Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "I had a dozen phone calls before I left the office, but no. Hope you believe it, Sam."

  "Ross?"

  "Eight calls. Nope."

  Sam needed to believe them. They were his friends. They'd been with him when Jeanie died. He needed to brave it out. "Cat, I want to see it. I've gone revisionist pro tem, okay? If it's alien invasion, let's have it. I want hedges to form. I want them stretching along the road all the way to town. People should be able to poach stuff. Break bits off."

  Cat answered right on cue. This was an area of major personal concern. "A lot of wildcat lagan owners agree with you. I've always said it. Keep the cartels out."

  "I've got control, right?"

  She gave a little frown. "Your property, Sam."

  "What about outside options?"

  "Some control. It's an official thing. What's on your mind?"

  "I want it all hands-on. No remotes. None of those little science doovers. No aerostats."

  "That's tricky, Sam," she said. "It's standard nowadays. Every general access unit means a thousand global onlines and probably a thousand research facilities. A fortune from sponsors to you. Even if you could close 'em out, you'd just get thousands more people coming in. You don't want that."

  "Then only for part of the day. Only in the afternoon. Say, 1300 till sundown. None at night. Can we do that?"

  "We can try," Jimmins said and keyed in the request, waited less than a minute, nodded. "You've got it for now, flagged for renegotiation later. Bless your MF, Sam. You'll get rogues slipping in, but we'll put up a burn field. Fry 'em in the sky."

  Cat nodded, confirming how easy it was going to be. "They'll stop when they lose a few. So, what will you do?"

  Talking the talk was easy, Sam found. "I'll fish it myself. See what comes up."

  "Great idea. Can we help?"

  · · · · ·

  It all happened quickly once the Mayor and Jimmins left. The waiting fishers at the gate drove off the moment they learned Sam was going to wildcat it himself, all but one, the craggy-looking, grey-haired older man perched on the bonnet of his truck. When Sam went down to quiz him on why he stayed, he saw that it was Howard Dombey, the proprietor of the Lifeways produce market on the far side of Tilby. He was a part-time lagan fisher, and people said he did some lagan brokering as well.

  "It's Howard Dombey, isn't it?" Sam said.

  "Right on, Mr. Cadrey. Like to help if you're a mind." His idioms were straight from Life Studies Online, all very PC, optimally relaxing, maximally community building.

  Sam found himself matching them. "Doing it myself. And it's Sam."

  "Like to help just the same, Sam. Don't figure profit margins too well anymore. Just like working with it. Seeing it come to."

  "Why?"

  Howard Dombey shrugged, going with the role beautifully. "Just do. Watching the spin. Seeing it all flicky-flashy with lagan, pretty as the day. Give me five per cent and I'll do the scut work. Give me ten and I'll fence the bounty you clear as well. Save you the grief."

  "There'll be slow days, Howard."

  "Counting on it. At my age, they're the ones I like."

  They made quite a team—a vet skeptic with a face ruined by MF, a town mayor looking like a shuttle-butt spaceways groupie from the nineties, a pipe-smoking AIO officer, and a small-time entrepreneur who did the culture-speak of mid-twentieth rural USA.

  They started early each morning and left off around 1300, with Howard often as not staying on at the sorting trays till sunset when the last of the afternoon's tek and spec groups had gone—whichever AIO officials were rostered for that day's site check.

  It was funny how much of an unspoken routine it all was. By the time Sam had disengaged the perimeter sensors and AIO alarms around 0700, the four of them were there, ready to set off in pairs, carefully locating the newbies and keying spot and spec codes into notepads for their own constantly updating operations program and the AIO global master.

  It was on a spell during one of these start-up checks, after Sam had pointed to a perfect cloudform lagan building on one of the hedges, that Howard told him about the name.

  "You know what lagan originally was?"

  Sam just stared; it seemed such an odd question. "I thought it was named after the river in that old Irish song. You know, My Lagan Love. They're always playing it."

  "Most people think that. No. It's from the language of shipwreck. Flotsam, jetsam and lagan. Flotsam is wreckage that floats when a ship goes down. Jetsam is what's thrown overboard to lighten her. Jetsam when it's jettisoned, see. If it floats, it's flotsam. If it sinks, it's lagan. A lot of valuable stuff was marked with buoys so they could retrieve it later. There were salvage wars over it. Deliberate wrecking, especially on the coast of Cornwall and around the Scillies. Lights set during storms to lure ships onto rocks. Lamps tied to the horns of cows—'horn beacons' they called 'em. Whole families involved. Whole communities."

  "So why that name now? Lagan?"

  "Some scientist came up with it. These are floats from somewhere else, aren't they? Buoys poking through. Lines leading down to stuff."

  "I've never heard this."

  Howard looked at him as if to say: You've been out of it for quite a while.

  "Lots of folks haven't. But it's true. We get whatever comes up from the 'seabed.' "

  "But—"

  "Okay, don't say it! There's no line. No seabed. It's how the whole thing goes—first the shelltop like yours last week, then the bounty is hauled up."

  "But it's not down is it, Howard? And it isn't hauledup. Words hide it. Tidy it up too much."

  "Okay, but they help us live with it."

  "And hide it. How's the weather? How's the lagan? Geologists and seismologists doing their tests all the time, finding nothing. No pressure variables under the caps. None of the expected physics. It's all so PC."

  "See my point, Sam. The blooms link to somewhere else, somewhere out of sight, to something worth waiting for. Stuff comes up; you get the hedges with bits of lagan in them like fish in a net. At the very least, you get chunks of molybdenum and diamond-S and those funny little spindles of—what're those new words?—crowfenter and harleybine? Now and then there's the gold and silver."

  "But no Nobel Prizes yet."

  "What? Oh, right. No, no Nobel Prizes in those hedges so far. No real answers."

  "See, there's another word. Hedges."

  "They follow roads and field lines, Sam. That's what hedges do. Hedges is what they are."

  "Hides it, Howie."

  "Hasn't stopped you."

  Which was too close to the truth and too soon in their friendship right then, so they both gladly changed the subject. It was made easier by Mayor Catherine dumping her sample bag on the sorting table.

  "New tally," she said. "Eighty-two viable. Sixteen fallow."

  Howard keyed the totals into his notepad. "Sounds right. Everyone gets twenty percent that are empty."

  "Looted?" Sam asked.

  "Don't see how. Just empty. Nothing when the hedges form. Air pockets."

  Sam kept at it. "Looted elsewhere?"

  Howard watched him for a few moments. "Hadn't thought of that. Looted on the other side. You better watch 'im, Cat. Sounds like we got ourselves a new rocket scientist."

  Howard knew well enough to take up a sample bag then and set off for the hedges.

  · · · · ·

  By the end of the fifth week, their four major branchings had become seven, and what started as an ordinary watchtower lofting on one of them swelled, brachiated and buttressed first into a classic "salisbury point," then—over another twenty days—a full-blown "chartres crown," finally a true "notre dame." It meant endless media fly-bys, countless tek visits, even more busloads of tourists and school groups, but so few blooms became cathedral that Sam couldn't blame them. It was the appropriate response. He would have been worried if there hadn't been the extra attention, though it made it harder to live with what his world was becoming. Having t
he lagan was one thing; now it was becoming too strikingly alien.

  Again it was genial, friendly Howard who triggered the next outburst, dumping his bag on the sorting table, then coming over to stand with his newfound friend to admire the towering structure.

  "How about it, Sam? A cathedral. Makes you believe in the mirroring, don't it?"

  "What's that, Howie?" The word mirror often caught him like that. The Tilby Tiger lived in a house without mirrors. (But full of reflections, he sometimes quipped on better days, making the tired old joke.)

  "The online spiel. That it's mimicry. Skeuomorphism. The lagan sees clouds; it tries to make clouds. Sees trees and roads, does its best to give trees and roads."

  "You believe that?"

  Howard shrugged. "Makes sense. Has a certain appeal. This stuff pushes through, looks around, imitates what it sees."

  "Sees! Sees! Sees! Where the hell has my bloomseen a cathedral, Howard, tell me that!"

  Again Howard shrugged. "Dunno. It goes into the sky; it blows in the air; it feels the sun and gets in among the flowers. Maybe ancient cathedrals were just imitations of high places too. Maybe other lagan blooms have seen cathedrals and pass on the knowledge. Anyway, Sam, I figure why resist what's as natural as what nature's already doin'. Why resist it? Why do you?"

  Because, Sam wanted to say. Just because. Then, needing reasons, needing reason, gave himself: There's my face, there's the other MF impairment, my infertility, there's Jeanie lost (not MF-related, no, but more old sayings covered it: "collateral damage," "friendly fire"). This is too new, too fast, too change-everything insistent. For someone keeping someone lost as alive as possible in what had been, simply been for them—views, routines, sugars in coffee, favorite songs, the spending of days, the very form and nature of days—how dare this brutal new lagan change it so. As Jeanie-bright, as Jeanie-fresh as Sam tried to make it, the lagan more than anything was always sayingthat time has gone. Jeanie is gone. Let them go.

  Sam found himself trying so hard. Jeanie would have loved the lagan, arranged picnics, invited friends. Jeanie would have liked Howard and the others getting together, liked the little-kid thrill of them bringing in the bounty—grown-ups acting like kids acting like grown-ups.

  But try as he might, Sam always found himself on both sides of it, and his words kept coming out a bit crazy. He couldn't help himself.

  "Look at what's happened. First the MF outbreak in '29, then the lagan five years later."

  "They're not related," Howard said. "It's not cause and effect."

  "Maybe. Experts in nineteenth century London didn't see the connection between smog and tuberculosis either."

  "Between what and what?"

  Sam was careful not to smile. For all his smarts, Howard was an aging child of the times, a true citizen of the age, lots of compartmentalized knowledge, but no true overview. He knew all about shipwrecks and 1930s Hudson locomotives and Napoleon Bonaparte and vintage CD-ROM games, but lacked the larger cultural horizon for such things. For him the old term PC still meant "Politically Correct" not "Pre-Copernican," though who remembered Copernicus these days, or Giordano Bruno, or William Tyndale, or the Library at Alexandria or, well, the economic conditions that had led to horn beacons and shipwrecking and the original lagan, all the other things that were lost? Things eroded, worn smooth and featureless by too much time.

  It sobered him having Howard to measure himself by. It brought him back, made him remember to be smarter. Kinder. Set him in the present as much as anything could.

  "But Howie, what if it's real lagan? In the shipwreck sense?"

  "What, marked with a buoy?"

  "Or sent up as a buoy."

  "What! Why do you say that?"

  "I have no idea. Just should be said, I guess."

  · · · · ·

  At 0140 on 15th October, Sam woke and lay there in the dark, listening to the wind stir in the dream hedges. He was surprised that he could sleep at all, that he didn't wake more often. It was almost as if the soughing and other hedge sounds were deliberately there to lull the lagan-blessed. Like the dross, the spindrift, the honey-balm, it too was benign. The hedges breathing, thriving, being whatever they were.

  Even as he drowsed, settled back towards sleep, that slipping, dimming thought made Sam rouse himself, leave his bed and go out onto the verandah. Of course it was deliberate. Look at how everyone accepted the phenomenon now, built it into their lives.

  Sam regarded the fields picked out by the half-phase spring moon. He smelled the honey-balm wind that blew up from the hedgerows and made himself listen to the "croisie," not just hear it—that mysterious, oscillating tone produced by nearly all lagan blooms, a barely-there, modulating drone set with what one moment sounded for all the world like someone shaking an old spray can, the next jingling bangles together on a waving arm. Never enough to annoy or intrude. Oh no. Not the croisie. Lulling. A welcome and welcoming thing. Always better than words made it seem. Something that would be missed like birdsong and insect chorus when the bloom ended and the hedges were left to dry out and rattle and fall to slow dust on the ordinary wind.

  Sam left the verandah and walked down to the road. The hedges stretched away like screens of coral in the moonlight or, better yet, like frames, nets and trellises of moonlight, all ashimmer—all "flicky-flashy" as Howard would say—yes, like blanched coral or weathered bone robbed of their day colors but releasing a flickering, deep, inner light, an almost-glow. Better still—fretted cloudforms, heat-locked, night-locked, calcined, turned to salt like Lot's wife, turned to stone by the face of this world meeting the Gorgon-stare of some other.

  The croisie murmured. The honey-balm blew. Spindrift lofted and feather-danced in the bright dark. The air smelled wonderful.

  What a wondrous thing, he thought. What a special time. If only Jeanie were here to see it. The different world. The dream-hedges and lagan. The spindrift dancing along the road and across the fields. His own MF legacies too, though she wouldn't have cared.

  There are enough children in the world, she would've said. Who needs more than six in ten to be fertile anyway? The world is the birthright, not people. It doesn't need more people. Hasn't for more than a century. Can't have too many people or people stop caring for each other. Only common sense.

  She would never have mentioned his face—or perhaps only to quip: "My Tiger. You were always too handsome anyway."

  She would have made it—easier.

  Sam watched the ghostly palisades in their warps and woofs, their herringbones and revetments, found himself counting visible towerheads till he reached the riot of the notre dame. Then he shut his eyes and listened to the ever-shifting, ever-the-same voice of the croisie and tried to find, beyond it, the rush of the old night wind in the real-trees. He could, he was sure he could, anchoring himself in the other, larger, older world by it.

  But he wouldn't let it take his thoughts from Jeanie. No. He kept her there in the questing—most vividly by adding to the list of things he would have said to her, imagining what she might have said to him. Like how you did start to count your life more and more as doors closed to you, that was a Jeanie line. How it took the MF pandemic damaging much of the genetic viability first of Europe, then Africa and Asia, on and on, to close some important doors for everyone, to unite the world, make them finally destroy the old weapons. The destroyable ones.

  Jeanie would have put her spin on it. Her spindrift.

  Sam grinned at the night. More language from the sea. More shipwreck talk. Spindrift blew along the road, the skeins and eddies of spores and hedge-dust, the "moonsilk," the "flit," the "dross"—there were so many names—but, whatever it was, all safely moribund, sufficiently chemically inert, they said, though still finely, subtly psychoactive just by being there. Had to be. Part of the night. This night. His.

  Theirs. Jeanie keenly there. His lagan love. Still.

  Sam breathed in the bounty, filled his lungs with all the changed nature. Howard was right. Blooms
and hedges. Lagan. Watchtowers, thunderheads, cathedrals and hutches. So much better than crystalline molecular skeuomorphs with key attributes of long-chain polymer-calcinite hybrids or whatever they were touting in the net journals.

  Then the cathedral sighed, the only word for it. A single falling note swelled against the croisie, a distinct sad trailing-away sound that left the alien lagan-tone, the honey-balm and the night-wind beyond like a strange silence when it had gone.

  From the cathedral?

  Sam accepted that it was, knowing that almost all the logged lagan anomalies were around the big cloudform and cathedral loftings. The hutches and nestings, the basements and even stranger sub-basements were always silent, but the loftings sometimes belled and breathed and sounded like this, like great whales of strangeness making their song.

  The mikes would have tracked it. Nearby stats had to be homing in, risking burn. Tomorrow there'd be extra flybys and spec groups.

  Sam walked closer to the looming thirty-meter structure, looked up into the interstices of the triple spire, the converging, just-now braiding salisbury points, then down to where the portal and narthex would be in a true cathedral. He began a circuit. There was only the croisie now and the distant wind if you listened for it.

  There were no doors in the logged salisburys, chartres and notre dames. There were outcroppings like porches and lintels, but no doors, no chambers. The loftings were always solid lagan.

  But here was a door—rather a shadowing, a doorness beneath such an outcropping, a cleft between buttress swellings that held darkness like one.

  Why now? Why mine? Sam thought, but came back, Jeanie-wise, with: Why not? If not now, when?

  Still he resisted. He'd finally—mostly—accepted the lagan. He'd welcomed the wealth, but mainly the companionship the lagan had brought, a new set of reasons for people doing things together. But he wanted nothing more, no additional complications. Another old fin-de-siècle saying from Life Studies covered it: "not on my watch."

  Had to be—ready, the words came, bewildering him till he realized they answered his two unspoken questions.