Explorers_Beyond The Horizon

by C J Paget

  EXPLORERS: Beyond the Horizon

  Copyright © 2012 by Positron Creations, LLC

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by P.G. Holyfield

  The Garden Pool by J. Daniel Sawyer

  The Burning Land by Jeff Brackett

  Along the Portal Road by Lauren M. Roy

  Interview with a Robot Heresiarch by C.J. Paget

  The Art of Data Tri-So by Vincent Morgan

  Thinking is the WORST Way to Travel by Ira Nayman

  Under the Flower Pot by Jocelyn Adams

  A Mournful Rustling by Court Ellyn

  Night Market by Jesse Summerson

  Beneath an Orange Sky by Andrew Hawnt

  Dribbling in Xibalba by Mark Mellon

  Universes Like Champagne by Laura Givens

  Where the River Ends, There is a Land by James Ebersole

  The Water of Happiness by Kurt Heinrich Hyatt

  The More Things Change by Daniel Latham

  [About the Authors]

  [About the Editors]

  [Copyright Information]

  FOREWORD

  By P.G. Holyfield

  “I want to shake the dust off this one-horse town. I want to explore the world. I want to watch tv in a different time-zone. I want to visit strange, exotic malls... I want to live. Marge, won’t you let me live?”

  - Homer Simpson

  Okay, maybe that isn’t the best quotation to start off with, but wait... you’ll see how it serves my purpose. Here’s one that you might appreciate more:

  “Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.”

  - Frank Borman

  The desire, the need for exploration is a uniquely human condition (even for Homer). There are examples of exploration in other species, particularly tied to seasonal migration, the lack of food, or the existence of threatening predators. But it is humanity that explores for the sake of exploring—to discover something new, to learn, to evolve, to survive... and yes, just because it’s there.

  “Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.”

  - Sir Edmund Hillary

  Of course there are other factors that have created the opportunity for exploration in our past, mostly motivated by economics and the expansion of power. But for many of these “explorers,” the economics involved was a means to an end. Without the support and sponsorship of those that desired a faster way to the Indies or new lands to conquer, they would not have been able to cross that desert, to see what was beyond the mountains, or to sail across the supposedly endless ocean (or as some thought, the ocean that had a particularly finite end).

  For humanity, exploration is as much a spiritual journey as it has been a worldly journey, an attempt to answer those questions that we have always asked: “Why are we here?” “How can we become closer to God?” And as such the act of exploration for humanity has just as much to do with the examination of ourselves; our minds and our hearts, to discover the secrets of what makes us human... our ‘souls.’

  “The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart.”

  - Julien Green

  So what you have in your hands, or on your screen (although your screen could be in your hands, of course), is a collection of speculative fiction stories that touch in some way on the theme of exploration: of new worlds, new forms of magic, and even of one’s own soul. Rest assured that it is the characters featured in these stories, human or not, that undergo the greatest examinations and scrutiny—and in the end, hopefully you the reader will as well.

  P.G. Holyfield is the author of Murder at Avedon Hill, available through Dragon Moon Press and through Amazon.com. P.G. manages the speculative fiction website SpecFicMedia.com, co-hosts the Game of Thrones podcast Beyond the Wall, and organizes and emcees the yearly online speculative fiction live-streaming marathon called TuacaCon. P.G. is currently working on a multimedia fiction project that deals with exploration as well... the search for a new Earth. For more information on this project, please visit pgholyfield.com.

  THE GARDEN POOL

  by J. Daniel Sawyer

  The silence of the evening, broken only by the thundering gasworks two miles distant, settled on the hedge like mist on a grave. Last season’s dried holly twigs crunched beneath the hand-cobbled leather shoes—the thin coating of snow did nothing to muffle it. A pair of wintering jays squealed and scattered up into the graying gloom, the late fall storm clouds glowing pale from the endless gaslight.

  “Chrissakes, Audrey, keep it quiet wontcha!” Tosha ducked behind the second stage of the hedge, keeping watch. All seemed to be quiet.

  “Oof!” Audrey muffled a scream.

  “Cummon, sissy, what’s wrong witcha now?” Tosha abandoned her post and turned to see her small friend crumpled on the ground holding her ankle.

  “Thinks… gah… thinks I broke it.” Her breath came in gasps, each one drawing a small cloud against the darkening brick wall that served as a fence for this forbidden world. Now that they were down, Tosha didn’t know how they were going to get back up. It didn’t matter anyway, if they had to they could sneak out through the garden gate after the power was turned off.

  “Lemme see… ah, here.” Tosha’s fingers found the sore spot on Audrey’s ankle and gently rubbed it away, loosening it up with a bit of the warmth that her friend’s natty stockings and sewn moccasins were too thin to lend her by themselves.

  “Owie. Careful there, Toshi. It hurts!”

  “Okay, here…” Tosha closed her eyes and moved more gently, remembering the healer’s hands ritual that she spent her days rehearsing with her mother. “That should doya there.”

  “Oh… ooh… ow… ah… oh… yeah, that’s much better.” Audrey let go her foot and looked fondly up at her friend. “Tanks, T.”

  “No worries.” She smiled, glad that it seemed to work, even if she wasn’t good enough yet to do it without cheating a little stick of camphor up her sleeve to help. One of these days, she’d be able to do it for real, once she learned the proper way to give the healing touch. “Up witcha now.” Tosha stood and took Audrey by the wrists and hoisted her up. She was too small for her age. Fourteen years old and still looked like a boy, or would have without the schoolgirl blue dress she wore during the day.

  The two girls peered over the hedgerow, looking for any sign of life. There was still a light on in the upper room, so someone might be home. That light burned every night, even after the power got turned off for the rich folks. The owner’s power was never shut off. No one would dare. So the light was on, like it always was, and maybe it didn’t mean anything.

  The lit window was inside the courtyard, and they could only see it by its reflection off the other windows that peered out between the notches in the battlements. The old Tudor manor had been fitted with them when the new owner moved in. The owner who no one would speak of, for fear he would hear them.

  The wizard.

  Tosha had first seen him last year while hauling wood for the gasworks past his mansion. He was out in front of his estate, lighting the incense bowls—no one but a wizard was allowed to light the incense bowls except at the Sacrifice festival in the spring, when they cooked the rabbits that had lasted through the long winter and prayed for a long summer—and this wizard was elegant. He moved with purpose and authority, all willowy and long in his blue coat that came down almost to his knees. Ever since then she’d wanted to get in with him.r />
  It wasn’t allowed. Landowners and landowners’ children weren’t allowed to mix with the learned. The learned were dangerous, they told her. No human mind could bear to see the things they saw, to understand the things they understood—things that unmade the world. That’s why all the wizards were mad.

  Mad enough to seduce the young, twist their minds, send them off to parts unknown. No one taken by a wizard was ever the same again—if they were ever again seen alive.

  Without young backs and young minds, the city would starve.

  And besides, her parents told her, it’s against the law. They protect secrets that could destroy everything. The police will come. They’ll take you away. People who go to his palace don’t return.

  With a reputation like that, who could resist? When the curfew bell rang an hour ago, Tosha had stolen out of her bedroom, being careful not to wake her siblings, and crawled around the tenement ledge with Audrey, and the two had taken the fire escape to the cobble-broken street. Keeping always to the shadows, which were many in the gas-lit workers’ quarter, they’d managed to find their way past the thieves and slave prowlers to the forbidden walls behind which so many had disappeared.

  Inside the sheepskin coat wrapped over her pajamas, Tosha shivered. She’d known some of them. Pastor Mathus. Audrey’s Aunt. Old Man Jordan. Her parents said the wizard had taken them all.

  “I dunno, Toshi. Sure’n we should be doin’ this?” Audrey whispered hoarsely in her ear.

  “Shh.” Tosha moved her lips right up to her friend’s ear, like a kiss, and barely used her voice. “Talk low, in my ear, like this. Whispers carry on the snow.” She spoke properly, like a parent, and not in the normal way of a Bannockburn girl at all. It got Audrey’s attention. The smaller girl moved her mouth to Tosha’s ear.

  “Okay. I will. Sure’n we oughta come?”

  “Yesum. I dona thinkin’ he’s here now. I saw his cartie leave a’fore sundown. Maybe off to some big wizard’s claver.” It was why she’d called Audrey to come spend the night in the first place, and why they’d snuck out of her bedroom window in their shoes and PJs: It wasn’t safe trying to find out what Tosha needed to know, now with the wizard about.

  “Then why quiets?”

  “In case his alarm’s on, dummy. Cummon, lezgo.”

  Tosha pulled back from Audrey but held on to her hand. They’d need to be able to communicate right quick if they spotted anyone. Quietly, gently, they parted the stickery holly hedge and squiggled through. Tosha silently cheered when Audrey managed to make it through without getting her flannel wrap stuck. She’d been clumsy since she started growing, and the fact that she hadn’t filled out yet embarrassed her and made her hunch over.

  Just as well—she was going to be taller than Tosha, and prettier, even though she didn’t know it yet. The cards said so, over and over, every time Tosha consulted them when Audrey wasn’t around. They said Audrey would leave when a man finally noticed her.

  Tosha was already fighting them off. She should have been married off already, but so far she’d found reasons to refuse. Life would be too small, and delaying marriage as long as she could might encourage Audrey to do the same.

  Good job she was growing slowly—she’d be awkward for a while yet, and as long as she was, Tosha didn’t have to worry.

  The hedgerow gave way to a low ring of rosebushes and a small gravel footpath around a delicately manicured oval lawn dusted with snow, stretching almost a hundred meters from the patio of the manor to where it disappeared in a bottleneck break between the holly bushes. Little flecks of black gave the look of pepper to the expanse, as blades poked up through here and there in the glinting white. The rosebushes—dormant this time of year—formed the first line of the

  oval, and overshadowing them were the statues. It was too dark to make out their details, but they towered imperiously over the lawn, watching it. Protecting it from violation.

  They walked along slowly on the crunching aisleway, not daring to venture out onto the snow lest their footprints give them away, but something in the sharp night air put the dance into Audrey, and she skipped softly next to Tosha.

  Audrey was infectious. She always had been. Tosha couldn’t resist—she never wanted to. Before she’d taken six breaths she was skipping along, trying not to laugh for fear of being heard. The still of the enchanted garden seemed to warn against its being disturbed.

  They hopped and tumbled right up to the gap in the hedges, where the walkway stopped. They would have to brave the turf beyond the gravel’s end if they wanted to explore further.

  “‘hut now, Toshi?” Audrey’s hot breath in her ear tickled, giving her another reason to shiver beyond the cold and excitement.

  Tosha leaned out and peered around the final statue, looking up toward the house. That’s where she’d go, if she could work up the nerve—but not yet. Maybe there was something the other way…

  She pulled Audrey back from the edge, and let go her hand. Tosha scooted right up to the edge of the grass and grabbed two fistfuls of holly branches, making sure to avoid the stickery leaves. She snuck an eye ‘round the hedge to see what lay past the bottleneck.

  She gasped.

  In winter? It couldn’t be possible.

  She lost her grip on the hedge with her shock, and fell sprawling onto the lawn. Audrey was at her side in two shakes, helping her up and dusting her off.

  “You gonna done it now,” she rasped “If’n it don’t snow tonight, he’ll know we’re here!”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Tosha!”

  “I’m sorry! Jesus!” Tosha grabbed her friend and pulled her back on to the safety of the gravel path.

  “Whadidya see in there?”

  Tosha pulled Audrey’s ear to her lips again, barely daring to voice her discovery. In this enchanted garden, saying anything too loudly might spook the magic and make it vanish. “It’s… ‘oly Chris’, Audrey… I think it’s… a pool. It’s steaming, not frozen.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “Wouldn’ believe it if I didn’ see it m’self. But ‘s there. Take a peek.”

  “Okay.” Audrey pulled away and stepped cautiously out onto the lawn, careful not to make any new marks in the snow. Tosha followed, and took her hand again. The two of them stood transfixed at the sight before them.

  The water glowed just enough to light the vapors dancing on its surface. Off to the right, a smaller pool, also lit from below, steamed even more. Neither of them had ever seen a hot tub, and swimming pools were only open in the summer, when it was cleaner than the river that flowed down from the nickel mines and less expensive than air conditioning.

  It wasn’t what they’d come for—not that Audrey knew that—and Tosha didn’t want to get sidetracked. They had to find a way into the house.

  They had to.

  But the water was there, calling them. The wizard was out—Tosha had seen him leave—so a few extra minutes couldn’t hurt, stolen swimming in the winter.

  Swimming in the winter! Who ever heard of such a thing?

  The pool deck extended out to the hedgerow, just past the bottleneck. It wouldn’t take much to get there without leaving more prints.

  Tosha leaned close to Audrey’s ear. “Ya know, we could get there. Hangin’ the branches and scootin’ around to the pavers.”

  Audrey turned back to her. “Let’s go!”

  Fists full of prickles, they planted their toes in the dirt beneath the bushes and shuffled the five meters to the concrete. The deck, slick with melt, wasn’t quite cold enough for the snow to stick to it.

  Wordlessly, they both ran to the water’s edge and dipped their hands in. Tepid, perhaps thirty degrees. Warm enough not to freeze anyone unless the wind picked up, but that wouldn’t happen. This was a place where no wind was allowed—Tosha knew it in her bones as surely as she knew that her cousin Jacob fancied her since her tits grew.

  It smelled faintly of bleach. How could anyone afford that much bleach? She l
ooked over to her right, at the smaller pool. Without saying anything to Audrey she sprang to her feet and ran lightly along the edge, then dropped to her knees to dip her hand in.

  It’s hot! Like a hot bath, but better.

  She almost yelled for Audrey, but remembered where they were and shut her mouth before the sound came out. She pursed her lips and whistled like a whippoorwill, hoping no one would notice a summer bird’s song in the winter.

  Audrey’s blonde head, hovering over the water, jerked up and looked at her, alarmed, her long hair whipping around. Tosha’s hair was too curly, it’d never grow that long.

  She waved Audrey over, and like a cat in ballet shoes, Audrey scampered across the wet ground on tip-toe right up to the edge of the water.

  “Feel it.” She took Audrey’s hand and interlaced their fingers and plunged them both up to the wrist. Audrey looked at the water, and then looked up, her eyes wide with wonder. They locked on to Tosha’s, and between them, silently, they agreed.

  Letting go Audrey’s hand, Tosha stood, and Audrey followed. Her eyes glowed. Then, as if someone rang a starting bell, they both hurriedly grabbed at the buttons on their overclothes—Tosha on her fleece jacket, and Audrey on her flannel. Without taking her eyes from Audrey’s, Tosha continued on with her shoes, her top, and her pajama bottoms. Audrey matched her move for move, until the two of them grasped hands again and slipped, limb by limb, down into the decadent, forbidden water.

  How could such a thing be? Did wizards merit this much power? Did they have it on their own?

  “Toshi…” Audrey looked at her, and her mouth tried to form words, but she couldn’t find sounds to match the wonder. Tosha squeezed her hand under the water and smiled. It wasn’t what they’d come for, but perhaps there would be another opportunity for that. This…