Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (73 page)

I’m so pissed at the malfunctioning visuals, I wish I could tear them out of my eyes. And then I’d
really
be blind, drifting and bleeding, but I’m suddenly so pissed it almost feels worth it.

What is it,CERA?

Tough to say. Density is estimated at 1 x 10
¹³
—but it’s only an estimate. Alpha, beta, gamma, and electromagnetic radiation are all minimal.

No heat or light to speak of. Not a star. Unless.

God.

Everything here is wild speculation. That I’m even
here
is wild speculation—we were pretty sure this would work, but we weren’t positive. Time, space, how exactly the mechanics of both would work when my little craft shoved them in a blender and hit
puree
—we didn’t know. It’s too much to call this an
experiment:
we were flailing around in the dark. I wasn’t afraid of that. But a lot can change in a few million years. If something went wrong. If I went too far. If I’m not where and when I should be.

That thing out there in the dark might be a hungry mouth, open and ready to swallow me.

Visuals on, I stare at black nothing. I
will
some photons to sneak out of that blackness and give me a clue. But none come. Or I can’t see them. The end is the same.

So here’s what I could do, I think, staring so hard my head starts to ache and the cocoon around me starts to feel like something designed to smother instead of something keeping me alive. I could just drift blind until someone finds me, if anyone does, if anyone’s there to do the finding. I have a week of air. I have enough water to keep me going almost that long, if the moisture reclamation sponges laced into the cocoon’s fabric hold out.

Or I could start being a little more goddamn proactive.

Launch the probe, CERA.

I have one. It was a kind of concession to research outside of the tunnel-vision focus on what we were really trying to do. In case I found anything interesting. Now it might tell me nothing useful. It might be able to tell me, in exquisitely measured detail, just how fucked I am.

But we have to know, don’t we? We always have to fucking know.

I feel the craft eject the probe. I imagine it shooting toward the thing spinning invisibly out there, black and potentially lethal. I don’t trust any of what CERA is telling me. I don’t trust my eyes. I haven’t in a long time.

They never showed me what was there until I didn’t want them to. And then it was all they would let me see.

I ran, Kendra. Okay? I admit it. You got me. I ran. I was always running. Maybe I saw something in you that I didn’t know how to deal with. Maybe it’s just who and what I am. I ran away from you and then after you were gone I ran away from everything.

But we were going to blast a hole through decades and pop out the other side. You weren’t just a little bit excited by that? You don’t think that was worth some sacrifices?

Was it? Was it worth you?

I hate questions without answers. I ran from them, too. Here’s the thing, Kendra—here’s my dirty little secret. I thought maybe, in the future, they’d have neatened everything up. Simplified things. The world would be a less messy place to be in. Everything would fit. Everything would make sense. And in that world, you would naturally come back to me, because
we
made sense.

I believed in something better. I did. Better… and
easy.

And now look.

Iron.

I wait for more. I wait a while. Time spins out—I wonder if I’m hallucinating its passing. The truth is, I’m sort of wondering if there is such a thing as time anymore.

CERA?

The composition of the object is pure iron. It’s very dense. It’s highly probable that it is the last remnant of a stellar object.

I wait again. There’s more silence. In that silence, I think I’m dreaming, and what I’m dreaming of is laying my cheek against something hard and cold in the darkness. Lying down on its surface and letting it pull me into itself. Because this—right here, in the ending-black, circling a ball of solid cold—this is always where I was headed.

We try to make things mean things. We can’t. They don’t.

CERA. Are there any records of any such objects on file?

Everything I know about it is only speculation, Vita.

Tell me.

She does. I stare into the darkness and I listen.

We have a lot of ideas about time, us temporally-bound creatures. I know them. I read all about them years ago in the kind of quantity that requires scientific notation. Some of it was research. Some of it was… well.
Passing the time.

Here’s one that I always liked, because it’s not about time, not really. It’s about
spacetime
, and it’s about probability and the shape of things. That every possible choice we could make has been made, somewhere, in some iteration of the universe. That bad decision you made that changed everything? Somewhere you didn’t make it. You took the other door and you got the lady and not the tiger.

Of course, that leaves an almost infinite number of versions of you that got the tiger instead. And you personally? You only get the one choice. That’s the rule.

The rule broke me. I wanted to break it. That’s why I climbed inside the cocoon. Somewhere there’s a me that came home when I said I would, said the right things, did the right things, and somewhere there’s a Kendra who didn’t drown in a country I still can’t even spell. Somewhere we’re together and we’re happy and we might even get to go on forever.

But I don’t get to make that choice, even if the rules don’t totally apply to me anymore. Even if I broke the one. I get the choice I made. And now I get the darkness.

How long?

CERA is silent for a moment—for her a moment is a decade and I wonder what she can possibly be doing that holds her back from response. Then she vibrates at me out of the center of my cortex.

I don’t understand your question, Vita.

Fuck.
How far did we go?

Another moment of silence. This time I can feel what it is: she’s actually thinking through it, reading entire books on the subject, consulting a hundred thousand databases’ worth of info. Getting all she can for me. But of course, when she speaks again I already know the answer.

The theoretical timeframe within which stellar objects could potentially decay into spheres of iron-56 is 10
¹⁵⁰⁰
years from our temporal point of departure.

One sentence. Very simple. I almost can’t believe it took her so long to come up with that.

There’s nothing,
I think. I feel the words behind my lips.
Nothing.
Not technically correct, but practically true, and the latter means more than the former most of the time. Like:
She left me. She’s gone.

I’m gone. I can’t get back. With no one, with nothing, no energy source for the jump, no hand to pull back the slingshot. I can’t move on pure iron. I’m here. Here is the only
when
I’ll ever be.

My cocoon closes tighter around me in response to the drop in my body’s temperature. I feel a flash of fear of smothering even though that couldn’t happen. But it will. It is. Air, water, food… Here I am in the dark, in my warm little center of the nothing that’s left. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing that I
can
or
should
do. In the most fundamental way possible, I am inconsequential, and so are all my stupid little choices. The ones I made and the ones I didn’t. The ladies and the tigers.

And somewhere in that darkness I realize that what I’m feeling is relief.

CERA,
I say, and really, the words are so much easier than I thought they would be.
Take us away.

I can almost sense CERA’s confusion, though I know that technically she can’t have any.
Please specify a destination, Vita.

Random.
My eyes are open, staring at a darkness without stars. Iron dark. All I want to do is sleep.
It doesn’t matter.

I’m dreaming with my eyes open. I don’t need to close them now if I want the dark; it’s all around me. It’s the night face of everything. CERA is quiet in the center of my head, the cocoon is warm around me, and I drift. I think about water and blood and countries the names of which I can’t spell. I think about light in the strands of Kendra’s hair. I think about choices, ladies, tigers.

I had to come billions of years to understand that it doesn’t matter. That it is what it is. That we had what we had and now it’s over. I shift my hands in the folds of the cocoon, it’s like I can reach into the dark and touch iron, close my fingers around it. Feel the coming cold. Sleep inside it. Dream.

About the Author

Sunny Moraine
is a humanoid creature of average height, luminosity, and inertial mass. They’re also a PhD student in sociology and a writer-like object who has published short stories in
Strange Horizons, Three-Lobed Burning Eye,
and
Shimmer,
among other places. Her first novel
Line & Orbit,
co-written with Lisa Soem, is forthcoming from Samhain Publishing.

Life After Quatermass: Hammer Films’ ’60s Science Fiction

Mark Cole

Hammer Films: The name conjures images of sinister images in garish color, of Frankenstein, Dracula, and a thousand other terrors of the night.

Like some monstrous creature in one of its own films, Hammer has returned from the dead. After a 43-year absence,
The Woman in Black
recently hit American theaters, with the promise of further films to come.

So far, however, Hammer has announced no plans to explore another important part of its legacy (although one unfamiliar to many of their fans): science fiction. Hammer’s SF films of the ’50s—inspired by the legendary Quatermass serials—were the company’s first venture into horror. Not only did their success encourage Hammer to make its first Gothics, but they played a pivotal role in the development of British SF cinema over the next decade.

While many critics have discussed the Quatermass films and their numerous copies, few have paid much attention to the SF films Hammer made in the decade that followed. They are a curious lot, ranging from true classics to classy exploitation films, from the deadly serious to the just plain goofy, from daring astronauts to topless cavegirls. They reflect the rapidly changing times and Hammer’s own struggles to stay afloat in an uncertain market. But no matter how dark or absurd they can be, they remain eminently watchable, thanks to the care and professionalism that Hammer brought to all its films.

According to Bill Warren’s massive
Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties,
it was the rise of Gothic horror that drove SF out of the theaters at the end of the ’50s. For Hammer, 1957 marked both the end of its initial burst of Quatermass films and the beginning of its horror cycle. This is no accident: Quatermass’ adventures featured strong doses of horror, something nearly unprecedented in SF film at the time they appeared on TV. It was Hammer’s desire to make horror films that led the company first to Quatermass, then to Gothics. These proved so successful that it would be six years before Hammer returned to SF, in a sadly neglected classic.

The Damned
(aka
These Are the Damned
in the U.S.) remains one of Hammer’s strangest and most elusive films. One look at the shocking images on its movie posters tells us that Hammer intended to cash in on the success of MGM’s
Village of the Damned.
However, while lethal to those around them, the film’s radioactive children are otherwise ordinary: They evoke not horror but pity.

Nor does
The Damned
look anything like our conception of an SF film. Set in the English seaside town of Weymouth, its stunning widescreen cinematography contrasts the sharp cliffs and rocky seashore with the crowded Victorian streets. In fact, the film takes its time reaching its first SF elements.

It starts like another sort of film altogether, introducing us to a gang of Teddy Boys led by the psychotic King (Oliver Reed) who uses his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field) to trap wealthy tourists. By 1961 many people had become frightened of the growing number of youth gangs and the increase in juvenile delinquency; at first glance,
The Damned
could be yet another serious drama about violent teens. (It is also one the few elements taken from the film’s source, H. L. Lawrence’s
Children of Light.
)

But the gang is not the only thing disturbing Weymouth. The army is there as well, and military helicopters buzz constantly over the peaceful town. On top of the cliffs is a high-security research facility run by a soft-spoken scientific bureaucrat (identified only by his first name, Bernard) played by Alexander Knox. As Joan attempts to escape her brother’s control with the help of the gang’s latest victim, retired American businessman, Simon Wells (MacDonald Carey), the two stumble on the underground complex hidden in the caves beneath.  There they find a handful of seemingly ordinary children—only they don’t feel the cave’s chill and are themselves cold to the touch.