Escape Velocity: The Anthology

by Unknown

“You wouldn’t believe how not from around here I am,” said Jutzi, with just a hint of panic. “Where I come from, we smoke tobacco in a pipe made of wood.”

  “Wood? You don’t say? We have plastic ones nowadays.”

  Jutzi took out his notepad and wrote plaztik.

  “Here, let me light you up.”

  Jutzi jumped back in alarm as the man held up a metal thingamadoodle that produced a flame without matches.

  “It’s all right, it’s just a lighter. Don’t you have those either?”

  Jutzi shook his head, and his moustache started to slip.

  “Say, pardon me for askin’, but is your moustache upside down?”

  “It is?” Jutzi turned away and adjusted it. Fancy wearing it the wrong way up all this time, he thought.

  “Is that better?”

  “Yeah, swell, just swell. What’s the matter, the cars bother you?”

  “Cars?”

  “You jump every time one goes by.”

  The horseless carriages. ‘Karz’ went into the notepad.

  “Tell you what. I’m just about to go on my dinner break. Why not tag along? A fella like you, new in town, never even seen a car before? I bet you’ll get a real kick out of the Automat.”

  Jutzi nodded, if only to get away from the horrible karz.

  “Er, what about my... stuff.”

  “That junk over there? Heck, no self-respecting New York crook would steal that stuff. It ought to be safe where it is until we get back. I’m taking my smokes though. It’d be like leaving gold behind.”

  The Automat, it turned out, was right next door. It was a very fancy, shiny building made of metal and glass. There were lots of rounded corners and bold stripes, and above it was an illuminated sign. “Pretty neat, huh? It even has go-faster stripes.”

  Jutzi wasn’t sure how a building was meant to go anywhere, let alone get there faster, but found the concept worthy of writing down. The interior resembled a cross between a church and a dining room; there were tables and seats to accommodate many.

  “Name’s Frank, by the way,” said Frank.

  “Jutzi Coblentz.”

  Frank gave him a funny look.

  “You don’t say. Call you Yutz, then, shall I?”

  “Eight to the power of ten.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Frank led him to the far wall, which was made up of lots of little windows with buttons beside them. Behind the windows were all kinds of prepared meals, packages, and even cigarettes. “Here we are...anything you could want at the touch of a button. Steak and mashed potaters? No problem. You just put the money in the slot, like so, press the button, and... bingo!”

  Jutzi watched intently. A buzzer sounded, and Frank lifted the window and took the meal from the cupboard. A moment later, another identical meal appeared in its place from an inner compartment.

  “You mean... the food comes out of the—”

  “Out of the machine, yes.”

  “Machine...” Jutzi wrote the word in block letters. It was so much more dignified than ‘whatsathinger.’ “This is amazing... food that comes out of machines! Does no-one get their food from the land anymore?”

  “Well,” said Frank, taking a seat. “That’s probably where it comes from originally. I mean, they told us that in school. I’ve never actually seen a farm myself though...”

  “I come from a farm!” said Jutzi excitedly.

  “I can believe that, Yutz. Say... I think someone’s out there messin’ with your fork.”

  Jutzi left the Automat so fast he almost left his moustache behind. He reached his time machine to find two men, who’d arrived in a cart, investigating it. They turned when they heard him exclaim, “Cosine x squared!”

  “Jutzi?” said one.

  Jutzi removed his moustache at once. It was his Uncle Otto and one of his cousins.

  “What? How? Er?”

  “What are you doing here? I thought you didn’t like to stray from home.”

  “I travelled in time!” said Jutzi. “But I ended up in the future instead of the past. How did you get here?”

  “We took the road, same as we always do when it’s time to come in for supplies.”

  “You mean... this isn’t the future? My time machine didn’t work?”

  “It’s still nineteen-fifty, you daft sod, and if by ‘time machine’ you mean ‘bucket of cheese with a pitchfork sticking out of it,’ then no, I don’t suppose it did.”

  Jutzi was slightly crestfallen, but he’d learned so much as a result of his experiment that the particulars scarcely mattered.

  “I guess a ‘town machine’ isn’t a bad second...”

  “How did you get here, anyway?” said Otto.

  “By, er, karz,” said Jutzi, referring to his notepad.

  “Oh yes? You’re lucky you’re so dim-witted or I’d tell your father you were riding in one of those contraptions. Go on then, get on up and we’ll take you home.”

  Jutzi climbed into the cart, already thinking of ways to make it go faster by the application of stripes. Yes, his great grandparents would be proud.

  Relativity

  Gareth D. Jones

  Dominique, she was called, a fast cruiser bound for numerous ports. In typically secretive space service style Leo had been given no details about his shipboard assignment. He reported to dock sixteen and stumbled as the smart, grey-clad sentry welcome him aboard. A barely acceptable salute completed his less-than-impressive arrival. He recovered his composure in time for the gruff-looking Lieutenant Barrington to take him in tow and give him a whirlwind tour of the ship. Dominique was lumpy, grey and ugly on the outside, but inside she was a thing of functional beauty - every console had purpose and every bulkhead had function. Leo quickly realised his initial impression of Barrington too had been superficial. The lieutenant might be gruff on the outside, but he was proud of his ship, kind to the nervous Middie and seemed to be on friendly or even jovial terms with the whole crew. It was almost enough to alleviate Leo’s home-sickness.

  Now that he was part of the space service, Midshipman Leo Paterson had cast off all ties with his family. He would be travelling the stars and didn’t expect to return home for years, if ever. Dad was still working a desk somewhere, the same dull job he had occupied for Leo’s whole life. Mum was involved with her therapy clients, always full of inane stories of what they got up to. With his sister gone they were all he had left, and now he had left them behind.

  He didn’t remember much about his sister. He had only been seven when she had gone away. He recalled images of a big, dark haired girl, gangly and awkward. She was always loud and often yelled at him and his parents. He could never understand what she said; it was just noise. He remembered her face though, her softly curved chin, rosebud lips, broad features that made her look wise. Her eyes were a brilliant green, like emeralds that had caught the light, and she would stare with such intensity that he was sure there was something special there, just beyond his vision.

  She especially loved looking up into the night sky; both of them did. Dad would take the two of them out into the garden on a clear night and point at the moon and find constellations for them to look at – Draco, Orion, the Plough. She was always calm, looking at the stars. Leo was fascinated and wanted to go and see the stars close up one day.

  Other times she would fly into a rage and attack him - if he took something she wanted or got in the way of something she was staring at. Mostly mum or dad was there to hold her back, and then she would attack them instead, beating her fists against them and kicking her heels with all her might. It was only years later that he realised there had been something wrong with her. She was five years older than him and he learned later that he had been an attempt at salvation, another chance to have a normal child.

  He thought of her occasionally, but not often, as he grew up. Her absence was a source of relief rather than a source of puzzlement. His parents were quiet on the subject, saying only that the authori
ties had taken her away to take care of her. He wondered if they felt the same way about him, now he had gone to work for the authorities.

  Leo was assigned to navigation feeding in data and monitor system functions. Somewhere, protected in the heart of the ship, sat the real Navigator, wired straight in to the navigation systems, guiding them safely on their way. The shuttle pilots that operated between Earth and the orbital stations worked on the same principal, controlling their craft by thought. They jacked themselves in and, for the duration of the flight, the cockpit, their flight crew, everything inside the ship was gone from their mind as they thought their way to their destination. It was something Leo wanted a chance to try one day – the freedom to switch off from the world and feel the glories of space; at least, that was how one of his instructors had described it.

  With barely any time to himself, and hardly an idle moment for gossip or chatter, Leo slowly immersed himself in the operations of the ship. He met the Captain on one occasion, during a routine departmental inspection. She was a striking woman with ebony skin and shaven head. They stood to attention. It felt like the first time in a fortnight that he had stopped working. He saluted her as she approached, but didn’t get to speak. She looked over the area with her intense gaze and then moved on without acknowledging Leo’s existence.

  “You’ll get there,” said Barrington, smiling at Leo’s crestfallen face.

  “When?”

  “Give it time, lad.” They turned back to their work as the inspection party disappeared into the distance, the smell of cleaning fluid and concentration filling the air. Leo was determined to prove his worth to the lofty figure.

  Three weeks out, Leo was woken early by a Barrington who looked nervous for the first time.

  “Exec wants you,” he said brusquely.

  Leo felt his chest go tight. “What for?” He leaped from his bunk and swiftly pulled on his shipsuit.

  “He’s the exec. You don’t ask questions.”

  Leo followed Barrington swiftly to the navigation section in the heart of the ship. The lean exec arrived a moment later, dressed in an immaculate grey shipsuit that made Leo feel scruffy.

  “This way,” were the exec’s only words. He led the way along a corridor that had been out of bounds until that moment, feet thudding dully on the floorplates. “Absolute silence when we enter.”

  Leo followed the exec into the navigation chamber, a ritual for all new officers that would finally take him to the heart of the ship. He discovered the details afterward, after time to absorb what he had seen. The Navigators were like the shuttle pilots, but this job was far more intense. There was no room for any extraneous thoughts or distractions. Not ever.

  In a coffin-like couch at the centre of the chamber lay the navigator. The body shrivelled, atrophied, unrecognisable, kept functional by a profusion of wires and tubes that Leo cold not bring himself to look at. But the face was unforgettable; sunken, vacant, but still familiar – the broad features, the rosebud lips, the softly curving chin, her dark hair cropped close. In life, a waste, her brain unable to cope with living. Wiped clean, a blank canvas to process the intricacies of space travel.

  Her brilliant emerald eyes stared up at the ceiling, unfocused, unaware of anything within the room. What was her name? His mind numb, he could not remember. Now she was Dominique. Now she saw the stars.

  Oveio

  Kevin Gordon

  Dammit, when are you gonna get it done? I mean, you lay around as soon as you damned well please to get home, putting up those bricks you call feet, smokin’ on a rolled turd, when I’ve actually been doing somethin’, pushin’ somethin’, makin’ somethin’! Are you listening to me, ya damned piece of—

  He moaned, as his own words rumbled through his memories.

  This quarter, last quarter, what quarter have you even come close to any kind of projection you’ve put in writing? I’ve got dozens of status reports from the people that actually seem to work here, and they all can make some progress, can get something real and tangible and, most of all, profitable done! How long are you going to lie on your ass and keep soaking up the allotment I waste on you?

  Answer me!

  His voice hammered with a big bass thud in his brain. He glanced down at the still-warm emdec lying on the ground, reeking of sulfur, bathed in blood.

  The world was full of promise. The grass was new, the trees only recently born; the air itself conjured out of the death of what was before. The old ones still living, who had experienced the world that was, that tired, foul, polluted waste of a world crammed with a trillion souls, spoke of how delicious it was just to breathe. They waxed poetic about the rays of the morning sun, sung odes to the dew of night, and wrote verse after verse about the taste of a fresh root, washed down with an untainted glass of pure water. There was one of them at his work, and after hearing him talk, he felt bad just breathing, like he was doing it all wrong.

  “Hey Eldis,” waved Oveio, the boss’ new assistant. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

  His reply was short, swift, and mercilessly to the point. “Nope.”

  Oveio hovered over his station, in all her despicable perfection. Bathed in what must have been the combined joy of a million saints, she glowed with purity and love, from the silken locks that framed her sublime bronze face, to the mathematically elegant curves that defined her lithe, young body.

  A part of him suddenly wanted to ride her like a cheap carnival whore. Another part of him wanted to lay prostrate before her in worship, forever adoring a purity he could never possess. However, she was as common as a blade of grass, for many others in this new world echoed her perfection and precision. Eldis felt like vermin in paradise, tolerated, but never enjoyed.

  She pressed on, undeterred by his misery. “So . . . you’ve almost finished this cycle’s plotting?”

  He was late – again – because he couldn’t seem to focus. He had started having dreams a few weeks before, intense dreams whose content he couldn’t really remember, save for a lone image or two that would hang over his mind like a storm cloud threatening lightning.

  Eldis cued up a report of his progress, squinting, moving his gray hair aside to press his head close to the screen to make sure he hit the right commands. “Yeah, I’ve got all the gridwork established for Unia. The orbital emdecs can be configured to fire, once the other two projects have completed.”

  Oveio leaned over and waved a TMSD over his station, downloading his work. Her body was close, and intoxicating. “They were done a few days ago. We’ve just been waiting for you.”

  Eldis flopped back in his chair. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Didn’t want to bother you. After all, so much is going right, so much is being accomplished!” Her voice was full of the light of the sun; weightless, yet nourishing to the soul. “This is the dawn of all that will be, a reset of anything and everything that went wrong in the past. In a few months, the new city of Unia shall rise from nothingness, and join her brothers and sisters in our new utopia.” She grasped the back of Eldis’ chair, squeezing it once as if she were comforting him. “I know you’re a child of the Envoys. There are just some things you’ll never do as fast as we will.”

  We. It was a disgusting word he now loathed. We will get it done. We are making it happen. We are building it, we are shaping it, we will inherit it! ‘We’ was a word now owned by the perfect children of Novan, and Eldis, and the few who remained like him, had lost claim to its usage.

  She walked away, and something about the movement of her crisp, pressed pants made him remember a fragment of his dream. A dream that he knew foretold the day’s events, but that he never could quite remember enough to make any sense.

  It’s almost like I’m just supposed to know that I’ll keep on living.

  For ten weeks he trained in the gym of his building, running ten miles each morning before work, grunting and lifting weights for two hours afterward. The first five days were murder—his body was well past its prime, a
nd every time he thought of Oveio, he wanted to lie down and sleep. Through sheer will, he conquered his aging body and pressed forward.

  His wife yelled at him more frequently, cursing him, and calling him an old fool. He paid no attention. For the first time since Novan was resurrected, he felt as if he belonged again. He could sit in the company of others and take solace in their glances, in their words, in their actions. They were knit so tightly, that even their thoughts became known to one another. He even was one of the select few allowed to attend the meetings, deciding on whom they would recruit, whom they would avoid, and what lay in their own future.

  Eldis practiced with a hand-held emdec, the same weapon his father had used during the war. Even though his vision was getting worse, and he had to take increasingly powerful corrective injections, he was satisfied with his progress. He loved how cool and slick the gun felt in his hands, and took pleasure in the destructive power of its blast as it ripped mercilessly through the concrete targets. The sulfur smell was irritating at first, but he came to find it utterly intoxicating. He loved its efficiency, and how it could recharge in less than three seconds. It had a beauty about it, a mathematical precision in its lines that was almost sexual, almost—

  Damn!

  He slammed the gun down, realizing he was thinking on Oveio. The concrete target whizzed by him, almost clipping him in the head, yet he remained motionless with his gun, and felt his confidence slipping from its foundation.

  In two days he and his friends would assault the main hanger-deck of the city of Ithmarin. The plan was to commandeer the old battle-worn dromon Redemption and head for one of the outer colonies. They were determined to live their lives apart from the polished perfection of a world that no longer held a place for them.

  “Oveio . . .” he moaned to himself. “Oveio . . .” Her face hung in his mind, her soul-consuming smile, her sanity-robbing voice. He had felt himself slipping, fading away into her clutches.