Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (18 page)

“Look at the space in this room,” said Stay Puft bitterly. “We should have rented
it
instead!” The sound of sirens approaching from the distance grew louder. The Cloverfield Monster said, “Time to adjourn this meeting.”

Kong nodded his agreement. “Moved, seconded, and let’s get the hell out of here!”

The monsters all scattered in different directions.

As Antoinette scurried off, El Pájaro Grande caught up to her and asked, “Am I a member now or not? I’m very confused.”

“You can try again next quarter,” answered Antoinette.

“I’ll have to think about it,” said El Pájaro Grande. “Are all the meetings like this?”

“Oh, absolutely not,” Antoinette assured her.

“Good!”

Antoinette nodded. “This was one of the calm ones.”

Original (First) Publication
Copyright © 2013 by Brennan Harvey

********************************************

C. L. Moore was the creator of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry before collaborating on a number of classic stories with her husband, Henry Kuttner. This is the second of three stories we are publishing from her college magazine; it has been out of print for 82 years. (Thanks and a tip of the hat to Andrew Liptak for unearthing it.)

--------------

TWO FANTASIES

by C. L. Moore

(A legend they tell of the notorious Duchess of Penyra says that once in her childhood she saw the Sea Maid. Segramar includes a highly ambiguous account of this in his
Dark Ladies.
)

Down at the edge of the sea two children were playing. A little girl, a little boy. The tropical sun beating down on their bare heads made blue highlights on the black hair of the boy, but the girl’s bright curls blazed defiance in the face of the sun, and every sparkle was a glint of red gold. Under the burning of it her eyes were stormy, dark, and her face and her beautiful little golden body gave promise already of the turbulent years to come.

Now she wore a single torn garment, and her feet were bare and her hair a mop of ragged glory. Save for that ominous brightness there was no way to tell her rank from that of her playmate; no one could have guessed that here by the sea a Duchess sat digging in the sand.

The children were absorbed in their sport, and they did not see the tall lady who came walking along the edge of the sea—walking like a queen in her long green gown. She must have been down at the water’s edge, for the trailing hem of her dress left little pools of brine along the beach, and every footprint that she made filled up with sea water. She came to the children playing together in the sand and stood for a moment bending above them, quietly. At her presence the boy looked up, startled. Whatever he saw in the deep eyes above him, he scrambled to his feet and fled.

The little girl sat still, very still, and her eyes traveled slowly up the green skirts—the hems dripping brine—up very slowly to the bending face above her. She looked deep into the green seas…fathomless waters…ice and amber and the echo of a Song…

She sat very still. She did not feel the lady’s hand—her foam-white hand—that stretched out above her head, hovering over it, touching with infinite lightness the burning gold of her curls. She felt sea wind in her hair…she saw the shifting tides and sank fathoms deep through the green seas. For so long as the lady stood there, as if she were warming her hands at the bright-blazing hair, the child did not stir.

Then the tall woman straightened. She looked down at the little girl, deep-eyed, silent. She did not smile, she did not speak; she only gazed at her, long, and with all the green seas in her eyes. Then she turned away and went off along the sand, walking like a queen. In the footprints behind her salt water welled slowly up, and her long skirt-hems trailed brine behind her as she walked.

***

Yellow Brian Doom swung his sword to the frosty stars. The wind was in his hair, and his horse’s mane tossing, and his cloak flowed out behind him. Over his shoulder he called eternally to his vanished legions. Yellow Brian in bronze bestrode his rearing horse under the winter stars, and the wind wailed eerily about him down the Square—Yellow Brian, shouting with upflung sword. Brian Doom, King of Gradenborg. His voice was in the wind. The tramp of his legions sounded down the storms. Yellow Brian, surnamed the Damned.

Brian Doom, with his yellow hair and his yellow lion’s eyes, had ridden into Gradenborg a hundred years ago, the wind in his cloak and his horse stepping high, singing as he came. Yellow Brian was king, and his hands were red and the steps to the throne slippery, but he sat there with the crown on his head and defied the world to take it off. He ruled stormily for seven years, and died with the taste of blood in his mouth.

Yellow Brian was twenty-five when he came to the throne, six feet three, muscled like a bull, ruthless and blithe. He had a cruel, ugly face and eyes like yellow jewels and a harsh mouth and a charming smile. Women were fascinated by him—splendid and ugly and gentle, and he loved no one and no thing, and yet.…There is a story of Brian Doom and Princess Margaret, and it is a strange, wild, tender tale, but it ends half-finished in a whirlwind of steel and shouts, with a young man lying face down on the cobbles, his cheek against a lady’s velvet shoes and the taste of blood in his mouth.

There was never any happiness about him. He brought black ruin to his friends and red ruin to his enemies, and something more to the lady he might have loved; and he stole a throne and ruined a kingdom and died on the cobbles with blood on his tongue.

They say he swaggers through Hell merrily, his stolen crown over one ear—Yellow Brian the Damned.

Copyright © C.L. Moore

********************************************

Ron Collins, a HOMer winner and Writers of the Future finalist, is the author of more than 50 stories that have appeared in Asimov’s and elsewhere. His first collection, Picasso’s Cat and Other Stories, was published last year.

--------------

THE TEAMMATES

by Ron Collins

The door shut behind us and we sat down.

The chief controller shifted her collar uncomfortably. Her face was flat, with that marshmallow-toned skin that made aliens look so soft and puffy. Late afternoon sun sliced through the window to show bright green roots in the part of her hair, so she hadn’t bleached in a while, which was unusual for her. The controller was always trying to fit in, and green hair didn’t.

She folded her ropey fingers together in a way that reminded me of the spiders behind the storage shed where I slept these days.

“We should probably make a formal introduction,” the alien said. “I am Alit ul Lach. I operate this hydrogen plant.”

“Carl Weeks,” I replied. “I, uh, I wait tables.”

This was very strange.

I had waited on her at the Universal Grill for the past three years, yet never known her name. She was pancakes and grits with no butter, all you can drink coffee (of which she drank a lot), and a thirty-percent tip. Dependable as the rising sun. We spoke only a little in the early days, but more often recently. She seemed good as aliens go. But we were on her turf now, so I sat there in her office, uncomfortable in my newest shirt and my grease-stained pants, waiting for her to get to business.

“You are on probation among your own people, correct?” she said.

“How’d you know that?”

She shrugged as if to say it didn’t matter.

“What did you do?”

“I stole food for my family.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

She sat there with the same irritating patience the city judge had when he gave me that probation three years ago, and the same smug-assed expression Jamaal had when he cut my hours last week just to spite me. Power and control apparently do the same damned thing to people no matter whether they are human or alien.

“I need to know why you took the food,” Alit asked.

“I don’t suppose you know what it’s like to be hungry,” I replied.

She pursed her lips.

“These people you call family were not related to you.”

“They raised me after…” I looked at her, trying to come up with a decent phrase.

“Your parents died in the Installation.”

I gave a sigh. “The Installation” was alien-tongue for the True War to End All Wars, the single week, more than fifteen years ago, that it took them to smash every major city we had and forever alter the face of the planet. All our planes, missiles, and satellite warning systems, and we never stood a chance. A couple billion people dead. One planet taken. Life as we knew it, gone forever.

“Yes,” I said. “My mom was a pilot, my dad was fire crew.”

“And you felt compassion for this second family, so you risked yourself for them?”

“Yes.”

“Because they were hungry?”

“Why does any of this matter?”

She blinked. “We don’t think the way you think.”

“No offense,” I said, “but I
am
painfully aware of that.”

The aliens are dispassionate about everything, literal to a fault. They live a step at a time, moving directly toward whatever they think of as perfection. Not that they are inflexible, or robotic about it. Just the opposite. They change course all the time. Their ability to drop a losing strategy and take a better one without thinking it over again is as much annoying as it is outright scary. And it is universal; every one of them accepts the goal and pushes toward it—but any one of them is also completely free to change tactics as needed to make sure the final vision happens.

In the case of “the Installation,” the final vision was:
Create Big-Assed Hydrogen Fuel Depot
. Which is where I was now, deep in the executive offices of HydroCen 93, a plant built expressly to turn millions of gallons of sea water into raw hydrogen every day.

“You know what we do with the hydrogen, correct?” she said.

“You put it in your rocket ships.”

“And you know why we need to do that?”

“You’re in another war.”

She nodded in her smooth, alien way. “My people are defending our planets from other combined forces,” Alit said. “Do you know how this war is going for us?”

“Why should I care?”

“You should care because this morning I received an order to destroy the center. The war is not going well. I and the Chief Controllers of each of the other two hundred ninety-seven HydroCens on Earth have been ordered to retreat. We will not leave fuel depots for the enemy.”

I didn’t know what to say. This changed everything.

“Why are you telling me this? Why not just send a notice? Say you’re gonna blow up the HydroCen, and we all just need to get the hell outta the way while you hightail it outta town?”

“No, Carl Weeks. You listen, but do not hear. Our order is to destroy the
depot
.”

It took a moment before the full truth of this dawned.

“You’re going to blow up the Earth?”

She nodded. “Not fully, I suppose. There will still be a planet. You won’t recognize it, though, and human life will almost certainly be removed.”

I shook my head, anger and disbelief rising together.

“I can’t…you’re going to blow up the oceans? How do you do that?”

She dismissed my question with a flip of her hand. “Not exactly. We’ll pull free hydrogen from the water, though, and when our primary devices are triggered, the Earth’s entire atmosphere
will
be set afire. It won’t be complete, of course. Electrolysis at such a scale isn’t perfect. But the explosion will rock the planet, and it might be years before it can support human life again.”

“Why?” It was the only word that would come for several moments. “Why are you telling
me
this? Is this your idea of a joke?”

“No, Carl Weeks. This is no joke,” the alien said. “You stole food for people who were not your family. You care deeply about others. But it is not just you. You are a strange species. You fight with each other, yet you have a sense of being part of something bigger than yourselves that is unique throughout the universe.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“We don’t have that,” Alit continued almost as if I had not spoken. “We work in the now. We find ways to achieve, to go forward. We are very strong in that fashion.” She looked at me with a depth in her eyes that I had never seen in an alien. “Perhaps it is just that I have been on this planet for too many years, but I think we are missing something, and I have come to see this human ability to feel for things beyond yourself as something important.”

She paused. I waited.

“You ask why I am telling you this. My answer is just that: because I think humans are important. And you, Carl Weeks, have always been of the utmost service.”

“Thanks. I think.”

“No one in B-Command will listen to me, though. If I press it further, my career will be over. So it falls thus: if I follow this order to its letter, I eradicate you, which, if I am right, means I destroy something the universe desperately needs. But if I do something different, perhaps I can achieve our goal while making a better path.”

I calmed down and tried to follow her.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I propose that you find two hundred people to come aboard my ship. I will leave you on a remote planet, which should give you enough time to grow strong as a people.”

“
What?
”

“It’s all I have room for, but given reasonable genetic differentiation two hundred should be an effective population seed.”

“This can’t work,” I said. “No one’s gonna listen to me, and everyone will go crazy when you start talking about blowing up the world.”

“That is why you cannot tell anyone. If chaos erupts, I will have to put up security, and there is nothing to gain from that, right? So you will have to lie, tell your people you are looking for volunteers for something, maybe a study. Promise they will be paid. Whatever will work.”

I sat there, my brain flopping like fish on a dry dock.

“This is insane.”

“But you will do it?”

I looked at Alit ul Lach and saw her concern, her worry, and her guilt. These things had crossed her face earlier this afternoon at the Universal Diner when she had asked me to stop by this evening. I understood them now. But I also saw her determination and her energy. She was going to bug out one way or the other.

It was my choice.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do it. How many weeks or months do I have?”

She gave me an alien smile. “We leave in two days.”

Crap.

***

The sun had set by the time I was walking away from HydroCen 93, striding over the empty remains of a road, over a sidewalk that was mostly dust, and alongside a rusting chain fence with coils of razor wire at its top. The night was cloudless and cool. I pulled my jacket over my shoulders.

How was
I
going to find two hundred people, let alone convince them they should jump on a space ship so they could preserve the human species? I’m barely twenty. I don’t know anyone. I’ve lived the last three years by a simple creed: stick to basic conversation, shot from the hip and smothered with humor; don’t get in too tight; and save every credit possible while I live out probation. Then get the hell out of Delano, California, and start over again.

I also admitted that, assuming the alien’s whole story was true, in my heart I struggled over whether I even wanted do this thing the controller had asked for. While
she
saw compassion in human beings, I can’t say as it seemed all that common to me. No one has lifted a finger for Carl Weeks except to strip me of everything but the need to work like a pack mule so I can keep food in my mouth. So, really, humanity as a whole could just burn in hell as far as I was concerned.

But I looked into a night full of stars, and I walked, and as I walked, a pressure settled over me, a huge, dark pressure that felt like it might crush me. Eventually, I felt embarrassed for myself—embarrassed for what I had become. My parents would be ashamed of me today. I had been able to hide from that fact for a long time, but there was no hiding now. I felt ugly. Mom was a pilot. Dad was fire crew.

What was I?

What did my life stand for?

And, after more hours of walking than I am happy to admit, I finally realized this was more than just finding two hundred people.  I had to find the
right
two hundred, whatever that was.

***

The next morning found me as blank as the night before.

I considered not going to work. Wasn’t like it would make a difference if Jamaal canned me or not, but I decided to go because at least there I knew people, and there I had a reason to open up and chat with folks that might lead to a recruitment.

It sounded good, anyway.

My shift didn’t start until lunch, and I needed to clear my mind, so I went to shoot some hoops.

I love hoops, even though the park’s goals are old, the backboards are dry-rotting, and the nets are made of chain. The game is about controlling yourself at full speed. It’s aggression with pace. You run, and you sweat, but it don’t seem like you’re working because there’s so much to do, so much to think about. I’m not the best athlete. I’m too small and I don’t jump high. But hoops is a game where the best athlete doesn’t always win.

Johnny Randall was there, of course. Johnny R—a good guy, a dude who makes it by picking up jobs here and there, painting, or washing, or hauling crap out of places where other folks didn’t want it. Mostly just enough to eat on. He could probably do about anything he set his mind to, but Johnny R was born dribbling and never stopped. All he really cared about was hoops. He was tough as a desert lizard on the court, nearly impossible to guard, and clutch as hell. When the game was on the line, you wanted the ball in Johnny R’s hands.

But he was a team player, too. He looked out after guys, kept them up, fed them the ball when they needed it, and scored only when they couldn’t (which was most of the time). He could run all day. Of course, he could run his mouth all day, too, laughing and joking and talking trash as pure as fresh shit, which is fine if you can back it up—and Johnny R backed it up with the best of them. He may not have much else in life, but Johnny R had game.