A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Here. Eat.”

  He looks at the muffin all yellow and drippy, then at me, then back to the muffin. The aroma hangs over the counter in an invisible cloud and I’d be getting hungry myself if I didn’t have so much riding on this little move.

  I’m not worried about going to jail for this. Never was. I know all about suspended sentences and that. What I am worried about is being marked as a ‘legger. Because that means the giraffes will be watching me and snooping into my affairs all the time. I’m not the kind who takes well to being watched. I’ve devoted a lot of effort to keeping a low profile and living between the lines—“living in the interstices,” Gabe calls it. A bust could ruin my whole way of life.

  So I’ve got to be right about this guy’s poison.

  He can’t take his eyes off the muffins. I can tell by the way he stares that he’s a good-citizen type whose mother obeyed all the Lipid Laws as soon as they were passed, and who never thought to break them once he became a big boy.

  I nudge him. “Go ahead.”

  He puts the shield on the counter and his left hand reaches out real careful, like he’s afraid the muffins will bite him. Finally, he grabs the nearest one, holds it under his nose, sniffs it, then takes a bite. A little butter drips from the right corner of his mouth, but it’s his eyes I’m watching. They’re not seeing me or anything else in the store . . . they’re sixteen years away and he’s ten years old again and his mother just fixed him breakfast. His eyes are sort of shiny and wet around the rims as he swallows. Then he shakes himself and looks at me. But he doesn’t say a word.

  I put the butter and eggs in a bag and push it toward him.

  “Here. On the house. Gabe will be back any minute with the troops so if you leave now we can avoid any problems.”

  He lowers the gun but still hesitates.

  “Catch those bad guys in the city,” I tell him. “But when you need the real thing for yourself, and you need it fresh, ride out here and I’ll see you’re taken care of.”

  He shoves the rest of the muffin half into his mouth and chews furiously as he pockets his shield and gun and slaps his hat back on his head.

  “You gotta deal,” he says around the mouthful, then lifts the bag with his left hand, grabs the other half muffin with his right, and hurries out into the wet.

  I follow him to the door where I see Gabe and a couple of the boys from the mill coming up the road with shotguns cradled in their arms. I wave them off and tell them thanks anyway. Then I watch the guy drive off.

  I guess I can’t tell a Fed when I see one, but I can name anybody’s poison. Anybody’s.

  I glance down at the pile of newspapers I leave on the outside bench. Around the rock that holds it down I can see where some committee of giraffes has announced that it will recommend the banning of Bugs Bunny cartoons from theaters and the airwaves. The creature, they say, shows a complete disregard for authority and is not fit viewing for children.

  Well, I’ve been expecting that and dubbed up a few minidisks of some of Bugs’ finest moments. Don’t want the kids around here to grow up without the Wabbit.

  I also hear talk about a coming federal campaign against being overweight. Bad health risk, they say. Rumor has it they’re going to outlaw clothes over a certain size. That’s just rumor, of course . . . still, I’ll bet there’s an angle in there for me.

  Ah, the giraffes. For every one of me there’s a hundred of them.

  But I’m worth a thousand giraffes.

  TO FILL THE SEA AND AIR

  During the period in question there were two items on the interstellar market for which supply could never equal demand. The intricate, gossamer carvings of the Vanek were one, valued because they were so subtly alien and yet so appreciable on human terms. The other was filet of chispen, a seafood delicacy with gourmet appeal all across Occupied Space. The flavor . . . how does one describe a unique gustatorial experience, or the mild euphoria that attends consumption of sixty grams or more of the filet?

  Enough to say that it was in high demand in those days. And the supply rested completely on the efforts of the individual chispen fishers on Gelk. Many a large interstellar corporation pressed to bring modern methods to the tiny planet for a more efficient harvesting of the fish, but the ruling council of Gelk forbade the intrusion of outside interests. There was a huge profit to be made and the council members intended to see that the bulk of it went into their own pockets.

  from Stars for Sale: An Economic History of Occupied Space

  by Emmerz Fent

  Imagine the sea, smooth slate gray in predawn under a low drifting carapace of cloud. Imagine two high, impenetrable walls parallel on that sea, separated by ten times the height of a tall man, each stretching away to the horizon. Imagine a force-seven gale trapped between those walls and careening toward you, beating the sea below it to a furious lather as it comes.

  Now . . . remove the walls and remove the wind. Leave the onrushing corridor of turbulent water. That was what Albie saw as he stood in the first boat.

  The chispies were running. The game was on.

  Albie gauged it to be a small school, probably a spur off a bigger run to the east. Good. He didn’t want to hit a big run just yet. He had new men on the nets who needed blooding, and a small school like the one approaching was perfect.

  He signaled to his men at their posts around the net, warning them, to brace for the hit. Out toward the sun stood a long dark hull, bristling amidships with monitoring equipment. Albie knew he was being watched but couldn’t guess why. He didn’t recognize the design and closed his right eye to get a better look with his left.

  The doctors had told him not to do that. If he had to favor one of his eyes, let it be the artificial one. But he couldn’t get used to it—everything always looked grainy, despite the fact that it was the best money could buy. At least he could see. And if he ever decided on a plastic repair of the ragged scar running across his right eyebrow and orbit, only old friends would know that a chispie wing had ruined that eye. And, of course, Albie would know.

  He bore the chispies no animosity, though. No Ahab syndrome for Albie. He was glad to be alive, glad to lose an eye instead of his head. No prosthetic heads around.

  Most of the experienced men on the nets wore scars or were missing bits of ears or fingers. It was part of the game. If they didn’t want to play, they could stand on shore and let the chispies swim by unmolested. That way they’d never get hurt. Nor would they get those exorbitant prices people all over Occupied Space were willing to pay for filet of chispen.

  Turning away from the dark skulking hull, Albie trained both eyes on the chispies. He leaned on the wheel and felt the old tingling in his nerve ends as the school approached. The middle of his sixth decade was passing, the last four of them spent on this sea as a chispen fisher . . . and still the same old thrill when he saw them coming.

  He was shorter than most of the men he employed; stronger, too. His compact, muscular body was a bit flabbier now than usual, but he’d be back to fighting trim before the season was much older. Standing straight out from his cheeks, chin, and scalp was a knotty mane of white and silver shot through with streaks of black. He had a broad, flat nose, and the skin of his face, what little could be seen, showed the ravages of his profession. Years of long exposure to light from a star not meant to shine on human skin, light refracted down through the atmosphere and reflected up from the water, had left his dark brown skin with a texture similar to the soles of a barefoot reef climber, and lined it to an extent that he appeared to have fallen asleep under the needle of a crazed tattooist with a penchant for black ink and a compulsion for cross-hatching. Eyes of a startling gray shone out from his face like beacons in the night.

  The stripe of frothing, raging water was closer now. Albie judged it to be about twenty meters across, so he let his scow drift westward to open the mouth of the net a little wider. Thirty meters seaward to his right lay the anchor boat manned by Lars Zaro, the only man in t
he crew older than Albie. The floats on the net trailed in a giant semi-circle between and behind them, a cul-de-sac ringed with ten scows of Albie’s own design—flat-bottomed with a centerboard for greater stability—each carrying one gaff man and one freezer man. The two new hands were on freezer duty, of course. They had a long way to go before they could be trusted with a gaff.

  Albie checked the men’s positions—all twenty-six, counting himself, were set. Then he glanced again at the big ship standing out toward the horizon. He could vaguely make out Gelk Co I emblazoned across the stern. He wondered why it was there.

  “Incredible! That school’s heading right for him!”

  “Told you.”

  Two men huddled before an illuminated screen in a dark room, one seated, the other leaning over his shoulder, both watching the progress of the season’s first chispen run. The main body of the run was a fat, jumbled streak of light to the right of center on the screen, marking its position to seaward in the deeper part of the trench. They ignored that. What gripped their attention was the slim arc that had broken from the run a few kilometers northward and was now heading directly for a dot representing Albie and his crew.

  “How does he do it?” the seated man asked. “How does he know where they’re going to be?”

  “You’ve just asked the question we’d all like answered. Albie uses outdated methods, decrepit equipment, and catches more than anyone else on the water. The average chispen fisher brings home enough to support himself and his family; Albie is rich and the two dozen or so who work for him are living high.”

  “Well, we’ll be putting an end to that soon enough, I guess.”

  “I suppose we will.”

  “It’s almost a shame.” The seated man pointed to the screen. “Just look at that! The school’s almost in his net. Damn! It’s amazing! There’s got to be a method to it!”

  “There is. And after seeing this, I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”

  The standing man would say no more.

  Albie returned his attention to the onrushing school, mentally submerging and imagining himself at one with the chispies. He saw glistening blue-white fusiform shapes darting through the water around him in tightly packed formation just below the surface. Their appearance at this point differed markedly from the slow, graceful, ray-like creatures that glide so peacefully along the sea bottoms of their winter spawning grounds to the south or the summer feeding grounds to the north. With their triangular wings spread wide and gently undulating, the chispies are the picture of tranquility at the extremes of their habitat.

  But between those extremes . . .

  When fall comes after a summer of gorging at the northern shoals, the chispen wraps its barbed wings around its fattened body and becomes a living, twisting missile hurtling down the twelve-hundred-kilometer trench that runs along the coast of Gelk’s major land mass.

  The wings stay folded around the body during the entire trip. But should something bar the chispies’ path—a net, for instance—the wings unfurl as the fish swerve and turn and loop in sudden trapped confusion. The ones who can build sufficient momentum break the surface and take to the air in a short glide to the open sea. The chispen fisher earns his hazard pay then—the sharp barbed edges of those unfurled wings cut through flesh almost as easily as air.

  With the school almost upon him, Albie turned his attention to the net floats and waited. Soon it came: a sudden erratic bobbing along the far edge of the semi-circle. A few chispies always traveled well ahead of their fellows and these were now in the net. Time to move.

  “Everybody hold!” he yelled and started moving his throttle forward.

  He had to establish some momentum before the main body of the school hit, or else he’d never get the net closed in time.

  As the white water speared into the pocket of net and boats, Albie threw the impeller control onto full forward and gripped the wheel with an intensity that bulged the muscles of his forearms.

  The hit came, tugging his head back and causing the impeller to howl in protest against the sudden reverse pull. As Albie turned his boat hard to starboard and headed for Zaro’s anchor boat to complete the circle, the water within began to foam like green tea in a blender. He was tying up to Zaro’s craft when the first chispies began breaking water and zooming overhead. But the circumscribed area was too small to allow many of them to get away like that. Only those who managed to dart unimpeded from the deep to the surface could take to the air. The rest thrashed and flailed their wings with furious intensity, caroming off the fibrous mesh of the net and colliding with each other as the gaffers bent to their work.

  The game was on.

  The boats rocked in the growing turbulence and this was when the men appreciated the added stability of centerboards on the flat-bottomed scows. Their helmets would protect their heads, the safety wires gave them reasonable protection against being pulled into the water, but if a boat capsized . . . any man going into that bath of sharp swirling sea wings would be ribbon-meat before he could draw a second breath.

  Albie finished securing his boat to Zaro’s, then grabbed his gaff and stood erect. He didn’t bother with a helmet, depending rather on forty years of experience to keep his head out of the way of airborne chispies, but made sure his safety wire was tightly clipped to the back of his belt before leaning over the water to put his gaff to work.

  Gaffing was an art, a dynamic synthesis of speed, skill, strength, courage, agility, and hand-eye coordination that took years to master. The hook at the end of the long pole had to be driven under the scales with a cephalad thrust at a point forward of the chispen’s center of gravity. Then the creature’s momentum had to be adjusted—never countered—into a rising arc that would allow the gaff-handler to lever it out of the water and onto the deck of his scow. The freezer man—Zaro in Albie’s case—would take it from there, using hand hooks to slide the flopping fish onto the belt that would run it through the liquid nitrogen bath and into the insulated hold below.

  Albie worked steadily, rhythmically, his eyes methodically picking out the shooting shapes, gauging speed and size. The latter was especially important: Too large a fish and the pole would either break or be torn from his hands; too small and it wasn’t worth the time and effort. The best size was in the neighborhood of fifty kilos—about the weight of a pubescent human. The meat then had body and tenderness and brought the highest price.

  Wings slashed, water splashed, droplets flashed through the air and caught in Albie’s beard. Time was short. They had to pull in as many as they could before the inevitable happened. Insert the hook, feel the pull, lever the pole, taste the spray as the winged beastie angrily flapped the air on its way to the deck, free the hook and go back for the next. It was the first time all year Albie had truly felt alive.

  Then it happened as it always happened: The furious battering opened a weak spot in the net and the school leaked free into the sea. That, too, was part of the game. After a moment of breath-catching, the men hauled in the remains of the net to pick up the leftovers, the chispies too battered and bloodied by their confused and frantic companions to swim after them.

  “Look at that, will you?” the seated man said. “They broke out and now they’re heading back to the main body of the run. How do you explain that?” The standing man said nothing and the seated-one looked up at him. “You used to work for Albie, didn’t you?”

  A nod in the dimness. “Once. Years ago. That was before I connected with Gelk Co.”

  “Why don’t you pay him a visit? Never know . . . he might come in handy.”

  “I might do that—if he’ll speak to me.”

  “Oh? He get mad when you quit?”

  “Didn’t quit. The old boy fired me.”

  “Hello, Albie.”

  Albie looked up from where he sat on the sand in a circle of his men, each with a pile of tattered net on his lap. The sun was lowering toward the land and the newcomer stood silhouetted against it, his features in shadow.
But Albie recognized him.

  “Vic? That you, Vic?

  “Yeah, Albie, it’s me. Mind if I sit down?”

  “Go ahead. Sand’s free.”

  Albie gave the younger man a careful inspection as he made himself comfortable. Vic had been raised a beach rat but that was hard to tell now. Tall, his mid-thirties, he was sleek, slim, and dark with blue eyes and even features. The one-piece suit he wore didn’t belong on the beach. His black hair was slicked back, exposing a right ear bereft of its upper third, lost during his last year on the chispen nets. Restoration would have been no problem had he desired it, but apparently he preferred to flaunt the disfigurement as a badge of sorts.

  It seemed to Albie that he had broken Vic in on the nets only a few days ago, and had sacked him only yesterday. But it had been years . . . eleven of them.

  He tossed Vic a length of twine. “Here. Make yourself useful. Can I trust you to do it right?”

  “You never let a man forget, do you?” Vic said through an uncertain smile.

  “That’s because I don’t forget!” Albie was aware of the sharp edge on his voice; he refused to blunt it with a smile of his own.

  The other men glanced at each other, frowning. Albie’s mellow temperament was legend among the fishermen up and down the coast, yet here he was, glowering and suffusing the air with palpable tension. Only Zaro knew what lay behind the animosity.

  “Time for a break, boys,” Zaro said, “We’ll down a couple of ales and finish up later.”

  Albie never allowed dull-witted men out on the nets with him. They took the hint and walked off.

  “What brings you back?” he asked when they were alone.

  “That.” Vic pointed toward the ship on the horizon.

  Albie kept his eyes down, concentrating on repairing the net. “Saw it this morning. What’s Gelk Co I mean?”

  “She’s owned by the Gelk Co Corporation.”

  “So they call it Gelk Co I? How imaginative.”