Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 7, October 2014 Page 5

  “It’s simple. Obey the rules and something like this doesn’t happen. Trust your friends,” Colin pleaded.

  Why did it have to be so damn hot? Henry stared at the cement, stared long enough to make out an ashy splotch, a scar left by a combustion victim. He blinked and it disappeared. A group of girls, black hair falling in silky sheets down to their waists, giggled past. Colin eyed them with momentary interest as they disappeared inside.

  “Let’s go in,” Colin said, his voice quieter.

  Henry ground his teeth. He hated the way Colin sounded.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t. I just can’t forget about it.”

  “I’m not asking you to,” Colin said.

  Henry shook his head. “He looked at me, you know. Right before it happened. As though he knew. As though he felt some sort of shock. Some realization hit him about what was going to happen. What the world was all about. He went really still. I thought I heard him say something, thought he turned to me and said ‘No!’ But then he was gone.”

  Colin reached into his back pocket. “Look, I’m not trying to be insensitive. He was my friend too. And he should’ve come to me if he needed more time. You guys don’t get paid enough.”

  He grabbed onto Henry’s arm and pulled him away from the neon lights. He lowered his voice. “I don’t want this to happen again. Let me help you. Let me help pay.” He pressed time slips into his hand.

  Henry’s fingers itched. The transparent bills glowed in the dark, the rectangular sheets green. He wanted to say yes or thanks or whatever it was that you were supposed to say when someone gave you a life. But his tongue felt thick; the air pressed down on him.

  “Too hot for autumn,” he whispered.

  “What?” Colin replied, confused.

  “I’m fine,” Henry said. “I’ll be fine, but you should have seen it. How he just vanished. Right before my eyes.” He tripped away from Colin, away from the fumes and temptations, the Pleasure Dome that helped the government meet their combustion quota.

  “You can always come to me,” Colin shouted after him, but the music oozing from under the door drowned his voice. Henry’s lungs ached. Fingers itched for a cigarette. He wanted to be a smoker, a drinker, a dancer, a waste of space. But he didn’t want to be a splotch on the pavement, erased by the wind. The air was stagnant. It rested on his shoulders, smelling of trash and sweat.

  He walked down the street, back toward Franklin Memorial. Maybe he could help the MP find what he’d been looking for, a grain of ash, a partially preserved pointer finger, anything that said that Peter was a real person. That he had not deserved to die. The street lights flickered and followed him. He’d walked this same way back to his apartment that last time he’d been to the bar with Peter. It felt too familiar. The same way the sweat dripped down his back and soaked his body in warm discomfort.

  Through the darkness spotted with pinpricks of white light, green flashed. He paused. On a street corner, between 15th North and Main, a credit flickered in the light, taunted him. It’d probably fallen out of a passerby’s pocket on the way to a club or bar or hotel room. A shadow from across the street had spotted it too. A Sparkler, his clothes tattered and ragged on his skinny body, stood a few feet away, perhaps in hope to gain a few more minutes before the wires installed in his heart would short-circuit and explode.

  Without thinking, Henry raced toward the credit, leapt across the space and snatched it. He was going to change; he would make this all better, make his time worth it. A Sparkler would just burn it away.

  “What are you doing?” the man cried. “Can’t you spare some time for a poor soul?”

  I need this more than you do, Henry wanted to say. Turning from the man, he lifted his shirt and fed the credit into his timer slot. There he watched fifteen more minutes add to his life. Biting his lip, he took the long way home and avoided Franklin Memorial.

  ###

  Salena Casha's work has appeared in over 30 publications. She was a finalist for the 2013-2014 Boston Public Library's Children's Writer-in-Residence and a 2011 Bread Loaf Scholarship Recipient in Fiction. Her first three picture books were published by MeeGenius Books. One of them, titled Nuwa and the Great Wall, was featured in the 2014 PBS Summer Learning Series for Kids. When not writing, she can be found editing math books, carving pumpkins and travelling the world.

  A Vision of Paradise

  Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

  Aboard the Salome of the Seven Veils, a solitary pilot scanned the heavens, recorded his findings, and activated the Conduit. A few hundred kilometers from his ship, space folded into a vortex of cobalt blue.

  The pilot checked his report one last time before sending it. The planetary system around Iduaban remains lifeless and of little interest to the Cohort. The only body eligible for level-one colonization is Rakesh’s fifth moon, which offers no strategic or economic value. Recommendation is to implode this Conduit and abandon exploration of this sector, per Spectral Mandate Five Two Zero. A Collapsar ship should be dispatched at the Cohort’s earliest convenience to enforce Closure protocols.

  Satisfied, the pilot activated the Conduit’s pull-through sequence. The Salome of the Seven Veils entered the swirling blue ring.

  Time to go home.

  #

  The pilot’s report was wrong.

  On Rakesh’s fifth moon, under a fierce magnetic field, deep inside a chain of interconnected mountains and caverns that encompassed a continent-sized chunk of ice, life stirred.

  “This was the weakest Blessing yet,” whispered Drosian Azo.

  “Perhaps it was the last one,” replied his daughter, Sumelyu Enchar.“Perhaps we’ve missed our chance to escape this place.”

  Drosian’s voice became firm, in marked contrast to his frail, stooping figure. “This is our home.”

  Sumelyu knew she should hold her tongue. But it was colder than usual, and she was hungry, and miserable at the sight of her father’s deterioration.

  “Guild-leader Azo,” she said, with artificial formality, addressing an invisible audience of Guild members, “I believe you have lost perspective on our situation. It has become more and more rare for ships to visit our system. And each time these ships caress the heavens, the Blessings we receive are weaker than the time before.”

  Drosian was overcome by a wracking cough. “Then we will learn to live without the Blessings.” He spat.

  Sumelyu cringed at the sight of a thin trail of blood on the icy rock. She wiped away the remaining spittle from his lips and ran her fingers through his white hair. Her touch lingered for a moment on his feverish forehead.

  He smiled. “We will adapt.”

  She took a step back and stared at the old man. Her head sank. He had lost touch with reality. He spoke of adapting, but he couldn’t even contain the disease ravaging his own body.

  He is doomed, she thought. But I won’t allow his blindness to be our downfall.

  #

  After the old man had fallen asleep, something that happened with increasing regularity since the Blessings had softened, Sumelyu approached the two Guild-speakers she trusted most, Krossatar and Felioe.

  She felt a shiver of disappointment at herself. It was not like Drosian Azo’s daughter to consort in shadows and stir up trouble. But he leaves me no choice, she thought.

  “How is your father?” Krossatar asked, concern—and tentativeness—evident in his ragged features.

  “He’s dying,” Sumelyu said. “As we’ll all die shortly, if we don’t do anything about it.”

  Krossatar exchanged a pained look with his mate Felioe.

  “I believe our Guild-leader has been very clear about what we should and should not do,” Krossatar said.

  “Clarity is the farthest thing from his mind,” snapped Sumelyu. “I think of you as my friends. Believe me then, friends, when I tell you that the disease has poisoned his thinking as well as his body. I need your help.”

  She paused. Silen
ce hung thick and gelid in the air, brittle as her father’s bones.

  Felioe glanced at Krossatar, who nodded, and said, “Sumelyu, we feel your loss. It’s a terrible pain for everyone in the Guild. But we must trust in our abilities, just as we did sixteen cycles ago after the Landing.”

  Sumelyu snorted. “We barely managed to salvage enough scraps from our crashed ship to keep half our crew alive. You call that an ability?”

  Felioe’s eyes grew soft at the remembered loss. She had been with child—one among so many other casualties. But her voice did not waver. “We paid a steep price. But we endured. We became one with this place. We accepted our fate. And in so doing, we received the Blessings.”

  Sumelyu hesitated. “Look, I won’t argue that something…truly unique…has happened to us.” She studied Felioe’s pale face, as youthful and lively as it had been sixteen cycles ago. And Krossatar, who stood right beside her now, just as strong and commanding as he had been the day their ship fell to this desolate moon. She thought about Drosian himself, already an old man when they had crashed. Without the Blessings he would have died a long time ago. “I can’t explain how the Blessings keep us young. But without them this place will kill us.”

  Krossatar sighed. “Just for argument’s sake, what do you propose we do?”

  This was the moment Sumelyu had been dreading. “The next Cohort ship that appears, we signal it. Ask them to evacuate us. Rejoin them.”

  Felioe crossed her arms. Her voice was bitter. “What makes you think they would take us back? You think they’ll simply forget that we’re exiles?”

  “We have to try. Maybe we can work with the Cohort to understand the Blessings, so that their people can also defeat the ageing process.”

  “The Blessings must be earned,” Krossatar said. “That’s all there is to understand about them.”

  “If we earned them, why are they being taken away from us now?” shot back Sumelyu.

  “Perhaps it is… a lack of faith.”

  “We should be coming together at a time like this,” added Felioe. “The Cohort cast us out. They have no use for us, and we have no use for them.”

  Sumelyu stood very still. “You are too proud,” she said. “Too convinced that what you cannot see will save you.”

  “It saved us once before.”

  Krossatar turned his back to her, and Felioe joined him.

  Without their support, Sumelyu would be unable to convince anyone of significance in the Guild. And without her own Guild’s vote, there was no use in approaching a different clan.

  I’m on my own, she realized.

  #

  Sumelyu spent the following five days and nights by herself. She set up camp in a remote cavern that she had discovered on an expedition ten cycles back. She needed time away from the Guild, to make sure she knew in her heart that she was doing the right thing. And more importantly, she could not risk capture. Now that her two former confidantes knew her plan, there was every reason to think they would try and subdue her when the next ship appeared.

  If one appeared.

  During this time she only emerged from the mountainside once. She gazed at faint Iduaban in an evening sky littered with other, more distant stars. Its sight filled her with melancholic longing, a desire for her people to return to the days of old when they had roamed among the stars.

  On the way back to her makeshift dwelling that evening, an unexpected weakness overcame her. She felt her legs turn to mush, her arms slacken. Black ghosts danced at the edge of her vision, and twice she nearly fell down a slippery, heavily-inclined path. As she turned off her portable light and tried to sleep, it felt like her blankets had become useless against the all-pervasive cold.

  Her hands and feet grew numb.

  Her throat dried and her head pounded.

  She recognized the symptoms at once. It had started the same way with Drosian.

  Without another Blessing soon, I won’t make it through the cycle.

  She imagined her father, suffering alone in their cavern. It made her feel even worse.

  #

  In the depths of restless sleep, she felt a familiar rejuvenating effect, less potent, less cleansing than other times, but discernible nonetheless. It coursed through her like a gentle stream of wellbeing, invisible energy stimulating her body here and there, eliminating the worst of her pains. Her hunger dampened and her headache disappeared. She woke with a smile, grateful for even a partial restoration of her health.

  It didn’t take long for her joy to be replaced by something else.

  If the Blessing has just occurred, she thought, the ship won’t be in this system for long.

  Making use of every iota of her new strength, she scrambled up the path and through the rock tunnel in half the time it would have normally taken her. Emerging from the mountainside in the middle of pitch black, she had to slow her pace on the ascent to the mountain’s peak to avoid slipping and falling.

  Lugging the transponder beacon, one of the few pieces of their ship that they had managed to stow away and repair so many cycles ago, slowed her down even more.

  By the time she made it to the summit her lungs burned in her chest and her arms trembled with exhaustion. It felt like she’d been climbing for hours. All she wanted to do was lie down in the soft snow and sleep forever.

  The desire for rest set off alarms inside her head, warning her of oxygen depletion.

  Adrenaline now coursing through her body, she set up the beacon and completed its simple start-up routine with surprisingly nimble fingers.

  Using infrared binoculars Sumelyu scanned the night sky. After several minutes she located her target, a fleck of pulsating orange that moved against the backdrop with unnatural precision and speed.

  She aligned the direction of the transponder’s beam with the fleck’s coordinates and let out a long breath.

  Now to wait.

  #

  The Ariadne, one of the Cohort’s latest-generation Collapsar ships, detected an unusual signal emanating from Rakesh’s fifth moon.

  The lone pilot studied the signal, adjusted the Ariadne’s course and prepared to land.

  #

  “How do you feel?”

  Sumelyu’s eyelids fluttered and opened only halfway, white light stinging her with pinpricks of pain that shot through her forehead and into the back of her skull.

  “Too bright,” she moaned, raising her hands to shield her face.

  “This should help.”

  She felt a mask being attached to her face. She risked a peek and saw that the glare had muted down to a tolerable level. And with every filtered breath her head seemed clearer.

  “Better,” she managed, and rose up.

  “How long have you been here?”

  The pilot wore the standard colors of the Cohort uniform, a configuration that apparently hadn’t changed over the last sixteen cycles. The pilot’s own partially masked face betrayed weariness, a life of too much duty and too little recompense.

  “There’ll be time for explanations later,” Sumelyu said. “Right now I need your help. There’s several Guilds—” she saw the pilot’s puzzled expression “—groups of us living deep inside this mountain range. Maybe one hundred and twenty people in all. I need your assistance for a full evacuation.”

  The pilot looked concerned. “Even if I was authorized to assist, my ship can only hold a crew of five. But, more importantly—”

  “You’ll have to call other ships!”

  “You don’t understand,” the pilot said. “No more Cohort ships will be coming to this sector. My craft is a Collapsar. I’ve been instructed to close the Conduit.”

  Sumelyu, still standing upright, felt like the wind had been knocked out of her.

  “But surely, if you let the Cohort know that there are people down here—”

  “I already did, during my descent.” The pilot shook her head slowly. “It didn’t take them long to figure out
that, improbable as it seemed, you’re survivors from the Naxos. I came down to confirm it. The Cohort doesn’t want to allocate resources for this rescue mission. Our alliances have been strained, our empire in retreat. Why do you think we’re closing down Conduits? Cohort Central has decided it’s time we look inward and preserve our resources, instead of squandering them on places like this.”

  “But we can offer you something unique,” Sumelyu said quickly, stomach sinking while she spoke the words she’d rehearsed for days. “Scan my body. I haven’t aged in sixteen cycles. The Conduit provides Blessings, which we would be willing to share with you in exchange for your aid.”

  The pilot frowned, pulled out a sleek piece of equipment from her suit’s rear pack and probed Sumelyu’s body with a dozen different sensors.

  The pilot’s mouth dropped. Then she said, “You’re sick.” The pilot paused.“Your body is riddled with at least nine types of cancer. Yet somehow you haven’t developed malignancies. I think that the foldspace radiation from the Conduit’s opening and closing is interacting with the planet’s intense magnetosphere to somehow keep your cancers in check. The same magnetosphere prevented our scans from detecting you… But according to my ship it’s been weakening, and you’ve probably started experiencing some symptoms of your cancers.”

  “Cancers?”

  “You talked about not ageing. Cancer cells are immortal. Your hyper-stimulated cancers are hijacking your biochemistry so that they can continue to thrive indefinitely. I can try to treat you with my med-pack, but I’m not sure how your body will react.”

  Sumelyu’s head was spinning. She had gone against the wishes of her father, who might well be dead by now, against the wishes of her friends—for what? To discover that the Blessings were nothing but a curse, that Krossatar and Felioe had been right when they warned her that the Cohort wouldn’t take them back?