Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 4, July 2014 Read online

  “Hi, Day.” Her voice was subdued.

  “It’s good to hear from you! How are things?”

  “I’m…” She seemed to stumble on the words. “I need someone to talk to. Can you meet me?”

  “Of course.” Sudden dread overtook his relief at hearing from her. “Are you okay?”

  She ignored the question. “Are you free now? I’m in the city.”

  “Roasted Bean?” He checked his watch. “Half an hour?”

  “Great. I’ll be there.”

  He arrived a few minutes late, as the city traffic was worse than he remembered. He reached the shop to find Anna waiting for him outside. When he hugged her, she clung to him longer than before.

  “Can we take a walk instead?” she asked as they parted.

  “The sun’s shining–why not?” He smiled as they crossed the street to the little park opposite. Anna didn’t smile back.

  They walked in silence for several minutes. Damian decided to break the tension. “What did you want to talk about?”

  Anna stopped beside a park bench and they sat down.

  “Damian.” Her voice cracked. “I have a brain tumour.”

  The sounds of the city faded. Damian shook his head to comprehend her words. “What? Anna…When did you find out? How bad is it?”

  “Bad. Two days ago. The doctor said it was too advanced for conventional treatments to have a reasonable chance. It’s inoperable.”

  No. No, he’d just got back! He wasn’t ready to say goodbye again.

  “So–they’re referring you to the Institute?”

  She nodded.

  His mind was a whirl of questions and denials. “When do you go?” How much time do we have left?

  “Next week. Supposedly.”

  He knew that tone of voice, laced with cynicism and mistrust. “Wait. You are going?”

  Her breath caught in what might have been a sob. “I don’t know. Every nerve in my body is screaming ‘no’. I don’t want to die…but I don’t want to live forever. If this is it, if this is meant to be my time, then maybe…”

  He interrupted her. “Don’t be foolish, Anna. It doesn’t have to be your time! Technology gives you the option to survive–why would you even think of rejecting that?”

  “But I don’t want to just survive!” Tears flowed down her cheeks now. “Whatever I choose, I won’t be living. I’ll be unconscious in a dark chamber until who-knows-what century, or I’ll be gradually losing pieces of my mind until I can no longer function. Either way, living isn’t an option.”

  “Look at me, Anna. No, really, look at me!” She turned her distraught face to him. “I had the same choice. Exactly the same choice. Are you telling me I’m not living now? That I made the wrong decision?”

  “You knew your cure wasn’t far off. But what if they never find mine? What if a future society decides there are too many frozen people and starts putting time limits on us? Or the Anticry Brigade finally manages to blow up branches of the Institute, killing all the people they’re housing?” She took a breath. “Maybe it’s time we all stopped running from death.”

  He was angry at her now. It had been one thing holding her staunch views from a safe, healthy standpoint, but now she was talking about throwing away her life for them. He was damned if he was going to let her do that. She was upset; she wasn’t thinking straight. He took a deep breath to center himself before he spoke again.

  “You still have time to think about this. I’ll be here for you, Anna. I can answer your questions about the process. I’ll help you make the financial arrangements with your insurance company, deal with your outstanding affairs so you don’t have to worry about anything–whatever you need. Just promise me you’ll continue to think about it?”

  She nodded miserably.

  “Come on. Let me drive you home.”

  They had to drive past the local branch of the Cryonics Institute on their way out of the city. Damian wished there was a different route. He didn’t want to see the groups of anti-cryonic demonstrators, gathered as always, chanting and waving their placards. Anna stared at them as they passed, though she’d seen them hundreds of times.

  “LIVE YOUR LIFE–EMBRACE YOUR DEATH”, the placards read, alongside others such as “CRYONICS: SPITTING ON GOD’S WILL” and the classic overpopulation argument: “MAKE ROOM, ACCEPT YOUR DOOM”.

  He had heard new trials were seeking to address the issue of population expansion, but the latest, incentives for sterilisation, was already being decried as a waste of public money. Apparently, the vast majority of applicants had already produced children, so the scheme looked to be failing as a preventative measure.

  As they turned a corner, Damian was forced to slow by a group of demonstrators blocking the street. He craned his neck to see what was going on and realised that this group was comprised of the more radical protestors. They had a huge effigy of a stocky middle-aged man, spray-painted all over with the word ‘HYPOCRITE.’ It stood directly in the path of traffic, preventing travel in both directions. The other motorists were getting impatient, blaring their horns or yelling insults at the demonstrators, who were dousing the effigy in liquid.

  “Who’s that supposed to be?” Damian asked.

  “Curt Denning,” Anna replied. “He’s the ex-leader of the Anticry Brigade.”

  “Ex-leader?”

  Anna looked up at the effigy’s cardboard face. “He was all over the news boards recently. He was wanted by the authorities for years on terrorism charges and inciting violence. Then he shocked everyone by turning himself in and opting in to the cryonics programme immediately.”

  “Wow. Talk about a drastic U-turn.”

  “It turns out he was diagnosed with an incurable neural disease. I guess being faced with his own mortality was enough to turn him against everything he stood for.” She gestured at the demonstration. “His former followers weren’t impressed.”

  They were setting light to the effigy now. A siren announced a police vehicle, which overtook the line of queued traffic and pulled up in front of the demonstration. Denning’s likeness went up with a whoosh, his former admirers leaping back from his already-consumed figure, chanting and clapping as they watched him burn.

  Silence filled the car as they observed the scene. After a few minutes, Anna broke the quiet. “I’m beginning to have some idea what he must have struggled with.”

  Damian looked at Denning’s crumpling face and prayed Anna would follow his path. Hypocrisy was nothing when faced with slow, undignified death.

  #

  Sleep eluded Damian that night. He was still reeling from the news of his mother’s death, and now he struggled with the prospect of losing Anna. He could only pray he would lose her to cryo instead of her illness. He should have been celebrating his return to life. Instead he was forced to confront the mortality of those he loved.

  As he lay in Phyllis’ spare room, staring at the ceiling, he thought of a book he once discovered in a second-hand bookshop. It was a beautiful thing, leather-bound with gold-edged pages. The simple title, Greek Myths, was embossed across the cover. Damian wrote an inscription to Anna on its first page and gave it to her for an anniversary present. Six months ago. That’s when he gave her the gift, wrapped in red tissue paper and propped against a vase bursting with tulips. Tulips were always her favourite. He had saved up to afford dinner at Olivio’s that evening. The food was divine; he ordered champagne. She was beautiful, sitting opposite him wearing that off-the-shoulder dress she knew turned him on. He had been so in love with her that night.

  They made love into the early hours, and afterwards Anna sat up in bed with a sheet draped around her to read aloud from the book. She read the myths as if they were sacred in their ability to peel back the layers of human experience and describe the universal truths affecting people across the ages. She had always loved Prometheus the most. Six months ago, she read Damian his story.

  Only it hadn’t been six
months. It had been eight-and-a-half years, and the memory would be much more distant for Anna. They had discussed more than mythology that night.

  “Isn’t it rather…bloodthirsty?” Damian asked, caressing Anna’s bare shoulder.

  “It’s poignant, not bloodthirsty. It’s topical. And I know it better than the others. It’ll be perfect for my presentation.”

  He had always loved the way they could go from pillow talk to academia in moments. Anna had been fretting over this assignment for days, and had suddenly found inspiration in his gift.

  “But you’re focusing on his torture?”

  “Prometheus’ torture is the whole point, Day. It’s what relates his story to modern society, which is the task our tutor’s set.”

  Damian turned to look her in the eye. “Seriously? You, of all people, are going for that angle?”

  Anna sighed and put down the book. “Just because you took the same class last year doesn’t mean you’re an expert on modern interpretations of myth.”

  “But the theme of suffering is still the main point, right? Prometheus, chained, degraded, undergoing nightly agony every time the eagle comes back to eat his liver…just so that it can regrow for a repeat of the torment the next day. Poor bastard. How can you interpret that theme without acknowledging that cryonics could eradicate suffering permanently?”

  “I think that misses the whole point of the myth. To me, it’s about the drawbacks of immortality. If Prometheus had been a man, he would have escaped in death the first time the eagle dined on his liver. He underwent countless years of agony before Heracles found him and shot the eagle. Prometheus’ immortality was his curse…the true depth of his punishment for daring to defy Zeus.”

  “Don’t you think Prometheus, the one who gave us fire, the god who was all about allowing humans to help themselves, would be the first to help us find our own immortality?”

  “I think he, of all the gods, would recognise immortality’s great downside. Aren’t we dooming ourselves to an eternal cycle of freezing and reanimating?”

  Damian could see where this was going. He shook his head in wry amusement. “Okay, I’m removing the soapbox before you get comfortable on it.”

  Anna opened her mouth to protest, but he grinned and kissed her to erase the sting of his words. She let out an exasperated sigh and pulled him closer, and they dropped the subject for the remainder of the night.

  #

  Damian found it hard to argue with Anna’s assertion that Prometheus would have given anything for the release of death when the eagle came yet again to pierce his flesh. As he tried to phone her for the fifth time in as many days, he began to recognise aspects of her view he’d never considered before. Aspects he couldn’t have considered before his own experiences with cryonics. He would not die of the illness that sent him to his cold chamber. But he was faced with finding his place in a world that had moved on without him. When he entered the care of the Cryonics Institute again, he would likely be facing that ultimate killer: old age. What vast time might pass between that moment and his next reanimation?

  Anna didn’t answer. He’d even tried calling her on Phyllis’ phone this time so she couldn’t ignore his number. Perhaps the reality of his return to health was too difficult to reconcile with her views. Maybe she was worried that he would talk her out of any decision that didn’t involve cryo. Whatever the reason, she had begun by asking for his help and now she was shutting him out.

  Her appointment at the Institute was imminent. When she finally contacted him via text message the following morning, his anxiety trebled.

  “I’m sorry, Day. I love you.”

  Her bedraggled body was discovered washed up on the shore of the city harbour, but not before Damian found her note. He rushed to her apartment after receiving her message. He found her door unlocked and entered, calling her name to no response.

  In the middle of her coffee table was a book he recognised with a pang of nostalgia. Trapped between its gold-edged pages was a piece of paper he mistook for a bookmark. He picked up the book, caressed the embossed cover, and opened it to the marked page. The story of Prometheus gazed back at him, and he saw that the slip of paper was more than a place marker. His heart lurched at its strange, brief note. Grief and solitude overwhelmed him as he took in the words, written in Anna’s precise hand:

  “I am mortal. Death, not science, is my Heracles.”

  ###

  Eleanor R. Wood’s stories have appeared in Bete Noire, Sorcerous Signals, and Plasma Frequency. She writes and eats liquorice from the south coast of England, where she lives with her husband, two marvelous dogs, and enough tropical fish tanks to charge an entry fee.

  The Maltese Pterodactyl

  George S. Walker

  Yasmine had been watching crabs scurry on the beach when the promontory behind her exploded. Boulders tumbled down the cliff side, and the girl ran for her life.

  Waist-deep in the Mediterranean, she finally turned, sea breeze whipping black hair around her face. The last rock stopped rolling on the beach. Shrieking gulls circled back.

  The cliff now had an ugly gash about twenty feet from up the beach. The midday sun shadowed a cave-like opening.

  She looked around. No witnesses.

  If she told anyone, the Maltese authorities would cordon off the peninsula. If she didn’t, she could explore. That was something to email her father about. Maybe he’d answer–for once.

  Yasmine waded back to shore and crossed the sand in her bare feet. She knew every foothold on the cliff and zigzagged from ridge to crevice. Pausing just below the new cave, her body pressed against the rock, she listened…only wind and the cries of gulls.

  The explosion must have been a UXB, an unexploded bomb left from the WWII siege of Malta. By now, anything left of the bomb was scattered over the beach.

  Yasmine pulled herself over the lip of the cave and crouched on the rocks. Her eyes darted over jagged walls and rubble. There was something–not a rock–at the back, mostly buried. She let her eyes adjust to the darkness, then crept cautiously into the cave. She heard a scraping sound, like something trapped under rocks. Maybe there’d been a hidden cave with a UXB in it. An animal must have set it off. Somehow, it was still alive.

  She began moving rocks out of the way, careful not to crush her toes. She could see something trapped in the rocks. It was quivering, probably afraid. She called softly to reassure it.

  After half an hour, she’d clear away enough rocks to partly expose one of its limbs. It was emaciated, with loose leathery skin and three large bird talons at the end. But if the bird was upside down, with its head crushed beneath the rocks, how could it still be alive? The talons clenched when she touched one.

  This was like no bird she’d ever seen. She stroked the black leathery skin, feeling for traces of feathers.

  It was like fabric and flesh at the same time. As she tugged gently, she realized the limb wasn’t a leg. It was like the wing of a bat. The wingspan must be huge, she thought. Scales like a chicken leg led to the talons.

  The truth dawned. It was a pterodactyl.

  #

  Dr. Huntington was in his CERN office in Geneva, double-checking the GRACE orbital data when his secretary called.

  “I have the captain of the HMS Trafalgar on the line. Will you–”

  “Put him on!”

  After a pause, there was an electronic hum. “Captain?”

  “Dr. Huntington, I have orders from CINCFLEET to assist you. Some sort of science experiment.” The captain sounded annoyed, as if ordered to chaperone grade-schoolers.

  “We need to gather data on a mascon in the Mediterranean. Somewhere north of Libya.”

  “A mascon?”

  “Mass concentration. According to the orbital detectors, an Everest-sized mountain just appeared out of nowhere.”

  “A mountain,” the captain scoffed.

  “It may not appear as a mountain. It could be a magm
a swell.”

  “I don’t see what the Trafalgar–”

  “Or something like a black hole, though that's impossible.”

  “Black holes are those things you make in your Hubble Collider.”

  “Large Hadron Collider. We don’t make black holes.”

  “What’s a hadron?”

  “A bound state of quarks.”

  Silence from the other end.

  “Very small particles,” Huntington said patiently.

  “All right. I have orders,” said the captain, “but if you want my help, you’ll have to get to NATO Base Sigonella on Sicily. We’ll send a helicopter from the Trafalgar to pick you up there.”

  #

  Yasmine’s mother didn’t come home to the flat on Malta till well after dark. Yasmine was twelve years old, used to fending for herself. Her mother reeked of alcohol.

  “I found a dinosaur this morning,” said Yasmine. She didn’t use the word pterodactyl, because she was sure her mother didn’t know it.

  “Yeah?” Her mother’s voice was slurred. She sat down at the kitchen table and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.

  Yasmine sat across from her, elbows on the wooden table. “It’s buried under rocks, but it’s alive! I spent all day trying to free it.” She held up her hands, displaying the scratches on her olive skin.

  “Dinosaur? Like a lizard?”

  “It’s a pterodactyl. That means it has wings.”

  “You been watching anime?” Her mother took another drag on her cigarette.

  Yasmine clenched her fists. “I found it in a cave.” She was careful not to tell her mother about the UXB.

  “Dinosaurs are extincted.” Her mother took another long drag, then ground out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Like this.”

  “I can show you. In the morning, before you go to work at the hotel, we can go down to the beach.”

  “Beach? Morning? Not me, girl. That’s for tourists and school kids.”