Of Man, Sun and Stars

by Vasileios Kalampakas

After a small period of silence, he asked Sam, his words heavy with dissapointment, floating on the vapors of cheap liquor:

  “That’s it? No DNA on the perps? Something I could use so I can post a warrant and let the ’forcers handle it? Doesn’t seem they wanted to keep the place clean..”

  Sam lit up a cigarette, the homegrown-in-orbit variety, which made Bodereau reach out and grab it from his mouth just when he was taking his first draw. Sam instantly became pretty full of emotion:

  “Hey! Hey! Fuck you Bodereau!”

  “Why, won’t it grow back? You’re messing with the crime scene, asshole.”

  “That’s bullshit. As if someones care for a smuggler like Gretchetna and the likes of him. Who probably wiped him cause he owed them money. Or because he owed them, same deal.”

  “Do you want my job, Sam? Cause if you got it all figured out, I can go home, and you can fill in the blanks, do the monthly report and yeah, you can have my implant too.”

  “I’m fine with letting the robots cut up corpses, thank you.”

  “So stick to your end, then. Gretchetna had a good name, as good a name as they come down here. Every dealer in the market has had tradings with him, and word is he kept his word, which in this line of business is like sainthood or something. I don’t think his esteemed colleagues did it.”

  Detective Bodereau started to stroll around the emporium, noticing the signs of the firefight: intense heat marks from the amada gun, chipped off blocks of aerogel and polysteel from the kinetics, clean-cut holes from the lasers. Not much in the way of looting, which only made him pause and think.

  The medbots were hovering a few feet away, humming like worker bees, their sound unobtrusive yet prevalent. At length, Bodereau took notice of the box lying almost in the middle of the emporium, not far from Gretchetna’s bench. Sam had moved over to one corner, trying to light up another cigarette without being noticed, taking advantage of Bodereau’s unusually deep thinking. Even while Sam savoured the first few puffs, Bodereau started talking without taking the box out of his gaze:

  “Do you hear that?”

  Sam looked at Bodereau with confusion.

  “What, the medbots?”

  Bodereau had his eyes fixed on the box. His voice came out suddenly diminished, faint and trembling:

  “The voices, Sam. Can’t you hear them?”

  Sam furrowed his brow in disbelief. He then nodded and grinned, the cigarette hanging from his lips:

  “Medical discharge on grounds of mental instability. Can you put on a good act for the tribunal?”

  Bodereau became strangely drawn to the box, running his hands around it, almost caressing it as he would a marvellous sculpture or the body of a beautiful woman. He seemed to revere it, as if it was something hallowed. The sight alone gave Sam a chill down his spine.

  “You can cut the crap, Bodereau. The tribunal won’t eat it up. You’ll get the Farm for that kind of bullshit, not a discharge.”

  “I can hear them, Sam. They’re wonderful. They’re so vibrant. So real.”

  Sam dropped his cigarette and put it out. He walked towards Bodereau, his expression a mix of anger and worry, the grin extinguished.

  “Bodereau, what the fuck? Snap out of it. Are you on something? It’s bad enough with the drinking, don’t tell me you started doing trippers or sky now. Hey, man. Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  Bodereau did not turn to face Sam. Nor did he stop his weird show of adoration towards the box. Sam still felt he was looking at a bad practical joke. Bodereau became ever more attractede to the box, almost hugging it now. Sam took a deep breath and punched him on the face. Bodereau calmly took the hit, and started mumbling. His eyes had now taken an otherworldly gleem, their focus somewhere beyond the walls of the emporium. Sam was now starting to worry. In fact, he felt an uncanny sensation of fear across his spine. He took a step back before touching his armband’s interface.

  He quickly selected the Emergency tab, and then brought up the Officer Assistance dialog. He selected two enforcer droids and a class-II medbot, complete with table and restraining harness. This was not an act, he now knew. Bodereau seemed to have snapped like a twig, in the blink of an eye. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock, with all of Bodereau’s history and psych profile. But to see a man break down just like that, was enlightening.

  Sam felt a sadness and pity he did not think himself capable of. Then, as he stood there, near the mumbling, hunched form of Detective Bodereau, he heard a voice. It was the voice of an angel, or perhaps the voice of the heavens. It was a sweet melody, not a voice. There were no words, only chords of blissful sounds. It was like everything around him vibrated with music. He could still see Bodereau hugging the box as if they were lovers, his lips moving endlessly to a rhythm that now Sam could understand.

  It was joyous. It was an answer. The answer to everything. It felt like everything could be explained, that everything could have an absolute, infallible meaning. The sensation of wonder was mind-numbing. Sam could now see more clearly than ever. He could now feel everything in dizzying detail. A cosmic awareness seemed to envelop him, and caress his heart and mind like only a mother would know how.

  Then he heard a clear voice, bright and mellow like the sun:

  “Will you have us?”

  Sam felt tears of running down his cheeks, like icy rivulets on desert bedrock. He still possessed a clarity of mind and self to ask in his mind:

  “What about Bodereau? What about me?”

  The voice then spoke with a timbre that could noone could resist to hear in awe and tearful marvel:

  “He is spent. You are not. Will you have us?”

  Sam closed his eyes and accepted, in what he believed was his last act of free will. He knew then, he had no other choice. As the enforcer droids entered the emporium with the medbot in their trail, Sam disappeared as if he had never been there, as if he was less than a mere illusion. Along with the box.

  The small device the three men had left behind gave a flash of light, but the droids’ advanced sensors registered nothing. And then a stream of high-energy particles ensued before the orbital was obliterated, turning into a cloud of ionized plasma. The death shriek of a small star in the sky.

  Sam looked up into the bright mauve sky, and saw the small cloud hanging like an iridiscent pearl, shining with an ever diminishing glow, until nothing but a faint, hazy shadow remained. It was still him, he thought. And then he heard the voice once again, crystal clear, and much less monumentally awe-inspiring:

  “Welcome to the Exchange, Sam.”

  He talked to himself then, feeling a strange serenity, as if a huge burden had been lifted off his shoulders:

  “What now?”

  If the voice could have been the voice of a man, the man would have been smiling:

  “Now Sam, we walk.”

  Raging Star

  “Why did you do it, Frank? Did the rage take over?”

  Magistrate Keller sat in a simple metal chair opposite Frank Demeris. There was the slight sheen of pity in his eyes, but he did not dare show it in his voice. It was something only Frank should know. It’d be against appearances if the judge showed mercy for the killer, the abomination, the madman.

  “What do you know about rage, Martin? It’s a human emotion.”

  Keller stood up and faced the complete darkness around them, as if peering through a window on sunny day, admiring the view. He sat there silently, hands in his pockets. Frank filled the silence:

  “Was it rage that drove me? Is that what you think?”

  Martin leaned his back against the invisible boundary of the containment cage. He couldn’t stop looking at his shoes. Real leather, one of the last few pairs in existence. Made out of some kind of animal that had once lived.

  “I can only assume Frank, but -”

  “To merely assume it was blind rage would be an insult to her memory!”

  Frank did not spit out the words. He rather ushered them with profound for
ce, hammering them at Martin Keller as if their roles had been suddenly reversed, and he was no longer the one on trial.

  “And yet, that’s what everyone will remember Frank. Don’t you realise what it is you have done, Frank? Billions, Frank.”

  Keller came a few steps closer towards the paralyzed form of Frank Demeris. He looked him in the eyes then, searching for his friend of old. He found a total stranger, and quickly averted his gaze as if he feared that whatever had gotten over Frank was somehow contagious. It wasn’t before long that his eyes wondered to his shiny leather shoes once more.

  “Ashamed, Martin?”

  Keller shrugged as if his shoulders belonged to someone else. They were his own though, original biological.

  “Just sad, Frank. Don’t you feel sad? About what you did? About her?”

  Frank sat silent for a few moments, tempted to close his eyes and let his mind wander to times past. But that recluse had been burned away, along with the sky, the stars; along with everything and everyone else.

  “There’s nothing for me, Martin. I made sure of that. I did the right thing,” Frank said, his voice flat. He kept trying to peer past Keller, into the darkness beyond.

  “No point in trying to look into that darkness, Frank. There’s no one there. It’s just us.”

  “I know that. But we’re not alone? Are we?”

  Keller turned his back on Frank, and sat back on the chair. A rococo table appeared as if out of thin air. It sported a dark green granite surface, and an ashtray carved in the shape of a swan, made out of ebony. Martin produced a