Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology

by Amy J. Murphy

  His silence made her uncomfortable, as did his new lifestyle of burying himself in his work.

  "Dad, mind if I ask you something before you put that in?"

  He grunted in reply. She accepted it as a yes.

  "I wanted to ask you if you've ever noticed anything strange out in the fields."

  He gave her an odd look, and she glimpsed something, almost a shadow of surprise. Then he leaned the stone against the grinder and brushed stone dust from his hands before answering, "Just the odd joey tossing a stone at me here and there. And I got bitten by a stone mole once. That's about it."

  "Ever hear anything?"

  His face didn’t change, but his eyes shifted off into the darkness. "Just the wind Kahleigh, just the wind." Then he turned away, and heaved the slice of monolith toward the opening, ending the conversation with the sound of diamond grinding stone.

  Logan McMillan kept an old joey in a steel cage hung from the back wall of his tavern. It was behind the bar, between the shelf of single malt and the shelf of “tourist milk,” as he referred to everything else. The joey was showing signs of white in its once sable coat, and wasn't quite as quick as Kahleigh remembered at catching the peanuts patrons tossed from the bowls on the bar, or to polish off the occasional mug McMillan drew for it from the vat of his family’s famous stout.

  "What can I get the lady?" he asked her as she settled onto a padded stool at the bar. If he was surprised to see her, he showed it only in his smile. The bar was nearly empty, and even when full the small establishment would barely seat a dozen. Rupert was late. Almost an hour late. Nothing to worry about, she thought, because he probably remembered she was always late too.

  "A pint of the stout, of course."

  "Haven't seen you here in ages." He gave her the once-over. "Were you legal last time I saw you? Could be you’ve been iced away on a slowship and haven’t aged a wink." He grinned at her, and to her surprise, she blushed.

  McMillan himself was as much a draw to the bar as his joey. His blond hair was retrogrown and drawn back in a tight ponytail. If he was still as quick to act on a whim as Kahleigh remembered, next week it might just as well be waxed back in a slick pompadour, or shaved clean. He always wore his trademark kilt, proud of his heritage and his tartan, and would launch into an embellished tale of his grandpoppa at the least bit of prodding, and often without any at all. She guessed that he was in his mid-thirties, but who could tell anymore? He’d looked just the same ten years before when, as new colonists, Kahleigh, her father, and mother had first wandered into the pub. Kahleigh and McMillan had exchanged some bantering flirtation on the many occasions she’d been in, before her acceptance to the University had taken her off-world.

  Setting a wooden mug of dark brew in front of her on the hand-polished bar, he broke for a rare moment from the character he played for the patrons and the odd tourist, "Sorry to hear about your mother, Kahleigh. She was a nice woman, though I didn't see her often." He nodded over his shoulder at the joey. "Hated to see any living thing in a cage, she told me once. Didn't matter that the poor devil might be shot dead by a farmer the same afternoon I let it go."

  He took the nearest bowl of peanuts from beside Kahleigh, and passed it through the slot of the cage. The animal lowed softly, and began cracking open the nuts with its nimble three-fingered hand. Two thumbs and one finger, she reminded herself.

  The joey caught her watching. For a moment she felt embarrassed, as if caught staring at a cripple in a crowd. The animal’s black star pupils seemed to float on their golden orbs, staring back.

  "By the way, lass," McMillan said, slipping back into his role, "your friend called ahead. Said to tell you he'd forgotten about another engagement, and hoped you'd stop by tomorrow to reschedule."

  "Damn," she muttered. Stood up, and not even on a date.

  "But," the barkeep continued merrily, taking another wooden mug from atop the tap, this one emblazoned with his family crest, "that merely means you get to enjoy the fine drinking company of The McMillan."

  The next morning, after telling herself that she'd let McMillan seduce her, as opposed to inviting the seduction from loneliness and despair, she did her best to act nonchalant about the whole affair by digging up the basics for a breakfast. He had, in fact, been an interesting if not accomplished lover, and held her afterwards in the quiet night until she slept. It was, she reasoned, just what she needed.

  "Those eggs aren't fit for human consumption. I let them ripen a bit—it's the way the joey likes them." He surprised her; she hadn't heard him wake. He was in his boxers—tartan of course—framed in the bedroom doorway.

  He stepped past her in the small kitchen and dug some edibles from the fridge, and began tossing something together. "Going to be leftovers I’m afraid. I wasn’t expecting company."

  "Don’t go to any trouble." She moved to the opposite side of the counter and stovetop that divided the room, sat on a wobbly stool, and tried to decide what it was he was reheating.

  "Something's troubling you," he said, "I could see that last night, and so could the joey. Want to talk about it?"

  She shrugged. He was politely not staring at her. She wore only the button-down blouse she'd worn the night before; the rest of her clothes were still in a rumpled pile on the bedroom floor. "Just a weird experience I had."

  "Tell me about it. Therapists run in my family, you know. Either that, or they make a living off my family. I can't remember which."

  She laughed at his deadpan delivery, feeling more at ease. "Well, I was out in the 'lith field at the edge of my father's farm. There's about a dozen there that my mother asked him not to clear, where she had a garden in between. She used to like to sit out there, painting, and recording mail."

  "Go on." He was suddenly very attentive.

  "Well, I thought I heard her talking to me. Weird, huh?"

  "Hmmm. Not as weird as you think." He began cooking again, dicing an unrecognizable piece of meat on the counter. "My father loved folklore. Collected diskfulls of the stuff. Said that every world developed its own myths, and that Bergemon was special because it was one of the very, very, few that not only had indigenous life, but showed signs of once having a tool-using culture."

  She raised an eyebrow. "Where is there evidence of that?"

  He smiled knowingly. "The monoliths themselves. Those aren't a natural phenomenon."

  "That's been argued for decades." It was, in fact, barely even a point of contention any more. "Last I heard, the theory was they were natural phenomena, and not really monoliths at all."

  He smiled, genuinely amused. "And the gyre effect?" The monoliths all had a gentle swirl of spiraling fissures running bottom to top, except for the area interrupted by the occasional hollow of a carved out bench.

  "The twisting of the stone? Bergemon's eccentric magnetic field interacting with the iron and pyrite during their formation." She recited it as she’d learned it, straight from a text.

  Logan laughed. "College girls. Is that what they’re teaching you these days? Listen, you might be able to show there's some incredibly tiny probability that over a geologic period of time something like that might form. But what about the benches?"

  "Colonists carved them."

  Logan shook his head. "They were there when the first ones arrived. Even in the holos from first landing, you can enhance in on the 'liths in the background and see some benches already there."

  Kahleigh scoffed. "So who carved them?" Bergemon was a backwater world, with no known colony prior to the formal expansion. There was no evidence of one being lost, at least not in the University records.

  Logan shrugged. "I tend to go with the theory that the joeys were to some sentient species what the monkey is to us. Something wiped them out, and the monoliths are all that's left.”

  "Sounds like a stretch to me." Something in the micro was beginning to smell appetizing. She inhaled deeply. "What is that?"

  "Left-over haggis. Just don't ask what's in it and you'll lov
e it." He dished some onto a plate and set it in front of her. "Back to what you were saying—why is it a stretch? The Centauri colony failed, and by the time anyone got back there, all that was left was the original lander, some plastics, and some rusting vehicles. And that was after only fifty years. Whatever was here has been gone for thousands. Maybe longer."

  She tasted her food hesitantly, because somewhere in the back of her mind a memory of just what it was kept trying to emerge. She found it palatable, and kept the memory, and the food, down.

  "I don’t buy it." She gestured with the empty fork. "A lost colony I could almost believe, but nowhere on the inhabited worlds is there any indication that homo-sapes have ever been anything but alone."

  "Wouldn’t that be convenient," he said, starting to dig into his own food. "Ah, Scottish ambrosia." He winked, and when he finished his bite he said, "My grandpoppa taught me that an absence of evidence wasn’t evidence of an absence. But what say we put that aside, and later we can take a look at your garden?"

  "This is where I heard it." The path they walked between the blooming roses was lined with polished white stones. The path and the thick dark soil had been her father's contribution to the area from the multipurpose grinder.

  "Real roses. They're tough to grow here," Logan said appreciatively.

  Kahleigh could see where some of the leaves were already beginning to brown from lack of care. Their shoes crunched on the gravel as they walked; that and the rustling of the wind the only sounds.

  "When the disease was slowing her down, my mother spent a lot of time out here. Painting, thinking, and resting on her favorite bench. The one there, in the center."

  She walked to the central monolith, its dried lava texture spiraling upward, glistening with wayward sparks of color in the midmorning sun. The bench itself was a smooth shelf notched at waist level into one side of the ‘lith, about a quarter of the width of the stone. The bench’s back arched up and out, like a shallow amphitheater, or the wind notch that produced sound on a flute. Sitting in it, a normal-sized adult would need to lean over to keep from brushing her head inside. But one could comfortably curl up on the bench, on the side that usually faced the arc of the sun across the sky.

  "Hear anything?" Logan said, cocking his head.

  "No, nothing now." All she could hear was the wind.

  Logan laughed softly, "You know it's just like one of those old horror videos. The scary stuff never happens when there's someone else around."

  "It wasn't exactly scary, but I know what you mean. Maybe it was just a waking dream. The setting is right, because I always pictured her here when I was away." The last photo she had of her mother was taken and transmitted by her father: her mother curled up on the bench, asleep, a faint but contented smile on her face, her hands folded neatly beneath her cheek.

  Logan gestured towards the bench. "Why don't we sit awhile? It's a beautiful area regardless." The morning sun was still low on the hills, its orange light casting distant shadows from far off ‘liths; hash marks on the hillsides.

  They sat quietly, Logan with his elbows resting on his knees where they were exposed past the hem of his kilt, head supported by his hands. Kahleigh sat far forward, back arched, her feet braced against the stone. The wind shifted the rose bushes in a slow and silent dance.

  "Hear that?" Logan whispered.

  A soft bass tone, like a breath blown over a cider jug.

  "The wind through the stones," she said, "I've heard it before, and it's not what I heard."

  "Keep listening."

  They did, and the soft humming of the wind repeated at odd intervals as the gusts gently picked up.

  "Kind of pretty," he said.

  "Shhh."

  Over the sound of the wind came a soft lowing, a baleful song.

  "A joey," Logan said. "There." He pointed to the top of a stone no more than ten meters away. The joey peeked over the top, its eyes glowing with the moist reflection from the secondary lids.

  Every few moments, it would drop its jaw slightly and emit the low song.

  "It's like it's singing with the wind. I've never seen that," he said.

  "Kahleigh..."

  Kahleigh grabbed Logan’s right arm with both hands, the hair on the back of her neck bristling, icy fingers caressing her back.

  "I hear it," she cried, "Oh, God, I hear it."

  Startled, he turned to her. "It's just the joey."

  "No, I heard her," she whispered through clenched teeth.

  "Kahleigh...I..."

  "Look at the joey," Logan said. Kahleigh’s stare was already locked on the creature, and Logan barely winced as her nails bit deeper into the tanned skin of his arm.

  The joey was in full view, crouched down at the top of the stone, its dark striped tail hanging in a loose J in front of itself. Its simian head was bowed slightly, secondary eyelids back now, and even from the distance, the starred pupils were visible, large and fixed in a trance-like gaze.

  "Kahleigh, I miss you. Dear Kayl—"

  The joey went sideways as if kicked, the report of a rifle sending Logan leaping from the stone and Kahleigh cowering further into its hollow.

  "Dear God!" Logan yelled, running toward the animal, even as it was beginning a spastic crawl towards Kahleigh and the central 'lith.

  Kahleigh broke into sobs as the animal pushed itself towards her, its tail twitching, brilliant violet blood pouring from a dark wound in its side.

  Logan stood over it, unsteady and unsure.

  "It's not going to make it, it's not going to make it," Kahleigh sobbed hysterically.

  Logan matched its slow pace, looked around for the source of the shot, then jumped as the animal seemed to find a final reserve of life and energy and lunged forward with a flick of its tail.

  "Get away from it," Kahleigh’s father shouted, trampling her mother's roses as he rushed from beyond the stones, gasping for breath, towards the wounded animal. He bore his rifle at the ready.

  Logan stepped in front of him, one hand up, "I think the job is done."

  Indeed, the animal died with one small hand outstretched toward Kahleigh.

  Dust motes danced in the sunbeam streaming through Kahleigh’s window, and she tried to concentrate on just one, following its drifting path. The relaxant patch Logan had encouraged her to use left her head swimming, feeling as though she were floating along with the mote, a kindred spirit.

  "What’s your business in all this, McMillan?" That was her father, his voice carrying through the door.

  "Just a friend, Joseph."

  "Be sure it stays just a friend, McMillan. I don’t think you’re what she needs right now."

  She could hear Logan snort in surprise, "I think I’ll let Kahleigh decide what she needs."

  Her father’s voice, more angry now, "I don’t think I find you much to my liking anymore, McMillan."

  "Joseph, I recall many nights at my tavern over pints of ale when I seemed to be exactly to your liking."

  "Maybe that’s where you should be now. I’ll look after Kahleigh."

  "Do that. She’ll know where to find me if she needs me." She could hear his footsteps on the hardwood floor, "Oh, and Joseph, I have to say, I always thought your philosophy with the joeys was catch and release. Not shoot to kill."

  "Things change. And people change." Her father’s voice was cold, and more bitter than she’d ever heard.

  "I guess they do." She heard the outside door shut, just loud enough to be a slam.

  The bedroom door squeaked enough for Kahleigh to know her father was peering in, checking on her.

  "I heard her out there." she said softly. "I heard Mother talking to me before you shot the joey." She didn’t look at him as she spoke, but instead she watched the mote she’d chosen be cast from its place in the sun on the small gust from the opened door. If he reacted to her words, she couldn’t tell.

  "It was the wind, Kahleigh. There’s nothing out there but the wind." But in his voice she thought she heard j
ust a hint, she wasn’t sure, that perhaps he was trying to convince more than her—maybe trying to convince himself.

  The door clicked shut, and she was alone.

  McMillan’s was more crowded that evening. Kahleigh, still feeling the fading effects of shock and the patch, held the starry gaze of the old joey until it looked away. "I want to go back to the ‘lith, and I want you to bring the joey."

  "Why, Kahleigh? There’s nothing out there." Logan leaned across the bar, took one of her hands in the comforting warmth of his own.

  "I heard her again, and it wasn’t a hallucination. She was talking to me, trying to tell me something, up until the moment the joey died." There was something about the joey, about it being there. She needed to know.

  "I didn’t hear anything, Kahleigh. Just the joey and the wind."

  "I did. I know I did, Logan. And when I heard it, you saw how the joey was, crouched on the ‘lith and focused on me."

  "How do you know that whatever it was, it wasn’t just from that joey? Some kind of indigenous telepathy or something."

  "I’d just as soon believe it was a ghost. I can’t explain it, but it was like she was there. I could feel her as well as hear her, like when someone is lying on the other side of a big bed, but you still know they’re there."

  He smiled at that. "Okay, we’ll do it. Matilda hasn’t been out in a while, and it might do the girl some good. Tomorrow morning be all right?"

  "Sure. If you wake me up early." She smiled.

  Logan gave her hand a quick squeeze, then turned to help a local at the other end of the bar.

  A hand on Kahleigh’s shoulder startled her. She turned abruptly, found Rupert dressed in gray casuals behind her.

  "A day late, Rupert." She said with a wry smile. "Scared the hell out of me."

  "Sorry, Kahleigh. And sorry about last night. But there’s something I need to talk to you about." He stood very rigid, his face emotionless.

  "Sit down and tell me. It can’t be as bad as what I’ve been through the past few weeks."

  He sat, and Logan drifted back over, polishing a glass. Rupert glanced at him, waved a hand to indicate he didn’t want to order. Logan didn’t walk away.