From the Indie Side (12 page)

Riley’s computer laughed for her. “No, silly,
this is how we are even before we’re born. I can’t imagine my lungs
empty, the way yours must be.”

The corners of her mouth turned up a little,
a dimple forming in one cheek. Cort recognized it as a smile. And
pretty.

He started to say something about her hair,
but she cut him off.

“You should put it back in,” Riley said,
pointing to her own tube.

Cort looked around and saw the kids coming
back from intermission. He put his tube back in and turned to
compose something for Riley, concentrating on the words as hard as
he could.

“Like our talking,” it came out, the computer
voice stilted and awkward.

The corners of her mouth tightened again; she
spun out of the chair with a wave of golden locks, then went
running around the balcony, back to the stairs.

Cort looked sheepishly down at his controls,
which were counting down to the resumption of the games.

Time being the only numbers the system kept
track of.

* *
*

“How was school?” Melanie asked.

Cort jumped in the passenger seat, spitting
out his tube and trying to get comfortable with his pack pressing
into the seat.

“Don’t you know?” he asked.

“I didn’t look at any of the reports.” She
put the car into gear and merged with the flow of heavy traffic
moving past the school. “I wanted to wait and hear it from
you.”

Cort thought about telling her all about
Riley, and that first intermission, and how he was going to use the
same pod tomorrow, and hoped she’d do the same, except he’d try and
walk with her to recess next time, and maybe they’d be on the same
team, and she could talk about what it was like to breathe amniotic
fluids, and he could blow air through her hair, and let her see
what that was like—

“It was okay,” he said, his mind reeling. “I
got busted down to fourth grade,” he added, figuring she might as
well hear it from him.

His mom reached over and tousled his hair.
“I’m sure you’ll be back before you know it,” she said. “Did you
practice your talking?”

Cort nodded. “Yeah. A little.”

And he vowed to practice some more that
night. Really, this time.

“Mouth Breathers” is the second in a
trilogy of short stories about Melanie and Daniel, a woman and an
android who dare to be in love. In “Mouth Breathers,” the focus is
on their child. Each of the stories is inspired by the challenges
of everyday life, which science fiction illuminates so well.

I fell in love with science fiction in middle
school. When I set out to complete my first novel, I chose the
genre for that nostalgic love. And what I found was that I could
write about my deepest thoughts, fears, and desires while
disguising them as plot. A planet’s destruction allowed me to write
about the fall of the Twin Towers. Unrequited love was an
exploration of failed relationships. Journeys through lonely space
took me back to sailing my small boat through the Bahamas. I wrote
the fantastical. I wrote what I knew.

The first short story I ever wrote and
published was “The Automated Ones,” in which Melanie and Daniel go
out to dinner. The whispers and accusatory glares from other tables
would be familiar to my uncle, who was ostracized for being gay.
This is the power of science fiction. It isn’t merely a warning
about the strange future; it can be a sad look at how little we
change.

It is a huge honor to have a story in this
collection. One thing that is changing quite rapidly is the number
of opportunities for writers to reach an audience. There is no
guarantee that anyone will listen, nor should there be, but the
walls that once blocked our voices are coming down. I’m fortunate
to have been writing when I was. I write some dismal stories, but I
remain an optimist. The future is bright. Hope to see you
there.

Cray stood on
a
northern hillside, facing the city of Tritan far below, the
wretched place he used to call home.

Used to. Back when. Twenty years? Thirty? Had
it really been that long? He hefted his rucksack higher up onto his
shoulders, feeling the weight of the small bomb inside. Small, but
powerful enough to reduce the Consulate into a fine, white mist.
There would be nothing left of the wickedness contained within the
tall, pyramid-shaped building where evil men ordered evil
things.

To Cray’s left, a crow sprang from a limb in
a flurry of wings, almost as if it knew that distance was the
wisest option.

The white-haired, archaic man beside him,
Rowan, cleared his throat and readjusted himself on his crutches,
the wood at the handles worn smooth by many miles and countless
years. “I haven’t seen it since you were a boy,” he said. “From up
here, you would never know.”

“How long has it been?”

“You were five, I think. They were able to
keep you hidden for so long, even after your time for the Ritual.
Lots of winters since then.”

“Do you really think she’s still down
there?”

“I wouldn’t swear on my right leg, but Arka,
he said it was so.”

“You don’t have a right leg.”

Rowan chuckled, lifted the stump. “Sure I do.
See my toes wiggling?”

Cray ignored him. Below, he watched the city
move. Railcars, transport vehicles, the occasional hovercraft
zipping in from the south, likely bringing the wealthiest citizens
back from their ocean-side retreats—those that had bought their
freedom for a weekend.

At least, that’s what he remembered. As a
little boy, he’d slip the curtain aside, just enough to peek out
with one eye and watch them riding the escalators down from the
docking bays in their brightly colored shirts with their deep, dark
tans; balancing on expensive crutches inlaid with gold and jewels.
He recalled daydreaming about where they’d been, imagining himself
running down the beaches he’d seen in pictures. Soft sand, green
seas, waves capped with white as they rolled and crashed.

Running. On two legs.

Regardless of social status, the great
equalizer, the thing that made the richest citizen no different
than the poorest, sewer-dwelling tripod, was the absence of the
right leg, amputated at mid-thigh.

Old, young, athlete, grandmother, it didn’t
matter. Tritan was a metropolis of single-legged citizens, made
that way by ancient customs. A means to appease invisible gods and
keep the population under control. A barely mobile city was a
contained city.

“You’re really going to do this?” Rowan
asked.

Cray glanced to the side, watched as the cool
autumn breeze lifted Rowan’s thinning hair and pushed it across his
face. He tried to mask the scorn in his voice. It didn’t work. “You
told me she was dead, Rowan, and my answer is the same now as it
was a hundred miles ago and a hundred miles before that. I have to
get her out. She deserves better. The only reason you’re here is
because I needed someone to carry extra water. I don’t care how
close you were to my mother
or
my father before he died,
nothing you say is going to change my mind, understood?”

Rowan shuffled around on his crutches. Facing
Cray, he lifted one and rested it on the younger man’s shoulder. He
started to speak, then shook his head and looked down toward
Tritan.

Cray shoved the crutch away. “What?”

“She didn’t want you to know.”

He stepped closer to Rowan, bent over, face
to face, noses an inch apart. “Know what?”

“That she was still alive. She never wanted
you to find out,” Rowan said. There was a sadness in his eyes, and
maybe a touch of relief, finally admitting it after so long.

Cray ground his teeth together. “You’re
lying.”

“It’s the truth.” Rowan hopped back a step,
bent low, resting his aching back and tired arms on the thin,
wooden props. “You were always such a precocious child. Too
intelligent, too soon. Bright. Gifted. Whatever you want to call
it. Headstrong and stubborn, too. She knew that if you ever found
out, you’d try to come back.” He nodded at the satchel slung across
Cray’s shoulders. “And do something like this.”

“She was right.”

* *
*

Nighttime, five years old. Alone. Mother
slaving through triple shifts at the wood-shaping plant, securing
screws, affixing rubber stoppers to the bottoms of poorly made
crutches. As grueling as it was, hours and hours propped up in
front of the never-ending assembly line, her job was vital. Oak
legs splintered. Handles broke. Nuts and bolts loosened over time
and distance. Children grew taller. The work she did kept the city
going, kept life moving.

Three quick knocks on his window. Lifting his
head from the pillow. Outside, a much younger Rowan, taller, not
shrunken by decades and age. Long, brown, stringy hair pulled back
and tied there with a thin strip of cloth.

His mother’s friend.

Rowan motioning for him to open the window.
Harried. Frantic.
Pleading
for him to open the window. Then,
ten words that held no weight to his young ears, not until they
were far, far from home, after slinking through dark alleys, hiding
from strangers, and nearly being spotted as they clambered
underneath the mountain-high fence surrounding Tritan. After he
realized they weren’t going back.

“Your mother was in an accident. We have
to go.”

It took him years to ask why they had to
leave, why they didn’t remain in Tritan and live at Rowan’s house
there, why he had to stay in the tiny village hidden among tall
evergreens as thick as their hovels were round. He knew he was
different, unburdened by the lack of a right leg. Others needed
crutches to get from one place to the next, just to get through the
day, while he walked and ran wherever he wanted to go.

The villagers had their own rules, their own
customs, and their own celebrations. But even out there, in the
middle of the forest, miles and months of walking away, those that
had escaped lived physically as they had lived at home—incomplete.
And hanging over them, every time the sun rose or the smoke drifted
too high during the evening campfire, was the constant fear that,
one day, the Tritan soldiers with their robotic legs would come
with their guns.

Since he was able to move unhindered, a
number of chores and tasks were given to him, like carrying
firewood and water, hunting, and chasing squirrels, rabbits, and
deer. He didn’t mind; it meant less waiting. The impatience of
youth rewarded his growling belly and warmed him on cold nights. He
grew strong, both in body and in mind.

He’d seen ten winters before he’d thought to
ask Rowan, “Why did we leave?”

“Aren’t you happy here?”

“Yes, but why? I could’ve lived with you, at
your house. We didn’t
have
to leave because she was
dead.”

“How many legs do you have, Cray?”

“Two.”

“That’s your answer.” And Rowan would say
nothing more.

Summers came. Winters passed. New tripods
arrived, old ones died. He fell in love; lost Eryn to the fever. He
grew bitter after that. Sullen. Morose and listless, but he pressed
forward in a fog, day after day, because he’d become their leader,
shoved into the position because he could do what they couldn’t.
Run, jump, climb. Carry.

Their one steadfast rule—the one and only
rule that none dared break—was no children. No new births, for two
reasons. First, as a means to defy the tradition they’d left
behind; and second, if they were ever discovered and the soldiers
came for them, they couldn’t bear the thought of loved ones being
ripped away and made incomplete. Or executed for their
insolence.

Cray remained the only whole member of their
tiny clan.

Strangers drifted into the encampment from
far away, from other reclusive, secretive places like their own,
all coming to see what they thought only existed in rumors and
whispers: the man with two legs.

It was dangerous to allow them in—they all
knew it—because any one of the many visitors could’ve been a spy
from Tritan, scouting for runaways, marking their position so that,
one day, the rulers in the Consulate would know where to find Cray
and his people. But they brought gifts: much-needed items like
extra clothing and dried meats. Fruit and vegetables that hadn’t
spoiled or been ruined by frost and poor storage.

So they let them in. Cray let them see.

And he hated being a spectacle. He hated the
way they marveled over his wholeness as a human being. They’d ask
him to scale a tree or jump over a log unhindered. He felt like one
of the dancing monkeys he could see from his window as a child,
down at the docking bays where the merchants offered their wares
and promised entertainment to visitors.