That hot buzzing I get in my head when I talk to Di, that pounding I feel in my neck when I’m in a life-threatening situation, the cardiac arrhythmia I get when she touches me… these things stack. My pulse felt like someone was holding a jackhammer to my skull. I might get thyroid cancer later, but I was definitely going to have a heart attack first.
“Ex! EX! EX!” Eventually his head lolled scarily toward me, and he smiled. “How do you die?”
He said nothing, just smiled.
“Fuck the rule, how do you die?” I could feel Di’s breathing through her back in my lap—it was fast and irregular.
Ex whispered something I couldn’t hear. In a painfully stupid way, I tried to lean so my ear was closer to his mouth. The three of us were linked in the most ridiculous pose: Di limp, me double helix, Ex fetal.
The tiniest voice: “I don’t know.”
He suddenly gave a horrible, choking, seventy-year-old smoker’s laugh, spitting blood in my ear and half deafening me.
I took his radio. “Security, Ex is down on level twelve, needs urgent help and is being a dick about it. Also, everyone who isn’t helping him needs to get the hell out of here. Also, where do we keep the boats so we can get the hell out of here?”
No reply. I scooped my arms under Di and prepared to lift her. “If this hurts, you have to tell me, okay?”
“OW OW OW OW! Other side, other side, you dork!”
Lesson learned: try not to grip a gunshot victim by the gunshot wound.
As she clung clammily to my neck and I carried her up the stairs, I heard Ex lapse into another fit of loud, bloody coughing behind me. And then, hoarsely:
“I think it’s probably this, man.”
It was twelve floors to the surface, Jeth’s broadcast playing on the PA and every screen on the way up. The aching in my arms had gone past the good ache, back to the bad ache, and straight through to the I would ache, but it’s Di and I shot her, so I’ll shut the fuck up.
Jeth was pontificating about the significance of what he’d achieved in a way that was in danger of putting everyone off listening to what he’d achieved, and I wished he’d get to the point and die before the agent got to him.
“Mort…” Di murmured, pawing at me as she was jostled by my graceless stair sprinting. “I’m sorry I called you a dork.”
I almost laughed, but it was tough with no breath. “Well,” I managed between pants, “I shot you… so I think… I’m going to win… this guilt battle.”
“No!” She grabbed me quite painfully. “You saved me! That guy was gonna shoot me in the head.” I had a lot of objections to that, but I saved my breath for the climb. “You’re the reason my slip doesn’t say GUNSHOT.”
“You don’t have to… tell me…”
“It’s ALZHEIMER’S. I’m ALZHEIMER’S.”
I stopped. I could pretend it was in shock, but in fact I just really, really needed to stop.
“Holy shit. The long good-bye? You should be carrying me.” I set her down for a second. My shirt was soaked with her blood. She smiled peacefully. Something was happening on-screen.
“Ah, how nice! The United States have sent an ambassador to verify my results firsthand!”
Shut up, Jeth. Start the reactor before he shows you his prediction!
“If you are here to kill me, agent, I hope that your name is LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE, because you have seconds to spare!”
I have told him, repeatedly, not to do jokes.
The leader walked on-screen, snapped arm dangling. I couldn’t watch. I scooped Di back up, making her wince, and kept running.
The problem with not watching turned out to be view screens on every floor, positioned at the top of each flight of steps.
The leader didn’t say anything, just held something up. You couldn’t make it out at that resolution, but I knew what it said. It said LAZARUS REACTOR MELTDOWN.
You also couldn’t make out Jethmalani’s face as the agent pushed him callously into the reactor, but I had a pretty good idea of what it must have looked like. I’ve seen a man die of HEARTBREAK.
I lowered Di into the cancer squad’s dinghy and looked at the time. They hadn’t written “Cancer Squad” on it or anything, but it was jet black and docked haphazardly on the beach, so I figured it was theirs. I looked at the time. I grabbed two radiation suits and a medkit from the supply locker and looked at the time, then pushed its tough rubber prow back into the wobbling water and looked at the time.
There still wasn’t any—it had been three minutes since Jeth died in the fission sequence, and the meltdown would happen inside of ten. But two things kept making me check.
One was Ex. I wasn’t used to dealing with people who had no predictions, and the uncertainty was paralyzing me. Did it mean I could save him? Or did it mean I couldn’t?
The other was the broadcast. Jeth gave his life to send this out, and I couldn’t stand the thought of these cancerous assholes stopping it. Whatever happened with the reactor, people should get to see his work. He’d set the schematics to go online just after the reactor started up. If they took out our satellite dish in the next few minutes, nine years of work would end up as free R & D for the USA.
I thought about all these possibilities for three, maybe five seconds, then looked back at the only sure thing. Di, curled up in the dinghy.
I climbed in. I’d spent my career changing the inevitable—for once I was just going to run with it.
As we puttered out into the glinting orange sea, the roof of Jeth’s facility came into view. I saw an agent—Rectal?—heading for the satellite dish. At the very edge of the roof, just below the south mast, he slipped on something red and fell out of view.
Four minutes out, I’d helped Di dress her wound and she was sitting up. I found some military rations that included something labeled, honest to God, a “HOOAH! Bar,” which I decided I should try before giving to her.
“Oh my God, you can’t have this.” She looked at me, wide-eyed. “It’s delicious!”
A fist hit my leg, surprisingly hard.
At six minutes, it was time. The island was surprisingly small already—six years of my life, so easily shrunk to a postcard. I hauled the radiation suits out and helped her in with her leg. I was about to pull the big plastic helmet up on mine when she stopped me.
“It’s going to be a while before we get out of the fallout zone.”
“Yeah.”
“And once the reactor blows, we can’t take these off.”
“Not for long, no.”
“Is there anything you want to do before we put our heads in plastic boxes for two days?”
I thought about this for a second, then held the side of her face and kissed her.
We both zipped up our suits just in time to see the reactor blow: a column of green radioactive fire, belching black smoke. Di squeezed my hand, our big boxy heads knocked clumsily together, and I tried to think of something romantic to say.
“Well, I guess that’s why they all die of cancer.”
* * *
Story by Tom Francis
Illustration by Les McClaine
DROWNING BURNING FALLING FLYING
“THEY’VE GOT BLOOD, DON’T THEY?” I asked.
“The biologists say so,” Brianna said. “Blood analogue, anyway.”
“Then it should work, shouldn’t it?”
She shrugged, still looking ill at ease. Brianna was a worrier at the best of times, and in the month since the alien ship had landed, or appeared, or beamed down, or whatever it had done, I’d seen the lines on her forehead grow like spiderwebs.
“It’s not that it won’t work, Emily,” she said. She took a sip of her coffee and grimaced. Hospital coffee is universally vile. “I think it will work. I’m just—not sure it’s a good idea; that’s all.”
I couldn’t really blame her for being twitchy. She and the other scientists had the government and the military and the media all breathing down their necks, demanding to know
how the aliens did this and that and the other thing. Brianna Quinn was one of the foremost quantum physicists of our generation, and her team was trying to figure out the aliens’ faster-than-light stardrive. She wasn’t used to working in the spotlight.
I, on the other hand, was on-site only because among the ten thousand orders sprayed in all directions in the first hours after the landing had been the command “Send us linguists!” Then, of course, it turned out the aliens, the Nelat, spoke English, French, and a few dozen other Earth languages, so the diplomats didn’t need us after all. I was seconded to Brianna’s team to help them work out the technical terms that lacked English equivalents (which, in the case of their quantum drive, was nearly all of them). Nobody was pestering me for interviews or demanding status reports or shouting at me because they didn’t understand my status reports, all of which they were doing to Brianna pretty much daily.
That was why we were here at the Montreal General Hospital, where nobody would be looking for us. Brianna wasn’t exactly shirking her work, since two of the pilots, Isperander and Hasfenoon, were going to meet us there, and we’d probably get a chance to work through some more of their explanations. Like the rest of the alien crew, they were friendly and helpful, eager to share their knowledge and to learn about Earth in return—professional tourists, by both inclination and training. They visited churches, homeless shelters, hardware stores, anything that caught their interest. Today they wanted to see a Death Machine. It had been arranged, but while we were waiting, Brianna had started to fret. I honestly didn’t understand why it was such a big deal and said so.
“It just worries me,” she said. “Think about what human society went through when we first invented the Death Machine. People went crazy. The riots, the economic crashes, the cults, all those people trying to cheat fate by leaving their homes, their jobs, their families—it was decades before we got used to it.”
“Yeah.” Personally, I thought a lot of that stuff must have been exaggerated. A century and a half could distort perception a lot. Sure, it had to have been a shock for people at first, but it was just the Death Machine, after all.
“And Isperander said she’d never heard of anything like it. Thousands of species in the Union and we’re the first ones to come up with the Death Machine. How do we know what impact it’ll have on them?”
“We survived it,” I said. “Look, Bree, thousands of species, like you said—they must have run across weird new technologies before. Who knows what they have? Dyson spheres, time travel, immortality—there could be anything.”
“Not immortality,” Brianna interjected. “Isperander told me they die.”
“Well, anything else. The point is, their Union’s probably weathered a lot of changes. I don’t think our little planet’s going to be rocking the boat much.”
“Hm.” Brianna didn’t look convinced, but she let it go. We talked about other things until the pilots arrived—her work, mostly. Isperander had promised to let Brianna see the drive in operation next time they moved the ship. They kept it at the landing site north of Montreal most of the time, but every so often they went somewhere else on Earth for a day or so. Tourists. It drove the security people crazy. For that matter, it drove the scientists crazy, too. My translation work gave me a glimmer of the outlines of what they did, or at least of the words for what they did, but I couldn’t explain it. Something about the ship existing in multiple versions (“roots” they said, or a word derived from their word for roots) of the universe at once, and their being able to become (“grow”) their alternate selves. Brianna thought it worked like a quantum computer, with the various minds on the ship acting as individual qubits, but she had no idea how that translated itself into propulsion. She was hoping direct observation might provide a clue.
“I’m jealous,” I admitted. “Any chance you can get me on board?”
Brianna shrugged. “Maybe. They don’t want too many humans at once, Isperander said. Just in case we have some kind of bad reaction to the drive. There are a few species who can’t use it; it does things to their minds.”
“And the government’s letting you be the guinea pig?” I asked incredulously. “You, the world-famous scientist? Don’t they have army guys for that kind of thing?”
“I want to see it,” Brianna said simply. “And Isperander said I could. You know nobody wants to deny the Nelat anything they don’t have to.” That was true enough; all the governments of the world were salivating over the technological prospects.
There was a commotion at the front entrance then, and we got up to see. As we’d guessed, it was Isperander and Hasfenoon, along with the diplomats and their entourage. A line of police kept gawkers back.
I spotted Lily Dane, one of the officers I knew a little. “What kept you?” I asked her.
Dane rolled her eyes. “Protesters.”
“Oh? Against what?”
“The usual. Aliens are the spawn of hell, aliens are going to take away their jobs, aliens ought to officially apologize for kidnapping and probing people, blah blah blah. Anyway, we had to detour, and then the little one wanted to go back and argue with them.”
“We want to engage with humanity,” Hasfenoon piped up. He was the smaller of the two pilots and had a splotch of black across his muzzle. Isperander, behind him, was an even gray-brown all over. Both of them looked like armored greyhounds in the exoskeletons they wore to deal with Earth’s gravity, except for the long fingers tucked up at the backs of their legs. They walked on all fours, usually, on their knuckles, but all their paws were hands. “How can we invite you into the Union without addressing your grievances?”
“They’re not my grievances,” Dane said. “My grievances are with whoever leaked our plans for today. Stay here a minute, will you? I’m going to see if everything’s ready.”
The two aliens hopped up onto chairs beside us and curled up on the seats, looking even more doglike than before. The diplomats arrayed themselves around the room but didn’t press for the aliens’ attention. “You have before used a Death Machine?” Isperander asked us. Her English was more accented than Hasfenoon’s, but I was still impressed; I knew how long it took to reach that level of fluency in even another human language.
“Sure,” I said. “Everyone does, when they’re born.” Brianna nodded.
“Is it impolite to ask what you read?”
I shook my head. “Not in Canada. Some places.” There were cultures where you didn’t find out your death till twelve or sixteen, and cultures—England was one—where you didn’t discuss it socially. I couldn’t imagine. “Mine is blunt force trauma. That means some sort of impact, like getting hit by something,” I added, not sure if they knew the words.
“Mine is suicide,” Brianna said.
I glanced at her. “No kidding? My mom was suicide.”
“Oh yeah?”
“She decided to die when she got bone cancer,” I said. “Once it was obvious she wasn’t responding to treatment and the pain got bad. The whole family flew in for it. It was really nice.”
“I’m hoping for something like that,” Brianna admitted.
“This is most interesting!” Hasfenoon exclaimed. Isperander flicked one of her ears at him, and he lowered his head onto his forepaws. Chastened, maybe. I made a mental note of the interchange; I was trying to compile a list of Nelat gestural cues, among a hundred other linguistic projects I wanted to do.
Dane came back. “They’re ready,” she said.
The machine in the office had been partially disassembled, its casing removed to allow the pilots to get their upper haunches under the needle. Even so, Isperander had to contort herself awkwardly to get into the available space. The attending doctor pressed a button. The needle clicked down.
I found myself holding my breath.
The printer hummed. A slip of paper shot out into the doctor’s hand. “Drowning,” he read. There was a collective exhale.
Brianna caught my eye. I shrugged. Whatever the consequences t
o galactic society, they were unstoppable now.
The printer hummed.
Heads whipped around. Looking baffled, the doctor took the second slip as it emerged. “Burning,” he said. “I’m sorry, are we sure this is working properly?”
Isperander, who had wriggled out of the machine, took the third slip. “Falling,” she read. The fourth. “Flying.” The fifth. “Luggage.”
We stood looking at each other. Obviously the machine was broken, but somehow nobody wanted to interrupt. Isperander’s recitation was taking on a hypnotic, chanting quality. “Air crash. Water. Stabbing. Hubris. Blanket. Plenpelleklet. Decompression. Library.”
With a convulsive movement, one of the diplomats slapped the power button. The machine went silent.
“We’ll try another machine,” he said, red-faced. He looked furious; I suspect he was the one in charge of this outing and was afraid of being held to account by his superiors for the glitch.
There was a brief argument between the diplomats and some of the hospital staff about taking another machine apart, but eventually the whole group of us went up two floors to the maternity wing. The casing was removed from the machine up there, and Hasfenoon volunteered to be tested this time.
“Vacuum,” he read. We were all half expecting it, I think. “Fire. Chocolate. Electric shock. Sup—spelunking. Dogs.”
“You’ve broken it,” the doctor accused.
“They don’t work on aliens; that’s all,” the spokesman retorted. “Here.” He turned the machine off, then back on, and pushed past Hasfenoon to thrust his own hand under the needle. He snatched the printout triumphantly. “Electrocution. It’s working fine.” We all waited, but the printer was silent.
A few others tried it; Brianna was one. She shrugged and silently showed me her “suicide” result. I didn’t bother rechecking mine; I hate needles.
It made the news briefly: “Aliens Immune to Death Machine!” The tabloid press talked of little else for a few days. Several more tests were done, as a formality more than anything. Rumor said the official in charge was being sacked on general principles. Some people wondered if this would somehow affect Earth’s admittance to the Union, though no one could clearly articulate why it might.
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