Masked

by Lou Anders

  Light was creeping into the horizon when finally, softly, Captain Shao said, “I understand now why you left.”

  “I doubt that,” she whispered, but pushed herself up and rubbed her face. “Your men are safe. As many as could be saved. We should find them.”

  His eyes glittered, reflecting the dying firelight. “We have no submersible. And there is a war raging.”

  Namid studied the revolver in her hands. She had found the vial of poison nearby. More bullets could be made. “I suppose that’s true.”

  A sad smile touched his mouth, so much like his sister’s that Namid’s eyes burned with tears. “And I suppose it might also be true that the only way for us to survive is to fight.”

  Namid sighed. Captain Shao whispered, “Can you be what they need?”

  “What people love in war, they hate in peace,” she said quietly. “But yes, I can be what they need.”

  Captain Shao stood and walked to her. He did not look at his sister’s body, but held out his hand to Namid.

  “Lady Marshal,” he said. “You, MacNamara.”

  “Yes,” she said again, and took his hand.

  Ian McDonald is the acclaimed science fiction author of such works as The Dervish House, Brasyl, River of Gods, Cyberabad Days, Desolation Road, King of Morning, Queen of Day, Out on Blue Six, Chaga, and Kirinya. He has won the Hugo Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and the BSFA Award, has been nominated for the Quill Award and the Warwick Prize for Writing, and has been nominated several times for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. Asimov’s Science Fiction called him “one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era. Indeed, maybe the most interesting and accomplished.” Need more be said?

  Tonight We Fly

  IAN MCDONALD

  It’s the particular metallic rattle of the football slamming the garage door that is like a nail driven into Chester Barnes’s forehead. Slap badoom, slap badoom: that he can cope with. His hearing has adjusted to that long habituation of foot to ball to wall. Slap baclang. With a resonating twang of internal springs in the door mechanism. Slap baclang buzz. Behind his head where he can’t see it. But the biggest torment is that he never knows when it is going to happen. A rhythm, a regular beat, you can adjust to that: the random slam of ball kicked hard into garage door is always a surprise, a jolt you can never prepare for.

  The bang of ball against door is so loud it rattles the bay window. Chester Barnes throws down his paper and is on his feet, standing tiptoe in his slippers to try to catch sight of the perpetrators through the overgrown privet. Another rattling bang, the loudest yet. A ragged cheer from the street. Chester is out the front door in a thought.

  “Right, you little buggers, I had enough of that. You’ve been told umpteen times; look at that garage door, the bottom’s all bowed in, the paint’s flaking off. You’re nothing but vandals. I know your parents, though what kind of parents they are letting you play on the street like urchins I don’t know. This is a residential area!”

  The oldest boy cradles the football in his arm. The other boys stand red-faced and embarrassed. The girl is about to cry.

  “I know you!” Chester Barnes shouts and slams the door.

  “Chester, they’re nine years old,” the woman’s voice calls from the kitchen. “And the wee one, she’s only six.”

  “I don’t care.” Back in the living room again, Chester Barnes watches the five children slink shamefacedly down the street and around the corner. The little girl is in tears. “This is a quiet street for quiet people.” He settles in his chair and picks up his paper.

  Doreen has balanced the tea tray on the top of her walker and pushes the whole panjandrum into the living. Chester leaps to assist, sweeping up the precarious tray and setting it down on the old brass Benares table.

  “Now you know I don’t want you doing that, it could fall as easily as anything, you could get scalded.”

  “Well, then you’d just have to save me, wouldn’t you?”

  There is tea, and a fondant fancy and a German biscuit.

  “Those chocolate things are nice,” Chester says. “Where did you get them?”

  “Lidl,” Doreen says. “They’ve a lot of good stuff. Very good for jam. You never think of Germans having a penchant for jam. Is it in again?”

  “What?”

  “You know. The ad. I can see the paper, you’ve left it open at the classifieds.”

  “It’s in again.”

  “What does it say this time?”

  “Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle.”

  “And?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Are you going to reply?”

  “With what? It’s nothing. I’ll bet you it’s not even him. It’s kids, something like that. Or fans. Stick on the telly, we’re missing Countdown.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t like that new girl. It hasn’t been the same since Carol left.”

  “It hasn’t been the same since Richard Whiteley died,” Chester says. They watch Countdown. Chester’s longest word score is a seven. Doreen has two eights, and gets the numbers games and today’s Countdown Conundrum. Doreen gets up to go and read in the backyard, as she doesn’t like Deal or No Deal. “It’s just a glorified guessing game,” she says. Not for me it’s not, Chester Barnes says. As she advances her walking frame through the living room door, she calls back to Chester, “Oh, I almost forgot. Head like a seive. The community nurse is coming round tomorrow.”

  “Again?”

  “Again.”

  “Well, I hope it’s after Deal or No Deal. ”

  Doreen closes the door after her. When the creak of her walking frame has disappeared down the hall, Chester Barnes picks up the newspaper again. Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle. A rising racket on the screen distracts him. Noel Edmonds is whipping the audience up into a frenzy behind a contestant reluctant to choose between the sealed prize boxes.

  “Twenty-seven, pick number twenty-seven, you blithering idiot!” he shouts at the screen. “It’s got the ten pounds in it! Are you blind? No, not box twelve! That’s got the fifty thousand! Oh for God’s sake, woman!”

  Nurse Aine is short and plump and has very glossy black hair and very caked makeup. She can’t be more than twenty-two. She radiates the rude self-confidence of the medical.

  “You’re not Nurse Morag,” Chester Barnes says.

  “No flies on you, Chester.”

  “Nurse Morag calls me Mr. Barnes. Where is she anyway?”

  “Nurse Morag has moved on to Sydenham, Belmont, and Glenmachan. I’ll be your district nurse from now on. Now, how are we, Mr. Barnes? Fair enough fettle? Are you taking your half aspirin?”

  “And my glass of red wine. Sometimes more than a glass.”

  “Bit of a secret binge drinker, are we, Mr. Barnes?”

  “Miss, I have many secrets, but alcohol dependency is not one of them.”

  Nurse Aine is busy in her bag pulling on gloves, unwrapping a syringe, fitting a needle. She readies a dosing bottle, pierces the seal.

  “If you’d just roll your wee sleeve up there, Ches… Mr. Barnes.”

  “What’s this about?” Chester says suspiciously.

  “Nasty wee summer flu going around.”

  “I don’t want it. I don’t get the flu.”

  “Well, with a dose of this you certainly won’t.”

  “Wait, Miss, you don’t understand.”

  Plump Nurse Aine’s latex hands are quick and strong. She has Chester’s arm in a grip, and the needle is coming down. She checks.

  “Oh. I’m having a wee bit of a problem finding a vein. Chester, you’ve obviously no career as a heroin addict.”

  “Miss, I don’t—”

  Nurse Aine comes in again, determination set on her red lips. “Let’s try it again. You may feel a little prick.”

  “Miss, I won’t…”

  “Oh. Wow.” Nurse Aine sits back.

  “What is it?” Chester asks.

>   She holds up the syringe. The needle is bent into a horseshoe.

  “I’ve heard of hard arteries… I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like this before. Mr. Barnes—”

  The living room door opens. The walker’s rubber toes enter first, then Doreen’s low slippers.

  “Suppositories,” Doreen says. “My husband gets all his medication by suppository.”

  “It’s not in my case notes,” Nurse Aine protests.

  “My husband is a special case.”

  The rattle of the letter box disturbs Nurse Aine’s departure.

  “There’s your paper, Chester.” She hands him the Telegraph as the paperboy nonchalantly swings his leg over the fence to Number 27 next door. Chester waves it after her as she goes down the path—daintily for her size, Chester thinks—to her small green Peugeot 305.

  “Mr. Barnes!” he calls. But the kids are hovering around the garage door again, casting glances at him, trying to block the football from his view with their bodies.

  In the living room Doreen sits on the unused seat beside Chester’s big armchair in the window bay rather than her wing-back chair with the booster cushion by the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re hovering.”

  “I am not hovering, I’m perching. So is it in?”

  “Is what in?”

  “Don’t come that with me, Chester Barnes. Turn to the small ads right now.”

  They flip through the pages together. Their fingers race each other down the columns and sections, stop simultaneously on bold print.

  Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle. Ormeau Park.

  “Ormeau Park. He’s close. Where do you think he is?”

  “I heard Spain, on the Costa, with the rest of them.”

  “What do you think he wants?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Chester, I’m concerned.”

  “I’ll look after you, don’t you ever worry. Nothing will ever harm you.”

  Doreen lays her hand on her husband’s.

  “If only you could do that.”

  Then with a slap baclang! like a steel avalanche descending into Haypark Avenue, the first goal hits the metal garage door.

  Old men wake easily in the night. A bulge of the bladder, the creak of something that might be an intruder, the gurgle of water in the pipes, a night plane, the lumber of a big slow truck making deliveries to Tesco, the sudden start of a dream, or a nightmare, or that edge-of-sleep-plummet into nothingness that is much too much like death. Anything at all, and they’re awake and staring at the ceiling. And no amount of lying and turning and punching up the pillow to try to make it comfortable or flicking the blankets in under your feet will send you off again. Doreen sleeps sound as a child, her mouth open, her eyes crinkled up in a private, slumbering smile. Every insomniac knows the rule that a partner steals the sleep from you.

  Chester waddles out to the toilet and pisses, long and appreciatively. Still a good pressure there. On the landing he looks up through the skylight. He never puts the main light on because if anything is guaranteed to banish all hope of sleep it is harsh centralized lighting. Beyond the yellow city glow stand the brighter stars. A constellation of fast lights crosses the rectangle of night. Chester Barnes holds his breath, thrilled by a wonder he feared he had forgotten.

  “Away, avaunt!” he breathes. “Plays hell with City Airport Air Traffic Control, my arse. They always were bloody jealous dogs.” Then he hears the high rumble of jets. A lesser wonder.

  A wave of warmth and laundry-fresh fabric conditioner spills over him as he opens the hot-press. Socks, shirts—Doreen still irons his underwear. Chester thinks that one of the greatest tokens of love anyone can show. Sheets, towels. To the top shelf, where everything is piled along the front because Doreen can’t reach any higher. Chester takes down the shoe box. Inside are the press clippings, yellowed and redolent of age and laundry, and the comics. Chester lifts the comic out, then sets it back, replaces the lid. A confidential, matey tap.

  The Bushmills bottle is at the back of the kitchen cabinet for the same reason that the top-shelf laundry is at the front. Not that Doreen would object; it’s that it would be too easy, over Deal or No Deal, or the documentaries he likes on the History Channel. Chester Barnes still has an image, still has pride. When he opens the mock leather lid of the Dansette record player, the smell of old vinyls and glues and plastics whirls him back through years and decades. It’s a dreadful tinny box and he can’t find a decent replacement for the stylus, but it’s like valve sound. The 45s only sound right on it. He takes them out of the shelf of the old radiogram, stacks them up on the ling spindle, settles back into his chair with the Bush and the comic. Always the dread, as the latch moves in, that more than one disc will fall at once. The Dansette doesn’t fail him tonight. Billie Holiday. “God Bless the Child.” Except the ones who bang that bloody ball off the bloody garage door. No. God bless the child and God bless you, Lady Day. He opens the comic. Captain Miracle, issue 17.

  The setup is rubbish; the writer never was any good. It’s the one with Dr. Nightshade’s Malevolent Meteor Machine, and the usual superhero dilemma: save the girl or save the city from destruction. The true hero must do both, in a method that surprises but is consistent, different enough from last month’s installment, and return all the balls in play to their original triangle on the table. Nothing must change in the world of comic book superheroes, unlike real superheroes.

  So, Captain Miracle, decide. The woman you love, or two million people in Belfast.

  Cobblers. There weren’t even that many people in the whole of the North. Chester Barnes smiles. Good panels of Captain Miracle flying into the meteor storm plunging down through the upper atmosphere haloed in plasma. Kick two into each other, send a third into the Irish Sea just off Dublin where it swamps Blackrock ( It’s PR, the Northern Ireland Office management team had said), fry one with laser vision, swing one by its tail, get underneath the big one bearing down on the city (the artist was an American, no idea about what Belfast looked like: a shipyard and the City Hall surrounded by miles of thatched cottages) and struggle and strain until the people in the streets were pointing and staring, before heaving it on his shoulders back up into orbit again. And of course, leaving one last, unseen straggler to bear down on innocent Belfast, before grabbing it and booting it back into orbit as sweet as any drop goal at Ravenhill.

  “I’d’ve been good at rugby,” Chester Barnes says. “Ach, too good. It would’ve been no game at all.”

  Then screaming fist-forward back down to Dr. Nightshade’s Castle of Evil, which was based on the real Tandragee Castle where they made the potato crisps, which Chester Barnes always found stranger than any Northern Ireland superhero comic. Intercepting the deadly grav-beam with which Dr. Nightshade had hauled the meteors from the sky and with which, on full intensity, he would collapse his hapless prisoner into a black hole. Pushing the ray back, back, with both his hands, until grav-beam projector, power unit, control room and the abominable Dr. Nightshade himself all collapsed into eternal oblivion. Until he extricated himself in the next episode.

  I’ve got you, Doreen. Soaring up from the singularity, his love in his arms.

  “Away, avaunt,” Chester Barnes whispers. Dean Martin now; good old Dino.

  They’re PR material, the NIO Department for Nonconventional Individuals had insisted. He has every issue of Captain Miracle, from Number 1 in 1972 to the final issue in 1979.

  It’s not really making any difference, is it, Chester? But it couldn’t, that was always understood. Now Chester lifts out the press cuttings. Robbers thwarted. Passengers rescued from sinking car ferries. Fires put out. Car bombs lifted and hurled into Belfast Lough. It was always impressive when they exploded in midair, until people started putting claims in about damage to roofs. Freed hostages. Masked villain apprehended: Supervillain for our Superhero? Here he could make a difference. Here were things a hero could do. Agai
nst politics, against sectarianism, against murders and no warning bombs and incendiaries slipped into pockets of clothes on racks, there is nothing super to be done.

  It’s four-thirty. The stack of singles has played out. The bottle of Bush is half-empty. Chester Barnes refills the shoe box and climbs the stairs. Beyond the skylight there’s a glimmer of dawn.

  Together they paw over the Belfast Telegraph, so eager they tear the sheets. Forefingers race each other down the small ads.

  “What’s it under?” Doreen asks.

  “Prayers and novenas,” Chester Barnes says.

  Their digits arrive simultaneously on the message. In bold: Dr. Nightshade to Captain Miracle. Ormeau Park. Tonight…

  “Does that dot dot dot mean there’s something more?” Doreen asks. “Maybe the rest of it’s in the late edition.”

  “Him pay for two small ads?” Chester Barnes says. “That wouldn’t be like him.”

  “Tonight, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to go?”

  “Of course not.”

  There’s a pounding all along the right side of Chester Barnes’s head, from behind his eye to just above his ear, a steady pulsing beat, a painful throb. A headache. He never gets headaches, unless they’re tension headaches. Then he realizes that his brain is thumping in time to the thudding of the ball, that ball, that bloody ball off the garage door. Slap baclang. He had been so intent on the message from his former nemesis that he hadn’t noticed the little voices outside, the cries, the ringing smack of football on the pavement.

  “Bloody kids!” Chester Barnes shouts, sitting bolt upright, trying to scrub the hammering out of his head. “Will they never, ever, never go away and leave me in peace?”

  And now Doreen is saying that she’s worried, what’s it all about, why has he come back and what does he want with Chester, are they safe? But all Chester can hear is the slap baclang of the ball and then a different noise, a change in tone of the voices, alarm, fear. He rises from his seat and turns around as the football comes looping in through the front window in a smash and shower of shards, great spears hanging from the frame, fangs of glass poking up from the sash, splinters flying around him and Doreen as he covers her. No flying glass, from a window or a blast, could ever harm him. Chester seizes the ball and storms out onto the street where the children still stand, frozen in horror. They are very small. But months and years of the rage and frustration of a man able to do anything but allowed to do nothing bursts inside him like a boil.