Scifi Motherlode

by Robert Jeschonek

  By the time the minister said, "I now present Mr. and Mrs. Hermes Tourniquet," I was startin’ to think maybe no sabotage was comin’ after all. Maybe, my brothers’ real plan was just to drive me crazy waitin’ for the hammer to fall.

  Then, as Bigfoot an’ I started down the aisle, the back a’ the church started to run...not like legs or a nose, but like a paintin’ in the rain.

  Holdin’ Bigfoot by the arm, I stopped in the middle a’ the aisle an’ stared. The white a’ the walls, the dark brown a’ the doors an’ woodwork, the red an’ gold an’ blue a’ the stained glass windows ran downward in streaks. Where the colors melted away, a backdrop a’ perfect blackness loomed, uninterrupted by even the faintest flickerin’ star.

  Just then, as everyone in the church turned around to see what the heck I was gapin’ at, I heard one a’ my brothers curse at the front a’ the church. It was Buck, the third oldest after Delaney an’ Gila.

  "All right," said Buck. "Which one a’ you guys forgot to set up the safety bubble around the church?"

  "I thought you were goin’ to do it," said Rattler, the overexcitable next-to-the-youngest a’ the five brothers.

  Buck let out a disgusted sigh. "I can’t believe you guys dropped the ball again."

  "It was your job, Buck," said my youngest brother, Thirty Ought.

  "All a’ you shut up," said Delaney. "Hey, Vicky. Can you come here a minute?"

  I tore myself away from watchin’ the church melt an’ headed for the boys. People in the rear pews were crowdin’ toward the front a’ the place, hopin’ to escape the growin’ void.

  "We, uh, released this new world-eatin’ bacteria, Vick," Delaney said sheepishly, like he was confessin’ to readin’ my diary. "The bad news is, someone forgot to protect the church...but you’ll be okay. You’re about to be the last person in the world."

  "‘Cept there won’t be a world," said Buck.

  "The good news is, we’re pretty sure you can ‘shine up a new one," said Delaney.

  "And don’t feel compelled to bring back these other screwups when ya’ do," said Buck.

  *****

  As I sweep my hand through the darkness, trails a’ twinklin’ glitter cascade from my fingertips. The world has ended, an’ I’m not alone.

  I float in an ocean a’ microbes, the well-fed remnants of all I once knew. My brothers did a great job programmin’ ‘em for my survival; the microbes kept me safe durin’ the apocalypse, an’ now they’re providin’ all the air an’ water an’ nutrients I need to live.

  And more. I found out they respond to my thoughts.

  If I picture somethin’ an’ concentrate, it pops right up in front a’ me, conjured from the digested matter an’ energy a’ the destroyed Earth. If it’s a hamburger, it’s real enough to eat. If it’s a person, he’s real enough to talk to.

  I’ve never heard of a wildshiner usin’ mind control on microbes before. The only controllin’ we ever did was with DNA manipulation in the lab an’ creative mixin’ in the field.

  But I’m wonderin’ if maybe I have seen this before. I keep thinkin’ back to the way Mama’s memorial kept goin’ wrong. Even though I’d program the microbes real carefully an’ triple-check my work, the scenes they’d recreate were always different from the one I’d programmed into ‘em.

  For a while, I’d wondered if I was subconsciously sabotagin’ my own work with my own two hands, but Bigfoot an’ Delaney had both checked the work an’ said it was A-OK.

  Now, I see another way I could’ve sabotaged myself.

  I close my eyes an’ focus my thoughts on a memory, bringin’ it to the front a’ my mind. It’s a moment I remember well, too well, an’ it comes easy to me.

  When I open my eyes, the moment surrounds me, life-size an’ perfect in every way.

  Mama an’ I (at age sixteen) sit together on a plank dock juttin’ from a bank a’ the Cacapon River. It’s mid-summer in the Best Virginia hills, hot as the engine block of a pickup just got done climbin’ the switchbacked road up a mountain face.

  While my younger self sits there with Mama, I personally watch from a few yards away. I’m hoverin’ over the cracklin’ brown water in the middle a’ the river, an’ they can’t see me.

  Even before Mama starts talkin’, I understand. There’s a reason I thought a’ this now.

  It’s the same reason I kept ruinin’ her memorial.

  *****

  "I only changed the outside a’ you, Vick," says Mama, danglin’ her feet in the river water. "The inside’s just the same, an’ the inside’s what I truly love."

  Sixteen-year-old Vicky tries to skim a stone over the river’s sparklin’ surface, but it only hops once an’ sinks like her heart. "I knew it," she says, her voice bitter cold. "I always knew there was somethin’ wrong with me."

  "No no, honey." Mama reaches over to try to stroke Vicky’s long, black hair, but Vicky ducks away from her touch. "There’s never been anythin’ wrong with you."

  Vicky looks up suddenly, like she just thought a’ somethin’ awful. "My brothers?" she says. "Did you change them, too?"

  Mama sighs an’ nods. "I ‘shined up all a’ you."

  Tears gush from Vicky’s eyes. "Why?" she says. "Why did you do it?"

  My own heart pounds as Mama takes Vicky’s hand. "To make us look more like a family," she says. "The family I always wanted."

  Vicky tries to tear her hand away, but she can’t. "I don’t even know what I really look like!"

  "You think I don’t love you?" Mama kisses Vicky’s hand. "Tell the truth, now."

  Vicky glares at Mama through her tears. She sobs an’ shakes as birds sing an’ fish flip outta’ the water an’ splash back down. "What’d I look like?" she says. "Where’d I come from?"

  "Don’t matter," says Mama.

  "Tell me! Why won’t you tell me who I really am?"

  Mama looks down at the river glidin’ past. "Because I love you too much," she says softly, "an’ I’m too scared I’ll lose you."

  "I hate you," says Vicky. She jumps to her feet. "I hate you an’ I’ll never forgive you."

  Then, as she storms away, leavin’ her mother alone on the river bank, I close my eyes. When I open ‘em, the scene is gone. Nothin’ but blackness again.

  *****

  At last, I understand. As I reach out with my mind to the ocean a’ microbes around me, I know why I couldn’t bring myself to ‘shine up the memorial Mama wanted...an’ I know why she wanted it.

  It wasn’t just for her. It wasn’t just a memorial to her favorite moment of her life.

  It was a gift to me.

  Mama’s instructions for the memorial were in the form a’ genetic code. I won’t see all the details till the memorial’s done, includin’ the one thing I’ve always wanted to see more’n anythin’ else in my life...the one thing I’ve also been most scared a’ seein’.

  The one thing Mama gave me as a final show a’ her love. The one thing she could finally afford to give me without fear, without worryin’ she’d lose me, because I was losin’ her first.

  Now that the world’s over an’ I have a clean slate to work with, I believe I can bring her gift to life. And maybe I can finally forgive her.

  All around me, the darkness glows with the light of a gazillion microbes churnin’ my thoughts into reality. Shapes appear in the murk, blurry like I’m seein’ ‘em through a curtain...an’ then they get brighter an’ more solid.

  Like the curtain’s liftin’.

  *****

  Mama Circa gazes down at the small form glowing in the moonlit cradle. Smiling, she runs her hand along the side rail, watching the child curled up in the bedclothes.

  The trailer smells of beer and roses...beer because the man and woman who live there are drinkers, roses because of the soothing garden Mama Circa has wildshined around them to deepen their sleep.

  Her heart pounds. Gently, she reaches for the child, drawing her up out of the cradle and into her arms.

  Closing her
eyes, Mama hugs the child to her, but not so tightly that she will wake her. Mama beams and breathes deeply, turning slowly with her prize in the silver moonlight at the scene of the crime.

  The one-year-old she is stealing sleeps soundly on Mama’s shoulder. The little girl has thick, black hair and long, black lashes.

  Just then, somewhere in the night, a dog barks. The child in Mama’s arms stirs and grunts, and her eyes flicker open.

  The child tenses and catches her breath as if she is about to cry. Gently, Mama swings her around and makes a funny face at her.

  The child relaxes and smiles. She stares for a moment—her eyes are bright green—and then she drifts back to sleep.

  Mama kisses the little girl’s forehead and eases her onto her shoulder. The child sleeps soundly as her new mother whisks her out into the full-moon summer night.

  *****

  The Cross-Dressing Cosmic Cortez Rubs Off

  As Philippa the Conquistadora waves his ribbony rainbow blade over the bowed head of Koocha, king of the alien Skoo, one bid after another chatters in over the phone in my head. Every network, from the bigs to the babies, wants to carry the live feed of this execution.

  I love this job. When I was a boy, I watched the space conquistadors on pulsenet, roving among exotic worlds and violently subduing the primitive natives. Now, I’m repping Philippa, the cross-dressing, bloodthirsty, cosmic Cortez, skimming my fifteen percent of more money than there are hydrogen atoms in the universe.

  "Thus endeth the greatest campaign of conquest in history!" roars Philippa, shaking a black-leather-gloved fist in the air. The butt-rings dangling from his exposed posterior jangle as he thrusts his leather-chapped hips to one side. "At least until my next campaign!" he says with a lipsticky smile aimed right at the camera cloud drifting in front of him.

  "Wait, O Conqueror!" yips kneeling Koocha, who looks more like an ugly orange baby with green stripes and foot-long glowing purple whiskers than anything else. "Before I die, I must speak with that man."

  To my surprise, Koocha points his stubby finger-bud right at me.

  The rock soundtrack kicks up ominously, screeching to a crescendo of skirling ultra-guitar feedback.

  "Bo-ring," groans Philippa, and then he flutters a languid hand in my direction. "He’s just my aaaagent. I can feel the ratings drooping already."

  "I will outbid all bidders if you will spare my people," Koocha says to me in his/her/its/whatever’s squeaky voice.

  "I’m listening," I say with a smirk.

  "We offer your species total enlightenment, perfect happiness, and eternal bliss," says Koocha. "We can give you the wisdom that most species take millions of years to obtain." Koocha’s whiskers glow brighter. "What say you?"

  I laugh. "You’re serious?"

  Koocha nods. "If you accept, humanity will hyperevolve into gods multimillennia ahead of schedule, and you will become the greatest hero in human history." Koocha shrugs. "Or you will refuse and become the greatest villain."

  Philippa prances over and rubs my chest. "How deliciously tempting," he purrs.

  I am very aware of the ribbony sword in his other hand, though that is not what makes up my mind.

  The thought of bringing spiritual transcendence and hyperevolution to mankind—if such a thing is even possible—also gets my attention...but that does not sway me, either. Nor does the secretly longed-for fulfillment of my boyhood dreams by outdoing Philippa on the celebrity villain front.

  What does it, what makes up my mind, is when the insta-ratings graph floating always in the corner of my eye takes a sharp plunge.

  The viewers have spoken.

  I give the nod to Philippa. With a shake of his flouncy black curls, he swishes his rainbow sword in a whistling figure eight and levels it at Koocha.

  "Sorry," I say to the shivering alien kinglet. "I can’t spend fifteen percent of enlightenment."

  *****

  Star Sex

  The alien who looked like a cactus blinked his prickly pear eyes and made a noise like a screaming cat.

  At first, Dinah Ryan wasn't sure that this was a bad thing. For all she and her fellow Earthlings knew about aliens, it could have been a cry of pure ecstasy.

  But then, the cactus puked chunky blue slime all over Ben Blakey, which tipped them off. With a noise like a dental drill running at full throttle, Mr. Cactus scooted off to the next booth.

  So humanity was still screwed.

  "Ah, man!" Blakey flicked slime from his gray jumpsuit and wrinkled his nose. "This stuff stinks!"

  "You're telling me." Mahalia Davis darted away from him. "How the hell many of these species communicate by spraying shit at each other, anyway?"

  Dinah grinned and shook her head, tossing her shoulder-length sandy brown hair. "I still say it's a joke. Initiation pranks for the new kids on the block."

  "No," said Captain Alec Strayhorn. "We don't matter that much to them. Half of them don't even know we're here."

  Dinah gazed out at the cavernous hall and realized Strayhorn was right. Every imaginable shape and size of alien being walked and bounced and flew and crawled and oozed across that giant crystal chamber. There were aliens with skin like stained glass, faces like mirrors, bodies like smoke, fur crackling with electrical current...and none of them were looking or sniffing or twitching in the direction of the Earthlings' booth.

  "This is a disaster." Blakey used one end of the tablecloth to wipe slime from his arms and chest. "Three days at this debacle, and what do we have to show for it?"

  "Lots of alien freebies." Mahalia shuffled the pile of bizarre devices, objects, and pocket-sized lifeforms on the table.

  "Which we don't know what to do with!" Blakey bent down and wiped slime from his lumpy bald head. "For all we know, they're meant to kill and eat us!" Usually, Blakey was the funniest and most upbeat member of the team; his current surliness showed just how badly things were going.

  Some Worlds' Fair this was turning out to be. The Fair was designed to give the inhabitants of many planets the chance to showcase their wares and attract investors. Plenty of other species were getting attention...but for the humans, the Fair had been an exercise in invisibility. They sat at their cobbled-together plastic booth playing old Earth movies on a TV pried out of their ship's cockpit, and nobody gave them a second or even a first look.

  "We've done the best we could." Dinah tucked her hair behind her ears and shrugged. "We didn't exactly come prepared for this."

  It was true. As the crew of Earth's first deep space exploration mission, the four humans had not expected to be setting up a booth at a glorified trade show on an alien space station. They hadn't even expected to meet

  honest-to-goodness aliens, for that matter.

  Now, they'd been surrounded by so many wildly different varieties for so long, Dinah had to admit that the novelty was starting to wear off.

  "I say we pack it in," said Blakey, dropping the slime-covered end of the tablecloth. "Let's go home."

  "And tell the folks at home what?" Captain Strayhorn--a tall man with thick, dark hair, chiseled features, and haunted gray eyes--straightened the tablecloth. "That everyone on Earth will die because our trade show booth was half-assed?"

  That was enough to take the wind out of everyone's sails...and remind Dinah why she had a crush on him.

  Strayhorn was a leader. While everyone else got bent out of shape over a little blue slime, Strayhorn kept his eyes firmly on the prize.

  Which was saving humanity from extinction.

  Blakey sighed. "I just don't know what else we can do. These bastards don't care about what we have to offer."

  "Maybe you need to diiig deeper," said a familiar voice.

  Just hearing it was enough to make Dinah's skin crawl. The voice had an oily, sinuous quality that curled around her brainstem and licked her fear center with a flickering, forked tongue.

  The voice belonged to the alien who'd brought them to the Worlds' Fair in the first place. Dinah and the othe
r humans called him "Heavy," which was derived from his endless, unpronounceable alien name.

  "Surpriise them." Heavy looked like a five-foot long eggplant covered with writhing cilia topped with chattering faces. There were hundreds of tiny faces, every one of them representing a different alien species. Whichever face Heavy was using at a given moment--the human face, in this case--inflated to life size and spoke the loudest.

  Mahalia patted her curly black hair and snorted. "How can we surprise them when we don't even know what's not a surprise out here?"

  Heavy's human face looked like Blakey's: pinched, puffy features and a lumpy scalp. The main difference was that the lip movements didn't always match the words. "Your homeworld wiiill be uniiinhabiiitable soon, yes?"

  "You know it will," said Dinah. Hyper-accelerated climate change on Earth had already cranked up the heat and forced everyone underground. Scientists projected that humans would no longer be able to survive anywhere on or under the planet within five years.

  "You came here looking for help to fiiix the homeworld, yes?" said Heavy.

  Dinah nodded. The team had originally launched into space seeking new Earthlike homes for humanity. When all the inhabitable planets within reach had turned out to be taken, they'd jumped at Heavy's invitation to the Fair.

  "You wiiill pay any priice for that help?" said Heavy.

  "Of course," said Strayhorn. "But we don't seem to have anything anyone wants."

  Heavy made a gurgling sound that the team had decided was his way of laughing. "Are you sure you have triied everythiiing?"

  "Pretty much," said Blakey.