Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors Page 314

by Anthology


  The Dragons had agreed to leave the ship’s transponders in the “off” position for now, until it was for certain whether any of the members of the Faction were receiving transmissions. Nobody wanted to tip off the enemy, who was threatening to unleash their weapon any moment now, that the plans for emigration to the Third Planet some were beginning to call Terra, others calling Earth, were activated. Jude checked all the engine instruments and signaled to Yalta-ba-oath that the checklist was covered.

  It was time to go!

  ***

  Genesis

  In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.

  2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

  3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

  4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

  5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

  6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.~ Genesis 1

  The ships, ten of them, pierced the atmosphere just above a land mass shaped vaguely like a bare foot without toes. There was a twisting river that the Geographers had decided would be the best possible place to land, and the glaciers which touched most of the planet’s upper quadrant were far enough away that there should be warm weather and fertile soil.

  It had been a bumpy trip. Just as the ships, guided by the Dragons (and their capable human navigators) had guided the ships out of the atmosphere of their home and leveled off into space’s quiet vacuum, a great explosion had pierced the planet’s sky.

  Clouds of yellow-gold, almost beautiful, definitely terrifying, had billowed upward. Those who were still awake watched the aft cameras, some weeping openly as their planet’s atmosphere was forever changed. The initial plume of golden cloud grew exponentially, quietly for them but probably eardrum piercing on the planet’s surface. The cities could not be seen from this distance, but the flames that could be seen beneath the yellow clouds were undoubtedly destroying everything. The flames reached as high as the clouds for a moment. Near the planet’s southern regions, where the oceans reigned, the watchers could see water plumes vaporizing, the intense heat burning off into steam. As they travelled space and the cameras began to lose the magnification possible to see anything other than a vague shape, they could see the vapor adding itself to the clouds, and lightning-like flashes of whitehot energy blasting the entire southern region near the volcano plains.

  There was no hope that anyone who had been left on the planet had survived. The ten ships with seventy passengers and crew each had barely cleared the danger zone when the Factions had exploded their device. Its inventor, John Tycho, was still on the planet, having tried to negotiate with the Faction’s faceless, nameless leaders.

  The families on the ships would never know who it was that set off the planet killing bomb.

  Those who had opted to take the interplanetary journey without the aid of the cryo sleep chambers eventually rose and gathered in the crew areas, seeking comfort, hugging, crying. It seemed impossible that their home was gone, and they were on the way to an alien planet.

  If it hadn’t been for the Dragons, some whispered quietly, perhaps this would not have happened. But if it hadn’t been for the Dragons, they would not have been saved, either. The whisperers looked at their sleeping children, faces slack with the dreamless sleep of the cryo chambers, and sighed.

  The new planet was impossibly blue, broken here and there by brown land masses. In the quadrant oriented upwards from the ships, there were large white bodies that the Dragons called glaciers. They were similar to the peaks of the highest volcanoes on their home planet, but so much larger. The Dragons said that this was a temporary cycle of the planet’s position furthest from the Sola, and that it happened at such an infrequent cycle that it wasn’t to be worried about forever.

  Larger than theirs, and the Dragons reported that its planetary rotation was backwards! That the solar cycle lasted a mere 24 hours, splitting the period between darkness and light into a tiny fraction of time. There was evening, and there was morning. There were nameless animals creeping over the surface of the planet. Plants that would yield unfamiliar fruits. Flowers with unknown scents waited.

  The people on the ship, still reeling from the experience of leaving their home and seeing it destroyed, found hope in their hearts.

  The people, who would take to calling themselves the Tribes in Exile, watched as the ships landed in the driest area, similar to the plains on their home planet. The Sola was just rising in the Eastern skyline and there were a few small groups of the proto-humanoids that lived on this planet gathering to watch the Ships land. The Dragons would go first.

  They were always first.

  It was the end of everything.

  It was a beginning.

  ~Safkhet, Star Date 21*520*205500

  ***

  World News Time-Gazette

  January 15, 20—

  Ancient Rosetta-Stone Like Text Uncovered! Scientists Stunned!

  The International Scientific community is reeling with the publication of a new translation of an ancient text. Readers may remember the story of a strange sphere being discovered years ago. Many thought it was a hoax, but this new discovery has changed that speculation.

  This week, news that the ancient story of an extra-terrestrial race of beings had come to the Earth was uncovered by a graduate student. When her computer was taken over by a virus, Sonya Lake found the initial installment of an amazing story. Publishers are fighting over the rights to release the rest of what might prove to be a historic text that will change the way we view our own evolution, as well as this planet’s history, and that of the entire solar system. Computer scientists say that what has been done to her computer is impossible. Top history and archeological scientists have given no comment at this time, but an anonymous insider says the story is huge.

  The first of several stories have appeared, and are supposedly written by an ancient scribe named Safkhet. Stay tuned here to the World News Time-Gazette for more information as the story unfolds!

  For Wide Release.

  For more information, contact K. Zimmer

  @ Time-Gazette.com.

  Alison Wilgus

  http://www.alisonwilgus.com

  King Tide(Short story)

  by Alison Wilgus

  Originally published by Terraform

  Some particular trick of the moon, the weather, and the Earth's closeness to the sun had pulled the tide all the way to 5th Avenue, a good half-block further uphill than usual. The city had put out an alert, so Jordyn knew to clear out the basement ahead of time. Their landlord had been smart enough to have the foundation sealed years ago—that would be fine—but there wasn't much to be done for cardboard boxes and old futons. Those had to be kept above the tide line, or they were garbage.

  Her girlfriend, Mia, had paused on the first floor landing to breathe, a disintegrating tomb of Jordyn's family albums clutched in her hands. Its weight eased for a moment as she rested an edge on the railing. "We should toss these," Mia had said. "You digitized them years ago."

  "Oh, but it's not the same," Jordyn had said, and it wasn't.

  Now she sat cross-legged on their bed while Mia showered, a stack of albums on the duvet beside her and another open in her lap. She peered at the careful handwriting under each photograph, names and dates and in-jokes, most of them incomprehensible. The photos had been taken with cell phones and carefully printed out, an anachronism even then. Her grandmother had pressed hard when she wrote, and as Jordyn ran her fingertips over the pages she could feel indentations beneath the ink. The album smelled of dust and old glue and a worrying hint of mildew.

  Jordyn had copied one—taken a photo of a photo, found a place up in Bushwick that still d
id small print jobs, bought a silver frame secondhand at the Brooklyn Bazaar—and set it on the wooden dresser beside their bed. Her grandmother had taken it decades ago, when her mother was a little girl and the Gowanus canal only rarely ventured out onto the streets.

  In the photo, a small, smiling version of her mother sat on the stoop of her grandparents' house. She was an almost-copy of Jordyn herself: curly black hair, brown skin, freckles on her cheeks and bare shoulders. The house was yellow brick, with white-washed iron bars over the windows and a little flower garden tucked between the concrete stoop and the stairs down to the cellar. Her grandparents had bought it in the 1970s for very little money, and, at the time the photograph was taken, were rightly smug about their foresight. When the photo was taken, they could have sold it for a million dollars to developers who'd have cheerfully replaced it with a narrow stack of condos.

  They'd stopped using the cellar after Hurricane Oscar. Hurricane Andrea had ruined the curtains and the carpets on the first floor. In the end, they’d been forced to sell the house for little more than it cost to buy a new car.

  Jordyn lived just up the hill, now. The yellow house in her picture wasn't large—two stories and a basement—but on most days, its top story rose out of the lagoon. She liked to look at it from her roof in the late afternoon, when the warm golden sunshine made it look buttery and romantic. Like it had sounded in her mother's stories, back when she was still alive to tell them.

  The pipes thumped as Mia turned off the water. She walked out the bathroom in a cloud of steam, her stout brown body naked and dripping as she toweled off her hair. "Moon's out," she said.

  Jordyn closed the album in her lap and set it on top of the others. The bed creaked as she slid to the edge, tucked her feet into her slippers, stood up; she stretched her arms above her head and her muscles resettled. "It's a King Tide," she said. "Highest this year. By a lot."

  Mia pulled her head through a cotton tee shirt. "We should drink a couple beers on the roof."

  "Hah! In winter?”

  Mia shrugged.

  ***

  Jordyn opened the door to their apartment, then turned the lock so that the deadbolt would catch on the frame and keep the door ajar. Theirs was the top floor; they climbed one flight of steep marble stairway to the roof. Two bottles clinked together in Mia's hand, held by their necks between her fingers.

  The winter had been mild, but little mounds of rotten snow hid in the shadows, and Jordyn rubbed her arms through her sweatshirt as she walked across the tarpaper. Through the steam of her breath, she looked out over a city of brick and stone and water. Behind her swelled the high-rent higher ground of Park Slope, dry townhouses marching up the hill to Prospect Park, Flatbush, Windsor Terrace, Crown Heights. Neighborhoods that emptied this time of year, when everyone escaped to their condos in Georgia.

  Before her, an archipelago.

  Real estate agents had started calling it "Gowanus Beach," which Jordyn thought was pretty misleading, even by real estate standards. At least when people said Red Hook was "The Venice of Kings County" that evoked a useful image: water-stained townhouses and floating wooden walkways, plastic kayaks tied up in front of corner bodegas, tanned women in sundresses puttering around in little zodiacs with outboard motors, the East River lapping at second story windowsills. "Gowanus Beach" implied sand, maybe sea-smooth stones, even the muddy shore of a lake. Nothing about "beach" said crumbling asphalt, or concrete gnawed away by the tides, or exposed rebar skeletons dissolving into rust, or the bloated carcasses of cheap student furniture bobbing up from drowned garden apartments.

  The wind was wet and heavy. Jordyn shivered and looked down at the rippling gray water. She couldn’t see her grandparents’ house. The tide had swallowed it entirely.

  Mia popped their bottles open on the low brick wall of the facade. They stood in the cold and looked at the city, at the full moon in the blue evening sky, at the waves. A trash barge puttered along the street below, pausing every half-block for building supers to add to its load. Jordyn could hear the siren of a fire boat, but couldn’t see the boat itself, nor the smoke.

  Jordyn took a sip from her beer, which was warm and tasted of hops and cardamom. "The tide's supposed to drop all the way down past Fourth Ave," she said. "I thought I might go for a walk."

  Mia pursed her lips. "It'll be dark."

  "It hasn't gone out this far in years,” Jordyn said.

  "Still." Mia nursed her beer in silence for a while, time measured out in the swish-pop of her sips. "When was your last tetanus shot?"

  "Couple years ago. Remember? I fell off Madison's dock."

  Mia sighed. "Wear your reef shoes, all right?"

  The sirens faded. Jordyn stepped into the warm space beside Mia's body and slid an arm around her thick waist, tucking her hand into the far pocket of Mia's coat. "I'll be fine," she said.

  ***

  Anticipation kept Jordyn from sleeping soundly, and she woke before her alarm. She had dreamed about riding the old subway system her mother had told her about. She dressed by the amber light of street lamps, pulled a coat on over her wetsuit, slipped her feet into her reef shoes. Kissed Mia on the forehead and closed their bedroom door.

  Mia had set the big flashlight to charge before they'd gone to bed. Jordyn took it and her set of keys, locked up the apartment, descended the stairway in rubber-soled silence, and stepped out onto the empty sidewalk. The water was gone, but the tree wells were stiff with frozen mud.

  As Jordyn walked downhill toward Fourth Avenue, below the usual tideline, she had to pick her away around soggy timber, hunks of old insulation, rusted soda cans, tangled knots of plastic shopping bags—the usual trail of city detritus left behind by high tide. She passed under the elevated boardwalk running along the east side of the avenue, a tourist attraction some mayor had built when she was a little girl. The wreckage of a gull had caught on one of the pilings.

  Beyond the boardwalk, asphalt crumbled into a sort of coarse black gravel, bits of the roadbed mixed in with the sand and soil and stones that had once supported it. In places, the steel tubes and concrete cylinders of the old infrastructure were exposed—gas lines, water mains, sewers, electricity. Round black holes gaped open, liquid noises echoing up from underground. Most of the old manhole covers had been stolen by trophy hunters years ago. Jordyn chose her steps carefully, eyes on the ground.

  Once she reached the buildings on the far side of the avenue, she paused to look behind her. Only the foolish or the desperate would eat anything fished out of the Gowanus lagoon, but the boardwalk was crowded with seafood restaurants hoping to capitalize on the maritime atmosphere. Their neon signs still winked at her from above shuttered doors and windows, criss-crossed by the black silhouettes of utility lines.

  She walked downhill. The canals of the lagoon were lit, but not well, and the low tide made the landscape unsettling and strange. Buildings were taller than she remembered; boats moored in shallow water now rested on the ground.

  The lagoon had retreated to a few yards below the avenue. Jordyn switched on the flashlight and waded in one cautious step at a time, careful not to shift her weight forward until she was sure of her footing.

  The water was cold. Her toes were numb within half a block, but that was fine. The soles of her shoes were tough enough for nails and glass, and she didn't have far to go.

  In the LED glow of her flashlight, the yellow brick house looked almost white. For a disoriented moment, she wondered if she'd gone down the wrong street, or misremembered which side of it the building was on. Someone—a thief, an interim owner, the tide—had taken the bars from the lower-story windows. And the brick was striped with stains, each line a marker of the lagoon's creeping progress uphill.

  But the black iron numbers hanging above the door were the same. This was the house, reclaimed from the tide, if only for tonight. From this stoop, her mother had watched the water come.

  Jordyn was up to her waist in the lagoon. Her feet still had some f
eeling left, and she poked around with them under the night-black water, looking for the first step. Finding it, she climbed the uneven stairs, water running down the legs of her wetsuit and dripping from the saturated hem of her coat. She sat on the stoop, her back against the font door. Her feet were still in the water, and it tickled as it lapped around her ankles.

  She dried her hands off on her hair, then tugged her phone out of a plastic pouch in her jacket. She held it up in front of her, looked into its little black eye, and smiled.

  Noise Pollution(Short story)

  by Alison Wilgus

  Originally published by Strange Horizons

  I'm not an idiot. I don't leave the house without at least one set of juiced-up double-As, two if I remember when I'm putting my purse together. A minute is enough time for a spell to fall apart, and if you think you can find a bodega and buy a pack of batteries and swap them in and get your tape running again in less than five, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

  And that Saturday I'd been so good! I'd been a real responsibility champion, one set in my bag and another in the pocket of my coat, just in case I was mugged, though come to think of it a mugger would probably be enough of an asshole to take my walkman, too, so I'd be in kind of a tight spot either way.

  Anyway I'm not an idiot, but I can't really pay attention to more than a couple of things at once, either. I've got no problem with keeping one ear open to make sure the cloak Song's running while I'm on the train or at the store or you know…doing normal things like an adult is supposed to. I can leave my apartment, I'm not one of those people.

  But sometimes it's three or four things. Sometimes a punk-ass kid wants to haggle with you over an unopened ten-pack of Type Two BASF Chrome Maximas and you're on the phone with your goddamn choir director and your walkman runs down while both your earbuds are out. And you don't notice right away. And then the Noise comes swooping down on you like a summer storm, and you've got problems a whole truckload of responsibility batteries isn't gonna fish you out of.

 

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