Shortcuts

by Grant Stone

  ‘You don’t see things at all!’ Ern blurted, and had he been even a couple of years younger he would have clapped his hands over his mouth, looked as guilty as he felt. What was the point of biting your tongue when you were going to speak regardless? But he wasn’t a couple of years younger. He was close to a man, fifteen years old and he’d been watching his father drag himself out of the house earlier and earlier, come back later and later. He’d watched him spend his free time tramping coastlines, watched his siblings and his mother as they came to understand, to accept, that any free time wasn’t theirs anymore. Watched his neighbours talk behind their hands, the pity on their faces or in their voices when, every so often, one would leave his own work to walk with his father, and not for Herbert’s sake, not for Charlie’s.

  Why can’t you just accept it? he wanted to scream. They’re goddamn dead and they’re not coming back! Ern wanted to scream this more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Under any other circumstances it might even have earned him a belting for taking the Lord’s name in vain but beneath the anger and the guilt and the desire for cruelty (the desire to avoid it? he wasn’t even sure anymore) was the fear that his father would smile at him sadly and turn away. That he wouldn’t even care.

  ‘You need to trust yourself,’ James said again. There must have been something in his son’s face that spoke to him then, even when the son did not. ‘Even if you turn out to be wrong. Especially if you turn out to be wrong. No one can go through their life not ever being wrong, Ern. Not even you. It’s alright,’ he said. ‘It’s all right, son.’

  ‘You’re never going to find them,’ said Ernest. He straightened his back, looked his father dead in the eye. ‘It’s been a year now. You’re not going to find them.’ It was an effort to keep his voice calm, and though he clenched his fists he could feel that his hands were shaking. ‘I’m sorry for it, Dad, I am. I’d do anything for it to be different. But it isn’t. They’re gone. Herbert and Charlie ... they’re gone. But we’re still here.’

  ‘I know,’ said James. He knelt down briefly, the movement almost absent, his wiry body whippet-thin. When he stood again there were shells in his hand and as he spoke he tossed them into the sea, the movement jerky and thoughtless, as if he needed something to do with his hands while he talked. Early that morning, Ern had been woken by his father for the first time in a long while, been woken to go walking with him, go searching. ‘I always said to myself, I’ll give it a good year,’ said James. It was almost conversational. ‘A good year. They were good boys. They deserved that much.’

  ‘What?’ said Ern, off balance and suddenly dizzy in the sand. He could hear blood rushing in his ears, hear it over the ocean, and there was blood in his mouth.

  ‘I’m going to stop now,’ said James. ‘I always meant to. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I meant to do that too, but it all got away from me.’ There were tears in his eyes, and Ern had never seen his father cry before. ‘Then I looked round one day and saw you watching me, and I knew I hadn’t told you. Knew it was too late for that. That you’d already built up in yourself what you wanted to say to me. But Ern ... you needed to be able say it. You needed to know that you could.’

  IT IS OF COURSE TRUE that some of the advances of science may occasionally be used for ignoble ends but this is not the fault of the scientific man, but rather of the community which fails to control this prostitution .... It is sometimes suggested that scientific men should be more active in controlling the wrong use of their discoveries. I am doubtful however whether even the most imaginative scientific man, except in rare cases, is able to foresee the ultimate effect of any discovery. (Ernest Rutherford, Norman Lockyer Lecture, November 1936.)

  ENGLAND, 1930S

  Could he have been so wrong, all along? Could there be more in the atom than prizes, more than electrons and protons and the miniaturisation of power?

  What a thing to be responsible for. Ernest had no illusions: he was not immutable in his point of success, not so very individual a pivot. Had he never been, had he stayed in New Zealand, a professor at a frontier university, a smaller man than he had become, then another physicist would eventually have done what he had done. Another physicist would have opened the same door, would have done it in confidence and ignorance both. And had Ernest met that man, met that woman, he would have shaken their hand and told them it wasn’t their fault, what could arise, and that they should be congratulated for what they’d done – the expansion of knowledge, that tiny step towards the unravelling of the universe.

  But it had been him. The knowledge of the atom, the dissection of its structure, had come to a man who had lived through one World War, who had contributed to the development of technology used in that war – when he had been able to, when the naval forces of his second country had allowed him, though that allowance was a thin one and short-sighted. But for all that, he’d never fought on the front line, never died there – as young Moseley had in Gallipoli, and what a waste of a mind that had been!

  It had hurt, losing Harry, but there’d always been the comfort in the back of Ernest’s mind that the lads who were lost had at least not been his. None of the children had been his – he’d been safe that way, with his young daughter. The only child, the one he’d never have to give up to uniforms and parades and the distance between the trenches and his laboratories, the possibility of poison gas. He’d sympathised with the other parents, of course. That was only decent, and Ernest had felt for them as he’d felt for his own parents, long ago. But the compassion he’d been able to give had been a starveling thing, something still with little colour in it. Then Eileen had died, and he had understood.

  ‘I feel old,’ he said to Mary, after it happened, and he could see in the faces around him the belief that he was growing older faster than he’d done before. It was true, too. When he emerged from the fog that was her funeral and the first months of his life without her (and that absence was so different from life before her, the life with her) his joints seemed to ache easier, his hands to sink and quiver more rapidly.

  The worst of it was his mind. Never quick, but he had prided himself on the long slow workings, of the ability to seize and hold and worry. Once, on a long night when he had lain awake, still and silent and trying not to picture his daughter’s face, he had overlaid her image with that of another woman – one distant to him, the connection made through pity and disgust and the horrified rising of guilt.

  Fritz Haber had worked at a chemistry so different to Ernest’s – the chemistry of war and chlorine gas. While Ernest had spent his war research on underwater sounds and signalling, Haber had learned to kill at distance, to use science as a method of slaughter. Ernest had looked down on him for that. Turned his back, refused to shake his hand. Had refused to help the other man find work – and his contempt had been all the sharper for what Haber’s work had done to his wife. Clara Immerwahr had shot herself to death in her own garden – and that was too close to home, a wife who loved gardens – because she couldn’t stand what her husband had made of war. A deliberate act, to follow another deliberate act.

  The analogy was not a complete one, Ernest knew. It was not fitting. If a weapon could be made from atoms then he had given the impetus all unsuspecting. Eileen, too, had died in a manner other than suicide. She hadn’t meant to die in the labour of her last child; there was nothing deliberate about her loss. And she was a daughter, not a wife. The analogy was flawed. But even so, once he had connected them the contamination was there, the comparison caught in his mind, rendered immobile: the father of chemical slaughter lost one woman to their mutual deliberation, and the man who had stumbled into fatherhood of another kind had lost another woman, quite by accident.

  ‘You’re a silly old fool,’ he said, staring at himself in the mirror one morning. The basin was full of cold water, clean where he had hoped somehow for salt. Then Mary had knocked on the door to call him to breakfast and Ernest did his best to pinch colour into his cheeks, to make him
self look normal, as though he didn’t feel anything but. A fool, yes, but a fool with a wife who had her own grief and he would never have been so self-indulgent as to add to it with the spectres of his conscience, made over-sensitive with insomnia and sorrow.

  There was no one he could tell.

  Instead, he cornered Maurice Hankey at a committee meeting, spoke to him of the potential of atomic weapons, the ghosts of his nightmares. ‘Keep an eye on the matter,’ he said, as if he hadn’t said for years that such a thing was impossible, that such a device could never be made. ‘Keep an eye on the matter.’

  ‘You’ll likely know before I will,’ said Hankey.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Ernest.

  He was an old man, with grandchildren.

  About the authors

  *

  AC Buchanan

  AC BUCHANAN LIVES JUST north of Wellington and would welcome a visit from any passing sauropods. They’re the author of the recent novella Liquid City and their short fiction has most recently been published in the Accessing the Future anthology from FutureFire.net and the Crossed Genres Publications anthology Fierce Family. Because there’s no such thing as too many projects, they also co-chaired LexiCon 2017—The 38th New Zealand National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention and edit the recently launched speculative fiction magazine Capricious. You can find them on Twitter at @andicbuchanan or www.acbuchanan.org.

  Grant Stone

  GRANT STONE’S STORIES have appeared in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Semaphore, and Use Only As Directed and have twice won the Sir Julius Vogel Award. He’s also one-third of the Cerberus Writing Band, along with Dan Rabarts and Matthew Sanborn Smith. You can find him on Twitter as @discorobot or his website at http://grant-stone.com.

  IK Paterson-Harkness

  IK PATERSON-HARKNESS lives on a grimy street on the fringe of Auckland’s CBD, watching seagulls squabble on the roof of the Chinese supermarket across the road while she tries to write her stories. With university degrees in music, philosophy and creative writing she doesn’t quite know what to do with herself. Mostly, when not writing, she’s doodling on a pad or thinking about time travel. Her prose and poetry publications, as well as music and weird, lo-fi music videos can be found at www.ikpatersonharkness.com, or @IKPatersonHark.

  Lee Murray

  LEE MURRAY WRITES FICTION for adults and children, for which she has been lucky enough to win some literary prizes. Her novels include A Dash of Reality, Battle of the Birds, and Misplaced. Lee lives with her family in New Zealand.

  Octavia Cade

  OCTAVIA CADE HAS SOLD stories to Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, and Aurealis, amongst others. She has a PhD in science communication, and enjoys mixing science history with her fiction. Octavia has recently published her first novel, The August Birds (also containing Ernest Rutherford) and has a sci-fi poetry collection about the periodic table currently in press. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the BSFA and Sir Julius Vogel Award.

  Piper Mejia

  PIPER MEJIA IS AN ADVOCATE for New Zealand writers and literature. She was the co-editor of Write Off Line (2012/2013) and Beyond This ... (2012/2013), collections of writing by New Zealand intermediate and secondary students, and continues to manage both national writing competitions. In 2014 her short story “Lockdown” (included in the horror flash fiction collection Baby Teeth: Bite-Sized Tales of Terror) was shortlisted for the Sir Julius Vogel Award for science fiction and fantasy writing. Her young adult novella, The Fence, appeared in Conclave: A Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy and she won a national poetry competition for her poem “Sounds of Evolution”. In her spare time she is a high school English teacher.

  Tim Jones

  TIM JONES IS A POET and author. He was awarded the New Zealand Society of Authors Janet Frame Memorial Award for Literature in 2010, and his recent books include short story collection Transported (Vintage, 2008), poetry anthology Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand (co-edited with Mark Pirie; Interactive Press, 2009), and poetry collection Men Briefly Explained (Interactive Press, 2011). Tim’s short fiction has appeared in Best New Zealand Fiction 4 (2007), The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (2009), and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012). Tim’s latest book, a companion anthology to Voyagers, is The Stars Like Sand: Australian Speculative Poetry, co-edited with PS Cottier and published by Interactive Press (IP) in 2014.

  Imprint

  PAPER ROAD PRESS

  paperroadpress.co.nz

  Landfall © Tim Jones 2015

  Bree’s Dinosaur © AC Buchanan 2015

  The Last © Grant Stone 2015

  Mika © Lee Murray & Piper Mejia 2015

  Pocket Wife © IK Paterson-Harkness 2015

  The Ghost of Matter © Octavia Cade 2015

  This collection first published 2015. All authors have asserted their moral rights.

  Thanks to Elizabeth Heritage, for all her excellent publicity work for Paper Road Press.

  Paperback: 978-0-473336-48-6

  Epub: 978-0-473336-49-3

  Mobi: 978-0-473336-50-9

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publisher. A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.

  Cover art by and © KC Bailey

  Design © Marie Hodgkinson, Paper Road Press Ltd.