Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  But as they died, erased from existence, the image of their death was overlaid in my mind with countless other images of death and loss, the same as those that had haunted my dreams these many months, but now more immediate, more vivid. They were all real, and none of them was.

  I reeled back, clutching the sides of my head, and for an instant I couldn’t bring to mind what had just happened. Had I just beamed Serj and Tamsin into noncorporeality? And if I had, which was my partner and which the interloper? Or had it been another whom my beam had struck, or another who had been about to beam me?

  Reality reasserted, and I remembered what I had done, but even then my grasp was tenuous, and I felt as though I might slip back into a myriad of unreal worlds at any moment.

  Throwing my disruptor to the ground and racing from the shelter, I headed for the caverns.

  I had to find Kloster. He would know what to do.

  I don’t know how long I searched for the engineer in the darkened caves of Eventide. Hours? Days? Longer? I passed through caverns large enough to house the Phonix itself, and crawled through tunnels scarcely wider than my shoulders, and I forgot all about hunger, and thirst, and fatigue. I thought of nothing but everything that I had lost, and the nightmares that plagued us, and the frozen sky, and the crash, and the sure certainty that there must be an answer to all of it, and that Kloster must have it.

  I cannot say whether some part of me recognized that the walls along which I groped were no longer rough stone but cool and polished metal, or that my eyes, long accustomed to the darkness, could again see in the gradual gloom ahead. I think, in fact, that I was almost nose-to-nose with the engineer before it even registered on my consciousness that he was before me. The dawning realization that he stood before a massive wall of metal, covered with strange shapes and symbols, followed at some distance.

  “Ah, Assistant Astrogator,” Kloster said, with a resigned nod, looking up from his work. “Well, what was it this time?”

  I stammered, my throat parched, my tongue thick in my mouth.

  “Well, come out with it, Zihl, what happened?”

  “Serj . . .” I began, my voice croaking. “With Tamsin. In our bed.” I tried to swallow but passed only dust and air.

  “Go on,” the engineer said, waving his hand impatiently. “Serj was your partner, I believe, and you found him in the arms of another.”

  I looked down at my hands, cut, bruised, and filthy from my journey through the caves.

  “I had my disruptor . . .” I said, and could go no further.

  Kloster rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. “I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. The pairing of Tamsin with Phedra was never particularly stable.”

  The Engineer clapped his hands together and turned to face the metal. He began moving the shapes and symbols in sequence, at a lightning pace.

  “What . . . what is this?” I managed to croak, and waved a bloody finger toward the towering wall. The metal of which it was constructed was one I had never seen before, shimmering and strange, and seemed to shift beneath my gaze.

  “Hmmm?” Kloster glanced back over his shoulder, distracted. “Oh, this? This, my dear Zihl, is the proof that the Demiurgists would murder their own children in their beds to possess. This is not a planetoid. It never was. This is an ancient engine, capable of warping the fabric of space-time around it. Everything between here and the surface is merely matter that has accreted to the engine’s surface, over countless eons.”

  I staggered back, blinking lids over bloodshot eyes, my mouth working soundlessly.

  “At some point, probably before the Old Earth cooled, the engine malfunctioned and pinched off from normal space into its own pocket continuum. That’s what attracted the Phonix as we transitioned back from underspace. We never could have escaped, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not once we passed within the event horizon of the engine’s space-time bubble. But while it’s taken long years, I’ve been able to master the rudiments of the engine’s controls, so that I can now manipulate the flow of time within the bubble.”

  “Time?” I said, feebly.

  “Yes, rolling it backward and forward, trying to find the proper combinations. If we’re to live here, it may as well be in the best circumstances, yes? But so far, I’m afraid it always ends badly. That’ll be the cause of the nightmares, bleed-through from the other iterations, but that’s a small price to pay, don’t you think?” He grinned, darkly. “But it could be worse, after all. You could be forced to remember all of the iterations, like I do.” He mimed a shiver, and shook his head, comically.

  I stepped forward, raising my hands.

  “We’ve done all of this before?”

  “Yes, Zihl,” Kloster said, a touch of sadness in his voice, “but I’m confident that I’ll work out all of the suitable variables, given time.”

  The Engineer reached out a thin finger, and touched a final symbol on the metal wall, and the world fell away.

  It was everywhere.

  It was nowhere.

  I remembered all of it, and I remembered nothing.

  It was . . .

  It was while burying Dobeh that Tamsin first caught my attention. In the strange twilight of Eventide, she shone like a distant star, her crimson hair and eyes standing out like firelight against the cool emerald of her skin. She smiled, and I knew then that we’d be paired.

  What We Still Talk About

  Scott Edelman

  Selene, blue pill cupped in one palm, wondered where she would find the strength to raise the small lozenge to her lips. The longer she stared out at the harsh landscape, the heavier the morning dosage seemed in her hand.

  The dome had hoped that she and her husband would find the vista in which it had chosen to place them that morning pleasing, but for Selene, the generated location was a failure, as had been its other recent choices. Karl would perhaps feel differently, but for Selene, as the rocks stretched on, rough and dry and red, the scene brought to mind nothing so much as the interior of her own heart.

  She closed her fingers tightly around the pill and could feel its smooth metallic surface grow sticky from her sweat.

  “Does anyone,” she said, in a soft, uncertain voice, “remember how to get to Earth?”

  The words spurted out of her so suddenly that she was startled. Her question had exploded on its own without even the thought of an audience that might receive it.

  “Did you hear what I just said, Karl?” said Selene. “Or did I only think it?”

  “I heard you, darling,” said Karl, lifting wiry arms above his head as he stretched out on rainbow sheets that shimmered with his movements. “It just took me a moment to digest it. I haven’t thought about Earth in years.”

  “Oh, please, Selene,” said Karl, entering through one of the bedroom’s irises while bearing a tray of drinks intended to cool them from their lovemaking. “Earth is so boring. Promise me that you’re not thinking of going back there again. You’re not really—are you?”

  “It’s not very far,” shouted Karl from the opposite dome from which Karl had just entered. Selene, peering through the connecting biolock, could see him busy at work, his fingers encrusted with a yellow dust from pollinating the wall for the coming season’s sculptures. “No, it’s not very far at all. But then, these days, what is?”

  “Good,” said Selene. “Then let’s go.”

  She tossed the pill in her mouth and swallowed too quickly; the pill stuck in her throat. She took the drink Karl held out to her, swirled the sheer cup until the thick liquid began to spark, and forced the pill quickly down.

  That was that, then. Her choice had been made. There’d be no more thinking, no more worrying. Not for today, at least.

  “This will be fun,” she said quietly, almost to herself. She licked away the last of the sticky blue residue that remained in the folds of her palm. “I love you, Karl.”

  “And I love you,” said her husband.

  “And I love you,” said her husband.
>
  “And I love you,” said her husband.

  The joyful harmony of his voices caused her heart to skip a beat, its pulsing overwhelmed at being the focus of her husband’s love.

  “Let’s get started then,” she said, jumping to her feet.

  “Right now?” asked Karl. He flung the bedsheet toward the ceiling and then, as it billowed, stepped beneath it. As he lifted his arms, the flowing fabric descended to wrap itself tightly around him. Mere molecules thick, his garb was less clothing than a second layer of skin, as if his nude form had been dipped into a vat of multicolored paint. He snatched the second mug from Karl’s tray.

  “Why not?” asked Selene. “I see no reason to wait. There’s something to be said for spontaneity.”

  “Yes, something,” said Karl, dropping his empty tray to the floor, where it was quickly reabsorbed into their dome. “I’ve never been sure exactly what that something is, though.”

  “Which flitter should we take?” asked Selene, strong enough now, as she might not have been before, to ignore her husband’s joke. She looked into the sky and tried to see past the moons above.

  “Why a flitter?” asked Karl. He left a yellow trail of powdery footprints that suffused with red behind him as his steps germinated. “All we need to do is simply think our destination, and we’re there.”

  “No,” said Selene firmly, still intent on the distant Earth that hid somewhere in the sky. “This is something that must be done real, or at least as real as anything can be done these days.”

  “As if projecting our way to Earth wouldn’t be real,” said Karl, shaking his hands by the wrists until the bedsheet extruded opalescent gloves that grew to his fingerstips. “As if the new choices are any less real than the old ones. It’s all real, Selene. You have too much love of old-fashioned things.”

  “Which explains why I keep you around, I guess,” she said.

  Her husband reached out simultaneously to swat her on the rump. Karl’s hands collided one-two-three before they continued on the final few inches to make contact with her, the sort of overlap that she knew only occurred in those rare instances when she touched a nerve. She smiled, and they hugged, his arms weaving together to embrace her at the center of a warm cocoon. She murmured peacefully. For a brief moment, she forgot about blue pills, about the endless red rock, about the pleasant, tickling memories of ancient Earth.

  Then Karl had to speak, bringing them all back again.

  “We should really ask Ursula and Tomas along,” said Karl, his words echoing wetly in the confines of their flesh.

  “Oh,” said Selene, stepping outside of the curtain of Karl’s body. “I was hoping that we could all go alone.”

  “All?” said Karl, looking from himself to himself.

  “Why, yes,” said Selene. “All. All alone. It’s been so long since we’ve all been away alone together. Too long.”

  “Too late,” said Karl, coming up behind her. “I’ve already invited them. It never occurred to me that you’d object.”

  “You should have thought about it a little more carefully before you thought them an invitation, Karl,” she said, slowly turning away from her husband.

  “You’re right, Selene,” said Karl, from beside her. “But it’s too late for that now, unfortunately. You know how Tomas and Ursula are. I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. I’m sorry, Selene.”

  But what about my feelings? she thought, and then, almost before that emotion could claw its way to full consciousness, the feeling effervesced, as all such feelings did, if only she made the right choice each morning. She turned back to Karl and touched her husband’s cheek, while by the dome’s outer window, Karl watched as a flitter blossomed from the rocks around them. A jagged skeleton slowly rose up that was but a whispered promise of the vehicle that would carry them light-years away. Molten ore feathered through the air like spun sugar and wrapped about the flitter’s core.

  “Look,” Karl said, as the process completed and Selene’s name etched itself into the finished skin of the ship.

  “Hello,” tickled Tomas in her ear.

  Selene smiled, perhaps at the flourish her husband had provided, perhaps at the arrival of her friend. Perhaps both. She felt the familiar good mood wash over her as the nanobots massaged the chemistry of her bloodstream.

  “Thank you, Karl,” she said. “Hello, Tomas.”

  “Ursula will be along shortly.”

  “But never shortly enough for you, Tomas, right?” said Karl.

  “I can be a patient . . . man,” he vibrated, everywhere and nowhere. If he had chosen to sneak up on them, they wouldn’t even have known he was there. “Someday, she’ll grow tired of a material existence, and then, there won’t be anything left for me to have to be patient about.”

  “Other than enjoying your practice of such restraint, Tomas,” asked Selene, “how have you been?”

  “Bored,” he vibrated. “The universe continues to hold far too few surprises. So I’m glad that you asked us along.”

  “How could you possibly be bored with all this?” asked Karl, as he stepped through the iris back to his wall work. “I can’t remember when I’ve last been bored.”

  “Oh, it’s more than just that, Karl,” said Tomas. “It’s that you can’t remember, period. I never have been able to figure out how you manage to keep yourselves straight.”

  Before Karl or Karl or Karl could answer, the ground rumbled, and Selene jumped in quickly. She needed the day to go smoothly.

  “That would be Ursula,” she said, as the dome compensated for the clamor outside, and the room regained its silence. “You know, Tomas, for someone so willing to take the greatest of leaps, your emotions can be awfully old-fashioned.”

  Ursula plodded toward them from the short horizon, her robotic feet crushing rocks into crimson sprays of dust. It wasn’t until she arrived at the flitter, overshadowing it in a tower of chrome, that Selene was able to judge the size that Ursula had chosen to carry that day. Ursula had felt like being a giantess, and so she was.

  “We’re all here, then,” said Selene. She had made her own choice about what she was to be that day, and she intended to stick to it. “Let’s go.”

  Selene walked in the direction of the flitter, and when she arrived at the dome wall, she kept walking and flowed effortlessly through it, passing as if through the fragile skin of a bubble. A thin membrane clung to her as she continued walking, and stretched the wall outward, and as she drew closer to the flitter, the connection snapped, and the skin sealed shut behind her. The flitter extended a tongue in her direction, and as she mounted the walkway, she waved up at Ursula from within a self-contained atmosphere.

  “Are you feeling any better today?” said Ursula, her faraway speakers booming deeply.

  “How I’m feeling doesn’t really matter,” said Selene. “It’s how I’m doing. And right now, I seem to be doing something at last.”

  Selene paused near the top of the walkway. She turned and gestured back at the dome, making the assumption that her movements were being watched.

  Karl seemed to be the first to follow her and vanish inside the flitter, though with Tomas around, she could never be completely sure. Once her husband was inside, Karl then followed. He brushed past Selene on the walkway and stopped at the hatch. While she looked up at him, Karl came along, stepping up behind her and wrapping his arms about her waist. Karl smiled down at the two of them from above, then turned and vanished inside the ship.

  “Do you really need all of me?” Karl whispered. The pliant membrane allowed her to feel his breath hot in her ear.

  “Yes,” said Selene. “This time, I do. Please, Karl.”

  Arms locked, they strolled up the rest of the walkway together and entered the ship. Karl and Karl were already seated within a teardrop-shaped room otherwise bare of furniture, a compartment larger than the ship in which it was contained. At the narrowest point of the teardrop, Karl and Selene dropped back off their feet, trusting that a couch woul
d ooze up from the floor to catch them.

  “Ursula?” called out Selene.

  The opaque wall which curved about them grew steadily transparent until Selene could see her friend framed by the landscape outside. She swelled even larger, and was soon crouching down above them, her head alone as big as one of their dome rooms.

  “I have a feeling that this is going to be fun,” said Tomas. “Yes, darling, it’s time. You know what to do.”

  Ursula scooped up the flitter, growing even taller as she hugged the vehicle to her chest, carrying them to where the atmosphere was even thinner. Staring into her friend’s ever-more-enormous face, Selene felt as if she were instead shrinking away. At times like this one, she always found it hard at first to tell which one of them was actually doing the changing. Ursula lifted the flitter behind her head for a moment and then pitched it high into the air. As it neared the top of its arc, great flames spouted from the soles of Ursula’s feet, and she rocketed after her friends. She overtook them and slammed into the rear of the ship, adding the thrust they needed to escape the gravity of the small planet.

  Once Ursula and the ship she’d propelled were both fully free of the atmosphere, the gleaming plates that made up her body receded into each other. As they overlapped, she shrank until she was down to a size capable of entering the airlock. As she fell back into the circle of her friends, a seat sturdier than the others grew up to greet her.

  “How long do you think this will take?” she asked with a dull buzz, as she brushed meteor dust from one shiny shoulder.

  “That all depends,” said Karl, looking out at the stars.

  “It will take however long Selene wants it to take,” said Karl, looking intently at his wife. “That isn’t something that can be timed.”

  “Then I think I’ll have a drink,” said Selene.

  Karl pressed his hands against the front wall of the small ship, which extruded mugs that he handed to Karl and Selene and Karl. Ursula pressed a few buttons on her wrist, and a small door slid open in her chest. She took the offered drink and poured its contents down into a permaglass funnel. Karl offered Ursula a second mug, which she balanced on the flat of her knee joint as liquid gurgled pneumatically within her. As the level in that beverage dropped, Selene could hear a gentle slurping.