Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  The vehicle jumps over the uneven ground. Wheels churn in slippery mud. I hang onto the handhold, alternately squashed into the side by the weight of bodies on my bench, or holding on so I don’t squash the people next to me.

  First stop: the Hern camp.

  The door opens, letting in a cloud of humidity. I hang onto my mask, feeling claustrophobic again. A camp guard yells over the pelting rain.

  “No damage to the perimeter . . . all asleep . . .”

  The door shuts again. Everyone is talking and with the noise of the engine and the rain, I’m missing half the conversation, but I gather that the Hern who have mounted an attack on the Pari did not come from the detention area.

  We arrive at the Pari camp. The cabin door opens and everyone is pushing to get out. Onto the muddy ground, where my crutches promptly sink into the soft soil. Someone helps me into the hall of the central building, where we’re out of the rain. A small group of Pari waits there in a pool of light from a neon storm lamp strung onto the lift ropes. I’m wondering where the rest of the Pari are and why they haven’t gathered here to be together and safer in the face of an attack. Maybe the rest of the brothers will bring them here.

  Brother Tycho is speaking to another missionary.

  “Who were these Hern? Where did they come from?”

  The missionary doesn’t know. Says he’s not familiar enough with the Hern to be able to tell individuals apart.

  The Pari just stand there, staring. Surely, they know these Hern well enough to recognize them?

  “Anyone here who can speak a few words of their language?” I ask.

  A brother comes forward.

  “We can protect you from the Hern,” I say, and the brother translates. “You have to help us. I want you to point out the individuals who attacked so they can be punished. If we can catch these killers, then we can start negotiating peace.”

  “Peace,” one of them repeats and drops to the ground, knees in the mud.

  “Peace,” says another, and within a few seconds, all the Pari are on their knees, murmuring peace until the sound mingles with the teeming rain.

  I feel like tearing my hair out. At least Brother Copernicus could make some sort of sense out of them. “You want peace? Then tell me, who came here? Where did they come from?”

  They stop their murmuring, eyeing me from under deep frowns. Angry, although I don’t know why.

  Someone is shouting elsewhere in the camp. A flash. A zap of fire.

  We peer into the rain. To my horror, it falls less heavily than before.

  Dark shapes run through the camp, too tall to be Pari. All around me, brothers unlock their weapons with definitive clicks.

  “Any news from the others?” I ask a brother who’s wearing a headset.

  Whatever answer he would have given drowns in shouts from the Pari camp. The brother runs, pulling his crossbow from over his shoulder. A few steps into the rain, he stops and takes aim. Shoots. Runs forward. Shoots again.

  Too late: the Hern swarm all over the gathering house, where the Pari are still sitting on their knees.

  I scream, “Get up! Fight!” I find a bundle of sticks and toss them into the group, but the Pari just sit there, passive, still murmuring peace.

  Brothers discharge guns at random, but the Hern take no notice. They take hits, but walk on, oblivious to their wounds. Their comrades are killed, but they don’t seem to care.

  I’m holding the gun in outstretched arms, but I know I won’t use it. The shot might hit a Pari or a brother.

  The Hern pick up the Pari as if they’re dolls, slicing open their bellies with long nails. They scoop out handfuls of blood and drink it. The black fluid runs down their faces, necks and pale-skinned bellies.

  In the carnage, I spot a Hern wearing a white armband. The murdering bastard! In my rage, I don’t think, but struggle forward, pointing the gun at the creature.

  “Stop it, now!” I scream.

  The Hern does. Turns her head. Her eyes meet mine.

  As a black mixture of blood and entrails oozes from her fingers, I recognize her face. No, she hasn’t killed the Pari girl I gave that arm band. She is the Pari girl I gave the armband. I lower the gun, trembling.

  She wipes blood on her thighs and takes a few steps towards me. The dark patches on her skin have grown and have turned green. She reaches out and touches my robe with a bloodstained hand. I need all my willpower not to discharge the gun.

  “Munni.” She takes my hand and places it on her belly. I slide my fingers up and down the blood-covered skin. It feels tight, even through my gloves, like her entire belly cavity is taken up by a huge football, a white membranous sac brimming with eggs.

  This is absurd. The Hern think I’m pregnant rather than obese.

  And I realize: the Pari and Hern are not separate species, but stages in the life cycle of one species. That’s why there are no young, why the Pari don’t seem to reproduce: they are immature. That’s why the Hern don’t eat regular food: their bodies only need to feed the eggs. Of course they’re angry with us—for disrupting the process. And trying to stop it is utterly futile.

  “Stop shooting!” I shout at the brother nearest to me, but his eyes are glazed over. I push him hard causing him to fall. The gun slips from his hands. I step on it before he can pick it up. “Stop shooting. There’s no point.”

  He sits there, panting. The next moment he’s on his feet again and he takes off into the darkness.

  The Hern girl that used to be Pari is dragging bodies into a pile, many of them bloodied and mangled beyond recognition. She’s alternately cramming grisly entrails into her mouth or clutching her belly, gagging and coughing.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, foolishly.

  She looks up, frothy vomit dribbling down her chin, seems surprised I’m still here and motions with her hand over the top of the trees, where the sky has turned light blue.

  It’s almost daytime. It has stopped raining, and humidity is dropping.

  Another Hern throws a burning log into the pile of bodies. Fire spreads like an ink stain.

  Fire.

  My mind rings with warnings. Warnings in the cabin of the craft that brought me here. Warnings plastered on every wall in every corridor of the mission building.

  In case of fire, make your way to the bunker immediately. Do not try to save others. Do not try to retrieve material goods. Do not fire weapons. Do not hesitate.

  I run. I didn’t think I could, but I do. Past the half-built houses, past the fields, my crutches sinking deep into the mud. I see no Pari, only Hern. Some are still gorging themselves, others are running around with burning torches, others still look like zombies, clutching bellies that are visibly swollen, their eyes wide and faces gaunt with what I presume is pain.

  “Thank the Lord, Envoy, there you are!”

  A single brother waits at the entrance of the camp. “Quick, let’s get out of here.” He grabs my arm and drags me onto the white field with its oozing thick mud.

  I gasp, “The truck.”

  “Can’t use it . . . would blow up . . . in the daytime. Run . . . as fast as you can.”

  I push down my crutches, haul myself forward, again and again. I think both my knees and my hips will need surgery after this, but I run. For Brother Copernicus.

  Behind us, the burning camp lights up the morning sky. The heat radiates through the back of my robe.

  At the mission’s entrance, the alarms are ringing. The air whooshes past with the rush of oxygen making its way to the fire. Fifty percent oxygen in the air. It’s like a bomb. White flames leap from the camp to the trees, higher than I’ve ever seen. There is an explosion, a flash; the sound follows a second later. I’m thinking how there is no way the Hern can escape the inferno to birth their young safely. Flames billow out f
rom the forest, spreading over the canopy, engulfing it.

  “In the bunkers, now!” Brother Tycho shouts over the roar.

  In the throng of bodies, I’m unsure who helps me. Even inside the building, the air shimmers with that sort of tension that makes me sure it’s about to explode. A brother stands at the entrance to the bunker, making sure everybody has their rebreather masks and supply packs, because when the fire has passed, there will likely be nothing left of the building.

  Down the stairs, one, two, three stories, into claustrophobic darkness. We all huddle on the floor while explosions shake the ground.

  I don’t know how long I sit there, concentrating on my breathing in that dark and cramped space that smells of sweaty bodies even through the mask. It’s pitch dark, and I count the time by how often I have to crawl over legs to visit the toilet. The hole in the ground is designed only for men, and after three days, or what I think has been three days, I can smell it through the mask.

  Eventually someone decides the fire is over and climbs up the stairs to open the air lock. I’m busy thumbing messages on my PAD for the next beamsweep, which is due very soon. I’m not going to wait until I’ve surveyed the disaster outside. With that chemical cocktail, there’s not going to be anything left for us to survive. We’ll need to be lifted off this hellhole. Soon.

  When I finally climb outside the bunker, it turns out I’m even more right than I thought. Not only has the building burned to cinders, there is nothing left of the forest. The ground is covered in white ash as far as I can see. There is no sign of the Pari or the Hern, or indeed of any life.

  It’s raining.

  A brother is walking around with an air quality meter. He turns around, and laughs. Takes off his mask. Everyone yells at him, but he just laughs.

  “It’s safe,” he shouts and balls his fists at the sky. “The air is safe!”

  The ash in the older burnt tracks is no longer white, but gray with soot. I kick the muddy clods, angry with the waste of life. I was sure the Hern were about to go through a mass birthing event. Now, thanks to us, they’re all dead. My boot dislodges a rock. Underneath, I can see green.

  With difficulty, I sink to my knees and push the ash away with my gloves.

  I find a seedling.

  Another piece of the puzzle falls into place. The ash, and specifically the titanium oxide, protects the soil from the excessive UV radiation. That is necessary, because the soil is mostly inorganic. With high-oxygen atmosphere, fallen leaves take next to no time to decay, so there is no leaf litter to shelter seeds.

  The Hern create paths where the catastrophic fires that are inevitable won’t reach. Fire breaks, as it were. Corridors where regeneration will be a few months ahead of everywhere else, so that when the fires come, their progeny will have food.

  But there is no progeny. The entire planet is dead.

  The rescue team takes time to turn up. In the days before they come, we witness a transformation of the track of formerly ash-covered land next to the ruins of the mission.

  On the first day, whole slabs of ground lift up with the force of growing seedlings. We camp in tents and we’ve had to put our masks back on. The air is heavy with cyanide, which I’ve come to associate with growing plants on this planet. Soon, plants jostle each other for sunlight, spreading out their little canopies further and further. If we could see the planet from space now, it would look like a negative image of what I saw on arrival: a white planet intersected with bands of green.

  On the second day, I notice movement in the greenery. There are already some butterfly-like creatures out, fluttering in the shimmering air.

  On the third day, the smaller plants burst into flower. I suspect they will set seed and will not grow again until the next fire.

  On the fourth day, I am busy recording the astonishing growth when my scanner picks up a weak signal. The beamsweep isn’t due for another two days, and the signal isn’t strong enough anyway. It repeats a single ID tag, a twelve-digit code. That’s like . . . a travel tag.

  My heart thudding, I dig in the layer of ash and mud and locate my armband, no longer white, but half-melted and gray. I’m standing on the remains of the Hern girl.

  Again, I dig in the cover of ash. I smear it all over my sleeves, but I don’t mind. With all the bending and kneeling, some of my muscle strength has returned, and in the past few days, I’ve felt better than I have for years.

  My gloves strike something soft.

  Carefully, I scrape ash away from a white mushroomy thing, egg-shaped and longer than my forearm. Its soft leathery skin quivers when I touch it. The surface is warm. I dig it free from the soil and have just lifted it onto my lap when the skin ruptures, peeling back as if it’s been shot from the inside. Slime oozes onto my robes. Something moves inside the leathery sac. I push the membranous flaps aside and out crawls a humanoid creature, unfolding long legs and stretching out of its confines. It rolls off my robe and crawls to its feet. It only reaches to my knee and is skinny and covered in slime, but I recognize the brown skin and lithe form of the Pari. All around me similar “mushrooms” are popping.

  The life cycle is complete.

  The recently-burned soil is barren still, but I have no doubt that, given a few months of regeneration, it will burst with life. Then the trees will grow and the Pari will get bigger. They will start building, accumulating fuel for the fires. And then, after years of growth, when the forest is mature, the Pari will start to change, entering their last phases of metamorphosis, losing the ability to communicate and focusing only on the instinct to cannibalize for the need to reproduce. How long this will take is anybody’s guess. We might hang around to study the process.

  Yes, I think I might recommend that to the board. I might even do a stint myself, but: no more missionaries, only observers. Bianca doesn’t need us and has never done so.

  Sailing the Sky Sea

  written by

  Geir Lanesskog

  illustrated by

  JOEY JORDAN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Geir Lanesskog was born in Norway, but moved to the US when he was five. He has been reading science fiction since his mother started taking him on weekly trips to the public library in the 1970s. He’s read well over a thousand novels, anthologies and other science fiction works and hopes his recent acquisition of a Kindle will prevent him from starring in a future episode of Hoarders.

  Geir started entering the Writers of the Future a few years ago, stubbornly submitting a story every quarter. At a friend’s urging, he also entered his artwork in the Illustrators of the Future Contest and won on his first entry. He won the Writers contest on his eighteenth consecutive entry.

  Geir has degrees in history and finance. Combined with his love of science fiction, he has developed a detailed future history complete with chronology and spreadsheets of background material that cover a span of nearly five thousand years, with at least one entry for every year. Most of his artwork, stories and his four attempts at novels are based on this background, and he hopes his experience at the Writers of the Future workshop will help him publish further stories in that universe.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Joey Jordan, like many artists, has drawn and spun tales since her earliest days. In her first grade class, she won her first art competition against older children and her teacher sent home a letter informing her mother, “Your daughter is going to be a great artist. Nurture and support her in this the best you can!”

  Since her youth, she has always had a mind filled with images of fantastic worlds, beings and events. Many of her ideas come as complete images with all of the characters and an understanding of their backstory and lives.

  Joey spent many years jumping from thing to thing, always thinking of art as a hobby when she had time. She has worked in horse stables because of her
love for horses, in a cedar shake mill, for a film development warehouse and spent a little over eight years in the Army and the Army National Guard, where she was a tank turret repairer (electrical and hydraulic systems)—tanks are very large in person. In the Army she also had fond memories of her M249 Saw, filling sandbags, eating bugs, running bulk fuel lines, a duty as a “hooker” (the title for the person that gets to hook a vehicle or load under a helicopter), and a time when she had to pull her partner off a load when the wind blew and the pilot almost smashed him and a short span on a hazmat team.

  After a few years of feeling like she was in a mundane rut, she asked herself why, and what would make life wonderful again, and she answered herself with her art. Now the rest of her life will be an artist’s adventure for she cannot truly live any other way.

  Sailing the Sky Sea

  I was outside the sky mine when the war started. It was luck that had me working on the intake that morning. Luck that I’d switched shifts with Liam Kelly so I could rack up the OT before the end of the pay period. And luck that I was way up on the forward intake when the missiles hit. And, believe it or not, luck that I fell off a rig floating in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant.

  We never wear tethers on outside jobs. Gas mines float in the winds of Uranus’ atmosphere. It does seem insane to be high up in an infinite sky, riding a hurricane in an e-suit with nothing but magnetic boots and a good sense of balance, but the first tethered guy that fell, he bounced off the rig like a pendulum. So the union suggested a change of work rules. See, we were already about a hundred atmospheres of pressure down into the sky, just below the water clouds. If you slip, you can fall for a long time—a couple of hours, down to where you’re basically buoyant. The problem is that the temperature down there is about a thousand Celsius. Or Kelvin, I forget. It doesn’t matter, because the suit isn’t good past five hundred Celsius for very long.