by John Klima
“The Burren,” the priest said. “Bare stone for as far as you can see. No soil only in the cracks between the rocks, no rivers or lakes. Not enough water to drown a man, not enough wood to hang him—”
“And not enough flat ground for him to land his aircraft.” Dale shook his head and smiled. “Rock and mountains and boulders and dust.”
“Sorry?”
“Something Rodriguez told me once.”
“You know,” O’Grady said quietly, “you can’t wear the armband forever.”
“Copy that.” Dale thought about the hearings, the investigation, the names cut into the granite wall at Kennedy. He thought about those pieces of Aquarius laid out across the hanger floor, little more than scrap and garbage. Rodriguez, the tone of his voice; no worry or no anger, just surprise. Uh-oh.
There was nothing anybody could have done.
“Here,” O’Grady said, stepping back from the telescope. The American took his place above the instrument, turned the focus slightly and watched another world jump sharply into view. The Moon, itself a great mirror bathing in the sun; its soft mountains rising off romantic maria, the Ocean of Storms, the Sea of Rains, the Lakes of Excellence and Perseverance . . .
“Man,” Dale said, “that’s beautiful.”
O’Grady took a turn and murmured his agreement while Dale stood back and looked up at the sky. Mark-one eyeball, they called it in flight school. Sometimes there’s just no substitute.
“There,” he said suddenly, raising his arm to the southern sky where a new star bloomed and flew in a short arc before fading back again into the darkness. “The Space Station,” Dale said. “Will you look at that.”
The priest peered up just in time. “Impressive,” he said.
Dale laughed. “I could have gone there once, you know.”
“You can’t still go?”
“I suppose. Take a ride with the Russians. Ah, but it wouldn’t be the same. I’m a pilot, an explorer. I’m not a hitchhiker.”
O’Grady nodded.
“You know,” Dale said, “I can still remember going to the Space Centre as a kid and asking my mom if I could stay up all night when they landed the first man on Mars.” He laughed. “I really thought they’d do it too. Hell, I thought I’d get to do it once I joined the program.’
“Could happen yet.”
“Maybe,” said Dale, “but then again maybe it’s as well I’m out. Space is hungry, Padre. This business, it devours people. I’ve been devoured by it. It mightn’t hurt to take the time to . . . ” He trailed off. I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
The astronaut smiled. “To consider it, I suppose. To get my head around it.”
O’Grady leaned back against the wall. “I’ll bury your friend here if you like. But are you sure that’s what he wanted?”
Dale stared at the canister where the priest had placed it on the floor and considered the sad strange journey which had brought it here, all the questions which surrounded it. He looked out through the open shutters, across the otherworldly hills. Nothing was certain anymore, nothing at all.
Rodriguez, if he could have seen him, would have laughed his ass off.
*
Soon after that he left O’Grady in the tower. There’d been a chaplain of the same mold aboard the Truman, he recalled; could get inside your head like nobody’s business. It was not a shock to find another here; priests were all of a kind, Dale thought, though even so there was something very likeable about O’Grady. Not the astronomy or even the rudimentary philosophy. No, it was completely separate. He dared to call it enthusiasm and immediately felt bad.
Making his way down the narrow stairs and out through the church, Dale found Bartley and McGovern waiting outside for him, the latter with the palm of his hand pressed firm against the wall.
“Heard you’d finally gone to see the priest,” McGovern said.
“This one was worried for ya,” Bartley added, shaking his head.
McGovern shrugged. “Civility never broke a man’s jaw.”
“Clearly you’ve never been in a pilots’ ready room,” Dale said. “But thank you, Gerry. I appreciate it.”
“Come on now,” said Bartley. “Tell us, is your business done?’
“My business is done here,” he said. “But I’ve got one more thing to do, if you want to join me . . . ’
“You’ll stand us the line?” the old man asked with a wink.
Dale grinned, the keys to his rental car already in his hand. “Sure.”
Ten minutes later they were out of the village, crystal moonlight making everything unreal as they drove into The Burren. The pale-faced sky-child of earlier was gone, as was the golden hue of dusk, the Moon’s disc having slipped to a colder, sterner blue which cast long, chaotic shadows all round them. Hills squeezed the twisting road and each shape was another sculpture in a garden of demented stone where everything became reverent and cruel. In a field by the road with the light streaming through it, the silhouette of a horse stood proud on the hilltop. Dale thought he glimpsed an empty saddle on its back but couldn’t know for sure. They drove on.
He remembered, back in training, Rodriguez and himself; still young men, men who had fought together, who had chosen a most dangerous profession.
“You’ll take me back to Houston?” Dale had said.
“If you take me back to County Clare.”
Beer-bottle necks had clinked at the arrangement, but Dale never thought he’d have to see it through, never once reckoned that he’d end up here with his friend in a metal can.
“What’d’ya think,” McGovern said. “Does this look good?”
Dale nodded, “Yeah.” He pulled in from the road and stopped the engine. Everything was silent. Leaning over the steering wheel, he stared into the sky where the spirit of his friend flew free. The image of disintegration was burned into his mind. The whirling debris, the cloud of vapor when the remaining hydrogen and oxygen collapsed against each other. Aquarius, he thought; the water carrier.
The president had made a speech which came back to him from time to time. “The cause for which they died will go on,” he’d said. “Our journey into space will continue.” He quoted it to Bartley and McGovern.
“Always liked him,” Bartley said. “A good lad, now. A good lad.”
“Yes,” said Dale, who had met him once, a tall, sad man whose ambition had surpassed his reach. “I guess he always seemed to be.” He picked up the canister and opened the door of the car. “Let’s go.” He led them out onto the bare shoulder, through the stile and up into a steep, rocky field. There was no soil, or very little anyway, and it was odd, he thought, to recognise the kind of features he had been trained to see on lunar missions, erratics and stratigraphic markers. He picked up a stone from the rough surface and turned it over in his hand.
“What’s that?” McGovern asked.
“The technical term is FLR. At least according to Rodriguez.”
“FLR?”
“Funny Looking Rock.” He smiled as he dropped it to the ground. Rodriguez always said that levity was appropriate in a dangerous trade and he was right, Dale realized, as he picked his way through loose stones, careful not to lose his footing on the crumpled ground. One had to be able to laugh at one’s self, at the job, at the danger.
“Woah,” he said, catching his toe in one of the great, deep cracks which slithered everywhere.
Bartley sniggered. “You all right there, Dale?”
“Yeah,” the American said. “Thanks.”
They were on the true Burren now, a vast, wrinkled plain of undulating stone weathered into near oblivion. A kaleidoscope of gray, it spread on and on, beyond history, beyond the night, out of sight beyond Dale’s unrelenting dreams. Behind them, the few stray streetlights of the village sparkled in the distance, and, above, the wash of moonlight made it seem another world entirely.
It was, Dale decided, as good a place as any. “Here,” he said.
Besid
e him Bartley nodded. “When they buried my brother it wasn’t like this,” he said, “it was a fine spring day.”
Dale and McGovern both turned to look at him, startled by his openness.
“He was a hero,” Bartley went on. “Of the kind they name streets after, you know? Brought down a lot of them lot here at the time.”
“The Tans,” McGovern said. “The British.”
“Aye,” said Bartley. “And they’d men from his column there to see him away, draping the tricolor across his box, a few of them with rifles that they let off. The noise of it all,” he said. “Twas a fierce honor.”
Dale cast him an unsure look. “You’re not . . . armed now, are you Bartley?”
The old man laughed, a booming ho-ho as loud as any shot. “Not at all. Not at all, a’course. I’m just saying, you know, the moment should be marked.”
“And what had you in mind?” McGovern asked.
Bartley grinned, and with great effort brought himself to his full height. He raised his right arm and bent his elbow, bringing his hand to his head in a salute. McGovern quickly did the same.
Dale nodded, and carefully he opened up the flask, tipping its cremated contents out onto the breeze. The cloud flattened out at once, dove towards the rocky pavement, and then took flight, specks of ash like busy stars exploding all around him while the world turned overhead. Dale straightened up and saluted too, the remains of Rodriguez taking wing into the night.
When it was over he brought his hand down and, behind him, his two friends mumbled something as they let their own arms fall, Bartley rubbing at his shoulder.
“We should take a stroll now,” McGovern said quietly.
“What?” Bartley said.
“You know, as we’re here, we should give Dale the air of the place.”
“Ah, will you not be—”
“No,” Dale said. He laid his hand on Bartley’s shoulder, “I’d like that.” He was tired, that was true, it was late, and yet some new energy was coming to him. It compelled him to move, to walk, to see what he could find.
“Well then,” McGovern said, “come on so,” and he led them out across the hillside.
They were at last, Dale thought, the crew he had imagined, ambling across this odd terrain with the strange, loping gait required to leap from one great limestone block to another. Step-by-step the three of them picked their way across the broken surface, away from the road, away from the lights of the village and everything that Dale had come to know. This was a separate place, severe and beautiful and altogether alien. There, in the stone, were red and orange tints which he could not explain. In the sky, the universe’s mechanism whirled while the three men drifted on, and, as the gray rock fell off toward the close horizon, they could have been walking on the moon.
Melt
Cislyn Smith
She knows the thousand and one secret names of snow,
whispers them up into the clouds,
calling the snow to her like a lover,
and waits for white touches sunk in drifts.
It is then that he sees her,
pale and fallen, in a bank on the side of the road.
Panicked, he thinks her dead, dying, rushes over
wading through three kinds of snow to reach her.
He kneels, taking hold of her wrist, hoping to find her alive
and is surprised when she opens her cold blue eyes.
She is never really sure why she left her chilly covers
to walk beside him, to listen and speak.
She usually avoids people
preferring the quiet company of crystals and slush.
He is much noisier.
He takes her for coffee, which she does not drink.
But she rests her chill hands against the cup
marveling at the colors of it, and he tells her
about his family in warmer climes
and how he came to be here rather than there.
She nods, pretending to understand.
She tells him about the wonders of flake and blizzard,
about flurries in forests and ice rains on plains.
“Snow is so much more than water,” she says, looking
into his eyes earnestly.
“And water is so much more than snow,” he replies.
She smiles then, but will not meet his eyes again that night.
She knows so many names, but finds more she does not know.
The world seems filled with things not snowy.
These things puzzle her and she puzzles him
when they meet once a week and walk, through the snow, for coffee.
She enjoys watching the way his breath becomes visible,
names the snow silently when it sticks in his hair and on his gloves.
He sighs, staring out the window at the white
and wishes for spring and an end to all this snow.
She sighs, looking down at her coffee, going cold now,
and wishes for an endless winter to spend with him.
She does not know how to tell lies,
her tongue sticks cold to her mouth when she tries.
He does not know how to truly see her,
expectations rime his eyes with frost.
It cannot last. No winter really lasts.
For him, water is so much more than snow, but not for her.
She knows the thousand and one secret names for snow
and one of them is hers.
The Beasts We Want to Be
Sam J. Miller
Two things were wrong with the Spasskaya assessment. The first was the painting: a tiny square in a simple frame, something I barely noticed at the time, but which would go on to cause us so much suffering. The second was the woman.
Wailing greeted us when we arrived, almost at midnight. Assessment teams had to come without warning. Snow fell in great marching waves, helpless in the hands of the wind off the Moscow River. Barely three weeks old, the winter of 1924 seemed to know how desperate and hungry we were, and to be conspiring with the Western imperialists to slaughter us.
Twelve people lived in the Spasskaya mansion. Mere blocks from the Kremlin, big enough that thirty families would be moved in once we had stripped it. Our soldiers herded those twelve fat parasites into one room and encircled them while we did our work.
They had been expecting us, of course. Every aristocrat and landlord and other assorted enemy of the people could anticipate a visit from an assessment team. We came in the night, and we stole the things we could sell abroad.
Fabergé eggs and German expressionist sketches and errant Rembrandts passed through my hands; decadent filth that nonetheless could be turned into tens of thousands of rubles to feed the starving Soviet state. A watercolor by Kandinsky could buy us ten cows. The engagement ring of a century-dead empress could bring back two tractors. And these parasites, every one of them, actually believed they deserved these foul treasures bought with other men’s sweat and blood. No matter where we went in the mansion, we could hear them wailing.
*
I didn’t like it anymore, when they wept. Joy in the suffering of others was the first habit Apolek broke me of, sparing me a couple hundred hours in a Pavlov Box in the process. Class enemies saw us coming and attacked, or begged, or burst into tears, but I no longer singled them out for special brutality.
“Lenin says we need to punish the parasites,” I had said, the first day I was assigned to Apolek’s detail, when he urged restraint.
“Not with violence,” he had said. “Not with cruelty.”
Apolek was a blond and ruddy peasant, younger than me, the youngest assessment team leader in the Red Army. Soft-spoken, earnest, above human emotion. I was an illiterate bloodthirsty street urchin, the son of steel workers who starved to death in the famine of 1910. Plucked out of the orphanage by the Ministry of Human Engineering, I was reconditioned into a species of man they said was “slightly smarter than a dog but just as vicious.”
&
nbsp; “They treated us with violence and cruelty,” I said, pouting, plotting.
“Do it if you want,” he said. “We’ll see which one of us Volkov puts in a Box.”
Back in the orphanage I’d beaten boys like him bloody on an almost daily basis, but his words were well-chosen. I’d just emerged from a Pavlov Box, suffering unending hours of electric shocks and chemical burns, pharmaceutical fumes and super-high-speed recordings, three times a day for months and months. And the mere possibility of escaping further torment was worth a try.
And Apolek was right, of course, as he would always be about everything. I didn’t understand it, how a man as savage as Commander Volkov would reward us for not being savage, but I didn’t need to understand. I just had to do what Apolek told me.
“The Soviet Union needs beasts,” he said, after that first assessment, carefully logging newly nationalized statues in the basement of the Kremlin Armoury. “It needs savage men to die in distant border skirmishes, or to torture kulaks. Is a beast what you want to be?”
“No,” I mumbled, and in that moment I saw that I didn’t want that at all.
“What do you want to be, Nikolai?”
I shrugged. I looked at Apolek, too dazed to hide the desperation on my face. I wanted him to answer my question for me.
“But not a beast,” he said.
“No.”
“We’ll work on that, then.”
I was nineteen and he was seventeen, but in that moment I gladly and wholeheartedly attached myself to him as his protégé. And while the lean and hairy Commander Volkov came sniffing around our unit several times a week, for a year and a half he never found a reason to Box me up again.
*
Our soldiers were Broken. Eight of them accompanied us on our runs, to deal with the parasites when the parasites fought back. The Broken were boys who had been left too long in the Boxes, or test subjects who snapped beneath the weight of some new regimen of flashing lights and film strips and toxic fumes and prototype medicine. They were useful for the terror they caused, and for the savage violence they would break into with the proper command from their conditioned leader. They were also useful as a constant warning to other revolutionary soldiers.
