Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (20 page)

The metallic clicking of a pass key came from the locking system. My cell door opened, and a man with a mask listed me to my feet.

“Come on, Carl,” said Johnny R. “Time to get outta here!”

My heart fell.

“They didn’t take you?”

“Didn’t go. Now let’s scram!”

I ran then, leaning on Johnny. He led me through tear gas that clogged my lungs and burned my eyes. Gunfire was sporadic. We burst into the open. I gulped air, amazed at what I saw.

A thousand people? Two thousand?

They were kids, mostly, but there were folks I had seen all over town, too—people of the streets, kids who worked the fields, a few construction workers, shop runners, and even chime dealers from the docks. They were the broken ones. The awkward ones. People who were too poor, or too little, or too brainy, or too dumb to be at places like Grubb’s Point.

They cheered as we ran through the streets, their voices rising and screeching, each turning to run with us as we passed. I wanted to ask what the hell was happening, but there wasn’t time, so I just followed until we came to a fleet of trucks with flatbed trailers. We flowed onto them like a human river, and as each was loaded it lurched forward, leaving behind a precious plume of petroleum exhaust.

I grabbed onto a rail at the front of the platform.

“What is this?” I asked.

Johnny R smiled.

“I saw what was happening last night, and I knew you was bullshitting when you said we was just gonna be tested. Once the deputies took you, I figured the aliens wasn’t gonna take us anyway. So we freed you and here we are.”

“I still don’t get it. You should be running for the hills.”

“We
are
running for the hills.”

I looked at him, feeling something incredible—camaraderie, brotherhood—something I really don’t have words for.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth,” I said.

“No problem, man. You’re a good dude.”

It was the first time I had heard that in a long time. The platform bounced over a rut. The truck’s engine groaned with diesel pain.

“They’re gonna blow the planet,” I told him. “We got no place to go.”

“Oh, we got a place,” said a girl sitting next to Johnny. “It’s a cave, deep and deep.”

“A
cave
?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “A cave. It’s got water down under it. Jenny’s been warning folks of this kinda shit for years. Trust her, dude. She’s goddamned brilliant.”

“How’s a cave going to help if the entire world’s getting smoked?” I asked.

“Oh, it won’t be fun,” Jenny replied, riding the flatbed like a skateboard. “But you can’t trust everything a controller says, right? I mean, a hydrogen blast like that will burn shit outta the place, so everyone topside dies, no ifs, ands or buts. But the land’ll come back. And all that H2 just comes to water again later on. Until then there’s lots of it underground, or we can move inland if it gets too bad.”

“We’re more worried about food than water,” Johnny R said.

I suddenly noticed every flatbed had sacks of grain or meal or something on it. I shook my head, shocked at what could be done in a few hours. I looked at the people again, a couple thousand of us riding an automotive fleet that kicked up dust as it raced across the desert.

“How’d you find them?” I asked.

Johnny R smiled. “They found themselves, man. I told a couple of guys when we got back from GP. They told a few more. We met this morning and talked about it. Took everyone who wanted to join up and left the rest.”

I looked at them again, this wave of kids. They screamed and they whooped, they raised their fists as their trucks bounced in the desert. And in looking at them, I saw myself, too. We’re all like Johnny R, you know? We’re all broken, and there are a lot of things we don’t have. But we all want to make it.

Yes, I thought. Perhaps we are all here because we are the ones who just want it badly enough.

Then I looked at Johnny, and I saw that he was what the controller meant when she talked about the human sense of greater purpose. He was the one who saved my ass when it didn’t deserve saving. He was the one who had gotten these people together. He was the one who had always been of the utmost service.

Not me.

But then I thought about it a little more, and remembered that I was the one who found out what was about to happen. And Jenny was the one who knew how to survive once it did. We were all teammates, we humans. Johnny R was our leader now, doing what he did best, but each of us brought something to the game.

The mountain and its haven of caves loomed ahead. Then a rumble rattled the air, a deep groan that came from somewhere across the universe itself, and behind us, a spaceship rose into the sky, trailing a white line of smoke and vapor.

I didn’t know quite what the coming days would be like, but if nothing else, the experience had taught me to trust my teammates.

Original (First) Publication

Copyright © 2013 by Ron Collins

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

Michael F. Flynn is a multiple Hugo nominee, a two-time winner of the Prometheus Award, a winner of the Sturgeon Award, a winner of Japan’s Seiun-sho Award, and the very first winner of the Robert A. Heinlein Medal.

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

BURIED HOPES

by Michael F. Flynn

The chair in the counselor’s office was soft and cool to the touch. Leather, perhaps, but almost like buckskin. It was a bit large and high off the floor, so that Rann felt smaller than usual. The walls were adorned with comforting diplomas, and the windows muted the raucous sounds of the Manhattan traffic far below. The décor was composed in gentle earth tones. On the table between them, the counselor had set bone china cups filled with tea. All the little tricks of the trade, deployed to put the patient at ease. He squirmed a bit in the chair, seeking that elusive ease. He did not care for tea, but it was the least obnoxious of the alternatives she had offered.

Rann said, “I don’t know why I’ve come here, doctor.”

The counselor wore her hair in an authoritative bun and dressed in mannish, but mammalian fashion. Her large-framed glasses gave her a distancing, professional mien. She sat in a second chair facing him at an angle.

“You don’t have to call me doctor,” she said. “Call me Liz, or Ms. Abbot, if that is more comfortable for you.”

Yes, she was trying to reduce the doctor-patient distance while maintaining a professional detachment. Friendly, yet not too friendly; at least, not until she could understand how close she might come without breaching the wrong psychological barriers.

Rann said, “Yes, ‘Ms. Abbot.’ Yes, that would be fine.” He could see from the way she cocked her head that she had heard the residue of his accent. Once it had been thicker and had drawn quizzical glances, but diligent practice over the years had shaved nearly all the edges from it.

“Should I call you Mr. Velkran, or will Rann do?” she asked him.

Rann considered the alternatives. If she was “Ms.” and he was “Rann,” that would place him on the wrong end of a parent-child divide; but “Ms.” and “Mr.” created another and broader divide. Rann thought he would rather like being treated as a child, at least for the next hour, and told her to call him Rann.

“Is that short for ‘Randolph’?” she asked him as she made a note.

He answered with a shrug into which she could read any answer she chose. “Don’t call me Randolph.”

She looked up and arranged her notes in a leather folder against her knees. “Something is bothering you.”

Rann looked for the question mark at the end, but of course it was not there. He would not have come to her if nothing bothered him. Rann said, “Depression, I think.”

Ms. Abbot glanced at the questionnaire he had filled out. “Don’t you know?”

“I’ve always been given to melancholy and nostalgia. It’s in my blood, and who can gage whether it is a little more or a little less. But it seems to me that it has deepened these past few weeks…”

“What is it that causes you to feel depressed?”

“I thought you might tell me. I mean, that’s your job, isn’t it?”

Ms. Abbot made a brief moue with her lips. “My job is to help you tell yourself. To help you search, as it were. But why don’t we start with something else. Tell me a little about yourself. You live in New Jersey…” She tapped the forms he had filled out. “But you’ve come all the way into Manhattan to see me.”

“You should feel flattered.”

“I would if ‘Abbot’ were not the first listing in the index.”

“Then I think you know why. I would rather not do this closer to home.”

“There’s no stigma to seeing a counselor.”

Rann answered with another shrug and then, when the silence had dragged on, suddenly blurted, “Did you know that the international space station was de-orbited?”

Ms. Abbot seemed accustomed to conversational left turns. “I saw something about it on the news. It was worn out and abandoned, wasn’t it?”

“It didn’t have to be. It could have been maintained, upgraded, replaced.”

“Is that why you’ve been feeling depressed? Because the old space station was decommissioned?”

“I…”
Was it?
he wondered. “I’m sentimental. I hate to see things end. The last moonwalker died…oh, years ago. No longer lives there anyone who has walked upon the moon.”

“Ah, that was before my time, I’m afraid. And didn’t it turn out to be a hoax?”

Rann leaped from the chair and began to pace the room, agitated beyond measure. “No, it was not! It was not!”

Ms. Abbot maintained her composure and said mildly, “But if the story is true, it would mean that people went to the moon
before
they built a space station in Earth orbit. Does that make sense? To go all that way, and then to backtrack?”

His pacing had brought him to the window and he looked down on the thumb-sized pedestrians teeming along the sidewalk. “It seemed a good idea at the time.”

“Did the space program mean a lot to you? You don’t appear old enough to remember it.”

He turned from his contemplation. “It meant a lot to all of us,” he told the counselor. “If only we had at the time realized it.” He sought out the patient’s chair and sank once more into it. “Who knows what might be out there? On the moon, on, on Mars there might be…” Rann fell silent. “There might be anything. Now, how few are left! Sometimes…” He paused and ground one hand in the other, like a mortar in a pestle. “Sometimes,” he added more quietly, “I feel so lonely.”

He saw the counselor nod, and he knew he had revealed something of himself. Automatically, the old guards went up. But then, why had he come here unless it was to reveal something of himself? “I miss the old country,” Rann said, deliberately. “The music, the foods, the festivals—oh, how the young boys and girls dressed so fine on those days! Even the sound of the old tongues on the lips of friends. Sometimes sees my mind over the Oorlong Hills the sun set so great and red, painting in every color the clouds.”

“Have you ever gone back to visit?”

Rann shook his head. “No. There are…difficulties.”

Ms. Abbot said “ah” in such understanding tones. The world was full of people unwelcome in their own homelands. That was not precisely Rann’s problem, but he decided not to complicate matters. “It helps to talk about it,” he added.

“Do you have family back there? Is there anyone in particular you miss?”

For a moment Rann could see the Miss Kopál as if she stood directly before him, the dandi-flowers round her crown, the golden lace about her throat, the tattoos winding like vines along her arms. Then…the moment was lost and he realized that he no longer remembered what she had looked like. He fumbled in his jacket pocket for a kerchief, but the counselor leaned across to hand him a tissue. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry. There were, once. But they have all by now forgotten me.” He squared his shoulder, felt the unexpected crack of bone, and deliberately relaxed. “I suppose this seems silly to you. A bad case of homesickness.”

“No, not silly at all. Have you been in this country long?”

Rann looked at the floor and clasped his hands. He waited for the inevitable question.

“If you are undocumented,” Ms. Abbot said, “don’t worry. My job is to help you deal with your depression, not to do the government’s work for them.” She reached out and touched Rann briefly on his wrist. Reflexively, Rann pulled back.

“A double-dozen of us came to the, to the New World together,” Rann admitted, “but we’ve to the drogo scattered and seldom anymore do we see one another.”

“The drogo?”

“Ah. Did I say that? I am falling into the rhythms of my suckling tongue. Drogo is in my country a seasonal wind—hot, dry, brisk—and as a way of speaking we say that we have blown off with it.”

“Tell me, Rann, how long have you felt these pangs of loneliness?”

“Always. Ever since we landed here. It was not so bad when we all lived near one another; but…”

“But the old neighborhood has ‘scattered to the drogo.’ Tell me, is this feeling of loneliness persistent, or does it come and go? How did you feel, oh, last year? Two weeks ago?”

Rann closed his eyes and tried to imagine what he had been doing a fortnight since. His neighbors had invited him to a cookout. There had been burgers and franks and beer, discussion of the Giants and the new cable series on Teddy Roosevelt. The neighborhood dogs did not like him much and the beer had upset his digestion, but…“If you had asked me then, I would have said I was reasonably happy. Perhaps no less happy than most people believe they are.”

“Do you think everyone unhappy?”

“Of course,” he said. “It is only a matter of one’s awareness. Have you no regrets, doctor? Is there nothing that in quiet moments might tinge with melancholy your thoughts? An old fiancé who slipped away? A brother or sister untimely gone? A childhood friend fallen out of touch? A…a calculation performed incorrectly?”

“A calculation? You’re a mathematician, then?”

“I teach at a small college in New Jersey.”

Ms. Abbot nodded and added notes to the folder. Rann admired the way she could write of one thing while talking of another and without even a glance at her paper.

“Then something happened,” she said.

“What?”

“Something happened. You were ordinarily happy…Very well, you were not too unhappy. Now two weeks later you are deeply depressed. The BDI-4 you filled out prior to our meeting…There were some anomalies, but it did indicate sadness, guilt feelings, past failures, weeping. But no self-dislike, loss of pleasure, or change in appetite. As I said, a mixed…”

“Excuse me. BDI-four?”

“Beck Depression Inventory. It’s a standard instrument for…”

Rann chuckled. “Oh. An inventory? An instrument? Do you keep depression on shelves in your stockroom? Do you at the QC bench measure it?” He knew he was deflecting, and he knew that Ms. Abbot knew. “No, doctor, I intend no mockery. It is only that such words fall on my ears oddly. Ish! I try so hard to speak standard American. Bear with me, please. It is my homesickness. It will hear the cadence of the suckling-tongue even through the mask of other words.”

“Would you like to say something in your mother tongue? I should like to hear the sound of it.”

“Will you mark it then on that sheet you have beside you? Ah, well. A poem, then.” He thought for a moment, conjuring the syllables, feeling them sweetening his mouth before he ever spoke.

***

“Offen mere killanong

Kay-kaka doolenong

Waffen tok ishanong

Ish, doo kill-koffen.

***

Which I would translate not literally, but to give you some idea of the word-play involved:

***

‘Long have I longed

To say aye for an aye,

To close while so close.

Oh, the time is too short!’”

***

Dr. Abbot waited while Rann wiped a tear from his cheek; then she said, “That was charming.”

Rann said, “It is hard to say in American. The play is of ‘long’ and ‘aye’ against ‘close’ and ‘short.’ And the title we might translate as ‘The Long and the Short of It.’” He paused and closed his eyes, the better to see the sunset tints now so long past and to hear a faint echo of that sweet voice. He had composed the poem himself, just before his departure and recited it in the sunset to she whose face was now lost to him. “‘It,’ of course, is love.”

The counselor smiled. “Isn’t it always? Tell me, despite the separation from your homeland and relatives, is life worth living?”

Rann laughed. “Is that one of the questions on your little list? ‘Rann Velkran shows moderately suicidal tendencies.’ Sorry to disappoint you, doctor; but Rann does not give up on life simply because it has become unbearably sad these past two weeks…‘The saddest life is happier than none at all.’ That is a proverb among my people. Only the dead never weep…because they never laugh.”

He paused because in his imagination he saw the international space station entering the atmosphere, warming, glowing, turning red from the friction, white hot as it began to come apart, raining into the embrace of the broad Pacific, incinerating all aboard…

“But there was no one left on board by then,” he whispered.

“What was that?” Dr. Abbot said.

Rann said, “Never mind.” He reached blindly for his tea cup and, misjudging, tipped the thing over so that green tea spilled across the glass table top, twisting into rivulets. Rann stared in horror and began to hyperventilate, then to sob. Alarmed, Ms. Abbot said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?” Rann cried. “How could this happen! Look at it, running all over! So shapeless, so empty and meaningless! Never will we save it; the drink will now forever be untasted.” Rann covered his face with his hands, but between his fingers he studied the eddying streams of tea and he imagined the acid tang of the hot liquid never now to be experienced.