by Various
When he lay there, limp as a child’s lost ragdoll, I turned to Soderstrom, and hugged him tight. He was still alive but fading fast.
He clutched my arm and whispered the great secret in my ear, and I felt his grip loosen.
With a final shallow breath—an exhalation soft as a moth fanning its wings while it basks in the high Colorado sun—his chest sank and he died.
• • •
They slammed me in that hole, and it was ninety-nine days and one hundred endless nights before I ever set eyes on the sun again. I never saw another human face, only ever heard footsteps echoing down the corridor.
I imagined it was Pizza Face, coming to watch over me, every time.
But on the morning after that final night, night number one hundred, he did something that flat-out stunned me.
He slipped my flimsy plastic breakfast tray through the stainless steel flap, as usual.
And then the lights came on. A pair of fluorescent tubes caged by wire mesh high above, but light nonetheless.
On the tray was my breakfast, scrambled eggs and buttered whole-wheat toast with bacon, along with my e-reader and a small package wrapped in a brown paper bag, probably from some local grocery store that I’d never live to set foot in.
The guard’s voice whispered through the iron slot, and it stunned me, made me jump back more than any shout of his ever did. “Your reader,” Pizza Face said, “and a gift from Clark Soderstrom. Take it back to your cell when you’re ready.” His shoes clacked back down the hall, a buzzer sounded, and that riveted iron door rolled open.
I was ravenous, but I never touched that breakfast.
Vincent, I learned. The guard’s name was Vincent Marsham. He’d taken this guard job part time so he could help out his mother. She lived here in Fort Collins. Cardiac problems.
He’d dropped out of college to take care of her. The man was a saint.
Boy, did I ever feel like a jerk. A worthless convict, one of those who’d been found to be lacking. A man given up by society, and with good reason at that.
But not beyond rehabilitation.
The first curtain had lifted, from my mind as well as his, and I had not yet even opened the package.
• • •
In the meantime the letters kept coming, and Vincent, Correctional Officer Marsham that is, hand-delivered them to me. It was Ol’ Man Soderstrom’s wife, you see. Her doctors didn’t think her heart could take it, and so her daughter never told her the news.
I looked up on the internet where Soderstrom had gotten those eggs and kept the pipeline coming. I didn’t even have to hide it any more, not really, at least not like Soderstrom had, because Officer Marsham looked out for me now and helped make it work.
More and more of those larvae started to pupate. More and more of those cocoons managed to hatch.
And as before, the ones that didn’t make it, I soaked in scalding hot water and harvested the silk.
When I tore open the package, of course, it contained all of Soderstrom’s pebbles, every last one wound with yards and yards of silk. It was really starting to add up to something worthwhile now, so I jury-rigged myself a spindle.
The other thing in the package was a letter from Soderstrom, handwritten in soft-lead pencil with a trembling hand. The print was tiny, in the habit of prisoners given to eke the most out of any tiny scrap of paper, and I found I needed a magnifying glass to read it.
I guess I wasn’t getting any younger either.
But what I read there amplified what Soderstrom had whispered in my ear, and my mind raced with the possibilities.
The problem with jumping into the future is you can’t ever go back. Never. That’s it, game over, finito and done.
Oh, there’s lots of people think they’re ready to give up their life and shuffle off into the future unknown, but they don’t really know until they’re confronted by the situation, the unholy terror of the cascades of time. Most run. Some freeze. But fellas like me? Fellas with a soul like cold granite and absolutely nothing to lose?
We jump in and swim like hell.
Kicking and flailing against the thunderous torrents of the time-streams crashing down all around us, the mists of the reality we thought we knew hissing away like the cold clouds thrown up by a waterfall, settling their way back down to earth, until it’s hard to believe that anything ever existed at all.
• • •
I suppose the time has come where I must confess.
Come clean, lay bare the truth of my crime.
It was, as the worst crimes always are, a crime of passion. It’s no excuse, I know, but there’s something wired ever so subtly wrong within me, and when the deep-down rage that shakes a person to his core strikes, I explode.
I doubt my six years in Afghanistan helped, always twitching and ducking every time a truck backfired or a rebellious teenager—yes, they have those there too—shot off his gun in the air.
I don’t know how to explain this, so let me put it to you this way.
I took Cecilia Elizabeth, my first wife and my last, to visit the ocean once, to Lincoln City, Oregon, for a summer vacation on the wild western fringe of the land. The place where the world ends and settles into the deep.
We sat there for hours, hand in hand, on giant logs of old-growth driftwood bleached and splintered by the sun. We listened to the waves crest and collapse on the shore, to the latent rage of the sea, that never-ending roar of the surf.
The brilliant sunlight sparkled off the spray like the glints of fallen stars, failed wishes and broken promises that settled themselves into the foam, drawn back out and drowned in the sea.
I never imagined I’d picture myself in with those waters, failed promises of my own, that latent rage. Bottled up, waiting to boil over.
Waiting to detonate.
I thought I had the perfect plan. Then again, the criminals always do.
It makes me cringe, to think of myself that way, but as I said, here I must confess the truth.
Little Jenny, my daughter, our daughter, my lovely Cecilia and me. So bountiful in her youth. Five years old. Always running, jumping, bouncing off of things.
Always covered in bruises.
And then her skin began to tear, and to bleed, all too easily.
Like wet vellum.
Then the headaches began, the “Head monsters, Daddy…” that would keep her wailing long into the night.
An acute non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease so rare they had to name it after the only three doctors ever to diagnose it.
I plunged into despair. The hospital bills mounted. We were about to lose our home.
Do you know how much money moves through a Mega-Mart in a day? Those hulking flat-roofed superstores that spangle these United States?
No math this time, I’ll tell you straight up. It’s a lot. A really frickin’ lot.
Maybe enough to keep us afloat for a year or two.
I went in, my large black gym duffel slung over my shoulder, my baseball cap hugging close to my brow.
Grabbed one of those gallon jars of candied cashews, and shuffled my way up to the registers with everyone else.
Only instead of pulling out my wallet I pulled out my sidearm, chamber chock full of shells. Screamed for everyone to get the hell down.
Only some goddamned Rent-a-Cop, God rest his soul, took it upon himself not to listen, to be Mr. Hero instead.
He rushed me from behind, and in the second it took me to wheel and fire I thought of little Jenny laying at home in bed, too weak to even stand up much any more, the way I cradled her in my arms when I carried her to the breakfast table, the injustice of the reality she knew. The months of sleeplessness, the frustration, of my stunning Cecilia’s tears on my shoulder.
Then Mr. Hero was upon me, in my face, that soiled blue-black uniform right up in my grille.
I flashed to steam, and exploded.
And much to my eternal regret, my Army-issue service revolver did too.
Even as
the sirens neared, as I sat there in shock, unable to move, unable to believe what I’d done, a black velvet curtain of shame and remorse settled itself over my mind.
It sunk into the folds and creases of my mind, seemingly never to be lifted, until I was a man no more.
Cecilia delivered the bail money, or the lack thereof, in an envelope stuffed full of divorce papers. And as for Jenny, my little Jenny—
Please, O Lord, take care of her soul.
I’ve prayed for repentance, I have prayed for rehabilitation. I know I must atone to the world.
But all that ever greeted those prayers were cold concrete walls, harsh words and hard stares, featureless days upon days rolling in like those waves from the ocean.
Until that day Ol’ Man Soderstrom whispered in my ear, told me the intricate geometries to spin into the silk, and I began to weave together my redemption.
When the sheer white silk curtain was ready, I went out on the yard, and unfurled it in the sun. The rays shimmered in the microscopic prismatic cross-section of the Cecropia moth’s silk. It’s in the light, see, the secret is in the light. It is the one force in the universe free of the iron curtain of time. The sunlight beamed down on me. It emblazoned the silk with gilded rays.
And the next thing I knew, the walls of the prison were gone.
• • •
The world was greenhouse hot with the sins of the past.
Every climate prediction ever made was bang on, the more pessimistic the better. There were no polar caps, the glaciers of the world had run into the sea, and the high Colorado plateau was baking hot, slowly turning into a desert. The air had the cloying tang of fresh exhaust, and it catalyzed the taste of aluminum in my teeth. All was silent, save for the wind.
I had aged not one day, not one hour, not one single second.
Meanwhile, best I could gather, some twenty years had passed the world by.
Remember the lesson I have taught you. For the traveler, moving at the speed of light, time does not exist.
Time.
Serving time, a life sentence.
No more.
It took a lot of searching but I finally found the place, far out in the long-abandoned sands.
Dried-up grasses and thistle weeds gone to seed heaved up the cracks in the patches of concrete that peeked through the dunes, a veiled glimpse of what had once been the yard.
I didn’t see a single one of those black pebbles I used to collect for Soderstrom.
The prison had been mothballed. The prisoners were all old men now, the Soderstroms of a lost age.
We didn’t need it any more.
I jammed my hands in my pockets, soaking in the sun, and only then did I remember the sachet of moth-eggs, and the pupae, and most of all the bag of black pebbles wound with the giant Cecropia moth’s silk.
Time, I needed more time.
I let my curtain of silk billow on the wind.
• • •
It was stunning, what a difference another fifty years makes.
The air smelled like cold mountain water, a smell so pure there is carries no scent.
But you know that it’s there.
It was clear and dry, the sky a rich cobalt blue, the lodgepole pines drinking in the sun greedily through long green needles as squirrels chattered in their boughs.
The nanocarbon sequestration engines had been a spectacular success. They did their work, staying in the atmosphere between eighteen and twenty-four months, and then they scuttled themselves in the ocean.
Billions upon billions upon billions, self-replicating engines that locked up stray molecules of carbon dioxide.
The world’s population was rebounding now, advances were taking hold, and the path forward was certain once more.
I met Annalisa as I walked out of the clinic, my neuro-synthetic corrections now in place, and I think she saw the change in my eyes. That subtlest of flaws in my mind that had been silk-curtained over.
She flashed a big toothy grin, and I smiled back, and ten minutes later we were drinking coffee together at the sidewalk bistro down the block. She was a pediatrician, a women who loved children and who knew how to heal.
I was a man renewed, a product of rehabilitation.
There were no correctional facilities any longer. The society of men had finally found the wisdom for healing, an actual building up of men instead of tearing them down.
The world was a place on the mend. It was still far, far too hot and food production was still moving forward on a razor-thin margin, but something lifted within me and I found myself believing in time again, a world with a future beyond my own life.
We still had so far to go, and I wanted to witness the fruits of my faith.
But I had one last thing I needed to do first, and I hoped Annalisa would understand.
• • •
Annalisa insisted they were extinct.
So I showed her the pupae, the cocoons, even the eggs as yet unhatched. I taught her everything I knew, every trick in Soderstrom’s tiny hand-printed book, and had to hope that she would study it well.
We worked together for months, perfecting our craft, raising more and more mulberry trees to supply us with the foliage the moths favored.
The first Cecopria emerged from its cocoon in the spring, its ruddy brown wings fanning the sunshine, its false eyes taking in the world. Brilliant orange-red bands ran down its wings like the halo of the sun in full lunar eclipse.
That was it. My totem, the emblem for the rehabilitation of my clan, we men of curtained minds. The giant Cecopria moth. I’d found a way to lift the shroud from my mind, to give my future wings.
Let me put it to you this way.
If a species, S, goes extinct, is there anything a man, GWA, Gareth Warren Abrahamson, can do about it? Are we forever resigned to live with the sins of our past?
Or is there a hope, a radiant photon γ screaming like hell out of the past at the speed of light, that intercepts our destiny?
I hope by now you have your answer. I know that I have mine.
We went on like this for some time, through that spring and high mountain summer.
But I knew I hadn’t gone far enough yet, that there was one more future to forge.
“Do you want to take the leap with me?” I asked. I didn’t know if that was even possible, but I prayed it would work. That I could once and for all rid the world of these illusions, tear them down, these curtains of iron and flesh alike.
“Yes,” Annalisa said, smiling wide, her teeth an even white row of hope astride hope, and only then did I know that my faith in the future had wings.
I once again stuffed my pockets with the giant silk moth eggs, as Annalisa did hers, just in case this didn’t work out the way I expected. But I wasn’t worried about it. My lungs swelled with faith without bound for the future.
Clutched Annalisa’s hand in my own, and together we unfurled the future one last time.
If we leapt forward far enough, I knew we would finally find the people who had done it, made it possible to live that dream of boys as-yet-to-become men, of girls brimming with wonder.
To bridge the immense gulf to the stars.
One by one, we went down the caterpillar tents, the chicken-wire cages we had cobbled together, and swung open wide the cellblock doors.
One after another, the moths fluttered out and took to the sky, hundreds upon hundreds of them, an immense flock of wonder.
The air was utterly still, but the silk curtain billowed as the moths rose with their bright dappled wings.
They dizzied the air, their wings buoyed by the brilliant sunshine of a glorious day.
Michael Hodges became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Grangy” in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review (Oct. 2012), edited by D.F. McCourt.
Visit his website at michaelhodgesfiction.com.
* * *
Short Story: “Fletcher’s Mountains” ••••
Flash: “Hydra” ••••
Short Story: “Seven Fish for Sarah”
FLETCHER’S MOUNTAINS
by Michael Hodges
First published in Perihelion Science Fiction (Aug. 2013), edited by Sam Bellotto Jr.
• • • •
The rules don’t apply up here. Not the city rules anyway—the ones about credit, finances, and stature. You know. All that irrelevant baloney that doesn’t matter a hill of beans once we die. The only thing we take with us is what we’ve seen. At least that’s what I think. Maybe that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans either. But Fletcher, my eyes have spent a lifetime in the Divinities. And that makes me the richest S.O.B on earth.
— Arnold P. Enders, last seen in the Divinity Mountain country
THE SNOW FROZE his feet. The boots he’d gotten from the local sporting goods outfit worked as well as a screen door on a submarine. He chuckled. His old man used to tell him that joke a long time ago—back before The Event. It took the old man just like it took most humans. What was left of them had scattered, most going to the cities. Foolish.
The socks were no good either. Package said they were wool. No way. More like double-layered athletic socks. Oh well, they were free. The store was empty, like most stores now. And the highways too. Except for the dead SUV’s, nothing more than tombstones, their mass blocking the roads at former population centers like plaque near the human heart.
Fletcher trudged in the drifts, leaving posthole tracks. Clumps of snow dumped from spruce branches as he brushed against them. His breath was cold when it reached his lips. The stillness of winter entered his soul, pushing on it. Perhaps it was the thing squeezing out his breath.
He’d seen deer tracks. They were confident, not sloppy like his. Man wasn’t meant for snow in these parts. But he had to come. Enders was up here, holed up in a cabin, riding out the icy winds. Hell, riding out the world. And for the last ninety miles something had been riding his tail—a shadowy figure two hundred yards back, disappearing from sightlines when he turned. Fun and games in this new era, an unpleasant surprise at every corner. He’d tried to evade the thing behind him, doubling back, side-cutting, even crossing creeks and crawling through drainage pipes. This was the world, now. Chase or be chased.