Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3

by Various Writers

  “Oh my Gawd,” he said to her, touching his tongue as if it had been severely bloated. “What do you think this means for…for other parts?”

  And from outside I could see it all. It looked funny and horrifying: those parts of his that touched her came and went in size as he kissed her again—like funny bulbous growths coming and going—but I don’t think they sensed it quite that way at all. The only thing they felt was the coming-together part of it, and that the parts they shared were just the right size for the both of them.

  That’s when I came and got you because I wanted you to see this. I admit for a long time I have thought of you, of calling you to maybe go down for pizza at Mabel Delashmit’s place—maybe watch a movie, just go for a walk; something simple, to do something, you know, since we’ve not been in touch. I confess I don’t want to stay in some universe distant from yours any longer. I just want to get in touch and share this—this amazing thing that I know is about to happen. I hope you don’t mind.

  Now I don’t know the physics of it, and neither does anyone else, really—especially those nuclear physicists and scientists from Stanford or Homeland Security. I do know that what folks say is that sharing real love is like coming home and that it makes a man or a woman something much more than they could be without it. Sometimes it means giving up anything and everything else; giving up a whole world—at least the world someone has built up so separately that it hurts—so that separation ends. You see?

  Now you and I are standing on what we, of course, think is the wrong side of that stack of cars and pickup trucks at the edge of Idella May’s yard—hard to see even through this little crack exactly what that old boy Horace Daryl Hudspeth and his newfound mate Idella May are doing in their first, most intimate, most primal re-encounter, and what parts might be involved. But if we think about it, it’s probably best that we not go through to the other side of those cars and pickup trucks; it’s sometimes best to leave sacred, quiet, private places to those things human beings do together that are sacred and quiet and private, if you know what I mean.

  Do you feel that shake? Like the whole world just shifted? Whatever has happened in there—the sharing of just some breath, maybe, or of a tiny fingertip or just a touch, a real touch, a deep touch, whatever happened—it happened. No, don’t worry; I know it looks like this wall of cars and pickups could fall right over on top of us. Sure, sure—we can move back a little with the rest of the folks if it makes you feel better; they are expecting it to come down, expecting the whole world to crumble away, aren’t they? Here’s what I think: suppose you just hold my hand. That’ll make it better; to even imagine that you are doing it will help because I think it’s not a physical touch or a kiss that matters so much; maybe it’s just the being-together-of-it. Do you see how it makes things feel better, that maybe the world doesn’t crumble even though we let our defenses down?

  And come here, friend. See? Above the wall, there—there’s the giant woman, only you see it ain’t just her. See? Intertwined with her naked body, her very human, all-too-human female form, towering into the sky, do you see it? His, too? Naked man—human. Their embrace: towering and growing and widening like some cloud?

  “Get them A-bombs ready!”

  Some moron back there—you hear ’em? Getting missiles ready. For God’s sake, what the hell they gonna do, kill every one of us? Aiming it right here at her yard and all of us—you think that’s gonna stop them? From what? Growing, expanding, loving?

  Look again friend: good God, do you see how their heads have gone up into the clouds, into the feathery clouds of the highest stratosphere? Do you see that? Look, look—you’ll see it. That naked giant man and that naked giant woman, as naked as any first humans might have been, as any Adam and Eve could have possibly been, do you see how large they are? How they are on their way to being larger than large, than size itself, than the universe itself?

  It does look like expanding; they’re gonna knock over the damned wall, and—no, no, you see? I don’t understand the physics of it either. Do you? I don’t want to. Maybe it ain’t about physics. But do you see how they have widened, expanded out so that their molecules, their quarks, the events that make them up are so far apart in expanded space-time, so diffuse that they grow right through everything—right through the cars and pickups, the trees and the houses, and right through we the people, as if they are a breath, two joined breaths, some breath from the stars? They’re growing—more subtle than gas, more subtle than the ether of the ancients, more subtle than mere words or text or ideas or mere stories or the supernatural.

  Do you see how their bodies, joined, intertwined, have grown around all of us—past the houses and streets of Redgunk, past the military camp and Uncle Joe’s Corner Liquor Store and Gas, past Redgunk and Felpham and Blue Falls and the wide Mississippi River. Do you see how they keep growing, wider and more subtle like a vast sky, past all the woods and mountains and streams, cities and seas, clouds and stars and whatever else is out past all the stars? Do you see how like nothingness, or like everything and everything-past-everything, they have become so that there are no walls between worlds, theirs and yours and mine; no difference between the story and the real, story-teller and reader—no differences at all?

  “Don’t shoot them missiles,” says the moron. Of course not: there’s nothing to shoot at, unless they just want to blow the steeple off of the First Mount Zion Christian Church of Redgunk. “Stand down.”

  And they stand down, and we all just look—just look.

  Because the giants have gone on and there’s nothing else; nothing else, in fact, but us standing here with our little awe, holding hands, us and the rest of Redgunk, Mississippi.

  Beyond Valhalla

  By Laura J. Campbell

  Dean stood in the observation lobby and watched the monstrous doors open. It was like being in the belly of a great space-faring beast. The metal heaved outwards, the darkness of nothingness lurking outside the carefully crafted landing deck.

  Dean’s mother stood beside him, still in her uniform, squeezing his hand. It was his eighth birthday, he remembered thinking. Why did Allison have to have a field trip today? Couldn’t she leave one day just for him?

  The field trip was a routine excursion. A quick look at the stars outside as part of the deep space astronomy lessons, then a return to the safety of the Estrella. It was the sort of thing that large space ships did almost every day.

  Dean popped gum in his mouth. It came from a birthday card he had received earlier that day, before they had to go and pick up Allison from the landing bay. He could hear the hum of the ship in his ears. Usually he did not notice the omnipresent white noise, but popping the gum changed the dynamics of his eardrums. The sound ebbed and flowed with increased clarity; a slow, steady, almost pounding beat.

  It was not too bad, being a kid on a space-faring vessel. There were fewer responsibilities than on Earth, certainly less than on the colonies. It was comfortable. His father was an interstellar cartographer; his mother was a senior terraforming officer. He just wished he had them all to himself sometimes and did not have to share them with his brilliant sister Allison, who already showed great promise in alien geology studies.

  Not like him. No one was quite sure what to do with Dean.

  He watched the shuttle approach, its small size dwarfed by the landing bay. It was moving very slowly, aiming towards the plate-like dock.

  Then Dean saw it.

  He was sure he saw it first.

  Just outside the bay, as the shuttle slipped from the oblivion of space back into the Estrella’s womb, a small fireball exploded on the outside of the shuttle’s skin.

  All Hell instantly broke loose.

  Unlike the fortified Estrella with its advanced reactive armored hull, the shuttle was not designed to take much of a hit. It was designed for near ship excursions and atmospheric transfer.

  The unanticipated space debris pierced the shuttle’s armor almost instantly. It began to wobbl
e erratically. Security personnel flooded the observation deck, herding the waiting observers together.

  Dean resisted, pressing his nose against the cold glass, watching. Black screens fell between the glass planes, cloaking the events from his witness.

  After an investigation and just a few years later, the rules would be changed. Every shuttle would have fully reactive armored hulls. That would be because of the Estrella.

  But on that day, it did not matter to Allison and the others aboard the shuttle.

  And it did not matter to Dean.

  He would always remember his sister dying on his eighth birthday. It was the sort of memory that would not fade.

  Fifteen Years Later

  Dean sat across from the Academy official. He supposed other people might sweat an event like this, but the conclusion was already so neatly drawn it no longer concerned him.

  The man placed a plastic box filled with brightly colored tablets and pills in front of Dean. “Are these yours?”

  “Sure,” Dean replied. It was his birthday today and he was remembering again. His self-medication normally helped stop that, but they had found the contraband in his locker. Now the memories danced in his mind.

  The little flame on the shuttle—his own personal fireworks display for his birthday. He remembered his mother, usually so calm and sensible, screaming as the alarms went off. He imagined as he pressed his face up to the unforgiving glass that he could see Allison’s pretty bright blue eyes fill with confusion as the vacuum of space ripped the life from her lungs.

  “Son?” The man asked. “I’ve tried to help you. Anyone else would have been kicked out on the first offense. But because you were from an Estrella family we gave you three strikes. This time, son, you’re out.”

  Dean nodded, his mind overwhelmed by the memories. His mother had never believed they did not suffer on the shuttle. She had taped a photograph of Allison up on the wall alongside the twenty-three other victims to commemorate the dead. Dean remembered the picture. It had been of him and Allison, but his mother had cut him out of the photograph and pasted the remainder on the wall.

  Sometimes Dean would go with his mother when she went to cry and whisper Allison’s name. Dean would put his ear next to the cold metal of the wall, imagining that he heard Allison and the others outside. Knocking on the hull. Wanting to get back inside the Estrella.

  “I could almost understand amphetamines,” the official droned on. “Something to keep you up, help you study. But hallucinogens make no sense. And you’ve failed your psych evaluation. They don’t let unstable pill poppers run interstellar hyperdrives. You do understand that, don’t you, son?”

  Dean had no emotion to offer the man. “I probably never really wanted to go back into space anyway,” he answered.

  Twenty Years Later

  Dean’s hands were in cuffs. He was wearing a garish orange uniform, the convicted criminal’s costume. It had been five years since they had thrown him out of the Academy. Five years that hadn’t gone well.

  “Dean Yallis?” the transfer judge asked. She looked him square in the eye. “You have been found guilty of felony murder. This court has sentenced you to lifetime confinement at the penal colony on 2002LM60. Therefore you are ordered aboard the prison vessel Resolution for transport.” She cracked the gavel against the bench. The sound echoed in Dean’s ears.

  Dean’s lawyer moved him along.

  Dean inhaled with a purpose. These would probably be his last breaths of real air. From now on, he would be breathing recirculated manufactured atmosphere generated on board ship or by the penal facility.

  “Not much we could do,” the lawyer said, walking Dean to the ramp. “You were bound for Quaoar the moment you stepped foot in that bank.”

  Dean declined to shake the attorney’s hand. “Well, thanks for nothing.”

  “You made your own bed,” the lawyer replied.

  “Now I get to go lie in it.”

  He stepped into the airlock. The doors slid down, cloaking him from the world.

  Twenty Years, Three Hours Later

  The process was bureaucratically slow.

  As Prisoner UXB22224fm10QL, Dean moved in a slow line along with the other prisoners. A woman at a doorway pressed a small gun-like utensil against his shoulder, injecting a locator chip.

  A muscular man walked up beside Dean.

  Dean recognized him from the Academy.

  Back then, the man had been qualifying for security. Now, he sported a large scar weaving its way around his bald head.

  Forbidden to talk in the line, they nodded recognition.

  The larger man moved on.

  Dean shuffled, happy for the distraction. His mind was filling with the sound of the Resolution, its propulsion system humming lowly.

  It had been a long time since Dean had heard the incessant hum of engines. It was almost like returning to the womb.

  Twenty Years, Four Hours Later

  The guard paused outside Dean’s cell. “It will take a day or two for your mind to learn to subtract out the noise,” he told Dean. The guard’s body was plopped into a wheelchair like a scoop of flesh-colored ice cream. “The noise is worse back here near the lifer cells. You ever been in space before?”

  “I was in space as a kid. My folks were part of the early Titan development team.” He remembered Titan and its orange soda sky, the rings of Saturn barely visible through the gauzy atmosphere. The terraforming had gone faster than scheduled.

  “That was good work,” the guard said. His body was ill-defined and atrophied. It was uncomfortable to look at him.

  “I guess,” Dean answered. “It took their minds off my sister’s death. They worked all the time. We were on the Estrella right before then.”

  “The Estrella?” the guard said, awe brimming in his dark eyes. He said the ship’s name correctly, melodically rolling the double “l” into a lyrical “y” sound.

  Dean nodded. All things dated back to that day, and not just for him. The papers still used it as a benchmark. Pre-Estrella. Post-Estrella.

  Dean didn’t like the noise of the engines, the peculiar oily smell of the ship. He didn’t belong here in space. This is where Allison and the others live.

  The guard’s reaction was expected. Dean was used to the sanctity the Estrella accident inspired. He supposed it was like the Titanic in the twentieth century or the 9/11 terrorist attack of the twenty-first. There was an aura to the Estrella.

  He had borrowed very heavily against the line of sentimental credit it afforded.

  “My sister died on my birthday,” Dean said, “so I don’t have much opportunity to forget.” It wasn’t her fault, a voice in his mind whispered. She didn’t schedule the field trip on your birthday. Remember how you found her gift to you when you got home? The headphones and the music chips? So you wouldn’t have to always hear the hum of the engines?

  “I am sorry, señor.”

  “You speak Spanish? I had to learn in the Academy.” Voices, go away!

  “Sí,” the crippled guard replied. “It is my native language. I was an engineering officer in beyond systems exploration for the Regnas Corporation. Before it became the huge company it is today. We had to speak five languages back then to qualify for flight status. English. Spanish. Russian. Japanese. Hebrew.”

  “Beyond system? Is that how you got like that?”

  The man’s body had been reduced to rubber. It was a well-documented consequence of long-term zero gravity exposure. The guard looked old enough to have flown in the days before artificial gravity had been fully developed.

  “No g does a man no good, they say. Now all I can do is work the prison ships. Call me Galvéz.”

  “I’m Dean. Dean Yallis.”

  “Well, Dean, I must be attending to my duties. ¡Adios!”

  Dean watched the guard wheel himself away. “Yeah. I’m Dean. Always just one letter away from Dead.”

  Twenty Years, Three Days Later

  The life senten
ce prisoners were located near the back of the ship. The death sentence inmates were located towards the middle. Crew and operations comprised the front end of the vessel.

  Once on the prison asteroid, the death row inmates would be separated from the life sentence prisoners by a barren, frigid, uninhabitable landscape, incarcerated at two distinct facilities. On board the Resolution they were permitted to mingle, more out of logistical simplicity than any sense of shared community.

  During morning recreation, Dean sat on a bench. Humming to himself. Trying desperately to not hear the engines. The large man from the Academy sat next to him.

  “You a killer now too?” he asked.

  “Felony murder,” Dean replied, surprisingly casual.

  “I settled a family quarrel in a dramatic way,” the bald man responded.

  “Your lawyer didn’t go for diminished capacity? Moment of passion? I hear about that on television all the time.”

  “Helps to be a celebrity for that to work,” the man replied. “And my targets were sleeping when I had my moments of fame. The prosecutor argued I had time to cool off before going over there with a new gun and extra bullets in my pocket. His argument ended up being the more persuasive one.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Gustar.” Dean reached out and shook the man’s hand, using the handshake they were taught during their senior year at the Academy. When it looked like they were set to graduate.

  Gustar remembered the handshake. “Long time since those days,” he said. “I heard you got a life sentence, Dean.”

  “At least I don’t need to worry about what I’ll be doing for the next sixty years.”

  “I’m not so willing to go to a fucking hunk of ice at the edge of nowhere.” Gustar paused, cautious for eavesdroppers. “I have a plan.”

  “Really?” Dean asked, hiding his doubts.

  “Some other Academy rejects got a small ship together. They make delivery runs to the nearer colonies. I’ve coordinated a rendezvous.”

  “How do you intend to transfer? I doubt our captain will just let you hop off this ship and onto another.”