by Eugen Bacon
She feels something curious and leans forward. She closes her eyes and presses her lips to his toad lips.
“Your tail . . .” he murmurs against her lips.
***
“What happened to your tail?” he murmured against her lips.
“My tail,” she whispered and opened her eyes. “I’ve lost my tail.”
Her breathing was shallow. She gasped and leaned to the ocean as if it would breath for them both. The black ocean breathed, massive waves humping in silence. She felt his eyes in the hush and turned. But there was no toad all brown and warty with big black eyes.
***
She feels his eyes in the hush and turns. But there is just a man, a beautiful man with a short crop and it is salt and pepper and he has the greenest emeralds in his eyes.
“The toad—”
“I’m here,” he whispers. He is still holding her hand. “Do kisses break curses?”
She smiles.
***
“I’d never leave you, I’m here,” he whispered, still holding her hand. “Do kisses break curses?”
She smiled.
“I don’t know if you’ll give me a fair go, but we’ll be right,” he said. “Just know that I am not a man of virtue—I lived with a woman who was a shrew and she’ll never welcome me home.”
“I don’t really care. Remember I asked you about traveling musicians?”
“Is this the most I’ve heard you speak?”
“I know a song,” she said.
“Then sing it.”
She began to hum a siren song:
Blessed are they who speak and beg the garden of souls—too many of them now, such suffering and death—for they shall be rewarded with listening. Oh is our desire for more in sync with our poetic vision?
“Amen,” he said.
***
“Amen,” he says. “There’s no rhyme, nothing. Your beatitude is as awful as mine.”
“Blessed are we.”
“Amen.”
And together they float on the water reed to a place all their lives long.
SNOW METAL
Torvill watches the girls. They outnumber the boys, aloof lads, most of them tradies at the weapons plant. Now the boys, hoods with a bit of income, play keystroke games on small electrode beamers, fiddle with music, act like they have a bit of class. The girls, similar in hip-huggers, in defiance of norm, are mostly signal sorters—these wear honey and black. Torvill understands their working rights, their privileges and independence, their resolve to build Goth hours in graveyard shifts for a lunar paycheck instead of settling as breeders like the rest of their lot.
He also understands the sorting process, what goes on in the pillared towers of the Enclave, an impregnable place, airtight security. In this messaging tower that “listens” to the galaxies, colossal pillars steeple into antennas that pick anion and plutonic noise, any wave leaking off space. It is here that intergalactic battles are lost or won, military or diplomatic secrets intercepted to much vantage. Intel-sensors snap signals into a looping continuum of capsules in a belt system, an intricate network that compresses the waves, sorts them on type, date, time and origin. Officers in encoding vectors decrypt the signals, assign weight quotient in terms of intelligence, emboss inferred threat into intel-chips for the senate.
Not all girls are graveyarders: scarlet and black indicates rank. These are the encoders: reserved. Unlike the sorters—who chat nonstop to each other, at each other, who gesture continually to demonstrate their talk—encoders hold a dignified air.
The Gate station vibrates. A distant drone grows loud, louder into the platform, until the vessel Shuttronix rolls to a halt. Shuffle, step. Shuffle, step. The crowd files forward. Each citizen takes turn, touches a magnetic pass to a flashing reader. Doors snap open, shut in an instant, boarding pass after pass.
Torvill is almost at the hatch when he notices her at the belly of the queue. Moot! She is a looker. Big hair. Her face is small, celestial. She is paired, he can tell. She wears rank, curvy in her officer’s uniform. There is interest in the gold eyes that regard him. He returns her gaze. Burnt-orange lashes, wild and rich as her hair, flutter, then lower. A blush climbs to her cheek. She looks away.
***
The Shuttronix rumbles, rocks. A blast of horn, then a wail. Momentum, a blast of speed, and the vessel spears into the sea. Torvill’s stomach tightens. A sneeze gathers in his nostrils. He sees her again, two seats away, unmissable with that hair. Her head is turned. She is gazing at the sea’s womb.
He flexes his knees, loosens the throb from his foot. He gazes again at the female. Her blazing head is upright, touching the minipod that holds her. Each pod is a capsule, luminous as magic, sturdy as titanium.
The chameleon sea shifts from a map of blue to streaks of silver. Then layers of white and gold vacillate between hues until little points of light fade, until the sea is deep, deep black, miles, miles out. As Torvill’s breathing gets even, the vessel sighs, rocks, slogs its speed, judders to a halt and totality of sound.
“The Enclave,” says an automat. “Termination point in seven seconds.”
Torvill plows through the crowd. Ahead, so does she. He is two lengths behind her. She turns into the jaws of security, the Enclave. He waits at Zone 9 for a sensor shuttle to take him to Embassy Sanz.
***
Three days. And though not a word is spoken, he sees it, understands it. He need not be told: the stagger of her heartbeat at the sight of him; lowered lashes when he meets her stare; a tilt of head; the quiet smile . . . The argue of emotion with her mind; she could well shout it. He hears it. He’d still hear it if she whispered it.
Hers is not a gradual melt—like the others. It comes instant. Magnetic.
Moot! It’s a matter of Goth hours. But he is patient.
***
He sees her outside the trapdoor; their shoulders almost brush. This time, he walks ahead. She tails.
“Sir,” her voice raspberry.
He turns. The Enclave towers above them, a lime-tinted building, revolving, with spiked protrusions.
“Yes?”
“I see you.”
“I see you.”
“Work at the Enclave?”
“No.”
“Snow.” She stretches her hand. “Snow Metal.”
“Torvill.” Her grip is tight. “Gaulter.”
“You new?”
“Emissary. Land of Sanz.”
“The north, huh. So you’re the replacement.”
“Vice. Former emissary. Let’s just say he had other matters.”
“Matters? Total recall is what I heard. Vice was not—” She looks for the word. “Effective.”
He smiles. “But you are.”
***
A nod, a handshake, sometimes a few words.
One day outside the soaring tower of the Enclave, she hovers as he waits for the Zone 9 shuttle. They stand beside a crystal fountain, perfect spray.
Her lips open, close.
He waits.
“Maybe we can . . .” she tries.
“Be effective?” he helps.
She smiles. “Drink sometime?”
“Yes,” he says. “Sometime.”
“All right. Then.”
***
One day, he kisses her.
He takes her to La Japonesa. Broiled calf, cured innards, servers a clap away. She eats without reserve, sweet meats in a tender glow of light.
“Hurting for calories?” he says.
She laughs. “Just effective.”
Later, much later, she does not protest when he engineers a coach.
***
A week. Oyster Street fair. They laugh to an exhilaration of speed shuttlers. Wolf burgers at Centro. Down shooters at the Vortex under
pink, yellow and green strobe lighting.
He confounds her with questions: about herself, her family, her work. Yes, mostly her work. She talks: about shuttles, no siblings, geo magnet. Yes, little of her work.
“Come.” He pulls her to a swirl of lights, to new music.
Her dance is raw, electrifying.
***
He invites her to Solaris, an island.
They meet by the sea. She is wearing a flowing dress dyed in patterns of rivers and dawn. His shuttle docks into a beautiful and private world. Hands clasping, they climb up hilly terrain, to the tip of a hillock. They gaze at the tossing sea.
When the air turns gray, blustery, as eagles vanish into the darkened sky, a sliver of moon, thin as a snake, casts its glow to the ground.
Torvill sits. His feet are stretched toward the sea.
“Tell me about the Enclave.”
“What about it?” she laughs.
“The signals you encode.”
“Let’s not talk shop.”
As they move to kiss, a beam from his eyes sears the gold in her eyes.
“Stop. What are you doing?”
He touches her memory, feels it.
“Stop. Torvill. Hurts—”
“Silence.”
She fights him, physically, mentally. He stills her to the ground. But he can’t read her. She is masking semantic data. Each download dimension from his beam strikes a call back routine. Success equals zero.
She wrestles from his grasp.
Moot! She is a fighter.
“You cannot decode me,” she breathes.
“No one is that—” Torvill rolls, pins her again to the ground. “Effective.”
“Get away from me you, you f-fossil, you.”
She kicks, rolls, knocks him with a fist.
“You are well trained,” he calls after her as she runs. “But I get what I want.”
He is a hunter. He stalks, circles. He trails her fear, clothing caught in brush. A twig cracks near him. He pounces, grips her ankle as she flees.
“Get away from me you, you foul smelling, loose-livered, degenerate rake!”
“Good. Fire in your belly.”
“La Japonesa! Oyster Street! The Vortex! Didn’t any of those, us, mean anything?”
“I have a mission.”
He hauls her by the foot.
“Torvill! Torvill? Please . . .”
He sits on her, knees astride her chest. Her prises her eyes open. He focuses his steady beam to the hippocampus of her brain. Start stimulation implant. Establish neural connection. Convert memory to transferable data: 5 %, 6 %, 14%, 41%, 43%, 43.01%, 43.17% . . . She is blocking him.
It weakens the decoding; shifts his access from her long-term brain hippocampus to short-term amygdala memory. Engrams of data show him the clip of her surrender in his arms that night of La Japonesa . . . He relives it: a conscious experience full of sensory data, parsed.
Smash!
***
Rainbows in his focus . . . Torvill sits. He raises a hand to the back of his head, winces. Moot! A rock to his cranium? Volcano in that belly!
Somewhere in the distance, racing with wind and a murmur of sea, his shuttle roars away, away. He pulls a beamer from his back pocket, groans with effort. Mission failed, his syntax to Sanz. Fail, fail, fail hammers in his head.
Unlike Vice, former emissary, total recall is not his to embrace.
Despite soreness, he smiles, half-bemused at his new instruction from the planet up north: “Win her to our side. Make her a double agent.”
“And if I fail?” he asks.
“You disintegrate.”
A MAJI MAJI CHRONICLE
Maji! Maji! Myth or legend
Or a scheme of fads, ideas embedded
One battle, one struggle.
Freedom! Freedom!
Painted features, glistened spears.
Maji! Maji! Myth or legend?
Sanctified water skims no bullet.
Grave, the lone stream bleeds scarlet.
1905 AD.
A copper-breasted sparrow circumvented the tree line. Flapping, he savored the natural scents of Earth that lingered in the wind: coppice, flora, even rain, beneath layers of clay and loam soil. Milk of woodland saplings blended with compound complexities of bodily secretions from nocturnal creatures marking territory or warding off peril.
The little bird surveyed the silence of twilight within a new smell of burning that explained a curl of black smoke in the horizon. He fluttered lime-mottled wings and landed on a branch tremulous from tepid wind. So this was Ngoni Village, the warm heart of German East Africa. He reined himself with the tips of his claws, leaned his body with a subtle shift of weight on the bough. His face twisted skyward, where an eagle soared in a battle dance overhead.
Broad wings slowed. Gleaming eyes angled at the limb of the thorn tree. The eagle swooped with power and a wild cry, talons outstretched with skill and focus.
Schwash!
The eagle and the tiny sparrow toppled in a downward shred of branch, twigs and leaves, and a curtain of red and lime-mottled fluff entangled in silver eagle feathers. The little bird floated out first. He preened himself and hopped two steps away in good recovery on firm ground.
“Surely, Papa!”
Papa was Zhorr, the grand magician of Diaspora. “I did not mean to loosen your feathers, younglin.” He looked around, cleared his throat and said, “Well!” A gust of something burning swept into his nostrils. It grew stronger and wilder in the air, wild enough to push rain clouds away.
“This bird thing won’t do,” Pickle, his son, said. “Now what? Mmhh? What?”
“We go to the village.”
“Like this? As birds?”
“And that troubles you, I see. Pretty much everything displeases you, ingrate lad.”
“Having traveled back in time to build a picture of history, we’ll be dinner in a human’s pot before we catch up with that past. Imagine the possibilities: skinned or feathered, how will they eat us? Apprentice, guinea pig or bird, Papa, I do not goad fate.”
“Relax. We won’t be birds long. But we need to observe before we can morph and fit in.”
“Fit? We could have fitted in better had we done the vortex. Churn, swirl, a blast of color and schwash! Right into this world in our normal forms. Why come as birds?”
“No mess, no structural changes,” said Zhorr. “The black hole causes atomic fusions and chemical transfigurations. Flying in was safe. Safer! I understand your frustration. You must appreciate that 3059 to 1905 AD is a hell lot of years.”
“No kidding. So why birds again?”
“You make an awful sparrow.” Zhorr regarded Pickle for a moment. He swirled. Monster wings flapped and a swell of rapid air slapped Pickle to the ground. “That better?”
Pickle lifted on two legs. He sniffed around, scratched his ear and landed back on fours—a reddish brown mouse. He scurried into clumps of grass, dragging his tail.
“No point sulking,” the magician said, now transformed to a gray squirrel himself. He gnawed his forefeet and shaped his nails. He rubbed his whiskers and sat on a bushy tail.
Above them, the dazzling eyes of a shadowy owl picked bustle in the shrubbery.
“Either way, Papa,” came Pickle’s voice from the brushwood. “In all these shenanigans, you leave me silly and game. If humans don’t gobble me, that darn owl up there will.”
“I’ll do something. Maybe. At dawn.”
They veered north, eating miles away in bristle undergrowth on a forest walk. Shadows peeped in and out between leaves and soft moon glow. Zhorr and Pickle steered by thick smoke curling in the horizon. They found an open field dazzled by white stars. The meadow closed to unfenced farmland bulging with blonde ears of maize. Yellowing grass t
rembled and snapped at their chins. Pickle legged it out. But digging, scratching and sniffing at whim, he simply couldn’t keep pace with Zhorr, who looked fine and strong.
Pickle struggled, out of breath, way out of legs and famished. This is some adventure, he thought. A sudden nostalgia for Diaspora overwhelmed him—its gold and rainbows and snowcapped crags. In this godforsaken past, the wind looped and whined with speed and ferocity. The trees murmured and loomed tall like mountains to Pickle’s modest size. A whisper ran across the grass and nearly scared him out of his fur. A dried leaf raced near his cheek. Behind the leaf’s rustle came a gasp from a rousted and irate cricket. It, zinged! past Pickle’s muzzle.
Zhorr and Pickle traveled over a dirt road stippled with clumps of dung in various stages of drying. Hungry, they paused and nibbled sprouting maize shoots by the roadside. Further north, a golden carpet of millet and sorghum fields spread. Fallen stems by the roadside crumbled at their feet.
“I’m still hungry,” said Pickle.
Zhorr shook ears of grain into his paws and they had another meal.
Finally, they came upon sporadic huts. Zhorr and Pickle moved along a cattle fence and into a forest of mango trees laden with fruits. A narrow footpath led to a mud hut with thatched roofing. Beside it, they ate their way into a food shed where they huddled in sound sleep on a golden bed of drying grain, malleable as a waterbed.
Zhorr awoke to the crow of a cockerel and transformed himself into an old man. Drums echoed in the distance. The staccato beats left Pickle’s sleep of light snores unruffled. The grand magician appreciated his son’s exhaustion from a flight across years. The great land of Diaspora stood eons away from a small African village invisible on the global map but visible in a magic bowl with special effects.
He contemplated washing his face. He perused the compound and took note of a well that had seen better days. He prayed it held a trickle or three, else he’d have to cast a spell. A tin pail lay beside the well . . . all seemed hopeful. But before he could stir or rise, within minutes of the cock’s crow, hinges of the hut’s wooden door groaned. A boy with tight hair and bark loin came out. His lazy hands rubbed sleep from his eyes. He lifted the empty pail and took to his heels, swinging the handle, presumably on his way to the river for a day’s ration of bath, drink and cooking water. That trampled the well’s possibilities as a washing place for the magician.