The Future Is Short (18 page)
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4
0.
Joanna Lamprey
The brief, three years ago, had been electrifying. Interstellar travel was a reality, with the first exploration ship due to launch in five years. Nick Taylor had been one of three thousand experts pulled onto the project, and the years since had been the most exciting, exhausting, alarming, and thrilling years of his young life.
His section covered crew wellbeing—even at interstellar speed, the closest promising-looking planet was four years away. The ship would transport a team of experts, spend a year on the planet—all going well, of course—and return. Most of the passengers would travel in stasis, since it wasn’t logistically possible to provision up to ten years for so many people, but the minimum crew of nine—three at a time on duty, 24/7—was their main worry. How could nine people be kept from going stark staring mad in eight years, during the hours they were neither working nor sleeping?
The section personnel were gathered today for an update on that vital issue, rehashing the many suggestions that had been tabled—revolving all the personnel in and out of stasis, or choosing only crew who shared a single language; loading ship databanks with thousands of films and books; hurriedly inventing a Voyager-style holodeck. That one never drew many laughs; it was so obviously what was needed. Entertaining a crew, even a multilingual one, wasn’t the impossibility; relaxing them, however—the five volunteer teams living in trial conditions were all stressed almost to incoherence within months.
Overall coordinator Tom Burkett tapped a pen against his glass for attention, and the heated conversations died. “You’ll remember at the original brief we invited some SF writers, in the hope they could think outside the box on this? We’ve got a presentation from William Robertson coming up next. We’ll go through now.”
William Robertson! Nick had been a fan all his teens, still was if he had time to read, and craned eagerly over the heads of the people walking in front of him for his first close-up glimpse of the author.
Robertson was taller, heavier, and older than anyone in the room; he nodded unsmiling greetings as they entered the room, where nineteen chairs were grouped around a steel fire bowl.
Fire? Nick took his place with the others, and Robertson, leaning on one of his trademark sticks, bent to touch a lighter to the bowl.
Flames leapt and Burkett spoke up. “No talking. Relax and watch.”
This was stupid—there couldn’t be an open fire on a spaceship!—but Nick watched obediently. His frayed nerves eased; he could smell wood burning, and an elusive faint trace of something else. Someone, presumably Robertson, threw a chunk of rock salt on the fire, which sparked and burned blue. There was something else … people, shadows against shadows, and the plaintive strains of a harmonica. Horses snorted nearby, and stars burned huge in the night sky. One of the men threw a log on the fire in a flurry of sparks—
Nick flinched, and was back in his seat.
“How the hell did you do that?” he exclaimed involuntarily. The others were looking equally startled, and Robertson grinned into his tidy beard.
“Since we first learned to summon fire,” he rumbled, unexpectedly Scots, “it has been our comfort, our safety, our dreamy pleasure, triggering our most primal feelings of wellbeing. I released a permitted narcotic—milder than a wee dram—to prime you. The crew will have the same narcotic. Imagination—memory—you’ll have all experienced summat different. And will, every time you look into the flames, no matter how often you look. Our trial team use it a few times a week, and their stress levels have dropped back well below concern levels.”
He swung his stick at the fire pot, which flickered as the stick went straight through the image.
“It’s not real?” Ann Moore wasn’t the only one to gasp, but she was the only one to speak.
“Och, it’s real, burning right now, and it will for the next two years. Every flicker, every added log, all captured on holographic film for the journey. Smoke and mirrors, ken? Smoke and mirrors.”
Joanna Lamprey lives in Scotland, near Edinburgh, mainly writes whodunits set in the very beautiful area surrounding the Firth of Forth, under the name E J Lamprey, and will one day achieve an alien amateur detective who solves murders brilliantly. One day.
http://www.elegsabiff.com/sf-microstories/
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41.
Andrew Gurcak
Heat, stench, water, violence—everywhere, all the time, no escaping for Boseda. His earliest memories were of being chased by Area Boys across the plank bridges that joined the houses and shops perched on stilts above the open sewer lagoon. Maybe he was a Beninese orphan, abandoned along a street or waterway. Someone must have shouted a name and he answered, or he didn’t and they beat him until he did. So he was Boseda of Makoko, of the worst slum in Lagos.
Boseda survived through quickness and wiles—enough, barely. When he began to pluck melodies from the din around the shacks and stalls, and not only mimic but expand them, his life got better. And then better. At first, he hummed and sang to himself just to have one thing, one nice thing, in his control. His sometime friends started pressing him to entertain them. He hit on the idea of stopping in front of a stall, starting a popular song,
then improvising extravagant riffs. Passersby paused to listen and the shopkeeper would hustle them for a sale, tossing the boy a few coins. Boseda soon began demanding coins upfront, began scheduling his stops, and finally was trawled by an A&R exec from a local recording outfit. They first had him cover foreign hits, but soon he was fashioning his own songs with wildfire success—Nigeria, next sub-Saharan Africa, then worldwide. He needed only one name, and Boseda became one of the wealthiest entertainers on the planet.
He was vastly amused by his successes, and whenever reporters interviewed him, he would first chat at length with them, gauging their story slants, then spin out what would most entertain them, laughingly waving off inconsistencies. What people called truth was to him no more than a choice at a crossroads—always his to make and dependent only on where to go next.
That, and from childhood, the odds of being caught, if he chose poorly.
Boseda enjoyed his wealth, but more his ability now to explore the wide world. It was the late 21st century, after all, and he was determined to learn from others as excellent in their fields as he was in his. He befriended technologists and became obsessed with breaking out of what he sometimes saw as a life grown no less cramped than that of his boyhood. He began talking to anyone who would listen about actually sailing to a star. “The road to any star can’t be harder than mine from Makoko to London.” He grilled experts in interstellar propulsion and suspended animation, discussing with total earnestness such an adventure, however impossible the odds of success. He would travel solo, and would not be dissuaded by wise people warning him of his dreams’ foolishness.
He liquidated his fortune to bring together the minds most capable of building him his starship. He invented misinformation and ploys to maintain secrecy, but his fame fast punctured those schemes.
Plans were assembled, prototypes built, failures accumulated, and lessons learned. At last, he had bankrolled the best vessel he could, and outfitted it with the most capable AI, navigational, survival, and musical gear possible.
Boseda was determined to have no coverage of his launch. Equally determined news organizations, however, obtained crude amateur footage from technicians showing Boseda entering the hatch, then the craft lifting off. Telemetry reads showed all systems activating as designed for the solar slingshot. From Boseda, uncharacteristic silence. Over the months, he transmitted only snippets of observations and wonderment. As he neared the sun, data reported an irremediable malfunction in the ship’s AI. The navigation failed to recover, and with the last words the earth would hear before his sunfall, Boseda assured his listeners that he had chosen the right road, no matter. He would die ablaze and smiling.
About that same time, a man so ordinary one could scarce remember his face came into a small town somewhere in Africa. He hustled gigs singing in bars. He had a pleasing voice and patrons would urge him to try for the big time. He demurred and lived a long, happy life there. He was appreciated for two traits: riffing effortlessly on any phrase, and needing no audience to applaud his act. He rather seemed to prefer an empty room to a packed house.
Andrew Gurcak and his wife, Elaine Lees, divide their retirement time between Pittsburgh and the Finger Lakes region of New York. The Science Fiction Microstory Contest entries are his first fictional pieces.
[email protected]
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42.
JD Mitchell
—You sure look uptight, mister. You going to a funeral or something?—
Wernher wished things could work out that simply. They couldn’t. Not today, not ever.
—Not really, sir. Please watch where you’re driving. —
The cab careened over the newly-laid causeway’s rubber surface. Wernher wanted to say the ride reminded him of the autobahns back home. But the cabbie was a Chinese refugee, and you just didn’t see people like that in the Socialist West. Not with the Big Berlin Wall.
—Hey, don’t worry about me, mister. I learned to drive from a G.I!—
Wernher looked out the window as the last of the Marina merged into the Mudflat District. New Bay Street’s columns flew by at a fast clip.
A blur of speed.
—Can’t you go faster, sir?—
Already, the traffic hemmed them into the lanes on the causeway. There was barely any room to make it around other flivvers.
—You’re crazy, mister. Everyone on the coast is coming for the USS Hornet. Even the president will be here!—
Wernher knew that wasn’t true. MacArthur would stay far away from this event. His advisors wouldn’t have wanted the scandal to tarnish his reputation.
The causeway looped around the projects of the Mudflat district. The grand land-filling of the Bay continued. Lamps from the night shift workers bathed the sides of the temporary brown tenements. The flivver’s “fifth” electric wheel made sparks against the causeway’s wires.
—Why you in such a hurry, anyways, mister? The astronaut’s speeches will last for hours.—
Wernher half-listened.
He took his mind off the scenery of filled-in Bay Area sprawl, the webwork of canals, and trains of container ships. In his hand, he held a tooth—the tooth of Jacqueline Bouvier—the only proof he had to implicate astronaut Michael Collins.
The cabbie looked back at Wernher in the rearview mirror. They made brief eye contact. Most likely the cabbie was a refugee of the very brief Sino-American War.
—It’s a pretty big deal, huh, mister?—
For a second Wernher feared the cabbie realized the significance of the tooth. The cabbie smiled. Most of his teeth were gone. Radiation sickness. . . .
—It’s a big deal, right?! What the astronauts found, right? Proof of life on Mars.—