Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 7, October 2014 (6 page)

The man’s blue eyes blinked. “Should there be?”

“No,” Henry said. He wanted to explain himself, about Peter combusting here, but there was something odd in the MPs posture, a tightness in his gaze that pierced through Henry’s flesh. As though the man already knew about Peter’s death and was challenging him to ask what had really happened.

“Nothing, sir,” Henry said, averting his eyes.

“Good. I suggest you get a move on.”

They nodded and continued on their way. Henry shivered. Standing there for too long made him feel like he’d go up in smoke as well. Their pace increased as their lengthened stride ate ground faster. Henry could see the discotheque lights up ahead, remembered the faint smell of sweat and hopelessness that would soon sour the air.

Colin slapped Henry on the back.

“Trying to get into it with the law?”

Henry glanced over his shoulder. The officer’s dark eyes had returned to the ground, his irises searchlights. It was as if the man was looking for something.

“Funny,” he mused.

“What?” Colin asked.

“It’s just. You only see MPs at bars, looking for troublemakers. You don’t think…”

“What?”

“That they’re investigating or something?”

“Why would they be investigating?” Colin snapped.

“I don’t know. Maybe Peter combusting was a mistake.” He bit his lip. Maybe the government had become all-knowing, had overheard Peter thinking about trying to change the system. A boy with little education frequenting a library could be disconcerting, could cause unease, disturbance. Maybe that was what Peter had been doing at Franklin Memorial. Following through with his idea to try and find another way to live.

Panic bubbled in Henry’s stomach. What if they thought he had been involved, an accomplice? They could pull his plug, make his timer turn to zero with the flick of a switch.

Colin stopped and grabbed Henry’s shoulder. The vein in his neck protruded.

“Henry, he didn’t have the money to pay his time tax. He didn’t ask for help.”

“We don’t know that. No one ever tells you the number, how much time they have left. It’s private. It’s not something you’re supposed to discuss.” Colin’s hand dropped. If Colin wasn’t immune to it, he would have known that unspoken rule. Henry could see his friend’s shining leather shoes, crisp jeans, brand-new Messaging Identifier. The things that said, “My parents paid for my time exemption at birth. Shelled out 150,000 credits to let me do whatever I want while everyone else scrapes their time together like loose change.”

Without looking at his timer, Henry knew his own number was five years, two months, several hours, and constantly changing minutes and seconds. But Colin didn’t.

“It’s simple. Obey the rules and something like this doesn’t happen. Trust your friends,” Colin pleaded.

Why did it have to be so damn hot? Henry stared at the cement, stared long enough to make out an ashy splotch, a scar left by a combustion victim. He blinked and it disappeared. A group of girls, black hair falling in silky sheets down to their waists, giggled past. Colin eyed them with momentary interest as they disappeared inside.

“Let’s go in,” Colin said, his voice quieter.

Henry ground his teeth. He hated the way Colin sounded.

“No,” he said. “I can’t. I just can’t forget about it.”

“I’m not asking you to,” Colin said.

Henry shook his head. “He looked at me, you know. Right before it happened. As though he knew. As though he felt some sort of shock. Some realization hit him about what was going to happen. What the world was all about. He went really still. I thought I heard him say something, thought he turned to me and said ‘No!’ But then he was gone.”

Colin reached into his back pocket. “Look, I’m not trying to be insensitive. He was my friend too. And he should’ve come to me if he needed more time. You guys don’t get paid enough.”

He grabbed onto Henry’s arm and pulled him away from the neon lights. He lowered his voice. “I don’t want this to happen again. Let me help you. Let me help pay.” He pressed time slips into his hand.

Henry’s fingers itched. The transparent bills glowed in the dark, the rectangular sheets green. He wanted to say yes or thanks or whatever it was that you were supposed to say when someone gave you a life. But his tongue felt thick; the air pressed down on him.

“Too hot for autumn,” he whispered.

“What?” Colin replied, confused.

“I’m fine,” Henry said. “I’ll be fine, but you should have seen it. How he just vanished. Right before my eyes.” He tripped away from Colin, away from the fumes and temptations, the Pleasure Dome that helped the government meet their combustion quota.

“You can always come to me,” Colin shouted after him, but the music oozing from under the door drowned his voice. Henry’s lungs ached. Fingers itched for a cigarette. He wanted to be a smoker, a drinker, a dancer, a waste of space. But he didn’t want to be a splotch on the pavement, erased by the wind. The air was stagnant. It rested on his shoulders, smelling of trash and sweat.

He walked down the street, back toward Franklin Memorial. Maybe he could help the MP find what he’d been looking for, a grain of ash, a partially preserved pointer finger, anything that said that Peter was a real person. That he had not deserved to die. The street lights flickered and followed him. He’d walked this same way back to his apartment that last time he’d been to the bar with Peter. It felt too familiar. The same way the sweat dripped down his back and soaked his body in warm discomfort.

Through the darkness spotted with pinpricks of white light, green flashed. He paused. On a street corner, between 15th North and Main, a credit flickered in the light, taunted him. It’d probably fallen out of a passerby’s pocket on the way to a club or bar or hotel room. A shadow from across the street had spotted it too. A Sparkler, his clothes tattered and ragged on his skinny body, stood a few feet away, perhaps in hope to gain a few more minutes before the wires installed in his heart would short-circuit and explode.

Without thinking, Henry raced toward the credit, leapt across the space and snatched it. He was going to change; he would make this all better, make his time worth it. A Sparkler would just burn it away.

“What are you doing?” the man cried. “Can’t you spare some time for a poor soul?”

I need this more than you do
, Henry wanted to say. Turning from the man, he lifted his shirt and fed the credit into his timer slot. There he watched fifteen more minutes add to his life. Biting his lip, he took the long way home and avoided Franklin Memorial.

###

Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 30 publications. She was a finalist for the 2013-2014 Boston Public Library's Children's Writer-in-Residence and a 2011 Bread Loaf Scholarship Recipient in Fiction. Her first three picture books were published by MeeGenius Books. One of them, titled
Nuwa and the Great Wall
, was featured in the 2014 PBS Summer Learning Series for Kids. When not writing, she can be found editing math books, carving pumpkins and travelling the world.

A Vision of Paradise

Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

Aboard the
Salome of the Seven Veils
, a solitary pilot scanned the heavens, recorded his findings, and activated the Conduit. A few hundred kilometers from his ship, space folded into a vortex of cobalt blue.

The pilot checked his report one last time before sending it.
The planetary system around Iduaban remains lifeless and of little interest to the Cohort. The only body eligible for level-one colonization is Rakesh’s fifth moon, which offers no strategic or economic value. Recommendation is to implode this Conduit and abandon exploration of this sector, per Spectral Mandate Five Two Zero. A Collapsar ship should be dispatched at the Cohort’s earliest convenience to enforce Closure protocols.

Satisfied, the pilot activated the Conduit’s pull-through sequence. The
Salome of the Seven Veils
entered the swirling blue ring.

Time to go home.

#

The pilot’s report was wrong.

On Rakesh’s fifth moon, under a fierce magnetic field, deep inside a chain of interconnected mountains
and caverns that encompassed a continent-sized chunk of ice, life stirred.

“This was the weakest Blessing yet,” whispered Drosian Azo.

“Perhaps it was the last one,” replied his daughter, Sumelyu Enchar.“Perhaps we’ve missed our chance to escape this place.”

Drosian’s voice became firm, in marked contrast to his frail, stooping figure. “
This is our home
.”

Sumelyu knew she should hold her tongue. But it was colder than usual, and she was hungry, and miserable at the sight of her father’s deterioration.

“Guild-leader Azo,” she said, with artificial formality, addressing an invisible audience of Guild members, “I believe you have lost perspective on our situation. It has become more and more rare for ships to visit our system.
And each time these ships caress the heavens, the Blessings we receive are weaker than the time before.”

Drosian was overcome by a wracking cough. “Then we will learn to live
without
the Blessings.” He spat.

Sumelyu cringed at the sight of a thin trail of blood on the icy rock. She wiped away the remaining spittle from his lips and ran her fingers through his white hair. Her touch lingered for a moment on his feverish forehead.

He smiled. “We will adapt.”

She took a step back and stared at the old man. Her head sank. He had lost touch with reality. He spoke of adapting, but he couldn’t even contain the disease ravaging his own body.

He is doomed
, she thought.
But I won’t allow his blindness to be our downfall.

#

After the old man had fallen asleep, something that happened with increasing regularity since the Blessings had softened, Sumelyu approached the two Guild-speakers she trusted most, Krossatar and Felioe.

She felt a shiver of disappointment at herself.
It was not like Drosian Azo’s daughter to consort in shadows and stir up trouble.
But he leaves me no choice
, she thought.

“How is your father?” Krossatar asked, concern—and tentativeness—evident in his ragged features.

“He’s dying,” Sumelyu said. “As we’ll all die shortly, if we don’t do anything about it.”

Krossatar exchanged a pained look with his mate Felioe.

“I believe our Guild-leader has been very clear about what we should and should not do,” Krossatar said.

“Clarity is the farthest thing from his mind,” snapped Sumelyu. “I think of you as my friends. Believe me then, friends, when I tell you that the disease has poisoned his thinking as well as his body. I need your help.”

She paused. Silence hung thick and gelid in the air, brittle as her father’s bones.

Felioe glanced at Krossatar, who nodded, and said, “Sumelyu, we feel your loss. It’s a terrible pain for
everyone
in the Guild. But we must trust in our abilities, just as we did sixteen cycles ago after the Landing.”

Sumelyu snorted. “We barely managed to salvage enough scraps from our crashed ship to keep half our crew alive.
You call that an
ability
?”

Felioe’s eyes grew soft at the remembered loss. She had been with child—one among so many other casualties. But her voice did not waver. “We paid a steep price. But we endured. We became one with this place. We accepted our fate. And in so doing, we received the Blessings.”

Sumelyu hesitated. “Look, I won’t argue that something…truly unique…has happened to us.” She studied Felioe’s pale face, as youthful and lively as it had been sixteen cycles ago. And Krossatar, who stood right beside her now, just as strong and commanding as he had been the day their ship fell to this desolate moon. She thought about Drosian himself, already an old man when they had crashed. Without the Blessings he would have died a long time ago.
“I can’t explain how the Blessings keep us young. But without them this place
will
kill us.”

Krossatar sighed. “Just for argument’s sake, what do you propose we do?”

This was the moment Sumelyu had been dreading. “The next Cohort ship that appears, we signal it. Ask them to evacuate us. Rejoin them.”

Felioe crossed her arms. Her voice was bitter. “What makes you think they would take us back? You think they’ll simply forget that we’re exiles?”

“We have to try. Maybe we can work with the Cohort to understand the Blessings, so that their people can also defeat the ageing process.”

“The Blessings must be
earned
,” Krossatar said. “That’s all there is to understand about them.”

“If we earned them, why are they being taken away from us now?” shot back Sumelyu.

“Perhaps it is… a lack of faith.”

“We should be coming together at a time like this,” added Felioe. “The Cohort cast us out. They have no use for us, and we have no use for them.”

Sumelyu stood very still. “You are too proud,” she said. “Too convinced that what you cannot see will save you.”

“It saved us once before.”

Krossatar turned his back to her, and Felioe joined him.

Without their support, Sumelyu would be unable to convince anyone of significance in the Guild. And without her own Guild’s vote, there was no use in approaching a different clan.

I’m on my own
, she realized
.

#

Sumelyu spent the following five days and nights by herself. She set up camp in a remote cavern that she had discovered on an expedition ten cycles back. She needed time away from the Guild, to make sure she knew in her heart that she was doing the right thing. And more importantly, she could not risk capture. Now that her two former confidantes knew her plan, there was every reason to think they would try and subdue her when the next ship appeared.

If
one appeared.

During this time she only emerged from the mountainside once. She gazed at faint
Iduaban in an evening sky littered with other, more distant stars. Its sight filled her with melancholic longing, a desire for her people to return to the days of old when they had roamed among the stars.