by Various
Miriam shields her eyes with her hand, peering back at the house. The oak trees stand up straight and taller than ever before, then the house crushes inward like a paper bag. Miriam buries her face in Bobby’s chest and they cling to the muddy ground as the twister screams overhead.
As suddenly as it began, the storm is over.
Miriam opens her eyes, slow. She and Bobby are pressed cheek to cheek, arms twined ’round each other like kudzu in an old tree. She starts to sit up, but he tugs her back down, pulling her into the curl of his arms as though she was made to fit there. They are breathing hard, muddy cheeked and wet from the storm.
Bobby pushes a strand of hair back from her face.
She clutches his shirt, giddy, and for the first time she asks herself what it would be like to love him. The answer is as startling and enlivening as the lightning touching the broke-limbed tree.
She already does.
He kisses her.
She wants to put a label on the feeling, to store it in a jar or her heart so she can remember the moment forever and ever, but the electricity of skin touching skin, an ordinary thing that is extraordinary now that it is Bobby’s lips pressed to hers, refuses to be bottled or named.
Just like God.
Something crashes to the ground in a chime of broken glass and Miriam stands up, reluctant. The house is a snarl of wood; all except for the front bedroom and the stairs leading down to what used to be the hall. Aunt Margaret and Aunt Leslie crouch in the middle of the floor, their daughters and husbands pulled tight around them.
The nurse is the first to move. She clatters down the steps, white-faced and wide-eyed, runs a few steps across the yard before her ankle turns on an upturned root and she falls, heavy and unmoving.
Miriam sighs. It’s still raining and the ground shines like glass, fog rising in cold tendrils as the hail melts. The cars have taken a beating, dents in the roof and hood, windows broken out, the trailers ripped free and the contents scattered across the field. The furniture lies closest, splotchy and warped, veneer peeling and discolored by the rain. The boxes of china are broken to smithereens, shards glistening among the rapidly melting hailstones.
Another piece of the house shifts, nails squealing as they pull free of wooden beams. Aunt Leslie squeals herself and rushes for the stairs. The others are a breath behind, staggering down the listing staircase and out into the storm-torn yard.
“My things.” Aunt Leslie’s voice whines like a band saw. “What have you done to my things?”
Uncle Thomas shuffles toward the car, Matilda under one arm, Veronica under the other. “Get in the car, Leslie.”
“Not ’til I get what’s mine.” Her gaze settles on Miriam. “You. You did this.” She tries to pinch Miriam’s arm, but this time her fingers just slide off.
Miriam straightens her shoulders. “Go home.” The rain trembles in the air around her.
Aunt Leslie stares at her and something in her eyes folds up and she turns away, small and unhappy and unable to do anything about it. Uncle Thomas starts the car and it rattles down the road as fast as possible through the puddles.
Bobby and Uncle Earl are in the front yard, trying to help the large nurse to her feet, hindered by the fact she keeps pulling them both down like a drowning swimmer.
“If you just let us help you up, we’ll take you straight into town.” Uncle Earl is talking loud and slow. He gets her arm across his shoulder and pulls her upright. With Bobby’s help, he steers her to the car where Aunt Margaret and Jeanne are already waiting.
Miriam picks her way toward the wreckage of the house. The stairs creak underfoot but they hold and she climbs up to Gran’s bedroom. The room is empty. Gran and her bed are gone with the storm. Everything else as well.
Uncle Earl’s car sputters down the road and Miriam pushes rain-slick hair back from her face. Her head aches and her hands are cold. She closes her eyes, too tired to do anything but stand in the rain.
I thought I’d taught you better than that.
She looks up, staring out across the field where the wood meets the grass and the shadows are deepest. There is movement through the slow rain—the thing which is God and Gran and Miriam walking under the trees.
In the cracks between the floorboards something glints. She reaches down and pries it loose—the thin gold chain and carnival glass pendent Gran wore around her neck every day. This is yours. Miriam slips the chain over head head, the glass settling against her breastbone, cool and heavy.
“Miriam.” Bobby’s at the foot of the steps, looking up at her, serious. “You all right?”
She nods. Comes down and takes his hand.
“A shame about the house,” he says. There’s a cut on his forehead, blood trickling down the side of his face in a bright line.
Miriam takes a breath and presses her fingers against the torn skin and something like what she felt earlier when they kissed stirs in her chest. Love. And God. And something else. “We can build another house.” She pulls her hand away and the skin underneath is new and clean.
Bobby frowns. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Miriam rests her head on his arm as they make their way toward his truck. “Glad for the rain. It was too hot.”
Vajra Chandrasekera became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Pockets Full of Stones” in Clarkesworld (Jul. 2013), edited by Neil Clarke.
Visit his website at vajra.me.
* * *
Short Story: “Pockets Full of Stones” ••••
Short Story: “The Jackal’s Wedding” ••••
POCKETS FULL OF STONES
by Vajra Chandrasekera
First published in Clarkesworld (Jul. 2013), edited by Neil Clarke
• • • •
THE GHOST of my grandfather Rais flickered when he talked about first contact. He was a decade younger than me now, unwrinkled and black-haired, far from grandfatherly.
Beside me, Hadil gestured for a pause. My grandfather’s ghost stopped talking, his features losing expression. The rich brown of his skin faded, became ghostlier, as the imago switched over to standby mode.
“Dike,” Hadil said, nudging me unnecessarily. “You notice the flicker?”
“Probably lost some frames in the cooker,” I said. Error-correction was tricky with neutrino-based communications over the light-years. The original Rais, very much alive, was extremely far away and travelling fast. “Did he say first contact?”
“He did,” Hadil said. He took off his augmented-reality glasses to rub his temples. Without them, his eyes looked too big, the red veins standing out. Too much time behind the glasses. “But I think that’s all the time he’s going to spend on it, no matter how important it might be. He just wants to talk to you.”
I would have argued, except it was true.
• • •
Picked up a neutrino transmission, the ghost of Rais had said tiredly. Could be pulsar activity. Some talk of first contact. See attached update for details. As if that closed the matter. Then he had changed the subject to his obsession: the petition to open up a bandwidth allocation for family members of his twenty thousand fellow colonists on the Cây Cúc. The right to talk to the Earth they’d left behind.
“Let me take a look at the attachment before Da Nang comes up,” Hadil said. On Makemake Station, we lived in epicycles. The station’s magnetic transmission horns tracked Earth in her orbit, waiting every day for the planet to spin Da Nang Mission Control into our line of sight so we could report home. There were a few hours left to go today.
“Do you mind if—” I nodded at the silent ghost. Without his glasses on Hadil couldn’t see the imago, but it hadn’t moved since he paused it.
“Go ahead,” Hadil said, getting up. “It’s your Grandpa. He probably spends the next twenty minutes crying about bandwidth and your Grandma, anyway.”
I scowled at his back as he walked to the other side of the workroom, walking through a
ll the phantom displays he couldn’t see without his glasses on: bright screens and blinking glyphs, the scale model of Makemake Station in the corner, the wall of clocks hovering in mid-air, my silent flickering grandfather, and my favorite Gauguin, D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Hadil had once complained it gave him nightmares, but I found it both soothing and ironically appropriate.
I had pulled rank and kept it at full size, four meters wide in our shared virtual space. Hadil always sat facing away from it.
• • •
As the relay station, the only link between Earth and her first colony ship, we could read the Updates from the Cây Cúc but they weren’t meant for us. Once we transmitted it back to Earth, it would be unpacked and pored over by analysts at Da Nang. This Update would have details about the mystery transmission, phrased carefully so that Da Nang wouldn’t think that the crew of the Cây Cúc was having a collective psychotic break. But there wouldn’t be much in the way of analysis from the Cây Cúc, just raw data. The time dilation meant they had no time to sit on information.
And neither did I. Hadil could satisfy his curiosity, but I had laws to break and no time for hypothetical aliens.
It couldn’t possibly be real aliens. They’ve probably discovered a new kind of pulsar.
“You want coffee?” Hadil said.
“No, thanks.”
The slightly acrid smell of instant coffee filled the room. You couldn’t virtualize a kettle, Hadil always said. “Do we have any fresh fruit left?” I asked, not turning around.
The fridge door opened and closed behind me. “Nope. Three days to the next supply drop.”
When he first got here, Hadil had been a little shocked to discover what I was doing. Makemake Station was a two-person miniature civilization at the outer edge of the solar system. There could be no secrets here, so I had just told him: I was dipping into that precious bandwidth to talk to my grandfather on the Cây Cúc. A strange crime, I’d admitted, but a crime nevertheless. He could have reported me, had me shipped off back home, banned from space.
But Da Nang was very political, even so many years after the troubles. He would be tainted by association, I had told him. I didn’t say that I would make sure of it. He wasn’t stupid. After a few months, he had relaxed. After his first year, we had become friends.
Given enough time, all problems are solvable.
• • •
“Oh, crap. Look at this,” Hadil said. He pushed an array of screens across the room in my direction, displacing my own virtual workspace. Process listings and system status monitors, bars in the green flickering up to angry reds.
I rubbed my hands over my close-shaven scalp. “What did you do now?”
“There was an executable binary in the Update,” Hadil moaned. “It was part of the signal they said they picked up.”
“You opened an attachment… from space?”
“No! I swear,” Hadil said. He sounded guilty. “Only in a sandbox. I was curious. I’m rebooting.”
I waved at the illegal ghost of my grandfather to continue. Color bled back into the imago’s skin, and light into his eyes.
Dear Dikeledi, Rais said. Granddaughter. He kept looking down at the photo in his hands. I’d walked over and looked at it once, but it cycled through so many pictures of my grandmother and Mom as a baby that it came across blurry and indistinct in the imago. Please let me know about the petition. Has Da Nang given answer? His voice was warm, a little too loud. Little puffs of air from the tiny speakers in my glasses, as if my too-young grandfather had his lips pressed to the soft skin behind my ear.
• • •
If things had been different, I would have been one of the twenty thousand colonists. No, that wasn’t right—I wouldn’t even be born yet. If Rais had been allowed to take his wife, Abena, and their infant daughter along with him, my grandmother would be a young woman, my mother still a baby. I wouldn’t be born for another four hundred years.
But he hadn’t been allowed to take them with him. Something happened, eighty years ago, while the family was preparing for departure. My grandmother wouldn’t speak of it except elliptically, to say that Rais made an enemy of someone powerful, someone in the junta, someone with control over the colonization project’s approvals board. I didn’t know exactly what it was that Rais had done to deserve this—Grandma Abena wouldn’t speak of it, and Mom didn’t know. It had been serious enough that after Rais left, Grandma Abena had changed her name and gone into hiding for a while. But by the time Mom was grown up, the urgency and the terror had faded. By the time I was born, it was only history.
I could even appreciate the clever cruelty of it: to give him the choice of being part of the colony, but only if he went alone.
A forced decision, made in haste. I distrusted haste. Decisions needed planning, strategy, not a wild leap into a dilemma constructed by somebody else. And it was still so recent for him, just a year and a half at relativistic speeds. A year and a half of recent memories and regrets, against eighty years of half-forgotten family history for me.
There had been no contact for all of that time, until he got that first message from me. An older woman who called him “grandfather” and told him that his wife and daughter had grown old and died, that I was his only family.
• • •
I look forward very much. Your next message, Rais said. Your last before you leave Makemake. Perhaps petition will move faster when you are back in Da Nang.
Rais kept pausing, as if expecting an answer. He wasn’t used to one-way messages yet, having only been doing them for a few weeks. His messages were full of awkward pauses and non sequiturs. Or perhaps the error correction at this range was poorer than I’d accounted for and parts were being lost. There was no way to tell.
Family, under time dilation: he’d append a personal message to the Cây Cúc’s daily update; I’d get it every two months. I’d add a small personal message to the annual update from Makemake; he’d get one of those every week.
When it ended, he would have spent a month talking to me. I would have spent five years, the full term of my contract on Makemake Station. It was almost done.
• • •
I nudged Hadil. “Your spikes are on the host network now,” I’d just noticed the angry red spikes indicating increased activity on Makemake Station’s computers both physical and virtual.
“Everything’s showing spikes,” Hadil said. “Except ops and life support.”
“Those are physically separate networks,” I said, absently. The CPU temperature graph was climbing steadily. I’d missed something Rais said. I’d have to rewind him later.
“Will you please switch off your Grandpa and check the logs?” I could hear the glare in Hadil’s voice. He was right, but I was reluctant to stop listening.
• • •
I’d been ten years younger than Rais was now, when the plan occurred to me. I was still at Nha Trang University, working through the qualifying courses to apply for extraplanetary duty. Plan—more of an intention, then, an understanding that I wanted to do this, that maybe I could, that maybe I should. I’d grown up hearing about Rais from Grandma and dreaming of space, which may have had something to do with my choice of career. But that was the year I put the plan together. The time dilation, Makemake Station, my career, the time and training I’d need to get there. I could talk to Rais himself; I could close the loop, answer the nagging little questions.
Now at forty-two I was as old as Mom when she had me. Ten years older than Rais, who had aged less than a year in my two decades of putting all the pieces together. I’d thought I knew him from Grandma Abena’s stories, from the things Mom didn’t say. Rais had grown bigger in the tellings, his absence having density and mass.
In person, he was too small, too young.
• • •
My grandfather’s ghost was flickering again, almost strobing.
Hadil and I both looked at it.
“Did your Grand
pa break the imago?” Hadil said.
“Shut up,” I said. “I’m pretty sure this is all your fault.” I grinned at him to take the sting out of it a little, while swiping rapidly through the last hour of logs. Makemake generated a lot of logs even when not doing anything in particular. Anything of note should have been flagged. There was nothing.
• • •
I really miss Abena, Rais said. He said this every time. He had never known her as a grandmother, with the wrinkles and the white hair that I kept expecting him to have. He wouldn’t talk about Mom at all.
I’d told him in my second message that Mom had lived into her eighties and taught art history. She specialized in Lý dynasty ceramics. But he didn’t acknowledge what I said—or he did and it was lost in the sea, neutrinos that didn’t ping. To him she was still a baby, or should have been.
When I made my plans I had intended to ask him questions. Why leave? Why not stay? Did they force you? Did you choose?
But well-made plans adapt to changing circumstances. I realized when I first saw his imago that closing the loop wasn’t about getting answers to those questions. It was about resetting our time-twisted family’s history back into a single story. It was the open-endedness that nagged at me, the sense that Rais had vanished into some other world—the future, perhaps, or the past—which was forever cut off.
• • •
I hope you plan to have kids, Rais whispered.
Rais believed that the petition would allow him to talk to any descendants I left behind, after I died. He didn’t put it like that, but we were all mayflies to him now. Four centuries would elapse on Earth by the time he sent foot on his colony world in a few years. At least a dozen generations. Would my descendants even want to talk to him? I didn’t know, but it felt distant and irrelevant to me.
I didn’t know if I wanted children. I’d had my eggs stored before I left Earth, left myself options. But I didn’t want to pass Rais down like a demented heirloom. I’d made up the story about the petition to get him to stop talking like I was a candle about to be blown out, and now he was obsessed with it.