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TOMORROW
Speculative fiction that reminds us of our impending mortality
and our immortal aspirations
Geri’s father is one of the scientists who finds the remains of an alien culture, providing proof we are not alone. For Geri, though, her father’s involvement with another world leaves her feeling more alone than ever.
IN RING
by Scott Thomas Smith
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You wouldn’t know, huh?” He smiles at her as if he can find her secret with his eyes. Lift her gaze to meet his. “You wear it but you don’t know where you got it.”
“It’s just a ring.” She holds her hand over it to hide it from him. She doesn’t want him to talk to her anymore.
It doesn’t matter if he knows where she got it or if she is supposed to have it; she just wants to be left alone.
“Yeah, alright. Your father is in his office. Go ahead up.”
The exchange proves once again that her father’s work is not a place she wants to be. Too many questions, too much intensity. But she has promised to visit him, and he is gone so much of the time.
The ring, which he had given her, was brought back from there. It was all over the news, and people practically boiled over in the halls and meeting rooms of the high tech station where he worked. The scientific find signified first contact with another species — an abandoned colony on one of the newly discovered planets. Earth, still in her maiden days of interstellar travel and colonization, had already found evidence of alien life. Theory held there would be living civilizations discovered soon nearby.
She walks down the corridor to his office.
“Hello Geri,” her father says as she comes in. The room is like entering a museum. She is suddenly full grown.
She loves the ring. She loved it the moment he gave it to her. Even before he told her where it was from. The simple, glassy material set in a single colorful band, smooth all around.
When she sees the pictures of the planet it came from up in his office, she believes in the distance between the stars. The lost civilization makes sense in existing. Neither the ring nor the news stories — not even the strangers asking her questions — made her think of that world and its people as real before. But his office seems set up to point to evidence to convince her.
She makes a perfunctory hello and stands at the side of his desk to drop her backpack.
A young, red-haired man in a suit and tie comes in behind her.
“Sir, you have a phone call from a … Doctor … Wukovits? He’s calling about the … condensed life theory?”
“OK, I’ll take it in here.” As the man ducks back out, he says to Geri, “Sorry, I have to talk to this person.” She shrugs her indifference.
“Yes, hello Doctor.”
She walks around his desk to get a closer look at the images of the planet: mostly landscapes and buildings.
“Yes, I’m familiar with the anthropic principles, and what you’re saying does make sense, although these theories are all a bit … conjectural.”
One picture must have been taken by an aspiring amateur photographer, and could have been the illustration for a book of pictorial poems about wheelbarrows and such things. Or rather their alien versions, as the main subject looks like a cross between a gavel and a mini scythe propped next to some kind of barrel divided into two compartments.
“Well, yes, if there are aliens around every other star, I suppose we might have to worry about resources, but on the other hand what if it is only us?” His tone and a brief eye meeting indicates to his daughter that he is humoring the Doctor. They share a smile.
He stands up and walks to the window, his tone now clipped, indicating his desire to end the call.
Waiting, Geri sits in his swivel chair and, spinning back and forth, studies the titles on his bookshelf. Astrophysics and Technology, Alien Civilizations: Projections of the Mind, The Mind of Man in Space. He has made up his mind on possibilities. She admires him deeply. And tries to imagine what it would be like to have his knowledge. Almost like having built a space station inside yourself, a stepping stone to the stars. It could also give you a firmer grasp on your home planet. But she always wonders where he really lives. With no memory of her mother, he is the earth and stars, and space as well.
The phone is cradled.
“You said on TV you don’t know much about them.”
“Well, we know a lot about them, but there’s so much to know, it’s hard to say what a whole race is like.”
She thinks about it.
“We know they look something like us, and had a similar evolutionary history. And their technology was about at the level ours is now.”
“But you don’t know what happened to them.”
He leans against his desk. “It could have been a couple of things.” He hesitates, a tape recorder pause, like he doesn’t want to be quoted on it, even by her. “They could have been in a war. Or maybe they left the planet because the colony wasn’t doing well. Or they might have died out. Or maybe they just abandoned the place, for whatever reason. We’ve barely done any study on it, so we can’t say anything for certain.”
“Are those pictures from there?” She points to an album on his desk.
“Yep,” he says, gesturing for her it’s okay to look at them.
It isn’t like looking at a group of images from a TV show where they show you a ship landing on an alien world, and you see the headquarters of their government and everything is stylized to look like a certain culture, with one taste, uniform and homogenized. Instead it is much like Earth just a handful of years back before the big thrust for more planning in cities’ constructions, with buildings of all sorts and jumbled purposes clashing and rising up against each other in the mostly natural landscape. Like a soft grid of streets surrounding a metropolitan community — a nerve center, with strong industrial capability. It looks run down by a few decades of overgrowth and decay, rusted and jungled. Resources and terrain, technology and construction methods make it alien, but the same would make it home.
“So they’re going back then.”
“Yeah, and soon.”
“You’ll probably be going with them.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Sounds like the opening to a horror movie.”
~~~
Riding her bike home, she thinks about what her father is doing. Everyone knows who her father is. She’s popular at school. She could have any boy she wants.
She sprawls out on her bed, surrounded by books she’s bought since junior high, from popular science thrillers to philosophy and non-fiction on The Varieties of Religious Experiences and Art and Aesthetics to Metaphysics and Being and Nothingness. And thinks about the hype everywhere.
I mean! — If any of those newscasters busy bothering all those scientists up at where Dad works discovered this bookshelf! And thought this bookshelf were from outer space… They’d put more work into studying these texts than they had in reading anything else in their lives. But they’d never pick them up otherwise.
People are stupid.
If I grow up to be the writer I hope to be, she thinks, I’ll put that in a book.
Or no, she thinks. I won’t. Some things you shouldn’t write down. That…
That would be saying too much, maybe. It’s a truth everyone should see so obviously. It’d be obscene to put it down.
Yes, she decides, I won’t write it down. I’ll keep that one for myself. And she wraps it around herself to keep.
I imagine the civilization out there is much like ours, she thinks. They may be surprised to meet us, or maybe they’ve already met many others like us. Maybe they’ll change us when we meet them. Maybe it will change us all.
She pulls a blanket over her. It’s nice to have someone else now to think about — or so the planet thinks, she thinks. But re
ally, life here is life here. And that shouldn’t change. She wants — needs — to think about her own life, and the things going on at school, with her friends, with the boys she talks to. There’s a lot going on right here, even in this boring capeside town, she thinks, as she drifts off to sleep.
~~~
“I thought you were still working on the Pre-Columbian excavation?” she says across the table. Her father’s finally home for dinner.
“I … was.”
“The one you said was going to bring up more answers to man’s past than any dig in history … And was the most important thing you ever did? Could ever do? And? You’re just quitting what you’ve been working – worked — so hard on?”
“They need someone to head up the offworld excavation. They asked me. I couldn’t say no. It wouldn’t be right.”
“What does that even mean?” She slams her fork down. “You know I always go with you on your trips. But I can’t go with you offworld.”
He nods.
“So I’m just stuck here — by myself.”
“I know, but — It means so much for us. It’s a big opportunity! I can’t stay on an old project when the state-of-the-art is being written out there.”
“Who cares about the state-of-the-art?”
“Geri, this could mean so much more for humanity. It’s a chance to give my previous work a context that’s been … lacking.”
She waits. She palls. It isn’t an affront to her. It is a statement that just makes her wonder about the man her father is. And that makes her wonder about all men.
His crumpled expression tells her he sees it in her eyes.
She starts, coming half out of her chair. “Letting things go …” she struggles for words, “isn’t the virtue you think it is!”
She storms to her bedroom.
~~~
She holds her hand — the one with the ring — out into the night, fingers spread, feeling a web running in her bones that expands beyond her physical hand, out to everything, and at the point where it cruxes, reaching to the sky…
She doesn’t go to the launch, but over the cityscape she catches glimpses of the small transport taking off; even more visible is the ship her father will meet in orbit, on this clear night.
The ship hovers in the sky like a blinking reminder for a higher nature and a lesser world. She’s used to seeing UFOs in these skies. The arc of the expunged fuel from the transport engulfs the moon in its curve, turning the horizon into a jackknifed dream.
She caresses the ring on her middle finger with her thumb as though playing a string on an instrument, then tilts her head down and starts to run after the ship, so far above and so far away.
~~~
When you hang something up in your room, and only later realize why, you understand how the mind works. That’s how it was with her and the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars, and the images of the moons and planets around the ceiling.
In such actions there is a meaning waiting to be realized. Only later can you see how that action really relates to you; that somehow you knew you would realize it, and that’s why you started the series of events in the first place. Why you decorated the walls, why you chose to come in contact with the meaning — and it’s like what must start a thunderstorm. Some fuse jump of electricity like a neuron firing. And maybe she never wanted to think of the stars. Like that. Like beacons from all the individual could-be homes, so distant and calling…
But she knew she’d not be at home on any of them, looking at their pale imitations, their perfect replications. She lies in her bed beneath the cool blanket, making a wish on a plastic star to stay on her home world, in this bed, and find one to land on. Maybe one where they give you a ring to let you know you belong. And she holds on to the ring, and listens to the cool night breeze through the open window, and breathes in with her eyes closed.
~~~
She decides to bury it.
She takes the automatic shovel from the garage.
The moon watched her carry it along the back fence to the yard where the motion light came on and bathed her in a weary yellow light.
Watched it churn up the soil as she poked it into the firm but yielding earth.
And then … pausing…
Tossed her care below.
Neatly covered the site. For future archaeologists to discover. Perhaps after we’re all gone.
And she walks away. Thumbing the possession she still keeps, having only pretended, like playing a string on an instrument, twirling in the moonlight and dancing beneath it, running ahead to catch a ride.
~~~
SCOTT THOMAS SMITH is 26 years old, lives by himself in St. Louis (with two cats) and has been writing seriously since high school. He finished his first novel, Down With Strangers, in the same year he shipped off to Chicago to attend Columbia College. Quickly deciding college was for suckers, he dropped out before completing his first semester. Now he spends most of the day reading and writing. Hard at work on many new projects and stories, you can find out more about what’s going on with Scott at his website and blog at http://www.theneonheart.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/GarterBeltSupremeOfTheCosmoDemonicSlagheap
Had it been left to protocols rather than human ingenuity, Commander West’s expedition might have easily overlooked one of Mars’ greatest treasures.
Bones Of Mars
by D Jason Cooper
“You’ve had anomalies before, Casey. Martian soil isn’t uniform—”
“It’s a lot more uniform than Earth’s. No seas here to stop the wander of sand and there are fewer chemical processes to change constituents in the soil and—”
“Casey. Anne.” West paused as if telling his troops not to charge. His muscles relaxed, though that took a conscious effort. “Could we actually have a conversation where we let each other finish sentences?”
“Lose the balls. Seriously. As a scientist, I always look to the widest possible range of explanations that fit the evidence. That means stopping and checking. As commander of the mission, your job is to focus on getting a result and moving on to the next site. We’ll never stop being at loggerheads if we keep working at cross purposes.”
“So you’ll stop fighting if I just let you have your way?”
“More or less,” said Casey without irony.
Commander Howard West looked at the walls. They were supposed to be battleship gray, but in an early defiance of protocol, every bulkhead, girder and rivet was painted a different color — except red. West turned to the porthole and the evening landscape of Mars. This far south the sun set reluctantly and evenings lingered. Political opinion about the mission was divided back on Earth, but he could not join the chorus who described the landscape as barren. Both politically and aesthetically he sided with those who called it rich in form and stark in content.
“We have a limited number of days here,” said West, “and we have used up way too many of our unallocated test days tracking down the previous…” he waved fingers in the air to indicate quote marks, “anomalies.”
“Who was unhappy I found that gold? Did they tell us to move on or did they tell us to take ten extra days to assay the potential mining site?”
He put up his hand to stem the onslaught. “Casey. The date for the end of the mission is fixed. We have a relatively short launch window. So thanks to several extra stops and extra days at sites — that we took largely by your recommendation, I’ll point out — if we spend more time here, there’s a danger we’ll have to cut other sites altogether. I recognize your scientific reasons for wanting to stay, but there are also scientific reasons for wanting to check every individual site possible – look at the Moon.”
“The Moon has become the Vietnam of space exploration. It’s the ultimate reason to not do anything,” she said.
Not needing to hear her opinions on the failings of previous generations yet again, Commander West ordered her to go.
Anne Casey put what dignity was possible int
o her low-grav bounce out the cabin door.
“Don’t forget the restrictions Buggy A puts on us,” West called after her.
She came back and slammed the door because — well, because she could.
West stared out the porthole at the rim of the Secchi Crater, its ancient solid-stone formations dusted with undulating patterns of sand. In the depths of winter, like tonight, it sometimes snowed.
Here, flakes came from pink or black skies and individual crystals tended to cluster into huge colonies before gravity pulled them toward the ground. Usually, fierce winds, common on Mars, would shred them out of existence long before they touched the surface. But tonight was calm and the snowflakes drifted peacefully, tipsily, to Mars.
“Hey, West, what’s Casey on the warpath about now?”
With a sigh, West turned from the snowflakes. Standing in the doorway doing a fair imitation of a door was Aoki.
“Something about an anomaly in her latest readings. How’s Buggy A?”
“After the refit it got, its engine systems should last longer than the ones on this buggy. But the electrical and life-support systems are still on the fritz. Schmidt’s working on an idea now.” After a pause, Aoki added, “I assume you’re hard up for time?”
“No. Finish what you’ve got to say,” said West.
“We don’t have to launch from Site 1. If we launch from Site 3, the trip will be more Spartan, but we’ll have an extra fourteen days we can put in on Casey’s stuff.”
“Did Casey tell anybody what the anomaly is?”
Aoki shook his head, so the Commander told him.
“Forget I said anything,” said Aoki as he left.
West turned back to the topsy-turvy snow. A breeze had come up, sweeping sand and snow into playful little piles. After a very long while he turned to the computer to bang out some more names for Martian features. That job was his and his alone, not to be delegated, or so the news always said. What it didn’t mention was that to name features, West had to use drop-down lists with names of people influential politicians owed favors to. As the features were cataloged, they were assigned to the appropriate lists already prepopulated with names for the first active volcano, the biggest cave, or whatever other natural formations were found. That was the real protocol.
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