Fade Away and Radiate (5 page)

Billy looked down, then scraped Violet
off her foot with his boot, and stomped until the AI was no more
than a cluster of crushed gears.

“
I bet the beacon inside the
AI still works,” Billy said. “We’re getting out of here, just in
time.”

With that, they pressed through the
membrane and walked up the pathway of light and into the belly of
the ship that waited for them.

And Annie looked back one last time, to
the garden she had grown, to the illusions of safety she was
leaving behind. The dome glowed in the morning sunlight, iridescent
as a soap bubble, the blasted frozen whiteness surrounding
it.

Roberto wasn’t there.

A huge weight suddenly rolled off her
shoulders, a burden she’d never realized she carried, until it was
released. After a long, barren season, she was ready. It was time
for Annie to let the grief move through her, radiate and fade away,
though not the love, never the love. She’d never forget him, would
love him always, but now she knew she was strong enough to carry
the loss forward into the future.

Annie turned, kept walking into the
light. And Billy Murphy walked beside her.

She’d never run away again.

###

Author’s Note

I originally wrote "Fade Away and
Radiate" for the short story collection The Mammoth Book of
Futuristic Romance. Those of you who've read my novel NETHERWOOD
will recognize some of the same elements and setting here, though
the events of this story happen before Talia's adventures in the
Forest with her outlaw. If you haven't read NETHERWOOD and you
liked this story, look for the novel to re-release late in
2013.

As for the title, it is inspired by an
old Blondie song, and I think the mood of that song captures the
longing and cosmic regrets lurking in this tale of grief and
redemption.

Here is a bonus story for your reading
enjoyment. “The Triumph of Arachne” first appeared in Penumbra
Magazine’s June 2012 issue. I had a ton of fun writing this one,
and it shares some themes with “Fade Away.” I hope that you enjoy
it! ~Michele

The Triumph of
Arachne

By Michele Lang

Copyright 2012 Michele Lang

Smashwords Edition

this story first appeared in the June
2012 issue of Penumbra Magazine

“
You are in terrible
danger,” said the spider.

Clea startled and looked up from her
hologram matrix. The spider dangled in front of her, defying the
sterile environment of the lab. They floated in a finely-engineered
exploratory vessel, the Arachne, where spiders ironically were
strictly forbidden.

Clea rubbed her eyes and looked at the
spider again. The spider’s presence violated ship protocol, but
Clea’s spider remained her own little secret. The spider glowed a
delicate spun gold, and Clea had spotted her before, dangling from
silken thread over her work. As if she were studying the intricate
data weaving that Clea herself performed in service to their
ship.

Given their circumstances and the
pressure bearing down on all of the crew, Clea could use a secret
little sign of life. Of home. But the spider had never spoken
before. That made Clea think maybe the pressure had finally taken
its toll on her sanity.

“
Hello,” Clea finally
whispered, feeling like a fool even as she spoke. Her grandmother,
who had raised her, had taught her to always remember her manners.
Never knew who you would encounter in the vast frontiers of space.
Gramma also taught her to respect the prophecies that come in
dreams, and to remember that magic lurked everywhere, especially
where a person least expected.

“
You hear me,” the spider
replied. “I can’t believe it.”

“
It’s just us, you know,”
Clea said. “The crew is up top, not down here in the lab. Maybe I
can hear you because nobody else is around.”

She spoke softly, but still the spider
swung wildly around in the wake of Clea’s breath. She folded her
lips and waited for the spider to gain her bearings.

The spider unwound more silk, came
closer. “If you hear me, heed my message. Before it’s too
late.”

“
You remember Cassandra,
then,” Clea said with a smile. She only meant it as a little joke,
but the spider choked back a sob. “Yes, yes. Poor girl. Her fate
was worse than mine.”

Clea’s blood ran cold. She sat hidden
inside the hull of the Arachne, out of Moon Port 3, headed for the
copper mines on Mars. The corporation expected a lot out of this
mission, and Clea stood to make a gigantic pile of money should she
succeed in her quest. But this spider…the name of the
ship…

It all foretold doom, hubris, the wrath
of the gods. Clea gulped and forced herself to keep
calm.

“
I am listening, goddess,”
Clea whispered, trying to say the words her grandmother would have
said in these circumstances.

“
I am no goddess, though I
am immortal,” Arachne replied. “I was once a girl like you, clever
and headstrong and maybe a little arrogant. I was never a goddess.
I offended one.”

Clea leaned back in her lab chair and
sighed. “I am sorry,” she said. “But we are long past your time,
you know. Thousands and thousands of years.”

“
But still I weave my webs,”
Arachne replied. “Do not be afraid. I cannot catch any butterflies
here. I’m not here to make you feel my sting. But I can warn you,
that someone weaves a web to capture you.”

Clea glanced around the lab, the
machinery humming. “Capture me? Who?”

The spider lowered down to the computer
screen, touched the face of the monitor with a gentle swipe of her
front legs. The computer reacted to that touch, shifted to a face
that Clea knew intimately.

Her teacher. Her mentor. The woman she
trusted with her fortunes and her life.

“
No,” Clea finally managed
to stammer out. “Not Elena. I owe her everything, my career, my
position at the Institute, this particular job. I’m sorry, you must
be wrong.”

The spider actually shrugged. Her laugh
sounded like a little chuff of static. “I did not realize I would
offend Athena so intensely. I presumed that she would take my
triumphs as her own. I presumed that I occupied the same exalted
level as my teacher, the Great Weaver. Do not presume.”

Clea stared at the image of Dr.Elena
Shivath, and remembered. The long years of apprenticeship, the many
papers and awards they had won together, the letters of
recommendation. “I don’t presume, Arachne. To the contrary, I
appreciate, I honor. I am sorry you suffered so for your
indiscretions, but we’re different.”

“
Are you?” For the first
time, Clea heard the acid venom in the spider’s voice. “Ask
yourself why Dr. Elena didn’t come on this trip, the great triumph,
the pinnacle. Tell me why she told you not to patent the Weave
Drive you developed right before you left. Explain why the only
other people on this vessel are low level ground engineers,
expendable to her affairs.”

“
Why are you telling me all
this?” Clea asked. Trembling, she drew up to her considerable
height, and she towered now over the fragile, iridescent creature
standing over the image of her mentor’s face. A single swat with
the handheld Clea clutched in her hands, and Arachne’s voice would
be silenced forever.

“
I like you,” Arachne
replied simply.

Clea rested the handheld on the
gleaming metal desk, ashamed. “But how do you know me?”

“
This is my home. I have
watched you prepare for this mission, watched you working on your
ideas, humming as you tried first one way then another. You…remind
me of who I used to be.”

“
So you think my teacher is
stealing my new invention?” This was the worst thing Clea could
think of, and she said the words in a wounded, angry voice. As if
she were mad at the spider, not the betrayer.

“
Yes. But I think she will
get away with it if you don’t disable the self-destruct
instructions embedded in your flight codes.”

Clea staggered away from the spider.
The very idea of it was too absurd to even contemplate. But then
she remembered her grandmother’s admonition, and the fact that she
spoke with a spider. If she could accept Arachne’s existence, Clea
should at least prove her warning invalid.

Clea swiped the spider out of the way,
and ignored her indignant exclamations while she pounded on the
face of the computer to bring up the flight codes, to see if
Arachne could possibly be telling her the truth.

“
That’s not how you’re going
to get out of this alive,” Arachne said, in a low, intense rush of
words, but Clea was too focused on the screen to reply.

She worked her way into the base codes,
and found the instructions pooling out.

“
Self-destruct sequence
activation in 5:23, 5:22…”

Clea disabled the flight codes, but the
computer reinstated them again a moment afterwards. If Arachne was
right, Elena had programmed this sequence with genius – the vessel
was set to destruct at the edge of Mars’s atmosphere. It would look
to a search team like the ship had simply broken up on
entry.

Clea racked her brain, trying to come
up with a workaround. The seconds ticked away, faster and faster,
and she covered her face with her hands.

“
I can’t override the
codes,” Clea forced out. Instead of screaming panic, she floated on
a dead calm, a serene certainty that in a few minutes she and the
entire crew would be exploded into microscopic
particulate.

“
Yes you can,” Arachne said.
“But you have to believe in yourself. I never did, not until it was
too late for me to escape my fate. I defined myself only in
relation to my mentor.”

Clea forced herself to take slow,
steady breaths. She had a few minutes left to work on this
problem…she had unraveled worse tangles in her professional
career.

“
First things first,” Clea
said. “Elena’s a computer specialist. She can program anything. But
I…”

“
You are a weaver,” Arachne
said. She drew closer, delicately climbed up and perched on the
bend of Clea’s knuckle like a miniature dragon. “You weave. Like
me.”

Clea took another deep breath and
considered Arachne’s words. She invented new things, Elena
initiated sequences within existing systems. With a gasp, she saw
their relationship in a new, disturbing light.

Elena had the technical skills. But
Clea had the flashes of insight, the crazy ideas that turned out to
be breakthroughs. “Why would she kill the golden goose?”

“
Because she couldn’t bear
for you to outshine her. The protégée can never exceed the master.
At least for some mentors, the false ones, that is the secret
rule.”

Clea looked down at the golden creature
perched on her hand, and she could see the iridescent eyes, the
pretty, neat limbs. The sharp mandibles.

“
It’s going to take a crazy
idea, isn’t it.”

“
Yes. A flash of brilliance,
or we’re all dead. Look, only a couple of minutes left, dear
Clea.”

Clea looked from the spider to the
screen, back and forth, until she felt that familiar yet always
exhilarating click when the larger pattern was revealed. “This
meeting, you and I, is no coincidence.”

“
No.”

“
My gramma had something to
do with all of this.”

“
She loves you very much.
She knows that space contains the greatest strangeness, and she
remains open to the whispers of intuition, the favors of the gods.
And she saw the danger you had gotten yourself into.”

With a flash, Clea remembered her
grandmother’s final warning, before embarking on this now-doomed
mission. Gramma knew from knives in the back – she’d been betrayed
before, and survived. She warned Clea to watch out, and Clea had
shrugged, not really listening.

Her fatal mistake.

“
But it’s too
late.”

“
Okay, say it’s too late.
What then?”

In two minutes, less, the ship was
going to self-destruct. The ejection sequence wouldn’t work outside
of the planetary atmosphere…they’d just burn up out
there.

What would Gramma do?

What?

Clea held her breath and did the one
thing her instructors had taught her she must never do.

She reached down, under the console,
and punched the kill switch.

The computer powered down, and now the
Arachne floated in space, without circulating oxygen, without
power, without automated pilot.

Clea sat at the bridge computer, her
face in her hands, and heard the screaming from the bridge. A
minute later Juaraz, the ship’s engineer, came bounding into the
lab. “What the holy--” he began, but Clea held up a hand to stop
him.

She explained the self-destruct
sequence she had discovered, how the only way to stop it was to
kill the system that ran the ship and piloted it. He protested
frantically, lunged for the command console, and only Clea’s
presence of mind kept him from overpowering her and re-activating
the automated captain program.