Universe 9 - [Anthology] Read online

  “I ought to thank you,” he said, getting to his feet. “If it hadn’t been for you...”

  “Forget it” Shimming extended his hand. “I’ve had the pleasure of putting a couple of department politicians in their places. Come back and see me any time.”

  “Thanks.” Hobart shook hands and paused awkwardly. “I’d like to come back, but they’ve assigned me to the Longer Maple—on the Sigma Draconis run—which means...”

  “A three- or four-year round trip for you, but forty years for me on Earth. I’ll most likely be dead when you get back.”

  “I wasn’t going to put it like that.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Shimming laughed, almost brutally, and for an instant his eyes resembled those of Dorcie Langer—suspicious, resentful, hostile. “If I’m not worried about it, why should you be?”

  Hobart nodded, his sense of alienation complete, then turned and left the office, already wondering how he was going to get through the month that lay ahead before he could rejoin his own kind and take flight among the stars.

  <>

  * * * *

  Speculations about future life styles have become a frequent and rewarding format for science fiction in recent years: the opportunity to write about how we or our children might live decades hence is irresistible. Here Paul David Novitski, a comparatively new writer, projects a number of social and scientific trends into the future and shows us that despite our current problems we may yet achieve a semi-Utopia. (In fact, we may be forced to, in order to survive.)

  But even a near-flawless society will leave individuals with problems, and Novitski pinpoints one in a novelette that’s both convincing and thought-provoking.

  * * * *

  NUCLEAR FISSION

  Paul David Novitski

  As dark hills rolled beneath the zeppelin, the sun rose behind it to cast pale, gold tendrils up the ridges of the coast range ahead. Spider lay curled in a hammock in the port cabin, watching through the wide window as the Willamette landscape began to appear beneath the fading stars. Somewhere in the folds of the foothills ahead lay the cluster of domes that was her home, nestled in fir and rhododendron. She stretched out in the sling and yawned. Her brother Fuchsia would probably be the only one up this early—he always got up before dawn, trudged up the hill to the pottery to throw a few before breakfast. But the others would still be asleep.

  Spider yawned again. For her it was too late at night—or too early in the morning—to be fully awake or asleep. These annual transcontinental flights always threw off her circadian rhythms. When she had boarded the zeppelin in Pennsylvania it had been nine at night; during the flight the sun had risen behind them, arced overhead, and set in their eyes. Now it was rising again, and although she had caught one full night’s sleep during the thirty-hour trip, she felt exhausted.

  She turned and slipped quietly out of the hammock, flexing her shoulders in the cool, dark air. Several other hammocks in the long cabin bulged with softly snoring shapes. Spider moved along the sleepers to the hatch.

  She stopped in the head, to squat, for a minute, over the toilet set into the floor. Stood, threw cold water from the tap onto her face. With long fingers she brushed back her shaggy white Afro, and contemplated her flat, thick features in the mirror. In the pale light from the bathroom’s tiny window she seemed to float in the mirror like a ghost, like the afterimage of someone who has suddenly disappeared. She shivered, dried herself quickly with the rough towel, and stepped back into the corridor.

  The first hatch on the left opened to her push to reveal the pilot and console silhouetted against the dawn-lit mountains. She could hear the burr of the engines more clearly here. She slid into the empty co-pilot’s couch and sighed.

  The pilot glanced over. “Howdy. Up already?”

  “Still, you mean. Never really got to sleep. I’m your passenger for Noti.”

  “Oh, right.” The pilot’s face was serene in the dilute glow of dawn. “Well, you haven’t got long to wait. We’re due to touch down in about forty minutes.”

  “Eugene?”

  The pilot shook her head. Her hair was so short it looked like fur. “No, yours is the only stop till we turn up the coast. I’ve got time to take you right to your door.”

  “Great! I wasn’t looking forward to that three-hour bike ride.”

  The pilot snapped a finger against the radio mike. “Yep, it’s been a real quiet night. No one to pick up till we get to Astoria. Folks don’t travel much this time of the year. They’re all at home, putting in gardens, pruning trees—”

  Spider groaned. “Don’t remind me! I’ve been gone three weeks to that G.R.C. conference in the East, and I just know that no one in my household will have gotten around to pruning my dwarf apples.”

  The pilot laughed. “Yeah, I know what you mean. After I’m done with this circuit I’m going to stay home for the summer. I miss my folks.”

  Spider put one foot up on the edge of the console, crossed it with the other. “Where’s that?”

  “Place in the Cumberlands. We’ve got a big old farm out there, sheep, chickens, soy, hemp. About twenty of us live there full time, sixteen wives and four daughters.”

  Spider looked over at the pilot with surprise. “You’re married?”

  “You bet. I like that commitment. We’ve got the best ten-year contract this side of the ocean.” She threw a row of switches with her toes. “And yourself?”

  Spider waved vaguely. “Oh, just a small extended family. My son, his father, his mother, me, my brother, his lover, his daughter. We’ve never wanted to get married. A few years ago we all changed names together, but we haven’t wanted anything more formal than that.”

  The pilot sniffed. “Sounds like a pretty tight little clan.”

  Spider frowned, picked at a button on her shirt. “I guess.”

  “You don’t sound so sure.”

  Spider shrugged. “People change. Right now I’m closer to someone in another household.” She was silent for a while. The world outside was getting lighter, the hills steeper and greener. The white peaks of the coast range were visible in the distance, where they melded with the clouds. She glanced over at the pilot. “You have any kids?”

  “Hm? Yeah, like I said, we’ve got four on the farm—”

  “No, I mean—”

  “Oh.” The pilot frowned, adjusted a lever and snapped a switch. “Since you ask, yes, I do. Had a couple of them, years ago.” She glanced up. “Boys.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Who knows? Wherever their father is, most likely.”

  Spider ran her hand across the flat of her stomach. “I got tied after Sparrow was born.”

  “Really?” The pilot shook her head. “Not me, sister; I don’t want nobody poking around in my insides.”

  Spider gaped. “You mean you’ve had two kids and you’re not tied? Gods! If you could only see the global starvation figures I have to work with every day!”

  The pilot turned in her couch and cupped Spider’s cheek with her hand. “Lady,” she smiled wryly, “there’s no way I’m going to get pregnant where I am now.”

  “Oh.” Spider felt her face get hot, swallowed hard. “Sorry, that was stupid of—”

  “Forget it.” The pilot turned back to her board.

  Spider searched for a way to reconnect. “My lover is pregnant,” she said at last

  “You don’t say.”

  “That’s why I’m coming back early from the conference. She wanted me to be there.”

  The pilot shrugged. “Why didn’t she just postpone it?”

  “No, she decided on the date more than a year ago. Today’s the cusp.”

  The pilot snorted. “I never paid much attention to that astro stuff in school. When I had my two boys, I just went about my business and let my body handle the whole thing.” She shifted several toggles on the board and Spider felt a slight descent. The hum of the distant engines rose in pitch.

  “Actually,�
�� said Spider, “I feel the same way. I had my boy naturally. Walker still hasn’t convinced me that controlling the gestation period doesn’t harm the fetus.” The pilot did not reply, and Spider sat back to watch the details appear in the landscape as they descended.

  “Tell me where you live exactly,” said the pilot, “so I can put this thing down.”

  Spider blinked, then rummaged in her shirt pocket for a pen and a scrap of paper. “Come to think of it,” she said, “I’d like to ask you the same thing.”

  * * * *

  Sunlight spilled the warm syrup over Sparrow’s face, blood-red through his eyelids as he squirmed on the mat. Reluctant to waken, he grasped at the melting splinters of recent dreams, but those visions, touches, and smells trickled only more swiftly between his mental fingers, leaving him beached, finally, on the broad round morning.

  He blinked and rubbed his face, shifted across the mat so that the sun, shining through the eastern window, was out of his eyes. A cool morning breeze swept smells of tree blossoms gently through the room. With dawn, the top of the little dome had opened like a flower, spreading back petals from the sun’s warmth. That old familiar branch snaked across his circle of sky, shaking clusters of pinky-white blossoms in the morning breeze.

  Sparrow took a deep breath of the cool mixture of smells and let it slowly sigh away. Way up in the sky, a solitary black speck drifted amid the blue. He squinted one eye. What was that bird seeing way up there? A shaggy beard of woods, most likely, spread across the mountains’ face, creased by veins of streams and road. And here, in a patch of morning sun, a handful of domes like warts.

  Sparrow giggled to think he was living in a wart. Was the world really like a face, like the face of the moon? When Spider used to let him sit in her lap, he liked to run his finger tip across that bump below her left ear that sprouted three thick, white hairs like cats’ whiskers. He shook his head to clear away the memory. Thinking about Spider made him feel too lonely. The world was like Coyote’s face, but with a green beard, not red.

  He sat up, shivering as the sheet fell from his brown chest, round belly. He brushed the long squiggles of hair from his face, let his head fall back, and froze in mid-yawn. That wasn’t a bird up there! The speck had grown to a blob, and now he could make out its shape, long and rounded.

  Spider was home!

  He jumped up from the mat and padded down the short tunnel that connected his room with the main one of the house. He flung aside his flannel door and stepped into the wide, cool room. The cozy smell of carob permeated the air. Prints and paintings, familiar pillows, and shelves stuffed with ragged books lined the main dome’s wall. The thick round rug that hugged the floor was shaggy with forest colors. All the doorways that led to the other domelets wore different cloth doors, emblems of their occupants. Only three were tied back with thongs—Coyote’s spare landscape in black brush, Swann’s ancient psychedelic prints, and Fuchsia’s brown fuzzy rug. The others must still be asleep. Fuchsia always got up first— he’d be up in the pottery—but Coyote and Swann ...

  Sparrow circled the room toward the kitchen alcove, taking the longer way around to stop in the toilet to pee. His narrow yellow stream fell away into the darkness of the composter. He remembered to close the lid after himself, rinsed his hands briefly under the tap, and shook them dry on his way to the kitchen.

  He crept the last few steps and peeked around the fireplace. Swann lounged at the kitchen table sipping carob, engrossed in a book, while Coyote knelt at the garden bin peeling breakfast. He glanced up, saw Sparrow, and waved.

  Sparrow walked over and plopped down on a pillow at the low table. Swann, wrapped in a thin green robe, looked up from her book and murmured something, the branching lines of her face congealing in a smile. Sparrow grinned back, savoring his secret, and poured a mug of orange juice without spilling much. The cool, thick lip of the mug met his mouth. Sweet juice.

  Coyote put a bowl of sectioned fruit on the table and sat across from Sparrow. His lips moved behind his bushy red mustache: “What’s new?”

  Sparrow signed with his hands: I know a secret!

  Coyote gaped in mock astonishment. “Well, don’t keep us in suspense!”

  Swann put her book down. “What is it?”

  Sparrow jumped up from the table and ran a circle around the room, head down, cheeks puffed, arms straight at his sides. One quick circuit of the kitchen and he sat down again, grabbed a handful of fruit, and looked slyly at Coyote and Swann as he sucked on a piece.

  Swann and Coyote looked at each other in bewilderment.

  “Let’s see,” said Coyote thoughtfully. “You saw a bee!”

  Sparrow shook his head.

  “The bull in the meadow,” said Swann.

  Wrong again, he signed.

  Then Swann leaned over and laid her hand on Coyote’s shoulder. He cocked his head, frowned, then broke into a grin. “That must be the ship!” He got to his feet and went to the window, the sunlight electrifying his bush of red hair. Swann joined him, and a sudden shadow fell across the room, turning off Coyote’s hair. A low, fluttery feeling was happening in Sparrow’s stomach. Coyote turned around and abruptly stopped grinning.

  You cheated! Sparrow’s hand jerked in the air. You didn’t guess, you cheated!

  “Oh, come on,” said Coyote, kneeling in front of him. “Don’t be like that. I can’t help it if I can—” He blinked, tried to grin again. “Hey, Sparrow,” he said, “let’s go outside and see it land!”

  Sparrow set his jaw and turned away. His secret excitement had drained away, leaving him sad and tired. He wanted to see Spider land, but not with dumb old Coyote and Swann and Rabbit and the others all crowding around. His eyes started to hurt and he brushed away wetness. He tore a ragged piece of fruitflesh with his teeth and chewed it hard. When he finally looked around, both Swann and Coyote were gone.

  He jumped up and ran from the kitchen, then froze for one agonizing minute in the main dome. The tremor in his stomach was stronger now, a low, pulsing vibration. He ran, then, not outside, but back through his own flannel door, down the short tunnel to his room.

  His mouth fell open, slowly closed. Filling nearly half the sky was the gigantic bulge of the zeppelin, dark red in the morning light. He climbed onto his clothes trunk and stood on tiptoe, peered over the edge of the open dome. The zeppelin hovered above the meadow next to the house, two tiny figures standing underneath—that was Coyote’s rusty bush of hair, Swann’s gray shag—as a bubble descended on a long cable from the shadow of the ship’s belly. Sparrow caught sight of Fuchsia’s dark body moving down the hill from the pottery, and Rose appeared beyond the curve of the main dome with Rabbit in his arms, strolling out to join the others.

  The bubble, which had been tiny beneath the bulk of the airship, turned out to be much larger than the people standing below. It swung gently on its cable and touched down on the grass. A doorway appeared and Spider’s familiar white cloud of hair popped out. She swung onto the lawn and reached back in for her bags. The bubble rose quickly into the air as everyone crowded around Spider. Sparrow chewed his lip, flexed his cramping feet. Everybody was hugging everybody else, then they turned and started back toward the house.

  The zeppelin was already rising, moving away. The rumbling in Sparrow’s gut began to lessen. He stepped down from the trunk and stood wavering in the middle of his room, then lunged for the window, jerked it open, and scrambled outside.

  * * * *

  Coyote paced across the main dome rug, rubbed his palms together, and paced back again. Where had Sparrow run off to now?

  “Hey,” said Spider from across the room. “Will you sit down and stop worrying? He’ll be okay.” She sat against the wall beneath the blue Picasso print, Swann beside her and Rabbit on her lap. Rose and Fuchsia had long since gone, Rose to work in the village garden and Fuchsia back up the hill to work on his pots.

  Coyote turned and recrossed the room. “It’s really my fault,” he said. “If I hadn’
t come out with that stupid remark about being able to hear, he would have gone out with us to meet you and this whole dismal business—”

  “Coyote!”

  He stopped.

  Spider looked weary. “Come on, would you please just sit down and be quiet for a while? You’re making me nervous, and I’ve only been home an hour. Sparrow has to work out his own problems, that’s why he’s not here. He’s got to learn sometime that people who can hear have certain advantages over him, and he’ll be lucky if the lessons are only as harsh as losing guessing games. Don’t be over-protective.”