They should have killed him before letting him get that far. They stopped short because he was theirs.
Parts of three levels ripped open instantly, spilling the ship’s guts to the void. Captain Scott managed to cut all the ship’s power, deactivating the drive before the ship was destroyed completely. The ship’s medics sedated Mitchell. The accident had killed twenty people, a third of the crew. Through sheer, stubborn heroism, Scott and the remaining crew patched up the ship and managed to fly to Law, the closest outpost. There, Lieutenant Mitchell Greenau could be deposited with people who might be able to explain what had gone wrong with his mind.
Head bowed, Mitchell knelt on the floor below the window as Doctor Keesey explained.
“The dysfunction usually develops gradually. The patient experiences memory loss, synesthesia, schizophrenia, dystonia, ataxia—any number of neurological anomalies. The captain of the ship will take a navigator off duty at the first signs. A sudden, catastrophic episode like yours is very rare.”
Who had died? He wanted to ask, but he doubted Keesey would know. Twenty names were too many to remember. But Mitchell would have to learn someday who among his friends and colleagues he had killed.
“You saw the right numbers, like you always saw,” Keesey said. “But your mind showed you something else.”
“Captain Scott didn’t want me to know what happened.”
“Because she knew it wasn’t your fault. It’s a terrible memory. I’m sorry.”
A memory that, for all he had struggled to reclaim it, now felt pristine, nestled in the center of his mind.
Mitchell felt calm now. Dalton stood nearby, and Keesey knelt beside him; both were watchful, like they expected him to break, or burst, or something, with the knowledge he had found.
Keesey finally said, “Mitchell, how do you feel?”
He despised that question.
He chuckled a little. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry—”
“Mitchell—”
He could look up, and even at this awkward angle he could see lights on the opposite curve of the station, the blackness of the shadows. The beauty was an ache in his gut. That he could still feel that beauty startled him. “Don’t isolate us from what makes us happy. We kill ourselves trying to get back to it.”
“Are you ready to come back to the ward?”
He climbed to his feet, using the wall as a prop. He looked out the window again to the stark vastness of even this little corner of space. “Just another minute, Doctor.”
They waited for him.
When Mitchell finally returned to the common room, Dora wasn’t there. She’d made an escape attempt and had been sedated.
Jaspar was at his usual table, working his word puzzles on his handheld. Mitchell found what had happened to him: he’d tried to close his head in a bulkhead door. No one knew why. The trauma team got to him quickly, and he’d survived, somehow. People were resilient.
Sonia was also present, humming, her eyes closed. Mitchell sat across from her.
He placed a player with earpieces in front of her. She stopped humming. She looked at him, her gaze narrowed and confused.
“It’s yours.”
Her hands trembling, she reached for the headphones. They skittered away from her fingertips the first time, but she caught them, slapping her hand to the table. Then she hooked on the earpieces.
Mitchell had gotten Keesey to give him records of Sonia’s musical vocabulary, all the pieces of music she’d been known to speak of. He convinced the doctors to let her have the player.
She touched the play key. Her face tightened, an expression of anxious disbelief. Then tears slipped down her cheeks. Mitchell heard the music, a faint buzzing through the earpieces, and his fists clenched nervously. He thought she would smile. He wanted her to smile.
Then she did smile, though she still didn’t relax, and Mitchell realized that she was concentrating on the music with every muscle she had. She met his gaze, and he thought she looked happy.
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Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2016.
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About the Artist and Authors
Forever Magazine | 462 words
Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)
Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.
Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.
His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart; The Guns of the South; How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks ; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death. Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.
Paul M. Berger (paulmberger.com)
Paul M. Berger has been a Japanese bureaucrat, an M.I.T. program manager, an Internet entrepreneur, a butterfly wrangler, a museum administrator and (God help him) a Wall Street recruiter, all of which, in the aggregate, may have prepared him for nothing except the creation of speculative fiction. His work has appeared in publications including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2011, Strange Horizons, Interzone, Podcastle, and Escape Pod . The story of his battle against giant Japanese spiders was the first true-life memoir published in Weird Tales . He is a graduate of the 2008 Clarion workshop, and a founding member of the stunningly talented New York-based writers’ group Altered Fluid.
Carrie Vaughn (carrievaughn.com)
Carrie Vaughn is The New York Times Bestselling author of more than twenty novels and over eighty short stories. She’s best known for the Kitty Norville urban fantasy series about a werewolf who hosts a talk radio advice show for supernatural beings—the series includes fourteen novels and a collection of short stories—and the superhero novels in the Golden Age saga. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared-world novels edited by George R.R. Martin, and also writes the Harry and Marlowe steampunk short stories about an alternate nineteenth century that makes use of alien technology. She has a masters degree in English lit, graduated from the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop in 1998, and returned to the workshop as Writer in Residence in 2009. She has been nominated for the Hugo Award, various RT Reviewer Choice Awards—winning for Best First Mystery for Kitty and The Midnight Hour —and won the 2011 WSFA Small Press award for best short story for “Amaryllis.”
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About Forever
Forever Magazine | 89 words
Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.
Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His next anthology, Galactic Empires, will be published this month and the second volume in his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series will be published by Night Shade Books later this year. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two childre
n.
Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.
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Forever Magazine - January 2017 Page 14