Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (24 page)

The one character I liked the most was the Poet, an alien who, while onboard the
Guardian of Night
, sends out his (its?) poems, which are captured and interpreted by a human female character. All of which becomes just another avenue to pursue
Guardian of Night.
I was surprised and delighted by the depth of characterization in this book and recommend it to you heartily. That it’s a stand-alone makes it all the more worthy—although I can see
Guardian
’s incredible weaponry being used again in another story.

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

PHOENIX PICK PRESENTS

This is where the publisher gets to showcase one of Phoenix Pick’s hidden gems.

Ex-U.S.-Senator Gibson Altman rules the prison colony where everyone is expected to live by rules that govern every aspect of their lives.

The inhabitants of the experimental colony survive in a society plagued by crime, corruption and despair, toiling endlessly at tasks they are appointed to. Altman lives a life of luxury, ruling the lives of the souls trapped within his experiment and brooking no opposition to mandate.

However, Pallas, the terraformed asteroid, is also home to Curringer, a society in stark contrast to Altman’s prison. It is a community where individual freedoms are championed and men and women are free to live as they please.

Emerson Ngu escapes from Altman’s prison colony and becomes a hero of Curringer. Altman is driven by a deep hatred of Emerson and his triumph and will do anything to get his revenge on him. But in the process will he also destroy his own daughter and even the world of Pallas?

Winner of the Prometheus Award

***

Please note that the following is an excerpt
from the book, not a complete story.

PALLAS

The Voice of Pallas

The police are like parents. They’re not really interested in justice, they simply want
quiet
.

—Mirelle Stein,
The Productive Class

Emerson Ngu wound the tuning coil carefully, following the instructions in the book he’d found in a Residence trash bin, and scraped the varnish off the wires along the top.

Even in this secret, private place, he worked as quietly as he could for fear someone might hear and report him to the goons. He’d never suffered a shock baton “treatment,” but had seen others writhe beneath the instrument of discipline, too agonized to scream. That there would be a first time for him he had no doubt, but it didn’t have to be here and now, and wouldn’t be if he could avoid it.

The variable capacitor had proven more difficult, and from half a dozen alternatives suggested by the brittle-paged paperback he’d settled on a strip of thin aluminum covered with plastic wrap, over which he slid another piece of foil, varying the area of their mutual effect. The mechanical arrangement was inelegant, hard to keep adjusted, and the best he could do with materials at hand.

Reflexively, he glanced outward through the ragged-edged entrance to his private, secret place, watchful for the pale blue livery which stood out against the color of the local terrain as if dyed fluorescent orange. Seeing nothing but a handful of peasant colonists like himself, clad in off-white denim, and the endless brown furrows they tended—and feeling little relieved—he returned to his work.

The easiest part had been the detector, a lump of galena from an unworked area of the Project, wedged into a short section of plumbing copper. A wisp of the wire he’d used for the coil stood over that little chunk of lead ore, insulated with a bit of tape, to serve as a “cat’s whisker,” used to find a rectifying facet of the crystal.

The earphone had been hardest. The discarded “how-to” book had assumed that the hobbyist would buy one at some nearby establishment—which Emerson decidedly could not—but had included a diagram to show how they worked. He’d wound five different coils around the magnetic core of a carpenter’s broken stud-finder, much smaller than the tuning coil he’d wound around a discarded toilet paper roll but with many more turns, before he found the correct “impedance”—whatever that meant. A small washer of foam wrapping plastic separated this field coil from its diaphragm, a tiny disk of steel he’d cut from a jar lid. The homemade earphone crackled whenever he attached it to the rest of his homemade radio.

Unable to stop himself, he looked up again—in the failing light at the end of the day, the goons might already be relying on the sickly green torches at the handle ends of their batons—and back down at what he’d accomplished in these stolen hours when nobody expected somebody like him to be able to go on working in the fields. Others of his kind would be off playing somewhere, one of the few offenses overlooked by the goons because the only alternative was working children to death—or even worse, being caught at it by visiting officials.

Just like the radio receiver he was building, Emerson’s kit of scrapers, cutters, measurers, and screwdrivers, his mallet and flame-heated soldering iron, were homemade out of little bits and pieces furtively salvaged from this scrap heap or that garbage can. Nobody had ever told him that having them, or having done with them what he had, was forbidden. Somehow he knew it without being told.

Everything that interested him was forbidden.

It was the same with the stack of magazines and paperbacks he’d salvaged, safe and dry in the niche he’d scraped out for them at the back of the cave after others had tired of them and thrown them away.

With a sigh compounded equally of excitement and fear—of failure or discovery—he blew out the little paraffin lamp he’d made last year from the bottom of a can. It was the first such “forbidden” project he’d undertaken and he was unreasonably fond of it. Familiar with his whereabouts by feel alone, he took up another coil of wire—this one long, loose, and with a weighted end—and emerged from his tiny cave at the base of the crater wall just below the Rimfence.

It was not quite dark, even here in the shadow of the rim, and his pale lamplight would probably not have betrayed him, either against the setting sun—or what he knew was about to follow. Still, he was careful to readjust the clump of brush which concealed the entrance to his cave, no more than a boy-sized bubble in what had once been molten lava. He liked that brush almost as much as he liked his cave or his little lamp. This was the same untended section of the Project where he’d found the galena crystal, and the wild plant had obviously blown here as a seed from the Outside, where things like weeds were allowed to happen.

Holding the unweighted end of the coiled wire firmly, he freed a couple of meters from the weighted end, swung it experimentally around his head a few times, and heaved it as high and far as he could up the crater wall, over the Rimfence that stood above it. It would have been an impossible toss on Earth. Here, the coils flipped from his fingers as the weight sailed dozens of meters into the evening sky until he heard and felt it thud to the soft ground on the other side.

Immediately, he glanced around to make sure he hadn’t been seen. He’d already taken the precaution of mottling the antenna wire’s plastic insulation so that it matched, as closely as possible, the carbonaceous chondrite soil it lay against, which was about the color and consistency of a slightly overdone chocolate chip cookie. Emerson had never seen a chocolate chip cookie, but he understood, again without ever having been told, that this illegal antenna of his mustn’t be conspicuous. Spending hours at the mind-dulling task, he’d patiently camouflaged it using a double handful of not-quite-exhausted marking pens thrown out by the Chief Administrator’s office. Now he painstakingly added to its disguise with strategically placed clumps of brush and dirt clods.

At last, pulling the free end of the wire inside with him, he attached it to one side of his tuning coil, having grounded the opposite side in the cave floor. He placed the phone against his ear, wriggled the cat’s whisker, and adjusted the flat capacitor and coil, hoping to hear more this time than the mindless humming of the Rimfence or the vagrant crackle of his own primitive circuitry.

“
—got a dozen fresh pan-sized trout she’d like t’swap for venison. Better hurry, ’cause they don’t keep and they never taste the same after they been frozen.
”

Even prepared as he was, Emerson started violently at the voice blasting amiably into his ear—and almost as violently at the grisly subject being discussed: the eating of once-living flesh. There was no way to adjust the volume, so he slid the commutator on the coil aside, detuning his receiver slightly to reduce the noise.

“
Speakin’ of swappin’, C.W. Brown of Brown’s Household Engineerin’ here in beautiful downtown Curringer tells me he’s got a handful of CPU chips he d like t’get rid of for pistol ammunition. He’s stuck with some old-fashioned caliber
—
nine millimeter Parabellum, it says here on the card—and can’t get fodder for it. You reloaders better give him a call, ’fore he winds up socially nekkid.
”

So the goons hadn’t been lying about that, either: the Outsiders
did
have weapons of their own. Emerson shook his head, not understanding half of what he heard—not even understanding a third—but knowing that it was wonderful.

“
I’m gonna go get m’self another cuppa coffee an’ inspect the plumbing, so you settle back an’ listen as Jim Kweskin an’ the Jug Band ask the musical question, ‘Somebody Stole My Gal.’ An’ don’t touch that dial, friends an’ neighbors. There ain’t no other station on the asteroid anyway. This here is KCUF—that’s what we’re callin’ it this week—the one an’ only radio voice of Pallas!
”

A hideous, wonderful, terrible, beautiful thumping, twanging, slamming, and scraping noise commenced. All his fears forgotten, Emerson was completely overwhelmed. He’d never heard music—if that’s what it was—like this before. All he’d known was the folksinging demanded of his family and the others as they worked in the fields—and of course the lifeless, insipid murmuring personally approved by the Chief Administrator and played over the compound’s loudspeakers during meals and all day on Sundays. This was different. It made him feel happy deep inside for no reason at all. It made him want to jump up and jerk his body around for nothing other than the sheer irresistible pleasure of it.

Yes, it was wonderful. And so was this little crystal radio he’d made. And so was KCUF, the one and only radio voice of Pallas. Unlike most of his expectations so far, it had turned out to be everything he’d hoped it would and more. Not only had he never heard music like this—if that’s what it was—he couldn’t remember ever hearing the words of a single human being who didn’t live and work inside the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project. But he would remember this moment for as long as he lived. He would learn all he could from it for as long as it lasted. And he would come back for more until they finally caught him at it and punished him.

And they would, sooner or later.

Emerson had learned that much personally, and through the bitter experience of others, even at the age of eight.

Remembering at last to glance outside the cave, he could already see the eerie green torchlights, bobbing and swinging in their carriers’ hands, of the goons on their rounds, searching field and furrow for slackers and stragglers. Their punishments for lying down or slowing work at the end of the day were bad enough.

What would they do to him if they found him listening to voices from the Outside?

A Place for Everyone

I’m not the first to say so, and I came to the idea pretty reluctantly myself, but considering all the consequences, the invention of agriculture may just be the worst mistake humanity ever made.

—Raymond Louis Drake-Tealy,
Hunting and Humanity

Sunset had begun in earnest, differently on Pallas than anywhere else, prismatic brilliance racing across the heavens chasing complementary-colored shadows over the landscape.

As if the tolling of a huge bell had been suddenly made visible, vast feather-edged rings of violet, born within the dazzling diamond bead at the horizon, soared to the zenith, subtly fading. That alone might have made the Pallatian sunset the stuff of travelogues and tourist brochures, but it was only the beginning. Streamers of a fierce, deep blue arched out from the same hot pinpoint, lashing the sky. The pulsing emerald sinuosities that followed were only slightly less furious in their intensity and motion. Titanic loops of crackling amber, vast braids of actinic orange, each glowed in turn and dimmed.