Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction Part 4

"No, but listen to this. A skiff's lost on the first planet. Some kind of geomagnetic disturbance is tripping up rescue-all sorts of equipment down. Survey teams across the fleet reporting very strange data."

I could have told her then, and perhaps I should have, but words would just not come. How could I convince her that what I had heard, what I had seen, was real without triggering an emergency of my own? I checked my life support. Ga.s.ses in the nominal range, though I was building CO2 too rapidly-hyperventilating? I had only an hour left in Area Seven, at the outside.

"I want to come down and get you."

The thought of Tessa on the surface, of both of us losing track of time, made me s.h.i.+ver. "Just . . . a few more minutes," I said. "Whatever you do, stay with the s.h.i.+p. We need someone to stay with the s.h.i.+p.""Serge. . . ."

"Tessa, stay with the s.h.i.+p."

From other suicides I heard more war stories-one from a foot soldier who ran from battle but ironically found the courage to slit his own throat rather than face his sergeant. A large, doubled form, situated on a low rise, the smaller shape entwined around the larger, turned out to be the painful twin suicide of an exiled father and son.

Further north, they told me, lay the spirits of the conventionally violent, the murderers, the terrorists, the thugs, wallowing in a river of ancient, boiling blood. South of us, towards the planet's equator, on a plain of sand so hot that it suggested planetary processes fleet had never encountered before, resided those guilty of more refined versions of the sin, the perverse, the falsifiers, perpetrators of violence against nature on its most fundamental level.

When I finally turned back toward the skiff, an even taller shape caught my attention. It stood apart, a full meter higher than anything else in sight, erect, with a kind of stately bearing. My life support was hovering near reserve, but I made my way over.

I ran my hand over its surface. I used my hammer to pry a section free. In its place on the trunk the blood-red quicksilver bubbled out, as if under pressure.

"Speak to me," I whispered. "Tell me who you are."

A sad voice answered: I was the next to rule.

I held the keys to the n.o.blest heart Of all the lords. Envy turned all against me, Envy was the start.

He had been regent and it was said of him that he knew his lord's mind even before his master did. The old inner circle grew jealous, whispered of his complicity with a rival faction, ties to an exiled commander. They had him arrested.

Once in the damp prison, he was tortured. When he would not reveal his lord's battle plans, they took a fine hot wire and pierced his eyes. The pain, he said, was inexpressible.

Locked in his cold cell, without even a cord to hang himself by, he marshaled his strength and began to beat his head against the wall. He beat and fell, and rose and beat again, crus.h.i.+ng his skull against the stone until he felt nothing, saw nothing, and heard nothing at all.

I swear, that never in word or spirit did I, Peter of the Vine, break faith with my lord.

Oh traveler, vindicate my memory!I remembered him from Dante! Pier della Vigne, Peter of the Vine!

It moves me even now to think that, though many there had ended their lives out of shame, or cowardice, many others had done so in a search for honor or in pursuit of relief from unfathomable pain. Yet they all shared the punishment by the means I saw before my eyes, and pain inhabited every shape. How could I understand their sin? A failing in each of them, a turning away from life, from the heart of things? Story after story suggested it, each half fairy tale, half tragic history, life stories from a fantastic world of lost beings.

I was aware I was running out of time from the visuals I was getting from Tessa on my helmet array. In the end, I toggled down even that display, listening to my own breathing and the hypnotizing voices of the figures before me.

I don't know what broke the spell-the light on the horizon, rising voices, Tessa's insistent calls on the override com circuit. At some point I toggled the skiff back online, but only to silence the suit alarm.

"Serge, we are listing emergency event. Please respond. Repeat. Emergency event. Planetary rotation critical and dangerous. Repeat. Emergency event. Your life support numbers are degrading and surface time's approaching terminus. Repeat, Serge, surface terminus. This is urgent. Whatever minutes you've got, when you see the sun, the temp's going to exceed your suit's cap. Please respond."

I swayed, fought for balance, as the blue world seemed to spin around me. My experience had shriven my soul-now my own problems seemed inconsequential, my own depression trivial and self-indulgent. I felt I had been granted a vision, but would I be able to make sense of it?

I knew it was too late now for Tessa to launch a rescue. Had I, I wondered, come down to enact my own suicide? Was that what it all meant?

The light on the horizon was resolving into a bright pillar of fire. A rising heat, beyond the already elevated temps of the planet, had begun fracturing the shapes. Around me, the murmuring was coalescing into cries and weeping, appeals and rants. Another memory from the home planet: lava falling from a low cliff into the sea, boiling waters, the awful rending cry of a torn landscape-I thought I heard it now on a rising wind.

That's when I made out Tessa's voice on the com channel, throaty with desperation and fatigue. In my mind's eye I could see her in the dim light. "Oh, Serge, it's too late now. I don't know why you've been so sad. I should never have let you go. I should have come down. I can only tell you how much I love you-I wish you'd get it, Serge, wish you'd understand. I need you. You always thought it was the other way around-Ineedyou . I don't know what I'm going to do without you. . . ." She went on for a while-and then all I could hear was quiet weeping.

Something . . . snapped in me. It felt it like a small electrical charge, and from that tiny impulse I struggled against inertia and finally turned back toward the skiff. Tessa was firing off seismic rounds to get my attention, but I have to tell you, they weren't what made me move.

I credit Tessa herself, the quality of her heart. It was what I could hear in her weeping, her willingness to reach out to me even after I seemed lost. She saved me that way, I think, touched my own heart, turned me away from the sad death I was surrounded with and was sinking toward, turned me back toward the s.h.i.+p. I've thought about it a lot since then. Really, it was Tessa who saved me.

I stepped heavily toward the lift cable. My suit felt as if it had turned to lead. I could see heat rising around me in visible wisps from the surface, shapes running with blood, I could hear a rising chorus ofvoices, howling as one. . . .

Eventually, the sunlight was so bright, so shot through with high-frequency yellows and pale, s.h.i.+mmering blues, that it was as if I was pa.s.sing through flames themselves, as if my body was stepping through the heart of some strange fire. Voices screaming around me, white light devouring my sight, I found the heavy cable and clenched it in my hand.

That very day they pulled us out. They pulled usall out, all the skiffs, the whole C Survey. Only when we were all a.s.sembled for the journey back did we come to understand the depth of the trouble we'd been in. Two crews had been lost out of twenty-two, two entire skiffs. Think of it-almost one out of ten of us didn't make it back. We lost tons of instrumentation and equipment. All for nothing-navigation errors corrupted every bit of the data. Besides the serious stuff, there were dozens of accidents, accounts of bizarre experiences like mine. As you know, the survey's become something of a legend. You hear about it in the service bars, in the NCO clubs. All sorts of wild stories-as if what happened wasn't wild enough!

The official line is that crews suffered under a kind of ma.s.s delusion, that some set of circ.u.mstances stressed us collectively. It caused us, as skiff crews, to translate our responses into the discourse of Dante's imagination.

But the data's not that coherent. I don't think one in ten of us, of the crews on station, had actually read the poem. It hadn't been on my mind for years.

Takahis.h.i.+ has an alternate explanation. He thinks that we stumbled onto one of the cosmos' gallery of amazements, an alien race who took the transmissions that we humans have been flooding the galaxy with for a thousand years now-all the great works of art, our genome, our technology, our languages and works of literature, the details of history and daily life-and reconstructed a medieval Catholic milieu to test us once we arrived on their doorstep.

I don't know. Why Dante? Why would they be so specific? Still, maybe Takahis.h.i.+'s right. Extraordinary events require extraordinary explanations. Imagine for a moment that Takahis.h.i.+'s explanation is true-a sun with three planets on which strange intelligences live out eternities enacting ideas that come from such a profound distance. Who could these intelligences be?

Personally I think the truth lies between the two explanations, that it's stranger than even Takahis.h.i.+ imagines. Perhaps what happened to us can be seen as a message from the beings of that system. They accessed our computers, looked for a set of stories to describe us to ourselves. Maybe they knew what we had in mind for them-we'd come looking for planets to rearrange and terraform, after all. It could be that they took our inner lives, dramatized punishments for our mission, made them personal, and cast us away. I don't know.

Of course, the way we're finding minerals in the Arcturus sector nowadays, it'll be a long time before we get back to that three-planet system to figure out what really went on. Tessa and I have talked about it a lot. She thinks it'll be at least a thousand years before we get back there. Morgan agrees. The system's out of the way, he says, and there's just no percentage in going back.

Now, if you'll be seated, Tessa will bring you some refreshments, and I'll tell you some of the other stories we heard. We've got quite a bit of material from the fragmentary data, from the transcripts, from the reports. About the first planet. I don't know much about the other two. That data's been cla.s.sified from the start. Morgan claims that the third planet-where we lost those two crews without a trace, first one crew and then the other that was sent to look for them-was a version of Paradise. Perhaps they're in some kind of heaven, or maybe they died only thinking they were living out their fantasies.Anyway, as for the planet Tessa and I were scouting, the first planet, we have some images to show you as well. Thank you, Tessa. See if you can make out the human shapes punished in what looks like an icy storm, or bodies ravaged by the swipes of snarling beasts. I know the images aren't quite clear, but these are things survey crews claimed they saw, or heard, much as I did the bleeding suicides. The reports especially shake the soul-we have one of a woman, her intestines spilled from her body, who holds her severed head by its black hair like a lantern. I don't remember her from Dante. At the planet's south pole, Morgan claims he saw living shapes ripped and gnawed by packs of hydra-headed monsters. Is this a peek into the alien world? A hidden part of Dante's? Ours? What a savage place the imagination can be!

The Dream of Vibo

Patrick O'Leary

In a sad year that no one thought would ever end, Vibo, Third Ruler of The Great Empire, fell into a deep sleep from which he could not be woken. His attendants lit candles for every hour he slept, and at the end of his dream journey, he yawned, his eyelids fluttered, and he sat up in the great golden bed of his chamber to find the room swimming in light.

Vibo had a strong long triangular face, like an arrowhead pointing to the ground. And his attendants watched as he shook it, violently back and forth, as if to clear his mind of a nightmare or a wicked thought. It frightened them to watch in the candlelight for it looked to them as if Vibo, their great ruler, was becoming many men, many versions of himself. Multiple faces appeared in his s.h.i.+vering visage, and his wide beautiful eye sockets trembled like the wings of the legendary b.u.t.terfly.

Finally, the shaking stopped and their ruler was returned to them.

"I have had a dream," said Vibo the Third in a great booming voice. "It is a big dream. I must tell it to my son."

His son stepped out of the dancing lights, a pale boy, just growing into the crown of his brow, who handed his white candle to his attendant and sat beside his father on the golden bed.

"Leave us alone," said Vibo.

And when the attendants and lessers and majors and all his wives had left the chamber, and they could hear their footsteps like giant beetles scuttling down the hall, Great Vibo took the boy into his arms and said, "I have learned a great secret, my son."

His son was a wise lad, who only spoke after he had considered several angles of thought-a skill his father had taught him. Yet being young, he was not afraid to question.

"In a dream?"

"Yes," Vibo said. "Except it didn't feel like a dream. Strange. It felt like a memory. Someone else's memory. And it happened long ago. There were cars."

"Cars?" his son said. Recalling his lesson on those ancient vehicles of transport. The lessons of the poisons people used to breathe. Poisons that sickened the world, and caused generations of mutation and strife. Their dark history.

"Yes, cars. And birds.""Birds?" His son asked in wonder. As distant to his mind as dinosaurs: flying creatures who once roamed the skies. When skies were blue. Birds. The stuff of legend.

"And everything was dying," Vibo cried. "And n.o.body knew it."

His son rubbed his shoulder as the Great Ruler wept.

Finally Vibo sighed, and sniffed, and collected himself. "There was a day," Vibo began, "when all life depended on one moment. And everything before and everything since depended on that one moment. It pa.s.sed and n.o.body knew it."

On this day, a sad man woke and found his wife smiling down at him. She hadn't done that for years. And it was the nicest morning he could have imagined. The sun came through the window behind her and gave a nimbus glow to her thin gray hair. And he asked her what she was thinking that made her so happy. I was thinking of you, she answered. And why I love you. Outside their window a red cardinal swooped down past the bird feeder over the white lawn to rest on the low branch of a tree. There he smelled the boys who played in the treehouse they built that summer.

And the cardinal c.o.c.ked his head in question. And in the house next door the boy he smelled leaned down to pick up a golden cat. The cat purred and accepted the boy's warm arms. The boy looked deeply into the cat's eyes. And wondered why he purred. And the boy felt the cat's answer.

Because somebody loved me. And the boy smiled. And his mother caught his smile as she was was.h.i.+ng the smeared window that overlooked the white lawn, the white rag squeaking, squeaking as it absorbed the ammonia water and grime. And a flash of red went by and she thought: Is that a cardinal? Then she recalled birthing the boy, how after a long, hard labor, he erupted between her legs, folded onto her chest, took his first breaths, and transformed limb by limb, like a great spreading blush from a blue baby who loved her on the inside into a pink soft creature who loved her on the outside, too. And she recalled the smiling nurse who swabbed him gently and asked his name. And at that moment, that very important moment, that nurse's sister (who had moved into the neighborhood last summer) was dying. And she reached up to touch the chin of her husband (the only place he had to shave), who had sat in vigil at her bedside for many long and harrowing months. And she smiled a weak smile, and said Remember Ford Road? And their smiles deepened as they recalled the night they drove off the freeway, deep into the dark and found a side dirt road, then a crooked two-lane trail that led them to a hidden cove in the heart of the woods. And crawling into the back seat of their car they hungrily, desperately stripped off their clothes and made love wildly, screaming as they never could before. And they wept there in their bed, surrounded by the sacred memory. What was that? the dying sister said as a red streak flitted past their window and paused before it dipped and found a perch on an aluminum gutter where a dead brown leaf lay frozen in a posture of wide wonder. Like an open fist. The leaf had escaped its tree, the only tree it ever knew, its only home. And caught by a gust of October wind and torn from the branch, it had been swept away into the first and only flight of its life. And as it spun and twirled it knew that this, this was what it was made for, not to cast its dark shape into a fluttering patch of shade in the hot summer sun, not to bathe in the chill spring rains or even to lie frozen and splayed out in a gutter to bask in its memories, but for that one, brief dizzy moment of flight. The red bird understood and he affirmed the leaf's joy by spreading his wings wide. Then he coasted down to where a car was trying to back out of a drive. Stuck. Its rear tires spinning, spinning in two slick grooves of snow and ice, and what interesting music it makes, the bird thought. And a young man was behind the wheel, s.h.i.+fting back and forth from drive to reverse, and slamming the accelerator and letting it go. And cursing to the young woman beside him: It is an awful world, a f.u.c.king awful world. Why would anyone want to live in it? And the young woman told him why and for that moment he wanted to live again, if only to see in her eyes the beauty she saw in him.

What was that? said the young woman. A cardinal, said the young man, and they watched itdisappear over a roof in a perfect acrobatic arch. And in the next yard an old man stood looking up at the clouds gray and close and thought, have I done nothing right, have I wasted every moment, will I always wonder if it mattered? And he heard a sound and turned in his sorrow to find the red bird tasting water from the broken ice of a puddle in the shape of a shoe. I made that puddle, the old man thought, recalling the crunch and the shallow sink of his foot as he had stepped despairing out onto the white lawn to look at the sky and consider all his life had brought him and taken away. What a beautiful thing that is, he thought. Momentarily stunned by the red red stain against the white white lawn. We never know why we live, the old man thought. Maybe it was to give that hobo a ride to the bus station. That was when? Twenty years ago? He could smell the liquor on his breath, feel the chill coming off his army jacket as he entered the warm Impala and slammed the door.

Impala? the Prince wondered.

Or maybe it was to give my coin collection to my granddaughter. Sarah. He loved to say her name. Sarah. Or maybe it was that pony I whittled for my son when he was sick.

Pony?

Or maybe it was the glimpse of that naked woman undressing in a hotel room in Manhattan.

Watching that one window in a night city of many windows. Her beautiful white body stretching in the glow of one bedside lamp.

The Prince did not wonder about that.

Or maybe it was this. This lovely red bird. Oops. Where did it go? And the red cardinal dodged a swarm of chickadees and coasted over the hill and skimming the gray slate stream that ran slow and steamed until he came to the old church, painted white and hidden from the road in a circle of pines. To the high broken window that let out warm drafts from the sanctuary. His refuge when the cold got to be too much. As he perched he could hear an organ playing. He coasted down into the dark church, over the empty pews, to where the only light was from the red votive candles and saw the young woman in gla.s.ses playing the organ. Identical red flames danced in each of her lenses. He landed where he could watch her fingers. Fingers being the only thing he envied of humans. How versatile they were. How they could make food and peel fruit and rub muscles and stroke hair-it was hard for him to reach his head. And the music they made. So full of longing.

So empty of flight. And he listened to her playing the complicated old song. Her favorite piece to play when she was alone. She was alone. Her boyfriend was in the war and his last letter was a week ago. And her fingers dancing on the yellowed keys were her fingers dancing on his skin, the skin she knew so well and might never know again. If I finish this one piece without a mistake, she thought, if I play it perfectly, he will return to me. Whole. He will not die in fire. His beautiful body will not be torn open by shrapnel or bullet. If I only finish this one piece. The cardinal left then, finding the high broken window, escaping into the long white hills, ribboning between the dark towering trees, each of whom greeted him as he pa.s.sed, saying Red One, where are you going?

Scratch my trunk! Please scratch my trunk! And he flew to the park where no one was playing on the monkeybars, or the slide, the swings or the teeter totter. He landed on its handlebar and grasped it with his claws. And he thought about the many people whose thoughts he had touched.

They think they are alone, he thought. They think everything in the world is sleeping except them.

Not me, said the teeter totter plank. I remember being a tree. There were no children then. Hush, thought, the bird, I am thinking. I am thinking of time a million years hence. A time of great order brought by great violence. I am thinking about the wisest, most powerful leader. He is dreaming a dream. He is dreaming my life. He has waited and lived and conquered and killed for this onemoment to happen. He is ready to hear me, though I will be dead a million years when he does.

What will I tell him? What is the story he needs to hear? Is it the leaf's story? The sad boy's story?

The cat's story? The dying woman's story? What is required of me? The playground was silent.

The snow, the trees and all the high pa.s.sing clouds were silent. The cardinal shook his head.

Shook it so hard that a spray of moist microscopic beads was jettisoned into the air, rained down and froze solid the moment they touched the snow. I have this to tell him, thought the red bird.

Every moment is important. You do not know that yet. Everything is awake. You do not know that yet. Everything is alive. Everything matters.

Shake off this dream. Wake up.

On the golden bed, in the dark day, surrounded by candles and holding his only son's hand, Vibo the Third and Last Great Ruler of Earth, shook his head again. And sighed.

"That was our past," Vibo's son said, looking out over the balcony onto the cold dark land, the steaming red sky, and the dimming red sun.

"Yes," his father said. "I dreamed a bird's life. A million years ago." He frowned. "But what good is this dream? What can we do now? It is too late."

"Maybe," his son said. "Maybe dreams do not obey the boundaries of time."

"Yes," Vibo said. "Yes!" His face opened in the candlelight and his eyes glowed. "Maybe it is possible for someone back then to dream our life."

"And they will wake up," his son said smiling.

"And they will wake up," his father said.

For Claire 1/23/02

The Artist Makes a Splash

Jerry Oltion

They wanted to destroy his finest work. That wasn't the way the Terragen Council presented it when they came to Talan with their proposal, but that's what they wanted. He would create the best sculpture he could possibly build-for what artist could do less with each new project?-and then at the dedication ceremony for the new atmosphere, they would smash it to flinders for the crowd's amus.e.m.e.nt.

Ephemeral art was all the rage back on Earth. Perhaps it came from living in an open environment.

Everything came from the soil and everything eventually returned to it; what matter, then, if you returned something a bit early? In humanity's far-flung colonies, however, where people lived sealed in domes and held a hostile universe at bay mostly through sweat and engineering, anything that might still have a use was carefully h.o.a.rded, repaired, and returned to service.

Of course the dedication of the atmosphere could change all that. For the first time in human history, a terraformed planet was about to be declared habitable on the surface. It required a generous interpretation of the term "habitable," to be sure, but for the last few months a person could step outside on Nivala without an environment suit and live to tell the tale. Only at the poles, where Altair's intense ultraviolet rays came in at a low enough angle to keep from crisping an unprotected body, but there was still vastly more acreage available outside than in the domes. The icy ground-frozen for millions, maybe billions, of years-had begun to thaw. In a few more years, farmers could plant crops in the open, and people could sleep with the sound of rustling leaves coming in through their windows.

And maybe they could relax the intense code of recycling that they had lived under for so long. Lengthen the chain of processing steps between wastewater and drinking water. Bury bodies instead of rendering them down for their protein.

Talan considered his commission. An artwork that existed only to be destroyed. It did open new possibilities.