by Jane Yolen
Irene Radford
The Natural Order
Irene Radford
1st Sergeant Dore, 4th Battalion, checked the load in her pulse rifle. Enough for a dozen single shots or one short burst of rapid fire. Was it enough to control the mob of refugees waiting in line to exit the shuttle?
The vessel needed every atom of remaining energy just to get dirtside, overloaded with more than two hundred refugees, their twenty guards, plus the fifty member crew of the now that they had arrived soon-to-be-derelict space ship. Why would she expect anything left over to charge weapons?
The cargo didn’t seem to care if the weapons worked or not. They’d seemed docile enough, loyal to the Natural Order of Things that had doomed them to become refugees.
Until those in power on Earth had decreed that the refugee camps were in the way of their invasion forces, so the camps had to go. Why not let refugees explore new worlds and breed new troops elsewhere to feed their never-ending need to fight each other?
The two current emperors decided the space fleet abandoned in orbit two hundred years ago was getting in the way of their missiles. So, solve two problems at once, send the refugees away before the orbits decayed to the point they endangered precious troops. A few hobbyists dug out ancient files and found a dozen planets deemed suitable for humans to breathe the air and possibly feed themselves. And if they survived, they could breed new troops.
No one mentioned to the troops and the ships’ crews that it would be a one way trip, for them as well as for the refugees. Those ships hadn’t the hull integrity or the fuel to return to Earth.
“You there! No pushing. No crowding. No getting out of line,” 2nd Lieutenant Bullé ordered at the top of his basso voice. It came out as a cultured bellow, worthy of an opera singer. Indeed, he’d trained to be the star of La Scala until the Emperor had decreed he must follow his father into the military. As the first son, that was his duty and the natural order. Frivolous careers were left to younger siblings.
1st Sergeant Dore, 4th Battalion, 7th Division, 12th Corps raised her rifle to rest on her hip, not aiming at anyone in particular, just letting the restless throng know she was ready to shoot if they got too out of hand. They continued to shift restlessly from foot to foot while they waited. Their lives were dedicated to waiting. That was the lot of the refugee. The natural order.
At last the shuttle touched ground on a newly found planet. Only drones had explored it, sending fractured and indistinct pictures back to Earth two centuries ago. The ship bounced and skidded, tipped on its nose, and flopped back, breaking two of the four wheel stanchions to starboard.
The people standing in line jerked forward, piling into each other. They screamed and flailed. Moans of pain pushed past Dore’s eardrums, already mangled due to air pressure changes and screaming metal trying to stay intact on the too rapid descent. She fought for balance, found the deck canted to her left. With that knowledge she managed to establish herself upright. Then she waded into to the melee, pulling people off the top and setting them aside. The five uniformed people under her command followed her, doing likewise.
In minutes they had the people sorted and back into something resembling a line. Only the three at the front were seriously injured. Bullé had moved as close to the forward hatch as he could manage to stay out of their way. He looked about in panic until he spotted Dore. Then he righted himself, set his threadbare uniform to rights and ordered his sergeant to deal with the few moaning and crying injured.
Dore assessed a broken arm, a concussion, and a cracked rib. The first aid kit was at the rear with her personal gear. So she made the three sit in the front most seats, out of the way and promised them all aid and comfort when they’d disembarked on their new home.
Bullé took that as his signal to open the hatch. It irised open half way at the touch of his palm print and retinal scan. Then it halted. The entire vessel seemed to sigh in exhaustion. Bullé and Dore got in the middle and pushed. Eventually they got the door three quarters open, enough for two people at a time, and manually cranked down the ramp the rest of the way.
Fresh air rushed into the rank hold of the shuttle. Dore paused to fill her lungs and coughed it all back out again. It had been so long since she’d breathed anything but recycled chemicals that her body refused to acknowledge this atmosphere as anything useful.
Bullé leaped free of the cockeyed ramp and turned a slow circle, pulse pistol charged and ready. “Hold, hold, hold,” he yelled back to the mass of people pressing to exit. Everything came to a jagged halt at the panic in his voice.
“Dore, this does not look like a refugee camp. We have green grass and trees. Those are reserved for the wealthy. We must blast a perfect circle down to bedrock and let charred dirt and dust fill it back in. Order the captain to fire all weapons!”
Dore, snorted. “There isn’t enough energy left to recycle air let alone charge a blaster.”
“But the natural order of things…”
“Doesn’t work here,” she muttered, not caring if he heard her or not. Then she sorted out the mass of people and pushed the first two out the hatch and down the ramp, followed by two more.
“Just like the ark,” one of the refugees said to her with a smile. The first smile Dore had seen from these people in months of space flight.
“An ark,” the woman behind him whispered. “We’re an ark settling on a new world.”
“Look, look!” cried a teenager at the mouth of the hatch. “A rainbow. Do they have rain on this world?”
“With all that green out there, there has to be moisture, rain or ground water.”
“Hey, even the sky is green. We won’t go thirsty here.”
“And it’s warm, but not scorching. Comfort.”
“But… but we have no fence to contain you!” Dore could hear the rest of it, the mantra that was the only thing Bullé knew, echoing inside his mind: That’s the natural order of things. It is natural for humans to divide into two or more sides and go to war to determine who should rule. The people who dwell in the middle must be pushed aside to clear paths of invasion. It is their destiny to become refugees. Refugees must be contained so they don’t contaminate…
“Give up, Bullé. This is a different world. We get the chance to create our own natural order of things. Guns won’t work.” Dore threw her rifle as far to her left as she could. Then she grabbed Bullé’s pistol and heaved it to the right.
Behind her the limited troops did the same with their weapons.
“We get to work together to make our new world whatever we want. We can farm and forage. You can sing! I can dance. We can live free and die free, without the shadow of war making decisions for us. We decide the natural order of this world, not the emperors back on Earth. We do.”
She stepped out of the way, to allow people who were no longer refugees to stream off the ship and onto the green grass of their new world, free to establish their new home with no particular order to anything.
Dirty Raggs. The place stinks like cinnamon.
Gregory L. Norris
The Pillars
Gregory L. Norris
Mister Ulmer already didn’t like them, Beebe’s mother said. She paced the apartment, which grew colder, darker, as seconds dragged out with the weight of long hours and the Pillars stayed gray. Just another Ragg family living off government handouts and Pillar assistance, that’s what Mister Ulmer would say.
“What’s ‘Pillar assistance’?” Beebe Magenta asked.
Her mother turned and fixed her with one of those looks, and Beebe realized she’d slipped up again; that Nelida Magenta hadn’t spoken the words but had thought them.
“I’m hungry, momma,” Beebe said, hoping a fresh argument might counteract an older one. “When can we eat?”
You’re reading my mind again, Beebe heard, though in the graying light within the apartment, she couldn’t tell if her mother’s lips moved. But when Nelida spoke again, it was not to mention food. It was the words that
ended every argument.
“Go to your room.”
~*~
Beebe huddled on her bed, a tiny square of blankets on the floor set beneath a window cloaked in curtains fashioned from a sheet. The Pillar in the corner sat gray and silent. She scooted over, touched the transparent tube, and found the surface cold. Not icy, like in the summer months when the system absorbed heat and humidity from the air, more like a metal railing at her school where she and other Raggland kids gathered five times a week. Poor kid’s school, she’d overheard more than once, whether the sentiment was spoken aloud or jumped out of the speaker’s thoughts, like a bug alighting from the folds of a dark flower blossom.
“Are you in there, Ky’neika?” Beebe asked the still, gray tube.
Her imaginary friend—that’s what Beebe’s mother called the girl living in the Pillar—didn’t answer. Beebe rapped the Pillar with her knuckles, though that was fated to get her punished if found out. The Pillars were not to be touched. As though to cement that warning, she caught parts of a one-sided conversation even before Mister Ulmer walked in—they’ve got a kid, bet she’s been messing around with the system again!
A knock sounded on the front door in lieu of the sharp, chirpy chime of the bell. With the Pillars gone gray, nothing worked except Beebe’s imagination. She heard Mister Malouf next door talking to himself, though the walls should have devoured the words, and the grinding of Mister Ulmer’s teeth when he walked past the threshold and into the living room of Beebe’s apartment.
Tasteless, he said, and though Beebe heard the thought she didn’t understand it, because her mother hadn’t offered him anything to eat, either.
What followed was more accusation—the Pillars had only gone in five years earlier, top-of-the-line tech, none of that Black Diamond garbage from the Ukraine. Made with pride right here in the Good Old Americas.
Dirty Raggs. The place stinks like cinnamon. Not sure what they did to the system, but I bet it was that kid of theirs—
“No,” Beebe shouted, unable to contain the outburst, even if Mister Ulmer’s claim had merit. “It wasn’t me!”
The apartment fell silent again. The chill deepened, as did the darkness of the new night.
~*~
“Mrs. Magenta, I’ll have to do a full restart to your system,” Mister Ulmer sighed, and Beebe didn’t need to read the man’s thoughts in order to comprehend his mood. “It’s gonna take a while. If that doesn’t work, you and your daughter are in for a long, cold night. You may want to call a friend with a guest room, just in case.”
“No, absolutely not,” her mother insisted. Nelida Jovan Magenta was no charity case, she emoted in silence.
That, and she worked hard to pay for the place—the least she could expect was decent Pillars to keep it warm and run the lights, stove, and refrigerator. What she didn’t say, though Beebe heard it as clearly as Mister Malouf’s mumbles, was that they hadn’t made many friends since escaping from the Ragglands. There were no guest rooms available, and no extra money to pay for a motel, even the cheapest out near the spaceport.
“We’ll hope for the best,” said Mister Ulmer.
~*~
The Pillars were out.
Beebe watched her mother’s approach with a sense of familiar sadness. The candle Nelida carried reminded her of the one they’d lit for her father at the temple. That candle was long, thin, white. This was imprisoned in a glass jar. Still the flickering flame connected both. A representation of the soul, a kindly older woman had said, or thought, at the temple. She hadn’t known Beebe’s father, but how she and four other woman dressed in black had wailed for him and the others remembered on that day.
“So you can see,” her mother said, bringing her out of the past and back to the moment. “Don’t play with it.”
Nelida set the candle in the jar upon the old wooden dresser that they’d been granted from the apartment building’s ‘still-good’ cages in the top floor filled with castoffs from previous tenants.
“I won’t,” Beebe said.
“Promise.”
She did, and crossed her heart. Her mother lingered at the bedroom door, and Beebe sensed all Nelida wanted to ask. Exhaustion made the thoughts difficult to link together and read clearly.
“Try to sleep,” Nelida said, settling for that instead of saying something that would begin a conversation she did not want to continue. .
“There’s no one to talk to anyway,” Beebe said, and instantly regretted slipping up.
Her mother’s eyes shot toward the dark Pillar. “You aren’t going there again, are you?”
Beebe held her tongue.
“I asked you a question. Ky’neika. The girl that lives in there?”
Before she could muster an answer, Nelida about-faced and marched away to the other end of the apartment, where a second candle flickered.
Ky’neika was gone, Beebe sensed. Free. It was Beebe who had helped her escape her imprisonment inside the Pillars.
~*~
Beebe drew the covers up to her face so that only her nose extended past the corner, and then sandwiched her head between two pillows, just like Grandma Ella used to in that other life and distant place, in the Ragglands. Grandma Ella had claimed it helped her to sleep by cutting out all the noise and chatter. Whenever Nelida caught Beebe sleeping like her father’s mother, she flipped out, cursed both humans and gods in the language of their birth, and ordered Beebe not to repeat the action. It was forbidden. Beebe remembered how Grandma Ella had been asleep when the fire broke out, asleep with her head between the pillows, the world and all its voices tuned out. Not even Beebe’s screams had woken Grandma Ella from that deep sleep on that tragic day.
Only sleeping in that fashion didn’t completely silence the world’s voices and thoughts. Beebe just liked feeling warm and protected, and connected to Grandma Ella, who could also read other people’s thoughts and had gifts she often labeled as curses.
Mister Ulmer was back, with his tools and replacement parts, which would keep her mother occupied. Beebe slipped deeper beneath the pillows.
“Let me remind you that this is the second time since you moved in,” he said. He didn’t sound any more pleased than during his previous visit.
“Which should tell you that the problem’s with the Pillars themselves, not us.”
Ulmer went into the usual spiel—about how clean-burning power after petroleum got phased out was more than a gift; it was a miracle that kept people warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and lit their nights against the darkness. It didn’t simply break down.
With her head between the pillows, she listened to the theoreticals and gobbledygook his mind used to fill in gaps where the technology eluded him. Exotic energy particles. Limitless source. A dark thought floated past the structural schematics from which Mister Ulster took his basic knowledge: the Magentas had likely sabotaged the system out of spite. After all, they were from the Ragglands, whose desert sands had been squeezed dry of oil. But it wasn’t even true, not really Their family had lived along the fractured coastline of Old Lebanon, Beebe argued in silence, where the only oil came from cedar trees and olives.
Limitless, yes. But the energy contained within the Pillars didn’t burn as cleanly as Mister Ulmer thought, Beebe knew.
“What were you doing before the system went down?” he demanded more than asked.
“I was about to fix us dinner. I swear, we did nothing out of the expected. My daughter was in her room doing homework.”
Which also wasn’t entirely the truth, Beebe thought.
“It’s so cold in here,” Nelida said. “Can’t you hurry this up?”
Beebe extended her nose out from the covers. When she exhaled through her nostrils, she saw her breath transformed into a curlicue of gray rising up, up, before vanishing somewhere between the space over the bed and the ceiling.
She thought of her father, Grandma Ella, and of Ky’neika. There’d been another man before Ky’neika who’d also lived in
side the Pillars. Beebe’s pulse galloped. She heard the frantic heartbeats as they throbbed in her ears, which helped to dull the other noises and voices around her.
She drew back the covers and focused on the candle’s flame. Just like the one in the temple, representative of her father’s spirit, burning warm and bright among the stars of Heaven.
Energy thrummed through the apartment, and the air shuddered. The Pillar in Beebe’s room lightened from gray to a dull orange. The glow intensified, and the color purified to a sunny yellow.
“There,” Mister Ulmer said. “You should be back up to full lumens within an hour, I’d say.” That quick enough for you, Beebe heard the man add, bookending the private statement with a sigh.
Nelida voiced relief in silence, using a mix of holy and forbidden descriptors. Beebe removed the top pillow fully to avoid her mother’s anger. The light thickened to gold. By the time her mother entered the room following Mister Ulmer’s departure, the Pillar was white, verging on blue.
The air warmed. Nelida blew out the candle and studied Beebe through narrowed eyes.
“Beebe Magenta,” her mother said in that tone. “Promise me that you had nothing to do with this.”
Beebe drew in a breath. “No,” she lied. “I did not.”
“And what about your—”
Imaginary friend. A trick, a trap, Beebe knew, and wished the words off her tongue before they reached her betraying lips. Silence, however, seemed to confirm her guilt worse than reading Nelida’s mind and answering her mother’s questions.
Beebe’s mother folded her arms and turned. In the warm blue light of the Pillar, the girl clearly saw the exhaustion on her mother’s face, along with something worse she guessed was fear.