Seasons Between Us

by Alan Dean Foster

  If I had become an astronaut, would the unit have had that feature? Could some other engineer have made the same breakthrough? Yes, of course. What hubris to think I’m that special. Dozens of people helped to build the RCEMP. Only a handful would operate it on the Moon.

  The moment I entered our flat with a baby, everything seemed so strange, like my life had splintered in two and I was me but also someone entirely new. Where would I put Chandra when I wanted to sit in my favourite chair? What if I dropped her on our hard tile floor? Could I watch TV with her nearby, or would she become addicted to the screen as an infant?

  When my mother left for her job the next day, I felt more alone than ever in my life. I needed someone to experience this new parental feeling with me. I needed my husband, and I couldn’t even call him.

  People at ISRO were sympathetic to our situation, but our new baby couldn’t overrule the limited communications channel between the lunar research base and Earth. Having a live feed during the birth had been a massive concession.

  I dictated more messages, long-winded and rambling, while the baby slept on my lap. In those raw thoughts of lonely moments were words I would say to Mangal’s face. I kept those locked away in my private journal, a safety deposit box of bile I needed to expel, and transmitted only partial, positive truths across the void of space.

  During our allotted five minutes of video chat, Mangal gazed at Chandra with soft eyes and said, “I wish I could hold her.”

  I inhaled near Chandra’s head. “I wish you could smell her, too. She is so warm and delicious.”

  On my lap, Chandra smacked her tiny lips and sighed. She warmed me, the weight of her enough to be soothing but not uncomfortable. I stroked her cheek, and an idea penetrated my sleep-deprived brain fog.

  “You can,” I said, thinking and nodding. “You can hold her.”

  His eyes lit as he understood. “The delay—”

  “It’s less than three seconds roundtrip. We can make it work as long as ISRO allows us to use the RCEMP.”

  Three days later, while Chandra napped, I bathed, donned a brand new sari, and carefully placed a red bindi between my brows.

  The tech crew arrived from VSSC in the late afternoon. They moved the sofa behind the swing and the armchairs to the balcony to clear space in the centre of our hall, but that’s because our flat was so small, not because the RCEMP was bulky. It was an identical model to the one on the lunar base. I helped the crew connect it to the power and internet and then ran the systems check.

  Sahana Agarwal stood discreetly in a corner of the room to film the whole thing. Her hair fell in perfect waves, and her makeup and clothes were as fashionable as my sari wasn’t. The publicity aspect was the only reason VSSC allowed this to happen. At first, they asked me to come into the facility, but Public Relations thought the optics were better from a house, so there we all were, crammed into this tiny space as Mangal’s face appeared on the TV screen.

  “My brilliant wife,” he said with a big grin. “Are you ready?”

  I nodded and bounced Chandra in my arms. She’d started to fuss. It was silly, but I wanted her to make a good first impression on the world. Or maybe I wanted the world to judge me as a good mother.

  On the monitor, Mangal disappeared under the VR helmet.

  A second and a quarter later, the time it took for the signal to reach the earth, the arms of the RCEMP bent at the elbows. I walked over to it and placed Chandra in its arms, keeping mine underneath just in case. How foolish that I didn’t trust my own work.

  “Do you feel her?” I asked.

  Three seconds later, he replied, “Yes,” in a husky voice. “I have her.”

  I held my breath and released our baby into his arms.

  The RCEMP cradled Chandra and rocked her back and forth while Mangal, on the screen, completed the same motion on nothing but air. Unlike their interaction on the moon, he and this RCEMP didn’t move synchronously, but the physics of a few seconds delay wouldn’t matter if we were careful. The unit adjusted one arm to support Chandra’s entire body and head. The other arm moved, and its fingertips stroked her dark curls.

  Chandra stared up at the RCEMP’s “face,” which had the same shape and size as the helmet. She blinked, sighed, and then closed her eyes. You could have heard a pin drop in the hush of the room.

  “She’s so small,” he marvelled. “And warm, too.”

  I hadn’t realized the RCEMP temperature feedback was enabled. It wasn’t a necessary feature for this mission. I bit my lower lip as my heart beat faster, and then I gave in to the urge and wrapped my arms around Mangal and our child, cameras be damned.

  “I love you both so very much,” he said, his voice breaking on the last word.

  “You must feel wonderful to make space history like this,” Sahana said softly from her corner.

  On the screen, Mangal nodded, and seconds later, the unit nodded.

  “You too, Doctor Varma,” the reporter said.

  I looked back at her, startled. Nobody had called me that since my post-graduate teaching days. A small smile curved the reporter’s lips.

  The whole world celebrates your accomplishments, but they don’t know the names of those who made your journey possible. Hundreds of engineers designed and built your vehicles. Physicists plotted your course. Chemists gave your rocket the power to escape Earth. Doctors made sure you stayed healthy during a three month stint on the moon.

  They didn’t know the name of the person who kept you safe while a facsimile explored craters. The person who loves you, who’s gazing at an adorable and lovely child sleeping on her lap.

  They didn’t, but now they do.

  It wasn’t your fault, their not knowing. Nor was my resentment, mostly, but I forgive you anyway. My feet may never leave the Earth, but tonight, I feel lighter than air.

  Author’s Notes to My Younger Self: Persistence is more important than perfection, and if you stick with something long enough, you will improve at it.

  Joe

  Vanessa Cardui

  The details of my parents’ lives are not well documented,

  But eight boys and one baby girl were born and soon lamented.

  But ten was more tenacious, and once born, refused to die,

  So Mátyás József Farkas lived, and that boy who lived was I.

  I made it.

  I’m not sure that they wanted me, and I didn’t know them long,

  I was on my own when our little home began crackling with bombs.

  I packed a bag, I locked the house, I gave away the key,

  And I crossed into my parents’ homeland as a refugee.

  I made it . . . but I didn’t stay long.

  I made it . . . but I was only fifteen,

  And no help on a farm or in a restaurant.

  But I did find work that would take me far,

  And keep me busy to the end of the war,

  Helping out the German army with their horses and their carts.

  My clothes got tight and I saw I’d grown,

  I was given some black garb in place of my own,

  The war ended in May, I was on my way, I had made it!

  Now I’d never really been a patient kid,

  Which should partly explain the next thing that I did:

  I started home without getting rid

  Of my black and damning clothes,

  And they scooped me up with their other fallen foes.

  It was a two-week march,

  They only fed us once,

  One loaf of bread, and some meat that I ate half raw.

  You could get shot if you took too long to shit,

  And we drank from the ditch,

  The same water that soaked the corpses of men like me.

  Me
n just like me.

  Three months in camp was a little like life,

  I met the father of my future wife,

  We needed a chess set, so I found a knife, and I made it.

  I kept the knife and I didn’t get caught,

  I didn’t get sick, and I didn’t get shot,

  I guess some are lucky and some are not, but I made it.

  I made it!

  I made it!

  They let us go, and I went where they spoke my tongue.

  And I did what a good man does:

  I supported a wife and kids,

  And for once, my life became about more than just me.

  No, not just me.

  The fall of 1956 was turbulence and fear,

  The slaughter in our streets needs no elaboration here.

  Our muddy trek to freedom was the hardest of my life,

  I made it only goaded by my strong, beloved wife.

  There was one moment when we might have died,

  The machine gun sprayed when our baby cried,

  And we bit the mud, and if they’d really tried,

  Then there would be no song.

  Some thieves took a chance then to rob us blind,

  We were crossing a border, they crossed a line,

  But we crossed in time, and when I read a sign in German . . .

  I knew we’d made it!

  We made it!

  My children and my grandchildren are Canucks.

  ‘Cause I chose not to live in fear,

  And had some amazing luck.

  (And in all my life, I never buried one kid.

  They all survived, like none of my siblings did.)

  Kedves nagypapa, I hope you don’t mind,

  I told your story as though it was mine,

  It might have been wrong that I made this song, but I made it.

  You brought us here, and some of us died,

  But a dozen of us are still alive,

  A dozen descendants with shining lives, we made it!

  We made it!

  We made it!

  Your love and courage pulled us from the abyss.

  And I thank you, for all of this,

  The opportunity to exist.

  I’ll remember you and honour all that you did.

  The loving man I knew when I was a kid.

  Author’s Notes:Joe was my grandfather. When he was dying of cancer, he wrote an autobiography for the benefit of his children and grandchildren. He escaped death in Europe many times before coming to Canada, and in his book, whenever he survived a dangerous situation, he wrote “I MADE IT!” in bold capital letters. When I first read it in 2018, more than 25 years after his death, those words exploded in my mind as a cry of triumph and became the chorus to this song. I wrote it to honour him, and my grandmother, and all of the parents and grandparents who have fled their homelands to make a better life for their children.

  Editors’ Notes: This song had its world premiere during the Calgary book launch of Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders. How appropriate it is also for this anthology on memories and identities.

  Author’s Notes to Younger Self: Hush, child. Your life is a miracle. Great dictatorships were formed and broken, and men and women bloodied, to bring you into being. Your parents, born to improbable enough circumstances themselves, were catapulted from their homes to find each another and concoct you. Your heritage is strife and triumph. By your own strife and triumph, you will consecrate their grief.

  Summer of Our

  Discontent

  Tyler Keevil

  Alan had taken the night shift in their family look-out atop Bryn Y Fan mountain. It had been a struggle to stay awake. Recently the emissaries had rarely appeared before dawn but the Paradigm had changed its patterns before, so they couldn’t afford to be slack.

  He peered through the telescope at regular intervals, scanning the valley in the direction from which the emissaries always appeared. His son Bran had jury-rigged an infrared sensor that they attached at night, using an old thermal imager. It was basic but effective. Through it, Alan saw the orange glow of a few sheep and cows, but no humanoid shapes. No emissaries.

  When the sky paled and an edge of sun slit the clouds on the horizon, he turned from his post and spotted his daughter Summer scrambling up the shale slope behind the lookout. On time. Summer was always on time. She moved efficiently over the uneven terrain, far more agile than him now. Alan was only in his early forties and should still have been in his prime, but around her and Bran he felt increasingly old, and outmoded.

  He opened the door for her. Summer was wearing a wide-brimmed hat that had belonged to her mother and a loose leather jacket. The way it flapped around her made her look like a cowgirl. She glanced at his face and said, “You look tired.”

  “I’m knackered.”

  She crossed the lookout and took up the rifle, which he’d left leaning against the wall. It was a basic Thompson .270, with a retro wooden stock, completing her Western look. She opened it to check the cartridges—as if not trusting him to have loaded it correctly—and snapped it shut. She laid it flat on the table and peered through the telescope, then set about removing Bran’s infrared add-on.

  “You better get some sleep,” she said.

  “If you see anything . . .”

  “I’ll signal.”

  “Before you shoot.”

  “I’m not that trigger-happy, Dad.”

  “I just have a feeling.”

  She looked back at him, curious. Not understanding his impulses—his inexplicable hunches. His children were both rationalists, like Olwen.

  “It’s the solstice,” he said. “The Paradigm might change its methods.”

  “Okay, sensei,” Summer said.

  He let himself out and began the descent to their cottage, Hafod, at the head of the valley, half a mile away. From the base of the shale slope it was easier going—the path well-trodden, an old sheep-track they’d worn in further by trekking to and from the lookout. The cottage was built from traditional stone, with a slate roof typical of Mid Wales. Hafod was Welsh for “summer house” and centuries before it would have been where the farming family lived during the summer months—near the upper pastures where their herd grazed. A thread of smoke leaked from the chimney: they used the Rayburn for cooking and heating, and saved the solar panels and wind turbine for electricity. Much of the work had been done before the Shift. It was just serendipitous that Olwen and he had made their place largely self-sufficient. The reason they’d bought a smallholding in such a remote part of Wales was to live off-grid, get back to basics, at a time when the world was increasingly plugged-in, on-line, wireless, and fused.

  They hadn’t expected their lifestyle to protect them from what happened.

  In front of the cottage, slate flagstones formed a rustic patio, where they’d set up a picnic table. Summer had left their steel coffee bodem there, knowing Alan wouldn’t sleep right away, knowing he had his rituals, his ways of coping. The solstice had always struck him as a particularly melancholy time of year, arriving earlier than expected, at the end of June: summer had barely started, and yet the passing of the longest day meant it was also already over, that autumn was on its way.

  Alan poured himself a mug and cradled it, the warmth through the ceramic seeping into his palms. Sitting out there was something he and Olwen had always done: for morning coffee, or evening wine. Watching the sunlight roll down one valley wall at dawn, as it was doing now, or scroll up the other at dusk. It had been routine since they’d moved out there, just before having the kids, nearly twenty years ago. It seemed an impossible length of time—too long and too short. It didn’t feel so long ago, in terms of his memories, his life with Ol. And yet
it seemed too short for everything that had happened: for the world to change, for most of humanity to be lost—and then for Olwen to be lost, too.

  That felt too recent, and raw. Not a scar, but a wound: 171 days old, but still painful. And their lives were divided into the time before, and the time after. In the time after, he sipped his coffee alone. Tasting it sweet and creamy, with fresh milk from their cows. Gazing down the valley, at the ribbon of river below. And patches of mist on the hills, which were rounded and ancient—very different to the Rockies he’d grown up around.

  Wales had always seemed mystical, and partly mythical to him: his first experience of it having come through reading the Arthurian legends as a kid, and later, as a teenager, Susan Cooper’s fantasy novels. When he’d met Olwen, and moved out here, it felt partly as if he’d entered that story landscape, or dreamscape.

  Now life did feel like a dream, or nightmare: a world taken over. Only pockets of individuals left. Maybe he and Summer and Bran were the last. Maybe that was why the Paradigm was in no rush—was content to send its benevolent, non-aggressive emissaries. No matter how many they turned away, forced back, or shot down. They could only wait for the next, and the next. They pretended they were waiting for one thing, but with each passing day it seemed increasingly futile.

  Alan feared what he was really waiting for was an end, any ending. Even if it meant converting: a truth he would never admit to Summer and Bran. They were young, and hurt, and full of fury. The loss of their mother had made them all the more adamant: they would resist and fight till the last.

  Losing her had affected him differently. All the fight had gone out of him. All the fire. Olwen had carried that with her, carried it away. But he still had to pretend, for Bran’s sake. For Summer’s. He could still maintain appearances for a while.