Anu transported tens of millions of spores to its body part that besieged where the ball was. Following the strong airflow, the spores flocked into the centre of the passage. In just a few seconds – it took only a few seconds – the vanguard invisible to the naked eye would charge into the new world at the other end of the passage, and it, Anu, would become the master of these two worlds.
This was the closest moment towards victory for Anu.
A fiery light, without any warning, flashed on the console. All of a sudden, the air pressure difference between the two ends totally changed. The moment when Anu sent its first troop of spores into the passage, the air pressure at the other end of the passage abruptly soared over two hundred times. The high-pressure air, all at once, spewed backward and transported back Anu’s vanguard that was infinitely close to its destination. What followed was a large bulk of grey dusty matter fluxing into this world with the airflow, and there came more, more and more….
A human captured by Anu – one of the operators in charge of the passage generator – suddenly fell to the ground, getting out of control and trembling. Just in tens of seconds, all his vital signs faded away, and his body fluids froze promptly because of rapid cooling, making him a frozen meat as hard as a steel. Soon, it spread to all the staff and even to Anu’s body. The tens of billions of spores that Anu produced to invade the new world were all killed before they got the chance to release. The cell sap of the slime molds by which Anu’s body was formed was all getting frozen, and the organelles were all pierced through by spreading ice. Soon, the area surrounding the spacecraft disappeared from Anu’s vision, becoming a blind zone, a frozen blind zone even colder than absolute zero.
That was a devastating start, but it just began.
When this blind zone started to extend itself, Anu finally found the cause bringing this: the snow-like grey dust that was hurrying to devour all the heat of anything it passed by, vanishing all life in its way. Part of the ‘snow’, getting full with heat, turned into invisible and odorless gas rising into the atmosphere and, very soon, condensing into a solid again and falling to the ground again by the force of gravity, starting a new cycle of depriving life.
As the deadly blind zone expanded steadily to half of Anu’s body, the crumble of most sensory systems pushed Anu’s consciousness to the edge of collapsing. Biological instinct replaced rational thinking, and began to direct its last struggle. Anu attempted to prevent its heat from escaping by sending a signal to individual bits on its body surface to secrete a thick layer of insulating matter. Yet Anu eventually found it all in vain, no matter what, as another kind of ‘snow’ started to fall.
– That was Dry Ice.
Oh, Crap. It was the last thought of Anu before the collapse of its integral senses.
“See? Problem solved.”
In the central monitoring room, Lee gave a very relieved stretch, crumpled the disposable coffee cup in his hand, and tossed it into the bin. For some reason, the little move made him feel so relaxed as if it was something extremely heavy and uncomfortable.
– For example, an unfamiliar parallel world with unknown dangers lurking.
Beside Lee, experts of the technical team, standing casually in groups, talked with each other, with a few of them – the minority of course – expressing their doubts in vehement voices and wording. Lee did not even notice what had they said; after all, it was over. After the extermination-like attack specially designed for a ‘hostile world’ with potential threats, the atmosphere of that earth would become a layer of dirty snow sticking to the ground for many years. No living thing, including all the explorers if there were any of them still alive, could live there any more, except for few Chemosynthetic bacteria that could live off the geothermal energy.
“Hey, Sir. How did you make sure the one talking to us was not a real explorer?” Rolfe patted his colleague on the shoulder, “I hadn’t heard any problem….”
“That’s why you’ll never be an explorer. Never.” Lee shrugged, “If I’m correct, you failed the last section of the explorer’s selection test, right?”
“Yep! I achieved the highest level in all sections including physical fitness, knowledge level and living skills! But they, they…” When it came to his ‘old story,’ Rolfe was still quite indignant, “they said I lacked the ‘necessary psychological quality!’ But –”
“But you did lack the necessary psychological quality.” Lee helped him finish the words, “Of course they would not tell you what quality it is. Because no evaluation criteria is going public, and I know well that the secrecy is indeed justified. Not the same as many people think, the qualities for an explorer do not…conform to the public values. Do you know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well.” Lee thought for a moment, “Do you remember the last section of the test?”
“I’ll never forget it.” Rolfe subconsciously lowered his head, “We were all dumped at the deserted tiny islands in Micronesia with not even a decent tool to survive – but a radio, of course. Every ten days, teams scattered on different islands would receive random communications, and the examiners would tell us about other teams, and we had the right to apply for an airdrop of supplies or to give the opportunity to teams worse off.”
“And your team was very lucky, and was always one of best condition teams.”
“Yes, we…how do you know it?”
“Because all the teams were of the ‘best’ condition – since you couldn’t verify the authenticity of the information provided by the examiner.” Lee shrugged, “Survivability was not the real end of the test but kind of your uh…psychological quality that is not suitable to speak out in public. If I’m not mistaken, you hardly received any airdrop supplies, right?”
“Well, actually we had received them twice, but I left most of the opportunities to others.”
“Hence you shall never be an explorer,” Lee said, “because you’re not selfish enough.”
“What?”
“Selfishness. That’s the psychological quality they really want, but also really not suitable for telling the public. People living in a civil society are naturally opposed to selfishness, because selflessness is much more beneficial for a society that generally does not lack living materials.” Lee threw his hands up, “But to colonize another world or another universe is totally different. At least in the very early period, the connection between explorers and us is extremely weak. An accident, or even a tiny error, could mean they never see any of homo sapiens. Don’t forget that only one fifth of the potential colonial worlds eventually established permanent contact with our world, and not all of those who were missing were dead.”
“So –”
“So the colonists shouldn’t be too noble. Living in the jungle as a civil man, you’d definitely be swallowed by the jungle. Only those who are selfish enough and can behave in the most cold-blooded pragmatism can most probably survive and spread the human gene. This is the precious experience that the Vikings, the Polynesians and the colonists of the new continent drew from their own experiences. That, of course, is the reason why I can make sure that the one talking to us was not a real explorer – who would attempt to convince us to deliver the supplies first to them; at least they would try every means to do so.”
“Certainly,” Rolfe subconsciously licked his lips, “but…but who do you think we were talking to? Or…uhm…what is it?”
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know.” Lee shook his head, “What we only need to know is that it was a potential threat. That’s enough. Don’t forget that the liveable worlds can be so plenty that a world can definitely be sacrificed as long as we can eliminate a threat by doing so.”
“Of course.” Rolfe nodded, turned back, and walked to the exit of the monitoring room, “Good night, sir.”
Home is a House That Loves You
Rachael K. Jones
Martha was the first in my family to become a skyscraper. Mostly we became ordinary buildings. Service ran in my family. When our time came to take root, we usually carried on our lifelong vocations. My surgeon great-grandmother became the new cancer wing at the Aurora hospital, and Uncle Bert, who loved pickup basketball on the street at summer, transformed into the elementary school gymnasium when the old one grew too old to repair herself any longer.
My grandfather seized upon my pride in Aunt Martha and reflected it back as resentment. He kicked steel-toed factory boots against her red brick foundation, thumped on her drywall, gray eyes scanning and probing her structure for flaws. But he turned up nothing worth criticizing. Martha was perfection, an architectural marvel, a monument to define the horizon’s boundaries for future generations. So he made up his own reasons to hate her. “Forty-five is too young to take root. Cat and Graham aren’t even eighteen yet.”
My father cupped an arm around five-year-old Graham’s shoulder and steered him down one of Martha’s grand cobblestone courtyards to muffle out the adult talk. “I think I saw a lizard crawl beneath the picnic table,” he said. Graham’s tears ran to hiccups. The little boy squatted down, lost to his search.
Cat, though, glowered at Grandfather, her hands twined like ivy through the fantastic brass scrollwork of her mother’s fire escapes. She had caught them saying her name, and hadn’t overlooked the slur against her mother. “That’s ridiculous,” she called after them. “Uncle Bert took root even younger.”
“Bert was sick,” Grandfather said. He returned Cat’s pointed look. He didn’t like us to bring up Uncle Bert. It was still a sensitive topic, a tooth that ached when storms blew in from the far-off ocean. When he got his diagnosis, Bert marched down to City Planning and volunteered his body to take root where needed. “Martha could have waited a few more years at least. She’s all those kids had left. Selfish woman.”
Cat pulled her stocking cap over her eyebrows to shield her from Grandfather’s angry eyes. The adults moved on to dividing up Aunt Martha’s estate.
“Those kids can’t live in the house alone,” said Grandfather. “I suppose we can keep her in trust for when Cat’s old enough for independence.” By her, Grandfather meant Aunt Martha’s house, his older sister Angela. “She only just took root.”
There was no talk of selling the house. In Aurora, nobody ever sold houses. You might sell land, but you had to wait for the building to die, or else petition City Planning.
“Cat and Graham better stay with us in that case,” said Dad. “We’re only a block away.”
Grandfather squatted down beneath the picnic table. “How about that? You want to live with your cousins?”
“Okay,” said Graham.
Grandfather pointed his chin at Cat, who was still pretending not to listen. “And you?”
Cat glanced at me, a look of anger and sadness and overwhelming pride. A soldier’s eyes, where pride and loss were housemates. Those who fought in the wars with Apsides often wore that look. She nodded sharply. So it was decided like it often was in Aurora when relatives took root too young.
From that day, I worshipped Martha in the way of teenaged girls. She became my god and my morality, the name I prayed in the dark as I fell asleep. I wanted to be like her. She chose her own immortality, and didn’t ask for our opinions. It took great strength of mind to stretch your body so far when you took root, and Martha brushed the sky.
* * *
People talk about what starts wars, as if by knowing we could stop it from happening again. As if all events are selected from an infinite menu. Like choice is an ocean instead of a closed set picked and guided and hedged by circumstance and history and competing wants and needs.
The truth is the people of Apsides never understood us. Not when they drove on our roads or climbed our stairs or walked our sidewalks. They never understood our city was built on service offered up by the generations before, and that we were their stewards and caretakers.
None of us could stand a tourist. They graffitied our heroes. They gouged potholes in our beloved weathermen and trod gum into our musicians, and through all of this, we forgave. We tended our broken buildings, cleaned off the insult, and we forgave, because we knew they didn’t understand. Their cities were dead, and their homes did not love them. Nowhere else in the world did people take root like we did, and we did not invite outsiders in. Only Apsides, which lived on the edge of our nimbus.
But even our forgiveness had our limits. For me, it was what they did to Graham.
* * *
The seeds of collapse were sown in the years after Aunt Martha took root, when three teens on a field trip to Apsides disappeared overnight. When they were found, it was a horror of fresh asphalt for their parents. Barely old enough to take root, they couldn’t become more than some access roads to line a strip mall.
The Apsides police insisted the kids must’ve done it on their own. Who could prove otherwise? The criminals were never caught and punished.
That marked the start of a new era. You had to be careful when you traveled abroad, because if they found out you were Aurora-born, the wrong people might force you to take root, your body used for a stranger’s gain, and you helpless to stop it. And if your family somehow found out, what could they do? At that point, it was only the priest and the bulldozer, or else leave you forever in a strange city, alone among silent buildings that had no memory of birthday cake, or french kissing, or the taste of strawberry wine.
From people like that, what can you do but withdraw, hide away, deepen your reservoirs and store up flour and rice and canned black beans? What trust can there be? What commerce or cultural exchange? We shared a language, but we did not understand one another.
Our buildings whispered and creaked and groaned. Our sidewalks bent crooked in the night. The jail counseled war. Two old women on the westside became gun factories. Their grandchildren sold bullets.
Through all of it, Martha whispered to those of us who listened. If they only understood, she said. If they truly understood, they would let us be. Make them understand.
Graham, eighteen and idealistic, cut straight from his mother’s brick, struck off on a road trip the day he graduated high school. The last time I saw him, his arms sunburnt and peeling where his t-shirt sleeves ended, he gave me his second-favorite baseball cap and told me to get outside more.
“You’re getting paranoid in your old age,” he said. I had had my daughter Cleo by then, and a son on the way, and Graham took this as proof positive I was now certified old, risk-averse from some parental infection he swore he would never contract.
“Not old. Just less stupid.” But I cracked a sideways grin when I said it, so he hugged me. A real, tight hug, hard enough to make my shoulders ache, doled out like favors to those Graham loved enough to outstrip his machismo.
I was grateful for that hug later, when he fell out of touch entirely. He was a day or two late coming home, and we thought nothing of it. After a week, we made jokes he’d fallen in love with an Apsides girl on a beach somewhere. After a month, Cat showed up on my doorstep with a road map and a packed bag and one of the guns from the new factory.
Cat and I traced h
is route together, alternating the driving and sleeping so we just stopped for gas. We kept the brights on at night for signs of new construction: dirt piles, fresh asphalt, anything that could be him. We spoke to no one, lest our accents give us away. Every foreigner became a kidnapper on that trip. I touched my belly, slightly rounded, and finally understood the fear that could make a woman into a gun factory.
We found him behind a chain-link fence around a new supermarket.
He was a parking lot. Not a smooth, flat one – he’d arched up in the middle, epileptic, his painted lines radiating downhill like an infected wound. Flat as his mother was tall. It had been a violent rooting for him. I pressed my face against the sun-warmed tar and sobbed. We’d found him too late. Oh, much too late.
“Oh, Martha.” A prayer, an oath, a vow. I wasn’t sure which. “I am so sorry, Cat.”
Cat had curled around one of the violent asphalt swells in the frozen black ocean. She whispered to her brother. Maybe he whispered back, but I didn’t hear.
I gave them their privacy.
We spent the night in Graham’s parking lot, the cheap streetlights flickering on whenever a squirrel climbed the fence. In the morning, new cracks spiderwebbed Graham’s asphalt like shattered glass. He’d grayed like he’d aged twenty years overnight. He’d gone on.
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