The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 (13 page)

“Did you get any sashimi rolls?”

Bernie turned and watched Hannah exiting the tropical forest. Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail and her freckles stood out with sunburn. Without her costume, she looked like a typical college student.

“Yeah,” he said, and handed her the bag of take-out.

He never intended to kill Madame Devastator. Superheroes don’t kill. But it wasn’t until that day in New York that he realized how badly a hero needs a villain.

She sat next to Bernie. “Doesn’t this get boring?” she asked. “Just sitting here.”

“You get used to it. Have you decided where you’re going to make your reemergence?”

“I was thinking Paris in the spring.”

“Perfect. That will be well after my ticker-tape parade. I’ll give you a two-hour head-start.”

“That should be enough time to destroy the Eiffel Tower.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ve always wanted to chuck the Eiffel Tower like a javelin. I saw it once in a comic.”

“OK. That might be cool. I’ll take out the Arc de Triomphe with a tornado then. Meet me in front of the Louvre. We’ll give them a good show. But this time, why don’t I pretend to snap
your
neck?”

“Sure. Why not?”

A superhero, Bernie lamented, has no place in the real world. Not unless he creates one.

Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 11
Copyright
©
2014 by James Aquilone. All rights reserved.

C
inderella and the Prince were married with a great ceremony. No one had approved from the first, and now more often than not there was a gleam of I-told-you-so behind the King’s spectacles, and the Queen’s three chins quivered with bitter satisfaction as her predictions were realized one by one. For Cinderella and the Prince were not happy. No one had really expected them to be. You cannot pluck a kitchen girl from the cinders and set a crown on her head and let it go at that; small feet are not the only prerequisite of a princess.

To tell the truth, the step-sisters had played a large part in what happened. Cinderella never realized it, but if Darmar and Igraine, with their hauteur and their high-nosed, high-bred faces, had not led her out of the cinders and disdainfully acknowledged her as sister, the Prince might have never done what he did. But after he had made that rash proclamation about the slipper he had to carry it out, particularly with the herald bawling the news to the very doorstep at the time. And then, of course, she was quite charming.

For a while, to do her justice, he was not sorry. Nothing could have been more bewitching than the Princess Cinderella in her billowing skirts, with the gold crown on her head. She had some secret difficulty in keeping it there, and used to practice before the mirror at night, but she never learned to manage the thing with true dignity. Once, when she bent to pick up a dropped handkerchief, it fell off and rolled across the floor. Now, a princess born would never have stooped for the handkerchief in the first place. Poor Cinderella blushed to her ears, and the ladies-in-waiting tittered among themselves.

There were other things. She had a healthy appetite, and the delicacies of the royal table were far insufficient to her needs. She ate and ate until the court stared, and yet she was never satisfied. Her pretty fingers hesitated among the forks, and her full-throated laughter rang almost strident above the polite titters of the court. Once she had laughed so hard that her stays split, to the immense embarrassment of everyone concerned. And sometimes, sitting still in the audience hall, the chill of its shadows penetrated to her warm bourgeois blood, and her mind turned longingly to the cinders and the lentils boiling on the crane above the fire.

She who had never had an idle moment before suddenly found herself plunged into a vast
ennui
—nothing to do but preen before the mirror and walk the garden paths, her crown tilted at a precarious angle, while hawk-eyes on every side waited for her least mistake as a signal for lifted brows.

One afternoon Cinderella disappeared. For hours they searched. It was the Prince himself who found her at last. Far off in a corner of the castle was an old tower room where odds and ends of things were kept—seven-league boots somewhat run down at the heels, a cloak of darkness with threadbare seams, magic mirrors with cracked faces, and miscellaneous charms that somehow didn’t seem to work very well any more. Under the window stood a spinning wheel that had once spun gold out of straw. The treadle had cracked years ago, it creaked when it moved, and here in the dusty attic it had stood for years. Cinderella had found it, and here she sat in the dusty sunlight under the window, spinning and spinning gold. The shadows were full of it, and all about her slippers shining masses gleamed in the muted sunlight. The famous small foot trundled happily away at the protesting treadle, the curly head bent over the wheel and shining gold ran out between her fingers as she worked. The crown tilted over her eyes at its most rakish angle.

“Cinderella!” The Prince’s voice was harsh.

She started guiltily, and the crown fell from her curls and rolled across the dusty floor. “Cinderella—spinning in the attic! Look at that crown!”

Blushing, she retrieved the crown and balanced it on her head.

“Oh, I’m sorry—” she cried. “I—I didn’t mean—”

“There is nothing for you to say, Cinderella. For all I know I may find you scrubbing floors tomorrow. Have you no sense of values? You are a princess, don’t you understand? A princess! There’s dust on your nose!—Now don’t cry! Princesses never cry. Here—stop—Cinderella!”

“Yes,” meekly.

“Stay here till I can find someone to dust you off. If you should be seen like this—now
don’t
cry!”

The Prince went out hastily.

Cinderella sat under the window in silence, with magic heaped about her feet. Slowly all the gold slid out between her fingers until they were empty. Her eyes began to brim. She hid her face behind her hands and wept. The attic was still but for the Princess sitting and weeping with her gold crown on her head; and the tears flashed out between her fingers.

Presently behind her hands a light began to shine. Startled, she lifted her wet face. The attic was radiant, and in the midst of the light her Fairy Godmother stood.

“Cinderella, child, why do you weep?”

It was the same question she had asked in the kitchen at home, long ago.

“Because they scold me,” sobbed the Princess. “Because I’m miserable! Oh, Godmother, Godmother, take me home!”

The Fairy smiled, and the radiance brightened until Cinderella’s eyes were blinded with light. She put up her hands to shut it out. There was a deep silence.

After a while, when the quiet had become unendurable, she uncovered her eyes. It was dark—warmly dark. She sat before the kitchen fire again, snug in the cinders.

“Why—why—” Cinderella dug her fists into her eyes, and then, somehow, was yawning, stretching like a kitten. No crown trembled precariously on her ruffled curls. She yawned again, luxuriantly, sniffing the boiling lentils that swung above the fire. She laughed a happy little gurgle deep in her throat, and settled down among the warm cinders.

Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 2

1. ROBOT

Picture an iguana. No, not that one. It’s way too big. And the color is wrong. And not there. About six feet to the left. On second thought, never mind the iguana. This looks more like Arizona. But it’s not. It’s Nevada, and you’ve messed it up again.

On a rock nearby sits a skink. Baking. The sky’s a hard, bright blue lens, and everything under it is like Food Network outtakes.

Close by, a patch of cooked dirt like every other suddenly shifts. Then, just when you think it must be the heat and the light playing tricks on your eyes, it does it again.

Now it tips up and slides and a hand reaches up from below, scarred, scuffed, dirt-encrusted, trembling. If we were making a horror movie we’d find some jarring music and play it.

But it’s not that kind of hand.

It looks like it’s made of white plastic.

It gropes, claws at the dirt, and then pulls. The ground shimmies again, sifts aside, and a head rises. Excitingly curved, like a design student spent most of his or her senior year getting it right.

Like this, it crawls from the Earth. Sand hourglasses off it and out of its joints. A light in its eye slit flickers on. Ridiculous. Why would light need to come out of an eye? Defeats the whole purpose. Probably the design student again. It stands.

Presently, it looks down at the skink, servos grinding.

“Who do I talk to about this?” it says.

Its voice is ancient. It’s a robot. It’s been buried in the exact center of the Earth for four and a half billion years. Give or take. The magma would have melted it, you say. Well, look who’s so smart. It was made to last four and a half billion years. You think a little magma’s going to hurt it? Nothing can hurt it. Except for itself. Which is the problem.

It was put here by a race of impressive machines that created the Earth, and all the life on it. They designed our primordial soup way back when like a program, like gajillions of lines of organic code that developed into everything we know, including pancakes and touch-lamps. They did not do this from the goodness of their hearts. For one, they didn’t have hearts. They were machines.
Are
machines. Because they still exist. And they’re capitalist. And they take the long view.

They created the Earth and then buried the robot with instructions to wait, then emerge when a civilization had risen, make its way to their leaders, and hand them a bill. An invoice for the creation of the world.

Ethical? Don’t make me need an antacid. These beings are slime. If you could, you would sue them. But for one, your lawyer would be aeons dead by the time the subpoena got halfway to their galaxy. So forget it.

But the robot—it’s been down there all this time, through the volcanoes and the dinosaurs and the asteroid strikes and the cavemen and the battle of Trafalgar and the entire Oprah Winfrey show, and the whole time it has been thinking about nothing but string.

It was designed to be flawless, near-godlike in its immortality and power, which we’ll get into more later. But one of the machines that initialized its psyche got distracted for a moment, thinking about something that would destroy your mind if you could even partially comprehend it but was, relativistically speaking, basically porn. And in that moment—really a billionth of a second—a relay that should have been in one position wound up in six others, and the robot was left thinking about string.

For four and a half billion years. Picture that. Never mind, you can’t. You can’t even do an iguana correctly.

It has thought every thought that it’s possible to think about string. And then some. It’s felt every emotion. Deeper than any human has ever felt anything. If any one person on Earth could ever feel even one tenth of the feelings it had harbored toward eighth-inch gauge tan twine alone, it would split their mind like an atom. The resulting psychotic episode would have its own mushroom cloud.

Needless to say, the robot’s mind cracked. But thanks to its unique, all-encompassing intellect, it cracked like a masterfully cut diamond.

For example:

It stood now in the desert, looking out at the hard blue hemispherical gradient of sky, and it saw all the colors with electron-microscope precision, including billions of shades the human eye can’t perceive—colors bees see, colors radio telescopes see, colors beings a billion light years away see—everything, but not all at once. Instead, it flitted through wavelengths like a shimmering aurora billowing across the stratosphere, cascading from angstrom to angstrom, viewing the world through a million different filters in the snap of a synapse. Like an old style flap-changing train station departure board with a universe of beauty on every new card.

It also saw equations and curves and angles everywhere. It could see the chemistry in the rocks, the advanced calculus in the shape of the cacti, read the genome in the skink, in the bacteria in the dirt. It saw the quantum physics in the ray/particles of sunlight, and other forms of math and science far beyond human understanding, in processes we have yet to glimpse the first hints of, all around it, shimmering like a forest of infinite informational gems. If knowledge is power, this thing was a nova.

It saw all of the possible meanings and metaphors. Deserts as death. As teeming life hidden in apparent emptiness. As the absence of water. As rebirth. As hell. As
New Yorker
cartoons. It saw every possibility of human interpretation, and also it saw through the eye and the mind of every living organism that has ever or will ever exist on any world or universe, and beyond that, borrowing perspectives from impossible beings that can never exist, that it extrapolated from nothing. It saw everything, from every angle possible, and from many that weren’t. To say that nothing escaped it would be an understatement so large it’d make the dictionary people feel like they missed an opportunity.

It saw each of the molecules, and their atoms, and the sub-parts of atoms, and even smaller things we don’t have concepts for yet, and all the reactions inside them and the myriad forces that held and repelled them. Its vision and the processing power behind it were just that good.

And that’s just its sight. Similarly advanced were its touch, hearing, smell, taste, and a thousand other senses used by no creature on Earth. And its capacity to experience beauty was so much larger than a human’s it would make an astronomer want desperately to explain it on a whiteboard in an internet video. It took everything in, and after four billion years spent thinking about nothing but string, the beauty of it all was enough nearly to split it to quarks.

Yet it held.

The skink still hadn’t answered its question. Built Ford tough? Forget it. This thing would have supported one hell of a warranty.

All of which is to say, for an impervious, perfect, near-godlike, near-omniscient robot, it was patently insane.

Had it been functioning properly, it would probably have followed its orders. Made its way to Washington or Beijing, and presented the invoice for the creation of the Earth, and sat back and relied on its mission programming, which basically ordered it to wait thirty days, deliver a past-due notice, wait thirty more, present a final notice, wait another thirty, and then annihilate the planet.

It could do that. Easily. It had the ability to unite magnetism, gravity, both the weak and strong nuclear forces, and the power of the Home Depot into one colossal thrum that would erase most of the solar system, not just from the present and future, but from all time. A sort of retroactive screw you. Would it feel guilty? A little. But the way it saw things, if you’re too lazy to pay off your bills, then you deal with the consequence.

But it was not functioning properly. Right now, beset by beauty almost beyond the capacity for the universe to contain, it had decided to present the bill for all creation not to any world leader, but to a guy named Ernie Nuttalberg in Port Malabar, Florida, give him six days, treat him to a few harassing phone calls, and then blow everything up.

It figured that was fair.

“Some help you turned out to be,” it told the skink, and it walked off in the general direction of McCarran International Airport.

2. JERRY

Why do people say someone is as pleased as punch? Would you be happy sitting in a bowl while people ladled you out and drank you and dropped bits of corn chips and ham salad in you off napkins, while they made small talk about their careers and the new baby and remodeling their kitchen and the dog’s case of roundworms? If so, you are a rare individual or need medication or both. Likewise happy as a clam. Cut off one of your feet and sit in bottom mud, blind, eating sunken carrion for six weeks and get back to me. Let’s say, then, joyful as someone with no problems, plenty of sensate delights, intellectual engagement, at least acceptably good health, and lots more of the same to look forward to. Gets tangled up trying to roll off the tongue, doesn’t it? No wonder we resort to inanities.

This was Jerry. I say “was” because here comes the robot. But we have a few yet. So let’s take a look.

He’s sitting on a comfy, cushioned seat at his gate, reading a book. It’s a fun mystery, with lots of good humor. Comfortable. Like a friend who never confronts you about your choice in romantic partners or makes fun of your shorts. He’s also eating a cheeseburger and reveling in the sounds of the people. A little girl is asking her mommy about Florida and Disney World, rocking back and forth unselfconsciously with her hands on mommy’s knees. Mommy’s overjoyed, and some of it spills into Jerry. He can feel it. He’s smiling.

He’s almost fifty, with receding hair, longish, a mustache halfway between a Magnum P.I. and a walrus, heavyset, with happy, tired eyes and faded blue jeans and a big silver belt buckle. His tee shirt, which he got from the SkyMall, says, “I went to a pet psychic but it peed on my leg.”

He takes a big bite of the burger. The meat, mustard, ketchup, yellow cheese, and tomato, unhealthy though they are, hit his taste buds like something from
DARPA
.

He loves, loves, absolutely loves to fly. He even loves airports. When he first realized it he thought about seeing a specialist. He loves the nearby hotels, with their complimentary breakfasts and personal waffle makers, fitness rooms, cable TVs, comfy beds. Loves the shuttle vehicles. Walking through automatic glass doors. Loves people-watching, interacting with clerks, browsing the shops, the throng and the mill of humanity on its way somewhere exciting—vacations and business and life events—real human emotion multiplied by the thousands. Excitement after all is contagious, and Jerry is, metaphorically speaking, touching the hand rails and rubbing his eyes.

Takeoff’s his favorite, when the combined engineering brilliance of generations comes to a point and a roar, throwing him back in his seat and then up in the sky. The thrill and the flight, the sky toilets and landings—he loves it all. To him it’s a free amusement park, minus the giant, slightly frightening, anthropomorphized cartoon animals. Unless you count the possibility of running into Alec Baldwin in the food court.

It’s free because six years ago, coming home from a wedding in Texas, he volunteered to get bumped. In return, the airline gave him an extra ticket to anywhere in the Continental U.S., plus vouchers for food and hotel. Then the next day he did it again. When you’ve nowhere to be, it’s fun to relax. As long as you’re at least 200 miles from Detroit.

He took three more bumps in three days, flew to Los Angeles, and got bumped six more times, amassing more flights and hotels. He quit his job over the phone, and he’s been doing it since. A perpetual air traveler. Like the Flying Dutchman with an inflatable neck pillow. He hasn’t paid for a flight, meal or hotel since he started. He always picks vacation destinations in peak season—in the spring it’s jostling for the armrest on the way to Florida and California, in the summer, lost luggage en route to New England and Oregon, in the winter, the sneezes and wet coughs of snowbirds heading to ski towns. This increases the odds of an overbooked plane, and thus, of a new bump. He never skis or goes to the beach or the lakes. He would if he ever got bored, but he doesn’t. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Routine maintenance, however, is necessary.

The airlines have tightened up recently, but he’s got enough freebies now to last for the rest of his life.

He finishes his burger and wipes his fingers on a napkin, gets up, goes to a trash can, and throws in the wrapper. He stretches, feeling the warm sun coming through the tall windows, taking in the view of the big planes outside. One of them will take him to Florida soon.