Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology (L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future)

by L. Ron Hubbard

  This is Jon’s second speculative fiction sale, following the flash story “The Saviors,” which appeared in Penumbra #32 (May 2014).

  about the illustrator

  Killian McKeown is the founder behind Vision Images. Killian started as a young adventurous entrepreneur, with a father deeply involved in professional photography, so it was a given that Killian would follow in the creative vision industry.

  After his dad’s passing, he decided to further his father’s legacy and direct his vision into photography. Mentored at Empire West Studios by Arizona’s top fashion photographer, Clayton Hall, Killian learned studio lighting, equipment setup, shooting, editing, printing, and the overall start-to-finish product presentation for clientele.

  Killian was able to build on his talents and soon moved into graphic design, developing right into a triple threat in the world of visual imagery. Since the age of nineteen he has worked on multiple sets as film crew, videographer, photographer and Assistant Director. Killian has created pieces for Lucky Strike Bowling, Salute the Troops 5k Run, Java Magazine, and Industry Magazine. He has been a press photographer for Phoenix Fashion Week, Laughlin International Film Festival, Comic-Con International, and the world-famous Harlem Globetrotters. Killian acted and was the camera production assistant for the movie Goats. Additionally, he has filmed, produced, and directed rap artist Heaven Sent’s very first music video. He currently works with New Angle Media in advertising.

  Illustrating has become a way to bring his imagined epic space adventures in far-off lands into reality, using a mix of all his photography, drawing and Photoshop/multimedia skills. It’s almost a necessity for Killian to do what he does or he’d go crazy with the epic characters and adventures stuck within his mind.

  The Star Tree

  I was fourteen years, not yet grown, the summer that my father, my brother, and I moved across the vast red desert from one domed city to another, a dusty two-and-a-half day trek in a pressurized train car whose glass dome looked so much like the ones over the cities we passed between, as if it were our world in miniature. The car smelled of solvents, aerosolized lubricants, and unwashed bodies.

  We were the only people traveling first class on an oversubscribed train, though a number of miners squatted in our car, smudging the seats with dust from their rough, ill-fitting work clothes. The women had the same broad shoulders as the men, the same short-cropped hair and flinty gazes, the same fingertips stained with miners’ grease, even under their close-bitten fingernails. Only the men’s thick beards, bushy and unkempt, distinguished them from women. A shiver passed through me: I’d never seen miners up close. Some of them weren’t any older than I was, perhaps even younger. One woman, a little older than me, had my mother’s piercing green eyes. She saw me gazing at her, and made an obscene gesture with her pinkie.

  The first evening on the train, when the lights went out and stars blossomed bright overhead, Chiq gawped at the constellations. He was half my age: seven years old by standard reckoning, two seasons by our local metric.

  “See, Marq?” He pointed up with one trembling clay-red finger. “That’s the star tree, Rhyonon. If miners in the Northern Desert lose their gear, they walk to her. There’s a ring of oases, and it’s another day to Tonnish City from there.” Chiq collected stars. I didn’t doubt he could name each star in Rhyonon, and number each system’s inhabitants.

  “We’re not miners, Chiq.” I knew a “trunk” of stars pointed north, “rooted” in Tonnish City. I’d seen fanciful drawings of that tree in the sky flush with leaves and blossoms. Whenever I looked up, all I saw were stars, glittering but haphazard, without a tree in sight. The stars were of no use to me.

  “We’re all miners here,” my father insisted. We’d never lived near the mines, always in cities, in homes suitable to his diplomatic post: private apartments with room for personal belongings.

  I knew what he meant. We were obligated to treat the miners as equals. They were the source of our world’s wealth and prestige. We adopted their mental habits, their pecuniary and emotional parsimony, their disdain for softness in all its forms. Had I traveled to another world, I would have claimed I’d descended from miners. My own hypocrisy sickened and aroused me.

  “Papa,” Chiq asked, “Can you point to Jiri?” He pointed up through the glass dome at the starry sky. “I want to see Mommy.” His eyes glistened. Surely he wouldn’t embarrass us all by bursting into tears?

  The star Jiri wasn’t visible from north of our equator. Surely Chiq knew that. Was he testing Dad? When I had been his age, my faith in our father was unbroken—though it had not yet been put to the test the way that Mom’s departure had shaken Chiq. I held my breath and waited for Dad to lie to Chiq.

  Dad patted him on the shoulder. “It’s too far away. We can’t see her from here.” Which wasn’t exactly true, as I’m sure Chiq knew—but might have been close enough to reassure him. I also heard the other things Dad didn’t say: he wanted to see her too. She couldn’t cross the gulf that separated us. Not just the distance between the stars, too expensive to bridge except when interstellar politics demanded, but the distance between her and my father as well. Ah, the look in her eye when my father told diplomats from other worlds that his was a mining family! She’d seen how miners lived. As I recalled how he’d “plucked” her—his word—from a dusty mining settlement, it dawned on me that she’d never forgiven him.

  KILLIAN MCKEOWN

  I looked through the bubble, across the vast and unlit desert. The atmosphere here was so thin that the stars didn’t twinkle like they did under containment domes. Tens of millions of stars shone dispassionately upon us. My father mourned for a woman on a world so far away that he couldn’t have pointed to it in the southern hemisphere, her star a grain of sand in the sky’s infinite fractal lode.

  I woke in the morning to the train’s gentle shimmy and the drone of Chiq’s voice. The three of us were alone in the car and he was reading his cards. His mouth twisted around names his tongue could never tell, in languages we didn’t have the anatomy to speak, as he stared at each system card in turn. His collection was childish but appropriate, not so mortifying I’d have to pretend he wasn’t my brother.

  “Coyopa, Nintoku, Tiye,” he recited. I couldn’t guess what worlds the names were for, how many billions of lives my brother held in that deck of star systems.

  “Will you stop that, Chiq?” Dad snapped. “You and your foolish game.”

  “It’s not a game, Dad. It’s real.” Chiq believed he held legal title to the stars and planets in his deck, systems destroyed by disease or asteroid, by their own hubris, cultural fugue, or unforeseen catastrophe. Worlds rebuilt by The Unexpected Delight Company’s enormous fleet of autonomous self-replicating terraformers and repopulated according to records of the genetic, epigenetic, and cultural state of the world at its peak—only to sell its title for a child’s subsistence budget.

  Chiq’s friends in Vervi Arrill, the city we had left, kept score of how many lives they ruled, little emperors and empresses. I considered myself mature and worldly, too old for such toys. I affected amusement, not amazement, at the scale of a universe where distressed worlds were so common as to become children’s playthings. What would happen should one of those little empresses set foot on a planet to which she held title? Did The Unexpected Delight Company maintain a fleet of autonomous soldiers and bodyguards for their customers’ benefit?

  Nor did I understand the gap between reality and the story spun by marketing feeds. It would be years before I understood the worlds had once been real, but the one-of-a-kind cards represented their only continued existence. They contained enough data to simulate worlds, or reconstruct them to their last statistically significant inhabitant, but physical reconstruction of a single world dwarfed even The Unexpected Delight Company’s seemingly limitless resources.

  I’d gleaned from my brother’s cards that most planets
vulnerable to such tragic fates were the lone inhabited worlds within their systems; in those cases, the deed was for an entire star system. I never saw any sign that Chiq and his friends cared about the scope of their possessions, outside of counting the number of sentient beings they putatively owned.

  “It’s not real,” Dad repeated. “They’re just cards—paper! Not even digital.”

  “Smartpaper, Papa. A cryptographic certificate of legal planet ownership. It’s electronic inside the paper.” Chiq parroted the promotional copy that sheathed each card. Dad was too old to understand paper. I was too old for planet cards, but Dad was so far beyond that he couldn’t even see what they were.

  “So, what? You could fly to one of those planets and they’d worship you as the embodiment of the local deity? Because you have a piece of paper?”

  “That’s religion, Papa. This is economics. Money.”

  “And people turn their lives over to you—for money?”

  “The people didn’t exist when title was granted,” I explained. “No sentient being existed at the time of the title grant, prior to reconstruction.”

  “It’s absurd.” Dad rolled his eyes.

  “Look: He’s learning cartography, economics—does it matter if it’s real?”

  “It matters to me!” Chiq butted in. He looked down at his cards and resumed taking inventory.

  Dad didn’t answer. I was old enough to know he was remembering Mom. Remembering the arguments they used to have. I was young enough to despise him for both their arguments and his sentimentality.

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. “They’re important to Chiq. If you want him to forgive you, show some interest in what he likes.”

  Dad blinked.

  “My systems!” Chiq shouted. “They’re missing!”

  “They’re right there,” Dad said. “You’re holding them.”

  “Not these. I have a hundred planets I’ve lost. Seventeen billion citizens.”

  “Paper.” Dad sniffed. “Not worth a thing: you can’t search it, can’t back it up.”

  “Paaaapa!” Chiq burst into tears. Here he went, embarrassing us in front of the whole train car.

  “Are they in your bag?” I asked. “Have you checked your pockets?”

  We looked through Chiq’s meager belongings: the Keensa-bark coat that Mom had shaped for him, the hollowed-out Tonsu shell she’d given him for a suitcase.

  “They’re not there,” Chiq wailed. He looked up. “I must have left them in Vervi Arrill.” He’d hidden his cards in an old food canister, just inside the ventilation unit behind our shared desk. I’d pretended not to know where they were. Keeping secrets was as childish as it was embarrassing, but not so immature as prying into them.

  “You’re sure they’re not here?” Dad said. “Can you replace them?”

  “Replace them?” Chiq shrieked. “Every system’s one-of-a-kind. There’s only one Coyopa.” He waved that card in Dad’s face. “Did I have two mothers?”

  That got Dad’s attention. A look I didn’t understand played across his face, perhaps an amalgam of guilt and resolution. He had to be everything to us now, didn’t he?

  “We’ll find them,” he said in a low voice. He sounded alert, focused in a way he hadn’t for a long time. “Wherever they are, we’ll find them.” He took Chiq’s hand. I turned away and pretended we weren’t related.

  “They’re not here, Papa. I left them back home. I know it.” Chiq hadn’t yet learned that none of us had homes.

  “I’ll send a note. The Dwelling Council can forward them along, if they turn up.” Dad didn’t sound very confident, for a diplomat.

  Chiq seized on that. “They won’t send along my cards. They’ll keep them for themselves, or incinerate them.” He was right.

  Dad sighed. “We do have rights to that unit for another week, so nobody’ll be in there yet. If we get off the train at the next stop”— he looked up at the pulsing diagram that ran like a frieze around the bubble—“at Korga, we can catch the next train back to Vervi Arrill. We’ll pick up your planets and take the next train back. We’ll make it to Tonnish City before my work assignment begins.”

  That was true, but he wouldn’t get much rest, and I wouldn’t have time to taste the various delights of Tonnish City before we were all too busy.

  I seethed: why would he do this, turn around for a handful of cards you could buy for the weekly pittance allotted to children? Why was Dad so weakened by Chiq’s baby tears? Wasn’t he always saying we were miners?

  “You go,” I said. “I’m staying on the train.” It would be just me and the miners. I ached at the half-formed thoughts that bobbed just beneath consciousness.

  Chiq looked as if I’d socked him in the jaw. We’d long ago learned that a united front held Dad hostage to our demands. We’d maintained an unspoken agreement, a tit-for-tat system. We backed each other against his resistance. I’d just broken that truce.

  “Your planets are stupid,” I explained. “You own them, but so what? You’ll never see them, like you’ll never see Mom again. Nobody on those planets will ever know who you are. It’s just a baby game.” He’d started collecting cards when Mother received her work assignment, months before her departure. I didn’t think a lot about how the two things were related for Chiq; it was enough to know that they were. “No way am I going back to that old dump, just for your stupid game.”

  “Fine, Marq. You stay on the train. Papa and I will go back. See you in Tonnish City.” His lip quivered only a little.

  “Chiq, Marq, I don’t care which way we go, but we’re staying together.” Dad seemed old, frightened. I wanted to agree with Chiq just to make him happy, but something wouldn’t let me do that. It was being an adolescent, I suppose: I despised how both Chiq and Dad behaved. Chiq, awed by our father, treated Dad’s every act as deeply meaningful. He couldn’t see that Dad was doing the same things again and again, that they’d lost any meaning they’d ever had, like repeating a word over and over until it sounded strange, the way he repeated Mom’s name when he thought we were asleep. It struck me that he felt about Mom the way I felt about the miners we were sitting with on the train, but I buried the thought.

  Nobody said anything for a long time. I heard the high harmonics of the vibrating rails and the low whoosh of the air filtration, smelled the cooking grease, felt the sun beat down through the bubble. I paid close attention, as I wanted to fix this moment in my memory.

  I couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

  “I’m going to the dining car. I want a snack.”

  “I’m coming too,” Chiq said.

  “No you’re not.”

  “Let me.”

  “Let him,” Dad said.

  “Fine.” I pressed the airlock pressurization button without waiting for Chiq, but he stood beside me before it hissed and opened. We pulled the door of our car shut and passed quickly into the next.

  “Can you keep a secret?” Chiq looked up at me, tears welling in his eyes.

  “You’re such a baby. Can you stop crying for even one minute?”

  “I—” Chiq lost it. I hurried him into the single-occupancy restroom at this end of the car.

  “What is it?” I hissed, furious.

  “The cards—”

  “Not this again.”

  “Jiri’s in my lost cards,” Chiq wailed.

  I hugged him tight and didn’t say anything. Chiq’s revelation crushed whatever secret hope I’d nurtured, of my improbable emigration or Mom’s inconceivable return, like a lump of ore by the refinery. It left me with nothing but slag in the pit of my stomach. I was going to be sick.

  “You can’t tell Dad,” Chiq said. “He’d—”

  “I know.” I hugged Chiq as if we were both babies. I’d half-felt his desperation, but now I knew Mom, like everyone else on Jiri V, was truly gone. Dead.
Dad was lost and the two of us were alone, with nothing to steer by in the infinite and bosomless universe. In the face of that, I was no more grown than Chiq.

  I studied him with a sudden sense of wonder. How had he kept this secret for so long? No wonder he blubbered in fits. “Fine. I’ll go with you.”

  “Don’t tell Papa.”

  “I won’t.” I hugged him again, as though I were the child. I wasn’t hungry anymore, but Dad would know something was wrong if we came back without our snack. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  Dad didn’t ask any questions. He was just happy we’d agreed on something and didn’t want to know what kind of bribery was involved. I let him presume that Chiq would be giving me a chunk of his subsistence budget.

  We transferred to the Vervi Arrill train at Korga, a mining depot too small for even a proper station. The air was full of dust, as though their bubble had been permeated. But of course they had no bubble.

  Miners hunched over, now and then convulsed with coughs, as we waited for our train. Some ideas I’d previously considered in isolation formed new constellations: the cheapness of the miners’ air filters and how infrequently they were replaced; the way the trains between Vervi Arrill and Tonnish city elided the continent between them, and with that distance the dignity of manual labor; that the economic underpinnings of this planet were hidden in plain sight, its domed metropolitan spires just froth from the subterranean churning.

  I stared frankly at the miners on the platform, willing any of them to look me in the eye. Father would never stand for it, a miner in the family. That just made me want them more. Most of the miners wouldn’t meet my gaze. One—a boy too young to beard, or perhaps a woman—bared his teeth and hissed at me. Blushing, I turned away and didn’t look back until the train came.

  We boarded the first-class car. This train was less full, and no miners camped in our car. I plotted to enter the second-class cars but lacked the nerve when my chances came. Once, a miner passed through our car, but he never looked my way. My heart shouted, but my voice remained silent.