by Anthology
We kissed, her tongue assertive, experienced, mine stumbling, awkward. On the sheet above, magma flickered and flowed. She was my first kiss.
Our passion had not worn off when the show started, but we mustered a glance at the screen. The room was stifling with packed body-heat. Despite the haze in my head, and the pounding of my heart, I made a mental note to tell Cox that we would have to scout larger locations for the next show.
On the screen I saw a city, old, like one on Earth from thousands of years ago. A foreign-looking people crossed streets, drove cars, pedaled goods, rode bicycles, as the telescope scanned them, focusing here and there, zooming in and out, panning. Nothing happened for the longest time. Just as I thought the crowd would begin to grumble, a smoldering light flashed across the room, piercing, hot, so bright Lem and I winced.
It was as if the brothers had pointed the telescope towards a star. Then the smoke lifted, and Timmet punched past half a dozen filters until we were seeing through the dust cloud as if it weren’t there.
Thousands of people lay dead in the streets; thousands more walked about, dying, flesh dripping from their stumbling frames. Buildings had become liquefied skeletons stretching up toward the telescope, some still bending and breaking in the firestorm’s wake.
Trager zoomed in on a man burnt so badly that his clothes and skin had become indistinguishable. He staggered as if blind and begging.
For what? Water? A quick death? His family? His lover? He latched on to anyone who passed, but most shoved him off, or avoided him narrowly, searching for families of their own. They were just as blind, just as naked.
There should have been the sappy cry of a solo violin. But there was no sound but the hum of the station and the breathing of its inhabitants. A boy laughed awkwardly, cracking midway. Or was he a man? We existed in that awkward stage somewhere between the two.
I felt Lem’s hot breath on my neck, soft cherry lips kissing my cheek. My jeans stiffened. I glanced back up at the begging, melted man, then filled my existence with Lem.
***
When all the death and dying and love and lust were over, no pigs came to interrupt us. The boys slowly trickled out of the skip station, drunk and high, whooping and laughing; Cox, the brothers, Todd, Lem and I were the last to skip out.
Cox smiled at Lem and me, “Not bad, yeah? Dark shit. Tell more of your girlfriends to come.”
“Sure, sure.” Lem said, smiling.
Then off we skipped, losing a friend here or there.
***
Over the next weeks my life consisted of three things: ditching class to explore the stations of the universe with Lem, planning and scouting with Cox and the boys, and lying awake in bed, ignoring mom while dreams of dying cities and planets kept me up.
For the first time in my life I wasn’t making straight As. Truthfully, I didn’t know what kinds of grades I was making. Mostly, I didn’t care, but there was a part of me—maybe the same part that occasionally dreamed of Earthen fields and real food—that tugged at my intestines.
On the occasion that I did go to class, I would sketch. I drew dying worlds on synth-paper, colliding meteors, cracking crust, bloody magma. Then moved on to cities—drowning, burning, screaming, wheezing. I would write captions like “Come See the Lightshow”, or “Watch the Wonders of Dying Worlds—Live!”, imitating movie posters I’d seen on Earth.
During a scouting trip, Cox saw one of my sketches after it had fallen out of my torn pocket. “Cheeky. The Earther’s an artist.” he said. Later he commissioned me to draw more, picked out his favorite design, then, in code, jotted down several skip station coordinates and times on the side, copied it, and passed it to people we trusted—to spread word of the next show.
At some point I suggested to Cox that we should get a band to play live at the next lightshow. He and the boys resisted the idea, but I managed to convince them to at least allow music during the preshow. They agreed, so long as I scrounged together the band. I accepted their challenge.
Earth was inspiring, full of young musicians and would-bes, but the stations weren’t. Luckily, a cramped corner of our school held a music hall where I periodically wandered between classes. I wasn’t looking for the best; we needed trustworthy guys, no one who’d rat us out to the teachers or pigs.
It didn’t take me long to spy and recruit Rodney, a boxy boy with a shock of dull blond fuzz that sprouted in wilting patches on his cheeks. He played saxophone and violin, terribly. An outcast, a rust artist, a pugilist, a perfect recruit. His weak connections in the music hall were enough for me to infiltrate and recruit four more equally qualified musicians on the promise that synth-smokers and some heavy bottles would be provided for their services.
So the next show had live music.
***
Strings screeched, buzzed, hacked, and coughed; the music was perfect. Rodney and his band played, still making the same mistakes they’d had while rehearsing thirty minutes before, as two dozen excited cohorts skipped into the current show-station.
Cox grabbed me by the shoulder, hard, pointed to the band, and said, nodding, “Aye, new kiddie, you ain’t bad for a peach-skinned Earther.”
I nodded back thinking: They may call me “new kiddie,” but I’m no longer an outsider, no more than anyone else here, haven’t been since the skip home from the first show, since I kicked that officer’s teeth in.
“They’re shit terrible,” Cox said, tossing a clanking rucksack full of bottles at me, “but people seem to like ’em. Give Rodney and ’em jars of piss booze when the show starts. Keep one for you and Lem.”
“Sure, sure.”
Two boys broke out in a fight. Just as I felt, Lem put her arms around me. One of the brawlers fell into a violinist, and was thrust back into the clash. People whooped and hollered, as the two blackened each other’s eyes, until one of the bruisers was too broken and bloody to fight, and Timmet and Trager flipped the projector on to a new preshow.
This time we saw a ghost planet, already dead. Skeleton cities, dried canyons where rivers had once flowed, all living things long ago turned to dust. I wondered, how far away would we have to skip to catch the light and witness the downfall of this civilization?
A tornado lashed the land. Lem traced a finger around my forearm and looked up at me with a devious smile, “Your brown skin’s turned pink. Give it more time and it’ll be as sexy as mine. But…in the meantime, it’s looking a little bare.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She jabbed her fingernail into my forearm, “Let’s modify. You’re lacking…tattoos, piercings, implants.”
I laughed nervously. What would my dad think? He was dead. And my mother? Who cared what she thought. “And you have a needle and ink, or some rusty implant gun?”
She smiled, “I told Todd to bring some. He’s just as talented an artist as you. He’s got clean stuff.”
He wasn’t. And he didn’t.
A violin screeched. A quake split a dead desert. And a needle pierced my skin. I’d decided on a tattoo of a planet, and was told it would look cool. It felt like a knife scraping, cutting, digging at my arm. I emptied half a jar of piss alcohol down my throat, lit a synth-cig, and watched the panning ruins of a ghost planet.
When the outline was done, Todd snatched my alcohol and splashed it on my arm.
The lights dimmed. The show started.
***
Then another show. And another.
***
So we went on, in whatever abandoned skip stations we found, for months, our posse slowly growing by word of mouth and the handouts I’d designed. Each show a memory with a different tattoo, piercing, scar or glowing implant. The pigs busted us sometimes, catching a few kids too drunk, stoned or slow to skip away.
Our lightshows became more frequent; we needed researchers who knew when and where cosmic tragedies had happened, and people good with equations, and techies, and musicians.
I’d go to school on occasion to recruit. Other th
an that, school meant nothing to me, the show, everything. Our enclave of misfits grew, as did my bond with Lem.
And as I spent the next months skipping across the galaxy with our gang of outsiders, my yearning for Earth waned; the memories of grass underfoot and wind brushing skin, once vivid, now faded. But did any of that matter?
Mom didn’t have a chance at getting us back to Earth. And I was too busy seeing new worlds to care if she did. I was in a river, slow flowing but with a current too strong to fight. Sure, I could swim for the bank, but oblivion was beautiful. The shows began to blur into each other, sometimes a planet died—war the killer one show, nature the next—sometimes it was just a city, occasionally a malfunctioning skip station.
They mixed like a trillion wisps of smoke commingling, fornicating, trapped in a room of flickering light. It was intoxicating, addictive.
Tattoos crawled up my arms, piercings punched holes through my skin, flashing implants danced up my spine. Friends came and went, but Cox and Lem were always there, never missing a show. True friends, true cohorts.
Then came one show, one particular show, where I realized the dreams of my father’s death had stopped entirely, shoved aside by the preparation and intoxication of the lightshows.
***
It started like all other shows. Rodney’s band played as friends skipped in from across the galaxy to a cramped room just warm enough to make sweat bead above the brow. The preshow flickered—a junked satellite station spinning in and out of orbit only to be drawn by its planet’s gravity and eaten in fiery gulps by its atmosphere.
Lem bit my lip and whispered something in my ear. Timmet and Trager tinkered with the projector, finalizing calibrations. Boys almost old enough to be men rolled about kissing girls who were almost women.
Somewhere, someone was in a classroom learning something.
The screen skipped. I felt a sense of familiarity. Earth, and a station just above it, round with vast clear windows, greenery on the inside. My stomach knotted itself. When was this? Where were we? How many light years from Earth? One? Two? How long had I been in interstellar space? In the skip stations? How old was I? Fifteen? Couldn’t be older than sixteen, but what’s a year and a half when you’re in a thousand different stations, light years from the embrace of seasons?
In my mind’s eye I saw my father on his death bed, weeping sores covering his skin, just as he was after the rescue team had skipped him back to Earth. He babbled, the radiation sickness frying him from the inside out. On the screen an infrared filter spotted a solar flare lash the station like a whip. The telescope zoomed in. Masses of doomed men and women pounded at the domed windows.
It was a research center, the same one dad had worked at.
What was I doing here? Watching people die? I wanted to stand up, to skip off, just…leave.
Lem felt the muscles in my back tense. I looked down at her hand on my arm. Grey. And so was my arm, except for the tattoos, all up and down my arms. When had I gotten those? In that sobering moment, I couldn’t remember half of the scribbles. An Earthen landscape sprawled across my left bicep, horribly inked by someone who’d never stepped foot on a planet. Who had done that one? Surely, not me. Hopefully, not me.
In the waning light, my tan was a figment of the past, a figment of Earth spinning below the domed station on the screen. I was a corpse, just like the rest of them, not an outsider. And we were kids no longer.
I tried to stand. Lem pulled me to her, licked my ear, “Baby it’s just getting good.”
“I think I should leave.”
I could hear her smile. “You can’t leave.”
Curtis C. Chen
http://curtiscchen.com
Zugzwang(Short story)
by Curtis C. Chen
Originally published by Daily Science Fiction
“You lose,” Lieutenant Darrow said. “Again.”
He tipped over Erin’s game piece, the one they were calling the king. Ton-Gla-Ben wasn’t exactly like chess, but the mechanics were very similar, and the actual Quggano names were mostly unpronounceable by humans.
Erin hated chess. She also hated being stuck in this cargo bay, with the ship’s first officer running her through a crash course in alien game theory.
“How long have we been in here?” Erin asked.
Darrow checked his wristcom. “Not that long.” His atypical lack of precision meant it was longer than he wanted to say.
“This is useless,” Erin said.
“You just need more practice.” Darrow swept up the pieces. “Let’s try a different opening.”
“Tell me again why we can’t just cheat?” Erin asked. “I wear a hidden micro-cam, you coach me through an earpiece?”
Darrow shook his head. “The Quggano are honorable, and they enforce honor in others. The competition chamber is fully radiation-shielded. And you’ll be naked.”
“Right,” Erin said. “How could I forget the best part?” She was not looking forward to exposing her flabby, middle-aged body to a bunch of aliens. She wondered if there was still time to kill herself.
“Ready to go again?” Darrow reset the board to its starting position.
“Why are we even bothering?” Erin stood up. “I barely have time to learn this game, let alone get good at it. I might as well concede and save myself the humiliation.”
“If you forfeit, we all become prisoners of war.”
Erin groaned. She wanted to pace, but there was no room. The Myrmidon wasn’t designed to carry passengers. Most of this compartment was still taken up by supply crates.
It was pure dumb luck that Erin had ended up here. A piece of space debris had killed her stardrive, and she’d spent nearly a week adrift before the Myrmidon happened into range of her beacon. Unfortunately, a Quggano destroyer had also heard Erin’s distress call, and intercepted the Myrmidon right after they picked up Erin’s ship.
When Captain Yokota demanded a champion game—a variation on the ancient Quggano single-combat tradition—the aliens had named Erin as their opponent. That had surprised everyone on Myrmidon, but the Quggano’s rules did allow each side to select a specific enemy champion to challenge. It didn’t happen very often. Usually, neither side knew who was on the other ship, and the respective ship captains acted as champions by default. All of Myrmidon’s senior officers had been trained to play Ton-Gla-Ben, and the XO, Lieutenant Darrow, was the best. So he was teaching Erin.
“You could get lucky,” Darrow said. “You never know.”
Erin sighed and sat down again. “Fine. Not like I have anything better to do with my last few hours of life.”
“Wait,” Darrow said as she reached for a light pawn. “Say the word. You have to say it when you start the game.”
“I can’t say the damn word.”
“Just try. Please?”
Erin grumbled. “Gaalaann.”
“Close,” Darrow said. “But not quite. Gaalaann.”
“What the hell does it even mean?”
Darrow shrugged. “Who knows? It’s just part of the ritual. Come on, try again. More of an accent on the second syllable. Gaalaann.”
“I can’t hear the difference,” Erin said.
“Listen closely,” Darrow said.
The door chimed and slid open. Rayley, the ship’s science officer, burst into the room, looking very excited.
“We’ve got something,” Rayley said. “A way for you to win.”
***
“A kid?” Erin gaped. “They’ve got a child on board?”
The conference room display showed an interior scan of the enemy destroyer: an overlay of radar, thermal imaging, and other passive radiation scans. There was definitely some kind of smaller creature running back and forth between two adult Quggano, an indistinct blue-green blob flanked by large, eight-legged, insectoid forms. Erin felt like she was watching some kind of bizarre nature documentary.
“Rayley hacked into their comms,” Captain Yokota said. “The adults are some kind of
state dignitary and his mate. Their presence aboard a destroyer is unusual, but not unheard of.”
“And now you can call out the child,” Rayley said. “Name him as your opponent.”
“You know it’s a boy?” Erin said.
“We know his name, his age, his bedtime—”
“It’s allowed,” Darrow said. “They never asked us to name an opponent. Most champion games involve the captains of the respective warships by default. The Quggano named Miss Bountain because they knew she was a civilian, and therefore hadn’t been trained to play Ton-Gla-Ben.”
“And neither has this kid,” Rayley said. “He won’t know anything about the game; his family’s not military caste. But he’s old enough to serve, according to their laws. They have to honor your champion request.”
“The losing champion dies.” Erin looked at the captain. “I’m not going to kill a kid. You must be considering other options.”
“Sure,” Yokota said. “I can blow up my ship.”
Erin blinked. “What?”
“Nobody here is going to become a Quggano POW,” Yokota said. “If you lose the game, we trigger the auto-destruct and hope we take those bastards with us.”
***
“This is the worst day of my life,” Erin said as she walked into the airlock.
“Stop saying that. You could still win,” Darrow said, joining her inside and closing the inner door behind them. “And win or lose, you’ll have more than done your part for the war effort. We’ve already transmitted a sitrep back to Fleet Command. Now that we know how the champion callout ritual works, we can target Quggano warships carrying civilians—”
“Great,” Erin said. “So I’m going to cause the deaths of more innocent people.”
Darrow stopped working the airlock controls and frowned at her. “They’re not people. They’re aliens.”