Parka hunkered down and wheelied and hit the booster. He soared, gaining clearance by a few meters over the Being. There were white kites protruding from the gelatinous skin of the Being, the kites’ strings puncturing the surface and spooled far below. The eagle-falcons’ bombs had accidentally scarred the Being in many places, but they weren’t able to break through the surface.
When the booster gave out, Parka held out his arms and leaned forward, just clearing the Being. He skidded to a halt and spun the motorcycle around, watching Jar.
Jar had accelerated too late, and he seemed to hang over the Being, suspended like one of the eagle-falcons.
Jar gave a thumbs-up sign.
Then one of the kites snapped to life and whipped at one of his legs, and the thread tangled around the limb. Jar careened forward and separated from his cycle, which slammed against the surface of the Being’s skin—the booster still on—and ricocheted upward. With the booster still going at full capacity, the motorcycle slammed into the wings of one of the low-flying fast-eagle merlins that was overhead. The eagle merlin spiraled out of control and careened into the side of a mesa about ten kilometers away. Parka felt the backblast as he watched Jar try to pull at the kite, tearing at the ashy paper. But the thread held. He landed, almost gently, on top of the Being. He tried to stand up, but in a few seconds he was beginning to sink into the Being.
“Jar!” Parka shouted. “Hang on!”
“Sorry,” Jar shouted back, his legs already consumed. He looked down. “There’s some serious alternate reality shit going on in there,” he said.
“Keep fighting!” Parka said, but he knew it was hopeless.
Jar held up all of his arms and slid into the Being.
Parka hunched over his motorcycle, his head sinking between the handlebars. About a dozen walking sticks landed in his fur. He ran his claw over the hair, scooping them up and eating them. They tasted like Fritos.
“Nasty,” he said, spitting them out.
He started riding again to Santa Fey in silence, with the shriek of the pre-mining operational maneuvers above him and to all sides. He put on his Toby Keith, but even this wouldn’t soothe his guilt.
When he saw Santa Fey on the horizon, and the glow of the madrigal lights along the city walls, and the faint thrum of fiddles and cymbals and electric guitars, he became light-headed and also ridden with shame, which was far worse than guilt. He stopped his motorcycle and revved it, his gills fluttering.
At last he thought of Jar and also tried to consider what his life meant, in the end.
“Screw it,” he said, and he turned around, back toward the Being.
About a kilometer away, Parka stopped and took the amulet out of the pouch. He knew, whatever happened, that his diplomatic career would be over. He would never be able to set foot in Santa Fey again, and they would in all likelihood hunt him down, if he lived. He would likely have to leave the planet he had grown fond of. Slowly, he slid the amulet around his neck. The walking sticks rose to the occasion, then. Soon there were thousands congregating around him, wedged in his joints and lining his shell. They felt warm and they tickled. The Being gurgled in the distance.
He remembered, with a sudden pang, what he had forgotten at the time—that the walking sticks were in his joints in much the same way during the kickboxing match.
A Camaro pulled up beside him, revving its engine. The boy, Sharon, was driving it; he was still covered in insects. Actually, Parka couldn’t tell whether there was a boy there at all. Parka’s own insects dropped off him and scurried up the car and through the open window to be with Sharon.
“Get in,” insect boy said. His voice was deep and unwavering.
Parka turned off his motorcycle and parked it, and then got in the Camaro. He was nearly too tall for it, but he bent his head forward. He saw that the sandwich board was in the back seat.
“How did you get free of your post?” Parka said.
“Liberation takes many guises,” Sharon said, revving the engine. “Enslavement is the pure heart of industry.”
“Alrighty,” Parka said.
Sharon turned toward him. “Therefore you shall be the Dwight D. Eisenhower of enlightenment and camaraderie.”
The Camaro shot forward, and Parka fumbled for a seat belt. But there was none. They were driving right toward the Being. Parka was beginning to think this was a bad idea.
“I have an idea,” Parka said. “How about we kickbox? If I win, you have to stop the car.”
But the boy ignored him, and continued to accelerate. A few of the walking sticks from the boy scurried onto Parka’s arm. He was too afraid to swat them away.
“Seriously,” he said as much to himself as Sharon, “there has to be some underlying goddamn plan to this endeavor.”
Sharon didn’t turn as he said, “Not really. No.”
They shot toward the Being, which soon was their entire horizon. The walking sticks were rattling with the velocity. The amulet was hot against his carapace. Parka closed his eyes.
In a blink of his outer eyelid, he expected one of three conclusions to his current predicament.
The first involved a high-impact collision against the outer husk of the Being, flattening him and the beautiful Camaro.
In the second, the Camaro would puncture the Being’s skin and come to some kind of high-impact collision inside the Being, with any number of the farm animals, people, and other physical remnants of the aboriginal civilization surrounding him and either flaying him or welcoming him into a pathetic intra-Being community.
In the third, Sharon would halt at the last second, or dodge the Being somehow, because he was really trying to mess with Parka’s head, which he was doing a spectacular job with already.
He missed home all of a sudden, the home he had tried so hard to forget, his twenty parents who all had contradictory advice for his well-being, and who hated interstellar travel—
“It won’t be long,” Sharon muttered, and then the Being was upon them, and they were upon the Being, and the Camaro screamed. It really screamed as it blew through the outer shell of the Being, causing an explosion in its wake and argent and vermillion sprays all around the car, and strands of Being fur flying. The front windshield shattered and the pieces blew away like tiny feathers. Then the top of the car ripped off.
They were inside the Being. But the Camaro didn’t stop. In fact, it seemed to gain an extra level of speed once it was inside the Being. The walking sticks glowed like solar flares or brane-gun bullets from a galactic transmutator. Past the blue and green haze, Parka couldn’t see much—shapes moving around that were vaguely aboriginal in form. The only things he could see clearly were the local sorcery-
powered vehicles that were known as “monster trucks.” They raced toward the Camaro, dozens of free-floating kites strung to their menacing hulls, but they were far too slow to reach the rocketing black Chevrolet stock car. The inside of the Being smelled like ferrous oxide, phlegm, sinew, and transdimensional energy. Before he was able to formulate the thought to look for Jar at all, the Camaro had burst through the other side of the Being with a roar. More fine, plush incandescent Being fur surrounded them. Then the light grew sharp and bright, and Parka shielded his eyes.
When he moved his pincer away from his face, he saw that the Camaro was sailing in the air above a deep canyon, which the Being was on the edge of.
“I want to warn you,” Sharon said, “that you might want to brace yourself.”
The Camaro seemed to be suspended above the dry riverbed far below for a few seconds, and slowly began to arc down. The other side of the gully seemed impossibly far away. The walking sticks, still glowing, began to thrum.
And then he touched the button on the center of the amulet, the one forbidden thing. The red rays embedded in the metal burst out, and solidified into strands many meters long, following the contours of his arms. Then they ballooned out like wings.
They were wings.
Without really thinking
—and it might have been the amulet thinking for him—he stood up and stretched his arms out. The wings were massive, and the Camaro wobbled but righted itself. As it fell, Parka could hear the Being on the other side of the canyon shrieking, and feel its reverberations around his neck.
Parka leaned forward and the Camaro landed right on the edge of the canyon with a thud. Sharon hit the brakes and the Camaro spun around. The Being was, in fact, in the throes of dying. Eagle-merlins from above were trying to maneuver out of the way, but aquamarine slime burst out of the Being like sulfuric geysers and coated the carpetbombers, which spun around and veered wildly. Parka could hear a high, sonorous call from many miles away—the continental emergency siren from Santa Fey.
Sharon was still. But then he pointed.
The Worm-Hare posse was there, gathered around a minivan, each with a brane gun strapped to its arm.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Parka said. He tried to get out of the car, but it was difficult because of his nascent wings. He ended up crawling forward through the glassless windshield and onto the hood. The wings settled around him like a reptilian cape.
“We want our damn car back,” the prime Worm-Hare said. It was a different prime from the one Parka had defeated in kickboxing. The sliding door of the minivan was open, and Parka could see the original prime in the back of the minivan in a shimmering heal-sac. “To say nothing about the amulet, one of the key symbols of our people, which you’ve gone on and messed up as well. You know that your corporation is going to hunt you down for triggering ‘dragon mode,’ right?”
Parka laughed. Dragon mode. “That’s great. Anyway, you seem to forget that I won the car fair and square. I don’t know why you’re so upset about that, considering your current sweet ride.”
“We don’t care,” the prime said, hoisting his gun at Parka, ignoring the jab about the Honda Odyssey. “We just want a souvenir to take back with us off-world.” He indicated the dying Being in the distance. “This planet is a cursed cesspool. There’s nothing here anymore. But nothing would make us happier than to disintegrate your sorry carapace and take this car into orbit with us.”
Parka spread his wide wings—which didn’t hurt at all—because he thought it would scare them. But it didn’t, at all. He sighed. He realized that sometimes it’s the smallest moments that could change a creature’s life. He had given the Camaro to a human as a prize, and had thought nothing of it. But here he was, about to die from the Worm-Hares after all, and with weird wings. But all the same, he felt good about his generosity, even if Jar wasn’t there to share it with him.
With that in mind, he wasn’t going to back down.
Sharon was motionless, but then he looked in the backseat and started laughing. It was such a quiet, tinny laugh that it shocked everyone into stillness.
“What?” the prime Worm-Hare said, exasperated. Then there was a red dot on his spiny forehead. Parka stared at it.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” the Worm-Hare said.
Then there was a whooshing sound, and a crossbow bolt hit the Worm-Hare’s forehead where the red dot was. The bolt went through his head, blasting into the front windshield of the minivan. The prime slumped over.
Parka turned around. There was someone in the back seat.
“Hey,” Jar said, sitting up, slinging a laser crossbow over his shoulder and looking groggy.
“Christ on a—” Parka said, but he stopped, because he didn’t know what to say. Instead, he ran to Jar and wrapped his leathery, demonic wings around his friend in a familial embrace.
“Look at you,” Jar said, still sleepily. “With wings and stuff.”
“It’s the amulet,” Parka said. The remaining Worm-Hares were forgotten, but they had made their pathetic escape in the minivan. “But, anyway, priorities. How the hell did you get there? You weren’t there all along, were you?”
Jar shrugged. “No, not really. I was in the Being and then . . . um, I don’t remember much about that, but I saw this sweet Camaro cruising through, and then stop in front of me, and I said to myself, hey, maybe I should hop on board, so I did. And I must have picked up this crossbow. I guess I was on a shooting range for awhile or something?”
Parka had no recollection of the Camaro slowing down enough for anyone to jump aboard.
He disengaged from Jar. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”
“Well, you came back, friend. That’s the important thing. I’d still be in there without you.”
“The Tree requests your presences,” Sharon said.
“What?” Jar said.
“Ah, the kid, he’s like that,” Parka said. He waved toward Sharon. “Okay, okay, the tree. But first, we need to get a beer.”
Later that day Jack Nicklaus and Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sharon met for a summit over a few of the local beers.
“How’s things?” Jack said.
“Super,” Dwight said.
“Awesome,” Jack said.
Sharon was silent. They were in a basement tavern somewhere north of Albuquerque, at a circular table. It was the off-season, and likely everyone in a 500-kilometer radius was trying to flee the potential blast zone of the Being, so they had the place to themselves. The beer was warm but the off-worlders didn’t care. Sharon didn’t order anything, so Parka had the bartender make him an Arnold Palmer. Toby Keith was playing on the speakers and everything was all right with the universe, at least for a few minutes.
“I’m going to miss Hallows Eve with the gang,” Jar said. “But it’s a small price to pay.”
“Yeah, it would have been fun. I’m glad we dressed up anyway.”
“You know, I wonder if Eisenhower would have won the war faster if he had wings like yours.”
“It’s very possible,” Parka said. The amulet against his chest pulsed like his second heart. The walking sticks swirling around Sharon clicked and skittered.
“What do you want to do after we, er, look at some tree that might very well be imaginary?” Parka said.
“I don’t know,” Jar said, taking a sip of his Budweiser Light. “It’s hard to say. Go back home, maybe. Start over with a new corporation. How about you?”
“Well, maybe I’ll stay here,” Parka said. “I haven’t decided. But I like it here. I still have no idea what the hell happened.”
“With the amulet?”
“A little. But mostly with the Camaro. And the Being.”
“Ah, that’s understandable,” Jar said.
Parka leaned forward, which was awkward because of his wingspan. “What I want to know is . . . I might not never understand, ever, what’s going on with these walking sticks. But they’re trying to say something, trying to do something. They’re trying to survive on this godforsaken planet we—I mean, not us personally, I mean the mining ventures—sucked dry for resource management. And for what? So we can get more fuel for our transmutators to find more planets to suck dry and destroy?”
Parka was melancholic, but not just for geopolitical reasons. He realized that this might be one of the last times of relative normalcy with his good friend.
“Yeah,” Jar said. “You make a good point. Maybe I’ll stay too. And learn how to properly ride a motorcycle and do a wheelie.” He laughed and then downed his beer. “Come on, Sharon,” he said. “Finish your drink.”
They rode for an hour in silence through the empty desert, and could see the Tree from many kilometers away. A towering, shadowy shape. Sooner rather than later—Sharon wasn’t exactly following a speed limit—they could see the enormity of the living structure. Parka stood up in the car, letting his body poke out of the shorn top, letting his wings free.
“Holy shit,” Jar said.
The Tree was as tall as the highest peaks that the Being had desiccated, many kilometers high. And the Tree was on fire. Smokeless fire. The tree pulsated with orange light. The branches were leafless, but they spiraled in gargantuan yet intricate patterns.
About a thousand meters away, Shar
on stopped the car. Everyone got out. The walking sticks encompassing Sharon, or perhaps embodying him, were glowing in syncopation with the Tree. Then it became clear that the Tree was made up of billions of the walking sticks.
There were many other abandoned vehicles all around the Tree in a ring.
“Why are the walking sticks doing this?” Jar whispered.
Parka shook his head but didn’t say anything. He had no idea.
Sharon turned to the two of them and said, “We need you two, the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jack Nicklaus of interpersonal diplomacy, to carry a message back to your people. You will relay terms for peace.” Sharon began walking toward the Tree.
“Wait, Sharon,” Parka said. “What will happen if we do?”
“What will happen if we don’t?” Jar said.
Sharon paused for a second and said, “My name’s not Sharon.” Then he began walking toward the Tree again.
Parka watched him for a little while, and looked at Jar, who shrugged.
“Who the hell knows,” Jar said.
As the general and the golfer followed Sharon to the base of the tree, Parka swore he heard Sharon, who wasn’t in fact Sharon, humming a tune, one of Toby Keith’s more recent songs about exile on the moon and earthly liberation. Or maybe it was only the sound of the walking sticks and the desolate wind making music together, which wasn’t meant for a stranger like him, wasn’t for him to understand.
Late Bloomer
Suzy McKee Charnas
The vampires showed up the summer that Josh worked at Ivan’s Antiques Mall.
The job wasn’t Josh’s idea. He hadn’t asked to be there.
Ivan’s side of the family were all fixated on material stuff, and what is an antiques mall about if not stuff? Josh’s side were the talented ones. His mother, Maya Cherny Burnham, was a well-known landscape painter. His father taught higher math at the technical college. Upward strivers both, they had never been shy about letting him know that they expected great things from him.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2012 Edition Page 18
