The Future Is Short (21 page)
“Where were we?” he asked himself. He went over to a corner and picked up the wrench. He must have thrown it at the cat during the chase, although he didn’t quite recall doing that.
“Aha,” he said, spotting the problem.
A few minutes later, he popped his head into the bridge. Wilbur was engaged in a testy conversation with the ship’s AI, which insisted that it knew the correct route.
“Sir?” asked Fox, attracting his attention. “I found the problem. There were mouse droppings in the engine room. Must have come aboard with those passengers you picked up on the last trip. Filthy buggers. They ate right through some wiring. The mice, I mean, not the passengers.”
“No wonder Pelly has been back there so often. I know you don’t like him very much, but you have to admit he knows his job.”
At that point, a bell rang, telling them that their ship’s plasma cloud had charged sufficiently. The AI acted first, before Wilbur could send them off course, and they leaped forwards into the abyss in a cloud of furious sparks and electrical discharges.
Jeremy Lichtman is a software developer, based in Toronto, Canada. He writes in his spare time, in moments intended not to incur the wrath of his family.
http://www.jeremylichtman.com
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48.
Kalifer Deil
At night I could hear her song echoing in the mountains. It was like a thousand singing voices calling me. It was beautiful, mystical, and it aroused an inner yearning that was new to me. My mother said I was coming of age and that I would be experiencing new feelings unfelt before. Maybe this is what she was talking about.
It was a new day and I needed to gather ice-radish at glacier edge. It was a long trek, but one I had made many times. There were rumors that there was much ice-radish on the slopes of Cave Mountain, but that was the home of Ordmak. It was closer than glacier, but I was told her song was irresistible and Ordmak would eat me for breakfast.
A children's story. I was sure. "It was just the wind playing the caves like organ pipes," I self-spoke.
As I reached the upper slope of Cave Mountain I saw many caves, which told me I was right and ice-radish was plentiful as well. As I approached one of the larger caves, I heard the voice of Birgo whisper to me, "Hi, Greimo!" He disappeared three weeks ago and was assumed eaten by Ordmak. I entered the cave and, as my eyes adapted to the dark, I noticed bones piled along the side of the cave. Then a dim flickering lit up the cave wall from behind me. I turned to face a creature longer than I could see, with one large eye and a gaping mouth with luminescent walls. It was propelling itself with wavelike motions of its frilled underbelly. It stopped a ways away and my fear turned to amusement. It had no appendages to grab me and the mouth was devoid of teeth. I also knew I could easily outrun it.
I heard a chorus of voices from its mouth, some familiar, of friends who went missing, and others I didn't recognize. I said, "Are you Ordmak?" It answered, "We are all Ordmak." I was then engulfed in a mist and was instructed to take my clothes off and throw them into what appeared to be a fire pit. My body complied even though my mind said no. Then I went into the mouth as instructed and it closed. Every cell of my body became like my male protuberance and I was engulfed with extreme pleasure. It was beyond anything I could have imagined.
I found I could see out of Ordmak's eye as he spit out my bones. That thought soon evaporated as I found myself in the company of many others. Birgo took my hand: “You are in the universe of Ordmak's mind. You just fed him so you will have ten lifetimes of pleasure. There are babes here I'd like you to meet."
I just realized that I missed my mother and would never see her again. "Birgo, I really miss my mother. She warned me about Ordmak, but I thought it was a children's story."
"Don't worry, she will be here soon. You will call her," Birgo explained. "Now check these out. This is Makin and here is Makin's mother, Milda."
"They look the same age."
Bilgo responded, "In here everyone is the same age. You and I are both older and more mature."
I looked down and noticed my protuberance was larger; then I looked over at Milda and felt my protuberance become firm.
Bilgo started to laugh. "We are all nude, so there is no hiding place for your feelings."
Milda took me by the hand and said, "Let's join a circle-of-eight."
It turns out the circle is more like a sphere of eight of us joined in a copulative manner. The sphere pulsates in and out more and more rapidly until a climax, when it blows apart and we all go flying. It was sensuous and fun and we repeated it several times.
Later I heard my mother calling, "Griemo! Griemo!" and I instinctively answered, "I'm in here!"
Very soon I saw her approaching me; she was nude and her body was in her late teens. I grabbed her hand and said, "Mom, let me introduce you to a circle-of-eight." She didn't resist.
Kalifer Deil is the writer pseudonym for Gary Feierbach, a Silicon Valley engineer. He writes mostly hard science fiction but occasionally branches off into occult, fantasy. He also writes science articles and has a website,
http://www.kaliferdeil.com
, with curiously interesting science articles and some short stories.
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49
.
Andy McKell
We turned the corner of the ancient riverbed and saw more of the same insane greenness—oh, how I had come to hate that color. This piece of jungle was another chaotic mess of green upon green. Again. It was just more of the same—part of this same hell. And we were finished. We could go no further.
Here, where the trees had not yet managed to enclose the sky and the full glare of the midday sun lanced through to add to our misery
… here, our search, our holy quest, was silently abandoned.
The guide, ever enthusiastic, dropped his pack, jabbering as he ran forward pointing at something, some
things, that eluded us. Things here, there, and over there.
We stared hard into the blazing green-hazed glare; a couple of the women even tweaked at the corners of their veils. We saw nothing but the endless overgrown, buzzing, biting, poisonous jungle that we'd battled through and hated for weeks. What had this solid team of seasoned conservationists become but a loose and bickering assembly of personal and collective defeat?
No, we still saw nothing but more of the same.
It was enough—done, finished, over, failed. But the guide kept jabbering and pointing
… some of the less-defeated reluctantly drew towards him. Others gazed around, lost. The rest collapsed to the foetid floor in despair.
Then our disbelief melted a little. Perhaps there was, after all, something
… some things … there? Our cautious, unbelieving shuffling slowly turned to a more enthusiastic pace, staggering against and over the boulders and fallen logs, careless of hidden beasts and toxic orchids.
Suddenly, we became a ragged line of madcap, headlong, rushing lunatics as our pattern-seeking inheritance reasserted
itself. Was that a ninety-degree angle? Could that stump indicate a crumbled tower? Was that a suspiciously straight line emerging from within the tangled growth? A building? No—buildings. Many buildings.
We began pointing, yelling out “Here,” “There,” “Over there!”
Crazy people. The guide grinned a knowing grin, perhaps silently thanking his own gods for his lucky break: crazy people.
It was a city. Gorgeous moss-covered, frond-encrusted angles too sharp even for this insanely cruel jungle to have randomly thrown up.
A city–our city.
We rejoiced. We stood in silent awe. We fell to our knees and offered up thanks. We lost our senses.
And then the long work of conservation began.
It was as expected. Long, long ago, all the fabrics had rotted; the useful metals had oxidized or leached away, even the perpetual plastics lay buried under meters of mulch.
But that mattered not—we had found the fabled ruins. The holy city from the elder days. We could clear away the jungle and all its dangers, scrape away the moss, spray preservation chemicals over the remaining stonework, build a railway from the coast, set up hotels, and stalls at a respectful distance … our joy was immeasurable.
We were truly, finally there at the legendary lost city so holy that they named it twice—New York, New York.
Andy McKell is a new writer of speculative fiction, whose short stories are starting to appear in various
anthologies. He retired early from the IT world and enjoys acting when he gets the chance. Married with three daughters, all pursuing careers in the visual arts, he currently lives in Luxembourg, Europe.
[email protected]
http://www.andymckell.com
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5
0.
W.A. Fix
Above the equator and over what would someday be called the Pacific Ocean, a vessel containing two beings began to enter Earth’s atmosphere. “Yood, my love, we are traveling far too fast. The vessel will break up in the lower atmosphere.”