“Please, no!”
“I’m going to prescribe some medication. Take this slip to the receptionist. She will give you the relevant forms. I want to see you again next week.”
Carl leans towards the doctor to take the slip. He keeps his head lowered to avoid looking. He forces himself to stare at the polished oak coffee table that separates them—so polished he can see his own reflection as clearly as if he were looking into a mirror. His and that of the doctor. The doctor who has the biggest ears he has ever seen.
He lets out a short, sharp scream and jumps back into the chair. The doctor’s ears are enormous. Even from the front they stick out like slabs of beef.
“Now calm down,” the doctor says, leaning closer. “There’s no need to get upset.”
“No.” Carl stares at the doctor with wide eyes. “Don’t come near me.”
But it is not just the ears. It is also the nose that now fills Carl with repulsion. The thing just sits on the man’s face, pointing at Carl like a fleshy accuser, above lips. Lips like rotten hamburgers smacking open and closed as he makes that awful sound. All the time watching him with bulbous, bug eyes.
“Assistance please,” the doctor calls into an intercom.
“No. Don’t come near me,” Carl cries, crawling backwards as the doctor approaches with fat, puffy fingers clawing towards him.
Then the door opens and three orderlies appear. They too have the same horrendous features. Hamburger lips smack in unison as they approach. One has a syringe.
“Please stay calm. We just need to give something to help you relax.”
~}~~~{~
In his dream, Carl is in a crowd. It is the same crowd as in his last dream. Same umbrellas. Same coats. He is alone without his umbrella and the rain pours onto his shoulders. He blinks into the rain and feels the cool water against his skin.
He wipes his eyes dry and looks around. This time they are looking at him. Their ears, nose, lips and eyes are monstrous caricatures and he no longer recognises them as human. They shuffle towards him, squawking and screeching in some maddening alien tongue, their hamburger lips slapping open and closed.
He pulls back, but they are too solid. They close in on him, crushing the breath from his lungs.
Their fingers touch his face. Spindly claws grope his cheeks and pull his hair.
He tries to scream but he cannot. He tries to breathe in but his chest will not expand. The world swims before his eyes.
~}~~~{~
Carl wakes slowly, rising through the haze like a swimmer towards the sun. There are shapes and sounds all around him. He recognises voices. Normal voices.
“He’s coming around, look.”
There are only vague shapes in front of his eyes. Colours blurred into each other.
“Hello? Are you all right?”
The shapes become a pinkish oval with smaller black objects inside. The black objects move in time to the voice.
“Don’t worry friend. You’ll be fine.”
The shapes become eyes and lips. Carl is relieved to see that they look like normal lips and eyes.
“Here he comes. Back to the real world, eh?”
A face comes into focus. It peers closely, like a child examining a bug. The eyes are blue and clear. The lips normal. The nose looks like a nose. And the ears…
…the ears are normal! They don’t stand out, or stick out, or look even remotely odd.
“Hi there. You back with us now?”
“What…what happened? I remember a needle.”
“You’re with friends now. I’m Luke.”
“Where am I? And how did I get here?”
Carl tries to move but he feels restricted and it is still hard to breathe. For a second the nightmare sensation of being trapped returns. He realises that he is wearing a coat of some sort, but his arms are tied to his sides.
“A straitjacket? Why am I wearing a straitjacket?”
“We all get them here,” Luke says. “Part of the uniform I’m afraid.”
Carl notices that Luke is also wearing a straitjacket. There are other people in the room. All are wearing the same. One or two smile at him from where they are sitting. Some are watching a television high up on the wall. Some are just sitting, staring at the windows. The windows all have bars.
“What’s going on? Where am I? Where’s my doctor?”
“He probably put you in here, mate.”
“You don’t understand. I’m not insane. I just had…”
“A fixation?”
There is a noise outside the door. The rattle of keys in the lock. The others in the room become agitated and they all turn to look.
Two men dressed in doctors’ uniforms enter, pushing a trolley loaded with cups and bottles of pills. They make the same screeching noise from his nightmare. And they have the same dreadful features. Ears, nose, eyes and lips. Hamburger lips.
“What are those things?” Carl whimpers, recoiling in horror. “Who are they?”
Luke leans closer, as if to share a secret.
“Their ears. Just look at their ears.”
~}~~~{~
Gizile straightened up, thinking about what she had just witnessed. She heard Tok’s gravel voice, “A whole new twist on being taken by the ears.” Humor tinted his words.
She shot a look at her teacher. “It was not a funny vision. Obsession is a horrible thing, a great evil.”
He gazed back innocently. “Is it? Perhaps then, you have not been taken by the ears enough!” Without a change of his normal, sour expression, he began to jitter slightly. Was he laughing at her?
She gave an unladylike snort and returned her attention to the pool—but not before noting his ears.
The ice began to form and she leaned in, ready to be sucked to another world. She saw a long-haired woman, young yet bent over. Gizile laughed despite herself. The woman’s ears stuck out from between the strands.
~}~~~{~
Lily’s Tale—Grace Bridges
A companion story to the novel Legendary Space Pilgrims
Lily Darcy. She’s the crazy one. Haunted. That’s what they all say. But do you know why she’s crazy? Why she walks bent over, hair covering her face, avoiding the gazes of her colleagues?
I’ll tell you. I’m the only one that knows, you see.
Lily has all her memories.
Yup. All the stinkin’ things our mindwipes are meant to take from us. She’s wired different or somethin’, but she don’t know cause she never told no one who might know why it is. At first, she was relieved. What kid doesn’t dread their first wipe? But as the years progressed it became her curse. She lost her friends—their memories of her, anyway—with alarming regularity, yet she knew they all murmured about her “problem” when they heard the newest layer of gossip. There was always someone left unwiped to carry it on for another day.
Lily’s crazy, yup. And Lily’s me.
I figure this ought to be normal, somewhere on another world, Old Earth perhaps, or other colonies if there was any besides Monday.
Monday. What a joke, an excuse for a habitable planet. And what a sorry excuse for a so-called government, playing with their techno-toys and implants, taking children from their mothers, outlawing strong feelings, wiping the emotions and memories of those who transgress.
That’s why they say Lily’s crazy, too, cause she says all this is wrong. They don’t see she only says so because the wipes don’t rob her of her thoughts like they do everyone else.
So Lily’s alone. She talks to herself. Yeah, you. No one else understands. You’re one crazy chick. And it ain’t the red hair, no matter what they say.
Crazy, but not unstable. I mean, as far as that’s possible when you’re the odd one out. It’d be hard not to have some kinks when you’re the only one without ’em to start with, know what I mean?
Consequences of my ability mean I remember everything, nearly my whole life long. Not my mother; she only had me for a few hundred days. But my educatio
n, learning to read, hearing how emotions are bad, then deployment to the agricultural sector X and the oat division X9. Here, everyone picks oats.
What? What’s that you’re asking? Do I remember the mindwipes themselves?
I remember, and I quake.
A travel pod takes you far, far up into the sky, beyond the edge of space, to a huge round structure where thousands of Mondayites are found at any time of the day or night. The trip there takes hours, so that the air in the pod grows stale and you get lightheaded. Then the tube spits you out into a round room and you’re on this table. A robot arm slaps a drug patch on your neck. There are voices, repetitive, calming for some, hypnotic for sure, the things they say are designed to make you fear emotion and deny it even though you don’t want to. They tell me I am nothing, worthless, meaningless, and they say over and over that I now know nothing of my prior emotions. I guess it would work if the hypnosis and drugs didn’t malfunction on me.
Yet when it’s finally over and I’m sent on the heart-stopping pod ride back down to the surface, I still know everything I knew before. Feel it, too, although I shake in my boots from the ordeal. That’s not what the Baxters intended—they want to reduce me to nothing and send me back to work as a productive citizen. So I make sure I am. Who knows what they might do to me if they found out?
I tell you, though, it’s so painful to watch my friends be wiped again and again. Especially Caitlin and Mario. In a more perfect world, they would have been meant to be together. Here, they keep falling for each other all over again after each wipe. For a long time I thought to myself, it’d be over for sure if they were both taken at once.
I saw it coming a few days earlier, right after Mario’s last wipe. The guy was besotted even before he knew there’d been something going on before he forgot it. They both tried hard to stamp out their feelings, but it was no use. I watched in as much horror as I could allow myself as she told him she loved him, and her emo-reader beeped up a racket. Mario tried to save her, but he couldn’t.
Then the real weird thing happened. He’d been into reciting some poetry lately, and that’s what he did now. His reader goes off too, and next thing you know, he’s off for wiping as well.
You know what the strangest thing is? I never saw the like in all my days. Neither one ever came back. New kids took their places in the harvesting line, and that was that. Their friend Irina went around with a big frown on, but I didn’t dare talk to her about it—she’s very emotional and would be wiped in three minutes flat. Mario’s dorm buddy Aaron looked so shocked too, and I thought I’d better leave well alone, though I did catch some intense glances from him. Wonder what he’s been thinking about.
I’m not sure how many days later it was. I’d had another mindwipe in the meantime, you see—not that I lost any memory, but it sure rattled me up, like they always do. In any case, Irina vanished as well. It was the darndest thing. She wasn’t taken from the field, or we’d have seen it. Must have been sucked out of her quarters—the very worst way to go. A place that ought to be safe, but even in private you can be snatched away and tortured.
Anyway, here I am, all alone, as always. Watching, ever watching, for the return of my friends, though the probability is fading fast. Aaron tried to remember the poetry Mario got so crazy on, and he told me a few snatches of it as we sat in the courtyard after dinner. Something about listening to a Voice, and a whole lot of weird instructions about obeying, and loyalty, and truth. Very strange stuff. But it does make me feel good, and I can’t explain why—it’s as if, even in this pitiful, grey world, there might be a reason to hope.
~}~~~{~
Did you see what happened there today, Lily? Do you remember it? Because you should. It changes everything.
You were sad. Not just a little bit, either. You were about to get mindwiped, and you knew it because the chip in your neck was beeping like crazy. You missed Caitlin and Mario and Irina who were really gone, and all the others whose bodies remained but their memories were gone. Face it, chick, you were having a cry—a sure recipe for a trip you didn’t want.
The other harvesters glanced at you, and those nearest moved away so they wouldn’t get taken by accident. That never actually happens, but you understand. Oat suction was still running, so you had a little more time before your ride.
Then, under your hair, out of the corner of your eye, you saw someone approaching. You started up and found you were looking into Aaron’s face.
“What are you doing, cowboy? Get away while there’s still time!” you splutter.
He steps nearer. “Listen to me,” he says, “l-listen. Can you d-do that for me? Focus on the words.”
You shrug, more from shoulder-heaving sobs than anything else, but he takes it as his cue to go on.
“Listen to me. I must be first. Th-that’s what the Voice said.”
“Mario’s Voice.” A shudder of some long-forgotten feeling traces your spine.
Aaron nodded. “And he said don’t confuse him with anyone else, and don’t speak carelessly about him.”
Your beeping calms as you laugh suddenly. “How do you know it’s a him?”
“I don’t. Mario always called him him.”
“What else did he say, then?” You’ve both gotten yourselves left behind the harvesting line. There might be trouble later.
“Be quiet and listen if you want to hear him speak.”
“He’s repeating himself.”
“It’s poetry. He’s allowed.”
“Go on.”
“This bit’s complicated. He wants us to do what he says, and also what other people say, people he’s gonna send. I think that’s what it was.”
You smile at last. “I remember the next bit. Life is worthy, so live like it.”
“Yeah!” Aaron’s grin widens. “Be loyal, not nasty, respect people and tell the truth.”
Together the two of you spoke the final patched-up line. “Don’t want anything if you haven’t got it, because I’ll make sure you get what you need.”
The silence is deafening. Your beeping has stopped.
“Woah.” Aaron’s happy.
You both rush to catch up with the others. They stare openly. Fair enough. Anyone beeping like you were a moment ago ought to be anywhere but here right now.
So you remember that, Lily girl. And remember those words. They saved you! That’s one unusual poem all right.
Why, thank you.
Who said that? I’m busy talking with myself here.
Listen to me—I must be first.
Oh. It’s you. Mario’s Voice. Hey, you here, quit shaking. I know you’re scared, Lily, but come on. Is this for real?
Do not confuse me with another, and do not speak carelessly of me. I want to be your Voice too.
Are you laughing at me?
Be still and listen, and I will speak. I’m just glad to be with you.
Woah. Why?
Monday’s going to be free, and you’re going to help me. Obey what I ask, and the Pathfinders I will send you. Respect what belongs to another.
Just like that, huh?
Treat life in a manner worthy of me. Esteem loyalty and do not give in to bent desires. So you want to hear how the rest of it really goes?
You tease. Go on then.
Speak the truth at all times, and do not wish for anything I do not give you, for I will give everything you need.
Are we going somewhere?
Not like Mario and Caitlin did, but yes, there is a journey ahead.
Are they all right? Where did you take them?
Yes. You’ll see.
Quit that shaking, girl.
Uh…It’s strange, you know, talking to Lily when she knows you’re listening.
So go ahead and talk to me instead. I’m here.
~}~~~{~
Gizile came to herself with a jerk when an unexpected wave crashed the ice away. Did others hear the same still, quiet voice she did? A warmth began to grow in her chest. It spread, chasing
the chill from her body. Was He real, then? Could He care about her? Maybe everything she thought, all her anger toward Him was…wrong. Maybe.
She smiled as she waited for the next incoming wave. When the water froze, she saw nothing. Only white. She leaned forward and strained her eyes. Yes. The vision was there. The white was a room.
~}~~~{~
Gravity—Travis Perry
He awoke to a room with white walls and ceiling, an off-white floor and an off-white frame on the single narrow window, feeling incredibly heavy, lying on a vaguely familiar spongy surface. His mind scurried to remember who he was and why he was there, but his thoughts were heavy, and no answers came.
A man wearing gray moved toward him through a blue-framed doorway, arms bare halfway up with impossibly massive biceps.
The muscular man pushed something toward him; it had the shape of a chair, but not quite. The giant leaned in close, his formidable bulk a menace. The massive stranger wasn’t familiar to him, still, based on size alone, he felt a panic building that gripped him in his chest and throat.
Get away, he screamed inside, but his voice came out as a hoarse croak. He tried to move himself away but his head was too heavy to lift. He swiped his hands at the big man, aiming at his face, but the other just casually brushed the hands aside, reached for him, lifted him effortlessly and moved him with surprising gentleness into the chair. Even as he tried to gouge the giant’s eyes out, he dully perceived that the other had said something to him in a calm, quiet voice.
Sitting upright, he could hold up his head, but it took a great effort. I’m a prisoner here, he realized. His memories were hazy, but he definitely recalled not wanting to be there and being moved and poked and prodded against his will. He intuitively knew what the man said would help him understand what was happening to him, so he strained to bring the words back to mind.