“Handy” was understating it by a couple of orders of magnitude, in Sheela’s opinion. She didn’t think there’d been a machine built that he couldn’t fix. It was a good quality for the mission’s primary equipment maintenance engineer to have. She nodded for him to continue.
“Well, the thing is,” Cam shrugged, “I never really had to work at it. I’ve just always seemed to know what was going on with a piece of equipment. I mean, I had to look, but still, I had an idea of where to look. Just now, though, going through the pre-flight, there was a glitch in one of the compressors, and you know, I didn’t have a clue.” He shook his head, “Not a clue.” He shrugged again. “Anyway, it was a weird thing. I thought it might relate.”
“Maybe. I’ve told you that magic hangs around you, even if you say you can’t sense it.” He made a face at her, and she laughed. “I know, I know, you don’t believe me, but I think that the ‘knowledge’ of what’s going on with a machine is how magic communicates with you. And it does relate to what I said about magic tricks. After all, you need to know what’s going on with a machine.”
Early in the training, about the third or fourth time somebody asked her to do a “trick,” she’d tried to explain that magic didn’t work like that. Magic responded to need, and intent, and purpose. She’d had a hard time coming up with an analogy that humans might understand. “It’s like, oh . . . like asking a horse to jump a fence when there isn’t any fence. Or asking a sheepdog to round up the flock when there aren’t any sheep. It can’t figure out what you need it to do, because there’s nothing that needs doing.”
That had satisfied them, so she’d left it at that. Even though it was really only part of it. There were some mages who could fool magic into doing tricks, but it was frowned on. Sheela more than frowned on it—she detested anyone who would do such a thing. It was a betrayal of the relationship between magic and mages. Magic sought the company of those who could sense it, use it, direct it. It wanted that connection. Even more, it wanted to be useful. To take advantage of that to trick it into doing something purposeless, was just . . . wrong.
“Hey,” Cam touched her arm, “guess we better get strapped down.”
Sheela started out of her reverie at his touch and looked around. Somehow, they’d made it to Hab Two’s core without her noticing. She grinned at him as he pushed off toward his quarters. “Sorry. Day-dreaming. See you later, and we’ll talk more.” She grabbed a handhold and launched herself in the opposite direction, toward her own quarters.
The crew had been assigned quarters within the two habs without regard to mission function, but Sheela suspected that the crew would sort themselves out into the “lab coats” and the “hard hats” before they passed the moon’s orbit. That’s what they’d done during the mission training, anyway. Not that the hard hats were really “grunts,” though they called themselves that, too. They all had advanced degrees and a record of accomplishments to prove their abilities. It was just that, with a primary mission of building a settlement capable of supporting 3,000 humans in two years, there would indeed be a lot of grunting going on.
Sheela’s problem was, she didn’t know which group she belonged to. Although she had PhDs in several of the life sciences—elves took a long time to mature, and she was nearly twice as old as most of her fellow crew members—her primary assignment was agronomy. She was basically the gardener, in charge of setting up and running the greenhouse. Of course, first they had to build the greenhouse. So that put her in the hard hat category. But she was also secondary for medical services, which was more like lab coat territory. Well, she’d just stick with Cam. That decided, she suited up, SOP during maneuvers, tapped the com button on the side of the helmet to open—also SOP—and set the bunk into its acceleration couch configuration.
It didn’t take long to settle into shipboard routine. Most of the crew members had no real flight duties. Their time was spent training for their backup positions and training their own backups. Thus it was that Sheela spent far less time with Cam than she’d have liked, and far more time than she’d have liked with Violet Mandel—“Shrieking Violet,” in the privacy of Sheela’s mind. Vi had been needling her since the training started, more than a year ago now. Nothing overt, that she could be called on. Just constant little digs. Maybe she just hated elves. Some humans did. But Violet was also a backup for Medical Services, so they trained together most of the time. Sheela was quite fond of Avasa Dalal, the primary doctor, and another one of those magic-attracting solid humans. But, since most of her time with Ava included Vi, that wasn’t as pleasant as it could have been. Nor did it help that Vi was better than she was. Sheela still had to fight that momentary impulse to use magic. It slowed down her reaction time, a bad thing in situations where speed counted.
They’d only been out a week when the first radiation warning came. Six hours in the close quarters of the core with Vi and six other people—none of whom were Cam; he’d been up in Hab One when the alarm sounded—hadn’t helped Sheela’s temper. When the all-clear sounded, Sheela went to her quarters with a damp towel and wiped down, then she headed for the wardroom for a bite. She heard Vi’s grating voice before she got there.
“I bet she used magic to get on the mission,” Vi was saying. She was sitting at one of the tables, with her back to the entry, talking to Ava. “You know, messed with their minds,” Vi added, making a flicking “woo-woo” gesture with one hand. Ava looked up and saw Sheela standing there, and made a shushing sound, nodding her head at the door. Vi turned around, and then smirked at Sheela’s glare, unrepentant.
Enough!
The last, thin thread of her control snapped at Vi’s sneering dismissal of Sheela’s years of studying human sciences and the past year of struggling not to use magic. Two long strides brought her to Vi’s side. She grabbed Vi’s shirt and hauled her to her feet. “I didn’t need magic to earn a place on this mission, and I certainly don’t need magic to deal with you,” she ground out, her other hand closing into a fist. But her intention to throw the punch that would wipe that smirk off Vi’s face got lost in the sudden realization that it was true. She didn’t need magic. Of course, she’d joined the mission on the assumption that she could live without magic, but she’d never really believed it until this moment.
Sheela carefully unwound her fingers from Vi’s shirt, noting with a small satisfaction that the smirk was gone anyway. “Ah, you’re not worth it.” She turned around to leave, and found Cam standing in the doorway, grinning at her. “What?” she demanded.
“ ’Bout time,” was all he said.
Sheela suited up and cycled into the unpressurized bay to check the pods containing her seeds one more time before she had to strap in for the orbital insertion maneuvers. Most of the bay’s floor space was taken up by the ship-to-surface shuttle that would ferry the crew assigned to Hab Two down to the surface, while Hab One was flown down to join the other two Habs left from previous missions. Pods of supplies that couldn’t be sent in advance—including, most important to her, the seedstocks for the greenhouse—lined the walls, held in place by thick cables. As she came around the nose of the shuttle, movement over by the launch tube caught her attention. Cam’s bright red suit was inside it, up to the waist. No doubt Cam was making his own last minute checks.
There was no air to carry the sound of the snapping cable; it was the jerk of the pod directly above the launch tube breaking loose that drew Sheela’s eye. It dropped slowly in the low gravity, but it massed enough to crush Cam. In a panic, she thrust out her hand and reached for it before overriding the impulse and tapping the com button on her helmet.
“Cam!”
She heard a “clunk” over the com as her shout startled him, then he clumsily backed out of the tube and looked around. She pointed up at the pod, nearly upon him now, and shouted, “Move!” He looked up, and reacted instantly, diving to the side to get out of its way.
He almost made it.
The hard case of the boot had protected his
foot, but his leg was pulped from mid-calf down to the ankle.
It took three of them to get the pod off his leg and carry him up to the tiny med bay in Hab One. Sheela stood beside Cam, holding his hand in anguished silence, as Ava examined him, and gave him the grim news.
“I’m sorry, Cam. I can’t save it.”
Cam, white-faced with pain, just nodded. Sheela suspected he’d figured that out already. “Now?” he asked.
Ava tapped her finger against her chin. “No. I don’t have time before we start insertion maneuvers. I’ll wait till we’re in orbit. You can ride out the maneuvers right here.”
She turned to Sheela, “And you can’t. I’m sorry, but you’d better go get strapped in now.”
Sheela made her way to her bunk, and suited up for maneuvers in a stupor. Cam’s injury was her fault. If she hadn’t wasted time trying to stop the pod with magic, he might have had time to get out of the way. If she had been able to use magic, she’d have been able to stop the pod. Or at the very least, heal his leg. Her dream—of being the first elf on Mars, of proving that elves could live without magic—that selfish, prideful dream, had both crippled Cam, and made it permanent. She lay in her bunk, paying no attention to the maneuvers and the accompanying com chatter. She was too busy trying to find a bottom to her despair.
Her fog continued while the crew prepped Hab One for its descent to the surface; while she cleaned and locked down her quarters on Hab Two; while she suited up and took her place on the shuttle. She passed Cam’s empty seat on the way to her own. He would be going down on the Hab, instead, missing his right leg from the knee down, and strapped into a med bay bed. Ava had offered to let her assist in the amputation, but . . . Vi was the better scrub nurse. Whatever her personal feelings for the woman, Sheela knew that. And she wanted Cam to have the best.
As the shuttle approached Mars, Sheela’s mental fog lifted as she slowly became aware of . . . something. An insane, alien muttering, disturbing the silence in that space where magic used to be. A moment more, and she was sure: magic. It wasn’t like any magic she’d ever known. This magic was wild, chaotic, unstructured—and it had its own purpose. It wanted her with a need so strong it nearly paralyzed her.
It clearly was aware of her and of her ability to sense it.
Well, that answers that question. I doubt that any elves have dissolved into this magic, she thought, in an absurd tangent.
The magic reached for her, jolting the shuttle.
“Wind shear!” a voice shouted in her ear. Another voice disputed it.
“Not. Wind.” she forced out. “Magic.” That was all the attention she could afford her crewmates. She reached back to the magic, sending a soothing tendril of calmness toward it.
When it felt her touch, the magic redoubled its frantic efforts to reach to her. Oops. She felt the magic’s overwhelming need to be with her. To be not alone anymore.
Time slowed. She became hyperaware of everything around her, even as she maintained her focus on mastering the magic, soothing it with her presence without letting it slip from her control. The shuttle rocked and bucked in the magic’s need, throwing her against the restraints. Metal shrieked with strain. Slowly, slowly, she felt the magic begin to respond. The rocking lessened. Metal-shriek turned to relieved groan as the strain eased . . .
Then the magic, in some misunderstanding she couldn’t spare the thought to sort out, altered some vital component of the engines. Sheela was enveloped in sudden quiet, broken by the gasps of the other crew members coming through the com. She didn’t know enough about the engines to direct the magic to fix whatever it had done.
“Do something!” someone shouted. Sheela felt the magic cringe away from the fear in that voice. The shuttle slued and dropped, tilted nearly vertical.
No! Sheela fought to control her own fear; struggled to bind the magic to her purpose. But it was too strong, its need too great, to be controlled that way. Maybe more elves, working in concert, could do it. Here, now, there was only Sheela. And only one way to make her purpose the magic’s own.
Sheela felt tears prick at her eyes.
Please understand, Father. I must go.
Before she could change her mind, Sheela sent her self into the magic. She felt a rushing out of her awareness that was also an infilling of something else, something more . . . then suddenly, she was the magic. But somehow, she was still Sheela, too. She hadn’t expected that. Maybe it wouldn’t last for long. No matter, she had time enough to do what she needed to do. Sheela/Magic cradled the dead weight of the shuttle, and gently lowered it to the Martian surface.
There. Whatever else happened, her crewmates could handle it now. And she would help, if she could, in her own way.
Time passed.
Sheela/Magic kept the little nodes of Other-consciousness within her awareness. They were scant company; she could not truly communicate with them. Still, she tried to make her presence felt. Sometimes, she touched the slightly brighter nodes that were Cam and Ava. Sometimes, she even felt a response. Sometimes she sensed Cam’s fledgling attempts to reach for something with magic, and reached back, to place it in his hand. And if Cam’s stump healed overnight, and if the plants grew a little healthier than expected, and if the oxygen generators worked a little better, and if sandstorms never seemed to come close enough to the domes to damage them . . . well, perhaps the others might believe that it wasn’t just good luck.
Time passed.
And then, a great brilliance flared in Sheela/Magic’s awareness, as the first group of colonists was ferried down. She restrained herself, mindful of the near-disaster of Christa’s shuttle’s descent. The colonists would be even more at risk than her crewmates had been—they wouldn’t be wearing suits. Three hundred lives, with only a thin metal shell protecting them from the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. Sheela/Magic waited, long, endless moments while the colony ship’s shuttle descended; while it touched down and rolled to a stop; while the gangway was extended and pressurized.
Finally.
The shuttle’s hatch opened. A great gaggle of humans came through, heading for the processing desk. Following them came the source of the brilliance that had dazzled her, a group of about fifty elves. One of them, a kind-faced, silver-eyed elf, stepped to one side to let the others pass him by. A slow smile spread over his features as he cocked his head.
Sheela/Magic reached to tickle the tips of her father’s ears.
Angels and Moths
Costi Gurgu
It’s night, it’s quiet, but above all, it’s freezing. I lie tightly curled in my bed. My stomach grumbles and my teeth chatter. The cold bedsheet seems damp. I feel someone touching my back; I recognize her touch. She draws me into her arms to warm me. It’s a familiar feeling, but it’s impossible. Tears spring to my eyes as the person at my back begins whispering a lullaby and rocking me in her silky arms.
“Dana?” My voice quavers.
The lullaby stops. It is again quiet and freezing. I turn over. It’s her!
“What are you doing here?” I blurt. The question seems absurd, but my wife smiles. “You’re dead,” I tell her quietly.
The smile vanishes and she nestles against my chest, shivering. I take her in my arms, remembering the cry, then the sound of crushed bones. I remember the outside intervention outfit lying on the morgue’s metal table, soiled, torn, its visor smashed. I remember the mutilated body pulled with difficulty from the ragged outfit, her face the only thing still whole, but scratched by dozens of frozen shards, the mouth twisted in horror, the staring eyes frosted. It had been a stupid accident, something that should not have happened. But there was Dana, lying on the morgue’s table . . .
“You’re dead,” I repeat. Teardrops tremble on my cheeks as my hands slowly touch her hair.
“Hush,” the woman whispers, and places a cold finger on my lips.
Somebody else slinks into the bed, on my other side. I try to turn and see who it is, but suddenly the room fills with bodies
and I can’t move. I’m suffocating under the growing weight. Panic darkens my sight, and I tremble. My mouth gapes, searching for air. I try to cry for help, but I have no strength left; I choke. I’m losing . . .
I wake with a start and breathe greedily. It’s night, the silence dark and heavy. It’s not cold—it’s actually very, very hot. Breathing easier now, I fall back on the pillow. It’s wet. I haven’t had a nightmare in months, and never one so vivid—and never one I remember after I wake up! I’d thought I was over the loss of Dana, yet I’ll probably never be. I’ll only get used to the pain, never forget it.
I’m completely awake now. Sighing, I stretch toward the night table and switch on the lamp. In the light, I notice something on my pajama sleeve. I look closely, see small, black letters. And not only on the sleeves, but also on the shirt, on the bottoms—I jump out of bed, my heart thundering in my chest. The sheets! Scribbled all over them are small lines of letters, with what seems to be the same three words repeated line after line, column after column.
It’s another nightmare! I’d laugh, but fear strangles me. The walls, the night tables, the curtains, the lamps—the three words venture into the tightest corner, the smallest cranny. The whole room is covered with the same lines, although they seem written by different hands. No two look alike, yet all are the same message: I forgive you; sometimes, We forgive you.
I withdraw, panting—I need to wake up!
Closing the bedroom door behind me, I look around, terrified, but the living room is clean. I rip my pajamas off, open the bedroom door and throw them inside, then I close it again. I crouch naked in a corner, pressing my back against the cold wall. I pull my knees up to my chin, rest my forehead on them, and close my eyes. I remain still, trying to control my breathing.
Ages of Wonder Page 27