by IGMS
"It has been decided," said the Wraith to Diallo.
"What has been decided?"
"Give me your notebook."
Diallo opened up his backpack and took out his notebook. The robot turned past the drawings of spaceships and never-before-seen beasts to a blank page. With rapid-fire pulses of its commlaser it burned a map.
"You are here," said the Wraith pointing to a little star. "You must go here," it said pointing to a bigger star. The Wraith handed him back his notebook and then the wooden case that contained the carved chess set.
"I can't accept it," said Diallo.
"There are plenty of bones in the world. I will make another," said the Wraith. "When I first met you I thought I would carve you into a pawn."
"And now," said Diallo.
"Now I would carve you into a king. Goodbye, Diallo. Give my regards to the Tutor."
"I will," he said, confused. His sister, Abeni, possessed the Tutor and after coming so far he had no intention of going home. "Goodbye, Wraith."
Diallo walked along the business road, no more than fifteen miles from his destination. A mongrel bitch, her teats heavy with milk, trotted out of the woods. She paced Diallo, head held low, ready to dash into the dark.
"Food?" asked the dog.
Diallo stopped and shrugged off his backpack. He took out a packaged meal and handed it to the dog's mouth. The dog sat on her haunches and opened the plastic with dexterous paws and sniffed inside the package.
"Thank you," said the dog. She picked up the meal in her mouth and padded away into the brush.
Diallo left the business road and entered the winding side streets of an unguarded residential area. He stopped at a park to eat dinner and rest a bit before he presented himself. He finished his last meal at a picnic table, then took off his shoes to wiggle his toes in the moist, green grass. He crawled into a child's play structure and shimmied through tubes and climbed ladders. He perched in a castle turret that commanded the entire park. Later, teenagers congregated on the picnic tables and listened to horrid atonal music. They drank each other's blood with lab grown fangs and sipped beer from plastic bottles. They laughed and cursed and then disappeared. Diallo thought them strange and then fell asleep with his head on his backpack.
The next morning he woke to the sound of sprinklers spraying the emerald green grass. He climbed out of the play structure and, to his horror, realized that he had left his shoes outside. He searched to no avail. He left the park, dodging the arcs of water, and walked the final four miles.
His destination did not look like a place where one became an astronaut. He checked his map. A small wood-clad bungalow sheltered under the canopy of an ancient oak. Gnarled roots, like the scaled backs of sea serpents, broached the emerald green grass.
Diallo climbed the porch stairs to the front door. Ceramic planters, bursting with flowers and herbs, flanked the door. Wind chimes in the shape of stars and crescent moons tinkled in the breeze. He grabbed the brass knocker and rapped three times.
The door opened, and a black man, white of beard and hair, stood before him.
"Who are you?" asked the man.
"My name is Diallo Joseph Truman Mokele and I have come here to be an astronaut," said Diallo.
"Diallo," said the man. He looked to the sky for a moment as if considering the plausibility of a potential astronaut coming to his doorstep. "It is too early in the morning to be an astronaut. And why would you want to be one? It is nothing but hard work and suffering. You should go back home and farm metals with your father and have babies. You will have an easy life." The man looked at Diallo's feet. "Besides you have no shoes. Whoever heard of an astronaut with no shoes?"
"I do not want an easy life and I don't think shoes will keep me from being an astronaut." He wondered how the man knew his father farmed metals, but he heard that American's always knew more than what they should.
"Maybe not Diallo, but you have to admit, you will need shoes sooner or later to walk on the moon," said the man.
"Perhaps," said Diallo considering the notion. "My father will make me shoes when he buys his fabricator."
"Maybe he will, but I am not so sure a simple fabricator can make astronaut shoes," said the man. "Why do you want to be an astronaut anyway?"
"I will be an astronaut like my father and his father before him."
"Ah, so you come from a long line of astronauts. It is the family trade, so to speak." The man smiled and Diallo knew he had won him over.
"Precisely, my father and his father have suffered and endured and made something of themselves and I, like them, have walked through strangeness and danger. That is what makes good astronauts."
"That might be important," conceded the man. "It might be the most important."
Diallo shuffled his bare dirty feet. "I will make my family proud when I take our name to the stars."
"I think they shall be proud of you when you tell them," said the man. "But first you will have breakfast and tell me how you came to my door."
"I took a test," said Diallo. He thought of the Tutor and the numerous lessons and questions that introduced him to possibilities he otherwise would never have dreamed of.
The man smiled. "It always begins with a test."
The man sat at his home workstation and reviewed his files. He leaned back in his chair and watched Diallo eat scrambled eggs and sweet cinnamon rolls. The boy came into possession of Tutor DX113-044 and exhibited remarkable scores in all areas of study. His sister, Abeni, the current possessor of the Tutor, showed even greater promise. He made a notation in the folder and closed it out.
The Tutors, clever machine intelligences, thrown into trash bins, scattered into war zones, abandoned in back alleys, and distributed to impoverished schools that had no right to such fabulous devices, suffered no fools in the pursuit of their mission. The violent slums of the tired, hungry, and hopeless proved the most fruitful hunting grounds for astronauts and explorers. Those that built comfortable nations in the past were the best candidates to build worlds for the future. So that is where the Tutors went. If a man dared to cross an ocean on a raft or if a woman risked her family trekking a desert, then odds were, they would make fine astronauts. Such people were cunning and resourceful and accustomed to hard decisions. Bereft of security and opportunity, they understood the value of such things.
They searched for ability and desire and then guided candidates to the man's front door. Not everyone survived; this world, still, was a dangerous place. Some abandoned their courage at their own thresholds, others were lost to the road, but enough made it that the program was worthwhile.
"Diallo, Diallo," said the man to himself. "You will make a fine astronaut. Eridani or Ceti or the place with just numbers, I don't know, and perhaps when you get to the world on the other end of the voyage you will found a nation. Oh, how I envy you."
The fabricator pinged.
The man turned off his workstation.
"Diallo," said the man. "Your shoes are ready."
Fantasiestück in A Major
by Bud Webster
Artwork by Jin Han
* * *
Andante: The Truth
Once there was a man who saw truth and was compelled to speak it. A great gift, you might think, but it's a terrible thing to always know the truth, and to have to say it.
He wasn't very smart; he wasn't handsome or witty; he wasn't possessed of a great personality. All he was, in fact, was dull and mundane.
That, and someone who saw truth and had to tell it.
Because of this, he had no friends, and few acquaintances -- fortunate, since he saw through the dissembling that friendship makes necessary. This made him sad in the way that rain makes a fish wet: in such an ocean of sadness, who notices a few more drops?
He began normally. He was born, diapered, and weaned. But when he learned to talk, his life changed forever.
His mother tickled him to make him laugh and said, "You're Mother's little angel sent s
traight from Heaven!" He would shake his head and say "Mother, there is no heaven." And his mother, dismayed and disturbed, sent him out to play.
His father would tousle his hair and say in gruff good humor, "Whose little man are you?" and the boy would answer, "I belong to Mother and the man next door." Shocked and hurt, his father turned from the boy who wasn't his son.
In school, he angered his teachers by saying "Columbus maimed the Indians who would not bring him gold," and "George Washington despised his mother." This was the truth, but legend is far easier to teach, and so his teachers reviled him.
Likewise, he horrified churchmen. "Your priests have been murderers and thieves," he said to them, "and your bibles composed of myths and hearsay. Whole civilizations have been wiped out in the names of your gods." And so they cursed him and sent him away.
And so it went. With the generals, he spoke of Ethan Allen's attempt to sell out to the British, of sailors sick from the radiation of "friendly" bomb tests. With the captains of industry he mentioned fortunes built on the broken backs of slaves, of children dying in unsafe mines and factories. With politicians, he simply shook his head and would not speak.
He could find no place where he wasn't met with sullen silence and anger, and so he searched for wisdom that might temper the truth. He walked the streets of cities, towns, and then smaller and smaller villages, asking wherever he went, "Are you wise? Are you the wisest you know?" All shook their heads and spoke of someone wiser still, somewhere down the road.
And at the end, he came to the last place. There, a man sat, naked, eyes closed, under a tree.
"Are you wise?" the man who could see the truth asked. "Are you the wisest you know?"
The naked man shrugged a shoulder and replied, "Wise? Hell, no. All I am is the last man in the last place."
The man who could see the truth shook his head and said, "I have traveled as far as there is to find you, and you're only an ex-bible salesman with pretensions of wisdom."
The naked man shrugged his other shoulder. "Then, you would seem to have a choice. You can piss off, and leave me to my pretensions, or you can take my place and continue your search." And with his eyes still closed, he stood and wandered off to another tree in another village.
The man who could see the truth thought. Then he removed his clothes, closed his eyes, and sat under the tree.
Sometime later, he heard someone approach. A woman said, "Are you the man who can see the truth?"
"I am," he replied.
"Can you tell me, then, what the Great Truth is?"
He plucked at the grass around his feet and considered the question, then opened his eyes and said, "The only Great Truth is that there is no Great Truth; there are only simple truths, which contain no more wisdom than they require to tell."
The woman shook her head in denial. "It can't be that easy. I've come too far for it to be. What of war? What of hate? Of poverty and disease?"
"All right," said the man who could see the truth. "The Truth is that all truths, great or small, are more annoying than enlightening, and that those who tell them are well meaning fools. Now, piss off and leave me to my own foolishness." And he closed his eyes again.
Sometime later, he heard someone else approach the tree. The man who could see truth, and was compelled to speak it, smiled.
Doloroso: The Dragon Slayer
There was once a man who slew dragons with despair. "You are so large," he'd say mournfully, shaking his head. "Don't you worry about your heart giving out?" And the dragon, sickened by the very idea of weakness in his flesh, would stop eating and waste away.
The man traveled all over the world, disposing of dragons wherever he found them. Now, killing dragons is a difficult task, no matter how you do it, because even though dragons begin their lives as men, they harden in mind and body as they age. Although not all men become dragons, it is true that all dragons were once men.
Once they change, dragons live for a very long time, and in that time accumulate great knowledge. However, few find wisdom, and this made his job easier, for knowledge without wisdom is a sharp weapon that can turn in the hand and stab deep.
He would climb a mountain to a dragon's lair and, upon entering it, stand quietly and stare at a spot just above the dragon's right shoulder. "Why are you staring?" the dragon would ask, momentarily distracted from annoyance by curiosity.
"Oh, it's probably nothing. Just a bruise on your shoulder." The man would shrug resignedly. "My father had one like it that turned to cancer and took him, but I wouldn't worry. It's only a slight discoloration, and dragons live forever, yes?" Then the man would sigh and turn away, and the dragon would fret and worry until, his mind on slow, agonizing death to the exclusion of all else, he would ram a mountain in the dark and break his neck.
The dragons didn't always die at once. Some took years, because sadness can be a slow, methodical poison. But they were no longer great, and no longer strong, and in time, they died.
So this man was much in demand, dragons being what dragons were. He was offered the hand of many a king's daughter, and many a fortune in gold, but he was a man with a calling and he turned them all down.
He slew dragons in many places for a long, long time, gaining fame with each death. He was feted and praised, knighted by royalty and respected by nobility. He learned much in his travels and was consulted by scholars from every land. He grew proud of this, and if there was a treasure in his life, it was the knowledge gained from a life spent killing dragons.
But knowledge is not wisdom, which you know, and it can stab very deeply indeed, which you also know, and what happened next was inevitable.
One day while sitting in a town square, thinking of his treasured knowledge, the man noticed a small boy staring at a spot just above his left eye.
"What are you staring at, boy?" he said, frowning.
"Oh, it's nothing, sir," the boy shrugged sadly, "probably. It's just that my mother, rest her soul, had such a swelling and discoloration before she fell to the plague. I wouldn't worry, though," the boy said. "You're great and strong, and undoubtedly very wise." And he walked away, shaking his head in resignation.
The man who slew dragons with despair sat very still for a long moment, and then got to his feet. He walked for hours until he reached the edge of a cliff, where he spread his wings and flew to a nearby mountain top. There, he turned his face to the rock and, in the fullness of time, died.
Scherzo: The Sleeper
There once was a man who slept for a billion years, and when he awoke, nothing much had changed.
That day began and ended like every other: indifferently. The sun rose. He awoke without anticipation, dressed without eagerness, kissed his wife without ardor, and left home for the city.
That evening, he returned, ate, and undressed for bed with the same lack of enthusiasm, and when he closed his eyes, had this dream:
He sat alone in a railway waiting room. Dusky light filtered in from outside, making soft shadows against the walls and floor. Across the room, an old woman scrubbed the empty benches with a stiff brush. Little by little, she made her way across. When she finally reached his bench, she dropped her brush back in the bucket and glared at him.
"You shouldn't have fallen asleep," she said in a low voice. "It's already been ten thousand years, and your civilization is long dead."
"Pardon?" the man asked.
She took a rag from her pocket and mopped sweat from her face.
"Your culture. It's faded into the mists of time, as they say. No more television, no more baseball, no PBS, no hole in the ozone." She wrung the rag, which was much wetter than it should have been, into the bucket. "All the damage you did has long since healed."
"But you said, 'ten thousand years'!" the sleeper exclaimed in distress.
The old woman looked at a watch pinned to her dress. "Hundred-fifty thousand, now." She chuckled. "Time flies."
"I'm asleep," the man said. "I'm dreaming."
"Yes, you ar
e. Nevertheless . . ." She shrugged.
"But how can I sleep for a hundred and fifty . . ."
"Million and a half."
". . . a million and a half years?" he cried aloud.
"You don't have to shout," she said. "I can hear you. Don't ask me how it happened, it's your dream. All I can tell you for sure is that time has passed. Your moon has fallen from the sky and wiped out the race of intelligent insects that replaced humanity. Your sun will go nova in . . ." she looked at the watch again, ". . . less than thirty million years, give or take a millennium. You still have time for coffee, though."
"I don't understand," the sleeping man sighed.
"Then assume you weren't meant to, and don't worry about it." She reached into the bucket and began washing his bench with long strokes. "Mind the soap."
He stood and paced.
"How long now?"
"Does it matter? Three hundred million."
"Why can't I wake up?"
"Better you don't. Atmosphere's gone, hard radiation. Like Newark in August."
"But there must be a reason!" The sleeper threw up his hands. "This can't be happening for no reason."
She stopped scrubbing the bench. "Look," she said, "you're an ordinary man with an ordinary life. Stagnant as hell. Think of this a free trip to Disneyland. The cool one, when they still had the old Tomorrowland." She wiped her face again. "You get to find out about things that the rest of your race never even conceived of."
"I suppose you're right, but what good will it do me?"
The old woman looked at him hard for a few seconds. "Well," she said at last, "I shouldn't tell you this, but you're coming back around to the beginning again. Try to keep your life in some perspective, okay? Have some fun. Build a model airplane. Do something useless." She looked out the window. "Yep. Big Bang, proto-stars, primordial soup, and thunder lizards." She stood slowly and painfully. "Time to catch your train, mister. You better move fast; there goes the first monkey out onto the plains with a stick in its hands."