by Various
He looked shocked—perhaps I had spoken out of place. Surely he would say no, and Callie would be deployed to some faraway base, where I’d never see her again. But his face softened.
“I’ve actually thought about it. Because of her exceptional performance, I could easily argue for her to be kept here for observation and testing. Not to mention, I’m developing a soft spot for you Golden Retrievers.”
I could barely keep still in my excitement, until I remembered what Dr Gleitman had said about behaving more like a human and not like a stray pup if I wanted to keep my job in the lab. But it was hard keeping my tail still when the news was making Callie’s tail wag so fast that she was sending strands of fur flying. Dr Gleitman was grinning widely at the sight. In time he would teach her to use language to convey her thoughts instead of these primal displays of emotion, as he had done with me.
“Well I’m pleased both of you are happy with this arrangement. You’ll have to do the paperwork though, Moe.”
“Gladly!” I would get started on that later, but for now I thought of what to say to welcome the latest addition to our home.
Brian Trent became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “War Hero” in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton.
Visit his website at www.briantrent.com.
* * *
Short Story: “Sparg” ••••
Short Story: “War Hero” ••••
Short Story: “The Nightmare Lights of Mars” ••••
SPARG
by Brian Trent
First published in Daily Science Fiction (Aug. 2013), edited by Michele-Lee Barasso and Jonathan Laden
• • • •
SPARG had difficulty making pancakes, but he was trying.
In the empty apartment, he clutched the silver bowl with one tentacle to hold it steady. With another, he attempted the far trickier business of whipping the batter as he’d seen his owners do many, many times. The bowl was bigger than him. The counter was sticky with flour, egg, and ink.
From his cage, he had watched them conduct this peculiar ritual enough times to understand it was how they prepared their food. More elaborate than the brown fish-pellets they gave him. When his food dish was empty, they usually noticed as they shuffled in from the bedroom each morning. If they didn’t, Sparg would gently thump his tentacles against the bars until they came over to see what was the bother. Then strange sounds would issue from their red mouths:
“Sparg’s food dish is empty. Can you get the bag?”
And Sparg would thump his tentacles merrily, knowing that food was coming and that his owners would likely pet him when they refilled his dish, and he liked that. Sometimes he gently wrapped his tentacles around their hands as they did, and he would squeeze his eyes shut and enjoy their warmth and smell and reassuring touch.
The pancake batter reeked. Atop the kitchen counter, Sparg gave the mixture another few stirs. Then he flung the whisk into the kitchen sink, taking small delight in watching the tool float through the air and clatter into the shiny basin.
His owners never had trouble moving the pancake batter from the counter to the stove. That was because they were tall, magnificent beings, striding from room to room on graceful legs. Sparg gripped the bowl with three tentacles and held it aloft as he crawled down the counter, leaving little sucker prints in the dust.
He was not allowed on the kitchen counter or stove. This was a rule he understood. His owners flew into frightful antics when they saw him there. In the beginning, they react mildly enough: lifting him off the counter and returning him to the floor, petting him and issuing stern words. One day, the deep-voiced owner was drinking coffee at the counter when Sparg crawled up to sit near him. Deepvoice yelled and slapped him off, sending him into a low-gravity spin across the room. Sparg had been shocked by the assault, but then he heard Deepvoice laughing and he realized this must be some sort of game.
He returned to the counter at once, to take part in the amusement. When Deepvoice slapped him off a second time, the blow was more painful.
“What are you doing?” asked the high-voiced owner.
“Stupid thing. This is why we should have gotten a dog.”
“Dogs and cats don’t adjust to the gravity here. Don’t hit it again!”
“It keeps coming back here! I thought they were supposed to be smart!”
“It doesn’t understand.”
“It will.”
Highvoice intercepted Sparg as he was limping towards the counter a third time, and she put him in Littlevoice’s bedroom. The pain set in when he was alone. Sparg didn’t like being alone. He resolved to never go to the counter again.
He reached the floor successfully, the pancake batter wobbling in his desperate grip. The floor glistened from past spills. Sparg scuttled to the stove and began the challenging ascent. The batter sloshed around in the silver bowl as he pulled himself up, one careful inch at a time. At last, he flopped onto the stovetop, fumbled amid pots and pans, dials and spatulas. Then he paused, trying to remember the rest of morning ritual.
Owners awoke and refilled his food dish. Owners went to the kitchen and made breakfast—usually pancakes. Owners…
Ah!
Sparg drew open a cabinet. It was time to make Littlevoice’s school lunch.
Each morning, the smallest member of the human trio would receive a brown paper bag filled with fruit, crackers, a juicebox, and sandwich. Sparg tapped the stovetop anxiously, considering the problem’s magnitude.
Crackers were plentiful, and there were still several juiceboxes in the fridge. He had no trouble constructing a sandwich, and rather enjoyed prying the peanut butter can open and spreading its creamy contents onto two slices of bread. The problem was the fruit. It didn’t look like fruit anymore. Sparg didn’t know what had happened. The bananas and apples and pears had changed into a putrid brown jelly, fuzzy and gray with moss.
More carefully than he had handled the eggs, Sparg eased a sagging, lopsided pear from the bowl and—hardly daring to breathe—he gingerly set it into the bottom of the paper bag. Then, breathing again, he scuttled down the stove and deposited the bag by the apartment door. He hesitated there, thumping all his suckered limbs, trying to think.
“Come on everyone! Breakfast!”
Breakfast! Sparg hopped up and down, recalling the clink and clatter of plates. He moved steadily along the floor, grabbed a smooth table leg, and ascended onto the kitchen table. The plates, glasses, and silverware were exactly as he had set them weeks ago. Still, Sparg squinted carefully at each place-setting. Satisfied, he threw himself to the floor, drifting in the low-gravity and remembering old amusements.
He went to the wallscreen. This too was part of the ritual. Deepvoice was typically the first one to awaken each morning, and after coffee he—
—coffee!
Filter, water, coffee, pot, mug! Sparg worked feverishly, swelling with pride that he had figured out the strange contraption. It had never been visible from his cage, and all he knew of its presence was the unpleasant hissing, popping, and trickling noises it exuded. Once the coffee was bubbling with those familiar sounds, Sparg leapt back into the low gravity and pressed the wallscreen to life.
“—second squadrons attempted to break the blockade. The North American continent has… firing of the defense satellite… in retaliation to the… will seek peaceful resolution if…”
The screen warbled and froze.
Sparg felt small as he sat on the rug before the wall of pixelating images. He didn’t understand the bright wheeling colors and disembodied heads. But he cast a hopeful glance towards the front door.
Then he saw the football. His color flushed to a dark cobalt.
Sparg didn’t like the football.
He used to fight with it, wrapping his tentacles over its toughened skin and trying to crush it. When that failed, he industriously worked to pry it apart at the laces. He wasn�
��t sure how the animosity had begun. It might have been that it reminded him of himself in a curious way: both the same size and similar color. Or perhaps it was the way Deepvoice would cradle and hold it as he watched the wallscreen. When Sparg was alone, he would often stare at the football through his cage bars and seethe.
He stalked the football now. It was nestled against the couch, unaware of him. Sparg flattened his body into a pancake of his own, approaching in an oblique line of predatory flanking…
Something was wrong.
The air smelled of smoke.
• • •
In truth, something had been wrong for a long time. Sparg had known it the moment his three owners rushed into the kitchen one morning, bags in their arms.
“The last of the shuttles takes off in two hours! Now hurry!”
“Daddy! Why are we leaving!”
“I told you! Everyone’s leaving! We have to get to the shuttleport while it still has transports!” Deepvoice sounded worried. That never happened, and it made Sparg worry.
Something was very wrong.
“But my toys!”
“Leave the goddam toys. We’re only allowed two carry-ons. I’ll buy you more toys on Earth.”
“What about Sparg?”
A pause. Sparg understood the sound of his name. He thumped the cage bars anxiously.
Deepvoice approached the cage. He peered at Sparg for perhaps half a minute. Then he unlatched the lock.
“He’ll have to fend for himself. Let’s go.”
“We can’t leave him!”
“No pets! We have to leave now.”
“But he’ll die without us!”
“Goddamn it, it’s just a stupid animal!” A hesitation. “Leave the bag of food open.”
“Will we be coming back, Daddy?”
Another pause, longer and graver than the last. “Yes. It’s only a war, and all wars end. We’ll be back and then you can be with Sparg again.”
And then they were rushing towards the apartment door. Sparg scampered after their heels, but they quickly passed through the doorway into the mysterious corridor beyond, and then the door slammed in his face.
And hadn’t opened since.
• • •
Something was wrong. Sparg smelled the pancakes burning.
Smoke gushed from the stovetop and slithered over the ceiling with black fingers. Sparg’s panic exploded, and he left a trail of ink as he pushed off for the stove. He was halfway into his climb when the alarm went off.
This had happened once before. Highvoice had been cooking and had received a phone call. She was in the other room while the food burned, and then the alarm lights flashed and water poured out of the ceiling.
Sparg had liked the water. Liked the feel of it on his skin. While Highvoice shrieked and waved her arms to dispel the smoke, Sparg had splashed merrily around the kitchen floor.
But now, the water brought no joy. Sparg reached the stovetop, wrenched the pan from the red burner, and wielded the spatula to flip the reeking, charred mess. The sprinklers drenched the kitchen. The lights flashed for a while, and then went dead.
• • •
They probably wouldn’t like the breakfast.
Sparg sat atop the kitchen table with the blackened pancakes in each plate. He barely moved. The smoke had given the apartment a greasy patina and now he waited, glancing dubiously at his only other companion: the football, strapped into the old highchair, with a plate of burnt pancake and a cup of juice.
Then he heard the voices in the corridor.
Sparg shivered in anticipation too great to be constrained. He gave the table one last, hasty inspection. Then he leapt off, spinning, all tentacles extended in joy. He hit the wet floor and slid, scrabbling madly towards the door, and waited.
From the corridor came the muted voice:
“—reason to be concerned. A fire has been reported on your floor but has been contained. Please do not panic. Fire safety personnel have been notified and are en route. There is no reason to be concerned. A fire has been reported on your floor but has been contained. Please do not panic. Fire safety personnel have been notified and are en route…”
And then the door opened in his imagination.
His owners rushed in. Deepvoice and Highvoice and Littlevoice reached down to pet him…
But the fantasy faded. The door remained an immovable, vertical slab.
Sparg waited.
When evening fell, he kept vigil as long as he could. At last he curled up against the door. When he awoke, he crept through the house to see if they had returned while he slept, and when he saw the empty rooms he stared for many minutes, trying to understand what he had done wrong.
Slowly, feeling his loneliness harden into renewed determination, he returned to the counter and began again.
WAR HERO
by Brian Trent
First published in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXIX (2013), edited by Dave Wolverton
• • • •
THREE DAYS pass before I decide to get saved.
They bump me to the head of the list, of course, and six hours later, I’ve got a military escort from the colony tram to the facility. Shane is my tech today. He resembles a young Abe Lincoln cut out of pale alabaster, elongated limbs in the classic indigenously Martian look, and a frilly beard hugging his jaw.
He sits in the neighboring control room, hunched over his bug-like monitor-spread, and gets to work stimulating my brain. His machine-prompted queries crackle over the intercom. Part friendly handball, part firing squad. My brain on TV, lighting up different branches like a blinking Solstice Tree. My head encased in the neuroreader that’s about the same as wearing a cooking colander for a hat.
I flip through a magazine, watching the firework images of the Phobos victory unfold across the smartpaper.
“What are your favorite movies?” Shane asks. “How long did you serve the Resistance?” “How many times have you been off-world?”
Yet every so often comes an indelicate prod. “Do you look in the toilet before flushing?” “Have you ever fantasized sexually about a relative?”
“What’s it like to kill a dog?”
I look up from the magazine, anger flashing in my thoughts like a red siren.
The pace of the questions has been winding down, and I thought we were just talking to pass the time. So I try to catch his eyes through the glass. “Excuse me?”
The Martian beanpole doesn’t return my stare. He hunches in his chair, hugging himself with his freakishly long arms like a Cycladic statue. In another few generations, humans on Earth and Mars will have diverged into different damned species.
“Want me to repeat the question?”
All business, this kid.
I clear my throat, uncrossing and crossing my legs. “It feels…” I swallow a lump. “Ugly. Like you’re a monster, and not this sixty-pound slavering beast who has just turned your little brother’s face to a Halloween mask of red pulp. So you bite down harder on its throat. You hug it fiercely in a death embrace, knowing if it gets free, it will kill you. You think of your brother. Your fear begins to change. It turns to… revenge.”
Shane looks over at me guiltily. “Sorry. Machine says I had to ask. Needed to light Zone 8 back here.” He taps an emerald-green screen.
“I wouldn’t mind having that memory erased, Shane.”
“Remove one block and it impacts the structure’s integrity.” Canned response, drilled in from his tech training. He sips from his water-bottle straw and swivels around in the chair, straining his giraffe neck to check the upload status. “You saved your brother’s life.”
I return to my magazine. Dazzling surface captures of the Phobos base explosion parade at my fingertips.
Shane’s voice pierces from the intercom. “In the years since, did you ever have to kill something again?”
“Just the people here,” I say, tapping the magazine.
“Corporal Peznowski. Doctor Javier Daigle. G
eneral Chatfield.” Shane throws up his hands. “Worst war criminals since the Nazis.” Head cocks, curious sideways tilt. “How did you ever infiltrate their ranks? The Partisans were famous for being able to sniff out a mole.”
“Is this a machine question, or your own curiosity?”
“Does it matter?”
I swallow hard, not wanting to think of the vast set-up the resistance had perpetrated to convince Partisan ministry of intelligence that I was one of their isolationist, fear-mongering, powercrat fanatics… the grotesque mutation of early Martian pride in having a planet of their own, pumped through a filter of jingoism and fundamentalism across Mars’ burnt-orange deserts. Or in the illegal torture wards led by sadistic thugs like Peznowski and Chatfield.
But Shane isn’t done. Eyes glinting in unabashed interest, he presses, “How did you get that scar on your chin, Mr. Pope?”
I shift awkwardly in my seat. “I was shot. The fleschette grazed right my chin.”
That was only two Martian days ago, high above the planet’s war-torn surface in the Partisans’ tactical command center on Phobos. I had just set the last of the explosives, wrapped in CAMO mesh so they blended in with the Phobos station weld points. The timer ticking down in red overlay in my vision as I walked the glossy length of the main corridor, dizzy, chest tight. Atlas with the world on his shoulders. Below on the Martian surface, the tide was turning. Resistance fighters had finally captured Olympus, and the Partisans were hemmed in by northern and southern rebels. Their headquarters on Phobos were clamped shut, no shuttles in or out. Just me and Corporal Peznoski and Partisan generals squawking in the war room while the blue tactical map on the wall updated every few minutes with more bad news from the planet below.
Red countdown to a new year. Eight minutes. Heart broiled in an adrenaline stew, flushing cheeks, sweat squeezing from my pores. It was almost relief when I heard my name shouted from behind.
“Harris!”
I turned to see Corporal Peznowski and four blue-uniformed agents rounding the corner with fleschette guns drawn. The first blaze tore inches past my head, one of the pencil-thin projectiles opening my chin like a zipper, before I could throw myself through the nearest double-doors. Two minute dash to the shuttle bay. Surprising and killing a pair of guards there. Charlotte’s hackpick in hand, wresting me control of my escape shuttle—a steel grey Thunderwing bomber loaded with medical supply freight. Shuttle dropping from Phobos to Mars’ burnt-orange vista, while the base seemed to cough behind me, flash of light, shockwave, two-hundred-and-sixteen bodies flung out, debris streaking the bubble-gum planetside sky.