by Various
Short Story: “The Ostracons of Europa” ••••
Short Story: “The Totem of Curtained Minds” ••••
THE OSTRACONS OF EUROPA
by Ken Hinckley
First published in Nature (Jul. 2013), edited by Colin Sullivan
• • • •
THERE WAS SOMETHING transcendent about the pattern etched into the ice-bound Europan surface looming fifty-three kilometres above Ricardo Cuerta’s submersible. The implacable gravity of Jupiter rewrote the great frozen palimpsest again and again, the pack-ice heaved and rilled with fissures that hinted at the mysteries of the deep.
That’s how he’d seen it from orbit. Now the intense blue-white glare of the spotlights seemed to be all that prevented the eternal midnight of the subsurface ocean from imploding his mind.
Particulate clouded the supercooled brine. Flurries of malformed magnesium-sulfate flakes tumbled through the cones of light cast off by the submersible and vanished again into the darkness. Ricardo floated, with nothing but the spotlights of the submersible and the sheer thrall of wonder between himself and the abyss. Even now, submerged within the shattered moon, he still couldn’t fathom what that pattern meant.
The black chimneys of a cryovolcano rose out of the gloom like a city of diseased skyscrapers. Ricardo torqued the joystick between his thumb and forefinger, applied just enough pressure to manoeuver the perspex tube at the end of the armature a little closer. He needed a sample, had to bring back proof—if not for the cold gaze of Science, then at least to convince himself he wasn’t confabulating wonders in the dark.
Cold sweat drenched the polypro fabric clinging to his chest. The tang of constant anxiety oiled the fatigue lines etched into his face. The slightest mistake, the tiniest unintended twitch of a muscle, and he could easily breach a chimney and bring the entire tottering structure down on the submersible.
If he were lucky it would breach the observation bell and he would be dead a few tenths of a second later. If he were not so fortunate, it would cripple the craft, leaving him drifting and helpless in the dark.
Communication with the rest of the crew awaiting his return at the surface was impossible. There would be no final cry for help; he would never be found.
• • •
Ricardo licked the salt from his lips. It wasn’t so different, really, than the brine the submersible was drifting in at this very moment. He could have been floating in himself. It had been ten years since Rosa had died. His wife, his bride, so young. Why did he have to travel so far from home to exile himself from his own darkness?
And yet here he was, floating in the abyss.
The spotlights fell upon a brilliant white chevron in the silt-shrouded murk. At first he thought it was enormous—there was no sense of scale, nothing familiar and human by which to judge the size of objects. It winked out, then appeared again, and Ricardo realized it was close at hand, something partially occluded by the soot-black columns of the cryovolcano.
Something that moved.
He let the submersible drift. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to startle it.
Slowly it came into view.
• • •
An alabaster-white carapace. Crimson-tipped thorns cresting sharp-jointed legs. A hooked beak framed by feathery fronds that sculled and groped at the deep.
It was a monstrosity pried from the oil-cake layers of the Burgess shale and jolted to life. The gangly and utterly alien way it moved was infused with a crawling strangeness that sent chills prickling up Ricardo’s spine, across his shoulders, and into the base of his brain. The words crab and spider and giant squid flashed through his mind, but of course it was none of these. He settled on xeno-arachnid, because, a man of science, he could not bring himself to call it what it was: monster.
Its fronds quivered and reached out. Probing. Curious. Angling his way. Suddenly Ricardo’s mind flashed with comprehension: the creature had nothing he recognized as eyes—but it, too, was dumbfounded with wonder.
Its gaping beak seemed to gnaw at the darkness. It lifted two thorned legs, not threatening, slowly extending them towards the spotlights on the front of the submersible. Ricardo was about to pull back when the xeno-arachnid halted. Its fronds undulated in the shadows cast by its limbs. The beak repeated its gnawing motion, then again a third time. Slowly. More deliberately. Ricardo gasped and his eyes went wide.
It was trying to tell him something.
But what?
Ricardo thought he glimpsed a shimmer, an iridescence just at the limits of his perception. He fingered the toggles for the spotlights and the interior lights, flicked them off one by one, and plunged himself into abject darkness.
But as his eyes adjusted, he realized the darkness was not absolute, the darkness was not eternal.
Not at all. He had only begun to see the light.
• • •
The xeno-arachnid’s legs glowed with a ghostly bioluminescence. Its carapace grew brighter, and slowly turned to face him. The legs—four of them working in unison—scrabbled across the surface, wove in somber blues and muted whites a tapestry of overlapping calligraphies that became more and more complex with each pass of its limbs.
The pattern lighting-bolted in Ricardo’s mind to something he recognized, to patterns larger still. The massive pack-ice shards of Europa’s frozen crust. The jumbled cuneiform of pressure-ridges and rifts stamped into the icy potsherds fracturing the surface.
The rafting of the Europan surface was not random at all.
The creature was writing its story, a small fragment of the same immense narrative that was etched into the Rosetta-stone shards that circumscribed the Europan globe.
Ricardo held no proof, but he knew. The xeno-arachnid was telling him. He knew. The light in the darkness was written on its carapace.
The creature was like him, a kindred spirit, an exile, and their names were scrawled upon the ostracons of Europa.
THE TOTEM OF CURTAINED MINDS
by Ken Hinckley
First published in Fiction River: Time Streams (Aug. 2013), edited by Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch
• • • •
“LIGHTS OUT!” the guard screamed, the pimply-faced new guy on Cell Block D, trying just a little too hard to assert his newfound superiority. Maximum security, one man to a cell. I guess he thought he had to seize every bit of control he could lay his grubby little fingers on.
He was one of those types, curtained off to the world, one of those men who like to dwell in a special little prison of their own devising.
“And that means you, 9-9-6-8-6-2-9,” he said, lowering his voice a register but still spitting out the digits like gunfire. “And make it snappy.”
I shook my head and tried not to laugh. Figured he’d last a week, if that, before this place drove him straight to crazy.
But just in case he was there already, I did what the man said. Clicked off the articulated reading light clipped to my e-reader, and plunged myself into darkness.
The sounds of men coughing and bunks creaking echoed through the hard, unyielding walls of the cellblock as we all settled into the night. The whole joint stank of mildew stewing in cracked concrete, of man-sweat and fear, all the smells they couldn’t scrub out no matter how many times they made us mop up the floors. The taste of watered-down Pine-Sol never left my tongue.
That was me, Gareth Warren Abrahamson, Prisoner number 9968629, serving a life sentence in Cell Block D of the Colorado State Penitentiary Annex, located in unincorporated Larimer County, Colorado, just outside the city limits of Fort Collins.
The reason for my incarceration doesn’t much matter, I suppose, though it’s not all that hard to venture a guess and smack it dead-on.
I’d been sentenced, and sentenced to life.
And even that turned pretty quick into life plus 20 years, but I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Twenty years! Makes me laugh, makes me feel old. Might as well be 9,968,629 years tacked onto th
at life sentence. The math works out just the same.
Only it doesn’t.
I’m not really sure why they needed this system of numbers, this incessant need to strip away our names and our identities and whatever else it is that makes us human, just so they can squeeze us into a cell somewhere. Whether it was one of concrete blocks or a little fifty-percent gray rectangle in some computer spreadsheet somewhere didn’t really seem to matter all that much.
They had us and they had us good, we prisoners of life, we men of curtained minds, and that was exactly the way they liked it.
• • •
Turned out I was wrong about that guard, the new guy, Pimple Face. He was still on the job, and he watched me like a hawk.
I refused to learn his name.
It certainly made things more difficult, but there’s ways to pull off most anything if your motivation is sufficient.
Turned out it was an old man who saved me. A man wise to the ways of the world, its untapped potential.
I have to admit that when I first came to Cell Block D I didn’t pay any attention to Ol’ Man Clark Soderstrom, not really, not the way you would to the last cigarette in a used-up pack of Winstons, the empty promise of the lingering tobacco smell on the air.
Or, say, the final resounding crash of that cold, riveted plate-steel door slamming shut the first time you’ve landed your ass in solitary. That’s a sound you can never forget.
I deserved it, oh yeah, I’m not saying I didn’t. Those twenty extra years weren’t tacked on for nothing.
But nights like those set a fella to thinking. And seeing. And feeling. I mean really feeling, the way I can feel a moth trapped in the hole with me dizzying the air with its wings.
Enough time down there, enough long long nights talking to yourself in the dark, enough days inhaling the stink of piss that didn’t make it all the way into the can, and you start to see things you didn’t before. You start to pay attention to those little clues fate scatters at the soles of your scuffed-up black leather oxfords, the prison-issue shoes engulfing your worn-out feet.
Clues. They’re everywhere, if you’ll only just open your eyes and look.
Like those books in the prison library, the ones with more squiggly little math symbols than words, the ones even the astrophysicists don’t know what the hell to make of. It’s a correctional facility, after all, a place to make more of men who’ve come up lacking. Self-improvement. Education. Science and math. Advanced principles of physics, the Road to Reality they call it.
A promise like that just makes me laugh.
We’ve books on everything here, electronic and otherwise, and I got plenty of time to read ’em all. Just because I done wrong doesn’t mean I was born full up of stupid. I got a good head on my shoulders.
Let me put the problem to you like this.
You emit a photon, gamma (γ), screaming like hell towards the future at the speed of light, c, at the same time a prisoner, P, weaves a strand of silk, S, that catches a ray of sunlight just so.
How long does it take him to get there?
Most people don’t follow this part, so listen and listen close.
The problem with time is that it doesn’t exist, not really, the same way Soderstrom didn’t really exist for me before I started paying attention, the same way that pack of cigarettes I thought I had is gone because all of ’em went up in veils of blue-coiled smoke. It’s a surface phenomenon, an illusion, a reality that emerges from nothing.
Time does not exist.
You see, it’s in the light. It’s all about the light.
And space.
And time.
Which, as I said, does not exist. Einstein dreamed it, riding a beam of light. He looked out, and what did he see?
Nothing. Time stops. It dilates to zero. It’s every man’s boyhood dream, to bridge the vast distances to the stars.
No time passes at all, for you and you only, when you’re moving at the speed of light. It’s the rest of us suckers that age faster than a chain-smoking con locked up in maximum security, in a featureless gray cell twenty-three hours a day.
Time is nothing but the unassailable logic of cause and effect, the eternal truth that things, once done, cannot be undone. An eggshell, shattered and spilling its viscera of yolk, that cannot be put back together. Men, broken and jumbled inside, that one fatal defect lying like an invisible curtain on their mind, who cannot be rebuilt. Who cannot be rehabilitated.
Except when they can.
Got that? Good. I figured as much.
Maybe not.
Let me run at this again, pose another toy problem.
Q: If a prisoner, P, travels at the speed of light to an unknown future, f, how long does it take him to get there?
At the speed of light, time crawls to a halt. It’s a divide by zero, a mathematical impossibility.
Only, we know that can’t be true. Light, the brilliant beams of the sun, pull it off each and every day. They’ve escaped. They’re free of time.
So here you have it, your answer. To wit:
A: It takes no time at all. Not even an instant. Time does not pass for a beam of light; time has no meaning at all. It dilates down to nothing, less than nothing. It simply doesn’t exist, an axiom utterly without foundation.
Time. It’s just one of the many curtains draped over the minds of men, the cloth stale with sun-bleached dust, the fibers disintegrating with age.
• • •
It was around the time of these deep musings that I first discovered Ol’ Man Soderstrom was raising the Hyalophora cecropia moths in his cell on the sly. The giant Cecopria silk moth, North America’s largest native moth. Their wings smelled like musty velvet when they first unfurled them, as Soderstrom let them dry there in the squat, narrow window sill of his seven-by-ten cell.
I don’t know how the hell he did it, but he even managed to keep it a secret from Pimple-Face, which was quite an accomplishment, even if the guy didn’t pay nearly as much attention to Soderstrom as he did to me. Most of those moths never made it, but the ones that did were six goddamned inches across. Six inches! Soderstrom delighted in setting them free on the yard, after they pupated, when he thought nobody was looking.
He was a blue-veined ghost with a shock of silver hair, and yet nobody ever caught on ’cept me. Shuffled right under their radar. He was practically invisible.
Being stooped and frail with skin like wet vellum has its advantages.
And then it doesn’t.
Soderstrom was just a weak old man, but he took it upon himself to shuffle around the perimeter of the yard each and every day for the one hour he was allotted to feel the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, the one hour a day when he could actually feel alive.
He’d confided to me that he had Parkinson’s disease, slowly spiraling his life to a halt, but he wasn’t going to shuffle off without a hell of a struggle, one hell of a fight.
He was absolutely right.
Somehow, Snyder Shankley, a good-ol’ boy hailing from somewhere in the Tri-Cities area of Eastern Washington, had gotten it into his mind to grift Soderstrom for his three packs a week of Winstons.
They didn’t call him Shank for nothing.
Soderstrom didn’t touch the things, of course, but they were the currency of the prison black-market, worth far more than their weight in gold.
Worth far more than an old man’s life.
Soderstrom bartered the cigs for the moth eggs, had ’em sent to his wife from some mail-order place. She’d slip a few into her letters here and there, and she wrote to him every day. Every single day, and twice on Sundays. She doted on him even after twenty years of never setting her eyes on his face. She’d had a stroke long ago, and hung on all those years, living with their daughter in Maine.
I don’t know what he fed them, but he’d concocted something they would feed on, and some of them even survived. Not many. But a doting wife can slip a lot of moth eggs into her letters in a year.
; When it finally happened, Soderstrom never saw Shiv coming.
It was only when the moths emerged alive that he was happy, but when they failed to thrive, as they often did, he soaked the cocoons in alternating baths of scalding hot and ice-cold tap water so he could harvest the silk. He wound it in spools of thread round little black pebbles I collected for him from the yard, small enough to where I could jam them into the gaps in the tread of my oxfords and walk them right back into the cell-block. He collected a few on his own, as well, but he liked me to help, he had taken me under his wing. I think it was his way of welcoming me into his little conspiracy.
It wouldn’t be long now. He nearly had enough.
Pizza Face never would’ve let me take the pebbles off the yard if he’d ever found them in my pockets. But once I’d smuggled them to Soderstrom’s cell they were harmless, little pebble eyes in the sightless palm of the old, wizened man of Cell Block D. It was easy, the smuggling, all I had to do was shuffle my feet just so as I passed by his cell, let the pebbles roll up near enough to the bars so he could just reach out and pluck them from the battleship gray paint-slicked concrete floor.
It fell, as tragedies so often do, on a day that took your breath away, under a flawless azure sky.
Shankley lunged and Ol’ Man Soderstrom toppled to the concrete tarmac of the yard, even the tenacious weeds in the cracks nearly pounded out of existence, his blood fertilizing the barren soil that had accumulated therein.
Pizza Face was there, no more than twenty yards away, but he hesitated, looking on with a dull glassy sheen to his eyes even as he reached for his mace. He saw exactly what had happened, and he witnessed everything I was about to do.
Rage flashed to a boil and my soul mushroomed with hate.
I wrested that crude plastic shiv from Shankley, a toothbrush handle ground down to a single savage point. I overpowered him, even though he had fifty pounds on me, even though he was stronger than me. He saw the wildness in my eyes, that I would keep coming and never stop, and he froze.
I plunged the shiv into his neck again and again. I gouged out Shankley’s eyes, I impaled his tongue to his chin.