Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 (7 page)

“I’m wiped out. These alien microbes have colonized every nook and cranny of my suit. It’s getting harder to move.”

Ignacio sighed and took a sip of fresh water from the tube in his helmet. It was another reminder of their short time together as a family, but no matter what, he thought, he had Ojore full-time. Would one child be enough for a being used to living with hundreds? Would it be enough for Yemaya? He had heard of new hodgepodge schools of mostly hybrid children and their interspecies parents, but would they accept Wahgohi? For the first time, he realized that he cared about her, about her happiness. She wasn’t just a floating egg sac—an anonymous surrogate—to him. She wasn’t even an intelligent, unfathomable monstrosity any more. She was family.

“Are you okay?” Ojore’s concern oozed over their private channel.

Ignacio wanted to be held in his big arms, anchored by muscles forged in Papua’s mighty gravity. Floating in this endless sea like flotsam was beginning to get to him. “Yeah, I’m just thinking.”

“About our future?”

“About their future.”

He thought he saw his husband nod through the visor, but Ojore said nothing, only gave his gauntleted hand an encouraging little squeeze. Ignacio squeezed back and something subtle and human passed between them.

“Wahgohi,” he coughed over the open channel. He took another sip of water, then reached out and grabbed one of the longer spines on her pectoral fin. It was ungainly and silly, but she didn’t shrug him off. The three of them were bound together like two small hydrogen atoms desperately clinging to a larger oxygen atom. Together they were creating something as fundamental and potent as water. “Would you like to have more children with us?”

A plume of lime green bubbles exploded from her scintillating scales. Yemaya danced around them blissfully. Wahgohi wasn’t laughing—or she was—but she was also crying. It was an eruption of emotion. “Yes, husbands, I would like that very much.”

###

 Alex Hernandez is a Cuban-American science fiction writer based in South Florida, and the first of his family to be born in the U.S. His most influential experience with written science fiction was as a kid, when he checked out a collection of Isaac Asimov’s short stories from the public library and immediately connected with the author’s immigrant story. Perhaps because of that, the themes of migration or colonization and post humanism permeate his stories, which usually blend the subgenres of space opera and biopunk. His work has previously been published by
Bean Books, The Colored Lens
, and
Interstellar Fiction
.

Forever Lights

Peter Medeiros

Dr. Lorena Hannish was good at a lot of things: theoretical physics, applied thermodynamics, advanced calculus, and the accordion. She was good at these naturally, almost without practice. "Practice," she said, "can help hone your talents, but it won't upset natural inclinations. You can't tell that to a bunch of MIT undergrads, but there you are."

When Dr. Hannish was a girl, her father insisted she play soccer. She seemed to grow less coordinated every season until a busted knee in sixth grade ended her father's athletic ambitions for her, and made sure she would never again miss an episode of
NOVA
. She told me the one thing she practiced, foolishly, was getting her husband, the late Dr. Clifford Hannish, to shut up and let her do the talking. She practiced for years, and with no improvement.

Dr. Hannish told me all this without turning from the passenger side window, though there was nothing to see but the glow of streetlamps in the distance. She paused, then added, "So what do you think?" The doctor asked questions aggressively.

I told her my dad said I could be anything I wanted, with enough practice. I told her my seventh grade basketball team won states.

"What do you want to be right now?" she asked. "The chauffer of a grouchy Nobel laureate, the 'Ice Queen of Clean Energy'? You want to be an underpaid driver freezing his ass off getting an old bat to a power station the middle of nowhere?"

I said, "Ma'am, what I want to be is asleep."

Dr. Hannish laughed and coughed and finally settled down in her seat and I could tell we wouldn't talk any more all the way to Wiscasset.

I had not expected to see Dr. Lorena Hannish again. After her husband died, she sold off the beach house in Castine, Maine and told me straight off that she would end her days in the Florida home. Clifford died chasing one of their dogs into a snowstorm. She had watched him hobble after the mutt, stood in the doorway for twenty minutes, then went inside and dialed 911 and told them he was dead. Then she called me to get her to the hospital, because she didn't want to ride in the back of any ambulance and she wanted to stop for coffee on the way. This was nine o'clock at night. In this part of Maine, the Starbucks closes at eight.

People asked me if she saw her husband's ghost, when it happened. If anybody could, they reasoned, it would be her. I told them what Lorena Hannish always told me: "There's no such thing as ghosts." And when they started to protest, when they said that Dr. Hannish's work had more or less proven the existence of life or
something
after death, I'd add, as she always did, "Just because there's smoke, doesn't mean there's a gun."

But she'd called me yesterday. First time I heard her voice in the year since Cliff's death. Now I was driving her from the airport to the Spiritual Residue Plant in Wiscasset. We passed beneath streetlamps that would never go out. She held a small black box in her lap, and a set of thick fuzzy headphones. I'll admit, I was curious. To the best of anyone's knowledge, Dr. Hannish and her husband hadn't so much as published an article in
Scientific Monthly
since they invented the SR turbines that solved our energy problems and stopped the oil wars. Or as some people said, since they'd saved the world.

#

I used to be a mall cop in South Portland, but nobody every pulled a gun on me until I started driving for the Hannishes. This was right after they bought the beach house. The two of them had arthritis and reflexes like molasses; they needed a driver. My older brother had worked in their lab in Cambridge, and he gave them my card. Lied and told them I was reliable. Lorena was exactly like she looked on the television: small, quiet, boiling with thoughts you wouldn't understand. Cliff, on the other hand, you could talk to. A guy's guy. He squinted at everything, had terrible posture, and he always wore this wide-brim camping hat he bought because he didn't want to look like summer people. It didn't work.

The guy with the gun, it turned out later, had stalked them for a week before the incident. I hadn't noticed. I was waiting to pick up the couple outside The Hartstone Inn. Cliff was opening the door for Lorena, she was shooing him away with a cane, and this bozo in—no shit—a white jean jacket over a green hoodie pulls a goddamn Glock from his pants and yells that he wants to talk with his dead boy.
I know you can do it
, he says. A conspiracy theory nut.

I sprang at him and grabbed the guy's wrist, forcing the gun lower until it pointed at the ground. I thumped him on the head and shoulders with my free hand. The gunman began spazzing out, high on adrenaline and oblivious to the blows. He fought me with everything he had; he scratched at my ears with dirty fingernails and shook all over like a dog, trying to regain control of the hand still wrapped around his pistol. I looked at the gun and saw that the moron still had the safety on, but I wasn't too relieved. He'd already given me some kind of disease, I was sure of it.

Here's what's crazy: Cliff wanted to talk to the guy. He said, "Mister, I'm really sorry, but you know we can't do that. Lemme explain."

Lorena tried to keep the situation from veering too far into the ridiculous. "Clifford!" she yelled, "He's a luddite, don't talk with him!"

But Clifford went on. "We don't call them 'ghosts' because it's not so much a them as an it. We use the term 'residual life force.' It's not ectoplasm. There's no such thing as ectoplasm. Let's say you make an engine that runs on burning wood. There’s heat, right? This is like a machine that doesn't harness the heat, but harnesses the smoke. The sign of having been. Does that make sense?"

Lorena: "Clifford! You can't
reason
with these people!"

The nut: "My boy, my boy…"

Me: "Doctors, please stand back. I'm trying to break his wrist, so, uh…"

Clifford, undaunted: "And this stuff, it's all moving around. So maybe the idea is more like tidal energy. And just like the tide's stronger in some places, so is the SR—the spiritual residue. "Residue" isn't quite right, but we named it before we knew how it works. Not that we fully understand it yet! Lots of work to be done, work for younger… Anyway, the plant here in Quebec doesn’t pull in that much juice, whereas all of Europe is powered by a single plant in Northern Poland. Or how the Hiroshima plant could do most of China, if they ever figure out some kind of agreement. They—I mean
it
—tends to stay concentrated in certain locations like that." Cliff sighed, a deflated sound you only ever hear from those who are very old, who have done all they set out to do and can do no more. "It's not your boy. How would we even find him?"

I got the gun out of the crazy guy's hands and kicked him behind the knee. When he went down I gave him another in the neck for good measure. He sobbed and sobbed, "I want to speak to my boy."

Cliff said, "I'm sorry."

Lorena said, "Don't be."

In the car, Cliff was breathing hard. I asked if he was okay. He said he was tired of lying. Lorena elbowed Cliff in the ribs and told me to drive.

#

Wiscasset. Lorena flashed an ID that got us inside the plant. She wouldn't let me carry the box. She wouldn't let me help her up the shaking maintenance ladder, either. And on the roof, she wouldn't take my arm as she hobbled over to the nearest of the purring turbines. You can't see the SR, obviously, but the turbines are still spooky. The spectral remains of the planet's dead blowing like silent wind through the tunnels.

I tucked my fingers in my armpits and watched Lorena put on the headphones. She opened the box and unfolded a long black microphone. There was a tiny control panel inside the box, a device not unlike a miniature soundboard. She stood very close to the turbine, and for a moment I was scared a sleeve or the bottom of her jacket might get caught and tug in her. She twisted a couple of knobs and held out the box. When she spoke, I was scared for a whole different reason.

"Clifford," she said. "Clifford, can you hear me?" A pause. When Dr. Hannish spoke again, her voice trembled. She was no longer the compact, cantankerous mad scientist who defended her work from so-called ‘Spiritualists’ in interviews. She sounded afraid. "I know, I know we said we wouldn't do this… No, it's just me. Well, and the driver. Heh… It's nephritis, Clifford. The doctor is talking about dialysis, but I am so tired. You know, it's not fair. We were the ones who figured it out. They billed us as geniuses, and here I am reduced to the same stupid questions as anybody. Can you tell me…is it going to hurt? Am I still going to be me?"

I backed away from Dr. Hannish until the purr of other turbines on the roof drowned out the sound of her voice. I didn't need to hear this. From the roof of the plant, I could see little Wiscasset shining a few miles away. No one turns off the lights any more. No reason to. The spiritual residue never diminishes, never goes still.

Sometime later, I couldn't say when, the doctor touched me on the shoulder. She was ready to go. I went down the ladder before Dr. Hannish. I was sure she was going to fall.

I'd left the car running. Once we were back on the highway I asked, "What did he say?"

Dr. Hannish's voice was dry, stripped of the impatience I'd always known from her. "He said it doesn't hurt. It's not the Elysian Fields, but it feels
right
, he said, even if you can't quite stop moving around. He said it makes everything before feel like…practice."

She got a flight back to Florida the next morning. It was only when I came back to the car that I saw she'd left her box in the front seat. It was surprisingly light in my hands, like it was made of leaves. I jammed it back under the seat and pulled onto the Pike and wondered if there was anybody I wanted to hear.

###

Peter Medeiros is only employed in the most disreputable of professions: he is a writer, a teacher, and a barista. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. Most recently, his work has been featured in
Spark IV
in January, and July's issue of
Outposts of Beyond
.

Remember Prometheus

Eleanor R. Wood

Damian inhaled the aroma of coffee to calm his nerves. He had arrived at The Roasted Bean well before he was due to meet Anna. It was their favourite haunt, and had hardly changed in the years since he last sat here. The walls were a different shade–less terracotta, more burgundy–and the once-trendy, iron-backed chairs had been replaced with ultra-ergonomic memory cushioned seats, but the layout was the same and the menu had hardly altered. For the first time since he rejoined the world, Damian could pretend no time had passed.

They hadn’t yet seen each other since his return the week before. He knew why Anna hadn’t been there when he awoke, but her absence still stung. Her phobia prevented her from facing his pale, clammy form as he was brought back from the cold, just as it had prevented her from accompanying him to the Institute on the day he was frozen.

He tried to quell his anxiety with two cups of coffee while he waited, but the caffeine rush only increased his anticipation at seeing her face again. Would he recognise her after eight years? She would have aged a little. She might have changed her hair, and the clothes she used to favour were surely out of fashion now. The bell on the shop door tinkled. He looked up, and relief flooded him. He would still know that gentle, bright face if a hundred years had passed.