Stories for Chip (49 page)

Why had there been no owl screech, no ominous dream, no fire alarm, no fire-colored moon in the sky the night his father had died? Logan had gone on sleeping, the mellow rhythm of his breathing unbroken while his father crossed that yawning gulf alone.

The death of his father should have been like the lowering of another world. He should have sensed that the sky had been swallowed, should have felt that second world settling like another night. Its magnetic poles should have pricked up the hairs on the back of his neck, made them stiff as cactus needles. The added gravity should have squeezed the breath out of him, pressed against his dreaming as though sinking into mud, tracking itself, leaving scarred terrain as proof of the casual forces loose in the world—which had collided at an intersection where two trucks had mangled themselves as if one of them had expected to win. Their shiny grills like sets of teeth caught, the two trucks had stopped dead trying to take a hunk out of one another. No witnesses, both drivers killed, both drunk, police had never ruled on who'd run the signal.

Twelve years later Logan hadn't let go. Fingers bent with gripping, cramped and tangled in horsehair, holding on to the bristling mane of night. Veins rippled across taut skin. Mane of the constellation Horse. Bright pain as the windows of the skull fog with frost.

It had been a car accident. Cal was a mechanic. But…how?

The amount of motion in the universe constant, only direction changes, is affected by will, acted on by the soul's desire. Is that how he did it? By wishing for it? By deep-felt belief?

And what is that whisper running along the bone like a breathy prayer rounding the dome of St. Pauls? His father's voice? Prodding his conscience?

Jim Lee looking around the room, sifting the haze of voices and exhausted cigarettes as if waiting in some dust-infested corner were the very thing he'd been scouring the sky for with his tripodded magnifying glass. Sitting there as though it might sidle up next to him, take a seat on one of Larry's stools (electrical tape covering a split in the leather), maybe he was waiting for a vision to visit. Weren't they all? A moment different from any other that would make sense of every other? That would make this long night of disappointment breathable, bearable? Why else look over at the door every time it opened? Jim Lee, who'd seen the submerged bottom of the world, stared forlornly at the unplugged jukebox.

Caught in the night's undertow, his flashlight lost, something of the cool shadows cast among tombstones in his eyes, Jim Lee—Logan would've bet—wanted to ask something of the dead, possessed of oracular knowledge as they were rumored to be, having circumnavigated this side and that, seen the darkest of places, what he wanted to know—his ass half hanging off the stool—was why he could blow things up two or three times lifesize but not see any clearer. Was how to keep night after night from etching unwanted tattoos on memory's skin. How it could be he was looking out on things and still wondering about the order to put them in: does death really come before dishonor (the price of those free scuba lessons)? And if forced to choose, would it be another line of poetry or a line of coke? A little sky scanning or another gander from his stool outpost at the sweaty faces and smoky voices? Where exactly was he supposed to be standing (or sitting) in relation to everything else? Deep-sea diver into the early morning hours, what was all that down there on the unlit end of the ocean floor? And what have we got here on the gritty floorboards we've never noticed by day? Light chases the mystery outta things, though pure darkness makes the exact whereabouts a your hand in front of your face fairly enigmatic. A Beethoven symphony or the insects in the fields with their endless nightchant? The Epic of Gilgamesh or another excursion to one of Frontenac's titty bars? A little more living or a peek at the secrets of the dead?

That is the question.

Tenea D. Johnson

For the moment, William had forgotten, and in forgetting an ephemeral, disjointed peace alighted upon him. He allowed himself to savor it. The sun warmed his upturned face as he lay on a secluded hillside, surrounded by purplish-pink flowers. He didn't see another person. So he could not ask anyone where, exactly, he found himself. It felt like midday, and the sun's position overhead confirmed this. William left it at that: he was out in the afternoon. Behind the curiosity, he sensed relief in the space knowing had left behind. It was enough that it was beautiful outside and he, alone. A gentle wind blew up the length and across the girth of him, pausing as it traveled to collect its breath to finish the journey. He stretched his long limbs, savoring the sensation of the great columns of muscle reaching their limits. Through the thin fabric of his pocket, he felt a small, hard rectangle slide across his thigh. Yawning, William shoved a calloused hand into his pocket to pull out the surprise.

He recalled that he enjoyed this game of discovering himself from the things he carried.

When he wrenched his hand free and opened his palm, he found an ancient datacorder resting in the expanse between his faint life and love lines. He recognized it immediately and cleared his throat. William's rich bass activated its sensor. With a click, it, and he, came to life.

He spoke. “This is the fourth, no, the fifth datacorder I've had. The others are…full, also hidden.” William took a long pause, searching his mind for more. What else should he say? He stared at the thing in his palm and concentrated.

“I traded for this one, on the way through…middle Tennessee…from a man…on a broken bridge contemplating a quick, wet end. He stood, staring at the water, at the end of a beautiful road. I discovered him because the pathway had pulled me in. Bright pumpkin, cherry red, a gold like tarnished quincentennial coins: those leaves. They framed the trail and it looked like I'd stepped inside a painting of the last bend before home on the prettiest day in autumn. I'd been walking eleven, maybe twelve years by then. I usually trekked in the dark. People took too much notice of my size otherwise. It made them want to talk to me, to ask questions. So my world was night, layers of dark, shadow, and pall. With the…
bombings?
Yesss, the bombings…and the round-ups, places like that path spread farther apart every day. Peaceful places are always precious, I guess.”

William let his gaze wander, begin to drift away. With an effort, he roused himself.

“Out in the country, when I saw people, they were usually huddled around lean-tos. They dotted the toxic sites and other abandoned places folks ran to when the gene corps came searching—” He paused, wondering what they were searching for. It eluded him.

“Because of the skull plate jutting out from his forehead and the dirty film on his camoed skin, I could tell the man on the bridge had gone AWOL from the corps. Like the rest of them, his adaptations were post-pubescent and work-specific, not genetic, therefore aching, foreign, and often fleeting. Not worth the pain, but the corporate reps didn't tell recruits that when they signed up, and seeing as they were recruits mostly because they wanted to eat it wouldn't have mattered. Still, back then, the gene corps had a high turnover rate. Often the heart rejected what the body did not.

“And so it must have been with him. He must have caught a case of conscience, and it had led him to that spot. He couldn't continue in his duties, or perhaps at all, so his former employer had no use for him. They paid the gene corps not to care how many suffered or died in their quest for…for…manufactured…immortality. Yes, they were searching for a single set of DNA that had become legend. That they had been sent as a provocation.”

Flashes of queues and refugee camps overwhelmed William's inner eye. He saw poor brown people rounded up for DNA tests: DNA tests for job applications, DNA tests for medical care, for food, for oxygen on days when smog obscured the sunrise. And when they wouldn't submit willingly: hair ripped from scalps, skin from flesh, stomachs emptied of their meager contents with well-placed blows.

William rubbed his eyes and ran a hand over his bare skull. He continued, shaken.

“Legendarily stupid, perhaps, to have shown the media that biogenetic adaptations could produce such longevity. There must have been a better way to subvert the system. The sample didn't give the downtrodden
hope
; it dimmed what little they possessed. The genetic corporations just created new rules to root out the exceptional. Sending that self-degrading culture of DNA sharpened their tactics—and our culture kept degrading. Lesson learned. Long life does
not
confer wisdom.”

William stopped. His breathing slowed, and a sliver of melancholy worked itself into his chest.
Oh.
He licked his lips and began again. Now his story, this history bubbled up in a rush, but he let each word settle before he moved on to the next.

“Rosedale; Base Brush; Doubtful Sound: these are the disappearing places. First from the world, then my mind, and finally, gone. Once they were of my world, errant stars born to burn bright and fall forever. The world grows darker with their absence. Even their names are a secret only I seem to have kept.”

William's head sunk to the side, his vision obscured by stalks.

“I've been to
dozens
of places that never officially existed. Those places were pillaged, plundered, and bulldozed into open patches of land. I still go back, checking for those hidden well enough to be saved. I'm not the only one. But just as quickly as gathering spots for the exceptional sprout, they're harvested. The privileged value those people, or rather their components, too much for the gene corps to leave them be. As always, some remain tools, like the man who I traded a handful of open-pollinated seeds for this datacorder.

“Even now, an incredible proliferation of human genetic diversity thrives, just hidden from view. Back then, it was as wild as the seeds it's illegal to keep. Mandatory gene registration didn't exist, and no one had thought of variable DNA exchange rates on mortgages. We had more choices. In that, we were rich and unique in global genomic economics. We were free on a mitigated basis.

“But that's just a memory now, and after 157 years, the gene corps keeps searching. They haven't found me.”

William straightened his neck, looked up into the blue of the sky.

“If they did, they wouldn't have what they're looking for. Immortality is a myth and I am but a legend. I've seen too many wasted and too little change to believe anything else. Death is a wilderness on a moonless night. One day I will find myself there.”

William looked out at the great mound of live-forevers that covered the hillside he'd chosen to store his bank of heirloom seeds. It lay a day's hike from anywhere even moderately populated, on a reclaimed ridge of ash overflow. It made for a beautiful place to take a nap, which William did often, near the bottom of the hill, his huge form hidden in the blossoms to everyone but the birds overhead. He knew because he'd walked the perimeter before he lay down, gathered his jacket under his head and stretched out. He'd done this just before he'd fallen asleep and forgotten himself.

Though clear now, when he woke it had been as if those moments never existed.

Was he succumbing to dementia? Or an unavoidable madness born of his accumulated sorrows and the pure, relentless press of time stacked up over the years? He couldn't be sure. Perhaps he had witnessed extinctions only to prepare for his own long walk into the wilderness.

For now, William had conjured himself back into the center of things. Again. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feel of oblivion. How many times had he done so?

Behind his closed lids, subtle flashes of light floated by. He wanted to wander away with them. These days, sleep came when it fancied, and judging by the last few months it had lost its fascination with William Woods. If only the world would, he thought, as he traveled up from the depths of his reverie to listen to the bird calls, the squirrels scurrying and, deeper still, to anything those sounds might have masked.

Alex Smith

1.

A bud; a piece of green peeking through the craggy rock, barely noticeable and caked with dust; that's what it was. He went out in a pressurized space suit, leapt from the ledge and descended the twenty stories down the ship dock and into the black of the atmosphere. When he touched the still budding leaf he had to watch it wither and flake, shrivel and die, almost evaporate and fall in a cascade of leafy ash to the ground. The LCD screen in his helmet lit up and buzzed, calculated in green typeface. Warnings and notices sounded off as voices intoned in monotonous British accents—“4% pressure drop in elbow region”; “Planetoid has 48% capacity for sustaining human life”; “Radiation levels spiking at 0.22 curie per 100 seconds”.

He scraped the remnants into a thin flask, zipped it away in one of the many compartments on his suit, bounded back over the dusty rock and made his way back up the ship's shaft. He had forgotten the code and had to manually override the security lock, which was always tricky because sometimes the sensor didn't recognize his voice pattern. He had to change the timbre of his voice slightly, this time a low bellow, and then, with a whir and click, the hatch would release air and open and he'd be back inside, faced off with sprawling air ducts and computers, walls lined with synthetic mesh that seemed to snake and breathe organically around him.

In the lab, he placed the flask into a chute and watched as the walls lit up, a display vibrant and inundated with chaotic numbers and holograms. A screen crackled and a man's worn face slowly emerged.

“Zyrn Altor. Codenamed X34-i7. What have you to report?”

“Specimen found, sir. Akin to the common house fern. It—it dissolved upon contact, sir.”

“Dissolved?”

“Yes. I think a change in atmospheric pressure caused by the landing mechanism created a—”