Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  “Selene,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “We can’t stay here forever,” he said.

  “Can’t we?”

  A deafening crash thudded outside. Selene could feel the vibrations through the soles of her feet.

  “Obviously not if we want this world to remain in one piece,” said Karl, smiling.

  When they climbed back outside, the front of the museum was entirely clear of debris. Ursula stood in the midst of several perfectly balanced columns of wreckage.

  “Much better that way, don’t you think?” said Ursula. “And I could use the exercise.”

  “You don’t need any exercise,” said Selene.

  “You must stop being so literal,” said Tomas.

  “Where have you been, dear?” asked Ursula.

  “Everywhere,” said Tomas. “I’ve seen it all now.”

  “All?” asked Selene.

  “Yes,” said Tomas. “The museum. The city. The world. Is it time for us to go?”

  “There’s much more the rest of us still have to see,” said Selene. “Go back and take a second look. It isn’t our fault that you can see everything so much faster than we do.”

  “Actually,” said Tomas. “It is.”

  “Tomas!” shouted Selene. She wished she had the ability to tell whether her sudden anger was a good thing or a bad thing.

  “Don’t bother,” said Ursula. “He’s gone again.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Ursula shrugged, her shoulders clinking. Selene sighed.

  They walked single file through the rubble, first Selene, then Karl, then Karl, then Karl, then Ursula, this time, none of them touching. At a building where Selene recalled a movie theater once had been, she stopped. There’d been tuxedos there on the screen, she remembered. Tuxedos and dancing. But now the marquee was fallen, blending with the broken concrete of the sidewalk to block their way. Ursula pushed through to center of the mound and effortlessly lifted a girder over her head.

  “No!” Karl shouted.

  “That’s right,” said Karl. “Put that down.”

  “Yes,” said Karl. “The old-fashioned way. Selene wants this done the old-fashioned way.”

  “If you insist,” said Ursula, lowering the girder slowly and moving back beside her friend.

  Karl dove into the pile, squeezing through the narrow path that Ursula had started. Karl tossed a small chunk of brick and concrete to Karl, who flung it on to Karl, who grunted as he caught it and then stepped outside the field of rubble to lay the clump at Selene’s feet.

  “A gift,” said Karl. “A gift of the old-fashioned way.”

  Selene laughed.

  “Good,” called out Karl, from where he continued to work. “You keep doing that.”

  “There hasn’t been enough of it lately,” shouted Karl, struggling next to him.

  Karl bounded away to rejoin himself within the forest of brick and metal and glass and continued widening the path. Pulling away the wreckage that barred the door, the three of him passed the rubble among himself like the hands of a juggler, and Selene laughed yet again, at her husband’s playful love and at the sight of the entrance that she’d been remembering with such hope.

  Karl bowed on the left, and Karl bowed on the right, and Karl waved her forward, and Selene responded with a curtsy, as she had seen the native Earthlings do in those movies made so long ago.

  Then, before she could step forward to entwine her husband’s arms with her own and go inside, she heard a deep rumbling as loud as the death of stars.

  The pavement cracked open in front of Selene, and her husband dropped away and vanished into the crevasse. Before Selene could move, the front wall of the theater spilled forward, sliding into the hole after Karl and Karl and Karl. From the ragged split smoke and ash plumed upward, blinding her. She screamed, but no sound came out, her throat clogged by a harsh dust.

  Ursula dove forward into the chasm, pushing debris aside and hurling rubble out of sight into the distance. Tomas returned, bringing a wind that blew the clouds of dust away. As soon as Selene could see her way clear, she stumbled down the lip of the pit to stand beside Ursula.

  “Selene, you shouldn’t be here. It’s much too dangerous.”

  “Where is he? Where’s my husband?”

  “Selene, you don’t want to see this,” said Tomas. She could feel Tomas surrounding her, beginning to lift her, and as she started to be wafted away, she shrugged him off.

  “Leave me be!” she said, as she saw limbs, ghostly with dust, protruding from beneath the rubble. “Karl!”

  As Ursula removed the last bits of debris that were keeping Karl’s broken bodies hidden, Selene threw herself alongside him and started to howl.

  “This can’t be,” she muttered, when speech finally returned. “This is impossible. He’s dead. All of him is dead.”

  “I don’t think I can remember anyone ever dying,” said Tomas.

  As Selene rocked and moaned, Ursula grew once more into a larger self and cupped her friends in her hands. This time, Selene did not object as Ursula cradled them all and returned them to the flitter. Kneeling, Ursula carefully placed them inside the flitter as if arranging the figures in a doll’s house. A chair rose up to greet Selene, but no pallet responded to support any of Karl’s bodies until Ursula waved her shrinking hand across the floor.

  “It can’t be over so easily,” said Selene. “Not now. Not today. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

  She moved from body to body, touching a bruised cheek here, flattening out a curl of hair there. As she traced a deep gouge in one of Karl’s legs, terror welled within her, terror that was then tamped down. She didn’t know what would happen if she was allowed to feel such pain.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” said Ursula, moving to her friend’s side. Ursula’s fingers felt colder on her arm than they ever had before. “We should leave here, Selene. Don’t you think?”

  “Selene?” said Tomas.

  Selene could not speak. Was there anyone left who needed to hear her voice? She did not think so.

  “Let’s just go, Selene,” said Ursula, as softly as she could. “There’s nothing more for us here.”

  Selene could feel her friend’s fingers in her hair, and she did not want to feel them.

  “Go?” said Selene, struggling to keep her voice from cracking with rage. “Why should I go? Why should I go back home now? There’s no reason to do anything any longer, no reason to come here and no reason to go back. If only I hadn’t made us come here! If only I hadn’t insisted all of him come here. Leave me. You go back. Just leave me.”

  “Why did you want to come here, Selene?” asked Ursula. “What was the reason? What was it all about?”

  Selene looked at her husband and her husband and her husband. She stroked his smooth face and his bruised face and then had to turn away from where there was hardly any face left at all. They’d begun their day in love and ended it in death, and love would not come again.

  “What was the reason?” Selene whispered. “What was the reason?”

  It had seemed so important, back when she woke on the other side of the galaxy. Earth, and all it represented, was more than just a goal, it was the journey as well, and it had seemed dreadfully important. And now . . . now nothing was important.

  “You’re right,” said Selene. “Let’s go back. Let’s go back now, and let’s go back fast. And let’s not talk anymore of the old-fashioned way.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” said Tomas.

  And as swift as the thought, Earth was gone, with no sense of a trip having been made. Selene, when she could bear to look out again through the transparent flitter walls, could see that they had arrived back outside her dome. It appeared exactly as they had left it that morning, in a prior dawn that was light-years away. She looked from the dome to her husband and back, with no idea how she could ever live in one without the other again.
She would have to have the dome destroyed.

  Later, after Tomas and Ursula left her alone, perhaps she would have herself destroyed as well.

  But before Selene could think the dome away, a figure pressed toward her through the membrane of its walls, and as a shell tightened around the approaching form, she could see that it was Karl. She struggled to cry out, but her mind was too numb to speak before he did.

  “What happened?” he asked, as he ran inside the flitter and embraced his wife while surrounded by his own dead bodies. “One moment I was clearing a path for you, and the next . . . nothing. I was cut off.”

  “How can you be alive?” she whispered, cradling his head in her hands. “The building fell and crushed you, all of you. . . .”

  “I was going to tell you,” said Karl, “but I figured that if there could be three of me, darling, why not four? There was so much work to be done around here, and I knew that once I explained, you wouldn’t really mind.”

  “You bastard!” she shouted, and pushed him away. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Only since the moment you left. As Ursula launched you all into space, I launched a new me down here.”

  “But I wanted to see Earth with you at my side. I needed to see Earth with you at my side! How could you choose to stay behind and miss that? How could you live without me? I thought you loved me!”

  “But I saw Earth with you, Selene. I was never without you. I was there the entire time.”

  “I could kill you,” said Selene, slapping at Karl through the tears.

  “If you’re going to do that,” said Karl, letting her succeed in striking him a few times before catching her hands, “I’d better make sure that there are a few more of me first.”

  He drew her close with a single pair of arms and kissed her. Her knees buckled, and she crumpled at his feet, sobbing, laughing, howling, giggling, her emotions in full revolt against her senses.

  “We should leave the two of you alone,” said Ursula.

  “Or however many of them there are,” said Tomas. “Let’s go, dear.”

  “You’ll let us know how it goes, Karl, won’t you?” said Ursula.

  Selene eventually stopped trembling, and was able to realize that she and her husband were by themselves. As she let Karl help her to her feet, the flitter dissolved around them and was reabsorbed into the planet’s surface. As she stared into the shadows spilling off the dry, red rocks, she realized exactly how much time had passed them by while they’d traveled through the void and explored Earth the old-fashioned way.

  An entire cycle had passed. It was that time again, if she still wanted it to be that time.

  They entered their dome, and she studied the view out of the bedroom’s picture window. She almost thought she could see Ursula, curving through the sky like a shooting star off in the distance. Selene replayed her friend’s last words in her mind, until . . .

  “None of today was real, was it?” Selene whispered. “Not a moment of it.”

  She waited for him to reach for her, hoping that he would, hoping that he wouldn’t.

  “Tomas and Ursula, they were both in on it, weren’t they?”

  “We just wanted you to have an old-fashioned experience,” said Karl. “We just wanted you to be happy, that’s all. I thought you would like it.”

  “And I appreciate the gesture, Karl,” she said. “I really do. But could you leave me alone for just a moment?”

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is fine,” she said.

  Once Karl exited through a biolock, Selene sat on her side of the bed. On a small table nearby, perfectly centered, was exactly what she knew would be there: a small, blue pill just like the one that had been waiting for her the morning before, and the morning before that, and all the mornings she could still remember.

  She snatched at, and choked it down quickly. Then, while thinking with terror of the old-fashioned ways, she held out a palm in wonder and supplication until a second pill appeared, and then she swallowed that one even more quickly than the first.

  Kyle Meets the River

  Ian McDonald

  Kyle was the first to see the exploding cat. He was coming back from the compound HFBR-Mart with the slush cone—his reward for scoring a goal in the under elevens—squinted up at the sound of a construction helicopter (they were still big and marvelous and exciting) and saw the cat leap the narrow gap between the med center and Tinneman’s coffee bar. He pointed to it one fraction of a second before the security men picked it up on their visors and started yelling. In an instant the compound was full of fleeing people; men and women running, parents sweeping up kids, guards sweeping their weapons this way and that as the cat, sensing it had been spotted, leaped from the roof in two bounds onto the roof of an armored Landcruiser, then dived to ground and hunted for targets. A security guard raised his gun. He must be new. Even Kyle knew not to do that. They were not really cats at all, but smart missiles that behaved like them, and if you tried to catch them or threatened them with a weapon, they would attack and blow themselves up. From the shade of the arcade he could see the look on the guard’s face as he tried to get a fix on the dashing, dodging robot. Machine gun rattle. Kyle had never heard it so close. It was very exciting. Bullets cracked all over the place, flying wild. Kyle thought that perhaps he should hide himself behind something solid. But he wanted to see. He had heard it so many times before, and now here it was, on the main streets in front of him. That cat-missile was getting really really close. Then the guard let loose a lucky burst; the steel cat went spinning up into the air and blew itself up. Kyle reeled back. He had never heard anything so loud. Shrapnel cracked the case of the Coke machine beside him into red and white stars. The security man was down but moving, scrabbling away on his back from the blast site, and real soldiers were arriving, and a med Hummer, and RAV air drones. Kyle stood and stared. It was wonderful wonderful wonderful and all for him, and there was Mom, running toward him in her flappy-hands, flappy-feet run, coming to take it all away, snatching him up in front of everyone and crying “Oh, what were you doing what were you thinking are you all right all right all right?”

  “Mom,” he said. “I saw the cat explode.”

  His name is Kyle Rubin, and he’s here to build a nation. Well, his father is. Kyle doesn’t have much of an idea of nations and nationhood, just that he’s not where he used to live, but it’s okay because it’s not really all that different from the gated community, there are a lot of folks like him, though he’s not allowed to leave the compound. In here is Cantonment. Out there is the nation that’s being built. That’s where his dad goes in the armored cars, where he directs the construction helicopters and commands the cranes that Kyle can just see from the balcony around the top floor of the International School. You’re not allowed to go there because there are still some snipers working, but everyone does, and Kyle can watch the booms of the tower cranes swing across the growing towers of the new capital.

  It all fell apart, and it takes us to put it back together again, his father explained. Once there was a big country called India, with a billion and a half people in it, but they just couldn’t live together, so they fell to squabbling and fighting. Like you and Kelis’s mom, Kyle said, which made his father raise his eyebrows and look embarrassed and Mom—his mom, not Kelis’s—laugh to herself. Whatever, it all fell apart, and these poor people, they need us and our know-how to put it all back together for them. And that’s why we’re all here, because it’s families that make us strong and hopeful. And that’s how you, Kyle Rubin, are building a nation. But some people don’t think we should be doing that. They think it’s their nation so they should build it. Some people think we’re part of the problem and not part of the solution. And some people are just plain ungrateful.

  Or, as Clinton in class said, the Rana’s control is still weak, and there are a lot of underrepresented parties out there with big grievances and arsenals of
leftover weaponry from the Sundering. Western interests are always first in the firing line. But Clinton was a smart-mouth who just repeated what he heard from his dad who had been in Military Intelligence since before there was even a Cantonment, let alone an International Reconstruction Coalition.

  The nation Kyle Rubin is building is Bharat, formerly the states of Bihar, Jharkand, and half of Utter Pradesh on the Indo-Gangetic plain, and the cranes swing and the helicopters fly over the rising towers of its new capital, Ranapur.

  When there weren’t cats exploding, after practice Kyle would visit Salim’s planet.

  Before Kyle, Striker Salim had been the best forward on Team Cantonment U-11. Really he shouldn’t have been playing at all because he didn’t actually live within the compound. But his father was the Bharati Government’s man in Cantonment, so he could pretty much do whatever he liked.

  At first they had been enemies. In his second game Kyle had headed home a sweet cross from Ryan from Australia, and after that every cross floated his way. In the dressing room Striker Salim had complained to Coach Joe that the new boy had got all the best balls because he was a westerner and not Bharati. The wraths of dads were invoked. Coach Joe said nothing and put them on together for the game against the army kids, who imagined that being army kids was like an extra man for them. Salim on wing, Kyle in center: three three four. Cantonment beat US Army two one, one goal by Salim, the decider from a run by Salim and a rebound from the goalkeeper by Kyle, in the forty-third minute. Now, six weeks in another country later, they were inseparable.

  Salim’s planet was very close and easy to visit. It lived in the palmer-glove on his brown hand and could manifest itself in all manner of convenient locations: the school system, Tinneman’s coffee house, Kyle’s e-paper workscreen, but the best was the full proprioception so-new-it’s-scary lighthoek (trademark) that you could put behind your ear so, fiddle it so, and it would get inside your head and open up a whole new world of sights and sounds and smells and sensations. They were so new not even the Americans had them, but Varanasi civil servants engaged on the grand task of nation building needed to use and show off the latest Bharati technology. And their sons too. The safety instructions said you weren’t supposed to use it in full sensory outside because of the risk of accidents, crime, or terror, but it was safe enough in the Guy’s Place up on the roof under the solar farm that was out of shot of any sniper, no matter how good or young she was.