Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  They were still mulling it over when someone knocked on the door. It opened and Wennda came in, smiling like someone with a secret she couldn’t wait to tell. “I brought you all a visitor,” she said, and stepped aside to let somebody enter the room.

  The room went graveyard quiet. A few men slowly stood.

  Francis Owens, tail gunner on the bomber Fata Morgana, stood looking back at them. Uniform repaired and cleaned. Boots polished parade-dress bright. A white gauze dressing covered his left eye. He wore no other bandages or dressings. Not so much as a Band-Aid. No scars, scabs, scrapes, or scratches. Not even a bruise. Cornsilk stubble where his scalp had been flayed to bone above his ruined eye.

  The crewmen stared at him in uncharacteristic silence. As if some certain ghost had come calling, pale and tall and blond among them like some revenant messenger. Their quick glances among themselves said more than mere words could. Even Farley hesitated. Francis had been flayed, more torn up by shrapnel than any man he’d ever seen who’d still been alive. And now here he was, three days later, all walking talking googly grin and skinny height of Francis Eugene Owens, white gauze neatly taped across one eye and not another mark on him. That wasn’t a medical miracle, it was goddamn witchcraft. Surely even Lazarus’ wife had pulled up short for a few seconds before giving him a hug and a welcome back, honey.

  Finally Shorty stepped close to Francis and squinted at him like a man holding a counterfeit bill up to the light. He poked the coltish tail gunner in the shoulder as if testing his solidity. Then he put his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Well, hell,” he said. “If they can fix you up this good, how come you’re still so damn ugly?”

  Francis flushed. “Aw, gee whiz,” he said. “Lay off, will ya?”

  The crew roared.

  *

  “I woke up,” Francis told the crew, “and I was floating in a fish tank full of Jell-O! I was breathing it. Like a fish! Can you imagine? The doc had to come and calm me down. A black lady doctor, cap!”

  “She did a fine job on you, Francis,” Farley said. “You look good as new.” He hesitated. “It’s a tough break about the eye, but I’d say you’re really pretty lucky.”

  Francis grinned and ducked his head. “Aw, heck, it’s not so bad,” he said. “The doc said the light’ll bother me for a couple days after the patch comes off, but then it ought to be just fine.”

  “That’s terrific,” Farley replied, “I’m glad it won’t—” He stopped. “She said the light will bother it?” he asked.

  Francis nodded eagerly. “She told me it’ll tear up something awful, but that just means it’s healing.”

  “Healing.” Farley stared at the patch. They all stared at the patch. Because what was beneath it five days ago had not been an eye. It had been a stringy, bloody mess clinging to Francis’ flayed cheek like the tentacles of a jellyfish.

  Farley tipped his cap back and scratched his head. “Doc say when the dressing can come off?” he asked casually.

  “Oh, not till tomorrow, at least.”

  “Tomorrow.” Farley looked at Wennda.

  She shrugged. “I said we’d take care of him,” she said.

  *

  Farley lay awake. The man who could sleep like a baby the night before a mission now found himself staring up toward the barely discernible ceiling while his mind hummed and sparked like an overdriven dynamo. Around him in the dimlit room his crew slept on their ingeniously designed bunks, a few of them fitful, a few snoring, most of them out like lights.

  The day’s events had gone well and the crew seemed confident that they could be helpful here, if not indispensable. Their stories were tiles in a mosaic that was forming a picture of who these people were, how they lived, how they’d stayed alive so long. All of it useful. All of it paling beside Boney’s knockout reply to Broben.

  “Nobody on earth could take a picture from outer space.”

  “Nobody on earth in 1943 could.”

  Farley realized that Francis’ arrival had derailed any further discussion of the idea that they had somehow landed in the future. He also understood that this was how the crew had wanted it. The future, another planet, the sky over Germany, it didn’t make a difference. What mattered was getting out. Getting back alive.

  But the notion ate at Farley. Germany was just another country. Even a different planet was just another place. You could at least imagine getting back. But as far as Farley knew the only direction you could travel in time was forward, at a steady speed of sixty minutes an hour. The future was a one-way trip. An inevitable destination. But the past didn’t even exist anymore. It wasn’t another country, another planet. It simply wasn’t. There was no more there there.

  Farley felt a blind panic lurking, like some stalking beast outside a cabin probing for an opening, a weakness. Any way in.

  He fought it down and frowned up at the darkness. Who knew how late it was? Three a.m.? Four? Would there even be dawn light in this alien and yet familiar place? Certainly there would be no growing birdsong, no morning dew, no rising breeze.

  Wennda, he suddenly remembered, had asked him out.

  As the crew had been passing Francis around like some kind of party novelty, scrutinizing his patch and his baby-pink skin, practically sniffing him like doubtful apes, Wennda had pulled Farley aside and asked, “Would you like to go somewhere together tomorrow? Before your meeting with my father?”

  “Sure,” Farley had replied, distracted by Francis, by the bombshell Boney had dropped into the discussion about still being in Europe. “Where’d you have in mind?”

  “Well, there’s no out to go to around here,” she’d said, “but I can come pretty close.”

  Farley had absently agreed, not registering Wennda’s faint disappointment, and they’d set an early date, and only now did Farley remember previously telling Wennda, When you take someone out, you go somewhere together. So you can get to know each other better.

  Captain Midnight, you are one magnificent lunkhead, Farley thought.

  Nobody on earth in 1943 could take a photograph from outer space.

  The welling panic threatened once again.

  Tomorrow, Farley told himself, the commander’s scientists will tell me more about how we got here and how we can get back. They’ll have equations and gold-plated words. They’ll have ingenious theories and speculations, clever solutions that will work as long as their hypotheses are true.

  I’m a pilot, Farley told the dark above him. Show me the route that gets my men back home. Show me the map that shows the way to 1943.

  twenty-one

  Wennda led Farley along the strip of savannah bordering the rectangular ocean. She pointed out features and functions, explaining their role in the web of the Dome’s ecology, as they headed toward the artificial cliffs built into the tiny rain forest. She had been worried that Farley would sense her nervousness, but he nodded mutely at her compulsive monologue. He seemed preoccupied, and he looked tired and distracted, as if he had not slept well.

  Wennda hadn’t slept all that well since discovering these strange men, either.

  Someone checking a water condenser in the savannah waved to her. She squinted and saw that it was Ingra, pregnant out to here. She waved back. Ingra dropped her hand and continued to look. Staring at Farley, of course.

  Lang and Grobe and several others had made it clear that they thought Farley and his crew were a danger in themselves. In this frail and tightly managed world, strangers burdened an infrastructure already operating near its limits—and these particular strangers were heavily armed soldiers of uncertain origin.

  Wennda understood their apprehension but she didn’t share it. She had spent more time with the crew than anyone else had, except possibly Yone, who seemed to have found a kinship of outsiders with them. They were loud and rude and blunt, but they were highly trained and highly skilled, disciplined when need arose, and admirable fighters. There was a kind of benign arrogance about them that managed to be charming and of
f-putting at the same time. If you were on their side they would help you, simple as that.

  There was also something very alive about them. They were spontaneous, emotional, sentimental. They told stupid jokes and played childish gags. They laughed in the face of danger—literally laughed—even though they seemed perfectly aware of the stakes. Her own people seemed so deadly dull beside them.

  She knew that her father’s cautious approval of Farley and his crew masked an eagerness to be rid of them. She couldn’t really blame him. Even if they were not dangerous themselves, they had certainly brought danger with them. The captured bomber had upset a long-running stalemate, and now costly and potentially disastrous action had to be taken. Wennda had been surprised when her father had assigned her to oversee the crew’s integration, and was even more surprised that he had not caused some wedge to be driven between his daughter and the leader of these disrupting strangers. Perhaps he was less concerned because he knew they would be leaving soon.

  Wennda felt a stab of unreasoning panic at the thought of Farley leaving. In a few hours he would be meeting her father and his team to put the final touches on the plan for recovering the aircraft and attempting to return to wherever they had come from. If the plan succeeded she would never see him again. Of course, if the mission did not succeed there was a good chance she would never see him again, either. Which was why she intended to be on the mission.

  Meantime Wennda was convinced that the crew themselves weren’t going to harm her city or her people. This morning two of them were back in the Ag fields, spraying liquid detergent as a disinfectant against crop mold. At Fabrication, one of them was recoiling an ancient copper-wire motor while another brought new kinds of food to scan into the bioprinters. Dr. Manday was sampling DNA from the wounded soldier for cloning tissue cultures, blood plasma, organ budding, white-cell bacterial resistance, and other organics that would help their fragile population. And it was looking possible to get the eleven o’clock sun back.

  Wennda looked up at the familiar facsimile sky. But not today, please, she pleaded silently.

  Farley looked up at the Dome when she did. “Gosh,” he said, “another nice day. Can you believe it?”

  She sensed he was poking fun, but she wasn’t sure exactly how. She felt that a lot around him. “It’s a day,” she said noncommittally.

  “Don’t you ever miss bad weather?”

  “I can’t miss it if I’ve never experienced it.”

  “Then you don’t know what you’re missing.” He squinted up. “A good rainstorm’s terrific if you don’t have to fly through it.”

  “We have rain. Temperature differences between the top and bottom of the Dome create evaporation and circulation, and pressure differences move warm wet air from the rain forest to the more arid side. So precipitation spreads where it’s needed.”

  Farley made a face. “That’s not rain. That’s, I don’t know. Mist. Drizzle. You need a toad-strangler sometimes. Thunder. Lightning. The wrath of God.”

  “I’ve seen lightning outside,” she said. “It’s very dangerous.”

  “It’s good to be reminded that someone else is running the show.”

  Wennda frowned. “But we are running the … show.” She gestured expansively.

  He gave a little smile. “This show,” he said, and held thumb and forefinger close together.

  And that was what disturbed Wennda’s sleep. Not Farley’s crew, not their weaponry, not some danger that followed their arrival here. Farley himself.

  All her life she had been restless—physically contained, mentally constrained. Her reason told her that the Dome was all there was. Her nature wanted more. Farley came from more. From somewhere unimaginably large, strange, free. Wennda glimpsed that wider world in his every move, in the texture of his speech. When she viewed her world through his eyes it was unfamiliar, enigmatic, clever. Yet it also became very small and rundown. Farley’s very character seemed larger than what she had known, and it spoke to that restless imp in her that yearned for more. At first she hadn’t listened. Now it was all she could hear.

  *

  The air grew humid as they left the savannah behind and entered the miniature rain forest. Three-fourths of the Dome’s plant life lived here, breathing out oxygen, filtering water. A little recirculating river ran through it, feeding into the strip of marshland and eventually the tiny ocean. The city’s only trees stood tall here. Lush greenery spread everywhere.

  They came to the base of the russet-colored cliffs amid the teeming forest.

  “This is nice,” said Farley. “We should have a picnic.”

  “All right,” said Wennda. “What’s a picnic?”

  He grinned. “It’s a fancy word for sitting on the grass and eating lunch.”

  “I’m afraid there isn’t much grass. Is it still a picnic if you eat in a tree?”

  He laughed. She liked seeing the worry lift from his face. “I don’t know another word for that, so sure, why not?”

  “I used to come here at night sometimes,” Wennda told him. “I’d run through the bushes and lie down in the grass and listen to the river.”

  He glanced around. “I can see why you’d like that. It’s as close to feeling like you’re outside as you can get in this bell jar.”

  “Outside’s not a bit like this.”

  He nodded and looked sad. “Then that makes this place even more special,” he said.

  “I always thought it was strange,” she said, “how it’s the same age as the rest of the Dome, but it feels ancient.”

  “Maybe there’s something old inside you that remembers it.”

  She grinned. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. Something older in me that remembers.” She turned a slow circle in the greenery. “I never told anyone about it before. It sounds—” she spread her hands “—well, odd.”

  “ ‘A long time ago,’ ” said Farley, “ ‘when we all lived in the forest.…’ ”

  She clapped her hands. “You really do understand,” she said.

  “Well, all that book time had to pay off someday.”

  Her look grew serious. “I don’t mean the trees. I mean me. You understand me.”

  “I don’t know that I’d go that far. But I’m working on it.” His smile became sly. “So,” he said. “What now?”

  Something in her thrilled at his now. She resisted an urge to glance at her chronometer. There was time. It would be fine. But in truth there was no time. Every second brought his leaving closer.

  Wennda pointed at the base of the cliff. “Now,” she said, “we climb.”

  *

  The cliffs rose a hundred fifty feet. They looked real, but there was a convenience to their structure that belied nature. Here terraces and tiers, gouges and cracks and outcroppings did double duty as steps, handholds, even a little amphitheater and benches. Farley admired their design as he followed Wennda along the narrow route up the artificial cliffs. He was glad to be alone with her, glad that by the end of the day a plan for recovering his bomber would be in place. Farley would be getting weapons, a squad, tactical help, technical help from the science boys on how to fly back through the vortex. Meantime his crew were earning their keep, and the CO seemed pleased by their participation and not even especially bothered about his daughter fraternizing with the Barbarian from the Sky. No one was dead, there was hope of getting home, and Farley was out in the sunshine with his dreamgirl. He couldn’t stop worrying about getting back, about getting his men back—but when you thought about it, there were worse things than not being able to get back to the war.

  *

  Wennda looked at the ten o’clock sun panel glowing on the other side of the sky, then glanced back at Farley. He seemed lost in thought. She turned forward and kept going. At least they were alone up here.

  She thought about when she used to come up here at night to run through the bushes and lie in the grass and listen to that lulling ancient voice. Often she would take her clothes off so that she could fe
el the world against her skin. Her skin against the world. Something old in her remembering. She wondered why she hadn’t mentioned that to Farley.

  *

  The top was flat and bare and maybe twenty feet square. Farley took in the miniature city, the ordered plots of crops, the rectangle of ocean, strips of marshland and savannah, the clustered buildings. You could easily believe you looked out across a thoughtfully patterned vista from a thousand feet up, but the true scale quickly asserted itself. The sky’s falseness was more apparent here, the nearer panels’ geometry impossible to ignore. Several of them dully reflected light from the ten o’clock sun on the other side of the dome.

  Farley put his hands on his hips. “I like the view,” he said. He turned to her, already half grinning and intending to say, “And the city looks nice, too.” He stopped.

  The feeling he was standing in his dream of her was overwhelming. This place he’d never been before, never could have seen. A world unto itself.

  “I thought a break would do you some good,” Wennda said, and broke his sense of déjà vu.

  “It’s gonna feel like R & R on someone else’s dime.”

  “I’ll assume that’s good.”

  “It’s terrific.”

  She beamed. “Come on.” She took his hand and led him to the cliff edge facing away from the buildings and fields. They sat with their feet dangling and they looked down on valances of mist among the bushes below. Farley’s eyes told him he looked out over a vast space. Other senses told him that a massive wall was near.

  Wennda leaned forward to look down at the mist and felt his grip tighten. His hand felt warm and strange and comfortable. “I won’t fall,” she said.

  His face was a caricature of disappointment. “Not even a little bit?”

  She rolled her eyes. There it was, in five words. Confidence, playfulness, protectiveness, and utter difference.

  “I don’t get to do things like this with people,” she said, looking down at tendril clouds fifty feet below. “With men. I’m the commander’s daughter.”

  “I can see how that would have its good and bad sides,” he said beside her.