Across the Spectrum

by Nagle, Pati

  But he led them on—through the bush, to the bamboo thicket, to the pepper field, to the ville, to the fire zone.

  ∞

  DeWitt tumbled across the floor of the foyer and slammed into the glass door. Fortunately it was tempered glass, reinforced with wire—it did not break. DeWitt sagged to the carpet.

  Shit. He hadn’t ended a replay that way in years. The grenade had landed among them, leaving him and the other two surviving men—Morgan and Ramos, this time—barely time to recognize it for what it was. Then the explosion hit and that was that. Instantly, he was back in 1983. The receptionist’s clock rotated another digit. As always, he’d been gone no more than a few seconds, as far as the present-day world was concerned.

  Shaking, he retrieved his keys from the floor, locked the offices behind him, and made his way to the parking garage. His hands were still unsteady as the attendant waved him out and he rolled out onto the street.

  A few blocks later, as he entered a residential zone, he saw a lemonade stand on a corner. A slim Vietnamese girl in Guess jeans and a white tee shirt was just closing up shop for the night.

  ∞

  DeWitt’s relatives began to arrive Saturday morning. Not that there were many, but it didn’t take large numbers to fill DeWitt’s modest living room. DeWitt planned to find a bigger home once the wedding was over and Rudy had settled in at his new school.

  Wanda wouldn’t let him go to the bus station to pick up Rudy. She insisted that father and son’s reunion should be complete with all the bells and whistles: audience, applause, a cake and balloons, good food—a real party. DeWitt let her have her way.

  And he was glad. It unnerved him to stand eye-to-eye with his own offspring, who scarcely had a right to be so tall so soon. The celebration and the company filled in what would have been awkward silences.

  Rudy liked chocolate cake. He didn’t like coconut. Just like DeWitt. He liked baseball, was indifferent to football. Just like DeWitt. By the end of the meal, it was no stranger seated across the table.

  “Care to sit with me for a while on the porch?” DeWitt asked his son while the dishes were being cleared.

  “Sure.”

  It was August. It was muggy. But to DeWitt, no place in the whole of the United States had as miserable a climate as what he was used to, and he settled comfortably on the step.

  “Like it here so far?” DeWitt asked. He wasn’t usually so direct, but God knows, he’d had few chances to talk with his own flesh and blood.

  “I guess so,” Rudy said, shrugging with a teenage boy’s classic indifference.

  “Your mother used to say you’d hate to live with me.”

  “Mom used to say you were crazy,” Rudy said bluntly.

  DeWitt coughed. “Hell. She might’ve been right.”

  “She said you were never the same after you came back from the war. Is it true that you were the only survivor of a patrol?”

  DeWitt wiped the smooth crest of his forehead, lips pursed. “I was.”

  He’d never told anyone the details of that night. But somehow, it felt right to speak now. Slowly, with precision, rendering the graphic parts with a steady voice and just the right sprinkling of euphemism, he told how the squad had been isolated from the rest of the platoon. He described how unexpected the sheer number of enemy in the vicinity had been. He told how, one by one or in pairs, the men with him had died, and how he, peppered by shrapnel, had crawled to the landing zone and been loaded onto a medevac chopper.

  He told the real story. He mentioned that Johnnie had tripped a claymore, that Smith had been caught in friendly crossfire because DeWitt was too confused to give good orders, how Boone had died cursing him for a dumb nigger for going out instead of waiting out the day and night in the elephant grass beside the road. Their mission had been search-and-destroy. Well, they’d searched, and they’d been destroyed.

  Not once did he offer an alternate picture. In many of the replays, most of the squad had survived three-quarters of the way to the LZ. In others, Johnnie had died a hero. And in just about all of them, DeWitt hadn’t been such a stupid fuck, because repetition had taught him strategy and erased his personal disorientation. Rudy heard none of that, because DeWitt told only the truth.

  Finally, mouth cottony from the long talk, he picked up a ladybug that had crawled onto the porch and pretended to be absorbed examining its markings. “But all that was a long time ago.” He didn’t want to turn, for fear he’d see the glazed look he’d seen so often on people back home whenever anybody mentioned Vietnam.

  “I’ve been wanting to hear about it,” Rudy said. The boy’s voice was full of interest, not boredom.

  DeWitt clapped his hand down on his son’s shoulder. “Then . . . we’ll talk about it again. We ought to have lots of opportunity, now that you’re here.”

  Rudy nodded. “That’s for sure.”

  DeWitt’s uncle, Hosea, limped onto the porch, aided by his hickory cane. How DeWitt had respected that cane, once upon a time. “Rutherford, your grandma wants to chat with you a spell before she leaves,” Hosea announced.

  Rudy went inside, waved on by DeWitt. Hosea lingered by the doorway. The screen door clattered shut, muffling the babble of the family dinner.

  Hosea cocked an eyebrow, a knowing look on his grizzled, former mechanic’s features. “He’s going to stay.”

  DeWitt nodded. His glance rose to a cloud formation up near the zenith, just visible under the eave.

  Hosea chuckled. But then, instead of returning to the party, he sat down on the edge of the porch with his nephew. “You know, if I don’t miss my guess, I’d say your life’s doing about the best it’s ever done for you, right here this summer.”

  “That’s the truth,” DeWitt said.

  “Then why ain’t you acting happy?”

  DeWitt looked down, and saw that his uncle was making a joke. The old man didn’t realize how startling the question had been. Because that cloud up there is turning purple, he might have answered, had it been a serious remark.

  ∞

  The cloud waited for him all that night. He heard it breathing up in the sky long after Wanda had fallen asleep beside him. He saw it out the window as he, Rudy, and Wanda sat at the breakfast table the next morning. Though the sun had long risen, the billows retained the hue of earliest dawn.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he said at noon, while Rudy was gone to fetch a new headlight for the car.

  The cloud descended as he ambled down the street, as DeWitt knew it would. The mist slid into an alley and waited, reeking of ozone. When DeWitt reached the alley’s mouth, it oozed forward. Two steps later, the cement beneath him turned to hard-packed clay, red and wet and steaming in the heat. He kept walking.

  The path’s beginning was gone. He knew the spot only by the surrounding landmarks. He stopped. The equatorial glare flashed from his bayonet to the glossy green leaves and back. The jungle hummed with its familiar, welcoming sounds. He did not attempt to move forward.

  He searched for the lemonade girl, but she was gone. Near the same spot, however, he saw a clearly defined trail, marked with whitewashed cobblestones. A sign beside it read, “R&R.”

  His stomach felt as if fire ants had taken up residence within it. He sat down in the center of the road, drew a deep breath, and waited. He nearly drained his canteen, enduring the open sun, before the elephant grass swayed and parted. DeWitt’s best buddy emerged, deep shadows under his helmet.

  “Hey, DeWitt,” Johnnie said. “What’s keeping you, brother?”

  The words formed a mass in DeWitt’s throat. He had to speak them, or swallow them, one or the other. If he didn’t, they’d choke him.

  “I got my papers. I’m going back to the World.”

  Johnnie nodded. The shadows would not clear from under the helmet. DeWitt could see only darkness—black skin against a fuliginous canvas. His buddy had no eyes to make contact with. “We know,” Johnnie said, with the voice of a man who has seen the bullet with h
is name on it. “We been feeling this day coming for a while now. Congratulations, Sarge.”

  DeWitt lost his grip on his rifle. It fell onto the rutted mud of the road. “I’m sorry, Johnnie. I’ve got things to do now, other places to be.”

  “Forget us, motherfucker,” Johnnie said with conviction. “You should have erased us from your brain a long time ago. You think it’s easy, dyin’ a thousand times?”

  A thousand times, a thousand times. “Shit,” DeWitt said, his tongue tasting as if it had been dusted with iron filings. “Johnnie, I never—”

  “Don’t sweat it, man. We all wanted you to try. At first. But there’s only so much tryin’ a man can do.”

  Johnnie stepped back, and with the grace of a well-trained soldier, faded into the elephant grass as if he’d never been—a ghost in its element. He left behind only a cloud of gnats and the dank odor of the rice paddy. And a cool draft of something very much like forgiveness.

  DeWitt turned, kicked the clay from the soles of his boots, and took the new path—the only path left visible. Around the first stand of trees, he came to a ville. Around the first bamboo hut, he entered a city of stucco, wood-frame houses, and lawns. In a few more steps he was once more striding along a sidewalk of his neighborhood.

  He stopped and looked back. A last wisp of Purple Haze climbed toward the sun and evaporated.

  Wanda met him on the steps. They went inside, and talked about where to send Rudy to school. That night, DeWitt Langdon slept deeply. Fourteen years behind schedule, his tour had ended.

  Terminal

  Chaz Brenchley

  This was an award nominee, shortlisted for the British Science Fiction Association award for best short story in 2007. It’s a favourite because it’s my first genuine SF story, and the seed that led to my novel(la) Rotten Row, newly out from BVC and set in the same universe.

  Dunno what else to tell you about it, except that it was held up for eighteen months by my utter conviction that I needed to know about plate tectonics on other Earth-like worlds—would they be inherent? essential? likely? rare?—and I couldn’t find the answers. Eventually it dawned on me that I could abandon that line of enquiry and seek another solution; this story wouldn’t be the same without it. And now, of course, I live a short walk from SETI and NASA, and planetary geologists are my friends, and I know all that we know about plate tectonics on other worlds. . . (Exceeding rare, at least in this solar system.)

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  unspeakable journeys

  into and out of the light

  He stood on the Tower of Souls, and watched her fly.

  ∞

  Say it another way, he stood on the high-stacked bodies of his Upshot kind, but that was nothing: filing. Bureaucracy. Paranoia.

  It was the locals, the natives, the dirigibles—she called them dirigistes, but that was ironic—who had built and named this height, who gave a value to these discards. Black discs, each one identical, each one uniquely coded: each one the residue of a human passing through. A carbon footprint, she liked to say.

  At other terminals, other ’Chutes, the discards were racked in vaults, in coded order, physical back-ups of what the record said: never needed, simply because they were there and known to be there. What greater security could there be? Here, they stood in another kind of order. As soon as the dirigibles understood what the discards were, what they meant—in so far as they did understand, in so far as free-floating bags of gas could understand the motives and intentions, the physics and biology of meat and bone, of mammals—they had taken possession, demanded it. They saw humans walk into the ’Chute, they saw them gone, and only these discs remaining; they claimed the discs, and built—well, this. A tower. Tower of Souls, just as they built for themselves, their own waymarkers, their almost-holy statements, we were here.

  It made sense, he supposed. It was the same message, even. And there was no risk, however much the bureaucracy disliked it: dirigibles were as careful of every discard as the most paranoid could wish. Just, they layered them into a tower, high and broad and solid, mute testament to how much traffic this terminal had seen in its century of standing. The Upshot might not be many, reckoned against downside populations, but they did like to keep moving; every stopover, every staging-post meant another discard, another disc.

  This tower was tall enough by now to be a feature of the landscape, standing higher than the terminal roof, though the spire of the ’Chute still dwarfed it. The landscape could use a few features, he thought, weary of endless wind-blown plains; which was surely why the dirigibles built their towers, and just as surely why she flew from here, and why he clambered up behind to watch her.

  It was only by grace that the dirigibles allowed it. Hard-earned grace he liked to say, but she wouldn’t have it so. She said that grace could never be deserved; it came as a gift, the soul of generosity. Like flight, she said, to earthbound creatures; like transit to the Upshot, immeasurable grace.

  Even on a low-grav world, flying was still a matter of faith as well as engineering. He always said he had faith too much; he believed very firmly in the solidity of things, and the susceptibility of air. She seemed to believe what people told her, and the evidence of her eyes. Therefore she flew, while he kept himself grounded. He watched her soar, and checked her equipment scrupulously, before and after. And talked to her, mid-flight—

  “How’s the wind?”

  “Easy; always easy, this late. Fresh at dawn, but that’s fun too. You should try it.”

  “What can you see? Tell me what you see.”

  “Nothing new. The sun’s so low, the spire’s shadow goes all the way to the horizon like a road, so straight—but you know that, you can see it from down there. . . “

  “Not so far. My horizon’s a lot closer. And for me it is a road, I could walk it if the sun stayed still.”

  “You do that, then. I’ll hold the sun steady, I can almost reach her from here. . . “

  “Not so high! Don’t fly so high. I told you before, keep the tip of the spire in your eyeline and stay below it. That suit’s not rated for heights above a thousand metres.”

  “Well, it should be. I’m fine. Anyway, I can too see the spire. . . “

  “Only by looking down. Don’t lie to me, I need magnification just to find you. Come back.”

  “Coming! Whee—!”

  “—Not like that, not all at once! Woman, do you want to see me die here?”

  “Sole purpose of dive. Ready to catch you when you fall. I thought it would be ironic.”

  —because he thought he was her anchor, her tether to the fixities of life. He really thought she needed one.

  ∞

  He thought they all did. So too did the downsiders, legislating for the Upshot community. Set free to roam as far as any ’Chute could fling, essentially rendered into information, they must necessarily be tethered by that same information: a backstory that led all the way, traceable through every separate body, every discard, to the one that they were born with, however long ago. Identity was absolute, and paranoia was the key. If one mind, one personality could migrate from one body to another—and have that body grown specifically for them, to a DNA-weave of their devising—then how could anyone be sure that the person they spoke to today was the same person they were speaking to yesterday? The body might match entirely, but that meant nothing any more. Questions of identity had to be cut entirely away from the physical; which meant by definition that no Upshot could be allowed two matching discards. They called them discards, even while the bodies were still growing in the vats, to emphasise the temporary; and every DNA profile was one-use-only, and whenever someone went through a ’Chute they were fitted into a discard not quite entirely at random. They might emerge as any racial mix and any gender, any body type; the only certainty they had, they would not be the person that they had been going in. If no one looked to recognise an Upshot from one trip to the next, if identity was carried in the mind and not the body, then no one stood in
danger of deception. Paranoia was a virtue; people’s private codes and passwords were intimate, intense, not to be stolen or given away.

  Like all the Upshot, his life was an open book, a matter of public record: how he had been flung out of school, out of the army, out of any discipline he’d tried; how in the end, almost in desperation, he had been flung into orbit to work on terminal construction. His home world wouldn’t tolerate it downside, but they had the schematics and the skills for an orbital platform, and chemical rockets to get there, and the benefits of a Upchute were too great to ignore. So it was built, and in the building of it he found a life he could cherish. The intimate spaceside disciplines that his and his co-workers’ lives depended on; the extraordinary physicality of working roustabout in a suit, in a vacuum, in nul-g; the extraordinary physicality of his co-workers in the dorm-ships, inter-shift, where rules and limits seemed all to have been left behind, downside; the constant call, no, suck of the stars, that were not a background to his new life so much as the vessel that contained it.

  And then, then, the ’Chute was finished, and he was eager in the queue to be away. His original body was abandoned, crushed and dried, compacted and coded by the process that his people had signed up to, compulsory paranoia; he’d been flung far and far, to another planet and another job, building mineworks for a new colony. He might have stayed, he might have found himself a family and another life again. In fact, though, he had been she in that new incarnation, and after so long as a male the shock of change was enough to be dealing with; pregnancy was something else again, and not to be considered. Besides, it was a wild ride, this being flung from one body to another. Why, whyever would he only taste it once . . . ?

  So he’d gone on, from that world to another, and another; and like most of the Upshot, he’d got the taste first and then the habit of it. And after a while, of course, he began to understand its deeper meanings—functional immortality, to be brief, in a life constantly refreshed by new horizons, new opportunities, new flesh—and he had yet to meet anyone with a good reason to offer, why they should turn away from that.