“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.”
“What’s going on?”
“I tried a few things,” Jano said.
“You did?”
“Uh-huh, and one of them worked.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You were right, Gellen.”
“About what?”
“You said we weren’t lost yet,” she said, favoring him with a beatific smile. “We’re back on our way to Kaluza.”
“We are? How?”
“When I ran out of ideas, I turned the receptors toward a pulsar beam emission, the only significant energy source I could be sure would be in our path even at this speed.”
“And it worked?”
“Yes, the beam deflected our course.” She pointed at a dimensional schematic depicting a crimson cone shooting from the magnetic fields of a neutron star. “It was no quasar, but it was enough of an impulse to refocus us.”
Gellen wallowed in her joy. He whooped, momentarily unmindful of what the passengers might think.
“Do you believe in miracles?” Jano asked.
“Not until now.”
“Call it luck, then,” she laughed, hauling him into the cockpit to hug him.
#
A few hours later, subjective time, the Serapis was braking, transitioning back into tardyons as photons caught up with it. Half an hour after that they slowed to sub-light speed as they approached the Kaluza Alcube. The passengers were still troubled, but Gellen assured them they were right on schedule. They seemed doubtful at first. But when he turned off the immersion floods and the dreamers came to, everyone knew that they were nearing their destination.
“You never did tell us what happened back there,” Ossian said from his open berth.
“It was just an optical anomaly,” Gellen said. “These things happen sometimes.”
Ossian was good enough to leave it at that, nodding and closing the lid.
The Alcube snagged the Serapis and came to rest. It felt fine to have some weight again, but even in Kaluza’s light gravity Gellen had to help some of the passengers out of their now awkwardly situated berths.
The exterior hatch popped open and admitted the busy sounds and smells of the station. Four crescent moons shone through the plasma shielding above the platform.
“Our new home,” Dyra said. The little one’s eyes were on Gellen, not the world of Kaluza.
“What a good baby,” Gellen said. “He’ll make a fine frontiersman.”
“Say goodbye to the nice man, darling,” Dyra said, smiling and lifting one of her child’s tiny hands to wave at Gellen. The baby yawned as she carried him out.
Gellen overheard Poole Laclan telling a still groggy dreamer what had happened. The travelers were relieved that they’d arrived without further incident, but Gellen pretended it was routine. All that really mattered was that they were alive.
Reborn, Gellen jumped out of the Serapis and stood beside the hatch to say goodbye to the debarking travelers. Ossian gave him a curious parting glance.
Reina Vidian didn’t even look at him. Gellen felt her relief from twenty meters away as she ran to meet a younger woman who was waiting for her. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but somehow he didn’t think it was about cutting off his pension. The daughter, whom he assumed the younger woman to be, appeared to be worried as she kissed Reina. It occurred to Gellen that he’d be worried too if Reina Vidian was going to live with him from now on, but he hoped she’d be all right. He silently wished them both well.
Poole Laclan was the last to get off.
“You did a great job,” Poole said, glancing toward Reina Vidian, “no matter what she says. If you need someone to vouch for you, just let me know.”
“Thank you, Mr. Laclan.”
“For a while there,” Poole said, “I thought something was happening, but you convinced me we’d be all right. Were you faking it?”
Without speaking, Gellen held his index finger up to his pursed lips.
Poole Laclan laughed and walked away, cocky as ever. He was approached by two uniformed officials and left the platform with one of them. The other, a harried-looking woman, turned toward the Serapis as robots started hauling out the travelers’ gear. She seemed to recognize Gellen, although he had never seen her before.
“Mr. Melotas, would you please summon the tach and come with me?” she asked.
“Sure,” Gellen said, “what’s it about?”
“I can’t discuss it here.”
“Okay.” Gellen went back inside and told Jano Mur. She finished shutting everything down and they hopped out to follow the officer through a corridor and rode with her down a few levels in a lift. When they got off, she led them along another corridor to door with a sign on it reading, “Authorized Personnel Only.” She glanced over her shoulder at them. Then she opened the door.
There were people seated in the room behind it—Jano Mur and Gellen Melotas. Several of both. Some of them rose from their folding chairs.
“The vessel before yours came in about forty minutes ago,” the security officer said, breaking the stunned silence. “It’s getting hard to find places to park them all.”
Gellen was too shocked by the sight of his gray-haired selves to speak, but Jano had the presence of mind to ask, “And the passengers?”
“I don’t know how we’re going to find accommodations for everybody, but we’re working on it.”
“How many are there?”
“Three hundred and forty-two, so far.”
“So there are . . .”
“Thirty-eight of you and Mr. Melotas,” she said, almost apologetically.
No wonder Reina Vidian’s daughter looked worried. She had nineteen mothers to worry about now. He tried to imagine them all under the same roof.
“I was the tach who brought the Serapis in just before you,” one of Jano Mur’s duplicates said.
Mur and Gellen glanced at each other and then back at the others.
“There are—there are going to be—more,” Gellen stammered, “aren’t there?”
“Yes,” a Gellen doppelgänger said in a strangely familiar voice, “there are.”
#
It’s a good thing there’s plenty of room in the sparsely populated Kaluza system, because its Alcube station is tied up until this recurring event ends, if it ever does. Gellen is living on the second moon now. He belongs to a large support group that get together to drink coffee and discuss great novels, among other things. They’ll soon have enough members to start their own union, which isn’t a bad idea for a bunch of retirees. The locals are so proud to host this unprecedented event that they’re putting up a new housing complex for the growing number of duplicates. Reina Vidian’s daughter had something to do with it.
The support group meetings get a little confusing occasionally, but most of the time all the members understand each other’s feelings. After all, they’re mopes who share a common history. There’s only one thing they can’t agree on.
Every last one of them believes he’s the true Gellen Melotas.
When We Were Witches
By Nikki Alfar
about school
I CAN TELL you now that it was really mostly Ginny’s idea to form the girls in our sixth-grade section into a coven dedicated to combating what we then saw as the unbearably annoying menace posed to the world by our preadolescent boy classmates, compact mirrors and all. Neither wild horses nor the collective stern glares of our assembled elementary school faculty could have dragged this admission out of me when I was eleven, mind you, but I’m thirty-nine now and practically convinced that Sister Savina Syncletica will not, in fact, materialize from out of the haze of my cigarette smoke to punish both Ginny and me for the sins of nearly three decades past.
Practically. What can I say? You can take the girl out of Catholic school, but you can’t take the Catholic out of the girl.
Let’s not get into which school exactly I went to, okay
? Because then you might do something nosy like ask them if it all really happened; and of course they’ll tell you that no, no such thing ever happened; and I’ll have to tell you that yes it did, I was there. And then you’ll say, and they’ll say, and I’ll say, and who knows, but we might all end up in court or something; they’re that careful about their reputation, which is partly why everything got so blown out of proportion the way it did.
(But I’m not making up a fake name for Sister Savina Syncletica, by the way, because first of all, she doesn’t teach there anymore—she went back to Spain or something—and second of all, it’s just too bizarre a name not to mention. I’ve googled it since, and found out she was named after a couple of saints known for their compassion, humility, beauty, and chastity, which just goes to show that you don’t need more than one out of four relevant qualities to get named after whichever saint you want.)
Anyway. Our school was ‘nestled in the heart of an exclusive subdivision,’ which is what they said in the brochures then and what they still say now (Not that this will help you figure out which school it was, because practically everyone says that), I suppose because it sounds a lot nicer than ‘smack dab in the middle of Snob Central,’ which is where it was.
It was allegedly a coeducational school, where ‘boys and girls grow and learn together in a balanced atmosphere of healthy camaraderie’. The reality was that we were actually segregated into all-boys’ and all-girls’ sections, the logic being that each gender would only be a distraction to the other during actual class. We were supposed to be able to mingle during recess and lunch hour, but in fact you could have neatly drawn a dividing line straight down the middle of the grade school canteen—between the giggly part that was suffused with the scent of Nenuco (for the rich girls) and Johnson’s Baby Cologne (for the rest of us), and the sweaty part that was distinguished by much yelling as well as flying spitballs, folded planes, and other airborne paper products. We were so used to being kept apart that we thought of each other as separate species, and mealtimes did nothing to dissuade this notion. No girl would have been caught dead crossing over to the boys’ section, and no boy would have survived the ridicule engendered (pun thoroughly intended) by walking the other way.
Eventually, somebody’s parents finally caught on that there was something non-coed in Denmark, if you know what I mean, so they made a big fuss about not getting what they were paying for, which led to a whole bunch of PTA meetings, which led to the compromise of trying out one Experimental Mixed Section per grade level, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-four.
Which is when the proverbial shit started making its way toward the fan.
about me
THEY PUT ALL the smart kids in the Experimental Sections—presumably with the notion that smart kids would be less likely to run riot at mere proximity to the opposite sex—which is how I ended up in the sixth-grade one. Not that I’m all that brilliant or anything—don’t think that’s what I’m telling you—but I was cunning enough to know my strengths (English, Science, and History) and trade them off to cover my weaknesses (as in, “I’ll write your essay if you do my crochet for Work Ed”).
So I wasn’t exactly a Good Girl, although the teachers thought I was, because certain types of educators tend to cling to the belief that good grades equal actual goodness. I was, in fact, something of a ringleader type in grade school. I wasn’t the most popular girl around, not by a long shot, but I did get chosen several times as a candidate for Miss Intramurals, which inevitably has a lot more to do with how well-liked you are than how actually attractive you are. I wasn’t gorgeous or rich or fashionable (and if you don’t think you can be fashionable or unfashionable in a uniform, you’ve obviously never been to private school), but I was funny, and smart (which is not necessarily an asset in school social circles), and most importantly, I could get away with things (which totally is).
I could talk rings around most of our teachers (By now you’ve gathered that the majority of them weren’t all that bright anyway), persuading them that no, it was not me and my friends who had been smoking in the girls’ locker room; we were merely hapless victims of whoever had left the choking miasma of tobacco smoke hanging in the air before us. I could convincingly testify that so-and-so had eaten some truly traumatic substance at lunch time, and was therefore completely justified in asking to go to the rest room three times in thirty minutes. I could forge any parent’s signature (including Mr. Simbulan’s, despite the fact that it appeared to contain no actual letters, and resembled a deformed dinosaur more than anything approximating a name), and endlessly invent plausible excuses to explain the many bizarre accidents that frequently happened to befall missing homework.
I was a genius, in my way, and because of it, everyone knew me or knew of me. All the girls did, anyway, which was all that really mattered to me at the time. (I’ve explained, right?) I presided over my own little table at the canteen and everything, close by the candy stand, which was a pretty prime location though not as good as right next to the soft drink vendo, which is where the real crème de la crème girls got to sit. (See? I told you I wasn’t that much of a big shot.)
I didn’t know beforehand that there were going to be mixed sections that year, or that I’d been picked to be in one of them. My parents weren’t the PTA type (although my dad was the opinionated type, but that’s for much later in our story), and they probably would have figured that, with four older brothers, I had all the exposure to male behavior a girl could possibly want—and more—anyway. So my big concerns the summer before were making sure I’d get the girls in my gang into the same section with me (annually accomplished by sweet-talking the registrar during enrollment, though inevitably I only wound up with one or two out of the three of them); having my plaid uniform skirts shortened or lengthened in my continuing sad effort to keep pace with current fashion and my own height; and charming my grand-aunt into wrapping my books in plastic for me, which the school required, and I could never do neatly, and would end up gradually picking off in shreds over the course of the year.
I only got one of my girls in the same section with me, when school started up—Lee, who, granted, I was closest to and was the only other one of the gang with a good enough grade-point average anyway—and can you believe that registrar never said a word to me about the mixed gender sections? I mean, here it was, this big exciting thing happening for the first time ever that year, and I had to walk into class that June as clueless as the next person. Honestly, what’s the point of having people skills, if people refuse to cooperate?
about Ginny
SO, OKAY, LIKE I said, first day of school, and I was as pathetically uninformed as everyone else who didn’t have PTA-type parents, and therefore kept wondering what the fuck these—ew—boys were doing in our classroom. (I would not actually have thought the word ‘fuck’, though, since I was still young enough at the time to retain the superstitious dread that Mama Mary would descend from the heavens to call me on my foul-mouthed internal voice.) They probably thought we were in the wrong place, just like we were all convinced that they were in the wrong place. (I later found out that Rowena Salgado, whose parents not only attended PTA meetings but actually showed up for sports events and the school fair and that kind of thing, knew already—but she didn’t say anything, because Rowena Salgado would not have said anything if her hair was on fire, unless you called on her to recite.)
Unlike the teeming masses of ignorant classroom humanity, however, I was not content to sit around and wonder, so I got up to check the class list on the door. (I know this seems like the simplest, most obvious thing to do, but you have to remember that the main goal of schools, especially Catholic ones, is to turn hapless students into sheep, which is why I was the only one who went and did it.) It was there, in the middle of my apocalyptic shock and dismay at discovering that we girls were indeed expected to coexist with those boys, that I first learned Ginny’s real name, which provided me with a much-needed source of
amusement at the start of what promised to be a truly trying school year.
“On my birth certificate, it says ‘Gently Go’,” the new girl said later, during the ritual tell-us-something-about-yourself in front of the class. “But if you want to be my friend, call me Ginny and don’t make any jokes about the dying of the light.”
Now you’re probably sneering at this point and wondering how I can possibly remember what someone said at a certain moment on a certain day twenty-eight years ago, but honest to God, I really do, because it was that little speechette that moved me from my initial position of laughing at the profound silliness of her given name to actually being intrigued by the transfer student from California. I was impressed by her confident assumption that people would actually want to be friends with her (It took an admirable amount of sheer nerve, I figured, to go around laying down ultimatums on making friends, when you’re new in school), as well as the implication that, including me and very likely excluding only a few of our teachers, there were now two of us in the entire grade level who actually had some notion of who Dylan Thomas was.
So I invited her to sit next to me, which involved booting some other girl (I don’t remember who anymore) from our prime spot at the back of the class (which means it wasn’t Rowena Salgado, an inveterate first-row-sitter). Theoretically, of course, there was a seating arrangement, but our homeroom adviser was so pleased that someone was willing to reach out to the new girl (and, honestly, so bamboozled, this being her first exposure to the syrupy, suck-up sweetness of me) that she let the matter lie.
By lunch time, I was utterly entranced with Ginny’s outspokenness, her bluntly-professed hatred of her father (which made my own perfectly pleasant relationship with my parents seem childish and boring), and the multiple earrings she obstinately refused to remove from her left ear, despite admonitions from various teachers throughout the morning. (It turned out that there was no actual rule in the school guidelines dictating the number of earrings a student could wear, so she got away with it, at least until the faculty managed to muster up enough organization to get said rule invented. This tells you a little something about the hierarchy of priorities at my school—they never could get all the toilets working at the same time, but God forbid anyone should wear more than two earrings, or that boys should have hair long enough to touch their shirt collars!)
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 50
