The Future Is Short (22 page)
Yood began retracting the
fibers, which made up his body, from those of his mate, Itch. “If we are separated, we will find each other again, and on that day our rejoining will be as the first.” Yood and Itch continued retracting thousands of fibers until only one fiber remained of the union. In that one fiber all emotion, all thought, and all sensation was shared. Then, as predicted, the vessel broke into two pieces and severed the final thread of the joining.
Yood’s half struck the planet in a swamp forest north of where New Orleans would eventually be located. Itch was carried another eight hundred miles north and east. Both were damaged and both took several years to learn that nourishment was obtained by simply extending volumes of fibers into the open air and absorbing the required elements. They eventually learned to hang the fibers from the local vegetation in clumps, and then extend new fibers to another location. In that manner the two began the search for each other. Unfortunately, the planet already had a mute life form so similar to their fibers that it confused even Yood and Itch with first contact. They would cautiously extend a fiber, hoping to find the other and offer the greeting, “Wobee (Wife), have I found you?” or “Dee (Husband), have I found you?” And so the search continued for nine hundred years. Then Yood sensed a structure. There was some kind of wonderful vibration that emitted from it every day at mid sun.
Wanting, … no … needing to be closer he extended himself and reached for a very slick surface built into the structure’s side. That surface seemed to amplify the vibrations from within. Just before mid sun, Yood touched the slick surface and waited.
***
Inside the cottage a man sat at a grand piano. He shuffled through a stack of sheet music and extracted today’s selection, “Rhapsody in Blue.” He opened the music, placed it in the stand, then opened the keyboard. His right foot found the pedals and his hands hovered above the keys. He began to play.
***
The vibration struck Yood in every fiber of his being. The sensation was so intense that nothing else mattered and the need to get closer became desire. When the vibration stopped, he slowly came back to consciousness. Then faintly, from another part of his being, he felt a touch and he sensed the greeting, “Dee, have I found you?”
“You have, my Wobee,” said Yood.
“It has been so long, my love, let us begin the rejoining,” she said.
“Wobee Itch, let us just hang a while longer. I have found something new.”
“But Dee Yood, you promised me the rejoining,” she said. “What will become of our Wois?”
There was a gentle movement in his fiber, as if a light breeze had blown through. “I.
… We have a Wois? Where is she? What is her name?”
“She has gone to the south in search of her own way. She and I are connected as you and I are now. She feels your touch as strongly as I do. She is named Smee.”
“I have a Wois,” said Yood with great pride. “Wois Smee.” He was flooded with a new set of emotions and the consciousness that was Smee. However, before Yood could recover, the wonderful vibrations began again inside the cabin, and this time Yood, Itch, and Smee were swept together into the rapture.
If it were possible at that moment to see all the moss on all the trees in the southeastern United States, about half would have been moving in time to music coming from a small cottage just south of Atlanta.
W. A. Fix (a.k.a. Bill Fix) is a retired information technology manager, who lives with his wife and three cats in the suburbs of San Diego, California. He has “toyed” with writing all his life and recently became more serious about the craft. Other interests include photography and golf.
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5
1.
Joanna Lamprey
“I’m afraid it’s out of the question.” The Daolan looked apologetically around the four men facing him.
Admiral Hansen leaned forward.
“Because we’re from Earth?”
The yellow-skinned alien hesitated,
then inclined his head. Humans have met many strange variations among the intelligent space-travelling races, but Daolans, acknowledged as the finest navigators of all, are odder than most, with a gelatinous body shape that can change at will. The Daolan had braced himself into a sitting position with four pudgy tentacles, and used two more to make gestures. The upper part of his sac-like body was fringed with silky follicles, which moved of their own accord as though sniffing the air.
Admiral Hansen looked round at the others, then back. “Gorman, we brought you here at some expense for this interview, you must have known we would be asking you to join our crew. I’ll be frank—we were really excited that you agreed to meet us at all, so this is a great disappointment. I accept you won’t take the job. I would like you to explain why, because yours is not the only race keeping their distance. ”
Gorman shrugged, his follicles rippling, but answered honestly. “Earth people have already accrued a reputation for a certain, uh, oddity. I wanted to meet you, because I didn’t believe it could be as disturbing as I’d heard, but … you say things that don’t make sense, then look at each other and pull faces. Sometimes you even make odd noises. It is—unsettling. Each voyage lasts at least twenty epochs; I think in your calendar that translates to a year. To be unsettled for that long would be deeply distressing, so I have to say no.”
“He means joking and laughing
!“ Smith realized.” I once tried to tell a Gannan a pub joke, changing it to a Gannan, a Doonong and a human entered a bar—he looked at me as though I was deficient.”
“What, you guys don’t laugh? So a pompous, very dignified Daolan slips on a banana peel—okay, okay, forget banana peel, slips—and is suddenly on his back with his legs waving in the air—you don’t laugh?” Jackman smirked and looked round for support.
The Daolan looked disgusted, all his nostrils pinching. “I’m afraid you just made my point.”
Hansen shook his head at Jackman, annoyed. “So, your children—do they play? How do you know when they are enjoying themselves?”
“They jiggle, and their follicles vibrate. Sometimes their tentacle ends change colour.”
“And does that disgust you?” Hansen persisted.
“Of course not.”
“But it would be unsettling to anyone who wasn’t a Daolan.”
“Yes—which is why our young put aside such things when they are of an age to meet other races, at least in public. It is something entirely private.”
“Well, our smiling and laughing is the equivalent of your jiggling and vibrating. Does that help?”
The Daolan pondered, then nodded. The admiral scrawled quickly on a piece of paper and handed it over. “Would you at least look at our offer?”
The Daolan took it delicately in a tentacle and read in silence. Then to their astonishment he started to shudder, and the follicles on his upper body started to vibrate. The tentacle holding the paper turned blue,
then purple, and the admiral grinned fiercely.
“Oops,” he remarked, “I gave you the wrong paper. Here’s the real offer. I think you’re going to fit in just fine.”
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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52.
Lars Carlson
Light puffed against the stars.
“Lost contact with the Rio, sir,” the tactical officer reported.
Vice Admiral Voan swore. Rio was the third destroyer lost, half of her screening force, and the cruiser Hamburg was making best speed away from the engagement zone on a power plant teetering on failure. That left her with five effective vessels to continue the engagement with the jyajub—including her own badly damaged heavy cruiser Nanking.
The vice admiral ran the numbers in her head. Between standard deployment fees, combat pay and the Commissariat’s Heroic Image bonus—she glanced to her right to see that the ship’s commissar was still on his feet and handling his camera—her force would break even, after the engagement.
Assuming they won, of course, without further losses.
Allowing the camera a heavy sigh, the admiral silently thanked the Lords of the Void for Avenger Bounties. At the rates the survivors of the Versas Massacre posted, she could still come out ahead.
“All done, sir,” a medic beside her reported.
The vice admiral nodded and dismissed the man. Bandages encased most of her right arm now, soaked with blood beneath the tattered remnants of her greatcoat’s sleeve where shrapnel caught her. The commissar’s camera captured that side of her from beneath the admiral’s command pulpit, giving her greatcoat’s gold buttons and the smoke-stained lance-in-tsunami badge of the Blue Union Navy on her breast a grim human contrast to their dull shine in the bridge emergency lights.
Victory demanded bold action.
“Captain!” said the admiral.
“Sir!”
The captain of the Nanking stood from his command seat below the admiral’s pulpit. He bled from a brow cut, yet that seemed only to enhance his command presence.
“Are there ASOs ready?”
“We have three available tubes, all charged and loaded,” the captain replied.
“Prepare to fire, captain,” Admiral Voan said, playing up for the recording. “Let’s not let them get away with Versas or the lives of our brave comrades.”
“Aye, sir!”
The Nanking’s CO sat down and issued orders via his console.
Klaxons shrieked throughout the ship. The Nanking’s computer warned the crew of the impending launch. It repeated twice.
Vice Admiral Voan fixed a suitably steely glare towards the main screen.
A jyajub Killship (nine klicks of scrap conglomerated in a web of cables, screen projectors and weapons) wallowed in space as the remnants of the admiral’s flotilla flitted about it like angry hummingbirds attacking a boar. The Killship streamed debris and atmosphere from dozens of places but continued to fight.
That ship had participated in the deaths of a billion and a half inhabitants of Versas (against a slightly higher pre-Massacre number) and cost Vice Admiral Voan two months of hunting and four ships. It had to die before it did any more harm.
“Firing.”
The Nanking “klunked.” Recoil rams thundered. Lights flickered across the ship. An ozone stink filled the air.
“ASOs away,” the tactical officer reported. “Terminal in two
… one …”
Built for taking out asteroids and space stations and similar slow, predictable objects at distances greater than one AU, the ASOs were poor choices to attack maneuvering starships.
Usually.
Accelerating towards the distracted Killship and light speed, two of three ninety-ton chunks of ferrous-clad tungsten found their mark. They blew through the Killship’s screens and hull, erupting out the far side in cones of silver flame. Seconds later their nuclear seed charges detonated, devouring the Killship’s husk in clumps of golden sunburst. It was a thorough and beautifully photogenic kill.