Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 (17 page)

Outside petal-like doors folded back from the noses of the ships, and the gossamer webs unfolded and expanded.

“Immediately after the collapsers have been launched,” she went on, “we will turn and attempt to ignite the main drives. You may find it disturbing, possibly frightening, but you must not fight it. Victor and I were bred for this task, but we need each of you, and all of you, if we are to have any chance. Let us wish ourselves well.”

In the control centre the one-time twins looked at each other. “This could be a rough ride,” Victor said, and blew Mariam a kiss. “Let’s do it.” He issued the final command.

Missiles streamed from the nose of the ships. The impulse drives cut, and the bay doors were closing even as the great vessels changed course, turning away from the missile tracks. And then Victor and Mariam locked their brains with all the other brains and began the impossible calculus which could subject the quantum foam to their bidding. Strange fire crackled through the webs. Slowly, much too slowly, flickering erratically, the ships began their leap into the void.

To one side of the projected path of the massive cluster of dark matter that hurtled towards the Milky Way, the collapsers fired. Matter turned on matter, dimensions distorted, and eight massive black holes erupted into terrible being. Gravity waves wracked the heavens. The gates of Hades were opened and the Furies unleashed. The pathways of the skies were re-mapping themselves.

* *

At last, one
lonely ship emerged from the roiling energies, its quantum webs destroyed, its outer shields ablated, stripped of sensors, black, inert. It was impossible to detect the name painted on the hull, or if there ever had been a name. But deep inside, a shoal of silver fish swam to and fro in a blue lake bordered with perfect grass and gently waving trees.

* * * * *

Copyright © 2013 Jim Hawkins

* * * * *

Jim Hawkins
started his first SF novel at the age of 10 and still hasn’t finished it. His Interzone stories ‘Chimbwi’ and ‘Digital Rites’ were republished in Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction in 2011 and 2012. Jim now lives in Hull, teaches screenwriting at the university, and also has a software company. He’s been a teacher, a BBC broadcaster, a sou-chef, a jazz pianist, a composer of orchestral works, an actor, and, for many years, a Hull City football supporter

* * * * *

"The new fantasy adventure"

Live link in Endnotes

by Tracie Welser

“
This will bring the whole thing down, to a standstill
,”
says
Mikhail. The
y’
re running, running, running, voices pushed out in breathy bursts.

“
You sure
?”
asks Roberto
.“
If we get caugh
t
…”

“
You sound like that fuzz-chin baby Conrad. W
e’
re
not
going to get caught
.
”

“
Alright, then. A dar
e’
s a dare
.
”

Both laugh, hearts pounding in their chests in time with the thumping of their regulation boots on the wet pavement.

* *

At first glance,
Mikhail is an unassuming figure: head-down, a hard-worker. His dark hair curls just an inch or two longer than regulation; not long enough to earn him a code violation, but risky enough to be stylish. He tucks it under his cap while in the work zone. When the evening shift ends, he puts away each of his fine tools, except for the special one that he keeps in his pocket, the one obtained through a faked requisition. He’s fashioned a larger handle for it from a piece of an old broomstick, and it’s good for opening small things.

As he leaves his station, he twists his cap at a rakish angle. He’s wary, but careful to avoid appearing so. He walks down the moving sidewalk on Industry Avenue, away from the work zone and through the shared housing sector. The sun slides behind the factories through a steadily increasing drizzle of rain, casting an orange glow on other workers walking to and from work shifts. They trudge past in gray coveralls and caps, heads down and eyes averted. A tiny older man squints up at the angle of Mikhail’s cap with a wry and disapproving expression, and then looks away. Mikhail weaves through the crowd to where the sidewalk stops, just short of a wall.

The concrete wall bisects the city, painted gray and dripping beads of rainwater. A sign with heavy black lettering says
NIGHT DISTRICT: MIND THE CURFEW
. When he steps through the wide opening in the wall, his shoulders relax, his gait slows and shifts into a saunter. He pulls a brown curl from under his crooked cap and glances back, once. No cameras track his movements on this side of the wall.

His friends converge on the Night District, crossing the line from the eastern agricultural zone and housing block. He spies Amrit, her dark hair in a neat regulation bob. The collar of her coveralls is flipped up, her signature statement of tiny rebellion. She hails their third, Roberto, from down the dark street. The stocky youth’s painted face leers in the dim lamplight, and Amrit laughs, her brown hand covering her straight, white smile. Arms linked, they cross the street to where Mikhail waits, grinning, bouncing on the balls of his boot-clad feet.

“You got Drift?” he asks Roberto. Up close, Roberto’s face paint is cracking already, and a misting of rain runs in a tiny rivulet around one thick eyebrow. His friend nods, opens his palm to reveal the little tin of pills.

“
Saved my whole week’s allotment.”

“
I’m so primed for Drift,” says Amrit. “My work shift today was the worst.”

“
Yeah, mine, too,” Mikhail chimes in, too quickly. He fingers the tool in his pocket.

“
If I never see another faulty component.” She savagely rolls up the sleeves of her coveralls.

But, of course, she will, thinks Mikhail. The very next morning, no matter how much Drift she does tonight to forget. No matter how quickly she uses her allotment next week.

“Shift matron in my face, assembly audit, faster faster, blah blah.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Roberto admiring Amrit’s diatribe, the fire of her form, her face. She’s clever and animated, her chin juts forward, her narrow hips move in a swagger. She struts back and forth in a circle, imitating her shift supervisor’s lumbering walk with exaggerated motions of her arms. Roberto’s eyes move over Amrit’s breasts, more apparent now that she’s unfastened the top button of her coveralls.

“My shift lost music privileges today,” Mikhail says helpfully. He forces himself to look away from Roberto.

“
What? Those assholes,” says Amrit. She halts in mid-swagger and links arms with him and Roberto. “Screw them.”

“
Forget them,” Roberto says, and with his free hand passes around the Drift. Amrit accepts hers directly into her mouth with a high, fluting laugh. Mikhail places the smooth green tablet under his tongue.
Forget.
They jaunt together in the direction of the Hangout, between wet streets and neat, blank-faced buildings, leaving the curfew wall behind.

His friends continue their litany of complaint about the tedium of the work zone, as is fashionable to do. Mikhail inserts a nod or a laugh at appropriate intervals. His secret shame is that he loves his work. But he forgets that now, and from the gradual quieting of their chatter, he can tell that Roberto and Amrit are forgetting, too, as the Drift kicks in.

Soothing blankness rolls over him, and he knows they’re experiencing it simultaneously when Amrit comes to an abrupt stop just outside the Hangout. She shifts her arms from their waists to their shoulders and pulls them both close. In a huddle around her, they breathe the same breath, look into each others’ faces. Amrit wears a slack smile. Roberto looks boyish and vacant behind his face paint, and Mikhail thinks of Roberto’s first Drift, when he drooled an oval puddle onto the street where they sat slumped against a building. Mikhail gives a little laugh in his belly.

Amrit lets go and dances away to the open doorway of the Hangout, glancing over her shoulder, beckoning. Roberto gamely follows, but Mikhail freezes at her gesture, one which triggers a flood of memory.

This is the Drift. Not so much forgetting as remembering something better:

Amrit, bright-faced and eager, just a few months ago, a step ahead of him looking back over her shoulder. They’re at the door of her shared room in the women’s dormitory, and her bunkmate is away, in the infirmary for the week after slitting her own wrists. Amrit turns to open the door and glances back again, beckons him forward with a wiggle of her index finger. Her face is flushed.

The hour is late, and soon the curfew siren will sound over the loudspeakers. He pauses at the door. They could have coupled in a sanctioned room in the Night District, but she likes the thrill of the forbidden. He steps into the room, and the memory blurs into soft, aching sweetness; the touch of her hand on the back of his neck, his hand slipping between the metal buttons of her coveralls, impossibly tender lips pressing into his, her eyes wide and mouth agape as he enters her. Then, her look of disappointment when the curfew siren sounds, and he pulls away.

He’d crept out into the cold afterward feeling both triumphant and ashamed. The next day, Amrit acknowledged him in the work zone with a wave, as though nothing had taken place between them. She never spoke of it again.

He blinks, and he’s in the Hangout. Music pulses in dim light, and through the crowd of coveralls, he spies Amrit dancing with Roberto. Her arms twine with his, and her open-mouthed smile is bright against his black hair as they move together lazily to the rhythms of the music. Around them, slack faces float in the darkened room, all under the influence of Drift. Mikhail dances with a woman with vacant eyes who whispers repeatedly into his ear, “James, James,” as she relives some pleasant memory. He’s dazzled by the music, by the smoothness of the woman’s bare neck against his cheek. He allows himself to pretend she’s Amrit. She even smells like Amrit, like soap.

“
We want you to meet someone,” Amrit is saying, and the stranger is gone. His two friends take him by the arms, and he’s whisked away from the dancing faces, past a screen displaying scenes from an old film. He’s seen part of this one before; a man kills another man with a weapon because they both want a statue of a bird.

“
I could build another one,” he says, randomly.

“
What?” Roberto shouts over the music and puts his ear closer to Mikhail’s mouth, but Mikhail shrugs him off.

“
He’s drifting, is all,” says Amrit. They steer Mikhail through the crowd.

The crowd parts, and individual forms dissolve: he’s moving through a knot of people in the bright afternoon light to get to his work station. Paul, from the morning shift, is demonstrating a repair. The older man’s hands shake a little as he holds the access panel open with one thumb and points into the interior of the tiny metal bird with a fine-pointed tool held between his other thumb and forefinger.

“Right there, see it?”

“
Where? Oh, I see it, that one.”

“
I just couldn’t quite. My hands aren’t what they used to be, or my eyes,” Paul says, apologetic. “I suppose they’ll retire me soon, if they find out.”

“
Don’t say that,” Mikhail whispers. “Let me.” He takes the bird, gently, like a living thing.

“
Do you think you can do it?”

“
I can fix it,” Mikhail says.

“
Fix what?” asks Amrit. He’s sitting in a booth filled with people in the darkness of the Hangout. His hand is on Amrit’s leg. He doesn’t remember putting it there, but her leg is warm, thin and tantalizing through her overalls. She’s painted his thumbnail a gleaming silver, using a tube of component fixative that he knows came from her assembly work.

“
Joseph was telling us about the sabotage at the water station and how his bunkmate got five months on the Turd Crew,” Roberto says. He looks queasy under his face paint.