TableofContents

by Low Bo

  "I remember a world," she said, "Where the sands were gold. Not just golden, but gold. And a handful of pebbles could buy you a palace on Earth because they weren't pebbles, they were rubies and emeralds and sapphires." Then she grinned. "When we left, we had to strip down to our skins, which they vacuumed. They searched us inside out. They counted our teeth and tapped our eyeballs to be sure they were really ours. And I came away with enough of their precious pebbles to buy a new ship, with enough left over for a month on Hedys." She barked a laugh at the memory. "Remind me later to show you how I did it."

  I had no stories to tell. I had spent my days bound to the Earth, living a little life in a little bar on the outskirts of the rest of the galaxy. I had dreams, though, and I told her about them. And if they were silly dreams, as the dreams of the young often are, they still seemed both wonderful and possible to me. She didn't laugh, even though to her they must have been little things that, despite their size, would likely never come true for me. I even read her a poem.

  "I loved a man," she told me, later, her gaze far away. "I loved him but I left him, with a promise that I'd come back. I did come back, in what to me was just a few short years, and he was an old man. Wrinkled and bald and shrunken. He'd waited for me. A whole long life he'd waited for me. When I saw him I turned away so he wouldn't see my disgust. I walked away from him. I left the Earth with no promises to anyone. And I will not make any promises ever again." She looked at me, no laughter in her eyes. "Do you understand me, pretty one?"

  I did.

  She summoned up her laughter again and said, "Good. Then let's leave this place. With the crew that came in with me, your father should be keeping his eye on his till, not on his precious pup. Come on." She stood up and pulled me by the hand. "We have a lot of vices to cover before your education is complete. And when you tell people that you spent her leave with Annie Jones, they'll be able to see the truth of it in your eyes."

  So we left, and we did things. Things I never imagined. We went places. Places I hadn't known existed. We saw people. People I would have run from without her. There were no seconds, nor minutes, nor hours, nor days. The time we were together existed all at once, forever. I blinked and she was gone.

  * * *

  The next time she went away, I was a man. Not young. Not yet old. I had been married, once, or twice, or three times. Depending on how you define it, depending on who you ask.

  I told myself it had nothing to do with spending a night (or two? Or three?) with Annie Jones.

  But the way I made my living did.

  I still sat at that same table in the corner. But I no longer even pretended to write poetry. And I no longer posed to lure girls and women. Now I sat in shadows and waited for people who wanted to sell something that had arrived on Earth and somehow bypassed customs. Or people who wanted to buy something they would rather their wife, or husband, or their boss, or priest, or their local policeman not know about. Or maybe they wanted to get away from Earth, far away, and fast, and, of course, furtively. My time with Annie made me known to people who knew things, in places where the sun winked and found somewhere else to shine. Useful people.

  It was just convenience that made me sit at the same table. It just happened. I wasn't waiting for Annie to come back. She wasn't coming back. And if she did, she'd probably look for someone like I used to be. Or maybe not. Maybe someone, or something, else would catch her eye. But not me. I'd had my turn. And I would be damned before I wasted my life waiting for her like that other guy. No promises. I still remembered, I still understood.

  There were two men across the table from me. Nervous men with big brimmed hats, who would not look at me but looked at the door often.

  "All right," I said. "Passage for five of you at the price agreed." An envelope snuck across the table to me. I counted and nodded. "Berth 17, at one o'clock. Will With the One Eye will meet you. Remember, five and only five. If there are six, none of you will board. And only ten kilos of luggage each. More and your luggage will stay here, even if you don't."

  Their heads bobbed. Their eyes searched the room for spies and eavesdroppers and they got up to slip away, when the door seemed to erupt inward and a bald woman in a black jumpsuit of some shimmering, simmering stuff burst in and crowed. Literally crowed, her head thrown back to show the lightning slashing down her throat.

  She saw me and cried, "Peter!" and headed for me like a goddess toward an offering left inside her temple. My customers knocked over their chairs and each other in their haste to be gone.

  She ignored them and looked me over. "You'll do. You're not the impudent little vintage you were last time. Something stronger now. Fuller bodied, certainly. What? No hug for the prodigal returned?"

  I was suddenly aware that my heart was beating, that I was breathing the same air she breathed. "I didn't wait for you."

  She grinned. "Yet, here I am. Unannounced, unbidden, and uncharacteristically unkissed." She pretended to look around the bar. "Is there a jealous wife lurking about with a knife? Or an innocent child too young to see what a lascivious spacer might do to her father?"

  My own smile broke free, opening the way for other feelings to wash over me. "No, no wife, not at present. And no child, innocent or otherwise to be shocked by you. Just me, and if I didn't wait for you, I'm still glad you're here." I got up and grabbed her, picking her up and squeezing her as if I didn't know I was going to have to let her go again. She gave me a kiss and I swear I felt her tongue tickle me down at the bottom of my stomach.

  She hadn't changed much. Less hair. Was she smaller? Maybe I had grown. Maybe the memory of her was bigger than the reality. But why should she have changed? From her point of view, she'd only been gone a couple of years or so. For me it had been a good-sized part of my life. Spent not waiting for her.

  We left the bar, and once again time was an ocean in which we swam, too vast to know if we were moving toward or further away from shore, or just staying in one place.

  We went places and did things. This time there were as many doors that I could open as ones to which she was the key. Annie of the Stars and Peter of the Port. If we weren't king and queen of our respective realms, we were at least the duke and duchess.

  We fought a handful of sailors. We watched the sylphs of Cygnus dance, or mate, or communicate, or all or none of those things, then we tried to imitate them, which caused a tavern full of pirates to be appalled. We tasted the pleasures of a hundred worlds.

  "Why did you come back?" I asked her as we lay in bed.

  "Chance?" She shrugged. "A job. Someone needed something from there to here and I brought it."

  "Why did you come back to me?" I waited for her to answer.

  Eventually she said, "It's what I do. There's a Peter on a lot of worlds. I come back to see what you've become. It's like visiting a series of portraits. I see you captured as a young man. Then I visit a moment when you are as you are now. If there is a next time, you'll be an old man. Three ticks of the clock. Beginning, middle, end. Then gone. It's like traveling through time."

  "So I'm some sort of marker, away for you to mark your passage through the years?"

  She looked at me. "I made you no promises. You said you understood. I never asked you to wait for my return."

  "I did not wait for you," I told her.

  I did not wait for her, I told myself.

  * * *

  The next time she went away, I was old.

  I'd married again, once or twice. I even had a son and a daughter, both grown. The stories of Annie Jones I'd told them I now told to my grandchildren. They weren't true stories. The truth I kept locked away inside of me, to look at now and then when I was alone.

  In fact, I made a good deal of money writing stories about Annie Jones. Like Annie Jones and the Space Squid. And Annie Jones and the Robots of Doom. And there were others, some of which were made into sensies. If Annie came back, she would find herself a legend, like Joan of Arc, or Buffalo Bill, or Neil Armstrong. I smiled to th
ink of her reaction and hoped I would be out of her reach when she found out.

  I still sat at the same table at the bar now run by my daughter and her husband. No longer posing, no longer intriguing, no longer waiting, just remembering and occasionally writing down a tale that had its start in a memory. My hair was white and thinning, and I was smaller than I had been, befitting my smaller life. And sometimes, I admit, satisfied, content, and happy, I fell asleep, nodding in my chair, dreaming dreams I kept to myself.

  "Hey!" The voice, next to my head, woke me and almost made me fall backwards out of my chair.

  "What have you done to me, old man?"

  "Annie?" My eyes weren't as good as they once were, but the woman looming over me had longish black hair, and no tattoo. She was wearing a loose blouse and a short skirt. "Annie?"

  "Yes, Annie, you slobbering, senile, son of a..."

  "What have you done to yourself?"

  She stopped and looked at herself. "What are you talk... Oh, I guess I look a little different than I did the last time you and I... Who gives a spacer's shit what the hell I look like? What's all this crap about Annie Jones and the Whore of Planet X, or whatever it is you've been spewing? Every time I try to pick up a lover or start a fight, people treat me like I wasn't real, like I'm sort kind of story book character come to life. I punched a cop just to see what would happen and she thanked me! Said, wait until she tells her kids that she got punched by Annie Jones. What have you done to me?"

  When I was able to speak without letting her catch me laughing, I said, "I made you famous, that's all. Or, not you, so much as the idea of you." I risked a chuckle. "Made a lot of money at it, too."

  "Money?" That calmed her down. "Well, I suppose if you did it to make money it's all right." She smiled. "I remember one time when we convinced the people on some hick world out beyond Andromeda that there was an asteroid coming that would wipe out half the planet. We sold about a thousand passages aboard a ship that might have held six or seven people if they didn't mind getting to know each other real well." A laugh burst from her. "Then we left two days, or rather nights, before we were scheduled to and left them all behind. I always wondered if they were so relieved we'd lied to them about the asteroid that they didn't mind losing their money."

  She pulled up a chair and we started drinking ale and telling lies. It was almost like going back in time. Almost like being alive. I could pretend that I could keep up with her, that I wasn't tired, that I didn't hope for one more night with her.

  Eventually I said, "How about some food?"

  "God, yes," she said. "I'm so hungry I feel like I could take a bite out of a neutron star. Where should we go?" She stood up, pushing her chair over, ready for whatever came next.

  Except for what I suggested. "How about my place?"

  She didn't laugh, which was a relief to me. She did look at me with pity, which made me angry, whether at her or at myself I wasn't sure.

  "I have food," I said, with some heat. "And I can cook." She still looked like she wasn't sure how to break it to me that she wasn't anxious to leap into bed with the decrepit husk of what had been a man. "I just thought you might want a real meal for a change, that's all. I have no dark designs on your virtue, if that's what you're worried about." I stared at her, daring her to laugh. Which she did, forcing me to join her.

  "Come on, then," she said. "Let's go and fill our bellies with something other than ale for a while."

  No promises, I told myself, but a perhaps, a maybe, a could be. I didn't even mind that she helped me to my feet. Her touch warmed places that had been cold too long. No promises, I told myself, but a hope, a wish, a prayer.

  Before we got to the door, it opened and a group of five, or ten, or a hundred people burst in, laughing, shouting, shoving, shaking the floor like a stampede of wild creatures in their rush to reach the bar. Spacers and the crowd they accreted as they cruised the port.

  "Annie!" they yelled when they saw her. "Annie Jones!" they trumpeted.

  And she answered them. "Trisha! Sasha! Wen Ho!" And more. She was surrounded and torn from me by the mob, swept away by a wave of old friends and shipmates. I stood and watched them go. Even though they were just a few feet from me, they seemed to recede into the distance until I was alone, a million miles from anyone.

  I went back to my table and waited.

  * * *

  There comes a time when old ceases to have meaning and the young become impatient to have you die and get out of the way. When every day you wake up is a miracle, or a curse, and you are never sure which.

  I waited, no more pretending to myself. I hung on, day after day after day. I could hear the whispers of grandchildren and great-grandchildren as they wondered if I would ever die. They loved me, I think, but enough was enough. Besides, I still had some money to leave them.

  Yet, even though there were no promises, I waited.

  And, finally, she came.

  "Peter?" she said, leaning over me as I lay in bed. Her voice was strained with the effort of trying to fit her normal shout into a whisper. Her hair was silver this time, the metal, not the color, though she was no longer young. The way she moved, the way she stood, were still filled with confidence, but some of her brashness was gone, as if she'd met a situation or two somewhere in her travels which she hadn't been able to handle all by herself. "Peter," she whispered again, a little louder, when I didn't respond. She leaned closer, trying to see if there was life in my eyes, to hear if I still breathed.

  I did breathe. I breathed in the scent of her, the scent of a time before I was born and the time to come after I was dead. I smelled crowded ships visiting a hundred worlds with a thousand taverns. Blood and sweat and sex and fear and joy. I inhaled Annie Jones like a drug.

  And when I exhaled, I let it all out.

  "You never promised to come back," I said. "But you always did. And I never meant to wait for you, but when I wasn't spending my time thinking about the last time, I was hoping there would be a next time."

  "Then you're a fool," she said, but she stroked my forehead as she said it. "I'm Annie Jones and I don't care about anyone but me. I'm a traveler through space and time, and, if sometimes by chance I happen to come back, I always go away."

  "I know who you are, Annie, and I'm glad that you came back. But this time it's me that's going away with no promise to return." I smiled at her. "And, unlike you, I mean it." And I swear I saw a tear fall. And I was happy, not that she was sad, but that, in her way, she loved me.

  SCREAM ANGEL

  Douglas Smith

  They stopped beating Trelayne when they saw that he enjoyed it. The thugs that passed as cops in that town on Long Shot backed away from where he lay curled on the dirt floor, as if he was something dead or dangerous. He watched them lock the door of his cold little cell again. Disgust and something like fear showed in their eyes. The taste of their contempt for him mixed with the sharpness of his own blood in his mouth. And the Scream in that blood shot another stab of pleasure through him.

  He expected their reaction. The Merged Corporate Entity guarded its secrets well, and Scream was its most precious. Long Shot lay far from any Entity project world and well off the jump route linking Earth and the frontier. No one on this backwater planet would know of the drug, let alone have encountered a Screamer or an Angel. That was why he had picked it.

  Their footsteps receded, and the outer door of the plasteel storage hut that served as the town jail clanged shut. Alone, he rolled onto his side on the floor, relishing the agony the movement brought. He tried to recall how he came to be there, but the Scream in him turned each attempt into an emotional sideshow. Finally he remembered something burning, something...

  ...falling.

  It had been one of their better shows.

  He remembered now. Remembered last night, standing in the ring of their makeshift circus dome, announcing the performers to an uncaring crowd, crying out the names of the damned, the conquered. Each member of his refugee ba
nd emerged from behind torn red curtains and propelled themselves in the manner of their species into or above the ring, depending on their chosen act.

  He knew the acts meant little. The crowd came not to see feats of acrobatics or strength, but to gawk at otherworldly strangeness, to watch aliens bow in submission before the mighty human. Trelayne's circus consisted of the remnants of the subjugated races of a score of worlds, victims to the Entity's resource extraction or terraforming project: the Stone Puppies, lumbering silica beasts of slate-sided bulk-Guppert the Strong, squat bulbous-limbed refugee from the crushing gravity and equally crushing mining exploitation of Mendlos II-Feran the fox-child, his people hunted down like animals on Fandor IV.

  And the Angels. Always the Angels.

  But curled in the dirt in the cold cell, recalling last night, Trelayne pushed away any thoughts of the Angels. And of her.

  Yes, it had been a fine show. Until the Ta'lona died, exploding in blood and brilliance high above the ring, after floating too near a torch. Trelayne had bought the gas bag creature's freedom a week before from an ip slaver, knowing that its species had been nearly wiped out.

  As pieces of the fat alien had fallen flaming into the crowd, Trelayne's grip on reality had shattered like a funhouse mirror struck by a hammer. He could now recall only flashes of what had followed last night: people burning-screaming-panic-a stampede to the exits-his arrest.

  Nor could he remember doing any Scream. He usually stayed clean before a show. But he knew what he felt now lying in the cell-the joy of the beating, the ecstasy of humiliation. He must have done a hit when the chaos began and the smell of burnt flesh reached him. To escape the horror.

  Or to enter it. For with Scream, horror opened a door to heaven.

  Someone cleared their throat in the cell. Trelayne jumped, then shivered at the thrill of surprise. Moaning, he rolled onto his back on the floor and opened his eyes, struggling to orient himself again.

  A man now sat on the cot in the cell. A man with a lean face and eyes that reminded Trelayne of his own. He wore a long gray cloak with a major's rank and a small insignia on which a red "RIP" hovered over a green planet split by a lightning bolt.