Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 54

by John Joseph Adams

  “What do you see?”

  Is he kidding? “I see an ugly fucking planet getting closer way too fast, Eric, what do you think I see?”

  “Do you see any debris? How far clear of the lander did you get?”

  The thing is you didn’t even notice. You just started falling. Look down again, look around you, this time really see it, not all that near, but there. Twisted metal, carbon fiber. Wires trailing like tangled nerves. A few tiny fires here and there as the last of the gases burn off. If this rock had any atmosphere to speak of, they’d be glowing like little falling stars, but then so would you, so in a way things have worked out pretty well, at least for the next two minutes.

  Two or three. Hard to say. Round down, maybe.

  “I see some debris. It’s not that close.” God, you sound so calm. “If anything’s going to be on an approach, be aware.”

  “Got it. That’s good, Sean, that helps us.” And that’s when you realize how much you want to believe him, how much you don’t want to die, how far you are from being all stoic and accepting it like a big damn hero, a tragic sacrifice to SCIENCE. All in caps like that, maybe with a trumpet fanfare. SCIENCE.

  Laugh again. You can’t help it.

  “Sean?”

  “Nothing. It’s just funny.” Picture him now, leaning over the comm, blond cowlick hanging over his forehead. Maybe he’s sweating a little, like he does when he’s stressed. His post, comm officer, among other things, and you could never shake the feeling that someone was doing you a solid, but dammit, you were really proud of him. You kissed him when he told you but you never actually said the words.

  He was going to fly with you.

  • • • •

  The first day, you said yes because you had the sense to see how important it was. How much it meant. There’s gold in them hills. Them brown, boring-ass hills. Dig it out and sail across the universe, a hundred ships, a thousand, going as far as they wanted to. Start by laying down some charges. You could do that, you love making things explode. It’s a risk, it might be suicide—you’d all have enough punch to make it all the way out there in about four months, but if the mission failed, you wouldn’t have enough to make it back.

  It was all on you. Three weeks ago, when you started decelerating and everyone threw themselves a party, he pulled you close and combed his fingers into your hair and murmured something about you being a hero.

  For SCIENCE.

  He said it like that. You laughed. You laughed and laughed and kissed him. The thing is, you loved how that sounded. You wanted to be a hero. You thought that might be pretty cool.

  But you had nightmares about falling. You had them every night—it’s all night here, but habits die hard and habits of thinking die even harder. You fell and fell into nothing but black, and you screamed for him, but he wasn’t there. You’d wake up in the dimness breathing hard, dragging in way more than your share of the oxygen the hydroponic module was pumping out, and you’d grope for him. And he’d talk to you. Didn’t even matter what he said. His voice gave you direction, guided you back. Guided you home.

  • • • •

  “Eric.” Lick your lips. Don’t look at it again. Find up, look that way, at the ship hanging there. Where he is. “Look, I can’t be the only one talking here.” Grin. It feels like a hole through which a scream might escape. “Tell me a story?”

  Now he laughs, and you really do love how that sounds. In bed, you’d tickle him until he laughed so hard he hurt, begged you to stop—you thought that was just about the sexiest thing he ever did.

  Everything gets blurry for a few seconds.

  “Once upon a time there was this stupid asshole and his stupid asshole husband and they went to space and it was a really, really bad idea.” He laughs again, a watery kind of laugh, and everything in your throat locks up. “Not the end, right? Sean, it’s not the end.”

  “Be a hell of a sucky ending.”

  “Yeah, well.” Something’s up. You always knew something was up. He’s up, so far. Flying without you. “Never thought that would really be up to us.”

  “Any updates on those options?”

  Pause. You have just over a minute. Maybe. You’re not counting anymore, except some irritating, masochistic little node in the back of your brain can’t do anything else.

  “Sean, we can’t do anything. There’s no time.” Close your eyes. You wish you could see the stars. You can pretend. “I’m so sorry, I should’ve—”

  “No. I’m sorry.” There’s no time. It’s playing on a loop in your head, over and over. You knew it before, you knew it since you started falling, but it’s different when he says it, when it’s that voice that led you out of the dark every time you plunged into it. “I’m sorry I dragged you out here. I’m sorry I put you through this.”

  “Sean, don’t.” And now he’s the one who sounds calm. Still watery, still on the edge of something, but calm. “I wanted to come. I told you.”

  “You would.”

  “No, I never told you the other part. I wanted to come, Sean, and I would have come even if you hadn’t. You think this is all about you. You honestly do think you’re that important. You are, you’re the most important thing in the world to me, but …” He’s smiling. Oh, God. “You’re not the center of it. I wanted to come. And I’m not sorry about that.”

  There are stars. There always were because they’re everywhere but now it’s like you’re really seeing them for the first time, seeing them like they matter in a way they didn’t before, so many, all of them so bright. “You’re not going to be able to make it home.”

  “We have a backup. You know that.”

  You do. But somehow you know something else. Or you’re just sure because you can’t conceive of this going any other way. “It’ll fail.”

  “Might not.”

  “It will. Eric?” You’re crying now. You’ve never cried in front of him but you’re doing it now, it’s wrenching at you, twisting at your gut, it’s so horrible and you wish he could see you because you feel like this is something you never should have denied him. “Don’t come after me. Promise me that. Whatever you do, don’t.”

  “Don’t you tell me what to do. Sean? Sean, I love you. Keep talking.”

  The little, boring, ugly-ass planet is big now. Very big. The last of the light gone from its surface. Look down. Soak in the view. More dark, open to swallow you. “I love you, Eric. Get home. Whatever you have to do, get home.”

  “We will. Sean, tell me what you see.”

  “It’s all dark. It’s—”

  Wait.

  Not far below. Maybe a couple of miles, now. You’re down to your last seconds, and each one is stretching out, long and precious, and it’s all so, so beautiful. Because there are stars over you and now, would you ever believe it, there are stars underneath you, on that boring, ugly-ass planet, a million brilliant little lights coming on in the dark.

  In patterns.

  They spiral outward, curl in on themselves, amazing and intricate. Shimmering slowly. Circles within circles, like some kind of diagram from the mind of a mad genius. Moving, dancing, and beneath that whisper-voice of the big black you could swear you hear something else now. Swear it to everything, swear it to God.

  You hear them singing. And how is it possible that you didn’t see this before, that you didn’t hear? Because you weren’t ready until now. Because they weren’t ready for you.

  Whisper. “Eric, look at this.”

  “Sean? What is it?”

  “Eric, you have to come see.” You told him to stay away. But now you know it can’t end here. He was right, you’re not the center of anything, and this doesn’t end with you. You can do this last thing, and it might be everything. You can still be a hero.

  For SCIENCE.

  Laugh, with shock and joy and more life than you’ve ever felt before.

  “Eric, you have to see this, you have to. Don’t listen to what I said before.” The lights turning, turning, lik
e a hand opening to you, a door warm and bright and inviting. “Come and see, Eric. Promise me. Promise you’ll—”

  “Sean, I will, just … God, don’t—”

  “—come back—”

  His voice guides you home.

  • • • •

  There were things in your life that, in moments of clarity, you’d do absolutely anything to be able to go back and change. But in those moments of clarity you also see something else, and it’s that everything, every choice, led you to every other choice, and to change one of them is to change them all.

  Sitting on that Caribbean beach with Eric, curled against him, under a really, really dark sky. Looking up at all those stars, and in that single clear moment you have this silly, romantic, Disney-movie thought—not the first one you’ve ever had and not, as it turns out, the last—about who might be looking back. Because yesterday you and Eric said yes, and this morning you said yes again, and you don’t even have rings yet but you’ll take care of that, and right now the universe seems so big and everything feels possible.

  You think about who might be looking back, and then you figure it doesn’t matter. That’s not what you’re going up there for. You’re going to see all those stars, though, and then you’re going to carve out a chunk of a chunk of one, use it to pave the road for so many others.

  All that shit you’d change. But this is okay.

  “Hey.” Eric reaches up, touches your jaw, tips your head back down so your lips brush his. “Where are you? Come back.”

  Okay, you say, and kissing him is like flying before you even start to fly. Stars behind your closed eyes, all around you. Okay.

  © 2014 by Sunny Moraine.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, and Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, among other places. They are also responsible for the novels Line and Orbit (co-written with Lisa Soem) and the Casting the Bones trilogy, as well as A Brief History of the Future: collected essays. In addition to authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometimes college instructor; that last may or may not have been a good move on the part of their department. They unfortunately live just outside Washington DC in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband. They can be found at sunnymoraine.com.

  To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

  Spidersong

  Susan C. Petrey

  Brenneker, the lyre spider, lived inside a lute, a medieval instrument resembling a pear-shaped guitar. The lute was an inexpensive copy of one made by an old master and had rosewood walls and a spruce sounding board. Her home was sparsely furnished, a vast expanse of unfinished wood, a few sound pegs reaching from floor to ceiling like Greek columns, and in one corner, near the small F-shape sound holes, the fantasy of iron-silk thread that was Brenneker’s web. Brenneker’s home was an unusual one for a lyre spider. Most of them spin their webs in hollow tawba stalks, which echo the music of these tiny fairy harps seldom heard by ears of men. Lyre spiders play duets with each other, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes bouncing counterpoint melodies back and forth across the glades between the tall bamboo-like tawba. They play their webs to attract prey, to win a mate, or for the sheer joy of music. They live alone except for the few weeks in mother’s silken egg case and one day of spiderlings climbing up the tawba to cast their threads into the wind and fly away. When they mate, the embrace lasts but a few moments. Then the female eats the male, who gives himself gladly to this deepest union of two souls.

  Originally, Brenneker had lived in the forest, surrounded by the music of her own kind. Although she lived alone, she was never lonely, for she could always hear the mandolin-like plucking of Twinklebright, her nearest neighbor, the deep, droning chords of old Birdslayer, and occasionally the harpsichord tones of Klavier, carried on the breeze.

  One hot afternoon, as Brenneker experimented with augmented fifths, she noticed that some of her neighbors had stopped midsong. She suddenly realized she was the only one still playing and she stopped abruptly, leaving a leading tone hanging on the air like an unfinished sentence.

  “These ones should do,” she heard a man’s voice say. An angry blow struck the base of her tawba stalk. She felt herself falling as the tawba that was her home broke at the base, tumbling her to the floor of the glade below. Bruised and frightened, she scampered quickly back inside her home and clung to her silent, broken web. She felt herself lifted up and then dropped with a jar as her tawba was tossed into a wagon.

  Over many hours of jolting and rattling, she fell asleep, and when she awoke, all was quiet and dark. She climbed out of her stalk and began to explore her new surroundings, a workbench with many hollow wooden objects lying about. Although she had never seen a musical instrument such as men make, she recognized with the eye of a musician that their shape was intended to give sound. She chose a lute and squeezed her plump body through one of the sound holes, saying, “Certainly this will give greater tone than my old home.” She began to string her web.

  At night there was no music in the instrument maker’s shop, and she was lonely without the songs of her friends to cheer her. Since she was also hungry, she played her hunger song, and a fat, stupid moth came, aching to be devoured. When she’d finished with him, she tossed his powdery wings out the sound hole.

  In the morning, the old instrument maker, Sanger, came to open up his shop. He paused in the shop doorway, rattling his keys, and then turned on the overhead light. Brenneker watched him from the sound holes of her new home as he ran a wrinkled hand through his sparse, gray hair, stuffed his keys back into a deep pocket, and picked a viola from the wall. Carefully, he adjusted the tuning of the strings, and then, picking up the bow, he played a short, lilting tune and then replaced the instrument on its peg on the wall. He made his way along the wall, pausing at each instrument to check the tuning. When he came to Brenneker’s lute, he did the same, tightening the strings briefly and then playing a few bars of melody. Brenneker felt her whole surroundings vibrate with the tone and her web pulsed in sympathetic vibration. Timidly, she picked out a few notes of the song.

  “Odd,” said Mr. Sanger, “I’d never noticed that it had such lovely overtones. Too bad I had to use such cheap materials in its construction.” He placed the lute back on the wall and was about to pick up a zither, when the shop bell rang to announce that someone had come in from the street.

  A young girl and her father came through the door and paused to look at violins.

  “But I don’t want to play violin,” said the girl, who was about ten years old. “Everyone plays violin. I want something different.”

  “Well, what about a guitar,” said her father. “Your friend Marabeth plays one quite well. It seems like a proper instrument for a young lady.”

  “But that’s just it,” said the girl, whose name Brenneker later found out was Laurel. “I don’t want to copycat someone else. I want an instrument that isn’t played by just anyone. I want something special.”

  Sanger interrupted this conversation to say, “Have you considered the lute?” He removed Brenneker’s home from the wall and strummed a chord. The vibration in the web tickled Brenneker’s feet as she strummed the same chord an octave higher.

  “What a lovely tone it has!” said Laurel, touching the strings and plucking them one by one.

  “Be careful,” said her father. “That’s an antique.”

  “Not so,” said Sanger, “it’s a copy. Made it myself. And I intended it to be played, not just looked at like a dusty old museum piece.”

  “May I try?” asked the girl. Sanger gave the instrument to her and she sat down on a stool, placing the lute across her lap. She strummed a discord, which caused Brenneker to flinch and grip her strings tightly so they wouldn’t sound.

  “Let me show you how,” said the instrument maker. “Put your first finger in that fret and your middle finger
there, like so.” He indicated where the fingers should fret the strings to make a chord. Laurel plucked the strings one by one. The tone was tinny but true. The second time she plucked, Brenneker plucked inside, on her own instrument. Rich, golden tones emanated from the lute.

  “Oh, Father, this is the instrument for me,” said Laurel.

  “But who will teach you to play such an antiquated instrument?”

  “I would be glad to,” said Sanger. “I have studied medieval and Renaissance music and I would like to share it with an interested pupil.”

  “Please, Father?”

  “Well, perhaps … there is the question of cost. I can’t afford a very expensive instrument,” said her father.

  “This lute, although made with loving care and much skill,” said Sanger, “is unfortunately made of inexpensive wood, and for that reason it is very reasonably priced.”

  Mr. Sanger and Laurel’s father were able to make agreeable terms for the lute and the cost of lessons. That morning Laurel took the lute, Brenneker and all, home with her.

  The first few weeks of lessons were torture for Brenneker, who sat huddled, clenching her strings to her body to damp them. But as Laurel improved, Brenneker rewarded her by playing in unison. This was great incentive to Laurel, who did not realize that she was only partial author of the lovely music. Mr. Sanger was himself at a loss to explain how such beautiful tones came from such a cheaply built instrument. He did not credit his workmanship, although this was in some measure responsible, but told Laurel that the lute was haunted by a fairy harpist, and he advised her to leave a window open at night and put out a bowl of milk and honey before she went to bed. Perhaps he had been the beneficiary of such a fairy in the past, for Brenneker found that the milk and the open window provided her with a bountiful supply of flies and insects, which she tempted by song through the sound holes of the lute to make her supper.

  Sanger valued highly the virtue of two playing in harmony. “For the ability to blend with another in duet is a mark of maturity in a true musician,” he would say. “Harmony between two players recaptures for us briefly that time when the universe was young, untainted by evil, and the morning stars sang together.”