Now, I’d seen duels out on the street. No one was ever a winner. And while I was fast, I couldn’t take down four of them, not before I got myself shot.
I was just gonna have to sweet talk my way out of this. Unfortunately, being sweet wasn’t something Mama had ever bothered to teach me.
I kept the gun pointed directly at Big Baldy’s chest, while with my other hand I took a sip of my drink. Casual like. Not because I needed the extra courage. Or to prove to myself that I could do this without my hand shaking.
It warmed me from tip to toes, like the sun was already coming up and heating me up on the inside. “Now, gentlemen,” I said. “Let’s be reasonable about this. I’m sure we can work something out.”
Before I could say another word, Big Baldy shook his head. “No,” he said.
Then he shot me.
* * *
You know those old houses, out on the prairie, that get abandoned after the fever runs through, or maybe the Indians come in and kill everyone? The way the walls all crumble in, bricks and boards collapsing to dust?
That was how my bones felt. Big Baldy’s gun shot out a huge black net that wrapped around my chest, pinning my arms to my sides and making my bones feel like they was all crumbly, nothing solid left inside.
Luckily, I was able to stay upright. Damn boots hurt too much for me to lose feeling with my feet: They was strapped in too tight to turn to dust like the rest of my bones.
Frick, Frack, and Nod all swarmed up over the bar. They made hissing noises at the machine, stroking it and chittering.
Big Baldy looked all too pleased with himself.
But they hadn’t pinned my arms all the way, just across my shoulders and my chest. I still had my hands free.
They wasn’t paying me no mind.
I didn’t have my gun anymore. I’d dropped that when I’d been hit.
But I could still reach my drink.
It was mostly colored moonshine, something these idiots had no idea about.
Mister Thomas could always replace the bar. But he couldn’t replace the machine. He’d told me that himself.
With careful, slow movements, I reached for my glass. My hands were shakier than the legs on a newborn calf. I had to watch my fingers to make sure they closed, then tightened, around the drink.
Just as slowly, I brought my hand up and my mouth down, getting a good mouthful of the liquid.
Gracie’s Fire.
I didn’t swallow it down, though it burned. I took small breaths, afraid the fumes would knock me out.
I took one stumbling step, then another, before I finally reached the lamp on the edge of the bar.
“Gracccccie, where are you going?” Big Baldy asked. He sounded like he was laughing.
That just made me push my poor, abused feet forward one more step. Then another.
I stumbled around the end of the bar until the lamp stood between me and Big Baldy, then clumsily knocked the lamp off, exposing the flame.
“I won’t hurtsssss you,” Big Baldy assured me.
With my mouth full, I couldn’t tell him, Too bad. Cause I’m about to hurt you.
Then I blew that pure moonshine straight onto the flame.
An arc of fire jumped from the light and hit Baldy straight in the chest.
Big Baldy fell back on his ass, screaming, his cloak flaming up nicely. He beat at the flames with both hands, not paying me any mind.
Frick, Frack, and Nod took one look at him, and skedaddled.
Seemed they didn’t feel like being toasted.
As best I could, I stripped off that damn net. It was sticky and clung to my fingers like spiderwebs. But I peeled it off and dove for my gun, finally holding it with still weak hands, pointing it right at Big Baldy’s chest as he rose up from the ground.
The gun he’d used on me was out of his reach, still on the bar. I picked it up too, pointing it straight at his head. “Keeping this as collateral,” I told him. “Now git.” I started walking toward him.
Big Baldy’s cloak was in tatters. Seemed he was just as orange all over, with weird black lines pulsing over his skin, like a map of a river delta.
“We needsssss the masssshine,” Big Baldy complained as he started backing toward the door.
“Then come during business hours and make a deal with Mister Thomas,” I told him.
When Baldy stopped moving, I put another bullet in the floor. “Git.”
“We will return,” he warned, but he left.
I locked the doors behind him and leaned back, taking a deep breath.
I had no doubt they’d come back. But I also had faith in Mister Thomas. Once he’d taken apart that gun they’d left behind, he’d know exactly what kind of drink I should serve ‘em next time.
I took another sip of Gracie’s Fire, thanking Mama for having raised me right, with a steady hand and a solid appreciation of moonshine.
After I made sure that Frick, Frack, and Nod hadn’t broken that damn contraption, I could finally close up the saloon for the night, head back up to my garret.
And take my damn boots off.
Quinta Essentia
Bradley P. Beaulieu
On the day they finally came, Sean Brannon tossed and turned in his bed, his ligature exoskeleton whirring while assisting his movements. The sound of the ligature was nearly, though not quite, masking the childlike whine that escaped him with each turn of his broken body. He rolled and lay in a fetal position, and found Therese an arm’s length away—a measure of space that in their early days had always seemed so tenderly close but now felt unbridgeable. He knew she felt his movements, heard every minute manifestation of his pain, no matter how hard he tried to mask it, but she tried to remain asleep while he in turn tried to remain as quiet as he could manage.
Dawn was still a distant dream, but Sean knew he would never get back to sleep now, so he threw off his thin blanket and pivoted himself up, joints howling from the attention the levering of a ninety-pound frame to a semi-upright position required. Placing hands on knees and gritting his teeth, he pushed himself up to a trembling stand. It was worse than normal today. The humidity—he could feel it in the air already—and something else, something more arcane than precipitation.
He was sweating by the time he managed to coax his body into a fully upright position.
“Come back to bed,” Therese said, reaching over the ruffled bedcovers with an arm that was well shaped. A woman that was well shaped. A woman that had helped him every day since this endless nightmare had begun.
“Go back to sleep,” Sean said.
She woke more fully then, raised herself up, arms and shoulders angling unnaturally as she propped herself on one elbow. By the light of gas lamps filtering in through the nearby window, she watched him with pity-filled eyes. This was the worst time of day for both of them. It reminded them how frail he was, and he suspected it reminded Therese how frail she was—how frail they all were in light of the ways the world had changed—and Therese was a woman who had never liked being reminded of her own mortality. She seemed ready to argue with him, to coax him back to bed, but then she relented and lay back, turning over with the leaden movements of the deeply fatigued, and fell back to sleep.
As she lay there, snoring softly, Sean forced the suit to work his body. As much as he’d learned to ignore pain, he couldn’t stand so much of it at once. He started in increments: toes, then feet, then calves and thighs. Sweat gathered on his brow as he continued with his back and stomach and chest. Then neck and jaw and mouth. His arms and hands were the least painful, but he was careful to move them properly—flexing, then releasing, flexing and releasing—lest he strain a something before he’d warmed up.
Every gradient in movement pained him, as if his muscles were being ripped apart. Even his bones felt like millstones, grinding themselves into dust. But he worked through it all. He couldn’t give in to the pain, not even a little. Do that, and he would return to bed. He would lie there, crying as the pain consumed h
im, and Therese would be forced to take him to the University hospital and they’d work his muscles for him until he’d gotten past it. If that happened, it would be infinitely worse than what he was feeling now.
By the time he pulled his clothes on—clothes made overly large to fit his ligature—the sun was burning blue along the eastern horizon, across the River Wear. In the distance, the towering haulms the Jovians had seeded twelve years before waved gently in the wind. Jovians, they’d been called, even though no one truly believed the haulms had come from Jupiter.
Like candles on a grand cake, the tips of the haulms were lit brilliant orange by the sun. The rest of their length was dark, like mottled ochre earth. Bits of flake fell away from each, twinkling in the light as they were blown by the wind. The skin of the haulms had been doing this ever since they’d emerged from the earth. The flake was like the bark of the eucalyptus, shedding as it grew, but the haulms were so large now that if the wind came from the north, the streets of Durham would be covered with layer upon layer of it—thin, chalky flakes building until the plows came to clear the streets or the rain dissolved it into a thick yellow slurry that eventually washed away.
A hundred men, hands clasped, would be needed to circle the base of one the haulms. Their roots dug deep, some said as deep below the earth as they towered above. Sean doubted this, though. Some few scientists from the British Society of Engineers had commissioned a dig to determine for certain, but gave up after excavating five hundred feet down. They’d run calculations based on how quickly the roots had narrowed, and determined they could go no further than half a mile down.
No one knew why the Jovians had sent the stalks. No person or government had been contacted in any way. The haulms had simply started to grow—all over the Earth—at an unimaginable rate, reaching up and up until they towered over every territory in the world where vegetation grew.
Sean reached the rail yard just as the sun’s first rays were gleaming against the horizon in the east. He headed to a red train that in an hour would carry dozens of workers from Durham up to the fluorite mines, one of the city’s major exports, especially since the discovery of quinta essentia some thirty years ago. Standing next to it on a second set of rails was a new train, or more accurately a train with a new power plant, fueled by an ingenious mix of quinta incendia, terra, and unda. It was shiny and bright and green with red trim, a recent prototype granted to the mining company from Morgan College—the University’s newest college dedicated to the study of elemental science. The gift made sense. The college, after all, benefited greatly from the fluorite mines. It was the primary doping agent in the lenses they made, the ones that focused the five elements into viable and useful applications.
Sean went to the first of the coal cars sitting next to the steam train and, after rolling back the tarpaulin covering the coal, gritted his teeth and began shoveling the coal into the tender. Pain ran through his arms and legs and back, but the truth of it was it felt good, no matter how much pain there was, for it was loosening his muscles even further, the first of many steps in a long and careful process of physical exertion that would, if he was careful, carry him through the entire day. Even his ligature—the exoskeleton drilled into every major bone used in typical human locomotion—whirred more enthusiastically, providing more than half the effort needed.
“Ah, now,” came a voice from behind Sean, “please, Mister Kelly, won’t you let me help?”
Sean turned and found Thomison, the old rail yard foreman, standing some paces away wearing his engineer’s cap and blue denim overalls.
“Good morning, Thomison.”
“I’d say the same to you,” Thomison said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag, “but I can see it’s going poorly enough already.”
“I told you, the activity does me good.”
“As you say, but you also said it would make you healthier. Just looking at you, begging your pardon, sir, but it’s been seven weeks and you’re looking worse’n ever.”
“Why, thank you, Thomison. You’re looking well yourself.”
Thomison bowed his head apologetically. “My father told me never to mince words, not when it might do someone some good. I can’t have the men late for work. I’ll be speaking to Master Hunt later today. I think it might be best if you went to see the doctor, spent a bit of time at home.”
“Thomison, I’ve seen the doctor. I can assure you, there’s no need for it.”
Thomison looked as though he was going to argue with Sean, but just then his eyes went wide, his mouth fell open, and he pulled his cap off and clutched it to his chest.
Sean turned, stared up at the thin layer of clouds high above. They were parting, folding backward as something with a dark, mottled surface drove through from above. It was huge. Massive. Larger than a bloody castle and shaped like an island ripped up from the sea. Its smooth top warred with a ragged underside and the strange tendrils hanging down from below. It floated down, down, down toward Durham, and behind it came more. One, then two, then three, then a dozen.
They lowered themselves, each heading slowly but inexorably toward one of the haulms.
Around him, the city was coming alive, more and more coming out from their homes or stepping away from the day’s early work and staring up at the wonder of it all. Screams came. Children wailed for their mothers. A gun rang out, and then another, rifles and pistols firing up ineffectually at this new menace. But the Jovians cared for them not at all. To them, the humans running about the ground below were little more than a host of teeming insects, a minor annoyance at best.
The first of the lowering shapes was nearing its chosen haulm. Thin tendrils reached up from the massive stalk. More reached down from the underside of the pod. And they intertwined, multiplying, strengthening, drawing one another closer until it had secured itself in place.
“What’s it mean, Mister Kelly?” Thomison asked breathlessly.
“I’ve no idea,” Sean replied, “but I can’t imagine it bodes well, can you?”
“No, sir, I cannot.”
* * *
Several months after the Jovians arrived, the steady rain of flakes dwindled and then stopped altogether, but something new soon took its place: a fecund smell wholly alien to the forests and bogs and marshes Sean had ever been to—a byproduct, the botanists said, of the pods’ tendrils attaching to the tops of the haulms. Sean thought it a poor sign. It meant that the haulms had stopped growing, that the pods were nearing maturity, and that the next steps in whatever plans the Jovians had for Earth were nearing.
Or so it seemed to him.
Winter passed and spring arrived. The pods had been catalogued all over Earth, wherever the haulms grew. In point of fact, as far as anyone knew, not a single haulm had been left untethered, suggesting an intelligence that couldn’t be explained away as simple extraterrestrial plant life. Fear of the pods and the hatred they’d initially generated were starting to soften. The pods simply were—a new feature of the landscape all over the world—and people were starting to say it was a good thing. What they saw floating above over their cities and countrysides was likely the worst of it, they said. The Jovians had come from wherever they’d come, they’d planted their seeds, and they’d grown. Simple as that. Like petunias. And one day, if the science community was right, they’d find something useful from these pods, something revolutionary. They’d come from another world, after all. Who since the days of Ptolemy hadn’t dreamed of this very thing?
Twelve months after the arrival of the pods, there was a breakthrough announcement from the team of botanists who’d convened in Durham. They had been taking weekly samples of the pods using the university’s science platforms—the undersides of which had been infused with quinta aeris—and now claimed the husks were slowly hardening, perhaps in preparation for some transformational event. A regrowth, a seeding. No one knew for certain, but it seemed to make sense. It was a natural organism, and so of course would have some way of reproducing itself.
Sean was pounding out a bar of iron, red and fresh from the forge, a new job after Thomison, the rail yard foreman, had seen to it that Sean had been shown the street. The forge suited him just fine. It let him work his body all he wanted—a thing it needed even more in the colder months—and the owner was rarely around to hear Sean’s groans, which, even Sean had to admit, were difficult to deal with.
Sean was just finishing the forming of the bar he was working on when he heard footsteps, saw the silhouette of a man in a brown suit standing in the entrance to the forge. He blinked against the lowering sun, trying to see who it was.
And then, like a dark dream suddenly returning in the light of day, he recognized him.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here, David?”
David Lock, a scientist Sean had worked with years ago, stepped into the forge. “I’ve come because we need to talk, Sean.”
“Bollocks, we need to talk …” Despite himself, his atrophied muscles began to shake. The ligature was as silent a piece of machinery as there was, but still it betrayed him, its sensors picking up his movements and whirring in response. “I want you to turn around, right now, and leave.”
Instead, David took a step forward. “I didn’t make this journey lightly, Sean. I’ve come bearing news. Critical news. And you’re one of the few people in the world who would have any hope of understanding it.”
“What, some mad new scheme to restore your chair at the University?”
“Nothing of the sort.” David doffed his bowler and gripped its rim tightly. “It’s the Jovians, Sean. I think I know why they’ve come.”
* * *
David led Sean to an abandoned shoe factory that had shut its doors a decade ago, but when David pulled the heavy door aside, rollers squealing in protest, he found a science lab within it—a proper, well equipped, elemental science lab. It smelled of leather, as if nothing save burning the warehouse to the ground would ever rid the place of it, but warring with this, and the other echoes of its sweatshop past, were four precise rows of workbenches with dozens of individual stations, glass beakers and blue flames and fluorite lenses all about, nearly an exact replica of the lab Sean had helped David run over a dozen years ago.
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