A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Breelyn poured the old man a fourth straight gin.

  “Who’s on the other side?” I asked and turned the book over. On that side there was an illustration of a guy, at night, crouched down under a tree, holding a futuristic-looking rifle while overhead in the starry sky a spacecraft in a shape sort of like a telephone searched the ground in the distance with a beacon of green light. The title on this side was in block letters in the same sea green as that of the searchlight. It read Six against the Mind Barons by Tom Purdom. Breelyn picked the book up and turned it over to see Werber’s side again.

  “Purdom lives in Philly,” I said. “He’s probably here at the convention.”

  “That guy’s got a story in Asimov’s this month,” said Breelyn. She looked at the ceiling. “I think it’s called ‘Civilians.’ ”

  “You can’t mention this book to him. He’ll say nothing about it. In 1983, I ran into him at the Worldcon in Baltimore. He told me how important that confiscated work was to him. He rewrote it, taking all the space opera elements out and setting it on earth in the twenty-first century. I think ACE was gonna publish it as stand-alone, but Purdom was so set back by them initially pulling the title that he missed the deadline by three months and that was it. Having Mind Barons confiscated was a kick in the nuts. I didn’t have it in me to tell him the truth, about the Icarus and everything.”

  Breelyn put the book back on the bar and slid it toward me. I picked it up, took one more look at each side, and handed it toward Werber. I was amazed to see that the fourth gin was already gone. He waved his hands in front of him and said, “You keep it. I don’t want it anymore.”

  “Sure you do,” I said.

  He slurred his words. “Seriously, I’m through with it,” he said and belched. He smiled and put his head down on the bar. An instant later, he was out cold. Breelyn called the cab company. While we waited, she swept up and wiped down the bar. I sat there and finished my second forty. The taxi finally arrived and I helped her cart Werber to it. He’d roused a little by then and almost walked on his own. He shook our hands, and we poured him into the backseat of the cab. Breelyn told me that her father didn’t want her working in the bar by herself at night. The sun was starting to go down, and it’s not like there was a mob of customers, so she decided to close up. She went inside and turned the lights out. After closing the door behind her, she pulled the metal curtain across the front of the bar and padlocked it.

  She walked along with me back toward the convention.

  “That’s one buggin’ white man,” she said. “Like what’s a space diamond?”

  “Yeah, he’s a hundred percent sense of wonder, but what about the book?” I said.

  “That is weird.”

  We walked a block in silence, and at the next corner she had to turn left. I held Rocket Ship to Hell out to her and said, “Do you want it?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve got other destinations in mind.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. Then I told her, “I’ll look for your name in the magazines.”

  “I’ll look for yours,” she said. She flashed me a Spock and was off down the street.

  Before heading back to Jersey the next day, I went to the dealer’s room at the convention. The bookseller Joe Berlant had a long table stocked three rows deep with old paperbacks. When no one was looking, I took the book out of my back pocket, shoved it in between two others, and walked away. Now, a dozen years later, and well into the new century, I sit by the window and dream of that book when evening comes.

  2014

  AND WASH OUT BY TIDES OF WAR

  An Owomoyela

  I am sitting at the top of the spire of the Observance of the War, one of three memorials equidistant from the Colony Center. The soles of my runners’ grips are pressed against the spire’s composite, their traction engineered at a microscopic level. But I’m not going to push off. I’m 180 meters up, and while I could drop and catch the festoons—my gloves get as much traction as my grips—that’s not what I want. I want to freefall all 180 meters, and catch myself, and launch into a run.

  That’s crazy thinking. I’m good, but no human’s that good; I’m a freerunner, not a hhaellesh.

  I shift my center of gravity. The wind is still temperate up here, fluttering cool under my collar. It outlines the spot of heat where my pendant rests against my skin.

  The pendant is the size of my thumbnail, and always warmer than it should be. This has something to do with it reflecting the heat of my body back to me, so the pendant itself never heats up. It was built to do this because it’s no gem; its brilliant red comes from my mother’s cryopreserved blood.

  It was, until the Feast of the Return that morning, the only thing I’d known of her.

  The colony’s designed for freerunning. The cops all take classes in it. That’s what comes of a government that worships the hhaellesh, who can carve their own path through the three dimensions.

  I’m not a cop, either.

  I end up dropping, twisting so my fingers and toes find the carved laurels, and from there I make a second drop to the Observance’s dome. At my hip, my phone starts thumping like an artificial heartbeat. I pause with my fingertips on the gilt, and finally turn to brace my heels against the shingles and lean back into the curve. I clip the hands-free to my ear, and thumb the respond button. Then I just listen.

  After a moment of silence, a human voice says, “Aditi?”

  I let out a breath. “Michel,” I answer. He’s a friend.

  “Are you okay—?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Obviously a hhaellesh could get up to my perch here, and so could Michel—he’s from a family of cops, so he’s been playing games with gravity for longer than I have. But effective or not, there’s a reason I’m nearly two hundred meters up, and that reason has a lot to do with not wanting to talk about how okay I am.

  Michel digests that, then says “Okay. Did you hear the new Elías Perez episode?”

  My chest fills with a relief indistinguishable from love. I love Michel so much that it’s painful, sometimes, to know he’s not my brother. I wish the same blood flowed through both our bodies, and without thinking past that, my fingers go to the pendant at my throat. There, my voice catches.

  There are moments when I feel so ashamed.

  “I haven’t,” I say. “Put it on.”

  The hhaellesh stand at least six feet tall, and usually closer to seven or eight. Their skin is glossy black. Their digitigrade feet end in small, grasping pads; their hands end in two fingers and two opposing thumbs which are thin enough to fit into cracks and gaps and strong enough to pierce titanium composite and tear apart the alloys of landships. They are streamlined and swift, with aquiline profiles and a leaping, running gait like a cat or an impala. They can fall from high atmosphere and suffer no injury. They can jump sixteen meters in a bound. They are war machines and killing machines.

  They are also human sacrifices.

  I envy them.

  Gods, if there was anything in the universe Elías couldn’t handle, his writers haven’t thrown it at him yet. He would know how to tell his best friend about an enlistment option. He could figure out how to deal with a hhaellesh showing up at his door.

  Michel starts the playback, and I tweak the audio balance so I can hear Michel breathing while we both listen. The serials are propaganda and we know it, but they’re enjoyable propaganda, so that’s fine.

  [The esshesh gave us the hhaellesh and the hhaellesh handed us the war—but if we didn’t have the hhaellesh, we’d still have Elías Perez,] the canned narrator says, and I lean into the backbeat behind his words. [Welcome to the adventure.]

  Around me, the colony spreads out in its careful geometry. There’s nothing left to chance or whimsy, here, or adapted from the streets and carriageways built by another, more ancient, society. There’s no downtown you can look at and say, this predated cars and light rail. No sprawling tourist docks with names that hold onto history. This place
is older than I am, but not by much; it’s only about the age of my mother.

  That’s why we cling so much to ceremony, I think: it’s what we have in place of tradition. We make monuments to an ongoing war, and when the soldiers return home we have feasts, and we plan holidays to rename the Observances to the Remembrances. The war’s only just ended and in a month we’ll have three Remembrances of the War, in shiny white limestone and black edging in places of honor.

  I get it.

  Seriously, I do. When you don’t have history in the place you live, you have to make it up or go insane.

  Earlier in the day, my mother’d shown up to the crappy little allotment I cook and sleep in but don’t spend much time in. My allotment’s on the seventeenth floor of a housing unit, which makes for a perfect launch point, and doesn’t usually get me visitors on the balcony. I was on the mat in my room, with my mattress folded up into the wall, doing pushup jump squats. They weren’t helping. I’d split my lip just a bit earlier, and since I bite when I get restless, I had the taste of blood in my mouth.

  Then there she was, knocking at the lintel, and I split my lip open again.

  I did a thirty-second cooldown and made myself walk to the window. If it had been dark, if the light hadn’t been scattering off the white buildings and back down from the cyan sky, it might not have glinted on her skin. She might have just been a black, alien shape like a hole in the world.

  “I expected to see you at the Feast of the Return,” she said. “I registered my arrival.”

  “I was busy,” I lied.

  She regarded me, quietly. And although I didn’t want to, I invited her in.

  When I first met Michel, he was walking along the rails of the pedestrian bridge by the Second General Form school. I was in Second General Form mostly because my father had hired a tutor before we came to the colony; my education in Shivaji Administrative District hadn’t exactly been compatible with the colony’s educational tracks. I was new, and didn’t know any of my classmates. We knew each other’s names from the class introductions, so Michel didn’t bother to introduce himself.

  “Settle an argument,” he said. “I think Elías is in love with Seve, and Seve just thinks he’s ridiculous. My cousin thinks Seve loves Elías but doesn’t want to show it, and Elías is just friendly and chirpy to everyone, so he doesn’t even see anything weird about acting like that at Seve. You should tell her I’m right.”

  I shook my head. “Elías? Is that the government stuff? I don’t listen to that.”

  “Wha-a-at?” Michel asked, bobbing the a. “Come on, everyone listens to Elías!”

  “My dad says it’s just propaganda,” I said, and I remember that little preadolescent me felt damn proud of herself and all smart and grown-up to be slinging around words like propaganda. “They just make it so people will want to join the war.”

  “Well, duh,” Michel said. “Everybody knows that. But it’s cool! Come on, lemme tell you about this time that Elías got stuck on this planet; they were trying to make it into a colony, but there was a whole swarm of the enemy and his ship was broken and he couldn’t take off . . .”

  Elías always found a way through, and by the end of the day, I was listening to the show. I never helped Michel settle his argument, but I came to my own conclusions.

  Today’s episode opens with the soundscape that means Elías is on the bridge of the Command and Control station in the sector designated as the Front. Meaning he’s on the front lines. Last time that happened, he was in a story arc that had him working with the Coalition forces, which he hates to do; Elías isn’t really an official sort of guy.

  [“If our intelligence reports are correct,”] says the voice of Commodore Shah, [“we’re about to lose the war.”]

  The art of the gentle lead-in is verboten in Elías Perez.

  [“A larger enemy presence than any we’ve ever seen is massing at Huracán II. We believe they’ll use this staging ground to launch a major, unified offensive on the colonies.”]

  [“You want us to what?”] That’s Seve, the captain of Elias’s ship. She snickers. [“Take out a whole fleet of the bastids? Hah. No bones in that dog.”]

  “Oh, Seve,” Michel says. Seve’s got a stack of sayings that only make sense to her—and to Elías, nowadays, though they didn’t always. Elías and Seve have been partners since episode 3, where Elías stowed aboard Seve’s pirate ship and ended up saving it when it was infested by the enemy. Seve turned around and said, there, that paid Elías’s boarding fee; what was he going to pay for passage?

  I’m a fan of Elías and Seve. Love at first uncompromising deal. And she isn’t the kind to think the end of the war obligates her into anything.

  [“If their war force goes unopposed, the enemy will be able to sweep through our territories unopposed. The Coalition doesn’t have the fleet strength to stop them.”]

  There’s a subtle swell in the background music, a rumble of drums and solar radio output, and a thrill goes through me. The writers can play drama with our fear of the war: for most of us, it’s the fun kind of fear where something is technically possible but pretty damn unlikely, like an asteroid crashing into the colony. After we lost the Painter settlement, the war was always off somewhere out there; we sent out troops, we made our hhaellesh, but it’s not like we were really under threat of invasion. I don’t think our colony even had an invasion plan in place, beyond the esshesh defense emplacements. We all got a little afraid, but the fear was a what if, on an offchance, someday . . . and not a when, as it will, this happens to us.

  [“Okay,”] Elías says, always the good guy, always the hero. [“What’s our job? We can barely take one enemy ship in a firefight; a force that size is beyond us.”]

  Commodore Shah says nothing, and the delay is striking. The audio play doesn’t go for delays. There’s another rumble, and another sensation thrills up my spine, but it’s not the fun kind of thrill this time.

  “Oh, you’re not,” I whisper.

  [“As you know,”] Shah says, her voice clipped so regret doesn’t make it through. [“Huracán II suffers from a violent geology. Your ship is one of the few with both the range to reach the Huracán system and the maneuverability to penetrate the enemy’s lines and engage your jump engines within the planet’s red jump threshold.”]

  I hear Michel’s sucked-in breath, and I’m sitting dumb, myself.

  [“Blow out the planet and us with it,”] Seve says. [“Jump’ll turn the rock into a frag grenade, and the gravity turns my girl’s engines into a nova. That what you want from us, Shah?”]

  Shah’s always looked after her people. Elías and Seve—they’re not official, military types, but Shah looks after them as her own. Problem is, even Shah’s people come in second to the war.

  [“It’s not what I want,”] Shah says, and I want to slam my headset down. [“But I don’t see another option.”]

  “They’re doing a finale,” I say, my calves and fingers burning again to run. “The war is over, so they’re just going to finish Elías Perez.”

  “You left when I was three years old,” I’d told my mother as she crouched at the edge of the table, as I shuffled through my shelves for a decent tea. I had a couple spoonfuls left of loose-leaf colony Faisal, which I hear is a good substitute for an Earth Assam, which I will never in my life be able to afford unless it goes big and all the importers start shipping it in in bulk. But the urge to make a good impression got in a fistfight with the urge to be petty and spiteful, and I pulled out two bags of a generic colony black and plunked them into mugs.

  “I remember,” she said. “I braided your hair and you wore your favorite dress. It was the blue of cobalt glass.”

  Her voice was deep and flanged, and totally factual. All hhaellesh sound alike. At least, the ones on the war reports sounded the same as my mother.

  I have an allotment and not a flat because I have a work placement and not a career. I don’t care for any of the careers on offer. But the colony’s not so muc
h of a fool to let work potential go unexploited, unlike the governments of Earth which I’m just old enough to remember. I still have images of walking to the subway past the grimy homeless, with my father’s hand on the small of my back to rush me along.

  That’s what I remember of my childhood. My father’s protective hand, my father’s tutoring after school, my father’s anchor mustache with a bit more salt in its pepper every year, my father’s voice carefully explaining the war.

  “I don’t like dresses,” I told my mother, and set down the two mugs of tea. Her fingers clicked around the ceramic.

  The hhaellesh can eat and drink, but human scientists still don’t know how food passes through the suits. We do know that the suits filter and metabolize any toxins—people have tried to poison them before, with everything from arsenic and cyanide to things like strong sulphuric acid, and the hhaellesh just eat and drink it up and are polite enough not to mention it.

  I did not try to poison my mother.

  “You’ve grown,” she said. “Of course, I expected that.”

  “Yeah, kids grow up when you disappear on them.”

  She was quiet for a few seconds. “I did not expect your father to die.”

  I stared down into my slowly-darkening tea.

  “I received notice,” she said. “I had to make the decision whether or not to come home. The tide of the war hadn’t turned yet. I knew the colony would look after you.”

  I swirled the tea in my mug. Tendrils of relative darkness wavered out from the bag.

  “I was one of only eight hundred hhaellesh volunteers at that point,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” I finally interrupted. “Without the hhaellesh, we wouldn’t’ve won the war.”