Strange Horizons, August 2002

by Strange Horizons

  “For some people, I'm sure that's true."

  She gave me an appraising look. I didn't dare say more. I watched the TV steadily.

  * * * *

  The houses petered out altogether on the edge of Flagstaff, a half mile from the launch site. The first hint of light at the horizon tinted the clouds a muted yellow, a promise of gold. Already I could see the tip of the shuttle, pointing skyward. It would launch just after sunrise.

  More and more cars passed me on the road.

  I hefted the pack higher on my back and quickened my pace. Russell padded beside me, claws clicking against asphalt, head low, tired already.

  “Hang in there, old boy,” I said.

  He wheezed a little now, and he couldn't bend low to the ground to sniff out a trail or wiggle sideways, as he had when he was a puppy.

  We came to the perimeter of the launch site. A chain-link fence ran alongside the road, abandoned cars parked in the grass next to it. More cars were arriving every moment. Some people leapt out and strode toward the gate in the fence ahead. Others spoke in low, intense voices. Still others just watched.

  I joined the line at the gate entrance.

  In front of me was a solitary woman, stooped and gray-haired, carrying nothing. In front of her was a family of four, with ten suitcases on a cart, and a small black cat, mewling its displeasure. The two children were bright-eyed, curious, cranky. The cruise ship would be as big as the world they knew. Maybe bigger.

  When I signed up for the journey, I told them what I would bring: my pack, my dog. The Tourists said there was plenty of food, that we would be comfortable. Still, some people wanted to bring their entire houses. Maybe they didn't really want to leave.

  I took the little Pentax from my coat pocket: f-stop 22 for the glistening shuttle beyond the fence. I didn't know whether I would ever be able to develop the film, but some habits are hard to break.

  I hadn't brought a watch, but the rumble in my stomach told me I had missed breakfast. Kira would be up. I thought of her searching the house, of slow realization transforming her face.

  My throat tightened at the thought. She would be all right, I told myself. She had her friends, her sisters. They would help her find someone else. Someone settled, someone with no love of the stars, no sense of awe at the beauty of the universe, no unfulfilled need to explore and discover.

  * * * *

  The shuttles were scattered across the globe: Africa, South America, Australia, Asia. They would take us, the Tourists said, to the bigger ships, the cruise ships. There would be room enough for farms and towns. We could organize governments and police forces if we wanted.

  The world was split. Some said the Tourists wanted us for their own experiments, or maybe for food. Some said we would be pets, like the parrots the Spaniards took home from the Americas after spreading their diseases. We would be the talking birds in lonely cages on a conquistador's balcony. We would die of boredom.

  Others pointed out the incredible opportunity offered by the Tourists. We, of all the generations before, had the chance to explore the universe. We would fulfill our true human potential, to reach the stars.

  Only one in ten thousand said they would join the Tourists. I couldn't understand why more people didn't want to go. People lived in an invisible, entangling web: parents, children, lovers, jobs, houses. Most lacked the strength to extricate themselves from their own lives.

  * * * *

  The day of my decision, I had been in my darkroom. In the dim red light I watched the images emerge from their chemical depths, photos from the outskirts of Flagstaff. Indistinct shapes became small houses with smaller yards, paper bags and empty bottles against chain-link fences, flattened and dying lawns. Houses too weary to lift tilting shutters, to hold onto chipped paint.

  No one would buy these pictures. I'd taken my previous photos to every gallery, every art show, every year. Kira said it was a waste of time. She was right.

  From outside my small sanctuary, the sound of the television blared away as Kira got her nightly fix. What was the appeal? Eternally happy people with easily solvable problems. She had long ago stopped asking me to watch with her.

  One month, the TV announcer droned. One month until the last ship left. Make your decision now.

  It made my whole body shake, thinking about how I would feel when they left. I imagined living out the rest of my tired days trapped beneath the Earth's crushing atmosphere. A whole life spent grabbing a free minute here and there to practice my photography, while Kira numbed herself a room and a universe away.

  I picked up a photograph using a pair of metal tongs, and there it was in the foreground: a single dandelion, poking impossibly through the tiniest of cracks in the sidewalk, the night's condensation wet and glistening on its hopeful leaves and bulbous head.

  Suddenly, the decision to go was easy.

  * * * *

  A woman in an orange safety vest, skin red from exposure, checked my ID against her list. I set my pack on the ground and waited.

  The wind rattled the chain-link fence. I could hear the murmuring of those in line behind me, the hushed, tense tones.

  Finally, the guard smiled at me, blue eyes reflecting the first light of dawn, and nodded me through.

  I walked onward.

  Sparse grass crunched beneath my boots. The sun loitered just above the horizon, a simmering orange-red globe. The shuttle towered above.

  I walked into its long shadow, and the air grew chilly.

  At the base of the shuttle was a wide ramp leading up into its interior. I walked up, and found myself in a small circular room where a dozen others waited. An elevator. I held my pack tight against my chest with one hand, my other hand on Russell's collar. A door slid shut, and the elevator began to rise.

  A moment later, the door opened onto a larger room filled with seats. The walls and floors were brushed copper, the seats wide and soft, better than first class. This would be our home for the journey to the cruise ship. One entire wall was a window. I walked over to it, Russell beside me.

  To the left and right were other viewing rooms, other faces pressed against the hard transparent surfaces, curving out of sight around the ship.

  Below I saw the ramp into the ship, and further on, the chain-link fence. A group of protesters huddled beyond the gate, mouths opening and closing in a silent chant.

  Already I could feel a vibration through my feet, a rumbling promising a roar. The shuttle would launch on schedule.

  * * * *

  Once I had made the decision, the rest was easy.

  I signed up in the police station in downtown Flagstaff one afternoon after work. Another man stood at the counter. I tried to give him a friendly smile, but he wouldn't meet my eye. Going on the Tour was nothing to be ashamed of.

  The officer behind the counter took my thumbprint, my picture. They made us register to keep track of who left, and to weed out the crazy people, the criminals. But the ones who truly wanted to Tour were the most sane of all.

  When I pulled up at home later, Kira was in the front yard. She had spread a blanket on the dirt, and was tugging at the weeds surrounding the base of the small mandarin orange tree she had planted the previous spring.

  Her shoulders tensed when I approached, though she didn't turn to look at me.

  “It died,” she said.

  I looked at its thin, peeling branches, at the dead gray buds. I had told her the tree wouldn't last through the winter, but Kira had insisted, saying that the mandarin is especially cold-tolerant.

  Kira held a Kleenex to her nose. Was she actually crying over the death of a plant?

  I gazed upwards, where the Tourists’ ship was visible as a single bright point of light in the sky. Even in midday it was easy to pick out. Soon, I would be up there.

  “I'm sorry, Kira,” I said. I turned and went into the house to find my pack.

  * * * *

  We were lifting, as gentle as a balloon at sunrise. I set my pack at my feet so
I could move closer to the window. Already the ground was five hundred feet below, the trees like bits of steel wool scattered across the pale ground. Straight up, toward the quiet black of space.

  It was silent within, the whisper of fabric against fabric, an occasional low cough. The young man to my left in fatigues and a thick wool coat pressed his nose to the window, his hands on either side.

  The sun's rays streaked the ground in long red arrows. The Earth was so beautiful from above.

  The girl next to me held onto her mother's hand and looked up at her with the sudden, desperate realization of a child. “We'll never see our house again?"

  The mother placed a hand on her shoulder and pulled her close. “I don't think so."

  We'll see much better things, I wanted to say. But there would be time to talk. There would be years and years to talk.

  Russell whined.

  I opened the top of the pack to take out his breakfast, and there, below the Tupperware container of kibble, was a brown paper bag.

  I hadn't packed it.

  I withdrew it carefully. The bag was lined and worn from reuse, just like the lunch bags Kira used to pack for me when I went on shoots.

  Inside was a small container of applesauce and a plastic bag with a sandwich. Deviled egg, my favorite. I closed the bag again, pressed it to my chest. Thirty years and I thought I had known her. How could she have slept last night, knowing I was leaving? I closed my eyes. I imagined her slipping beneath the comforter, whispering a soft goodnight, knowing her husband would be gone when she woke in the morning.

  I felt a tugging on my coat and opened my eyes.

  The little girl was pulling on my jacket hem.

  “What will you miss the most?” she said. Her mother smiled apologetically at me.

  The blues and greens and grays were blurring below, the houses merging into long rows of tan against the darker roads.

  What would I miss?

  Lightning in the plains, so bright the whole sky sizzles into white-hot life for an instant, and then goes absolutely black. Driving at night in the summer with the window rolled down all the way and the warm rain against my face and the wipers zwipp-zwipping in time to Nina Simone. The throaty warble of a red-winged blackbird in the cattails. The way the fog creeps through the pines by the Colorado River on a cold January morning. The hot, dry smell of the desert. A packed lunch.

  How long had she known? The possibilities exploded outward, like the time-lapse film of a flowering orchid, petaled layers concealing velvety depths.

  The little girl was staring up at me expectantly.

  “Deviled egg,” I told her.

  She nodded solemnly, satisfied with my answer.

  Below, the cities and lakes shrank to silver-streaked pebbles. I placed a hand on the cold transparent surface before me, looking back.

  Copyright © 2002 Corie Ralston

  * * * *

  Corie Ralston is a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where she gets to use cool words like “synchrotron” and “anomalous diffraction.” When she's not writing, she's reading, playing piano, or attempting to telekinetically control dice in the game of craps. Someday she and her partner Kelly will take down all the Las Vegas casinos.

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  Howling with Ginsberg

  By Phil Wright

  8/5/02

  I read your “Howl” and cried and roared and howled back.

  I read your “Howl” from a beat-up Anthology of American Literature.

  I read your “Howl” simply because I had never read you before.

  There you were, just sitting on the page.

  It was late at night, couldn't sleep,

  What other excuse did I need.

  What the hell, I thought, I'll read this

  Ginsberg guy, see just what he's all about.

  After the opening lines I grokked you in

  Seeing the best minds of my generation

  Destroyed by madness starving hysterical naked.

  After the first part my mouth fell agape,

  While my newly opening head Moloched with yours,

  And then I was with you both in the rocked-up walls of Rockland.

  Tears—real, honest-to-God-tears—welled in my eyes,

  Broke from their dam,

  Dropped onto the already full pages.

  Read you as though in a fever I did, and stood

  Dumbfounded and muted on your final punctuation point.

  Finally finding my voice

  I read you out loud to myself

  Just to hear your words

  Echo in real air and space-time.

  I read you to the dust on the TV set.

  I read you to the futon.

  I read you to the wrinkles in the blanket covering the futon.

  I read you to the plain-cheapo, because it's only a rental,

  brown-apartment-carpet

  And the newly Dover White painted walls that hold dark smudges

  From where I smashed spiders to their deaths.

  And I read you to those smudges,

  Now regretting my own

  Intolerance, ignorance, blindness.

  I read you, yelled you, shouted you,

  Balled you, wailed you, bellowed you, screamed you

  Ejaculated you out loud

  In my own ecstatic insatiate moment of total

  Decadence and rapture and fulfillment of

  Every last one of my raw, bleeding, throbbing,

  Filled-up now with fucking life nerves,

  Until my voice and throat cracked open wide

  And out flew my pounding, bounding, lusting

  Ginsberg filled heart.

  Then I did it again.

  I howled you to the world.

  Crazed in your words

  Drunk in your nouns and verbs.

  I howled your words forth in a werewolf's cry

  To the moon and the blood

  And the eternal struggle for the human soul

  —Oh God! let there be one for us to struggle for—

  In space too tiny to hold them

  My mind too tiny to hold them

  No way could I hold them

  All in.

  They stomped and tore and wracked me

  Ripping all the pathos, bathos, cathos right out of

  All that I was, am, and will be.

  They burst out of my mouth,

  They burst out of my throat, lungs, belly, and soul.

  They burst out holy,

  Ready to fight injustice in the world,

  Ready to kick some serious ass,

  Ready to knock down the bullshit.

  Making me deliverer of your words in a blistering moment of

  Dazzle and chaos orchestrated cacophony.

  Spouter of your truths, our truths, human truths

  —so small that moment was the cosmos could blink its eye

  And entire eternities would pass me by—

  Yet there I was ink transfixed, transformed

  Into images only a mind reading God could unfold.

  One with your words.

  All sound and fury,

  Blood and muscle,

  Human heart and human soul,

  Dead poet's voice and dead poet's spirit.

  Lightning through tear-blurred pages.

  I spoke and stood your words made flesh.

  Copyright © 2002 Philip Wright

  * * * *

  Currently Philip Wright teaches writing at a community college. Turn-on's (not necessarily in this order) include sushi, lean prose, deep dish poetry, pizza with extra cheese, coffee, classic rock, and dark haired women. Turn-off's include spam email and the “not un” combination in English.

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  My Infatuation with Chaos

  By Jonathan Price

  8/12/02

  Life promises only one sweet memory

  A single, glimmering happiness

  Th
e rest is a sea of chaos

  He strives to find interconnectedness

  There is meaning, there is purpose

  In the endless, fathomless patterns

  To his pain he only finds

  A gruesomely pretty girl

  Named pandemonium

  With all of her makeup shades

  Of gray and red

  And her Mandelbrot curls

  He falls in love with

  Those icy eyes of chaos

  It's probably infatuation

  It's probably not even a girl

  He can't help it

  The voice, the whirling turbulence

  Of her sonnets and her woos

  In the end, in his bed

  In the morning

  He finds an empty pool

  Of calmness and of cold

  He wanders about his day

  His spirit a mirror of the pool

  Quiet, cool, alone, and

  Fighting the currents of providence

  They are her tentacles

  Once again drawing him in

  To her bed of infinite recursion

  Of equations that are deceivingly simple

  But that have such complex

  Curves....

  Copyright © 2002 Jonathan James Price

  * * * *

  Jonathan James Price is a young working writer that lives in Northwest Indiana. He is an occasional poet, focusing mainly on writing science fiction. Currently, he is working his science fiction novel, Dreams of the Crimson Kitsune.

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  It Wears You

  By Ann K. Schwader

  8/19/02

  (to a wireless wearable computerite)

  Born swimmer in the data stream, you wear

  as effortlessly as a trout its gills

  this latest means of never needing air.

  No doubt the cyborg lifestyle has its thrills:

  your spectacles with that eyecorner screen

  keep you so well informed it's near obscene

  to plebeians without. I must confess,

  however, to a sudden Luddite chill

  when contemplating your connectedness:

  which part is host, & which the parasite?

  By now, I fear, the two are so enmeshed

  that neither exorcism nor the knife