The Apex Book of World SF 2 (18 page)

Spin-Man awoke in a
void, buffeted on all sides by peculiar purple rain. He bowed his head in
shame.
I've failed,
he thought.
I've fallen into the unknown,
somewhere beyond the far reaches of the multiversal continuum. If I don't find
my way back, the Forces of Chaos will engulf the universe and all that I hold
dear.
Spin-Man coughed. For a moment, his visage shifted into that of
James, his human alter-ego. His eyes glimmered with hope. Spin-Man's course was
clear.
I have to find my way back, no matter how long it takes.
With
that, he launched himself into the void, away from the reader, as the words "never
the end" appeared beneath him, like a promise. It was the last issue of
Spin-Man to achieve publication. I swear, I broke down right there in the
middle of the bookshop, holding onto that stupid little comic book. I realised,
right then, that I needed to do something; anything, or else James would be
lost forever.

These days, CATS no
longer sells comic books. They've since turned into a specialty store for
action figures, and though I visit it from time to time, the bargain bins I
used to thumb through are no longer there. I still buy comics every Wednesday
when I have the money. I keep track of my favourite superheroes' lives. For me
they affirm that, despite hardship, some things may still endure. I've taken a
course in Fine Arts, and I've been applying it to my comics' illustrations,
working hard to improve to a professional level. As soon as I finish college, I'll
send off applications to the major comic book companies. I'll get a job in the
States, and when I've saved up enough money, I'll look up Echo Comics and buy
the rights to Spin-Man.

Then I'll publish
Spin-Man #3
, and in that issue, Spin-Man will be at the edge of the universe,
contemplating his path home. A blue-and-gold wormhole will appear before him.
With superhuman courage, Spin-Man will activate his cosmic powers, jump through
the vortex, and spin his way back into our world.

 

Borrowed Time
Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro
Translated by Daniel W. Koon
 
Cuban author Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro is
a prolific writer of short stories, articles and scripts, and has organised
several conventions and workshops in Cuba. The following story, appearing here
in English for the first time, has won the first prize in the 2005 Juventud
Técnica SF competition.

 

Your hair, a centimetre or two
longer, your skin maybe more tanned than the last time. Smooth, yes, like a
shiny shell, without a single fold, without a scar. Me, on the other hand, my
face could serve as the canvas for an astronavigation map: you could catalogue
all my wrinkles by latitude and longitude. And locate all its globular
clusters, wormholes, and black holes. There's room for the entire universe on
my face.

 

You don't see my
face. You have taken up residence on a spot on the terrace where you watch the
stars fall—m-e-t-e-o-r-s, you make me repeat, letter by letter, helping me to
spell it out with your hands. And even the perfume of the poplars in bloom
seems to bother you. Serena-Ceti is a world without a future—you shake your
fingers wildly and point at the night sky over the terrace.

Look up above, so
many worlds to visit, so many twilights beneath double and triple stars, the
chance to use hyperjumps to effectively live forever…an eternity of
journeying between the stars. I struggle in vain to understand your words, your
passion for those faraway lights in unknown and unreachable houses that inhabit
the night; I am only five years old.

I run my fingers
through your hands, as I did back then, trying to find some final assignment in
them. But they are rigid, muteness, fingers that refuse to surrender the secret
behind your need to transcend.

The Persephone
docked for the first time on Serena-Ceti a few days after your confession on the terrace. How
long ago was that for you? Three months, four…? It doesn't matter… For you
it is time elapsed, time transcended. For me, the indelible image: the hydrogen
smell of the aerotransporter that carries you to the spaceport; the shards of
glass embedded in the soles of my boots (from the last glass lamp we would ever
put in our hallway); the colour of helplessness on my father's face… You don't
need any superior intelligence to understand what "stomping out of the house"
means to a five-year-old girl, even if she's a deaf-mute. But I didn't
understand then what it meant for you. Father did.

Father spends hours
writing up his Academy lectures, the crumpled papers piling up around him and
his computer growing mouldy beneath the dust. He never sleeps more than two
hours. He never rests. I think that he is afraid of falling asleep and aging at
an accelerated pace. Or of falling asleep and dreaming of you. Father
accompanies me to the pulse station in the capital to receive a message you
sent barely a week after you left on the exploration ship,
The Persephone
, with that splendid annual contract as back-up exobiologist. I am twelve. You
are exactly as I remember you. And your fingers speak with the same fluency as
ever
: maybe, when you see this message I will be arriving home.
Funny
how these transmissions keep coming from the Sorceress of Hyperspace.
You
must be quite grown up, sweetheart.
And then, in gestures:
I'll bring
you some glass rock earrings from Delta Altair to set off your ears with that
short haircut of yours.
I am twelve years old, hair down to my waist, my
ears marked with scars from the cochlear surgery and the rejected implants that
have not cured my deafness. But you don't know. And in my naïve twelve-year-old
eyes, that not knowing makes you innocent; and besides, I already know that you
will be back in less than three years for my fifteenth birthday, and I will
wear those earrings at a party and my ears will shine with the light from other
worlds, from other stars, from the entire universe.

I waited a whole
year when I turned fifteen. I watched so many twilights of our little sun and
the conjunctions of the moons twice nightly. But not a single star came down
from the sky.
The Persephone
arrived one random afternoon in the summer.
I went by myself to pick you up at the spaceport. I'm sorry, Miranda, you said,
with a quick hug and the same smile as ever. My calculation was off by a few
minutes. You could not have forgotten the way. How far off was it this time…?
Two minutes, five? That doesn't matter to you either. But I've turned eighteen
and it would have been a miracle for me to still be so naïve. Something has
changed dramatically in this lost little world during what has seemed like only
three weeks to you. I can forgive you missing a lot of things in your absence:
the operating rooms, puberty rudely taking over my body, the angst of my first
unrequited love, the listless and frustrating experience of my first
non-orgasm. But your absence from my successes was more painful.

Over my father's
objections, I got a scholarship to study astronomy at the Academy for Physical
Sciences in the capital. No more nights of tiptoeing through the house, an
amateur telescope under my arm, hiding from my dad to get to the terrace to
stare at the dawn. At first I naïvely looked for a sign from you in the
heavens, but then my loneliness finally latched onto the stars themselves. I
stopped necking with the neighbourhood boys, and they began to call me a junior
lunatic.

I told you about the
scholarship then. You smiled and I think I caught a glimmer of pride in your
eyes. You apologised for not knowing about my interest in astronomy and you
regretted the many things you could have brought me for my personal collection
from the many planets you had visited. I gave you a lukewarm thank you. In the
end, we were just two intimate strangers.

Later, after a week
of rest, you left on another space mission. I will return for your wedding, no
ifs ands or buts! you promised, winking an eye at Iranus, my boyfriend at the
time, who accompanied us to the launch. We would be marred when I left the
Academy. Back then, I believed in eternal love, and I believed that a mother
kept her promises.

It was then, at the
beginning of my final course at the Academy, that the first symptoms of papa's
sickness began to show. I was called to his office several times to bring him
home. I found him disorientated, physically exhausted and trembling. His
formerly dark hair grew greyer and thinner by the day. Papa got old much too
soon, while you remained unchanged.

For you time sped by
red-hot, while for Papa it froze ice-blue. And he was growing more distant from
me by the second.

I had already been
working two years in the pulse station when you came back the second time.

It has been barely
six months since the birth of Harlan, my third child. Iranus? My God, how do
you still remember him? That was an ancient chapter in my life, followed by so
many other forgotten versions.

Deverios, Harlan's
father, had just died in an aerial transit accident. I was two years older than
you at the time, but I still couldn't understand what dragged you away from
Serena-Ceti, and what I was supposed to understand by your need for
transcendence: watching your children grow up? Seeing your own self carried on
in their lives? No, Miranda, I'm watching you grow up, at a speed that any
parent would envy. And I don't miss the changes, because for me the world is
measured in astronomical units; what you see as abstract units are my reality.
What I want is to transcend the time and space that are limiting us as a
species. It was a lively lecture, but all I heard was the immature teenager
underneath it all. Because now I no longer wonder why you left Serena-Ceti, but
why you returned.

You and Papa saw
each other for the last time on that trip. He was confined to the sanatorium
for patients with retroviral dementia. Hospitalised for over a year with no
definitive diagnosis.

A few short lines in
his report spoke of a premature aging syndrome. Cause unknown. He confused you
with me; he confused me with you. I still hold the memory in my cheek of the
heat of his slap. Later, he lapsed into an impenetrable silence until the end,
barely a week after
The Persephone
lifted off again.

Your third trip came
at the end of an anguished time on Serena. Torrential rains and unknown
epidemics that led to a planet-wide quarantine.
The Persephone
's planned
return, coming as it did during the spaceport's closure, was delayed for
thirty-two years, and when you appeared again, my grandchildren raced through
the entranceway to greet you. For them, like my children before them, you were
an almost magical and distant being, like the stars. And one week with you did
nothing to change their opinion. It surprised you to see the holograms of so
many strange persons in my albums, all of them bearing a trace of your DNA. You
had a large family that you never knew and who never knew you either. It
surprised you to see my room filled with trophies and awards from social and
scientific organisations, some of them off-planet, in recognition of my work.
But it was my old age that surprised you most of all. Although you knew that
the years would not stop for me, it was still very difficult for you to accept
that your daughter, your only remaining link to Serena-Ceti, now embodied
everything that you had feared so much. And I learnt then, that now you would
never come back again willingly.

Nearly forty years
have passed. I have seen so many dreams blossom and die, so many broken
promises, and so many loved ones who followed the natural order of life, the
one you rebelled against, forcing me to betray it, too. Papa always said that
children should not die before their parents; I accepted that as a commandment.

One hundred and six
years after your first departure, that message arrived on the hyperjump
channel. That
The Persephone
would arrive in six days. That it would
carry your body. Killed in an excavation accident on the fifth planet of
Procyon Alpha. How large an error was it this time? One second, two…? Enough
to bury all your passion for transcendence in an avalanche of xenophobic
stones. I had wanted to cry, but at one hundred and eleven years of age, one's
reflexes grow sluggish and sometimes disappear. I signed for your body in order
to process the customary funeral ceremony. It did not surprise me to once again
see the mother who had abandoned her home when I was five. Aside from the skin
colour or the hair a centimetre or two longer, nothing had changed.

Now I have dressed
you with my own hands, something I don't remember you ever having done for me,
and I come back to your ears, as useless as my own have been, to those rock
crystal earrings from Delta Altair.

Once more I sense
the flames as they consume fat, tendons and bones. But I know that this will be
the last time. Now you are returning to the heavens in the form of smoke. You
return to the night, but not to the stars, those windows open to an endless
parade of strangers' homes. Now that you will never leave again, now that, for
some reason you could not foresee, the natural order of your life has been
fulfilled, I can rest. I no longer have to look at the sky and ask which star
you are on.

 

Branded
Lauren Beukes
 
South African writer Lauren Beukes is the author of novels
Moxyland
and
Zoo City
, raved about
by everyone from André Brink to William Gibson. She works as a journalist and
TV writer, and lives in Cape Town.

 

We were at Stones, playing
pool, drinking, goofing around, maybe hoping to score a little sugar, when
Kendra arrived, all moffied up and gloaming, like, an Aito/329. "Ahoy, Special
K, where you been, girl, so juiced to kill?" Tendeka asked while he racked up
the balls, all click-clack in their white plastic triangle. Old-school, this
pool bar was. But Kendra didn't answer. Girl just grinned, reached into her
back pocket for her phone, hung skate-rat-style off a silver chain connected to
her belt, and infra'd five rand to the table to get tata machance on the next
game.