IGMS Issue 48

by IGMS

  I explain my plan, and the mirror's mouth curls up into a smile. Might this be the act that finally makes him love me as he did fifteen years ago?

  My people did their jobs admirably.

  The whispers of a traitor within the king's own circle reached the king's ears swiftly, but his concerns were not truly flared to life until our enemies to the north exploited a weakness that only the innermost circle would have been privy to. My husband raged after each loss - recouping that much gold and livestock would take years, not to mention the casualties and the country's reputation.

  The king personally followed his guards around as each of our rooms were searched. Even though the king apologized profusely for the invasive search to his most beloved two ladies, myself and Snow White, the fire behind his eyes told me that he would not rest unless he found the traitor. Even if it broke his heart to do so.

  And break his heart it did. Finding the damning letters in the ambassador's rooms, and subsequently in Snow White's chambers, was too much. He examined the evidence, and reexamined it again, losing hope with each word he read in her hand, for no one knew her handwriting better than he did. And in his heart, her shock upon discovery of the evidence only confirmed her guilt.

  The stress was too much for him to bear. First he lost his voice. He had to ask me through notes written with shaking hand to give the orders I thought necessary to show the country that the king was just yet merciful, and he thanked me through silent, choking tears as I executed his commands.

  When he saw Snow White, his only daughter, after her punishment, his heart could not stand the sight: raven hair darkened even further by black, clotted blood that matted the uneven locks into a ragged bird's nest on her scalp; the word treason cut into her cheeks, her forehead, her shoulders, and on down to her feet, assuring that anyone who saw her would know her for her betrayal; and the lips that were redder than ever with the blood that never seemed to stop dripping from the raw, gaping wound on her nose.

  The king clutched at me in front of everyone, weeping soundlessly, and in that moment his heart failed him for the last time.

  After the exiling and the funeral, only the mirror watches over me as I weep on my bed. It has always been so: after his tongue-lashings (and worse), after all the miscarriages, his voice wafts from the wall and whispers in my ear. At times comforting me, other times making me even more deeply aware of my flaws and weaknesses. But always he pulls me back from the brink of despair before I can give in to total darkness.

  I am alone at last with my love. Now I am queen of the land, and my love can step out from the mirror to visit me any night he likes without fear of discovery. But I cannot stop asking him to show me how Snow is getting on. I know that I risk losing his love, but I cannot rest until I see that finally someone takes her in - the seven dwarf outcasts in the cottage in the woods. I watch through the mirror as they nurse her back to health and treat her wounds. After the worst of her fevers and infections have dissipated, they attempt to heal her scars: her skin is massaged with oils of every kind, and she is given a special kind of silver to drink and apply to her skin. They even rub newly mined ruby jewels on her stark white slashes.

  They continue trying, but no folk remedy can make up for cuts that once showed the white of her bones. Each slash stands out, blunt and stark, against her creamy complexion. Her nose remains stunted and piggish. I am pained at her twisted upper lip, which pulls her mouth into an eternally crooked smile.

  However, I did not try hard enough with her hair, or her spirit. She cuts her hair to even it out, and although the spiky hair initially resembles one of the coal miners, it regrows over the months, curlier, thicker, and shinier than before, framing her cursed heart-shaped face. Worse, her emotional damage seems to lessen under the gentle influence of her companions. At first I saw nothing but despair, shame, and hatred for herself, and I thought she might even end her own life, leaving me to live my own in peace. But the dwarves are simple folk, and they spend their time mining, singing, and teaching Snow to care for the injured forest creatures they encounter to and from the mines.

  Snow latches on to these creatures, and she takes their healing quite personally. Each time an owl appears with an injured wing, or a deer with a hunter's arrow jutting from its flank, is a moment that Snow seems to forget herself. Slowly she forgets the scars, and, I suppose, the pain of her father's death, and she grows into her new face: fierce, gentle, loving, determined.

  The mirror reminds me that he belongs, as always, to the fairest in the land. My stomach twists every time he repeats this.

  "If you really wanted to keep me to yourself, you would not have cut off her nose; you would have killed her."

  I tell myself that avoiding such a loss is worth the evil-doing, and I send Snow a basket of poisoned apples. I watch through the mirror as she shares the gift with a few of her deer friends, who die before she herself can take a bite.

  And I watch her trace the guilt back to me.

  It's even harder to take my eyes off the mirror now. I continue to watch as Snow raises an army of animals and citizens and marches to the castle. The mirror screams that I am an idiot, but I already know that. I stir only to order the general and guards to stand down. I do not know why I remain passive: maybe I will have my head cut off, maybe I will live in exile. Maybe Snow is as vindictive as I have become and will cut away my beauty too, though somehow I doubt it.

  It matters not, none of it, because the mirror loves me. That is all I care about.

  Snow storms up the stairs.

  She throws my door open and finds me sitting at my vanity table with the mirror.

  "Look at her confidence!" the mirror says. "That is a woman worthy of the throne. Strength and beauty."

  My guts twist.

  "But. Her face," I manage to say.

  The mirror looks at me in a way I have never seen - with pity. "Beauty goes deeper than skin. I have been trying to tell you that for sixteen years."

  The mirror looks away from me, dismissing me as simply as if I were a servant come to fetch soiled bed linens. Its gaze falls instead upon Snow, who stares back at him, transfixed. Hungry.

  "Snow White," it says, bowing behind our reflections. "My Queen. How long I have waited for you. I will make you whole again."

  I do not mean to punch the mirror. Or at least, I do not think I meant to.

  First I saw my own hideous reflection. Then my arm just swung out.

  It is possible that I was angry with the idea of losing my mirror to Snow White. It is also possible that I was trying to protect her, though that thought is ephemeral and I reject it because what would I be protecting her from?

  I think I hoped to hit myself, to punish myself for being the weak, ugly, cowardly woman that I have become. But I am, of course, stupid enough to strike my beloved mirror.

  He shrieks as his power is shattered, and for a single moment his cry is split into a thousand separate voices.

  Snow White cries out too, as though she has also lost something precious. But what does she know of pain? I have been forced to destroy everyone I have ever loved. Her pure heart understands nothing of my pain.

  Snow tries to pull me away from the mirror, but I will not be dissuaded or dragged off to prison or whatever she has planned for me, not until I have recovered every single broken piece. I know that the fragments are cutting into my skin, but I do not care. I will cradle every shard and every sliver, and press them close to my ear, in hopes of the faintest whisper from the man behind my mirror.

  It is a small price to pay for love.

  For the Bible Tells Me So

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  Artwork by M. Wayne Miller

  * * *

  "Where did you find him?" asked a gravelly-voiced blond man in a lab coat as they wheeled me into the generation-ship Voyager's primitive-looking med center.

  "Area 451," replied one of the three jumpsuit-clad men who'd been standing over me when I first regained consciousness.
All three wore identical orange-sleeved and brown-bodied jumpsuits.

  "451? I thought that space had been cleared out years ago."

  "So did everyone else, brother. Guess they were gonged off," said jumpsuit guy number two, an albino. "We were scavenging spare parts. Found this guy in a cryo-pod shoved into one corner. He was surrounded by a few dozen non-functioning pods, but his was hardwired right into the bulkhead. Must have happened right after The Wrecking. Don't know how they did it without losing him, but there he was. It's some kind of miracle, praise God."

  "Save the 'miracle' talk for someone who buys that bullshit," the labcoat blond said sharply.

  The third guy in a jumpsuit turned out to be a woman. Her feminine voice contrasted starkly with her short black hair, her grime-covered face, and her unnaturally, almost inhumanly prominent chin and lower lip.

  "Think I could get on the litht to breed with him, doc?" she said, her high-pitched lisp cutting through the fuzz wrapped around my brain. If I wasn't completely awake before she started, I was by the time she finished. Her words -- their meaning -- ignited a flame of panic to go along with the nausea that swept through my body. Have sex with a woman? If there had been any food left in my stomach, it would have been strewn across the floor like a bowl of frog leg soup.

  "I'll have to check the computer's gene-pool program," the doc answered. "Maybe in a year. Consider yourself lucky you found a guy. If you'd found a woman, the boys would probably never've had a chance to spread their genetic material around."

  "A year?" the woman cried, wiping her brow with a faded orange sleeve. "Come on, doc, can't you work me in any thooner? I'm the one who notithed his cryo-pod was thtill working, you know."

  "No promises," the doc said. "I'll see what I can do." He transferred the IV bag from a metal rod overhanging the gurney to a higher one protruding from the wall. Then he shooed the three jumpsuits out the door.

  "Scoot," he said, even as they tried to hover and gawk. "I've got tests to run. It's going to be a while before anyone gets to bed him down."

  My mind reeled, trying to process what was going on around me. This gen-ship was a mess. The people were a mess. But worst of all, the things they were talking about were appalling. I was a decent, God-fearing man, yet the first thing they wanted to do after waking me was figure out how many women I could have sex with and who got to have me first.

  I tried to think of a way to voice my indignation -- not that anyone had asked my opinion, or that I'd even tried speaking yet -- when the doctor jabbed a hypodermic into my thigh. "I know this is going to sound counterintuitive," he said. "But you need to go back to sleep. Those three were well-intentioned, but they didn't follow protocol when they pulled you out of that pod. If we don't wake you correctly, it's going to screw up your metabolism. We'll talk again in a few hours."

  Before I could say a word, my eyelids became unbearably heavy. I think I was unconsciousness before they even finished closing . . .

  When I woke again, I found myself surrounded by three new people and the doctor again. This batch was better dressed than the last, but seemed no less intent on hovering and gawking. Apparently I was quite the novelty.

  One of them, an albino woman, stepped forward and began speaking. I'd never before seen an albino in person; now I'd seen two in the same day.

  "Mr. Fallgood," she said. "I'm sure you -- " She shot her unnaturally pale blue eyes down to the tablet in her hands, the standard five-by-seven sheet of clear, hard glastic. It struck me as somewhat odd that in the 250-year transit from Earth to Kepler 186f, the technology hadn't changed, but before I could ask about it, the albino woman started over. "You are Jeremy Fallgood, yes? That's what it says on the crystal the techs pulled from your cryo-pod, but given the unusual location where you were found, maybe we shouldn't make assumptions. Are you Mr. Jeremy Fallgood, born October 10, 2669, in New Detroit, Ontario, Canada?"

  I nodded, still unsure of my voice. Hearing this woman refer to me as Jeremy made me think of my husband, Michael. I coughed a little, then squeaked, 'Please, call me Jerry." The effort of speaking scratched my throat.

  "Excellent," she said. "I'd hate to start with bad information. As I was about to say, I'm sure you have a lot of questions. We do, too."

  It made no sense. After not using my voice for God knows how long, why would such a tiny effort be painful? Regardless, I wasn't about to test it again. I nodded.

  The albino woman smiled. "I'm sorry. I forgot how uncomfortable speaking can be after hibernation. Your body didn't produce any saliva during that time, but I promise, it will come. It's been such a long time since anyone found a survivor of The Wrecking that I'd all but forgotten some of the problems you have."

  Found a survivor? The Wrecking? Clearly things were bad, but what kind of disaster had I woken to?

  The concern on my face must have been evident because she handed me her tablet, saying, "Use this to write your questions. But first give me a moment to explain what's going on."

  I punched PLEASE DO into the image of a keyboard that materialized when I thought about typing. The tablet responded to commands as they passed through my mind, just as always. The tech was identical. I don't know why, but that troubled me.

  A second woman, broad-faced with a hint of Asian in her ancestry, stepped up next to the albino, inserting herself into the conversation. "My name is Mary Ellen Trumbul," she said impatiently. "My pale colleague here is Tina Gareth, and the two gentlemen over there are Roy Markham and Dr. Chip Jones. Collectively we are the greeting committee for what is left of the crew of Voyager. In a nutshell, what was supposed to be a 250-year, multi-generation journey to a planet known as Kepler 186f has become a voyage of the damned, with no real end in sight, and not much hope of survival. Welcome to our party."

  I looked at the tablet in my hands, wanting to ask so many questions. The display swirled randomly, mirroring the chaos of my thoughts. If this device sought something in my mind to work with, it would have to wait in line; I had no idea where to begin. Fortunately the doc stepped in.

  "Nothing quite like foreplay, is there?" he said, smiling. "Please forgive Mary Ellen's bluntness. Still, she has a point: there's no way to say and have it sound good, so we may as well say it straight. Maybe they solved their problems back on Earth, maybe they didn't. We don't know because we lost contact with them a long time ago. Voyager was always intended to be a one-way ticket someplace else -- Earth's insurance policy when it became obvious the planet was unable to support human life for much longer. Overpopulation, food shortages, water shortages, air and soil toxicity levels off the charts. We had to get a bunch of people off-planet, quick. I suspect that's why you entered the lottery in the first place.

  "What you probably don't know is this: On its way out of the Solar System the Voyager was scheduled to stop in the Oort Cloud to collect ice for water and methane. We're not sure exactly what happened because the damage was so extensive, but it looks like multiple collisions occurred in the Cloud with some pretty massive ice comets. From there it was a deep-space reenactment of the Titanic that we called The Wrecking. Power failed throughout much of the ship. Few in hibernation survived. Going back to Earth was never an option, so we've limped along ever since, making do with what we have. Things have gotten tight in every way imaginable over the last 800 years, including genetically."

  I could barely contain my astonishment. 800 YEARS???????

  Doc nodded.

  "That's where you come in," said the albino woman, Tina. She clasped her hands as if she were about to pray. I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn't thought to do so myself.

  "Your contribution to Voyager's genetic diversity is vital to our survival," she said. "Your DNA is new, different, and we need you to spread it as widely and as quickly as possible. So for you, it literally will be a party."

  "More like an orgy," said Roy Markham with feigned disapproval and a cheesy grin. He was an older gentleman with smoke-gray hair that contrasted attractively with his hot-
cocoa skin. "Scientifically speaking we could do it through artificial insemination, but long ago we realized there were a lot more benefits to personal interaction, and now it's ingrained in our culture. Who sleeps with who has a lot of status associated with it."

  "You're just jealous because he's going to sleep with everybody and be king of the ship," Doc Jones chided. He turned back to me and said with surprising earnestness, "Jokes aside, we really do need your help. The ship's overall F-values are routinely above .12, sometimes spiking as high as .17, and we're seeing more and more cases of hemophilia, deformities, and still-births. Your genes are going to help us forestall a genetic mutational meltdown."

  I shook my head vigorously, not liking the direction this conversation was heading. I stabbed one finger at a time onto the onscreen keys: NOT THAT WAY.

  I held the tablet up for all to see. Then I drew it back to my chest and typed one more word.

  CHRISTIAN!

  Doc Jones rolled his eyes and turned on his heel. The other three joined him in a conversation so animated it was impossible to follow. Raised voices spoke over each other and hands exploded repeatedly into the air like five-fingered fireworks. I caught words and phrases like "One of those elated people . . ." and ". . . that idea was gonged off almost a thousand years ago . . .: One of the women said something like "Make him do it anyway . . .," but besides that last comment, none of it made any sense; I had no context.

  While they talked, I typed on the tablet.

  CAN'T YOU DO IT WITH CLONING, THE WAY GOD INTENDED?

  I held the tablet aloft, but they were so engrossed in their conversation they didn't notice me. I banged my hand against the metal bars of the gurney. It hurt, but it got their attention.

  Roy noticed first. He walked over, shaking his head as he read what I'd typed.

  "You're one of those elateds, aren't you? Part of that cult that bought into the government's bizarre reinterpretation of scripture when Earth's population got out of control."