I was afraid to discover that I did not.
She didn’t come back the next night. I guess I never really thought she would.
~ * ~
Here’s another place the story could end. If it finished now, it would be maybe a wistful ghost story, of sorts, about a girl whose death was really a transfiguration, and about my own real and metaphorical fear of dying. I could end the story here and it would most likely be good enough. But I owe it to Janey to tell her story right, so bear with me a little longer.
I never saw Janey again, but a lot of other things happened. I got older. I finished school and went to college. I fell in and out of jobs. Some of my stories started to get published. I got married. We had a son. He went to school.
What you’d call a life.
In a sense, Janey never really left me. Our short time together became the wellspring of my work, the source of all my storytelling. There are many writers better than I, with more art and literary merit. I don’t care. I write what I like. I write what I remember: tales full of adventure and colour and outlandish imaginings. The Blazer became the sentient alien vessel that helps the hero save Earth in Last Chance The Stars. Rogue space-trader Jane Clayforth adventured around the rim of the galaxy in more than a dozen stories.
In this way, I remind myself who I really am - and who I will never be.
My son Damon is eight years old. This afternoon, at half past three, he charged into the house and tossed his schoolbag under a chair. Then he clattered into the kitchen and dragged a bottle of milk out of the fridge.
“You’re a bit late,” I said. “Was the bus slow?”
Damon shook his head, splashing milk. “No,” he said. “It was Janey. The time circuits on her ship haven’t been calibrated lately. I should have been here ten minutes ago.”
You might suppose I thought it an odd, eerie coincidence. But like I said: I remember.
Just to be certain I said: “Did you say Jaidyn?”
He shot me a withering look. “No way. Jaidyn doesn’t know how to fly a spaceship.”
“So,” I said. “Janey, then. Where does she live?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said, biting his lip. “I promised that I wouldn’t. I can’t tell anybody except someone named -”
I took a deep breath. I wasn’t afraid, I promised myself. Not of Janey. Never of Janey. “Commander Lincoln Steele, at your service,” I said.
Damon looked at me doubtfully. “You’re not him. Janey said he was young, like me. And she said he’d say something special ...”
“Solid Steele,” I whispered, and touched my knuckle to my temple.
His face cleared. “That’s it,” he said. “You’re Link Steele? That’s so cool, Dad. But -” he frowned at me. “Why are you crying?”
“It’s nothing,” I told him, though I didn’t even try to wipe my face. “Something in my eye. And you don’t have to tell me where Janey lives. Out there, flying among the stars - that’s her home, right?”
He nodded, a mixture of amazement and pure relief on his face. “I thought maybe you might not believe me.”
I shook my head. “Never happen, kid. You know me. I can believe anything. Hey, she’s not still having problems with the Monoclates, is she?”
He collapsed back onto a wicker kitchen chair, the picture of exhaustion. “Problems! She’s got me firing the Quark Cannons, but unless I use them on full power the Monoclates are so fast that they can dodge. And we still don’t know how we’ll fight them on the far side of the Rift.”
“Wait here,” I said, and I gave him some chocolate biscuits to go with his milk. Then I went upstairs and washed my face. I noticed my hands were trembling, so I took a few long, deep, shuddering breaths until they steadied - but the trembling inside me wouldn’t stop.
Under my bed was a plastic box that my sister sent to me after Mother died. Inside, underneath a lot of handwritten stories and pebbles and home-made cards and faded photographs, I found the thing I wanted, just the way I remembered. I have no idea how Mother got it, or why she kept it, but I was grateful.
I brought it to my son, in the kitchen. “Here,” I said. “This should help.”
He sat up, and touched the thing I held. “Wicked,” he said. “What is it?”
I hefted it, and sighted down the barrel at the refrigerator. “It’s a Chrono-Kinetic Blaster,” I said. Then I sat down and showed him how it worked: how the digital watch mechanism mediated the chronon stream so that the burst of hyper-velocity Z-particles released by the meson capacitor could actually be guided through time. “It’s set to shoot exactly two seconds into the past,” I told him. “All you have to do is point it where the Monoclates were, and press the trigger button.”
Damon studied it carefully. “You built this, Dad? It looks pretty complicated.”
“I used to be good at this kind of thing,” I said, and put it into his hand. “Here. It’ll work when you need it.”
“Wow,” he said, turning the wooden-handled, plastic-barrelled thing over in his hands. “Thanks a million, Dad. You may just have saved the galaxy!”
I shook my head. “That’s your job, kid,” I said, and gave him a shove towards the door. “Go on. You’ve got a couple hours yet before dinner. Homework can wait tonight.”
Then he was gone, and in a rush of affection, I found that I really wasn’t afraid at all.
That’s the last of the story that I can tell you. There’s more, I’m sure. I’d like to tell it, but I don’t have the right. It was never mine anyway, and my small part in it is over. Now it belongs to my son, blasting away at the evil Monoclates somewhere beyond the Galactic Rift, with Captain Janey at the helm of the Blazer, battling to save the galaxy from destruction.
I hope he’ll tell it to me, one of these days.
* * * *
Dirk Flinthart is currently sitting at a keyboard in a dodgy cybercafé in Borneo, but normally he works from North-East Tasmania. He’s been writing short speculative fiction for something like ten years, and has been a recurring feature of Australian publications including Andromeda Spaceways, the agog! series, Twelfth Planet Press, and others. Last year he was hit on the head with a Ditmar for the story appearing in this book. He’s hoping to make the move to longer fiction any day now.
His most recent book is the novella Angel Rising from Twelfth Planet press, and he recently edited the anthology, Canterbury 2100: Pligrimmages in a New World, for agog! press.
* * * *
* * *
Truth Window
TERRY DOWLING
The Nobodoi came to Earth a little after midday on 4 June 2023, accompanied by their support races: the Hoproi, the Matta, the Darzie, so many others. They brought with them the star Wormwood, a fragment of antimatter some said, and used it to begin their great xenoforming of the Earth, making it what they wanted. Then, overnight, the Nobodoi vanished - stepped back, withdrew, who could say? — leaving behind their Bridge Races, the remnants of a blasted Humanity and the great Patchwork they had made.
~ * ~
It was light-commander Raine Halva Belicrue who first raised the issue, tracked it, set his Human aides to doing the relevant searches, then made the query across the world. That powerful Darzie, Fist of the Stars, Arm of Law, localized and hurting as only the most determined and committed of the Darzie Race ever would, sat in his Rule-of-Hand tower at Dars-Bayas and learned of this growing movement among the crushed, long-conquered Humans, then took it that one step further. Made it a question to the full spread of the Flower.
What do you know of the Lady Mondegreen?
He expected little that was new. No surprises. Few surprises. For it had been expected, modelled, some sort of emergent belief system. It’s what all peoples did, all sufficiently cognate conquered peoples, just one more inevitability. But Raine took it further. His localization was the finest, the most excruciating. Only the Darzie fighting elites, the Elsewheres and the Purple-and-Blacks, endured more, surrendering self, but they st
epped back into a quasi-existence of hot-glass and reverie and barely knew what they did.
For Raine Halva Belicrue there was no stepping back. This Fist of the Stars, Flame of the Encosium, harnessed his pain, used his pain, did the search and posed the question.
No Humans replied, of course. They lacked the Cohabitation resources, probably would for centuries, millennia, eons, unless the Nobodoi overlords, the Recalled Ones, were to Return, intervene and decree otherwise.
But twenty-eight Matt scholars did, astonishing Raine, requesting enhancement, offering reciprocation, data-trade, asking questions of their own.
And one - Holding-in-Quiet - made the incredible offer of leaving its typhy, its home, its work of the life, to meet “in the reach of hands” should that be required. This one had a quest of the heart, it seemed, was no doubt building this religion of the Lady into an identity artefact that would mark its days. Who would have thought?
Raine should not have been surprised, that was the thing. After all, look at what the Cohabitation brought: access to the great Overlord nets - the Acrimba, the Tutifa, the Sarannas, the Wail Guydo. Keywords and encrypts like “Mondegreen” and “Lady” and “Goddess” would have been flagged: ideologically, sociologically, archaeologically. Philologically and etymologically, too, in current Human sayings alone: “By the Lady!”, “Praise the Lady!”, “Lady be with you!”
He blamed his localization. But even as he sat back in his Talking Chair, even as his manner became carefully businesslike and his crest spines settled, another astonishment occurred, even more amazing than the first: a stat-flash blazon and a voice on that closed alliance channel.
“Hey, you, Darzie-pants, Raine! This is Fond Louie hisself, so be paying the tensest tension, okey-doke! Know what’s shakin’ the Human tree. Know the Mondegreen Lady’s first and best church! Know that, hey!”
Raine’s crest flared again. Fond Louie? It truly was. The Hoproi warmaster at the Bassantrae Sequester. The screen filled with the image of this famous, crafty Hoproi, an image shot from a field link somewhere in its war-garden. The creature loomed three metres above its four elephantine legs, great grey-brown barrel body painted with stars and bulls-eyes and geometric patterns in the powdery reds and oranges of its shooting chapter.
Raine couldn’t see those legs on the screen, of course, just three of its four cardinal trunks coiled in against the great barrel torso with the single dark eye peering out between each juncture, the body finally flattening at the top with the clustering of sensory fibres where the mouth was.
And resolutely speaking Antique, the Human occupation language all Hoproi so maddeningly insisted on using instead of Anvas or Kolack. Raine didn’t care. This was wonderful, better than he had hoped.
Such participation - and about such an issue. This trivial but curiously robust Racial yearning, this quaint and inevitable first flowering of hope among the Humans was being transferred globally, and so cohesively, that was the thing, by what could only be word of mouth: solitary wanderers, tinkerers and minstrels, Human bureaucrats, travelling siswitch troupes - circus performers: Raine knew the term well - despite the culls, the checks and prohibitions, the sampling imposts. It was the cohesiveness that fascinated Raine, troubled him. Two hundred and thirty-eight years since Wormwood arrived, fifty-six years since the Recall, and despite the Great Work, the xenoforming and all that it entailed, such an effective degree of interfacing. Was mutuality the word?
All that came in seconds, moments, instants for Raine, primed as he was.
“Fond Louie, what do you know of this? How is your chapter involved?” Raine spoke the Antique terms carefully. The Hoproi were notorious for misunderstanding words, twisting language and meaning to suit themselves.
“Know this, you betchy! Know Humans using this to make a way. Crooning kumbayas aplenty.”
Raine’s fingers danced on the keypad of his chair, cuing additional flash translations, sending surge commands through a dozen monitoring systems. “There can be no prospect of insurgency in this.”
“None,” Fond Louie boomed, trunks flexing merrily. “We ruling the roost!”
“The what?”
“No mattress! No threat or intent. Namby-pambies behave, bejeez! But I got the goods. That church close by this Sequester, capisce?”
“We can visit?” Straight to it. Raine had to control this exchange, snatch sense from the dross.
“Certainment, mon capital! Ours for the done-deal. Name the day!”
“Fond Louie, a house-lord will accompany. You have no reservations?”
“Plenty of seats. More the merriest. When-so, great Raine?”
“Let me confer with this lord. But the sooner the better, once I’ve assessed the data coming in.”
“Done deal. But limited, capisce? Just you. Just me. Just this one crimpy. No sharps.”
“But you will have choi protection.”
“My Sequester, Best Raine. My turf. Natch.”
“Then I shall bring a bodyguard.”
“Fraidy cat! No scratch Darzie. No probable claws.”
“I will call you shortly.”
“Done deal.” And the screen went blank.
~ * ~
The church, such as it was, sat ten metres back from the dirt road in what did indeed look like a prairie stretching off for miles: a small-enough whitewashed stone building made from hand-fetched discardo, twenty metres on its long sides, ten on the shorter, a little under three metres high, with a small dome at the flat roof’s midpoint. A simple pillar and lintel archway was the only entrance.
A Human place, old in design to those who knew such lore - Mediterranean Vernacular - but new, newly made.
Such a rare thing.
And equally rare on this plundered, extravagantly xenoformed Earth two hundred and thirty-eight years after the great Nobodoi rulers brought down their piece of controlled antimatter - controlled, the word said it all! - brought in three Bridge Races and dozens of Lesser Races to rule it for them, for a Matta, a Hoproi and a Darzie to meet face to face at a Human place.
Such meetings did happen between the Races, of course they did, but rarely away from sanctioned holds, optimals and vast dedicated protections, and rarely with just one member of each species present.
The scale of it was dazzling, thrilling. Bridge Races they were, the ruling elect, each judged sufficiently compatible by the Departed Ones that they could be left to do this job this time, interface with Humanity and with each other, marshal the less Human-coterminous Races in the great spread of the Donalty Flower. But an imperfectly localized Darzie could so easily lose phase and turn rogue. A Hoproi warmaster might suddenly discern a fine logic or status-enhancing joke in a trophy kill, despite - because of - the inevitable reprisals; a Matta’s life journey, the callings of the Narrow Way, might demand some ultimate and crucial self-immolation. The mindsets, tropisms and imperatives were profoundly different; understanding so easily deflected down so many by-ways. Only elaborate compatibility totes, localizations and an abiding fear of the Nobodoi made it possible.
So they agreed to come, this unlikely, possibly unprecedented three, to this quiet, green-enough field outside the force-wall of the Bassantrae Sequester. Raine arrived first, phasing in from his swordship Nobion, shimmering in its containment field at thirty-thousand feet. With him came six Elsewheres in full hot-glass armour, who stood quietly by the entrance tracking the scene at a dozen vested data-ranges unavailable to most Races in the Patchwork. They waited while the light-commander stepped through that doorway and entered the shadowy interior.
It was very much as Raine had expected: a dim, all-but-empty space with no windows save for the unglazed square opening in the building’s rear wall. Four slender discardo columns supported the roof, but there were no other adornments, no pews laid out for worshippers, just a few makeshift Human-style benches along the wall, a spigot from a rain tank feeding a small dish to one side, a door into a curtained alcove on the other that stat-flash specs showed
to contain a bench above a sump for a toilet.
Fiercely localized, sharp with it, Raine immediately understood why the structure was here, in this location, at this lonely, singular spot, saw too the desperate and probably guileless cunning of it.
Outside to the east was the Bassantrae Sequester, the Hoproi domain with its hazing of mighty force walls sweeping upwards, held by the massive towers of the luda supports, sparking now here, now there, off into the distance, and with the heavy-gravity, phase-up markers themselves set within the perimeter, increment by increment until all was locked in a misty sepia sheen. Earth’s lesser gravity made the Cohabitation a joy for the Hoproi and they gleefully set up their shooting chapters in the great Trade Cities by preference but, like any occupation forces, they too needed something of home.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 10