by John Skipp
She thought for a while, and then began to tell it about the City, but since it was her story now, she told it her way.
FUTURE IMPERFECT:
BROKEN LAWS
MARGE SIMON
The First Law
The Great Ones who made our Laws are gone,
but once I dreamed they came back here
and played with our children.
It was only a dream.
Those who rule interpret the Laws.
The Second Law
A new age is born of disobedience
by rebellion and bloodshed.
I am of another time.
I see my kindred denied education,
shackles of a different kind.
The Third Law
Trail the rebels to their own mirage,
a holocaust in black & white,
silver mirrors and glass bowls.
Protests die unspoken.
THE PRETTY
PUPPETS
MARC LEVINTHAL
He woke slowly, unsure of where he was. Who he was.
Charlie. Charlie Findstrom. I’m twenty-six. I live in Los Angeles. One out of two, he thought. Let’s try for the other one.
He was laying on his side on a bare striped mattress, black nylon straps across his chest and legs. He turned onto his back, panicking momentarily until he realized he was only held by Velcro strips.
He reached up and undid the Velcro at his chest, then at his legs … and began to float slowly up into the air. The adrenaline rush roused him instantly. He flailed around a bit, then, deciding that was not going to accomplish anything, forced himself to breathe, to calm down, look around, and figure out just where the hell he was.
Okay, he thought, fact number one—the floating is definitely not normal. He was rising slowly through a spherical chamber of some sort. The bottom half was made of a solid dark material, maybe metal. He looked up and saw bright stars through a series of windows that curved around the upper hemisphere, laid into a web-work of bars. As he rose to the level of the window, a glowing blue-white disc loomed up out of the blackness, and beyond that, a mercilessly brilliant orb—harsh, too bright to look at.
A sudden realization—a chill went through him and he turned around. There, the enormous bulk of the moon loomed across three quarters of the sky.
He couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed to be getting bigger. He floated there, staring out at the cratered lunar surface.
This can’t be happening, he thought. This must be a really vivid dream. How could I possibly be here? People don’t fly to the moon in spherical cages. No. I don’t want this. No. I’ll just force myself to wake up. Wake up.
He screamed it. “Wake up!”
He was still there. And he’d never had a dream with this level of verisimilitude. He could see the colors, feel the metal bars, the chill on the glass. He’d come close before, but nothing like this.
Everything was pointing to one thing: he was alone, in some sort of space vehicle, rushing toward the surface of the moon.
No dream.
He tried to recall what he’d done the night before. The party. The last thing he remembered was being at the party. It hadn’t been a very good one …
He mingled with the few people he knew there—mostly acquaintances from work—and had a couple of beers. The music was pretty lame, mostly disco and emo shit. He wanted to smoke, as he always did when he came out and had a couple of drinks, but resisted the urge to go out to the patio and bum a cigarette from a total stranger. Finally, tired of standing around by himself, he decided it was time to go.
Then he saw the girl. She had just opened a fresh box of Marlboros and tapped one out as she headed for the patio.
She noticed him looking.
“Would you like one?” she asked, smiling. Pretty blonde. Slight indeterminately European accent. Hair done up in pigtails to either side of a bright, roundish face. Blue eyes, little turned-up nose.
“Yes,” he said, “thanks.”
She offered the pack, and he took one. Then they moved outside. The blonde girl produced a lighter, and she cupped her hands around it as they lit up.
“Jen,” she said, offering her hand.
He shook it. “Charlie.”
. . .
Nothing after that. The patio. Then what? He remembered taking a hit of the cigarette, then waking up … wherever he was—on the way to the moon, apparently. That’s crazy. How did I get from there into this—ship, or whatever it is? I had to have walked out on my own. So why don’t I remember?
Charlie managed to grab ahold of one of the metal struts and hang on. He looked out at the huge moon. Could he really be in a spaceship, or was this some kind of elaborate prank? The moon, the earth, the sun—it looked real, like he was seeing it out of a window. It looked too real to be a simulation. If it was, the weightlessness was a good touch. How could someone pull that off?
He was close enough now that the curve of the gray, cratered orb was hard to recognize—it was a broad, slightly-curved horizon with black space above it. He must be close enough now to be in orbit—or not.
He fought down panic. Why would somebody put him into this thing just to crash him into the moon? Surely there were easier ways to terrify and kill someone, if that’s what his captors were up to. No, he reasoned, there had to be more behind this than simply trying to scare the living shit out of me, or kill me. Whatever’s going on here, it isn’t that simple.
But that didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t in any danger.
He pushed off from the wall, glancing around at every surface, looking for anything that might be a control of some sort. There was nothing distinguishable from the rest of the metal bars and glass or the solid metal hemisphere below. (Below? Above?) He was losing any sense of up and down, and starting to feel seasick.
Then he remembered something else.
The pencil.
It was a fat pencil, not a regular number two pencil, but big around as a cigar. It had fallen out of her purse when she got the lighter out, and he’d bent down and picked it up. There was writing on it. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” it said on one side, then, “NSDAP 90. Jahrestag” on the other. He knew enough German to know what it said. He gave it back to her with a funny look.
“So, what is that, some kind of … joke, or something?” He dragged on the cigarette, blew some smoke out. “National Socialism’s Ninetieth? Work Makes You Free?”
She smirked, looked embarrassed. “It’s a little hard to explain. But I’m not a—Nazi, if that’s what you think.”
“So, what are you?”
Blackness.
Yes. Indeed. What are you? he thought, staring out the window, watching the cold gray expanse roll by. What the fuck did you do to me? And why?
There was a crackle, like radio static. Quick, then gone. Somewhere down near the opposite side of the vessel.
He started to doubt he’d actually heard anything, then again, the crackling came, and then, a man’s voice. Five short words—they sounded like German.
Frantically, he pushed himself toward the source of the sound, grappling along the side, pushing off from the metal struts. Again, the voice. Five words in German.
“Drücken sie die rote taste.”
He scrambled around the other end of the vessel until he’d located the source of the voice: a rounded chrome oblong, about two feet around. There was a speaker grille on it, above a round, softly glowing red button about the size of a half dollar. Underneath it, a set of numbers—high-contrast black against yellow—counted down, ticking off the seconds.
“Drücken sie die rote taste.”
He tried to recall the German he’d learned in high school. Drücken sie—press, you press. Press the—“rote” was “red.” Press the red—
He reached out, without thinking about it, and pressed down the red button.
Instantly, there was a rumble from beneath his feet, and a feeling that he’d suddenly grown a little heavier. H
e felt the sphere turning slowly, adjusting.
Thrust. Something had fired, some rocket or something.
He was still, for the most part, weightless. He pushed himself along to where the windows were. The forward motion had slowed, and it looked like the surface was growing closer. But as the ship approached the mottled, gray expanse, he began falling slowly towards what was now definitely the “bottom” of the sphere.
Relief flowed through him. He wasn’t going to crash: this thing was going to land.
Then he thought about what that meant. It’s landing on the fucking moon. And all I have is a German voice, telling me to press the red button. The whole thing could be automated. I could be completely alone here. Stranded.
In another moment, there was a jolt, and a thud as the spacecraft came to rest.
He had weight again, although not anywhere near earth-normal. He was down in the “bottom” of the sphere, near to the speaker and the red button.
Now what? he thought. Hydraulic hissing and gurgling filtered through the walls of the ship. He tried to calm his breath, get himself ready for whatever was coming next.
An electrical hum suddenly rose from beneath his feet. A hatch was opening downward, exposing a brightly-lit chamber about ten feet in diameter. He looked inside. There was a ladder attached to the wall. Without thinking about it, he put his feet on the ladder and started to climb down.
The chamber was mostly empty, but for two conspicuous items. Against the wall, secured with Velcro straps, was a lightweight gloved suit, and a bulbous helmet hanging next to it. Against the opposite wall hung a bicycle, with the gears and other hardware sealed up behind some sort of plastic casing. It had oversized tires with thick treads, like some sort of mountain bike on steroids.
He undid the straps from the bike and took it down, then did the same with the suit and helmet. He wasn’t sure exactly why he was doing it; he was acting automatically. It stood to reason that if these things were here, they may have to be used sometime in the very near future. He had no way of knowing how much air was still left in the sphere, or if there was any food or water. It made little sense to leave his only place of relative safety to go biking across the moon. What could he possibly find outside? But if there were no provisions for his future life support, he’d die here just as handily as outside on a bike in a space suit.
Then it occurred to him that he’d never actually taken any kind of inventory of what was in the upper chamber. He’d found the speaker and the red button, but he hadn’t checked out any of the surfaces for compartments where supplies could be stored. Maybe there was enough air, water and food up there for months.
With that thought, he started up the ladder again. As he neared the hatch, it slammed down and sealed itself with a dull thud.
A new voice, a woman this time, spoke calmly from somewhere below: “Bereiten sie für die evakuierung. Bereiten sie für die evakuierung.”
He had no idea what this meant. Bereiten? He was panicked again. What was coming now?
“English!” he screamed out. “Speak English!”
“English.” The calm voice said. “Prepare for evacuation. Prepare for evacuation.”
A chill went down his back. He jumped down from the ladder and raced over to the suit. Now he could hear a hissing sound, like air leaking out. He struggled to unzip the suit, see how to get his arms and legs into it. After a moment, his ears popped—the air pressure was going away. That meant the air was going with it.
Frantically, he struggled into the suit, managed to fit his hands into the gloves, zip the zippers shut. He grabbed for the helmet and fitted it over his head, trying to puzzle out how it sealed. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he mated it to the ring at the neck of the suit, and it rotated into place with a satisfying click. Something began to hum inside the suit, and cool air stared blowing into the interior.
He noticed a display of numbers and symbols in the lower left of his visor. They seemed to be abbreviations, with a fluctuating set of numbers next to them. One set, with “HF” as the indicator, hovered around eighty—could that be his heart rate?
The wall opened out slowly, revealing the gray lunar plain. A ramp extended out beneath the opening, forming a forty-five degree angle with the surface.
His breath was fast and shallow now; he was hyperventilating, the “HF” up around 115. He forced himself to calm down, taking in long, slow draughts of air.
When he finally felt himself calming, his panic quieting, he grabbed hold of the bike and began to walk it down the ramp.
Silence, but for his breathing, the touch of his boots on the ramp, the soft rumbling of the wheels. The landscape spread out around him, utterly desolate, unspeakably beautiful. The gibbous blue-white orb of the earth hung in the void.
He hiked his right leg over the bike frame, sat down on the seat and began to pedal. The big rubber wheels sank down into the lunar powder, blowing up a slo-mo dust storm behind him as he rode. At first, he just circled the ship, trying to gauge the dimensions of it, see if there was another way in. It was a dull metallic sphere on low, spindly legs, like something out of a Soviet science fiction movie. He came back around and looked for the hatch he’d come out of—anything that looked like an obvious entrance—and found nothing. Just the smooth, weathered metal.
When it became apparent that he was completely locked out, he decided to just pick a direction, and ride. If he was going to run out of air on a bicycle on the moon, he would make it count.
If there was something out there to find, somewhere he was meant to go, he would do his best to find it. If not, at least it would be a magnificent way to die.
He pedaled up a slight incline, a rill between two low hills. He reached the top with little effort: in the low gravity, it was almost like flying. He paused at the top, overlooking a wide, shallow crater. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a glint of light shining off something below.
He tested the brakes, then began to coast down into the crater in the direction of the shiny thing he’d spotted.
It proved difficult to keep a fix on it—the light shifted as he got closer, and he thought he’d lost it for good. Then he spotted it, close by: a circular, shiny white object, half buried in the regolith.
He got off the bike and walk/jumped over to the object. Grasping it clumsily in his gloved hands, he held it up to his visor. It was a commemorative plate, like something from a souvenir gift shop. On it was a picture of two swords crossed on top of a confederate flag. There were a lot more stars on this one than he was used to seeing: twenty-eight rather than the thirteen he remembered. Inscribed along the bottom was, “CSA Centennial 1861 – 1961”
He let the plate fall slowly to the ground, and took a long look around the moonscape. There were things all over the ground, poking up out of the dust and rocks, things that shouldn’t belong on the moon. And looking up, he noticed for the first time, here and there, a gentle rain of objects—books and spoons, framed photographs, little objects—all clearly man-made artifacts, on a slow trajectory from somewhere out there, landing with a soft puff of regolith.
Close by, something shiny caught his eye. He pedaled over to it, and pulled it out of the gray grit. It had printing on one shiny surface, and the familiar rainbow shimmering of a CD on the other. Only this one had eight sides, and was about eight inches around. He squinted down at the printed side. “Coltrane/Hendrix Group – Montreaux, 1976” it said.
There was a flap, with a big pocket under it on the front of his suit. He opened it and stuck the octagonal disc inside.
Then, movement out of the corner of his eye. He peered at the horizon, and saw nothing. Crazy, he thought. How could something be moving? Then he thought, why not? Why would that be any crazier than me on a bicycle on the moon, tucking a Coltrane/Hendrix CD from 1976 into my spacesuit?
There was the motion again—this time, he spotted it: a little white dot on the horizon, floating over the side of a rise, maybe a mile or so away. As it g
ot closer, he could make out what was it was: a cyclist in a spacesuit. The figure stopped from time to time, picking things up from the ground.
Then he saw two more.
He hopped back on the bike and pedaled toward the nearest figure, who was moving off in the opposite direction, racing away as if he’d spotted something. Maybe he’s doing the same thing I am, he thought, chasing down another moon cyclist. He kept pedaling, figuring that if he didn’t catch up with that one, there were others not much further away.
When he came over the next gentle rise, he saw where the other cyclists had been heading: a massive dome, dazzlingly white in the unfiltered sunlight. Cyclists converged on it from all sides. And it looked as though doors were opening in the sides to let them in.
He raced down the slope.
No one tried to speak or sign to each other; they were too intent on getting inside the dome. When he got within twenty or so feet of it, a door opened up, revealing an enclosure with a facing white wall inside. He pedaled inside along with the others. The door, now behind him, closed, and the wall opened up in front of him, revealing a cavernous chamber.
He gazed upward to a luminous white dome. Down below, hundreds of handsome men and beautiful women sat behind tables—all copies, or clones of the same four or five people. One of the clone types was the girl from the party. The bikers in their dusty white space suits sat across from the photogenic men and women, looking dazed and frightened, uncertain.
Over a loudspeaker, a neutral voice, not the same one from the ship, repeated something in several different languages, some recognizable and others unlike anything he’d ever heard. Finally, the neutral voice said, in English, “It is safe to remove your helmet. Please do so, and proceed to an available desk for debriefing.”
