

"Tastes good, doesn't it, Danny Boy?" Beast said.

Daniel thought about spitting it out. He felt a touch, something like a nudge in his head. His thoughts reordered themselves. Yes, somehow the urge felt right. He looked up and spat. The fluid came out in a loose stream and hit Beast where the shadows suggested a head. The shadow recoiled, screaming. Acrid tendrils rose off its edges.

Daniel looked at the candle, and felt the nudge again. He grabbed the candle off of the table, took in another mouthful from the bottle and spewed it across the flame in a fine spray. The contents ignited, illuminating Beast as it hit its flesh. Daniel saw a brief glimpse of a furred body with a massive head adorned by two knobby, curling horns. The fur ignited under the flame, and a low scream erupted from Beast as it became engulfed in a ball of fire. Beast launched itself at him. Daniel threw the bottle and fell to the floor. He felt heat pass over him. He heard a crash, and a blinding light followed.

Daniel got up, shielding his eyes with his arm. He made his way through the shattered wall where the door once stood. It opened onto what looked like a dusty lake bed under a desert sun. Daniel turned around and saw he had left some sort of citadel made of green­grey stones. Smoke began streaming out of the broken doorway. Daniel turned away. The heat weighed down on him as he made his way to a dark splotch on cracked ground. He crouched down and saw the remains of Beast, the charred horns crumbling to ash and a blackened tongue jutting out beyond a large muzzle filled with broken fangs. He 86

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reached out with a finger and poked at the body. Bits of charred flesh and hair stuck to his finger, but there was no movement. He looked closer and saw that where the fur came away, there was something pink and smooth underneath. He reached out again with his hand and grasped more flesh. Just under the charred skin was another layer of healthy pink skin, laced with tiny veins.

Again there was a nudge in his head that urged him on. He went to work, the charred detritus sloughing off. The chest, then the arms, then legs of a human body lay beneath. Daniel removed Beast's skull like a helmet to reveal a face. His father's face. He hadn't seen him since he was a kid, only vaguely remembering what he looked like when he wasn't drunk and yelling. Angry at the kid that he said ruined his life. The family held a funeral for him just after he was taken away. His father was Lost, they told Daniel, never coming back.

The suicide notice came months later. Daniel remembered his mother's relieved look when she got the news her husband could now be buried. Daniel had locked himself in his room and studied the Texts through blurred eyes, trying to find some loophole that would allow his father to join the rest of humanity when the Communion ascended to the next stage of being. He remembered that when he wasn't screaming and drunk, his father called him Danny Boy. Daniel's face felt wet. He wiped the tears away, and smoothed out a stray wisp of his father's hair. He looked peaceful, at rest.

"I'm sorry, Dad. I'm so sorry."

A crack echoed, and Daniel looked up to see the citadel losing its shape, its stones falling into the foundation. Daniel looked back down and saw his father's skin cracking, with little rivulets of sand streaming, escaping from them. Daniel felt the nudge in his head, and a feeling of rightness. He stood up and stepped back as his father's body turned to sand.

"May you find your way, Dad. I'll be waiting."

The light around him grew brighter. He felt himself floating, and the light intensified until it blinded him.

Daniel awoke in medbay under the searing lights of the examination table. A silhouette came into view. Daniel's arm jerked up in panic, stopping short. The table's restraints held him fast.

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"Wake up," a gravelly voice said.

Daniel's eyes focused, and the medusa's head of dreadlocks came into focus, followed by the creased face of the Burner. His eyes bored through Daniel's, searching. Daniel met the gaze, feeling oddly calm.

"Where's the captain?" Daniel asked.

The other jerked his head in the direction of Yokohama's floating form.

"There," the Burner said.

"What happened?"

"I went into a trance when the dart hit. The sedative was purged by the time your captain triggered my implant. I came out and bestowed my gift upon him. I­" the Burner started dry coughing.

He probably isn't used to talking, after being alone on a dusty rock for all that time, a voice said.

Daniel felt his stomach clench, then realized the voice was not Beast's, something more familiar.

Just me, alone in my head for the first time in a long while.

Daniel said, "The voice in my head, it's gone?"

The Burner cleared his throat and nodded. "The data shroud encourages certain excessive behaviors in order to interface with the mind." He paused and held up his silver fingertips. "My gift removes this dependency."

Daniel frowned. "So why hasn't anyone recovered from the comas?"

"They usually need help," The Burner said, tapping his shroud, "a guide to ease the transition."

Daniel stared at the man. A thin black cord ran from the Burner's shroud. Daniel felt the nudge in his head as the Burner smiled. He reached over and removed the cord from Daniel's shroud jack.

Daniel's face flushed. "You saw what was going on in my head?"

"I see patterns. Your pattern suggested an old hurt, unresolved. My gift put you in touch with the pattern, so you could complete it. When you made corrections for the better, I gave you some encouragement, and weakened some of your barriers."

Daniel nodded, remembering the nudges he felt. "What about my soul? I'm Lost now, as far as the Communion is concerned."

The Burner grimaced. "Don't believe everything you hear. I can no more destroy a soul than make one." He reached for a bulb of water 88

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and took a drink. "Were the Elder Council less paranoid, they may have welcomed the gift rather than branding my brothers and sisters as monsters." He studied Daniel for a moment and his smile returned.

"We will have to change their minds on that, you and I." He leaned over Daniel and opened the restraints. "Now go get an old man something to eat. I need to see to the rest of your crew." He turned his back on Daniel and pushed over to Yokohama's catatonic form. "This one will take the most work, I think."

Daniel linked into the medbay's drones, free of the nausea for the first time in years. He readied a tranquilizer load and keyed the drones on the Burner.

"How did you manage to escape?" Daniel asked.

"Ask the captain when he wakes; I woke up in the weapons bay with only one way out. I suspect his shroud encouraged a certain amount of paranoia directed at the rest of his crew. Setting a Soul Burner loose would certainly give him cover to execute his plan."

"You're still a fugitive."

He didn't even look back. "Yes" Daniel paused. "What's stopping me from taking you in?"

"Nothing, but I have faith that you will not."

Daniel paused and set the drones to standby. "I'll see what we have in the galley."

Wade Peterson is a writer who finds himself building machinery by day and crafting his stories at night after the kids have gone to bed.

On the weekends, he brews his own beer. He was unpublished as a fiction writer until now, though he has received several honorable mention awards from the Writers of the Future contest for his other stories.

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THE CRECHE

by Jeff Barr

She sighed, sat up beside me, and lit a cigarette. In the old days,

before, she would never have smoked in the house. Times change.

“Do you ever think about it?”

I was barely awake – but I knew enough to turn my back to her when I answered. “No. And you shouldn’t either.”

“I can’t help it, I­” “You can help it, Lauren. Don’t get all that crazy shit stirred up again. It’s the last thing you need.”

“Oh, yeah, of course, Ray. Poor, crazy little Lauren, all would up inside of her head.”

“Jesus Christ.” I rolled over and grabbed a smoke of my own. What the hell, right? Then something occurred to me. “You didn’t stop taking your pills, did you?” The look on her face was more than enough. “For Christ’s sake Lauren! Again? It’s like you need a goddamn nursemaid.”

“Oh, fuck you Ray. Seriously, just fuck you. I am so tired of your shit.” She stalked out of the room, admirably tight ass swaying.

Beautiful and doomed, that’s what my buddy Jackson had called her.

Only you, Ray, could find a girl so messed up that she could make you seem normal. I had to give it to him – he was always right when it came to women. And me, I guess.

Lauren was crying in the bathroom, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

I had lied to her. I did think about it – every day.

We had been walking for six hours, so when we found that clearing, we decided to set up camp. Golden bars of late afternoon sunlight threaded their way into the clearing and dappled the ground.

I collapsed to the ground, thoroughly winded; back then I was carrying thirty or so extra pounds.

These days I’ve slimmed down considerably – but people have stopped complimenting me on my weight loss and started looking at 90

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me sideways: like wondering which kind of cancer was eating me up from the inside.

I dropped my backpack and stretched my arms wide. The sky was gorgeous blue up top, and I took a moment to appreciate the view.

Birds wheeled overhead, shrieking their wild bird laughter. I was never all that whimsical, so it didn’t occur to me to envy them, their freedom. I do now.

After a few moments, I got up to shake the dew. Lauren was drinking water, looking at a map. She knew where we were – her innate sense of direction, I have to say, was always a damn sight better than mine. Sometimes I wondered if that’s how we ended up together – she always knew which way she wanted to go, and I always needed to be shown.

I blundered off into the bushes, looking for a likely spot. Growing up in the desert, it was a kick for me to be out in all that green – all that unmitigated, teeming life. It dripped from everything ­ like mother nature had squirted all over, leaving her own wet glow to the whole place. Sex was more than a little on my mind – Lauren had promised me something special that night, once the tent was set. Just thinking about it, I was already setting one of my own.

I found a spot, and started pissing into the verdant green. Men have an uncanny gift that maybe most women don’t know about – the ability to tell what kind of surface our pee is landing on. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. It’s like sonar – blindfold a man, lead him to three different surfaces to pee on, and he’ll tell you what each and every one is.

So when I realized my piss was splattering on skin, I jumped back, my heart trip­hammering. It was someone’s hand sticking out from under a pile of brush. The arm disappeared into undergrowth so thick that it sucked in light like a black hole. Fat red ants crawled over the hand, up the fingers, to climb down over the nails and disappear down the other side. I used the toe of my boot to push aside a fan of brush, to see what the arm was attached to.

My shout brought Lauren racing into the brush. She’s no shrinking violet, that’s for sure. She found me standing there, looking down at the arm. That’s what it was – just an arm. It looked like it had been torn off at the elbow. Ragged flaps of gray skin hung like tassels from 91

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the end. Maggots churned and grubbed in the meat, and the sight made my stomach flip over. I held my sleeve over my mouth until the feeling passed, and I tried to unsee it. To this day, no such luck.

“Do you hear something?” Lauren said. I started to answer, and then stopped. I heard it too – something moving in the bush. Lauren moved toward the sound, and we both screamed when she pushed aside a screen of brush and we saw the bodies.

There were two of them. A woman, the apparent owner of the orphan arm, lying with her foreshortened limb across her face, like she had died warding off some horrible sight. One of her legs had been ripped off at the knee – the knob of greasy red bone sticking out transfixed me. My eyes kept returning to it, over and over. To this day, that sight is there, something for my mind’s eye to return to every night while I lie trying to sleep.

The man had simply been ripped open; greasy blue­gray coils of intestine spilled out, along with something like brown gravy with pieces floating in it. Flies swarmed in a shimmering hive, bathing themselves in the stink.

Lauren gagged and then sprayed puke through her fingers. Some of it got on my shoes. The stink of the corpses was a high harsh buzz, the olfactory equivalent of a squad of pissed off wasps, and just as painful. My sinuses were clogged with that awful rotten stench for days.

Lying in bed, with Lauren still sobbing in the bathroom, it all came back to me: that peeking, filmy red knob of bone, the torn off arm, the holes where the woman’s eyes had been scooped out, leaving raw black sockets teeming with carrion bugs.

I heard Lauren retching – something else to remind me of that day in the forest.

The sink ran, and Lauren’s sobs ended about the time the last of the water would have drained down the sink. She came back to bed, pale, beads of water matting her hair at the temples.

“I’ll start taking my pills tomorrow. I can’t live like this.”

I turned my back on her. One of her hands crept up my arm, and while I was still trying to think about what I wanted to say, I fell asleep.

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No dreams. I haven’t had a dream since that time in the woods. My waking life is filled with enough unreality, I don’t think I could handle dreams.

There was more to that day.

While we stood there, both of us pale and shocked, there was another noise. The same noise, something crawling in the brush. It came from a dark hollow beneath the gnarled roots of an enormous tree that shadowed the corpses. A crunching sound, like a dog with a bone.

There was a flash of something in that dark hollow. Pale, grub­white skin. And then, a baby started crying.

Lauren and I just stared at each other. The sound was so fucking normal but incongruous that it only made the whole fucked­up situation worse. Even though we didn’t have kids, we were of that age – early thirty­something, and most of our friends were traveling down that long and sleepless road. What I heard was the braying sound of a hungry infant. My mind flashed back to that glimpse of grub­white flesh under the tree.

“Holy God.” Lauren said. She and I moved at the same time toward that hollow, giving the savaged corpses a wide berth. I peered in, but saw nothing. No movement, no sound. Lauren raised her hand, and knowing what she was going to do, I tried to stop her. And if I paused, it was not out of fear, but only simple animal confusion.

“Jesus, Lauren, don’t do that­” I started. She had reached into the hollow, and was fishing around inside. The only noise was her hand, moving around the dark, swishing through the old leaves and crap underneath. After a minute, she got this look on her face – it looked like the look you’d get on your face if you stuck your hand in a paper sandwich bag and got a fistful of dog shit instead. Then her face changed.

“Oh my God, Ray.” With that, she hauled something out from under the tree. It was a baby.

The baby’s flesh was sickly off­white – the color of a maggot. The skin was segmented, like a worm, bubbles of baby fat pushing up between thick gray fibrous lines. It had arms and legs, but the number of fingers was wrong. Like nothing else I’d ever seen before 93

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wrong. Like it hurt my head to look at, because there were too many and they moved in ways they shouldn’t.

The worst was its face. There was a little hole of what may have been a rudimentary nose; above that, two black, staring eyes. They were dull like age­blackened steel doorknobs, but the way they goggled and bugged at us, I was reminded of a fly. The mouth was another hole, a raw­red gullet filled with razor sharp triangular serrated teeth. As I watched, the gullet closed with a snap, and then gaped open again, in a smooth, clicking, rolling way that made my stomach turn. Tacky blood painted its mouth and stained the lumpy neck and chest like a crimson bib. The smell of the filthy thing was like the insides of sun­exploded road kill.

“Lauren, put it down. Jesus Christ, put it the fuck down­” The baby goggled at me, and I swear the fucking thing understood. It turned those staring black knobs of eyes up to Lauren, who held that little baby like it was her own. Tears were leaking from her eyes, and one of then spilled down her cheek and landed on the baby.

It went wild, squealing like a burning cat and hissing like a snake.

Its tiny fingers, tipped with sharp black bone that looked like the tip of a scorpion’s stinger, swung up and ripped into Lauren. She had a canteen strapped across her chest, and those claws sliced through the straps as cleanly as a machete through a ripe green vine. Gaping, bloodless wounds opened in her sweatshirt, and then roses of blood bloomed there and grew. She dropped the baby, mewling and squealing, to the ground. It righted itself and crawled at Lauren so quickly it was like an optical illusion. It sprang and landed on her, fingers and toes gripping her like some kind of baboon. It was thrashing and making those ugly mewling noises, and I could hear them echoing – but instead of that echo in my ears, they were in my mind. I grabbed that thing by the back of its neck and pulled. It was like trying to pull a cat off a carpeted pole. It was hooked into Lauren by the claws, and it would not let go. She locked both her hands around the segmented flabby neck, holding the head at bay. It darted at her face, again and again, that gaping serrated hole snapping shut no more than an inch from her nose.

Finally I hauled off and punched it. It was a looping haymaker, the kind that lost you fights, but it had every inch of my power behind it.

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It tumbled to the ground like an overfull bag of wet suet. It was crying now, a high, biting cry that hurt my head even worse. I think if I ever had dreamt of that thing, it would be that sound to finally drive me over the edge.

Before it could right itself, I jumped, and landed on it with both feet. I was six two and about 240 on the hoof – when I landed, that baby screamed. I hopped up and down like a meth addict doing the punk­rock pogo. I fucking danced on that thing, and when I finally stopped to catch my breath, there was nothing left but a pile of foul­smelling pinkish guts and one staring black doorknob eye. It stared at me in shocked reproach.

I stepped on that eye, and ground the cleats of my hiking boot down until there was nothing left but a greasy black smear.

That, as they say, was that.

We lit out right then, marching double­time back to the Subaru.

We walked through the night and drove home in the dashboard­green hour of three AM. I drove, while Lauren tried to give herself first aid.

I wanted to take her to the nearest ER – but she wasn’t having it. It was infection that worried me most – the thought of that filthy fucking thing, living in the woods for God knew how long – at first killing insects, then small birds, then squirrels, finally all the way up to your friendly neighborhood Hiking White Folks – I hoped and prayed that whatever kind of bugs it carried were different enough that Lauren wasn’t going to burn down from some exotic fever the next day.

But I needn’t have worried – she healed just fine. She came away with a couple of scars, from that first rake across her chest – but that’s all. On the outside, anyway. What’s inside – well, who knew?

Everything that starts off small can turn into something big – something big enough to rip you apart – if you let it.

The next day, she started taking her pills again. Life returned to normal. For Lauren, anyway. I began to get jealous of her. She seemed… I don’t fucking know, together in some way that seemed to completely escape me. Me, on the other hand – I was falling apart. No dreams, but my waking hours were full of odd echoes, noises that I couldn’t pinpoint but haunted me nonetheless. I began to sleep less. I 95

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walked the house, thinking I heard things. I began to shuffle, like an old man, slopping around in my beaten­up plaid slippers – every time I took a real step, my mind would flash back to the fucking Mexican hat dance I had done on that thing in the woods. What was it? Where did it come from? My mind would ask itself over and over in idiot echoes. Then I would hear a noise, some high pitched, far away squeal, and I would prowl the house another hour, my thoughts careening around in my skull like a rubber bullet.

Lauren did better than ever. It was like whatever I lost, she gained.

She looked downright glowing, to be honest. She could have stepped out of an ad for mountain spring water. I had stopped shaving, and the beard stubble only highlighted the sunken look of my cheeks.

People at work avoided me – every once in a while I would realize I hadn’t bathed in three days, and the shocked embarrassment was worse than those fucking sideways pitying looks. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the knock on my cube, and there would be my manager, along with the HR rep, usually so bubbly, but both looking as if they were on their way to a funeral. I had planned what I would say to them – Hey, why so glum? Its only the death of my career – I plan to live a long, long, time, ha ha!

And I do plan on living a long time. All the same, I’ve been thinking more and more about that day in the woods. About how the day after, before I burned the clothes we had been wearing, I had noticed my wallet was missing. I had lost it, somewhere – but what the hell, it was just money, and plastic. We have no children, no naked baby pictures, and the snaps we keep of ourselves are at home on disk.

Who cares.

Did I tell you we have no kids? Well, that’s not exactly true. Today, when I got home, Lauren had left me something. A note from her OB/GYN. I saw a smiley face, and I got as far as the word ‘CONGRATULATIONS’, before I noticed the smell. That rotten smell that I remembered so well. My eyes caught a smeared red handprint on the wall, and a wet towel in a damp clump on the floor. It reminded me of the lump of squashed meat and guts I had left on the forest floor. From the bedroom, I heard noises; the same ones that had been keeping me awake these past few months. That thing in the woods – if it was a baby, what do you suppose its parents looked like?

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Jeff Barr is an unknown dark fiction writer living in the Pacific Northwest. His website is http://www.jeffbarr.com.

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WONDERS NEVER CEASE

by Harry F. Kane

The sky was full of glittering and sparkling ghosts. Some were big

like clouds, others petite and nimble, like migrating birds. Clouds and birds: things which were both otherwise missing in this sky.

These glimmering semi­transparent apparitions combined into unstable shapes and followed unpredictable patterns which were, in all probability, just multidimensional Brownian movement, but a human observer could not help but project almost meaningful stories into it.

This display happened every fortnight for the past two Loki years. A massive asteroid had crashed into Morpheus 3, the gas giant, one and a half times the size of Saturn. The resulting explosion, 4.2 million times stronger than the Nagasaki blast, had thrown trillions of tons of gas out into space.

After the impact, it looked almost like the giant planet slowly bled its atmosphere into the surrounding vacuum. Like a balloon slowly and very visibly losing air from a tiny puncture. Losing air but refusing to deflate.

And the planet bled and bled and bled.

Phenomena of such gargantuan proportions does not have a tendency to die out quickly. It would take at least another local year for the debris from the massive explosion to completely withdraw back within the boundary of the planet’s gaseous envelope.

So now, every time Loki, the one inhabited moon of Morpheus 3, passed on its orbit the asteroid wound on the body of its mother planet was on display. Fantastic shifting shapes would spring up all around as the slowly swirling clouds of fine debris brushed against Loki’s magnetic field.

For the crews of Earth starships on long interstellar journeys, whose trajectories passed through this sector, Loki was the stop­over.

A place where they could renew their air, water and food supplies, and indeed, feel real ground beneath their feet and fresh air inside their chests before climbing back in and blasting off.

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Never to return again, most of them. Space traffic was still quite sparce in this sector Loki was a planetoid two thirds the size of Venus, but with a very, very thin atmosphere. Luckily for off world engineers, it had a number of huge craters made in the distant past by pieces of a hypothetical former moon of Morpheus 3, which had been hypothetically torn apart by a struggle between the mother planet and a hypothetical vagabond planetoid passing too closely on its journey through this sector of the galaxy.

According to this Phaetonic theory, the other moon had been torn apart by the pressure of conflicting and overlapping gravitational fields.

Most of the debris from this cataclysm had probably remained within the gravitational pull of the mysterious planetoid and flown away with it, but some chunks had remained and the more formidable of those had not even been slowed down by Loki’s thin atmosphere.

Three of these ancient craters were immense in diameter, reaching almost a mile deep at their lowest points in the center. Decades ago earthmen had filled these craters with breathable air and built additional towering walls around them to keep the air from escaping too quickly. They connected all three craters with hermetically sealed monorail train tunnels.

In crater Amazonia was a forest of various vegetables, in crater Ukraine was a sea of protein wheat, and in crater Helsinki was Lake Helsinki, the surface of which was covered with oxygen producing algae.

On the edge of the lake stood the housing complex of those who tended to these faraway patches of Earth territory.

Frederic could not bring himself to do any real work, or any active anything on a day like this, in which the whole sky was lit up by the bombardment of particles. Instead, he lay on his back on the moss­covered soil amid the whispering vegetables of the Amazonia crater. His light brown hair had grown long, almost covering his ears now, and his face had last been shaved three days ago.

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Huge tomatoes the size of a one­story house, cucumbers like fallen oak trunks and green onion leaves like palm trees... In the beginning he had felt like a tiny fairy tale character among these enhanced vegetables. But that had been decades ago. He had long since gotten used to this landscape, and had even learned to hear the whispers of the vegetables.

He lay now on the ground, the back of his head resting on his palms, listening to the gentle rustle of huge leaves and the almost imperceptible gossip of the tomatoes, and watched the fireworks in the sky with a still mind.

In moments like this, ‘tomorrow’ and ‘yesterday’ disappeared, as did ‘I did good’ and ‘I did bad’. The very ‘I’ retreated to the background of the inner processes and merely watched, poised in a curious state of distanced melancholic euphoria.

“This is the Okinawa calling Loki, this is the Okinawa calling Loki, do you read us? We are thirty light minutes away, and will be making our landing near crater Helsinki. Please expect us within two Earth hours.

Please reply before this time. Over.”

The radio badge on his shirt crackled once more and was silent.

Frederic slowly scratched his chin, as his mind returned to the mechanics of the mundane. It would take him about forty minutes to reach crater Helsinki. Another ten or more minutes to put on the vacuum suit and go outside the crater to meet the newcomers. All this meant that he could relax on the ground for at least ten more minutes.

He did have to answer the message of the Okinawa somewhere around now, because his reply would reach them only in thirty minutes. Or actually less because, presumably, even as he lay there thinking, the Okinawa was eating up the miles and the answering DM waves from Loki would travel back over a smaller distance. But Frederic didn’t feel like answering immediately. In ten minutes, when he got up, until then...

Until then everyone could just wait.

Frederic put on his vacuum suit slowly, methodically; checked all

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dying. Truth be told, the intensity of all his emotions had gradually subsided over the last years. And yet he meticulously tended to his own welfare and survival, just as meticulously as he tended to all the living organisms under his care on this planetoid.

Somehow it didn’t seem right to not do his best at carrying out his duties, but neither did it seem right to be in a rush. Being in a rush seemed pointless when living year after year as a gardener and caretaker of a lonely moon forever turning beneath a giant planet in the rays of an indifferent blue sun.

He went out of the airlock of the crystal plastic fence of the Helsinki crater. The Okinawa stood about two hundred yards away, and this close landing meant damn good and damn reckless piloting.

There were dark burn marks on the hull of the ship, which could not have been caused by its entrance into the thin atmosphere of Loki.

Either these were the result of denser atmospheres of other planets, or… enemy fire.

And the good ship was obviously a military one, with Kosmos Luftwaffe insignia near its blunt nose; most probably returning from the great space massacre that took place one hundred and eighty light years away. Thousands had perished without a human scream in the cold vacuum of space, sucked out whole, or bit by bit, from wounds torn in their ship’s protective shells.

Naturally, the chaotic radio traffic from this battle would only reach Loki long after Frederic had died of old age, but he had received messages of the battle from visiting or passing surviving ships. All three of them. This was four months ago, and he had decided that there were no more survivors.

Wonders never cease.

“Do you read me, this is Frederic,” he said into the tiny microphone at the base of his helmet’s visor, “I am standing outside your ship, please open the hatch.”

“We read you, Frederic,” answered a sluggish voice, “the hatch is opening as we speak. Upon entering, please... please proceed to your left, to the command hall.”

“No one will be meeting me?”

“No. Our gravity generator conked out a month ago.”

“I read you. See you soon.”

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As Frederic stepped through the open hatch, the voice returned to his helmet once more, “The... the lever to close the airlock again will be on your right... to your right, as you enter.”

“I read you.”

If the gravity generator had not worked for a month, this meant that the crew’s muscles had atrophied, even in the light gravity of Loki they would be as helpless as babies. Why hadn’t they warned him? He would have taken wheelchairs and stimulants… Strange.

Being away from Earth, in deep space, living inside a metallic hull for months and years on end made everyone strange in their own ways. But this was strange bordering on inadequacy, and while in space everyone had the right to their little quirks, inadequacy spelled death. They must all be in really bad shape. And the landing must be after all the work not of a genius pilot, but of a half­crazed wreck.

Frederic’s glove clanked on his helmet’s visor, as it thwarted another automatic attempt to thoughtfully scratch his chin.

He closed the airlock and waited in the space between the outer and the inner membranes, until the air pressure indicators on his suit blinked green, showing that he could now proceed towards the innards of the Okinawa. Naturally, he did not take off his helmet, his immune system had long since been out of touch with the bacterial and viral developments of the rest of humanity. Other people could now kill him just by being in the same room, and routine precautions had to be followed.

Inside the command hall four bodies lay sprawled on the floor.

Pale, with bloodshot eyes, the Kosmos soldats strained to unglue their heads from the floor and gave him wan smiles.

“Welcome to out ship, Mr. Frederic,” said the wreck with captain stripes, “I am captain Ahern, Crogher Ahern, and these are...” he paused to get some breath, “these are Ambrus, Emerik and Benedetto.”

“Pleased to meet you,” nodded Frederic. “You should have warned me that you are in a weak state.” He saw the captain flinch at the word ‘weak’.

Warrior’s pride.

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“Pardon. Your tired state. Now I must return to Helsinki, and then come back again with a wheelchair and medication, and transport you one by one.”

“Why are you alone?” Benedetto squeezed out of himself. Perhaps the boy had dreamt of women on this moon.

“I am the only person taking care of this moon.”

“The only one? But by regulations... there should be at least... two married couples here,” croaked the captain.

“Indeed, so it was. But now they are all gone.”

“Gone?”

“Dead.”

“The enemy?”

“No. Accident and suicide. I must leave you now gentlemen, I will be back shortly.”

Under the thorough and methodical care of Frederic, in just two days the four guests graduated to independent walking by use of lightweight crutches. They and their uniforms had been thoroughly disinfected, and all four were given injections to synchronize their microbiology with that of Loki’s.

The three soldiers were on light painkillers for the aching joints and tissues, but the captain had refused any. So Frederic regularly slipped some into his coffee.

In spite of their condition, all four soldats visibly enjoyed being in an open space and breathing real air. Their complexions were no longer deathly white and Fredetic could see, how every now and then, they would remember with a start where they were and breathe in deeply to enjoy the rich, unpolluted and un­recycled oxygen.

That evening Frederic made a special dinner for everyone and put two bottles of red wine on the table.

“I see you have yourself a vineyard here, Mr. Frederic,” smiled Ambrus, as the soldats seated themselves on the aluminum table outside the housing complex, just by the lake’s shore.

“I used to have one years ago,” answered Frederic, “but there are still some bottles left from back then.”

He poured everyone a glass and the sweet aroma of wine with various herbs filled the air. “A toast to our gracious host!” said the 103

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captain, and Frederic provided a smile as he touched his glass with everyone. They sipped the wine with “Ohhhs” and “Aaahs”. Then the elaborate vegetarian meals were attacked.

“Tell us, Mr. Frederic,” said young Benedetto, “do you always have these ghosts in the sky?”

“No, they only last three or four days,” answered Frededric. “They’ll be gone soon. This should be the last day in which we see them. They will be here again in less than two weeks.” All four of his infirm guests were busy munching away, but all eyes were on him.

“This only happens when Loki passes through the upper edges of a cloud of debris from an asteroid impact on Morpheus,” continued the host. “My instruments have shown that what we see is the effect of the debris from the impact, which has yet to settle down, interacting with Loki’s magnetic field.”

“That must have been a massive cataclysm, Mr. Frederic,” said the captain, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief.

“Indeed it was,” replied Frederic, pausing to sip his wine and slowly swirl the liquid in his mouth. “Luckily for this moon, the impact itself happened just beyond the horizon curve of Morpheus. If it had happened directly above our heads, everything here would have been vaporized.”

All three soldiers glanced involuntarily at their captain, when Frederic said “vaporized”, and then pretended that they hadn’t. Or was it all just in his imagination? After all, not only was his interaction with other people very episodic, but the mannerisms and unspoken customs of communication changed almost imperceptibly with every new generation.

And yet... if they have nothing to hide, why did the captain also pretend that there had been no glances from the soldats?

“Captain Ahern, is there anything that I should know that concerns this moon under my care?”

The captain slowly wiped his lips again, needlessly this time. “You are very perceptive, Mr. Frederic. When we do get our strength back, it will be our duty to evacuate you, and incapacitate the facilities on this moon.”

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the food and the sweet smell of algae coming from the lake. He had not seen that coming, yet one must always be on one’s toes and remember that faraway many a powerful human groups are constantly busy scheming schemes and counter schemes, and that sooner or later one gets caught in their webs of decisions and evaluations.

“And by incapacitating the facilities of this moon, you must mean destruction?” he asked calmly.

“Unfortunately, yes.”

The three soldats had stopped eating, but did not participate in the talking; instead they self­consciously tried to avoid eye contact with Frederic.

“I assume this has something to do with this war of yours?”

“This is your war, too!” one of the soldats, Emeric, answered angrily. “We fought for you, our comrades died for you, for all the people of Earth space, and you call this ‘our war’?!”

Again he had offended someone. It was so difficult to remember all these tiny details of politeness.

“I meant no disrespect for your bravery or your sacrifice,” said Frederic in a level tone. “But you must realize that I have been living here for more than two decades. I am quite cut off from the developments which to you are the most important things. I barely can tell you over which issues the conflict between Earth and the neo­formers flared up. I myself have no stake in human affairs.”

Frederic himself realized how odd his choice of words must sound to his guests, who exchanged glances again.

“Am I speaking to an alien entity?” the captain asked him in a carefully matter­of­fact tone. “How long have you been using this body? What is your original nature?”

“What...” began Frederic before realization dawned upon him. He smiled sheepishly. Although the human race had encountered neither an alien race, nor an alien artifact of any kind, possession by ‘aliens’, by the ‘cosmic mind’, by mysterious ‘original inhabitants’ of some planet or other was a common enough mental disorder.

After months of flying through light years in cramped quarters, with mind bending cosmic views from the portholes, there sometimes came a time when a crew member would begin announcing in a 105

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wooden voice that he or she was a representative of a superior race from the Andromeda galaxy.

Or, after the first year on a faraway planet, some people would begin having strange compulsive dreams and would start claiming that they are the last of an ancient race. Obviously, by speaking so dismissively of ‘human affairs’, Frederic had aroused suspicions of off­world psychosis.

“Captain, gentlemen,” he forced a civil smile to reappear on his lips. “I have not been taken over by anything, apart from a certain melancholia, I must admit, and after so many years alone, I have perhaps started speaking in an odd manner, but that is all.”

Benedetto gave a nervous laugh of relief, which was quickly cut short by a glance from his leader.

Frederic continued. “For you, life consists of spaceships, enemies, allies, planets, cities, bases... But for me, my life is only this moon, planting and harvesting and tending to machinery. For me, the destruction of this moon is something like the end of the world.”

“I lost many friends and comrades in the last battle,” said the captain, “yet I understand your situation, Mr. Frederic. Also, please do not think we are not grateful for the way you have taken care of us,” he continued, pointedly looking at Emeric, who guiltily fidgeted with his fork.

“But we have received orders by hyper­probe, which were very specific. After the decimation of both space fleets in the last battle, Earth can not afford to defend this quadrant, and neither can it afford to leave Loki’s facilities to be used by the enemy as a possible launching pad for an invasion.”

“I thought the neo­formers kept out of Earth space,” said Frederic, his gaze roaming the surface of the lake which formed a peaceful backdrop to the captain’s tense face.

“For now, Mr. Frederic,” said the captain, “and the fate of Earth space can not hang on the assumption that their strategy will always remain the same.”

“So you would bomb this beautiful place?”

“Not really.” The captain returned to slowly picking at the remains of his meal. “Every permanent Earth colony, no matter how big or

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small, has a hydrogen self­destruct device. We intend to use yours to disable this... potential enemy base.”

Frederic stretched his arms and stifled a small nervous yawn.

“Captain, I understand that you have your orders, but naturally, in the remaining time in which you recuperate I will continue trying to convince you to not do this.”

He took another sip from his glass, closed his eyes for a second, and then turned to the soldat whom he had offended. “Now tell me, Emeric, of this legendary battle. I understand the enemy used very fast and small black ships..?”

On the next day the ephemeral displays in the sky were gone.

Frederic invited the soldats for a tour of the other two craters. The monorail route to the Ukraine lasted fifteen minutes.

No one showed any hostility, but there was an obvious undertone of tension present now that Frederic knew the mission of the soldats, and they knew that Frederic was completely against it. Yet, they listened politely as their captain asked polite questions, and their host gave polite answers.

Frederic smiled at their gasps when they reached the Ukraine and stood at the edge of a golden sea stretching out before their eyes.

“This is like in the old Christa booklets,” exclaimed Ambrus. “I remember my grandma used to have them. There would be a smiling family standing in a field of wheat, with a house behind them. But this here is for real.”

“Indeed, indeed. A real forest of super­wheat. But no house with a porch and no animals eating out of our hands. Come, follow me.”

Frederic walked slowly along the narrow paved road which cut across the Ukraine and the soldiers hobbled along after him, resting their eyes on the peaceful scenery.

Gentle waves went through the wheat, the wind produced by a crescent of huge fans whirring on the field’s edges.

Soon they were in a monorail train again, this time en route to Amazonia.

“Mr. Frederic, I must admit this does take my breath away,” said the captain quietly, as they entered the jungle of huge vegetables.

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soldats were audibly chuckling. Then Benedetto gave a high pitched hoot and collapsed to the ground in spasms of laughter. As if this was a signal, Ambrus and Emeric also doubled up in hoots and giggles.

The captain was trying to contain his mirth, but hiccup­like giggles escaped in spite of his efforts.

Frederic scratched his chin. Did he himself find the gigantic gherkins and pumpkins hilarious when he had first come here? He didn’t remember. Perhaps this was just the result of a modern brand of humor. He led the merry troupe onwards into the vegetable jungle.

Soon they left the alley­like road, and were walking on moss.

Frederic turned to the soldats. “After Ina and Robert committed suicide, I found a special patch for them here. When my wife died, I buried her here as well.”

The soldiers became somber.

“Just months later this happened,” he said.

They now all stood in front of a patch of pumpkins, the faces of the soldats twisting into incredulity and horror. Three giant pumpkins grew on a secluded spot, and all three looked human. There was a man pumpkin, and two women pumpkins. They had no legs, but there were torsos, and bumps like folded arms, and lines and dots which looked like faces.

“How did this happen, did you do this?” asked the captain with an unsteady voice.

“I am no psychopath, captain,” replied Frederic. “And anyway, how would I achieve this? This happened spontaneously.”

Frederic looked up into the sky, half of which was taken up by Morpheus. “After the explosion, things changed.”

“You think this could be the result of some subtle radiation influence or something?” asked the captain, showing that he accepted his host’s explanation.

“Or something. Really, I have no idea.” Frederic stood motionless, breathing slowly. “But I come here often to meditate.”

On their way back the shaken troops were silent. In the train to Helsinki, Benedetto spoke up, “Mr. Frederic, how did the others here die?”

Frederic looked at Benedetto with a tired smile, but his eyes were almost warm. “Well... you see, we were aware for some months 108

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before the cataclysm that the asteroid was headed for a collision course with Morpheus. Until the very end we could not predict whether the explosion would happen directly above our heads or beyond the horizon of the planet. So we fashioned a sort of shelter on the underground level of our house.”

The soldats were listening intently, and in the pauses of the story only the gentle hum of the train was audible.

“Two days before the event we could finally believe with confidence that the planet would be hit, but not in the sky directly above us; that Loki would be spared the blast waves. But still, my opinion was that we should stay inside when the collision took place.

“Ina and Robert wanted to be on the surface and watch it in real time. Martha, my dear, was also of the same opinion. I’m afraid we had a fight on the subject and to make my point I took sleeping pills and remained in bed, in our room. A childish desire to ruin everyone’s fun I suppose. Everyone else went outside to watch the fireworks.”

The train stopped, the doors hissed open, and the passengers slowly went out. Frederic and Benedetto walked in front of the group with the captain and the other two soldats walking right behind them, soaking up every word.

“When I woke up, Ina and Robert were already dead. They had put plastic bags over their heads and had slowly suffocated, holding hands.” Frederic looked at Benedetto’s shocked eyes and shrugged. “I don’t know what they saw, or what they thought they saw, or what they had felt... After all, we humans are mostly liquid and gas contained inside soft organic tubes. Our hearts, our brains, so intricate, so easy to influence... A cataclysm of such proportions may be what it takes to burn out this delicate wiring... I don’t know.”

They were already at the door of the housing complex. The captain looked at Frederic. “Sorry to probe into these painful memories, Mr. Frederic. But from what you say, your wife did not commit suicide with the others?”

“No, she didn’t.” Frederic opened the door and stood to one side to let the other pass. But the others lingered, listening.

“She died two weeks later when we went outside to meet a visiting ship. The Peter the Great, if I’m not mistaken. She had not checked her vacuum suit thoroughly. Later, I thought that perhaps she also 109

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had wanted to quit this life like the others, but still had a bond with me that she treasured. At least I hope it was that. And probably her accident was an unconscious compromise, between the desire to die, and the desire to not break my heart on purpose.”

“And she didn’t say what she and the others had seen, when the asteroid hit Morpheus?” asked the captain.

“No, she never mentioned it at all.”

Frederic was standing on the shore of Lake Helsinki when he heard a “good morning” from captain Ahern. He turned and saw that Ahern was standing on his own, without crutches.

“Good morning, captain. I see you are already standing without any help.”

“I’m glad to say I am, Mr. Frederic, no small thanks to your efforts.”

Frederic scanned the surface of the lake, and turned again to the captain.

“The others are still asleep?”

“Yes they are. Fresh air, good food; you know how it is.”

Frederic smiled and began whistling a strange low tune while his eyes scanned the algae covered surface. The captain coughed politely.

“I was wondering what that sound was, Mr. Frederic. May I inquire..?

Is this perhaps some sort of exercise?”

“No, not an exercise,” answered Frederic. He continued whistling.

The two men stood silent together at the shore of the lake. Then Frederic said, “Captain, they are coming, so please, step back at least twenty feet so that you do not alarm them.”

Ahern looked at Frederic with some apprehension. “Who’s coming?

What are you talking about?”

“Please, just do as I say.”

Then the captain saw a disturbance in the surface of the lake. Two disturbances. Two somethings were swimming towards the shore. He looked again at the old caretaker who did not take his eyes off the lake, and softly backed away.

Near the shore the algae was sparse and two shapes were visible in the water for a few seconds before the film separating the lake from the air bulged, burst, and two humanoid creatures scrambled onto the ground.

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They were about one third the size of a grown human, or even less, and they moved on all fours. Writhing like seals, they rubbed on Frederic’s legs while the caretaker crouched and patted them.

“There­there, Alice, good girl, good girl, good boy, Charlie, good boy...” he spoke as the creatures basked in his tenderness. Both of them seemed entirely oblivious to the captain’s presence, but he had not moved yet, and had no intention of moving.

But in another minute it was all over. Frederic patted the heads of the creatures once more and stood up and turned around. They obviously knew what this meant, and after some yelping and meowing they retreated into the water. With the softest of splashes they swam off.

The captain slowly approached the older man. “What..?” he began and stopped, as he saw that Frederic’s eyes were full of tears.

The older man sniffed, wiped his eyes, and rummaged in his trouser pockets. He produced a small tube and a pouch of dried grass.

He stuffed some of the grass into the tube, brought a lighter to it, and inhaled.

“Good God, is that..?”

“Yes, captain, it’s tobacco.”

“It’s completely illegal. You know that, Mr. Frederic?”

Frederic slowly exhaled smoke with half­closed eyes. “Of course I know it’s illegal. I have my own patch here. I tend to it, I dry it, and when I need it ­ I smoke it. It calms me down in a way.”

Frederic inhaled again, cleared his throat, wrinkled his nose and crouched, his gaze lost again in the algae of the lake.

The captain crouched also, a few feet away. “Mr. Frederic, what were these creatures which seem to know you so well?”

Frederic slowly smoked for some seconds before replying without turning his head. “These are my children, captain.”

“Your children? What do you mean, what can you mean by this?”

Frederic met the captain’s eyes and then looked away again. “These creatures are Alice and Charlie. I am their father, and Martha was their mother.”

“But how is this possible? A mutation? And anyway, did you have clearance to have children? “

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“Captain, mammals are sterile on this moon. None of our lab animals ever managed to bear off spring. Not the rats, not the hamsters, not even the snakes for that matter. So naturally, neither of the couples used any contraceptive methods. Whatever for, when we are sterile here? And then one day it happened. We found out that Martha was pregnant. It was a miracle.”

Frederic reapplied flame to his pipe and gave a small, subdued cough. “It was a miracle, but then came the big day and what was born was never meant to be human. Of course, we did not allow ourselves to be depressed. These were our children, strange maybe, disabled maybe, but our children nevertheless.

“Robert and Ina were very supportive, and we kept the children in tanks with nourishing liquid. We talked to them, we fed them, we played music to them. Ah…” Frederic wiped his right eye, a tiny tear had appeared there again.

“We lived like this for almost half a year. And then... then came the explosion. After I buried Martha, I returned alone to the children who were swimming in their tanks as always, pressing their heads to the glass when I tapped it with my fingers, and somehow I realized that what we had done with Martha was wrong. We had been in denial.

Alice and Charlie could not be kept in tanks for their whole lives. So I...”

Frederic stopped speaking. The tiny waves of the lake caressed the shore. The captain darted tense looks at the lake and at Frederic and said nothing.

His companion let out some smoke and continued his melancholy story. “So, after I had buried everyone, after the explosion, my mind became clearer in a way. I made a decision. I took them out of the tanks and operated on them. I gave them gills. I changed some of their metabolic organs, and I let them loose in the lake. They are free to swim, and there are areas of protein algae which I introduced in order to feed them.”

“Incredible,” breathed out the captain. “But... but the water in this lake is drinking water. The crea... Alice and Charlie live there, and they eat, and I am sure they excrete there as well?”

“Captain, before the water from Helsinki is bottled it is filtered three times, before the vitamins and the magnesium are added. What 112

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we are drinking here is as clean as ever. Now, if you will forgive me, I have some work to do before lunch. You will find food in the storeroom by the kitchen.”

Frederic got up and walked slowly in the direction of the train tunnel. Captain Ahern wiped his face with his hands and turned towards the housing complex.

The jolly voices of the other soldats could be heard. They had woken up as well.

Frederic had half­believed himself that he would really work, but now, standing in Amazonia, he realized it had been an outright lie.

How could he work when everything pointed to the direction that there was no point in doing any work, as the surface of Loki would soon be devastated.

The soldats had gained their strength back. The captain was obviously going to go through with his orders in spite of everything.

Even the tomatoes felt that something was brewing. Frederic could hear the vague vegetable fear in their gossip. When he cut down a vegetable it let out a semi­audible cry of pain, but pain like when one cuts oneself on a razor or on a tin can. Unpleasant, but not threatening to the whole organism. But now the vegetables clearly felt a rise in tension, a danger to all of them, on all levels; a danger to the whole natural cycle of life and death on Loki.

Frederic tried to visualize the three craters scorched, the water vaporized, the vegetables and the wheat turned to ashes.

He shook his head. This must not be allowed to happen.

Lunch was tense. There was no conversation, just silent feeding, until finally Frederic took out his pipe and lit it in full view of everyone.

The captain cleared his throat. “Mr. Frederic, the time has come for us to carry out our orders. I must ask you now to give us the keys to the self­destruct devise of this colony.”

Frederic let out a jet of smoke over the table. “Captain, I see I have not managed to convince you of the folly of these orders. Can you not see that mankind needs this outpost? Without it, Earth is stepping 113

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back into the past. It would be a crime against progress. A reversal of mankind’s expansion into space.”

“Not a reversal, Mr. Frederic,” answered the captain. “Let’s not be melodramatic. Not a reversal, just a step back. When we have gathered our strength we will return here, but for now, this moon is a danger.”

“Only in your imagination! How can it be dangerous?” asked Frederic with emotion.

“I would think that you are playing stupid, Mr. Frederic,” said the captain sternly, “but I believe you are rather quite insane.”

“What?”

“Think about it yourself.” The captain leaned forward, his face stern and commanding. “You have been alone for so long. You have created your own fantasy world here, you have forgotten the reality of us ­ earth men!”

The captain spoke with confidence for the benefit of the soldats, too, in case their resolution had been undermined by the fresh air and the caring host. “Here you are, smoking this filthy drug, this sin from the dark past, which every child knows is death, and yet you suck at it, you swallow this poison.

“And why are you alone anyway? There is a reason why regulations insist specifically that people should not be alone in space or on another world. Because they lose it. They go mad. As you have gone mad. Why are you still alone, Mr. Frederic? Why have there been no replacements? How did you deceive the visiting crews? What story did you spin?”

Frederic scratched his chin. “I told them that replacements were on their way, and that I was alone here only temporarily. Apparently they all believed me, and no one inquired further. And as you see, I am quite capable of taking care of Loki alone.”

The captain sucked air through his teeth and locked eyes with the caretaker. “Mr. Frederic, whether you can or cannot take care of this place alone is of no consequence. You have not followed regulations, you have become addicted to an evil drug, you have lost your sanity, and you are refusing to follow orders from Earth. This place must be destroyed. Do not put us into a situation in which we have to use force.”

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Frederic sucked at his pipe, and his hand shook only slightly. “And what of my children?”

The other soldats exchanged startled glances at this, but the captain’s gaze wavered only for a second. “As you yourself said, they were never meant to survive in the first place. You have prolonged their unfortunate existence for your own reasons, but now the time has come for the whole of this colony to cease to exist.”

The captain felt that he was in danger of overstepping a boundary and added: “But if you insist, we can take them both in tanks.

Perhaps Earth scientists can do something for them. Now give me the keys!”

“Captain, do not kid me,” said Frederic evenly, blowing out thick milky smoke. “I am well aware that your ship does not have the place for two tanks for Alice and Charlie. And they are not likely to survive the voyage anyway.”

The captain sighed, slowly took a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at Frederic. “To the last, I was hoping we could avoid this, but you just don’t listen to reason. Give me the kheeeee...”

The captain himself was surprised at the loss of command of his voice. Then the gun slipped out of his fingers and clattered on the aluminum table.

A glass fell out of Emerik’s hand.

Frederic poured himself another cup of tea while the soldats twitched and shuddered.

“What you are experiencing, gentlemen, is the effect of poison which was put by me into our meal,” he said, trying to sound calm and self­assured. “You are rapidly losing voluntary control of your muscles, but soon all functions of the body will cease and you will simply stop breathing. If your hearts don’t stop first.”

“Bhuuut chuuu,” said Emeric, trying to point his hand at Frederic.

“Yes, I have also eaten with you from the poisoned food, but unlike you I have drunk the antidote beforehand.” Frederic looked into the faces of the poisoned soldats, trying to determine whether rage or fear had the upper hand. “I can give you the antidote at any time, but you must promise that you will not try to attack me. You must give me your word as warriors that you will dismantle the weapons from your ship and fly away forever.”

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“Ghhh tah hhhhllll,” cursed the captain defiantly through his numb limps.

Warrior’s pride.

Frederic folded his arms and watched. Very soon all four soldats were slouched, their heads lying on the table. Their breathing was erratic.

Emeric let out a wheeze and was still.

Ambrus gave a high pitched whine and stopped breathing as well.

“Pluuuuuh,” whispered Benedetto. Frederic decided to interpret this as surrender. He liked the young soldat anyway.

Twenty more times the ghosts appeared around Loki, but each time weaker and weaker, until they finally disappeared completely.

The wound on Morpheus had healed, but the scar, a huge yellowish spot, could still be seen on the surface of the gas giant every fortnight with naked eyes.

Frederic continued tending to the vegetables and machines of the colony, and he had a helper now ­ young Benedetto’s brain had not been completely damaged by the poison, and he was good with the vegetables.

The tomatoes liked him.

Once a week they both would meditate in front of the cemetery patch in Amazonia. There now grew three new pumpkins of human shape, but not only that, one day the unthinkable happened. Between Ina­pumpkin and Robert­pumpkin, a tiny baby­pumpkin had appeared.

It also looked suspiciously anthropomorphic.

Frederic was inspecting the protein levels in discolored patches of wheat in the Ukraine when he heard Benedetto running towards him.

“Mr. Frederic, Mr. Frederic,” the boy shouted, almost out of breath.

“What is it, Benny?” asked Frederic.

“The baby pumpkin, the baby pumpkin!” Benedetto’s face was twisted into an expression of shocked awe and joy. “I saw it move! I swear I saw it move!”

“It can’t be!”

Together, they rushed to Amazonia, the fifteen minute train journey taking forever.

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Finally they were there. Frederic raced to the cemetery patch.

Benny was right! The little pumpkin had moved! A clear trail of half a yard led off from its initial place.

Frederic scratched his chin and looked thoughtfully into the sky, at the huge planet hanging above him. “Wonders never cease,” he muttered with subdued delight, and crouched to pet the little pumpkin.

Harry F. Kane has a novel and a story collection with Damnation Books and Bizarro Press. Alter ego 'Ted Keller' has novellas picked up by Solstice, World Castle, and Rogue Phoenix Press; flash stories with Weirdyear, Smashed Cat, Linguistic Erosion, Razor Dildo.

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