Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead (30 page)

Something had to be lost.

I turn from the bunker.

I sniff at the open air.

Nothing.

It doesn’t matter. I am full for now. I can keep walking. I’ll find something out there, sooner or later. There has to be someone left for me to drink.

But what if there isn’t?

It doesn’t matter.

I walk — a solitary speck of darkness enduring within a long and parched eternity of light. The bones behind me wash clean in the dust of burning forever.

Far off, long into that lonely gulp of horizon, I see a distant glinting.

I’m coming.

I know it is out there.

* * * * *

Steve Vernon is a Halifax, Nova Scotia writer and storyteller with nearly thirty years experience in the yarn-spinning business. He wrote “The Faith of Burning Glass” while in the heat of ship-in-a-bottle building entrapment. It took rescue teams nearly three hours of environmental lubricant, glass-welding techniques and applied snappy patter to talk Steve out from inside of that bottle. A much-altered version of this story appeared in an ultra-limited thirteen copy edition of his recent dark fiction collection
Do-Overs and Detours
(Dark Region Press). Steve has recently released his very first YA novel,
Sinking Deeper
 (Nimbus Publishing), the saga of a young boy, a dying town, a sea monster and a caber toss.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Soulglobe

By John Shirley

“Even death has its fashions,” said Tet, chuckling softly as he led Frank and Mella Zand through passage seventy-seven of the catacomb world. Frank thought the remark was pretty flip and insensitive, given that Mella was dying. But pushing his dark-eyed Iraqi wife smoothly along the stone passageway in her float-chair, he kept his peace. He’d promised Mella he’d accept Soulglobe, every last bit of it, including the morbid sense of humor sometimes displayed by its docents.

“
Soulglobe
is fashionable,” the docent went on, in his silky voice, “but it will transcend mere fashion, that I promise you!” The docent was a tall, stooped, gray-eyed man, papery pale, with a tumble of curly flaxen hair about his shoulders; he wore a long white robe trimmed in gold and silver filigree; his feet were sheathed in spray-on gold shoes sharply outlining his toes. “This asteroid will survive for millions of years. Those laid to rest here will be safely entombed for all that long time. Memorialized in a work of art.”

“I’ve got to wonder about that term, ‘laid to rest’,” Frank grumbled. “What with the drift coffins. The Ballet of the Dead…”

Mella glanced over her shoulder at him, her gaunt, reproachful face making his heart ache. Her raven hair had gone thin and white. At thirty-five, she was ten years younger than him — but she looked far older. “Frank…? Please?”

He sighed. “I’m not complaining, Mel. I just…” He couldn’t say it.
I just don’t want to think about your dead body floating through this place like a speck in a snowglobe.

They were reaching the end of the passage; the docent, striding ahead, was framed against the semicircular opening into the Great Cavern. As they walked up to him, Frank noticed that the docent’s fingernails had been replaced with long, sharp flattened crystals so that his hands sparkled when he gestured.

Why don’t his fingernails grow and push the crystals out?
Frank wondered. Had the guy gone to all the trouble to get genetically re-engineered for a fingernail effect?

“And here it is,” Tet said, with a glittering flutter of his hand.

Frank pushed Mella closer — not too close — to the balcony’s edge. They looked out over the great spherical chamber. A cold, fluctuating wind stung his cheeks. The Soulglobe was an asteroid, a nearly perfect sphere a little over a kilometer and a half in diameter. It was a gigantic, transparent bubble of crystal, with encrustations of scab-like rock making a rough mesh around the outside of the bubble; each rocky section was pocked with balconies like theirs. Shafts of light, curiously muted with a faint blueness, angled into the misty, spherical interior and bounced around inside, reflecting from glistening inner surfaces, shifting as the globe slowly rotated. It was difficult to see the stars from within the asteroid but floating close to one of the diamond-shaped transparent sections, an observer could see the distant sun. The sun was Sol; from time to time, in the right conditions, it was said that the planetoid Pluto and the nearby gas giant Neptune were visible as gemlike orbs against velvet black.

Frank shook his head in wonder. “You claim this thing is natural? That crust out there — the mesh pattern looks almost—”

“It does look almost artificial, at times, yes, though one can see the natural patterns of rock if one looks closely,” the docent said, in his pompous diction. “We have plans to build artificial copies of this one, when we’ve reached capacity. Of course, the Soulglobe
could
be an artifact — it was found floating in the asteroid belt, then moved out to this safer location, and there is speculation that the asteroid belt was part of a planet that was destroyed, and that the sphere was a structure on the lost planet, artificial or natural. Personally I think it’s a sort of giant geode.”

“It reminds me of a Ramadan decoration I had when I was a kid,” Mella said, her voice weak. “It was supposed to be a moon. I used to stare into it, imagine what it would be like to be inside it.” Her voice was scarcely audible, trailing off when she said, “I feel like I’m inside it here…”

Sounds echoed across the vast interior space of the Soulglobe: a deep hum, rising and falling, the occasional rachitic metal clangor, the sigh of wind and a poignant sound that might be weeping.

The sounds made Frank think of that first battlefield pre-dawn on the terra-formed plains of Mars. He was Sarge for a relief platoon, defending Colony Three; wounded soldiers were calling from the dull red sands of the battlefield; crackly voices in transmissions carried thinly across the plains. The gusting of manufactured air — the artificial atmosphere of Mars — sighed as it lifted wraithlike curtains of red dust. Frank kept his platoon hunkered behind the barriers, waiting for morning, as per orders; the InstanStone the Orbital Army engineers had laid down for them was still soft in places. They’d deployed in a hurry, ready to advance with their night-seeing goggles — but it was the old ‘hurry up and wait’. The sandstorm, and the procrastination of Command Center, kept them in their igloo-like shelter, peering out the stony slits. Their brothers, Rangers in the OA, were dying out there and they couldn’t get to them.

For thousands of years, men on battlefields had groaned and died, their dying taking all night long, their cries unanswered; a soldier’s life draining slowly away, as the hours of darkness passed.
Ought to be a better way to make war by now.
Three medical robots and a remote scoop had been sent to bring in the wounded, but the enemy had refused a medical truce, had slammed the rescue gear with seeker missiles, despite the fact that they’d have rescued wounded Orthos too. Frank and his men watched the fires of the rescue gear burning, the flamelight guttering along the crater rim; they’d listened to the screams, the begging. That night Frank had learned to hate the Russian Orthodox Army: psychological robots from the theocratic cult Russia had become.

A night of sighing wind, as if the darkness were weeping…

Something glossy-white swept by the balcony of Soulglobe passage seventy-seven, making Frank step back from the balcony, back into this melancholy moment with Mella and the gray-eyed, flaxen-haired stranger who called himself Tet.

“What was
that?”
Frank asked.

“One of our Guests,” said Tet with a slight smile. “I just got a glimpse, but I believe it was a woman’s body, sheathed in the new Mark Three coatings. Fixed in the cruciform position.” He bowed slightly to Mella. “The posture was as per that lady’s final request, of course.”

Another of the dead swept by — this one carried in a glass coffin. The farther one went, away from the rotating shell of the asteroid and into the center of the globe, the weaker gravity became. Even here, in the enhanced gravitation of the shell, gravity was less than a quarter of Earth normal.

Tet reached into a pocket of his robe, pulled out a round, shiny golden object, and peered at it. When Frank looked at it quizzically, Tet smiled. “Oh this?” Even his smile seemed silky. “It’s a ‘pocket watch’. Nineteenth century vintage. Three hundred years old. A family heirloom. And it tells me that the Ballet of the Dead is about to begin … Ah! The first strains of Mozart’s
Requiem in D Minor!
It’s shortened a bit, adapted for ballet.”

“Oh!” Mella said, as classical music skirled through the immense globular space with surprising fidelity.

Frank stared, as corpses danced by in the globe’s hollow interior, moving precisely to the music: sheathed in translucent preservative material, fixed in a variety of dramatic poses, the bodies of all kinds of people, even a few children, flew into the near-zero-gravity core of the globe. Released from a circular opening below the other balconies, they were directed in their dance by pulsars at the extremities of the corpses; the dead were choreographed into a grand balletic display, first around the edges, close to the curved walls, then drawing in toward the center of the cloudy, light-shafted sphere. The music swelled; the corpses whirled, spun, arced up like droplets in a fountain, then spread out in choreographic symmetry, whirling like the dancers in a ballet.

“They’ll all be guided back to their resting places,” Tet said, soothingly, “when the
Communio
completes the Requiem.”

“You see, Frank?” Mella said, raspily, gazing out at the Ballet of the Dead. “They’re part of a work of art … a gigantic kinetic sculpture. I want to be part of it too.”

Twelve hours later, Mella hadn’t changed her mind. She signed the releases at the ship’s computer interface. She signed the euthanasia release without a flicker of hesitation.

Hands trembling, Frank dressed Mella in the pretty ivory-white clingsuit that she’d picked for the occasion. He wore his ceremonial Orbital Army uniform. It was a tad too small for him, tight at the waist. He’d gained some weight since last time he’d worn it, at Lieutenant Bernard’s funeral.

They took the shuttle from the space station to the Soulglobe hangar, scarcely saying a word, just holding hands. Neither one of them had bothered with breakfast. Through the shuttle viewport Frank glimpsed the finale of one of the ballets, seeing it from outside the Soulglobe, through the transparent panes: floating bodies, their small, distant outlines making him think of parading chromosomes, were silhouetted against the blue glow of the hollow sphere. Peering at the exterior of the globe he could just make out the clustered blackened carbonized steel tubes of the orbital adjustment thruster, fixed into the southern pole, the external part of the fusion engine that Transcrystal Inc had installed to move the Soulglobe to this position.

Frank was thinking, once more, of signing a euthanasia waiver too; of joining Mella in death. She was pretty much all he had in the world, except for the OA. He’d been a specialist in killing — and she’d been about life
.
She’d always been so lively, a believer in the beauty of living; she was his refuge from destruction. She was
his
center of gravity. He’d be like the moon without the Earth to orbit. And it didn’t matter to him what happened to his body after death, though the Ballet of the Dead seemed ludicrous, even humiliating. Still, he’d killed too many men, seen too many bodies in his time to really care.

But they’d been all through it. She wouldn’t hear of his joining her in euthanasia.

The Ballet of the Dead.
Imagining Mella becoming part of that absurdity — it twisted his insides. He already felt responsible for her dying, though it hadn’t been his fault the radiation shielding on the transport had been compromised. She’d been coming to share his furlough on Mars One, both of them happy — and then she started to shrivel up, even before she arrived. Interplanetary radiation poisoning was still being studied. No one knew exactly how uninsulated exposure led to Rapid Decline Syndrome, or why it resisted the cell reboots, the revitalizations that worked for so many other illnesses. But the doctors were certain that Frank Zand’s wife was dying of the syndrome, with a great deal of suffering; that she was eligible for euthanasia.

It was natural, he thought, that she’d be attracted to the Soulglobe. She’d been an art history teacher — an activist in the Face-to-Face Teaching movement, insisting on human, in-person teachers in a time when most children learned via cognitive transfer and VR conditioning. She wanted to be an example to her students, show her commitment to art by donating her body to a work of art.

But there was something about the Soulglobe that alerted his protective instinct. And his instincts had grown keen on the battlefield.

“I’m sorry we didn’t have kids,” she whispered, as he eased her float-chair out of the shuttle, along the passageway to the Euthanasia Center. Ahead of them, a wizened, white haired man in an ochre clingsuit was riding an elderchair, heading for his own euthanasia.