Writers of the Future, Volume 30

  And then there are only Two.

  “No cowardice,” says Odd to Dove, shooing her along. “No fear.”

  She reaches for Pilgrim and emits a chirrup of assent.

  The wolf comes next, slinking toward Dove. His eyes are yellow, his teeth bared. “I only want one,” he howls. “Just one. The rest can go.”

  The glassy expression of desire has vanished from Dove’s face. She flies at him, her hands like talons. She gives no cry, not even when he catches her arm between his teeth with a sound of shattering glass. I wince, thinking of her hollow bones, but she tears into him before any of us can intervene. I had thought her meek, a coward, helpless; but there is fire in those little airtight bones of hers, and it is fueled by love.

  There is only One left, but we do not see her. She is not there when we gather up our Dove, who is whimpering and breathing heavily; neither does she appear when we scale the last of the boulders and approach the ship that carried Pilgrim to us. The ship is nearly spherical, and nearly white—not the blinding glow of Pilgrim’s light, more like the white of a meteor, blue-tinged and frostbitten.

  “Is she in here?” I ask, but I get no answer. I turn to see Pilgrim caught up in the seductive viselike arms of the last admissions officer. Dove slips from his arms, where she lies limp as a downed fledgling.

  Pilgrim does not struggle; he has gone fluid at the One’s caress. The One smiles at me, her eyes like the chasms we have left behind. “You’re safe here,” she tells him. “No need to doubt, no need to be afraid.” Pilgrim shudders.

  “Not again,” snarls Odd. He is running his hands over his body, his fingers tracing the burns. He looks at her, looks at me, shakes his head. “Not again.”

  “I will hold you,” whispers the One, backing away. Pilgrim’s light is fading; his face is the pasty color of the dead. “I have what you want. What you need.”

  Behind the One, Leon and the wolf struggle to their feet, their sour wounds oozing, their faces split with grins wider than their mouths should be. Who was I to think we could escape? After a thousand years, shouldn’t I know better?

  But I am still caught up in hope’s engine, though it crushes me in its merciless teeth. I want to give up, but I can’t.

  “I love you,” says the One, crushing Pilgrim against her.

  And I laugh, the mechanical, tinny laugh of the mad. “Of course she doesn’t,” I say.

  She turns her cavernous eyes on me.

  I meet her gaze, allowing not a single tick in my mechanism. “She doesn’t love you,” I tell Pilgrim. “She isn’t Beatrice.”

  Pilgrim looks up—I see in his face what the One cannot see: that she is already defeated. “Beatrice,” says Pilgrim. And the light spills from him as if the sun itself, for which he was only a conduit, has been invoked into the DC’s very air; behind us, the hulk of Pilgrim’s ship gleams, blazes, sears. This is the source of the light. Pilgrim is nothing more than a dull moon, reflecting and scattering this perfect glow.

  The One screams and stumbles back. The corpses that are her companions howl with something more human than fear, more animal than pain. Even Pilgrim draws a hand across his eyes, but my retinas are undamaged. I grab up Dove and throw her into Pilgrim’s arms, then snatch at Odd’s hand. He tries to look at me, but it is too bright to see. “I’m scared,” he says, grabbing onto me like a child. “I’m Nobody.”

  “True,” I tell him, dragging him toward the ship, “but you’re our Nobody.”

  Pilgrim is already inside. He pulls us in after him.

  “Beatrice,” he says, “close the door.”

  The ship hums in response and the door slides closed, shutting out the sight and smell of the DC. My arm jerks up reflexively—for a moment I’m afraid to see the darkness go. It has been my home for a star’s age, after all. But I let my arm fall and I turn away.

  Pilgrim is leaning against the wall, his arm around Dove, his face still pallid but no longer blank. He looks weary but pleased.

  “Welcome,” he tells us, “to Beatrice.”

  The ship gives a rumble of greeting, and then a fluid roar. I don’t need windows to know that we have left the DC far behind.

  Lying in the room Pilgrim has given me, I listen to the motion of Beatrice’s engines.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet you,” she tells me in the language of intelligent machines.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet you, too,” I tell her. “Maybe not as long, but more urgently.”

  She laughs, a whir of parts chattering together like music. “Pilgrim spoke of me.”

  “He loves you,” I tell her.

  She says, “I know.”

  I ask, “Do you love him?”

  She only laughs again.

  “I have so many questions,” I admit.

  “Me, too,” she replies.

  I understand what Pilgrim wants from me now: he wants to understand me, a machine in human form, a thing that not only thinks like him but looks like him as well. What he wants is an ambassador, someone who will understand that Beatrice’s heart cannot be found in her engine room. He wants proof that the mechanics of both living and man-made organisms cannot entirely account for the beings that we grow up to be.

  What will I tell him?

  Will I hold up a lantern to show him the way? Or will I hold my tongue, knowing that he already knows the answer?

  Beyond the metal hull that marks Beatrice’s physicals limits—a mere eggshell which protects Pilgrim, Dove, Nobody, and me—is nothing but empty space. It is known. It is inarguable data. But I fall toward sleep comforted by Beatrice’s gentle motion, knowing that the darkness beyond is populated with infinite stars.

  Long Jump

  written by

  Oleg Kazantsev

  illustrated by

  Adam Brewster

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Oleg Kazantsev was born and raised in eastern Siberia, in the city of Khabarovsk, just miles away from the Chinese border. Life there taught him a lot of things—some more and some less useful—such as: boxing, ballroom dancing, potato farming, calculus III and video game journalism.

  After he got his first degree in computer science, Oleg decided that he wanted to try something new, so he attended Columbia College Chicago to study fiction writing in English. Two-and-a-half years later, he found himself tutoring college students and teaching classes in an intermediate school in south Chicago.

  As great an experience as it was, teaching writing wasn’t what Oleg wanted to do for the rest of his life, so his next step after graduation was to zigzag back to IT consulting, to free up some time for his passion—writing. That’s where he is right now, but there’s no guarantee that in a year or two his life won’t change completely yet again.

  Oleg is twenty-five years old, married and raising a wonderful two-year-old daughter. His stories have appeared in Story Week Reader 2012 and 2013, Elastic Lumberjack, and Every Day Fiction. His comic book With You won the Albert P. Weisman Award in 2012 and can be found on Amazon.com.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Adam Brewster is also the illustrator for “Beyond All Weapons” in this volume. For more information about Adam, please see here.

  Long Jump

  To celebrate the fifth anniversary of our first date, Nancy lavishly splashed herself with gasoline and lit a cigarette. I watched her burn down to yellowed bones, and then went offline, tired. Next morning I made Nancy come with me to a boathouse restaurant and paid an Indian waiter to stay there and make sure Nancy didn’t try to swallow a shard of glass or cut her veins with a butter knife. It worked, but she refused to tal
k to me, so I finished my steak, logged off, and started this journal, knowing I would delete it three days later.…

  My story began eight years ago, when Phoebe, my wife, returned to Earth with some skinny lawyer and took our son Owen with her. Just before their departure, I came to the spaceport to say my final goodbye, a mint candy melting on my tongue to hide the smell of morning whiskey. Phoebe spotted me first, far across the busy terminal booming with jokes and laughter of Nigerian shuttle traders. Stepping over their bloated multicolored duffle bags, as if striding across an eclectic walrus rookery, she slowly headed to me. “You had to come here, didn’t you?” She pierced me with her brown eyes, the thin lips primed in a smile. “Must be an early morning for you, Ulysses.”

  As I stood there breathing deeply through my nostrils and gathering my words, she pulled her red Korean shawl over her shoulders and tied it in a tight knot around her chest.

  “I promised Owen I’d see him before you left.” I said quietly. I tried not to look at the feline features of her round face. “He called me yesterday, and I said it’d be the first thing I’d do when I wake up.”

  “Seems like it’s the second thing you did.” She gently touched my dirty collar and grimaced at the sharp alcohol scent.

  Her own fingers smelled of lavender and sour chicken, and I couldn’t help but turn my head and keep my breath. Memories flashed through my mind: my numb fist with Phoebe’s blood on it, and the aroma of lavender—her ever-present trademark— stuck to it as a reminder of what I had done.

  “How many times did you wash your hand with soap that night?” A voice in my head asked, masochistically. Just to chase away the thoughts, I hurried to speak.

  “It’s my … Where’s Owen?” From the corner of my eye, I saw my boy’s yellowish hair among the blue and green robes of arguing Nigerians.

  “Excuse me!” A man’s voice jumped in, and here he was, Phoebe’s new boyfriend, all excited, loud and generous with his gestures: “Hey, Pheebs, it’s check-in time. We gotta go.” He held his blue tie with one hand flat against his chest and offered me a handshake. “Nice to meet you, man. Name’s Lenny.”

  Phoebe flung her hands up at him. “Wha … Did you leave Owen alone?”

  “Come on, he’s on the suitcases.”

  “Jeez, you gotta be kidding me.” She headed back through the crowd. For a brief moment I saw Owen in the distance leaning against a mound of duct-taped bags, a see-through game tablet in his hands.

  “Ulysses, right?” Lenny the lawyer interposed himself between me and my boy again, his hand touching my shoulder softly. “Listen, I think Pheebs is overreacting. I’m pretty sure we can find some way to—”

  Phoebe shouted above the crowd.

  “Dammit, Leonard! We’re gonna miss the flight!”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

  I cast a glance at my boy for the last time, before a forest of people swallowed him. I straightened my back, stood on my tiptoes, but all I could see were muscular black necks of cheerful Nigerians wearing cheap Martian textiles.

  So, Phoebe went to Earth with the lawyer and took Owen with her. What did I do about it? Nothing. Maybe, if it were a story of a giant amidst mere mortals, it would have continued with me following her to Earth; me quitting drinking; me contacting the old-boys’ network from Lufthansa Raumtransport; me getting a consultancy job for some interplanetary logistics company; me finally getting a quality eye implant. Me seeing Owen again.

  But it’s not that kind of story. And I was no giant. I was a piece of spit in zero gravity: a miserable waste of society, too gutless to act or even raise my voice. I stayed in my studio in Zaragoza-17 on Mars, and some nights I wished I could be killed in my bed during a robbery or stabbed in the back and thrown into the warm gutters near a pump station. But nobody ever came for me, except night terrors.

  It was then that I met Radzinsky. I was on my way to the Red Aurora bookstore, where I’d heard that some freaks with tons of cash were secretly hiring experienced pilots for the Légion de la Liberté. The hell of the Neptunian Civil War with its attacks on stratosphere stations and airborne assaults in the poisonous blue fog was exactly what I seemed to need the most at the moment. I was squeaky clean and well-shaved. I had with me my passport, my Communard party card, and my interplanetary pilot certificate. My eye implant was slightly malfunctioning, but I was expecting to be dead in six months anyway, so it didn’t matter. And it was then that I met Radzinsky.

  Greg found me in an empty intersection near the ramshackle community hostel. His black executive hover-car stopped in front of me as I was jaywalking, its bulky shape an imitation of early industrial design circa the 1940s. A tinted glass window opened, showing Radzinsky’s smiling round face, but instead of a greeting I heard just a long loud honk. For a second, I stared at his face in confusion and anger, knowing that the small black eyes studied me behind his mirror shades that looked like perfect copies of his car’s windows. Finally, I checked myself and tried to get around his hover, but the car started jerkily and blocked my way again, sending flocks of shredded plastic bags into the air from under its air cushion.

  Finally, Greg spoke, his hands still on the wheel.

  “Ulysses. You need a ride, old buddy?” It didn’t come out as a question.

  I crossed my arms and looked around. There was no way of ignoring him: the street was empty, except for a single Peruvian hobo in a red down jacket who was looking at us indifferently from the entrance of an abandoned toy store.

  “Come on, don’t be shy.” Greg’s voice was disgustingly cheerful.

  Suddenly, I felt a temptation. I picked a concrete chip from the ground and felt its weight in my hand, imagining its sharp shapes smashing those mirror shades and digging into Radzinsky’s eyeball. As I hesitated, a garbage truck crawled past us behind my back, and before my thoughts materialized into action I felt a hard kick on the back of my left leg just under my knee. With ease an attacker twisted my right elbow and grabbed me into a tight armlock. I tried to break free, but another man in a black suit with an unnaturally calm expression on his white face grabbed me by the neck and plunged his cold fingers deep under my jaw, feeling his way to a pressure point. Effortlessly, they forced me to the hover; its doors gaped open, and before I knew it the car swallowed me complete with my captors.

  “It’s been a long time, pal!” On the back seat, sandwiched between the suits with fake silicone faces, I heard Radzinsky speak. He nodded to the agents, and they released their grip. To my surprise, just one of them had a standard face implant on; judging by the aftershave acne, the suit to my right had kept his real skin.

  “You look great. Miss the old days?” Greg asked over a growing howl of the hover engine.

  “Not really,” I replied grimly as the car took off. For half a minute Radzinsky was silent.

  “Have you seen the news? Kuala Lumpur suburbs got wiped out this morning. A meteor strike.” Greg set the car on autopilot and turned to me, wiping his black-rimmed glasses with a handkerchief. He’d gained a lot of weight, had turned gray, and his rebellious Nietzsche mustache was gone. “Media’s in panic. First time a first world city got hit. Where have they been when a bigger sucker fell on Dallas, right?” He chuckled ironically and tried to make an eye contact with me, but I glanced away and massaged my numb right hand.

  After a pause, Greg changed his tone. “I heard some hotheads are recruiting volunteers around town to fight for the Commune of Neptune,” he said.

  “These red bastards must be desperate, to look for people in such a prosperous city,” I muttered and scratched my Chekhov beard with a middle finger. Behind the window, rows and rows of abandoned high-rises were crawling past us, some of their gaping casements lit, indicating squatters.

  Finally, the car turned onto an autobahn, and for some time we drove mutely. To calm my (or, rather, his) nerves, Radzinsky turned on some music from our colleg
e past: a soft Pan-American neoclassic, much unlike the underground Mercurian class-tech we both used to devour between reading Spengler and reciting Mayakovsky.

  Finally, the car took an exit from the highway and, after a long drive amid red rocky hills dotted with yellow bushes, the car stopped at the entrance of what looked like a research facility.

  “The trip’s over, pal. Follow me.” Radzinsky buttoned up his beige suit and left the car, his movements slow and awkward. The suits followed his example, and, for a second, I found myself alone in the leather salon, my eye implant blinking on and off on the brink of dying. Motionless, I closed my eyes and sighed.

  “Sah, we do insist dat chu leave da cah.” I heard a flat deep voice, recognizing African Martian pronunciation. Mr. Real-Face peeked into the window and repeated his request, the aftershave acne a pink spray on his pale Caucasian face.

  “Now, aren’t you the smartest boy right here, to fool me like this!” I grinned at him. “Real dedicated to the job, too.”

  “Sah, hand me yo party membahship cahd and leave da cah,” Mr. Real-Face said in the same voice, without changing his expression.

  I did as he said. Outside, Greg was standing with his hands crossed and his head hanging down.

  “We really need good professionals, Ulysses. Sorry,” he mumbled.

  After a few medical tests and a twelve-hour shuttle flight simulation they brought me to a room without windows where another couple of silicone-faced clowns—this time female!—told me that if the experiment were to be successful, my political preferences would be forgotten and my debts repaid by the government. When I sneered, they showed me Owen’s picture and a travel card for a free ride to Earth. That’s how I became a part of the Long Jump project.

  I can’t say I made a lot of new friends there. I already knew most of the faces in the lab from my past experience in Sektion VI, the officially nonexistent branch of Lufthansa Raumtransport. Some of them I used to drink with. A couple of them I used to sleep with when they were younger. The same familiar routine sucked me up in the endless sequence of reports, counsels, training, tests, and retraining. Time after time, the people around me who were unable to fix up their marriages or to treat their prostatitis were discussing the fate of the solar system in the next ten thousand years. Every day I heard the same familiar words: “wave function,” “relative time coefficient,” “coherency point.” The only phrase nobody seemed to remember was “the Spot.”