Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction
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But the man everyone wants to see is a ghost; a shadow; a Dracula risen from the grave, a Frankenstein monster animated by who-knows what strange passions. His name is on the lips of militia fighters and busboys, of Syrian spies and Shi’ite commanders.
That name is Che.
For the past decade he has made his appearance wherever evil and injustice rear their ugly heads. Which is to say, he’s been sighted everywhere.
Where has he come from? Where is he going? Tales abound of the cigar-smoking, bearded hero of the revolution, from Soweto to Phnom Penh.
And now he is here. As a series of mysterious assassinations rock the once-grand capital of Lebanon, leaders of all sides being taken down with military precision by an unknown killer, many speculate Che is, single-handedly, attempting to end the bitter civil war.
But where is he? Does he truly exist? Thompson claims to have met him, to have spoken with him, but his story shifts and changes with each telling. O’Rourke claims to have caught traces of him on a recent jaunt South, near the Israeli border.
Syria claims to have him in prison. So does Israel. At least one militia claims to have executed a man fitting Che’s description.
Could all those stories be true at once? Or are none true at all?
“Che?” the hotel’s busboy told me earlier tonight. “He stays here, at the Commodore. Room four-oh-one.”
Everybody, it is said, comes to the Commodore. When I went up to investigate I found the room bare, the bed made, the sink cleaned. Could he have been there? Is he here at all?
– Extract from Strange Passions: A Memoir of the Civil War in Lebanon, by Carl Bernstein, published 1985 by Random House, Inc.
The on-going civil war in Lebanon has officially ended today with the dissolution of the various militias (with the sole exception of Hezbollah) and the election of a new parliament. Lebanon now faces the long road to rebuilding a torn country and a city once described as “The Venice of the Orient” [...]
When asked about the whereabouts of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, new president Elias Hrawi said, “I don’t know to whom you are referring.”
Mystery continues to surround –
– Extract from End of Civil War in Lebanon,
by Jeremy Levin, Associated Press, 1991.
Part Four: Destinations
“Why do we say Che is alive? Because of his grandeur, his transcendence. For us, Che is here, very much alive, in everything we say.”
– Osvaldo ‘Chato’ Peredo
There were seven of them who met at the Mojave Desert airfield. Seven dusty men with olive skin and haunted eyes. They had arrived separately. Outside, on the tarmac runway, a futuristic vehicle sat waiting, SpaceShipOne written in bold black typeface on its sides. One of the men lit up a cigar, coughed, and said, “I remember reading about these things in those American magazines we used to get sometimes.”
“Science fiction,” one of the others said. “I always thought such literature was ideologically suspect.”
“The world has changed,” a third said. They moved inside, into the hangar. The place was theirs alone. “So few of us remain…”
The seven examined each other in silence. The pain in their eyes was visible.
“The world changes,” said the first one, after a moment of reflection, “yet people don’t.”
“Soon they will go to the stars,” said one. “The Chinese already are talking of Mars, and the moon again…”
“Malaysia wants to explore commercial opportunities in the asteroid belt.”
“In Equatorial Africa they are speaking of building something called a space elevator.”
“Enough!” the first one said. “Where there is commerce there is exploitation. Miners once dug for coal. So now they would dig for precious metals on rocks in space, while others will grow rich from their labour. The world changes. We won’t.”
They all nodded. Veterans of endless conflicts, of the Balkans and Afghanistan, Gaza and Tibet, Timor and Argentina and the Western Sahara, they were weary but unbent, tired but not defeated.
“They put our face on undergarments now,” said one of them. “They put them on T-shirts and bandanas.”
“Rampant capitalism will seek to subjugate its opponents by commercialising their own image,” another said. They all nodded.
It was quiet in the hangar. A giant model of a ship, half-completed, filled up the space. They avoided looking at it.
“Out there,” said the first of them, his hand sweeping across the desert, the runway, the spaceship outside – “out there is not the future. But it is a future. One of many.”
“So many of us are gone…” one said.
“Yet we remain.”
They nodded. “Do you think we made any difference at all?” one asked.
“We cannot be the judges of that,” the first said. “Only history can judge us.”
He looked at them. The tip of his cigar glowed red. “And history is a thing to be shaped and remade.”
None of them spoke after that. Outside, the sun beat down on the tarmac, and the desert, like the future, stretched far away and disappeared beyond the horizon.
STEEL LAKE
JACK SKILLINGSTEAD
Jack Skillingstead lives in Seattle with his wife, Nancy Kress, whom he’s noticed seems to write a lot more than he does. ‘Steel Lake’ marks his thirtieth professional short story sale since 2002; the first twenty-six of which are gathered in his Golden Gryphon collection, Are You There and Other Stories. In ‘Steel Lake’, Jack wanted to write about a father and son with parallel issues and that slippery region that lies between dreams, imagination and so-called reality. The piece proved a particularly troublesome one to get right. Jack’s 2009 debut novel, Harbinger, prompted The New York Review of Science Fiction to dub him ‘The matador of our field.’ The author is quite proud of this, reckoning it has a nice ring – as long as you don’t ask him to explain what it means.
“Why are you doing this?” Brian Kerr asked his son.
“I’m an addict.”
“Yeah, I know that. But why now?”
They sat at a table in an institutionally grim room. The flat glare of fluorescent light made Brian’s eyes ache. His shirt clung to his body in dark patches of sweat. A big school-style clock counted the seconds in tiny jerks of a black needle.
“I took something that scared me,” David said.
“According to the checklist we just went through, you’ve taken every damn drug known to man.”
“This one wasn’t on the list.”
“Great. What was it?”
“It isn’t even on the street yet. This guy, he stole it out of a UW lab, he said. Like he was a volunteer for this test?”
“Okay. But what was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Jesus Christ.”
David shrugged, looking away. His over-sized white T-shirt hung loose on his shoulders – the way it would on a coat hanger. Green spray paint speckled the shirt. Graffiti blow-back.
“You just took it. Without even knowing what it was?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Why?”
“It was there so I took it, is all. You don’t really get it, Dad.”
“No, I don’t. What scared you about this drug? I mean, what’s scarier than –” He picked up the checklist, the unbelievable, terrifying checklist. “– heroin, for instance?”
“It turned my head inside out.”
“What’s that mean, turned your –”
The door opened and two men entered. The older man, Ray, was in charge – he handled the late shift intakes. About forty, lean and muscled, he looked like a penitentiary cliché. Tattooed thorns vined around his muscled forearms and a pack of smokes bulged in his short rolled up sleeve. Rehab wasn’t jail, but so far it shared a similar flavor. Or so Brian imagined. The younger man was actually a kid David’s age, eighteen or so, pale and blooming with acne.
“Nick’s going to check your bag f
or contraband,” Ray said.
Nick, all business, opened David’s hastily-packed suitcase and began pawing through it. He tossed aside a paperback novel. Brian had packed the book for David, thinking it would help him get through the next month.
“Why can’t he have that?”
Ray picked up the novel and handed it to Brian. “The only book allowed in here is The Big Book.”
“That’s –”
“Dad, it’s okay. I don’t care about it.”
“What your son needs, he has to keep his mind on recovery.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
Ray pushed the insurance papers across the table and held out a Bic pen. Brian sighed and started on the forms. Until it was time to say goodbye, David did not speak another word.
Business as usual.
For a week David had been living in his car, a black 1993 beat-to-shit Honda Civic. Turning the ignition key produced a rapid series of dead clicks. When Brian picked him up, they left the Honda parked on a residential street in a south Seattle working class neighbourhood. Sooner or later somebody would call the city to get it towed. Before that, Brian decided to strip out whatever ‘contraband’ he could find.
A Mag-Lite in his left hand, he popped the glove box. Registration papers, parking tickets, a dead cell phone, half a dozen disposable syringes, and a pipe that looked like it was hand-tooled out of plumbing parts. Brian sniffed the bowl, winced at the burnt smell.
He dropped the syringes and pipe into a plastic Safeway bag then swept the Mag-Lite around the foot wells. Among the crumpled cigarette packs and Taco Time wrappers, colonies of little Ziploc baggies gleamed in the moving light. Some were empty and some contained a faint residue of white powder. Brian scooped them all up and added them to the Safeway bag.
He found the miniature aspirin tin under the cup holder insert, shook it, flicked the lid up with his thumbnail. Five chalky blue tablets, each printed with the same Greek letter. David’s mystery drug? A car turned onto the street behind the Honda, headlights swinging through the Honda’s rear window. Brian froze but his shadow tilted across the dashboard, as if ducking out of sight. The car rolled past without slowing.
Brian let his breath out. He pocketed the tin, checked the backseat and the trunk, then walked quickly back to his own car. He dropped the Safeway bag in a garbage dumpster behind a Korean restaurant.
By midnight he was drunk, holding down a stool in The Sitting Room, a quiet lamp-lit bar two blocks from his apartment. Even on the best of nights, the studio apartment felt like a divorce tomb. This was not the best of nights. Murphy’s Irish whiskey and pints of Stella failed to erase various realities, the tomb-apartment being one of them.
He fumbled his cell phone out and thumbed a garbled text. Immediately, he regretted it. But when Trish failed to reply, he regretted that even more. He ordered another drink and nursed it along until closing time.
Halfway up the hill, stumbling towards his apartment, the phone vibrated in his pocket. He squinted at the display window.
One word, from Trish: ‘Okay.’
“You’re a mess,” she said when she opened the door to her condo. She wore a Seahawks jersey and nothing else. Her hair was messed up, like she’d been asleep.
“Bad day,” he said. “Look, I shouldn’t have texted you.”
“I know that.”
“Oh –”
“And I shouldn’t have invited you over. So we’re both stupid.”
In the bathroom he toed his shoes off, dumped the contents of his pockets on the towel rack. He rinsed his mouth in the sink, the tap water cold and metallic.
Trish was sitting up in bed, waiting for him. “I’d offer you a drink, but that would be like offering kerosene to a burning man.”
“Yeah.” He collapsed on the bed beside her.
“So what happened?”
“David called and I checked him into Lakeside.”
“I’m so sorry, Brian.” She held his hand, picking up where they left off – where Brian left, actually. The Man Who Couldn’t Stay. “But it’s kind of good, too,” Trish said. “I mean, maybe it’ll straighten him out this time.”
“There’s always that chance. At least I’ll know where he is for the next six weeks.” Brian covered his eyes with his free hand. “I really am an idiot. My head’s going to hurt so bad tomorrow.”
“Wait a minute.” She scooted off the bed, returning shortly with a tall glass of water. “Stick your tongue out.”
He did, and she placed two bitter-tasting tablets on it.
“Aspirin. Swallow – and drink that whole glass. Plus the next one I’m going to bring you. It’ll undercut the hangover.”
Brian came awake at some dead hour of the morning.
He had been dreaming about playing catch with his son. In the dream they stood on a grassy slope in Steel Lake Park, near the old neighbourhood. David was a young boy again. The baseball sailed between their gloves, and the good world, the lost world, was restored. Then something woke Brian and it was over, his son was gone – as if David had stepped out of the dream, and the sound of his passage had awakened Brian, like a person leaving the bedroom and pulling the door shut.
The good years, right. Not long after Brian taught his son to catch a baseball, a man was murdered in that same park, knifed repeatedly. Some gang thing, the opening event of the neighborhood’s long, steep slide. The victim’s blood stained Brian’s good memories, like sour wine spilled across a holiday table cloth.
Trish’s bedside clock read 4:17AM. Brian was wide awake. Sharply, almost painfully, wide awake. He did not feel drunk or hung-over. Trish slept on her side, turned away from him.
In the bathroom his haggard face regarded him from the mirror. He rubbed his sandpaper cheek. His mouth tasted like rust. He stuck his tongue out, almost expecting to see it coated with iron oxide. His wallet and keys were on the towel rack over the hamper. Brian stuffed them into his pockets.
In the living room he grabbed his empty water glass and carried it into the kitchen. A little tin of aspirin sat on the counter next to the microwave. Brian stared at it. He set his glass down, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. The tin rattled when he shook it. He pried it open. Three chalky blue tablets with Greek letters. When he found the tin in David’s car it had contained five.
“Trish?” He shook her gently until she woke up.
“Huh? God, what are you doing awake, it’s –”
“Five. Never mind that. Last night you gave me aspirin. Where did you get them?”
Lying on her back, she held the clock up and squinted at it. “My God, it is five.”
“Trish, the aspirin. It’s important.”
“I was out but there were some with your wallet and keys in the bathroom. What’s wrong?”
“Shit. Shit.”
She sat up. “What’s wrong, what’s happening?”
“Nothing’s wrong, except those weren’t aspirin.”
“Oh, God, Brian, what were they? Is it something David had?”
“Yeah.”
She took the tin out of his hand. “What are they?”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking: Like father like son.
“What’s this symbol? Damn it, I’m sorry, Brian. I should have looked more closely. But I was half-asleep and –”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Let me hold on to one of the pills. I’ll show it to a lab rat I know at the hospital. Maybe she can figure it out.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Are you on any other medication? There might be something reactive –” Trish suddenly inhabiting her full-on RN mode.
“I’m not taking anything. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
“Excuse me for trying to help.”
“I’m sorry. Look, tell your rat they might be part of some kind of drug trial at the UW. David said that’s where they came from. And I appreciate it, I really do.”
“Okay.” She looked closely at h
im. “Are you feeling anything… weird?”
“Just really wide awake.”
“Maybe they’re some kind of stimulant. That wouldn’t be too bad.”
“No, that wouldn’t be bad.”
It was bad.
A week later, Brain still hadn’t slept. He no longer felt sharply awake, but he didn’t feel sleepy, either. Or he felt he was asleep, walking through a dream. But he knew that wasn’t true. Reality did not bend the way it did in dreams. At least, it hadn’t so far.
Three north bound lanes of Interstate 5 were shut down for resurfacing, and even at ten-thirty PM traffic was slow, rolling into Seattle. Brian slouched behind the wheel of his Ford Focus, windows cranked down. He was wrung out after nine hours on the night shift, stringing wires in the fuselage of a 737. A big industrial fan circulated air through the hatch but it didn’t help much; the air was thick and hot, stinking of human sweat and machine oil. The fan blades scraped the safety cage – like a blade scoring the inside of Brian’s skull.
The lights at Safeco Field blazed over the twelfth inning of an interminable tie game between the Mariners and Toronto. A play-by-play broadcast chattered from the radio speakers, which was a lucky break, considering the radio hadn’t worked in two weeks.
The last game he had taken David to had been four years ago. They sat in the sun, Brian with his seven dollar Budweiser and David with his four dollar Coke (all Brian could afford, after paying for the tickets and parking). The plastic cups sweating in their hands, they watched the Mariners take their lumps against the Oakland A’s. The Mariners were always taking their lumps. David sipped his Coke and crunched ice with his teeth, speaking only when he had to respond to something Brian said.
In the traffic crawl, Dave Niehouse, the Mariners’ venerable color commentator, was in the middle of calling a pop fly to right centre field, when the broadcast washed out in a tide of static. Brian reached for the knob to turn the volume down but hesitated when another voice, low and intense, began speaking. “I hate you, you fucker. You think you got away with it, but you didn’t.”