Mark, seeing he was having no success, sighed and stepped back from the panel. “I'm a customer, a camper,” he said, trying for a soft, civil tone. “I request, no demand, you switch the dome back to clear."
“I'd like to accommodate you.” Cranford sat, heavily, and swiveled his chair to face Mark. “But I'd lose my job."
“What?” Mark waved an arm toward the window. “For letting people see the night sky? Ridiculous!"
“Yeah, I know.” Cranford slid the chair forward. “Look. I'd like to switch the dome transparent, but a camper called. She said her children were frightened out of their minds."
“You mean, because of some narrow-minded idiot who—"
“I looked and she was right. The meteor shower was much too violent, much too frightening for our campers. I had no choice."
“Of course you have a choice.” Mark turned toward the door. “But since you won't exercise it, we'll just have to go out and watch it—under the real sky."
“Go ahead if you want to die of exposure. You'll freeze out there."
Mark took a step toward the control panel. Nervously, the supervisor stood again, interposing his body between Mark and the panel. “I can't believe this,” said Mark, pointing to the banks of controls. “Technology should help us explore the unknown, not hide from it."
Cranford glanced at the control panel. “Oops,” he said. “Now look what you've done. You turned the announcement system on. They could hear us throughout the entire campground."
“I don't care if they can hear us on Mars,” Mark shouted as the supervisor reached for the switch. He turned on his heel and stormed out the door, slamming it behind him. He flew down the stairs and began jogging back to his campsite. Just as he left the building, he heard Cranford's voice—soft and modulated this time—coming from the all-camp speakers. “I apologize for the disturbance,” he said. “A misunderstanding. Everything's fine now. You may return to sleep in complete safety."
“Safety!” Mark spoke the word as an epithet. But, as he padded back to the site, he thought again. He could well be cavalier with his own safety, but he couldn't take chances with the kids. They had no cold weather clothing and the summer-weight sleeping bags were useless. Cranford was right; the kids would freeze. Wait! We could watch from the car. What am I thinking! We're on a friggin’ island. We'd have to swim.
He slowed to a walk. Maybe the dome simulation will be enough. The kids are accustomed to simulations. Anyway, how can the real sky ever compete with full-color, holographic immersion games?
When he reached the site, the boys were waiting for him. Then he saw the three sleeping bags rolled up at their feet.
“What! I...” Mark struggled to make sense of it.
“We heard everything you said,” said Kevin.
“We heard the guy say oops,” said Adrian. “And then you said you didn't care if they can hear us on Mars.” Adrian giggled. “Then we got our sleeping bags together—Kevin said we should do it. We can watch the meteors from outside—in our sleeping bags."
Mark and his son exchanged a glance containing a deep message. Mark, thankful for the eye contact, didn't quite know what that message was but, as would be the case with SETI, the fact of a message was orders of magnitude more important than the message itself.
Mark reached over and tousled his son's hair. “I really appreciate the thought,” he said. “But we can't do it. They're summer-weight bags. We'd all freeze."
“No, we wouldn't,” said Kevin. “They're all-weather sleeping bags."
“What?"
“They're temperature adaptive,” said Adrian. “We read about them in the brochure."
“Really?” Mark still felt behind the curve.
“Come on, Dad. We don't have all night.” Kevin picked up a bag. “The fibers expand as it gets colder. We'll be fine."
“It's so they can use the same sleeping bags for their winter camping.” Adrian picked up his bag and looked at Mark expectantly.
Mark laughed. “Okay.” He scooped up his bag. “Let's go, then.” He led the way toward the entrance. Then the boys took the lead and he sprinted after them.
At the entrance of the campground, they paused, looking through the small, tinted-glass windows of the night-doors. The frost-encrusted ground shimmered under the white fire from the sky.
“You know,” said Mark, “we could just watch the shower from here."
“No,” said Kevin. “Let's go outside."
“Yeah,” said Adrian.
Mark smiled. That was the answer he'd hoped for. “Fine!” He pointed toward the lone tree on the knoll, leafless and dark against the streaked brilliance of the sky. “To that flat spot in front of the tree. We'll run there and jump into our sleeping bags, shoes and all, ‘kay?"
“Yeah,” from both of them. Their eyes were sharp, alert—like cats.
Mark opened the door and the cold wind wafting in from the ocean hit him like an icy fist. He took a quick breath and ran for the knoll. From the corners of his eyes, he saw the boys running beside him—and then ahead of him.
When, a few seconds after them, he reached the knoll, the boys were watching the sky and shivering.
“You know,” said Adrian. “I read that the radio waves from the meteors go right into your head and it sounds like sound.” He gave a spasm of a shiver. “Gosh, it's cold out here."
“Come on, guys,” said Mark, pulling the release cords on both the boys’ bags, “into your sleeping bags. Now, please!"
The barked command got their attention. They unrolled their bags side by side, and dived inside them.
Mark unrolled his bag beside Kevin's and cocooned himself within it, with only his nose exposed to the cold. After a minute or so, when his body had warmed the inside of the bag and he no longer felt like a frozen slab of meat, he ventured to look out. The meteors rained, lighting the sky with smooth streaks of brightness and reflecting oscilloscope-like waves from the rippling ocean.
Glancing earthward, Mark saw the boys, with barely more than their eyes visible, staring up at the sky. He peered at Kevin, what little he could see of him. The boy's blond hair looked like sparkling silver under the light of the plunging meteors.
Kevin, apparently sensing that he was being observed, turned his face toward his father. “I liked the way you talked to the camp ranger,” he said. “That was neat."
Mark felt a welling up of parental pride—strong enough to even encompass Adrian. “Kevin, I can't begin to tell you how incredibly proud I am of you."
Kevin gave a shy smile.
“Hey, look,” came Adrian's voice. “On that branch. There's an owl."
Again, Mark smiled. The kids are okay.
“Wow, he's enormous.” Kevin gave a hint of a chuckle. “Maybe it's a vampire owl."
Adrian giggled. “You know,” he said in a low voice, oddly serious. “Thinking about Werewolf Park ... I wasn't scared when we watched the movie, but I'm a little bit scared now. And ... and it's sort of fun being a little scared."
“Yeah."
Mark wasn't scared, but he realized that his own sense of adventure, which he'd not even understood had been damaged, has been restored by the experience.
A noise from the campground entrance caught his attention. One by one, he saw kids carrying sleeping bags, some wearing sweaters or jackets, some not, come furtively through the door. Many had a parent in tow. Quietly, like ghosts, they ran to the knoll, got into their sleeping bags—and watched the sky.
Mark smiled at the growing assemblage of adventurers. The kids are okay.
Copyright (c) 2007 Carl Frederick
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* * *
Poetry: LITTLE RED ROBOT
by G.O. Clark
My little red robot
stares at me with dark eyes,
toy arms raised in anger,
teeth permanently set
in a tin leer.
-
His stomach is full
of
toothy gears hungry
for the fragile shell I inhabit,
this flesh and blood and
brittle bone.
-
Neutron by name,
he poses a threat only
when I wind him up, and I
become a god and fool with
each turn of the key.
—G.O. Clark
Copyright (c) 2007 G. O. Clark
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* * *
Short Story: DEBATABLE LANDS
by Liz Williams
Liz Williams's forthcoming books include Precious Dragon and The Shadow Pavilion (both from Night Shade). One of her most recent novels, Banner of Souls (Bantam Spectra, 2006), is currently nominated for the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. It was also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke award. The author's contribution to our annual slightly spooky October/ November issue may look a little like fantasy and a little like horror, but it's all science fiction.
He chased it through the rushes at the water's edge, late spring, with the dark-mist twilight coming down around him. It was as though he had been chasing it lifelong, all through the racing years of childhood, past the time when he was initiated as a warrior and warlord's man, past the battles of Cadon and Burn, the years of love and the years of war. He knew that it was barely a short span since the hounds had put up the scent and begun the chase, but that was what it felt like. And already he was exhausted by it, bone weary, as though the day was already at its end. The thing he was chasing had sapped him: he could feel it sipping at his strength, leaching into marrow and sinew, spooling him out like the thread from a dropped spindle. Then it raised its unnatural head and gave a pealing cry and the sound brought him to his knees.
He was somewhere else. There were towers all around, made of red stone, higher than any building he had ever seen before. They reached up into cloudy greyness, rain on the way, and he felt dizzy and disconnected. Hastily he looked down and around. He stood on a grassy circle but the grass was not green, as it should be, but yellow and sere, as though the summer had been hot and long. It did not feel like summer to him, but there were no trees to show him the season.
There was, however, a plank of wood on a ball, tilted so that one end of the plank rested on the ground. A smaller plank hung from a frame, creaking in the rising wind. He blinked. A child was sitting on the plank, swinging to and fro. The child was staring at him, her face as blank as an egg.
“Where am I?” he cried. “What is this place?"
But the child's face cracked and she laughed and laughed, not kind laughter but cold, and he knew her for one of the Changing, or thought he did. Then the child and the towers were gone and there were only the rushes and the marsh's edge, with the wind whistling through the reeds.
That night, he dreamed of Less Britain.
He had been born there, on the sea's edge. First memories were of the salt wind whipping his face, the ocean thundering in and lashing against the granite cliffs until exhausted into froth. His father had died young, in Broceliande, but Broceliande was too often a word they used when they did not want you to know how a man had died, the magic in the name weaving a spell over blood and shattered bone, making death into music. A forest code, and he had never found out how his father had met his end.
His mother had gone under the protection of his uncle shortly afterward—not willingly, but she had little choice and he had rejoiced, seeing his uncle's fort as a safe place, true, but also the court in which he would become a man. He had been made welcome, his mother less so, and as she faded and sank in the shadows of the tower, he was trained in arms. There was little doubt as to what kind of man he would be: a warrior, but silent-souled, loving the woods and marshes, the sea's edge, solitude. When he took his totem, it was not raven or gull, but curlew, the sad cry in the dark, always at the edge of things. The other boys, and, later, men, recognized this: he was left alone.
When he was thirteen, he killed his first man, a raider from the northeast. By the time he was seventeen, he had killed more, a man for every year of his age. Shortly after that, the call came from the High Court and he left the sea-churned shores and the cold cliffs for the milder, wetter marshlands around the island kingdoms, in Britain-the-More.
He was initiated, all the same. They sent him out into the lake villages, the lands that had belonged to the king's queen Whiteshadow, that she had brought with her as dowry. He saw the marsh homes of the small dark people, the ones who had been there since time began and the moon was set on its track. He did not understand them, and they did not trust him, although they admired the iron spear he carried and he saw them looking at it with longing. They were covered in blue markings, allowing them to disappear against the reeds and the coiling mist. He painted himself with the same, and went out into the marsh when the early sun was a brass circle in the east.
That was when he saw the thing, but that came later. When he first took the coracle out into the rushes that marked the channel, a curlew flew across his path, calling its ghost-cry, and he knew it would be a good killing day. He speared a heron shortly after that, laying its striped corpse on the slats of the coracle, admiring the beauty of it. Then a crested duck, but never the totem he was seeking: hunting was a pastime, nothing more, but it was preparation for the initiation feast. He had no intention of being unsuccessful.
He heard it before he saw it. At first he thought it was one of the booming birds that rose like reeds, with their necks stretched up from the marsh. It was a long, belling cry, similar to bird or hound, but with a strange pattern to it, like someone crying out in a language that he did not understand. Maybe it was one of the lake people themselves, come stealing after him to take the iron spear, and he jolted round in the coracle. No one was there.
It came again and it was desolate, a spirit's cry. He reached for the charm around his neck, hazel bound with bronze to keep him safe from fire and water, and he thought it had worked because the cry was cut off, suddenly, as if choked. Then he swung the oar, took the coracle around a bend in the channel into a wide flat pool, and saw it.
It looked like death. It was all sinew and bone, with more legs than a natural beast, and a face made of spines, that as he stared, aghast, shifted to become something else, something human and ancient and sad. Then it bounded high in the air. He saw a twisting tail, ending in a spiked club, and all of it was the color of summer roses, or the inside of a dead man on the battlefield's earth. It was gone and he was left gaping after it.
He knew then that his initiation was complete: he had seen what he was supposed to see, yet he did not know what that was. He could not take this for his totem; it was no natural thing. And so, wondering, he paddled the coracle back through the channel of reeds, to the banks of alder through which a white sun was rising.
It was early, but he had seen enough. There was a bursting pressure in his head, the sense of a summer storm. He put his hands to his ears to block out thunder, then realized that it was within. It was not until he stumbled back into the alder groves that the pressure lessened and even then his head rang to the end of the day.
The high king's oak-man was silent, when he spoke of what he had seen. At first, Curlew thought that he was not believed. But yarrow thrown smoldering into the fire sent smoke into the oak-man's rafters and the oak-man passed a knife across the palm of Curlew's hand and proclaimed him a man of the high court.
That night, the high king asked him to tell the court what he had seen. He did so grudgingly, but the warriors did not laugh; something about his quietness, perhaps, or the black haunt in his eyes. The thing he had seen had left a scar on his soul, something he did not want to tell the other warriors, but perhaps they saw it in him all the same.
His account of the creature, his quest beast, excited them. Knives were stuck into the tabletop; toasts were made. The king watched with guarded interest; by his side, Whiteshadow's face was avid. They wanted to set out that night, run the beast to ground in the ma
rshes, capture it and bring it back—living or dead, or so the head of the king's warriors boasted. Curlew did not think that was as easy a choice as it might seem, but he said nothing.
The king was indulgent, but held them back. Curlew, watching the king's face closely, thought he saw something pass across it, a shadow like the knowledge of a man's death, but he was not sure. The king was a young man, who looked old, and Curlew did not know what the king had or had not seen.
That night, he dreamed he was back in the marshes. It was afternoon, the day glowing, but when he looked up he could see the stars and he knew that the glow was not coming from the sun. The beast came out of the light, walking on two legs like a man, but the rest of its legs were coiled around it, drifting like seaweed in the shining air. Curlew reached for the iron spear but it was no longer by his side and anyway, there was no need. His fear had drained into the light, leaving him empty and calm.
“What are you?” he said, and the beast replied with that belling cry that seemed to be made of words. He had the sudden glimpse of a great plain, grey and shivering with grasses, mountains in the distance that were the color of old ale. Home, but not his. Then it was gone and the beast and the dream with it.
Next morning, nine warriors rode to the marsh, leaving their rough-coated ponies restless at the water's edge. Curlew went with them, but did not follow them into the reeds. Instead, he waited, standing alongside the oak-man as the sun came up through the alder groves.
“That boy, the one they call Lamb,” the oak-man said. “You know him?"
Curlew nodded. “I've seen him at the court."
“He is older than he looks. Lamb is his child-name; he has not yet seen his totem."
“Perhaps this will be it,” Curlew said, with an idleness that he did not feel, for suddenly the back of his neck prickled like nettle-sting. The oak-man gave him a sharp glance.
“I will be surprised if he comes back."
“Do you know of this thing, this quest beast?” Curlew asked, echoing the previous day.
“No. I told you truth,” the oak-man said. “But I have heard of things like the thing you have seen. They come after dark stars; war comes in their wake, and famine. They love the blood of men. There were a lot of things like that, in the wake of the great comet that swept the land a hundred years ago, bringing iron cold, disease. This is why I will be surprised if Lamb comes back on his own two feet."
Asimov's SF, October-November 2007 Page 20