Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (23 page)

Two years later, another crash, on the turnpike. Howard’s own first van lies twisted and grotesque in the far lane, a broken Mammoth, with a crushed Volvo in its mouth. There will be fire, soon, and this time, the figure in his arms is a young woman, unknown, unknowable, her face black with soot and slack with shock. She isn’t blistered, has survived the whoosh of the fire drumming the sky, but her figure is strangely lax in his arms, and something is terribly wrong. Ambulances, hospital, eventually, insurance agents. All is taken care of. He has never seen her again. And now, with the smell of turpentine and smog still in his clothes, there they are, white and drifting on the river: the flowers he has trampled, floating.

Carla knows nothing of these dreams. She wants to run, to find the horizon. This glade and the river’s noise enclose her, and she startles with each shiver in the bushes. She has tried a few times to ring friends in the Bay, but no call goes through. Her mobile is useless, now, her world shrunken to a peanut butter jar and the knife, to her muscles and her ability to focus. She hugs herself, hard, the sinews and long muscles of her torso warm and taunt against her skin.

“Goodbye.” She whispers to her mum, her dad, her friends, after Howard has turned in for the night, has left her alone by the rushing river. She crouches, her mobile in her hand, open, lit, and creates a little raft of sticks to hold the phone in the smoother waters near the rushes. It sails off, a little lit rectangle in the falling night, bobbing from time to time. Carla can’t see if it turns a corner in the river, or drowns.

6 hours before the song ruptures the playa. Howard awakes, rolls out of his dreams of scorching fire, his throat aflame, screaming and caught in the folds of his sleeping bag. In a second, Carla is off the truck and by his side.

Howard keens, still half asleep, and Carla holds him, rocking him.

They sit, and rock, the world shifting beneath and above them into morning. Stars fade slowly, and a green gold glow creeps over the horizon.

The keening stops, and Carla feels Howard’s muscles uncramp, relax, fall heavily toward earth. His face is blank and the eyes won’t look at her. She withdraws her arms, and they sit, side by side, on the sleeping pad, looking out at the green walls around them.

Something small rotates into view, a shadow against the slowly vibrating leaves on the bushes. They both stare. Another move, an angular twist of an articulated leg, down, over, up. A small lizard, a salamander, emerges, black with yellow spots, as if bees’ wax has dripped from an old alchemist’s table. The salamander moves across the clearing, stays off the sharper grit that surrounds the tent site. It stops. Maybe it detects their heartbeat, or their thermal signature. Frozen in the air, only the eyes and tongue move, a small pendulum. Howard and Carla are measured, seen. The rising sun’s rose sky reflects in the silvery coils of the salamander’s eyes. The creature moves on, toward the sounds of the river.

It is time to pack, and get on the road again. The truck is readied in minutes. Howard and Carla step down to the river for a few minutes, their ears full with the rushing and falling of water. Then they climb in, Howard with the achy morning hitch that dropped into his bones so many years ago, that night in the van, breathing petrol fumes into a woman’s life; Carla, nimble, holding onto the overhead struts of the truck as she swings herself into place. Next stop, past the green and blue, into the banded lands: Oregon’s alkali lakes. Behind them, far behind, the skies begin to change.

An hour after the emergence. The founder arcs her back, her legs a sea anemone beneath her, beside her, floating white in the blue. She has tried to crawl onto the land, but the new lake’s edges are sculpted glass, bulbous forms with sharp edges. Merl does not want to cut unknowingly into unfeeling flesh. The water is warm, thermal, but not scalding or unpleasant. It is drinkable, too, tastes delicious and health-giving, with an edge of metal. The mineral content makes her float easily, and she watches hair and limbs entwine around her, delighting in sensual rolls and curves, her strong arms carving furrows through the water.

Merl sings, to herself, not the keening of the rupture, but a pleasant vocalization, old melodies and newer harmonics melding on her tongue. The sun is high above her, and she can no longer hear the church bells, or any sounds. Only the water lapping at the glass rim.

Later, change.

Two heads appear above her. Merl is nearly transparent now, her tissues swelled and full with the desert water. The heads talk. She tries to focus her thoughts to decode the sounds. And raises a hand, a greeting, a blessing, an invitation. The heads withdraw. Merl sings.

Later still. A new sight. A raft is lowered into her lake. Antlers and sticks make a filigree nest, old amazon book box air cushions provide lift, and, in the raft, jars of peanut butter, white bread, and packets of beef jerky stand in neat rows, surrounded by nutritional bars and small sealable containers with toilet paper tissue. Merl sings to it.

Larger sounds. A wave. One being has jumped in, and she is no longer alone. After a while, the second. The beings are naked, like her, brown sinuous shapes darting around her. She does not wish to stop singing, and there is nothing to say.

They all touch, and drift. The sky changes color above them now, pearlescent shades bow to a deep red, then a white flash. The air moves. They float.

“Flux” by Pandalion Death

Previous Page:

A person with curly hair stands with their back facing the viewer. They are wearing striped pajamas and slippers. The person is standing in front of a large pane of glass that looks out on to a cityscape of buildings. The image of the buildings to the right and left of the person is sharp and clear. The space that directly surrounds the person is all clouded, leaving the image of the buildings in front of them blurred and indistinguishable.

Puppetry

A.C. Buchanan

In the bunk room, I pick shrapnel out of the puckered skin around my knee.

“Med can assist,” comes the voice in my ear. “Topical anaesthetic available.”

No thank you
, I think back.
I’d like to do this myself.

“Agreed.”

The sheets are pale blue, smooth and clean, and I’m about to splatter them with blood. Too late now. This is a minor wound, and I’m quite capable of seeing to it myself, of instructing my hands in the delicate motions to repair it, quite capable of not fainting under the pain of each extraction.

By the time it is finished, I feel like vomiting. The only other in the room, Lance Corporal Cannan, a convicted murderer, is asleep, so I could probably get away with it, but instead I swallow painfully, pour half a bottle of antiseptic over the wound, and bandage myself up.

I’ll be back on the front lines shortly. Six years to go. Six years of war.

We fight good, honest, ethical wars these days. I’ve seen film from a previous era, on Earth or its closest planets, of drones striking the innocent, cities in ruins. The Harken-Achanli treaty put paid to that. We know, though we don’t like to admit it, that humans are the weaker of the three known races. When our governments see how quickly all their worlds can be taken over or obliterated by aliens many times more advanced than us, they have to pay more than lip-service to not killing civilians.

So everyone on the battlefield is, at least nominally, a volunteer. We’ve
chosen
to fight Cerule over this strip of dusty land or, a few hundred miles away, New Catalonia over water supply. Most have been found guilty in a court of law of a sufficiently heinous crime that this is their only chance of freedom. Others have fled a hostile nation or planet, and are paying the price of citizenship. And some of us have other reasons, like me.

The bell sounds and there is a hiss in my ear which signifies external command kicking in. I’m pulled from my bunk, my arm moves to straighten my trousers and I’m standing, perfectly arched back, against my bunk. Cannan has leapt down from hers, and other soldiers file in, in various states of tidiness. I look out at the 32 perfectly made beds. Mine is a disaster. Blood and antiseptic are dripping down my leg. Waves of childhood shame wash over me. “Elevated heart rate,” the voice in my ear confirms.

Thanks!
I think back, probably unwisely.
Never would have noticed that.

I try to not hold anything against the Sergeant who enters this room, the sound of his boots on the grey glass corridors making me shudder. I know exactly what’s happening, that the voice in his ear is informing his every word. Computers are good at this kind of interaction.

“Tanner.”

“Yes Ser.”

“Is your bunk made correctly?”

“No Ser.”

“Do you have an excuse for this?”

“I was injured and I…”

“Do you have an excuse for this?”

“No Ser. No excuse Ser.”

Like I said, computers are good at this type of interaction. The external command drops off, and all but three of us file out. Cannan gives me a sympathetic nod as she leaves. Not sympathetic as in “poor you” but closer to “we both know they’re a pile of shit”. I think my way through each fast motion, while behind me I can hear Private Joben shaking out his bedsheets as if raising a sail to catch an imaginary wind.

Being able to make my bed like this, a skill afforded to me by the wires and implants running through my body, is still a novelty, and one I’m not entirely sure I’m comfortable with. As a child, my ability to move was unpredictable. It was like, I said once, having message scramblers along my nervous system. Anything could become scrambled in any way.
Move your left foot forward one step
might emerge as just that, but it could also result in me putting my right foot atop my left and falling facedown in the dust. Chairs and exosuits, which allowed me to choose from pre-selected sequences of movements, none designed to injure me, helped. My body still didn’t do what I wanted much of the time, but what it did at least translated into typical patterns like “moving forward”.

The command system, wires made of organic material implanted throughout my body, was, I told people, what would make me normal. It’s true, I can make near every movement anyone else can. I can climb rockfaces, I can dance. What I don’t tell them is that none of it comes automatically. That I have to plan each motion in my brain. That just as internal command augments rather than replaces their abilities, so it has done mine. That motion still requires conscious thought, draining mental effort, in a way they’ll never understand.

They think I’m cured. Right now, I want them to keep thinking that.

I pull the sheets off the bed and refit them. I’ll be back on the front lines tomorrow; I need to make the most of today. The blasts that shake the building even back here don’t make me jump any more, but the thought of being back in the thick of it sends a cold shudder through my skin like a wave.

After our attempts are finally approved, Joben and I make our way to the mess hall where there’s cold hi-carb, hi-protein food waiting for us. I don’t care anymore; it’s gone within seconds. After collecting my equipment from servicing, I steal time to compose a message to my family.

I hope you are all well. Things carry on here much the same, and as usually you’ll know more about the progress of the wars than I do out here. I have sustained a minor—minor! don’t worry!—injury but it’s healing well. I’m now past my second year of service. Six years to go. That desk job at central office is very appealing right now. I know you are worried, but I also know you understand what a difference this can make to my life. Your support means everything; I know that with persistence I’ll have the life I always dreamed of, be the person I always knew I was supposed to be.

I tell myself that part of being an adult is distancing yourself from your parents, finding your own beliefs. But it doesn’t stop me feeling that each time I tell them something like this, it’s driving a wedge between us that will never be healed.

Janny, good luck with your exams. Remember, no one will care about them in a year or two (and yes, I can see mum shaking her head in disgust I’ve told you that. Sorry, ma, but it’s the truth!).

All my love to all of you,

Merie

Private Merie Jae Tanner 59FFRK920 Platoon 867

Unclassified Personal Communication

Before the sun rises in its murky, turquoise haze, we are en route to the front, clinging to the side of buggies, pulling on noise insulators one handed as the sound of plasma fire grows louder. Nausea grows in me, and not for the first time I wonder if I could leap down into the blue-grey dust and run and run and run.

Of course, I can’t. That’s the whole point of this setup.

Once, back on Earth, wars were driven by fervour and patriotism. Young men—it was mostly men then, I’m told—stood firm in the face of danger, their conviction that they were in the right outweighing the determination of the body to save itself. They clambered out of trenches into direct fire, kept walking as mines picked off one then another.