by Various
“And we should do this even though you found a way out?”
“Just come with me, Captain. Come with me and you will understand. Hope, purpose, meaning, happiness of a sort—what we had in the years before was infinitely, unthinkably better than what awaits us without.”
• • •
Captain Seong took little convincing once he had seen the desolation which lay beyond the caves. He and Pete took a few steps out down the hillside until the ash began to choke them, cold acrid fingers down their throats. They heard the sounds, saw things that were not there. Captain Seong swore he felt something brush his shoulder, though Pete was only a few feet away and saw nothing but ash. They turned back lest they lose sight of the entrance: Earth held nothing for them and if it did they were terrified of it.
Inside the cave mouth, the other officers waited. At a shake of the head from Captain Seong, they began to rebuild the wall, working in silence. On the walk back to the ship, they tore up the guide-strips. Over the next few days, as Bottom teams tore up the other strips, removing all signs which pointed to their ship, Pete and the officers between them got the ship’s systems rebooted.
When all was complete, they sealed the cavern doors and closed off the ship once more. The ship’s journey was a lie, but it was one with promise—promise they would pass on to later generations.
• • •
Pete finished transcribing the last of the records from the dispersal and sat back, cracking his knuckles. It was only right, he thought, that he complete his duty as Archivist before betraying it. His generation would keep few records, and preserve none of them.
He lifted the paper from the desk and set it in the book he held, behind the two older sets of papers, then walked with it from the stacks, nodding to the two officers who stood at the ready with vid-cams and torches.
At the door, he stopped to watch. One last time, one last event: the fire-swept cleansing of all they had recorded, all their history and lore. He felt no regret at the destruction of their legends and dreams, their pasts and their futures.
After a while, he set the book firmly under his arm, turned on his heel, and walked to the express lift and the rich, verdant hills of Bottom. Behind him, the tongues of flame licked over everything but the shelf of the first years, already long since empty.
RAISING WORDS
by Stewart C Baker
First published in Penumbra eMag (Jul. 2013), edited by Celina Summers
• • • •
AFTER WE ENTOMBED my father, he transformed into a giant bird of the purest white and burst forth from the earth all holy and clean.
My mother and her co-wives, my sisters, my cousins—all followed as he soared, majestic and terrible and filled with beauty, away to the East and the sea.
I alone of the women in that place stood watching. The rest ran through plain and brush, pushing past the sharp bamboo which must have cut their feet like swords; they ran through wave and spray, unmindful of the cold wetness which wrapped their robes about them like black ocean weeds. As they ran, they sang, their high-pitched, nasal voices rising in rhythmic bursts of ritual lament to the kami my father had become.
I alone sang no songs. I alone remembered.
• • •
When I was very young, I used to beg my father to take me hunting. Though even then he was stern, he would always relent, the sun glinting through his jet black hair as he grinned our secret grin and set me in the bough of the sky-reaching black oak at the forest’s edge.
I loved the burst of activity as courtiers swarmed around readying horses and bows, the shouts ringing out in the crispness of the early spring air. But I loved more the way my father sat, perfectly still, astride his own horse. His own bow held loosely in his lap, he would chant the ritual blessing slowly, and with god-like calm.
I used to sit in the oak for hours and listen to the distant thrumming of bowstrings, reveling in the idea that all things were connected. In the idea that my father connected them.
• • •
When he slayed the warlords of the Kumaso tribe, my father received a new name. Yamato Takeru, they called him as they died. Yamato Brave.
When he returned, he had changed.
He no longer hunted, no longer held his bow. Instead, he practiced swordsmanship. He stood waist-deep in the Kino river, drawing and slicing and drawing and thrusting over and over and over again with a sword we learned he had received from his aunt, the high priestess at Ise.
He did not come to my mother or her co-wives a single time before leaving again at the Emperor’s orders to pacify the peoples of the East.
A part of him, I thought, a part of my past, was dead and gone forever. My mother cried for days, and I was filled with unease at a world unstrung.
• • •
We heard tales of his further exploits, this Yamato Takeru who had been my father. He smashed savages, argued with kami and gods, and struck them all down to the dead land of Yomi if they did not submit.
My mother and her co-wives received reports daily, tracking his progress with a mix of hope and trepidation.
From the boughs of the oak where I sat, alone once again, I could find no trace of former times.
• • •
“You will marry the Emperor’s first grandson, and raise my chance of ruling.”
Those were my father’s first words to me when he returned.
“My cousin.” I stated it flat and unflinching, ignoring my mother’s gasp.
“Yes,” my father said. “The throne’s heir.”
“And if I will not?”
My father laughed, a sound sudden and sharp, like an arrow striking wood. “You would raise words at me, girl? I have killed kami, and burned to the ground whole tribes of stinking rebels. I have subjugated the rivers, and the seas, and bent the messengers of gods to serve my own will. If you refuse, I have other daughters. Any of them can easily become my eldest.”
I set my teeth and raised my chin. “As you say, my lord father.” Keeping my words to myself.
• • •
But that night, I went once more to the forest.
I did not stop, as I usually did, at the foot of the oak, but walked further than I ever had before, into the untouched wilderness of the deep forest. I walked until the canopy closed overhead, then opened again to reveal the eternal patterns of the heavenly river. The air was rich with the smell of humus and rot.
I came to a mist-wreathed spring, and there I stopped, amidst the dim shapes of pines and rocks and the silent glow of distant stars reflected on its surface.
A white boar as big as a warhorse rose from the waters, its eyes unfocused and its movements calm and measured. Its form shifted as it walked, lopsided bulges of life forming on its body and sluicing away into the air with each step.
A kami. Its snout close enough that I could feel its breath on my skin, even and deep, it spoke.
woman-child, it said. what do you seek
The words echoed in my skull with the sound and thunder of trees falling. I did not reply. I did not dare.
woman-child do you seek justice
“No, I—”
woman-child do you seek vengeance
“No, I—”
do you seek… It paused, jaws opening slightly. death
“My father died already. What I seek is—”
your father’s death? it will come again if that is what you seek
My breath sat like a stone in my stomach; my throat burned like fire.
“Beast-god,” I rasped, “I order you stop! I, I wanted…”
leave this place woman-child, the kami said, or what you say you do not seek will come to you
Then it turned back towards the spring and, as it did so, slowly melted upwards into mist.
• • •
I walked through the forest for long enough to count a lifetime. I lived off mushrooms and berries, drinking from pellucid streams whose water chilled my throat and aching belly.
/> When at last I found my way back to the Yamato I knew, I was told that a half-moon had passed. My mother ran to me, her hair in disarray and her robes disordered, her eyes puffy and red.
“Thank the white plain of heaven,” she half-sobbed, collapsing against me. “I thought we had lost you too.”
So it was that I learned my father had been stricken dead at mount Ibuki by a massive white kami in the shape of a boar, while I wandered lost in the forest.
• • •
As my father’s kami vanishes towards the sea, and the wailing of my mother and her co-wives fades from hearing, I step from the shadow of my father’s new-built tomb, face his empty grave, and speak. Raising words one final time.
“I will remember you as you were,” I say, “and not as you became. Daily will I erase your divinity, ever chronicling your early, mortal life until your godly wrath is naught but legend.
“I will tell all who listen of order and calm.”
Then I turn. I do not look back at the fields and the cliffs and the mountains and the oceans of my homeland. I turn, and face the sun, and I leave that barren place in search of fertile ground.
Jeffrey A. Ballard became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “The Highlight of a Life” in Fiction River: Time Streams (Aug. 2013), edited by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Visit his website at jaballard.com.
* * *
Short Story: “The Highlight of a Life” ••••
THE HIGHLIGHT OF A LIFE
by Jeffrey A. Ballard
First published in Fiction River: Time Streams (Aug. 2013), edited by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• • • •
“REUBEN, have a seat,” Dr. Anthony Landau said. The Director’s tone was at odds with the warm sitting area that contained an aged oak table and padded benches.
“Thank you.” Dr. Reuben Rutherford sat and waited for the Director to finish whatever email correspondence he was working on. The sight of the six-foot-one Director standing at his workstation made Reuben’s back ache. Standing while working was the latest fad, a younger man’s game that Reuben had no interest in. The Director even still had all his hair, though there were just the beginnings of speckles of gray dotted throughout his tightly cropped brown hair and well-maintained mustache.
“No, cellphone?” the Director asked.
A chill went through Reuben. No cellphone meant going classified, which could only mean one project. How much does he already know? he wondered. “No, sir.” What’s done is done. There’s no going back now.
The Director clicked a mouse key with finality then turned around and hit some type of switch Reuben couldn’t see. Plastic shades made of some meta-material and coated with acoustic dampening foam descended down over the windows, cutting off the view—Chicago’s Washington Park—a sea of green covered in patches of white and gray snow in an endless urban sprawl.
“No electronic devices of any kind, right?” The Director sat down across from Reuben.
“No, sir.”
“Good.” The Director seemed to hesitate, but then came to a decision. “Your wife, uh, will not be able to reach you during this period. That switch was a communication kill switch for this office, including an electronic jammer.”
Reuben leaned back in surprise. Jammers were illegal by the FCC. No signals could go out, but neither could they come in. If his wife tried to get a hold of him through the Director, someone would have to physically knock on the door and the Director invariably told his secretary not to be disturbed. “Is it really that bad?”
The Director nodded. “The Chinese are relentless in trying to penetrate this lab. I swear they try to steal everything that isn’t nailed down.” His tone changed to concern, “No word yet from your wife?”
The question was genuine. This more than anything is why Reuben was loyal to the Director. He cared. Not only about the projects and health of the lab, but the people. “No, sir. We’ve been on the adoption waiting list for a few years now, but received a call last week that it could be any day.”
“I remember.”
“Kayla needs a playmate.” Reuben broke into a large smile. “Rambunctious little girl. We’d really wanted another child here soon, so they could be close in age.” His voice fell. “But it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”
“I’m sorry, Reuben,” the Director said softly. “Please let me know if there’s anything we can do to help.” He took a deep breath and continued, a tone of command slipping into his voice, “Reuben, I need to know what’s going on with Project Itho.”
“Yes, sir.” The name Itho was meaningless, a random name chosen to confuse anyone who might learn of it. Its very name was a top-secret code word. “You remember the briefing?”
“Multiverse, yes. I’ll confess though, Charlie’s slides filled with equations left something to be desired.”
Reuben chuckled. “Yes, sir. I can agree with that. But that’s Charlie, it’s easier to communicate with him in equations than words.” The smell of dry erase markers hit Reuben hard at that moment. The thought of standing in Charlie’s office in front of a white board as fresh as if he just came from there. “It’s actually not all that hard to understand conceptually. Remember manifolds?”
The Director nodded. “Yeah. The earth appears as a flat two-dimensional manifold to a person on its surface, but it’s actually a sphere in three-dimensional space.”
“Exactly, our universe is a four-dimensional manifold in an eleven-dimensional space.”
The Director rolled his eyes. “Why couldn’t Charlie just lead off with that?”
“It gets even easier, sir.” Reuben found himself enjoying the explanation. “Think of a newspaper. Each page is a two-dimensional manifold in a three dimensional space. But they’re all stacked on top of one another. That’s like the multiverse. And just like if you punch a hole through one page, you can peer through the hole to read the next, we can punch a hole in our universe and look into another.”
“Or travel.”
Reuben gulped. He wasn’t enjoying himself anymore. “Yes, sir. Or travel.”
“And nothing has been sent back? No data, nothing.”
“No, sir.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
He knows. “Uh—Sir?” he faltered.
“When did you do it?”
Reuben considered lying. But the Director was a good man, a man he admired even though he was twelve years his junior. He looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes ago.”
The Director shot out of his chair and started pacing. Anger, wonder, frustration, worry all passed over the Director’s face. He didn’t respond for several minutes as he worked through the implications of sending Charlie to another universe, as he considered the very likely scenario that Charlie was dead, since there was no evidence the device had ever even worked.
The Director remained standing and asked a wholly unexpected question, “Why Charlie?”
“Sir?”
“There’s four of you on the project. Why Charlie?”
Any of them could have gone. The idea was to send someone through that could then build a communication device to send information back through. Once that was done they could come back themselves.
Reuben couldn’t look the Director in the eye. “Charlie was a widower with no next of kin. The closest thing he had to family was an orphaned niece who died of a drug overdose several years ago. And he didn’t even learn of that until several months after it happened. He was never the same again after that.”
“That’s when he had his incident and I had to put him on administrative leave, right?”
“Yes, sir. He never talked about his niece. All I ever got from him was that she was in foster care and that he felt responsible for leaving her there. I tried talking to him about it but… all he ever said was his hubris killed her. Up to that point, the project had been his whole life. It was a
ll he ever talked about, the highlight of his life he called it. It wasn’t until we jokingly talked about sending someone through that he reengaged. He volunteered, and since he had no ties… we agreed.”
“Do you realize the position you’re putting me in? If the Dean catches wind of this—”
Pounding on the office door cut him off, followed by indistinguishable muffled yelling.
The Director strode over to the door and opened it.
Dr. Jason Heyse, a researcher in his mid-thirties, stood there panting. “Reuben—” He glanced about the office and saw the shades down. “Anthony, you’ve got to see this.”
• • •
“Ma’am, please, remain calm.” Charlie approached an older woman sitting on a bench enjoying the summer sun, in Chicago’s Jackson Park. “I need some help.”
She turned at the inquiry and said nothing for a moment as she clearly processed what she saw. A naked man in his sixties, covered in white hair, cupped his crotch and was slowly approaching. She got up and started to back away.
“Ma’am, please—”
“Stay back!”
“Ma’am—”
“Don’t. Move.”
Charlie didn’t listen.
“Help! Rape! Rape!” She started screaming in a high pitch that rattled around in Charlie’s head.
Charlie sat down on the vacated bench and tried to tune her out. It hadn’t gone as he hoped, but figured the end result of this would be suitable for his needs. He was silently thankful it was summer here, the warm sun rested on his shoulders and a light breeze from the lake kept it from burning. Charlie used the intervening time to when the police showed up to enjoy the nice weather and to think of a strategy.
About fifteen minutes later Charlie estimated, two policemen approached him. The older and more senior one was smaller with broad shoulders and kept his brown hair short and parted down the side—a gentleman, Charlie thought. The younger one’s mullet spilled out over the top of his collar, and its spindly nature matched his lanky arms and legs reminding Charlie of a greasy spider.