Journeys of the Mind Read online

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  Journeys of the Mind

  by Sean Williams, Sonny Whitelaw

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  Science Fiction/Fantasy

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  Double Dragon Publishing

  double-dragon-ebooks.com

  Copyright ©2006 by Double Dragon Publishing

  First published in DDP, 2006

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

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  Journeys of the Mind

  Copyright © 2006 Trent Jamieson, Maxine McArthur, VC Parv, Damon Cavalchini, Cat Sparks, Sabine C Bauer, JC Jones, Cory Daniells, Sean Williams, Marianne de Pierres, Chris McMahon, Robert N Stephenson, Sonny Whitelaw

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing Inc., Markham, Ontario Canada.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from Double Dragon Publishing.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Double Dragon eBook

  Published by

  Double Dragon Publishing, Inc.

  PO Box 54016

  1-5762 Highway 7 East

  Markham, Ontario L3P 7Y4 Canada

  www.double-dragon-ebooks.com

  www.double-dragon-publishing.com

  ISBN: 1-55404-359-X

  A DDP First Edition June 2, 2006

  Book Layout and

  Cover Art by Deron Douglas

  www.derondouglas.com

  * * *

  Journeys of the Mind: Volume I

  An Anthology of Speculative Fiction

  Compiled by Sonny Whitelaw

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  Introduction

  Like many such anthologies, Journeys came about through a confluence of unusual events.

  Well, sort of.

  In fact it started out with several friends and a glass (or three) of wine from a wonderful little boutique vineyard named Two Paddocks.

  Acquiring this wine is not easy. I'm periodically obliged to fly to New Zealand, drive through Lord of the Rings country and whine pitifully outside the doors of the Central Otago Wine Company until they reluctantly divest themselves of a few bottles. The proprietor, it seems, prefers to keep most of the Pinot Noir to himself.

  What does this have to do with an anthology of speculative fiction—aside from the obscure coincidence that the vineyard's proprietor has played the lead role in many a spec fic movie? Well, purchasing this fine drop of red velvet requires that I undertake a journey through the most stunning—and oft-times haunting—landscapes on the planet. Now you, the reader, are about to embark on a journey of the mind through landscapes, both stunning and haunting, crafted by some of today's leading speculative fiction writers.

  Between them, this exceptional collection of authors have published over a hundred hardcover and paperback titles in twenty-six languages including Russian, Polish, Icelandic, Hungarian and Japanese, and enjoy a readership in excess of 25 million worldwide. Many are the recipients of prestigious SF and Fantasy awards, and their works have appeared on bestseller lists—including the New York Times. While I've included a brief bio on each writer at the end of this collection, I recommend you explore their websites, for therein await many more great travels for those who love superb fiction. This anthology is just the doorway.

  As the convenor of this little get together, I slipped one of my own non-fiction titles in on the final pages. If Deron invites us back for further anthologies, I'm hoping to repeat this occasional foray into the slightly offbeat real world, because sometimes fact is indeed stranger than fiction, especially when the two worlds overlap. But what we include next time around is largely up to you, the reader, so drop us a line and tell us what you think. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy these Journeys of the Mind.

  Sonny Whitelaw [email protected] www.journeysanthology.com

  * * *

  Dedication

  To Two Paddocks. May your vines be fruitful and multiply ... so that your proprietor will leave one or two measly bottles for the rest of us.

  www.twopaddocks.com

  * * *

  Contents

  Always by Trent Jamieson

  Bakermono by Maxine McArthur

  Get Out the Garamond by VC Parv

  The Tenth Life of Sergeant Tom by Damon Cavalchini

  Cross the Nullarbor to the Sea by Cat Sparks

  Tesla's Slippers by Sabine C Bauer

  The Processor by JC Jones

  Suffer the Little Children by Cory Daniells

  The End of the World Begins at Home by Sean Williams

  Nikei Love by Marianne de Pierres

  The Temptation of Mael by Chris McMahon

  White Room by Robert N Stephenson

  The Spiffy Cult by Sonny Whitelaw

  * * *

  ALWAYS

  Trent Jamieson

  My work, my driving work, was done.

  We had pierced the shivering membrane of the universe, and the last Way Station was already so distant that it defied imagination.

  Standard procedure.

  I can drive here, as my licence will attest, I've earned the right and the bitter nugget of pride that comes with it; regardless it's something that's better off left to the AI. Safer.

  But it's not just a driving job; it's a people one, too.

  These passengers were my wards.

  'You gotta love them. Love them honestly,’ Govinda once told me, long ago. ‘Every single one of them needs you more than they can ever know.'

  I was taking them off world, between worlds; across a lot of space and a lot of time. You take the Highway and there's no going back.

  For driver and passenger both.

  After Deb died, I took up this job, started running and haven't stopped. When you lose your Everything, driving doesn't look like such a bad deal.

  'We're all wounded here,’ Govinda said, when she started my training. ‘You've just gotta accept it. Gotta work with it.'

  Govinda was one of the best, she taught me at the end of her career. But then, careers do not end here; they ripple. You do not leave the highway; not really, there's always echoes. I've come across her several times since, at Way Station bars and the like, but they all predate me.

  None of them know of the single night we shared late in my training. An evening that stripped away a little of the pain, or, maybe, made it something else. Because after that night I'd fled her, too, drove away into a different place and time.

  The only thing worse was the one time I saw myself. An earlier me, driving my first bus, a big and basic model. It hurt, catching a glimpse of my past; certain brutal truths were driven home.

  I was sadder, angrier, still struggling with responsibilities that I hadn't even considered would come with the job. Well, that was how I remember it.

  But damned if I could see that in my eyes. Because the truth is I don't remember what I was thinking back then. Hell, even if I did, it wo
uld be an illusion distorted by the years that separated us, by the things that I have learnt and seen, by the endless mutable miles of the Highway.

  I saw the blank incomprehensible face that was my own and realised that time had severed me from my past. Now. Everything is now, perpetually changing, merely coated with a crust of apparent stability. The me on the tip of the wave.

  I hid before I could see myself. It's little wonder that few search themselves out at the Way Stations, or look too closely at rigs that could be their own.

  No one likes to see their own face and the stranger behind it.

  * * * *

  I got up from the driver's seat and, after a cursory glance at the monitors—everything sitting green and clean—I looked over my passengers.

  This is the transportation of the lost. There are other, faster, ways and some that eschew corporality altogether, but none are cheaper than the buses.

  However, these travellers must pay in other ways.

  The Highways distort time, they are unshielded from relativity or, as some arguments go, extremely susceptible to it. You can end up at a depot a thousand years before you began, or a hundred thousand years after. Something to do with Temporal-Spatial Flex. I've never understood the physics and if anyone asks I can rattle out the TSF ratios and the standard company spiel, but that's where my knowledge ends. I just drive the bus and help my passengers make it through.

  What it all boils downs to is this, you pay your money and you take your chances.

  If there is any continuity in the universe I have yet to find evidence of it, beyond pain and the Highways. Beyond the road that stretches on forever and the past that drives you along it.

  * * * *

  There were about forty passengers on the bus—thirty of these tuned out—plugged in to whatever personal systems they could afford. The usual stuff, VR simulators, powder fabulators, even a couple of straight-up personal sound systems of the sort you slip into your ears rather than your cortex.

  I walked the length of the bus and those who hadn't zoned out clung to me with their eyes. I chatted and calmed, dipped into the all too large collection of lame jokes that I knew, and did my best to take their minds off what was happening. Every single one of them would have fretted enough. You do not make this decision lightly; they deserved a break from their doubts.

  Among them was a girl in a bright floral dress. She didn't have any personal entertainment systems, not even a simple stereo unit. Sara Edwards, you know all their names, that's part of the job. I'd packed her things in a side compartment. Her luggage was small, almost pathetically light, though the nervous smile that she gave me was weighted with so much hope.

  'Do you think it will be a long journey?'

  I shook my head.

  'There's no way of knowing, Sara, the times chop and change. Often it takes thirty hours, others we're there in under ten.'

  She gripped my arm, gently but firmly, and I noticed the bruises, poorly hidden by make-up running from her wrists to her shoulder. Sara's chin, too, bore the faintest memory of a bruise.

  'I hope it doesn't take too long.’ Her gaze flicked to the window. ‘It's weird out there. I'd read about the Highways of course, everything I could find, but I didn't expect it to be so ... unsettling.'

  I smiled my most professional and calming smile. ‘It can be beautiful. The things I've seen, some of them can take your breath away.'

  But the dust that beat against the glass then was nothing special. Just the usual spiral of light, the active charge of the bus wasn't disturbing the particles all that much which meant the TS Flux cycle was in a quiescent phase.

  Still, I knew what she meant; I'd felt the same way. It's the physics of it all, the mind-bending paradox of the Highway. It spans the universe, but should not be. The greatest alien artefact—if it is indeed an artefact at all or, for that matter, alien—and we drive buses along it.

  That's the human species for you. Give us all the wonders in the universe and we'll find a way to make them mundane.

  'How long have you been doing this?’ she asked

  I looked down at her, my face twisted; I could feel it, an involuntary reaction that I'd never quite been able to outrun. ‘A long time. A long, long time.'

  Leaving Sara to her thoughts, I walked to the toilets. Gareth had gleefully informed me of the mess waiting down there. Someone had thrown up, missing the bowl and spraying over the floor. The acrid smell of vomit, not at all an unfamiliar one on these journeys, clung to the back of my throat. The cleaning module on my bus was running on one third efficiency—I hoped to get it fixed at the next Way Station—but that didn't help me now.

  Sighing, I reached for the old-fashioned mop and bucket and got to work.

  'There's something up ahead,’ Gareth subbed, just as I finished.

  'What exactly?'

  There was a moment of almost exasperated silence.

  'If I knew I would tell you. I don't trade in ambiguities. It's some kind of distortion on the road. I could run over it, but I think we should stop.'

  I walked up front. Buses are almost indestructible, self-repairing, and very cautious. There is little room for error out here.

  'Okay, let's do it.'

  Gareth stopped the bus about a hundred meters from the anomaly, the dust died down. He launched one of his drones to take a look.

  'It's a face,’ Gareth said. Then brought the image up on the cockpit monitor.

  I went cold. ‘I'm going out there.'

  'Are you sure that's wise?'

  'Deb,’ I whispered. ‘That's Deb's face.'

  * * * *

  I slipped on the armour and felt it mould around my body. I avoided the mirror instinctively, I knew I cut a fairly ridiculous figure; a tin man with a round belly. Too much driving and not enough exercise or vanity to pay for fat-eating viruses. I used to be vain, not any more.

  Deb would have laughed at me and the thought of her, not to mention the thought of what lay out there, sent a chill down my spine.

  The passengers were all staring at me now, and I lifted the faceplate and smiled.

  'I'm sorry about this. There's something on the road and I am going to have to look at it before we can go on. It's standard procedure.’ I hoped my face wasn't too pale. My hands were numb in the cool containment of the armour. It certainly didn't feel like standard procedure.

  'What if something happens to you out there?’ Sara asked.

  'If something happens to me, Gareth will take over. But nothing will happen. The external atmosphere is within standard parameters. There has never been any trouble on the Highway, and there's absolutely no reason to expect it now.'

  Of course none of that was absolutely true. You drive long enough and you hear stories—things on the road, buses coming in empty, their AI's memory wiped clean—never from someone who's actually experienced them, never often enough to give credence to the tales, just enough to plant a seed of doubt. Something was out there and the armour, more a shield against the radiation that the TSF occasionally generated, felt completely inadequate.

  I stepped through the door and it shut behind me with a click.

  I walked towards the anomaly, my breathing loud in my ears.

  'Your heart rate is up a little,’ Gareth said.

  'What do you expect?'

  'There, I've fixed it.'

  I thought about Deb. Her death was swift, a freak accident. There had been a sudden depressurisation of the skytube she and her schoolchildren were taking, the result of a flaw in the spun-diamond walls of the tube and a micro-meteor impact. Seventy-one people died in seconds, the oxygen in their blood boiling away. Deb had always said she would try and contact me if she died first and, in a way, she had.

  Somehow she had managed a simple text message. I found it in my log a day after the accident. One word.

  always.

  That word was in my head as I walked along the highway. Towards a replica of her face.

  At last I reached the spo
t and looked down. I felt as though someone had punched me. I forgot to breathe. Deb. She was as beautiful as I remembered. That's it with faces, you think you forget, that they've faded from all hope of true recollection, and then it burns back, perfect. And with that single image comes a flood of emotions, of memories, little things you didn't realise that you had ever noticed, the small scar under her right ear, the wry curl of her lips.

  I gazed upon her features and tears splashed against my faceplate.

  It was surreal, almost Daliesque. Where the road ended was Deb's skin, pale and freckled as I remembered her skin to be.

  'Is that really flesh?’ I asked.

  'No,’ Gareth replied. ‘It is remarkably lifelike, but it's definitely not flesh.'

  I crouched down to touch it, and the face opened its eyes.

  Deb's bright green eyes stared at me and I stumbled back.

  'Richard?’ She said and then the face was gone, swallowed up by the road.

  I fell to my knees, and scrambled to the spot where it had been. Gone. I clawed my gloved fingers over the road and wept.

  * * * *

  Deb gave me a piece of rose quartz on our second date and it is all I keep of her. That and her final message. Sometimes when I am at my darkest. I open that e-mail.

  always.

  I sat in the cockpit and watched the universe smudge against the glass. The quartz felt soft in my hand. I squeezed it until my fingers ached.

  'What was out there?’ Sara asked, surprising me, so that I almost dropped the stone.

  'Just the ghost of a memory,’ I said.

  She smiled.

  'Sometimes I wish I could remove all my memories. Just wipe the slate clean.'

  'They fade eventually. Every memory fades.'

  'Do they?’ she said. ‘I think memories are always. I think we spend our lives circling around them, trying to give them meaning.'

  I stared out at the road; the dust was growing more excitable, charged particles dancing like ghosts around the bus.

  'I loved her and now she is gone.'

  Sara squeezed my shoulder.