Writers of the Future 32 Science Fiction & Fantasy Anthology, Page 3

  We took the creaky lift to the third floor and walked to the end of the hall. Its curtain had been pulled open and the unit emptied. Chiq dropped to his knees and searched the ventilator, but the food canister wasn’t there.

  “We had another week,” Dad muttered. “The council will be hearing from me about this.”

  I tugged his arm. “You’re not a constituent anymore. They won’t care. Let’s go.” He tugged Chiq, and I pulled them both into the passageway. A maintenance worker, her long hair knotted into an elaborate tapestry, squeezed past us.

  A day ago I wouldn’t have seen her, but now I tugged gently at her uniform as she passed.

  “Hey!” She slapped my hands away from her as she turned toward me. “What gives?”

  “This unit—”

  “I can’t help you if you’re looking to move in. You’ll need to talk to the council rep—”

  “No, this was our old unit.” My heart beat so loudly I could hardly hear myself. “We left—something.”

  “Anything you left should be in the reclamation depot, level minus two.”

  Chiq raced to the stairwell and launched himself down, not even waiting for an elevator.

  “Thank you.” I smiled at the woman. She didn’t see me, the way I wouldn’t have seen her before the train. I’d always counted Dad’s rank a blessing. Now I felt it a cage, perhaps the way that Mom did. Had. The maintenance worker continued down the hall away from us, clucking softly and shaking her head.

  Dad and I waited for the elevator. By the time we’d arrived at minus two, Chiq had located the corner with the detritus we hadn’t honored as possessions, opposite the small electricity-generating incinerator where all this trash was headed. He dug through the pile, looking for his canister.

  “It’s not here,” I said. I kicked at one midden heap, but I wasn’t looking. There wasn’t anything here for me any longer. I didn’t want Chiq to have more to care about than I had.

  Chiq found the canister. He held it aloft, like an archaic trophy. Its top popped off, and dozens, hundreds of worlds floated to the floor.

  Chiq screamed. He and I dove for the floor with the same thought: we had to find Jiri before Dad could. But Dad knelt next to us.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Chiq said. “They’re my cards.”

  “No,” Dad said, “I’ll help.” He began to pick up cards, reading them as he went, naming worlds, counting lives.

  “This is a children’s game?” he asked nobody. “Millions—perhaps billions—of children, collecting lives as though—” He trailed off, astonished beyond speech. “And all of these dead worlds, lives lost. We mean. . . .”

  He trailed off again, but I heard the direction of his thoughts: the infinitely capricious universe, arbitrary as the unspoken laws that interposed themselves between my body and the miner or the maintenance worker.

  “We’ve got it, Dad,” I said, but he ignored us. Chiq and I exchanged looks.

  “Jiri.” My father picked up the card. “Jiri?” He moaned and lay flat on his back among the middens. He sobbed. I hadn’t ever seen my parents cry. Neither of them cried when Mom left. My father hadn’t cried when his own mother died, not in front of me. I’d never even seen Chiq blubber like my father did now. I turned away, embarrassed, even though nobody was watching.

  All of what my father had held onto, beyond any reason or possibility—all that had fled. He was alone, and neither Chiq nor I knew how to comfort a man who had lost everything. His emotions stung me.

  I ripped the card from his hand as though that would stop his inappropriate display.

  “Give it back!” Dad squealed. He sounded like Chiq, a soft city boy who still revered possession. I held it near his outstretched hand, then snatched it away. Dad collapsed back into the heaped discards, moaning.

  It was wrong to torment Dad, but I couldn’t help myself. Everything he’d told me about the world was a half-truth, a way to possess me by directing my path—a set of rails like those the train ran on, twisting this way and that around inconvenient realities.

  We drained the miners: took from their bodies and their minds and their pockets. We gave them as little in return as we could manage, not even the air filters that would protect their lungs.

  Children of privilege, me and Chiq included, were kept away from the other classes, taught to hoard our collective wealth, though we claimed to disdain ownership. (“I don’t own this, citizen: it belongs to Tonnish City!” But not to Korga, no.)

  Most inconvenient of all, Mom was dead. I looked at the card: it was fresh from late this season, long after Mom would have arrived. The card would document how the planet had been destroyed, but I couldn’t read it through my own blurred and welling eyes.

  If only she’d taken me with her. But I had this card, the billions of lives reclaimed from death by the self-replicating automatons of The Unexpected Delight Company. Assuredly, the resurrected were identical in number and statistical variety to the deceased. As assuredly, she wouldn’t be among them. Nobody who preceded the catastrophe would be. I pictured her as a column of ore-dust, of ash, blown into clouds by a gentle breeze.

  I held the card. My hand trembled. I could crush it, tear it, stomp the chip—throw it into the incinerator. I heard Chiq wail at me, but he seemed very far away.

  I looked at Dad. I had power over him, yet I wanted more than anything for him to tell me what to do. I wanted that direction from my strong father, not this whimpering animal.

  “Please,” he said.

  I listened to the furnace churn. I heard Dad’s ragged breathing and my own pulse thrum in my eardrums. So many systems, and nobody to tell me what to do.

  I took his hand, as though I was the father. “She’s not there, Dad. These are reconstructed planets. Places nothing survived.”

  “I know that, Marq. Still, it will remind me of her.”

  “Why would you want to be reminded of something that makes you feel like this?” I nudged him with my foot, as though sizing him up for a good kick.

  “It tells me where I am in the universe, Marq.”

  “But none of it means anything.”

  “The miners, they use the star tree to navigate across the desert. If they’d been given different stars, would the miners be lost? They’d navigate by whatever they saw above them, whatever new Rhyonon they dreamed. The constellations are arbitrary, but they’re all we have to go by. One day you’ll understand.”

  I felt warm and tingly, as though something of great import had been passed on to me. My family, like the constellations, was composed of separate bodies that sometimes seemed related only by chance. Still, despite the nearly uncrossable distances that separated us, and the powerful forces that tugged us apart, its power to guide me remained strong.

  “Maybe I’m beginning to.” I handed him the card.

  We collected all the others we could find and bundled them safely in Chiq’s coat pocket. We sat together on the long slow train to Tonnish City, the only passengers in the first-class car. Chiq nestled up against my father and slept, while I looked out the dome and dreamed of a steady star to guide me.

  Images Across a Shattered Sea

  written by

  Stewart C Baker

  illustrated by

  Paul Otteni

  * * *

  about the author

  Stewart C Baker is an academic librarian, haikuist, and writer of speculative fiction. He has been a reader since he was very young, but didn’t start writing until his mid-20s. Stewart’s poetry has appeared in various haiku magazines, and his fiction has appeared in places like Flash Fiction Online, Nature, and Galaxy’s Edge, but he has not yet found a reliable way to successfully combine the two forms. Writers of the Future is his third professional short story sale.

  Stewart was born near London, England, and can speak in a convincing English
accent if the mood strikes him. Since leaving England at the age of eight, he has lived in South Carolina, Japan, and Los Angeles, and currently makes his home with his wife and two children in Oregon, where he spends far too much of his time cleaning up the vomit of cats. When he’s not doing that, spending time with his family, working, reading, or writing, he is usually asleep.

  about the illustrator

  Paul Otteni was born in September in 1992, in Kirkland, Washington—a lakeside city near Seattle. As a child, he found himself with an unquenchable thirst for creating, mostly in the form of drawing. Raised in a family that was big into movies, Paul was surrounded with fantastic images of distant worlds and futuristic landscapes. These images would, over time, leave a lasting effect on him. As he grew, film continued to establish itself as a great influence in his life.

  During his schooling, Paul’s interest in drawing faded somewhat: he never saw much of a career in it. It wasn’t until he enrolled in Vancouver Film School that his passion was rekindled. Taking classes in production design opened him to the idea of drawing and painting as a means of design for film, games, and stories.

  Soon after, he invested in a Wacom tablet and software to pursue his interest in digital art. After a year of classes, Paul went on to graduate from VFS with a diploma in film production.

  Currently, he is spending his time back home in Kirkland, working on digital paintings, short screenplays, and finding occasional work on film sets, ranging anywhere from production assistant to visual effects artist. He hopes to continue to improve his illustrations and make a career for himself as a concept artist.

  Images Across a Shattered Sea

  The air on the cliffs above the Shattered Sea was hot as a furnace and twice as dry. Still, Driss couldn’t suppress a shiver at the way the shimmering message-globe moved through the sky, dozens of meters above the churning, black waves.

  He had seen the globes before, of course, but only after they’d been captured and put on display in the village’s cozy museum. It didn’t quite seem real, the way the little ball bobbed and danced on the breeze, drifting ever so slowly toward Fatima where she stood atop a heap of boulders at the edge of the cliff.

  “Here it comes,” she said, waving her net back and forth as she hopped from foot to foot.

  Her eagerness just made the dangers of the place worse. It was as if she didn’t care that one misstep would send her tumbling to her death. Driss himself would have been happy never to have seen the coast in person. It had always been a deadly, desolate place, even in the days when the message-globes blew across the sea in huge clouds which blotted out the sun. And those days were long since past: They had seen only three globes during their two week hike, and this was the first that had come anywhere near them.

  “Gotcha!” Fatima leaped into the air, hooking the bubble-like ball in her net and pulling it down from the sky. “What do you think is in it?”

  She clambered down from the rock, looking for all the world like a goat rushing down from an argan tree after eating the last of its fruits. Driss laughed at the absurdity of the image, the tension flowing out from him as she moved away from the cliff edge.

  “A book of law?” she continued, ignoring his laughter. “Perhaps philosophy? Machine schematics? An encyclopedia?”

  “A recipe for pie,” Driss countered. “A picture of a cat and a joke that makes no sense. Lewd sexual acts.”

  For all of these, as well, had been found in the message-globes. Driss’ father, who had lived through the mad rush to the coast when they first appeared, still spoke with derision of the women and men who had bragged that they would recover the priceless lore of the past, only to find themselves the owners of meaningless trivia.

  Fatima tsked as she sat on a rock. “You have no romance, Driss. No soul. Even those are treasures, to have traveled so long and so far.”

  “Activate it, then. Let us see what ‘treasure’ has come to us across time’s yawning chasm.”

  “You are as eager as I am,” she replied, waving the globe in its net. “Just admit it, and I’ll open it here, where you can be the first to see.”

  Driss crossed his arms. “Kha! Didn’t I come with you on this fool’s hike? Didn’t I leave a steady job with my father to chase down meaningless messages from a dead civilization? Of course I am as eager as you!”

  Fatima grinned and set her catch on the rock.

  Up close, the globe looked much sturdier than it had when drifting through the sky. Its surface, which shimmered with the translucence of soap bubbles when viewed from afar, had taken on the sheen of polished glass, or of the mirror pieces sometimes found in the old, abandoned tunnels to the south. The structure of the thing was not what it seemed, either; far from being smooth, it was made up of hundreds of tiny hexagons, each adjoined to the other in a pattern that shifted subtly as it crossed the message-globe’s surface.

  As solid as it was, the globe clearly wanted to be off; it bobbed at the top of Fatima’s net, held to earth grudgingly at best.

  PAUL OTTENI

  “It’s so beautiful,” she murmured. “Let’s see . . .” She flipped the net over and took the globe in her hands, twisting the top portion around so it popped open with a click to reveal a palm-sized gray square. “There.”

  A small red light flashed, and then the square in the globe’s center came alive, showing not information from the past, but an image of Driss and Fatima in miniature, echoing their expressions and movements in jerky fits and starts.

  In the dimness of the panops room, a solitary monitor flickered to life, bathing Jen’s face in a sickly, stop-motion glare. She sucked in her breath and pushed a buzzer, then passed several minutes by staring at the scene on the monitor, which showed two people who did not yet exist having a discussion about events that had not yet happened.

  The door to the room opened and a man in a beige suit entered. “Whaddawe got, kid?” he asked, clicking the door softly shut behind him.

  In the sanctity of her own head, Jen bristled. I have a PhD in quantum mechanics, she wanted to say, and one in electrical engineering. I am not a “kid.” But these were not the sorts of things one said to the man directly responsible for funding one’s research, even if he was a jumped-up bureaucrat with delusions of being a general from a World War II movie.

  Besides, he’d called her “kid” so many times now it barely offended. In revenge, she referred to him as “hog” in her thoughts. Hog for his sideburns. Hog for his chauvinism. Hog for the way his eyes narrowed in concentration every time she tried to explain how the panoptic shards worked.

  Hog leaned up against the next console over. The smell of his stale sweat, insufficiently masked by strong cologne, wafted toward Jen, making her wrinkle her nose. “So who are they?” he asked. “You picked somebody important, right? The descendants of one of their kings or somethin’?”

  Jen sighed. “That’s not how it works. The panoptic shard can only broadcast what it happens to find—we can send it to a general place and time, but we can’t target it at specific hypothetical individuals.”

  Hog did the eye thing.

  Funding, Jen thought. Remember the funding. “Even if we don’t know who these two are,” she continued, “their appearance and the way they act can tell us plenty about the state of society two hundred years from now. For example, we can assume from the fact that they were able to activate the shard that they have at least a basic understanding of technology. And we can see that the surface is livable, given that they’re not wearing any kind of breathing device or other protection.

  “It’s very general information—certainly not the sort of thing a market analyst would want to know—but since we’re only interested in generalities, it serves our purpose well. And because the images we see in the shards derive in part from the actions we take in the short term, we can use them as a sort of gauge to measure those actions’ effec
ts.”

  “So I map out where we’re gonna bomb, and this’ll show me how far back into the Stone Age we knock ’em?”

  Jen winced. “That’s a gross oversimplification. There are so many variables that we can’t definitively say a chosen military action alone is responsible for what we see. Even our observation itself causes variation with these people’s hypothetical ‘control state.’”

  “What?”

  “Think of it like measuring the temperature in a room. If you send someone in with a digital thermometer, both the person and the thermometer are going to add a small amount of heat. And the shards are very sophisticated pieces of equipment—especially given that we’ve tried to disguise the ones that transmit by putting them in groups of shards which act only as information packets. The mere fact that we’ve sent them will have impacted the course of future events.”

  Hog grunted. “But planning a military action will have some observable effect?”

  “It should, yes.”

  “Then I’ll leave the ‘hypotheticals’ to you, kid,” Hog said with a grim smile. He jabbed one finger at the screen. “Give me a live stream of this in the situation room. I got meetings to hold.”

  Then he left, clicking the door shut behind him, leaving Jen alone with the light of the monitor, which showed the silent images of two people she feared she had killed long before they ever had a chance to be born.

  Brightness. Heat. The bone-deep sense that something was wrong.

  Fatima staggered across a landscape her body insisted was not what she saw, a splitting pain in her head and a hard, silvery ball clutched in one white-knuckled hand.