Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  And so it was decided. The colonists would end their history on their own terms. They would attempt to enter the World to Come, but without the Biography inside of them. They would excise it from their genes, shedding themselves from the thing which the Horde seemed so desperately to desire. Shedding themselves of humanity's sordid history. It would be, in their own small way, revenge.

  But they'd have to get to Afsasat first. The Eluder Ship was being constructed in a quadrant of space that was rumored to be tolerant of humans. But the colonists would have to navigate through large quadrants of dangerous space. So they traveled in many ships, by multiple circuitous and zigzagging routes. Betsy and Julio arrived safely. When Betsy walked around the ship, looking for other humans, she found none. They were the last two.

  And now, on this second Eluder Ship, there was only her.

  Outside the windows, lightning the size of a hundred dead planets forked across Maera's surface. The star looked ancient, tired, ready to sleep forever. The aliens throughout the chamber paused to stare up at the star.

  Her wrist flickered like the star outside. On the film, the mustachioed man. The woman with the beautiful black hair. Another party. A different day. A cake with five flames. Eyes reflecting candlelight. The boy, blowing the flames out. Smoke and applause. Silent cheer.

  "You said you wanted a story," the Perslop said, "Well I have one. A few weeks ago I confronted a group of wandering Ergs. One told me that he'd captured a human—"

  Betsy started in her seat.

  "The Erg said the human was an ugly, repulsive thing," the Perslop continued. "With dark hair covering most of its carbuncle head, and liquid leaking from its odious eyes. It pleaded for its life. And the Erg, a compassionate being, decided ultimately to let it go. But afterward he became terribly distraught. He said he'd missed his opportunity to destroy a creature which had caused so much of the galaxy's pain. For a long time I considered this Erg's position.

  "I once had a vast starship. I found a bore-worm nibbling in my refuse berth. I believed in the sanctity of all life, and decided to let it live. Six weeks later, my ship was infested with bore-worms, and no one would dock with me for fear of having their hulls eaten. I had to incinerate my ship. You see, I let one worm live, and thousands returned to ruin me. Is it not the same with humans? If we let one live, do we not give them the chance to destroy us again? I told the Erg that he did the righteous thing, but I truly did not — do not — believe it myself."

  The Twirlovers chirped quietly.

  "Where did he find this human?" she blurted. "How many weeks ago was this?" Dark hair covering its head? she thought. Julio, is he speaking of you?

  The first Twirlover said, "Please, tell us more, beloved! This is wonderful!"

  "What more is there to tell?" the Perslop said. "We may be reborn in a new universe, but if we carry that worm along with us, do we not risk infestation again?"

  Betsy stared into the Perslop's tripod eye-cups. It knows, she thought. It knows what I am. Then she remembered the aeroform creature studying her and the Whidus staring at her and the Twirlovers' odd behavior around her.

  They all know, she thought. Every one of them knows!

  "Do not fear, human," the Perslop said. "I'll not kill you. I define myself by being what you are not. I let you live even though every pulse of my hearts says you should be squashed between my arms like vermin."

  Betsy stared at the Perslop, shivering. Weakly, she said, "Was your story about the human true?"

  Outside, a brilliant solar flare leaped from Maera and grew angrily out into space. The Daughter, shedding her last vestiges of life. Soon now.

  The Perslop gestured to her screen. "Is your story true? Is not history filled with lies and obfuscations?"

  On the screen, a beach, waves crashing silently. Umbrellas casting large shadows. A beautiful young woman smiling shyly at the camera. The future wife of the boy. A burning ball of light in the sky. Everyone watched the screen.

  "So beautiful," the Perslop said. "And gone forever..."

  Silence. Even the Twirlovers went still.

  "Please!" she said. "Tell me! Was it true?"

  "Why?" the Perslop said. "Why should I tell you? Why do you deserve an answer?"

  She took a deep breath. "Because someone I love might still be alive," she said. "To me, that's everything."

  The alarm trilled, startling her. "Gravitational collapse imminent, beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!"

  "No!" she cried. "Not yet!"

  The Perslop began to move away.

  "Wait!" she screamed. "Please tell me!"

  The Perslop paused but did not turn back. "I am the last of my kind," the Perslop said. "I came over here to tell you that you are not."

  The Twirlovers shrieked and suddenly merged. They tumbled madly, yelping, barking, while the Perslop left for its transitional shell.

  Ninety seconds to collapse.

  Maera flickered and angry waves rippled across its surface, but Betsy could not summon the will to close her shell. On her viewscreen, the park, the blond-haired boy skipping, scaring away pigeons. Dappled sunlight. A breeze through trees. A dead pigeon on the dirt. The boy, stopping, staring. Staring.

  Suddenly, she understood why the boy stared at the bird for so long.

  This is the first time you knew death! she thought. You knew the bird would never rise again. And you knew that one day you'd fall too, that everything falls! That's why you gave these films to your son. You wanted him to remember you, forever!

  Seventy-five seconds.

  The Perslop had been right, she thought. I could be polluting the new universe with this history.

  Sixty-five seconds.

  But all those lives, erased? I can't kill you, great-great grandfather. You are the first. Without you, we would be nothing. My ancestors, without all of you, I am nothing.

  Sixty seconds.

  The fourteen billion-year history of this universe had already unfolded. But for the World to Come, the story had yet to be written. Maybe the World to Come was a lie, but then again, maybe there was new life on the other side of the event horizon. Maybe they truly had been doing this forever and ever. A flower gone to seed.

  She jumped out of her transitional shell, took off her grandmother's computer from her wrist, and placed it inside the shell. Then she pressed the button to seal it inside.

  She'd send the Biography, its mammoth history, with its eons of joys and sorrows, through Maera. She hoped that in the next universe, humanity would be different. Better. What every parent wishes for her children.

  "Goodbye," she said.

  The Twirlovers still tumbled together in the air beside her, as wild as a radioactive atom. The alarm continued to wail. "Get in your shells!" she screamed. But they ignored her.

  Twenty seconds.

  She ran to the rear of the chamber and leaped into an escape pod. She pressed the emergency activator and in an instant she was hurtling away from the Eluder Ship at a large fraction of the speed of light. In the window behind her, Maera blinked twice, like two eyes closing, then began to fade. The star shrunk to half its size, and a moment later the sky filled with white light. The ship bleated a thousand warnings as Betsy closed her eyes.

  "I'm coming, Julio. I'm coming for you."

  She had watched the ancient film so often that it still played in her mind, projecting on the back of her eyes like a movie screen. The boy in the park, running, laughing. Falling. Scuffing his knee. Father picking him up, kissing him, comforting him. Above them, a sun.

  A young sun.

  GREG VAN EEKHOUT

  Greg van Eekhout is a science fiction and fantasy writer. His "In the Late December" (2003) was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

  Van Eekhout's parents are of Indo (Dutch-Indonesian) extraction. His last name (meaning "of Oakwood") is pronounced "like this: Van, as in the kind of thing you drive, eek, as in, 'Eek, killer robots are stomping the rutab
agas!' and hout, like 'out' with an h in front of it. The emphasis is on the Eek."

  He grew up in Los Angeles and attended UCLA, where he received a Bachelor's in English. He earned a Master's in Educational Media and Computers at Arizona State, and worked for a time at ASU designing multimedia.

  He attended the writing workshop Viable Paradise in 1999. His first professionally published story, "Wolves Till the World Goes Down," (2001) appeared in the anthology Starlight 3 and was later reprinted in Fantasy: The Best of 2001. His story "In the Late December" (2003) was nominated for Nebula Award for Best Short Story. His work has also appeared in a number of other places, including Asimov's Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

  His first novel, Norse Code, an adult urban fantasy, was published by Bantam Books in May 2009. His second novel, a middle-grade fantasy titled Kid Vs. Squid, was released by Bloomsbury Children's USA on May 11, 2010. The Boy at the End of the World, also a middle-grade fantasy, was released in June 2011 by Bloomsbury Children's USA.

  He is currently working on expanding the short story "The Osteomancer’s Son", which was anthologized in Year’s Best Fantasy 7 and Best Fantasy of the Year: 2007, into a trilogy to be published by Tor Books.

  He currently lives in San Diego, California.

  In the Late December, by Greg van Eekhout

  22 December 2003

  Here's a secret of the North Pole: Santa powders his hands with talc before donning his thick red mittens.

  It is a small secret, true, but some would give anything to steal even that. A secret is a detail, and here in the late December, a detail is as precious as a true name.

  Santa, a red exclamation in a white world, walks the reindeer line, stroking sugar-and-cinnamon fur. The reindeer shiver and snort and stamp their hooves, the lines connecting them to the parcel-laden sleigh jingling. Santa looks over to his candy-brick castle and waves good-bye, but no one stands in the doorway to wave back. With a sigh, he climbs onto the sleigh's driver's seat, the bench creaking beneath his weight. He pauses, holding the smooth and supple leather reins, and considers how to start the team. Onward? A-heya? Giddyup? Ho-ho? No, he's already used those. He makes a point of uttering a different word to inaugurate every outing, because he's been doing this for a long time, and if he didn't deliberately insert some bit of novelty into the procedure, he fears his jolly round head might well explode. That is another detail.

  Then he has it. He snaps his fingers (no mean feat in his mittens) and with a brisk snap of the reins, he shouts, "Zorxa!"

  Zorxa was a great emperor whose realm once encompassed sixteen degrees of the Curvature, and though his despotic rule made him a natural enemy, Zorxa knew how to accept a gift as well as anyone.

  The team surges forward, muscles flexing, great gouts of steam pluming from flared nostrils. The sleigh runners sound one briefshruff against the snow, and then there's the ring of bells as the sleigh leaves the ground. Within seconds the reindeer reach the sky, and when they penetrate the white-world barrier, they grunt in pain. Their fur stands on end, and Santa feels the hair on his arms and chest and great round belly rise. His beard becomes an anemone of loose strands, and he gnashes his teeth, and with tears glistening in his eyes, he bellows a defiant Ho-ho-ho.

  Then, suddenly, like a cork popping from a champagne bottle, the sleigh breaks free into a dark world.

  Santa is once more grateful for the little reindeer at the head of his team, the one whose light yet burns in the cold. The little reindeer's beacon gives Santa's eyes something to focus on, and the team pushes through the dark, navigating by nose.

  They come to a cloud of silver mist, and there Santa finds a little boy made of molten silver with liquid silver eyes and sweeping silver delta wings. His wrists are ringed with missile launchers, and a rounded cone emerges from a cavity in his chest. Once there were many silver boys, fleets of them, protecting the outermost parts of inhabited space against things that came from outside inhabited space. But now, there is only the silver boy.

  Santa consults his list. "Well, well, well . . . who do we have here?"

  The silver boy sighs. Silver gloops and gulps inside him. "You know who I am. This isn't your first visit."

  "Goodness me," Santa says to Blitzen. "Somebody doesn't seem very happy to see us. Somebody has forgotten his manners. Somebody," he says, significantly, "is not being very nice."

  "You, sir," the silver boy says, "are a tiresome consciousness cluster. Your binary value system remains as laughable as it is irrelevant. How you manage to remain cohesive is beyond me."

  "My value system is hardly binary," Santa says. "In between naughty and nice I've made room for you: grumpy but fundamentally sound. Do you want a toy or not?"

  The silver boy crosses his arms and pouts. "Something good this year."

  From the back of the sleigh, Santa produces a silver cannon that affixes smartly to the silver boy's head. It pleases the silver boy immensely, though he won't admit it.

  Santa zooms off, ho-ho-ho-ing.

  In the old days a little boy with such a sour disposition would have earned nothing more than a few stalks of straw, but Santa's list has grown short, and he has had to make some compromises.

  His next stop is a carbon husk that used to be a star with six planets, two of them inhabited, which were home to the Columnar Beejaru Domani. Now, a little girl lives here, all alone.

  The sleigh touches down lightly on the surface of the carbon husk, the reindeer adjusting to the heavy gravity here. Santa climbs down. He erupts in a belly laugh and says, "Why, hello, there, little girl. And a merry Christmas to you."

  The little girl is an independent consciousness cluster in the form of a cephalopod with waving tendrils. She lives in a puddle of gel. Both she and her puddle are smaller than they were last year.

  "Have you been a nice girl this year?"

  "I have been frightened," the little girl says. "The Big Empty has come close three times, and each time I've nearly lost coherence. I am very frightened."

  Santa's frosty brow creases. He forces a smile. "But you fought off the Big Empty, I see. You are a brave and very coherent little girl."

  The little girl sinks to the bottom of her puddle. "Thank you," she says, shyly.

  The cephalopod is a very old little girl. She's all that's left of the Columnar Beejaru Domani, a civilization that once cultivated coral tubes into such clever, flexible configurations that they were used to bridge worlds.

  Santa leaves the little girl a toy -- a trio of swimming, dancing lights -- and then he returns to the sleigh and takes off, waving merrily.

  "She did not look good," he confides to Dasher. "She did not look good at all. Very sketchy. Very under-realized."

  Dasher grunts, hooves scraping vacuum.

  The next stop is a point in space where Santa expects to find a little boy named Kindril, the last remaining consciousness of a financial consortium that, at its height, spanned three glittering arms.

  Upon arrival, Santa stands in the sleigh and looks around. There is nothing. All is gone. The space here is empty black.

  Santa picks up the reins and drives toward the next name on the list.

  He fails to find Do-tha-min-tong, a crystalline matrix of a little girl who lived in the Ventral Lanes. Santa scratches her name off the list. She will never see the bottle of whisper-drops he made in his workshop just for her.

  Next on the list is Binda Blue Shoe, a mischievous plasma jet of a little girl, but she is gone.

  Next, Vornati Vornati Vornati Stop, a little boy. Gone.

  The diamond spider thing living where the chessmen built their final lens. A little girl. Gone.

  Santa goes down the list, pushing the team relentlessly across the black. Little girl after little girl, little boy after little boy, absent, vanished into the emptiness of the old, dying, dead universe.

  Not a particle left of them.

  Not a ghost of a wavefront.
>
  "Enough," Santa says, yanking back on the reins and bringing the sleigh to a halt. "I've had enough. He's left me no one. He's eaten them all." He tugs his fur hat firmly over his head. "We know what we have to do. It's time, lads."

  "Time for what?" Dasher says, skittishly dipping his antlers.

  "We're going to find him," Santa says. "And we're going to put an end to him. Once and for all. We're going to kill him."

  "How?" Dasher says.

  "Do you have a plan?" Dancer says.

  "If Big Empty's absorbed all the little boys and girls, he'll be very strong," Prancer says.

  "His consciousness cluster is very solid," Vixen says.

  "We can't beat him," Comet says.

  "Let's go back to the North Pole," Cupid says.

  "We won't help you fight him," Donner says.

  "You'll be alone," Blitzen says.

  And then the beacon at the front of the team, the one who yet burns, cranes his neck to face the others. "Cowards," he says. "We owe Santa everything. If it weren't for him we'd have all lost our cohesion a billion years ago." The beacon's nose burns so bright it brings tears to Santa's eyes. "What do you think these delivery runs are about? Giving little girls and boys a merry Christmas? The universe is forty-three billion years old. Who cares about Christmas? But all those deliveries, all those toys. . . . Every time we make a stop, Santa assures a small consciousness cluster that, yes, he sees it. That yes, he knows it's there. Yes, it still exists. Santa's keeping things alive."

  The beacon looks at Santa. "Unhitch me," he says. "I don't want to be connected to these sad excuses for reindeer any more."

  Dasher opens his mouth to speak, but before he can utter even a single word of protest, he is gone. It's as though he never existed, just a spot of cold space left behind. Bells tinkle and fade as his harness falls and falls and falls.

  In the darkness floats a wavering shape. "Oh, goodness," the shape says. "That was so deliciously warm."