Eclipse 4: New Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Jonathan Strahan

“No disrespect, but he’s a total dick. I think he’s crazy.”

  I heard someone descending the steps at the back of the house. “Listen, do me a favor,” I said. “Get word to my wife that I’m here and to come get me. You know her, right?”

  “If I get a chance,” she said. “I’m due downtown in a couple of minutes. May’s in the grocery store, and I’m scheduled to appear in the frozen food aisle. If I get a chance I’ll have her call Lynn.”

  I gave her a silent thumbs up and then my double was at the entrance.

  Before we lifted Fantasma-gris, he broke off his double’s pinky finger and stuck it in his mouth like a cigarette. “Got a light?” he said. Screams of agony issued from the chocolate.

  His room was on the second floor and I was out of breath by the time we arrived. We set the double in a chair. The position he’d formed while in the trunk was perfect for sitting, although he was somewhat slouched forward. I was afraid if he fell, he’d shatter all over the floor.

  “How come the Fantasma smog didn’t leak out when I knocked his toes off? The fucking thing’s hollow,” I said.

  “The chocolate is his prison.”

  I took a seat on the edge of the bed and my double settled down at a little table by the window. Our prisoner faced me, but the double stared out the window. “As soon as it’s nightfall,” he said, “we go to town on him.”

  “Why nightfall?” I asked.

  “Cause that’s the way you kill him. In the dark.”

  While I considered whether to bolt for the door or not, I looked at Fantasma-gris’s face. The white mask was off-putting. It had very prominent cheeks, egg-shell smooth, that I recalled having seen before in a book, on a Noh mask from the fifteenth century. The character was called Shite. “Shite is right,” I thought.

  Out the window, through the trees, there was still the sight of a thin red line at the horizon with night layered on top. Fantasma-gris was whispering to me, trying to communicate something, but I couldn’t make it out. He seemed to be losing power.

  “OK, now,” said the double. He lifted the gun and cocked the trigger. “Let’s have some fun.” He pointed it at me.

  I put my hands up and turned my head.

  “Get up.”

  I stood, trembling.

  “Go over and eat his face.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “Get the fuck over there,” he said, and fired the gun into the ceiling.

  I jumped and was next to Fantasma-gris in an instant.

  “Bite his nose off to spite his face.”

  I leaned over and opened my mouth, but the prospect of sinking my teeth into a white chocolate nose made me sick. So very faintly, I heard, “Help me, help me….” I gagged and then turned away.

  “I said eat his damn face,” said the double, and lunged from his chair toward me. I reached down, grabbed Fantasma-gris’s right arm at the wrist with both hands and pulled it off. The double meant to pistol whip me, but I brought the chocolate arm around like a baseball bat and hit him in the side of the head. White shards exploded everywhere and my double went over like a ton of bricks. The gun flew out of his hand. My instinct was to run, but I remembered all along that I’d have to get the keys from him.

  I leaped on him and fished the keys out of his left pocket where I’d seen him stow them earlier. Just as I got up and made to split, he grabbed me by the ankle and tripped me. I went over and smashed into our prisoner, who toppled to the floor with me on top of him and was crushed to smithereens. The leg of the chair rammed into my stomach and knocked the wind out of me. I couldn’t move.

  As he predicted, there was blood. It trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He fetched the gun and aimed it at me. “I’m through with you,” he said.

  The door opened then and Lynn walked in. “What the hell’s going on here?” she said, standing with her hands on her hips. The double immediately lowered the gun and gazed at the floor.

  I finally caught my breath and said, “You see, my double. I told you.”

  “Give me the gun,” she said, and walked straight over to the double and took it out of his hand. “You two are ridiculous.”

  The double said, “My double is pretending to be me and tried to kill me. He busted my head with a chocolate arm.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m the real one.”

  Lynn backed up three steps, raised the pistol like they do in cop shows and pulled the trigger once. I squinted with the din of the shot, and when I looked, my double had a neat round hole in his forehead. His eyes were crossed and smoke issued from the corners of his mouth. He teetered for a heartbeat and then fell, face forward on the floor. The body twitched and convulsed.

  From out in the hallway, I heard May’s voice ask, “Is everything all right in there?”

  “Swell,” called Lynn, and then stepped around behind the double, took aim with the gun again, and put two more slugs in the back of his head. She dropped the gun on top of him and said, “Let’s get out of here.” She helped me up and we held hands as we had in the gold mine. Passing May on the stairs, Lynn called a thank you over her shoulder.

  We got into my car and I breathed a sigh of relief. The double was gone for good. “How’d you know which of us was the real one?” I asked as I hurriedly pulled away from the curb.

  “It didn’t matter,” she said. “Whichever one of you was in that fetid fucking suit wasn’t coming back to the house.”

  “What if you chose wrong?” I asked.

  “Come on,” she said. “I know you.” Then she disappeared.

  Later that evening, I made coffee and Lynn and I sat on our respective ends of the couch in the living room. “You’ll never guess who I met today?” I said.

  She took a sip of coffee. “Who?”

  “Your double,” I said.

  She was about to raise the cup again but froze. A smile broke out on her face.

  “You need a trip to Dr. Ivy,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I know, what a hypocrite, but I didn’t see my double before you told me about yours.”

  “Why didn’t you let me know?”

  “It didn’t matter as much if I had one, I just didn’t want you to go crazy.”

  “So you’re as crazy as I am,” I said.

  “In my own way.”

  “But your double was actually helpful. How come yours is cool and mine was an asshole?”

  “Think about it,” she said.

  I did and while I did she took a folded napkin out of the pocket of her sweat pants. She held it up in the palm of one hand and opened it with the other. Between her thumb and index finger, she lifted up a white chocolate ear and let the napkin flutter down. She broke off a piece and handed it to me. We had it with our coffee while she told me that it was in the chapel with the image of Copernicus on the ceiling, in that ancient castle in Krakow, where we’d been told we could experience “The 9th Chakra of the World,” that she’d first seen herself.

  NINE ORACLES

  EMMA BULL

  1. The Oracle of Brooklyn

  She sponges milk off the table, the floor, the Hot Wheels car. She’d heard her mother come out her mouth when she’d said it, which is how she’d known it wouldn’t do any good. Then why hadn’t she moved the glass?

  She tugs a paper towel off the roll and dabs milk out of the tiny wheel wells. Had her mother wondered the same thing, afterward?

  Advice, predictions, warnings, aimed at her, her brother, her father. They used to joke about it: “What does Mommy say?” “‘You better not!’” They’d heard, they’d joked, but had they ever listened?

  Being right doesn’t fix anything. Fixing is another set of skills, and some days she can’t remember if she ever learned them. Call your mother. That, at least, she can do something about.

  2. The Oracle of Santa Monica

  It’s called a bubble for a reason.

  She stares at the blue-and-white insignia in the middle of the steering wheel. If cars were bough
t a piece at a time, she’d probably own all of this one except that damned little disc. She’ll sell before the repo, buy a used Toyota.

  Being right ought to deflect the splatter when everything hits the fan. But as one of her professors once said, “So tell me the mathematical symbol for ‘ought to.’” When the corporate ought-to runs into real-world math, it’s not mathematics that gets towed away and declared a total loss.

  It’s easier on her, because she’s had time to prepare. That’s the upside of being the one dissenting voice in the conference room: time to prepare. God knows she won’t get credit for calling it, back when they could have avoided disaster. Finance is a superstitious business, worse than theater. Because she saw it coming and said so, it will be as if she made it happen. Her pink slip will be in the first wave.

  The light turns green. She goes forward, because she has to.

  3. The Oracle of Baltimore

  She wades, alone, into the seething flock of news vultures outside the courthouse. Their microphone beaks reach to peck at her, their screeching batters her: Did you! Your testimony! What do you! How will this! She can barely keep herself from flailing her arms to watch them scatter into the sky.

  Where were you carrion birds when I first spoke up, when you might have done some good? You only appear when the beast is already dead and stinking. You don’t know what it’s like to face its teeth and claws.

  “Doctor!” One earnest young vulture stands his ground and blocks her path. “Now that the court’s verdict has confirmed your allegations about Protelect and your former employer, how do you feel?”

  Tiny black stars dance in the margins of her vision, and her mouth is dry and tastes like steel. Under her skin and inside her ribs she can feel the imminent vibration of panic. She imagines the brave benzodiazepine fighting and dying before the rebel hormones overwhelming her central nervous system.

  Protelect supplied arms to that rebellion, of course. That’s why the rebels will triumph. It’s benzodiazepine’s last stand.

  “How do I feel?”

  “About the verdict. You were right.”

  As if the verdict makes her right. As if she needs the verdict to prove it to herself, like a “100%!” scrawled at the top of her test paper. She’s been right for ten years. She was right before the first death. If the case had been dismissed, she’d still be right, and the company would still be wrong. Is it possible schools no longer teach the difference between science and law? Or is it not required for vultures’ credentials?

  And the disabling effects, the ruined lives, the deaths—Being right doesn’t mend a single one. How does he think she feels?

  She stares into his blue, blue parasitic eyes and clenches her teeth to still the shivering muscles in her jaw. “Anxious,” she says, with a precision terrible even to her.

  The color drains from his face. He steps back and lets her pass.

  4. The Oracle of Montgomery

  “You’re sure?” Dr. Mujarrah says. He’s a good doctor. She likes him, likes working with him. But he’s young, so there’s things he hasn’t seen much of.

  Some of the young ones think they have to prove they’re better than the nurses, which is a lot of damned foolishness and wastes time. It’s not better. It’s different. And being right isn’t about pride and awards. It’s for the patients.

  Dr. Mujarrah’s smart enough to know he doesn’t know everything. So she shows him some respect by stopping to consider the question. “I’ve been surprised before.”

  “But you think…”

  “Sometimes you can tell. Something in the eyes, maybe, trying to look past things they’ve seen all their lives.”

  Dr. Mujarrah gives her a stare like the one she gets sometimes from her daughter Janice whenever she starts to say something about Janice’s church.

  Mr. Vilek is eighty-four, which is a wonder, with rheumatic fever at the age of twelve on his medical history. Heart damage. He knows it, and so do his family and his doctors. But it’s not given anyone to know the day or the hour, until it’s close.

  “I’ve warned the family,” says Dr. Mujarrah. There’s still one little question in his voice. She nods. “They’ll want to come now.”

  5. The Oracle of Wichita

  The band plays “Kiss from a Rose” for the bride-and-groom dance. She’s pretty sure neither Steve nor Vonda requested that. Maybe Vonda’s mom.

  They waltz, not quite as stiff as the mannequins in Bloomingdale’s. Vonda holds the ruffles on her fishtail train with more attention than she holds Steve. Steve sneaks looks at Vonda’s cleavage.

  “We’re taking ballroom dance lessons,” Vonda had announced at the bridal shower. “Steve was all, ‘No way,’ but I talked him into it.”

  Yeah, she can just imagine that.

  She’d done what she could, as a friend. She’s known Steve since

  sixth grade, for chrissake. She’d covered for him when he crashed the Driver Ed car, and helped him train for the state swim finals, and sat up with him all night at the hospital when they were afraid his mom would die of appendicitis.

  Unfortunately, friends don’t always listen to good advice. In fact, sometimes good advice makes friends so mad they might just stop being friends.

  Maybe someday he’ll forgive her for being right.

  Steve and Vonda waltz slowly along the edge of the dance floor. She can see Vonda’s lips moving: ONE-two-three. ONE-two-three. Steve must not have said anything. Vonda would never have invited her if he had.

  Steve catches her eye over Vonda’s bare shoulder and raises his eyebrows as high as they go. See? the eyebrows say. You’re wrong. It’s totally perfect.

  The dance turns them away, and she sighs. You moron. Of course it’s perfect today. That’s not what I said.

  6. The Oracle of Sheridan

  A red, white, and blue shield-shaped sign and an arrow, glimpsed between swipes of the windshield wiper: the most beautiful thing she’s seen for hours. She sinks deeper into the passenger seat with relief. Nina catches the change in body language and shoots her a glance.

  Oops. And after she’d pretended she wasn’t worried. I’m not judging you, sweetie…

  Nina stops at the turnoff for the entrance ramp and looks across the console at her. “This right here? It’s exit 97, isn’t it?”

  Nina’s mouth is pinned closed between her teeth on one side and pulled upward on the other, which also wrinkles her nose. It’s the most ridiculous and adorable apology on Earth, and it gets her every time.

  “I… kinda think it is.”

  “So, hey, we’ve only lost, what? Seventy-five miles?” Nina grins hopefully.

  She clears her throat. “Something like that?”

  “But it could have been a cut-across.”

  Caught up in release of tension and Nina’s mad revisionism, she can’t hold back the bubbles of laughter pushing up from her lungs. “God, the look on your face when the pavement quit.”

  “Pavement, hell! There were sheep! Sheep!”

  They sit in the rain-washed car and shriek with laughter. Everything is funny. The wipers are funny. A chunk of mud falls from the undercarriage—gok—and she laughs so hard she’s afraid she’ll pee.

  Slowly it occurs to her that being right doesn’t mean being unloved.

  Not anymore.

  Nina wipes away tears and puts the car in gear. “That’s it. No more ignoring the navigator. Next time I’ll listen to you.”

  She smiles and rubs Nina’s shoulder with her knuckles. “No, you won’t.”

  7. The Oracle of Red Lake

  In the end, the river wins the race.

  She staggers, trips over sandbags they hadn’t had time to get to the wall, and falls to her hands and knees. Ice water rushes in over the tops of her insulated mittens as if it had been waiting for the chance.

  Hochstetter grabs her at the armpits and hauls her upright. With one arm across his shoulders, she slogs, shivering, to the truck. Chunks of ice eddy and bump around her b
oots. She’s too tired to drag herself into the high cab. He plants both hands on her ass and shoves (Inappropriate touch, she thinks, and it’s so hilarious she knows she’s out of rope), and slams the door as soon as her feet are clear.

  “Hurry” isn’t one of the things she has to tell him. If the water floats the truck, it’s over.

  But they make it. The high school, up on the bluff, is the emergency shelter and command center. She stumbles past the glass case of hockey trophies and National Honor Society plaques to reach the over-warm gym, a piece of floor to sit on, and coffee steaming in a styrofoam cup.

  From the bluff you can see most of town. She can name the families who’d be under each roof if it weren’t for the cold gray-brown water. Thank God the gym doesn’t have windows.

  Hochstetter squats next to her, a cup in his own hand. He’s left his fire department jacket and hat somewhere; in his snowmobile coveralls he looks like just another neighbor. Well, he is.

  “There’s soup, Mayor. Beef barley. Get you some?”

  “Not yet.” She lifts her coffee in both hands and eyes him over the quivering horizon of rim. “My arms are too tired to hold the spoon.”

  He nods, which from Hochstetter is an out-loud laugh. They listen to the murmur of half the town, including kids, in one big room. She’s used to roaring noise in here, basketball games and pep rallies. Now you’d think it was a library.

  Hochstetter clears his throat. “I didn’t figure you’d be out sandbagging.”

  “Why not?” She can’t really taste the coffee, and she doesn’t care. It’s hot.

  “Couldn’t have blamed you if you sat back and said ‘I told you so.’”

  She’d give anything—anything—to have said so and been wrong. For the first time since she started fighting the town council, the residents, and the river, she wants to bust out crying.

  Instead she swallows coffee too fast, so she can pretend it makes her eyes water. “Being right isn’t the same as being an asshole.”

  8. The Oracle of Ft. Lauderdale

  “I want to thank my mother…”