Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (17 page)

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

“
T
his will bring the whole thing down, to a
standstill,
”
says
Mikhail.
They
’
re running, running, running, voices
pushed out in breathy bursts.

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

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

“
Alright, then. A dare
’
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.

He gestures to a pale, lanky man with a
slightly receded hairline who shares the booth. Joseph has a
coppery brown tooth set in the middle of his bottom front teeth,
and Mikhail wonders if it’s a false one. They were fashionable a
few years ago, when Mikhail was still an apprentice. He guesses
that Joseph is at least three nursery-sets older, maybe four, than
he and his friends.

“
That one was stupid,” says the girl on Joseph’s arm. She’s
pretty but has a cruel look, something playing at the corner of her
mouth. A predator, thinks Mikhail, like those extinct animals in
nursery learning vids.

“
At least he didn’t get put in the box for it,” says Roberto.
He looks sidelong at Mikhail.