A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Vonda laughed, and Pamela smiled for the first time since she’d removed the Equalizers.

  “But seriously,” Pamela went on, “I need to wrap up the trial period, and decide our policy on the goggles. I want to keep using them for interviews, but I don’t think we can make the entire company wear them all the time. That’s a step too far.”

  “The goal isn’t to make everyone in the world wear Equalizers,” Vonda said. “The goal is a world where Equalizers don’t exist, because there’s no need for them.”

  “Absolutely. Still, we should chip away at the toxic culture we’ve got. How about an annual awareness day, where everyone has to wear Equalizers for just one day? It’ll be educational, and a taste of what’s in store if there’s any more trouble. Anyone who crosses the line will be forced to wear the goggles for as long as it takes.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” said Vonda, “but remember what you said earlier? Let’s not talk about work on a Saturday night!”

  “Yes, you’re right,” said Pamela. “I’m sorry. And I appreciate your efforts. How about some old-school TV to chill out with?”

  She scanned the shelves of neatly filed DVDs and pulled out a box set of Six Kinds of Forever, the cheesy supernatural TV show they’d watched endlessly in college. “Mullets ahoy!” she exclaimed. “Being dead is no excuse for bad hair.”

  “Being dead is no excuse for wearing a tartan waistcoat,” Vonda said, running with the old catchphrase they’d riffed on countless times.

  Just listening to the show’s theme music cheered Pamela up. As the first episode unfolded, Vonda checked her messages. Pamela took out her own phone, but her inbox only had alerts from the dating app. Guys wanted to meet her. Tomorrow was Sunday, an empty day.

  Brooding, Pamela tapped the familiar icon. The usual procession of pictures appeared, starting with the most recent profiles. There were always new faces. What happened to the old faces? Did those guys ever settle down, or did they just flit from one website to another, one warm body to the next, all the way to old age and a lonely death?

  I’m thirty-seven. That’s not old. There’s no point worrying about a lonely death—I’m lonely right now. If I reply to any of these messages, I can hook up tomorrow. Fresh meat from the hunk mines!

  The prospect did not seem satisfying. It had not felt satisfying for some time. Vonda’s diagnosis was that, despite blaming the Equalizers, Pamela wanted to sleep around. Perhaps that had been true at first. When Jeremy left, Pamela was keen to reassert her desirability, and clutch at whatever scraps remained of her youth and beauty. Surfing the website, with all those available guys, had felt like being a child in a sweetshop. It’s amazing how quickly sweets can pall.

  Pamela scrolled through the menu until she found “HIDE YOUR PROFILE.” The screen asked, “ARE YOU SURE?”

  Yes.

  Meanwhile Vonda had been tapping away, accompanied by the soft beeps of messages sent and received. She said, “I heard from the guy you were supposed to meet tonight. He’s really sorry about canceling: something came up. But he can meet you next week if you like. Do you fancy it? You don’t have to wear the goggles—he’s quite good-looking!”

  “Thanks,” said Pamela, “but I’d better not see a new guy until I’ve given the last one a fair chance. I need to see beyond the skin . . . and hear beyond the dodgy accent.” She fired off a quick message. “HI, DO YOU STILL HAVE THAT LEPRECHAUN IN THE FRIDGE?”

  Soon a reply came. “AYE, TO BE SURE. ARE YOU FREE TOMORROW?”

  Pamela smiled. “YES, LET’S MEET UP AGAIN.” I’ve got to start doing that.

  “WHAT MAKES THE DESERT BEAUTIFUL”

  John P. Carr

  The sun was rising somewhere behind Yaran. Even here, in the shadow of his wrecked escape pod, the air was thickening with heat. The temperature would increase, and the shadow protecting him would shrink, as the sun crept higher. The heat would become more bearable when night fell again. But by then, if he was still propped here against the pod like so much broken equipment, he would be dead.

  He raised a hand with slow, painful deliberation, shielding his eyes against the glare of a flat lead-coloured sky. Emptiness stretched to the horizon. A range of ashen dunes with purple crests and deep blue shadows, rippling in the heat.

  Beyond the rolling patterns of the desert, a pink smear shimmered on the skyline. The ice on the top of Nebo mountain. And somewhere in that ice was Base. Usually a place he escaped as much as possible; now an oasis he needed to reach. But an oasis as distant as the forests back home.

  Home? Was Linvana still home?

  Sand, caught in his glove, dribbled through his fingers and glittered as the wind tore it away, just like . . . Like what? The plume of grey reminded him of something, but he couldn’t remember what. His mind was starting to fog.

  He let his hand fall, and his face twisted into a grimace as bone grated on broken bone. Without thinking, he pressed his hand to the blood-stained rip in the side of his overalls. That caused a yelp of pain.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Stupid, first, to neglect his pre-flight checks. “Don’t matter if your ass is on fire,” the old prospector told him during his orientation. “You still do your pre-flights before you take a float into the desert.” But with all five prospectors together at Base, and Admin too, there were too many eyes and voices. He’d rushed to get out on his own.

  Stupid to ignore the system warnings when his intakes started to clog. He assumed he had time to land at an outcrop and clean them, but then he smelled overheated metal and burning plastic.

  And stupid to panic at the sirens and flashing screens. He’d bailed out too soon, too low, and cannoned into the crest of a tall dune. He’d watched from his shattered pod, cursing and in pain, as the float curved toward the horizon and came down somewhere over the next dune with an impact so soft he barely heard it.

  The escape pod comp, before it sputtered and died, told him the float’s systems were fully functional apart from the flight drive. Which was great. Except it was maybe thirty minutes’ walk away now, and he had a broken leg, and broken ribs, and was bleeding into the sand beneath him. How would he explain all this to Admin?

  But first things first. Everything useful was in the float or had been junked when the escape pod came down hard. The pack he’d dragged out with him contained no meds, no shelter, no food. Some electronics: a couple of drives and the voice box. Could he cobble together a comms device? Except he had no power. And no time. Because, no water.

  The shadow was starting to retreat over his boots and, now that he’d noticed that, he felt the heat penetrating to his feet. He’d been here too long.

  Wait. The voice box. He’d been due to meet Pak this morning. He’d missed the rendezvous, so Pak would have come looking for him. And Pak was always eager to help. Eager to a fault.

  There!

  Down the slope, in line with his leg, a pattern in the sand. He had to squint to see it clearly, but it was a precise, geometric spiral that moved against the wind. Pak’s signal.

  Yaran tossed the voice box onto the dune, towards the pattern. The movement sent a sharp pain scything down his body.

  The sand sparkled as it heaped and flowed around the voice box. Then Pak spoke through it in the buzzing, humming, drone that always set Yaran’s teeth on edge.

  “You were not at the intersection expected. I needed to flow on many vectors to find you. Perhaps we did not share our intents well.”

  “Whatever. Listen—” Yaran began, but Pak’s drone continued.

  “I have found a new cluster of iron to interest you. Seven point five seconds negative vertical here. I will calculate a precise vector and direct you.”

  “Wait!”

  No acknowledgement. Yaran frowned: had Pak left? But the sand rippled and the voice box droned again. Was the voice more staccato? Hesitant?

  “I conclude you ask me to stay here with you. You do not often want this.”

  “Yeah, well.
No choice. I want you to . . . do something. Then we’ll get back to normal. You won’t have to talk to me anymore.”

  “I value to talk to you. Exchange with offworlders interests me.”

  Yaran drew as deep a breath as he could manage without pain.

  “Maybe later . . . I got separated from my float. The machine I—”

  “I understand ‘float’. The other offworlders talk to me of it.”

  “You understand ‘offworlders’ too, right? You understand we can’t . . . We need stuff to live in the desert. Water, things like that?”

  “I understand.”

  “All that stuff’s back in my float. So I . . . I don’t have it.” Yaran heard defeat in his voice.

  Another pause. Long enough for Yaran to notice the heat creeping over his ankles.

  “The others talk to me of a place where the offworlders gather on top of the rocks. Long horizontal from here and long positive vertical. Water is at the rocks. You should move to there.”

  Yaran gritted his teeth.

  “I can’t get to the float. Never mind back to Base.”

  “I will flow to the place on the rocks and talk of you to others there.”

  Yaran would have to endure being the centre of attention. He shuddered at a vision of faces gathered around him in the medical bay, sympathising and interested, with an excuse to ask him questions. The shudder sent a spasm of pain down his side and into his leg. It jerked, and kicked a swirl of prismatic sand out of the shadow and into the arid light.

  “Alright,” he said. “Do that.”

  “I calculate the movement will last three hundred thousand seconds.”

  Yaran did the arithmetic and felt a sick pressure in his diaphragm.

  “Perhaps more,” Pak droned through the voice box. “I flow with lower velocity in the rocks. Some rocks resist me. That is why I am here in the sand.”

  “Okay, that’s . . . Whatever.”

  Yaran tried to pull himself more upright against the escape pod, further into the shrinking shadow. The movement wrenched his broken leg, and he hissed through dry lips.

  “Pak,” he said. “There’s still water here, right? Deep under the desert. You could find it.”

  “I can find water. I will calculate a vector and direct you.”

  “No! I told you. My machines are damaged. I can’t dig. Can’t you bring the water up to me?”

  Sand rippled around the voice box, forming spirals, stars, circles. Like it did when Yaran asked where to scout next, and Pak calculated a rendezvous point.

  “Perhaps. I have not done this. I can flow negative vertical into wet sand. Perhaps I can move the sand and make holes. Water may move and make a cluster. I can flow again and make a new hole further positive vertical to you. When do you need water?”

  Yaran looked at the sun bleaching his boots and lower legs. The heat was running ahead of it to bite at the pain already there. Rusty stains were still spreading across his jacket and the sand beneath him. The wind scoured his mouth and throat.

  “Soon.”

  “Then this is not a solution.” The same toneless burr. “If I can do this I calculate the movement will last above a million seconds.”

  Yaran cursed under his breath. Aloud he said, “It’s not just my machines. I’m damaged too.”

  The desert seemed to lurch and tip him sideways. His eyes snapped open. No! He couldn’t afford to pass out. He had to explore options. But his eyes were heavy, and his mind was like mud at the edge of a river.

  “You’re the native. Any ideas?”

  Pak was silent, and the geometric patterns flowed around the voice box.

  Beyond it, Yaran watched the wind swirl a puff of grey sand across the dune, like the trickle that had fallen through his fingers. Hotter now. The shadows were smaller and paler, their shapes flickering in the heat haze. That one looked like the blurred silhouette of a figure standing on the slope. As if anybody else would be stupid enough to be alone in the desert.

  “You are not suited to here,” said Pak. “Query. Why did you move to here?”

  Yaran’s jaw tightened.

  “Not now . . .”

  “Did you move away from your people to find new experiences? Did you find that sand became rock that resisted you after you moved through it and you could not find the vector to go back?”

  “I said not now!” Yaran glared at the voice box. He shook his head and, after a few shallow breaths, he muttered, “I didn’t want to go back.”

  “Good,” whispered a voice. Not Pak’s. Yaran narrowed his eyes. That blurred silhouette, rippling on the edge of sight. Was that Kerfed on the slope, dressed incongruously in a raincoat? “Say nothing. Walk away.”

  “You told me you only wanted a face-to-face meeting,” said Yaran.

  “I do not understand,” hummed the voice box.

  Yaran blinked his vision clear. Not a figure at all: another dissipating cloud of sand. But . . .

  “I remember,” he said.

  Pak’s sand flowed around the voice box. “Query. What do you talk of?”

  “Been trying to remember something,” said Yaran, his gaze focusing beyond the desert. “The wind blowing sand out of my fingers . . . Was like rain blowing out of a leaky drain pipe . . .”

  Kerfed and he had been standing in a covered alleyway. Just two citizens sheltering from the torrential midday rain. People hurried along the boulevard sidewalks in plastic coats, hunched against the downpour. Towering buildings disappeared into low clouds and the sound of water hitting glass and steel drowned out the city noises.

  Yaran had been watching as rainwater guttered from a cracked drain pipe and the wind tore it into lacy patterns. Kerfed was peering out, his right hand buried in the pocket of his raincoat. Now, with his left, he waved Yaran to his side and nodded towards a man who had stopped by a car across the street. He raised his voice above the noise of the rain.

  “Is that Shayzikara? In the green coat. Be sure.”

  Yaran peered through the screen of raindrops.

  “That’s him.”

  Kerfed nodded. With a brief, grim smile he closed his eyes and threw his head back so that rain streamed across his face.

  “See you when I see you,” he said. With his free hand, he pulled his collar up, and cap down, and strode away.

  They’d told Yaran to walk away as soon as he identified Shayzikara. He didn’t. He stayed and watched through the wash of rain.

  “Query,” said Pak through the voice box.

  Yaran’s head snapped up and he blinked in the glare.

  “What?”

  His tongue grated in his mouth when he spoke, swollen and dry.

  “I interpret your form is a system of solid parts. The parts link together. You use force like my force to control the parts and the system. Am I correct?”

  “I . . . suppose so.”

  “I can move earth and sand when my force flows in them. I interpret that I can flow into your form and move your parts.”

  Yaran knew he should understand, but his thoughts were sluggish.

  “Perhaps my force can control your damage and add force to your movement. Perhaps together we can move your form to your float.”

  Now he understood.

  “No! Something else.”

  “You asked me to calculate solutions. The solutions are limited by what I can do and what you can do and time. I find one proposal. You need to choose it or not choose it.”

  Yaran’s skin crawled.

  But the shadow had shrunk back above his knees and the hot fabric of his overalls pressed against the twisted angles of his broken leg. He had once nudged against a steam pipe when he was a child, and this was the same fierce stroke of pain. But that pain had faded when he pulled away instinctively. He couldn’t pull away now. And he couldn’t spare the moisture that filled his eyes.

  “It sounds dangerous.”

  “I value to find new experience and exchange. I value to help you if you choose this. You need to trus
t.”

  It was just the drone of air passing through the electronics in the voice box, but again Yaran was sure he could hear a change. A lower tone, a slower pace.

  “You’d be in my nervous system. How far? My mind? What would you . . . hear?”

  “I cannot respond. I have not done this. I do not know your form before I flow into it. I calculate you will control but you need to allow help. Also you need to choose before we attempt. If we succeed I cannot communicate with you.”

  Kerfed’s indistinct shape rippled again on the slope below Pak’s voice box.

  “What are you going to reveal?” it whispered.

  “Shut up!” Yaran pointed an unsteady finger. “You lied to me. I watched you.”

  He’d seen Professor Shayzikara standing by his car, balancing a plastic wrapped screen on one knee as he fished in his pockets for a key card. Kerfed stepped up behind him and reached out as if to tap the Professor’s shoulder. Yaran thought he heard a flat pop, but he wasn’t sure. Shayzikara jerked forward against the car and slid out of sight. Kerfed bent over him and Yaran might have heard another pop. Kerfed walked away without looking back.

  People across the street looked around, sensing something wrong or noticing the pops, confused by the rain. A woman, coming from the law department steps as Shayzikara had done, reached the car and looked down. Even above the downpour, Yaran heard her thin, ragged screams.

  So they’d lied to him, to persuade him to help. It should have been a shock, but it wasn’t. There had been too much talk about violence being the only avenue left. Just meeting Shayzikara, or even threatening him, would have been a step backwards.

  But Yaran had to be sure. He crossed the road and pushed into the group that was gathering on the sidewalk.

  A man in clerical uniform knelt beside Shayzikara, bending over and whispering something so that Yaran couldn’t see the Professor’s face. The cleric was grasping one limp hand and the other had flopped onto the pavement. A trickle of blood trailed into the gutter, glistening red and impossibly intense for a few centimetres before it dulled and thinned in the rain.