Fiction River: Moonscapes (4 page)

Predator and prey crumpled to the ground, the
Ornitholestes
’s face filled with wide-eyed terror, its screams disturbingly human.

The coppery stink of blood suddenly everywhere.

The herbivores reacted at once.

The
Triceratops
trumpeted, their bugling danger calls filling the blazing hot air, adults turning
toward
the threat and lowering their massive, three-horned heads. The juvenile ’tops tried to work themselves back into the herd’s center, bleating in terror.

The three-ton
Stegosaurus
wheeled away from the water, swinging its spike-tipped tail.

And charged straight for the children.

The boy gasped and took a startled step back and tripped, the simulation so real that he forgot for a moment that it was all just for fun and there was no way the pretend dinosaur could hurt him.

The girl’s eyes widened and she fell backwards, arms thrown out, terror stamped into the lines of her little face.

She was afraid just like her brother. But, unlike him, she didn’t get up.

Not even after the stegosaur charged past.

***

Saxon awoke, the dream still in his mind. It wasn’t
just
a dream, it had really happened—but it wasn’t quite a memory either. He couldn’t remember that day, couldn’t recall why he wanted so badly for Kara to leave, couldn’t remember the shock and fear when she didn’t rise.

Oh, he had watched the vidclip of the event, watched hundreds of times, had reconstructed,
reimagined
it but he didn’t
remember
it.

Not
really
.

His sister had
died
, and he couldn’t remember any of it.

Because his mother had stolen that memory away.

Children were rare, precious. No parent would trust their progeny to messy biology. Children were
engineered
, every chromosome, every
gene
just so.

But sometimes there were mistakes.

In Kara’s case, the mixture of terror and a subtle coronary defect had proved fatal.

Unable to live with the tragedy, Saxon’s mother had administered a heavy-duty psychotropic combined with neural pruning to wipe Kara from their memories.

If it hadn’t been for the nightmares, Saxon never would have known he’d had a sister.

She’d been killed twice, once in a dinosaur holo, her fear accentuated by the excellent simulation and Saxon’s taunts. And then she’d been killed a second time.

In his mind.

All around him the moon’s scarred surface passed away, dusty and gray and as dead as time.

***

Saxon had expected the strange alien signal to lead him to long-abandoned alien ruins or a crashed starship or, at the very least, some kind of advanced communications tower. But when he reached the source of the signal, he found none of these things.

What he found was stranger still.

The artifact sat on a mostly flat piece of black basalt a meter above the moon’s gray surface. Not a speck of dust marred its perfect surface, as if its alien master had set it down a moment ago and would be back for it any time.

It looked more like a work of art than a mechanism. It was circular, about ten centimeters in diameter, and resembled a rose more than anything else, a flower fashioned from pink petals.

The petals pulsed with a faint light, like a heartbeat.

Around the rose’s outer diameter were a collection of metallic rings painted black and marked in some white, alien scrawl.

Knowing it was foolish—and perhaps dangerous—Saxon reached out to gently touch the rings, to see if he could move them.

He couldn’t.

They were locked in place.

He studied the artifact for a long moment. It wasn’t emitting any kind of radiation (beyond the pulsing pink glow in the visual spectrum). Its temperature precisely matched its environment. He probed it with gamma and UV, microwave and radio, IR and X-rays, looking for internal structure.

Nothing.

Saxon peered down at the little enigma, caressing the strange device with his gloved hand.

One of the rose petals depressed.

He jumped, jerked his hand, and managed to brush one of the black rings.

Terrible,
crushing
weight slammed Saxon to the ground.

Agony lanced through his body and he struggled to breathe. It felt like someone was sitting on his chest. Crimson bars edged his vision.

The device had fallen mere centimeters from his outstretched hand, but it still took all of Saxon’s strength to reach out for it, to place a gloved index finger on the ring he’d bumped before. To slide it the other way—

Suddenly, the horrible weight was gone, just
gone
, his chest heaving, his lungs flush with oxygen, his heart hammering in his chest. Saxon hauled himself painfully to his feet, bent down and retrieved the strange device, stared at it in disbelief.

Had it—He shook his head.
Had the little device just altered the universal constant of gravitation?

***

Standing in the small, cramped bridge of the little shuttle that was both refuge and prison, Monica peered at the delicate rose cupped in her hands. In her grasp it resembled some kind of ornament, a work of art meant to accent a woman’s beauty.

She frowned, delicate brows hunched over those pretty blue eyes.

“You’re saying it’s some kind of ... remote control?”

“Exactly,” said Saxon. “
Exactly
. I played around with it while I was rolling back in. It changes gravitational force and the duration of time and heat transfer and look at this.”

He snatched the rose away from her, touched a certain petal, spun one of the metal rings. He pulled out a cutting laser from the right front pouch of his suit, thumbed the safety off.

Monica’s eyes widened in alarm. Her voice rose in alarm. “
Hey, wait, what’re you
—”

He pointed the laser down at the deck and pressed the rose up against its barrel.

“
Saxon, don’t! You could cut right through the—
”

He touched the firing stud and sparks of dust-scattered ruby light poured out of the krypton laser, but slowly, ever so slowly, as if the scarlet photons were particles of molasses. The laser should have emitted a high-pitched shriek, but instead a bass hum emanated from the machine, as strange and
wrong
as the light.

Saxon released the firing stud watching the flickering light slant slowly toward the deck.

And then, suddenly, there was a small whip crack of sound and a ruby flash of light that left behind a black-burn scar on the deck and the ugly odor of ozone and burning plastic.

“It controls ... the speed of light?” she whispered.

Saxon nodded. “Within a certain range.”

Monica stared down at the burnt spot on the gray tile, her lips slightly parted, her breathing a rasp.

Saxon replaced the laser and set the rose on the pilot’s chair.

She did not pull her gaze up from the deck.

After a minute he couldn’t stand it anymore. He grabbed her by the shoulders and her gaze jerked up to him.

He laughed, his laughter loud and maybe a little wild. “Don’t you see, Monica? This’ll save us. This explains why our orbital insertion went bad. The planet’s gravity was too high. But with this device,” he glanced at the rose, “we can
change
gravity. It’ll be ridiculously easy to break free of the moon. We’ll have enough delta vee to reach Osiris, refuel.”

She shrugged. “And what do we do then?”

“We set course for Earth.”

Monica frowned. “Earth? Earth’s more than 150 lightyears away. How can we—”

She stopped. She saw it, too.

Saxon let go of her and lifted the rose, held it up. “Earth’s 47.1 parsecs away, but how many lightyears is up to us. We can go home, not in a thousand years, not in a hundred, not in
ten.
We can go home whenever we want to.”

The blood drained from Monica’s face, that lovely skin suddenly china-doll pale. She reached a trembling hand out to the right-hand chair to brace herself.

“I don’t think you’ve thought this all the way through yet, Saxon.”

“What? Yes, I have. This’ll get us home, Monica.”

“Yes,” she admitted, “but—”

“Look,” he said, “you didn’t come with me because you loved me. And you didn’t come with me because you thought my hot jupiter research was important. You came with me for another reason.”

Monica licked dry lips, but didn’t look up at him.

“Didn’t you?” he demanded.

She nodded, the movement of her head so slight, it almost wasn’t there.

“You came with me for the same reason you cheated on me. Because your life is empty.”

She looked up sharply, her eyes blazing with fury.

“
You son of a bitch.
”

He shook his head. “It’s not just you, Monica, it’s all of us. We live forever. There’s no want, no
challenges
. Human beings ... We’ve been twisted into something nature never intended.” He raised the rose, shook it at her. “But with this, we can explore the galaxy, colonize the stars. With this, we can
strive
. With this, all our lives will mean something again.”

“Your little found toy, it solves everything, yes?” she said caustically.

She heard the cruelty in her words, but it didn’t frighten him. There was no way for her to cut him.

“Say what you have to say,” he said. “I’m not afraid of the truth.” He thought of his little sister, gone without a trace. “In fact, I insist on it.”

She nodded slowly, her baleful, blue gaze locked on him.

“All right. Because you love the truth so much.” She drew a deep breath. “The name of this moon is Horus.”

He blinked. “Yeah. So what? Horus was the son of Osiris.”

She nodded again. “Falcon-faced Horus, the son of Osiris, the god of sun and protection and one more thing. Do you remember the last thing that Horus ruled over?”

Saxon frowned trying to remember his Egyptian mythology. None of it really mattered. The gas giant had been given the name Osiris because Osiris had ruled the underworld and the gas giant was a dying world. And once you named a world Osiris it just made sense to name its moon Horus.

He shook his head. “I don’t—”

“War,” she said softly. “Horus was the Egyptian god of war.”

He shrugged, still not seeing her point.

“Your aliens tore the gas giant from its orbit. Scattered the planets in this system, sent them spinning into the cold of interstellar space. While you were out riding your rover, did you get a good look at the moon’s cratered surface, Saxon? They bombarded this little moon. War, Saxon. They were waging war. And not just
here
. Everywhere in the sky where there’s a hot jupiter, scores of star systems, and in
every single one
we’re seeing the remnants of a terrible, apocalyptic war.”

She tore the rose out of his hands. “And they did it with
this
.”

Saxon’s mouth tasted dry, bitter.

“Can you imagine their power?” she whispered. “Can you imagine their
hatred?
”

“But it’s all just history,” he said, “they’re long gone and—”

And then he remembered the signal they’d detected upon landing, the alien device calling to its masters across time and space.

“They’ll destroy us,” she whispered. “Not just our people, but our
worlds
.”

The signal, he thought. How had he managed to make himself forget the signal? And suddenly he understood his mother burying her grief, Monica desperately telling herself she loved him.

For the first time he understood the necessity of lying.

Because that’s what you did when the truth was unendurable.

Introduction to “
The Old Guy”

I bought Annie Reed’s first short story years ago. Since then she’s gone on to sell short fiction in a lot of different genres. She’s an award-winning mystery writer whose stories have appeared in many anthologies as well as
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
. But she’s a heck of a science fiction and fantasy writer as well, as her history with Fiction River proves. Even though this is our sixth issue, Annie’s stories have already appeared three times. Her next appearance, after this one, will be in our first special edition, called
Crime
.