Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215

by TTA Press Authors

  Daniel blinked. “Fantasy? If you didn't believe it, why were you working with me?"

  "You paid me. Extremely well."

  "So how much will Gupta be paying you? I'll double it."

  Lucien shook his head, amused. “I'm not going to work for Gupta. I'm moving into particle physics. The Phites weren't all that far ahead of us when they escaped; maybe forty or fifty years. Once we catch up, I guess a private universe will cost about as much as a private island; maybe less in the long run. But no one's going to be battling for control of this one, throwing grey goo around like monkeys flinging turds while they draw up their plans for Matri-oshka brains."

  Daniel said, “If you take any data from the Play Pen logs—"

  "I'll honour all the confidentiality clauses in my contract.” Lucien smiled. “But anyone can take an interest in the Higgs field; that's public domain."

  After he left, Daniel bribed the nurse to crank up his medication, until even the sting of betrayal and disappointment began to fade.

  A universe, he thought happily. Soon I'll have a universe of my own.

  But I'm going to need some workers in there, some allies, some companions. I can't do it all alone; someone has to carry the load.

  Copyright © 2008 Greg Egan

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  HOLDING PATTERN—Joy Marchand

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  Warwick Fraser-Coombe

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  Joy Marchand holds a B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of the Pacific and lives in Salem, Massachusetts. Her poems and short stories have been featured in Bare Bone, The Elastic Book of Numbers, Polyphony and Interfictions with more upcoming in Talebones, Shimmer, Apex and Interzone. For more information, visit joymarchand.com.

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  The fasten seat belt sign was on, Flight 219was on its seventeenth pass over LAX, and there was an alien in seat 1a.

  Nanette knew that there were scarier individuals who could be sitting in 1a sucking down Johnny Walkers than an alien from an-other planet. For instance, a guest on her favorite talk show was in prison for roasting and eating his mother. After hearing about that guy, one sweaty alien dressed like an optometrist was singularly un-intimidating. Besides, he looked familiar, and his alien death device looked like a ballpoint pen.

  Rummaging in the First Class liquor cache for more Johnny Walker, Nanette tried to block out the sound of Portia and Minn falling apart. Their desperate keening rose and fell in a wash of operatic fear that was impossible to ignore. “For crying out loud,” said Nan, rattling ice cubes. “You're like a Tammy Faye look-alike contest with surround sound."

  The formidable Portia—once known as Travis K. Pimentel of Abilene, Texas—sat with her size-14 pumps touching at the toes. She was squeezing Minn in her great arms, as if clutching a tiny Asian teddy bear. “It's always the same,” said Portia. “All the stuff people say about terrorists. Emergency services will need metal detectors to find all our pieces on Venice Beach."

  "Who said anything about terrorists?” Nanette peered around the curtain at the alien in 1a and poured his drink. According to stews like Portia, everyone on every plane had a corkscrew, a box cutter, or a dab of plastic explosive and a fuse. Every man who wore a cloth on his head had a holy mission, and every Asian woman had a briefcase full of sarin nerve gas and the conscience of Dr Mengele. To fight this terror, flight attendants romped with the flight crew, abused tranquilizers and attempted suicide left and right. It was always the same damned depressing story. Nanette took the Johnny Walker to 1a and sat down in 1b.

  "Here's your drink,” she said. “The whole world's going to hell, but it's nothing a little booze can't fix, right honey?"

  The sweaty alien looked at Nan. Like a regular middle-aged white guy, he wiped his forehead with a pocket square and took the drink. With a grateful look, he drained the highball glass to the ice. “Booze can't fix it,” he said, wiping his mouth. “It's always the same. We circle twenty times, then we crash."

  Nan opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  Even though he'd gotten his way, Hector was pulling the same macho crap he always did. He was too manly to admit he was sick as a dog, and too distracted by his fear of flying to put his hand on Luisa's belly to feel the baby kick. “He'll play soccer one day,” Luisa said, hoping paternal pride would take the constipated look from Hector's face.

  "We keep going around,” Hector said. He had claimed the window seat by making little noises about how many times Luisa had to get up to pee. His handsome, boyish face was dark with anxiety, and he kept wrenching the sun visor up and down on the window, as if the violent repetition would somehow help. “Are these gringos too stupid to land a plane?"

  With all the fuss he was making, she couldn't help noticing the cuffs of his shirt, which he'd started to destroy by picking the threads out. Luisa turned away. It was impossible to talk to him when he turned inward onto his own insecurities and began to destroy things. She rested her hands on her belly to feel the oceanic swell of the baby, and she smiled. “Ai, Miguelito,” she whispered.

  "What a strong boy you will be."

  Hector was right about their arrangement. Th e aisle seat really was more convenient for someone who had to pee every ten minutes. The unsettling thing had been the way he had spoken to her when claiming the seat—the way he'd hidden his true motives with excuses that were beyond reproach. Plain and simple, he'd wanted the window seat so he could look out at America's crazy quilt of farm land, and imagine crashing into it. But he would never in his life admit such a thing.

  The thought burned Luisa deep in her spine, and she levered herself up and out of her seat to escape it. She waddled to the lavatory in the back of the plane and locked herself in. As she yanked her stretch pants down and hunkered over the toilet seat to pee, she noticed how much the lavatory was like marriage. You had to move around in a space much too small for a human being. The space had been dressed up with scented soap and pink facial tissue, but the surface details didn't make the space feel any larger than a confessional. To drown out the sound of her pee hitting the metal basin, she prayed. Holy Mother of God, hear the prayer of the Church for all mothers.

  Smelling of antiseptic and fancy pump soap, Luisa returned to her seat. When she saw Hector hunched against the window with an air line pillow under his head, she breathed a sigh of relief and sat back. A sweet moment of peace followed, and she reached to caress an inky comma of hair from his fi ne brow—but stopped short of touch ing him. Hector wasn't asleep. Th e muscles of his jaw were clenched, and his eyes had that scrunch at the corners that said he was aware of her every movement. He ignored Luisa's sudden intake of breath, as Miguel chose that moment to kick her in the heart.

  Luisa cradled her belly and imagined her son growing taller and taller, until he stood over his father like a church over a woodshed. She set each stone into place with a mortar of bitter tears, knowing that Miguelito would be like his father, just as Hector was like Miguel Concepcion. Muy macho. Muy infantile.

  Oh Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Grace, Hope of the world. Hear us, your children, who cry to you.

  Nanette glanced down the aisle at the pregnant Hispanic woman, and turned back to the alien. “You know their stories? Each and every one?"

  The alien had wiped out the Johnny Walker and was starting on the J&B. He had arranged a squadron of bottles on his tray table, mini ature green soldiers. It had taken him one full pass over LAX to re late the story of Luisa and Miguel, and the eff ort had drained him. “It's always the same,” he said, resting his head on the seat back. “Luisa uses the aft lavatory, we circle LAX twice more, then we crash."

  "How do I know you're really an alien?"

  The alien regarded her. He had the sweaty, earnest look of an aging Boy Scout leader trying to show courage in the face of adver-sity. With a pained grumble, he spat out his tongue, which unrolled like a prehensile necktie. A moist snap, and the alien had zapped a peanut fr
om Nanette's tray table. He sat crunching it. “I never said I was an alien."

  Her eyes wide, Nanette cracked open a mini J&B and took a swig. It was a violation of flight attendant protocol, but she wanted to avoid collapsing like Portia and Minn, who were still huddled by the cockpit, crying like puppies. “Captain says the landing gear won't go down,” she said, ejecting a cloud of scotch fumes. “Regular old equipment malfunction."

  The alien shrugged. “Sometimes it's faulty landing gear. Some-times there's a suitcase on board with a flesh-eating virus. Some-times the co-pilot has a stroke and inadvertently knocks the pilot unconscious, while flailing around in pain. The cause can fluctuate, but the outcome is always the same.” Using the alien device, he played an uncomfortable melody on the J&B bottles.

  Nanette twitched. “You can stop this, can't you?"

  Noticing her discomfort, the alien let the fractured song fade away. “I don't know what gives you that idea, Cupcake. No matter how many times we travel the closed loop, you always seem to think we can stop it. Maybe you can; but I can't."

  Nanette fumbled for the bottle of Merlot she'd snagged from the First Class luncheon stash and made short work of the cork. The first swallow made her shudder. “Are you saying we've been in this situation in a past life or something? I don't believe in reincarnation, pet psychics, or men from Venus."

  "In this pocket of space-time, this is the only situation there is.” The alien lifted the window shade and looked out at the fathomless smog of the LA skyline. “Insignificant factors vary. Sometimes I'm wearing a different colored suit. Sometimes you serve pretzels in-stead of peanuts. But everything else is pretty much the same. Luisa never tells Hector to grow up."

  "In this pocket of space-time?” Nan touched her forehead. “Wait a second—I know this. You mean to say nothing exists but this one flight. It just keeps going over and over again.” She shook it off, ges-ticulated with the bottle. “Listen up. I know growing up in a trailer, taking care of a pot-bellied single dad with too much charisma and not enough ambition isn't much of a life story. But you can't tell me it didn't happen.” She took a messy drink, and a droplet of expensive red wine splashed on her ivory silk cravat. “Ack. See? You can take the girl out of the trailer park, but trash is forever. Hand me a napkin, you."

  The alien handed her his neatly folded pocket square. “You know, it pisses me off that you can remember the physics of the loop, but never my name. It's Franklin, for Pete's sake."

  "Nice name. Call me Nan."

  The alien rattled another song on the bottles, grooving to a shattered scale never heard on Earth. “The only thing about sweet Nanette that never changes is her name."

  Nanette belched and relaxed into her seat. Something about the alien's melancholy brought to mind her favorite talk show, a new tragicomic cast of characters every week. Teenaged hookers in a fistfight over their spotty fifteen-year-old pimp. A man in a tuxedo begging his mother for a nuptial blessing, his blushing bride standing by with a bouquet nestled in the cleavage of fake breasts so large she had to wheel them around in a cart. Folks in the audience laughed, but Nan, sitting in airport motel rooms with a remote in her hand, never did.

  She wept like a child.

  Michael was sitting in the window seat reading Field and Stream. Seth was reading The Sun Also Rises, and he paused to imagine what Michael would look like running with the bulls in Pamplona. Lying in the avenue smeared with his own gore, he'd say I once had a fishhook in my lip. That hurt much worse. He might bleed to death in Spain from a thousand crushing hooves, but he'd be butch, stoic, cool. A protest ejected itself from Seth. “They'll blame it all on me."

  Michael didn't look up. The lesion on his face looked like a sexy mole. “They won't blame you for anything. The day M and P found me and Fabian the Magician practicing x-rated handcuff tricks in the pool house, they formed an opinion of me that will never change. I'm their prodigal faggot, and you're my innocent, hemo-philiac concubine.” Michael turned the page.

  "I hate it when you call me that."

  "Fine. Gender Neutral Domestic Partner."

  "Who hires a magician for a sixteenth birthday party?"

  "I did. Found his number in the men's room at P's country club. He came highly recommended."

  Seth jammed the abused Hemingway novel into the facing seat back and put on his headphones. Everything about Mike was flip, his voice, his closed expression. Even his goddamned hair was flip, styled away from his face so ‘M’ wouldn't bitch about not being able to see her boy's ‘beautiful blue peepers'. God help Michael, it was always the same. Instead of talking, he put on his butch armor and went to battle with lances of irony.

  Seth slouched lower in his seat, grimacing at the airline program-ming; it was a particularly heinous urban legend that all queers loved Cher. Distracted, he glanced at the orderly lineup of airsick-ness bags on Michael's tray table, and quickly looked away. It was the brutal HIV cocktail, not airsickness, that sent Mike's nausea into overdrive, and Seth felt the old terror rise.

  He slipped out of his seat to retrieve his camera bag from the overhead bin. Michael's backpack shifted, pills slithered and rattled, and Seth slammed the bin shut again. The path to the First Class lavatory was blocked by a weepy-looking flight attendant leaning over a pasty-faced guy in a tacky suit. The attendant looked around, but Seth avoided her gaze as he wedged past her, and crammed himself into the toilet cubicle.

  The first Xanax burned on the way down, and with a grimace, Seth wished he could empty all of his pill bottles into the bin marked waste. Seth was only twenty-eight, Mike was thirty-one, and their combined prescription sheet looked like the telephone directory for a small town. Aside from his own complicated HIV cocktail, Seth had Xanax for anxiety, Welbutrin for depression, Viagra for erectile dysfunction. Who could maintain an erection when it could kill someone?

  The overhead speaker in the lavatory crackled. “Attention, passen-gers, this is your captain speaking. Although we're still working to resolve our mechanical difficulties, it's my duty to inform you that this flight may terminate in a water landing. Please review the emergency cards located in your seat pockets. Flight attendants, please tour the cabin—"

  Halfway through the captain's speech, Seth cracked open the Xanax again. Choking down a second bitter pill, he imagined how Michael was taking the captain's message. On a subscription card for Field and Stream, Michael would be composing his own epitaph in Latin. It is right and good that a faggot should go down in flames.

  Dulce et decorum est. Seth shoved out of the lavatory, bumping the worn-looking flight attendant.

  She steadied herself on his arm. “Just say you're sorry."

  Seth recoiled. She had a kind enough face, but her breath smelled like a frat house carpet. He thought about shoving past her, but per-colating with Xanax, he felt he could hardly blame her for getting smashed on the eve of destruction. “Okay,” he said. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to take so long in the john."

  She gave him a funny look, but he shinnied past her, glad to escape. When he slid into his seat, Michael didn't look up, though another airsick bag had been added to the collection. A strand of Michael's hair had come loose from the M-proof style. Seth itched to brush it into place. For a moment, he considered all the things he wanted to say that weren't in the pre-approved script. The words gathered in his mouth like mushy peas. With a sidelong glance, Seth took up his book, and slouched deeply in his seat. They would die that way together.

  Butch. Stoic. Cool.

  "It's not your fault,” said Franklin. “One time you decked Seth to see if Michael would come to his rescue like a knight in shining armor. Michael had a cow, but we still crashed."

  Nanette had resumed drinking, unsure if the splashing sound was the Merlot hitting the bottom of the bottle or the bottom of her stomach. “So because Luisa's a Catholic and doesn't believe in divorce, she never tells Hector to grow up. And because they have this code of silence, Seth never apologizes to Michael for infectin
g him, and Mike never forgives him. Christ."

  Franklinmadeacirclingmotionwiththealiendetonator."Around and around. The only person who does something different each time is you, Nan."

  Nanette struggled to her feet. “This has been a hell of a neat dis-traction, Franklin. I don't know how you do that tongue thing, and the mind-reading thing is a great shtick, but I gotta go bully some stews into verifying the emergency rows so some of these people will get a chance to live."

  "No one gets a chance to live,” said Franklin. “We crash, and then the timeline resets at take-off."

  Nanette set the empty wine bottle on the alien's tray table and leaned in close. “Look, buster. If you really are an alien terrorist, you've had your kicks. Either activate the detonator or tell the cap-tain how to repair the landing gear before I give you a black eye."

  Franklin drew back against the fuselage, waving the alien device as if he'd never seen it before. “This? A detonator?” He tugged up the sleeve on his sport coat, clicked a button on the device and scribbled his name on a cocktail napkin. “It's just a pen, Nan. All those disaster scenarios? I didn't say I set them up. You watch too damn much TV."

  Nanette made a moue. “According to you, I only exist from take-off to explosion."

  "Touché.” The alien made a flashy magician's pass over the pen and it was gone. Huffing, he reached out, teased his pocket square from her ear, whipped it into a rabbit shape, and used it to wipe his sweaty brow. “What made you think I was an alien, Cupcake? Or a terrorist?"

  She straightened, her hair all in wisps. “You told me you were. An alien terrorist-optometrist. And something about the Boy Scouts.” She looked at her hands. “I sound stupid."

  "You're anything but stupid,” said Franklin. “You've remembered my extraterrestrial nature all on your own this time, which is kind of interesting, if you consider the ramifications. Aren't you wondering how you know what I want, before I've even asked, or why you're so calm?"