by Jw Schnarr
So who was the pervert?
He smiled and gave Sandra the minicorder again when she asked for it, holding the little screen in the palm of her hand. She watched scenes of the two of them laughing, walking along the beach (here she brought the shells out of her pocket, feeling their weight), dressing after lovemaking. She stared at her own stolen image. The emotions in her face were impossible for Paitin to sort out, but he thought he saw some grounds for hope, some allowance that it was all true, that he loved her and she’d loved him.
While she stared at herself, he stared at her. Sandra. The spectrum of Sandra, the could have, would have, politically incorrect should have, conditional perfect tense Sandra, even the metaphysical might have but did not Sandra. He never bothered to wonder which she was.
At one point she became deeply quiet and seemed to come to a hard decision. She became stiff and heavy as wood against him. Then a giant explosion brought dishes off of shelves and plaster from the walls. Sandra jumped and he seized her protectively in his arms, and she did not push him away.
He told her they had to leave, to get away from the area where Tarrington had called for the extract.
His arm was around her shoulders as they left by the front door. She still wasn’t steady on her feet. But that was normal.
Many of the buildings were burned and gutted in the aftermath of the world’s most spectacular party. To Paitin they seemed flat, truly unreal, as he’d been accustomed to think of them. He still experienced a certain visceral reaction to the red blood of the conditional perfects themselves, which made them a little more real. But Sandra…she’d glowed from the first.
He helped her pick her way over a spill of rubble in the street. He stood in front of her when a nude figure darted between two buildings and dove behind a garbage can. As they walked slowly and steadily, others broke cover like timid forest animals. Some of them had escaped captivity or been set loose and wore incongruous bits of costume: jester hats or bits of shackles; they had flaps torn out of the backs of their pants; some bore lash marks. The dead lay in strange contortions, embedded in four inches of cracked asphalt, eyebrows still glazed with the frost of the high clouds through which they’d fallen.
Paitin knelt to scoop his prize over his shoulder as she collapsed with a moan. It was for the best: he could hear the heavy buzzing drone of a splatterbot far down the street. He could even faintly see it. It worked away in the crisp morning, tall as a house with a swiveling torso, picking up victims and smashing them together, flinging them through the air, dashing their innards out against the blackened walls of the buildings. Where they tried to flee it stomped on them or kicked them, and the hovers followed languidly above, their passengers staring down tired and glazed from the night’s revelries. Sandra groaned.
Paitin patted her rump affectionately. “It’s alright,” he said. “Not you. Never you.”
She sagged, but Paitin felt confident she would rebound. She would never have to be a splatterbot victim or a gladiator or a sex show. He would keep her safe. Paitin clicked a button in his tooth, and a few minutes later Drew came swooping down with a hoverload full of clanking liquor bottles and stretched underwear. He came in low so that a naked man chained to the fender by his ankle would bang into the sides of buildings.
Drew stopped. He spoke without looking at Paitin as if he were ashamed. “We’re going to see the catapult, chum. Are you coming or not.”
Paitin pictured all the dumb shocked faces of the naked people in some makeshift corral, waiting to be flung over the hills. He found he didn’t need to see it.
“Just pitch her up here,” said Nick with a grin, “no reason she can’t come.” He began reaching for Sandra’s belt.
Paitin pulled Tarrington’s police-issue Twirp out of his belt and held it over his head. Nick disappeared behind his door.
Drew shook his head. “Just chirp again in an hour, pucker. You can have that again next weekend.”
“Fly away, Drew.”
Drew did. The ankle-chained man smacked against every chimney on the horizon, twisting on the length of chain.
Paitin chose a direction and started to hike across the rubble. Soon he would set Sandra on her feet and tell her to walk with him. At the thought of them walking side by side, hand in hand, Paitin knew he wanted to stay and protect her, forever.
He would stay.
If not this time, then certainly next time.
By His Sacrifice
by Daliso Chaponda
I
His toys were chosen by a group of twenty-seven physicists, paradoxologists and psychologists. Saul’s favourite was a copper slinky. This pleased them. His favourite book was Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon.” This pleased them too.
It was mostly positive signs for the first four years of his life. They watched him progress and patted each other on the back. “It was worth the sacrifice,” pronounced Angelica, the Project Leader. She had left behind a husband and twin daughters but that was not the sacrifice she spoke of.
Harrod, Saul’s head teacher, had the most trouble accepting what they had done. His hours with Saul were his only oasis of joy. The child was exuberant. Saul had soft mulatto skin, large brown eyes he’d inherited from his mother, and tiny fingers which clutched Harrod’s wrists tightly enough to reel him into the present. Often he felt he did not deserve the child’s love.
When Saul was tested on his fifth birthday, the results were disappointing. He performed worse on the test than an average child of his age. Naturally, the finger was pointed at Harrod. “You have been too distracted,” Angelica accused. “Your obsession with guilt is jeopardizing the project.”
“It is easy to blame me,” he replied. “But there are more rational explanations. Saul has grown up with no companionship of his own age. We have been obsessed with intelligence above all else. Creativity and passion are equally important. We have been bringing him up like a lab specimen. Of course he didn’t do well in the tests.”
Angelica recognized this as more than Harrod’s tendency to blame himself for everything. She passed on his words to the council.
Two weeks later, eighteen children were kidnapped.
II
The Esposito family woke up to find their daughter’s sleeping cot empty. Mrs. Esposito screamed and collapsed. “Where is she? Where is my baby?”
The Austrian authorities could not answer her question.
Fernando Esposito, the little girl’s uncle, was a detective in the Rio de Janeiro police force. He took a leave of absence and flew to Vienna. His sister had barely spoken since the kidnapping. She sat in her daughter’s room daily, staring at the empty cot.
In a severe boarding school, Fernando had been taught that weeping was weak. The beatings had been more brutal for the ‘cry-babies’. He had learnt to bite back the tears and take the pain like a man. When he tried to speak to his sister and she stared at him blankly he felt the tears well up but he did not cry. Instead, he swore an oath to her that he would find her daughter.
If she understood his words, her face did not show it.
III
Gabriella remembered the sun. She stared up at the solar lamps that bathed the compound with light and thought of golden sunsets. And clouds. Clumps and columns of white fluff.
“What you mean you’ve never seen clouds?” She asked Saul, scrunching her nose.
“I’ve seen them on vid-screens.”
“That’s not the same,” Gabriella teased.
Saul said nothing. He did not say much else to her that break-time. He found her in the evening, after classes and asked her to tell him about clouds.
She did, even though telling him made her sad. “Cumulo… cumulo-something the big ones are called. They look like candy floss.”
“What’s candy floss?”
Gabriella’s sadness changed. She was no longer sad for the skies she would never see and the sun she would never feel. She was sad for the boy in front of her and she just wanted to g
ive him a big hug or tell him a funny joke. She tried as hard as she could to find, in the few words she knew, the right ones to make Saul see clouds, taste wind and smell spring. She told him about the game she and her mother played where they pointed at the shapes in clouds and said, “Look a double headed elephant.”
“Look, a trumpet.”
Talking about her mother made Gabriella think of the nuclear fires and she began to cry.
Saul placed his palm on her shoulder. “Let’s play that game now.”
Through her whimpers she nodded.
Saul pointed at a shadow cast by a pole which marked the edge of the compound. There was a large circular transmitter come motion sensor come force field generator on top of a pole. “A tall skinny man with a big head. Your turn.”
Gabriella looked around, searching for a shadow that hid a secret.
IV
Saul asked Gabriella hundreds of questions about what it had been like living above ground. They worried at how depressed this made Saul. Angelica disagreed. “No. It’s perfect. He has to care for the planet enough to sacrifice himself. She is making him love the life he could have lived. Because of Gabriella, he is mourning the things lost in the nuclear war.”
“But it’s a lie,” barked Harrod; his eyes were red and there was a tremor in his voice.
Soon, Harrod would no longer be useful. Angelica wished this was not the case because he had given so much to the project. He deserved more but he had been insufferable ever since the other children had been brought down. He complained, whined and questioned the tiniest details.
“We have justified so many things,” Harrod continued. His words were addressed to no-one in particular. “We have robbed these children from their families and normal life on the surface. We lie to them every day. So many terrible things and there is always the possibility, that possibility we all hide from and never say out aloud. What if we’re wrong? When it comes down to it, everything we’re doing is based on a theory. Imagine we’re wrong?”
Not ‘soon’, Angelica realized, ‘now’. She made the order after the meeting. She felt no guilt.
Harrod’s last words were “forgive me”. The scientist who shot him wondered to whom Harrod had addressed his plea. Like most Baronists, he had not believed in God.
V
Saul still asked about Harrod many months later. He had been told that Harrod died heroically. “He saved all of us. There was a crack in the engine that generates energy for the entire compound. He sealed it but he died in the attempt.” It was a carefully chosen lie — to increase Saul’s admiration of martyrdom.
Harrod had been the only teacher who had befriended Saul. He had been the closest thing to a father in the boy’s life. His absence left a void in Saul that nothing could fill.
“Why can’t he just accept the loss?” Angelica asked one of the psychologists. “Isn’t it easier to adapt to death at that age? The other children are all coping with having lost their parents and they are dealing with it better than Saul. Why can’t he forget as well as they can?”
Angelica was wrong about the other children. They had not forgotten about their parents; they just did not talk about them often. This was what they had learnt: if one person loses their parents and talks about it, everyone feels sympathy for them. When everybody has lost their parents, the person who brings it up does nothing but remind all the rest about their own pain.
In other ways, Angelica was right. Saul was unable to talk to the other kids; he didn’t know what to say to them or how to be. His only friend was Gabriella and even she preferred playing with Ricky with the blond hair. She only played with Saul when Ricky with the blond hair was otherwise occupied. Saul knew this. It made him hate Ricky with the blond hair and it made him hate himself.
VI
“He doesn’t necessarily have to be a genius,” said Angelica to the rest of the council while looking through the results of the most recent academic evaluations. There was a hint of desperation in her tone. It was eight years since the other children had been brought into the compound and Saul was still scoring worse than most of them.
The others at the table looked at her bleakly. They were among the brightest minds on the planet and they could barely understand quantum and temporal physics. To make breakthroughs, Saul needed to be more than just gifted. He needed to be a Mozart.
“Maybe it will come with time,” said Angelica, trying hard to be positive. “He’s only thirteen.”
Her optimism was a sham. There were only nine more years. Recently, she had started to have the sort of thoughts Harrod used to. She began to wonder if they had been wrong. Maybe in bringing Saul to the compound they had done exactly what they were trying to avoid.
A consummate leader in all ways, Angelica did not let her doubts show. No-one doubted her conviction and it helped them to believe.
VII
Nineteen children in puberty – nine boys and ten girls. Flirtation and kisses were inevitable. Saul had vivid fantasies about Gabriella and Maia and Hanna and Thirumeni and Linda. Mainly about Gabriella because sometimes she leant forward and whispered into his ear. He would later remember the feel of her breath against his lobe. Sometimes, her body brushed against his. Sometimes he wanted to reach forward and pull her into his arms.
A decade had gone by but things had not really changed. Gabriella still spent time with Saul only when Ricky with the blond hair was otherwise occupied. Saul still hated Ricky with the blond hair.
Ricky with the blond hair’s full name was Richard Montcalm. He was beautiful and his memory was perfect. He also understood numbers and equations in a way that excited his teachers. Now, all that they learnt in their classes was science: nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, probability mathematics, temporal theory.
The children were finally allowed into the section of the compound that had been off limits to them for the last nine years. They were introduced to the scientists who had been arduously struggling to build a machine that could send an object backwards through time.
“We have no choice but to succeed,” the children were told. “Within ten years the force fields which protect this compound will run out of power and the radioactivity from the surface will kill us.”
“Then why aren’t you working on a way to make the force fields draw power from something else?” Gabriella asked.
“All we would do is buy ourselves time,” Angelica explained. “We are trying to reverse things. We want to make a time machine and send someone back in time to stop the war before it happens.”
This was a beautiful idea to the children. Of course it was. They had grown up reading H G Wells and Jules Verne and Kurt Vonnegut. The books available in the compound had been chosen carefully.
Ricky was fascinated and he boasted to the other children, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to find a way to make a time machine.”
If anyone can do it, the other children thought, Ricky can. Saul hated him all the more for this and swore to himself then and there that he would do it before Ricky did. He might not be able to say exactly the clever thing that would make Gabriella laugh but this was something bigger and better. He would save the world. Saul began putting all his effort into assimilating all the temporal research that the scientists had done. After classes, he continued reading. He drew sketches and he made calculations.
They all sighed with relief. They patted themselves on the back.
“This is how it will happen,” Angelica said, nearly in tears. “This is how we will be saved.”
VIII
Saul worked and the other children worked. They learnt everything the scientists knew about temporal theory and they struggled to find a way. After two years of failed attempts, one child said in frustration, “Maybe it’s not possible.”
Angelica only replied, “It is possible. We know it is.”
“How can you be so sure.”
She didn’t elaborate. They had all decided against explaining too much. If they told the children
more, questions might be asked that no-one was ready to answer.
All the children’s theories were examined closely, but especially Saul’s. They encouraged him whenever he was losing hope. However, try as he might, Saul could hardly even understand the things the scientist’s had taught them. Even what had initially motivated him had dulled. He still hated Ricky but he had come to accept that Ricky was better than him at everything. He had even found a way to pretend he didn’t mind Ricky and Gabriella’s relationship. They had been together for half a year. Gabriella had even less time for Saul now.
IX
An image was the greatest breakthrough. Ricky succeeded in building a camera that took a photo, not of what was in front of it, but of what had been there twenty minutes earlier. It wasn’t sending an object back in time, but it was a step in the right direction.
It bothered Angelica that this breakthrough had come from Ricky. It should have come from Saul. “Saul Baron. By his sacrifice we live. By his sacrifice we love. By his sacrifice we sacrifice.” She still said the prayer every night, struggling to keep faith despite what she saw right in front of her eyes. Time was running out.
Eight years left. And then seven and then six. Still the camera was their only tangible achievement. Many in the compound still had faith in Saul even though he wasn’t a genius. They told themselves, he’ll be the one to make the final suggestion that will click things into place.