With a little hop, Kelly now sat on his hind legs, his real legs dangling like a young boy's at the grown-up table.
"This machine,” he said, “It's something that shouldn't exist. It reaches all the way into the center, to the birth of the universe. For some reason, I don't know why, we've got power there. It likes our telee,” he said, spinning his finger around his temple like he meant crazy.
"You just see what you want in your mind, feel it so strongly that you don't believe any other reality. If you do it right, the ground rules change ever so slightly and that blue shirt you're wearing might suddenly become red, if you've wished it hard enough."
"It might as well be magic for all the sense that makes,” Carlos said. “The results are all that matters. So why can't someone wish for world peace hard enough? Why can't someone wish for an end to suffering hard enough that it makes the world a decent place for everyone?"
"It's tricky. It's very tricky. Popes and prime ministers and seven-year-old girls have all knelt here in front of that box and wished for it strongly enough that it would happen all right. But it's not the way they imagine it might be."
"How do you know?"
"I can see the consequences, the deal with the devil, if you will. The computational power of an entire dimension rests within these seven sides,” he said, pointing to the box. “Sometimes people wish for an end to all violence, and everybody dies because we can't feed the world. In some scenarios, we all die because we can't defend ourselves from an outside threat. Sometimes a wish for an end to suffering does us all in, or turns us all into unfeeling vegetables. There's no way I can let any of that happen."
"There's no way you can let it happen? You can stop it?"
"I've got to activate the final step. We can't have crazy people changing the air to cheese or putting the dust mites in charge of things. I have to turn the key, so to speak."
Carlos hissed. “Are you trying to tell me that the fate of the universe rests in your hands? How can you judge? How can that kind of power be trusted to an ordinary man?"
"I do okay. You're not breathing cheese, are you?"
Carlos couldn't find the words. He dropped down and sat on the marble surface, then scooted over to put a little more space between himself and the Wonderbox. They looked out from the topmost level of the architectural bastard child of an ancient Mayan step pyramid done in the white marble and majestic columns of Classical Greece. His eyes followed the carved body of a winged serpent in the chillingly, beautifully, stomach-churningly expensive marble far to his right. Its long, trailing form raced downward alongside the steps he'd ascended.
He had climbed three hundred feet of steps after Mike, in that sharp gray uniform, had called out his name. Two-thirds of the way up Carlos had passed a weeping couple, descending from their own experience with the Wonderbox and he spent the final third of his trip trying to puzzle out why they could be crying. Now he knew that the serpent had chased them all the way down. To his Christian mind, the serpent seemed an apt symbol for this place and for this man.
"I feel like I'm watching a two-year-old playing with a hydrogen bomb,” Carlos finally told Kelly. “You've got the power of a god here! You need to use it responsibly!"
"I am! Haven't you been listening to me?"
"I'm not just talking about keeping people from destroying the world. Why can't you keep trying to fix things?"
Kelly shook his head and sliced the air with his hands.
"I just can't. I've tried every type of wish that I can think of. And every so often, in the middle of the night, I'll fly out here and try a new angle. It never pans out. It's beyond my imagination. That's why..."
"That's why you need other people."
"Right, nine billion other points of view. One of these days someone will come up with something."
"Why don't you just tell everyone what you're looking for in the first place? You've got people all over the world thinking that this box is Santa Claus. Tell them what you're really after!"
"And who would come? The few that are already trying to change things and no others. I need the diversity of the world."
"No. You need to tell people what this really is and we can stop wasting our time with toys,” he said waving his pad in Kelly's face.
"No."
"Then I'll tell them, damn it!"
"Be my guest, Carlos, but who's going to listen? People want their fantasies, they want their toys. You heard more than one story about the Wonderbox. Did you come up here looking to end the world's problems? No. You whored your way up here hoping for fame and fortune like so many others."
"Shut up! I might have come for the right reasons had I known the truth!"
"The truth wouldn't have seduced Darby for you. The truth wouldn't have been enough to move you halfway across the continent to come here. It's desire that does that. Petty desire is what I've got to count on. Even with that, we may never really change the world. Not the way we want. Maybe it can't happen at all."
Carlos leaped up. “It can! Tell the people!"
"No."
"You old bastard! You idiot! You sit here and hope then. I'm going to change things myself! I'll fix this goddamned world with nothing but my own two hands if I have to!"
"I wish you luck, Carlos. I really do."
"To hell with you, Mister Kelly! To hell with you and everybody associated with this waste of a salvation!"
Carlos stormed down the steps, curled with anger, his clenching fists biting into the yellow pulp pad in his hands.
"You ready for the next one, Savon?” Mike teleed from the foot of the pyramid.
"Gimme a minute, Mike,” Kelly said. He knelt before the box as he had so many times before and rested his hand upon it, waiting to see what might come.
He saw a woman in a blue-checkered dress. Someone on the street had handed her a few handwritten yellow sheets of paper, and now at home she finished reading them. She put them down slowly, smoothing them out on the end table next to the couch. Kelly saw her go to her son's room, kneel beside the drunken man's bed and hold the boy that she'd given up on, the son that she had been utterly disgusted with. She held him for a good while longer than she had held him in years. Her son woke, his sudden surprise gone in a flicker and his arms wrapped around her broad back in a way he'd forgotten since he was nine years old.
Kelly saw a hesitation in the face of a scraggly young good-for-nothing as the kid felt the large round belly of his estranged girlfriend and the powerful young life within, fighting for elbow room. And Scraggly asked to be let back into their lives as a few yellow pages fell to the floor at the girl's bare feet.
He witnessed a sheaf of yellow sheets caught by the wind and blowing over the desert sands as a man, across the span of a heartbeat, lifted the barrel of his rifle from the face of a young girl to the sky above her head, before his finger tightened on the trigger.
Everywhere, Kelly saw, yellow sheets of paper passed from hand to hand, were copied to datapads or published anonymously. It involved no destruction of life as we know it, no world wide disaster, no rip in the fabric of reality. There were just little people across this small corner of the solar system, for a few moments or for a few days, being a little more considerate of one another. And that made all the difference in the world.
"Oooo,” Kelly said, as he turned the key, “That's a good one."
* * * *
Matthew Sanborn Smith was born and raised in New England and lives in South Florida with his wife and two children. When he's not writing, Mr. Smith roams the countryside with a flaming jaguar at his side, bringing Rice-A-Roni to losing game show contestants everywhere. He tries to post a new story each day at his blog “The One-Thousand” at theonethousand.blogspot.com.
* * * *
If I could describe a “human being” I would be more than I am—and probably living in the future, because I think of human beings as something to be realized ahead ... But clearly, “human beings” have something to do with the
luminous image you see in a bright child's eyes—the exploring, wondering, eagerly grasping, undestructive quest for life.
—James Tiptree, Jr., Epigraph to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, quoted in “Yesterday's Tomorrows” by Graham Sleight in Locus (June 2007, Vol 58 No 6)
[Back to Table of Contents]
Print Back Issues
Number 1
+ Stories by Tim Reid, Timothy Dyck, Terry Thwaites, Douglas M. Grant, Charles Conrad, and Gord Zajac
+ Reviews of the Blade Runner books and movie
* * * *
Number 2
+ Stories by Michael Mirolla, D. Sandy Nielsen, Paul Benza, Greg Bechtel, James Schellenberg, and Stefano Donati
+ Reviews of Isaac Asimov's books and movies
* * * *
Number 3
+ Stories by Bonnie Blake, Erik Allen Elness, Tom Olbert, Hans Albanese, and Robert Arthur Vanderwoude
+ Reviews of Stanislaw Lem's books and movie
+ Interview with James Alan Gardner
* * * *
Number 4
+ Stories by Timothy Carter, Bonnie Mercure, Carl Mills, Nicholas Pollotta & Phil Foglio, and Erik Allen Elness
+ Reviews of Frank Herbert's Dune books and movie
+ Interview with Tanya Huff
* * * *
Number 5
+ Stories by D. Sandy Nielsen, Anne Louise Johnson, B. R. Bearden, Mark Leslie, Carol W. Berman, and Hugh Cook
+ Reviews of Arthur C. Clarke's books and movies
+ Interview with Robert J. Sawyer
* * * *
Number 6
+ Stories by Leah Silverman, Nicholas Pollotta, K. G. McAbee, Hugh Cook, Stacey Berg, and Daniel Pearlman
+ Reviews of books by and about Philip K. Dick
+ Interview with Julie E. Czerneda
* * * *
Number 7
+ Stories by D. K. Latta, Hugh Cook, Kate Tompkins, Stefano Donati, K. G. McAbee, and Michael Mirolla
+ Reviews of feminist science fiction books and movie
+ Interview with Robert Charles Wilson
* * * *
Number 8
+ Stories by James A. Hartley, Ken Rand, A. R. Morlan, Vincent Sakowski, Kelly Howard, and James Viscosi
+ Reviews of feminist science fiction books and movie
+ Interview with Phyllis Gotlieb
* * * *
Number 9
+ Stories by J. S. Lyster, Kate Burgauer, D. K. Latta, Shelley Moore, Joe Mahoney, and Chris Reuter
+ Reviews of The War of the Worlds books and movie
+ Interview with Charles de Lint
* * * *
Number 10
+ Stories by Hugh Cook, David Chato, Nye Marnach, Matthew J. Reynolds, Chris Webb, and Karina Sumner-Smith
+ Reviews of New Wave SF books and movie
+ Interview with Candas Jane Dorsey
* * * *
Number 11
+ Stories by Peter S. Drang, Mark Anthony Brennan, Karl El-Koura, Hugh Cook, Harrison Howe, and Diane Turnshek
+ Reviews of books that Judith Merril wrote and edited
+ Interview with Guy Gavriel Kay
* * * *
Number 12
+ Stories by Carl Sieber, D. K. Latta, A. R. Morlan, Justin E. A. Busch, Rudy Kremberg, and Hugh Cook
+ Reviews of books and movie about Mars
+ Interview with Nalo Hopkinson
* * * *
Number 13
+ Stories by Ilsa J. Bick, Christopher East, Hugh Cook, Erol Engin, Nye Marnach, and Donna Farley
+ Reviews of Alice in Wonderland book and movies
+ Interview with Jim Munroe
* * * *
Number 16
+ Stories by Uncle River, Vincent W. Sakowski, A. R. Morlan, Ken Rand, and Michael R. Martin
+ Reviews of time travel books
+ Interview with Alison Baird
+ A Survey of SF & Fantasy Art (Part 3 of 3)
* * * *
Back issues are available online at www.clarkesworldbooks.com or through the mail. If you're ordering through the mail please make your cheque out to Crystalline Sphere Publishing and send it to:
Challenging Destiny
R. R. #6
St. Marys, Ontario
Canada N4X 1C8
* * * *
Back issues are $7.50 Canadian, $6.50 U.S., and $7.00 International (in U.S. funds).
[Back to Table of Contents]
Electronic Back Issue
Number 24
+ Stories by Ian McHugh, Jennifer Rachel Baumer, Brian Patrick McKinley & Mark Jenkins, Corey Brown, Harvey Welles & Philip Raines, Andrea McDowell, and Hayden Trenholm
+ Review of the latest in Canadian SF
+ Interview with Michelle Sagara
* * * *
Issue 24 is available exclusively at www.fictionwise.com for a limited time. The cost is $4.98 U.S.
[Back to Table of Contents]
Visit Our Web Site
On the Challenging Destiny web site you'll find previews of upcoming magazines, as well as guidelines for authors & artists.
* * * *
You'll also find lots of reviews from James Schellenberg that aren't in the magazine—reviews of books, movies, soundtracks & games.
* * * *
The web site is here:
challengingdestiny.com
* * *
Visit www.crystallinesphere.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
Challenging Destiny #25 Page 20
