Asimov's SF, October-November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Little Kenny, barely five feet tall, who'd been poking around at the base of the ant stump, straightened and picked up one of two reed swords resting against it, gave me a credible fencing salute. He was wearing one of those old leather football helmets like you see in old movies, some Knute Rockne thing he'd gotten from his dad, who looked way too little to play football himself.

  “Adar Thu of Cillpa salutes you, Onol!” He tossed me the other reed sword, which I caught somewhere in the middle, almost missing.

  I heard Micky mutter, “Cut yourself ?” Then he looked at Johnny. “Tengam?” Nothing. No reaction. “Hey, you! Tengam of Alaln! Ready to go?"

  Johnny, bareheaded as always, gave him that baffled look he always got, and said, “I guess.” Johnny always had the most trouble assuming his Jovian identity, kept calling us by our real names, right in the middle of some scene we were playing out, which always made Micky mad, arguing, when it was just the two of us, that we should leave Johnny out, find someone else to play the part of Tengam, or even make up a new character, so his neighbor Wally could play.

  Johnny'd been my friend longer than anyone else though, and I liked having him around, even if he couldn't quite get into his role.

  I said, “You bring the carbide?"

  Micky picked up a green rucksack that'd been laying in the weeds by the creek, hefting it. “My dad had a couple of pounds left from the Fourth of July.” You could hear Carl's carbide cannon all over Marumsco Village, so loud the police had come the first year they lived here, but it turned out there was no law against it.

  “What else?” The rucksack was stuffed full.

  “My Mom made some sandwiches. Ham and Swiss on Jewish rye!"

  I glanced at Kenny, raising an eyebrow, then said, “All for you, I suppose?” Micky showed his teeth in something only halfway a grin.

  I pulled the brass magnifying glass from my pocket and aimed it at him, thumb on the knurl I pretended was a trigger button. “You'll share, or face the power of the ectolens!” That got a grimace. Micky never liked the ectolens idea, preferring we use toy plastic ray guns he called “thissars.” Then he'd stopped wanting to carry a toy gun on his belt, because sometimes we went in stores while out adventuring, and people would look at him funny.

  Kenny picked up a small blue pack, something left over from Cub Scouts maybe, and said, “Never mind. My Mom made corned beef."

  Suddenly, Johnny said, “Let's go, guys,” and started walking off down the creek. No lunch packed for him, or me. Sometimes, Johnny would bring his own peanut butter and jelly along, but not today. He never would say what was wrong at his house. Anyway, my Mom was still asleep, and I never minded skipping lunch, knowing I'd get fat like my Dad if I wasn't careful.

  I handed Micky the spare hard hat and lamp combo, and said, “One helmet, one sandwich; one lamp, one carbide load, right, Desta?"

  More teeth, but he put the helmet on his head, and I knew he'd come through at lunch time. I turned and followed Johnny-turned-Tengam down the left bank of the creek.

  It was a beautiful day for a Jovian adventure, cool and breezy, but sunny enough, patches of deep blue sky and puffy white clouds visible through the trees, sunlight dappled here and there on the ground, lighting up shiny bits of rippling stream.

  Micky and I always played here more than the other kids, so much it made us feel we owned the place. I'd played with Kenny here long before Micky moved to Marumsco Village, but it was Micky who had an imagination like mine, full of wonder worlds from books and comics. He was the first one willing to call himself by another name, and his willingness to do that made Kenny join in, so he wouldn't be left out.

  I looked over my shoulder, “Hey, Mick...."

  Another show of teeth. “Desta."

  “You remember Herman and Melville?"

  He got a sudden look of pleasure, and smiled. One summer, here by ourselves, we'd caught a couple of big black beetles, each one close to an inch long. We'd named them Herman and Melville, then floated them down the creek for miles on a piece of dead wood, two alien adventurers exploring The River of No Return. I was always glad we let them go, in the end.

  He said, “Sure."

  “You suppose they ever found their way back home?"

  He shrugged, bemused, and we walked on.

  * * * *

  We came out of the woods not far from Dinky's Cliffs, walking out into dazzling sunlight, into a hotter sort of day. The woods here were bounded by barbed wire, but it'd been cut in places a long time ago, and the field beyond was covered with tall, dry brown grass, almost like hay, cut across the middle by a footpath made by kids like us. Maybe just us? I hardly ever saw anyone else here.

  Some Occoquan kids who'd lived here before Marumsco Village was built had told me there used to be a mean old bull in this field. They were full of tall tales about daring to jump the fence and be chased by the bull. Micky laughed when he heard that, said something about the bull being hamburgers by now, and didn't seem interested in my explanation about the difference between a bull and steer.

  Micky and I were walking side by side now, talking about Aceta, the Cenons, and stuff, making changes in how the story went to suit the new ideas we had, which were displacing old elementary school stuff. This had all started years ago, when some teacher thought the class should write short stories as assignments. “Not less than four pages!” she'd said, to alarmed groans and complaints.

  Micky and I collaborated on our two stories, “The War in Aceta” and “Revenge of the Plant Men” set on an imaginary Jupiter, then had insisted we be allowed to read them aloud to the class, one after the other. We'd been worrying at it ever since.

  Lately, we'd been talking about something called “The Guardians of Jove,” which started with Onol and Desta embarking on a long caravan trip, headed for the vast, unbroken mountain range of the title, which barricaded one hemisphere of Jupiter from the other. We thought there might be many such ranges ringing the planet, possibly what caused the famous banding visible in big telescopes, and maybe the Great Red Spot was a swirling storm where part of the Guardians had collapsed.

  Other things had started to intrude as well, especially in the past year or so. A lot of the stories we'd read in the Ace and Ballantine paperbacks flooding all the bookracks lately had what you might call “romantic interest.” It was pretty sketchy stuff, especially in books that were reprints of things from the Thirties and Forties, but it was there.

  There was also some boy-girl stuff happening around the seventh and eighth grades that was pretty hard not to notice, and Micky and I tried our hands at putting some of it in our little story fragments. Micky did a pretty good job writing an imitation of what we were reading, a scene with a man and woman bantering coyly with each other, just the way they did in stories.

  I never liked admitting it, especially to him, but Micky can usually write better sentences than me, and combine them into better paragraphs. So I tried something a little different. My parents are pretty young, not even into their mid-thirties yet, and my mom's got a little sister only a couple of years older than me, though I'm supposed to call her “Auntie” when there're grownups around.

  Anyway, I'm not totally clueless about this stuff.

  So I wrote a little scene in which the boy/girl banter was a little more ... oh, I guess torrid would be the word. And at the end of the scene, they wound up in what kids in school call “liplock.” Micky seemed uneasy when he read it, and suggested I hide it somewhere in my room.

  Somehow, that scene led to Micky coming up with an idea very different from anything we'd ever talked about before, and now he was arguing, “That stuff between John Carter and Dejah Thoris is as silly as what's in a Nancy Drew book!"

  I'd never read a Nancy Drew book, and wasn't sure he had either, but I had to agree John Carter's problems with the Princess of Mars were pretty goofy. I mean, here's a man who never ages, is so old he can't remember ever being young, who's killed people, and he can't figure out what
to do with a snotty little egg-laying princess?

  “So what do you think we should do? Write about prostitutes?” People don't talk about this stuff in front of kids much, but when you drive through the crappier parts of Washington, D.C., which is pretty much most of it, you see those women in the shadows, and if Mom's not along, you might see your dad looking at them too. “So what're we going to call our book, Micky? The Red-Hot Streetwalkers of Jupiter?” Actually, I kind of liked the title.

  Micky tried to look pissed off, but tittered inanely instead. “Idiot. Look, what we need are Sector Maidens."

  “Huh?"

  “The way we have it now, Jupiter is divided into Bands, right? By the Guardians, I mean."

  “Yeah. So?"

  “So what if we divide the Bands into Sectors? And what if each Sector has a girl in it who's supposed to...” He made a vague gesture with his hand.

  I smirked. “Christ, Micky! Where'd you get an idea like that? And why Sector Maidens?"

  Kenny, who'd been listening, said, “Moslem Paradise."

  That made Micky look mad, I think, because he'd been about to tell me he'd thought it up out of nothing. “Right. Virgins.” It seemed like a good idea, but ... I said, “If we ever do any of this stuff for real, I don't think we could get away with something like that. Not in a story.” Not in Amazing or Fantastic. Surely not in Analog!

  Ahead of us, Johnny turned around, and said, “You guys are nuts, you know that?” Then he said, “Anyway, we're here."

  I stepped past him and stood as close as I could bear to the edge of Dinky's Cliffs, looking down at the muddy red lowland below, the yellowish expanse of the Occoquan River beyond, finally the bushily overgrown, rocky start of Fairfax County beyond that. Somewhere up there was Lorton and the big state prison, but we'd never walked that far.

  Micky stepped a lot closer to the edge than me, looking straight down, something like eighty feet. “Conveyor's over there,” he said, pointing.

  My Dad had told me this used to be a clay pit, servicing a nearby brick factory, though that didn't seem right, somehow. I remembered he'd brought me here when I was maybe eight or nine to see the old kiln chimney, by far the tallest structure in all of Woodbridge, demolished. What I remembered was, flash! Boom! There'd been a hard punch against the soles of my feet, then the chimney went telescoping down on itself, disappearing in a cloud of red dust, rather than tipping over the way I imagined it would.

  We got to the top of the rickety old conveyor belt, which went slanting on down the face of the cliff to the ground below, ending near the ruins of some old buildings, Micky and Johnny setting right out, pounding on down at top speed, wobbling and slipping as they went.

  Kenny and I stood and watched them for a while, and when I looked at him, I could see he was pale, though probably not as pale as me. He said, “I guess if Micky doesn't fall through, we won't, huh?"

  I tried to smile, but couldn't. “We better get down there before they see how yellow we are."

  On the way down, I tried not to hold on too tight, feeling faint, almost like I might suddenly turn and pitch over the guardrail, screaming my way down to the mud below, glad Kenny was behind me, so I couldn't see if he was scareder than me or not. Down at the bottom, the other two were waiting, watching, Johnny's face expressionless, Micky with a suppressed smirk.

  When I got there, he said, “Onol make it with dry panties, did he? Oh, don't shoot me with that there ectolens ... !"

  Beyond the wrecked buildings was a hole in the cliff face, a hole surrounded by a steel skeleton that'd once held some kind of winch mechanism, I think, though what was left now was a hook and dangling chain. What it dangled into was another hole, a vertical shaft, nothing but darkness down below.

  Johnny grabbed the chain and leaned out, actually hanging over the shaft, peering downward into the dark. Micky picked up a round white rock of some kind and threw it in, then we all held our breaths, listening.

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Kenny, standing well back, said, “How far...."

  John pulled back in, bending his knees to get his balance, teetering on the edge, scaring the hell out of me. “If you guys have that argument again about whether a rock would go all the way to China or hang suspended at the Earth's core, I'll throw you both in so you can..."

  Micky gave him one of his looks, stepping closer. “I'm bigger than you."

  “Fatter, anyway."

  I said, “Cut it out guys. Let's go in."

  That made them look at the horizontal tunnel opening in the cliff wall, and suddenly the shoe was on the other foot. A couple of other feet. Kenny danced around the edge of the vertical shaft and into the old mine, grinning back from the beginning of the darkness there, pulling a flashlight out of his pack and shaking it like a magic wand. “So. Onol? Brave Desta? Mighty Tengam?"

  Micky said, “Silly Adar Thu...” but you could see he was nervous, see the little swallow as he thought about it.

  I stepped in with him, and said, “Might as well get out that carbide. Anyone remember to bring a canteen?"

  “Me,” said Kenny.

  We got the carbide lamps going, gas jets making a little hissy whine, little flame in the middle of the brass reflectors casting a pretty good yellow white glow ahead of us. I told Kenny to put his flashlight away, save it for if we got into some kind of trouble, and we walked on in.

  We'd been nerving ourselves up for this all summer, ever since I'd talked my Dad into giving me the helmets and lamps as toys, hadn't done it earlier because we'd needed to argue about whether or not we should, Kenny and me for it, Micky and John against.

  Now that we were in, Micky seemed to calm down looking around at wet, slimy old walls, at the big, rotten looking timbers, at the veins of color, red and green, in the gray rock walls. What were they mining down here? Clay? Doesn't look like clay.

  Behind us, I could hear Johnny whispering to Ken, “We're just going to get hurt down here. What happens if there's a cave-in? You ever think of that?"

  Kenny said, “You were brave enough at the top of the cliff."

  “That's different."

  When I looked at Micky, he was smirking again, and rolling his eyes.

  I think he's always happiest if someone's more afraid than he is, and it doesn't matter who.

  The tunnel ended abruptly, widening out into a sort of a room, with wooden walls and a wooden floor, another tunnel entrance black and empty in the far wall. Johnny stepped around me into the light, walking to the center of the room, his concerns overcome by obvious curiosity, and said, “Wonder what this place was for?"

  I said, “Bunk room maybe."

  Micky said, “There's a bulletin board with paper still on it over there.” He took a couple of steps toward it, and stopped suddenly, looking down at his feet. Bounced a little. Stopped. “This floor's got a little give to it."

  I laughed. “Maybe we better not stand too close together?"

  Kenny said, “Don't stand next to Desta, anyway!"

  That got a show of teeth.

  Something made a low creaking sound, almost like a painful groan.

  Johnny opened his mouth and took a deep breath, said, “Um..."

  There was a loud crack! and he went down like he was on an elevator, straight down through the floor, posed like a statue, mouth open, blue eyes popping, curly red hair flapping like a flag as it went down in the dark.

  Thump.

  Nothing.

  I said, “Oh, man. ..."

  The floor made another creak, higher pitched this time.

  Kenny said, “Alan?"

  “Hang on.” I took a step toward the hole, felt the floor shift, got down on my hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way. There was nothing but black down the hole where Johnny had gone. No help from the carbide lamp, which sputtered and flickered when I tried to look down. I took my helmet off, laying it on the floor next to the hole, and said, “Ken? I need your flashlight."

  H
e crawled over and handed it to me, while Micky stood rooted to the floor, halfway between us and the tunnel entrance. When I took the flashlight, I could see Micky was looking at the tunnel, not me.

  There was nothing down the hole but dust, all lit up in the flashlight beam, blocking passage of the light.

  Kenny said, “Oh, shit. Alan..."

  The room made a tortuous squeak, like someone pulling a hundred nails all at once, and I felt the floor start to tilt.

  Micky yelled, “I'm getting out of here!"

  The entire universe went snap-crackle-pop, and I suddenly went head down, the flashlight beam spinning crazily as I lost my grip. I think I said, “Fuck,” heard Kenny gabble something like “Shame a yizz..."

  Maybe something hit me in the head then.

  I sure don't remember.

  * * * *

  I opened my eyes on utter black, lying on what felt like rocks and old broken bricks, ears ringing, head spinning, smelling something like dust, something like gunpowder, something like the smell of a nosebleed. I sniffed, but there wasn't any blood in my nose, as far as I could tell.

  There was a scuffling sound somewhere, something like breathing, a vague little bit of something like a whisper, a rattling sound.

  I whispered, “Shit,” to myself, quietly, putting a hand up to my head, my bare head, trying to sit up somehow.

  I heard Kenny's voice in the dark, kind of muffled, “Hang on. I think I...” More rattling noises. “Jesus..."

  I felt something in me try to boil up in a giggle as I sat on the bricks and rocks, rubbing a lump on my temple, so I said, “Kenny, you're a Jew. You're not supposed to say that."

  “Fuck you."

  “That's much better."

  There was a squeaking sound, another rattle, and suddenly the flashlight clicked on, shining up through yellow-lit dust, lighting up Kenny's face from below, making him look like a hollow-eyed ghoul. A ghoul in an old leather football helmet. “Damn. I thought it was broken."