The Future Is Short (3 page)
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3.
J.J. Alleson
There was a woman here once, named Mo. A wondrous dancer. That’s how she taught me. History, maths, chem, astro-fizz. “Time for school, Denzel!”
Eyes still closed, I’d smile. Whenever I opened them, she always looked the same. Pale.
Long blonde hair, mussed; grey-misted gaze full of love. The world on her shoulders. She’d help me dress; comb my hair, whispering softly, “The Shield-suits will fix your legs soon, Denny. You’ll be able to run as fast as you can.”
“Like the Gingerbread Man?”
“Faster. Like Conran.”
Mo didn’t much resemble Conran or me. We’re identical.
Both dark-skinned, with ebony corkscrew curls. Con didn’t need her, she’d say. He could walk; go to out-school—a no-go area for me. Mo said Earth had wasted all its money on space exploration and intergalactic communications. She said that chain reactions from environmental disasters had killed too many, created deformities. That the next generation had to be protected.
Conran agreed with her. “It’s just freaks and dodos out there now.”
I knew they were both fudging. Con’s friends were Primes, who stared endlessly at my withered legs. And the gliders I saw through the ’zone-shields were clearly Alpha-Hs. But everyone has secrets. Mine were hidden deep in Hol-EF/Cca 4-2340 of the virtuarchives—the Fairy Tales section.
I’m a fire dragon.
At ten, I had my first birthday party. Girls came. That evening, still pumped with excitement, I fell asleep on silky blue sheets. I woke up on singed, smoking ones. Con got the blame: Mo gave him a day-long bout of Celtic curses which made my own ears burn. But Con’s never picked up Cornish. He simply gave Mo a blank look and carried on playing Galaxy Division.
At thirteen, the Shield-suits came for me—like thieves in the night.
Brought me back at dawn. They left me standing solo in the hallway like some triumphant trophy.
“Shh,” they said, “It’s a surprise.”
Surprise …? Back then, my child’s mind has no time for caution. I skip decks; leap upper levels; race down corridors. I can go outside! Have friends! Meet girls!
***
Flying into Mo’s cube, I shake her awake excitedly. “MammMammMammIcanwalkIcanRUN!”
Mo snaps upright, sentry position, and I see something inconceivable in her eyes.
A killing terror. She slaps at me. “Away, ye FREAK!” Icy horror strikes me. I stumble back, mute. She knows … Mo knows all about my fire.
My own terror erupts when those Celtic curses begin. And under a diamond-white roar of despair, my whole world dissolves.
Flesh; blood; bones. From ashes to dust, Mo’s screams are born and die an echo.
Without warning, Con’s there, mirroring my frozen, dull-eyed shock. We’re both blank. Hollow; with no hearts left to break.
Where my tears track, his follow. He bears his own grief and mine, by lifting me and carrying me effortlessly into my own cube. He lies there beside me, and says—to no-one at all—in a voice with no tone at all: “Penultimate Earthling Ended.”
***
There was a woman here once, named Morwen. Named Amma, Mother. Mamm. She danced tales of Anansi. Rip Van Winkle. Of Isis, Allah, Vodun, the Khrishna-Christ. Of Twains, Austens, and Andersens. She sang of Ethiop’s fables; of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Of humans.
She’s gone now. Yet Kawgh an Jowl y’th
vin Conran, the Devil’s shit-mouthed deceiver remains. Like Jan Tregeagle, labouring on endless tasks all across Bodmin Moor, Con and the New Gods still feed me the knowledge of an entire planet. But I’m all full up. Now, I’m ready to burn.
Hic sunt dracones.
They’re manipulating my XYs with Morwen’s stored DNA. If they do make a woman, I’m taking her with me. We’ll run even faster than the Gingerbread Man. For now, I do the only thing I can to stop my dragonfire.
I dance. I sing.
J.J. Alleson is a London-based freelance editor, multi-genre writer, and poet. She writes across the spectrum of romance, science fiction, murder mystery, and the paranormal. Her anthology of science fiction short stories, A Step in Time, will be available on Amazon, Smashwords, and other online platforms from December 2014.
[email protected]
http://www.jjalleson.com
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4.
There Is a Silent Secret in the Woods of Ar-Cortiex
Paula Friedman
What I ’member about Granmer was she loved the silence, and she showin’ me, out on the high forest hillside, what people usedta call “birds.” See, this was out on Ar-Cortiex III, back when I was a kidsie and Daddy worked as gobernor of the whole Ar-Cortiex System. “See birdie,” Granmer’d tell me, n’ she’d point, say “birdie-birdie” and how big “in our thin air” them wings. And tell me, “Sylvie, know the forest sings a secret, but you gotta go discover it you’self.” I’d laugh and listen, and hear silence. Them were the days.
Back on Earth-Crowd’dr, though, two decades later, after Dad’s death and my Marvin’s, sick on that thick air, we got forced to join the lined-up folk, awaiting export (“exile,” Oaksing calls it—she’s my treesie, brought from Cortiex, skinny-light like me ’n Granmer, and all leaf-silk fur). It was ’cause-of Granmer, mostly; she’d got old.
And can’t take Earth-loud noise.
Hey hell, she never could—that’s Granmer. Kinda-like me and Marv, y’know?
Grew upsie on Ar-Cortiex.
So, hearing now her screamsies here, crunched in that bed, tubeses and stuff, I hear them birdies, silence, forest back on Cortiex III; ’member how my little Granmer took me out for treats, and now she’s sayin’ “Help me, end me, Sylvie, no more this”; I know she means the noise. Kinda all around in Hospi-Crowds like here. I say, “I’ll try.” I can’t, though—not Earth noise.
All started with that tooth, see. Infected—’fore then, back on Cortiex where “air’s so thi
n /
ya wanna spin,” Granmer was full-on perky. But here, and with them twenty-eleven days’ wait per an appointment, wow that tooth got bad, them microbes “climbed her bones
, /
got up so hig
h /
they sought the sky,” as Oaksing told me, and docs stuck her right into a Hospi-Crowd. So Granmer—oh they kept her life up, kept her ears on, all that, but—she’s never been the same. And so every day she’s here, my Granmer, locked in Hospi-Crowd, where all the televisies and “gamesies play
, /
all night and day” and every other moment, too—bzzz-thump-bzzz-zhppp, no stop to it.
’n they drug her up, too, ’cause she shouts “Stop the noise! Let me sleep!” which ain’t allowed. To shout—’tain’t allowed, in crowds. It bothers folksies. Here on Earth.
Me? I’ve sent Josie and my mother out to exile over Delta Araiadne, sent Kalie and the boy along with. They’ll be okay; there’s grass on Delta, folksies say. “The sky is blue, the trees are pink
, /
the snakes don’t climb out of the stink”—y’see? They’ll be okay.
But I stay here with Granmer. I take her on my lap, then sigh and carry her out through the corridors’ bang-bangs, past televisie, televisie blarin’ and the guys’ constructin’ Noisies next each wall. I
carries her on—on beyond. And then I put her on my lap, here out on The Last Meadow (more kinda a square), and I put Oaksing by her too, so she lies back to hear Cortiex’s music of the heart, and, ’spita every throbbin’ from the Noisies’ tractors, and in ’spite she’s got her palm across her mouth to hide all them lost teeth, she smiles. And I say, “There, now you comfortable, Granmer? No need we ever be goin’ back.” And she still smiles. And taps my finger, the one that usedtahave Marvin’s ring, and says too low. So I says, “Whatzat, Granmer?” and she draws, with her skinny fingers, six words.
Bless you. You found it.
Love.
Paula Friedman is author of The Rescuer’s Path (2012), which Ursula K. Le Guin has called “exciting, physically vivid, and romantic.” Friedman has received two Pushcart nominations and several literary awards; her short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines. She seeks a new siamese cat and a Macarthur, Nobel, or other major award/grant.
[email protected]
http://www.paula-friedman.com
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5.
J.F. Williams
Hundreds of glogla clung together in the great spherical cluster as it wended its way in the deep water and swept through the thickest clouds of plankton. A fissure had opened in the seabed far below and a bubble of gas charged toward the colony, interrupting the feeding and diverting the cluster’s lazy progress. But only for a moment. The elders with their many tentacles held firm, preventing any rupture to the sphere. It shuddered and rippled but all their barbs remained fixed in their purchase. Except for one daughter’s. One of her six limbs released its grip, exposing one of six stomata, and in that moment a selka worm slipped in.
She could feel the worm inside her, its tiny, writhing form swimming up the vessels of her inner fluids, finally resting against the glofa at her center. That organ of feeling swelled at the selka’s touch, as when a plankton cloud was unexpectedly thick and nourishing, or the waters quieted after a storm, or one of the mothers’ limbs cleaved and became a daughter. Emboldened by this emotion, her barbs retracted completely and she freed herself from the cluster. Her glofa continued to swell in bursts as she beat her tentacles and pushed her body higher and higher. She heard the distant call from her mother, a subtle vibration in the water, pleading “No!”
How much time had passed, she did not know or care. As she continued rising, her entire form swelled, no longer constrained by the pressure of the deep. She was intoxicated by life now, and danger only felt like adventure. As the pressure lightened, so did the water; it become warmer and the dancing shafts of light from the two suns—one white, one yellow—became brighter, smarting her six eyes. Finally, she reached the surface and her forward limbs padded against the sandy beach, pulling her up and halfway out of the drink.