Star Fall

by David Bischoff

  Mother sat in her wheelchair, preparing breakfast. She peered around from the sizzling, oily smoked meatwafers—oh, she must have thought, running her finger down the food log, I must get that for Todd’s last breakfast. Mrs. Spigot smiled a bright good morning smile that trembled a trifle. Mother was being brave, which was somehow worse than her tears. “A lovely day for a shuttle flight.” The spider-web wrinkles about her eyes had a reddish hue. She had cried last night. “I hope you’re not in too much of a hurry. I bought some eggs. Real eggs, Todd, not the synthetic kind. We’ll fry them in the grease from the pork. It’ll be just like the Sunday morning breakfasts we used to have with your father. Orange juice, toast with butter and strawberry preserves ... I’d like to see those chefs on the liner make a better breakfast than this. Hot chocolate, too. Chocky, you used to call it, remember?” As she spoke, she broke two greenish hen’s eggs lovingly on the side of the skillet and let them drip into the splattering, smoking, burned-smelling fat from the meat. “You know what you said to me once, Todd?”

  “No, Mother.” He kissed her on a damp forehead, and then sat at the table. It was already set, the slightly chipped Interworld Wedgewood china ready to hold his food. His favorite cup of childhood—featuring the orange and blue face of a leering harlequin—stood steaming with fragrant hot tea.

  “Don’t ever leave me, Momma. I’ll never ever leave you.” She sighed the sigh of martyred motherhood as she wheeled the frying pan over to carefully serve the eggs without breaking the yolks. “Oh, well. Time goes by. Boys grow up.”

  “Yes, Mother. Eventually.” Todd stared at the eggs, and the eggs stared back in bug-eyed accusation. Damn, damn, damn! He knew that he was doing the right thing, the only thing! He had to get out, had to… for his sanity’s sake.

  Why then, did he feel so guilty?

  But the answer to that was easy enough, thought Todd. However, even with what he thought to be the answer, how could neurotic emotion be assuaged with reason? It was like hunting Moby Dick with a B.B. gun. Yeah, he was like some crippled Ahab drifting on an uncertain sea, determined to kill this monstrous perverse love/ guilt, and then it would always heave up and devour him from the sea depths of his being.

  Oh God. Help me.

  “Something wrong with your breakfast, Todd’?” his mother asked as she pulled her wheelchair to the stained tile table.

  “No, Mother. I guess I’m not that hungry. I’ll eat a little.”

  Squeak!

  She never oiled those rickety wheels! That wheelchair ... ! That bloody wheelchair ... !

  “That’s the thanks I get, is it?” The smile had flip-flopped. Now it was a frown, quivering with barely suppressed agony. “You’ve never appreciated me, Todd. All the world, all the pain I went through for you all my life ... they warned me I shouldn’t have a natural baby—but the Church wouldn’t let us have one artificially. They ripped me open to get you out of me, Todd. You didn’t want to leave. And now, when an old woman needs you most, when she lives only to see you every day, hear your voice, have her flesh and blood near—you leave.” She snuffled back a sob. “If your father was here, he’d make you eat that breakfast.”

  Todd’s attention was on the plate. The eggs had been chopped halfheartedly. A deep feeling of sickness overwhelmed him—a free-floating anxiety—at the mention of Duncan Spigot, his father.

  Images shot through his mind: his father, looming like an angry Jehovah before him. The mine-hardened muscles, the gritty bushes of eyebrows, the devout mania that glinted in cavernous black eyes.

  They had hated him, the mine owners had, and yet he was the best driller they had, with a fiery intensity he applied to his work that seemed almost capable of digging into the shale for ore veins without the aid of the laser-drill. They had put him in their richest and most dilapidated mine.

  Todd often woke in the middle of the night. shivering and choking in a claustrophobic nightmare, imagining what it had been like for his father when the roof had given way a mile under, and he lay under a ton of rock, slowly being crushed, slowly smothering in the dirt-laden black. Unable to move those muscled arms that had struck his son so many times, disciplining ...

  Gasping, screaming for help from a deaf God he had served fanatically all his life.

  * * *

  And Todd had never had the chance to tell the man that he forgave him ... had loved him ...

  Todd had been twenty then. Those tumbling rocks had crushed his dreams as well ... his dreams of attending University off-planet, away from this sewer-hole. Now his mother, a delicate sort at best (as she often reminded everyone), had to be taken care of. The blow of her husband’s death had sent her into a numb shock for weeks, and when she partially recovered she had a psychosomatic paralysis of the legs. With the sparse insurance money, they had ordered a Mark Nine mechanized chair, and Emily Spigot seldom left it now, even though the paralysis had passed. Evidently her self-image as a cripple appealed to her.

  “I don’t want to talk about father,” Todd said sharply.

  “Then eat your breakfast.”

  Truce enough, Todd thought, and struggled the goopy stuff down.

  He ate in silence. A difficult silence; the sort that had curtained them from one another often since the day some six months before that Mrs. Spigot had discovered his travel folders and the letter from a Portown travel agency concerning the Star Fall. He would have preferred keeping his plan a secret for longer than the year and a half he had managed—but when she had found those pieces of incriminating evidence, there was nothing to do but tell her everything.

  Except, of course, about the Body Parlour.

  That would kill her.

  Finished with the eggs and meat, Todd looked up. Emily Spigot’s spray of matronly hair had been freshly set, just for Todd. Brown, veined with gray. It topped her head ludicrously. To try to renew at least an attempt at a pleasant last few moments, Todd complimented her on it. She continued sulking over her cup of Kaff.

  She muttered, “I hope you have a good time meeting all those exciting new people, Todd. I wish I could meet new people.”

  “You won’t be alone, Mom,” he said, unable to hold back a note of irritation. “You have lots of friends. And certainly the people from Church will look in. I’ll only be gone for eight months at most.”

  “Eight months, eight years,” she said in a little schoolgirl whisper. “I’ll just pine away while you’re gone. You won’t let them orgbank me, Todd? You know it’s against the Scriptures. They will come to you to see what is to be done with the body.”

  “But Mother ... you won’t die. Don’t say these things!”

  She breathed in deeply. “Little you care.” She smelled strongly of cheap eau de cologne. Todd felt like gagging, but he simultaneously felt a helpless love for the familiarity.

  “I care, Mom. I do. Don’t dare deny that I care!”

  She closed her eyes and it all came out ... a replay of last night, and the night before that, and the night before that ... “I don’t know what got into you, Todd, to buy that ticket and to take leave from your job. Your father found you a good job with the company accounting computer. No mines for Duncan Spigot’s son. He wanted the best for you, Todd, and so do I. But if you’re gone for so long, you might lose that job, Todd. And then where will you be? Where will I be? And, meanwhile, you gallop off to sample the sins of the Universe!”

  “I’ve saved up enough leave, Mother. I’ll have the job when I get back. And Mr. Tenz was talking about a promotion too. Don’t worry.”

  “Don’t worry? What has my life been but worry? You sweat and strive for your son, and what do you get? A kick in the face! Honor thy father and mother, Todd Spigot. Look it up, it’s in the Scriptures, right next to every other commandment you’re going to break. Todd. I’ve prayed for your soul every night, every morning. Prayed and prayed these last months to God that he’ll turn you bac
k into the wonderfully loyal and loving Todd we used to know. If you take this trip, I just know sin will take you over and you’ll be lost to me and to God forever!

  “Don’t you realize that this is the reason I don’t want you to go? Not for me, but for yourself. Oh, Todd. Todd! What will become of you?”

  Todd grabbed hold of the table to steady himself. Oh, how simple it would be to just acquiesce, forget the notion, not go ... Oh, the relief he received when he obeyed his mother ... a tangible wave of pleasure. He closed his eyes. Screwed them tight, trying to cut off the constant nagging.

  How could he forget the constant attention the woman gave him his whole life—her constant support. When Father had whipped him, it had been his mother who had wiped his tears and hugged his unlovely body. It was his mother who had listened to all his woes, all the torments from school. All the people who had not understood him, who had not even tried ... not even his father ... but his mother had. He was her life. Her last breath she’d give him if he needed it.

  Even when God himself seemed to have turned away, there was always his attentive mother ... fussing, worrying, and loving.

  He sprang from his seat, an accusing finger upraised. “Listen—you’re not God! You can’t hold onto me like this. I’ve just got to get away.” He struggled to control himself. “At least for a while, Mother. Can’t you understand? Can’t you see I’m slowly turning into— ”

  It was then that the full impact of his words hit him.

  He clenched his teeth and tried to hold guilt back. Guilt and sadness and the distinct realization that he would miss his mother. He staggered and fell against the wall, jerking spasmodically, in the full grip of an anxiety attack.

  “Todd? Todd, are you all right?” came his mother’s voice as through heavy gauze. “Let me call a doctor. You look sick. You should get back to bed.”

  Intense fury sang through Todd, a song of freedom, a song of escape. And he stood, wretchedly, and he saw that his mother was standing beside him. He stared at her coldly.

  “Save a cool place in Hell for me, will you, Mother?”

  With a last impression of Emily Spigot’s mouth agape with surprise, Todd lurched away, ran to the door, grabbed his luggage, and raced out to catch a taxi.

  WORSE THAN any swipe of wind, any threat of the falling death that lay vertiginously below, a numbing disorientation engulfed Philip Foxglove Amber. Why was he up here, painstakingly slicing a hole in duranium-laced glassteel, risking his life when he should be back on Prometheus’s Rest, parked on the veranda, watching sunrise squeeze into the starry night?

  The answer, as always, was closely attached to the doubts.

  The money.

  The main reason indeed. The goddamned creds, the plastickets to paradise. Greaser of palms, comfort-bearer, open-legged whore of the ages: the legal tender. Oh, how many illegal things had he done for scratch? Well, he mused as the puce-purple and orange of the tear-shaped flame ate through the glass in its present glow-torch role. Chalk up one more to the tally.

  He would have preferred to have worn a body-shield, stormed this place with a miniature proton bazooka, ending it all with a simple thumb-squeeze. The wonders of warfare technology, banned in most systems, were at his fingertips thanks to his military contacts. Unfortunately his employers were paying him extra ducats so that this job could be done with style and delicacy. How could he tell them that death was never delicate?

  No, never.

  Momentary self-revulsion gnawed in his mind, which surprised him, because generally that only happened in quiet moments of brooding when his army “readjustment” was not on guard, not in the midst of a job. He shoved the feeling back into its little wormhole in his subconscious and concentrated on the task at hand.

  The fire-tongue licked up, slicing the necessary rectangle to allow Amber’s body entrance into the apartment’s living room. Just beyond its perimeter duralloy wire circuited an alarm current running through the translucent panel. The folks of the Terran Emergency Army had turned him into a regular can opener, they had.

  LEARN A CAREER AS YOU SERVE THE STARS!

  How right that slogan was.

  The burning line of glassteel suddenly flared marking the end of the cut. Amber switched off the torch. Gripping the suction device centering the rectangle, he slid the glassteel section away from the window with careful skill. The interior was pitchy with darkness and silence. Amber adjusted infrared specs over his eyes and tried for another survey.

  A .2mm energy spurter parted from the darkness and hung in the air centimeters from Amber’s nose.

  Not terribly surprised, Amber adjusted the focus on the specs; a fuzzy form before him solidified, and the shape of the thing did surprise him.

  A Peevian. They hadn’t told him that. Maybe they’d been afraid he’d have backed out. Maybe so ... But bloody shit, this Durtwood character must have hoards of numerals before the decimal in his cred account balance. Peevians cost. And they were worth it.

  “Hello, Amber,” the thing said in a voice reminiscent of an air skimmer engine without a governor. “How’s tricks? Care for a spot of tea, or should I spray the street with you now?”

  The gourd-like head was ringed with various hair-tufted ridges, beneath which several layers of eyes stared out, unblinkingly, through all the wavelengths of the spectrum. The barrel body sprouted innumerable appendages, each specialized. The Peevian evolution was damned generous when it handed out tentacles. Guile and cunning too, at that.

  A sick sensation tendriled through the pit of Amber’s stomach.

  Maybe this would be it.

  “Tea, with milk and sugar, please,” he said. His free hand, meanwhile, diddled with his magnetic-field generators. He prayed that the spurter had metal in it.

  A claw like digit at the end of the gun-wielding tendril squeezed the firing stud, squirting an intense thread of light. But the sudden interference of the magnetic field jiggled the beam enough that it just missed the side of Amber’s head. Amber jammed the glassteel section back into place, pulled his hand away from the suction device, and drew his own weapon, all in one liquid motion. The acrid stench of ozone clung around his nostrils.

  The spurter beam slashed through the glassteel section, exploding the suction device. Glittery shards scattered inside, outside. They tinkled down three meters and sparkled furiously as they disintegrated in the force field’s interior. A small sliver wedged into Amber’s thigh, like a pin sliding into its cushion. A jagged chunk severed the support web.

  Heart thumping, Philip Amber hurled himself away from the window and the continuing blast from the needler. He kept his feet just barely on the narrow ledge. Teetering, he grabbed and clung to the rung grip. The energy bolt zipped immediately to where he had stood; but it wavered, as though whoever held it was shaking. It flashed brightly as it played over the force field, not quite in control. Abruptly, it winked off.

  Inside, an alarm began to ring.

  Damn and he wasn’t even inside yet!

  “I thought I might be seeing you eventually, friend assassin,” the Peevian ground in its gritty voice. “Mr. Durtwood heard you were in town. He didn’t think you were here for him, though. Lucky I played it safe.”

  So much for the secrecy methods of his lack-brained employers. Painfully, he pulled the piece of glassteel from his thigh. Blood leaked freely. “Amber? Never heard of him. Me, I’m just a window washer. My wipers slipped. Cheap windows you got.”

  So much for subtlety.

  At one time in his bumpy career, his hits had routinely been razor-sharp, clean as a sterilized whistle, clockwork-geared. But lately, he had come to favor messy quickness. He was almost relieved that he could resort to his usual methods. He fingered the gun control to a wide-radius blast, and then unsnapped the frag-grenade from his control belt. The suckers were illegal in the sort of “police actions” he was involved with in
the TEA. But just the thing for this emergency.

  No doubt the creature inside the window had a few tricks up its numerous sleeves as well. Why else would it stall with words this way?

  “You may be wearing a different set of flesh and bones for this gig, my man, but no one but a pro of your ilk could get through our security, let alone force field. So what we got now is a stand-off. I stick my snoot out, I get it blown off. You got something messing up my aim, but you can’t keep it up forever. Pals are coming, Amber. They’ll shoot you down like in a laser gallery. Zap. So, you throw that piece of yours away, and we be good buddies, huh? I’ll even introduce you to Mr. Durtwood.”

  Amber set the time of his grenade. Ten seconds. He cut his suspensors on. Nine seconds. He slowly maneuvered up above the window as he talked.

  Eight seconds.

  “Okay. You’ve really got me. I’ll throw it away.”

  Six seconds.

  Thank God the wind could not get through the force screens.

  Four seconds.

  “But no use wasting a good gun. Here, you take it.”

  Three seconds.

  The timer tick was silent. Amber aimed, and then pushed himself slightly from the building wall for the necessary angle. He tossed the grenade. One second. The oblong device sailed cleanly into the window.

  Seeing Amber hove into view, the Peevian was able to spurt off one weaving round of fire, which nicked a searing flesh wound in Amber’s gun arm, before the bomb blew.

  The explosion was like a stylized artist’s rendering of dawn. Jagged zigs and zags in multitudes of coruscating colors and shades radiated from the window, rippled with dense, foul smoke and boosted by an ear-splitting god’s belch of a blast. The alien’s severed head, along with odds and ends of its peculiar anatomy—slashed tentacles, ropy entrails—shot majestically out the window amidst the smoke and ash, landing in the force field below with flurries of sparks and chattering, harsh noise.