He pointed toward the hills in the near distance, humps of trees outlined against the horizon. "There."
I squinted along the line of his arm. "What?" But then I saw it: a sudden flare of light amid the trees. Something flew into the sky, like an arrow fired straight up. A rope of smoke trailed behind it. The dragons would ignore it, I thought in sudden, irrational hope. The smoke was graceless, too straight and too white, to be of interest to them. They would ignore it and everything would be all right.
The thing reached the height of the clouds and vanished. In its place, a splatter of blue appeared in the bowl of the sky.
Above our heads, the wheeling dragons paused in their dance.
The blue splatter began to spread. A ripple in a lake weakens with distance; this did the opposite, moving faster as it grew, gaining strength as we watched. The red sky had no defense, consumed utterly in the blue's wake.
I looked over at my suitor. His face was jubilant, adoring. This was his gift to me. I was touched by it, even as my soul wept in anguish. I knew what this meant. We had thought ourselves better than the sky-people. We had called ourselves guardians of the new Earth, yet we had failed in that duty. We were unworthy.
I heard him gasp as the clouds above our heads suddenly streaked toward the spreading blue circle. No longer wispy or slow, their intent was now obvious. They met, melded, and spun a thread—a dozen threads—a rope. Tawny white and water-swift, the rope raced to encircle the spreading blue. I imagined translucent jaws clamping down on a scraggling misty tail. They had formed themselves into a living, lashing breakwater.
When the edges of the blue crashed against this barrier I expected the cacophony of battle—roaring and shrieks and splashes of darker red against the sky. But the reality was nothing so dramatic. Blue met white; the white vanished. I thought perhaps I heard a cry of anguish, but that might only have been my imagination. The dragons were gone.
But in death they achieved victory as the circle of blue stopped. Its crisp edge held for a moment, then softened. Gradually, inexorably, it began to shrink.
And all around it, thunderheads began to darken the sky.
I turned to him. "Take off your bag," I said. "I want to touch you."
His confusion was painful to witness. I felt pity where I should have felt rage. "I don't understand," he said.
"Yes, you do." Above us the thunderheads roiled, flickering with lightning. Dragons arced in and out of the mass. I imagined their cries of fury and grief in the thunder. "Touch me before we die."
He stared at me for a moment longer, and then did perhaps the first natural thing he'd ever done in his life. He caught my hand, turned, and began to run.
Where could we go? I wanted to ask him. Where could we hide from the wrath of the very sky? But he moved with purpose as he dragged me among the cypresses, following a trail that was half mud. He could move swiftly in his clumsy bag. There was a roar to the east, in the direction of the hills. Through the trees we saw a spinning column wind down from the gathering clouds. The tip of it whipped and twisted, a dozen dragon-heads charging with jaws open, before it touched the place from which the sky-folk had shot their great arrow. Trees and boulders flew into the air.
Against the boiling sky other knots had begun to spin. Hundreds of them.
He reached a clearing and stumbled to a halt. A silvery box like a coffin lay there, open and waiting. He pulled me toward it and I balked. "No."
He looked at the sky in wordless argument: if we stayed, we would die.
"We deserve this," I said. I wanted to weep. Oh, Father, my father. "We have learned nothing."
He clutched my hands. "Please, Nahautu. Please."
What woman has ever been proof against such a plea from the man she loves? Even if it means betraying all she holds dear. Every daughter must leave her father's house sometime. I never dreamt it would be like this.
Yet I climbed into his coffin with him, watched as he sealed the door shut, and clung tight as the coffin lifted into the air. Through the coffin's window I saw us rise like a bird on a thermal; my stomach fell and my head spun as we soared above the trees. All around us, the sky drove gray tornado spears down into the earth, tearing apart forest and plain alike. I saw my village, and another in the near distance, obliterated beneath a column of angry, grinding dragons. We rose toward clouds like bruises, clouds angry enough to tear us apart, and I cried out. But though the coffin shook as we passed through the clouds, we emerged on the other side into sunlight, unharmed. A tendril of mist followed, looping once and opening silvery jaws to swallow us whole, but the coffin was too swift. We left the furious Earth behind and kept going and going into the sky.
***
Life on the Ring has not been what I expected. The people here are not so very different. They crave nature too in their own limited, tame way, and they have sculpted the Ring in ways that honor the Earth they've left behind. There have built rivers and hills. There are some trees here, brought up from Earth during the exodus. They grow well beneath the transparent shield that protects us from open space and the unfiltered rays of the sun. My husband has shown me the tiny patches of carefully-tended forest here and there.
Sometimes, as I travel the Ring to tell my tales, I forget that the earth on which I walk is nothing more than a narrow strip of crushed asteroids, a quarter of a mile thick and millions of miles long. Sometimes I forget that I have ever lived anywhere else.
And then I look up.
JOE HILL
b. 1971
Joe Hill is the author of three novels, Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2, as well as a prize-winning collection of stories, 20th Century Ghosts. He also wrote a pair of comics: Locke & Key and Wraith (which ties into the world of NOS4A2). Some nice people gave him an Eisner Award for his work in funny books, which is a great honor, even if “funny” probably doesn’t do a good job of describing the kinds of things that happen in the comics. Come to think of it, his comics aren’t very comic either.
Jude Confronts Global Warming, by Joe Hill
Georgia was in the music library, knitting little silver skulls on a shawl, and listening to the radio, when Jude wandered into the room.
“…3,000 scientists signed the strongest statement yet on the subject of global warming,” said the newsman. “The letter paints a dark picture of the earth’s future, warning that melting ice caps, super hurricanes, and coastal flooding are inevitable if the global community doesn’t act decisively to address climate change. Concerned consumers are advised to consider lowering their energy consumption, and to look at alternative energy cars…”
Jude flipped the radio over to FUM. They were playing Soundgarden,Black Hole Sun. Jude turned it up.
“What the fuck you do that for?” Georgia said, and chucked a sewing needle at the back of his head. It bounced off his shoulders. Jude ignored it. “I was listening to that, asshole.”
“Now you’re listening to this,” Jude said.
“You’re such a dick.”
“Oh hell,” he said, turning back toward her. “They were wetting themselves over global cooling, twenty years ago. Remember that? No, probably not. Big Bird didn’t talk much environmental science.”
She threw the other sewing needle at him. He ducked, stuck an arm up to protect his face. The needle glanced off his wrist. By the time he looked up over his arm, she had huffed out.
Jude followed her into the kitchen. She bent into the fridge, to paw out a bottle of that cranberry red stuff she drank now, one of her wine coolers. To Jude, it tasted like Kool-Aid, as prepared by the Rev. Jim Jones.
“It’s a crock,” Jude said. “Nobody knows.”
“Everybody knows,” she said. “There’s data that shows the earth’s temperature has been rising every year for the last fifty years. No one argues that.”
He had to clamp down on a laugh. It was always funny to him, when Georgia used words like data. He was maybe not entirely successful at disguising his amusement, because she threw
the cap of her wine cooler at him.
“Will you stop throwing shit at me?” he said.
She turned away on her heel, glared back into the open fridge for something to munch on. Her lips were moving, as she whispered angrily to herself. He caught just a word here and there: fuck; Jude; ignoramus.
He eased around the chopping block, slipped up behind her, and put his arms around her waist, clasping her body to his. At the same time he peered over her shoulder into the refrigerator. Nothing to drink except those fucking wine coolers.
“C’mon. I hate when we fight about stupid shit,” he said, and slid his hands up to give her melons a squeeze.
“It isn’t stupid shit,” she said, elbowing him off her, and wheeling around, her eyes giving him the old death ray. “Take a look at your cars. Why you got to drive everywhere in those shitty gas guzzling old cars of yours? Just because they make you feel like a badass? First it was the Mustang, then it was the Charger. They both get about three miles to the gallon, and when people are stuck behind us in traffic, you can see ‘em turning black in the face from breathing your exhaust. You ever thought about taking yourself out and buying a nice responsible hybrid—one of those superlow emissions vehicles that get such great mileage?”
“I was thinking about taking myself out to get some beer,” he said, and burped in her face. “Oops, sorry—runaway emissions.”
She punched him in the chest, gave him the finger, and told him to eat shit, roughly all at the same time. He turned away, laughing, grabbed his black duster off the back of a chair.
“The people who drive hybrids look like weenies,” he said. “I wouldn’t be caught dead.”
He left her in the kitchen, and cut through Danny’s old office, headed for the driveway. Jude opened the side door, shaking his head, and stepped out into the Atlantic Ocean.
He hadn’t expected it to be there—the ocean hadn’t been waiting outside the front door yesterday—and he sank straight down, his motorcycle boots filling with icy seawater.
“Blub,” he said. A jellyfish moved past him in pulses. He turned to go back inside, but the currents already had him, and he was rolled away through dark water. The hubcap of his Dodge Charger sailed by. Shit, he thought, the Charger. It had to be underwater too. The engine, the leather upholstery, the custom radio system…the whole thing was probably fucked.
Then Jude drowned.
SUNG J. WOO
Sung J. Woo (born June 8, 1971) is a Korean-American writer. He was born in Seoul, South Korea.
Woo came to the United States in 1981, when he was ten years old. He grew up in Ocean Township, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in English from Cornell University in 1994 and received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New York University in 2006. Woo currently lives in Washington, New Jersey.
Woo's short story Limits received the 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest Editor's Choice Award from Carve Magazine.
Woo has also published non-fiction. His essays have been published in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and KoreAm Journal.
Paris at Night, by Sung J. Woo
Today was rice day, fifty-pound sacks of white rice in trucks bearing an elephant logo. The same happy elephant appeared on the bags, its head raised to the sky, the trunk curved like an S.
"Elephant," Todd said.
He said it because a laborer was staring at it intently. Which meant he wasn't working.
"That's right," the man said. "I couldn't remember the word."
He was the only other human at the loading dock this morning. The man didn't have a name, just a number, like the rest of the robots.
"Let's get back to it, 8831, okay?"
"Yessir," the man said.
That could be me, Todd thought as he watched him work side by side with his silent mechanical counterparts, lifting, carrying, and dropping bags of rice from the back of the truck to the warehouse. A bad car accident, a bad fall from a ladder, and that could be me.
Or a bad memrip.
AT LUNCH, Todd thought of things he could sell. Everything he owned of any value, he could touch: his grandfather's watch, his grandmother's wedding ring, a gold necklace belonging to some forgotten relative. His car, too, but that was out of the question as he needed it to work.
He got up from his chair and scanned the floor below, the robots still working away, a sea of metallic shoulders rising and falling in unison, strangely beautiful in a way. Over by the forklift sat 8831, his eyes as blank as the piece of bread he was eating.
Two weeks from today was Todd's thirtieth wedding anniversary, and even if he were to pawn the watch, the ring, and the necklace, he knew he wouldn't even come close to having enough for Paris. That's where Sue had wanted to go for as long as he could remember. They didn't have the money to honeymoon there, but that was okay because back then, there had been plenty of time. They were young, both healthy and working, so they would save a little here and there and in a couple of years, they would be walking up to the Eiffel Tower at night arm in arm, find themselves underneath the arch and look up at the beacon that shined on this city of lights.
But then came two sons and three recessions and a second mortgage. A hysterectomy for her, a double bypass for him, and now here he was, nine years short of retirement, supervising a team of robots and a retarded man, thinking about folks who could sell things they couldn't touch, like stocks and bonds and whatever else he couldn't even fathom, people with money who would pay to experience another's most cherished moments.
Silly. That would be Sue's word for it if this were a story she'd overheard. For a trip, a goddamn trip, what a silly thing to do.
But it was more than a trip. It was their life together. There was life and there was death, and it seemed to Todd that if he waited any longer, there wouldn't be a difference between the two.
He opened the filing cabinet and rifled through the folders. In all the years he'd been here, only a handful of human workers had come and gone. All of them were handicapped in some way; they came through the city welfare program, and 8831 was no exception.
Name: Lopez, Manny
Age: 46
Tax Status: Married
Disability: Neural Trauma
Neural Trauma. It was worth a shot.
Manny's wife picked up on the second ring. Todd told her who he was, and after he assured her that her husband was not hurt, he was fine, he was a great worker, he asked her what he wanted to know. She listened without interrupting him, then there was a lengthy silence.
"Why?" she asked.
"Does it matter?"
"I can report you."
"I know."
More silence.
"He did it because he loved me. Loved," she said, hardening. "Not loves."
"I heard you."
Then she hung up on him, and for the rest of the day, Todd replayed the conversation in his mind. Should he have lied to her, made up some story about a sick mother, a dying child? He wasn't good at talking, especially on the phone. People thought he was unfriendly, hostile. A woman once told him his voice sounded like broken stones rattling in a cage.
The horn blared at five, time for the two humans to go home and the robots to be reconditioned and put in standby.
Todd was walking out to his car when Manny touched his shoulder.
"Boss," he said, sounding uncertain. He held out his phone. "My wife, she wants to talk to you?"
THE HOUSE was quiet when he returned, and it seemed to Todd that he wanted to keep it that way. Take small, measured steps, like a thief. He carefully pulled the door shut, holding onto the doorknob and turning it by hand until it locked.
Above, the floorboards creaked, Sue's footsteps as she walked from their bedroom to the bathroom. Then a flush, and the trill of water climbing up to refill the toilet tank. And now the muffled voice of the late-show host on TV, the encouraging laughter of the studio audience, the one-two punch repeating until they cut to commercial.
Todd sat at the di
ning table and peeked inside the microdome, at the plate Sue had made for him. Pork chops, a bunch of broccoli spears, a hill of mashed potatoes with a well of gravy. He touched the REHEAT button and watched his plate spin slowly, the inside of the dome steaming up.
One thing for sure, my clients never tire of wedding proposals.
The man Todd had met after work was funny, friendly, utterly normal. It didn't seem possible that they were talking about something that could land both of them a minimum of two years in prison.
I'm not going to lie to you, Todd. There's a risk to this. People do get hurt, like your friend Manny. But keep in mind that Manny didn't follow our simple yet extremely important directions. We told him over and over again that he wasn't to consume any alcoholic beverages twenty-four hours before the procedure. We even hired a Portuguese translator to make sure he understood what was required of him. See, this is why Mrs. Lopez still led you to us, because she knows we do good work. Her cousin's a regular sourcer, comes in once a month, has been for years. We don't mess up, Todd. It's the sourcers who mess up. And I can see we'll have a smooth ride, because you're a smart guy.
Though he introduced himself as Richard Gibbons, he also immediately admitted that it was an alias.
In my opinion, Todd? In my opinion, I think it's something the government should regulate. Because let's face it, everybody's doing it. But think how long it took for marijuana to become legalized. Hell, it's still not legal in Alabama.
Todd opened the microdome and took out the plate. The pork had gotten a little tougher, but it still tasted wonderful, his wife's signature flavors of mint and garlic in every bite.
The way I see it, you're getting peak value for something that is going to eventually disappear. I'm not just talking about Alzheimer's. Once you go past sixty, memories fade at an alarming clip. It's what happens because the brain can only retain so much. Like all of our other organs, it's about usage. When was the last time you thought about your honeymoon? Honestly? The less you use, the more you lose. It's the foundation of how our bodies work. The health benefits of memripping, they're not some urban legend. You're cleaning house. You're taking out the garbage and putting in out on the curb, but here's the difference: you're getting paid for that trash.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 384
