Isaac grinned. ‘Really?’
Leonard grinned back. ‘Yup. Mama told Cochrane he can change our names, so Cochrane told mama we were in, and mama told me, and now I’m telling you.’
‘Zac and Lenny Feelgood,’ Isaac said, trying the billing out loud.
‘Lenny and Zac,’ Leonard said. ‘Things should be done alphabetically.’
~ * ~
When the nurse came to test Isaac’s blood pressure, Erin looked out the window, but the sigh of the trees depressed her. They were the fast growing species that had been planted almost everywhere else in the world over the last century, like Monterey Pine, Karri and Yellow Box, in their way all reminders of what had come before and of everything that had been lost. So she turned away from the view and pretended to study the painting on the wall above Isaac’s bed while the nurse pumped and pumped the wrap around Isaac’s poor thin arm.
The painting was one of Munch’s Scream Series Two with a woman’s face distorted into a silent, consuming shriek with a Martian walker striding over the bridge behind her. The background comprised swirls of red weed, their rootlets extending off the edge of the painting’s borders. She remembered red weed from her childhood; some had been preserved in her local Museum of Conciliation. Well, pink weed then because of the formaldehyde, and getting paler year by year. It was nothing, really, a specimen as pointless as the jars filled with fetuses and two-headed lambs. But seeing Munch’s painting, Erin could almost feel what it must have been like living in those times.
Isaac was swearing at the nurse, but he ignored the language and when he was finished helped Isaac back into his wheelchair, thanked him politely for cooperating and walked out, nodding sympathetically to Erin before closing the door behind him.
‘It’s not my fucking heart they should worry about,’ Isaac spat, and jabbed at his skull. ‘It’s the fucking blancmange in here. I can feel it oozing out of my ears. I tell you, Erin Kay, I won’t have anything left soon. I will be all skin and bones and spit and in the middle my heart beating like a clock but no brain anywhere. They’ll scoop me up and put me in a bin, and that’ll be the end of Isaac Finkel, all the way from Danzig, and Zac Feelgood and Bubble and Squeak and all the stories. No one will remember the Martians any more. The Committee of Conciliation wants us to forget any of it ever happened because that way none of them can be hanged for what they did when they were the Committee of Collaboration. History gets stuck in their gullet like ... like ...’
He coughed and slumped in the wheelchair. He waved his right hand in the air, signalling Erin to invent a metaphor for him.
‘Like a fishbone,’ she said weakly.
‘Jesus, no. Like shit made from cement.’
‘So tell me, Isaac, so I can tell everyone else.’
‘Tell you what? I’ve talked myself into a stupor. I feel like I’ve got nothing but slag in my lungs.’
‘We’re not finished yet. What happened on that night? The opening night of HMS Minotaur?’
Isaac closed his eyes. ‘So long ago. You know, it isn’t the grease paint and the lights I remember?’
‘No?’
‘Never was. Never is for anyone in music hall. That’s just for the songs and the memoirs, you know, “I remember the smell of the grease paint, the heat of the stage lights”. It’s all bullshit. When you’re working on the stage all the time it’s just background.’
‘Then what do you remember about it?’
‘I remember the women, Erin Kay.’ His eyes opened and his mouth curled into a smile. ‘I remember being around twenty women or more, all taller than me and done up and sweating in their costumes, and the glass beads, and the powder on their breasts like flour on rising bread, skin so pale it was almost blue, and the pins and broaches and parasols and the way they let me look at them because they thought I was a kid and it was kinda cute, but Jesus I wanted them. I wanted Mary Ester and Lorna Dixon and Jane Fremont, all at once, and Annie Beaumont and Victoria Denny. All of us crammed into the wings waiting our turn to tumble out and entertain all the poor sods waiting their turn to be turned into fertiliser. You know, all that dying around us made us horny as the devil. I was fourteen when I first did it; that was with Annie, during the third act. My first time. It was over so quick we didn’t have time to clean up and then we were on and afterwards mama looked at me like she knew.’
Erin swallowed. She had not expected these confessions and did not want to hear any more; still, she could not help wondering what Annie had thought of it. Had she seduced him? Or was sex like alcohol for people who had no other way to relax, or maybe even to relate to each other? Maybe Isaac was right, that all that dying made everyone horny as the devil. How many conversations can you have when you know the world is dying around you? In the end, perhaps that was the only thing you could talk about, so maybe sex was a way to avoid it and a way to remind yourself you were still human when so much around you was not.
‘Not that mama minded, I think,’ Isaac went on. ‘With everything else going on. Besides, I reckon Cochrane was right. He and mama now and then. You know.’
‘The opening night,’ Erin prompted. ‘Tell me about the opening night.’
~ * ~
Running up from the dressing room, Isaac and Leonard caught their breath in the wings. The stage manager glared at them disapprovingly, but they didn’t care. There was no way they were going to miss the spectacular opening number, and when Cochrane walked onto the stage the entire audience, the biggest ever seen in the Empire, fell silent as if all were struck dumb by the hand of God. Cochrane knew exactly how long to speak, how far he could build up their expectations before losing them, and when he had finished he lifted his hand in a flourish and the curtains behind him rose as he left the stage.
And then the orchestra in the pit started up. Lime lights swung across the stage as if searching for the cast, and then the prow of HMS Minotaur was pushed into view and the audience erupted in cheers.
For Isaac, though, it was the costumes that made his eyes glitter. Cochrane had made sure the cast were decked out in the best costumes the Empire had, many saved from theatres and music halls long gone and never used since. The women wore dresses made from silk and chiffon with satin sashes, and on their fingers wore rings with fake pearls the size of peas, and in their hats wore peacock feathers and pins made from gold and silver. The men wore uniforms so covered in braid and toggles and brass buttons they would have made any real ship top heavy, and the dress swords that swung by their sides were broad and heavy enough to have come from giant Mamelukes. Even Isaac and Leonard, the only children in the cast, carried long knives suspended from their belts with bejeweled hilts and inlaid scabbards.
The opening number was so spectacular, so loud and audacious and fast moving, Isaac was overwhelmed by the glory of it; he did not think the court of the Sun King could have been half as brilliant. And then he and Leonard heard their cue and from that point on they were a part of it, the whole glittering show, their nerves succumbing to the excitement the whole cast felt, singing with such grace they could see people in the audience leaning forward in their seats to be closer to the sound of it.
At the end Isaac and Leonard had their duo, the grand finale where the rest of the cast gradually joined in until the piece reached its crescendo, and as the singers filled themselves with air and seemed to stretch on their toes to give the greatest voice they could, the audience stood, pulled to their feet by the music and words stirring inside them, something they had not felt since the invasion.
And then the last verse, sung like an anthem, rang out.
I humble poor and foreign born,
The meanest in the new division —
Despite the red-tentacled dawn —
The mark of Harvester submission —
Have dared to raise my wormy eyes
Above the dust to which they’d nail me
In mankind’s glorious pride to rise
I am an Englishman — behold me!
When it was done, the last note lifting into the dark sky above, there was a moment of condensed silence as if the whole world had fallen quiet. Then the applause started, rippling towards the stage like waves that grew larger and larger as the cast took their bows, the loudest and most sustained being for Isaac and Leonard. Isaac glanced at the wings and saw his mama there, tears pooling under her eyes, and at that moment, for the first and only time in his life, he felt invincible. Until he looked up and saw the dreadnought. It was almost completely hidden from view, revealed only by the thinnest sliver of silver that outlined its cabin and one of its three legs. It stood before the Empire, towering over the amphitheatre, not moving at all. One by one the others in the cast followed Isaac’s gaze, themselves becoming as still as the Machine, and soon everyone in the amphitheatre was looking up at it.
~ * ~
Isaac said nothing for a long time. Erin, who had finally reached the climax of the story of how Isaac and Leonard Finkel had saved the world, was torn between wanting to know how it ended and wanting to be suspended forever there at the moment before knowing, filled with a wonderful anticipation and tension.
In the end she surrendered. ‘Dot told me Leonard sneezed,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘Right on a Martian.’
Isaac’s gaze settled on her as if he did not know who she was.
‘He was allergic to them,’ Erin went on. ‘That’s what Dot says.’
‘No,’ Isaac said slowly, the word squeezed out from tired lungs. ‘It was nothing like that. That’s just myth; sometimes we’d go along with it, but mostly we said nothing.’
‘Then tell me, Isaac. What really happened?’
‘The dreadnought walked away, clumping through the city back to the walls and its own red kingdom. Everyone in the Empire waited and waited for something to happen, not making a sound, half expecting to die, to be picked up and squeezed like a ripe peach. But nothing happened.’
Isaac coughed loudly, making Erin jump. It was a deep wet sound, almost all phlegm and no air.
‘And then the Machines started dropping, one by one. All over the land, all over the world, the Martians died. I saw one crawling out of its machine. A huge grey thing that pulled itself along with its tentacles. It reminded me of a dying cow I’d seen during the invasion, its rear legs burned off and the stumps cauterised, pulling itself through the field with its front legs, a huge sack of dying meat. That’s what the Martians had become — huge sacks of dying meat.’
‘They caught a cold,’ Erin said. ‘That’s what all the autopsies showed. Influenza or something.’
‘Maybe,’ Isaac whistled. ‘But I think we defeated them because we survived, and kept on surviving no matter what happened. It wasn’t the singing and the acting and the jokes, or Cochrane and the Empire, although all of that helped. It’s simply that we hung on and hung on, and in the end it was the Martians who let go first.’
~ * ~
Isaac and Leonard were looking out the window of their tiny room.
‘I can still see Mars,’ Leonard said.
‘You thought it would go away, did you?’ Isaac jibed.
‘Kind of, I guess. Will they come back?’
Isaac shrugged.
‘If they do,’ Leonard piped up, ‘we’ll just build another Empire.’
‘We’ll sing them away.’
‘We’ll joke them away.’
‘Mama will scare them away.’
They almost laughed at that, but it sounded forced even to their ears. They turned away from the window.
‘What do we do now?’ Leonard asked, almost forlornly.
‘Get our names up in lights,’ Isaac said. ‘We’ll start here, in London. Then Paris, maybe, and Manchester, when they build it again. Edinburgh, too. Maybe even New York one day. I can see it now, little brother. Zac and Lenny Feelgood conquer the world.’
* * * *
Simon Brown has been writing for nearly forty years. He currently lives in Thailand with his wife and two children.”
<
* * * *
Ascension
MARTIN LIVINGS
From four hundred kilometres up, the Earth is still beautiful. Wisps of cloud drift in front of the small viewing window, obscuring the geology below. As I float serenely in the station’s microgravity, I can see the faint lines of major motorways beneath us, the rectangular patterns of cities. From four hundred kilometres up, everything looks normal. I can almost forget what’s happened.
Ignoring the bleeping fire alarm in the Zvezda control module is more difficult. It cuts through my concentration over and over again, sending a never-ending stream of piercing noises that makes my head pound. I try to tune it out, to look at the world below us, to pretend everything is normal. *
“Come on, Pasha,” my fellow Russian, Valentin, implores through the intercom from the adjoining module. “It shouldn’t be like this. We’re brothers.”
I ignore him. We’re not brothers; we’re co-workers in the most isolated sweatshop on - or, in our case, above - the planet. The International Space Station is our home and work place, a string of tin cans flanked by solar panels that seems enormous until you have to spend twenty four hours a day inside it, week after week. It housed four of us for nearly six months.
Now there are only two. Valentin and myself.
“You know I’m right,” he continues. But he’s not right. He’s utterly insane. Then again, who can blame him? And can I claim otherwise? “The Americans knew it. They accepted it.”
“Accepted it?” I repeat, horrified. “How can you say that?”
“They knew the truth,” Valentin replies. It’s hard to understand him through the warning siren. “They made their choices. As have I.” I wish I knew more about how this station works, how I could stop the alarm, or what would follow it. But I’m a biologist, along for the ride, my presence tolerated on some days, ridiculed on others. Valentin is the engineer. He should be in here, not I.
If he was, though, then we’d both be doomed.
“It’s been six weeks,” he continues. “Six weeks since the last transmission.”
“A month and a half,” I say without thinking. “That’s not that long.” I look out the window again. Just four hundred kilometres. I find that thought comforting. I know Valentin doesn’t, though. He’s a trained cosmonaut, went through years of training in the Uri Gagarin centre outside of Moscow. He’s always complained bitterly that he’s never been any further from the Earth than the training centre was from Nizhny Novgorod. It’s such a short distance, an easy day’s drive. Valentin had wanted to be a cosmonaut his entire life, to explore the universe, penetrate the dark veil of space. He has always hated the fact that he is still so close to home, rails against it constantly.
I can’t understand that, especially now. Four hundred kilometres is too near for him, but too far for me. Much too far.
As I watch, the world falls into shadow, as it does fifteen times a day up here. We orbit at around twenty five thousand kilometres an hour, or so Valentin has told me many times. My mind can’t even begin to fathom how fast we’re moving. It makes my head spin. I watch the planet go dark, and watch it closely, praying. A few months ago, the darkness would have been broken by a million pinpricks of light, cities and towns piercing the blue-black with their street lights and buildings. The Earth at night was once a mirror of the stars and galaxies above, a reflection in a deep, dark pool, shimmering with a breathtaking beauty.
Now there is nothing. Just cold, silent darkness.
“Ninety nine percent infection rate,” Valentin says through the intercom, between bleeps of the siren. “That’s what the woman in mission control said. And it was still rising.”
“I know,” I whisper, looking into the darkness, searching for any signs of life below.
“Ninety nine percent,” he repeats. “With a survival rate of zero.”
My wife and son are down there. I last spoke to Mischa two months ago, when the first reports of the
outbreak were beginning. She assured me that she and Nikolai were fine; they were staying in our house outside Vladivostok, the house my family had lived in for three generations. The house where I was born. The house where I’d planned to die. Not here, four hundred kilometres above the surface of the planet.
They are down there. They have to be.
“Please, Pasha,” Valentin says again. “Three minutes.”
I close my eyes. “You won’t do it,” I say. “You can’t.”
“You’re forcing me to,” he replies, his voice cracking. It’s the first sign of true emotion I’ve heard from him in days, weeks even. Since the second American killed himself. Dave Coulter had been a fine astronaut, an upstanding citizen, a patriotic family man. He was our electrical engineer and comms expert.
We found him in his bunk, his wrists sliced open. He’d tied plastic bags around his hands to stop the blood interfering with the life support systems. I think that might have been when Valentin lost his mind.
The Year's Best Australian SF & Fantasy - vol 05 Page 41