Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (27 page)

I read the history of all the Bell captains in the diffuse echoes of their Brilliance, and I understand why they have followed me here. Without Temetry, I would be just like them; as empty as Subsidence, as empty as their Bells, left orbiting like hollow moons about dead and dying planets.

The inferno rises, and rises, and at last, breaks.

Involutions rendered a hundred-minds strong finally crash as spume all about me. Everything is rewritten. Everything is under the Bell. We collapse, and around us this vast ship finally comes to a long, lone toll, as we snuff down upon a dry world, a grey desert planet, stocked with heat sinks and Gideon bores.

I stagger to the glass to look out over the world that was once mine. It is all craters. I fall in the corridor, struggling to hold on to what I am, as the sands billow up around us.

Simulacra wake me with water. The corridors are empty. I remember the long search, but there is no sign of the other captains. Perhaps they have already gone out, to my world, to find Temetry. Perhaps they all fell under the Bell.

I look out and see this planet’s atmosphere sparkling like corolla borealis, flecks of mist catching the reflections off my Bell’s sloping sides. I feel the branes thrumming around me, through my mind, filling me with possibilities.

I exit with nothing but the captain’s clothes on my back. This place is a desert, and the air is hot and dry. I feel the heat from their sinks radiating up from the grey sand. I walk a little way, past the silver Gideon bores, past the crowds of people watching and waiting. I see the 100, hastily turned out and waiting for admittance, flanked by their parents, grand and fierce expressions lashed across their faces.

They watch in confusion as I climb a dune and sit at the top. The vast weight of my Bell towers above me, shadows everything. I am yet its captain.

A man walks from the crowd to join me. He is perhaps as old as me, dressed in simple brown smocks. He sits by my side, but says nothing, only looks at me as though he knows me, with sorrow, with love.

He holds something out to me, on the palm of his hand. It is a speckled white sand-hopper. It is a pretty thing, its long legs stretched out to skein it over the hot desert surface. I reach out, thinking to touch it, expecting it to flee, but it does not move. I touch its back, its side.

It is folded paper. I lift it from his hand, turn it over in my hands. The folds and twists of its craftsmanship are stunning. All of its limbs, its sinewy body, its whip-thin antenna, are folded from a single sheet of paper. It has been twisted into a single side, like a simple Möbius strip, non-orientable.

I have never seen anything like it. It is beautiful. In all my travels, in all my years upon the Bell, I have never seen anything so alive brought out of the folding.

I turn to the mute man, look into his eyes.

“Temetry?”

About the Author

Michael John Grist is a science fiction & fantasy author and ruins photographer who lives in Tokyo, Japan. His stories can be found in
Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer,
and
Andromeda Spaceways,
and he is currently writing an epic fantasy novel. He runs a website featuring his writing and photographs of the ruins or ‘haikyo’ of Japan; filled with dark short stories and matching images of abandoned theme parks and ghost towns. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/michaelgrist.

From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit

Gary Kloster

Monkey waited until the sky over the Gulf had gone all black and empty except for a billion stars before he pulled himself back onto the sailboat.

“Ceegee’s roughed your stuff,” he said, perched dripping on the rail. “They rough you too, Cesar?”

I spit in the ocean. When the cutter caught me, the ceegee boys had swarmed aboard and slammed me down so that some officer, all pretty in her white and brass, could question me.

Who’re you, where you going, where you been? Where’s the sugar? Over and over she’d asked, while her boys tore the boat apart. She hadn’t liked my answers. She knew I was lying, even when they couldn’t find anything. Finally, she had her boys rip my shorts off and gave me to her machines.

The ceegee robots had tentacles, reeking of rubber and lube. Those thin limbs had pushed between my teeth and down my throat, burrowed up my nose and shoved themselves deep into my ass. Searching all my hidden places.

They had wrecked my boat, and then they wrecked me. Those slick machines had left me choking, shitting, bleeding, puking. Sobbing. For all that wreckage and pain though, they hadn’t found one speck of sugar.

Because a little monkey I’d found floating in the middle of the gulf days before had looked at the empty horizon and told me the Coast Guard was coming.

“Ceegee assholes,” I said. “Course they’d rough a South Padre boy.”

“You want to rough them back?” Monkey’s eyes, glittering with starlight, met mine.

“How?”

Monkey curled his tail in and untied a thin white rope from it. “Haul this up.”

“The sugar?”

“Yes. Plus something I took from their boat while they were busy with you.”

“A gun?”

“Gun’ll just get you killed,” Monkey said. “Got you something better.”

The rope ended in my drybag, and I opened it up. Three sealed boxes of sugar. Illegal pharma, or nano, or data or who-knows. South Padre pirates just called it all sugar, and gave dumbasses like me boats and money to haul it. Something else nestled between the boxes, a thin tablet of glass and aluminum.

“What am I suppose to do with a ceegee computer?” I could feel the rawness in my throat, in my ass, the ache deep inside me from being helpless and naked and violated while that ceegee officer and her boys had watched. A gun seemed like a better gift.

“Rough them,” Monkey said. “I can teach you.”

I frowned, turning the thing in my hands, not sure. Just a computer, encoded, locked, useless to me, but Monkey gave me a grin.

Why should I argue with the magic talking monkey? He’d saved me from either being sent to a work camp by the ceegees or being crucified by the pirates back home. So I held the computer and listened to him talk, and slowly the hurt and fear curled up inside me into a knot tight enough to ignore.

Excerpted from the astronomy site,
Constellation Prize:

Really? Unexplained astronomical phenomena? Possible supernova?
Really?

Worst. Cover up. Ever.

Sure, most of the sheep don’t know. They’re too busy sucking off the media streams to notice anything, even lights in the fucking sky. But they’ll know soon enough. We’ll force those apes to look up for once.

We’ve got pictures of the flare, and the tracking data before and after. So what if the gubmint has shut the hell up? We don’t need their fancy toys for this. We’ve already plotted the flight paths for Bogies 1 and 2. We can watch them ourselves — Big Brother gets my telescope when he takes it from my cold, dead hands.

We just have to agree on the narrative. We
know
what’s happening — a ship is tearing ass through our system right now, and last night it fired something off in our direction.

We
know
that. We can’t be mealy-mouthed. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, can’t be sure, yadda yadda fuck you. We
know.
Second guessing now is just helping the cover-up. (Yeah, and I know some of you guys in the comments are plants. Eat shit and die, federal sockpuppets!)

Possible supernova. Unexplained phenomena.

ALIENS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

We
know.

How stupid do they think we are?

Well, I guess we did vote for them
.

“Can I pet your monkey?” my sister Sophie asked, sitting on the balcony next to me, her back against the rust-rotted rail.

“He doesn’t like kids,” I said, but Monkey scampered down from my shoulder into her lap.

She smirked and ran her fingers through his fur. “See? He knows I’m not a kid, Cesar.”

I tapped the tablet in my hands, marking my place in the trojan wiki Monkey had me reading and set it down to stare at my sister. Thirteen, and scary tall all of a sudden, with unexpected girl curves rounding her skinny body. No, she wasn’t a kid anymore. That’s why she spent so much time in our rooms now, so the pirates down below wouldn’t notice her.

Hurricane Mindy had torn the south Texas coast to shreds, and only the newest and toughest of the resorts and condos on our barrier island had survived, broken teeth jutting from sandy gums that shifted and bled with every new storm. The mainlanders had given them up, and now they belonged to the squatters who’d refused to leave, like my mother, and to the pirates. With broken ships and garbage they had built a raft city between the towers, a port for the sugar trade, a rat hole where they could hide from the ceegee patrols circling out in the gulf.

It’d been rumored for years that the mainland would bomb us someday and send South Padres’ towers finally crashing into the sea. Looking at the gull-picked corpses the pirates had chained to the balconies of the Hilton across from us, I wondered if they’d ever bother. If the hurricanes didn’t finish us soon, the pirates would, and then they’d just eat themselves.

“You thinking about going out again?” Sophie said, her eyes following mine.

“No.” My cut from that sugar run would pay our squat rights for two more months. By then, Monkey said I wouldn’t need to risk my ass out on the ocean any more. Touching the tablet beside me, thinking of all I’d learned in the past few weeks from him and this little window into such a strange, wider world, I believed him.

“Good,” Sophie said. Then, “Mom worried.”

“Mom noticed?”

Sophie’s fingers traced Monkey’s back. “She cried.”

“She wouldn’t have had to, if she’d sobered up long enough to do her job and paid our rights. Then I wouldn’t have had to go.”

Sophie blinked back tears, and my throat went tight. “Christ,” I sighed, staring at Monkey. He stared back at me, big eyes innocent.

“What are you looking at, furball? You keep saying it’s almost time, well, I say it’s past time. Start talking. Teach her. She needs this.” Monkey stayed silent for a second, and I added, “You make me look crazy, and I’ll throw you out for the gulls.”

Monkey stuck his tongue out at me, but then he turned and faced my sister.

“Sophie,” he said, his voice too deep for his tiny body. “Would you like to be a doctor, like your mother?”

Sophie’s tough. She didn’t throw Monkey off her, though she snatched her hand away.

“What?”

“I can teach you. The way I’m teaching Cesar to work his computer,” Monkey said. “I can teach you to help people, the way your mom used to. You want to learn?”

Sophie looked at the little animal in her lap, eyes wide, lips starting to move, then the balcony door scraped open. Mom, red eyed and bleary, grimaced out into the bright daylight.

“Who the hell you talking to out here?”

“Cesar’s monkey,” Sophie said.

Mom stared at Monkey. “Rats with thumbs. Carry disease y’know. Should. . .” Her voice trailed away and she stumbled away from the light, back inside. The sound of plastic bottles rattled through the door, her searching for another swallow.

Sophie shoved the door shut. “What is he, Cesar?”

“Magic,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t know. Little bastard won’t tell me.”

“I’m telling you what you need, Cesar.” Monkey’s tail curled loose around Sophie’s wrist. “So you and yours can leave this place.”

“So we can be safe?” Sophie asked.

Monkey stared at me with his dark eyes, not answering, so I did.

“Not safe, Sophie. Strong.”

Excerpted from
Constellation Prize:

Bogie 1’s leaving the system today. (Don’t start with the quibbles. She’s in the Kuiper belt, and that’s my finish line. Going as fast as she is, it’s not like she’s going to turn around.)