Solaris Rising 3 - The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction

by Ian Whates

  June went back to her chair and sat down. The couple in the back seat of the car was grinning at her. The girl in the passenger seat looked away.

  The young man brought another paper bag to the hedge and now began tossing individual items – paper cups, a green plastic fork, and a few gnawed spareribs. The couple and the girl in the car opened their doors and got out, looking warily toward June.

  Bruno came out of the house and stood watching as the young man heaved the whole bag over the hedge. It landed and broke apart on the grass, scattering its contents.

  June stood up.

  Bruno grabbed her arm, but the blond young man was gone.

  June felt her strength rise up, and the red convertible disappeared. The boy turned around as the girl screamed. Then they fled.

  June fell back into her chair.

  Bruno looked down at her and said calmly, “Sooner or later you’ll do it to me, in your sleep!”

  She shook her head in denial, then looked at the street as if expecting the red convertible to reappear. “Never,” she whispered.

  He asked, “Would I be sent inside a mountain somewhere? Maybe in pieces! Ripped apart? Do you have any idea?”

  She gazed up at him, feeling his fear of her.

  ON MONDAY MORNING June looked out the kitchen window and saw Felix marching wearily up the hill toward their driveway, leaning forward far enough to look like he might fall over on his face.

  Winded, he finally came to his Jaguar but did not look under the hood; coming around, he released the brake, gave the car a push, and let it roll back toward the road. He got in quickly and waited until he was out in the street, with enough momentum to turn. He stopped after the turn, got out, pushed and got back in, and she saw that he would be able to coast the mile downhill to his house.

  The Jaguar rolled away silently. She took deep breaths and listened, then went into the living room and sat down on the sofa. She would not go to her accounting job today.

  The phone rang and took the message.

  “June, Bruno!” Felix cried. “My mind is gone,” and she wondered if she loved him.

  “You’ve turned it invisible,” Felix babbled on happily. “You’re playing a joke on me – right? Hypnosis, or something going around... I guess.”

  “Something going around...” June muttered to herself as the message cut off.

  She sat back, imagining an assembly line of disappearing engines. How many would it take before the companies stopped making them?

  She had felt sorry for Felix pushing his Jaguar down the driveway; but there had been no delusions, not with Felix or the cars on Delaware Avenue, nor with the look in Melony K. Jelle’s face.

  She could stand on the corner of Delaware and Whistler and snatch engines one after another, willing them gone with no one the wiser.

  An endless task.

  No one would know as she plucked. Bruno had killed wasps nesting above their patio, one at a time with a fly swatter, until the swarm got the message and stopped building under the overhang. Would the automotives stop making rolling sewers if she plucked enough of them? Unlikely. They would feel threatened and know that it was all happening deliberately, that someone had a plan... that it wasn’t all fools out there... that there was intelligence behind what was happening, but no one would find her. Bruno and Felix might inform on her, but no one would believe them...

  Her life would be a sacrifice to the future, until change bubbled up from below; that was what terrorists knew, especially the ones who died in the act, inspiring actions from below even as they damned themselves and left it to milder souls to bring the changes. “Go out there,” President Roosevelt had said to a petitioning party, “and make me do it.” Barack Obama had said as much during his campaign, but those who had risen to his call had been left behind with their hopes.

  Somewhere, elsewhen, it had all come right.

  Sacrifices? Everything carried a cost. Every effort was a sacrifice...

  Dismay and a vision of doom filled her, as she knew that the only alternative was to do nothing, to stop herself. Could she? For evil to prevail, the preachers prattled, it only needed good people to do nothing...

  But could she stop? Could she simply command herself to stop and live with her unused ability? It would wait, always ready to strike, and she would never be sure when the urge would take hold of her...

  “I’m sorry,” June had once said to her mother, “that I’m not the daughter you wished.”

  The hatred June had felt then, and still felt, frightened her. She might hurt people in her sleep; wishes waited in her fears...

  The end of engines was only a start. Humankind had failed at foresight; large power structures lived on the misery of the many; only insurrections and disasters had ever worn away at the oppression of the topmost, who reserved the right of violence for themselves and retreated only when overwhelmed from below.

  Retreated, only to return – because they were all us.

  Structures true to human yearning for justice had never arisen without upheavals, but had failed to completely sweep away the vampirism and vendetta that were the way of the world, because top and bottom were the same when turned over...

  Yet the people yearned for superheroes, dreaming of them in films and comic books, but, like the disbelieved Cassandra, only villains were permitted to tell the truth...

  She had to stop herself, or live with the horrors she would inflict. Thinning out the herds of cars would bring deaths through a lack of transport...

  Stop!

  Bruno wanted her death, but not by his hand.

  “You’re not needed,” he had said. “The internal combustion engine will die on its own.”

  “They said that about slavery,” she replied, “but still had to patrol the seas. And slavery is still here, disguised. Read the UN reports. Look at wage slavery, one-sided contracts, the slave brothels of the Middle East, suppression of collective bargaining, private kidnapping and blackmail. People keep at it. We’ll be dropping in the streets before they clear the air.”

  He gazed at her with dismay.

  “All this talk,” she had continued, “about not bemoaning and doing something constructive, fails to confront... what’s inside us... the old dark stuff, a crooked stick that can’t make itself straight.”

  “Then it’s hopeless?” he asked.

  “If it’s that deep stuff we have to confront,” she said, “then talk won’t help – and what action will? Exhortation? Laws? Police?”

  “Vicious circles, yes, but don’t sell bemoaning short.”

  The silence stood between them, hardening into a wall. “I’m nothing!” she cried. “All the terrorists in the world are nothing to all the official killing, the economic violence that no one ever stops.”

  He had gazed at her and said, “I’ve lost you.”

  “And I’ve lost everything.”

  “You’ve killed at least one person. Where did you send that boy?”

  “I... lost my temper,” she said. “But that’s nothing compared to the powerful, who are dedicated to the wholesale destruction of human flesh and make us pay them to do it.”

  “But your wretched... miracles won’t change a thing!”

  Life is lived forward but understood backwards. Religious and secular foresight’s pleading exhortations of hellfire and earthly damnation were not strong enough. Where is goodness, where are its armies? When did it ever add up and accumulate?

  She got up, went upstairs to the bedroom and lay down in darkness.

  SHE WOKE UP, and the lamp was not in her reach, and no bed beneath her. Her eyes would not open, but they were open. She called out to Bruno, then dropped back into sleep, hoping that his hand would find her and pull her out into the morning, out of herself, back into what she might have once been...

  She breathed with increasing difficulty. Darkness flowed into her and froze, and there was no axe with which to break it...

  A BREEZE, WARM and dry, crept into the bedroo
m through the screened window. A trolley belled in the beyond on its run from the suburbs into the center of the city. A whistle shot out from the bullet train into New York City.

  She got up and sat by the window in time to see the Chicago airship on its stately way. Bicycles tinkled on Delaware Avenue, their baskets carrying fresh-baked goods home for breakfast.

  But she was only a passerby. The world from which she had again awakened was only one of an endless series whose fates she shared and suffered.

  Poisons bled between worlds.

  Successes were as numberless as failures.

  One realm’s delusion was another’s reality, one delusion another’s nightmare, one happiness another’s illusion.

  What waited beyond her next sleep?

  Hopes hid in the horrors and terrors in the hopes – infinite runs of every kind, never helped, never undone, each pressing ahead in its own way, threads spinning out into nowhere, unwinding, never to wind again...

  As many instances of her own dark-eyed skulls drank the starlight as wore flesh and breathed this clean morning air. Unable or unwilling to choose a world, a gambling malignity had summoned them all to struggle all at once with each other for life.

  A standing, incomprehensible infinity.

  Never to be singular against the death of all others.

  But it was a beautiful morning outside her window.

  No, no, please, no more of pained hope, she prayed to the nameless darkness...

  SHE OPENED HER eyes. Stars waited in a deep blue sky as she breathed desert air. She had always been here, waiting to emerge from that other, now fading life...

  Too many lifetimes insisted in her memory.

  She sat up in the familiar red convertible and grasped the steering wheel. Engines stood around her. Dry, wind-cleansed, never to turn over again, dead lumpy robots listened to the desert’s night silence as if to their own lost whirring...

  How many had she sent here, she asked as she looked around in the brightening dawn. Too many to count in her continuous effort, across months, even years of learned exertion. To return them out of some misbegotten mercy would take as long. Her pitying of Felix had given him back his engine, but there was no pity in her now, not for others or for herself...

  The red convertible was comfortable.

  Throat dry, body weak and fevered, she knew that she had been here a long time. She held up her hand and saw a dry skin-stretched claw, blue-veined and shrunken, which no amount of moisture would revive.

  The metal of the engines glittered around her. Sullen in the coming light, they knew her, waiting to exact from her the price of their defeat...

  They had killed themselves, she told herself, by killing so many of us...

  She cried out as she glimpsed her raw distorted face in the rearview mirror. She might drive away from here; the engine, a careful arrangement of parts and physical principles, would produce its sustained series of explosions and carry her out of exile. She would drive to an oasis of tents and satellite uplinks drinking data from the sky...

  She turned the ignition key against an empty gas gauge.

  Rust, corrosion, and thirst were slow in this place. A million years from now her bleached skeleton would still be here, ancient under the stoic stars, cave-eyes blind to all light, her white skull’s fleshless emptiness filling with the flowing perfection of sand grains.

  Bruno and Felix had long ago guessed, of course, but no one had believed them...

  Something had imagined her, and should have done much better. Where was she now? Was the whole Earth a wasteland of junk? Now was a million years past the nows into which she had been whelped; born was too decent a word; spit out by nature into a useless awareness...

  It became too hot to sit in the car. She opened the door and stepped out on the sand, then crawled into the shade under the car and lay there thirsting the whole day, caged by her armied thoughts...

  Toward evening, she noticed some blond hair fluttering on a human skull that was partly covered by the sand near the front fender. The evening breeze had uncovered the dried remains of the boy. She looked away.

  Shivering as night came again, she crawled out from under, over to one of the orphaned engines, and embraced the metal block’s stored solar heat, then closed her eyes and lay back on the turning bed of earth.

  No, not here, she told herself, not yet...

  SHE LOOKED OUT over the parking lot and marshalled her strength. The waiting beasts stared at her as if ignoring the exertion she would hurl against them. Disaster was the midwife of progress, she told herself, but better mine than the ones waiting to overtake us.

  She reached out through the chainlink fence, feeling her will wielding the invisible force, its strangeness embracing her.

  There was no fiery chain reaction, no bomb touching off gas tanks. She simply gutted the beasts in silent sweeps, with nothing to see except a woman peering through a fence and later walking away. Offering up these engines was not the sacrifice of wars to imagined betterments...

  The sudden emptiness within her, after each reach, opened into a stillness greater than any fire that might have consumed the keyless mechanisms as they stood helpless and guiltless without their masters in a vast parking lot of victims.

  People came to start their cars, and left. Once in a while a homeless person got out, his night’s need fulfilled.

  She went to ever larger lots, gaining strength, half-hoping that the sheer volume would defeat her. Rains washed her sometimes, and the wind dried her. She came and went unnoticed as the sullen engines slipped away to the dry starry place where she would one day join them.

  DARK HARVEST

  CAT SPARKS

  Cat Sparks is fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine and former manager of Agog! Press. She’s won seventeen Aurealis and Ditmar awards for writing, editing and art. Over sixty of her short stories have been published since 2000. She is currently engaged in a PhD on young adult post-disaster literature. Her collection The Bride Price was published by Ticonderoga Publications in 2013. Her first novel, Blue Lotus, is finally nearing completion.

  “GET THAT MACHINE offa me,” screamed Dev. “I’m dying. I’m bleeding out!”

  “You are not bleeding out,” stated Jayce. “Your foot’s back on already.”

  When Dev glanced down he started screaming louder. Loud enough to drown out the relentless cicada hum.

  “Someone shut off that contraption,” Jayce shouted over the top of both the screaming and the chorus of native bugs.

  Commander Vassallo pulled his blaster, aimed it squarely at where she pointed – the Surgeco-460’s forest of operating arms, many of which were snapping and stabbing wildly.

  “Those things are worth a –”

  Vassallo fired. Metal splinters rained against the portable generator’s casing.

  “Fortune,” finished Stolk, coughing as acrid smoke fouled up the air.

  “It’s a goddamn goat rodeo in here,” said Vassallo. “Those sack-o-shit 460s were supposed to have been decommissioned, on account of that... What was that trouble that went down on Memphis?”

  Satordi snapped his fingers three times in a row. “Yeah, I remember something...”

  “Was a couple of procedures gone totally tits up,” said Jayce. “Literally. Was supposed to be a recall. Guess they missed a few.”

  Vassallo grunted. “More ExConn cheaparsery. Spending big everywhere but on the weedfront where it’s needed.”

  Dev’s screaming was getting louder.

  “Jayce, give him a shot of something. Gotta be something stronger in the kit.”

  “I’m on it.”

  Troy straddled Dev to hold him down. Blood smeared over everything, making it hard for Jayce to get a grip. She wedged the hypo between her teeth, growled something unintelligible. Troy shifted his weight, pushed down on the patient’s forearms.

  Dev kept up his thrashing and screaming. Jayce spat the hypo into her hand, sat back on her haunches. Frowned. “Don’t think it
s pain that’s got him spooked.”

  The others crowded around to see for themselves. There was no fresh bleeding. The wound was sealed, a thick pink ridge, only the foot had been sewn on back to front.

  She shook her head. “How do you even make a mistake like that?”

  “Shit for mechabrains,” said Vassallo, taking another pot shot at the robot, even though its arms had stopped flailing and it was listing severely to one side.

  “Tangier, better call for MedEVac.”

  “What for? Nobody came when the weed busted containment. Nobody came to take the body bags.”

  “Just call it in.”

  “What about the rest of us? When are we getting off this stinking rock?”

  “New orders,” said Sergeant Vassallo, which was a lie. There’d been no messages from Platform, neither through the comms, nor private wire.

  Dev, who had fallen silent as they all gawked at his foot, started his screaming up again in earnest. “Don’t evac me to Orbital. You know what they say goes on up there. Leave the foot. I’m getting used to it. Hell, I’m used to it already!”

  Vassallo put his gun away, satisfied that the 460 had been rendered smouldering scrap. “Can’t have you fighting with your foot on back to front.” He pulled his tobacco from his pocket, rolled a cigarette and jammed it between Dev’s quivering lips. “Rest up for a few days, mercenary. You ain’t missing anything down here.”

  He lit the smoke with his battered gold Zippo. The one he’d souvenired from some ConnEX bigwig’s corpse. Dev inhaled, pinched the cigarette between trembling fingers. “You know what they say about Orbital, Sarge. How the wounded come back different.”

  “Course you’ll be different, buddy – you’ll have your foot sewn on the right way round!” He slapped Troy on the shoulder and pointed to the ring of whitewashed stones they’d arranged themselves after insurgents took out most of the landing platform.