by John Shirley
One day, after seventeen sleeping periods, a voice amplified from the wall.
"Prisoners! The circuit magistrate has arrived on station! You will approach the food slot in a group, elbows touching, side by side. You are being observed. The door will not open until you have done as you are told."
"At last," Ivan muttered. They did as they were ordered.
"Now," said the voice from the wall, "turn your backs to the door, and put your hands together behind you. If you move, after the door opens, before you are told to move, you will be instantly shot dead."
They again did as they were told, and heard a faint hiss as the door irised in the wall; Jann felt a gust of chill on his hands and the back of his neck, where the hair stood up in response. Then he felt something slithering around his wrist--one of the snakelike artificial beings the Kastillians used for handcuffs. His wrists were painfully vised together.
"Now turn slowly around."
They turned to see four scowling, heavily armed uniformed Kaswills in a corridor of blue-gray metal studded with shock-absorption bolts. "You," said the oldest and shortest of the guards, nodding toward Derv. "Lead the way. Step into the hall and proceed to your right. You others follow him. We are right behind and you are also being monitored remotely, so don't try to run--panels will instantly seal you into the corridor, and a robot will be dispatched to take you prisoner. It will then place you in an airlock from which the air will be removed...and it will be removed very, very slowly."
Jann, Moss and Ivan followed Derv down the hallway. Shouted took them left at a cross-corridor, then down a ramp, and along a long passageway with curved walls. They were met by three more guards who directed them into a waiting room adjacent to the Hearing Chamber.
When Jann moved too slowly, a short, surly guard gave him a jolt with an electronlash and Jann fell convulsing to his knees, grinding his teeth with pain. He smelled something burning, and his gut contracted; it was all he could do to keep from vomiting. When Jann could not get to his feet, the guard raised the electronlash for another jolt.
"Up, dimpkin!" growled Derv.
Fury surged through Jann and he jumped up and spun to face Derv--then saw in the rueful smiles of the other prisoners that Derv had provoked him to get him up and spare him a further lashing.
He nodded, and walked hastily into the waiting chamber.
#
Jann regarded the Kastillian magistrate with a sickly fascination. The man who would decide his fate had a skullish, blotchy face: his hair was some cheap, glossy implant; he had sunken eyes and cheeks, a nose that was a snub and two holes, a slash of a mouth. He wore a black robe and an armband emblazoned with the symbol of the Kastillian interstellar military. His long lean frame was twisted in something near to a question mark shape in his chair and his head hung to the side almost touching his rounded shoulder.
The domed ceiling of the room was of textured steel; there were rows of benches, lined up in front of the magistrate's desk, on the dais before which Jann now stood. Small view ports looked into space, but little could be glimpsed through them from here but the feeble gleam of a few distant, comfortless stars.
Jann was the last of his cell to be judged; twenty-five from other cells had been judged that morning and through the afternoon. The Kastillian magistrate seemed weary and bored. "Are you the one known on the planet Paradine as Jann Grelle?" he asked, stifling a yawn.
"I am Jann a Grelle, DemiLord of Paradine. In one year I am to become Lord of Grelle Manor," said Jann firmly.
The guards standing behind Jann laughed. The magistrate scowled. "Silence, you dimwits! You laugh at his impudence?"
"Shall I lash him, your Omniscience?" a guard asked.
"No, no, not this time. He will have suffering enough. So if you are Jann a Grelle, little else need be said, prisoner, for I have before me remote footage of your murder of several Kaswill Fighters."
"Your Omniscience," Jann said carefully, with as much respect in his tone as he could manage, "I was acting in self defense. They had killed my behemoth, stolen my neighbor's property, and landed without permission. In retaliation for my acts of self defense..." He swallowed. He controlled his voice. "They killed my mother."
Throughout this speech, the magistrate stared in some surprise. Then he laughed: a sound like hollow blocks clattering across a floor. "You are attempting to excuse the murder of my compatriots?"
"Self defense is not murder, your Omniscience. But speaking of murders--who is investigating the murder of my mother and her servants? And who investigates the destruction of my home?"
"What? According to the records here before me, that home was destroyed by your planet's so-called 'Free Ranchers'. They attacked men from a Kastillian ship which had made an emergency landing for repairs--in their mad lust to destroy all in their path they also destroyed this Grelle Manor of yours. Your relatives will have to seek reparation from these 'Free Ranchers'--"
"That is a…" He bit his lip to keep from calling the judge a liar. His voice was hoarse with repressed emotion as he went on, "Your Omniscience has been misinformed. A forensic investigation will reveal the house was completely destroyed--the Free Ranchers have no weapons powerful enough. Clearly it was destroyed by the weapons on Kastillian flyers, or weapons on the Kastillian ship itself. I heard some of your guards speak of the reprisal--"
"So these 'Free Ranchers' cannot destroy a Manor?" the judge interrupted, snorting. "They have fire, I assume? Can they not light torches and throw them at the structure? That is what the record says."
"I visited the manor after its destruction--it was not burned down. I demand an investigation--"
"You demand! Of me? Do you, now!" The judge leaned toward him, eyes ablaze.
Jann swallowed. "I would only suggest, your Omniscience, that by rights I should be judged by the authorities of my own world. The alleged crimes took place there. I ask to be extradited to Paradine."
"Paradine will belong to Kastillia soon enough," said the magistrate dryly. There was a flaring in his eyes and his bony hands twitched into view, clutching at one another, his shoulders quivering. "I have seen it! I have seen the stars rushing to align to the magnet of the Supreme Grandee of Kastillia!" Spittle foamed at the corners of his lips. "The sky is glass and through it, the Great Eye stares!"
Then the gaping stares of the guards warned the Magistrate that he was close to raving. He broke off, and reached into a pocket of his robe, fumbled out a pill dispenser, and popped a calming agent.
"The fatigue, the long day," he muttered. "A mild seizure...computer, strike my, ah, irrelevant responses from the records..."
"The records are thus purged," said the computer, booming sepulchrally from the walls.
"But of course," Jann said, chuckling. He knew now it was no use arguing, no use pleading his cause, no use even in maintaining a pretense of respect. He raised his voice, more and more loudly as he spoke, till he ended with a shout. "I have not only a brute Kastillian, with no sense of justice for my judge! No, that was not enough--he is also a madman! And his madness is itself a poetic summary of Kastillian 'justice'!"
White-hot pain seared through Jann's shoulders as a guard struck him with an electronlash, and he fell down, convulsing.
"And now," the magistrate went on, dabbing at his lips with a kerchief. "And now...my judgment..."
Chapter the Fourth: the Abysmal Dilemma of Jann a Grelle
How beautiful, the lights of the engine that drew his life from him. The glow of the tubular lights increased as he diminished: purple and green glowing from the crystalline tubes; the quartz purple shading to ruby, emerald to sapphire; the connections, of black wire and pure filigreed gold--the Grelle colors!-- sparking iridescently with stolen force. The lambence of the starcraft's engines truly moved him.
Jann a Grelle almost laughed at the irony as, driven by the electronlash, he forced himself to stand and placed his palms and bare chest once more against the receiving plates, and willed a little more of his life force into the engine's power tubes, his urge becoming ergs; adding his force to that of the other energy slaves, driving the multipurpose starcraft His Majesty's Fervent Impulse forward through interstellar space.
He shivered, feeling quantum mindstuff--the essence of his spirit-- drawn away into the machine. It was almost enough, for awhile; enough to propel the ship into quantum jump. He looked down the line of slaves, men and women alternating at the absorption panels, all of them quite nude, some newly enslaved and still fully fleshed; others emaciated, enervated with months on the driveline. There, Derv the Alpha Centauran, his bone-colored hair quivering upward and then going limp with the outflux of his force into the ship; there was Moss, shaking as he tried to maintain contact with the panels. It might be that his heart was about to give out. There were six men from Grelle manor's fields here, too, and three Free Ranchers who had fought beside Jann and Vonn--including one of the women. There were many others, from across the colonized arm of the galaxy. Jann had seen two women and a man die, sucked dry by the ship, in this voyage.
Beyond the slaves stood the robotic task master -a squat figure of cobalt metal, with sullen-yellow lights for eyes: the IntraDigital 77. Called "the Id", in the slave quarters. The Id pointed a jointed pseudopod, and a yellow blue snake of electrons emitted to strike the heavy-worlder's back, raising welts, making him scream piteously even as he pressed harder against the panels. Draw back, but for a moment, and the robot punished you. It wasn't enough to strap a slave to the absorption panels, for the energy that translated into quantum-drive must be forced into the machine by an act of will. Thus the slaves were not artificially pressed to the plates that sucked out their life force, but driven to consciously submit to the interface by the alert brutality of the supervisory robot.
The naked stuff of will itself was drawn into the absorption panels, there transformed, and transferred to the storage bulb, as the ship built its quantum-energy storage to near jump capacity. How consciousness itself become the power to lift a ship into the higher planes, beyond space-time, for its short cut to a far destination in standard space, was a mystery to everyone but the starcraft's designers--and perhaps even to them, ultimately.
It seemed to Jann, as he watched, that the process was a dramatization of the tragedy of existence. Man was born to give up his joy and his freedom to some great confining machine he didn't understand.
But he knew what Vonn would say to that--that this defeatist point of view was distorted by the darkness of his dilemma, his slavery. There was more to life than just striving as your youth burned away.
But here it was hard to believe in anything else.
The slaves watched the quantum-energy increasing in the transparent bulb at the narrow end of the arrowhead shaped room; the quantum energy charge looked like a trapped nebula swirling around a seething blacklight core. When the singularity-nebula sucked into the living blackness at its center, there would come a reactive out-pulse, like a widening ripple in an incandescent pool, and when the pulse reached the containment glass of the bulb, the ship would Jump into higher space and its slaves would be able to rest.
The shimmer in the bulb brightened, sucked into itself, then expanded to reach the glass, and--it was done. The Golden Surge passed from the bulb to lift the whole ship out of space-time, sweeping through the superstructure of the spacecraft, through bulkheads and frameworks like a ripple in reality, and then they were in the quantum Between, the ship protected from the interdimensional chaos only by its probability field.
The galley slaves sagged back into their harnesses, panting, and the robot receded.
Jann hung in his harness, resting as completely as he could. He was far beyond fatigued: he ached in the center of himself, sensing a loss of his living essence. That living essence could be restored--but toiling as a quantum energy slave didn't give you that chance.
Soon the slaves would be unlocked, and led to the slave quarters, there to be given nutritious but nearly tasteless paste for their supper; to await the call for another Jump. A man's Higher Self--what in some eras had been called his Soul-- was said to be untouchable. But the psychic energy with which he lived his life could be siphoned away, and after a certain time, no amount of rest or replenishment would restore him; he would begin to slide downhill faster and faster, aging overnight, finally dying in his harness.
Quantum energy slaves rarely lasted six months. Four, five months at most--and they died. And they didn't even know the names of the ship's various destinations. They had no access to windows; they were given no information. They were never allowed out of the engine room or slave quarters.
The ship carried cargo--luxury items, likely. Many of the Kastillians aboard were on holiday. Slaves were dying so that Kastillians could have imported air-sweeteners, and Alpha Centauran blossom robes, and so that bored Kastillian debutantes could go to the ocean planets during spring break from their Deportment Schools.
The death of a few slaves en route mattered little to the Kastillians, for there were millions of others to be "harvested" from the Abandoned Systems, and the politics of the situation--economic interdependence and the military threat of Kastillians--prevented Earth Central from doing anything about it.
Jann realized he'd begun to slip over some inner borderline into surrender--he knew it because the stolen energies, the crystalline contraption of the engine, had seemed beautiful to him. He told himself again that he would escape. It had never been done successfully, to his knowledge, but what of that? Someone had to be the first.
But after giving up one's will to the ship, the feeling of despair, of bone weary hopelessness, made the dream of escape seem childish. Derv the Alpha Centauran had said it with his usual dour pithiness: "It takes will to plan and execute an escape--and that is exactly what they take from us. The very stuff of will. I no longer have any inner strength...and thus I have no outer strength. I am no one, and thus I cannot escape. Only a real person can escape..."
Jann struggled against this corrosive logic. He reasoned that if he tried to remember who he had been, he might remember that he still was someone.
Jann a Grelle closed his eyes and let himself drift back…to the solace, the hope, of remembering…
He had not always been a slave on a Kastillian Galleon. He had been a DemiLord on the pleasant planet Paradine, in the Polaris system...
Jann a Grelle gloried in riding behemoths through the clouds.
It was a spring day on the planet Paradine...
"This is an interesting specimen," said a voice dry and detached as an airless moon.
Click Here for Part 11 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
SKY PIRATES:Part 9
by John Shirley
Just as that thought came to him, the walls changed shape. The floor rollicked, so that Jann instinctively flailed for support and Moss went down on his hands and knees to keep from falling on his face as their confines shifted; the walls rippled and seemed to inhale, to draw back; the oblong room became even more elliptical, stretched out longer.
Some sub-warden had noted the end of an isolation schedule in the cell, had told the computer to adjust the room: the Russian's time in isolation was up, and the section of wall that had enfolded him now drew apart and flattened out, the rest of the room changing shape to allow for another prisoner, so that they would have the regulation square-yardage.
The walls and floor and settled in place, as if they'd always been in this new shape, and Jann, still sitting, turned to see Ivan. He was a stocky muscular man, his arms covered in faded blue tattoos of flaming skulls and exploding starcraft and guns with tongues. He had high cheekbones, dark eyes, brutal dark-red lips; the hair on his big head just a field of gray stubble that matched the growth on his heavy jaw. Ivan stretched and spread his arms out wide, spun around a few times. A smell was liberated, and the giant recoiled.
"Faugh!" Derv growled. "Ivan, soon the showers will come on--and you will go in first!"
"Ha! I smell like a sweet little flower compared to how you would come out of isolation, you great beast! A hole in the wall for waste, in clutching, and nothing more! I could not even stretch out, but only squat to sleep! Now this--this hellhole-- feels like luxury!"
Perhaps because a man had been set free from clutching, the shower came on, then, chemically treated water shushing down from the ceiling over the hole in the floor, and Ivan jumped in without taking off his coveralls, luxuriating.
The others took their showers, one by one, stripping for it, but Jann was not interested.
Ivan threw himself down, wet and fully dressed, on the floor before Jann, and began to do pushups, his head turned to evaluate the newcomer. "So! A DemiLord, you said! Well now you are what the Stumper joked himself to be--a Dirt Lord! Only you have not even dirt!"
He seemed to think this enormously amusing and had to hold off on his push ups till he was done laughing.
"I have no wish to be clutched," Jann said. "Things are bad enough. So I will not knock your teeth down your throat, though it might perhaps make me feel better to do so. I will fight you--any of you--only in self defense."
Ivan chuckled and resumed his push ups. "I am not trying to provoke a fight." Ivan spoke between grunts as he pumped his body up and down on his arms. "You boy...are just....a lot of wind...it's easy to make such...boasts...of what you might do..."
Perhaps trying to avert conflict, the Centauran broke in with, "Well DemiLord, tell us your story, then. We all must share our stories."
Jann shook his head. "I want no conversation. I just want to think about what I did, and come to terms with it. And then prepare for death. They'll execute me for sure. I'd appreciate it if you left me to do that."
"See here, boy, you may as well come clean," Moss said, stepping out of the shower and into a jet of drying air. "You may be here months--I've heard of people being lost in the Kastillian prison system for years. Eventually we'll know everything about you. We'll know what your favorite breakfast food was and what perfume your girl favored and certainly how you feel about onanism."
Jann sighed. "The Kastillians landed on our property without permission and shot one of my behemoths and stole some stock belonging to…a neighbor. I stupidly tried to confront them. One of their officers seemed ready to shoot me. I killed him, and I ran--I had to kill several others, before it was done. They..." He had to get control of his voice again before he could say it. "They burned down my family's manor. They killed my best friend...my mentor, and...they killed my mother. I killed some more of them and was struck down...I woke up here. Now. You have it--I acted against the advice of someone who knew better, and I called death down upon my family and those near to me. That is more than enough."
The giant sighed deeply, the sound resonant with sympathy.
But Ivan snorted derisively. "That is nothing like enough!" He stretched out on the floor, his hands behind his head. "Tell us in detail! Tell us all! How did this great friend of yours die?"
Jann only shook his head. He could not speak of it any more without weeping and he did not wish to weep in front of these men. It was unwise to seem weak in a prison.
Beyond that, he felt that if once he started talking about it, truly re-living it, the reality would eat through him like a corrosion, and he would crumble inside. He would go mad.
"Let the half-lord alone," said Moss, thoughtfully. "The boy must process these things as he can. He has lost his family, Ivan."
Ivan grunted. "And what have I lost? Only my wife and my children! We were on Taurus, in the Mesonos Nebula, Mr. DemiLord--we had come in search of a life away from the crowded welfare domes of St Petersburg. I was to be a Crescentium miner, operating the great mining machines. And then the Kastillians came and said it was their planet, they had claimed it, and we were all interlopers, and their slaves...We resisted and my family was killed and I had the bad luck to survive..."
"I told you, you were a fool to settle on a disputed planet," Moss said.
"Do you think the InterWorld Mining company told us it was disputed you bastard of a Stumper? No! They said they owned the planet! I suppose the reekers hoped to get away with a great load of Crescentium before the Kastillians caught them. InterWorld will feel my vengeance too, I assure you, once I have done with the Kastillians!"
"What is this Crescentium anyway?" asked Jann, leaning back and closing his eyes. He didn't really care--he thought he should make himself say something, from time to time, so the others would not feel they must provoke him into speaking. Conversation could be maddening, in prison, he was to learn, but at times it also kept them sane.
"Why," said Moss, "it's the stuff of interstellar drives--it's how you drive a starcraft without mind quanta. The metal is found in the stone in crescent shape pieces shaped like an early moon."
Jann remembered, then: Subjected to certain frequencies of light, crescentium released quantum-jump energy--the first Crescentium was discovered on one of the moons of Saturn.
"But it's expensive," Moss went on. "Much cheaper to use the quantum mindstuff of slaves..."
Derv waved a dismissive hand. "Earth has pressed for an agreement to use only Crescentium--as the Earthmen use, as we use--but the Kastillians sneer at the expense. 'Criminals must be used for something--why execute them and waste the energy'?"
The prisoners talked on and on. Jann groaned inwardly. Would they never shut up?
He got up, went to the nearest wall--though they were on a space station, the smooth dull-white wall melding cornerlessly with the floor could not be called a bulkhead--and lay down, with his back to the others, and closed his eyes. After a time, he dozed.
He was distantly aware, a little later, that food emerged from a slot in the wall--the door the guards had thrust him through had vanished. He shook his head when the others asked him if he wanted to eat, and they gave his share to Derv. The big Centauran was perpetually hungry.
Hazily, Jann wondered if they gave Derv the extra because they were afraid of his great size. But something about the offhanded ease with which it was done made him feel that it was something else: comradeship. Even a sort of gruff kindness.
After a time the others quieted down, with the only sound coming from Ivan, as he sang softly to himself, some ancient song in Russian.
By and by the light cycled down into near-darkness, signaling time to sleep.
Jann was afraid to sleep. But sleep took him eventually, and subjected him to exactly the dreams he most dreaded.
#
Jann was wakened when the light cycled up again. He ate a little of the salty mash that constituted breakfast and they each took turns using the hole in the floor, while the others kept their backs turned.
About an hour after breakfast, they had a break in the monotony. There was an instructional hologram, projected from the red crystal node, followed by "refreshment imagery".
The instructional hologram featured supremely depressing material on how to work the absorption panels on a slave-driven starcraft. The ‘refreshment imagery’ was provided once a week to prevent psychosis from a lack of stimulation. The imagery consisted of various planets seen from space, the occasional flower, landscapes and seascapes: postcard material, all quite colorful and unthreatening. Twenty-two slides would project for ten seconds apiece, and then repeat, for half an hour. Jann watched them with a vague interest, for the first twenty slides--but the twenty-first showed the rolling landscape of southern Paradine Prime, and the image went through him like a crossbow bolt. He turned to look at a blank wall instead.
He asked no questions of the others, but couldn't help but listen to them talk. As time passed--Jann spending most of it either exercising, or lying with his face turned toward the wall--he gleaned bits and pieces of their stories till eventually a rough picture of Derv and Moss's "crimes" and captures emerged.
Derv's story was much like Jann's. He had been riding a klemth, an elephantine creature with a cluster of eyes and no visible ears, across the icy steppes of Alpha Centauri's only habitable planet. He'd been on his way to the yearly convocation between alien natives and the human-descended Centaurans like himself. He had come across a Kastillian flyer, the two Kaswills in the process of stripping Puhrum gland from a klemth. The gland is prized by the Kastillians for its supposed enhancements of masculine sexual energy, but the animal is endangered and thus protected by game wardens--and Derv had been a game warden. "You are poachers," Derv told them. "You will come to headquarters and you will pay a fine and your weapons will be confiscated. Then the judge will probably set you free with a warning."
"How can we go there," said one of the Kastillians, "if we cannot find the headquarters?"
"I will take you there!"
"And how can you do that--when you will be either dead or on a slave galley, for your impudence in attacking us?"
"I have not attacked you!"
"You were about to, in the enforcement of your ludicrous poaching law!" Said the Kastillian grinning--and he shot Derv with an energy bolt that would have killed a Terran. Like Jann, Derv had come to himself in the healing chambers aboard the space station. He had left behind no wife or children, but he was fearful for his parents, who relied on him to take care of them in their dotage.
"Should I once more lay my hands on a weapon, never again will I let a Kastillian fire first," said Derv. And he said it more than once in Jann's hearing.
Moss had been the navigator of a freighter that usually plied his home solar system at sub-light speeds. Now and then, when they got an order from someone willing to pay for the Crescentium it took to make the trip, the freighter jumped to the quantum plane and popped back into space in other star-systems. Somehow, despite the usual preliminary check with mass-sensors, they'd come out close to a Kastillian cruiser, the freighter's unexpected gravitational pocket causing the cruiser to spin so that some of its aft mechanisms were torn free in the g-surge. Or so the Kastillians claimed. Certainly some debris floated near their spinning cruiser--which quickly righted and opened a retaliatory fire on the freighter, crippling it--and killing most of the crew. A platoon of Kaswills seemed disappointed when they boarded the freighter and found only Moss left alive.
"Why you fool, it's obvious," said Ivan, "they were aiming to cripple but not kill--for they were after slaves all along. They used your supposed offense as an excuse. What are the odds you'd nearly collide with another ship coming back into space, in all those billions of miles of emptiness in any star system, eh?"
"You needn't tell me that, you Russian pick-swinger! I'm a navigator! The Kaswillss knew that freighters emerged at those coordinates--they watched from till they saw the corona of arrival, and rocketed close so they could play at being damaged! Spinning their ship, jettisoning a lot of junk--all a boldfaced deception! And my Sworn Brethren were on that ship, who were closer to me than family--dead, all of them!"
It occurred to Jann, listening to these melancholy tales, that he too had been set up, in some way. And who knew what other Paradinians had been taken prisoner from Grelle Manor?
Hadn't Vonn hinted that the Kastillians might have been up to something of the sort? And Jann had not listened...
What passed for days in the prison ship slowly rolled by, Jann saying as little as possible. But inwardly he was going over all that had happened, again and again.
It was the Kastillians, he decided. He had been set up. He constructed a reality that he could live with. And the foundation of it was simple and direct:
He was not to blame!
And if they gave him even the slightest, faintest chance...he would take his revenge once, twice, thrice--a thousand times over.
Click Here for Part 10 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Just as that thought came to him, the walls changed shape. The floor rollicked, so that Jann instinctively flailed for support and Moss went down on his hands and knees to keep from falling on his face as their confines shifted; the walls rippled and seemed to inhale, to draw back; the oblong room became even more elliptical, stretched out longer.
Some sub-warden had noted the end of an isolation schedule in the cell, had told the computer to adjust the room: the Russian's time in isolation was up, and the section of wall that had enfolded him now drew apart and flattened out, the rest of the room changing shape to allow for another prisoner, so that they would have the regulation square-yardage.
The walls and floor and settled in place, as if they'd always been in this new shape, and Jann, still sitting, turned to see Ivan. He was a stocky muscular man, his arms covered in faded blue tattoos of flaming skulls and exploding starcraft and guns with tongues. He had high cheekbones, dark eyes, brutal dark-red lips; the hair on his big head just a field of gray stubble that matched the growth on his heavy jaw. Ivan stretched and spread his arms out wide, spun around a few times. A smell was liberated, and the giant recoiled.
"Faugh!" Derv growled. "Ivan, soon the showers will come on--and you will go in first!"
"Ha! I smell like a sweet little flower compared to how you would come out of isolation, you great beast! A hole in the wall for waste, in clutching, and nothing more! I could not even stretch out, but only squat to sleep! Now this--this hellhole-- feels like luxury!"
Perhaps because a man had been set free from clutching, the shower came on, then, chemically treated water shushing down from the ceiling over the hole in the floor, and Ivan jumped in without taking off his coveralls, luxuriating.
The others took their showers, one by one, stripping for it, but Jann was not interested.
Ivan threw himself down, wet and fully dressed, on the floor before Jann, and began to do pushups, his head turned to evaluate the newcomer. "So! A DemiLord, you said! Well now you are what the Stumper joked himself to be--a Dirt Lord! Only you have not even dirt!"
He seemed to think this enormously amusing and had to hold off on his push ups till he was done laughing.
"I have no wish to be clutched," Jann said. "Things are bad enough. So I will not knock your teeth down your throat, though it might perhaps make me feel better to do so. I will fight you--any of you--only in self defense."
Ivan chuckled and resumed his push ups. "I am not trying to provoke a fight." Ivan spoke between grunts as he pumped his body up and down on his arms. "You boy...are just....a lot of wind...it's easy to make such...boasts...of what you might do..."
Perhaps trying to avert conflict, the Centauran broke in with, "Well DemiLord, tell us your story, then. We all must share our stories."
Jann shook his head. "I want no conversation. I just want to think about what I did, and come to terms with it. And then prepare for death. They'll execute me for sure. I'd appreciate it if you left me to do that."
"See here, boy, you may as well come clean," Moss said, stepping out of the shower and into a jet of drying air. "You may be here months--I've heard of people being lost in the Kastillian prison system for years. Eventually we'll know everything about you. We'll know what your favorite breakfast food was and what perfume your girl favored and certainly how you feel about onanism."
Jann sighed. "The Kastillians landed on our property without permission and shot one of my behemoths and stole some stock belonging to…a neighbor. I stupidly tried to confront them. One of their officers seemed ready to shoot me. I killed him, and I ran--I had to kill several others, before it was done. They..." He had to get control of his voice again before he could say it. "They burned down my family's manor. They killed my best friend...my mentor, and...they killed my mother. I killed some more of them and was struck down...I woke up here. Now. You have it--I acted against the advice of someone who knew better, and I called death down upon my family and those near to me. That is more than enough."
The giant sighed deeply, the sound resonant with sympathy.
But Ivan snorted derisively. "That is nothing like enough!" He stretched out on the floor, his hands behind his head. "Tell us in detail! Tell us all! How did this great friend of yours die?"
Jann only shook his head. He could not speak of it any more without weeping and he did not wish to weep in front of these men. It was unwise to seem weak in a prison.
Beyond that, he felt that if once he started talking about it, truly re-living it, the reality would eat through him like a corrosion, and he would crumble inside. He would go mad.
"Let the half-lord alone," said Moss, thoughtfully. "The boy must process these things as he can. He has lost his family, Ivan."
Ivan grunted. "And what have I lost? Only my wife and my children! We were on Taurus, in the Mesonos Nebula, Mr. DemiLord--we had come in search of a life away from the crowded welfare domes of St Petersburg. I was to be a Crescentium miner, operating the great mining machines. And then the Kastillians came and said it was their planet, they had claimed it, and we were all interlopers, and their slaves...We resisted and my family was killed and I had the bad luck to survive..."
"I told you, you were a fool to settle on a disputed planet," Moss said.
"Do you think the InterWorld Mining company told us it was disputed you bastard of a Stumper? No! They said they owned the planet! I suppose the reekers hoped to get away with a great load of Crescentium before the Kastillians caught them. InterWorld will feel my vengeance too, I assure you, once I have done with the Kastillians!"
"What is this Crescentium anyway?" asked Jann, leaning back and closing his eyes. He didn't really care--he thought he should make himself say something, from time to time, so the others would not feel they must provoke him into speaking. Conversation could be maddening, in prison, he was to learn, but at times it also kept them sane.
"Why," said Moss, "it's the stuff of interstellar drives--it's how you drive a starcraft without mind quanta. The metal is found in the stone in crescent shape pieces shaped like an early moon."
Jann remembered, then: Subjected to certain frequencies of light, crescentium released quantum-jump energy--the first Crescentium was discovered on one of the moons of Saturn.
"But it's expensive," Moss went on. "Much cheaper to use the quantum mindstuff of slaves..."
Derv waved a dismissive hand. "Earth has pressed for an agreement to use only Crescentium--as the Earthmen use, as we use--but the Kastillians sneer at the expense. 'Criminals must be used for something--why execute them and waste the energy'?"
The prisoners talked on and on. Jann groaned inwardly. Would they never shut up?
He got up, went to the nearest wall--though they were on a space station, the smooth dull-white wall melding cornerlessly with the floor could not be called a bulkhead--and lay down, with his back to the others, and closed his eyes. After a time, he dozed.
He was distantly aware, a little later, that food emerged from a slot in the wall--the door the guards had thrust him through had vanished. He shook his head when the others asked him if he wanted to eat, and they gave his share to Derv. The big Centauran was perpetually hungry.
Hazily, Jann wondered if they gave Derv the extra because they were afraid of his great size. But something about the offhanded ease with which it was done made him feel that it was something else: comradeship. Even a sort of gruff kindness.
After a time the others quieted down, with the only sound coming from Ivan, as he sang softly to himself, some ancient song in Russian.
By and by the light cycled down into near-darkness, signaling time to sleep.
Jann was afraid to sleep. But sleep took him eventually, and subjected him to exactly the dreams he most dreaded.
#
Jann was wakened when the light cycled up again. He ate a little of the salty mash that constituted breakfast and they each took turns using the hole in the floor, while the others kept their backs turned.
About an hour after breakfast, they had a break in the monotony. There was an instructional hologram, projected from the red crystal node, followed by "refreshment imagery".
The instructional hologram featured supremely depressing material on how to work the absorption panels on a slave-driven starcraft. The ‘refreshment imagery’ was provided once a week to prevent psychosis from a lack of stimulation. The imagery consisted of various planets seen from space, the occasional flower, landscapes and seascapes: postcard material, all quite colorful and unthreatening. Twenty-two slides would project for ten seconds apiece, and then repeat, for half an hour. Jann watched them with a vague interest, for the first twenty slides--but the twenty-first showed the rolling landscape of southern Paradine Prime, and the image went through him like a crossbow bolt. He turned to look at a blank wall instead.
He asked no questions of the others, but couldn't help but listen to them talk. As time passed--Jann spending most of it either exercising, or lying with his face turned toward the wall--he gleaned bits and pieces of their stories till eventually a rough picture of Derv and Moss's "crimes" and captures emerged.
Derv's story was much like Jann's. He had been riding a klemth, an elephantine creature with a cluster of eyes and no visible ears, across the icy steppes of Alpha Centauri's only habitable planet. He'd been on his way to the yearly convocation between alien natives and the human-descended Centaurans like himself. He had come across a Kastillian flyer, the two Kaswills in the process of stripping Puhrum gland from a klemth. The gland is prized by the Kastillians for its supposed enhancements of masculine sexual energy, but the animal is endangered and thus protected by game wardens--and Derv had been a game warden. "You are poachers," Derv told them. "You will come to headquarters and you will pay a fine and your weapons will be confiscated. Then the judge will probably set you free with a warning."
"How can we go there," said one of the Kastillians, "if we cannot find the headquarters?"
"I will take you there!"
"And how can you do that--when you will be either dead or on a slave galley, for your impudence in attacking us?"
"I have not attacked you!"
"You were about to, in the enforcement of your ludicrous poaching law!" Said the Kastillian grinning--and he shot Derv with an energy bolt that would have killed a Terran. Like Jann, Derv had come to himself in the healing chambers aboard the space station. He had left behind no wife or children, but he was fearful for his parents, who relied on him to take care of them in their dotage.
"Should I once more lay my hands on a weapon, never again will I let a Kastillian fire first," said Derv. And he said it more than once in Jann's hearing.
Moss had been the navigator of a freighter that usually plied his home solar system at sub-light speeds. Now and then, when they got an order from someone willing to pay for the Crescentium it took to make the trip, the freighter jumped to the quantum plane and popped back into space in other star-systems. Somehow, despite the usual preliminary check with mass-sensors, they'd come out close to a Kastillian cruiser, the freighter's unexpected gravitational pocket causing the cruiser to spin so that some of its aft mechanisms were torn free in the g-surge. Or so the Kastillians claimed. Certainly some debris floated near their spinning cruiser--which quickly righted and opened a retaliatory fire on the freighter, crippling it--and killing most of the crew. A platoon of Kaswills seemed disappointed when they boarded the freighter and found only Moss left alive.
"Why you fool, it's obvious," said Ivan, "they were aiming to cripple but not kill--for they were after slaves all along. They used your supposed offense as an excuse. What are the odds you'd nearly collide with another ship coming back into space, in all those billions of miles of emptiness in any star system, eh?"
"You needn't tell me that, you Russian pick-swinger! I'm a navigator! The Kaswillss knew that freighters emerged at those coordinates--they watched from till they saw the corona of arrival, and rocketed close so they could play at being damaged! Spinning their ship, jettisoning a lot of junk--all a boldfaced deception! And my Sworn Brethren were on that ship, who were closer to me than family--dead, all of them!"
It occurred to Jann, listening to these melancholy tales, that he too had been set up, in some way. And who knew what other Paradinians had been taken prisoner from Grelle Manor?
Hadn't Vonn hinted that the Kastillians might have been up to something of the sort? And Jann had not listened...
What passed for days in the prison ship slowly rolled by, Jann saying as little as possible. But inwardly he was going over all that had happened, again and again.
It was the Kastillians, he decided. He had been set up. He constructed a reality that he could live with. And the foundation of it was simple and direct:
He was not to blame!
And if they gave him even the slightest, faintest chance...he would take his revenge once, twice, thrice--a thousand times over.
Click Here for Part 10 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Friday, July 17, 2009
A Planet Of Your Own
by David Agranoff
art by Shasta Fletcher
More haunted than anything on earth, deep space to the human ear is beyond silence. To the awareness of the spirit it is a chaotic soundscape. Ninety nine percent of the universe is a total mystery even to the experts who study the heavens. For every one of the billions of souls to have lived and breathed the air of the earth hundreds of stars spin in the heavens. Each of those stars have collected planets in its pull and spun them into masses of gas and sometimes life. Planets that are green and lush, and some that are frozen and dead.
Each world speaks its own language.
One journey ends
Gene Reddick gripped his grandson’s hand. He had been in the hospice for only three months but he was still surprised that Billy was coming everyday. Most boys at the age of twelve wouldn’t understand until long into adulthood the opportunity they missed by not getting to know their elders. Not Billy, he understood.
The cancer had spread into his bones and was buried so deep in his body that nothing modern medicine could do would help him. He had lived ninety one years and had come a long way from the one room school house in southern Indiana. Not just geographically speaking; sure, he had established himself in western Washington. He married Estella while in graduate school and they had raised a family of three. His oldest grandson had started a family and his youngest Billy loved and cared for him these last few years since Estella passed.
No grandson needed to be so kind. Gene knew he deserved more and had told him many times to go play and be young.
“It’s not right you being so full of life spending your days watchin’ your papa die.”
Billy was a great listener when he wanted to be. He would ask questions, deep questions, deeper than a boy like him digs. The meaning of life, but not just life, why create life? It wasn’t questions about life that kept Billy coming back; he had deeper questions still--indeed, why spend everyday with a dying old man if you wanted to learn about life?
“Are you afraid?”
It was weeks of visits before he asked.
“Of dying? Who wouldn’t be – Billy you have no right to think about this until you’re older.”
“What is going to happen to you Grandpa?”
Gene looked at his TV, it was on but the sound was muted. The news raged on silently but he knew every story. The war in the middle east had claimed thirty more, a corporation was indicted yet no one would see blame, the rates of drug addiction and unemployment had risen this month again. He had been born into a simpler world, and was leaving it a mess.
He knew it wasn’t his fault; six billion other people and billions more of their ancestors shared the blame. Billy was waiting patiently for an answer.
“You mean after I’m dead.”
Billy nodded. He would wait until he was damned ready to talk about it, one lesson Billy had taken to heart. He didn’t have much time left, so let him take what he could, to make sure he said the right thing. Billy waited.
“My soul is pretty important to me, but I figure every one of those people – on both sides mind you - that died over in that damn war think they are pretty important to.”
Gene hit the power button on the remote, the TV clicked off and he stared at the blackness of the screen.
“It’s a big universe, I suppose--room enough for all of us somewhere.”
This light becomes you
He watched the boy tremble and felt guilt for the first time. Mark Neale hadn’t felt a shred of it when he saw them walking down El Cajon Blvd after dark. He knew she worked this street and wondered why the hell she had a child with her? He didn’t usually hunt on such busy streets but this was too much to pass up.
Her name was Didi and her son, Chucky--at least that was what she said. She shook like a cellphone on vibrate coming down off heroin and methadone. She asked for forty dollars, hesitating only slightly before offering one hundred for the family package.
Sold, Mark brought her back to the house, he could only hunt while Sally and the kids were visiting her parents in West Virginia. It was a pattern that was difficult for a profiler to pick up on. He got out his born in the USA vinyl and turned up the Boss as loud as he could. The neighbors thought he was drunk and relieving his glory days. He assumed that is what they thought.
It was his fourth hunting trip and Didi was still clutching her purse when the plastic Albertson's bag went over her head. He twisted the bag in his fingers behind her neck trapping her breath. It blew out filling up the bag but her mouth and nose were cut off from planet earth. Didi fought to keep her eyes on Chucky but she could only see a frosted white shape. She reached out for him, wanting to beg him, to plead for help. She was without air or a voice to use. Her body hit the floor thumping like wet laundry. Chuckie didn’t move an inch; would he stand there like a fucking sculpture while Mark played operation with mommy’s guts?
Time to find out.
The door burst open and Mark turned just in time to see the first two members of the SWAT team enter. They had followed him. Was Didi a cop? Mark quickly lifted his knife to his own throat but he didn’t have a chance. The light burst from the barrel and swallowed his existence. The bullet traveled nine hundred miles per hour but he was moving faster now.
Whisper
Garrett Johnson wondered when the hell his coffee had gotten so cold; he slammed down the cup but didn’t wake Barry, the other technician. They were the only ones working in the afternoon. Since the radiation haze was weaker at night, prime time listening were always vampire hours.
He sat ready for numbers, languages, patterns; who knew if the signals would come during prime time, or interrupting a soap opera. So Garrett gave up on One Life To Live to spend his days monitoring the skies through the one-hundred-twenty-five satellite dishes the government and the private sector had patchworked together for SETI in southern New Mexico. Besides Barry, he was left alone during most afternoons.
So here he was searching for extra terrestrial intelligence – a task one could argue was the most important endeavor of the human race, and tried desperately to stay awake. If he was lucky, he would get half-an-hour-long signals downloaded that he’d have to compress into minute-long MP3s. Most SETI research was done from tapes, but there was something important about listening live to his team.
All the money spent on Garrett’s education, which was three times the amount of social service programs for the homeless in the state of Rhode Island, got him a seat here listening to background buzz. The phantoms of space are good at hiding, and their hum became as natural to him as the soft breath of his wife as she slept.
His eyes felt heavy, if only he had drank that whole cup of coffee before it became chilly. He dreamed he was at home. His mother’s home, the one where he and Rebecca Crossen had been all the family one could ever need. He hadn’t been back to Minneapolis since the week of the funeral, not since the day he and Jessica had packed up his mother’s things.
The whisper was soft and gentle, calling his name.
Garrett shook awake and looked at Barry still deep asleep in his sound muffling headphones. Even if he had whispered his name--Garret had his on, listening to the hum.
If the Tree falls
The chainsaw ripped through the center of the great tree spitting splinters into the river that passed by for hundreds of years. The tree had stood over this river since before an upright being had set foot in the land. It watched as the rivers once clear became dirty and brown, it listened as the roar of thunder took over the clear skies.
The ground churned as the giant yellow earth mover ripped through the soil. Thousands of earthworms–-members of eighteen species in all--circled up to avoid the attack.
Worms have a mouth, but do not have a throat. Nor any means to scream in terror. Their bodies are covered in fine hairs called Setae which they use to feel. In moments of attack--whether it would be birds eating them or small children showing their parents what they found--the hairs retract.
Worms and trees have no screams, but they are not without a voice.
Listen Billy
The whole family had come in, one at a time, all day long, telling him that they loved him. It was his first clue that he was going to die soon. Billy was going to wait for his turn but Gene asked for him to stay with him. It took more strength than he wanted to think about, but he held Billy’s hand.
The youngest of the great grandkids were in and out, his grandchildren took only a few minutes, and Gene’s three children (who were not so young themselves) were distraught. While his son Luther Reddick talked to him about the house they lived in during the sixties, Gene found his attention drifting out the window.
Night had come in so many ways.
He didn’t even have the strength to close his eyes. Luther’s voice faded away. The room faded away. The bed was gone and without any fanfare, his body blew away in cosmic wind, his soul being pulled toward a bright light.
“What did he say?”
“Listen Billy, and then he was gone.”
“Just like that.”
“Yep, gone, just like that.”
You need a vacation
Garrett nervously tapped his pen on the table. Members of his SETI team were leaning back in their chairs and he knew none of them took him seriously.
“Garrett,” Barry coughed, “Have you lost your mind?”
“It wasn’t a voice exactly, but coming through the clicks and pops you can hear my name. Look--it repeated three different days as soon as the scan passed this system, it’s a little planet named Vir 70 by the Astronomers who…”
All of the four men and women looked at each other and then back at Garrett. Their team leader Lori Greenshaw rubbed her eyes before standing up enough to lean over the table.
“The magnetic pull of the poles spinning a planet gives off radio waves; we have charted around one hundred planets, give or take. Beyond those, there are likely a billion or more Jupiter-sized planets in our galaxy alone.”
Garrett put his hands up, he hated when she talked down to them like they didn’t know as much as a fifth grader. But he also knew she wouldn’t stop.
“It’s seventy-eight light years away. Consider how many radio waves are humming in the background, and considering how many sounds and variables are possible, don’t waste our time until you have studied the source and the sound a little deeper.”
“Dude seriously,” Barry laughed. “It’s like that Ozzy song they played backwards.”
Everyone but Garrett laughed.
“Fine,” He would let it go with them--but he knew what he had heard.
Find your voice
“If a life form were not humanoid--would it’s language be anything like our own?”
James thought about her question, he didn’t want to get into another of Rachel’s deep conversations, not that he had much choice. They were both locked into a tree stand a hundred feet above the forest floor by U shaped bike locks. They could hear the far off sound of chainsaws and knew the forest was coming down around them.
“No--it would be different.”
“I think the earth speaks to us all the time.”
They both wanted to save this old-growth forest, but her motivations were so alien to James. He wasn’t here for any hippie Gaia worship, he just loved being in the forest, breathing the clean air. He just didn’t want to see it go.
“It’s not language.”
“You don’t think the earth has a spirit, a soul?”
“Maybe, but not one we are able to understand.”
“Exactly, maybe she is talking to us through the wind, the rustling of leaves.”
“Or earthquakes and Hurricanes.”
Rachel smiled, for all his macho-ness, he was getting it. She reached and felt the U Lock scrape her neck, it was a struggle but she wanted to hold his hand. James stretched and felt her finger tips.
“If she could she’d thank us.”
Welcome home
The light faded away. Gene felt himself waking and wanted to stretch his muscles. His body was gone. He felt a breeze, air was moving but he didn’t feel any lungs. He woke up thirsty every single morning of his ninety-one years, but this time, he could feel the water already. Was it a spring day? He could feel warmth, smell blooming flowers. That wasn’t all. He felt cold, the fresh feeling of snow fall. He could feel feet running, mouths chewing on grass. He could feel it all.
He remembered this feeling, a distant memory of a home of his own - a world of his own.
Message from your mother
“Give it a try mister man of science.” Jessie was stoned. Garrett knew it when he walked in the door. The only thing he liked about his wife stoned was that she liked to walk around the house in her underwear. She sat on the bed in her bra and underwear looking at the Parker Bros Ouija board.
“From the makers of fine board games and a conduit to the dead,” He laughed and kissed her. She laughed and tapped the board.
“Available at Wal-mart!” Standing up she grabbed his belt buckle. “No, no, try it.”
He shook his head. She gave him the ‘I’ll make it worth your while’ eyes, and he melted like candle wax. She suddenly became serious as their finger tips touched the plastic piece.
“Who do you want to talk to?”
“Anyone from the planet Vir 70.”
“Dead people, not aliens silly.”
“Can I talk to someone from the planet Vir 70?”
The piece moved softly to the yes spot. Garrett laughed.
“No way,” Jessie smiled. “Do you have a name?”
Garrett felt the piece moving slightly faster than their fingers to the yes spot on the board.
“What is your name?”
The piece moved quickly to the letter R. It moved so fast it almost passed E. Garrett looked at his wife and silently told her he didn’t think it was funny when the piece finished spelling the name Rebecca. It was still moving and Garrett lifted his fingers until only the tip of his index touched the piece. Jessica did the same but the piece still moved spelling out Crossen.
“Garrett’s mother?”
Yes the piece responded. They looked at each other and a moment of silence passed.
“I asked to talk to someone from the planet Vir 70.”
The piece went to yes.
“Hey Becky are you on that planet?”
The piece went to no. The piece started moving across the board quickly spelling--I,M,V,7,0.
You should see the other ones
Mark just had enough time to realize the cop was shooting him, not enough time to be thankful he would miss Sally on 20/20, they had paid for her exclusive story. Marriage to a man who had stalked hookers and children became good business for Sally. She wrote books, sold film rights, and tried to protect the children from the memory of their father.
Mark’s soul had left the earth like a bullet train, the light overtook him and spit him across space. That was what it felt like; he was an old soul that had returned to earth and failed again to transcend. He was returning to his heavenly home and relaxed. He hated life on earth, somehow he had always connected to something greater. Something his human brain could not handle.
Hunting was something he enjoyed, he supposed that somewhere inside he always had this memory of spirit; the body was a disgusting prison of blood and guts. He was a liberator deserving of chocolates and flowers, not scorn.
Home was a world of lush mountains, rolling up near the shores of beautiful green oceans teaming with life, so much a part of his soul that he ached with sorrow each moment away. One planet in a system of three, each one four times the size of earth, floating around a pulsar still young in the celestial nursery when last his spirit was called for duty.
As he traveled further from earth, his body becoming memory, his name meaningless... But his experience was floating just beyond him.
He felt the world taking shape around him. The pleasure of life slipped past him, the green mountains had melted to ash, the oceans boiled to vapor which blew like hot gas throughout the atmosphere. High in the sky the pulsar burned bright, looking as close as a full moon.
A nova.
Reddick reunion
William Reddick had paid the hospice nurse twenty dollars to let him know when his grandfather’s room was next empty. He had promised her one hundred for the use of the room for a single night. It was over four months before the phone call came. The woman who had been dying in the room had passed. Her family had cleared out her things and he had one night before the next tenant of the arrived.
It had been almost ten years since he had last been here, but little had changed. When the nurse let him in, she gave a reminder to be quiet that no one knew he was there. Billy looked around as the door shut. The sun was going down. If he was going to have the light on, he would have to stuff a towel under the door.
The room was almost empty: TV and the bed. Billy understood a lot more filled this room. It was a gateway of sorts. One after another this room was the last stop in the lives of hundreds of human beings. This room was not empty.
He pulled out his tape recorder and microphone. Put in a fresh cassette and checked to make sure the counter was on 000. He pushed record.
“Grandpa? Gene Riddick?”
He waited while the tape reeled away.
Is an ocean aware that it is alive? Is the sky aware of its own functions? When does a soul forget that it once had a name? Creating a breeze for a summer day or dropping rain into fields filled with seeds might seem complicated, but to a transcended spirit, answering something as alien as a name is more of a challenge. It came across the heavens like a wave rolling up on him...Gene Riddick.
His name? It washed over him.
Time and distance didn’t matter, as he traveled to the voice. It was ironic that it seemed so long ago since he related to a physical body and already he felt like he was just an echo of Gene Riddick. Physically speaking, it was great distance, spiritually speaking, he never left here really, not even during his times in the body.
Billy was ready to listen.
Billy pushed stop. The counter was on 150. He put on his headphones as the tape rewound. Volume on twenty-five percent, he heard himself ask for his grandfather before turning up the tape until it was buzzing with near silence. He heard steps walking by the room on the tape that he hadn't heard when he was recording. At least they sounded like steps. Then the whisper.
“Billy. Don’t worry, I’m home.”
The counter was on 027 when it started. He rewound and listened to it four times but that was it. The tape wound through to 150 and the old man had spoken his piece.
Clear as crystal
Jessica hadn't told Garrett about it. While he believed that his mother was trying to communicate with him, there was only so far he would go for answers. He would have laughed at her and tried to stop her. She had to drive north to Santa Fe to find a medium that could channel the spirit for her. She talked to one in town, but he seemed like a fraud to her.
The channel’s name was Lydia, she asked her to come on Rebecca’s birthday or the day she passed. Her birthday was three weeks away and the appointment was set. She brought every item of Rebecca’s that had made the trip down from Minnesota. When she arrived at the medium’s house they piled the items on the kitchen table and held hands.
Lydia was in her sixties and her three daughters completed the circle. They were into Wicca, the whole house was filled with earth spirit and pagan symbols. Lydia wanted to turn around and leave before her hands had a chance to get sweaty.
“Your negative spirit is gonna push Rebecca away,” Lydia warned Jessica with a whisper. It didn't keep her away. Rebecca had heard the call and came into the room. Lydia sensed her presence right away.
“She is here and very happy to see you.”
Jessica wanted to look around the room but was worried she might break the connection.
“Ask your question, we may not have time.”
“Becky, Garrett misses you so much. When last we spoke you told Garrett and I that you were Vir 70, what did you mean?”
Lydia was silent for along time. Jessica was sweating now.
“Rebbeca wants you to understand the scope of the heavens.”
“The scope?”
“She says life exists on many worlds, but not one is like the other. Our souls are tested on earth but when the test is over we live in a world of our own...”
Lydia let go, the daughters dropped their hands. Jessica opened her eyes to wide smiles.
“Is that heaven?”
Lydia took Jessica’s hand. “Sounds like it to me.”
If the spirits are killing
“What are we but shells for the spirit?”
“I don’t see your point?”
James wished she would stop talking, they ran out of water hours ago and the sheriff’s department had arrested their support team and cleared out base camp. No water was coming. The trees were falling so close now that they had to raise their voices over the chainsaws and the trees, when they screamed their way down to the ground. The old growths crashed and shook the forest.
“Earth, Venus or alpha fucking centauri or my body-–Yours. Turtles, Bears, they are just different sized shells.”
James watched as a family of deer ran away from the logging crew. The sheriff was shouting into a bullhorn and seemed to be getting closer. James sat up as much as the U Lock allowed and saw the sheriff and a construction crew assembled below them. They had a crane. If they could get up, they’d use the Jaws of Life to cut them free.
“Murderers...”
A chainsaw roared near by. They heard the familiar sound of a tree falling and hitting other trees. Rachel felt tears forming that never came. The tree was an old growth; it would have taken both of them to hug all the way around it. The crew on the ground had expected the tree to fall south, but it fell north. They winced and turned away, but the home office had been screaming for board length that the protestors had denied them.
The tree hit Rachel instantly knocking her brain around in her skull. James was locked into another branch and felt his tree falling before his neck snapped under the pull of the lock. He saw a flash and then light.
Apple never fell far from the tree
He closed his eyes, but felt both trees crashing to the ground. He watched his body being ripped apart and instantly let go. The spirit that was in that body didn’t travel at all, feeling the earth take shape in it’s place.
The rivers ran hot with chemicals, the oceans became devoid of life, billions of souls waited in mountains of waste to be eaten. Molded stone and steel tore into the surface and scarred the sky. What realm was the next escape?
Click Here for Part 9 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
More haunted than anything on earth, deep space to the human ear is beyond silence. To the awareness of the spirit it is a chaotic soundscape. Ninety nine percent of the universe is a total mystery even to the experts who study the heavens. For every one of the billions of souls to have lived and breathed the air of the earth hundreds of stars spin in the heavens. Each of those stars have collected planets in its pull and spun them into masses of gas and sometimes life. Planets that are green and lush, and some that are frozen and dead.
Each world speaks its own language.
One journey ends
Gene Reddick gripped his grandson’s hand. He had been in the hospice for only three months but he was still surprised that Billy was coming everyday. Most boys at the age of twelve wouldn’t understand until long into adulthood the opportunity they missed by not getting to know their elders. Not Billy, he understood.
The cancer had spread into his bones and was buried so deep in his body that nothing modern medicine could do would help him. He had lived ninety one years and had come a long way from the one room school house in southern Indiana. Not just geographically speaking; sure, he had established himself in western Washington. He married Estella while in graduate school and they had raised a family of three. His oldest grandson had started a family and his youngest Billy loved and cared for him these last few years since Estella passed.
No grandson needed to be so kind. Gene knew he deserved more and had told him many times to go play and be young.
“It’s not right you being so full of life spending your days watchin’ your papa die.”
Billy was a great listener when he wanted to be. He would ask questions, deep questions, deeper than a boy like him digs. The meaning of life, but not just life, why create life? It wasn’t questions about life that kept Billy coming back; he had deeper questions still--indeed, why spend everyday with a dying old man if you wanted to learn about life?
“Are you afraid?”
It was weeks of visits before he asked.
“Of dying? Who wouldn’t be – Billy you have no right to think about this until you’re older.”
“What is going to happen to you Grandpa?”
Gene looked at his TV, it was on but the sound was muted. The news raged on silently but he knew every story. The war in the middle east had claimed thirty more, a corporation was indicted yet no one would see blame, the rates of drug addiction and unemployment had risen this month again. He had been born into a simpler world, and was leaving it a mess.
He knew it wasn’t his fault; six billion other people and billions more of their ancestors shared the blame. Billy was waiting patiently for an answer.
“You mean after I’m dead.”
Billy nodded. He would wait until he was damned ready to talk about it, one lesson Billy had taken to heart. He didn’t have much time left, so let him take what he could, to make sure he said the right thing. Billy waited.
“My soul is pretty important to me, but I figure every one of those people – on both sides mind you - that died over in that damn war think they are pretty important to.”
Gene hit the power button on the remote, the TV clicked off and he stared at the blackness of the screen.
“It’s a big universe, I suppose--room enough for all of us somewhere.”
This light becomes you
He watched the boy tremble and felt guilt for the first time. Mark Neale hadn’t felt a shred of it when he saw them walking down El Cajon Blvd after dark. He knew she worked this street and wondered why the hell she had a child with her? He didn’t usually hunt on such busy streets but this was too much to pass up.
Her name was Didi and her son, Chucky--at least that was what she said. She shook like a cellphone on vibrate coming down off heroin and methadone. She asked for forty dollars, hesitating only slightly before offering one hundred for the family package.
Sold, Mark brought her back to the house, he could only hunt while Sally and the kids were visiting her parents in West Virginia. It was a pattern that was difficult for a profiler to pick up on. He got out his born in the USA vinyl and turned up the Boss as loud as he could. The neighbors thought he was drunk and relieving his glory days. He assumed that is what they thought.
It was his fourth hunting trip and Didi was still clutching her purse when the plastic Albertson's bag went over her head. He twisted the bag in his fingers behind her neck trapping her breath. It blew out filling up the bag but her mouth and nose were cut off from planet earth. Didi fought to keep her eyes on Chucky but she could only see a frosted white shape. She reached out for him, wanting to beg him, to plead for help. She was without air or a voice to use. Her body hit the floor thumping like wet laundry. Chuckie didn’t move an inch; would he stand there like a fucking sculpture while Mark played operation with mommy’s guts?
Time to find out.
The door burst open and Mark turned just in time to see the first two members of the SWAT team enter. They had followed him. Was Didi a cop? Mark quickly lifted his knife to his own throat but he didn’t have a chance. The light burst from the barrel and swallowed his existence. The bullet traveled nine hundred miles per hour but he was moving faster now.
Whisper
Garrett Johnson wondered when the hell his coffee had gotten so cold; he slammed down the cup but didn’t wake Barry, the other technician. They were the only ones working in the afternoon. Since the radiation haze was weaker at night, prime time listening were always vampire hours.
He sat ready for numbers, languages, patterns; who knew if the signals would come during prime time, or interrupting a soap opera. So Garrett gave up on One Life To Live to spend his days monitoring the skies through the one-hundred-twenty-five satellite dishes the government and the private sector had patchworked together for SETI in southern New Mexico. Besides Barry, he was left alone during most afternoons.
So here he was searching for extra terrestrial intelligence – a task one could argue was the most important endeavor of the human race, and tried desperately to stay awake. If he was lucky, he would get half-an-hour-long signals downloaded that he’d have to compress into minute-long MP3s. Most SETI research was done from tapes, but there was something important about listening live to his team.
All the money spent on Garrett’s education, which was three times the amount of social service programs for the homeless in the state of Rhode Island, got him a seat here listening to background buzz. The phantoms of space are good at hiding, and their hum became as natural to him as the soft breath of his wife as she slept.
His eyes felt heavy, if only he had drank that whole cup of coffee before it became chilly. He dreamed he was at home. His mother’s home, the one where he and Rebecca Crossen had been all the family one could ever need. He hadn’t been back to Minneapolis since the week of the funeral, not since the day he and Jessica had packed up his mother’s things.
The whisper was soft and gentle, calling his name.
Garrett shook awake and looked at Barry still deep asleep in his sound muffling headphones. Even if he had whispered his name--Garret had his on, listening to the hum.
If the Tree falls
The chainsaw ripped through the center of the great tree spitting splinters into the river that passed by for hundreds of years. The tree had stood over this river since before an upright being had set foot in the land. It watched as the rivers once clear became dirty and brown, it listened as the roar of thunder took over the clear skies.
The ground churned as the giant yellow earth mover ripped through the soil. Thousands of earthworms–-members of eighteen species in all--circled up to avoid the attack.
Worms have a mouth, but do not have a throat. Nor any means to scream in terror. Their bodies are covered in fine hairs called Setae which they use to feel. In moments of attack--whether it would be birds eating them or small children showing their parents what they found--the hairs retract.
Worms and trees have no screams, but they are not without a voice.
Listen Billy
The whole family had come in, one at a time, all day long, telling him that they loved him. It was his first clue that he was going to die soon. Billy was going to wait for his turn but Gene asked for him to stay with him. It took more strength than he wanted to think about, but he held Billy’s hand.
The youngest of the great grandkids were in and out, his grandchildren took only a few minutes, and Gene’s three children (who were not so young themselves) were distraught. While his son Luther Reddick talked to him about the house they lived in during the sixties, Gene found his attention drifting out the window.
Night had come in so many ways.
He didn’t even have the strength to close his eyes. Luther’s voice faded away. The room faded away. The bed was gone and without any fanfare, his body blew away in cosmic wind, his soul being pulled toward a bright light.
“What did he say?”
“Listen Billy, and then he was gone.”
“Just like that.”
“Yep, gone, just like that.”
You need a vacation
Garrett nervously tapped his pen on the table. Members of his SETI team were leaning back in their chairs and he knew none of them took him seriously.
“Garrett,” Barry coughed, “Have you lost your mind?”
“It wasn’t a voice exactly, but coming through the clicks and pops you can hear my name. Look--it repeated three different days as soon as the scan passed this system, it’s a little planet named Vir 70 by the Astronomers who…”
All of the four men and women looked at each other and then back at Garrett. Their team leader Lori Greenshaw rubbed her eyes before standing up enough to lean over the table.
“The magnetic pull of the poles spinning a planet gives off radio waves; we have charted around one hundred planets, give or take. Beyond those, there are likely a billion or more Jupiter-sized planets in our galaxy alone.”
Garrett put his hands up, he hated when she talked down to them like they didn’t know as much as a fifth grader. But he also knew she wouldn’t stop.
“It’s seventy-eight light years away. Consider how many radio waves are humming in the background, and considering how many sounds and variables are possible, don’t waste our time until you have studied the source and the sound a little deeper.”
“Dude seriously,” Barry laughed. “It’s like that Ozzy song they played backwards.”
Everyone but Garrett laughed.
“Fine,” He would let it go with them--but he knew what he had heard.
Find your voice
“If a life form were not humanoid--would it’s language be anything like our own?”
James thought about her question, he didn’t want to get into another of Rachel’s deep conversations, not that he had much choice. They were both locked into a tree stand a hundred feet above the forest floor by U shaped bike locks. They could hear the far off sound of chainsaws and knew the forest was coming down around them.
“No--it would be different.”
“I think the earth speaks to us all the time.”
They both wanted to save this old-growth forest, but her motivations were so alien to James. He wasn’t here for any hippie Gaia worship, he just loved being in the forest, breathing the clean air. He just didn’t want to see it go.
“It’s not language.”
“You don’t think the earth has a spirit, a soul?”
“Maybe, but not one we are able to understand.”
“Exactly, maybe she is talking to us through the wind, the rustling of leaves.”
“Or earthquakes and Hurricanes.”
Rachel smiled, for all his macho-ness, he was getting it. She reached and felt the U Lock scrape her neck, it was a struggle but she wanted to hold his hand. James stretched and felt her finger tips.
“If she could she’d thank us.”
Welcome home
The light faded away. Gene felt himself waking and wanted to stretch his muscles. His body was gone. He felt a breeze, air was moving but he didn’t feel any lungs. He woke up thirsty every single morning of his ninety-one years, but this time, he could feel the water already. Was it a spring day? He could feel warmth, smell blooming flowers. That wasn’t all. He felt cold, the fresh feeling of snow fall. He could feel feet running, mouths chewing on grass. He could feel it all.
He remembered this feeling, a distant memory of a home of his own - a world of his own.
Message from your mother
“Give it a try mister man of science.” Jessie was stoned. Garrett knew it when he walked in the door. The only thing he liked about his wife stoned was that she liked to walk around the house in her underwear. She sat on the bed in her bra and underwear looking at the Parker Bros Ouija board.
“From the makers of fine board games and a conduit to the dead,” He laughed and kissed her. She laughed and tapped the board.
“Available at Wal-mart!” Standing up she grabbed his belt buckle. “No, no, try it.”
He shook his head. She gave him the ‘I’ll make it worth your while’ eyes, and he melted like candle wax. She suddenly became serious as their finger tips touched the plastic piece.
“Who do you want to talk to?”
“Anyone from the planet Vir 70.”
“Dead people, not aliens silly.”
“Can I talk to someone from the planet Vir 70?”
The piece moved softly to the yes spot. Garrett laughed.
“No way,” Jessie smiled. “Do you have a name?”
Garrett felt the piece moving slightly faster than their fingers to the yes spot on the board.
“What is your name?”
The piece moved quickly to the letter R. It moved so fast it almost passed E. Garrett looked at his wife and silently told her he didn’t think it was funny when the piece finished spelling the name Rebecca. It was still moving and Garrett lifted his fingers until only the tip of his index touched the piece. Jessica did the same but the piece still moved spelling out Crossen.
“Garrett’s mother?”
Yes the piece responded. They looked at each other and a moment of silence passed.
“I asked to talk to someone from the planet Vir 70.”
The piece went to yes.
“Hey Becky are you on that planet?”
The piece went to no. The piece started moving across the board quickly spelling--I,M,V,7,0.
You should see the other ones
Mark just had enough time to realize the cop was shooting him, not enough time to be thankful he would miss Sally on 20/20, they had paid for her exclusive story. Marriage to a man who had stalked hookers and children became good business for Sally. She wrote books, sold film rights, and tried to protect the children from the memory of their father.
Mark’s soul had left the earth like a bullet train, the light overtook him and spit him across space. That was what it felt like; he was an old soul that had returned to earth and failed again to transcend. He was returning to his heavenly home and relaxed. He hated life on earth, somehow he had always connected to something greater. Something his human brain could not handle.
Hunting was something he enjoyed, he supposed that somewhere inside he always had this memory of spirit; the body was a disgusting prison of blood and guts. He was a liberator deserving of chocolates and flowers, not scorn.
Home was a world of lush mountains, rolling up near the shores of beautiful green oceans teaming with life, so much a part of his soul that he ached with sorrow each moment away. One planet in a system of three, each one four times the size of earth, floating around a pulsar still young in the celestial nursery when last his spirit was called for duty.
As he traveled further from earth, his body becoming memory, his name meaningless... But his experience was floating just beyond him.
He felt the world taking shape around him. The pleasure of life slipped past him, the green mountains had melted to ash, the oceans boiled to vapor which blew like hot gas throughout the atmosphere. High in the sky the pulsar burned bright, looking as close as a full moon.
A nova.
Reddick reunion
William Reddick had paid the hospice nurse twenty dollars to let him know when his grandfather’s room was next empty. He had promised her one hundred for the use of the room for a single night. It was over four months before the phone call came. The woman who had been dying in the room had passed. Her family had cleared out her things and he had one night before the next tenant of the arrived.
It had been almost ten years since he had last been here, but little had changed. When the nurse let him in, she gave a reminder to be quiet that no one knew he was there. Billy looked around as the door shut. The sun was going down. If he was going to have the light on, he would have to stuff a towel under the door.
The room was almost empty: TV and the bed. Billy understood a lot more filled this room. It was a gateway of sorts. One after another this room was the last stop in the lives of hundreds of human beings. This room was not empty.
He pulled out his tape recorder and microphone. Put in a fresh cassette and checked to make sure the counter was on 000. He pushed record.
“Grandpa? Gene Riddick?”
He waited while the tape reeled away.
Is an ocean aware that it is alive? Is the sky aware of its own functions? When does a soul forget that it once had a name? Creating a breeze for a summer day or dropping rain into fields filled with seeds might seem complicated, but to a transcended spirit, answering something as alien as a name is more of a challenge. It came across the heavens like a wave rolling up on him...Gene Riddick.
His name? It washed over him.
Time and distance didn’t matter, as he traveled to the voice. It was ironic that it seemed so long ago since he related to a physical body and already he felt like he was just an echo of Gene Riddick. Physically speaking, it was great distance, spiritually speaking, he never left here really, not even during his times in the body.
Billy was ready to listen.
Billy pushed stop. The counter was on 150. He put on his headphones as the tape rewound. Volume on twenty-five percent, he heard himself ask for his grandfather before turning up the tape until it was buzzing with near silence. He heard steps walking by the room on the tape that he hadn't heard when he was recording. At least they sounded like steps. Then the whisper.
“Billy. Don’t worry, I’m home.”
The counter was on 027 when it started. He rewound and listened to it four times but that was it. The tape wound through to 150 and the old man had spoken his piece.
Clear as crystal
Jessica hadn't told Garrett about it. While he believed that his mother was trying to communicate with him, there was only so far he would go for answers. He would have laughed at her and tried to stop her. She had to drive north to Santa Fe to find a medium that could channel the spirit for her. She talked to one in town, but he seemed like a fraud to her.
The channel’s name was Lydia, she asked her to come on Rebecca’s birthday or the day she passed. Her birthday was three weeks away and the appointment was set. She brought every item of Rebecca’s that had made the trip down from Minnesota. When she arrived at the medium’s house they piled the items on the kitchen table and held hands.
Lydia was in her sixties and her three daughters completed the circle. They were into Wicca, the whole house was filled with earth spirit and pagan symbols. Lydia wanted to turn around and leave before her hands had a chance to get sweaty.
“Your negative spirit is gonna push Rebecca away,” Lydia warned Jessica with a whisper. It didn't keep her away. Rebecca had heard the call and came into the room. Lydia sensed her presence right away.
“She is here and very happy to see you.”
Jessica wanted to look around the room but was worried she might break the connection.
“Ask your question, we may not have time.”
“Becky, Garrett misses you so much. When last we spoke you told Garrett and I that you were Vir 70, what did you mean?”
Lydia was silent for along time. Jessica was sweating now.
“Rebbeca wants you to understand the scope of the heavens.”
“The scope?”
“She says life exists on many worlds, but not one is like the other. Our souls are tested on earth but when the test is over we live in a world of our own...”
Lydia let go, the daughters dropped their hands. Jessica opened her eyes to wide smiles.
“Is that heaven?”
Lydia took Jessica’s hand. “Sounds like it to me.”
If the spirits are killing
“What are we but shells for the spirit?”
“I don’t see your point?”
James wished she would stop talking, they ran out of water hours ago and the sheriff’s department had arrested their support team and cleared out base camp. No water was coming. The trees were falling so close now that they had to raise their voices over the chainsaws and the trees, when they screamed their way down to the ground. The old growths crashed and shook the forest.
“Earth, Venus or alpha fucking centauri or my body-–Yours. Turtles, Bears, they are just different sized shells.”
James watched as a family of deer ran away from the logging crew. The sheriff was shouting into a bullhorn and seemed to be getting closer. James sat up as much as the U Lock allowed and saw the sheriff and a construction crew assembled below them. They had a crane. If they could get up, they’d use the Jaws of Life to cut them free.
“Murderers...”
A chainsaw roared near by. They heard the familiar sound of a tree falling and hitting other trees. Rachel felt tears forming that never came. The tree was an old growth; it would have taken both of them to hug all the way around it. The crew on the ground had expected the tree to fall south, but it fell north. They winced and turned away, but the home office had been screaming for board length that the protestors had denied them.
The tree hit Rachel instantly knocking her brain around in her skull. James was locked into another branch and felt his tree falling before his neck snapped under the pull of the lock. He saw a flash and then light.
Apple never fell far from the tree
He closed his eyes, but felt both trees crashing to the ground. He watched his body being ripped apart and instantly let go. The spirit that was in that body didn’t travel at all, feeling the earth take shape in it’s place.
The rivers ran hot with chemicals, the oceans became devoid of life, billions of souls waited in mountains of waste to be eaten. Molded stone and steel tore into the surface and scarred the sky. What realm was the next escape?
Click Here for Part 9 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Thursday, July 16, 2009
SKY PIRATES:Part 8
by John Shirley
Two Kastillians fell, screaming with crossbow bolts, and then the others opened fire with their hand cannons and pulsers and the green-energy tubes, and half the oncoming Ranchers fell in a wave of death--it seemed to Jann that they were devastated by a bombardment of thunder and lightning. But then the surviving Ranchers were upon the Kaswills with scimitars, stabbing with daggers, and the Kastillians fell back, or fell dead.
Five of the Kastillians backed toward the creeper field, bringing their weapons to bear on the Ranchers--but the Kaswills had stepped back into the reach of the creepers, which whipped their purple tentacles around their legs and dragged them to ripping suckers. The Kastillian soldiers screamed piteously. The creepers showing even more killing zeal than usual, as if sensing on some primitive level that these men were invaders attacking those who had cultivated them.
Other Kastillians jumped into flyers--leaving their companions shouting angrily behind. The abandoned turned to face the Ranchers, and the fighting became close and fierce.
Jann hurried toward the battle, stumbling, falling on his face, getting up and hobbling painfully onward, shouting, "For Grelle Manor! For Sena a Grelle!".
A man shaped of flame ran toward him: a Rancher, his clothes having caught fire from the glance of an energy weapon. The man fell thrashing, dying at Jann's feet, dropping his scimitar. Jann muttered a prayer to the Great Organizer for the twitching, burning man, even as he picked up the sword--not caring the hilt burned his hand. And then he ran into the thick of the fighting.
"Murderers!" Jann shouted, and struck at a bearded Kastillian face; the sword sank in, and stuck edge--on from the man's forehead down: splitting his nose lengthwise, halving his mouth. The man clawed whimpering at the blade as Jann placed a boot on the ruined face and pulled the sword free.
He turned, dodged aside, barely escaping a pulser beam fired by a thick-bodied man shouting in wordless rage. The man then aimed very deliberately at Jann's belly--but the Kastillian went down with a bolt through the side of his neck. A crossbow bolt fired by Vonn a Vleet.
Vonn now stepped protectively in front of Jann--and immediately staggered back as he caught three Stropp rounds, bullets intended for Jann, the wounds stitched across Vonn's chest.
Vonn grunted and sagged onto his knees, then fell onto his back, his knees still tucked awkwardly under him. Jann threw the scimitar at the gunman, and it found its mark--the man stumbled back, stunned. A Free Rancher dispatched him.
Jann knelt beside Vonn, straightening his legs. Vonn gasped and pointed at the sky as Jann wept over him.
"Go there...return...go and return..." Vonn a Vleet rasped through blood welling over his lips. He seemed to stare into some private vision that filled the sky.
The gunfire and energy bursts had stopped--and a shadow fell over the field.
Jann looked up to see three enormous consecutive circles of gray blotting out the sky: the three linked segments of the Kastillian starcraft, which hovered rumbling perhaps three hundred yards overhead...
Green and gold bolts flashed down from muzzles extruding from the starcraft's underside, precision-fired with the help of a computer, and five, six, seven--eight Ranchers fell. The survivors scattered into the strip of woods bordering the grain field.
Jann picked Vonn up in his arms, and took one unsteady step...
He heard the whine of a projectile, and then there was a blinding flash of white--he was struck unconscious before he could hear the sound of the explosion.
Chapter the Third: You Are at the Beginning of the End of Your Life
"Where am I?" Jann asked.
He knew there were people in the room with him, though he seemed to be blindfolded. He was lying on a padded table of some kind.
He felt parched, his head throbbing, his body a feast of aches--in his delirium he imagined little creatures feeding on him, their serrated beaks digging into his wounds.
"Where am I? Where?" Jann repeated, more insistently. "What day is this?"
"You," said a bored male voice, "are at the beginning of the end of your life. You're a prisoner, of course. Now shut up and do us a favor--and die so we don't have to tend to you."
"They insist we save this one," said another voice in the darkness. "They have plans for him."
Jann tried to see who was speaking, but when he turned his head he could feel the bandages effectively blindfolding his eyes.
"Healing them can use up as much value as they might have as slaves," said another voice.
"Oh, it's not just for that. It's political. They need someone to stand trial, so it can all be...explain the reprisals, that kinda…"
Jann didn't hear the rest, it was blotted out by the sound of his own voice, his own uncontrollable bellowing of pain and rage.
He lashed out, and his fist caught someone's face--he felt a satisfying smack of knuckles on cartilage.
"Stinking death! Give him a shot before I put the misbegotten yokel out of his misery for good!"
He felt the needle stab deep into his right thigh--and darkness gushed from the needle, a cold shadow spreading into him and all through him, carrying with it a pitiless cycle of spiteful dreams.
#
"Ho! A dimpkin!" said the big Alpha Centauran with a sad chuckle, as Jann was thrust into the cell through the temporary door. The door sealed, becoming a seamless wall behind him.
The cell was an oblong of about twelve yards in length and eight feet high--or that was its shape at the moment. The walls were of a flexible material, unbreakable but with just a little give; an internal mesh responsive to commands from a central computer changed the shape of the cell as the jailers desired. The cell offered no windows, no visible light-source; the walls gave off bleak luminescence. The floor was uniformly padded for sleeping. The only features Jann saw at present were a small hole in the floor, he supposed for absorbing wastes, and a nozzle in the ceiling over the hole for showering. And where the walls curved together on Jann's left was a node of red glass.
The prisoner who'd called him a dimpkin was big enough to be authentically classed a giant. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, his back against the grimy plasflex wall of the prison cell. Jann had never seen a Centauran in person before, but the man's bushy bone-white hair, his droopy yellowish face, and gangly giant's frame made him a typical denizen of Pren-Thak, the only inhabitable planet around the star Alpha Centauri. Like most Centaurans he was at least two and two-thirds yards tall.
A dimpkin, had he said? A dimpkin was a grazing creature, looking somewhat human but stupid, docile and four-legged, a creature which drunken spacers on the planet Dritch were known to couple with when they lacked a woman. It was also slang for the weakest man in a prison cell. Jann hoped--in a despairing, detached sort of way--that the giant wasn't the sexual predator type. He would struggle helplessly in those big hands.
"I see by your expression you don't like my sense of humor," the giant said. "Few do. It's a sad wit, and simple. So then, if you're not a dimpkin, who or what are you?"
"I am Jann a Grelle, a DemiLord of Paradine," said Jann, as proudly as he could manage.
Jann could manage little pride, however--he felt mostly a kind of infinite dejection. The cosmos now seemed a vast passion play for celebrating tragedy and death--and guilt: his own guilt at the consequences of his impulsiveness, his indifference to counsel. He looked about him and took dull note of whatever he saw, but inwardly he felt like an automaton, going through the motions.
"A DemiLord! Most impressive!" said a deep voice behind him, dripping irony.
Jann turned to see a squat, barrel-chested man with waist-length dreadlocks and a short spiky beard whose legs seemed twice too thick. He was probably from one of the heavy planets in the Sirius system, Jann thought. Maybe the planet Xantipix, double the size of Paradine.
This was confirmed as the froggish face split in a grin and the man went on, "I'm a 'Dirt Lord' from Xantipix," said the Stumper. The residents of heavy planets were called Stumpers in the interstellar vernacular. Like Jann and the Alpha Centauran, the Stumper wore featureless prison coveralls the color of luminous bile; over each prisoner's right pectoral was a scan-code indicating his number and crime.
"A Dirt Lord?" Jann was trying to be polite. "Is that, er, a kind of, ah..."
"He's toying with your head, there, because you said you were a DemiLord, don't you know," said the Centauran.
Jann shrugged. "Do you have names?"
"I'm called...." And the Xantipixian said a name that might be written Msznzossz.
"Uh--Muzoss?" Jann asked.
The Stumper sighed. "Call me Moss. Everyone does."
"I fear that I am Dervnek Zlanda," said the giant, mournfully. "In my planetary language, it means 'an additional burden'--for so my parents thought of me. Just call me Derv."
"How long have you been here?"
"Me? About what you would call two months. A little more. Two months of sameness--except when the artificial gravity failed, for an hour. I became quite nauseated, floating about, but it was a lively contrast."
"Artificial gravity? We're in space?"
"You didn't know? You are on Kastillia IntraColony 87. Once a research colony, now converted to a penal holding station. Here we are adjudged and sent to our deaths--or to become slaves, in their plantations or...or on their ships." The words on their ships were said with a weighty foreboding that sent a chill through Jann. "Moss has been here twice two months--we're waiting for the circuit judge, who is said to be coming soon..."
"It's just we three, then?" Jann asked, with no real interest.
"No," said the wall behind Moss. "I'm in here."
The voice had come from a sort of navel in the wall and air holes that looked like finger-pokes in dough. Through one of the holes Jann could see a human eye, of dark-brown hue, regarding him gravely. "I am Ivan Damuskoff, from Russia."
"What system holds the planet Russia?" Jann asked.
The others guffawed. "Truly he's an innocent!" said Moss.
The man folded into the wall sighed. "It's a country of Old Earth."
"A man from Earth?" Jann tried to seem interested. Before the destruction of his family and the Manor, he would have been. "I've never met an Earthman. Of course my ancestors were from there, but…we don't think of ourselves as Earthers."
"I am a Russian," Ivan insisted, sniffing.
"They've clutched him in there because he pretended to be sick and then jumped a guard," said Derv. "Worth trying but doomed to failure, of course."
"The wall will open soon, and his isolation will be done," said Moss. "He's been in there his seven days."
"To think I yearn to be out into that cell, which is just a slightly larger clutching," Ivan muttered. "I fervently curse all Kastillians. I wish to bed their mothers, one by one! And when I'm done with that, why--"
He went on cursing in a language Jann didn't know, probably an Earth dialect.
"Ah," said Jann, sinking down onto the floor, his back against the wall, "there I agree with you--even with the words I don't understand. The Kastillians. For the first time I could happily see an entire planet wiped out."
But even as he said it, he knew that he did not believe it. Suddenly he remembered Vonn a Vleet standing with him on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the plains. "The ranchers and the plainsmen are there below you. The harvesting classes and the Independents and the elite manor lords. The sea farers, on the coast, yonder. Immigrants from space come from time to time: there is a colony of Centaurans, on the other side of Paradine Prime, and there are Kastillian merchants in Lapis, and there are Greneks, and Fibincians, and Meremecks, and the coldblooded Repsin-simians, and the Xantipixians, and Renapps--all those are in Lapis. And countless more across the known spaceways. I have heard it said that there are yet hidden colonies of the supposedly extinct Paradinian natives deep under the sea, for they were an aquatic race. On Earth humanity is mostly merged into the Blended, but there are still recognizable Asians and Africans and Latins to be found. All these and more, Jann--including alien races we have not yet encountered...And each sentient being, human and inhuman, has an individual experience of life! We may have to come into conflict with them in fulfilling our part of the great drama--so be it. But who are we to hate them, to judge them, no matter their cruelties, their disparities? For all are united in the struggle to live without suffering--and by the suffering they must endure while they struggle. We should not hate them--even when we have to kill them."
"They say hate helps a man kill," Jann had said.
"Why so it does. But it blinds him too. If you need to kill, a truly Soldierly man will do it from an austerity, an objectivity. If you truly must kill them, in self defense, then do it. But all the while--respect them."
Now Jann shook his head in sad wonder at how every word came back to him--how deeply Vonn had impressed him. Vonn had been a vital, sharply defined person, a monument to self discipline and learning and the soldierly ideal. His own departed father seemed a genial blur by comparison. His father had been a kindly, abstracted man of all too few words, but Jann had loved him--and had long ago lost him. Now he had lost them both, and his kindly, dreamy mother too.
Vonn was surely dead--Jann had sensed only the faintest, diminishing life in him, as he'd picked his teacher up. He'd felt Vonn dying. Then Jann had been struck down, and Vonn had fallen from his arms.
Yes. Vonn was surely dead, and he, Jann a Grelle, was alone in the universe, torn from his land and torn from his world. He'd never see his skyherd again; he might well never see a sky again at all. He'd never see the green and dun plains, the gardens and fields of the Grelle lands again. Doubtless Grelle would be seized for nonpayment of taxes, in time, and Baron a Gollden would buy the property at a song. For he had tried to buy the land in the past and Sena had refused him.
As for the future--there was only the question of how he was to die, and how long it would take. And the only certainty was the evil blandness of this prison cell.
Click Here for Part 9 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Check the Freezine tomorrow,
FRIDAY, JULY 17: When we host David Agranoff's
A Planet Of Your Own
David Agranoff is the author of the short story collection Screams From A Dying World, just published by Afterbirth Books. David is a hardcore vegan and his contributions to the punk horror scene have already established him as a bright young star to watch out for.
Two Kastillians fell, screaming with crossbow bolts, and then the others opened fire with their hand cannons and pulsers and the green-energy tubes, and half the oncoming Ranchers fell in a wave of death--it seemed to Jann that they were devastated by a bombardment of thunder and lightning. But then the surviving Ranchers were upon the Kaswills with scimitars, stabbing with daggers, and the Kastillians fell back, or fell dead.
Five of the Kastillians backed toward the creeper field, bringing their weapons to bear on the Ranchers--but the Kaswills had stepped back into the reach of the creepers, which whipped their purple tentacles around their legs and dragged them to ripping suckers. The Kastillian soldiers screamed piteously. The creepers showing even more killing zeal than usual, as if sensing on some primitive level that these men were invaders attacking those who had cultivated them.
Other Kastillians jumped into flyers--leaving their companions shouting angrily behind. The abandoned turned to face the Ranchers, and the fighting became close and fierce.
Jann hurried toward the battle, stumbling, falling on his face, getting up and hobbling painfully onward, shouting, "For Grelle Manor! For Sena a Grelle!".
A man shaped of flame ran toward him: a Rancher, his clothes having caught fire from the glance of an energy weapon. The man fell thrashing, dying at Jann's feet, dropping his scimitar. Jann muttered a prayer to the Great Organizer for the twitching, burning man, even as he picked up the sword--not caring the hilt burned his hand. And then he ran into the thick of the fighting.
"Murderers!" Jann shouted, and struck at a bearded Kastillian face; the sword sank in, and stuck edge--on from the man's forehead down: splitting his nose lengthwise, halving his mouth. The man clawed whimpering at the blade as Jann placed a boot on the ruined face and pulled the sword free.
He turned, dodged aside, barely escaping a pulser beam fired by a thick-bodied man shouting in wordless rage. The man then aimed very deliberately at Jann's belly--but the Kastillian went down with a bolt through the side of his neck. A crossbow bolt fired by Vonn a Vleet.
Vonn now stepped protectively in front of Jann--and immediately staggered back as he caught three Stropp rounds, bullets intended for Jann, the wounds stitched across Vonn's chest.
Vonn grunted and sagged onto his knees, then fell onto his back, his knees still tucked awkwardly under him. Jann threw the scimitar at the gunman, and it found its mark--the man stumbled back, stunned. A Free Rancher dispatched him.
Jann knelt beside Vonn, straightening his legs. Vonn gasped and pointed at the sky as Jann wept over him.
"Go there...return...go and return..." Vonn a Vleet rasped through blood welling over his lips. He seemed to stare into some private vision that filled the sky.
The gunfire and energy bursts had stopped--and a shadow fell over the field.
Jann looked up to see three enormous consecutive circles of gray blotting out the sky: the three linked segments of the Kastillian starcraft, which hovered rumbling perhaps three hundred yards overhead...
Green and gold bolts flashed down from muzzles extruding from the starcraft's underside, precision-fired with the help of a computer, and five, six, seven--eight Ranchers fell. The survivors scattered into the strip of woods bordering the grain field.
Jann picked Vonn up in his arms, and took one unsteady step...
He heard the whine of a projectile, and then there was a blinding flash of white--he was struck unconscious before he could hear the sound of the explosion.
Chapter the Third: You Are at the Beginning of the End of Your Life
"Where am I?" Jann asked.
He knew there were people in the room with him, though he seemed to be blindfolded. He was lying on a padded table of some kind.
He felt parched, his head throbbing, his body a feast of aches--in his delirium he imagined little creatures feeding on him, their serrated beaks digging into his wounds.
"Where am I? Where?" Jann repeated, more insistently. "What day is this?"
"You," said a bored male voice, "are at the beginning of the end of your life. You're a prisoner, of course. Now shut up and do us a favor--and die so we don't have to tend to you."
"They insist we save this one," said another voice in the darkness. "They have plans for him."
Jann tried to see who was speaking, but when he turned his head he could feel the bandages effectively blindfolding his eyes.
"Healing them can use up as much value as they might have as slaves," said another voice.
"Oh, it's not just for that. It's political. They need someone to stand trial, so it can all be...explain the reprisals, that kinda…"
Jann didn't hear the rest, it was blotted out by the sound of his own voice, his own uncontrollable bellowing of pain and rage.
He lashed out, and his fist caught someone's face--he felt a satisfying smack of knuckles on cartilage.
"Stinking death! Give him a shot before I put the misbegotten yokel out of his misery for good!"
He felt the needle stab deep into his right thigh--and darkness gushed from the needle, a cold shadow spreading into him and all through him, carrying with it a pitiless cycle of spiteful dreams.
#
"Ho! A dimpkin!" said the big Alpha Centauran with a sad chuckle, as Jann was thrust into the cell through the temporary door. The door sealed, becoming a seamless wall behind him.
The cell was an oblong of about twelve yards in length and eight feet high--or that was its shape at the moment. The walls were of a flexible material, unbreakable but with just a little give; an internal mesh responsive to commands from a central computer changed the shape of the cell as the jailers desired. The cell offered no windows, no visible light-source; the walls gave off bleak luminescence. The floor was uniformly padded for sleeping. The only features Jann saw at present were a small hole in the floor, he supposed for absorbing wastes, and a nozzle in the ceiling over the hole for showering. And where the walls curved together on Jann's left was a node of red glass.
The prisoner who'd called him a dimpkin was big enough to be authentically classed a giant. He was sitting with his knees drawn up, his back against the grimy plasflex wall of the prison cell. Jann had never seen a Centauran in person before, but the man's bushy bone-white hair, his droopy yellowish face, and gangly giant's frame made him a typical denizen of Pren-Thak, the only inhabitable planet around the star Alpha Centauri. Like most Centaurans he was at least two and two-thirds yards tall.
A dimpkin, had he said? A dimpkin was a grazing creature, looking somewhat human but stupid, docile and four-legged, a creature which drunken spacers on the planet Dritch were known to couple with when they lacked a woman. It was also slang for the weakest man in a prison cell. Jann hoped--in a despairing, detached sort of way--that the giant wasn't the sexual predator type. He would struggle helplessly in those big hands.
"I see by your expression you don't like my sense of humor," the giant said. "Few do. It's a sad wit, and simple. So then, if you're not a dimpkin, who or what are you?"
"I am Jann a Grelle, a DemiLord of Paradine," said Jann, as proudly as he could manage.
Jann could manage little pride, however--he felt mostly a kind of infinite dejection. The cosmos now seemed a vast passion play for celebrating tragedy and death--and guilt: his own guilt at the consequences of his impulsiveness, his indifference to counsel. He looked about him and took dull note of whatever he saw, but inwardly he felt like an automaton, going through the motions.
"A DemiLord! Most impressive!" said a deep voice behind him, dripping irony.
Jann turned to see a squat, barrel-chested man with waist-length dreadlocks and a short spiky beard whose legs seemed twice too thick. He was probably from one of the heavy planets in the Sirius system, Jann thought. Maybe the planet Xantipix, double the size of Paradine.
This was confirmed as the froggish face split in a grin and the man went on, "I'm a 'Dirt Lord' from Xantipix," said the Stumper. The residents of heavy planets were called Stumpers in the interstellar vernacular. Like Jann and the Alpha Centauran, the Stumper wore featureless prison coveralls the color of luminous bile; over each prisoner's right pectoral was a scan-code indicating his number and crime.
"A Dirt Lord?" Jann was trying to be polite. "Is that, er, a kind of, ah..."
"He's toying with your head, there, because you said you were a DemiLord, don't you know," said the Centauran.
Jann shrugged. "Do you have names?"
"I'm called...." And the Xantipixian said a name that might be written Msznzossz.
"Uh--Muzoss?" Jann asked.
The Stumper sighed. "Call me Moss. Everyone does."
"I fear that I am Dervnek Zlanda," said the giant, mournfully. "In my planetary language, it means 'an additional burden'--for so my parents thought of me. Just call me Derv."
"How long have you been here?"
"Me? About what you would call two months. A little more. Two months of sameness--except when the artificial gravity failed, for an hour. I became quite nauseated, floating about, but it was a lively contrast."
"Artificial gravity? We're in space?"
"You didn't know? You are on Kastillia IntraColony 87. Once a research colony, now converted to a penal holding station. Here we are adjudged and sent to our deaths--or to become slaves, in their plantations or...or on their ships." The words on their ships were said with a weighty foreboding that sent a chill through Jann. "Moss has been here twice two months--we're waiting for the circuit judge, who is said to be coming soon..."
"It's just we three, then?" Jann asked, with no real interest.
"No," said the wall behind Moss. "I'm in here."
The voice had come from a sort of navel in the wall and air holes that looked like finger-pokes in dough. Through one of the holes Jann could see a human eye, of dark-brown hue, regarding him gravely. "I am Ivan Damuskoff, from Russia."
"What system holds the planet Russia?" Jann asked.
The others guffawed. "Truly he's an innocent!" said Moss.
The man folded into the wall sighed. "It's a country of Old Earth."
"A man from Earth?" Jann tried to seem interested. Before the destruction of his family and the Manor, he would have been. "I've never met an Earthman. Of course my ancestors were from there, but…we don't think of ourselves as Earthers."
"I am a Russian," Ivan insisted, sniffing.
"They've clutched him in there because he pretended to be sick and then jumped a guard," said Derv. "Worth trying but doomed to failure, of course."
"The wall will open soon, and his isolation will be done," said Moss. "He's been in there his seven days."
"To think I yearn to be out into that cell, which is just a slightly larger clutching," Ivan muttered. "I fervently curse all Kastillians. I wish to bed their mothers, one by one! And when I'm done with that, why--"
He went on cursing in a language Jann didn't know, probably an Earth dialect.
"Ah," said Jann, sinking down onto the floor, his back against the wall, "there I agree with you--even with the words I don't understand. The Kastillians. For the first time I could happily see an entire planet wiped out."
But even as he said it, he knew that he did not believe it. Suddenly he remembered Vonn a Vleet standing with him on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the plains. "The ranchers and the plainsmen are there below you. The harvesting classes and the Independents and the elite manor lords. The sea farers, on the coast, yonder. Immigrants from space come from time to time: there is a colony of Centaurans, on the other side of Paradine Prime, and there are Kastillian merchants in Lapis, and there are Greneks, and Fibincians, and Meremecks, and the coldblooded Repsin-simians, and the Xantipixians, and Renapps--all those are in Lapis. And countless more across the known spaceways. I have heard it said that there are yet hidden colonies of the supposedly extinct Paradinian natives deep under the sea, for they were an aquatic race. On Earth humanity is mostly merged into the Blended, but there are still recognizable Asians and Africans and Latins to be found. All these and more, Jann--including alien races we have not yet encountered...And each sentient being, human and inhuman, has an individual experience of life! We may have to come into conflict with them in fulfilling our part of the great drama--so be it. But who are we to hate them, to judge them, no matter their cruelties, their disparities? For all are united in the struggle to live without suffering--and by the suffering they must endure while they struggle. We should not hate them--even when we have to kill them."
"They say hate helps a man kill," Jann had said.
"Why so it does. But it blinds him too. If you need to kill, a truly Soldierly man will do it from an austerity, an objectivity. If you truly must kill them, in self defense, then do it. But all the while--respect them."
Now Jann shook his head in sad wonder at how every word came back to him--how deeply Vonn had impressed him. Vonn had been a vital, sharply defined person, a monument to self discipline and learning and the soldierly ideal. His own departed father seemed a genial blur by comparison. His father had been a kindly, abstracted man of all too few words, but Jann had loved him--and had long ago lost him. Now he had lost them both, and his kindly, dreamy mother too.
Vonn was surely dead--Jann had sensed only the faintest, diminishing life in him, as he'd picked his teacher up. He'd felt Vonn dying. Then Jann had been struck down, and Vonn had fallen from his arms.
Yes. Vonn was surely dead, and he, Jann a Grelle, was alone in the universe, torn from his land and torn from his world. He'd never see his skyherd again; he might well never see a sky again at all. He'd never see the green and dun plains, the gardens and fields of the Grelle lands again. Doubtless Grelle would be seized for nonpayment of taxes, in time, and Baron a Gollden would buy the property at a song. For he had tried to buy the land in the past and Sena had refused him.
As for the future--there was only the question of how he was to die, and how long it would take. And the only certainty was the evil blandness of this prison cell.
Click Here for Part 9 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Check the Freezine tomorrow,
FRIDAY, JULY 17: When we host David Agranoff's
A Planet Of Your Own
David Agranoff is the author of the short story collection Screams From A Dying World, just published by Afterbirth Books. David is a hardcore vegan and his contributions to the punk horror scene have already established him as a bright young star to watch out for.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
SKY PIRATES:Part 7
by John Shirley
Guessing he'd flown about the right distance, Jann slowly angled the flyer down through the clouds. He broke from the cloudbank's underside to open sky, saw Grelle manor about a mile away, saw the gardens, the streams, the mauve creeper fields...
Then there was a flash of green and he felt as if someone had struck him with a hot poker. His mind cleared a few seconds later, and he found himself clutching blindly at the low railing of the craft as the flyer spun around him, smoke spiraling up from its engine. He glimpsed another flyer somewhere overhead. They'd shot the craft from below and now it was damaged, had spiraled down past them, and would soon lose power completely and plunge in free fall...
He saw an island in the sky, a mesh of green and brown, below him--rushing at him. He threw himself toward it, as the flyer spun away.
He spread his arms and legs and braced himself--the smack of impact struck the consciousness from him, quite unequivocally this time.
#
The ground was rippling under him...His nose was overwhelmed by a resinous, vinegary smell...
He lifted his head and saw it wasn't the ground rippling: he was lying on an interlaced bed of skypods and their vines. He had made it to one of the skylands. He could look down through the vines and glimpse the blue sky, ten yards down, and the uplands of the Granite Expression to one side, and the banks of the River Swenn--all seen between knots of skypods. Even a wisp of low-lying cloud, down below.
Each as big as a man's head, the pods were filled with a nutritious juice and a pocket of hydrogen that kept them ballooned high over the land. The plants absorbed mineral nutrition from the extensive behemoth and bird droppings deposited in gray and black patches across the "island". He could smell those, too.
He shifted about, trying to get more comfortable, knowing better than to try to stand--just shifting sent waves of ache through him. Wincingly trying his limbs, one at a time, he decided that no bones were broken. He was deeply bruised, at least, and there was blood in his mouth; his lips were swollen and he felt a gap where an upper molar had been--a moment later he located the tooth, and spat it out.
The bloody tooth stuck to a resinous, bristly pod, and he wondered how long had he been unconscious. The sun was much lower now, he saw. Late afternoon. He'd been out for hours, then. Which meant the Kastillians thought he'd fallen to his death. Would some officer send the men out to look for his body?
The reek of pod resin and behemoth droppings was too much. He had to move his face away from the mat a little, at least. He thought that if he moved slowly, carefully, he might be able to sit up. He couldn't see Grelle manor from this position--it was somewhere behind him.
The wind increased as the sun began to sink behind distant clouds--the foreshortened horizon of the skypods wavered in the rising wind, and the ripple traveled toward Jann just as he was easing himself into a sitting position on two pods. He didn't see the wave traveling through the skypods at first--he was looking over his shoulder, staring at the twisting column of black smoke exactly where Grelle Manor would be.
"Oh no..." How was he to get to his mother from here? How was he to get down at all?
Then a kind of wind-driven tsunami of skypod foliage came rolling over him from the outer edge--it loomed three yards over him...
He had just time to see it and swear, "Reeking death!"
And then it crashed down, and he was flung from his perch and felt himself tossed about until his support was pulled from under him and he was sliding down through the vines, falling faster and faster, tossed this way and that, skin burned by the bristles as he went.
He was going to fall straight through. He would be splashed over the brutal stone of the Granite Expression.
He flailed, grabbed a vine, hung on--hung there, panting and cursing, clinging to the vine with one hand--
And felt it snap in his hand. "No!" He kicked out with his hands and arms, trying to contact as many vines as possible, spread his weight around. They slapped him hard in the face so that his nose bloodied...
And then he stopped, or nearly--he was bouncing, slightly, in a tangle of vines. His feet and legs extended under the mat, from the crotch downward, into naked sky. One of his feet felt cold and he looked down in time to see the boot from his right foot spinning downward, and gone.
He ached from the impacts, his skin itched and burned everywhere it was exposed, blood ran from his nose and mouth...and if he moved, chances were he'd fall. The dusk was growing upon the land, and soon he would fall into the shadows.
He looked around through the increasing shadowiness of the vines, trying to find something to grip onto. Something solid enough to take his weight. But no single vine would do it--only by spreading your weight over many vines and pods could you survive up here.
The wind was rising...
The pods undulated in response, another great wave going through. The wave slapped at him so that he slipped down a little more and a vine broke under his right armpit. He cursed, and tried to relax, to ease pressure on the vines. He was afraid even to breathe hard.
The vines rippled again...he slipped down a little more...
And the rising wind brought something else: the smell of smoke. Of burning timbers--and other smells he was afraid to identify.
Then he heard a mournful grumbling reverberate from a good distance away. He went as limp as he could, tried spread his arms a bit more, took a deep breath, and shouted, "E'qer'minda'moy!"
Quickly to me!
No response. He shouted it again. And again. Ten times more till his throat was hoarse. The rising wind drowned his voice--and another vine parted under his crotch. He fell--
And grabbed at a thick vine just beside his head as he went.
He caught the vine, it pulled slack, then taut, he fell further--and stopped, swaying. Hanging by his hands under the skypod mat, dangling there...afraid to look down.
"E'QER'MINDA'MOY!"
This time there came an answering rumble, and a low-pitched bellow. Then something drifted closer, something he'd seen from the corner of his eyes, as he'd fallen, and taken to be a cloud--it was a behemoth, below and to his right.
But the final vine snapped--he fell--
And the behemoth was there, catching him with only a three yard drop. He landed on his right foot first and felt something give way in the ankle.
He pitched onto his back, shouting with pain. But now he was riding a behemoth--and he knew Aleshna by its rumble.
#
Completely barefoot, Jann walked down the road to the manor. His skin itched and burned with the welts left by skypod scratches, his gut ached with the injuries from his fall and his ankle lanced pain up into his leg with each step.
He'd been afraid to fly the behemoth too close to the house; the Kastillians might have men still posted there. Walking around the final curve, before he came in clear site of the manor, he knew what he would see before he saw it, when the smoke blew over him once more. There is a particular smell to a freshly burned and shattered building--particularly one destroyed by explosives. He had never smelled it before, but it seemed somehow familiar to him.
And then he saw what was left of the manor, and felt the last shred of hope dry up and blow away in some limitless interior wasteland. Before him was the flame-crackling wreckage of his childhood home--and the childhood home of his father, and his grandfather and great grandfather. Only a bit of the southeast wall stood, with a chimney, a fireplace standing absurdly alone; the rest was rubble and heaps of smoking ashes.
Coughing with fumes from the embers, he circled the house, calling to his mother, to Keska; to Vonn. Seeing no one, receiving no reply. But there--a blistered human arm thrust from the masonry: he thought it was probably the cook, E'Kenna, judging by the charred remnants of a sleeve.
He went on, circumscribing the vast, smoldering ruin. He came upon two other bodies: both were Kastillians, shot by crossbow bolts--shot from above, it looked like. The Kastillians had come here in force, and destroyed the house in retaliation for his having killed four of their number.
He stared for a moment, then continued onward, looking for his mother. He had given off calling to her. He was very much afraid he'd find her, soon enough.
The Overlook lay smashed on the sideyard, balusters scattered and blackened, ritual objects reduced to trash in the weedy flower garden. He'd never noticed before how overgrown with weeds and ill-kept the garden about the house had become, with Mother always on her rounds or taking care of him and the servants-- doing as much for the servants as they did for her.
He must have passed her the first time, but he found her when he returned to the wreck of the Overlook balcony, thinking of the Imploring Wand he had seen there amongst a tangle of Sweep-Lilies. The wand snapped in half as if the Great Organizer were mocking them.
A still-burning slab of wall hid Mother's body. He had only to squat down once, to look that one time only, to see what he would revisit in memory on many lonely nights to come.
He fell to his knees and began to dig at the dirt around her body, to pull her remains free--they were so crushed he doubted he could get them all out in one piece--when he heard the growing sounds of battle.
A battle. With it, the hope of revenge, an outlet for the pain and rage that burned through him now. Later, he knew, he would face another truth: this wasn't only the fault of the Kastillians. If he had listened to Vonn…
He almost tripped over Keska's body, half hidden in high grass, as he ran--hobbled, really--toward the sounds of fighting. Old Keska a Blunn--it looked like he'd been on the balcony with mother. Keska had been thrown clear by the blast that had smashed the wall from the other side, then shot with a Stropp in the back of the head by some passing Kastillian.
The battle was a few hundred yards away in a field of grain--about two dozen Kastillians had been surprised at their landed flyers by a force of Free Ranchers in buckskin and rough woolen tunics, near the edge of a creeper-field. Even as Jann came upon the scene, the Ranchers charged, some riding tallies and others on foot, firing crossbows and brandishing the long slim double-edged scimitars typical of Paradine Plainsmen. And there--in the midst of the men charging--was Vonn!
Vonn had come, but too late. Fighting at his side were about thirty men and ten women, of every age from nineteen to sixty. Women from the Free Ranchers were well known to be fierce fighters-- and they charged, screeching their war-cries at the startled Kastillians.
Click Here for Part 8 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
Guessing he'd flown about the right distance, Jann slowly angled the flyer down through the clouds. He broke from the cloudbank's underside to open sky, saw Grelle manor about a mile away, saw the gardens, the streams, the mauve creeper fields...
Then there was a flash of green and he felt as if someone had struck him with a hot poker. His mind cleared a few seconds later, and he found himself clutching blindly at the low railing of the craft as the flyer spun around him, smoke spiraling up from its engine. He glimpsed another flyer somewhere overhead. They'd shot the craft from below and now it was damaged, had spiraled down past them, and would soon lose power completely and plunge in free fall...
He saw an island in the sky, a mesh of green and brown, below him--rushing at him. He threw himself toward it, as the flyer spun away.
He spread his arms and legs and braced himself--the smack of impact struck the consciousness from him, quite unequivocally this time.
#
The ground was rippling under him...His nose was overwhelmed by a resinous, vinegary smell...
He lifted his head and saw it wasn't the ground rippling: he was lying on an interlaced bed of skypods and their vines. He had made it to one of the skylands. He could look down through the vines and glimpse the blue sky, ten yards down, and the uplands of the Granite Expression to one side, and the banks of the River Swenn--all seen between knots of skypods. Even a wisp of low-lying cloud, down below.
Each as big as a man's head, the pods were filled with a nutritious juice and a pocket of hydrogen that kept them ballooned high over the land. The plants absorbed mineral nutrition from the extensive behemoth and bird droppings deposited in gray and black patches across the "island". He could smell those, too.
He shifted about, trying to get more comfortable, knowing better than to try to stand--just shifting sent waves of ache through him. Wincingly trying his limbs, one at a time, he decided that no bones were broken. He was deeply bruised, at least, and there was blood in his mouth; his lips were swollen and he felt a gap where an upper molar had been--a moment later he located the tooth, and spat it out.
The bloody tooth stuck to a resinous, bristly pod, and he wondered how long had he been unconscious. The sun was much lower now, he saw. Late afternoon. He'd been out for hours, then. Which meant the Kastillians thought he'd fallen to his death. Would some officer send the men out to look for his body?
The reek of pod resin and behemoth droppings was too much. He had to move his face away from the mat a little, at least. He thought that if he moved slowly, carefully, he might be able to sit up. He couldn't see Grelle manor from this position--it was somewhere behind him.
The wind increased as the sun began to sink behind distant clouds--the foreshortened horizon of the skypods wavered in the rising wind, and the ripple traveled toward Jann just as he was easing himself into a sitting position on two pods. He didn't see the wave traveling through the skypods at first--he was looking over his shoulder, staring at the twisting column of black smoke exactly where Grelle Manor would be.
"Oh no..." How was he to get to his mother from here? How was he to get down at all?
Then a kind of wind-driven tsunami of skypod foliage came rolling over him from the outer edge--it loomed three yards over him...
He had just time to see it and swear, "Reeking death!"
And then it crashed down, and he was flung from his perch and felt himself tossed about until his support was pulled from under him and he was sliding down through the vines, falling faster and faster, tossed this way and that, skin burned by the bristles as he went.
He was going to fall straight through. He would be splashed over the brutal stone of the Granite Expression.
He flailed, grabbed a vine, hung on--hung there, panting and cursing, clinging to the vine with one hand--
And felt it snap in his hand. "No!" He kicked out with his hands and arms, trying to contact as many vines as possible, spread his weight around. They slapped him hard in the face so that his nose bloodied...
And then he stopped, or nearly--he was bouncing, slightly, in a tangle of vines. His feet and legs extended under the mat, from the crotch downward, into naked sky. One of his feet felt cold and he looked down in time to see the boot from his right foot spinning downward, and gone.
He ached from the impacts, his skin itched and burned everywhere it was exposed, blood ran from his nose and mouth...and if he moved, chances were he'd fall. The dusk was growing upon the land, and soon he would fall into the shadows.
He looked around through the increasing shadowiness of the vines, trying to find something to grip onto. Something solid enough to take his weight. But no single vine would do it--only by spreading your weight over many vines and pods could you survive up here.
The wind was rising...
The pods undulated in response, another great wave going through. The wave slapped at him so that he slipped down a little more and a vine broke under his right armpit. He cursed, and tried to relax, to ease pressure on the vines. He was afraid even to breathe hard.
The vines rippled again...he slipped down a little more...
And the rising wind brought something else: the smell of smoke. Of burning timbers--and other smells he was afraid to identify.
Then he heard a mournful grumbling reverberate from a good distance away. He went as limp as he could, tried spread his arms a bit more, took a deep breath, and shouted, "E'qer'minda'moy!"
Quickly to me!
No response. He shouted it again. And again. Ten times more till his throat was hoarse. The rising wind drowned his voice--and another vine parted under his crotch. He fell--
And grabbed at a thick vine just beside his head as he went.
He caught the vine, it pulled slack, then taut, he fell further--and stopped, swaying. Hanging by his hands under the skypod mat, dangling there...afraid to look down.
"E'QER'MINDA'MOY!"
This time there came an answering rumble, and a low-pitched bellow. Then something drifted closer, something he'd seen from the corner of his eyes, as he'd fallen, and taken to be a cloud--it was a behemoth, below and to his right.
But the final vine snapped--he fell--
And the behemoth was there, catching him with only a three yard drop. He landed on his right foot first and felt something give way in the ankle.
He pitched onto his back, shouting with pain. But now he was riding a behemoth--and he knew Aleshna by its rumble.
#
Completely barefoot, Jann walked down the road to the manor. His skin itched and burned with the welts left by skypod scratches, his gut ached with the injuries from his fall and his ankle lanced pain up into his leg with each step.
He'd been afraid to fly the behemoth too close to the house; the Kastillians might have men still posted there. Walking around the final curve, before he came in clear site of the manor, he knew what he would see before he saw it, when the smoke blew over him once more. There is a particular smell to a freshly burned and shattered building--particularly one destroyed by explosives. He had never smelled it before, but it seemed somehow familiar to him.
And then he saw what was left of the manor, and felt the last shred of hope dry up and blow away in some limitless interior wasteland. Before him was the flame-crackling wreckage of his childhood home--and the childhood home of his father, and his grandfather and great grandfather. Only a bit of the southeast wall stood, with a chimney, a fireplace standing absurdly alone; the rest was rubble and heaps of smoking ashes.
Coughing with fumes from the embers, he circled the house, calling to his mother, to Keska; to Vonn. Seeing no one, receiving no reply. But there--a blistered human arm thrust from the masonry: he thought it was probably the cook, E'Kenna, judging by the charred remnants of a sleeve.
He went on, circumscribing the vast, smoldering ruin. He came upon two other bodies: both were Kastillians, shot by crossbow bolts--shot from above, it looked like. The Kastillians had come here in force, and destroyed the house in retaliation for his having killed four of their number.
He stared for a moment, then continued onward, looking for his mother. He had given off calling to her. He was very much afraid he'd find her, soon enough.
The Overlook lay smashed on the sideyard, balusters scattered and blackened, ritual objects reduced to trash in the weedy flower garden. He'd never noticed before how overgrown with weeds and ill-kept the garden about the house had become, with Mother always on her rounds or taking care of him and the servants-- doing as much for the servants as they did for her.
He must have passed her the first time, but he found her when he returned to the wreck of the Overlook balcony, thinking of the Imploring Wand he had seen there amongst a tangle of Sweep-Lilies. The wand snapped in half as if the Great Organizer were mocking them.
A still-burning slab of wall hid Mother's body. He had only to squat down once, to look that one time only, to see what he would revisit in memory on many lonely nights to come.
He fell to his knees and began to dig at the dirt around her body, to pull her remains free--they were so crushed he doubted he could get them all out in one piece--when he heard the growing sounds of battle.
A battle. With it, the hope of revenge, an outlet for the pain and rage that burned through him now. Later, he knew, he would face another truth: this wasn't only the fault of the Kastillians. If he had listened to Vonn…
He almost tripped over Keska's body, half hidden in high grass, as he ran--hobbled, really--toward the sounds of fighting. Old Keska a Blunn--it looked like he'd been on the balcony with mother. Keska had been thrown clear by the blast that had smashed the wall from the other side, then shot with a Stropp in the back of the head by some passing Kastillian.
The battle was a few hundred yards away in a field of grain--about two dozen Kastillians had been surprised at their landed flyers by a force of Free Ranchers in buckskin and rough woolen tunics, near the edge of a creeper-field. Even as Jann came upon the scene, the Ranchers charged, some riding tallies and others on foot, firing crossbows and brandishing the long slim double-edged scimitars typical of Paradine Plainsmen. And there--in the midst of the men charging--was Vonn!
Vonn had come, but too late. Fighting at his side were about thirty men and ten women, of every age from nineteen to sixty. Women from the Free Ranchers were well known to be fierce fighters-- and they charged, screeching their war-cries at the startled Kastillians.
Click Here for Part 8 of SKY PIRATES,
by John Shirley
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Archive of Stories
and Authors
Callum Leckie's
THE DIGITAL DECADENT
J.R. Torina's
ANTHROPOPHAGUS
house ('90-'97), runs Sutekh Productions
(an industrial-ambient music label) and
Slaughterhouse Records (metal record
label), and was proprietor of The Abyss
(a metal-gothic-industrial c.d. shop in
SLC, now closed). He is the dark force
behind Scapegoat (an ambient-tribal-
noise-experimental unit). THE HOUSE
IN THE PORT is his first publication.
Sean Padlo's
NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW
Sean Padlo's
GRANDPA'S LAST REQUEST
Sean Padlo's exact whereabouts
are never able to be fully
pinned down, but what we
do know about him is laced
with the echoes of legend.
He's already been known
to haunt certain areas of
the landscape, a trick said
to only be possible by being
able to manipulate it from
the future. His presence
among the rest of us here
at the freezine sends shivers
of wonder deep in our solar plexus.
Morris's HOW THE GODS KILL
Konstantine Paradias's
Adam Bolivar's
Daniel JosΓ© Older's
Paul Stuart's
SEA?TV!
Paul Stuart is the author of numerous
G. Alden Davis's
THE FOLD
G. Alden Davis wrote his first short story
SACRI-FEES
Konstantine Paradias is a writer by
choice. At the moment, he's published
over 100 stories in English, Japanese,
Romanian, German, Dutch and
Portuguese and has worked in a free-
lancing capacity for videogames, screen-
plays and anthologies. People tell him
he's got a writing problem but he can,
like, quit whenever he wants, man.
His work has been nominated
for a Pushcart Prize.
Edward Morris's
ONE NIGHT IN MANHATTAN
Edward Morris's
MERCY STREET
Edward Morris is a 2011 nominee for
the Pushcart Prize in literature, has
also been nominated for the 2009
Rhysling Award and the 2005 British
Science Fiction Association Award.
His short stories have been published
over a hundred and twenty times in
four languages, most recently at
PerhihelionSF, the Red Penny Papers'
SUPERPOW! anthology, and The
Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. He lives
and works in Portland as a writer,
editor, spoken word MC and bouncer,
and is also a regular guest author at
the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival.
Tim Fezz's
BURNT WEENY SANDWICH
Tim Fezz's
MANY SILVERED MOONS AGO
Tim Fezz hails out of the shattered
streets of Philly destroying the air-
waves and people's minds in the
underground with his band OLD
FEZZIWIG. He's been known to
dip his razor quill into his own
blood and pen a twisted tale
every now and again. We are
delighted to have him onboard
the FREEZINE and we hope
you are, too.
Daniel E. Lambert's
DEAD CLOWN AND MAGNET HEAD
Daniel E. Lambert teaches English
at California State University, Los
Angeles and East Los Angeles College.
He also teaches online Literature
courses for Colorado Technical
University. His writing appears
in Silver Apples, Easy Reader,
Other Worlds, Wrapped in Plastic
and The Daily Breeze. His work
also appears in the anthologies
When Words Collide, Flash It,
Daily Flash 2012, Daily Frights
2012, An Island of Egrets and
Timeless Voices. His collection
of poetry and prose, Love and
Other Diversions, is available
through Amazon. He lives in
Southern California with his
wife, poet and author Anhthao Bui.
Phoenix's
AGAIN AND AGAIN
Phoenix has enjoyed writing since he
was a little kid. He finds much import-
ance and truth in creative expression.
Phoenix has written over sixty books,
and has published everything from
novels, to poetry and philosophy.
He hopes to inspire people with his
writing and to ask difficult questions
about our world and the universe.
Phoenix lives in Salt Lake City, Utah,
where he spends much of his time
reading books on science, philosophy,
and literature. He spends a good deal
of his free time writing and working
on new books. The Freezine of Fant-
asy and Science Fiction welcomes him
and his unique, intense vision.
Discover Phoenix's books at his author
page on Amazon. Also check out his blog.
Adam Bolivar's
SERVITORS OF THE
OUTER DARKNESS
Adam Bolivar's
THE DEVIL & SIR
FRANCIS DRAKE
THE TIME-EATER
Adam Bolivar is an expatriate Bostonian
Adam Bolivar is an expatriate Bostonian
who has lived in New Orleans and Berkeley,
and currently resides in Portland, Oregon
with his beloved wife and fluffy gray cat
Dahlia. Adam wears round, antique glasses
and has a fondness for hats. His greatest
inspirations include H.P. Lovecraft,
Jack tales and coffee. He has been
a Romantic poet for as long as any-
one can remember, specializing in
the composition of spectral balladry,
utilizing to great effect a traditional
poetic form that taps into the haunted
undercurrents of folklore seldom found
in other forms of writing.
His poetry has appeared on the pages
of such publications as SPECTRAL
REALMS and BLACK WINGS OF
CTHULHU, and a poem of his,
"The Rime of the Eldritch Mariner,"
won the Rhysling Award for long-form
poetry. His collection of weird balladry
and Jack tales, THE LAY OF OLD HEX,
was published by Hippocampus Press in 2017.
Sanford Meschkow's
INEVITABLE
Sanford Meschkow is a retired former
NYer who married a Philly suburban
Main Line girl. Sanford has been pub-
lished in a 1970s issue of AMAZING.
We welcome him here on the FREE-
ZINE of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Owen R. Powell's
NOETIC VACATIONS
Little is known of the mysterious
Owen R. Powell (oftentimes referred
to as Orp online). That is because he
usually keeps moving. The story
Noetic Vacations marks his first
appearance in the Freezine.
Gene Stewart
(writing as Art Wester)
GROUND PORK
Gene Stewart's
CRYPTID'S LAIR
Gene Stewart is a writer and artist.
He currently lives in the Midwest
American Wilderness where he is
researching tales of mystical realism,
writing ficta mystica, and exploring
the dark by casting a little light into
the shadows. Follow this link to his
website where there are many samples
of his writing and much else; come
explore.
Daniel JosΓ© Older's
GRAVEYARD WALTZ
Daniel JosΓ© Older's
THE COLLECTOR
Daniel JosΓ© Older's
THE COLLECTOR
Daniel JosΓ© Older's spiritually driven,
urban storytelling takes root at the
crossroads of myth and history.
With sardonic, uplifting and often
hilarious prose, Older draws from
his work as an overnight 911 paramedic,
a teaching artist & an antiracist/antisexist
organizer to weave fast-moving, emotionally
engaging plots that speak whispers and
shouts about power and privilege in
modern day New York City. His work
has appeared in the Freezine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, The ShadowCast
Audio Anthology, The Tide Pool, and
the collection Sunshine/Noir, and is
featured in Sheree Renee Thomas'
Black Pot Mojo Reading Series in Harlem.
When he's not writing, teaching or
riding around in an ambulance,
Daniel can be found performing with
his Brooklyn-based soul quartet
Ghost Star. His blog about the
ridiculous and disturbing world
of EMS can be found here.
Paul Stuart's
SEA?TV!
Paul Stuart is the author of numerous
biographical blurbs written in the third
person. His previously published fiction
appears in The Vault of Punk Horror and
His non-fiction financial pieces can be found
in a shiny, west-coast magazine that features
pictures of expensive homes, as well as images
of women in casual poses and their accessories.
Consider writing him at paul@twilightlane.com,
if you'd like some thing from his garage. In fall
2010, look for Grade 12 Trigonometry and
Pre-Calculus -With Zombies.
Rain Grave's
MAU BAST
Rain Graves is an award winning
Blag Dahlia's
armed to the teeth
with LIPSTICK
BLAG DAHLIA is a Rock Legend.
Rain Grave's
MAU BAST
Rain Graves is an award winning
author of horror, science fiction and
poetry. She is best known for the 2002
Bram Stoker Award winner for Best
Poetry Collection, The Gossamer Eye
(along with Mark McLaughlin and
David Niall Wilson). Her most
recent book, Barfodder: Poetry
Written in Dark Bars and Questionable
Cafes, has been hailed by Publisher's
Weekly as "Bukowski meets Lovecraft..."
in January of 2009. She lives and
writes in San Francisco, performing
spoken word at events around the
country. 877-DRK-POEM -
Listen. http://raingraves.com/
Blag Dahlia's
armed to the teeth
with LIPSTICK
BLAG DAHLIA is a Rock Legend.
Singer, Songwriter, producer &
founder of the notorious DWARVES.
He has written two novels, ‘NINA’ and
‘ARMED to the TEETH with LIPSTICK’.
G. Alden Davis's
THE FOLD
G. Alden Davis wrote his first short story
in high school, and received a creative
writing scholarship for the effort. Soon
afterward he discovered that words were
not enough, and left for art school. He was
awarded the Emeritus Fellowship along
with his BFA from Memphis College of Art
in '94, and entered the videogame industry
as a team leader and 3D artist. He has over
25 published games to his credit. Mr. Davis
is a Burningman participant of 14 years,
and he swings a mean sword in the SCA.
He's also the best friend I ever had. He
was taken away from us last year on Jan
25 and I'll never be able to understand why.
Together we were a fantastic duo, the
legendary Grub Bros. Our secret base
exists on a cross-hatched nexus between
the Year of the Dragon and Dark City.
Somewhere along the tectonic fault
lines of our electromagnetic gathering,
shades of us peel off from the coruscating
pillars and are dropped back into the mix.
The phrase "rest in peace" just bugs me.
I'd rather think that Greg Grub's inimitable
spirit somehow continues evolving along
another manifestation of light itself, a
purple shift shall we say into another
phase of our expanding universe. I
ask myself, is it wishful thinking?
Will we really shed our human skin
like a discarded chrysalis and emerge
shimmering on another wavelength
altogether--or even manifest right
here among the rest without their
even beginning to suspect it? Well
people do believe in ghosts, but I
myself have long been suspicious
there can only be one single ghost
and that's all the stars in the universe
shrinking away into a withering heart
glittering and winking at us like
lost diamonds still echoing all their
sad and lonely songs fallen on deaf
eyes and ears blind to their colorful
emanations. My grub brother always
knew better than what the limits
of this old world taught him. We
explored past the outer peripheries
of our comfort zones to awaken
the terror in our minds and keep
us on our toes deep in the forest
in the middle of the night. The owls
led our way and the wilderness
transformed into a sanctuary.
The adventures we shared together
will always remain tattooed on
the pages of my skin. They tell a
story that we began together and
which continues being woven to
this very day. It's the same old
story about how we all were in
this together and how each and
every one of us is also going away
someday and though it will be the far-
thest we can manage to tell our own
tale we may rest assured it will be
continued like one of the old pulp
serials by all our friends which survive
us and manage to continue
the saga whispering in the wind.
Shae Sveniker's
A NEW METAPHYSICAL STUDY
REGARDING THE BEHAVIOR
OF PLANT LIFE
Shae is a poet/artist/student and former
A NEW METAPHYSICAL STUDY
REGARDING THE BEHAVIOR
OF PLANT LIFE
Shae is a poet/artist/student and former
resident of the Salt Pit, UT, currently living
in Simi Valley, CA. His short stories are on
Blogger and his poetry is hosted on Livejournal.
Nigel Strange's
PLASTIC CHILDREN
Nigel Strange lives with his wife and
PLASTIC CHILDREN
Nigel Strange lives with his wife and
daughter, cats, and tiny dog-like thing
in their home in California where he
occasionally experiments recreationally
with lucidity. PLASTIC CHILDREN
is his first publication.