Meteor Mags: Omnibus Edition

by Matthew Howard

  Maybe they just didn’t give a fuck. Mags and Celina are different though. They’re more of a family to us than most of us ever had. They care about us.

  How did you meet them?

  I heard of Mags’ band because of Sarah. She was super into that one song they did, you know.

  Something to Destroy?

  Yeah, that one. Where Mags sings. I think it meant a lot to Sarah. But we met Mags after we’d been captured by the lizards. They had us in some kind of pen. If Mags hadn’t rescued us… Mags and Tarzi, of course. And Patches. And Tarzi’s little seahorse.

  So you know Tarzi, too. What do you think of him?

  He’s nice and all, but I wish he would quit smoking. It’s so gross. And I don’t know how he can listen to that stuff he calls music. Sounds like a lot of noise to me.

  What kind of music do you like?

  I like all kinds of stuff. Mags and Celina have been playing us music we didn’t even know existed. Weird, old jazz, stuff from Africa, Japan, South America. I mean, I don’t like all of it. I like stuff you can dance to, or sing along with. Not like Tarzi’s bands.

  Do you like the Psycho 78s?

  They’re alright. I mean, they’re a fun bunch of guys. They talk all tough, but it’s just like a lot of hot air, you know? I thought maybe they were creepy at first, but you have to get to know them.

  Do you have any hobbies? What do you do for fun?

  I like to draw a little bit. But Kala’s so much better at it than me. She’s amazing. I think she was born to do it. Celina’s teaching me some dance stuff. And not just pole dancing but like all kinds of things. Pole dancing is… It’s a little too sexy for me. I just want to dance, not have men drooling all over me like a—I don’t know. Like some kind of chicken on a rotisserie.

  (Laughs)

  Seriously though. I mean, nothing against Mags and Celina. They’ve been dancing for like a gazillion years. It’s just not my thing. Other than that, I help with teaching.

  You mean dance lessons?

  No, no. Reading. And math. You probably wouldn’t guess from talking to her, but Mags is crazy good at math. I don’t even know what she’s talking about sometimes, differential this and integrate that. But she’s pretty serious about making sure all of us are putting our minds to work. So, I help some of the younger girls with basic math and algebra. And Mags has some crazy antique books I never even heard of before.

  So it’s not just a constant party at Club Assteroid?

  Oh, god no. Celina keeps us pretty busy. But, I mean, it’s not like awful work. Some of the girls bitched at first about, you know, cleaning their rooms and stuff like that. And helping in the garden or whatever. But Celina knows how to make it fun. I mean, Mags might be all like, “Just clean your fucking room!” Hahaha. But Celina makes it seem not like work at all.

  How so?

  Oh, you know, we have contests, or we have to do some stuff, but then we can pick our own projects to work on most of the time. We always work together, so you’re basically just hanging out with your friends and talking. And we make little groups of our own to do stuff. Kala is giving drawing lessons, and she’s planning out a big mural for the club with her group.

  And do you have a group?

  No, not really. I mean, I sit in on Kala’s lessons, especially the figure drawing ones. But I haven’t thought of a project I’d want to lead. Honestly, I’d rather just do my own thing most of the time.

  Do you think the other girls look up to you?

  Me? Hahaha. Maybe some of them. They must think I’m a total bitch sometimes. I might have been a little too hard on them before. But I was just worried about them. I’m trying to be more chill these days. More like Celina.

  And less like Mags?

  I don’t have anything bad to say about Mags. Except she should quit smoking. It’s so gross.

  But she can be pretty rough on people, can’t she?

  I guess. It’s just how she is.

  Why do you think that is?

  Maybe how she grew up? I don’t know. I’m just glad she’s on our side. And most people don’t know her, I mean like really know her. They just see one side of her. Her pirate side or whatever. They don’t really know her like we do.

  So, do you have any plans to return to Earth in the future?

  Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. Earth is so fucked up right now. I think I’ll stick with Mags and Celina for a while. Like I said, they really care about us, and things are so much better for us than they were before.

  10

  Daughter of Lightning

  Every nature, every modeled form, every creature, exists in and with each other. They will dissolve again into their own proper root. For the nature of matter is dissolved into what belongs to its nature.

  …There is no such thing as sin.

  —The Gospel of Mary; Text from the Papyrus Berolinensis.

  PART ONE: THE VESTAL VIRGIN

  October 2029.

  Against the star-splattered canvas of space, Plutonian listened to the fabric of reality singing. His Siamese cat, Tesla, lay across his lap and purred. This soothed him. He stopped rubbing Tesla’s face just long enough to turn up the volume on the ship’s speaker system.

  Tesla opened his eyes. His pupils rolled up lazily to survey his human friend. Tesla did not know what they listened to, but he knew it was unlike anything they had ever heard.

  This was no small feat, considering the two of them had listened to every form of music imaginable in their years together. But this sound was something different, something Plutonian could not find words to describe.

  Below them smoldered the desolate husk of the Ghost Moon. Only a few months before, this moon had housed the machinery which transformed Patches from an ordinary calico cat into her adorably invulnerable self. But in the wake of the instantaneous reversal of its magnetic poles, it now orbited like a broken thing around its ringed planet. Fully two thirds of the moon had disintegrated and become part of the asteroids circling the planet. Little remained but a ragged chunk of destruction.

  Tears streamed from the corners of Plutonian’s eyes. “I thought we’d heard it all. But this—” With a gesture on the monitor’s touch screen, the Club Assteroid DJ activated a recorder. “We need to record this.” Waveforms sprang into life on his screen.

  He cradled his cat in his arms and stood before the window on the bridge. Plutonian scratched the side of Tesla’s face with one hand. He cried like he hadn’t cried since he was a boy. “So beautiful,” he whispered.

  If he had been the religious sort, the music playing over his speakers might have convinced him of the deistic nature of reality. Surely, he thought, this was what the ancient Hindus meant by the sound of Om, that original sonic vibration which caused the universe to spring into being and gave rise to all the forms we know. But he had abandoned deism long ago. He simply heard the music without any expectations. It washed over him and through him and in some way became him.

  Only a few days before, Meteor Mags had given him the coordinates of the now-obliterated Ghost Moon. “Knock knock, Mister DJ! What are you up to? Nobody’s seen a trace of you in weeks!” She stood in the doorway of his quarters, her tail swishing back and forth, her eyes shining over the rims of her tinted glasses.

  He set down his soldering iron and rested his safety glasses on top of his head. “Mags! So good to see you. Come in, come in.” He stood and opened his arms.

  She gave him a friendly hug. “Seriously, dude. What the fuck? People are getting worried.”

  “I think I’ve got it. Finally.”

  “Got what?”

  “Come here. Look at this.” He swept his hand in an arc to present the circuits on his workbench. “This is the recording project I was telling you about.”

  “Oh! No wonder you’ve been hiding out down here. How’s it coming?”

  “It hasn’t been easy. I fried the first dozen circuits. But those capacitors you gave me—wow. Perfect!”

  Mags smile
d. “Superconductivity at room temperature is something else, isn’t it?” She walked over to his bench. “You don’t even want to know how many motherfuckers I had to waste to get my hands on those. Friggin’ bloodbath! If not for Patches, I probably would have been FUBAR on that little excursion. But I thought we could use them.”

  “And how. Mags, these circuits are picking up stuff I never thought possible. Listen.” He flipped a switch. “Hear that? That’s Hawking Radiation coming out of the black holes at the core of the Andromeda galaxy.”

  “No way. That’s gorgeous.” She put her arms up, closed her eyes, and swayed. “I could dance to that for a million years.”

  “And these are residual wavelengths from a dying supernova.” He turned a dial. “This one here is a pulsar in the same sector.”

  “Damn. Did you just get bored of rock and roll or what?”

  “I’ll never get bored of that. But, you know, Tesla and I have archived damn near everything humans ever recorded. We thought it would be cool to record some things no one has ever heard before. Stuff technology just hasn’t been up to recording.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now.”

  Mags looked her friend up and down. Then she decided something. “Listen, dear. If you’re really into this thing—and obviously you are—there’s a little something I’d be curious to hear. I mean, if you have the time and all.”

  Plutonian placed his palms on the bench and leaned towards her. “You name it.”

  She laughed. “I don’t know if it has a name. Hell, I don’t even know if it exists.” Mags pulled a pack of cigarettes from her bra and took out a pair of them. She offered one.

  He took it and looked for a lighter.

  “I got this one.” She produced a lighter for him. “Now listen. Something weird went down this summer, when Patches and Tarzi and I were on the Ghost Moon.” Mags walked around to his side of the bench. She rested her backside on the edge of the bench and puffed leisurely. “Now, you’ve heard the story before, but I still have some unanswered questions. And I’d be willing to bet that whatever we did to that sodding moon left some interesting traces behind. Maybe radiation, electromagnetic disturbances, maybe some gravity signatures. I don’t know. But,” she said, leaning in closely to him, “I’d be hella curious to find out.”

  Plutonian took the coordinates from her, loaded up a ship with his new recording circuits, and went in search of whatever he could find.

  A soft beeping from the console broke his reverie. He set the cat down in his seat, glancing at the waveforms on the screen. Radar brought him unexpected news.

  “Check this out, Tesla.”

  Tesla did not check it out. He stretched out his body and rolled over. His claws kneaded the chair’s fabric. He purred.

  “These readings. It’s like we’re picking up two distinct signal sources. This one here,” he said, pointing to the screen, “is the remains of the moon itself. That’s giving us some radiation from what’s left of that rock. But this one here—” Tap, tap, tap. “This is something else entirely. A totally different source.”

  He pulled up his camera controls and zoomed in. “I wish Mags was here. I can’t even do the math on this. It’s like the carcass of the moon isn’t just orbiting the planet. It’s got some secondary orbit, like a binary star. It’s orbiting something else within that orbit.” Plutonian ran a hand over his face, thinking. He took the camera controls to their limit.

  “I can’t see a bloody thing. We don’t have high enough resolution.” He brought the ship in closer to the wrecked moon. “It’s got to be right there, but—”

  Then the alarms went off.

  ★ ○•♥•○ ★

  “Okay, just give it a little turn, Mags.” In the shop at Club Assteroid, Fuzzlow held a piece of machinery on the workbench. “Don’t over-crank it.”

  “I know, I know. Jeez, calm down.”

  Donny held a nut in place with a wrench on one side of the machinery. He lacked Fuzzlow’s magic touch with machines, but he had spent enough time repairing mining equipment to have proven quite handy in the shop. The two of them had spent many hours together, tinkering with all kinds of things since Donny had joined the band. “That’s a laugh! The great Meteor Mags telling anyone to keep calm.”

  She tightened the bolt from the other side. “What?! I’m as sweet as a little angel!” She cranked it some more.

  “Easy there, Magatha,” said Fuzzlow. “Don’t—”

  The bolt suddenly snapped in half, clattering down into the guts of the machinery.

  “Goddamn fuck!” She whipped her wrench across the shop. It smacked against the wall and fell into the piles of parts stacked there.

  “Mags!” Fuzzlow shook his head. “I told you—”

  “I know. I know! It was just a little bit loose.”

  “Well,” said Donny, “now we gotta drill out that damn bolt and start all over. How about a smoke break?”

  Mags’ eyes lit up. “Now there’s an idea!”

  “Fine, you two.” Fuzz set the machinery aside. “I’d get more work done in here if I had less help.”

  Donny snorted. “Go ahead and hold your own nuts, then!”

  “Yeah, Fuzz. Nut holder.”

  “Mags, can I just have my wrench back?”

  She sighed then searched for the wrench. “So when are you guys recording your next album?”

  “What do you mean, you guys? Aren’t you going to be on it with us?”

  “Fuzz, you know I can’t commit to rehearsals and sessions and all that. I got cargo to liberate! Lizards to exterminate!” Mags walked back to the bench and handed him his wrench.

  Donny offered his pack of smokes. “Come on, Mags. You can’t even do one song?”

  “Listen to this guy.” She took the pack. “Then we have to write the bloody thing, rehearse it, record it, decide that take sucked, record it again, do overdubs. It’s never just one song.”

  “What if we do it live? I mean, we’ve got a huge show next month. It’s your birthday, for crying out loud. You aren’t going to sing on your birthday?”

  Mags thought this over. “You’ve got a point. But I don’t want to be on record doing a cover. So what song goes on the album?”

  “Let’s do that one you’re always talking about but we never arranged.”

  Mags laughed. “That old thing? Oh, come on. No one wants to hear that.”

  “I want to hear it,” said Donny. “What is it?”

  “Oh, god. It’s just this thing I used to drive Gramma nuts with. It’s not even a real song!”

  Fuzzlow grinned. “Yeah, but it’s got a great title: Stone cold blasted at the edge of infinity!”

  “Now I gotta hear it,” said Donny.

  Mags rolled her eyes. “Okay. Fuzzlow, dear, would you give me a beat? Something like—” Mags drummed her fingers on the table.

  He put his hands to his mouth and beatboxed.

  “Yeah, like that. Okay, it goes something like this.”

  Stone cold blasted at the edge of infinity!

  Mags emulated the sound of a guitar riff: Duh duh duh DUH nuh nuh nuh nana NUH.

  You were plastered on the day that you lost your virginity!

  Duh duh duh NUHNUH duh duh duh duh dada WEEEER

  You were kicked outta house

  You were kicked outta school

  But you'll never build a rocket ship

  Flogging your tool!

  Take me to the stars now baby

  Take me to the—

  “Mags!” Donny held his belly and shook.

  “Donny,” she said, “what the fuck is so funny? Hahahahaha!”

  “Mags, that’s some real poetry there.”

  She threw her hands in the air. “I told you it wasn’t even a real song!”

  Donny laughed and laughed. “No, no. Go on! What’s the rest of it?”

  “There was only ever one verse! I was kind of wasted one night at La Plaza and started banging on the piano, b
elting this thing out. Suddenly Gramma storms in and yells, ‘Maggie, what in the name of god are you doing? It’s three in the bloody morning!’ So, that was the end of that.”

  “Gramma put the hammer down.”

  “She sure did.” Mags stubbed out her cigarette.

  Donny said, “I never would have rhymed infinity and virginity. Were you really plastered when you lost it?”

  Mags glared at him. “I assure you it was purely for comedic effect. There’s nothing about me in that line.”

  “Oh, quit yanking my chain. A wild woman like you? Dancing naked across the solar system for decades? I bet you have the best first time story of anyone.”

  “There’s no story, Donny. Get your mind out of whatever filthy gutter it’s crawled into.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you never, like—you know? Ever?”

  Mags put her hands on her hips, looking over the rims of her tinted glasses at him. “As if it’s any of your bloody business, Donald!”

  Fuzzlow laughed. “They don’t call this asteroid ‘Vesta’ for nothing, Donny.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mags asked.

  “You know, this crater all around us is Rheasilvia, right?” Fuzzlow leaned against the bench. “That’s from Roman mythology. Rhea Silvia gave birth to twins: Romulus and Remus. And you know who their father was?”

  Donny shrugged. “Who?”

  “Mars, the god of war.”

  “Damn, Fuzz!” Mags furrowed her brow. “Did you read a book or something?”