Stupefying Stories: August 2014

by Alison Pentecost

  In the months that followed, Schmidt experienced the Great Midday as little more than a warming of the air in her Shelter Cave. The Lithians gathered around the video monitors to watch the sky glow, the streams dry up and the watering holes boil away.

  The meetings, press conferences, negotiations and paperwork that filled Schmidt’s next few weeks would never have made for a good story—at least, not the kind that Ritter would have stuck around for. The Lithians marked another day—the day of their return to the capital—as the Great Sundown and the day of their rebirth.

  Balboa, Schmidt and Raccoon led the procession from the Shelter Caves to the Council Chamber, followed by the rest of the Council and a flock of airborne camera drones from across the galaxy. Jackson and the apostates followed, carrying tribute from their lush colony world on their backs. A fleet of ships hovered above the capital, bringing charity, trade and investment.

  Lithians streamed into the city, filling the streets. Each one left a token of gratitude by the entrance of the Council Chamber, until the pile of gems and artifacts filled the bone archway. Seeing them, Schmidt thought of the flood of job offers and interview requests that waited for her Earthside. Even Ritter flattered her after a fashion, telling any pundit who would listen how it had been his idea from the start.

  “You have kept your word,” said Balboa. “Now your place is among the stars. Before you go, you may take your pick from among the gems and precious stones. If you wish, we can drill a hole in it so that you can suspend it from your spinal column.”

  “Thank you,” said Schmidt. She looked around until she found a few chunks of basalt by the door. No doubt, she thought, someone had left them out in the sun to recharge and not bothered to retrieve them before heading for the Shelter Caves.

  “Can your artisans make something out of that?” asked Schmidt. “This little stone bore the brunt of the supernova and turned that deadly energy into a beacon. It has been here all this time, waiting for us. I want to remember that.”

  It will go well alongside the St. Jude medallion, thought Schmidt, as she looked up at the fleet that would take her home.

  S. R. Algernon studied fiction writing, biology and post-war Japanese science fiction, among other things, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been a member of critters.org for three years. His fiction interests include historical fiction, Golden Age science fiction, contemporary Japanese science fiction, hard science fiction, and science fiction that explores the sociological and political impact of new technology. He currently resides in Singapore.

  HER SYMPHONY AND SONG

  By Sarah Frost

  THE ASTRONAUT LAY ON THE COLD CERAMIC FLOOR as the contagion burned through her body. Pieces of a broken melody drifted through her mind like a signal fading in and out through radio static. She held onto the song with every scrap of lucidity that the fever had not stolen, convinced that if she let go and passed out she would puke and choke and die. She did not trust the aliens to take her body home. Her guts convulsed painfully, and a thin clear liquid spilled from the corner of her mouth, tasting faintly of bile. If she died, who would speak for Earth?

  She imagined the aliens pushing her body into space. She shivered. Would Jupiter pull its little corpse-moon down with it as it spiraled in towards the sun? Spinning down, down, throwing the inner planets into disarray...

  Elizabeth retched.

  Alien claws clicked on the ceramic floor. Alien voices spat and sputtered to each other. Thorpex, they called themselves, when they translated their words into English. One of them reached down and took hold of the towel she’d dragged over herself when she’d still had the energy to sit up. She clutched at the edge, said, “No, no!” in her acid-burned voice. Her fingers slipped, but they let her have the towel. Loops of prehensile, shimmering red flesh withdrew, leaving her to shiver, half-covered, naked on the floor. Sweat wept from her skin, running down her burning flesh to pool in the hollow of her spine. Exhaustion made her world dim.

  The aliens leaned over her, their heads like the swelling at the end of an onion-stalk. The aliens’ faces were immobile save for the teardrop-shaped pucker they used to make human speech.

  “Indeed, the Ambassador,” one said.

  “The Ambassador is, indeed, sick,” said another.

  “Indeed, the Ambassador is sick, and we should take her home,” said the third.

  “No,” Elizabeth said. She had to get up. Earth would not send another envoy if she failed. She got to her elbows and knees, refusing to whimper at the pain. White ceramic floor curved up into a wall and then into a ceiling, seamless. Beside her, it rose into the flower of a toilet that she had lost the strength to hold herself over. She rose to her knees, curled forward, and dry-heaved.

  One of the Thorpex tensed and flexed its clawed feet at the edge of her puddle of piss and puke and whatever that clear stuff was. Her muscles trembled. They should have sent a doctor, she thought. Elizabeth raised her head and met the blank, brass-colored domes that served the aliens for eyes.

  “I’m all right. How long—when will we be ready to ask for an audience with the Great One?” Talking took all of her strength. She rested her forehead in her hands and her elbows on her knees, and concentrated on not falling down.

  “This is the appropriate orbit.”

  “This is the appropriate orbit for an audience with the Great One.”

  “This is the appropriate orbit, and so you must make ready for an audience with the Great One.”

  Elizabeth nodded, then remembered that gestures wouldn’t translate. Gooseflesh rose all over her body. She shivered, suddenly freezing, and pulled the towel around her shoulders. The melody vanished in a hiss of mental static. She said, “Yes. I will be ready.”

  ¤

  Elizabeth leaned against a window not made of glass and watched an alien rise over the limb of Jupiter. Not a ship, not a creature in a pressure suit, but a living being the size of a small moon. The teardrop of flesh, its pointed end curled under like the shell of a nautilus, had appeared in telescopes years ago, with the usual chorus of headlines proclaiming “Scientists Baffled!” First Contact came soon afterward. Too soon. Elizabeth looked sideways at an alien writhing in silent devotion, and shuddered.

  All around her, the Thorpex abased themselves in silence, tentacles uplifted to the glory of their god. She pressed her face against the window and wondered if what she saw was only a projection, or if the photons entering her eyes had been born in the Sun, traveled across all the vast distance, and bounced off the whorled tops of storms bigger than the Earth itself to end up here, with her. I’m really here. She wept a little, and blamed her illness.

  The painkillers in her bloodstream made her head feel as though it were filled with gray powder. The back of her throat itched with the residue of too many anti-emetics, but the pills kept her from disgracing herself in front of strangers. She hummed softly, trying to remember the song she had heard during those awful hours on the floor. Drift through your life, drift on the ocean... no, that’s not it. Her breath tasted of bile.

  The Thorpex had cracked the language barrier first. They apologized immediately, explaining that their god, the self-contained world of an alien which they followed as it swam from star system to star system, planned to move Jupiter into a close orbit around the Sun. They did not know why. They did not know how to stop it. They were, they said, very sorry.

  “Why did it come here?” she said. The alien standing next to her quivered. She wished she knew what that meant, but there hadn’t been time to decode the aliens’ body language. We’re lucky they learned English, she thought. We’re still hopeless with their language. Her guts throbbed, and the whole ship seemed to make one slow revolution around her head.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to sit down,” she said. Cold sweat trickled between her shoulder blades. She wondered, belatedly, if she’d violated some silence taboo. None of the aliens said anything, so she eased herself down onto her knees. The floor b
eneath her fingertips had the sandy texture of unfired porcelain. The aliens smelled awful, like rotting flowers. Drift on the ice, or jump in the ocean... no. She realized she was shaking.

  The aliens prayed. The room tipped alarmingly, but none of the aliens reacted and the view out the window did not change, so she told herself it was just another glitch in her fever-addled brain. She imagined piloting the WISP suit in her current state of mind, and sighed. The poor thing deserved better. It was her joy, better than a plane, better than a shuttle. Elizabeth closed her eyes, feeling the controls in her hands, the warmth of its padding pressed against her body. She flew, easy as breathing, her surrogate body tall and armor-plated. The sky was utter black, empty of stars, and she was falling...

  She snapped awake with a gasp that set the aliens twitching again. The body of the huge alien beast rose above the edge of the window, its surface mottled green and white. She rubbed her arms, feeling naked. Soon, she and the WISP suit would take their first deep-space run. That was the easy part of her mission. NASA couldn’t train her for the hard part: Talking to that monster outside.

  Open negotiations, she thought. For the entire planet. Oh my God.

  ¤

  Elizabeth snuck back to her room. She decided to risk eating again, and opened one of her foil-wrapped food bricks. The first one she opened smelled sour. She brought it to her lips. Her mouth went dry, and her stomach cramped painfully. She sighed, rubbed her forehead with the heel of one hand, and set the food bar aside. The next one smelled just as bad, so she made herself eat it. I’m sick, that’s all. I must have picked it up before I left. Stomach flu. Norovirus. Something.

  When the aliens came to get her, she had just finished puking up her last meal. A quiet suspicion towards her pre-packed rations was growing in the back of her mind. She mustered a smile for the aliens, straightened her back, and walked through the short, narrow hallway that served for a door to her room. Three aliens stood in the T-junction.

  “The Great One will speak,” the first alien said.

  “The Great One will speak to you now.”

  “Prepare yourself: The Great One will speak to you now.”

  Adrenaline hit her bloodstream, drowning out the pain. She said, “Thank you, I appreciate you, and I will act on this information,” a stock phrase she’d practiced, picked to soothe the aliens’ sensibilities and compensate for a human budget for space travel that didn’t extend to a three-man team.

  “I need to change,” she added, and backed away before they could object.

  ¤

  Elizabeth stepped into the hangar and smiled. Her WISP suit crouched on all fours, its back arched like an angry cat. She hummed as she began her preflight walk-around, running her fingers over the articulated armor plates to check for damage. Someone back home had stenciled NASA’s blue meatball logo onto its chest. Touching something made by human hands comforted her, in all this alienness.

  She had met the WISP suit when it was still in its gunmetal gray and green, fresh from the Air Force’s Japanese contractors, with empty NATO hardpoints welded to its belly. Now it had its two transmitters bolted underneath it: the low-gain for transmissions back to Earth, and the dish for talking to the giant alien outside. They looked like evil barnacles. NASA had painted the suit white a few weeks before she launched. For visibility, they said. On camera, they meant.

  The boys back home hadn’t thought to send a ladder along, so she climbed up the WISP suit’s leg and eased herself into it feet-first, trying not to jar her aching guts. She took a deep breath, then leaned forward onto the belly pad and reached her arms deep into the suit’s manipulator-sockets. She sank down contentedly as the back hatch closed and the space inside the suit molded itself for her. She squeezed the controls under her fingertips in the combination that would power up the computer.

  The suit’s systems started to load, then threw an error. Something underneath the WISP shifted, and the suit slid. What the heck are they doing out there? Neither the radio nor the external cameras worked without the computer, of course. She swore, and hit the startup sequence again. Bile rose in her throat. The suit banged against something, hard. She felt a sudden vertiginous twisting, and then she was weightless.

  Elizabeth laughed, and would have pounded her fists against something but her hands were encased in their gloves, frozen inside manipulator arms until the computer powered on. The Thorpex had misunderstood her, or mistranslated some instruction from ground control. She floated in space where they’d dropped her, helpless and blind.

  Her stomach sloshed in time with the suit’s new-gained spin. The blinking red error message vanished, leaving her alone in the dark. She breathed deeply, feeling her belly expand against the padding that enveloped her body. Spinning out of control, she might die. If she puked in her suit, she would definitely die. Priorities, Liz.

  She entered the reset command, and this time her screens came to life. Jupiter flashed by as she spun, churning white-red-brown, and she nearly broke. She forced back the bile and hit the auto-stabilize controls. Thank God the guys back home thought pilots were idiots, and automated her suit so thoroughly a monkey could fly it.

  Well. Flight-school-graduate monkeys, maybe.

  She steadied her breathing, and said “Houston, WISP. I have started my first EVA,” for her voice-operated radio’s benefit. NASA insisted on a complete record.

  The Thorpex ship hung in space beside her, the obscene mouth of its matter-scoop gaping in front of its elongated ceramic hull. Her cameras could not pick up starlight without letting Jupiter’s glare burn out their sensors, so she hung in a perfectly black sky. Her inner ear screamed that she was about to fall! She forced herself to look in the direction her instincts called “down.”

  The horizon dropped away too fast in all directions. Below her, the surface of the alien looked like a frozen green sea, choppy waves eerily still in the dimmed sunlight. She wondered how they expected her to get its attention with a transmitter the size of a trashcan.

  Something moved on the alien’s surface. Elizabeth squinted down at it, then told her suit’s cameras to magnify the image. An immense shadow slid over the alien’s skin. She watched it, fascinated. It looked almost like... something rushing towards her, awfully fast.

  Another one rose up over the too-close horizon, and a third appeared in her rearward-facing camera. She instructed the computer to predict the shadows’ paths, narrating what she saw for NASA’s official record. The computer helpfully overlaid its predictions on her screen, a set of radiating lines all converging on one point—her. She couldn’t see the things casting the shadows, but she decided to play it safe. Elizabeth fired her suit’s thrusters, pushing herself out of the way.

  The shadows changed course to meet her. Elizabeth swore under her breath and tried again, mindful of her reaction mass reserves. The shadows changed course again, moving ungodly fast. She fired her thrusters again, and again, and each time the shadows moved to follow her.

  Closer. Too close. She had no more room to maneuver. She braced herself, cursing herself for an idiot. She had taken NASA’s side when they argued that the WISP suit should be unarmed. She kept her voice low, so a string of obscenities wouldn’t be the last transmission she ever made to Earth.

  The shadows hit one another and merged, far below her. She looked down. Elizabeth hung in space above an immense dark spot, a void on the alien’s skin that reflected no light. It looked like...

  An eye. It’s an eye. It’s looking at me.

  That was good, she told herself, despite her heart pounding. Good. She had its attention. First problem, solved.

  Deep breaths. Don’t puke. Oh, God, it’s looking at me.

  Elizabeth brought up the translator’s window on the screen directly in front of her face, and told herself that if the translator interface blocked her view of the huge alien eye, well, that was a coincidence. She let her hands run through the routines she’d practiced on Earth. She selected the stock greeting, as supplied
by the Thorpex, something that translated roughly as “Hail, O Lord of the Universe”—or so she was told. The phrase went out, low and slow on the big radio transmitter.

  She sucked on the suit’s water reservoir and asked the computer for music to chase the fever-dream song out of her head. It offered her a selection of songs by an old Tuareg guitarist. “Perfect,” she said, and let the music soothe her tattered nerves.

  Several songs later, the computer informed her that it was receiving a message. Elizabeth tried to relax into her suit’s padding until the translator’s results appeared on her screen. The alien had replied with a stock phrase of its own:

  “This thing is a thing that hears.”

  She switched the translator over to send. Her mouth went dry, and her voice came out as a croak. She swallowed, and tried again. “I am a representative from the people of the third planet in this star system.” She muted the translator, sighed, unmuted it. “O Lord of the Universe.” Then she told the computer to send.

  A few more songs passed, then the alien replied with a sensor-frying interrogative.

  Elizabeth cleared her throat. “The third planet is a planet with life. Moving the gas giant closer to its sun will destroy the third planet. The inhabitants of the third planet beg you, O Lord of the Universe, not to move the gas giant.” And that was it. The end of the script. She was on her own.

  The Thorpex either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell the humans what their god would do when asked to leave the Solar system alone. They only said that in all the centuries they had traveled with it, no such attempt had ever succeeded. They said they were sorry, but Humanity should focus on getting off their planet as fast as they could before Jupiter came swinging down out of the sky.

  They were terribly sorry to hear that Humanity had no way to get off its doomed planet.

  The translator beeped. It said, “This planet will be tuned. We recognize the necessity. Beauty Hallelujah.”