by Anthology
The fabric and foam of the seat tore the harder Horst held on. The man crouched over his handlebars like a frog, the T-shirt under his ski pants rippling in the burning-cold wind. Horst couldn’t see where he had the Glock.
The engine coughed into a deeper growl and the machine slowed. Horst just had time to scramble his hind legs under him and see they’d come to a gravel road intersecting the highway, blocking the ditch. There was a culvert underneath it to allow water to flow through in the summer, but it was far too small for the snowmobile. The man hauled on the handlebars and took them up to the left, toward the highway. Horst let go of the shredded seat and leaped up behind him, stumbling when his injured foreleg took some his weight and crumpled. The man glanced over his shoulder, screamed, and hit the gas. The machine shot up over the edge of the ditch and Horst clamped his teeth onto the nearest thing available—the man’s shoulder.
After a few seconds flying through the air, the snowmobile landed with a metallic scrape and a thud on the wind-swept asphalt. The man grasped for something in the front of his chest-covering ski-pants—the Glock, of course—while still driving forward. The roar of the engine drowned out all other sound, but from the direction Horst’s snout was pointed, he saw the semi first.
It was barreling down on them from the north. The truck driver hadn’t seen them yet.
Horst’s would-be abductor had the Glock out now and its muzzle flared with a deafening bang so close to his snout the reek of gunpowder shot into his nose. He let go of the man with his teeth and jumped back and away from the snowmobile. He landed heavily on the northbound turning lane, unable to do more than roll as his wounded leg gave out again. At the same time, the semi’s airhorn blared, too late, and the rig smashed into the snowmobile. The smaller machine flew to pieces with a splintering crunch. Plastic and metal and fabric shot through the air, along with the stink of oil and gas and rubber and the scent of blood. Horst glanced down the lane in which he had landed—headlights approaching. He crawled and limped, each ragged step far too slow, as the new vehicle bore down on him. Never look at the headlights, Mitch always said. You don’t want to be nailed like some stupid deer. But it was hard to look away.
Horst tumbled into the ditch and lay panting in the frigid darkness. His ears told him everything that was happening now, and his nose filled him in on the rest.
The car that had been coming toward him braked near where the semi had come to a stop. Car doors opened, shouts of Holy shit, what happened? And Guy tried to cross the highway on his fuckin’ Ski-Doo. Then Oh my God and the sound of retching. The scene was more than a hundred meters south of where Horst lay but his hearing was already starting to recover. You guys heal fast, don’t you?
He heard the sound of the trucker’s voice again. I radioed for help but they’re not gonna be able to put this poor asshole back together.
Horst’s wounded foreleg still wouldn’t bear his weight, and his other foreleg, whose paw still had a claw missing, felt weird. But he struggled through the snowy ditch to the stretch of field through which he had been dragged. If he followed the treadmarks of the snowmobile he’d find his way back and hide his own pawprints at the same time.
Each limping step was painful, and it wasn’t long before an unfamiliar scent put his back up. He paused, checking for cover. Where had he smelled this before? Right outside the house, when he’d encountered Rene—
A massive bear shambled out of the line of trees ahead, carrying a duffel bag and backpack in its teeth. It was so large—bigger than a grizzly—they looked like lunchbags. It dropped them in the snow when it caught scent of Horst, then melted back into human form.
“Got your stuff,” said Rene. “Saved your finger, too.”
Horst shifted back as well, his shoulder knitting itself back into shape as he did. Still ached though. And his empty knuckle remained bare.
Horst retrieved his clothes from his bag and dressed while Rene did the same. The realization that Rene was like him, but something he’d never seen before, kept hitting him like a final beat you don’t get right the first time. Bam. No, bam. Bam-crash. He had a hundred questions drowning in the relief that he—and Rene—weren’t going to die tonight. Mitch had always been vague on details about shifting into other animals. Now Horst had new questions—but they could wait.
“It over?” said Rene, his words a plume of steam in the moonlight.
Horst shuddered. “Semi smashed him up. He’s dead.”
Rene clapped Horst’s shoulder and left it there, a warm, reassuring presence. “Gonna have to find out what he was up to.”
Horst wanted to say something that didn’t sound like his whole life was turning into even more shit, but all he could come up with was “Fuck.”
“Hey,” said Rene. “No one’s in this alone. You know what I mean.”
Horst leaned his head in slowly until their foreheads were touching and then they kissed. “I guess I do.”
Rene smiled. “Next time, let’s go see a movie instead. No offence, but this first date kinda sucked.”
Horst grinned, and he knew it was a stupid, uncool kind of grin. He didn’t care. “Fuck off.” As they continued retracing the snowmobile tracks, he added, “Damn it, my car’s dead.”
“I got cables, you need me to jump you?”
Horst thumped his shoulder into Rene’s. “Second date. Second date.”
“Your call, Mahiinkan.”
“That’s gonna be less funny when I learn the Ojibwe for Big-Ass Bear.”
The trail led to a stretch of bush with a groomed ski trail where their footprints wouldn’t show, and they turned to follow it. Rene put his arm around Horst’s shoulders. “Maybe I’ll teach you.”
Horst decided maybe the rest of the year might not suck too hard, after all.
In Open Air(Short story)
by David Jón Fuller
Originally published in Accessing the Future (Futurefire.net Publishing)
Soraiya Courchene wasn’t sure she’d heard Rotational Captain Genevieve Makwa correctly; but it sounded, as the captain peered at her monitor and held her chin thoughtfully, that she’d said, “Well, here’s something new.”
In four generations aboard, even in the one-thousand-odd days of that that they’d been orbiting the planet, that wasn’t an expression you heard every day. It was the sort of thing reserved for events such as seeing the sun set in open air—something Soraiya would have dearly loved, but knew she would probably not live long enough for.
Soraiya turned to face the captain. She liked her; Captain Makwa usually remembered to look right at her when speaking, and she always welcomed her to the bridge with an old Anishinaabe compliment: “You’re so fat!” Which, coming from the captain with her big smile and dark eyes, never sounded like the whispers from some of the other crew that fluttered at the edge of what Soraiya could hear and couldn’t; and of course the whispers were meant to prick at her hearing loss as well as her weight. Soraiya, at 60, was long since sick of it. Most of the rotational command crew respected her ability to read the old data files, crusted in archaic monolingual constructions rather than in the current blend of the language they shared more with every new generation. But there were always some who thought it was a waste of time to study anything Prelaunch.
Soraiya cleared her throat. The air on the bridge was more stale than usual and it made her want to cough, but she made the sound mainly to get the captan’s attention. Captain Makwa looked up and faced her. Soraiya noticed that she hadn’t been looking at the blue/red/white whorls of the planet below, but rather the sensor array they used for tracking meteorites. “It’s moving,” said the captain.
Soraiya's heart started to pound. “Evasive?” she asked, her fingers itching to engage the thrusters, which hadn’t been used since they’d manoeuvred into geosynchronous. A thousand-odd days ago.
The captain might have grinned if it were only a matter of positioning their massive hollowed-out asteroid out of the way to avoid a collision. Cap
tain Makwa sometimes cackled at the thought of something so dangerous, but not this time. “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it’s coming to look for us.”
She patched over the data stream to Soraiya's monitor. There it was: not just a tracking signal showing a tiny object headed straight for them, slowly, but a hail. Soraiya recognized the Mandarin text immediately, and the English, somewhat; the third was written in Cyrillic characters, but she had not studied Prelaunch Ukrainian much. The Mandarin had many unfamiliar phonetic characters, and the English dialect before her was very odd.
“What do you think?” asked the captain. Meaning, Do we wake the rest of the command crew two hours early for this? And is it worth alerting all 435 people aboard?
“The ID isn’t one of the other generation ships,” said Soraiya, stalling, afraid of what the rest of the hail signified. “They’re saying they’re here to check on our ‘progress’.” Soraiya felt her throat tighten as she spoke; she knew that meant she was talking more quietly, so she forced herself to speak up, which always meant she ended up shouting. No use cursing the loss of her hearing aids; they’d been repurposed into a stethoscope when she was thirty-two, and not all the headsets on the bridge still worked. She called up a sidebar display to check some of their oldest records, and the Prelaunch dating system. She swallowed. “It says they left Earth 28 days ago.”
Captain Makwa sucked on her teeth. Soraiya always thought that made her look older than her 46 years. “They got here faster than light. I’d say that was new.”
***
Things might have been simpler if the captain’s rotational duty hadn’t ended before the new ship got close enough to dock. For the first time in two generations, the ship might have to halt its gravity-simulating rotation to allow the FTL craft from Earth to couple. The entire population of the asteroid they all called Home was abuzz.
Soraiya spent her off hours with friends chatting by one of the crowded observation decks, huge transparent panels beneath their feet allowing them to watch the planet as it passed by like clockwork. The population of the ship, renamed Home generations ago, had (eventually) unanimously agreed the planet they had journeyed so long to explore should be called They Are To Be Respected. The deep blues of seawater sworled into the white of clouds, the crimson and indigo vegetation seeming like swaths from a painter’s brush this far out. The planet rose and set while they watched. Before the hail from the Earth craft Soraiya had enjoyed the spark and argument of discussions over ecosystems, flora and fauna, the wonder of the smells their molecular scanners had detected at ground level and clumsily replicated in their labs. Like most aboard Home, Soraiya couldn’t bear the thought of intruding on the planet’s surface. The early days of Home’s journey, they had grown up learning, were filled with the incomplete attitude that you had to take what you needed and if you didn’t have enough, take more or take from someone else. That had worked, somewhat, as they were still mining the asteroid they travelled in for resources to sustain the journey; but when their ancestors (some of them) had begun fighting over them, there had been trouble. Murder. Strife. And, briefly, worse. But they had eventually changed their attitude, adopted a way of life that allowed them to survive in the frigid emptiness of space, and sometimes it took generations to see the best decision. Theirs was not the only way to do it, perhaps; but then they were the only generation ship that had been able to complete the journey.
They would not rush a human visit to the surface of They Are To Be Respected. Even their satellites stayed at a high enough orbit that (they hoped) indigenous life would never see them. That was, of course, at total odds with the Prelaunch goals, which Soraiya now found herself poring over, wondering less how the FTL craft had made the journey than why.
And while she was a firm believer in leaving They Are To Be Respected untouched and unsettled while they undertook a long study of it—how much of that was bound up in simply not wanting to leave Home, for all of them?—she felt more than curiosity to walk in its wildly coloured forests, rather than the clean but manufactured halls of Home, and to feel on her face the wash of sea spray in the wind, not just the comfortable, stale climate they depended on.
Now the conversations raged over what the new arrivals would look like, why they talked so differently, what news they had from Earth. The younger generation was most excited by this last part. The middle-aged and older, like Soraiya, had suddenly eager audiences for stories handed down. But in her few moments alone Soraiya stared out at They Are To Be Respected and wondered whether their practices of studying the planet from afar for the next generation were about to change.
Soraiya’s rotation was staggered from the captain’s, the better to transition from one command crew to the next, and she was relieved to note Dr. Mak’s shift did as well. She trusted his judgment, given his experience with their sporadic epidemics. But the new captain for this 40-day shift was Kenneth Rodriguez, one of the growing number of the younger generation who didn’t hold with leaving the planet below untouched while they studied it. He didn’t go so far as to suggest colonizing it, not yet, that was too radical a notion; but many felt a pull from They Are To Be Respected that went beyond mere gravity. Rodriguez’s fervour to meet with the new arrivals seemed to go beyond simple curiosity, she thought.
“Can you make sense of what they’re saying?” he barked at her in front of the rest of the bridge, assuming she just needed higher volume to understand him. You could tell someone a hundred times that wasn’t how your hearing loss worked; that you could hear quiet and loud sounds just fine, in fact very well—it was hearing anything against conversational hubbub of more than four people at once, or the white noise of their forced air system sometimes, that was impossible.
She put up a hand to signal for him to wait—and for everyone else to shut up. They almost never did, so she’d probably end up shouting. The signal from the FTL craft was strong, the words reasonably clear; it was the pronunciation and dialect that sounded foreign. It reminded her of the rigid simplicity of the old English text from early Postlaunch times, without the added Xhosa, Anishinaabe, Kirundi and Spanish metaphors and constructions they all took for granted now. It was like watching one of the uncorrupted old movies, but without subtitles. So she relied more on the automatic transcription of the incoming messages on her screen. “They’re asking permission to dock.”
“Do they need us to stop rotation?”
She sent the question to them, in Chinese. They’d long since adopted the non-strictly-phonetic characters of the Mandarin script aboard Home, adapting it to new idioms to accommodate 70 languages. As a writing system it was far better than Prelaunch English, and it had taken nearly a generation to replace all the signage and labelling they’d Launched with.
The monitors flashed with the reply back, in Mandarin, something like Our ships must be at rest for us to dock. Soraiya wondered if their pilots lacked the skill or their craft the fuel to do it otherwise. Now that it was up close, they could all see the FTL vessel was barely bigger than one of their unused dropships. How had these people crossed so much space so quickly in a craft like that? She knew the engineers aboard Home were burning to know. But she seemed to be one of the few worried about what these people wanted from them.
“Very well then,” said Captain Rodriguez. “Let’s prepare for zero-G.”
The signal went throughout Home, and everyone who was awake—which was all except the newborns and young children, given the excitement over seeing people from Earth—scurried to carry out emergency measures rarely used. Loose items were stowed; sick bay patients and the infirm were assisted to secure beds and chairs; children corralled; and many just grabbed on to bolted-down handrails, unable to tear themselves away from the newsfeed from the bridge.
In twenty minutes they were ready and Home’s thrusters slowed its rotation until they lost all sensation of weight; the following three hours as the FTL craft manoeuvred, coupled, and achieved hard seal seemed to last forever and yet take no time
at all.
Once the Home technicians gave the thumbs-up on the lock between the two craft, the captain asked Soraiya to let the new arrivals know they would be beginning rotation again. Soraiya did; there was a long pause before the other crew responded, in the affirmative. As Home resumed rotation, the pull of gravity returned. Soraiya wondered, fleetingly, if this were how it felt to enter a planet’s atmosphere and feel its welcoming strength. She knew it wasn’t; but the desire to feel it put a lump in her throat.
Captain Rodriguez now turned to Dr. Mak. “How long?”
“Depends on what they’re carrying,” came the doctor’s answer. “Could be a few days, could be weeks. We may have to figure out how to feed them while they’re quarantined, given the size of their ship.”
Soraiya eased her grip on the armrests of her workstation. Why had she been clenching them? She breathed out slowly. Now the newcomers were here and would be dealing with the captain directly, her part in this was likely done.
***
For the first few days, she was right about that. The captain took linguists when he went to meet with the strangers separated by the airlock, since they could barely understand the versions of English and Mandarin the visitors spoke. And scanning them for disease, despite their apparent protestations they were “clean” (was that really what they were saying?) proved difficult, as the equipment Dr. Mak used for this had never been fitted to the airlock before, and the process took much longer than it should have. “Probably not taking long enough,” the doctor confided to her in her bunk room after the third day of quarantine. “But everyone wants to welcome them aboard. And they keep asking for our research.”
At that Soraiya's stomach went cold. She offered him more tea. “Why do you think that is?”
He shrugged. “They seem in a great hurry.”