“In your case, never.”
They dismounted, and Byron led the horse into the shed. Shelley paused on the step.
“I keep a messy journal, George—and I know you are writing your memoirs. Include this please, that I may acknowledge a perpetual debt—and future generations may be inclined to remember me when they read it.”
“They will remember you without it, Percy. But, as you wish—some future Mad Jack may be amused.”
“Your memoirs will blaze through all generations.”
“I daresay. Now, get inside, it’s chilly out here.” He pushed him.
Mary opened the door, a twisted handkerchief at her waist. She peered out, blinking heavily.
“I’m sorry, Mary,” said Shelley.
Her eyes blazed as she stepped aside.
“Tempest-tossed, indeed!” noted Byron.
Halflife
by Theodore Krulik
He was screaming when they brought him into the burn unit. I had been dozing next to an empty bed and sat up wide awake, shocked by the pandemonium erupting before me. He was a large man belted onto a gurney and the two paramedics wheeling him in fought to keep him from ripping out the restraints. I watched with a mixture of horror and commiseration.
His face looked like it was cracked down the middle, only half of which resembled something human. It was a face I’d seen on the news often enough to recognize immediately. Still shouting in agony, the big man was held by the paramedics and several interns as they transferred him to the bed next to mine. Gathered around him, the interns attached an intravenous feed and one of the doctors studied him carefully. While they were examining him, his groaning began to subside. After awhile, the IV drugs put him to sleep and the doctors left. Men (four? six? I couldn’t tell) dressed in some unfamiliar military uniform stood at the nurses’ station and at the entrance to the ward. They had holstered weapons on their belts.
I knew who the big man was, of course. Everybody did. Like the whole population of the planet, I’d seen him on the vid-screens and read the news stories over the years. The media gave him the sobriquet HalfJack for obvious reasons. He was a biomechanical astro-pilot—half-man, half-machine. His given name was Jack Shandon. For the past thirty minutes, the vid-screen at my bed announced the crash of his spacecraft. He was airlifted to the nearest hospital. This hospital.
I was engaged in my own little piece of hell. Car accident. Three days ago. Unconscious for hours. Didn’t remember much about the crash when I came to. I was told my car went up in flames and a couple of good Samaritans pulled me out. But not before I had suffered severe burns to the back of my head and upper body. My head, scalp, and back itched like I’d been lying on a bed of sawdust and blazing ash. I was bandaged around my head, neck, shoulders and ribs. I might’ve had a concussion also, and the doctors were keeping me for observation while my burns healed.
I had my intravenous feed removed earlier that day and could walk the hospital halls, a semi-free man. At noon, sometime after they brought Jack Shandon in, I took pleasure in finally getting some solid food handed to me on a tray. Hospital food. I tasted it. If it tasted like anything, I couldn’t determine what. I ate it anyway.
I got out of bed and took my first real look at Jack Shandon. The uniformed men at the nurses’ station watched but didn’t move.
Jack’s chest rose and fell regularly under the hospital blanket as he slept. I saw a good portion of his face and shoulders. The left side of his face was charred and raw. The IV was plugged into his left forearm. Apparently that side was flesh—darkened and blistered—but it was human skin nevertheless. The right side however, that was something else again. Metal surfaces that once gleamed with a black sheen—I’d seen many photos of him in the magazines—were now warped and stripped to a dull gray. The rotation hydraulics of his right arm-shoulder unit were melted and fused solid. Unusable.
Jack’s eyes opened. Startled, I took a step back.
“I am quite a sight,” he said. His voice was sand and crushed rock.
I stepped closer. “You’re awake.”
“Observant.” His legs rustled under the cover as he moved to sit up. He let out a sharp cry and fell back.
“Here,” I said, and adjusted the upper part of the bed to raise him up. “That better, Mr. Shandon?”
He looked at the IV feed on the pole beside his bed and then back at me. “That’s not doing much good. The pain’s still there.” His gaze upon me softened. “Call me Jack,” he said. “You?”
“Name’s Roger.” I sat on the side of my bed.
“What’s your game, Roger?”
“Game?”
“What do you do? When you’re not inhabiting burn units.”
“I’m a writer.”
“Oh.” He looked away, seeming to ready himself to turn onto his side and show his back to me. Instead, he pushed himself up, something rasping under the blanket, and let out a groan. He considered me with lucid dark eyes. “Not a reporter?”
“No. I write fiction. Mostly.”
Jack sighed. “What you’ve been reading in the news. Or seeing on the vid-screen about me—I am fiction. Mostly.”
I opened my mouth to say something smart, stopped, opened it again. “That IV must be working now. You were screaming in pain when you came in.”
“Yes. I was.” He looked at the ceiling, reading something there I couldn’t see. “I lost something important to me. Something vital.” After awhile, he looked back at me. “Know what I’m talking about?”
I nodded slowly. “The Morgana,” I answered. His spaceship.
He gave me a wry half-smile. Pulling down his bedcovers, he revealed his legs. My eyes widened in surprise. They looked like flesh, both of them, right up to where the hospital gown covered them. One of them, the right one, was supposed to be prosthetic. It wasn’t. It was skin, clearly the genuine article. The other one was scarred and blistery from the accident but it, too, was clearly flesh-and-blood.
He rose into a sitting position and the snapping sound of heat-hardened flexion inserts thwacked inside him. He started to cry out but stopped himself by sheer will. He let his legs dangle over the side of the bed and faced me. His fused right armature hung at his side. Loose tubing within the prosthetic forearm pinged.
.He gave me a half-smile. “Not entirely human yet.” With his good hand, he rubbed his knees. “Had that new leg implanted before that last—” A long hesitancy—“flight.”
Just then, a uniformed man marched over to us.
“Need anything, Mr. Shandon?” he asked. He was eyeing me suspiciously, his hand covering his holster.
Jack watched my reaction and then looked back at the man, something like amusement in his half-face. “No need to concern yourself. Roger and I are just talking like two old buddies. That okay?”
“Whatever you say, sir.”
He left us alone again.
“Are you a good writer?” asked Jack.
Recovering from the interruption, I looked at Jack, searching for an intelligent response. “People seem to think so.”
“How much have you written?”
“Oh, about two dozen novels, a bunch of short stories, a handful of poems, a smattering of essays.”
“Prolific, then. Think you might write about me?”
I couldn’t read the expression on his half-face. I spoke with deliberate care, uncertain what he wanted to hear. “Maybe. Someday. I’d probably want to turn it into fiction, though.”
“Good. Do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Don’t write it right away. Wait until I’m long gone. Do that for me?”
“Okay. But as I say, it will probably be fiction. A short story most likely.”
“That’s fine, Roger. I don’t mind if you make up the whole thing. Because I need to tell someone the truth. I want to say it one time only. And be done with it.”
I drew in my breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m listening.”
“This leg—”
He smoothed his right knee with his good hand. “I had it grown from my own DNA and grafted on weeks before this last trip out. It was wrapped in cushioned layers, cocoon-like, when I went inside The Morgana.”
“That’s why that leg wasn’t injured in the crash,” I observed.
“Yes. That was the first thing Morgana noticed when I positioned myself into the control web. Morgana asked why I had replaced a significant part of my ship systems contact points with something so inessential. What could possibly be the reason for deliberately hindering my efficiency as her pilot?
“I told her that I was considering retirement. I was older and wanted to spend the rest of my days earthbound. I said I couldn’t take the gravity changes and acceleration stresses anymore.”
“Sounds like a reasonable decision,” I said.
Jack frowned at me. “I was lying to her.”
“What part?”
“All of it. I had none of that in mind when I decided to reverse my implants.”
“Why, then?”
“Kathi. I met her some time ago. Left her abruptly after I revealed what I was. She said she liked me that way. I didn’t really believe her—or I knew such a difference between us would come to matter at some point. Anyway, I left, never intending to return.”
“What happened?”
“I thought about her. I never stopped thinking about her.” He paused, looking at something beyond the wall behind me. “I wanted to go back, to see her again. But so much time had passed. I didn’t know if she would want me back. I called her a few months ago. I was a continent away and scheduled for another run outbound. But we talked on the phone for more than half an hour. We spoke of things as if no time had passed. No, she said, she wasn’t involved with another man. Yes, she would enjoy getting together the next time I was in town. That changed everything. There was a time when I believed I was only alive traveling among the stars. But now Kathi means more to me than being out there. When I leave here, I’m going to her.”
We sat silent a long time.
“So,” I began, “Kathi doesn’t know about your leg graft.”
“No. I didn’t tell her anything about my intentions. I want to see her. See if she really wants to spend a lifetime with me.” Jack winced. Not in pain, or so it seemed, but because of a thought. “There’s something more.”
“What?”
“About the crash. I—.”
Suddenly, unbelievably, the storm troopers double-marched in like a herd of buffalo. Within their phalanx, a bearded man dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit wheeled a well-cushioned mobile chair.
“Mr. Shandon,” said the bearded man. “Come with us, sir. We’ve just learned that the Wexler Laboratory in Fort Lauderdale has specialized facilities we require. We’re flying you there immediately.”
The burn unit’s chief physician came over to protest the move but the bearded man dismissed him with a word or two I couldn’t hear. The bearded man removed Jack’s IV and gave him an injection with a syringe, probably to ease the pain. Several of the uniformed men lifted Jack into the mobile chair and whisked him out of the ward. He was gone and I never knew what he was going to tell me about the crash.
.After I was released from the hospital, I got back to work writing a new novel. Two months went by while I tried not thinking about Jack. I was sure he’d forgotten about me. Then I received an Instant Message on my computer and opened it. It read:
Roger—I’m planning to go back outward. About Kathi and me, things didn’t work out. My new ship’s almost ready. So am I. You should hear from someone about the launch date. Abide.—Jack
I didn’t know how he found me or why he had bothered. Perhaps he saw a kindred spirit in me, someone who was as alone as he was. Thinking back, I realized I hadn’t told him a thing about my personal life. He must’ve checked my background. That still didn’t answer all of my questions.
I sent a reply on my computer but he didn’t respond. I returned to my novel.
Months later someone rang my doorbell. A man in military uniform stood there, envelope in hand. I was too old to be drafted, so. . .
It was a letter requesting my presence at the maiden launch of a new Intergalactic ship of the line to be piloted by Jack Shandon. With the letter was a single pass, authorized by the President of the United States.
On a hot August morning, I sat in the bleachers with a hundred other people. The spaceship on the launch pad gleamed under the rising sun. The name of the ship was The Cassandra.
Huge outdoor screens went from images in the central control room to men outside The Cassandra completing systems checks. We hadn’t seen Jack yet. Then all screens cut to the ship’s interior. A camera mounted on the ship’s console showed a shadowed figure sitting in the pilot’s chair. Something crossed the screen and a light came on, illuminating the area.
Immense on the outdoor screens was a silver-colored manikin—its head and shoulders looking much like a bust of Buddha, rotund and hairless. Inanimate, eyes closed, it sat on what appeared to be an elongated narrow chair matching the figure’s silvery sheen. It took a moment for me to realize that the Buddha wasn’t sitting on the chair. It was integrated into the chair.
The camera shifted downward momentarily and I heard a united gasp from the people around me. There were no separate compartments in the ship. We saw into the vast expanse of the ship’s interior. I learned later when I saw the schematics that there were compartments near the ship’s base for cargo and fuel and redundant equipment. But there were no living quarters and no compartmentalized work stations on board.
The ‘chair’ was a kind of metallic stalk that ran vertically through the interior of the ship. And like the bud at the end of a long-stemmed flower, the humanoid Buddha’s head-and-shoulders were at its top.
Its eyes opened. The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled as icy slivers crackled along my spine. I recognized the eyes and the sudden smile of Jack Shandon. His face seemed natural but I couldn’t tell if it was flesh. That silvered hue gave me doubt that it was his own skin. He gazed at the camera and lifted a tubular armature with pincer-like fingers in a brief wave.
“Cassandra, this is mission control,” a voice came over the massive speakers on either side of the bleachers. “How do you read? Over.”
I recognized Jack’s characteristic grin as he spoke: “A-OK. Reading you loud and clear.” His voice was of a higher register than I remembered it being. “Checking hydraulic systems. Stand by.”
Jack stared off-camera and adjusted something on the panel. Suddenly the camera lost him, picking him up seconds later as the Buddha-figure dropped down the interior shaft to a console much lower down. On the large screens, we saw Jack swivel one hundred-eighty degrees. Another camera picked him up at a different panel of dials and monitors.
Jack’s artificial face gave us a very natural smile. “Hydraulic systems a go. Over.”
“Cassandra,” said the voice in the control room, “secure entranceway. Final systems check. Over.”
Jack dropped several more meters and swiveled forty-five degrees, different cameras in sync with his movements so that the big screens picked him up with each position change. Jack’s armatures moved rapidly as he responded, “Entranceway secure, Control. Over.”
“Cassandra, check computer upload for flight plan sequencing. Over.”
“Checking upload for flight plan sequencing.” Jack altered position, dropping to another work station. “Flight plan sequencing at the ready. Over.”
That voice, I wondered. The inflections are Jack’s. But there’s something else. A sort of lilt that doesn’t quite fit.
One of the big screens showed the workmen descending the platform to the ground. We heard the Klaxon sirens signaling everybody to evacuate the launch area.
The large screens showed a split-screen image of Jack in the ship’s cabin and a bespectacled man in shirtsleeves and loosened tie in the control room. “Cassandra,” said the man, “Ground crew is secure. Ready to pr
oceed with launch. Over.”
From Jack: “Control, this is Cassandra. Event timer started. Over.”
“This is Control. Launch sequence T minus twenty minutes and counting.”
The back-and-forth between The Cassandra and Mission Control continued. Paced speech, calculated notifications. Inexorable, one measured tick at a time.
He’s not coming back, I realized. Not in my lifetime, anyway.
The ship rippled at ignition. White flame and billowing smoke exploded from Cassandra as it lifted. The immense ship tore into the blue sky, heading sunward. We watched as it diminished from a massive human construct impossibly defying gravity into a shimmering needle in the sky. Even as it disappeared from view, we continued to watch the image on the viewing screens grow smaller and more distant. People around me stood in the bleachers shouting and cheering while it slowly faded into nothingness. I stood too, my eyes red and watery.
What did it matter? I thought. Even if he returned while I was still here—he would never walk among people again.
He was Jack Shandon. And she was Cassandra. And there was no way of knowing where HE began and SHE ended.
The Lady of Shadow Guard
by Lawrence Watt-Evans
The inn called the Sign of the Burning Pestle stood beside the coach road overlooking the ocean, as it had stood for more years than anyone bothered to count, forever in Twilight. Its nightwood beams were black with smoke and age, and Rosalie had once looked up at them with wonder, wonder that they had lain faithfully in their places for so very long.
Now she viewed them with sympathy, for surely they were, in their inanimate way, as weary of the place as she was herself. She had been weary of it for a very long time now.
Her Jack, tall and gray-clad, had promised to take her away from this place, to take her to his castle, Shadow Guard, that no man save himself had ever seen. Instead his words had kept her here, waiting for his return, and now that she had finally realized that all his words were lies, that he was never going to come back for her, she had nowhere else to go. She was no longer the young beauty who could ask whatever she wanted of the handsome men who came through the inn’s door, who could reasonably hope to make her way in the world with a smile and willingness to learn. She was just another tavern wench, fetching drinks for travelers.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 18