by Unknown
The smoke issued from under the pot, a thick white cloud like the chugging tufts that oozed out of factory stacks. It crawled up the shiny sides where both of Mickey’s ears were drooping like a guilty dog.
Outside the wind whispered its plot.
“Shit!”
Irwin grabbed the pan to stop it from destroying the books beneath. He took hold of the plastic handles and lifted. They felt like tar, hot tar, tacky and soft. He managed to lift the pan, but Chicken Soup was sticking to the bottom. He raised it high trying to shake the book off as it dangled swinging by the cover. He had the pan above his shoulders when both ears came off.
His instinct was to catch the pot. Even as he made the grab he knew it was stupid. Catching the metal sides with his open palms was actually the least of his trouble. He also pulled the pot to his chest where the still flaming remnants of Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding burned his face, flash-frying his eyebrows, lashes, and the tuft of hair that once worked to cover a receding hairline.
Irwin screamed, only without cursing this time. He was too frightened to swear—swearing was for anger, and Irwin had jumped that puddle and landed with both feet firmly in terror. Less a cognitive thought and more a reflex to scorching pain, he let go. The pot fell with a thump and clang.
Outside the wind howled blowing gusts through the broken window flipping covers, fanning pages, flapping the wings of a thousand would-be birds.
Irwin’s eyes watered. His hands burned. Some of his skin remained fused to pan, but all that didn’t matter. For all the pain that grabbing the pot had caused, Irwin no longer noticed. Instead his eyes watched in horror as the contents of the pan spilled. A foot long environmental disaster of book licking flame was set loose on a mountain range of vintage paper, with a side of dried glue.
Thank you, Seymour!
Through the window the wind gusted scattering the embers, breathing on the flames, spreading them across the floor. Irwin watched for two ticks of a second, frozen in shock and disbelief. They were two seconds he wished he could have had back.
Water! He needed to get water from the sink.
He lost more seconds before he remembered the pump didn’t work without electricity.
His blanket! He could smother the flames.
He rushed scurrying rat-like through the tunnels to the Grotto.
Thrilling enough for you, Irwin?
He ripped the blankets free which started a minor avalanche. Coonts, Crichton, and Cussler fell on him in alphabetical order as he scrambled out of the collapsing tunnel like Harrison Ford with an armload of gold idol.
He took a breath and gagged. That was almost it. He started to panic. Trapped and without air his mind fragmented. He couldn’t think, couldn’t process anything more than the broken record skipping over the same moronic thought—Meep! Meep! He just stared as he watched the fire consume his living room. Yellow where the flames danced along the tops, orange where they bit deep into the pages, blue along the spines. And smoke churned across the ceiling, black as ink, rolling like a summer thunderhead.
A new thought arrived the way a car on ice is saved from going off a cliff by another car sliding on ice. I’m going to die! That one coherent estimation of the situation put Irwin’s feet back under him. He pressed the blanket to his face, fell flat to his belly, and shimmed like a snake working back toward the window, back toward the fire.
He was too late. The wind had spread the fire too far. Flames coursed up the Cliffs of Fiction—his living room a forest fire of Arthur C. Clark, David Eddings, Berry Malzberg, Mark Lawerence, and Raymond Fiest. Still he tried. He threw the blanket and himself upon the flames rolling as he tried to at least extinguish the floor, but the fire adored the neat stacks and raced up their heights.
Laying on his back, burned and choking, Irwin cried. The tears soothed his smoke filled eyes, but despite the brilliance of the growing inferno he couldn’t see anymore. Still, he knew where the shattered window was.
He couldn’t let them all go. Even if he couldn’t cross into that promised land with them, he had to save some. Irwin felt blindly for any book. His tortured fingers found a trade paperback and he threw it with a guess and a hope. He heard it bounce off the wall. He reached for another. He had no trouble finding candidates for escape. He just wished he could see—he’d hate to end up having only saved The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. What kind of world would that throw up in its wake? What kind of legacy?
Irwin couldn’t breathe anymore. It felt almost like drowning, something he’d almost accomplished in grade school and had allowed him to add hydrophobia to his list of fears. He was burning too. People always said that in a fire you’d pass out from asphyxiation before you’d actually burn, but that apparently didn’t apply to people trapped in a narrow, flaming canyon of paperbacks being fanned by a winter’s gale.
It didn’t hurt as much as he would have expected, which just meant he was finally succumbing to the smoke. He wasn’t feeling much of anything anymore except—he had a book in his hand. He felt the narrow spine. A paperback, one of the old ones he could tell by the semi-matte finish, the curled edges and the size. It was small. Not even two hundred pages. It didn’t have a chance but he gave it a flick anyway spinning it, using the spine the way a baseball pitcher uses the raised stitches.
It flew.
Irwin heard it flap, like wings on a bird, freed at last. He waited for it to strike the wall, or the ceiling. It didn’t. A perfect swish. Nothing but air.
And outside the wind howled, and wailed, wailed and howled.
The little house burned, a bright spot in an endless void of black. Snow hissed as it said hello to the now adult flame and the two did battle. Elements wrestling in an empty world that man had stepped out of. In the flicker of that fight, on its back in the snow lay a single book. The wind, now a spectator in a fight it helped provoke, brushed the pages that fanned out and closed again, fanned and closed, as if the whispering wind was trying to read the words there.
On the cover, a stylistic impression of flames was dominated by three numbers.
Four, five, one.
LIAM BALDWIN
Silver Sky
Liam Baldwin is 53, and is still waiting for the shiny, wonderful Future promised him as a kid to arrive. This is the 21st Century? He is married, has three kids and hates talking about himself in the third person.
Silver Sky is a love story at heart, but don’t hold that against it. It’s also a glimpse into the future where our fellow mammals work alongside us, but long held beliefs and dogma still hold sway.
9.
SILVER SKY
Liam Baldwin
It was midnight and the sky was silver. It shone from horizon to horizon in a single gleaming blue-white sheen. Beyond the mountains, a cobweb of ice gleamed; delicate, bright, brittle gossamers that spread, as they rose, fanning out and thinning to invisibility; at the zenith, a small, warm, fuzzy reddish blur, Earth's shadow.
“My God...” Clara Letoza said, her voice small in the stillness of the night. Though she had worked on the Project all her professional life this was her first visit. The first time she had seen it. Allan had timed her first sight of the Sail perfectly, keeping her indoors, tied up with endless technical details, till the moment was right. He had waited till midnight, then suggested they take a break. “Let's get some fresh air, take a stroll outside,” he had said casually. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.
Clara stood and stared upwards, gazing awestruck at this beautiful, sky-spanning wonder she had helped build. It was minutes before she spoke. “I've seen the simulations and I saw it from the ship as we docked. It was just a structure up there, vast, but still a construct... all beams and engineering and stresses. I never...” Reverentially, she said, “I never thought it would be so... so beautiful.”
“I never thought it would be finished,” said Allan.
She laughed, the moment gone. “You are a pessimist.”
“Maybe. But I'm also a politic
ian. It's part of my job as Coordinator to make sure –” He paused, looking past her at something far away. She followed his gaze. “What's that?” he said, and pointed skyward to the south. Something bright. A fading flash. “What the hell was that?” he repeated.
They stared at the disappearing light till it was no more than a faint after-image.
“There's another!” she said and pointed. “Off to the left! See it?” For a moment a sharp yellowy brightness lit the sky like summer lightning, before leaving an expanding, fading core at its centre. An explosion of some kind.
“And another!” Clara pointed again.
“What the hell?”
They stood looking at the fading lights.
“Whatever they were, they were a long way up,” Allan said.
“Big too, if we could see them from down here.”
“We need to get back inside.” His voice was cold.
***
It was three in the morning when communications with Top Side were finally re-established. They were in Allan's office. Allan, coffee mug in hand, switched from one news channel to another in frustration; Clara, calm and composed, sifted through what little hard data they had and tried to relate it to a schematic model of the Sail. It had become clear, very quickly, that someone had tried to destroy the Sail with nuclear bombs. Five of them, in a coordinated attack. What no one knew was who had done it and how much damage had been caused.
Within an hour, seven separate claims of responsibility had been made to the media -- all of them from Pro-apocalyptic or Millennialist groups. Crude triangulation had provided the possible locations of the targets. The news channels certainly had no facts, just grainy footage of the explosions, captured by chance, looping endlessly behind pointless, repetitive speculation. It had been a very long and frustrating three hours.
There was a knock at the door and a communications technician, a middle-aged chimpanzee, came in. He looked like he hadn't slept for a week.
“We've made contact with Top Side.”
Allan was instantly on his feet. He silenced the news channel.
“We've got voice only, and slow data links,” continued the technician. “You wouldn't believe the lash-ups we've had to put together to get even that. Face to face will have to wait.” He sounded almost apologetic.
“I'm just grateful you got anything so soon.” said Allan. “I'll be down to the comms room as soon as-- ”
“No need.” The technician waved Allan back to his seat. “It's patched through to your desk. You can talk to them from here. Get things sorted before everyone finds out we've re-established contact.”
Allan gave the chimpanzee a smile. The chance to talk to Top Side privately before he had to face the media and the rest of the project staff was more than he could have hoped for. “Thank you,” he said. “You look done in. You should get a rest.”
The technician gave a weary smile and pointed at their coffee machine. “I could do with a coffee,” he said. “We ran out two hours ago.” Clara poured him a mug and he left, holding it like a sacred object.
Allan opened a channel on his com and beckoned Clara to join him.
“Top Side, this is Coordinator Allan, who am I talking to?”
There was a delay. Top Side station was just below the Sail's surface out beyond where the Moon used to be before it had been moved and reshaped into a great silver sheet. Top Side was the sail's helm. From there the Sail and its cargo would be steered, nudged forward slowly by the solar winds, and then gaining full speed driven by the solar hurricane of the expanding Sun. The greatest sunjammer the universe had ever seen. Its destination, the Centauri system, 4.3 light years away.
“Hi, Allan,” came the reply. “It's Ruiz.” Ruiz's voice, which had the gentle lisp of all the evolved apes, was distorted and echoed. From the acoustic, it was obvious he was wearing a space suit.
“Ruiz. Good to hear your voice. What's going on up there? What can you tell me?”
“Not a lot,” said Ruiz. “As far as we can make out, three of our own people and a couple of 'stroid miners making deliveries somehow managed to get nukes up here and suicided. Looks like a coordinated attack. They all kamikazed into major ganglia. Christ knows what they thought they would achieve. They could have done a lot more damage a few klicks further down. Could have ripped the whole thing if they had taken out a couple of the Mainstays.”
“Any casualties?”
“Amazingly, no!” said Ruiz. “The bombers were the only deaths. We got a couple of people who are going to need retina transplants and one guy needs to grow a new arm, but nobody else dead. We were really lucky.”
“Space is a big place,” said Allan, relieved. “Even lobbing nukes around, it's hard to hit people.”
“Mind you,” said Ruiz, “with all the construction finished there's only a few of us left up here. Everyone else has gone home. And the damage isn't as bad as we first thought: shrouds 84g12 and 84f13 are torn, and two more are holding but will need some serious fixing. It's a mess but no show-stopper. There's a lot of debris flying about. I mean, a lot. We're all in suits up here -- which is slowing work up. We've had three living quarters blow out after being hit by some of this crap.”
“Christ!” said Allan. “Sounds messy.”
“It is. Very messy. Good news is that the Sail will hold. It's had a few holes punched in it, and it'll distort a little when we launch, but the simulations I've managed to run say it'll still hold, even in a worst, worst, worst case scenario. We designed this thing well; hey, I'm proud of us!”
“Ruiz?” Clara leant in over Allan's shoulder. “The torn shrouds, can you send visuals?”
“Should be with you already. We have a couple of data links open. I've been sending down the clearest images I can get. I know that voice. Is that you, Clara? I heard you were finally visiting. It'll be nice to meet you in person.”
“Hello, Ruiz. Yes it is. It'll be nice to meet you, too.”
Allan cut in. “Ruiz, be good when you meet her, shake hands; she's human, not Bonobo.”
“And you're a prude,” laughed Ruiz.
“I think we need to come up,” said Allan. “Assess the situation for ourselves. When do you think you'll be able to clear a shuttle?”
“Couple of days at least,” said Ruiz. “There really is a lot of crap flying about up here. We'll have most of the big stuff under control in a day or two. The smaller stuff we are just going to have let go and burn up. You're going to get some pretty spectacular meteor showers for a few days. I'll be able to tell you more when I can get full communications restored. As it is we're having to bounce signals all over the place to get through to you; some of the delays between teams up here are potential killers. People are going to die in stupid accidents if I don't get things working soon. Allan, I have to go.”
“Okay, Ruiz, thanks. Good luck.”
He killed the connection.
And threw his stylus across the room with sudden violence, “Goddamn Suiciders!”
Clara drew back. “Suiciders?”
“The nut-jobs who did this.” He saw her blank expression. “Hell, you really were out of touch on Centauri weren't you?” He sighed. “It’s a doomsday cult with a real doomsday to look forward to. After thousands of years of people prophesying the end of the world, their day has finally arrived for real.”
“They want to stop us moving the Earth?”
“If they can. Stop us and the world ends. I really don't understand why they want Earth to be destroyed, but they do. I mean, this is Earth. This is where we all come from. It's got to be preserved. There are five main groups. All of them with different reason for thinking the world should end and most of them are divided into various factions. The only thing that stops them from tearing each other to shreds is the fact that they hate us even more than they hate each other. We're the enemy. You noticed the security on the way in?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did. Seemed excessive.”
“I suppose it might seem
so when you meet it for the first time but it's not tight enough. We've had lots of minor stuff. Sabotage, cargoes destroyed or contaminated, more every day, but nothing on this scale before. No nukes. And they've shied away from killing people until now.”
“If they all want to die, why don't they just go to Mars or Venus? We're not saving them.”
“I don't think dying is the point,” said Allan. “I think it's being around when God comes back that's the point. I guess those five who blew themselves up had early bookings to Valhalla, or Nirvana, or wherever they think He's taking them afterwards.”
“And God comes back?”
“You guessed it,” said Allan wearily. “God comes back the day the Sun explodes.”
Clara looked Allan full in the face, green eyes staring into his. Unblinking. Intense. “We have to go brief the press now,” she said. “We're breakfast news in five hundred systems. But when we've finished...” She paused and blinked, then put her arms around his shoulders and pulled him close. She kissed him full on the lips.
Surprised, he pulled back, but she stayed with him. Her lips parted, her tongue pushed into his mouth. He responded. Held her. Pulled her to him. She broke free for a moment.
“When we have finished with the press,” she said, her eyes level with his, holding his gaze. “I want you to take me back to your place and fuck me. We need it.”
***
Later, in bed, exhausted, on crumpled sheets, they lay long and quiet, entwined and stroking each other.
Dawn was breaking. The Sail had set an hour before and now the Sun was rising. First light shone through the wide picture-window.