Ferguson was taken aback. “Why are you telling me all this, Rebek—Tau Martek?”
“For two reasons. First, your revelations are causing an upheaval on my world—”
The old engineer felt the blood rush from his face. “I had no intent to cause unrest—provoke bloodshed—except for the assassin!”
“I understand. But the turmoil has been long in coming. Tarapseti is not a part of the Association, but Association ideas have for decades infiltrated the literary and philosophical journals—contaminated them, in the words of some. My people, as they have grown in sophistication, have grown tired of the current form of government. And while the current form is not totally unrepresentative, there is a strong movement for reform. The outcome of the struggle is still in doubt, but recent news has been encouraging.”
Ferguson stared at the bug for a long time. “And what,” he finally asked, “is the second reason for your visit?”
The Tarapset unstrapped an object from his thoracic belt, opened the holographic projection and said, “I had hoped, perhaps, that you would join me in a game.”
Afterword
“Evensong” first appeared in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine (Issue 3, October/November 2002), as by T. Rex. “Evensong” was also later anthologized in ASIM’s “Best of” Anthology Vol. 1.
And, ASIM is still alive and kicking. And annoyingly regular in publication. It’s often listed as a semiprozine, but I’d categorize it as a gnat’s-eyelash-away-from-a-prozine. Plus, the people I worked with at ASIM were good people, when they weren’t falling off roofs (inside story).
“Evensong” is pretty much your standard SF adventure that includes at least one alien species. I tried to make the Tarapsetteans as alien as I could without creating problems for communication. This was, after all, an adventure tale and not a science tale about language. For the latter, I recommend James Gunn’s classic, The Listeners.
One topic raised in “Evensong” is the frequency of technological species in a galaxy at any one time. (For a detailed discussion, look up the “Drake Equation” and you’ll find plenty of articles.)
I rather suspect that technological species are very, very rare. Consider our own situation and the prospect of interstellar colonization. Space is filled with radiation inimicable to biological life without a significant metal or water barrier between the void and the inside living quarters of a spacecraft. That’s one reason why the upcoming manned mission to Mars is so hazardous. For an interstellar trip, placing so much shielding (read: mass) into orbit would be extraordinarily expensive, not to mention the cost of the interstellar craft to begin with.
I much rather think that, when we get around to colonizing the stars, it will be as frozen egg and sperm carried by robotic spacecraft, and managed later by artificial wombs and robot nannies and semi-sentient computers. The concept of living interstellar spacefarers is shaky at best.
When that happens, I just hope the computers don’t ask themselves, “Tell me again why we’re carrying this biological contaminant?”
The point I’m trying to make is this: Given the advances in computer technology over just the last 50 years (who remembers Hollerith cards?—raise your hands!), it won’t be long before we have the computer and robotic technology to handle the biological aspects of this. And as for the spacecraft itself, we’re already at the point where the Pioneer craft are at the edges of our solar system. As frozen egg and sperm, who would care if it takes a thousand years to get from here to Proxima Centauri?
But there’s one more point: Given such a scenario, it wouldn’t take more than, say, ten million years to colonize the entire Galaxy. The robotic craft, once proven effective, would explode in numbers and seek out every available, livable planet.
And so, unless we’re the first technological species in the Galaxy, the question is, “Why haven’t we been contacted or exploited?” Life on Earth has been around for at least a billion years. If the development of technological species were common, odds alone would have had Earth colonized by Others long ago.
So it’s pretty much lonely out there, I fear.
That’s sobering.
Drink, please.
Open Frame
I like Jerry. He always puts me back in the same spot, and from here I can see all the lanes and the front door too. I like lookin’ out the front door; it tells me there’s life out there.
But when Frieda cleans up, I wind up in all sorts of places. Like on the bottom rack, with the sixteen-pounders. Bunch of blow-hards. But Jerry cleaned up last night, and I’m in my favorite spot.
It’s mid-week, with just a couple lanes bein’ bowled. Outside the swingin’ door, it’s drizzlin’ rain. Not a day for yard work, but the rain looks delicious, and I’d love to feel it running down my face.
I see figures at the door, and soon two fellows push their way inside. An older man, with lines on his face and sunbaked jowls—farmer, ya know?—and a younger fellow, pale and skinny, with a bowlin’ shirt that says Stan’s Flowers on the back and wearin’ dress pants, for God’s sake. Weenie, first class. Mama’s boy.
So they roll a set, but in the middle of the last game the younger guy slips, tosses a flyer and his ball lands halfway down the alley. When the ball comes outta the return, he sees that it’s cracked.
I see it, too, and hope it’s nobody I know.
But his partner points to the racks and Skinny comes up, paws over the twelve-pounders and lifts me to his chest, usin’ both hands.
Now, ya may think that bein’ a bowlin’ ball is an easy job, and for the most part, it is. I don’t even mind gettin’ knocked into the pins; it don’t hurt much. What gets me is rollin’ down the alley, havin’ the world spin ‘round ya and havin’ first the boards in front of ya and then the ceilin’ lights shinin’ in your eyes—I’ve never gotten used to it.
But Skinny, see, he’s got a light touch, an easy touch, and I don’t really mind the rolls when he’s throwin’ me. And I keep havin’ funny thoughts, but it’s hard to concentrate when you’re in motion. Still I try.
Finally I get it, in the last frame, as he’s tossin’ his count ball, and I get all choked up, and then I can’t remember it again; it ain’t permitted.
I roll down the alley, hit the head-pin, and leave him a 4-7-10. Good thing he doesn’t have to spare it.
So when I come back outta the return, I see them packin’ up and the older guy says, “All you needed was an eight-count. What happened?”
Skinny zips his bag and looks up. “I don’t know, Dad. I was rolling the ball pretty well, but then this picture of Mona just popped in my mind ...”
The older face grows dark at the mention of the woman’s name, but Skinny keeps on talkin’.
“... and right at the end of my last backswing the ball got all slippery, so I tried to compensate—”
His dad snips off the words, like with a tree pruner, ya know? He barks, “Forget the wench!” and his jowls begin to chomp, like they’re chewin’ on the hurt of a thousand lousy harvests. “Any gal who leaves her man and daughter to run off with some slick-haired biker—”
“Dad! Please!” Skinny looks around, tryin’ to see if the other people in the alley are lookin’ their way.
“Please, nothin’!” his dad spits out. “She deserved what happened! An’ I wouldn’t be surprised if God Hisself—or maybe the Devil—covered the eyes of that stinkin’ boyfriend of hers that day they pulled out in front of that eighteen-wheeler ...”
The kid gets paler than he already is, and he wilts—like a flower in a furnace. He wipes a sleeve across his eyes and takes off for the door. His dad, realizin’ now what he did, runs after him, grabbin’ their bowlin’ bags along the way.
“Son, son ...” he calls out, and the hatred in his voice is gone, replaced by an emptiness that echoes in the big open space above the lanes. “I didn’t mean to be so rough,” he gasps as he falls into step beside his son. “I guess you still love her ... right?”
I
’m here, in the return rack, and I’m angry and I’m hurtin’. But not because I can’t remember. It’s ‘cause they’re headin’ out the door.
And I never hear the answer.
Afterword
“Open Frame” first appeared in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine (Spring 2003), as by T. Rex.
Every writer has a reincarnation story. And that’s all I’ll say!
Eliza’s Quick-Drying Polar White
The field cricket kicked and squirmed, but Rupert DeNeuve held it firmly between his thumb and forefinger.
He turned the cricket over, exposing its back, and dotted the creature with a dab of Eliza’s Quick-Drying Polar White fingernail polish.
Rupert never dotted the larger, spindley-legged camel crickets; if he caught one, he just threw it out the nearest window. But field crickets—like the one he held now—stridulated, and few things irritated him more than hunting down a chirping cricket in his bedroom at three o’clock in the morning.
The camel crickets—ugly as they were with their long legs and humped bodies—bore the virtue of silence.
Still, Rupert reasoned, the field crickets could hardly help being what they were, and at first he just threw them out as he did their larger warped cousins.
But after a time he suspected the chirpers he threw out were making their way back into his house, and he came to a sobering compromise between his distaste for violence and his need for sleep.
Every stridulating annoyance he caught would be given one chance. If the cricket re-entered his house, it would be summarily squashed, and to distinguish the first-time offenders from the career criminals, he marked those he released with the white fingernail polish.
After dotting his current capture, Rupert used a hair dryer—set on cool—to dry the polish. He then tossed the cricket out of his study window. The entire process had taken less than two minutes.
While some might think two seconds too long a time to waste considering a bug’s fate, Rupert DeNeuve was happy with his compromise. It suited his system, his temperament, his peculiar frame of mind.
For Rupert, a peculiar man, had grown so from his beginnings as a peculiar child. He saw the world differently from the way it was seen by his classmates or teachers. At age 6 he surprised his parents with the question, “Why is there Something instead of Nothing?”
To which, of course, all answers were tautological.
He wondered if others saw colors the same way he did. He wondered if others saw colors he could not. And Rupert questioned everything—from plot errors in Romeo and Juliet to the applicability of the Cause/Effect Paradox to superluminal signaling.
And Rupert wondered if the world in which he existed was the real Real World—or whether there wasn’t a greater existence just out of reach—just around the next corner—that would explain the mysteries of the present All.
Most persons, of course, had moments like that—moments of sudden awareness where the self is juxtaposed against a bizarre reality—but moments which never led to any satisfying revelation, each such moment an epiphany denied.
But where most would shrug off such episodes and go on with life, Rupert would seek out such moments and savor them, and he trained his mind to sift for these “cracks” in the fresco of existence.
After several near-accidents in his car, he ordered his mind to suspend the search while driving.
But at other times, his mind was always busy at the task.
So it was with no surprise that, after shutting the window and turning back toward his desk, the feeling of unreality struck once more.
Rupert relished the feeling. At these times he felt more alive than at any other, and this time the feeling was stronger than usual.
He wallowed in the sensation, let it run the length of his body. And his mind, in its peculiar way, resonated with the feeling, and Rupert DeNeuve took his hand and parted the curtain of existence and stepped through—
—into a sparely-furnished office housing an old wooden desk on which a feeble yellow lamp stood and glowed, and behind which a man in a gray burnoose sat gazing at a stack of printed forms.
Rupert stepped forward and harrumphed.
The hood of the man’s cloak fell back, revealing white hair, deep-set eyes and a tangle of bushy brows.
“What!” the old man gasped. “Who are you?”
Rupert told him.
“Rupert DeNeuve ... Rupert DeNeuve ...” The man shuffled through his printed forms.
“Confound it!” The man drew himself back. “Must be an error at Central. Doesn’t usually happen. Wait. I have some old blank registration forms, I think ...”
The man opened a bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a single sheet. He put it on his blotter and dipped a quill into an inkwell—only the second inkwell Rupert had ever seen; the other had been in a museum.
“Rupert ... DeNeuve ...” the man repeated, writing the name on the form. “Middle name?”
“Alexander. Who are you?”
The man wrote down the name but ignored the question. Instead, he pulled out a watch. “12:43 local time. Less the two minutes you’ve been here makes 12:41.” He wrote that down as well.
“Now,” the man looked at Rupert, “I need the place of death.”
“What?” Rupert’s reaction fell somewhere between amusement, annoyance and apprehension.
“Place of death. Surely you know where you died.”
“But I’m not dead!”
“Of course you are. Transitional amnesia is not unheard of, but it is hardly common. What’s the last thing you remember?”
Rupert folded his arms. “I was in my study. I had just thrown a cricket from the window when the feeling of unreality—the feeling that what most people perceive as reality is just a sliver of the whole—hit me. And when my mind figured out what to do, I reached out and separated the curtain between my world and yours.”
The man’s features, yellow under the lamplight, paled to match his ashen brows. “You jest!” he spat. “You take advantage of an old man’s humor!”
Rupert shook his head.
“Oh-my-God!” The man put down his pen and tore up the paper with Rupert’s name and time of arrival. And as he tore each bit, he stuffed it into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. “Must be—dimensional leakage—had the contractors here—just last week—incompetents!”
Done with his roughage, the old man rose from his chair and limped rapidly to Rupert’s side.
“You must understand,” the man began. “You mustn’t be here—yet. If this becomes known, there’ll be an inquiry, maybe even a visit by Central, and in the meantime I can kiss my job good-bye.”
Rupert prodded the old man. “Is this Heaven?”
“Yes! No! Dammit, don’t ask questions! You must go back, now!”
“But I don’t know how.”
The man spun him about, pushed him toward a faded, flower-printed wall and raised a bony finger. And as the old man lowered the finger, the office unzipped into the familiar world Rupert knew.
“That’s my bathroom,” Rupert said, “not my study.”
“Close enough,” the old man said. He put his hand against Rupert’s back and, with a force disproportionate to his ancient frame, popped Rupert through.
And as the Other World zipped shut behind him, the last Rupert heard from the old man was a terse, “Don’t come back!”
—
Rupert stood still in his bathroom for a long time. The adventure had confirmed several guesses of his about the afterlife but had also spawned many more questions. Perhaps, if he unzipped this reality at a different spot, he would arrive at a different place in the other.
Rupert took off his shirt. He was suddenly hot, as his experience had charged him with adrenalin and had pushed his metabolism into overdrive.
He started the shower and dropped his pants and shorts. But as he twisted to pull off his T-shirt, he caught a glimpse of something in the bathroom mirror. He turned his neck and looked, and a
n ironic laugh escaped his lips.
There, between his shoulder blades, lay the ghostly-white imprint of the old man’s hand.
Afterword
“Eliza’s Quick-Drying Polar White” first appeared in Talebones (#29, Winter 2004), as by T. Rex. Talebones, a digest-sized semiprozine, had a run of 39 issues, its last being Winter 2009. Although a semiprozine, it was a target market of every speculative fiction writer of the day. Slick, well edited (by Patrick & Honna Swenson) and well-respected, Talebones was a bright spot in darkish fiction.
Who Mourns for Spring?
Harry Snowden approached the darkened entrance of Jefferson Primary School with a stutter in his step and a brown paper bag gripped tightly in his right hand.
Clouds, heavy with the promise of life, blanketed the heavens. But Snowden carried no umbrella and cared nothing for the weather. Instead, he fixed on the school’s security lamps and forced himself to walk in their direction.
Halfway between the road and the entrance to the building, Snowden stopped. He could turn back, drive off, and the secret of what had happened would never be revealed. But he knew he couldn’t live with that. He had barely survived the last three days without going crazy.
His large, sweaty hand clutched even tighter on the brown paper bag, and he moved on.
At the entrance to the school, he tugged on the long metal latch, but a dull click told him the doors were locked. From inside, a muffled voice asked, “What do you want?”
Snowden cleared his throat. “AA meeting.” He got the words out on the third try.
One of the double doors opened, and a silhouetted figure waved him in. The hall of the school was illuminated with emergency lighting, but yellow light poured from an open classroom midway down the passage.
The Dinosaur Chronicles Page 9