Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 1 March 2013
Page 7
He excused himself, made apologies and hurried to the door. Looking to his left, he saw just the end of her skirt and her leg as she turned a corner. He sprinted down the hallway, not caring who was watching, and stopped at the corner. She was gone. But, again, there was a faint smell of jasmine in the air. He inhaled deeply, as if by memorizing her scent he’d learn something about her.
He glimpsed her, again and again, through the following weeks, just out of reach, never seeing her face, and always being just a moment too late to actually catch up to her. The downtown crowds of people would thin and part, offering a glance at her strong, alabaster neck, her well-defined shoulders, a nicely turned calf, before they would reform and swallow her again. Given the luck he’d experienced recently, with everything going his way, his inability to meet her in person was growing intolerable. He vowed to find her, no matter the cost.
So, on a Saturday morning, he drove downtown and entered the store again. Iselda was there, but the cat was still missing from the basket. She came to the counter, her face wrinkled in disdain.
“Listen, Iselda,” he began, a note of apology in his voice.
She held up her hand to stop him, her pale skin glowing. “No, you are not welcome here anymore. I cannot sell you another potion. You have already…”
Frederick bowed his head. “Listen, I’m sorry for the way I left things last time. I came across a bit too strong and I want to apologize.” He gave her his best boyish grin and, as he had expected, a look of doubt crept into her eyes. He allowed some warmth to enter his smile and pushed his advantage. “Look, I should have listened to you. Three was too much.”
She nodded, glad he understood. “Is bad to tempt fate, is all I meant to tell you,” she finished, her voice weak. She smiled at him and he thought, for a moment, that she looked very vulnerable. He leaned forward to seal the deal.
“I was meaning to ask you. There’s this certain woman I keep seeing, but I keep missing her. I want to introduce myself, but I can’t seem to catch her. Do you think, just maybe, that I might get a fourth…” He stopped. Her face had gone, if possible, even more pale.
“Who is this woman? Describe her to me!”
Frederick licked his lips. “Well, she’s very athletic, and she has long dark hair and she’s always just…barely…out of reach.”
Iselda nodded, her mouth set in a firm line. “Is bad news, this woman. You must stay far away. Do not approach her.”
“No,” he shook his head. “I need to meet her. She’s been on my mind and I can’t stand not knowing who she is. Just for a moment,” he pleaded. “Let me have a fourth potion and I’ll never come back again. I don’t care what the price is!”
She shook her head in reply and crossed her arms. No amount of wheedling worked and he left the store angry and frustrated. He paused on the sidewalk and looked back inside, through the window. Thinking that he’d moved out of sight, Iselda opened the drawer and held a vial up to the light, shaking her head. She put the vial back and closed the drawer. Frederick checked the posted store hours and walked back to his car.
That night, Frederick parked on the curb in front of the store. He killed the engine and sat in the car, listening to the engine tick in the cool night air. Pulling on a pair of gloves and opening the car door, Frederick stepped to the sidewalk. In his right hand, he held a prybar. Three long strides took him to the store’s front door and, a moment later, he slipped the prybar between the door and its jamb, exerted force, and, with the sound of crunching wood, popped open the door. Frederick held his breath, listening for alarms, but nothing sounded.
He stepped inside, picking his way around shelves by the moonlight streaming in through the front windows. The cat was back in the basket and it lifted its head, gazing at him with baleful yellow eyes. It stood and hissed, once, and the fur along its spine fluffed. Frederick stepped behind the counter, opened the drawer and removed the vial. He was back in the car and driving away, breathing quickly, within moments. On the palm of his leather glove, the glass vial caught and reflected the streetlights on the drive home.
Once home, Frederick sat in his room, on his bed, and gazed at the vial. He slowly opened the stopper. Inside, the potion still resembled water but, this time, the strong scent of jasmine poured out. He wrinkled his nose but drank the liquid anyway. It still tasted like water. He grew dizzy and lay back on the bed, falling unconscious.
Upon waking the next morning, Frederick noticed that the smell of jasmine had grown even stronger. The drive to work was uneventful, as smooth and efficient as he’d ever seen, and the day fairly flew by. He was very pleased with himself. At lunch, he sat outside, on the sidewalk of an outdoor café, at a small table. He watched the crowds until he saw her approaching. Her hair swung in front of her face, hiding it. He gulped down the last of his water and dropped a bill on the table.
Vaulting the low rail separating the diners from the sidewalk, he fell in behind her, noticing how her heels clicked on the pavement. He let his gaze travel slowly along her strong neck, to the alabaster skin of her arms, to the radiant waterfall of raven hair spilling across her shoulders. He admired her calves as they flexed, the way her heels made her legs look, how they made her hips sway.
He followed her into an alley and, quickly, moved closer. He touched her shoulder.
“Miss,” he said, keeping his voice light. “May I have a word with you? I’ve been wanting to meet you.”
She turned around. He gasped and took an unconscious step back. He’d assumed that her lithe, powerful body, attractive as it was, had a face to match. It didn’t. Her gaunt, hollow face was heavily lined, and her eyes were inky pools of blackness.
“You have been trying to introduce yourself to me?” she chuckled, her voice a deep contralto. “That’s not how it normally works. I’m so very pleased to meet you anyway, Frederick.”
A cold chill gripped his heart. How did she know his name? He stepped back again. Her face disgusted him, with lined gray skin and cold, dead eyes. She looked a million years old. She gazed at him and pointed a thin, crooked finger.
“You met Iselda?” Her mouth pursed and she licked her lips. “She works for me. The potion shop is my little honey trap to find…diversions. It gets so lonely through the centuries.” She stepped forward and traced a fingernail up his tie, then pressed it against the knot at his throat. “Fortunately, you came along at just the right time. I’ve been missing a man’s touch.” She squeezed his bicep and shuddered with delight. “You’ll do, oh, yes you will!”
Frederick recoiled in disgust. “Now, wait a moment. I have no idea what you are talking about!”
“If you don’t know now, you will soon,” she said with a predatory smile.
“You own the potion shop?”
“You were warned against manipulating the fabric of Time. But you knew better, didn’t you? So used to getting your way in things, you felt you deserved whatever you desired.” She smiled, exposing ghastly teeth. Frederick gasped. When she spoke again, her voice was mocking. “Most people spend their lives running away from me, but, you…you actually chased me down. Well here I am, Frederick. I’m all yours. Have me.” She spread her arms wide, inviting.
He shook his head. “No, there’s been some sort of mistake. I have a meeting. Look, it was nice to meet you but I have to go.”
“Look around you, Frederick!” Her sharp voice froze him in place. She waved her bony arms. “You see how alone we are? This was your doing! You bought the potion, you drank it willingly.” She held up four fingers. “Four times! I didn’t have to lure you at all!” She stroked her dark hair with long fingernails. “It would have been decades, Frederick,” she added in a little girl’s voice. “Decades. But you came to me, now, all on your own!” She clapped her hands and Frederick felt his stomach churn. “And now, my pretty young man, you are all mine!”
Frederick grimaced and turned to go.
With incredible speed, she grabbed his jacket lapels. Drawing him close, her ice-co
ld hands burned through his clothing and numbed his chest. She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. She clamped her lips hard against his mouth and inhaled, pulling his breath into her body.
He grew numb and felt his knees buckle as his strength left him. He thought, “Just a second…”—but there wasn’t any more time.
Original (First) Publication
Copyright © 2013 by Lou J. Berger
**********
Jack McDevitt is a Nebula winner (and seventeen-time Nebula nominee) as well as a Hugo nominee.
His most recent book is The Cassandra Project in collaboration with Mike Resnick.
ACT OF GOD
by Jack McDevitt
I’m sorry about showing up on such short notice, Phil. I’d planned to go straight to the hotel when the flight got in. But I needed to talk to somebody.
Thanks, yes, I will take one. Straight, if you don’t mind.
You already know Abe’s dead. And no, it wasn’t the quake. Not really. Look, I know how this sounds, but if you want the truth, I think God killed him.
Do I look hysterical? Well, maybe a little bit. But I’ve been through a lot. And I know I didn’t say anything about it earlier but that’s because I signed a secrecy agreement. Don’t tell anybody. That’s what it said, and I’ve worked out there for two years and until this moment never mentioned to a soul what we were doing.
And yes, I really think God took him off. I know exactly how that sounds, but nothing else explains the facts. The thing that scares me is that I’m not sure it’s over. I might be on the hit list too. I mean, I never thought of it as being sacrilegious. I’ve never been that religious to start with. Didn’t used to be. I am now.
Did you ever meet Abe? No? I thought I’d introduced you at a party a few years ago. Well, it doesn’t matter.
Yes, I know you must have been worried when you heard about the quake, and I’m sorry, I should have called. I was just too badly shaken. It happened during the night. He lived there, at the lab. Had a house in town but he actually stayed most nights at the lab. Had a wing set up for himself on the eastern side. When it happened it took the whole place down. Woke me up, woke everybody up, I guess. I was about two miles away. But it was just a bump in the night. I didn’t even realize it was an earthquake until the police called. Then I went right out to the lab. Phil, it was as if the hill had opened up and just swallowed everything. They found Abe’s body in the morning.
What was the sacrilege? It’s not funny, Phil. I’ll try to explain it to you but your physics isn’t very good so I’m not sure where to start.
You know the appointment to work with Abe was the opportunity of a lifetime. A guarantee for the future. My ship had come in.
But when I first got out there it looked like a small operation. Not the sort of thing I’d expected to see. There were only three of us, me, Abe, and Mac Cardwell, an electrical engineer. Mac died in an airplane crash about a week before the quake. He had a pilot’s license, and he was flying alone. No one else was involved. Just him. The FAA said it looked as if lightning had hit the plane.
All right, smile if you want to. But Cardwell built the system that made it all possible. And I know I’m getting ahead of things here so let me see if I can explain it. Abe was a cosmologist. Special interest in the big bang. Special interest in how to generate a big bang.
I’d known that before I went out there. You know how it can be done, right? Actually make a big bang. No, I’m not kidding. Look, it’s not really that hard. Theoretically. All you have to do is pack a few kilograms of ordinary matter into a sufficiently small space, really small, considerably smaller than an atomic nucleus. Then, when you release the pressure that constrains it, the thing explodes.
No, I don’t mean a nuke. I mean a big bang. A real one. The thing expands into a new universe. Anyhow, what I’m trying to tell you is that he did it. More than that, he did it thirty years ago. And no, I know you didn’t hear an explosion. Phil, I’m serious.
Look, when it happens, the blast expands into a different set of dimensions, so it has no effect whatever on the people next door. But it can happen. It did happen.
And nobody knew about it. He kept it quiet.
I know you can’t pack much matter into a space the size of a nucleus. You don’t have to. The initial package is only a kind of cosmic seed. It contains the trigger and a set of instructions. Once it erupts, the process feeds off itself. It creates whatever it needs. The forces begin to operate, and the physical constants take hold. Time begins. Its time.
I’d wondered what he was doing in Crestview, Colorado, but he told me he went out there because it was remote, and that made it a reasonably safe place to work. People weren’t going to be popping in, asking questions. When I got there, he sat me down and invited me to sign the agreement, stipulating that I’d say nothing whatever, without his express permission, about the work at the lab. He’d known me pretty well and I suddenly realized why I’d gotten the appointment over several hundred people who were better qualified. He could trust me to keep my mouth shut.
At first I thought the lab was involved in defense work of one kind or another. Like Northgate. But this place didn’t have the security guards and the triple fences and the dogs. He introduced me to Mac, who was a little guy with a beard that desperately needed a barber, and to Sylvia Michaels. Sylvia was a tall, stately woman, dark hair, dark eyes, a hell of a package, I’m sure, when she was younger. She was the project’s angel.
I should add that Sylvia’s also dead. Ran her car into a tree two days after the quake. Cops thought she was overcome with grief and wasn’t paying attention to what she was doing. Single vehicle accident. Like Mac, she was alone.
Is that an angel like in show business? Yes. Exactly. Her family owned a group of Rocky Mountain resorts. She was enthusiastic about Abe’s ideas, so she financed the operation. She provided the cash, Mac designed the equipment, and Abe did the miracles. Well, maybe an unfortunate choice of words there.
Why didn’t he apply for government funding? Phil, the government doesn’t like stem cells, clones, and particle accelerators. You think they’re going to underwrite a big bang?
Yes, of course I’m serious. Do I look as if I’d kid around? About something like this?
Why didn’t I say something? Get it stopped? Phil, you’re not listening. It was a going concern long before I got there.
And yes, it’s a real universe. Just like this one. He kept it in the building. More or less. It’s hard to explain. It extended out through that separate set of dimensions I told you about. There are more than three. It doesn’t matter whether you can visualize them or not. They’re there. Listen, maybe I should go.
Well, okay. No, I’m not upset. I just need you to hear me out. I’m sorry, I don’t know how to explain it any better than that. Phil, we could see it. Mac had built a device that allowed us to observe and even, within limitations, to guide events. They called it the cylinder and you could look in and see star clouds and galaxies and jets of light. Everything spinning and drifting, supernovas blinking on and off like Christmas lights. Some of the galaxies had a glare like a furnace at their centers. It was incredible.
I know it’s hard to believe. Take my word for it. And I don’t know when he planned to announce it. Whenever I asked him, he always said when the time is ripe. He was afraid that, if anyone found out, he’d be shut down.
I’m sorry to hear you say that. There was never any danger to anybody. It was something you could do in your garage and the neighbors would never notice. Well, you could do it if you had Mac working alongside you.
Phil, I wish you could have seen it. The cosm—his term, not mine—was already eight billion years old, relative. What was happening was that time was passing a lot faster in the cosm than it was in Crestview. As I say, it had been up and running for thirty years by then.
You looked into that machine and saw all that and it humbled you. You know what I mean? Sure, it was Abe who figured out how
to make it happen, but the magic was in the process. How was it possible that we live in a place where you could pack up a few grams of earth and come away with a living universe?
And it was living. We zeroed in on some of the worlds. They were green. And there were animals. But nothing that seemed intelligent. Lots of predators, though. Predators you wouldn’t believe, Phil. It was why he’d brought me in. What were the conditions necessary to permit the development of intelligent life? Nobody had ever put the question in quite those terms before, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.
No, we couldn’t see any of this stuff in real time. We had to take pictures and then slow everything down by a factor of about a zillion. But it worked. We could tell what was going on.
We picked out about sixty worlds, all overrun with carnivores, some of them that would have gobbled down a T-rex as an appetizer. Abe had a technique that allowed him to reach in and influence events. Not physically, by which I mean that he couldn’t stick a hand in there, but we had some electromagnetic capabilities. I won’t try to explain it because I’m not clear on it myself. Even Abe didn’t entirely understand it. It’s funny, when I look back now I suspect Mac was the real genius.
The task was to find a species with potential and get rid of the local carnivores to give it a chance.
On some of the worlds, we triggered major volcanic eruptions. Threw a lot of muck into the atmosphere and changed the climate. Twice we used undersea earthquakes to send massive waves across the plains where predators were specially numerous. Elsewhere we rained comets down on them. We went back and looked at the results within a few hours after we’d finished, our time. In most cases we’d gotten rid of the targets, and the selected species were doing nicely, thank you very much. Within two days of the experiment we had our first settlements.