Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #217 Page 4

  He must go down to her. It would only take a moment. Abruptly he thought of the weapon his father had used, still lying on the preparation room floor, and sprinted down the corridor.

  But before he arrived, the alarm sounded. He stopped in his tracks. “No!” he cried out. His voice merged with the alarm's wail, the urgency of the call pounding in his body like a heavy pulse.

  He raced to the control room. Surely he would have the moments he needed to bring the weapon down to Ainkia and help her before dealing with whatever threat faced the station.

  Then he brought up the displays, and everything in him shrank to a cold stillness.

  A fleet of ships, huge bronze globes, about to burst into realspace. How many? He counted, his heart thudding so fast there was hardly time between beats. Thirteen.

  Thirteen ships would hold enough humans for them to be a viable population. The Earth could be repeopled.

  The weapon was near, the one that Ainkia needed so desperately. He thought of her down there, struggling, close to death, while he stood here frozen, deciding what to do.

  These ships ... had she known? Had she lied? Or had she acted in ignorance? He closed his eyes, remembering the touch of her lips, the smell of the white flower, the look in her eyes as she stood on the soil of Africa.

  One more moment he paused. Then he reached out a quivering fingertip and thought, not quite knowing who he was saying it to, Forgive me.

  And activated, in sequence, the great weapons that pulsed their energy-crushing waves out at one ship after another. Saw the perfect bronze globes wrinkle, deform, lose their adhesion to reality. Saw them disappear, as if engulfed by the black maw of some ravening beast, hungrier than any on the surface of the Earth. He felt something disappear from the center of himself at the same time, extinguished utterly. Something he would remember through the long years ahead, but would never have again.

  * * * *

  "I thought you had forgotten me,” Ainkia said.

  "I will never forget you,” said Tomeer. “Are you injured?"

  "Only slightly."

  He treated her small scratches while the reek of the beasts’ bodies rose around them, a stench of blood and tissue let loose from their boundaries. Then, as she knelt by her father's body and touched the pale gashes the animals had made, Tomeer went from carcass to carcass, using the weapon to superheat each one. He burned them almost to vaporization. Earth's animals had a strong smell sense, he knew. He wanted to make sure none would be attracted here by the bodies of their own kind. It was the work of only a few moments.

  He went back to Ainkia, and she looked up at him. She seemed tired, but deeply relaxed, and somehow alight. The emptiness in her had been filled, just by being here.

  "How did you fare in the darkness?” he said.

  "I made a fire,” she said, and pointed. A ragged slip of flame, almost invisible in the sunlight, still wavered at the tip of a round heap of sticks nearby.

  "My father is ill,” he said. “I would have come before. But I fell asleep without realizing it."

  "How is he?"

  "Dying, I think,” he said.

  "I am sorry,” she said.

  Tomeer allowed himself to really look at her then, to take her entire face in and memorize it: the smooth pale planes of her cheeks, the undulation of her hair placed back behind her ears, the part of her lips as she returned his gaze, the depth of her eyes, their greenness. Her determination, so obvious to him now.

  "There were ships,” he said. “Ships that came. Thirteen."

  She took in a breath and stood up. They stared at each other in silence. Tomeer heard birds in the distance. The light was very beautiful this morning. Golden.

  "What did you do?” she said.

  It was as if someone had taken his chest and squeezed it in a great hand. “You knew?"

  She said nothing.

  "You knew,” he repeated. It was no longer a question. “You arranged for them to come here, made me soften, knowing I would have to make that choice."

  "It was a choice?” she said, her voice even more bitter than his. “It was difficult for you?"

  "It was difficult,” he said. “Did you think it would be otherwise?"

  She seemed to tremble then. “I realized as soon as I came to the station that there was nobody left except for you and your father. I know when a place is empty. And even from the sound of his voice, I knew he would not help us. But I thought differently of you."

  They both were silent. Tomeer heard the snap of the nearby flame, and smelled the heat from what remained of the carcasses.

  "You were right,” Tomeer said. “I am different, thanks to you. Making these choices now hurts me more."

  Her gaze dropped to the weapon in his hand, then came back up to his face.

  "I could never harm you,” he said. “I wanted only to help you. I still do."

  He backed away and slowly set the weapon on the ground, his eyes never leaving her face. Then he pressed the controls on his arm, and the Earth disappeared from his vision.

  * * * *

  Twice his father opened his eyes, once to look over Tomeer's shoulder, once to gaze at his face. But the person whose eyes stared into Tomeer's was seeing something else, something beyond the realm of humans and Guardians.

  Tomeer did the things the medical apparatus advised him to do, and watched the brief, temporary upticks of life energy.

  Meanwhile he had set the station's controls to stay directly over where Ainkia dug into the Earth. Hour after hour she labored to make a large hole. When Tomeer slipped his fingers away from his father's veiny hand and went to make sure she had survived a little bit longer, the hole had gotten wider as well as deeper.

  In the African afternoon, when she had not yet finished, he was by his father's bed. His father suddenly squeezed his hand. Tomeer sat forward and stroked the white brow.

  "Father,” he said.

  Slowly his father's eyes opened. The sagging face turned slightly, and the eyes saw him.

  Tomeer's stomach clenched, and his face trembled with the effort not to twist. But it did twist. His mouth pulled downward, his eyes squeezed almost shut. Tears blinded him. His father was dying, dying, and nothing would stop it.

  "Father,” he whispered again.

  His father suddenly gave the smallest tug on his hand, and Tomeer bent close.

  His father gave a whisper, very slow. “Sorry to leave you alone."

  "Father, don't go, I love you, I'm sorry, I am a Guardian too, I can prove it ... don't go, don't go, don't, please!"

  But silence was the answer.

  And Tomeer dropped his head on his father's shoulder and began to sob, heaving gasping sobs that no one witnessed or heard besides Strilikan, whose steps pattered as raindrops in a storm might have done, if he and Tomeer had been on Earth. Except that they were not.

  * * * *

  He stood in the preparation room and placed the translocator marker on his father's chest. He had bathed the body, thin and cold beyond anything he thought possible, the skin so fragile it had started layering off in his hands. He wrapped it carefully in fine white robes still preserved in the storerooms from hundreds of years before, the embroidery running in lines like runes down the length of the cloth to his father's feet. It had seemed only fitting to clothe him in the remnants of the Guardians’ majesty. Strilikan plucked at the robes, as if trying to keep Tomeer's father on the station, until finally Tomeer gathered Strilikan in his arms and lifted him away. Strilikan's legs wrapped around him like a web, the wiry exoskeleton hairs pricking him here and there, the hard disklike body pressing against his chest.

  He would have wanted more time with his father's body—he would have liked to spend the rest of his life with it, so reluctant was he to let it go—but Ainkia had finished digging the grave for her father. The sun would set in a few hours. He had to send his father now.

  Expelled and Guardian in the same grave.

  She would know that was what he meant
her to do.

  * * * *

  He barely slept. Strilikan never left him. Sometimes he curled up on the floor of a corridor and Strilikan sang to him, warbling songs in a curdled soothing voice.

  Once he found himself on the floor of the birthing room and could not think how he had gotten there or why he had come, except to remember his conversation there with his father and wish it had gone better.

  From there, unable to stand, he crawled to the dining chamber, as Strilikan pattered beside him. He put food on a plate and sat on the floor sharing with Strilikan, taking one slow bite for himself, then offering the next to Strilikan on his fingers. Strilikan took it with his beak, the hard horn gently scraping his skin. Tomeer set a bowl of water down in front of Strilikan, who extended his proboscis and sucked deeply, then withdrew the slender black tube and snapped his beak two or three times with satisfaction.

  Slumped against the wall, Tomeer stared at Strilikan, feeling he had never seen him before. Strilikan clambered onto his lap and folded his legs under his carapace. Tomeer stroked the hard, curving joints that stuck out beyond the edge of the shell, touching with respect and even awe the razored pincers, feeling the sheeny surface of the body.

  "Time to cast a membrane over you, Strilikan,” he whispered, and carefully kissed the blue-black dome of Strilikan's back. “Going on a journey."

  * * * *

  He looked down through the Inward Watcher. The sun streaked golden over the green land. He waited patiently for what he sought, the thing that would help him get through one more day.

  Finally they appeared, walking side by side up the rim of the forest toward the top of the open slope where Tomeer had left Ainkia. They had hunted early this time. And it appeared Strilikan had killed something again. It had happened more and more often lately, Ainkia shouldering a horned animal, walking slowly under the weight of it, Strilikan dragging the corpse of some smaller creature behind him with one or two of his pincers.

  Tomeer had decided to wait until Ainkia and Strilikan were dead before he tried to make a copy of himself. There would be fewer questions. If he succeeded, he and his son would carry out the purpose together through the hundreds of years until Tomeer's own death.

  He adjusted the lens.

  Ainkia had dropped her prey on the ground at her camp, as Strilikan had dropped his. She tossed something at Strilikan. He caught it in his pincers and threw it back at her. She threw it again, he caught and returned it.

  Now she moved away, and Strilikan followed her, catching the object, then returning it. Tomeer zoomed as close as he could, close enough to see that it was a ball of gray, perhaps made of some of Ainkia's own clothing tied together into a bundle. She ran down the slope toward the river, her hair streaming like a scarf behind her, Strilikan scampering around her, the two of them tossing the ball to and fro. It was something Tomeer had never seen. Something that humans and animals did, but not Guardians. Play.

  Tomeer smiled. And the sun rose ever higher, and turned the eternal green of Africa to golden fire.

  Copyright © 2008 Karen Fishler

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE TWO HEADED GIRL—Paul G. Tremblay

  * * * *

  Paul G. Tremblay is the author of the short speculative fiction collection Compositions for the Young and Old and the novellas ‘City Pier: Above and Below’ and ‘The Harlequin and the Train'. He served as fiction editor of Chizine and as co-editor of Fantasy Magazine, and was also the co-editor (with Sean Wallace) of the Fantasy, Bandersnatch and Phantom anthologies. His first novel, The Little Sleep, is forthcoming (February 2009) from Henry Holt.

  * * * *

  I have to keep swinging an extra fifteen minutes before I can go downtown and to the Little Red Bookstore, because Mom wants to run the dishwasher and the blender tonight. I wonder if my time on the swing will generate enough extra juice for those appliances, or even if she's telling me the truth. I've been having a hard time with telling-truth or truth-telling.

  Anne Frank is on my left again. I only ever get to see her in profile. Whenever I'm around a mirror she is always someone else. Today, she's the early-in-her diary Anne, the same age as me. Anne spent most of my swinging afternoon pining for Peter. But now she wants to talk to Lies, her best friend before the war.

  She says, “I feel so guilty, Lies. I wish I could take you into hiding with me."

  I get this odd, stomach-knotty thrill and I pretend that she really knows me and she is really talking to me. But at the same time, I don't like it when she calls me Lies. I say, “I'm sorry, Anne, but I'm Veronica.” The words come out louder than I intended. I'm not mad at her. I could never be mad at Anne. It's just hard to speak normally when on the downswing.

  Anne moves on, talks about her parents and older sister, and then how much she dislikes that ungrateful dentist they took in.

  "Nobody likes dentists,” I say and I want her to laugh. She doesn't. I only hear dead leaves making their autumn sounds as they blow up against the neighbor's giant fence and our swing set and generator.

  Mom sticks her only head out of the kitchen window and yells, “Looks like we need another fifteen minutes, sorry honey. I promise I'll get Mr Bob out here tomorrow to tune everything up."

  This is not good news. My back hurts and my legs are numb already. She's promised me Mr Bob every day for a week. She's made a lot of promises.

  "Hi, Veronica.” It's that little blond boy from across the street. He's become part of my daily swing-routine: when I come out, he starts off hiding in our thick bushes, then he sneaks along the perimeter of my neighbor's beanstalk-tall, wooden plank fence, and then sits next to the swing set and generator.

  "Hi, Jeffrey,” I say. Jeffrey has a withered left arm. Anne is quiet. Both of us try not to stare at it.

  He says, “Where's your Dad?” His little kindergarten voice makes me smile even though I'm sick of that particular question.

  "I don't know, Jeffrey. Just like I didn't know yesterday, and the day before yesterday.” I try not to be mean or curt with him. He's the only kid in town who talks to me.

  Anne says, “My Dad is hiding in the annex."

  Jeffrey stays on my right, which is closer to my head. He only talks to me. I know it makes Anne lonely and sad, which makes me lonely and sad, just like her diary did. I don't remember what came first: me reading the diary or Anne making a regular rotation as my other head.

  Jeffrey says, “You should ask your Mom or somebody where he is."

  I know Jeffrey doesn't realize what he's asking of me. Just like I know people never realize how much their words hurt. Sometimes almost as much as what isn't said.

  I say what I always say: “I'll think about it."

  "Can I ride on the swing?"

  Anne is mumbling something under her breath. My heart breaks all over again. I say, “No, sorry, Jeffrey. I can't let you. You'd have to ask my mother.” I find it easier to blame everything on Mom, even if it isn't fair.

  Jeffrey mashes his fully developed right fist into his cheek, an overly dramatic but affective pantomime of I-never-get-to-do-anything-fun.

  I say, “Do you want to walk downtown with me when I'm done?"

  He nods.

  "Go ask your parents first."

  Jeffrey runs off. With his little legs pumping and back turned to me, I let myself stare at the flopping and mostly empty left arm of his thin, grey sweatshirt. I watch him scoot onto his front lawn and past a sagging scarecrow, a decoration left out too long.

  My legs tingle with pins and needles, and Anne is crying. I wish I could console her, but I can't. And now I'm thinking about the question I've always wanted to ask Anne, but never have because I'm a coward. I could ask her now, but it isn't the right time, or at least, that's what I tell myself. So we just keep swinging; a pendulum of her tears and me.

  * * * *

  Jeffrey and I are downtown, playing a game on the cobblestones. I have to step on stones in a diagonal pattern. Jeffrey has to step on the
darkest stones. I've seen him miss a few but I won't call him on it. I'll let him win.

  Anne is gone and Medusa has taken her place. She is my least favorite head. Not because she is a gorgon. Just the opposite: I wish she was more gorgon-esque. Medusa is completely un-aggressive, head and eyes always turned down and she doesn't say boo. I feel bad for her, and I hate Athena for turning Medusa into a hideous monster because she had the audacity to be raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple. Athena was the one with the big-time jealousy and beauty issues, kind of like my mother. I used to try and talk to Medusa, to make her feel better about herself. I'd tell her that her physical or social appearance doesn't measure her worth and that her name means sovereign female wisdom, which I think is really cool for a name, so much cooler than my name which means true image. But she never says anything back and when I talk her snakes tickle my neck with their forked tongues.

  Jeffrey shouts, “I'm winning,” even though he keeps falling off dark stones onto light stones. Balancing with only one arm must be difficult.

  I say, “You're really good at this game."

  It's getting dark and I know Mom will be mad at me for being so late, but I'm allowing myself to champion the petty act of defiance. We make it to the Little Red Bookstore with its clapboard walls, cathedral ceiling, and giant mahogany bookcases with the customer scaffolding planks jutting out at the higher levels. There are people everywhere. Customers occupy the plush reading chairs and couches, the planks, and the seven rolling stack-ladders. I hold Jeffrey's hand as we wade through the crowd toward the fiction section. No one notices us.

  Jeffrey is as patient as he can be, but soon he's tugging at my arm and skirt, asking if we can find dinosaur books, then asking if we can go home. I need a stack-ladder to go after the books I want. They're still all taken. But even if I could get a ladder, I can't leave Jeffrey unattended and he can't climb the ladder and walk the bookcase scaffolding with me. So I grab a random book, something I've never heard of by someone I've never heard of, because I have to buy something. Then I walk Jeffrey to the kid section and to some dinosaur books. He sits on the ground with a pop-up book in his lap. He knows all the dinosaur names, even the complex ones with silent letters and phs everywhere, and I've never understood why boys love the monsters that scare them so much. Above my heads, people climb in and out of the ladders and platforms and book stacks.