by TTA Press
Missiles streamed from the nose of the ships. The impulse drives cut, and the bay doors were closing even as the great vessels changed course, turning away from the missile tracks. And then Victor and Mariam locked their brains with all the other brains and began the impossible calculus which could subject the quantum foam to their bidding. Strange fire crackled through the webs. Slowly, much too slowly, flickering erratically, the ships began their leap into the void.
To one side of the projected path of the massive cluster of dark matter that hurtled towards the Milky Way, the collapsers fired. Matter turned on matter, dimensions distorted, and eight massive black holes erupted into terrible being. Gravity waves wracked the heavens. The gates of Hades were opened and the Furies unleashed. The pathways of the skies were re-mapping themselves.
* *
At last, one lonely ship emerged from the roiling energies, its quantum webs destroyed, its outer shields ablated, stripped of sensors, black, inert. It was impossible to detect the name painted on the hull, or if there ever had been a name. But deep inside, a shoal of silver fish swam to and fro in a blue lake bordered with perfect grass and gently waving trees.
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Copyright © 2013 Jim Hawkins
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Jim Hawkins started his first SF novel at the age of 10 and still hasn’t finished it. His Interzone stories ‘Chimbwi’ and ‘Digital Rites’ were republished in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction in 2011 and 2012. Jim now lives in Hull, teaches screenwriting at the university, and also has a software company. He’s been a teacher, a BBC broadcaster, a sou-chef, a jazz pianist, a composer of orchestral works, an actor, and, for many years, a Hull City football supporter
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"The new fantasy adventure"
Live link in Endnotes
A FLAG STILL FLIES OVER SABOR CITY
by Tracie Welser
“This will bring the whole thing down, to a standstill,” says Mikhail. They’re running, running, running, voices pushed out in breathy bursts.
“You sure?” asks Roberto. “If we get caught…”
“You sound like that fuzz-chin baby Conrad. We’re not going to get caught.”
“Alright, then. A dare’s a dare.”
Both laugh, hearts pounding in their chests in time with the thumping of their regulation boots on the wet pavement.
* *
At first glance, Mikhail is an unassuming figure: head-down, a hard-worker. His dark hair curls just an inch or two longer than regulation; not long enough to earn him a code violation, but risky enough to be stylish. He tucks it under his cap while in the work zone. When the evening shift ends, he puts away each of his fine tools, except for the special one that he keeps in his pocket, the one obtained through a faked requisition. He’s fashioned a larger handle for it from a piece of an old broomstick, and it’s good for opening small things.
As he leaves his station, he twists his cap at a rakish angle. He’s wary, but careful to avoid appearing so. He walks down the moving sidewalk on Industry Avenue, away from the work zone and through the shared housing sector. The sun slides behind the factories through a steadily increasing drizzle of rain, casting an orange glow on other workers walking to and from work shifts. They trudge past in gray coveralls and caps, heads down and eyes averted. A tiny older man squints up at the angle of Mikhail’s cap with a wry and disapproving expression, and then looks away. Mikhail weaves through the crowd to where the sidewalk stops, just short of a wall.
The concrete wall bisects the city, painted gray and dripping beads of rainwater. A sign with heavy black lettering says NIGHT DISTRICT: MIND THE CURFEW. When he steps through the wide opening in the wall, his shoulders relax, his gait slows and shifts into a saunter. He pulls a brown curl from under his crooked cap and glances back, once. No cameras track his movements on this side of the wall.
His friends converge on the Night District, crossing the line from the eastern agricultural zone and housing block. He spies Amrit, her dark hair in a neat regulation bob. The collar of her coveralls is flipped up, her signature statement of tiny rebellion. She hails their third, Roberto, from down the dark street. The stocky youth’s painted face leers in the dim lamplight, and Amrit laughs, her brown hand covering her straight, white smile. Arms linked, they cross the street to where Mikhail waits, grinning, bouncing on the balls of his boot-clad feet.
“You got Drift?” he asks Roberto. Up close, Roberto’s face paint is cracking already, and a misting of rain runs in a tiny rivulet around one thick eyebrow. His friend nods, opens his palm to reveal the little tin of pills.
“Saved my whole week’s allotment.”
“I’m so primed for Drift,” says Amrit. “My work shift today was the worst.”
“Yeah, mine, too,” Mikhail chimes in, too quickly. He fingers the tool in his pocket.
“If I never see another faulty component.” She savagely rolls up the sleeves of her coveralls.
But, of course, she will, thinks Mikhail. The very next morning, no matter how much Drift she does tonight to forget. No matter how quickly she uses her allotment next week.
“Shift matron in my face, assembly audit, faster faster, blah blah.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Roberto admiring Amrit’s diatribe, the fire of her form, her face. She’s clever and animated, her chin juts forward, her narrow hips move in a swagger. She struts back and forth in a circle, imitating her shift supervisor’s lumbering walk with exaggerated motions of her arms. Roberto’s eyes move over Amrit’s breasts, more apparent now that she’s unfastened the top button of her coveralls.
“My shift lost music privileges today,” Mikhail says helpfully. He forces himself to look away from Roberto.
“What? Those assholes,” says Amrit. She halts in mid-swagger and links arms with him and Roberto. “Screw them.”
“Forget them,” Roberto says, and with his free hand passes around the Drift. Amrit accepts hers directly into her mouth with a high, fluting laugh. Mikhail places the smooth green tablet under his tongue. Forget. They jaunt together in the direction of the Hangout, between wet streets and neat, blank-faced buildings, leaving the curfew wall behind.
His friends continue their litany of complaint about the tedium of the work zone, as is fashionable to do. Mikhail inserts a nod or a laugh at appropriate intervals. His secret shame is that he loves his work. But he forgets that now, and from the gradual quieting of their chatter, he can tell that Roberto and Amrit are forgetting, too, as the Drift kicks in.
Soothing blankness rolls over him, and he knows they’re experiencing it simultaneously when Amrit comes to an abrupt stop just outside the Hangout. She shifts her arms from their waists to their shoulders and pulls them both close. In a huddle around her, they breathe the same breath, look into each others’ faces. Amrit wears a slack smile. Roberto looks boyish and vacant behind his face paint, and Mikhail thinks of Roberto’s first Drift, when he drooled an oval puddle onto the street where they sat slumped against a building. Mikhail gives a little laugh in his belly.
Amrit lets go and dances away to the open doorway of the Hangout, glancing over her shoulder, beckoning. Roberto gamely follows, but Mikhail freezes at her gesture, one which triggers a flood of memory.
This is the Drift. Not so much forgetting as remembering something better:
Amrit, bright-faced and eager, just a few months ago, a step ahead of him looking back over her shoulder. They’re at the door of her shared room in the women’s dormitory, and her bunkmate is away, in the infirmary for the week after slitting her own wrists. Amrit turns to open the door and glances back again, beckons him forward with a wiggle of her index finger. Her face is flushed.
The hour is late, and soon the curfew siren will sound over the loudspeakers. He pauses at the door. They could have coupled in a sanctioned room in the Night District, but she likes the thrill of the forbidden. He steps into the room, and the memory blurs into soft, aching sweetness; the t
ouch of her hand on the back of his neck, his hand slipping between the metal buttons of her coveralls, impossibly tender lips pressing into his, her eyes wide and mouth agape as he enters her. Then, her look of disappointment when the curfew siren sounds, and he pulls away.
He’d crept out into the cold afterward feeling both triumphant and ashamed. The next day, Amrit acknowledged him in the work zone with a wave, as though nothing had taken place between them. She never spoke of it again.
He blinks, and he’s in the Hangout. Music pulses in dim light, and through the crowd of coveralls, he spies Amrit dancing with Roberto. Her arms twine with his, and her open-mouthed smile is bright against his black hair as they move together lazily to the rhythms of the music. Around them, slack faces float in the darkened room, all under the influence of Drift. Mikhail dances with a woman with vacant eyes who whispers repeatedly into his ear, “James, James,” as she relives some pleasant memory. He’s dazzled by the music, by the smoothness of the woman’s bare neck against his cheek. He allows himself to pretend she’s Amrit. She even smells like Amrit, like soap.
“We want you to meet someone,” Amrit is saying, and the stranger is gone. His two friends take him by the arms, and he’s whisked away from the dancing faces, past a screen displaying scenes from an old film. He’s seen part of this one before; a man kills another man with a weapon because they both want a statue of a bird.
“I could build another one,” he says, randomly.
“What?” Roberto shouts over the music and puts his ear closer to Mikhail’s mouth, but Mikhail shrugs him off.
“He’s drifting, is all,” says Amrit. They steer Mikhail through the crowd.
The crowd parts, and individual forms dissolve: he’s moving through a knot of people in the bright afternoon light to get to his work station. Paul, from the morning shift, is demonstrating a repair. The older man’s hands shake a little as he holds the access panel open with one thumb and points into the interior of the tiny metal bird with a fine-pointed tool held between his other thumb and forefinger.
“Right there, see it?”
“Where? Oh, I see it, that one.”
“I just couldn’t quite. My hands aren’t what they used to be, or my eyes,” Paul says, apologetic. “I suppose they’ll retire me soon, if they find out.”
“Don’t say that,” Mikhail whispers. “Let me.” He takes the bird, gently, like a living thing.
“Do you think you can do it?”
“I can fix it,” Mikhail says.
“Fix what?” asks Amrit. He’s sitting in a booth filled with people in the darkness of the Hangout. His hand is on Amrit’s leg. He doesn’t remember putting it there, but her leg is warm, thin and tantalizing through her overalls. She’s painted his thumbnail a gleaming silver, using a tube of component fixative that he knows came from her assembly work.
“Joseph was telling us about the sabotage at the water station and how his bunkmate got five months on the Turd Crew,” Roberto says. He looks queasy under his face paint.
He gestures to a pale, lanky man with a slightly receded hairline who shares the booth. Joseph has a coppery brown tooth set in the middle of his bottom front teeth, and Mikhail wonders if it’s a false one. They were fashionable a few years ago, when Mikhail was still an apprentice. He guesses that Joseph is at least three nursery-sets older, maybe four, than he and his friends.
“That one was stupid,” says the girl on Joseph’s arm. She’s pretty but has a cruel look, something playing at the corner of her mouth. A predator, thinks Mikhail, like those extinct animals in nursery learning vids.
“At least he didn’t get put in the box for it,” says Roberto. He looks sidelong at Mikhail.
There’s a revel in the flow of transgressive words and ideas, illicit conversation where words like “oppression” may as well be expletives. It’s a game to them, a dare, to see how far the others will go, to send hot thrills down one another’s backs and to feel that twist of sensation, like fear but more enticing, in their own stomachs. To utter words that can only be said aloud in the Night District.
“The best part is,” says Joseph, “I’ve never been caught, not that time, not ever.”
“Sabotage?” says Mikhail. “What for?” He tries to shake the Drift, stay present in the moment. He focuses his eyes on Joseph’s brown tooth.
“So, Mikhail,” says Joseph, as if noticing him for the first time. He pronounces the name like it is two words.
“So, Jo-seph,” Mikhail replies, careful to replicate the man’s mockery of his name. Roberto shakes his head and takes another green pill from his tin. Amrit giggles.
“What sort of name is that, Mik-hail?”
A pause, and a bubble of tension forms around them in the din and clatter of the club. The name-calling taunt, questioning a person’s heritage, is as old as nursery dares. Amrit stiffens and shoots Mikhail a quick look.
Mikhail’s temper rises through the fading Drift. He looks down at his free hand and sees a bird cupped there. He knows it isn’t real. Amrit focuses her moist brown eyes on his hand still resting on her knee and begins to coat his last unpainted nail.
“Are you mocking my heritage?” he says finally, the expected answer to the old call-and-response. He’s cool, smooth like glass on the outside, his tone even and casual with just a touch of boredom.
“Heritage,” says the girl, with a huff that is almost a laugh.
“Heritage is a bedtime story over the loudspeaker in the dorm at night,” says Joseph. He and the girl exchange amused glances then look back at Mikhail. He says nothing, and his stomach feels cold.
“The state is our mother, our father,” ventures Roberto. “Heritage is a sucrose-coated term for, um, the state agenda of genetic diversity.”
“Ha, that’s bold, I like you,” says Joseph, sitting up to slap Roberto on the shoulder companionably. His movement dislodges the girl, whose name Mikhail hasn’t learned.
“I have to piss,” she says with a frown, and slouches off to the toilets.
Amrit looks up at Mikhail, smiles weakly. A moment is passing.
She pockets the fixative and turns to Roberto. “Wanna dance?”
* *
Mikhail stands by the door to the toilets, slumping against the wall. He can see the dance floor. He eyes the pills in his hand, but not for long. Two are dissolving under his tongue when the girl comes out of the toilets.
“Waiting for me, or the toilet?”
“Neither,” he says, glancing away.
“Amrit told us you used to be bold,” she says, folding her arms.
“Yeah.”
“Are you still?”
Mikhail shrugs.
He doesn’t trust her but offers no resistance when she takes his hand. He floats through the crowded Hangout as though his legs and feet aren’t attached to him. He slips into the Drift like warm bath water, and this time he yearns to forget.
Then: he’s alone on a cool, dark street. Silence sits deep like a presence. Away from the crowded dorm, the work station’s bustle, the noise of the Hangout. His fingertips brush the rough surface of the painted concrete wall that surrounds the Night District. The sensation is soothing, the wall is solid and comforting. The wall exists to protect him, to protect them all, to delineate spaces for work and play, control and freedom, on either side. He stops, strokes the wall with both hands.
“Well, this is disappointing talk,” Joseph is saying. The man’s face is close, his voice a conspiratorial whisper. “You don’t seem like the wall-loving, flag-waving type.”
“Because I’m not,” he says, a bit too loudly. The noise of the Hangout pours back into his head with a roar, and he wonders what he’s been saying.
“You’ve done some curfew-running over the wall, and now you’ve learned your lesson, is that it?”
“Amrit says this one’s good with tools, locks, things like that,” says the girl. “He should be able to get into the flag tower easy.” She’s still holding his hand, but sh
e’s talking to Joseph like Mikhail isn’t there.
Joseph smirks. “You up for a dare, Mik-hail, little friend, little man?”
“What, more nursery taunts?” Mikhail’s fingers slide over the polished handle of the tool in his pocket. He senses danger, tries to hold on, but he’s drifting again: it’s early evening, and he and Roberto are standing on Industry Avenue in the fading light just after a work shift.
“Well, I dare you,” whispers Roberto, and a freckled, red-haired kid named Conrad snickers. Conrad is second apprentice this rotation. He’s at least two nursery-sets later than Roberto and Mikhail, young and scrawny with a pale fuzz on his upper lip, precocious but eager to be liked.
“Shut up, you,” says Mikhail to Conrad, his face heating up. He kicks at a loose brick on the stationary pavement. But a pleasant thrill flushes under the edge of his embarrassment. “I’ll take your dare, if you come too.”
“What?” Roberto steps back with a nervous laugh.
“Yeah,” says Conrad, his little face bright and eager.
“And you, little brother,” says Mikhail. “Bold, all for one.”
He feels hot breath in his ear, and Industry Avenue evaporates.
“That’s more like it,” says Joseph. Mikhail blinks. Joseph leaves the Hangout through the back door, and he follows.
* *
They move fast through the Night District, skirting around clusters of people gathered outside the Hangout, into quieter spaces, towards the farthest side of the wall.
“You sure you’re up for this?” Joseph asks. They glide in and out of pools of light cast by lamp posts overhead. Mikhail glances at him, and in the dark moments between lamps, his face becomes Roberto’s.
“I’m bold, alright,” he says.
“That’s what we need.”
“Not like that brat Conrad,” Mikhail says.