INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (5 page)

Fifteen minutes later, we pulled into the old driveway of the house my Mom and Dad spent sixty years of their marriage in. I’d grown up in this house. In a month or two, if our plans went well, it would be sold, and another family would be living there.

I tried not to think of that.

“I need to grab something, Dad. Will you be okay?”

He unbuckled his belt. I had assumed he would stay in the car. That would be easier, but he already opened the door. I rushed around the front of the car to help him.

Inside, he sat on a folding chair that was the only furniture left on the living room’s hardwood floor. The drapes were closed, shrouding the room in twilight. At the care center, when he wasn’t sleeping, he sat. He’d never fallen while sitting, so I knew he would be okay to leave alone.

I went downstairs to get the box.

It didn’t weigh much. Before I turned off the lights in the basement, I looked around. My bedroom had been down here. It looked different without my parents’ photographs on the wall, without the interruption of couch and table. It was unlikely I’d ever see the basement again. Maybe some other little boy or girl would use the bedroom. Maybe they too would stay up late, reading by the closet light. For a second, I thought about leaving the old science fiction magazine. What would someone else’s child think of part three of ‘Glory Road’?

In the background, something buzzed. At first I thought it might be the furnace, but it came from upstairs. It wasn’t the door bell or a telephone, but it was incessant and familiar. I cocked my head to the side to hear better as I walked up the stairs.

The sound came from the back of the house upstairs, from the bedrooms. Dad wasn’t in the chair by the door, though. I almost dropped the box as I put it on the floor.

“Dad?”

I went down the hall, glanced in his empty office, checked the bathroom and the guest bedroom. Nothing.

His bedroom was empty too. The buzzing came from the closet and filled the room.

It was Dad’s UFO detector, still in working order after all these years. I moved the magnet off the contacts, cutting off the sound.

Where was Dad?

I double checked the rooms on the way out.

“Dad?”

Out the front door. He wasn’t in the car. I rushed to the street. Looked both ways. The sidewalks were empty.

In the next hour, I called the police. I called my sisters. I drove the blocks, slowly, windows down, looking at porch chairs and front yard swings. How could he get so far? Where could he be?

It’s dusk now. He’s been gone for four hours. I’ve answered a thousand questions. I’ve cried. I’ve been wracked with guilt. Now, though, for the moment, the house is quiet again. Everyone is outside, somewhere, searching.

I’m looking at Dad’s UFO detector, thinking about Martian moon maids and their queen. Dad introduced me to science fiction and telescopes and the stars.

It seemed fantastic, but his UFO detector had gone off.

For just a second, a tiny instant, I wanted to believe that maybe there was an alternate explanation. He wasn’t just a wandering Alzheimer’s patient.

He wasn’t.

•••••

James Van Pelt’s father introduced him to science fiction movies at a young age, starting with
The Day the Earth Stood Still
and the Godzilla films, and the rest of the best of the 50s. James sold his first short story in 1989, and since then has produced four collections and one novel. Besides
Interzone
– most recently issue #248 – his work has appeared in
Asimov’s
,
Analog
, and numerous other venues. He has been a finalist for the Nebula and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He occasionally blogs at
jimvanpelt.livejournal.com
and can be found on Facebook.

ANDREW HOOK

ILLUSTRATED BY DANIEL BRISTOW-BAILEY

When Adamson was a boy he imagined a planet. Days were dreamt in visual soliloquies, quiet monologues. He pieced together a harsh, barren, dangerous world from what he knew of the extremities of conditions on Earth. Volcanoes pepper-potted the surface, craters pock-marked its face. The atmosphere suffocated.

The night sky yielded the products of his imaginings. With head tilted back he gazed through his open casement window, each star a possible creation, each pinprick an aspiration. Adamson scorned the astrological books that his parents bought on special occasions, he didn’t want to understand the universe through second-hand knowledge: he wanted to experience it directly.

What made the human race different from the other species was that it sought not only to live within its surroundings, but to adapt them, to expand knowledge beyond necessity, to live outside its means.

Adamson had a special fondness for the brightest light in the night sky. He imagined darkness fell infrequently, that its radiance came from silver-suited occupants who braved the surface and were reflected back into the blackness as a message. He
wanted
this to be a truism. Adamson was lonely on Earth. He felt there were few people like him. If only he had known he was just a typical teenager who would live an average life and see all his dreams shattered, then maybe his perspective would have shifted.

•••

Gareth pinched the fly between his thumb and forefinger. Movement was felt rather than seen, a tremulous vibration resonated within the grooves of his fingerprints and made him want to rub those digits together, to erase the beating of that eloquent heart. Yet instead he maintained the grip, dropped the insect into the jaws of his Venus flytrap.

It bounced once against the plant’s interior, then unfolded its squashed wings like an escapologist freeing itself from a sticky straightjacket before rising and buzzing vehemently against the windowpane, catching a breeze and drifting to freedom.

Gareth sighed. He pressed the point of his pencil hard against the paper where he recorded his experiments and made a mark. The fly had been too fast. The trap would only spring when prey had contact with one of the three hair-like trichomes on the upper surface of the terminal lobes. Even then the hair had to be touched twice in quick succession – or two trigger hairs touched within twenty seconds of each other – for it to work. It was a delicate mechanism; but it was also deadly. The trap would shut within a tenth of a second under the right circumstances.

He found the entire process fascinating.

The
Venus
part of the plant’s name was a misnomer. It didn’t come from Venus. Gareth did, although he didn’t know it. Both the planet and the plant had been named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. The flytrap had been historically known as a
tipitiwitchet
, a possibly oblique reference to its resemblance to female genitalia.

Gareth didn’t know enough about female genitalia to make that comparison.

•••

Beth put down her copy of Jack Finney’s
The Body Snatchers
and shuddered. She had seen all four movie versions, the black and white classic directed by Don Siegel, the much-lauded remake featuring Donald Sutherland, the passable 1993 version directed by Abel Ferrara, and the execrable
The Invasion
made in 2007; yet it was the book which got under her skin.

There was something about the simplicity: of the idea, of the telling, of the plot, of the invasion. It resonated tiny triggers inside her body; goosebumped the skin like hairs stood to attention. It felt
familiar
, somehow. As though it had already happened and Finney was only setting out the facts for future generations to discover and find truth in it.

She arced herself back on the bed, looked upside-down out the window. The stars were in a reverse hemisphere, but not the opposing hemisphere of the Australasian states. She could still identify the three stars of Orion’s belt, the distinctive shape of the Plough, and the bright ‘star’ that was Venus. She looked for a long time at the planet, until closing her eye she found the afterimage remained on her retina, as though behind her eyelid was a pinhole camera.

She imagined Finney’s pods blowing through space and landing on Venus many millions of years ago, sucking the life out of the occupants there, and then leaving it desolate before heading to Earth.

She picked up her phone. It was only just past ten. Laura would be awake. With one push, eleven digits were dialled.

“Hello?”

“It’s Beth.”

“I know. What do you want?”

“Just tell me something.”

“Tell you something…?”

It was a game they had. The recipient of the question would make something up; often nonsense. Beth didn’t listen to Laura’s words, but she listened to
Laura
. She wondered if she would detect if Laura had been replaced by an emotionless being. If everything that made Laura human remained, or whether it had been subverted. She listened especially to Laura’s vowels, because she considered they would be the first to go. Not the staccato consonants, but the resonant vowels.

But Laura’s vowels were just as they should be.

•••

Adamson grew older and realised that all planets already existed before he imagined them.

He was only at the centre of his personal solar system.

The sense of isolation remained. It carried through his high school years and into adulthood, where, despite on the surface he hit each of the expected social landmarks at the right time, he found at the age of forty-seven that he could look at his wife and three children and not recognise anything of himself in them.

On nights where the rota dictated that he walk the dog, he took to the hills. Above him, the evening sky fought light pollution revealing its majesty. Unleashing the Labrador he looked upwards, basked in the glow. Unlike the constellations which beckoned with promise he knew many of these were dead stars. Their brilliance long extinguished, with the light itself no greater than a memory of it. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket, having taken it from the packet before he left the house. The slender stem had buckled and needed gentle pressure from his fingers to restore its shape.

He saw himself as the bent cigarette.

Venus might be the brightest star in the sky, but he now understood that it wasn’t populated by those silver-suited beings of his youth. Atmospheric pressure ninety-two times that of Earth, a temperature that made it the hottest planet in the solar system and air that was 96% carbon dioxide put paid to that. He lit the tip of his cigarette, sucked the smoke into his lungs. For a moment they felt like the hottest part of his body, his chest tightened, he blew out carbon like a world-builder.

What he had looked for in the stars and planets wasn’t reflected on the ground. He had barely discovered Earth. So it was that dreams were more than snatched, they were stolen.

The dog barked. Adamson paid it no attention.

Then it yelped.

He drew the cigarette down by half, threw the butt to the ground, and pressed the remainder into the wet soil with the toe of his shoe.

Then he wandered off into the darkness to find his pet.

•••

Gareth found spiders more suitable than flies. Their longer legs triggered the flytrap’s mechanism much quicker than something airborne. Beetles also provided sustenance. He would watch as the trap closed, the interlocking lobes becoming prison bars. From experiments he knew smaller insects could escape through the gap, possibly the plant’s intention. He imagined the cost of capturing small prey exceeded the benefits of digesting it. But for the larger insects, those that struggled, the trap tightened. Digestion took ten days, after which the trap reopened and Gareth removed the husk of chitin and placed it in a box.

Despite his inexperience he likened the trapping mechanism to a woman. The male an innocent insect, the colourful interior a woman’s promise; the trap was life.

Gareth never intended to become trapped.

If Venus were a goddess then she didn’t have man’s interests at heart.

Still, his tending the plants, his monitoring of their behaviour, his decision how and when to feed: all these elements represented his control. A pyrrhic victory.

Occasionally he dreamt of falling into a giant flytrap, the surface spongy with the texture of a tongue. Knowing it was useless, he would trampoline bounce in an attempt to rise above the closing mesh. Yet it never worked and he knew he would be digested before he starved.

On those occasions he woke and saw the silhouettes of his plants on the windowsill and waited until he could be sure they hadn’t moved.

Gareth was no fan of
The Little Shop of Horrors
.

•••

Beth read other books but always returned to
Body Snatchers
.

In Finney’s work the seed pods drifted through millennia until they reached a planet they might colonise. They affected the guise of the inhabitants although the science itself was sketchy as to how this osmosis might occur. Whatever you do, don’t sleep! Unlike the films the book made it clear that the lifespan of these amalgamate creatures was greatly shortened once the transformation had taken place. Five years at the most. Five years to remain in that state – being who you were but not who you were – until disintegration.

Upon which the alien life-form would move on.

She raised this speculation with Laura.

“Tell me something…”

Laura’s expression was blank, she began to speak slowly, emotionlessly, until a smile broke her face and she collapsed into giggles.

“Idiot!”

“Scared you, did I?”

“Of course not!”

But wouldn’t it be the case, Beth thought, that if an alien were to replace a human they would exhibit the necessary traits required to survive. Finney’s book was fiction, but the boundaries set by the book wouldn’t occur in reality, would they? If Laura were replaced might she not simply be Laura by any other name.

It was when Beth had these thoughts that she understood her interest had shifted into obsession.

•••

“Boy?”

Adamson never called his Labrador by its given name, because he hadn’t named it.

In his mind the name wasn’t something suitable to be calling on a hill top whether it was light or dark.

He didn’t see it return. A soft form ran around the outside of his right leg and a cold nose nudged the fingers of that hand. Adamson dropped to his knees and held the dog’s head within his palms. It didn’t shirk, didn’t acquiesce to his master’s touch. It didn’t look frightened or spooked but Adamson knew that it had been.

He clipped the leash, thought about another cigarette. Thought of his wife and children at home in the warmth in front of the television.

There was nothing worth watching.

There was never anything worth watching.

He walked in the direction that the dog had returned from. Night hid objects in the darkness. A rock pushed part of one toenail a fraction further under his skin and his swearing formed part of the soundtrack of that instance.

Up ahead a dark shape, possibly a bigger rock, merged into the surrounding blackness like a smudge on a charcoal drawing.

When he reached it the leash he was holding strained and sprang from his fingers. He looked back at the receding golden coat that resembled a blinked out light, and then turned back to the object.

Before he examined it he looked at the sky.

If there was a difference he didn’t see it.

He reached out a hand and touched the surface. It wasn’t stone.

•••

Gareth knew humans were composite bodies, made of trillions of cells. Some of those cells had been discovered to work independently of the host. Mitochondria, for example, had its own DNA. Yet the differences between life’s building blocks were almost infinitesimal. When you really thought about it, life astonished.

Sometimes he ran a fingertip across the tripwires at the heart of the flytrap. When the subterfuge worked, the closed trap took twelve hours to reopen.