Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  An amphibious something-or-other launched itself out of a nearby puddle, threw a mid-air glance her way with an array of eyes, then landed nearly splashless in a puddle ten metres away. That seemed to be some sort of signal because suddenly all of the dozen or more puddles surrounding her camp came to life as countless “puddle-jumpers” launched themselves back and forth from puddle to puddle in silence, each eyeing her as they arced through the thick air.

  “I don’t see why not, Lill. The only thing you lack for quickly creating a sustainable settlement is manpower. It will take you longer, but you can certainly achieve what needs to be done.”

  “Five years is a long time to be alone, Pete.”

  “You’ll never be alone as long as you’ve got me.” The assurance was strong in her earpiece, broadcast only a short distance from the shuttle.

  “Thanks, but there’s only so much an A.I. can do.”

  “Want me to talk dirty to you?”

  She laughed for the first time since she’d forced her way out of the deep-sleep pod. “Not yet, thanks. You just worry about cataloguing the native flora and fauna that your sensors pick up and let me worry about… that other stuff.”

  “Yes ma’am.” The A.I. paused, just as Pete had always done before bringing up a difficult subject. “Lill?”

  “Yah, buddy?”

  “They’ll be here in five. You won’t be alone forever. Besides, they’re expecting a complete settlement to be ready for occupation when they arrive, so you’ve got your work cut out for you with erecting structures and growing test crops on a very long Honey-Do list.”

  “True enough.” A far-off howl started up and rose in pitch until it was beyond Lill’s range of hearing. “Now, can you call up the repair manual for the K7 generator so I can get a damned secure perimeter set up? Please.”

  “Sure thing. Sending it to your tablet as I speak.”

  “Good stuff. Now, hand me the Phillips screwdriver, would you…”

  * * * * *

  “Canada’s modern-day Aesop”*, Timothy Reynolds, was born in London, Ontario, raised in Toronto, lives in Calgary, and comes from a long line of proud Nova Scotian Bluenosers. He’s a 7th-generation Canadian whose United Empire Loyalist forebears arrived in Halifax in 1760, and whose (many-times-removed) cousin, Charles Tupper was a Father of Confederation.

  Reynolds’ latest publishing credits include the story of a dying folksinger trying to teach Death a love song, and the dark tale of a bus driver who kills all of his passengers, for the good of Mankind.

  (*Barbara Budd, CBC Radio)

  Bird Bones

  Megan Fennell

  At the worldly age of thirteen, Charlie Feyton could not comprehend the insistence of terrified children that there was a monster living under their bed. Or in their closet, or peeking through the gaps in the basement stairs, for that matter. The flaws in those theories were obvious with a bit of reflection, and Father had always insisted on Charlie exercising critical thought.

  For one thing, there simply wouldn’t be enough space. Assuming the hypothetical monster was larger than the average housecat, as the majority of tales would generally indicate, it would be irrational to believe their first preference would be to cram themselves into the narrow dust-fuzzy space beneath a single bed. There would hardly be enough room to breathe or stretch their limbs, never mind executing complicated child-snatching manoeuvres.

  The issue of a food source was similarly problematic. The monsters of common lore were invariably man-eaters with a preference for the more tender flesh of children. Even with an astronomically slow metabolic rate, it just wasn’t a realistically sustainable diet. Charlie had briefly entertained the possibility that such creatures (genus: monstrum, species: under-the-bed) were uniformly cold-blooded and could survive off a biannual feed, but even that was too much. Two children per year disappearing from the safety of their own bedrooms within the same geographical region wouldn’t go unquestioned for very long.

  The most damning evidence, of course, was that for as long as Charlie could remember, he and his father had kept their monster in the garden shed behind the house. And aside from the occasional grumble and request for fine-tuning, that set-up had worked out just fine.

  Isaac slid a pawn forward with one long finger and then sat back, settling the translucent length of his wings more comfortably over the arms of his chair, the thin batlike folds of flesh rustling softly against the wood.

  Charlie studied the board for a moment. Standard Sicilian Defence to open, no surprises there. It was never particularly dramatic playing against an opponent who’d learned the game of chess from the same dog-eared book as you.

  “How was school?” Isaac inquired.

  Another standard opening.

  Charlie shrugged. “Redundant. Mind-numbing.” He selected a knight. “You’re not missing anything, Bird Bones.”

  It was sweltering as usual in the shed, warm enough that Charlie had to wriggle out of his jacket just to keep his attention on the game. Isaac, on the other hand, had bundled his thin frame in one of his modified sweaters that Charlie’s father had obtained for him after he’d begun to complain about the cold making his bones ache. He’d slashed the thick wool in two parallel lines from neckline to mid-back to allow room for the grafted bone protruding from each of his shoulder blades.

  “Still, I enjoy when you tell me what it’s like,” Isaac said. He lifted a knight over and across to duel with Charlie’s own, then sat back with a faint grimace of pain. “That’ll be our deal. You tell me about school and I’ll tell you what it’s like to fly, once I can.”

  “You’ll tell me anyway. Who else are you going to tell?”

  Isaac rolled up his sleeves, gingerly, like he was peeling delicate fruit, and leaned over to grab a small tub of balm from the wooden counter next to them.

  “I’ll tell the whole world,” he said, “I’ll go on David Letterman. Or maybe on Conan. The incredible flying boy… They’ll eat me up.” He began massaging balm into his skeletal wrists, adding the sharp tang of cinnamon and peppermint to the layers of faded scent already hanging in the shed.

  Charlie watched him for a moment before making his next move with practiced efficiency. Bishop forward to terrorize the queen.

  “It’s too warm in here for your bones to be hurting,” he said.

  When Isaac smiled, he looked almost like a normal boy. Unimproved, Charlie reminded himself sternly. An unimproved boy. Father had banished “normal” from their house with greater vigor than any cuss word.

  “Do you care?” Isaac asked, “Or are you just wondering whether to increase the cortisone levels in my injection?”

  Charlie frowned at him. “I don’t see the difference. And it’s your move. Go already.”

  Isaac leaned forward to consider the board with an aggravating, almost indolent repose before shifting his attention back to Charlie, his pale eyes wide with feigned innocence.

  “I know they say empathy doesn’t fully develop in children until somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve, but you had a birthday with ‘teen’ in it last summer, Charlie-boy. You’re out of time. I’d really hoped…”

  Charlie exhaled to interrupt him, borrowing Father’s patented sigh of irritation. “I am intellectually superior to the average thirteen-year-old, thank you,” he said, and pushed himself away from the table. “If something was meant to develop, I’d have already got it. Time for your shot, I think.”

  He turned his back to go pull the meds, but he could just tell that Isaac was silently laughing at him in that infuriating way of his. Sometimes the creature in the shed was such a teenager.

  “Don’t worry,” Isaac told him cheerfully, pushing his sleeve up to present his veins, “It was never very much of a hope.”

  There was a certain science to judging Father’s mood both acc
urately and promptly upon his arrival home from the lab. The man was good at his job but he loathed it, and since they’d begun this latest venture with its inevitable trappings of inspections and media hype, it had been a living hell for him. The CCAC had been all over the project since the beginning and then PETA had gotten wind of things… The lab had been beset by a legion of hostile acronyms ever since.

  Despite the controversy, Father had long since grown bored of using his special knack for creating artificial flesh to give the beef industry a boost. The added insult of having to battle his way through the protestors each morning to do so had turned him angry and bitter. Isaac was his labour of love and sometimes a daily update on the boy’s health was enough to get him talking. Sometimes it was better if Charlie just fixed himself a sandwich for dinner and didn’t bother attempting conversation at all.

  Still, they always watched the evening news together, though neither of them found much pleasure in it anymore. The protestors had become a staple item for the local stations, radical and absurd with their dreadlocks and their outrage, all too happy to put on a show for the cameras. It made him wonder if they actually chanted and hoisted their handmade signs all day, or if they waited for the media before getting started. Those signs looked heavy.

  “Vivisection is scientific fraud!” “Shut Down Project Minotaur: That’s No Bull!!”

  The new gimmick this week was a protestor dressed up as a dairy cow with what appeared to be a plastic Viking helmet attached to his oversized fluffy head, possibly meant to indicate that he was a bull despite the perky udders wobbling obscenely at his belly. “Stop Torturing My Friends!” his sign read.

  As part of their nightly routine, Father would spend the length of the coverage snarling vicious things at the screen, his face growing increasingly blotchy with rage, while Charlie stocked up on language startling enough to keep the bullies at bay and silently willed the weatherman to get his ass on screen and wrap things up with another apologetic prediction of rain.

  Deep down inside, buried among the beliefs so secret that he couldn’t even voice them to his strange confidante in the shed, Charlie was convinced that this could only end with Father killing one of the idiots on screen. PETA protestor bludgeoned to death with own stupid sign! Story at eleven.

  The evening news that night was bound to be unforgettable.

  It always was.

  The early spring storm lashed the side of the shed in horizontal gusts, hissing against the walls like sand, and Isaac wanted to go outside.

  “A: It’s raining,” Charlie stated, mopping raindrops off his glasses with the hem of his shirt. “Excessively. B: Father will be home in fifteen minutes.”

  Fidgeting by the door, Isaac shot him a plaintive look. “A: I don’t care. Secondary response to point A: You could’ve said ‘a lot’ instead of ‘excessively’. This is why they pick on you at school, you know.”

  “Father will be home in fifteen minutes,” Charlie repeated evenly.

  “So give me five. Please.”

  Charlie held his ground for about eight seconds longer. “Fine,” he sighed, fishing the keys out of his pocket. Goosebumps shot up his arms and down his spine as he wrestled back into his sodden raincoat.

  As soon as he had unlocked and opened the door, the storm hit them like it was trying to shove them back inside. It was obviously a very logical storm. Isaac, on the other edge of the sensibility spectrum, tilted his face up to the rain and laughed in delight. He slipped past Charlie onto the lawn. Despite the weather and the gloom and the tall pines lining the yard like a naturally occurring prison fence, Charlie found himself looking around anxiously to ensure that they couldn’t be seen.

  “See? I told you it was raining, Bird Bones,” he called over to Isaac. “You’ll be shivering for days now.”

  Isaac grinned wildly at him and stretched his wings. The rain sluiced over them, turning them into shining translucent things, the blue of his veins matching the sullen matte of the clouded sky. Everything shone in the rain, and combined with the sweet sharp scent of wet grass crushed underfoot, Charlie suspected that Isaac might believe the world to be a far more beautiful place than it really was, based solely on these short outings. He rubbed fat droplets off the face of his watch with his thumb and checked the time.

  “Four minutes,” he said.

  Isaac turned and headed back towards the shed, jumping up with his arms outstretched to catch the lip of the roof and pull himself up. For such a fragile-looking creature, the strength of Isaac’s reinforced bones allowed him to climb like a monkey. Charlie had always left that little factoid out of his formal reports for fear that Father would almost certainly ask when, precisely, he’d had the opportunity to witness Isaac climbing.

  He tucked his freezing fingers into the relative warmth of his damp sleeves and watched Isaac from the ground. When he looked up, a line of water from his hair slithered down the back of his shirt, making him shudder.

  “Two minutes,” he said, “Then you need to come down.”

  Isaac had perched himself at the apex of the shed’s roof, as still and watchful as a gargoyle. “You can still see the city hall from here even when it’s raining,” he reported. “The roof looks so white when the sky’s dark like this. The bell tower looks like half an onion.”

  “Uh-huh,” Charlie said. “Just another minute, okay? He’ll be home soon.”

  “There are pigeons flying around! A whole flock of them. I can see them when they turn. The light catches them. I guess I didn’t think they would fly around in the rain…”

  “Isaac,” Charlie sighed. “Come on. Back inside. You need to get dried off.”

  Isaac finally turned to face him, but instead of climbing down, he just looked at Charlie for a long moment, his face unreadable and streaming with rain like everything else. Braced against the wind, his flared wings bowed and moved in perfect harmony with the pine branches behind him.

  “It’s not just me, Charlie-boy,” he said, his voice quiet enough that Charlie had to strain to hear him above the storm. “I’m not the only one he’s turning into a monster in this picture.”

  Charlie stared up at him, lost for words.

  Isaac held his gaze a moment longer, and then tucked his wings away obediently, carefully making his way down from the roof and past him back into the shelter of his shed once more.

  Some viewers may find the following images disturbing…

  Charlie hadn’t been disturbed by the clips, personally. The little shed just two provinces to the east where they had found the child and her mother being held was a cramped mess and obviously had none of the creature comforts of Isaac’s den, but the stained mattress and piles of refuse weren’t going to trouble his sleep or anything.

  Father, on the other hand, had flown into a kind of hostile panic. They had soundproofed the shed out of necessity to stifle the sounds during the bone-grafting process, but backyard sheds in general were going to be under scrutiny and the neighbors might have made note of the unusual amount of time that Charlie spent out there. They weren’t ready to be discovered yet, Father insisted, carting haphazard armfuls of Isaac’s things into the house that evening after the sun had set. Isaac wasn’t ready. Until he could fly, all of their meticulous improvements were nothing more than an extensive deformity.

  They brought Isaac in last with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, hanging lumpy and inelegant over his wings. It made him look like a shock victim. And after fifteen minutes during which Isaac hadn’t made so much as a peep, Charlie decided that it wasn’t just the blanket giving that impression.

  The idea of monsters living under the bed was even more absurd with Isaac sitting silent and stunned on Charlie’s flannel bedspread, looking as displaced as a flower chucked into highway traffic.

  “It’s not forever, you know,” Charlie said, trying to sound reassuring. �
�Just until this whole shed thing blows over.”

  Isaac shivered his wings restlessly and then plastered them tight against his back, observing the room. His gaze passed over Charlie’s computer, his microscope, the little plastic dinosaurs that Charlie suddenly felt approximately decades too old for, and then settled on the window.

  “What can you see that way? When it’s light out, I mean.”

  Charlie shrugged. “The front yard. The houses across the street. A little bit of downtown. Sky. Cars. I don’t know; it’s not a great view.”

  Isaac regarded it wistfully. “He’ll make you keep it closed with me in here, won’t he?”

  He sounded so resigned that Charlie found himself wanting to say no just to surprise him. He shrugged again and moved to close the research logbook that he’d left open on his desk. “Maybe he won’t mind if we keep it open a crack.”

  “Yeah right,” Isaac snorted, “I expect better logic from the pint-sized Einstein.” The sarcasm made him sound more like his usual self. It made Charlie smile for a moment.

  He turned around to face him, arms crossed defiantly. “All right, Bird Bones,” he said, “So maybe he won’t mind if we don’t tell him.”

  A smile brightened Isaac’s pale face and Charlie could see some of the tension ripple out of his wings.

  There, he thought with satisfaction. Who says I can’t do empathy?

  Father pressed a new key into his hand the next morning and explained that the doors to the house would now be locked on the inside as well as the outside. He would be required to lock up behind himself when he left the house for school or anything else. Standard rules, just like the shed. Keep it locked and keep an eye on Isaac.